by Jilly Cooper
It was the same in her office. Crimson bougainvillaea rioted round the windows outside. Frescoes and wood carvings decorated the white walls of her office. On her shiny dark desk, which seemed to breathe beeswax, beside a silver vase of blue hibiscus flowers, lay the report of Rupert’s and Taggie’s marriage drawn up by English social workers.
But Maria Immaculata did not set much store by gringo gobbledygook. More importantly, Rupert and Taggie had come with an excellent recommendation from the Cardinal, who was a friend of Declan O’Hara, Rupert’s partner, whose television interviews were transmitted world-wide. Even the Pope, who was evidently writing a book, and might want to promote it on Declan’s programme one day, had put in a good word. Anyway, Maria Immaculata preferred to make up her own mind.
And then Sister Mercedes, who acted as the convent Rottweiler, had helped matters greatly by bringing in this beautiful couple — the man as blond, tall, handsome and proud as El Dorado himself, and his wife as deathly pale, slender and quivering as a eucalyptus tree in an earthquake, and whose eyes were as silver-grey as the eucalyptus leaves themselves.
Taggie was clutching a litre of duty-free brandy, a vast bottle of Joy, a British Airways teddy bear wearing goggles and a flying jacket, and a white silk tasselled shawl decorated with brilliantly coloured birds of paradise.
‘For you,’ she stammered, dropping them on Mother Immaculata’s desk and nearly knocking over the vase of hibiscus, if Rupert with his lightning reflexes hadn’t whisked it to the safety of a side table.
‘I h-h-ho-pe you don’t m-m-m-ind us barging in, straight from the airport, but we were so longing-’ Taggie’s voice faltered.
Timeo Danaeos, thought Sister Mercedes grimly. She spent her life pouring cold water on the romantic enthusiams of Maria Immaculata, who was now lovingly fingering the white shawl.
‘Dear child, you shouldn’t have spoiled us.’
‘They will do for a raffle,’ said Sister Mercedes firmly.
Maria Immaculata sighed.
‘Perhaps you could arrange some tea, Sister Mercedes. Sit down.’ She smiled at Rupert and Taggie and pointed at two very hard straight-backed wooden chairs. ‘You must be tired after such a journey.’
‘Not when you’ve been travelling as long as we have,’ said Rupert, thinking of the wretched years of miscarriages and painful tests and operations, the trailing from one specialist to another, not to mention the humiliation of the endless KGB-style interrogations by social workers.
‘Are you capable of satisfying your young wife, Mr Campbell-Black?’ or ‘Would you be prepared to take on an older child, one perhaps that was coloured, abused or mentally and physically handicapped?’
To which Rupert had snapped back: ‘No — Taggie’s got enough problem children with me.’
‘You’re too old at forty-four, Mr Campbell-Black. By the time he or she is a teenager, you’ll be nearly sixty. I’m afraid if you want a baby, you and Mrs Campbell-Black will have to go abroad.’
Rupert gritted his teeth at the memory.
Looking at the two of them, Maria Immaculata felt that beneath his cool, Rupert was the far more apprehensive. Probably because his background, which involved a disastrous first marriage, a string of affaires, one illegitimate daughter — the English social workers had hinted there might be others — was much more likely to scupper the adoption. He had, however, been an excellent father to his two teenage children and appeared to have a very happy marriage to this beautiful wife.
And who would not, thought Maria Immaculata, admiring Taggie’s sweet face, now that the sun curiously peering through the bougainvillaea had added a glow to her blanched cheeks.
The hand not clutching Rupert’s was now rammed between her slender thighs to stop them shaking. It was also noticeable how she winced every time the crying of a baby in the orphanage could be heard over the wistful chant of women’s voices coming from the chapel.
Over herbal tea so disgusting Rupert suspected it had been made from Sister Mercedes’ beard shavings, it was agreed Taggie should spend the next three weeks helping in the orphanage to indicate her suitability as a mother. Rupert would drop her off and collect her in the evenings. There was no way Sister Mercedes was going to let him loose among her novices.
As a rule, couples were never shown their prospective baby at a first interview. But Maria Immaculata was so charmed by Taggie trying so heroically to hide her longing, that she reached for the telephone and gabbled a few sentences. Sister Mercedes pursed her thick lips — it was all going too fast. Rupert, who’d picked up some Spanish on the international show-jumping circuit, went very still. What if they produced a hideous baby, Taggie had such high expectations.
‘You may find you cannot love the baby we have chosen for you,’ said Maria Immaculata as though reading his thoughts. ‘But our babies are like gold to us, and we, in turn, may decide you are not the right parents to have one, but we thought-’
There was a knock on the door and a beautiful young nun in a snow-white habit, whose dark eyes widened in wonder as she saw Rupert, came in bearing a tiny bundle hidden in a lace shawl.
‘This is Sister Angelica, who runs the nursery,’ said Maria Immaculata.
I wouldn’t mind taking that home, thought Rupert irrationally.
‘We thought Mr and Mrs Campbell-Black might like a glimpse of baby Bianca,’ went on Maria Immaculata.
This time the hibiscus really did go flying, as Taggie leapt up and stumbled forward, drawing back the shawl and gazing down in wonder at the little crumpled face.
‘Oh look,’ she whispered. ‘Oh, may I hold her? Oh Rupert, oh look,’ she gasped, taking the fragile body in her arms.
As if it were the Christchild itself, thought Sister Angelica.
Taggie gazed and gazed.
‘Look at her tiny nose and her perfect ears, and her long fingers and she’s got little fingernails already and eyelashes and her skin’s like ivory. Oh Rupert, was anything ever so adorable?’ Taggie’s gruff voice broke, and her tears splashed down onto Bianca’s face waking her, so the baby blinked and opened big shiny black eyes.
‘Oh thank you, she’s so beautiful,’ sobbed Taggie.
It was as instinctive as one of his brood mares nuzzling and suckling a new-born foal. Suddenly Rupert didn’t need that cocaine hit after all.
Seeing the look of pride and triumph on his face, Maria Immaculata mopped her eyes. Sister Angelica was openly crying as she dabbed Joy behind her ears. Only Sister Mercedes looked as though her big end had gone.
‘There, I mustn’t monopolize her, you must hold her,’ Taggie turned to Rupert.
But Rupert was only happy because Taggie was overjoyed. To him, Bianca was just a blob. In fact the only baby he’d ever liked had been his daughter Tabitha.
Perhaps Bianca sensed this, because when she was handed over to him she went absolutely rigid, screamed, and even regurgitated milk over his blazer, until Sister Angelica, laughing, removed her.
Meanwhile a dazed Taggie was hugging Maria Immaculata. ‘I know it’s only the beginning and she’s not remotely ours yet, but thank you,’ she mumbled. Then, turning to a still, stony faced Sister Mercedes, she settled just for clasping her hand.
‘You’ve all been so kind, oh may I hold her again?’
‘Would you like to give Bianca her bottle?’ asked Maria Immaculata, then, ignoring Sister Mercedes — to hell with the raffle — added: ‘I think this calls for a glass of brandy all round. I do hope you’ll be comfortable in the hotel Sister Mercedes has chosen for you. It is very convenient, only three kilometres from the convent.’
To Rupert, the Red Parrot was Sister Mercedes’ revenge — a two-storey, cockroach-ridden version of the hair shirt. Having acceded to Rupert’s demands for double beds and air-conditioning over the telephone, the landlord, Alberto, whose tight, grease-stained grey vest displayed tufts of stinking, black armpit hair, showed them into a room where the double bed wouldn’t have accommodated two anorexic midgets. The a
ir-conditioning consisted of wire netting over the window, an electric fan which distributed the dust and the swarms of insects, and a gap along the top of the walls to let in the blare of the television sets in neighbouring rooms. Outside the rickety balcony was about to collapse beneath the weight of two parched lemon trees in terracotta tubs, and traffic roared both ways up and down what had been described as a ‘quiet one-way street’. It was only when Taggie looked round for water to relieve the parched lemon trees, that they realized the nearest bathroom was twenty yards down the corridor.
Seeing that Rupert was about to blow his top, Taggie said soothingly that Alberto couldn’t be that bad.
‘Did you see those sweet little hamsters running round his office?’
Rupert hadn’t got the heart to tell her they were on tonight’s menu along with another Colombian delicacy: giant fried ants.
‘The only consolation,’ he said, crushing a second cockroach underfoot, ‘is that the Press will never dream of looking for us here. Tomorrow we’ll move somewhere else.’
‘I don’t think we can. Alberto just told me he’s Sister Mercedes’ brother.’
But they were so tired and relieved they fell asleep wrapped in each other’s arms in one tiny bed.
The next morning, Taggie, shrugging off any jet lag, was back at the convent, blissfully happy to be looking after Bianca and helping Sister Angelica with the other orphans. Having dropped her off, Rupert returned to the Red Parrot and spent half the morning on the telephone checking up on all his horses, including his best one, Penscombe Pride, who had happily recovered from a nasty fall in the Rutminster Gold Cup.
Rupert also tried to cheer up his favourite jockey, Lysander Hawkley, who was suicidal because his old horse Arthur had collapsed and died within a whisker of winning the Gold Cup, and because the girl he loved, Kitty Rannaldini, was showing no signs of leaving her fiendish husband.
‘No Arthur and no Kitty, Rupert, I don’t think I can stand it.’
Afterwards Rupert visited the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Bogotá. As a former government minister, he wanted to see how many strings he could pull, and how much red tape he would have to cut through to enable them to take Bianca back to England.
He lunched with a polo friend, a sleek, charming playboy called Salvador Molinari, who offered him a cocaine deal.
‘You know so many reech people, Rupert.’
The deal would have sorted out all Rupert’s problems at Lloyds. Regretfully, he refused.
‘I’ve got to behave myself, Sal, until we’ve got Bianca safely home.’
Later, in the Avenida Jiminex, Rupert bought some cheap emeralds from a dealer for Taggie, his daughters, Perdita and Tabitha, and Dizzy, his head groom. In Bogotá, beside the dark-haired, dark-eyed Colombians, Rupert was as flashily conspicuous as a kingfisher. Leaving the dealers, he was stopped by a policeman, pretending to be doing an official search, who then tried to make off with Rupert’s Rolex and his wallet. Being still high from a cocaine hit at the dealers’, Rupert knocked the policeman across the street, leaving him minus two front teeth, and went off and bought a gun and a money belt.
On the way to pick up Taggie, the taxi broke down. Having asked Rupert to give him a push, the driver proceeded to drive off with Rupert’s briefcase, containing the emeralds and all the adoption papers and medical reports, stamped both in Petty France and by the Ministry in Bogotá.
As Rupert proceeded to shoot the taxi’s tyres out with his new gun, two more policemen smoking joints on the pavement, totally ignored the incident. Retrieving his briefcase, finding excellent use for all the Colombian swear words he’d learnt on the flight over, Rupert went off and hired a bullet-proof Mercedes, which made him half an hour late picking up Taggie, which in turn resulted in a sharp dressing-down from Sister Mercedes.
Taggie, she said, had been worried and Rupert had missed a chance to bath and feed Bianca. Rupert tried not to look relieved. As the old monster waddled off to fetch Taggie, he reflected that in a battle with his bullet-proof Mercedes, Sister Mercedes would win hands down.
Taggie reeled out in manic mood.
‘Oh Rupert, she’s so sweet, she’s wearing one of the dresses we brought, and she drank all her bottles, and Sister Angelica said she cried much less today, and I’m sure she smiled at me, although it was probably wind. And Sister Mercedes was really friendly and sat next to me at lunch.’
‘Mercedes Bent,’ said Rupert.
After a surprisingly good dinner at the Red Parrot, of shell-fish stew and mango-and-guava ice cream, enhanced by a bottle of Chilean Riesling, they were just drinking to little Bianca, when Taggie turned green and lurched upstairs. Glued to the only lavatory on the landing, Niagara at both ends, she threw up and up and up into a bucket until she was only producing yellow froth and specks of blood. A local doctor, summoned by a demented Rupert, said it was only altitude sickness and prescribed rest.
In the morning, when Mother Immaculata popped in with a bunch of roses from the convent garden and a bottle of water flavoured with lemon-juice and sugar, she was happy to report back to the nuns that never had she seen a husband more devoted or worried than Rupert.
By the evening Taggie was delirious, raging with fever, too ill to be moved as various doctors supplied by Salvador trooped in and out. Trusting none of them, Rupert was onto James Benson, his doctor in Gloucestershire.
‘I don’t give a fuck if it’s three o’clock in the morning, I want you out here.’
‘Give it another twenty-four hours, altitude sickness often takes this form.’
‘You’ve given her the wrong jabs, you overpaid clown.’
Upstairs, he could hear Taggie screaming. ‘I’ll ring back.’
Red-hot pokers were gouging out Taggie’s brain, she was being bombed by massive cockroaches, the blades of the electric fan crept nearer and nearer like the Pit and the Pendulum. It was getting hotter by the minute, not a breath of wind moved the gum trees outside, the rains were expected any day.
In her more lucid moments, Taggie screamed for Bianca. ‘Don’t take her away, I hate you, I hate you.’ She was pummelling at Rupert’s chest.
Then at three in the morning, Colombian time, as he was changing her soaking nightgown, he thought he was hallucinating too, and that Taggie had turned into his first wife, Helen, whose slender body had been covered with freckles. Then he realized it was a rash, and was on to the hospital in a flash, yelling at them. Twenty minutes later, an old man arrived, yawning, with his suit over his pyjamas.
‘Just shut up and leave me alone with your wife.’
He was out in five minutes. He had given Taggie ajab to sedate her and curb the itching. When the blisters developed she would need calamine.
‘And you got me out of bed for this,’ he glared at Rupert.
‘What is it, for Christ’s sake?’
‘Virulitis.’
A little Spanish is a dangerous thing. Rupert went ashen.
‘Smallpox,’ he whispered. ‘Oh God, don’t let her die.’
‘Chicken pox,’ grunted the doctor.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Quite; pretty uncomfortable in older patients. Now keep her quiet and stop her scratching. Pity to spoil such a lovely face.’
Dizzy with relief, Rupert belted back to the bedroom, only to find Taggie sobbing her heart out.
‘Angel, you’re going to be OK.’ Rupert took her burning body in his arms. ‘But you mustn’t scratch.’
‘The doctor says I c-c-can’t see Bianca for a fortnight or go near the convent in case I give the babies chicken pox. They’ll think I’m not healthy enough to be a mother, they’ll give her to someone else. Oh Rupert, I can’t bear it.’
‘I’ll sit with her, I’ll go every day, I promise.’
Despite Sister Mercedes’ furious chuntering, Maria Immaculata was most understanding. Of course Rupert could take Taggie’s place. His was the side of the marriage of which she was unsure. It would be good to study him at close r
ange.
TWO
As Sister Mercedes grimly predicted, Rupert caused havoc among the nuns. Anyone would have thought a high-ranking archangel, if not the Messiah, had rolled up as they made endless excuses to pop into the orphanage to gaze in wonder at this edgy, sunlit stranger, whose cold eyes were bluer than Mary’s robes, and whose hair brighter gold than any medieval fresco. He also appeared to be poring over endless medieval scrolls.
Soon pale lips were being reddened by geranium petals, habits bleached to new whiteness, eyelashes darkened by olive oil from the kitchen, and beards and moustaches disappearing for the first time in years. Even Maria Immaculata discreetly wafting Joy, insisted on giving Rupert religious instruction, while the parish priest, who was as gay as a Meadow Brown after summer rain, bicycled over to preach a fierce sermon on the vanity of vanities.
The medieval scrolls were, in fact, reports on Rupert’s racehorses, his television company, and his various enterprises faxed out to the Red Parrot from England.
Other faxes read more like an illiterate serial in a woman’s magazine as Lysander, Rupert’s jockey, who was even more dyslexic than Taggie, joyfully chronicled the escape of his great love, Kitty Rannaldini, from her fiendish husband’s clutches.
Kitty had evidently made her getaway on The Prince of Darkness, Rannaldini’s most valuable and vicious racehorse and managed to stay on his back until she reached Lysander’s cottage. The horse had carried on into the village and trampled all over the vicar’s crown imperials. Rannaldini, even more incensed than the vicar, had retreated to New York to take over the New World Symphony Orchestra, vowing vengeance.
‘and the besst news,’ wrote Lysander, ‘is that kittys having my baby in the ortum so Biacna will hav sum ass to kik. Sorry yoov got to babysitt at least yoo can OD on snow or dope, botaga is sposed to hav the best grarse in the werld.’