by Jilly Cooper
Hurtling up the long drive because she was late and disappearing into the protective cloak of dark woodland, Georgie was shivering as she emerged. Ahead, through rusty iron gates, lay a mossy courtyard leading to the back of the house. Following the drive round the north side of the house, Georgie parked outside more ancient gates, with Omnia vincit amor written in rusty iron lettering across the top. Despite such an optimistic message, and a charming paved path up to the front door, which was overgrown with thrift, moss and saxifrage, and bordered by scented pale pink roses rising out of drifts of green lavender, the house gazed suspicious and unwelcoming out of its narrow mullioned windows.
Before Georgie had time to tug the ancient doorbell, Kitty came rushing out, looking comfortingly modern in a Ninja Turtle T-shirt and an overstretched grass-green skirt.
Although she kissed Georgie shyly, she actually put her lips to her guest’s cheek, rather than merely clanking jaw-bones like the rest of Paradise. She also hid the fact that she wasn’t wild about Dinsdale joining the party.
Not in a noticing mood, Georgie was only aware of a trek down scrubbed, winding flagstoned passages, past panelling dark and shiny as treacle toffee and hung with tapestries, crossed swords and the occasional family portrait. To left and right she caught a glimpse of rooms with leafy Jacobean ceilings and vast empty fireplaces.
‘Rannaldini wanted rooms big enough for two grand pianos and sometimes entire orchestras,’ explained Kitty, hastily looking the other way, as Dinsdale hoisted a red-and-white leg on some dark blue velvet curtains.
Finally they reached the tidiest kitchen Georgie had ever seen. Apart from the corkboard with the telephone numbers of Rannaldini’s children’s schools and a large smouldering poster of Rannaldini, there was nothing on any of the surfaces at all, except the newly bleached and scrubbed kitchen table which was laid for two at one end. At the other were two neatly stacked piles of envelopes and signed photographs of Rannaldini, which Kitty had been sending out to fans while she waited.
‘How Guy would love this house,’ said Georgie, ‘everything so wonderfully ordered and lined up.’
She picked up one of the photographs in which Rannaldini was smiling slightly, a fan of wrinkles at the corner of each smouldering, dark eye.
‘Beautiful man,’ murmured Georgie, thinking how odd that she would have secretly nicked one of the photographs, had she come to lunch a couple of months ago.
Giving a deep sigh, Dinsdale lumbered on to the crocus-yellow window-seat which gave a glorious view of silver hayfields and sloping lawns, no doubt paced over the centuries by monks wrestling with temptation.
Rather gingerly Kitty poured out Georgie a large Bacardi and Coke, and made a cup of tea for Mr Brimscombe, who’d recently been poached from Larry and Paradise Towers by Rannaldini and who was now clipping a yew peacock out of the vast dark green side of the famous Valhalla Maze.
‘I daren’t face Marigold when she comes back,’ said Kitty, ‘particularly as Mr Brimscombe’s tending a cutting of the Paradise Pearl in the greenhouse.’
Listlessly picking up a photograph of Rannaldini surrounded by adorable sloe-eyed children, Georgie asked Kitty who looked after them.
‘Well, Cecilia, that’s Rannaldini’s second wife, she’s livin’ with a record producer at the moment. He’s pretty wealfy, so she’s got the kids wiv her and a couple of nannies, but if it breaks up, they might come back ’ere.’
‘How awful,’ shuddered Georgie. ‘Are they monsters?’
‘They’re sweet,’ said Kitty, ‘but very Italian. Cecilia believes kids should ’ave supper and go to bed when they want to, and do what they like. Are you hungry?’
‘A bit,’ lied Georgie as Kitty poured white sauce on two slices of breast.
‘Lovely house.’ Georgie was making heroic efforts not to talk about herself. ‘Mother Courage said something about a ghost.’
I shouldn’t have said that, she thought, as the colour drained from Kitty’s face.
‘There was a young novice, very ’andsome evidently,’ mumbled Kitty. ‘He died here. Sometimes at night I fink I hear him crying, but it’s probably the wind.’
Georgie shivered. ‘Don’t you get frightened here all by yourself?’
‘I’ve got a panic button and the burglar alarm’s wired up to the police station. Security’s very tight, Rannaldini don’t want his furniture or pictures nicked.’
‘You ought to have a dog,’ said Georgie, as Dinsdale, lured by a delectable smell of chicken, lumbered off the window-seat, and took up baleful drooling residence beside her.
‘I’d be more scared if I ’ad them,’ said Kitty, sitting down at the table. ‘I didn’t mean to be rude to Dinsdale. He’s OK, but Rannaldini’s guard dogs frighten me to deaf. Stupid livin’ in the country and being terrified of dogs.’
‘You ought to have someone living in.’
‘Rannaldini doesn’t want it. Cecilia had a living-in nanny, and when Rannaldini fired her, she went to the Press.’
Georgie was staring into space, so Kitty pushed the carrots, peas and mashed potato dishes forward so they were in a ring round her plate.
‘Shall I ’elp you?’
‘Oh, yes please.’
Georgie had finished her Bacardi and Coke, so Kitty gave her another one.
‘Nice kitchen,’ said Georgie, admiring the walls, covered with exotic brilliantly coloured flowers, snakes, humming birds and monkeys like a Malaysian jungle. ‘I’d never have dreamt of having wallpaper like this in a kitchen.’
‘Meredith did it,’ said Kitty, ‘but Rannaldini told him what to do.’
‘Ouch, that hurt!’ screamed Georgie, as Dinsdale scraped her skinny thigh with his paw, leaving great white tracks.
‘Guy’ll probably employ Meredith to wallpaper over the cracks in our marriage,’ she went on bitterly. ‘Nice wife, nice family, nice house in the country, nice BMW, nice mistress. He believes in the united front for the outside world.’ She was twisting her napkin round and round.
‘Try and eat, Georgie,’ said Kitty gently. ‘I don’t mean to pry, but you looked so very unhappy in the churchyard.’
And like a burst water main, Georgie’s misery came flooding out. Kitty was appalled when she’d finished.
‘I can’t believe Julia showing you her diary and telling you all those fings.’
‘She was distraught. On balance, she probably loves Guy almost more than I do, but nothing’s ever hurt me so much in my life.’
‘It must have been a sort of fatal attraction.’
‘Fatal distraction,’ said Georgie in despair. ‘I can’t work, and we sink more and more in debt. I’ll have to pay back the advance on Ant and Cleo. I thought I might re-title it Octavia and write it from the angle of the cuckolded wife.
‘Every morning,’ Georgie dripped white sauce all over the floor, as she gave a piece of breast to Dinsdale, ‘I read Julia’s horoscope, then Guy’s and then mine. I bet Julia does the same thing. Then I feel sick. Guy and I are so terrified of touching each other, we keep bumping into the furniture. I know I should be sweet and loving with my legs permanently open, or he’ll go back to her, but I can’t stop sniping.’
Georgie was eating nothing because she was talking so much, and Kitty was reduced to giving herself second and third helpings. No wonder listeners got fat.
‘I don’t know what’s got into men,’ said Georgie despairingly. ‘They’re all at it, they ought to change the name of London on the map, and call it Bloody Adventure Playground. Doesn’t Rannaldini hurt you?’ she asked. ‘Hermione must. She’s such a cow.’
‘Yes,’ admitted Kitty, ‘but I knew what he was like before I married him. I love him so much, Georgie, even a bit of him is better than nuffink. An’ he’s forty-six, he might settle down one day.’
‘If only we could find nice lovers down here,’ sighed Georgie, as Kitty removed her untouched plate. ‘But men are so dire at the moment. Annabel Hardman went out with a quantity surveyor the other night, h
e just lay back on the sofa, said he wanted to hear all about her life from the age of two, and then fell asleep. Then he was terrible in bed, and expected her to drive him home afterwards.’
Kitty giggled, and put the kettle on. There didn’t seem any point offering Georgie apple tart, but she cut a slice for a lurking Mr Brimscombe who was weeding the flower-bed outside.
‘What are you going to do?’ she asked Georgie.
‘It’s the duty of all prisoners of war to escape,’ said Georgie, ‘so I’d better start vaulting over a wooden horse. My problem is I can’t stop telling people — ancient marinading I call it — I think I’ve gone a bit mad. It’s such a comfort to dump, but you feel so disloyal afterwards, and it’s bound to reach the Press soon.’
Kitty’s wide-set eyes behind the thick spectacles were full of tears.
‘I’m so sorry, Georgie. You and Guy are such lovely people, I can’t bear you both being so unhappy. I’m sure you’ll work it out.’
‘You are nice,’ Georgie hugged her. ‘I’m awfully worried about you being lonely in this huge place.’
‘I’m OK. Natasha and Wolfie come ’ome at weekends, bringing lots of friends. And you know Flora’s coming to stay on Sunday. I’m so looking forward to meeting her.’
‘Are you sure?’ said Georgie. ‘She always cheers me up, but it’s a bit of a strain having to pretend everything is OK in front of her.’
‘Wolfie adores her,’ said Kitty, ‘and Rannaldini says she’s got a wonderful voice.’
24
Meanwhile, in counterpoint to this tragi-comedy, Rannaldini was taking advantage of the boiling hot summer and the collapse of Guy’s and Georgie’s marriage to pursue Flora. At first he made no progress. None of his witty postcards from all over the world were acknowledged. Flora was simply not interested. She was carrying a torch for Boris Levitsky, who was still teaching at Bagley Hall, but looking increasingly gaunt and miserable at having left his wife. She had loads of boys in the school after her; she had a hankering for Marcus Campbell-Black who was terribly shy and wrapped up in his piano playing, and she much preferred the tall blond Wolfgang, who was now cricket captain and a year ahead of her, to his father.
As part of his campaign, Rannaldini encouraged Natasha to make friends with Flora. Natasha, who was feeling neglected because of her mother’s affaire with the record producer, was in turn gratified that Rannaldini was suddenly taking so much interest in her schooling, even rolling up to watch her play in a tennis match one Sunday which he’d never done before.
Longing to please him, she found she could always gain his attention by talking about Flora. How she was always climbing out of her dormitory window at night and running off to a night-club called Gaslight, and how Miss Fagan, their housemistress who was always pinging bras, far from being furious, looked really excited when Flora streaked through the house for a bet, and how Flora passed her French oral.
‘The examiner asked her what her father did for a living. Flora said: “Mon père est mort,” then he asked her what her mother did, and Flora said: “Ma mère est morte aussi,” and burst into tears. The examiner spent the rest of the exam comforting her and gave her an A. It simply isn’t fair. She’s so sexy, everything falls into her lap.’
Including Rannaldini, who, on the day Natasha had a music exam, offered Flora tickets for a concert at the Albert Hall. Flora jumped at it. Anything to get out of Bagley Hall — particularly when Rannaldini sent the helicopter for her. Arriving at the Albert Hall, she found queues hoping for returns, coiled like an ancient lady novelist’s plaits round the building.
Typically, Rannaldini delayed and delayed his entrance, so the packed audience would be panicked into thinking he wasn’t coming on. When he finally appeared, women didn’t actually scream, but they gasped, cheered, clapped, bravoed and then swooned at the incredible beauty of Rannaldini’s back on the rostrum. The gleaming pewter pelt emphasized the wide muscular shoulders beneath the impeccably cut midnight-blue tailcoat. The beautiful suntanned hands were shown off by the Kitty-whitened cuffs with the silver cuff-links, which Leonard Bernstein, whose showmanship, if not his excessive emotion, Rannaldini had greatly admired, had given him for his fortieth birthday.
And if Berlioz conducted with a drawn sword, Rannaldini conducted with a newly sharpened Cupid’s arrow. Flora was the only woman in the front row not wearing one of Catchitune’s yellow-and-purple — I LOVE RANNALDINI T-shirts. As he mounted the rostrum, she caught a whiff of Maestro and the white gardenia flown in for his buttonhole wherever he conducted.
The programme might have been chosen for Flora: Strauss’s Don Juan, followed by his Four Last Songs, sung by Hermione. Every time Rannaldini turned to bring her in with Toscanini’s ivory baton, the audience caught a tantalizing glimpse of his haughty profile.
He also took such liberties with a score, branding his own personality on it so forcefully, that afterwards his interpretation seemed to have become the true one. You felt it couldn’t be bettered, and it couldn’t be otherwise.
He and Hermione took bow after bow at the end of the first half. Her gushing ecstasy, blowing kisses and clutching Cellophaned roses to her heaving bosom, was in total contrast to Rannaldini’s cold stillness which became even colder when, glancing down, he saw Flora engrossed in Woman’s Own.
Strauss was followed in the second half by Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, which portrays a virgin, who has been offered up for pagan sacrifice, dancing herself to death, and which is difficult enough to unnerve the most sophisticated orchestra.
Having told Hermione he couldn’t see her later that evening because Kitty was in London, Rannaldini had left a note at the box office with Flora’s ticket, saying that, if she met him at Daphne’s in Walton Street at ten o’clock, he would buy her dinner.
Whizzing through The Rite of Spring even faster than Stravinsky himself, so that Toscanini’s stick was a mere blur, in order to get to Flora sooner, Rannaldini’s sexual excitement seemed to have transmitted itself to the orchestra. At the end the audience went berserk.
After a performance, Rannaldini always left the London Met rung out like a dishcloth, but there was not a drop of sweat on his forehead as he unsmilingly took his thirteenth bow. Only then did he deign to look in Flora’s direction, anticipating delirious adulation — her little hands with their bitten nails sore and scarlet with clapping. But her seat was empty. The briefest scrawl on a diary page left at the box office told him she’d had to leave before the end to meet some friends.
Rannaldini was so furious, he went back to the green room and fired ten musicians, including Beatrice, the little blond flautist whose bed he’d been intermittently warming since March. But Flora’s indifference only fuelled his lust.
Justifying his actions by saying Georgie and Guy needed space to sort out their marriage, he encouraged Natasha and the totally smitten Wolfie to invite Flora to Valhalla for half-term.
As Valhalla had many rooms on different levels, it was possible to look out of windows into rooms near by. An outraged Mr Brimscombe, who was increasingly tempted to go back to Larry, was told to leave the shaggy pink clematis montana round Rannaldini’s dressing room which had long since finished flowering, so Rannaldini could peer through it into Flora’s bedroom. But, far worse, Mr Brimscombe was then ordered to hack back from around Flora’s window a rare honeysuckle just as it was emerging into its gold-scented glory. Such was his desire that Rannaldini would have ripped out the Paradise Pearl.
Valhalla, with its tennis and squash courts, cricket pitch, which the village team was occasionally allowed to use, and huge swimming-pool protectively ringed with limes, was a paradise for teenagers. There were also horses to ride and to add excitement, the famous Valhalla Maze planted in the seventeenth century, while the abbey was briefly in the hands of the laity, by Sir William Westall for the entertainment of his descendants. Now twenty feet high, with nearly a quarter of a mile of dark, convoluted alleys, it was alarmingly easy to get lost in.
When Flora arrived at Valhalla, Rannaldini was away recording Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony in Berlin. A heat wave which had caught the country on the hop was into its second week. The darkening woods seemed to smoulder in the burning noon-day sun. The hayfields quivered. As though his battery was running down, the cuckoo called laboriously from a clump of horse chestnuts, whose candles were already shedding their white and bright pink petals. The dark maze drew the eye like a magnet.
‘It’s always more relaxed when Papa isn’t here,’ said Natasha, as she and Flora peeled themselves off the leather seats of the Mercedes in which Clive had collected them. ‘Papa’s wonderful, but when he doesn’t get his way, the whole building shakes.’
Looking up at the house, grey, brooding and secretive with its tall chimneys, Flora noticed blinds drawn on most of the windows.
‘Imagine Dracula’s victims languishing behind them, unable to take the sun.’
‘Papa likes them down during the day,’ explained Natasha. ‘Sun ruins pictures and tapestries. Beautiful, isn’t it?’
‘Quite.’ Flora refused to be fazed. ‘Bit Hammer House of Horror. In fact, extremely so,’ she added, as Natasha led her in through a side door past a darkly panelled room containing rows of gleaming black riding boots and a daunting collection of spurs, bits with chains and hunting whips, many of them with lashes. ‘I didn’t know your father was into SM.’
Normality was restored by a delicious smell of mint and fennel drifting from the kitchen. Kitty, spectacles misting up, her face as red and shiny as a billiard ball, damp patches under the arms of her straining blue cotton dress, was cooking Sunday lunch.
