The Good Companions by J.B. Priestley — Read

Inigo seemed to spend all his waking hours, the next few days, on the improvised stage at the Rawsley Assembly Rooms, pounding away on the ancient Broadwood Grand. Two of the notes, the first G in the treble and the lower D in the bass, were in the habit of sticking and even by the end of the first day he had come to know those two notes so well that they had taken on a personal life of their own, so that he appeared to have spent hours quarrelling with two obstinate little yellow men: Tweedlegee and Twoodledee, he called them. His wrists and forearms began aching by about twelve on Friday morning, and after that -- though Sunday was a holiday -- they went on aching until at last he forgot to notice them. It did not matter whether the Good Companions sang choruses, quartets, trios, duets, or individual numbers, he had to be at work. And if they stopped singing and took to dancing instead, then he had to work all the harder. For him there was no rest. Each member of the troupe prided himself or herself on having a large repertoire, known always as a "rep," and insisted on going through it at some time or other with the new pianist, who soon began to dislike the very mention of "reps."

"I never knew there were so many dirty tattered old sheets of music left in the world," Inigo confided to Miss Trant. This was after he had struggled through Jimmy Nunn's rep, which was the dirtiest, oldest, and most tattered of all. Many of Jimmy's songs, which did little more than announce that their singer was a policeman ("When you're going down the street. / You will see me on my beat / For I'm a Policeman -- pom -- / Yes, I'm a Policeman") or a postman or a waiter or some other droll public character, were in manuscript, and were further complicated by instructions scrawled in in pencil -- "Stop for patter," and so forth. Fortunately it did not matter very much what he played for Jimmy, who had no ear and no singing voice, and only demanded that the accompaniment should stop in various odd places in order that he should be able to point out that his father was a very mean man, or describe, with a wealth of unlikely detail, his wedding day. Indeed, the relation between Jimmy's singing and the piano was so vague that he had sung a whole verse of a policeman song to the accompaniment intended for a postman before either he or Inigo had noticed the mistake. "Have to use the old uns, my boy," said Jimmy, carefully removing from the piano a sheet that was dropping to pieces. "They don't write real comic songs now, you can take it from me. " And Inigo was quite ready to agree that these masterpieces had obviously been written a great many years ago. His only hope was that he would be able to vamp the accompaniments by heart before most of the scores crumbled away altogether.