by Jilly Cooper
Everyone jumped as the door crashed open and a furiously growling Sharon the Labrador backed into the room frantically worrying a sheepskin slipper. Hanging on to the other end, growling equally loudly but looking more sheepish than the slipper because he knew the drawing rooms were out of bounds, was Tabloid, Rannaldini’s senior Rottweiler.
‘Get them out of here,’ screamed Helen, as a rose-garlanded Chelsea bowl circa 1763 smashed into a hundred pieces. ‘You know those uncontrollable brutes aren’t allowed in the house.’
‘How did he get in, then?’ spat Tab, scowling at Isa.
‘Don’t be so goddam rude,’ shouted Helen.
Ignoring such brawling, Isa picked up Rannaldini’s Times and turned to the racing pages.
Lunch was predictably unrelaxed. Isa, who had the conversational skills of a Trappist monk, who had never visited Sydney Opera House or seen the Nolans and the Boyds in any of the art galleries, and who had never forgiven Helen for nearly destroying his parents’ marriage, turned his back on her and talked horses with Rannaldini. Watching his weight, he drank only Perrier, picked the bits of lobster out of the delectable mango and shellfish salad and had no tartare sauce or vegetables with his Dover sole. Tab just drank vodka and, horrified she was so violently attracted to Isa, disagreed with everything he said. Rannaldini watched them in delight, an evil smile flickering over his lips like a snake’s tongue.
After lunch Rannaldini, Isa and Tabitha rode the new French horses and the dappled-grey Engineer round Paradise. Tab, who had put on a blue baseball cap and an indigo bomber jacket, with ‘Can’t Catch Me’ printed on the back, proceeded to show off, executing dressage steps as gracefully as a ballerina, jumping huge fences and five-bar gates, beating Isa easily as they thundered down the long ride past Valhalla lake.
Passing the gates leading to Hermione’s beautiful mill, River House, Tabitha noticed her fiendish son Little Cosmo Harefield touting for a ‘fiver for the guy’, who looked surprisingly like Rannaldini’s fearsome PA, Miss Bussage.
‘What’s that obnoxious brat doing at home?’ she asked, knowing perfectly well that Little Cosmo was Rannaldini’s son. ‘I thought he’d gone to prep school.’
‘Cosmo has been suspended for bullying.’
Tab was shocked by the pride in Rannaldini’s voice.
‘Like son like father,’ she said disapprovingly.
Rannaldini laughed.
On the village green, parents and children were happily building a huge bonfire. As the horses clattered down Paradise High Street, lights were coming on in the cottages. Seeing people companionably having tea and watching television, Tab was overcome with longing for Penscombe.
‘What date is it?’ she asked.
‘October the thirtieth,’ said Isa.
‘It’s Daddy’s birthday tomorrow,’ she said bleakly.
Mist was rising from the river as they turned right towards Valhalla. The house itself was hidden by its great conspirator’s cloak of woods, but ahead in a dense copse known as Hangman’s Wood, they caught a glimpse of Rannaldini’s watch-tower.
The roar of a tractor taking hay to Rannaldini’s horses was accompanied by deep complaining from the rooks. An early owl hooted. In the dusk, Tab kept losing sight of Sharon the Labrador as the dog plunged into a stream choked by leaves as yellow as herself.
Entering Rannaldini’s estate down a little-used back lane, The Engineer stopped, and trembled violently, sweat blackening his dappled coat, his big brave eyes rolling. Even when Isa and Rannaldini rode on ahead, he refused to follow them between two gnarled oaks into a tree tunnel in which blackthorn, hazel and hawthorn intertwined overhead like a guard of honour.
In sympathy with The Engineer, Sharon raised her hackles and yapped, and when shouted at by Tab, rammed her tail between her legs, and howled.
Even when Tab uncharacteristically laid into The Engineer with her whip because she was so humiliated he was napping in front of Isa, the horse wouldn’t go forward. Finally he backed, terrified, into a rusty barbed-wire fence, entangling his hind legs.
Only Isa’s lightning reactions, leaping from his mare, chucking his reins to Rannaldini, gently talking to The Engineer as he calmly set him free, avoided a hideous accident.
‘Could have severed a fetlock, you stupid bitch,’ he swore at Tab as he bound up the horse’s leg with a red-spotted handkerchief.
Tab, who’d also jumped down, couldn’t stop shaking and had to lean against an equally shaking Engineer for support. After he’d given her a leg back up, Isa handed her Sharon to hold.
‘The little one’s gone far enough. Better carry her home.’
‘Let’s go back through the main gates,’ said Rannaldini, swinging his horse round.
The setting sun had emerged from beneath a curtain of dark grey cloud, firing the puddles, warming the swirling silver spectres of old man’s beard. As they swished home through the wet leaves, Isa lit a cigarette and drew deeply on it. Then, as Tab’s hands were full of reins and Sharon, he held it to her lips for a couple of puffs, letting his fingers rest for a second against her cold face.
‘Few horses like that lane,’ observed Rannaldini idly. ‘Sir Charles Beddoes, a previous owner, got so bored with the local blacksmith visiting his young wife Caroline, he rearranged the old man’s beard cables between the two oaks. Then he surprised the lovers in bed. Escaping on his horse down the back lane, the blacksmith rode straight into the cables and – snap – they broke his neck.
‘Over the years many villagers have heard the clattering of his horse’s hoofs or seen him hanging above the road at twilight.’ Rannaldini’s smile was satanic in the half light. ‘Sometimes on winter evenings at Valhalla you can hear poor Caroline sobbing for her lost love, or see her wandering the passages in a bloodstained grey dress.’
‘A fashionable colour for ghosts,’ said Isa sardonically, but he crossed himself quickly and spat on the tarmac, as they turned into the Paradise–Cheltenham road.
‘Maybe,’ said Rannaldini, ‘but the trail of her little footprints comes through locked doors leaving marks on the flagstones.’
‘Why the hell did you take us that way, then?’ yelled Tab. Then, slipping all over the wet leaves, endangering both her horse’s and her puppy’s lives, she galloped back to the stables.
Once the vet had given The Engineer the OK, Tab retreated along endlessly twisting dark passages to her bedroom, refusing any supper, tempted to drown herself as she soaked in a hot bath, sobbing helplessly like Caroline Beddoes as she waited in dread for the sound of Isa’s departing car.
Valhalla was full of priest-holes and secret passages, known only to Rannaldini and Clive, his leather-clad bodyguard. Rooms on all levels enabled people to peer out of the small mullioned windows through the creepers into other people’s bedrooms. Not trusting Rannaldini, Tab drew her tattered crimson damask bedroom curtains that covered the window overlooking the courtyard but left open the others so that she could gaze south over the quiet starlit valley.
Valhalla had been a royalist stronghold during the Civil War. On one of the mullions was carved the head of a cavalier – probably Prince Rupert of the Rhine. Running her fingers over his long hair and proud, patrician face, Tabitha wished he’d gallop down the centuries on his charger and whisk her away from all this confusion.
From the Summer Drawing Room directly below her bedroom she could hear the distant rumble of Rannaldini’s voice, and longed to gaze at Isa through a crack in the floorboards.
Used to owners banging on, Isa was only pretending to listen to Rannaldini’s post-mortem about why The Prince of Darkness had only won by four lengths at Chepstow. To take his mind off Tabitha, he was deliberately pondering on a small, lazy chestnut two-year-old called Peppy Koala, which he’d seen last week in Australia – or, rather, not seen because, frightened by a snake on the gallops, the colt had flashed past him faster than light.
Peppy Koala’s owner, a tycoon called Mr Brown, had no idea of the colt’s potential. I
sa didn’t ride horses for the flat, but he reckoned he’d found a Guineas, possibly a Triple Crown winner. If tipped off, Rannaldini would certainly pay for the colt, and its fare to England, but would then want total glory and control. He was a difficult, demanding owner.
Unfortunately Baby Spinosissimo, the Australian tenor, who let Isa do what he liked, had run out of money. It couldn’t be long before someone else sussed the colt’s potential. Rupert was also serenading Baby. The racing world was a bloody jungle.
Isa was brought back to earth at the sound of Tabitha’s name. Rannaldini was saying idly that he was thinking of settling a very large sum of money on her.
It wouldn’t be worth it, Isa told himself. Too much blood had flowed under the bridge and, being superstitious, he couldn’t defy that feeling of foreboding when Tabitha had entered the room that morning. As Rannaldini fetched the brandy decanter, Isa glanced at a letter on a nearby desk:
Dear Dame Hermione
I am sorry to suspend your son, Cosmo, but we cannot allow bullying, particularly of a much younger boy. Xavier Campbell-Black is only six and a half, a plucky little lad, who has settled in as a day-boy extremely well. The fact that he is black makes the whole business even more reprehensible. I hope ten days at home will give Cosmo the chance to reflect upon his actions.
That was poetic justice, thought Isa sourly. Rupert had bullied Isa’s father at school. Now Rupert’s adopted son was getting a taste of his father’s medicine.
‘Tell me all about Baby Spinosissimo,’ said Rannaldini, filling up Isa’s glass.
Later they went out on to the terrace to admire the winter stars, which Isa knew well, as he had to rise most mornings several hours before it was light. A small silver moon was sailing up from the east. As Isa breathed in the smell of moulding leaves and woodsmoke, Orion and his dog stars blazed down as beautiful, solitary and icily imperious as Tabitha. And, like the little silver moon, how much light she cast around her!
The chapel clock tolled midnight. Tab turned her sodden pillow. Oh, why had she left the latest Dick Francis downstairs? The front door banged. Isa was gone. She gave a wail of despair. But hearing distant steps on the flagstones, she hastily turned off her light, in case Rannaldini was on the prowl.
The footsteps, slow and deliberate, were coming up the stairs, getting closer and closer. In a moment of panic she felt sure she heard the door of the empty spare room next door stealthily opening and closing. As the boards creaked outside her heart stopped.
It must be Rannaldini. She wanted to scream, but who would hear, with her mother locked in Mogadon-induced stupor at the other end of the wing? Sharon, asleep on the bed, was no protection.
The floorboards creaked again, as if someone were deliberating. Then there was a knock.
‘Who is it?’ gasped Tab.
Shutting the door behind him, Isa leant against it. In the moonlight his eyes were a skull’s black hollows. ‘I’ve been brought up to hate the name of Campbell-Black,’ he said wearily, ‘but I can’t help myself. You are the most desirable . . .’
But he didn’t have time to finish. Tab had belted across the room, tripping over a still unpacked suitcase into his arms.
‘You’re as verboten as a cream bun in a health farm,’ she gabbled, ‘but I can’t help myself either.’
For a second, he put his hands round her white throat, so slender that he could have snapped it in an instant, telling himself he could still escape. But her breath, which came in little gasps, smelt so sweet and her mouth, shyly testing his, was so soft, that he found himself gently sliding his tongue between her perfect white teeth.
But it was the last gentle thing he did. Sharon must have thought one of the blacksmith’s oaks had landed on her as they collapsed onto the bed. Ripping off Tab’s striped pyjamas, scattering the buttons of his shirt, jamming the zip of his jeans, leaving on just his gypsy earrings to ward off evil, Isa appreciated her true beauty only when he held her naked and quivering in his arms. Kissing, often biting his way downwards, he found a little seahorse tattooed just below her left breast.
‘You’re in for a bumpy ride, fellow,’ he whispered mockingly, as his exploring fingers crept between Tab’s legs.
‘Oh, bliss, you mustn’t, oh, please go on,’ gasped Tab, then, worried that he might be bored by such a wonderful but extended foreplay, ‘Oh, please come inside me.’
As Isa brought her to extremes of pleasure with the same pelvic thrusts that drove winners past the post, she knew exactly why he had been nicknamed the Black Cobra. It was as though constant lightning were being unleashed from his body, and she never seemed to dry up, as if a Cotswold spring was constantly bubbling between her legs. As their breathing grew quicker and the four-poster creaked like an old tree in a high wind, she thought she had never known lovemaking like it.
As he watched them through the two-way mirror, which kept misting up, Rannaldini realized he had never seen anything like it either. Silvered by moonlight, they were so transported by their passion, it was as though Canova’s Cupid and Psyche had sprung to white-hot life: constantly changing positions, they coupled with snakelike frenzy.
Now Isa was kissing one of Tab’s small, amazingly high breasts, biting the nipple until she cried out. Now he was lying sideways his dark head and stabbing tongue buried in her blonde pubic hair as simultaneously her lips and tongue teased and caressed his cock, which Rannaldini was furious to confess looked bigger than his own. At least the little blighter couldn’t hold out much longer.
But, exulting in his control, Isa drew himself out as proudly as Excalibur. Then swivelling round, he plunged inside her once more, his pale murderer’s face triumphant, his hips a juddering blur. Only when Tab arched, went rigid then cried out, did he finally let himself come, kissing in ecstasy her long white throat, her damp forehead, her loving mouth, as for a fleeting moment his defences were down.
Frantically wiping a peephole in the steamed-up mirror, Rannaldini thought he would explode – and did. He must install a video camera so he could gloat for hours over the playback. Reluctantly he had to admit that Isa was as good at riding women as he was horses.
‘I love you,’ mumbled Tabitha, when Isa finally removed his mouth from hers.
‘Thank God you’ve washed off that bloody awful perfume.’
‘It’s Mummy’s. Jolie Madame. She never wore anything else until this summer when she switched to Organza so I thought I’d help her use up the old stuff.’
In horror Isa realized he must have smelt the same scent on his father, when Jake had come upstairs to tuck him in after stolen meetings with Helen.
‘Never wear it again,’ he snapped, and rolled off her on to his back.
‘Buy me something else, then. God, you’re a revelation, I’ve always been soixante-nervous before, but with you it was unbelievable.’
Isa couldn’t believe it had happened. How could he have betrayed his parents like that?
‘I’d better go,’ he said.
Hearing the rusty creak of drawbridges being pulled up, fighting desolation, Tab scooped a drowsy Sharon into the warm place left by his body. Then she caught sight of the bedside clock. ‘It’s October the thirty-first now,’ she said insolently. ‘Happy birthday, Daddy. Sleeping with the enemy is the worst present I could give him.’
Isa glowered down at her, his arms trapping her like the debtor’s chair. ‘Is that why you went to bed with me?’ he hissed.
‘Not entirely,’ said Tab.
For the next week, they devoured each other, making love in the hayloft, on the wet autumn leaves, knowing they were playing with fire but unable to stop themselves. Aware of the difference in their backgrounds and temperaments, Isa was the more detached of the two. But within three weeks Tab was pregnant.
Isa, who had a strong sense of dynasty and a smouldering eye for the main chance, hoped that Rannaldini would settle money on her as hinted, and insisted they got married. There was no way a possible Lovell heir was going to be terminated
. Anyway he couldn’t get enough of Tab.
But he was worried sick about Martie, his Australian girlfriend, to whom, in explanation of his absence, he had considerably exaggerated Jake’s illness. In junking her and consorting with the devil-led Campbell-Blacks, had he lost all his principles?
Terrified of trapping him, Tab would willingly have had an abortion.
‘I’ve never looked after a man,’ she gibbered. ‘I’ll probably give you hay for dinner.’ But she loved him so passionately, she was only too happy to get married.
Events were much bowled along by Rannaldini, who not only agreed to pay for the wedding, which – because of his overflowing diary – could take place only on a late afternoon in the middle of December, but also offered them his latest purchase, Magpie Cottage, just across the valley, rent-free.
Helen had mixed feelings. Tab could have done infinitely better and it would mean the press raking up her affaire with Isa’s father, Jake, but she’d enjoy showing everyone at the wedding how much better she looked than Tory, the wife Jake had gone back to. She must book in for a few days at Champney’s.
Finally there was undeniable pleasure in how much the whole thing would enrage Rupert, and at least it meant that Tab, who had draped a banana skin on Psyche’s head only that morning, would move out. And Rannaldini wouldn’t run after her any more if she married Isa, who looked capable of knifing any competition – or so Helen thought.
Meanwhile, rehearsals for Don Carlos were supposed to have started in a defunct WI hall in North London. Tristan, however, grew increasingly frustrated when all his stars, headed by Fat Franco who was singing Otello at La Scala, failed to turn up. This meant that poor Mikhail, whose hotel bill was being picked up by Liberty Productions, had no-one to rehearse with except his voice coach, who found it a great strain having to squawk Hermione’s and Chloe’s parts, let alone growling like an old bear pretending to be Alpheus. The reason for this mass absenteeism was that top singers hate rehearsing because they don’t get paid for it. ‘Why should we roll up because Mikhail Pezcherov hasn’t sung the part in English before?’ they chorused. ‘We’re only going to be reading our parts at the recording anyway, and could be whizzing round the world avoiding tax and making fortunes elsewhere.’