Appassionata

by Jilly Cooper

  Rannaldini, who was no stranger to lies and would have been quite out of control on a sunbed with Tabitha, expressed his disapproval. Topping a cloud of white rice with butter and putting it in a slower part of the Aga, he gave the lobster sauce a stir, and started chopping up chives for a salad of lettuce hearts.

  ‘How can you do so many things at once?’ marvelled Helen.

  ‘I am conductor.’

  Helen wandered over to the screen which Kitty, over the years, had lovingly covered with photographs of Rannaldini and the famous.

  ‘Everyone’s here,’ she cried, thinking what fascinating people she would meet if Rannaldini became her – er – friend.

  ‘Why d’you record in Prague?’

  ‘Because it’s ten times cheaper than London or New York. Not speaking ill of your country, Helen, but I am tired of New York. Last time I record a Haydn symphony the shop steward sit watching second ‘and go round, four seconds to go, eight bars from the end, he leap on to the stage. “All right, you guys, it’s over.” I tried to keel him. I had to be pulled off. Eet takes an act of congress and then of God to get rid of musicians over there.

  ‘I am almost broken man,’ sighed Rannaldini, belying it by removing his suede jacket to show off his splendid physique. ‘But I must not talk any more, I will burn your lunch.’

  Putting a white mountain of rice on each emerald-green plate, he spooned over the sizzling lobster mixture, then poured on the buttery sauce, topping it with a dash of cayenne.

  ‘Voila!’

  ‘This is too much,’ protested Helen.

  ‘You weel eat every bit, even if I have to feed you.’

  Rannaldini filled up her glass again.

  How wonderfully easy to give dinner parties, if one were living with Rannaldini, mused Helen, and think of the guest list. Her eyes strayed again to Kitty’s screen.

  ‘It is quite, quite delicious,’ she said in awe.

  As he told her his plans for the future Rannaldini’s warm eyes never left her face.

  ‘The leaves tumbling down remind me of new leaf I must turn over. I am tired of jetting round world. I must settle down in this lovely house, write music and build up a great orchestra of wonderful musicians, who would not be always chasing engagements and money like the London orchestras or threatening strike action like the guys in New York.’

  ‘You could be another Simon Rattle,’ said Helen warmly.

  Rannaldini scowled.

  ‘The CBSO is second-rate provincial orchestra,’ he said haughtily.

  ‘You can’t say that. Malise always felt—’

  Fortunately Rannaldini’s third secretary popped her head round the door to say the Princess of Wales was on the line.

  ‘My dear,’ Rannaldini took the telphone, ‘may I ring you back in one hour.’ He’d be leaving for the Albert Hall to conduct Turangalila around five o’clock.

  Helen was so speechless with admiration that this great Maestro should find time for her she forgot about Simon Rattle.

  ‘Why don’t you come with me this evening?’ asked Rannaldini, playfully spooning the last of her lobster into her mouth.

  ‘I must get back for Marcus.’

  ‘Eef only I had had a mother like you.’

  ‘Will Hermione Harefield be singing in Prague?’ asked Helen. ‘This salad is so good.’

  ‘No, she sing in Aida in Rome, and elephant run away with her. Nellie the Elephant pack her trunk and run away with Hermione,’ sang Rannaldini. His face was expressionless but he gave Helen a wicked side-glance and she burst out laughing.

  ‘Poor Hermione. I have to confess,’ Helen went on, ‘I do have reservations about Don Giovanni as an opera. The Don reminds me so much of Rupert,’ she gave a shiver, ‘and the way he used to get his best friend Billy Lloyd-Foxe to cover for him like Leporello.’

  ‘I know,’ Rannaldini slid his hand over hers. ‘Jake Lovell talks of you often, how terribly unhappy Rupert made you.’

  ‘How kind of Jake,’ said Helen, touched.

  ‘Jake threw you life-belt when you needed it,’ said Rannaldini. ‘But long term he would have bored you, you are much too bright for him.’

  Machiavellian, Rannaldini pressed every organ stop of Helen’s vanity.

  ‘That’s why he let you go,’ he added, knowing perfectly well that Jake had dumped Helen.

  ‘Do you think he’s happy with his wife?’

  ‘Jake dream of you often,’ lied Rannaldini, selecting a ripe peach, caressing its downy curves, ‘And who would not?’ Picking up a knife, he laid bare the gold flesh.

  Helen found herself not only sharing the peach with him but, after another glass, agreeing to come to Prague.

  Rannaldini’s secretary then brought in a pile of fan mail.

  ‘Have you sewn that button on my tail-coat?’ he called after her shapely departing back.

  ‘People think being a conductor,’ he continued as in dark green ink he scribbled his name on each letter, ‘is all helicopters, jets and princesses, but eet consist of worry where you’ll stop long enough to get your laundry done.’

  ‘Genius shouldn’t have to worry about clean shirts and missing buttons,’ said Helen shocked. ‘Rupert never bothered to answer fan mail,’ she added.

  ‘That appal me,’ Rannaldini signed a couple of photographs. ‘Eef by writing back to these young people I can lead them on to a lifetime of loving music, it is small thing.’

  ‘What a genuinely good man you are,’ Helen suppressed a belch. ‘How people have misjudged you.’

  ‘Come for a walk,’ said Rannaldini, putting his huge wolf coat round her shoulders. ‘How it become you, a leetle lamb in wolf’s clothing.’

  As they walked up a path behind the house, the low afternoon sun kept parting the clouds, shining through yellow-and-orange leaves, so they glowed like amber and topaz. Rannaldini picked up a red beech leaf and held it against a soft brown wand of ash leaves.

  ‘You must always wear brown with your red hair,’ he told her. ‘Black is too hard.’

  As they passed a monk’s graveyard, Helen noticed a little pink flower with bright crimson leaves growing out of the wall.

  ‘What a dear little plant.’

  ‘It ees called Herb Robert, all the year it flower, the monks used the leaves to staunch flow of blood.’

  ‘Herb Roberto,’ teased Helen, as they stopped to lean on a mossy gate. ‘Such a beautiful name, why don’t you use it?’

  ‘My mother, who reject me, call me that.’

  ‘Roberto,’ repeated Helen softly.

  ‘Coming from your lips it sound bettair.’ Not wanting to frighten her, Rannaldini decided against a kiss.

  As they turned for home, a biblical ray appeared through the clouds spotlighting Valhalla and the saffron larches, as though the place was on fire.

  ‘Look Helen, it is omen, my past go up in flames like Götterdämmerung. I bring you on this walk,’ Rannaldini took her hand, ‘because the trees at the top of the wood never turn because they only get sunshine in the evening. Oh Helen, let us have some sunshine in the evening of our lives.’

  Helen squeezed his hand, so moved that she couldn’t speak.

  ‘Before you come to Prague,’ said Rannaldini, ‘I must send you my video of Don Giovanni.’

  Helen, who prided herself on telling the truth, took a deep breath.

  ‘We have the video, Roberto, but I must say, neither Malise nor I thought it was your best effort. The music was delightful but all the sexual innuendo and the nudity seemed to trivialize the production.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Rannaldini icily.

  ‘And we both felt that the camera rested on your face too much. Although it’s fascinating watching a great conductor at work, it rather distracts from the action.’

  ‘My Don Giovanni achieve higher rating than EastEnders.’

  ‘It had popular appeal maybe, Roberto,’ said Helen earnestly, ‘but I think you are capable of greater things.’

  ‘Do you inde
ed?’ Rannaldini gazed fixedly ahead.

  Realizing she had goofed, Helen said hastily, ‘I guess it’s my fault, as I said the Don is so like Rupert.’

  ‘How is Rupert’s exquisite wife?’ asked Rannaldini silkily.

  Helen’s face tightened; she was wildly jealous of Taggie. Not only had she made Rupert happy, she was also adored by Marcus and Tabitha, and when he was alive, by Malise.

  That’ll teach her to slag off my Don Giovanni, thought Rannaldini in amusement.

  ‘I expect she’s busy chaining herself to some railing to stop lambs and calves being shipped alive to the continent,’ said Helen tartly.

  The thought of Taggie Campbell-Black being chained to anything excited Rannaldini unbearably.

  ‘Peter Maxwell Davies is on the telephone.’ The second secretary greeted Rannaldini and Helen as they entered the house. ‘Have you looked at his symphony yet?’

  ‘Put it in my briefcase, I do it tonight,’ Rannaldini looked at his watch.

  ‘Do you admire Boris Levitsky’s Berlin Wall Symphony?’ asked Helen, anxious to keep her end up. ‘Malise and I were overwhelmed by it.’

  ‘Hopelessly derivative. Boris speak of being divinely inspired by the great composers.’ Sneeringly, Rannaldini pretended to pick up a telephone, ‘’Allo, Beethoven, ’Ow are you? I am ready to receive message, I take it down . . . and out come chopsteeks.’

  ‘That’s unfair,’ said Helen reprovingly. ‘Boris is very dear. He’s been so supportive since Malise died, he rings me three or four times a week. I know Marcus would love him as a stepfather,’ she added defiantly, and then felt absolutely miserable.

  She is very insecure, decided Rannaldini, Malise had restored her confidence and hung a picture-light over her beauty; now it had gone out.

  Changing tack, he said gently: ‘Many men would like to be Marcus’s stepfather. Eef you didn’t like my Don Giovanni, I must give you other records and eef you won’t come to Albert Hall, Clive, my chauffeur, will drive you home.’

  Later that evening, Marcus endured a half-hour moan about bills from a restless, sobered-up Helen. He then pointed to Nielsen’s Flute Concerto and Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony lying on the piano.

  ‘If we’re that broke, why are you buying that bastard’s records?’

  Startled, because Marcus was normally so tolerant, hoping Mrs Edwards wouldn’t drop her in it, Helen tried a grey lie.

  ‘Rannaldini wrote me a delightful letter, admiring Malise’s flute book and sent me the Nielsen and the Mahler because he thought I needed cheering up.’ Helen gave a deep sigh.

  ‘Sure, Mum, Rannaldini’s still a fiend. He wiped out Flora and he crucified poor Kitty. You ask Lysander.’

  ‘Lysander stole Rannaldini’s wife,’ said Helen furiously.

  ‘Because Rannaldini was so unfaithful to her. He’s randier than Dad’s Jack Russells.’ Then, as Helen winced, added, ‘Small man syndrome. Although for a small man he casts a long shadow, and he’s got a repulsive black-leather-clad henchman called Clive, who takes women off the bone for him.’

  Helen shuddered.

  ‘Why does he dislike Boris so much? I read it somewhere,’ she added hastily.

  ‘Boris is taller,’ said Marcus, ‘and a million times more talented. Rannaldini only admires musicians who are dead.’

  ‘This article said he could be nice.’

  ‘Only because it’s such bliss when the electrodes stop.’

  FOURTEEN

  Helen was appalled. The last thing she wanted was another promiscuous sadist. When Rannaldini called, she’d just refuse politely. But Rannaldini did not call. Expert at fostering addiction, he knew exactly how to give a blue glimpse of Paradise before slamming the skylight shut. Whizzing off abroad, he left Helen to stew for a fortnight until she was diving for the telephone, snatching letters from the postman and scanning the pallid November skies praying one of the circling rooks would grow into a big black helicopter.

  Then, on the morning of the opening night, when she had abandoned all hope, Rannaldini rang blithely from Prague.

  ‘I hope you are coming; a messenger will drop tickets for plane and for Don Giovanni within the hour. Clive will meet you at Prague. I book you into charming discreet hotel, L’Esplanade.’

  ‘I didn’t know I was expected,’ Helen’s voice scraped down a blackboard of indignation. ‘I can’t make it at such short notice.’

  ‘I didn’t want to pressure you,’ confessed Rannaldini. ‘An I wasn’t sure of production, but eet come good.’ Then, after a long pause, he whispered, ‘I need you, Helen.’

  As Helen arrived at Heathrow, a defiant red sun leaving the western sky aflame had just been sucked below the dark horizon like Don Giovanni.

  Never had Helen been less prepared for a trip; normally every local legend would have been memorized, every fine church charted. In anticipation of their own proposed trip, Malise had bought her a guide book to Prague. But she had been too superstitious to open it and once she was on the plane she couldn’t take in a word. She kept panicking about things, including her wits, she had left behind.

  To avoid the Bourbon-breathed attentions of a businessman with hairy nostrils in the next seat, she accepted a copy of The Times from the hostess, only to find among the birthdays that international conductor, Rannaldini, was forty-four today – on the cusp of Scorpio and Sagittarius, those two most volatile and darkly virile signs. Rannaldini must want to share his birthday with her and she had brought no present except a first edition of Malise’s book on the flute. How awful.

  Although fog symbolizing her confusion delayed the plane by nearly two hours, Rannaldini’s Leporello, the sinister Clive, his light eyes as unblinking and expressionless as a cobra’s, was still waiting. Helen kept as far away from his lean leather-clad body as her seatbelt would allow. She was so thin now, there would be nothing for him to take off the bone.

  She was far too uptight to be more than fleetingly aware of empty, ill-lit restaurants, floodlit fortresses and spires, a gleaming river and overcrowded unkempt trees, trying to escape over park railings.

  As the Czechs had only recently had mass access to cars, the driving was hair-raising. Clive swore under his breath as somehow avoiding head-on collisions he hurtled Rannaldini’s black Mercedes down the narrowest of streets, rattling over the cobbles as if he would bang the heads of the tall lowering houses together.

  The hotel, as Rannaldini predicted, was charming, with a crescent of smiling receptionists.

  ‘Take your time, we’ve missed the first act,’ Clive called after her, as an ancient, knowing porter drove the rickety tram of a lift up to the fifth floor.

  Seeing her pinched, twitching reflection in the lift mirror, Helen was overwhelmed with longing for Malise; he’d always thought she looked beautiful and would have known exactly how many kopeks to tip the porter.

  The next moment she was gasping with joy for her entire room was filled with different coloured freesias, embracing her in their sweet heady scent. Beside a blue glass bowl spilling over with persimmons, peaches and passion-fruit was a bottle of Krug on ice and the bathroom was full of soap and bottles containing every permutation of Balmain’s Jolie Madame. How darling of Rannaldini to have realized it was her favourite perfume.

  More magical still, on the drab beige bedspread lay a long crushed velvet dress in the same soft umber as the drenched ash wand he had picked up in the wood. On the dressing-table was a red leather case from Cartier’s and a letter.

  My darling,

  The dress is to go with your beech-leaf hair. In box is small present to echo the stars I will put back in your eyes.

  In hope,

  Rannaldini.

  Collapsing on the bed so hard it nearly broke her back, Helen opened the box. Inside glittered a diamond necklace. The dress was wonderfully becoming, the high neck and long sleeves concealed her jutting collar bones and refugee arms. The ribbed clinging velvet made her look saluki-slender. But what would happen when Rannaldi
ni undressed her and found the skeleton beneath the skin? And how could she not sleep with him after accepting these gifts? She wouldn’t mind so much if her bottom hadn’t dropped and if she didn’t feel so leaden-limbed and out of practice. What would happen if she froze inside as she had done so often with Rupert?

  The clasp of the diamonds nearly defeated her shaking hands. She was going home. The telephone rang. Oh, why wasn’t it Malise?

  ‘Whenever you’re ready,’ lisped Clive’s voice.

  As Helen came out of the lift, he was singing to himself.

  ‘Where’s my master, Don Giovanni?

  Making love to youth and beauty

  While I stay on sentry duty.’

  But there was no admiration in his face. He preferred the more butch male singers from the chorus.

  It had been the worst pre-opening week he could remember, he told Helen on the drive to the theatre, Rannaldini’s clashes with singers and orchestra had been epic.

  ‘Musicians here are used to working for the state and having the same job for life, so it doesn’t matter if they learn the parts or arrive on time. They’re very bolshy. All the singers were in tears at the dress rehearsal. Donna Anna said first-night nerves were a doddle compared with Rannaldini’s rages.’

  I’m the one with the first night nerves, thought Helen. Clive shouldn’t discuss his boss like this.

  ‘It’s incredible to think,’ she said reprovingly, ‘Mozart himself conducting the première of Don Giovanni in this very theatre more than two hundred years ago.’

  ‘And Casanova was in the audience and wrote some of the libretto,’ leered Clive, thinking Rannaldini would have left both the Don and Casanova standing this week. ‘There’s the theatre.’

  Ahead, romantically and softly lit by old-fashioned street-lamps and hung with window-boxes full of clashing red-and-mauve geraniums, rose a square, peppermint-green building. The foyer was flanked with hefty pillars that would have challenged even Sampson.

  ‘How beautiful,’ sighed Helen. ‘If only we weren’t so late.’