The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous

by Jilly Cooper

  When she dialled The Savoy where Cecilia always stayed, a maid answered. Cecilia wasn’t to be disturbed.

  ‘Say it’s Mrs Harefield and it’s important.’

  Finally, out of curiosity, Cecilia allowed Hermione to be put through and was very surprised when Hermione congratulated her with great warmth on getting the part of Leonore. ‘I know how good you’ll be.’

  ‘Vy, tank you, ’Ermione.’ Although placated, Cecilia was still suspicious. ‘That is large of you.’

  ‘Is Natasha all right?’

  ‘Vy should she not be?’

  ‘Did Rannaldini give you those tickets last night?’ asked Hermione idly. ‘I thought we might all dine together afterwards.’

  ‘I did not see Rannaldini last night. I only fly een this morning,’ said Cecilia. ‘He was with Keety last night.’

  ‘He was not,’ screamed Hermione. ‘Kitty was in Paradise. I checked. Rannaldini said he was discussing Natasha’s UCCA with you.’

  ‘The fucker! He no discuss UCCA wiz me,’ screeched Cecilia. ‘Ven did he tell you zat?’

  But Hermione was gone, tugging on her clothes and roaring round to Rannaldini’s. The lift was still broken and a cellist was lugging his priceless Strad up the stairs, when Hermione overtook him. Shoving aside Rannaldini’s London secretary, who was holding the door open for the cellist, she barged inside.

  ‘Rannaldini’s not here, Mrs Harefield,’ said the London secretary aghast. ‘He’s just slipped out.’

  ‘Of whom?’ screeched Hermione. ‘Don’t lie to me.’

  Charging into the bedroom she met Rannaldini coming out of the shower wrapped in a red towel.

  ‘You wicked liar,’ screamed Hermione.

  Terrified she was going to knee him in the groin, Rannaldini clapped his hands over his testicles, leaving his face exposed. Next moment Hermione caught his eye with a punishing right hook. Rannaldini would have hit her back had not the cellist appeared open mouthed in the doorway, followed by a screaming Cecilia.

  Very Italian, with snapping over-familiar dark eyes, an oily, olive complexion, streaked blond hair and a muscular worked-out body, Cecilia was wearing an immaculate black suit with a long collarless jacket and a short pleated skirt and looked as though she’d come straight off the catwalk with every claw out. Gathering up a bust of Donizetti with a manic jangling of bracelets, she hurled it at Rannaldini, who ducked so it shattered the mirror behind him, which had witnessed so much of their lovemaking.

  ‘Scellerato, scellerato,’ screamed Cecilia, echoing Donna Anna as she started working her way through a bowl of alabaster eggs.

  ‘Monster of vice, sink of iniquity,’ screamed Hermione, echoing Donna Elvira.

  ‘Bastard,’ screamed Cecilia, just missing Rannaldini’s left ear.

  ‘She’s right, you are a bastard,’ yelled Hermione, kicking Rannaldini’s shins and rushing out of the flat.

  ‘Not my Strad,’ screamed the waiting cellist as Rannaldini ran into the living room and grabbed his cello to stem the bombardment.

  Cecilia had not played cricket at school but she finally caught Rannaldini on the corner of his other eye with a powder-blue egg. Storming out, she sent flying a blonde in a white towelling dressing gown who’d just emerged from the flat of the editor of The Scorpion to see what the fuss was about. At which moment, laughing her head off, Flora emerged from the shower, having witnessed the whole thing through a two-way mirror.

  ‘Oh dear.’ She touched Rannaldini’s two fast blackening eyes. ‘Now there are two Pandas in Paradise!’

  Rannaldini had conducted with peritonitis, with snakebite, even with a sprained right wrist before now, but he refused to expose himself to ridicule. Ringing Bob he croaked down the telephone that he was dying of pneumonia. Shrouded in dark glasses and a black fedora, he flew off to a retreat in the Alps.

  Over in Richmond in Chloe’s drawing room, Boris Levitsky wrestled with a two-hour lecture on Mahler, which he had to deliver at Cotchester University the following day and tried not to brood over Rannaldini’s vile letter returning his symphony.

  Chloe was out recording the Alto Rhapsody, one of her first big breaks. She would probably go out to dinner with the director and the conductor afterwards and not be home for hours.

  Bearing in mind Boris’s fondness for red meat and red wine and red-blooded women, she had left him a bottle of Pedrotti now being warmed by the evening sun, which he had vowed not to touch until he had finished his lecture. In the fridge was a large steak with instructions how long to grill it on each side and a pierced baked potato to put in the top right of the Aga an hour before he wanted to eat.

  Chloe herself, however, had been less red-blooded since Boris moved in. As he was hopelessly impractical, she had to look after him and, as he hadn’t sold a single composition and had packed in his job at Bagley Hall, she had had to support him as well. Finally last week, with the thought: Why doesn’t the stroppy cow get off her ass? ringing through her head, she had had to write a cheque for Rachel’s maintenance.

  This had been the greatest humiliation of Boris’s life, which was why he had fired off his new symphony to Rannaldini. Groaning, he wrenched his mind back to his lecture.

  ‘God, I could endure anything,’ Mahler had written in despair to a woman fan, after paying the Berlin Phil to perform his second symphony, ‘if only the future of my work seemed secure. I am now thirty-five years old, uncelebrated, very unperformed. But I keep busy and don’t let it get me down. I have patience. I wait.’

  Boris didn’t have patience – Chloe said it was like living with a good-looking bear – nor did he have the cash to pay the London Met to perform his symphony, which that shit Rannaldini had torn to shreds. Outside, the turning trees were casting long shadows of evening across the park. A young mother with a pack of dusty, happy children walked past carrying a picnic basket. Boris groaned again. He never dreamt he would feel so guilty or miss Rachel and his children so much.

  Bob Harefield, having endured Hermione’s hysterics, was now faced with the prospect of replacing Rannaldini, placating an enraged BBC and probably being lynched by a massive audience suffering from acute withdrawal symptoms. Oswaldo was in Moscow. Heinz the Swiss was on a plane to Rome. Bob was fed up with Rannaldini. There were other conductors he could have tried but he had always had a soft spot for Rachel and her husband.

  Taking a deep breath, Bob dialled Chloe’s number.

  ‘Rannaldini’s got his whores crossed,’ he told Boris. ‘Do you want to conduct the Verdi Requiem tonight? I’m afraid there’s no time for a rehearsal.’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘Yes, I will come. Thank you, Bob,’ said Boris, ‘but I ’ave no score, no car, no tailcoat. He is at dry cleaners. Chloe’s cat throw up on heem.’

  ‘I’m sending a car for you with the score in,’ said Bob, who knew Boris had been done for drink-driving and did not want to risk him getting lost, ‘and we’ll find you some tails. What size shirt are you?’

  ‘I look.’ Boris tugged the back of his collar round to the front. ‘Size sixteen. I thank you, Bob, from the beneath of my ’eart.’

  36

  Boris was too busy mugging up the score to feel really nervous until he saw the Albert Hall, enmeshed like Laccoon in the cables of the BBC television vans, and the vast crowds that had gathered without any hope of tickets just to get a glimpse of Harefield and Rannaldini arriving. Once in the conductor’s dressing room, he had great difficulty putting on the hired tails. When your hands are trembling frantically it is hard to get the studs through the starched shirt-front. He wished he could stiffen his upper lip accordingly. The white tie took even longer and was so white that his face and teeth looked yellow by comparison. He felt as if he were in a sauna and a straight-jacket already.

  ‘Need any help?’ Bob’s gleaming brown head came round the door.

  ‘Eef my hand shake this much when I get up there, we start prestissimo and the ’ole thing will be over een ten minutes,�
� said Boris through chattering teeth, then blushing, ‘Is possible to let Rachel know?’

  ‘I rang her,’ said Bob. Then, thinking that at such a time white lies didn’t matter, ‘She sent her love and wished you luck.’

  ‘Her love, oh God, if I make a dick-up, what will she say, and how can I control Hermione?’

  ‘Hermione’s cried off,’ said Bob grimly.

  Despite his uncharacteristically enraged accusations that she was being utterly unprofessional and bloody wet, his wife had refused to go on.

  ‘Christ! Who sing eenstead?’

  ‘I thought, fuck it – so I rang Cecilia.’

  ‘Omigod!’ Boris went even paler. ‘I control her even less. She raise skirt in middle of other soloists’ arias to distract audience.’

  Bob laughed. ‘Tonight she’ll play ball. She’s got the perfect opportunity to upstage Rannaldini and Hermione. It’s me who’s going to end up out of a job and in the divorce courts.’

  The shadows under Bob’s eyes were as deeply etched as bison horns in cave paintings. The poor guy really has put his head on the block, thought Boris.

  It was a stiflingly hot evening. Ladies with fans ruffled the fringes of those beside them. The London Met were tuning up like birds in a wood. Microphones hung like spiders tossed out of a window. In the dress circle, stalls and red-curtained gold boxes, people chattered away excitedly in a score of different languages. The promenade area was overflowing, mostly with young men with beards and their girlfriends, bright eyed and rosy cheeked like younger sisters in Chekhov. Many of them held up RANNALDINI RULES OK and WE LOVE HERMIONE banners. Paper darts were sailing through the air. The BBC had threatened to cancel. Richard Baker, who was covering the prom for television, and Peter Barker, for the radio, were frantically rewriting their scripts, as Bob mounted the rostrum and dropped the bombshell that both Rannaldini and Hermione would not be appearing.

  With the storm of protest that broke over his head, it was a minute before he could announce that their places would be taken by Boris Levitsky, a young Russian composer and conductor, very well known in his own country, and by one of the greatest divas in the world, Cecilia Rannaldini.

  ‘So at least,’ Bob shouted over the uproar, ‘you needn’t fold up your Rannaldini banners.’

  The audience glared at him stonily and started to boo and catcall. Some of them had flown thousands of miles and threatened to demand their money back. Others walked out in noisy disgust.

  ‘I ’ate them,’ muttered Boris, waiting to go on.

  ‘They’ll hate themselves even more when they realize what they’ve missed,’ said Bob, combing Boris’s tangled pony-tail at the back, his calm exterior belying panic within. What if Boris really couldn’t cope? The Requiem was one of the most complex and demanding pieces of music. The chorus, sitting up against their crimson curtains, slumped in disgust. All the young sopranos and altos had been to the hairdressers and bought new black dresses. They might never get another chance to sing, or whatever, under the great Rannaldini.

  ‘O day of wrath, O day of calamity,’ sang the front-desk cellist who’d nearly lost his Strad in Rannaldini’s flat the day before. ‘Bob’ll get lynched if Boris cocks it up.’

  ‘Boris is a good boy,’ said his neighbour, opening the score they were sharing.

  ‘And virtually inexperienced in public.’

  ‘We’ll be OK as long as we don’t look up.’

  Larry Lockton was so enraged he had to rush to the bar for a quadruple whisky. In anticipation of massive popular demand, Catchitune had just put on a huge re-press of Harefield’s and Rannaldini’s legendary 1986 version.

  ‘The only thing that fucker can be relied on to do is to let one down. We’re leaving at the interval.’

  ‘There isn’t an interval,’ said Marigold, consulting her programme. ‘They keep going for ninety minutes without a break. Poor Boris. I wonder what’s happened to Hermione and Rannaldini.’

  ‘I hope it’s something serious,’ snarled Larry.

  It was bang on seven-thirty. Boris tried to keep still, take deep breaths and make his mind a blank, but the butterflies inside him had turned into wild geese flapping around.

  ‘Good luck,’ said Bob. ‘And may God go with you,’ he whispered.

  The promenaders scrambled to their feet. Boris fell up the stairs as he and the four soloists came on and had to be picked up by Monalisa Wilson, enormous and resplendent in flame-red chiffon.

  ‘I’m glad mega-Stalin is indisposed,’ she murmured to Boris. ‘He frightens the life out of me.’

  Reluctant laughter swept the hall as she brushed the dust off his knees in a motherly fashion and straightened his tie.

  ‘We show eem, we do better wizout him,’ whispered Cecilia, who looked stunning, but more suited to sing in a night-club in clinging gold sequins. The boy’s very attractive, she thought, and comparatively untouched by human hand.

  The biggest audience ever squeezed into the Albert Hall were bitterly disappointed, but they saw Boris’s deathly pallor and his youth and some of the cognoscenti remembered his defection from Russia. Goodwill began to trickle back.

  Standing on the rostrum, all Boris could see below the soaring organ pipes were rows and rows of men and women dressed in black – as if for his funeral. He saw the pearly skins of the drums and the gleaming brass who would play such a big part in the next ninety minutes. The bows of the string section were poised above their instruments.

  Boris looked at them all solemnly and searchingly. The notes of the score seemed to swim before his eyes – 278 pages of decision making and complexity. Bending his dark head he kissed the first page and with a totally steady hand gave the upbeat. The whispering nightingales of the ‘Kyrie eleison’ can seldom have been slower or more hushed. Alas, some gunman took off down Kensington Gore after a shoot-out and soon a convoy of police cars, sirens wailing sforzando and hurtling after him, could all be heard within the hall, destroying the mood of veneration and snapping Boris’s concentration.

  The first deafening crashes of the ‘Dies Irae’ were very ragged. Every hair of Boris’s black glossy head was drenched in sweat. The audience were beginning to exchange pained glances. Twice he lost his place, pages fluttering like a trapped butterfly, but like kindly trusty old Arthur with a nervous young rider, the London Met carried him until he found it again.

  His stick technique was ungainly. When emotion overwhelmed him, he slowed down dangerously. In the ‘Recordare Jesu Pie’ when Cecilia and Monalisa sang their first exquisite, divinely complementary duet together, their voices chasing each other in arrows of light like fireflies, he was so moved that he took his stick in both hands and began loudly to sing along with them, until he remembered where he was, and then had to wipe his eyes. But slowly both orchestra, chorus and packed crowd responded to his passion and terrifying intensity.

  Back in Paradise earlier in the evening, Lysander, sounding like Neptune at the bottom of the sea, had rung Georgie from his car.

  ‘I’ve really goofed this time,’ he said. ‘Rannaldini’s ducked out of the prom so Boris is going on in his place – Verdi’s Recreation or something. Rachel wanted to tape it on my machine, but it’s fucked and I was stupid enough to say I was coming to see you and before I knew it, Georgie, I said, why didn’t she come as well. I’m really sorry, I’ve screwed up Flora’s last night.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ Georgie stemmed the flow.

  ‘We’ll get a take-away. Rachel can have very dry vegetables,’ said Lysander, reeling in gratitude. ‘She’s seriously fierce, but basically if she’s watching Boris she won’t have too much time to bang on about unleaded pet-food.’

  Rachel was even fiercer. Overwhelmed with envy for Georgie’s lovely house, her replete, indolent beauty and the obvious adoration of Lysander, only curbed by Flora’s presence, she was driven into a frenzy of disapproval. She was also overcome with nerves for Boris, furious at having to watch him in front of strangers, ashamed how jealous she felt t
hat he rather than she should be given this massive break.

  A quick drink on the terrace before the programme produced a storm of abuse because the overflow from Flora’s bath came splattering out on to the terrace and no-one did anything to save the water for the garden or even for washing the car. Trying to lighten things, Lysander said it was like Arthur peeing and then couldn’t stop laughing.

  Georgie, who was wearing an old sundress and a yellow chiffon scarf to hide yet more lovebites, was taken aback by how pretty Rachel was. Like one of those girls the upper fourth have crushes on at school, she carried understatement to an art form. Tonight her unmade-up eyes were hidden by big spectacles and, with loose black trousers and padded shoulders on her long black cardigan, you had no idea what shape she was, but could only think how marvellous she’d look with everything off.

  On the way into the drawing room and the television, Georgie made the mistake of showing her the new yellow-flowered paper in the dining room.

  ‘I wonder how many rain-forest trees were cut down to produce that,’ said Rachel coldly. ‘I prefer painted walls myself.’

  Nor were matters improved when Flora wandered in with a huge vodka and tonic and wearing one of Guy’s shirts with all the buttons done up to hide her lovebites from her mother, and promptly lit a cigarette.

  ‘You shouldn’t be smoking at your age,’ snapped Rachel.

  Having heard about Flora throwing up in Boris’s trumpet and remembering him saying how sexy and talented she was, she was not disposed to like her.

  ‘If I want to kill myself I should be allowed to,’ said Flora, kissing Lysander hallo.

  ‘It’s the harm you’re doing to everyone else’s lungs. Move dog,’ ordered Rachel, who wanted to sit on the sofa facing the television.

  Dinsdale growled ominously.

  ‘I’m afraid he won’t,’ said Georgie apologetically.