Appassionata

by Jilly Cooper

  There are two deaths,

  And one is such that all men dread and all abhor.

  The one is to be loved no more,

  The other’s nothing much.

  This is in no way to dismiss the depths of your suffering but at least you are safe in the knowledge you were never betrayed. My young wife left me for a boy her own age two and a half years ago. I cannot say I envy you, but at least Malise’s love for you and yours for him is intact and untarnished.

  Does Malise have any unpublished work? I would be so interested to read it and assist its publication.

  Perhaps when your heart is a little easier you would have lunch with me. I have a jet or a helicopter that could collect you, perhaps when I am next in London, and we could share our sadness.

  Yours ever,

  Rannaldini.

  ‘Hark, Hark the Lark,’ sang Rannaldini as smirking, he sealed the envelope and set the letter aside to be posted in a few weeks’ time when the trickle of consoling letters would have dried up and his would have far more impact.

  Helen was utterly charmed. Rannaldini’s letter arrived at the beginning of November at the nadir of her despair. It looked as though she was definitely going to have to sell the Old Rectory and Malise’s daughter, whom she had never liked, although she’d taken on Malise’s two black labradors which Helen had also never liked, was contesting the will and had laid claim to Malise’s prettier pieces because they were family heirlooms.

  Of course Helen remembered Rannaldini from the school concert, arriving late and plonking himself next to Hermione Harefield so Helen had been forced to move back a row and sit next to Rupert, who had behaved abominably as usual, whispering to Taggie and even nodding off and snoring in counterpoint to the Mozart concerto Marcus had been playing so beautifully.

  Helen was utterly heartbroken over Malise’s death but Rannaldini’s letter comforted her. She wrote back a charming note, littered with quotations, saying lunch would be delightful. After all, she told herself firmly, Rannaldini might well be able to give Marcus a leg-up in his career.

  Marcus, meanwhile, with conspicuous gallantry, had tackled his father about giving Helen an allowance. Rupert had replied that he’d think about it but had gazed out of the window at the reddy-gold leaves cascading down from his towering beeches as fast as his money seemed to be pouring into Lloyd’s. Thank God, he hadn’t been too badly hit and had never risked the house or any of the land, but he didn’t see why the hell he should support Helen. It was sixteen years since she’d buggered off and he’d paid every penny to support Marcus and Tabitha and was still giving them both whacking great allowances.

  When he’d first met Helen she had been working for a publisher and always pointing out his literary déficiences. She could bloody well get a job now.

  Privately Rupert was absolutely livid with Helen for asking Jake Lovell back to the house after the funeral. Jake was doing too bloody well as a trainer and Rupert was consumed by all the ancient jealousy that Malise had loved Jake more than him.

  To top it, Taggie had enraged Rupert by asking Helen to stay for Christmas, claiming that she and Marcus couldn’t be all alone the first year after Malise’s death.

  ‘I suppose you’re going to serve lame duck at Christmas dinner?’ he said nastily.

  And Taggie, remembering Sister Angelica’s warning about too many limping ducks, felt a cold chill.

  THIRTEEN

  Rannaldini planned his first telephone call to catch Helen at a particularily low ebb. She had just returned from Evensong at which Malise should have been reading the lesson. The church had always been full of admiring ladies on such occasions. Tonight they had turned up to see how his widow was coping. Not very well it seemed. Afterwards, as Helen emerged into the drizzle of a chill November evening, feeling them all shying away, she had scuttled off, black-scarfed head bowed, slipping on the yellow leaves concealing the slimy paving stones. She was too distraught to pause and to speak a word of comfort to Malise in his cold bed. Tomorrow she would bring him the pinched remnants of the rose garden.

  As Marcus had gone to hear Murray Perahia playing at the Wigmore Hall, Helen had a long night ahead, terrified of sleeping alone since the black labradors had departed, even more terrified of waking to the horrors of life without Malise and a new one hundred thousand pound Lloyd’s bill.

  The telephone was ringing as she came through the door. Malise? An instinctive desperate hope, but it was only a friend who’d been in church bossily summoning her to a dinner party.

  ‘Only ten of us, do you good to get out. Eight for eight-thirty, strictly caszh.’

  Helen had never been casual in her life.

  ‘I’m not up to it, Annabel.’

  ‘Course you are, I’ve asked Meredith Whalen for you. Such a duck and when one gets to our age, I’m afraid one has to put up with gays.’

  ‘Why should some poor gay have to put up with me? I’m sorry, I can’t.’

  Helen banged down the receiver with such force the roses on the hall table scattered dark red petals all over the flagstones, joining a shoal of leaves which the icy wind had swept in through the still open front door. The drawing-room flowers were dropping. She mustn’t let standards slip. The telephone rang again.

  ‘I truly can’t, Annabel,’ she shrieked hysterically.

  ‘Signora Gordon,’ said a deep caressing velvety voice, ‘’Ow are you. Theese ees Rannaldini ’ere.’

  He was so gently solicitous that Helen found herself quite able to accept an invitation to lunch on Wednesday, when Rannaldini’s spies had made sure Marcus would be safely at the Academy.

  Helen had always prided herself on her homework, but on this occasion she had no need to buy any of Rannaldini’s CDs, Malise had collected most of them, admiring their clarity, colour and controlled passion.

  Helen also rewatched Rannaldini’s famous video of Don Giovanni and found it deeply disturbing as the cameras lingered on Hermione Harefield’s rosy romping nudity and even more so on the still cold face and beautifully moving hands of Rannaldini himself.

  She was horrified that with Malise only two months dead she should be thrown into such a panic at the prospect of lunching with such a fatally glamorous man, or how resentful she felt towards Malise for leaving her too poor to buy a new dress. She couldn’t find her newish olive-green cashmere anywhere, wretched Tabitha must have whipped it, which meant she had to fall back on the Saint Laurent black suit she’d worn to Rupert’s and Taggie’s wedding. At least its white puritan collar would hide the dandruff which had snowed down since Malise’s death.

  Wednesday morning brought more devastating bills. Helen, who’d been up at first light, spent the morning in tears tidying unnecessarily. She had felt her daily woman’s chaperonage when Rannaldini arrived was more important than the gossip Mrs Edwards would later impart round the village.

  But as a final straw, Mrs Edwards rolled up, puffing with excited disapproval and brandishing a bad-taste piece in The Scorpion. Who would Helen, the most beautiful widow in England, marry now? Suggestions included Pierce Brosnan, Boris Levitsky, Richard Ingrams, Edward Heath, Julian Clary, Lysander’s father, David Hawkley – a darkly handsome headmaster who was, as The Scorpion pointed out, a dead ringer for Malise; and, horror upon horror: Rannaldini, photographed smouldering on the rostrum.

  Helen couldn’t stop blushing, as she told Mrs Edwards, that by extraordinary coincidence Signor Rannaldini would be popping in that morning to look at the colonel’s unpublished work on the flute.

  ‘I must f-find a f-folder for it,’ she stammered, bolting upstairs.

  ‘And I should coco,’ muttered Mrs Edwards, taking a hefty slug of the colonel’s sloe gin before strategically positioning herself with the Antiquax in the study off the hall. Not that there was much to polish. The poor little soul couldn’t stop cleaning since the colonel had passed away.

  In front of her dressing-table Helen prayed her blushes would not spread to horrible red blotches on her n
eck. Starting on her face, she plucked a grey hair from her left eyebrow, and five more from her temples, combing lustreless tendrils over her hair line to hide more dandruff. It would be drifting soon.

  Taking her hand-mirror to the window she gasped in horror. With a compass, despair and worry had scratched new lines round her pinched mouth and reddened eyes.

  Outside, the garden looked horribly untidy, half the trees stripped, half-showing rain-blackened limbs at awkward dislocated angles as they struggled out of their red-and-yellow rags. Then before her eyes a gust of wind covered the lawn with leaves again. Malise had insisted on sweeping them up at once. The leaves would break her in the end.

  Glancing in the mirror she saw that tears had left a blob of mascara on her cheek-bone. As she wiped it away the skin stayed pleated. Helen gave a groan. She couldn’t face Rannaldini. Mrs Edwards would have to say she was ill.

  But, bang on midday, punctual for the first time in his life, Rannaldini landed his big black helicopter on the lawn sending all the leaves swirling upwards around him as he leapt out; Don Giovanni returning from the eternal bonfire.

  ‘Blimey,’ said Mrs Edwards, applying Antiquax on top of Antiquax.

  For Rannaldini was stained mahogany from ten days studying scores in the Caribbean sun. Wading through the leaves like a surfer he handed Helen a big bunch of tabasco-red freesias. Then he briefly put his arms round her so she could enjoy the muscular springiness of his body and its sauna-warmth as though he had indeed emerged from hell-fire.

  ‘I know exactly how tired and lonely and cold you feel all the time,’ he murmured, then stepping back and staring deep into her eyes. ‘But nothing dim you great beauty. No wonder autumn ees in retreat when you upstage heem like this.’

  Rannaldini had always been able to lay it on with a JCB. Blushing redder than the freesias Helen invited him in while she put them in water.

  Better than a film star, thought Mrs Edwards, kicking the study door further open as she rubbed Antiquax into the blue damask arm of a chair.

  As Helen belted off to find a vase and slap on another layer of Clinique foundation, Rannaldini explored the charming drawing-room, with its apricot walls, faded grey silk curtains and glass cases containing Helen’s porcelain collection. One would have to break the glass to reach her as well, reflected Rannaldini.

  He thought it a particularly beautiful room because of the preponderance of his records and because of a photograph of Tabitha on the piano. Bareback, astride an old grey pony, her hair was in a blond plait and her eyes were as cool and disdainful as Rupert’s.

  The elm is a patient tree, it hateth and waiteth, thought Rannaldini lasciviously.

  Malise had had a good eye for paintings. Rannaldini admired a Cotman and a little Pisarro, but what had possessed him to hang that frightful oil of poplars against a sunset with a cow which looked more like a warthog in the foreground? Then he read the rather obtrusive signature: Helen Gordon.

  On a side table was an open poetry book.

  Who would have thought my shrivel’d heart

  could have recovered greenness? read Rannaldini.

  In the desk the green leather blotter wouldn’t close round the sheaf of bills. Flipping through them Rannaldini saw that Helen really was in trouble. The Cotman and the Pisarro would soon be off to Sotheby’s.

  Hearing her footsteps as she returned with the freesias in a saxe-blue jug, he turned back to her painting.

  ‘This is excellent.’

  ‘Oh, how darling of you. Malise liked it. I didn’t have much time but perhaps now—’ Helen’s voice trailed off, then pulling herself together she picked up a file on a side-table.

  ‘You said you’d like to see Malise’s unpublished work. Have you really got time?’

  ‘It is huge honour, I will make time,’ lied Rannaldini.

  Mrs Edwards was polishing the hall table now to have a better look. The Colonel had been a real gentleman, although rather frail towards the end, but this fellow looked as though he had three or four more pints of blood pumping round his veins and that lovely Boris Chevalier accent.

  ‘You help Malise?’ asked Rannaldini.

  ‘I made suggestions,’ said Helen eagerly.

  ‘How lucky to have someone to share one’s life work.’

  Rannaldini’s deep sigh fluttered the pages as he returned them to the file.

  ‘It’s fascinating how the flute was given the cold shoulder by musicians in the nineteenth century,’ began Helen earnestly, ‘because it lacked sufficient expressive range.’

  ‘May I?’ To shut her up, Rannaldini took Malise’s flute out of its case, tuned for a second and started to play.

  ‘Prokofiev. Malise played that.’ Helen’s eyes filled with tears.

  ‘I am sorry. I will stop.’

  ‘No, no, I never dreamt I’d hear it again so soon. Do you play other instruments?’

  ‘Piano, oboe, trumpet, bassoon, violin, teemps.’

  ‘Goodness, with so many accomplishments what made you become a conductor?’

  Rannaldini laughed.

  ‘Because at heart every man wants to be a fuhrer. We must go to lunch. I take you home.’ Then seeing the apprehension in Helen’s eyes, added, ‘Don’t worry, my secretaries, my gardener, my ‘ousekeeper and her ‘usband, my driver, Uncle Tom Cobbley and probably his grey mare will all chaperone you.’

  As the helicopter circled the Old Rectory before turning south, Helen could see Mrs Edwards belting down the drive twenty minutes early and gave a wail.

  ‘I forgot to put on the alarm, I’m so scared of being burgled.’

  Rannaldini smiled at her. It’s already too late, my darling.

  Orange leaves of beech, saffron flames of larch still flickered in the umber woods as they flew over the little village of Paradise up the River Fleet to Rannaldini’s house, Valhalla, lurking pigeon-grey and wrapped in its conspirator’s cloak of trees.

  Helen had a heady glimpse of tennis-courts, a swimming-pool, the dark serpentine coils of a yew-tree maze, wonderful gardens, horses out in their rugs in fields sloping down to the river and deep in the wood, the watch-tower, where Rannaldini worked and seduced. Valhalla itself, narrow-windowed and brooding had been built before the Reformation.

  ‘I’ve been reading a fascinating book on the dissolution of the monasteries,’ began Helen.

  Not wanting another lecture, Rannaldini whisked her down dark passages, past suits of armour, tattered banners and tapestries into a red drawing-room.

  ‘How pretty,’ gasped Helen.

  ‘Meredith Whalen decorate it and the kitchen when I was married to Keety. You ’ave such exquisite taste, I pay you to theenk up new colour schemes.’

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t take your money.’

  ‘My child,’ purred Rannaldini, ‘I know you need eet, as I need your help to exorcize bad memory of my life with Keety. Next week I go to Prague for ten days. By the time I return you must think up something wonderful.’

  But Helen was crying again.

  ‘Malise and I were going to Prague on 21 November for our anniversary. Malise tried to get tickets for a production of Don Giovanni at the Stasis Theatre. Mozart premièred it there in November 1787, you know, and that was where they made Amadeus. But it was sold out.’

  ‘Because I am conducting,’ smirked Rannaldini.

  ‘Of course, how stupid of me,’ said Helen appalled. ‘Since Malise died I don’t remember anything.’

  ‘Eet ees shock. It’ll come back.’ Rannaldini poured her a glass of Pouilly-Fumé. ‘You shall come to Prague with me instead.’

  ‘But I can’t leave Marcus and I can’t afford it,’ babbled Helen.

  ‘You will be my guest. I stay in flat. I book you room in nice hotel. I will send you plane ticket and ticket for Don Giovanni just for twenty-four hours, you deserve a treat.’

  Putting a warm hand on her neck as comforting as a wool scarf just dried on the radiator, he led her down more passages to the big kitchen whose walls we
re covered in a glossy green paper, populated by jungle animals and birds.

  ‘I certainly couldn’t improve on this,’ sighed Helen.

  ‘I want eet changed,’ said Rannaldini chillingly. ‘Keety loved the parrots and the humming-birds. I want eet out. Sit down. I will make your lunch.’

  ‘A bowl of soup will do,’ stammered Helen. ‘I can’t eat at the moment.’

  ‘Then you will start.’

  From a next-door office, despite faxes billowing out like smoke, four telephones constantly ringing and the raindrop patter of expensive computors, Rannaldini’s secretaries, who’d all read The Scorpion, kept finding excuses to pop in and gawp at Helen.

  Princess Margaret’s office had rung, they said; Domingo wanted advice on an interpretation; Sir Michael Tippett wondered if Rannaldini had had a moment to look at his latest opera; Hermione had rung four times. Rannaldini said he would call them all back later.

  As he cooked, checking rice, throwing pink chunks of lobster into sizzling butter, then laying them tenderly on a bed of shallots, tarragon and tomatoes, separating eggs, boiling down fish stock, Helen talked. Her tongue loosened by a second glass of wine, she told him about her money problems, the big house she couldn’t afford to keep up, Marcus’s asthma and her worries about his friendship with Flora. She was delighted when Rannaldini dismissed Flora as ‘an evil little tramp’.

  ‘We will take Marcus to the mountains,’ he went on warmly, then his voice thickened like the eggs in the double saucepan. ‘How about your daughter?’

  ‘Quite out of control.’ Helen didn’t want to tell him how incensed she had been about the appropriation of the olive-green cashmere. So she added: ‘At half-term Tabitha borrowed my credit card saying she needed some school books, then used it to buy a pair of jeans and spend the afternoon on a sunbed. I cannot stand such vanity and such lies.’