“I’m sorry about that, Ray,” she said, her voice pitched to indicate that she would leave me no way to back out. “But you may very well be the only one who can make it work for the instrumentation they’re giving me.”

“Right here I’ve got a chord that has five low notes in it that can only be played by a baritone sax or a trombone in pedal stops or a bass. I don’t know how I’ll do that.”

She looked at me as if I were crazy. “You weren’t going to completely scrap the piano, were you? There’s nothing here that doesn’t lie on the piano.”

I felt foolish. “Oh, how stupid of me! I was so busy thinking about how to take a work written for the piano and voice it for wind instruments that I forgot I still have the piano to work with. And drums, I assume, yes?”

“Yes, I’m told the Pan-Pacific Orchestra has the same instrumentation as Jack Donovan’s band, minus the guitar, xylophone, and vocalist, of course.”

I asked her what she wanted me to do about the drums, since obviously there was nothing resembling a drum part in the piano piece, although Swing didn’t lack for rhythm.

“I leave that to you,” she said, somewhat surprisingly, seeing as she’d told me she expected total fidelity to every other aspect of the work. “I can’t get the hang of a drum kit. I hear the end result of a drummer playing all those different things at the same time, but I don’t see how it’s put together. So do what you will with it, Ray.”

We went over the score bar by bar, and she was very receptive to almost all my ideas. I told her that although the job would be more difficult than I’d originally imagined, if we worked together, me orchestrating and Gail proofing my work, we should be able to complete the orchestral score in a couple of days, leaving more than enough time for a music copyist to then notate the individual parts for the performance.

Martha Prentice came in and said that she was serving supper and had set a place for me. She said it was lucky that they always had an early dinner, as it would allow me to get back to the Claremont in time for my eight o’clock start. The looks she gave me seemed a little more tolerant now. Perhaps this was because, in eavesdropping, she could hear that Gail and I were genuinely collaborating on this project and had been talking about nothing but notes and rests and instrumentation for several hours.