Julian Pyke-Weston was throwing one of his legendary tantrums. 

Normally Elise would keep well out of the way and let Alan deal with him. Darling Alan could always calm Julian down.  But today she had to bear the brunt of it because he was on a deadline and when Julian was on a deadline things had to be sorted quickly or it could cause no end of trouble further down the line.

     “Not the standard standard letter!” he screamed at her, his face red. “The standard commission letter. It’s a commissioned piece. They need the letter with the dedication. You use the standard commission letter.”

     “Julian, I have typed the standard commission letter.” Elise practically spat the words back at him but refrained from shaking the letter in his face to make the point. She loved Julian dearly and normally he was a poppet, but he had a terrible temper when he was under pressure and this morning had already turned into of his ‘difficult’ ones.  Deadline days always did. 

She toned her voice down a notch and started again, patiently. 

     “I introduced the concept of standard template letters to this household and I wrote them. The letter itself is not the problem. What I’m asking is what do you want the dedication to say? Such details are not in the template letters. That’s why they are called templates. They have gaps in them which I fill in each time I write to the recipients. And in this case I need to do that by half past eleven.” She looked at her watch with rising panic.

     “Well, how should I know what it says?” Julian whined.

Elise controlled her voice as best she could. 

     “Because you agreed to the commission, Julian. And you did it without my knowledge, so I do not have any relevant paperwork in my highly efficient filing system.”

     “You were on holiday!” he hissed.

     “She is allowed a holiday, Jules,” said Alan, patting Julian’s arm. “Try to think where you might have put it.”

     Elise was inwardly fuming. She had seen this coming a week ago and had tried to warn Alan but Julian had been pacing the house moodily for days, humming snatches of tunes under his breath, so Alan had not liked do disturb him by raising the spectre of the missing dedication. For several months Julian had been working on the new piece, a four part choral work commissioned for next year’s Three Choirs Festival,  and it had not gone well. He had re-written large parts of it several times and was still tinkering with it this morning, the day it was due at the publishers. It was typical of Julian to work until practically the last minute, but now the last minute was upon them. The manuscript had to be with Julian’s publishers by lunchtime in order to get it to the printers by their print deadline, in order for the printed scores to be sent to the commissioning choir by the contract deadline, in order for the publishers to get paid in full, take their cut and pay Julian and the printers. That was how things worked in the music publishing business and the publishers were extremely unhappy if Julian ever missed a deadline. The client would ask for a discount, but the printers still expected to be paid in full. (Julian was never best pleased either, but he could hardly blame anyone but himself.)

     Alan laid a calming hand on Julian’s shoulder. 

     “Can you remember anything at all, Jules?  What they might have said when they first called you? Where you put the notes you made of the conversation?”

Julian shook his head. “That’s why I employ her. She does all that for me.” 

Elise huffed and asked:

     “Did you tell the publishers anything when you told them about the commission? Might they have it already?”

     “I don’t know Elise. You type my letters,” pouted Julian.

     “Not this one, Julian. I would have it on file if I did.”

The grandfather clock in the hall struck the half hour and all three of them froze. They were getting nowhere.

     “Look, it must be here somewhere,” Elise insisted. “Can I look in your music room?”

Normally no-one but Alan was allowed in there.

     “All right. But don’t touch anything,” said Julian testily.

     “How can I look for it if I don’t touch anything?” she called over her shoulder and disappeared into the music room.

It was a dreadful mess. How can he work like this? she thought. No wonder his music is disjointed and shrill. Elise was not a fan of Julian’s compositions and often wondered how anyone could play them, never mind sing anything he wrote. Piles of unused manuscript paper littered every surface and heaps of sheet music and music books swayed in dangerous stacks on the floor. The shelves were groaning with tumbled books and bound volumes of music and several empty cups and saucers - goodness knows how long they had been there - balanced precariously on the arms of two horsehair armchairs by the fireplace. The handwritten manuscript of Arc, the new choral work, lay accusingly open on the grand piano with a stub of pencil next to it and there was an overflowing waste-bin next to the stool. Elise picked up the manuscript and folded it closed. Julian had to finish composing at some point and as far as she was concerned that point had been reached. 

     The manuscript pages were held together with a treasury tag.. She turned the pages over to put them in order. The curled frontispiece had several brown ring-stains where Julian had placed his cups over the last few months. She examined it in disgust, pitied the poor publisher then rolled her eyes and sighed with relief.  In Julian’s untidy scrawl across one corner of the frontispiece she read: For Augustus Merriweather and the Choir of Hereford Cathedral. First performed by the choir and the Orchestra of Musica Moderna under the baton of the composer at the Three Choirs Festival, Hereford Cathedral, September 1939. 

     “I’ve found it. Panic over,” she called.

     “Thank the Lord!” replied Alan. “Where was it?“

She walked into the house’s front room which served as their joint office, waving the manuscript. 

     “Here. He’d written it on the front.”

She held up Julian’s tattered manuscript and once again felt sorry for the publishers who would have to decipher all this scribble. It occurred to her, not for the first time, that maybe part of the problem with Julian’s compositions stemmed from the fact that the publishers could not read his manuscripts. Perhaps he actually composed rather pretty pieces under the tea stains?

Alan looked suitably embarrassed on Julian’s behalf - he had been an ogre for the last half hour -  but Julian looked resentful and said accusingly: 

     “You moved it. I hadn’t finished it yet.” 

He reached for the manuscript but she snatched it out of reach. 

     “No, Julian, it has to go to the publishers now.”  

She sat down at her desk, typed the dedication in the waiting space in the standard commission letter, pulled the letter out of the roller and handed it to Julian with her best green fountain pen.

     “Signature please, Julian. Now!”

Julian signed humbly. 

     “But I hadn’t finished it.”

     “I don’t care. It’s done.”

She glared at him to put an end to the discussion, then kissed him on the cheek and put the letter and the manuscript in a manila envelope and tucked in the flap. 

(For years afterwards the printed copies of Arc by Julian Pyke-Weston had p (softly) marked over bar 286 and fff (very loudly) over bar 290, but there was no crescendo (becoming louder) marked over bars 287 to 289, which Julian had been about to add in at the last minute. Choirs performing the piece thus sang quietly through to bar 289 then virtually shouted their words in bar 290. Audiences loved the ‘surprise’ but Julian jumped exaggeratedly every time he heard it and cursed Elise Lockhart - much as he loved her - under his breath.)

Elise grabbed her hat and gloves and headed for the door. Alan pushed a ten shilling note into her hand as she passed him. 

     “Take a taxi, Elise darling,” he winked. “It must be there by twelve thirty.”

     “Don’t worry Alan. It will be.”

     “What would we do without you?”

     “Starve.”