by Jilly Cooper
Rannaldini let his thoughts wander to the little blond flautist he had reduced to tears at the rehearsal. Tomorrow he would be stern at first, then stun her with a word of praise and ultimately ask her to his flat in Hyde Park Square for a drink. ‘I only bully you, dearest child, because you have talent.’
The orchestra, with Wolfie playing the clarinet, Natasha the violin and Marcus Campbell-Black the trumpet, were just murdering the ‘Dove’ from Respighi’s The Birds, and plucking the poor thing as well, and Rannaldini was about to stage another of his very public walk-outs which would take all the attention off Boris, when Kitty whispered that the girl Wolfie was mad about was coming on next.
The orchestra, who were going to end the concert with an Enigma Variation, stayed in their seats. Rannaldini couldn’t imagine his stolid rugger-playing son being mad about anyone interesting, but when Flora strolled on to the platform, he couldn’t take his eyes off her. Despite having several spots, greasy red hair the colour of tabasco and a pale green complexion from drinking at lunchtime, she was the sexiest girl he’d ever seen. Her school shirt, drenched in white wine, clung almost transparently to her small jutting breasts, her tie was askew, her black stockings laddered. Gazing truculently at the back of the hall she sang ‘Speed Bonny Boat’ unaccompanied and the room went still. Her voice was beyond criticism, sweet, pure, piercingly distinctive and delivered in a take-it-or-leave-it manner without a quiver of nerves. Her star quality was undeniable. Georgie clutched Guy’s hand. Deeply moved, Guy couldn’t resist glancing sideways, delighted at the dramatic effect his daughter’s voice was having on Rannaldini. He didn’t want her to become a pop star, but a career in classical music would be different. Perhaps Flora was learning to behave at last.
But when Flora reached the line about winds roaring loudly and thunderclouds rending the air, she so empathized with tossing on a rough sea that she suddenly turned even greener, and, grabbing the nearest trumpet from a protesting Marcus, threw up into it.
The first person to break the long and appalled silence was Rupert Campbell-Black, quite unable to control his laughter.
Sod Wolfie, thought Rannaldini with a surge of excitement, I must have that girl.
Georgie and Guy were so overwhelmed with mortification and, in Guy’s case, white-hot rage that they nearly boycotted the drinks party afterwards. Miss Bottomley, who’d been looking for an excuse all term, was poised to sack Flora on the spot when Rannaldini glided up and smoothed everything over.
Putting his beautiful suntanned hand, which was immediately shrugged off, on Miss Bottomley’s wrestler’s shoulders, he assured her that all creative artists suffered from stage fright.
‘The girl’s impossible,’ spluttered Miss Bottomley.
‘But on course for stardom. I never ’ear a voice like this since I first heard Hermione Harefield. Even Mrs Harefield,’ Rannaldini lowered his voice suggestively, ‘need endless coaxing to go on and very delicate handling.’
Frightfully excited at the thought of handling Hermione, Miss Bottomley agreed to give Flora another chance.
‘I will speak to her parents,’ insisted Rannaldini.
He then astounded Wolfie, Natasha and Kitty by changing his mind and staying on for the drinks party. As Rupert Campbell-Black had led the stampede of cars down the drive, he would at least have the floor to himself.
‘Was “Hark, Hark” OK, Papa?’ demanded Natasha, linking arms with her father as she led him down dark-panelled corridors past gawping staff and pupils.
‘Excellent,’ said Rannaldini abstractedly, ‘you’ve come on a lot. What was the matter with Wolfie’s little redhead?’
‘Flora?’
Deliberately Natasha let the door into Miss Bottomley’s private apartment slam in the face of Kitty, who was panting to keep up with them on her high heels.
‘Flora got pissed at lunchtime,’ explained Natasha. ‘She’s got this massive crush on Boris Levitsky and she saw him French, or rather,’ Natasha giggled, ‘Russian-kissing some strange blonde — not Rachel his wife — outside the Nat West this morning. That was Boris’s trumpet Flora was sick into. Boris had lent it to Marcus.’
So Boris is back with Chloe the mezzo, thought Rannaldini. Certainly he didn’t regard Flora’s massive crush on the Russian as any competition.
Miss Bottomley’s large study was already packed with parents falling on drink and food like the vultures culture always seems to turn people into. Most of them, Rannaldini noticed scornfully, seemed to be gathering like flies on a cowpat round that ghastly, blousy Georgie Maguire, who kept throwing him hot glances. Ignoring her totally, but accepting a glass of orange juice — he never touched cheap wine — Rannaldini spoke briefly to Boris.
‘Well tried, my dear. Slightly too ambitious. They are still cheeldren, and was it wise to programme one of your own compositions in front of these Pheelistines?’
Boris, whose conducting arm was not aching too much to prevent him downing several glasses of red, wanted to smash Rannaldini’s cold, fleshless, but curiously sensual face, but then Rannaldini murmured something about having a pile of freelance work. Boris needed the money badly.
‘Now introduce me to Flora’s parents,’ he said to Natasha.
‘Oh, didn’t you twig, Papa? Flora’s Georgie Maguire’s daughter.’
Rannaldini didn’t miss a beat. Gliding forward, parting parents like the Red Sea by sheer force of personality, he stopped in front of Georgie, put his hands in the pockets of his soft brown suede jacket, bowed slightly and glared aggressively into her eyes. His trick was to unnerve women by staring them out, then suddenly to smile.
‘Senora Seymour,’ he said caressingly. ‘May I call you Georgie?’ Then raising her hand which was clutching a soggy Ritz cracker topped with tinned pâté and chopped gherkin, he touched it with his lips.
Just one corny-etto, thought Guy.
‘I am sorry I mees your launching,’ went on Rannaldini, ‘I ’op it is not too late to say: welcome to Paradise.’
‘Oh, not at all. How lovely to meet you at last.’ Georgie was totally flustered, as though a great tiger had strolled out of the jungle and was rubbing his face against her cheek. Rannaldini was even more faint-making close up.
‘And I loff Rock Star. It is great music and your peecture don’t do you any justice.’
What could Rannaldini be playing at? Hermione, who’d joined them, was looking furious.
‘Oh, thank you,’ gasped Georgie, then remembering her manners, ‘This is Guy — my husband,’ she added almost regretfully.
‘I haff heard much of your gallery.’ Rannaldini switched his searchlight charm on to Guy. ‘You were first to exeebit Daisy France-Lynch when no-one else had ’eard of her. I ’ave several of her paintings.’
‘Oh, right,’ Guy was totally disarmed. ‘I’d love to see them.’
‘You shall,’ said Rannaldini. ‘First I want to get Bob over to talk about Flora.’
Seeing his endlessly compassionate and good-natured orchestra manager making too good a job of cheering up Boris Levitsky, Rannaldini clicked his fingers imperiously.
Refusing to be ruffled, Bob finished what he was saying and was fighting his way through the mob when Guy said to Rannaldini: ‘You may not have been here to welcome us, but Kitty has been an absolute brick, bringing us new-laid eggs and turning down curtains. You’re a lucky man,’ he added rather heartily, aware that the searchlight beam had dimmed a little.
Rannaldini, who detested Kitty furthering anyone’s interests but his own, much preferred it if she turned down invitations rather than curtains. He even begrudged her taking an hour off on Sunday to go to church.
Aware of a distinct chill but not understanding why, Georgie couldn’t bear to lose contact.
‘We wanted to take Kitty out to The Heavenly Host tonight,’ she stammered.
‘Why don’t we all go? We were planning to celebrate Flora’s first night home, although on second thoughts she seems to have pre-empted us rather too
well already. Why don’t you both come to dinner at Angel’s Reach? How about Friday week? We should be a little less shambolic by then.’
Hermione, who was about to draw Georgie aside and explain that the protocol in Paradise was for long-term residents to invite first, awaited one of Rannaldini’s legendary put-downs.
Instead, to her amazement, he accepted with enthusiasm.
On four glasses of cheap wine, Georgie proceeded to invite Bob, who’d just brought Boris over to be introduced, and Hermione who only accepted because Rannaldini had. Then she asked Boris and his wife Rachel, if they were in the country, to make up for the sick trumpet, which Boris reassured Georgie would easily wash out. Then, to placate Miss Bottomley, she asked her as well.
‘Best time to have a house-warming party when it’s not all done up for people to ruin,’ said Georgie happily.
As they drove home, a moon one size up from new was winging its way like a white dove towards a dying flame-red sunset. Slumped in the back Flora was fast asleep.
‘I thought you wanted peace and quiet in the country,’ chided Guy.
‘I got carried away. I thought it would be good for Flora to meet Rannaldini. She needs an older man to direct her. One never listens to one’s parents at her age. He says she’s exceptional. Anyway I can’t cut myself off completely. We can have sausages and mash. People will only expect a picnic as we’ve just moved in.’
Guy, who knew he’d be lumbered with the cooking and the organization, put his mind to the menu.
Georgie lay back in a blissful haze, convinced Rannaldini had only accepted because he fancied her. It was years since she’d felt that loin-churning excitement.
‘Rannaldini’s lovely, isn’t he?’ she couldn’t help saying.
‘Not terribly,’ said Guy shortly. ‘Not to Kitty and he’s clearly terribly two-faced.’
But it was such a beautiful face, thought Georgie dreamily, you didn’t mind there being two of them.
18
Guy was an ace cook and a wonderful host, but Georgie had never known him make such a fuss about a dinner party. His nose had been in Anton Mosimann for days. As the dining room was still being wallpapered, he took the Friday of the dinner party off and set the big scrubbed table in the kitchen first thing in the morning. He then got enraged when Charity the cat did bending races in and out of the glasses, decanters and flowers, and with Flora when she drifted in at lunchtime with a group of friends and started making toasted sandwiches and leaving a trail of mugs, crumbs and overflowing ashtrays.
‘We met a crowd of spiders fleeing down the drive singing the theme from Exodus,’ Flora told her father. ‘You ought to put one in a glass case to remind us what they look like.’
‘Don’t be fatuous,’ snapped Guy, bashing a lobster claw with unusual violence.
When he wasn’t cooking Guy seemed to spend the whole day cleaning surfaces, tidying and re-arranging the house, and disappearing to get petrol for the mower.
Every superfluous blade of grass must be cut, like a woman waiting for her lover, thought Georgie, who, having been told she was more hindrance than help, retired to work.
She was enchanted with her new study, high up in the west tower and reached by a staircase so narrow they had to hoist her piano, her worktable and Dinsdale’s ancient chaise-longue in through the window. Sitting at her table, pen poised over a blank page of manuscript paper, she was trying to write a song equating love to everlasting candles on a birthday cake.
‘The strongest winds may blow and rack, but I’ll come burning brightly back,’ wrote Georgie. The word ‘rack’ was too obscure: she’d have to think of something else. She got down the rhyming dictionary.
She could see the great lichened curve of an angel’s wing, and if she leant out of the window she could look over a fuzz of wood as soft as rabbit’s fur to the chimneys of Valhalla and Rannaldini’s grey tower beyond. Paradise lived more and more up to its name. Like quill pens plunging into inky-green spring grass, little poplar trees lined the drive. As Guy’s mowing machine paused, Georgie could hear the rattle of a woodpecker.
After the morning’s rain, the mist was rising milky blue down the valley like a thousand smoke signals. Dreamily she imagined herself sending a message to Rannaldini: ‘Guy’s home. His lunch in Bath’s been cancelled. We can’t meet today.’
On the mantelpiece was an unsigned good luck card from Tancredi who’d been the lead guitarist in her first famous group of the sixties. Georgie and Tancredi had been the most passionate and fatal of lovers, and when the group split up, she had settled for Guy and stability, and Tancredi had kicked his cocaine habit and married a homespun middle-American girl and made good in Los Angeles. But they still telephoned each other occasionally, and met up and made love when Tancredi came over to England, agreeing that, although they were far better off with their present partners, there was still an undeniable bond between them. Tancredi was due back in May. Perhaps he could come down to Angel’s Reach when Guy was in London. There were plainly advantages to being alone in the country mid-week, particularly if Rannaldini was around.
Then Georgie looked up at the corkboard where she’d pinned cuttings from the Rock Star launch. Guy — square jawed, clear-eyed, sternly handsome — stared down at her. She must get a copy of the photograph from the Express and have it framed.
Guy was the one who mattered, but it was lovely to be fancied. Feeling dreadfully self-indulgent, she slotted in the tape of Rock Star, glorying in the smoky beauty of her own voice and picked up her pen.
Flora had only agreed to wait at the table, because Boris was coming to dinner. Now she had further enraged Guy by messing up the guest bathroom and annexing his Free Foresters’ cricket sweater. Hearing shouting from downstairs, Georgie wondered if Guy was uptight because he’d picked up the vibes between her and Rannaldini. She felt very excited as she wandered downstairs reeking of Giorgio, in a clinging velvet midi-dress, the same luminous grey as the sky on a moonlit night, which streamlined her opulent body and showed off her tousled red hair.
‘No Spring, nor Summer beauty has such grace, As I have seen in one Autumnal face.’ She could imagine Rannaldini murmuring in that wonderful throbbing basso profundo.
The house certainly looked lovely. The huge rooms, although hell to heat, were a marvellous showcase for Guy’s paintings. Rannaldini and Larry, and to a lesser extent, Bob were collectors, Guy even had hopes of Rupert Campbell-Black, who despite not knowing the difference between a Titian and a Tretchikoff, had one of the finest collections of paintings in the country.
Drifting into the drawing room, however, Georgie found that all their own paintings had been taken down and the stark white walls covered with vast oils of the same copulating couple, a rapacious naked girl coiled round a faceless man in a pin-stripe suit.
Flora, who was still wearing Guy’s cricket sweater, and looking as trampishly sexy as her mother looked voluptuous and replete, was gazing at them in horror.
‘What’s this shit?’ she demanded.
‘Don’t swear.’ Guy’s lips tightened, as he adjusted a picture light. ‘And don’t make comments on things about which you know nothing. These are original Armstrongs.’
‘You’d need strong arms to hoist up a dog like that girl. They’re absolutely gross.’
‘It’s a moving and original interpretation of the Kama Sutra.’
‘Pin-stripe suitra more like,’ drawled Flora. ‘Who’s coming to this bash anyway?’
Guy looked even more bootfaced, but was not prepared to risk a row that might leave him waitressless.
‘Well, I decided in for a penny in for a pound. There’s Julia Armstrong and her husband Ben.’ Going into the kitchen, he gave his raspberry purée, to go with the lobster mousseline, a stir.
‘Who’s she?’ asked Georgie.
Guy sighed. ‘Oh Panda, I’ve told you a hundred times. She’s having an exhibition at the gallery next month. I thought people might enjoy a preview tonight. Ben and Julia live
in Islington, but they’ve rented a weekend cottage in Eldercombe. They’ve got young children. Ben’s in computers. I like him a lot. Leave those grapes alone, Flora,’ he said sharply. ‘And you were going to wash a couple of lettuces, Georgie, I’ve done the dressing. And for goodness’ sake, do the placement before everyone arrives.’
Oh God, placement was more taxing than A level maths! There was Julia and Ben, Rannaldini and Kitty, Annabel Hardman, another friend of Georgie’s who lived in Paradise, and Valentine, her brilliant beast of a lawyer husband, who might not turn up. Boris and Rachel, Marigold and Lysander or Larry, and for Miss Bottomley Georgie had invited Meredith Whalen, an extremely expensive, gay interior designer, who was nicknamed the Ideal Homo, because he was so often asked to make up numbers at Paradise dinner parties.
‘I’ll need log tables to work out this one,’ grumbled Georgie.
‘Bottomley’d better go on your right, Mum,’ advised Flora. ‘She’ll need two chairs.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ giggled Georgie. ‘She goes on Daddy’s right and Hermione on his left.’
But Guy, who was spooning caviar on to each plate beside the lobster mousseline, was not in the mood for frivolity.
‘Put Julia Armstrong on my left. She won’t know anyone, and I’ve got to talk shop to her, and put Ben on your left.’
With alarm Georgie suddenly noticed a dozen bottles of Dom Perignon, a battalion of Nuits St George as well as the vat of caviar and four bottles of Barsac in the fridge. They were horrendously overdrawn at the moment, but she didn’t feel she could remonstrate with Guy when he’d done all the cooking and her new grey velvet dress had cost a fortune.
Following him into the drawing room she found him putting on a record. Next moment Mozart flooded the house from every speaker.
‘Oh, lovely,’ sighed Georgie, ‘Rannaldini’s Così.’
‘It’s Mozart’s Così,’ snapped Guy.
