by Jilly Cooper
‘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 indeed?’ 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 Rannaldini 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.’
‘In Mozart’s day it was fashionable to be late and not stay the course,’ said Clive as he locked the car doors. ‘The Kings and Princes of Prague used to make a quick exit from the royal box down those,’ he pointed to an outside staircase, ‘so they could rush off to their fancy pieces.’
Helen looked bootfaced. Clive was far too familiar. Then they both jumped at a deafening machine-gun rattle coming from the auditorium: the traditional applause for the conductor at the beginning of the last act.
‘Shit,’ muttered Clive.
Only by brandishing his identity card as Rannaldini’s minion, did he manage to smuggle Helen past the doorman, who had had death threats not to admit latecomers.
‘Does Signor Rannaldini know I’ve arrived?’ asked Helen as they belted up the wide spiral staircase.
‘No,’ lied Clive. ‘Once an opera starts Rannaldini cannot be disturbed. He hates to lose the mood. He paces the conductor’s room like The Prince of Darkness. Sometimes in the interval he has a shower and changes his shirt in a trance, not realizing it.’
‘There are moments when art transcends everything,’ panted Helen.
But, as Clive smuggled her into a box overlooking the pit, the door banged and, in her nervousness, Helen dropped her bag with a clatter. There was a horrified silence. Bows stopped moving, wind and brass players stopped breathing. Rannaldini whipped round in a fury, he was known to scream at latecomers, or worse still, hurl down his baton and storm out.
But, as he caught sight of Helen, huge-eyed in the half-light, diamonds glittering at her graceful neck like the Pleiades, he gave a wonderfully theatrical start and stopped conducting. Donna Elvira languishing on her balcony, Don Giovanni and Leporello swapping clothes in the shadowy garden and all the musicians looked at him incredulously as though a metronome had broken down.
Rannaldini gazed at Helen. Then a smile of such rare sweetness and joy spread across his face that a ripple of laughter went through the orchestra and the nearby boxes and everyone was desperately craning round and leaping to their feet to see the beauty who had stopped the great Maestro in his course.
Hastily Rannaldini pulled himself together.
‘I am sorry.’ Briefly he turned to the audience then back to the musicians and singers, ‘We begin the trio again. Taci injusti core.’
The exquisite music started, Don Giovanni resumed his amorous escapades. Helen was overwhelmed. Clearly, even for Rannaldini, there were times when love was much more important than art. Clive was grinning broadly when, during an exuberant tutti, he slid back into the box bearing a bottle of champagne, a glass and a plate of caviar.
‘With the Maestro’s compliments,’ he whispered. ‘He was worried this afternoon that you might not have had time to eat.’
The toast was still warm — like Rannaldini’s hands. Helen quivered with excitement. Marcus had so misjudged him. She must eat a little but she mustn’t crunch too loudly.
In the dim light she admired Mozart’s theatre. Gold tiers decorated with plump white cherubs rose up and up to a huge unlit chandelier. Oblong gilt mirrors on the inside of each slate-blue velvet box, huge gold tassels on the midnight-blue curtains on either side of the stage, the musicians’ instruments all added to the subdued glitter.
Below her, in a pit bigger than one of the Czech Grand National’s fearsome ditches, the musicians played as if their lives depended on it.
It was also a mark of Rannaldini’s genius that after such an interruption, he immediately got his glamorous cast of unknown singers back on course without any slackening of tension. It was also obvious, except to a dazzled Helen, that after her arrival both Donna Anna and Donna Elvira sang of the pangs of love with even more tearful conviction. Zerlina, exuding snapping sloe-eyed sexiness in a cherry-red peasant’s dress, on the other hand, was glaring at Rannaldini as she defiantly flashed soft white thighs and black stockings, held up by one red and one purple garter, at her stodgy lover, Masetto.
But Helen had only eyes for Rannaldini, bewildered that such energy should come out of such stillness. His hardly moving stick twitched like a cat’s tail. His hair, now raven-black with sweat, was the only evidence of expended energy.
They were into the moonlit graveyard now. As Giovanni vaulted over the wall to boast of more conquests to a terrified Leporello, Helen thought once again, with the anger of too much champagne, how like Rupert he was.
Then she gasped in terror as the gaunt grey
statue of the Commendatore on his stone horse came to life and to the doom-laden accompaniment of the trombones uttered the first dreadful greeting to the Don.
‘Your laughter will be silenced before morning.’
‘Who goes there?’ undaunted by any ghost, Giovanni swung his machine-gun round the tombstones.
As the sepulchral voice rang out again ordering him to leave the dead in peace, Helen’s blood ran even colder. The statue looked so like Malise on his deathbed. Malise had rescued her from Rupert, now he seemed to be warning her from the grave to stay away from Rannaldini.
But Helen was most unnerved by the lascivious halfsmile on Rannaldini’s face as the handsome young Don, still raging and unrepentant, was finally sucked down into a quicksand of leaping flame.
‘A-a-a-h!’
It was like watching a great aeroplane crash. The Prussian-blue curtains closed like the gates of hell. There was a stunned pause as the audience realized Rannaldini had scrapped the last moralizing chorus. Then followed a deafening roar of applause. As the lights went up and the vast chandelier glittered like a huge thistle overhead, Helen could see the full beauty of the theatre, its soft blues and golds like a sunlit day at sea. But loveliest to Helen were the tier upon tier of ecstatically cheering people.
Down below the musicians were shaking hands and hugging each other in delight, as the cast trooped onto the stage, elated but slightly bewildered at such an ovation. How pretty the girls were, strong-featured, red-lipped, lusty and displaying such full white breasts as they bent to gather up the carnations raining down.
Rannaldini got the greatest cheer of all. For a man who’d been conducting for two hours forty minutes, who was black under the eyes and whose suntan had faded, he looked magnificent, smaller than any of the men but dwarfing them with his personality. Donna Elvira and Donna Anna, on either side of him, had kicked off their high heels and the audience cheered even louder as he kissed their hands and then reached out for the hand of Zerlina who was sulking down the row.
Then the chorus returned and everyone sang ‘Happy Birthday’ in Czech and Donna Elvira presented Rannaldini with pink roses and a bust of Mozart.
