by Jilly Cooper
‘Something wrong there,’ said Flora slyly. ‘Surely you should be behind the huge organ?’
Ignoring the crack, Rannaldini led her up the great stone staircase, where sunlight poured through the stained-glass window of St Cecilia at yet another organ.
‘Blessed Cecilia appear in visions, To all musicians,’ murmured Flora. ‘Is that Burne Jones?’
‘A copy,’ said Rannaldini. ‘The original’s in Oxford.’
Leading the way up to the attic, stepping over stray angels’ wings and broken chalices left behind by the monks, Rannaldini pointed to a rope running down a groove in the thick stone wall.
‘What’s that?’ asked Flora.
‘The rope of the punishment bell,’ said Rannaldini caressingly. ‘The Abbot used to ring it from his study after vespers every Friday evening, telling the monks to return to their cells and flagellate themselves for the duration of the misericordia. This went on until a Father Dominic came up here and valiantly clung on to the rope, and the practice was finally stamped out.’
‘How gross!’ Flora fingered the rope with a shudder.
Through a narrow slit of window, she could see the valley lit by chestnut candles and beyond, green fields streaked with buttercups and dotted with red-and-white cows, like the backdrop to some medieval madonna. It was very cold in the attic. In some distant room, she could hear Natasha sulkily thumping out a Chopin Nocturne.
‘I suppose you use the punishment bell on Kitty,’ blurted out Flora.
‘Only when she needs it,’ said Rannaldini silkily.
Flora shivered, but was determined not to appear afraid.
‘Mum said Kitty’s terrified of a ghost here.’
‘The Paradise Lad,’ murmured Rannaldini softly. ‘He was a very beautiful young boy. A novice here, and very loving and charming and not entirely sure of his vocation. Then he fell in love with a village girl, and decided he wanted to leave the order. Denied this, he was caught with the girl. The Abbot loved the boy, and was so insane with jealousy that he threw him down in the dungeons before ordering him to be flogged and rang the punishment bell on and on, until finally the monks grew quite out of control and flogged the boy to death. Many people say they ’ave heard his ghost sobbing at night.’
Rannaldini’s face was enigmatic, but there was a throb of excitement in his deep voice.
‘That’s horrific,’ said Flora, utterly revolted.
‘And probably apocryphal,’ said Rannaldini, idly examining a battered cherub, wondering if it could be restored. ‘The wind howl down the chimneys ’ere. That’s probably all the screaming people ’ear. Let’s go and play tennis.’
Rannaldini’s passion for Flora was severely tested on the tennis court. Unaware of the honour of being his partner, she simply didn’t try, and ducked, collapsing with laughter, each time Wolfie and Natasha, both powerful, much-coached players, hit the shocking pink balls straight at her. She and Rannaldini ended up in a screaming match.
‘Your father’s insanely competitive,’ she grumbled, as she and Wolfie cooled off in the big blue swimming-pool which was tiled like a Roman bath.
When he simmered down, Rannaldini was reduced to watching her through binoculars while she sunbathed topless, envying the Ambre Solaire Wolfie was rubbing into her high freckled breasts. At bedtime, peering through the montana, he caught a tantalizing glimpse of her undressing before she slipped on the outsize pyjamas which had come into fashion that summer. He imagined his hand stealing under the trouser elastic. With her cropped red hair, she’d be just like a schoolboy. Next moment he heard Wolfie’s door open and shut, followed by creaking floorboards, then Flora’s door opening and shutting. Then the light went out. Rannaldini was demented.
Stalking along the landing, he barged into Kitty’s bedroom without knocking. She was wearing a high-necked white cotton nightgown and knitting a custard-yellow jersey for her mother’s Christmas present. On the shelf were little bottles of shampoo, moisturizers and transparent bathcaps in cardboard packs which Rannaldini brought her from hotel bedrooms on trips abroad. She never threw out anything he gave her. Looking up at her husband in fear and longing, she waited for the next hammer blow.
‘Time for the real thing,’ said Rannaldini, dropping Danielle Steel on the floor.
Returning to the kitchen after waving goodbye to Natasha, Wolfie and Flora the following evening, Kitty gasped in horror. Flora had added a moustache, a squint, some long earrings and a mass of tight curls to Rannaldini’s poster on the cork board. Underneath she had written: STOP BEING SHITTY TO KITTY. Kitty removed it only just in time.
25
Over the next few weeks the heat wave intensified and so did Rannaldini’s obsessive passion; but whenever he flew home he found Wolfie and Flora wrapped round each other like Labrador puppies. He was in despair. Then, on the last Saturday in June, in the middle of Wimbledon fortnight, having despatched Kitty to stay with her excruciatingly dull, suburban mother, so he could install a two-way mirror between his dressing room and the spare room into which Flora had been moved, Rannaldini dropped in for a drink with Georgie and Guy.
As the sun had lost a little of its heat they sat out on the terrace, gazing down on a valley lit by white elderflower discs and garlanded by wild roses that shrivelled in an afternoon. Only docks, nettles and ragwort had been left by the ravenous sheep and cows. Both lake and river below it were dangerously low. Dinsdale panted gloomily under Georgie’s deck-chair.
Georgie, in a pair of oatmeal Bermuda shorts and a sage-green T-shirt, which showed the skin falling away from her upper arms and thighs, gazed into space. She had dried up like the valley around her. Great cracks split the footpaths. The ivy round the house was showering down yellow leaves and the lawns of Angel’s Reach, because Guy, unlike Rannaldini, observed the hose-pipe ban, had already turned brown.
Georgie and Guy were just reeling from another frightful row. While Guy was fussing around making Pimm’s, Georgie unbuttoned to Rannaldini.
‘Guy says he hasn’t seen Julia since her exhibition. Then he buggers off for two hours this afternoon and returns with poor Dinsdale utterly exhausted and reeking of Je Reviens. The shoe-maker’s children may be the worst shod, but adulterer’s dogs have the sorest paws.’
‘My dear, I cannot theenk why you’re upset.’ Rannaldini put a soothing hand on her razor-sharp shoulder. ‘You are cross with Guy so he seeks approval elsewhere. Having an affaire is like going on television, one gets the chance to talk at length about oneself in front of an admiring audience.’
‘But I don’t understand,’ pleaded Georgie. ‘If he needs her, why does he insist on sleeping with me all the time? I locked myself in the spare room last night and he broke the door down.’
‘Quite seemple,’ Rannaldini smiled. ‘He feel guilty and he know eef he stop fucking you, you will suspect something, and if he ees thinking so much of Julia, he needs the release.’
‘Ooo!’ said Georgie in anguish. ‘Is that the reason?’
‘My dear child, Guy will only really want you again when you find yourself a new man.’ He paused as Guy came out with a clinking tray.
‘Sorry, Rannaldini, I’d forgotten Pimm’s takes such a long time. Do you think Becker’s going to win?’
Guy, who always became more military when he sensed combat, had had a too short haircut. Rannaldini noticed with a stab of pain that Guy’s newly revealed, rather pointed, ears were very like Flora’s, as were his flat cheek-bones and square jaw. But Flora’s luminous white skin, her earthy animal features and big sulky mouth were all Georgie’s.
‘How’s my friend Kitty?’ asked Guy, putting a piece of mint in everyone’s glass.
‘Staying with her mother, a pair of clacking false teeth in an armchair, and sorting out my VAT,’ said Rannaldini.
‘Kitty’s a saint,’ said Guy heartily. ‘They always say behind every famous man there’s a clockwork wife.’
‘And behind every famous woman there’s a wildly unfaithful husband,
’ snarled Georgie.
Turning puce, Guy shot a see-what-I-have-to-put-up-with glance at Rannaldini. Fortunately the telephone rang and Guy bounded in to answer it.
‘I found a bill for Janet Reger under the lining paper of his pants’ drawer,’ hissed Georgie. ‘Do you think he’ll claim VAT – virtue annihilated tax – on that? When in silks, paid for by Guy, my Julia goes, Christ!’
‘You are on form this evening,’ murmured Rannaldini noticing Georgie go quiet, trying to work out if Guy was talking in code.
‘Hallo, Sabine,’ he was saying. ‘Did you beat Radley yesterday?’
‘Single-handed, I should think,’ said Rannaldini.
Guy returned looking absolutely furious.
‘Sabine’s had to suspend Flora until the end of term for three offences: drinking in a pub, smoking in church – in church! – and being caught half-naked behind a combine harvester this afternoon with your son, I’m afraid, Rannaldini.’
‘L’après-midi d’un fornicator,’ said Rannaldini, enviously.
‘Hell, it’s only a few fags, half a bottle of Sancerre and a roll in the hay,’ said Georgie, who thought it was funny. ‘At least she’s gone astray with the right sort of chap.’ She clinked her glass against Rannaldini’s. ‘Has Wolfie been suspended, too?’
‘Evidently not. He wasn’t caught smoking and drinking and the XI’s got a needle match against Marlborough tomorrow and Wolfgang still has two A levels to take. Flora shouldn’t have got caught,’ said Guy disapprovingly.
‘That’s always been your attitude,’ said Georgie flaring up.
‘I never did anything wrong,’ snapped back Guy.
Rannaldini was ecstatic. At last a chance to get Flora on her own while Wolfie and Natasha were still incarcerated.
‘And Sabine says Flora’s got a singing exam in ten days,’ said Guy, taking such a large gulp of Pimm’s he tipped cucumber and apple over his face. ‘I’d better go and collect her.’
And pop in on Julia on the way, thought Georgie despairingly. She shouldn’t have made those bitchy remarks, she’d have to crawl later.
‘Send Flora over to me,’ said Rannaldini. ‘I’ll go through her songs and give her a bit of coaching.’
Returning from a tele-recording in a suffocatingly hot London studio two days later, Rannaldini went straight into the shower. On the white porcelain floor lay a huge spider. A second later Rannaldini had assassinated it with a boiling jet of water. In almost intolerable sexual excitement he took a long time choosing what to wear, then opted to show off the depth of his tan and the broadness of his shoulders with an ivory silk shirt, tucked into cream chinos. Having brushed his hair till it gleamed, combed his black brows, which could splay like centipedes, and drenched himself in Maestro, he went downstairs to the summer parlour.
Here the cheerful serenity of primrose-yellow curtains and walls and drained blue and white striped sofas and chairs was somewhat marred by savage hunting scenes of lions and bears fighting off packs of dogs and men with spears. Rannaldini had just switched on Wimbledon and his own magnificent recording of Shostakovich’s Tenth, when Flora rolled up looking sulkier than ever.
‘Christ, I didn’t come all this way to watch Becker. He’s got white eyelashes like Dad, and why’d you always listen to your own records? D’you spend hours conducting in the mirror?’
For a second Rannaldini listened to the growling brass.
‘I’m playing this in New York next week. It’s important not to repeat oneself. Shostakovich wrote thees music to encourage the Russians to resist the Germans.’
‘You’re half-German – I don’t need any encouragement to resist you,’ said Flora rudely.
Unfazed by her sniping, Rannaldini handed her a glass of Krug.
The sunshine, which had browned everyone else, had merely sprinkled a few freckles on Flora’s turned-up nose. She wore no make-up, but at least she had washed her hair. Her cornflower-blue espadrilles were trodden down at the back. Her lighter blue skirt had been shredded round the hem by her bicycle. A black shirt of Wolfie’s was knotted under her breasts.
‘You look good in black.’
‘Matches the blackheads. Where’s Kitty?’
‘With her mother.’
‘Then I’m off,’ said Flora crossly. ‘I’m not staying here unchaperoned.’
‘Don’t be silly.’ Rannaldini took her and the bottle of Krug down some stone steps on to the terrace around which the Valhalla garden had reached perfection.
Sprinklers undulated languidly like strippers casting off rainbows of light over the emerald-green lawns. Old roses in every pastel shade, tawny honeysuckle, regale lilies, single and double white philadelphus, pale yellow lime blossom all seemed to be dabbing their sweetest scent on the pulse spots of the valley. Like women in their Ascot finery jostling forward to watch a big race, the herbaceous border was overcrowded with white-and-pink phlox, dog daisies, red-hot pokers, foxgloves, yellow snapdragons and soft blue cathedral spires of delphinium. A strange, very clear light heightened every colour, the smell of each flower intensified by the hot muggy air.
For a while neither Rannaldini nor Flora spoke, watching black-and-white cows like scattered dominoes in the fields below and listening to the tetchy bleating of sheep and the rattling hoof-beats of Rannaldini’s horses as, maddened by flies, they galloped about neighing. A red tractor chugged back and forth cutting Rannaldini’s hay. Swallows dived after insects.
‘It’s going to thunder,’ Flora said finally. ‘Mum’s got a ghastly headache.’
‘Perhaps she doesn’t want to sleep with your father.’
Rannaldini flipped through Flora’s music. ‘D’you want to sing to me?’
‘No.’
On the inside page of ‘The Magnet and the Churn’ she had written Flora Seymour, Lower Sixth A.
‘Beautiful trochaic name, Flora.’
‘It’s gross. How’d you like to have flat-stomached men mouthing your name across supermarket freezers? And as for Interflora, you can imagine what the boys at Bagley Hall made of that.’
Black clouds were edging round the sinking sun. Saying he had to walk his dogs, Rannaldini took Flora round the garden which seemed deliberately designed for love. Despite the drought, streams still hurtled through narrow ravines. Naked statues were strategically placed in sheltered glades. A little summer-house here, a white seat under a weeping ash there, beckoned dalliance. As he passed, Rannaldini let his hands rove suggestively over each romping nymph.
‘It’s like a nudist colony,’ grumbled Flora.
She was more charmed by Rannaldini’s Rottweilers who bounded ahead, muzzles covered in grass seed, soothing their thistle-pricked, nettle-stung paws in the streams, attacking clods of wet turf and wood, shaking and worrying them, emerging with dirty wet faces, giving skips in the air and bouncing fatly away.
‘Avant-garde dogs – they’re sweet.’ Flora hugged Tabloid.
‘To people who are not afraid,’ observed Rannaldini. Passing under a pergola fantastically entwined with pale pink roses and acid-green hop, they reached a frantically rushing stream, almost a river, but narrowed to a width of six feet between dark, drenched, very slippery rocks.
‘The sounding cataract ’aunted me like a passion,’ said Rannaldini softly, gazing down into the white churning water. ‘This whirlpool is called the Devil’s Lair. In the eighteenth century the young Westalls and their friends had bets eef they were brave enough to jump across. Several young men were keeled.’
Springing across like a great cat, Rannaldini turned towards her.
‘Come, leetle Flora.’
‘It’s a hell of a long way,’ snapped Flora, as the Rottweilers, distraught at being separated from their master, but not brave enough to jump, whimpered and barged round her legs. ‘Unlike you, I’m much too young to die.’
‘Life ees about taking risks,’ whispered Rannaldini, his dark eyes glittering, his teeth gleaming in the half-light. ‘Jump, leetle animal, or are you sc
ared?’
Refusing to be beaten, Flora took a great leap, slipped on the damp moss and was only just pulled to safety in time. For a second Rannaldini held her shaking with fury and terror.
‘Let me go, you fucker,’ she screamed, ‘I want to go home.’
Releasing her, Rannaldini trailed a warm caressing hand over the goose-flesh of her bare waist.
‘Why you fight me?’
‘Because I really like Kitty, because I’m not into gerontophilia and because I’m sleeping with your son.’
‘And he satisfies you?’
‘He’s known as Trunch at Bagley Hall,’ spat back Flora.
‘Hush.’ Rannaldini put a finger, which smelt of wild mint, over her mouth. ‘I want confirmation not details.’
‘And if that weren’t enough,’ went on Flora, ‘you’re utterly unselective. Natasha told me about Hermione and jumping on her mother every time she hits London, and bonking every female musician in the London Duodenal, not to mention choral sex with all those panting groupies in their – I LOVE RANNALDINI T-shirts. You just pick them off.’
They had reached a little bank, covered in pink-spotted orchids. A blushing sun was retreating behind the wood. Kicking off her espadrilles Flora cooled her dusty feet in the long wet grass. Like Rannaldini, his sprinklers went everywhere.
‘I am Don Juan,’ said Rannaldini, sticking to the path above which made him taller, ‘or, being Italian, Don Giovanni. I seek the perfect woman and always despair of finding her because all women are the same. You would be different. You are not classically beautiful, but you light up when you smile.’
‘Dad doesn’t smile when I light up.’
‘You shouldn’t smoke when God has given you a voice.’
‘I’d rather he gave me Boris Levitsky,’ taunted Flora, disappearing into the fringed depths of a weeping ash.
‘Boris not Goodenough,’ said Rannaldini chillingly.