by Jilly Cooper
Before he’d lost consciousness, miserably aware of regurgitated wine all down his dress-shirt, Marcus had heard James Benson reproving his father.
‘You must be more careful with him, Rupert, you know he’s never been strong.’
By mutual agreement neither Taggie nor Marcus’s mother had been told of this disaster, but Marcus’s relationship with Rupert, always shaky, had inevitably deteriorated.
Reluctant to witness the love he had always craved, so unstintingly lavished on little Xavier, Marcus had avoided Pensombe and concentrated on his career. Girls, except Flora who was more of a pal, were avoided even though they chased him like mad, not least because of his father’s bank balance.
Last night after copying out Boris’s score until long after midnight, Marcus had collapsed into bed, only to be jolted by a terrifyingly erotic dream about Boris, and woken, sobbing his heart out because it could never be possible.
Having dreaded confronting Boris today, he was ecstatic to find himself suddenly so attracted to Abby. His blue shirt was still stiff from the salt of the tears she’d shed outside Madame Tussauds. All this added radiance to his playing.
‘Who did Marcus’s mother marry?’ asked Abby, thinking of the stepfather who had quoted The Tempest.
‘Malise Gordon, thirty years older,’ replied Flora, writhing half in ecstasy, half in pain under Boris’s fingers. ‘He’s been a brilliant stepfather and really encouraged Marcus, but that doesn’t make up for one’s own father not giving a toss.’
Flora suddenly shivered. They had been so wrapped up in talking they hadn’t realized how cold it had become. As she banged down the big sash window the telephone rang. It was Helen, Marcus’s mother, in hysterics. It was a few moments before Boris could get any sense out of her. Malise had had a massive stroke and been rushed to hospital. Marcus must go home at once.
TWELVE
Marcus drove straight home to Warwickshire. He was bitterly ashamed afterwards that his main emotion was despair that he would probably have to duck out of a recital yet again, and disappointment that he would no longer be faced with the terrifying yet magical prospect of Abby in the audience. He wasn’t even very worried about Malise who, never having let him down, seemed unlikely to start now.
In fact Malise never regained consciousness. Marcus was devastated. He had loved his stepfather deeply. Kind, formal, old enough to be his grandfather, Malise had always encouraged him. They had played endless duets together; Malise had explained harmony, taken Marcus to concerts and shared with him his 78s of Myra Hess and Denis Matthews and Solomon. He had also provided him with a role model of total integrity and honour.
But Marcus had to surpress his anguish in order to comfort his mother who, having been adored and wrapped in cotton wool by Malise for sixteen years, was quite incapable of coping with funerals, let alone life, on her own.
The Press, of course, had a field-day dredging up the old story of how Malise as chef d’équipe had held the British Show-Jumping Team together during their golden era, and how during the LA Olympics, when Rupert Campbell-Black’s great rival, Jake Lovell, had run off with Rupert’s wife, Helen, the team had gone on with one man short to win the gold. There was also a lot of guff about how Malise had picked up the pieces, marrying Helen and restoring her self-confidence, which had been shattered by eight years of hell married to Rupert, and a disastrous few weeks with a miserably dispossessed Jake, who couldn’t wait to belt back to his wife.
The funeral was rather like a rerun of Madame Tussauds with all the show-jumping greats rolling up to pay their last respects and Rupert and Jake glaring into space.
As a further insult, Jake had brought along his son Isaac, a brilliant young jockey, who had beaten one of Rupert’s horses earlier that week. The only thing that could have redressed the balance for Rupert would have been if Marcus could have played Malise’s favourite Bach Prelude quite beautifully on the Steinway that Helen had insisted on hiring for the service.
But Marcus’s asthma always grew worse under stress and, in the panic of overseeing all the last-minute arrangements, he forgot to bring his inhaler. He just managed to help carry the coffin the three hundred yards across the village green to the church before collapsing fighting for breath beside his mother.
Helen was still young enough at forty-four to be described as ‘absolutely stunning’ rather than ‘having been absolutely stunning’. She was far too unnerved at seeing Jake again after all those years, and wondering guiltily if she were wearing too much blusher and eyeshadow on the grounds that Malise would have wanted her to look beautiful, to notice Marcus’s plight.
Unfortunately a church filled with flowers and the fumes from the ancient pew, which had recently been treated for woodworm, made the band round Marcus’s chest even tighter.
Rupert’s best friend, Billy Lloyd-Foxe, had reduced everyone to tears, including himself, reading the ‘Dedication to the Horse’, which always brought the house down at the end of the Horse of the Year Show. According to the service sheet Marcus should have been next but, white and sweating, he could only clutch his chest and shake his head, so, after a long agonizingly embarrassed pause, the parson, who had been a family friend for years, twigged what was up and carried on with the service.
Marcus was only aware of the reproach in his mother’s eyes.
‘I didn’t break down, I didn’t fail, Malise,’ she seemed to be saying and such a public failure would only confirm Rupert’s conviction that his son totally lacked big-match temperament.
Marcus had also been incapable of carrying the coffin to the graveside. Staggering back to the beautiful Queen Anne rectory in which Malise had lived all his life, revived by several squirts from his inhaler, he had been able to hand round drinks and sandwiches. There had been a horrible fascination in being introduced by Helen to Jake Lovell. He was amazed his mother could have left his gilded glamorous father for anyone so small and insignificant.
And then Rupert had walked into the room, caught the three of them talking and stalked right out of the house dragging a protesting Taggie and Tabitha with him.
Returning to the kitchen for more sandwiches Marcus had found Malise’s big-boned tactless daughter, who’d been brought up in the Old Rectory and whose eyes were now running over the furniture like beetles, wondering what she could claw back.
‘The boy’s not going to be much support to Helen,’ she was saying to Mrs Edwards, Helen’s daily. ‘Sickly looking fellow. Daddy did so much for him.’
And Marcus had wanted to shout: ‘I loved him, too.’
But the funeral was only the beginning of the nightmare. Malise had left his desk and everything else in order. To quote his favourite writer Montaigne, he had been ‘booted and spurred and ready to depart’. He had also hidden his worries from Helen so well that she’d had no idea how badly he’d been hit by Lloyd’s. He had made the Old Rectory and its twenty acres over to Helen, but not lived the necessary seven years to avoid estate duties. What little money was left would be eaten up paying the Lloyd’s losses.
Helen was so distraught Marcus felt he had to give up his London digs and stay with her at least for the autumn term. Helen managed to justify this sacrifice as not being too great. It would be so much better for Marcus’s asthma living in the country and commuting to London for his weekly lessons, and at least it would get him away from that trampy Flora.
Helen was too self-centred to realize how upset Marcus was by Malise’s death. She had always lacked the gift of intimacy and been admired rather than liked. Now, for the first time in her life, she felt popular and absolutely amazed by everyone’s kindness: the wonderful letters, the solicitous telephone calls, the invitations to stay, the quiches and apple-turnovers left in the porch: Dear Helen you must eat!
But once this stream of sympathy dried up and she no longer had the funeral to plan, Helen sunk into apathy. Terrified of becoming addicted she refused to take tranquillizers or sleeping-pills, or even a stiff drink to get her throu
gh the increasingly dark winter evenings.
She had never got on with her daughter Tabitha, who was still at boarding-school, who spent all her time at Penscombe with Rupert and Taggie; Marcus and his career therefore became all she had to live for. Marcus felt the millstone of her dark cloying love weighing him down and once again was ashamed of longing so much for all the fun of his London life with Flora, Boris and now Abby. The piano seemed to be his only refuge.
Meanwhile, over in New York, Rannaldini had not been enjoying the domination over the New World Symphony Orchestra he had hoped for, possibly because his musicians were in revolt that he earned a hundred times more in a night than they did in a week. He was still having gruelling battles with the unions and endless lawsuits had been brought by unfairly sacked musicians. There was also the unread pile of unsolicited manuscripts and far too much contemporary music to programme and no Boris to weed out and translate it for him any more.
Two and a half years on, Rannaldini was also still brooding on how he could get his revenge on Rupert, for orchestrating the break-up of his marriage to Kitty and hijacking his plane in BA.
‘The elm is a patient tree,’ murmured Rannaldini, ‘it hateth and waiteth.’
A few days after Malise’s death Rannaldini was lunching on oysters and seafood salad in his penthouse flat which was papered with platinum discs and photographs of himself with the famous and which overlooked the tawny autumnal beauty of Central Park.
Picking up The Times which was flown out to him every day from London, Rannaldini observed that another wife was standing by her cabinet minister husband. The photograph had been cropped at waist level, but Rannaldini felt sure the wife had a stiletto heel in her husband’s Gucci toe-cap and a knee in his groin despite the linked arms and the frenetically smiling faces. Kitty had not stood by him — the bitch.
Turning the pages, easing a piece of squid out of his back teeth, Rannaldini discovered Malise’s obituary, a glow job describing his brilliant war, his knowledge of paintings, his work on the flute and his skill as a chef d’équipe where he was the only person who could harness the genius of Rupert Campbell-Black.
He is survived by a second wife and one daughter from his first marriage, read Rannaldini, pouring himself another glass of Pouilly-Fumé.
He could remember the exquisite Helen at a school concert, definitely one of Rupert’s finest thoroughbreds, an earnest intellectual snob, thirty years younger than her upright second husband and in need of a little excitement.
Smiling, Rannaldini took out a piece of dove-grey writing-paper, and picked up his jade-green fountain-pen. He wrote in green ink:
My dear Helen, (may I?)
Please forgive my presumption but going through some old newspapers which I hadn’t had time to read, I found The Times obituary of your husband.
What an extraordinary fine-looking, multi-talented man. I had no idea that the M. M. Gordon, who wrote, to my mind, the definitive work on the flute, was married to you. I would so like to have met him.
You won’t remember but we met briefly when your son accompanied my daughter Natasha when she sang ‘Hark, Hark the Lark’ at a Bagley Hall concert a few years ago. He showed immense promise. I hope he has taken up the piano as a career.
You must be utterly desolate but please comfort yourself. As Voltaire wrote-
Rannaldini sighed with pleasure. Helen would love Voltaire, but he decided to translate the poem, Americans weren’t too hot on French.
There are two deaths,
And one is such that all men dread and all abhor.
The one is to be loved no more,
The other’s nothing much.
This is in no way to dismiss the depths of your suffering but at least you are safe in the knowledge you were never betrayed. My young wife left me for a boy her own age two and a half years ago. I cannot say I envy you, but at least Malise’s love for you and yours for him is intact and untarnished.
Does Malise have any unpublished work? I would be so interested to read it and assist its publication.
Perhaps when your heart is a little easier you would have lunch with me. I have a jet or a helicopter that could collect you, perhaps when I am next in London, and we could share our sadness.
Yours ever,
Rannaldini.
‘Hark, Hark the Lark,’ sang Rannaldini as smirking, he sealed the envelope and set the letter aside to be posted in a few weeks’ time when the trickle of consoling letters would have dried up and his would have far more impact.
Helen was utterly charmed. Rannaldini’s letter arrived at the beginning of November at the nadir of her despair. It looked as though she was definitely going to have to sell the Old Rectory and Malise’s daughter, whom she had never liked, although she’d taken on Malise’s two black labradors which Helen had also never liked, was contesting the will and had laid claim to Malise’s prettier pieces because they were family heirlooms.
Of course Helen remembered Rannaldini from the school concert, arriving late and plonking himself next to Hermione Harefield so Helen had been forced to move back a row and sit next to Rupert, who had behaved abominably as usual, whispering to Taggie and even nodding off and snoring in counterpoint to the Mozart concerto Marcus had been playing so beautifully.
Helen was utterly heartbroken over Malise’s death but Rannaldini’s letter comforted her. She wrote back a charming note, littered with quotations, saying lunch would be delightful. After all, she told herself firmly, Rannaldini might well be able to give Marcus a leg-up in his career.
Marcus, meanwhile, with conspicuous gallantry, had tackled his father about giving Helen an allowance. Rupert had replied that he’d think about it but had gazed out of the window at the reddy-gold leaves cascading down from his towering beeches as fast as his money seemed to be pouring into Lloyd’s. Thank God, he hadn’t been too badly hit and had never risked the house or any of the land, but he didn’t see why the hell he should support Helen. It was sixteen years since she’d buggered off and he’d paid every penny to support Marcus and Tabitha and was still giving them both whacking great allowances.
When he’d first met Helen she had been working for a publisher and always pointing out his literary déficiences. She could bloody well get a job now.
Privately Rupert was absolutely livid with Helen for asking Jake Lovell back to the house after the funeral. Jake was doing too bloody well as a trainer and Rupert was consumed by all the ancient jealousy that Malise had loved Jake more than him.
To top it, Taggie had enraged Rupert by asking Helen to stay for Christmas, claiming that she and Marcus couldn’t be all alone the first year after Malise’s death.
‘I suppose you’re going to serve lame duck at Christmas dinner?’ he said nastily.
And Taggie, remembering Sister Angelica’s warning about too many limping ducks, felt a cold chill.
THIRTEEN
Rannaldini planned his first telephone call to catch Helen at a particularily low ebb. She had just returned from Evensong at which Malise should have been reading the lesson. The church had always been full of admiring ladies on such occasions. Tonight they had turned up to see how his widow was coping. Not very well it seemed. Afterwards, as Helen emerged into the drizzle of a chill November evening, feeling them all shying away, she had scuttled off, black-scarfed head bowed, slipping on the yellow leaves concealing the slimy paving stones. She was too distraught to pause and to speak a word of comfort to Malise in his cold bed. Tomorrow she would bring him the pinched remnants of the rose garden.
As Marcus had gone to hear Murray Perahia playing at the Wigmore Hall, Helen had a long night ahead, terrified of sleeping alone since the black labradors had departed, even more terrified of waking to the horrors of life without Malise and a new one hundred thousand pound Lloyd’s bill.
The telephone was ringing as she came through the door. Malise? An instinctive desperate hope, but it was only a friend who’d been in church bossily summoning her to a dinner party.
>
‘Only ten of us, do you good to get out. Eight for eight-thirty, strictly caszh.’
Helen had never been casual in her life.
‘I’m not up to it, Annabel.’
‘Course you are, I’ve asked Meredith Whalen for you. Such a duck and when one gets to our age, I’m afraid one has to put up with gays.’
‘Why should some poor gay have to put up with me? I’m sorry, I can’t.’
Helen banged down the receiver with such force the roses on the hall table scattered dark red petals all over the flagstones, joining a shoal of leaves which the icy wind had swept in through the still open front door. The drawing-room flowers were dropping. She mustn’t let standards slip. The telephone rang again.
‘I truly can’t, Annabel,’ she shrieked hysterically.
‘Signora Gordon,’ said a deep caressing velvety voice, ‘’Ow are you. Theese ees Rannaldini ’ere.’
He was so gently solicitous that Helen found herself quite able to accept an invitation to lunch on Wednesday, when Rannaldini’s spies had made sure Marcus would be safely at the Academy.
Helen had always prided herself on her homework, but on this occasion she had no need to buy any of Rannaldini’s CDs, Malise had collected most of them, admiring their clarity, colour and controlled passion.
Helen also rewatched Rannaldini’s famous video of Don Giovanni and found it deeply disturbing as the cameras lingered on Hermione Harefield’s rosy romping nudity and even more so on the still cold face and beautifully moving hands of Rannaldini himself.
She was horrified that with Malise only two months dead she should be thrown into such a panic at the prospect of lunching with such a fatally glamorous man, or how resentful she felt towards Malise for leaving her too poor to buy a new dress. She couldn’t find her newish olive-green cashmere anywhere, wretched Tabitha must have whipped it, which meant she had to fall back on the Saint Laurent black suit she’d worn to Rupert’s and Taggie’s wedding. At least its white puritan collar would hide the dandruff which had snowed down since Malise’s death.