Appassionata rc-5

by Jilly Cooper

  Wednesday morning brought more devastating bills. Helen, who’d been up at first light, spent the morning in tears tidying unnecessarily. She had felt her daily woman’s chaperonage when Rannaldini arrived was more important than the gossip Mrs Edwards would later impart round the village.

  But as a final straw, Mrs Edwards rolled up, puffing with excited disapproval and brandishing a bad-taste piece in The Scorpion. Who would Helen, the most beautiful widow in England, marry now? Suggestions included Pierce Brosnan, Boris Levitsky, Richard Ingrams, Edward Heath, Julian Clary, Lysander’s father, David Hawkley — a darkly handsome headmaster who was, as The Scorpion pointed out, a dead ringer for Malise; and, horror upon horror: Rannaldini, photographed smouldering on the rostrum.

  Helen couldn’t stop blushing, as she told Mrs Edwards, that by extraordinary coincidence Signor Rannaldini would be popping in that morning to look at the colonel’s unpublished work on the flute.

  ‘I must f-find a f-folder for it,’ she stammered, bolting upstairs.

  ‘And I should coco,’ muttered Mrs Edwards, taking a hefty slug of the colonel’s sloe gin before strategically positioning herself with the Antiquax in the study off the hall. Not that there was much to polish. The poor little soul couldn’t stop cleaning since the colonel had passed away.

  In front of her dressing-table Helen prayed her blushes would not spread to horrible red blotches on her neck. Starting on her face, she plucked a grey hair from her left eyebrow, and five more from her temples, combing lustreless tendrils over her hair line to hide more dandruff. It would be drifting soon.

  Taking her hand-mirror to the window she gasped in horror. With a compass, despair and worry had scratched new lines round her pinched mouth and reddened eyes.

  Outside, the garden looked horribly untidy, half the trees stripped, half-showing rain-blackened limbs at awkward dislocated angles as they struggled out of their red-and-yellow rags. Then before her eyes a gust of wind covered the lawn with leaves again. Malise had insisted on sweeping them up at once. The leaves would break her in the end.

  Glancing in the mirror she saw that tears had left a blob of mascara on her cheek-bone. As she wiped it away the skin stayed pleated. Helen gave a groan. She couldn’t face Rannaldini. Mrs Edwards would have to say she was ill.

  But, bang on midday, punctual for the first time in his life, Rannaldini landed his big black helicopter on the lawn sending all the leaves swirling upwards around him as he leapt out; Don Giovanni returning from the eternal bonfire.

  ‘Blimey,’ said Mrs Edwards, applying Antiquax on top of Antiquax.

  For Rannaldini was stained mahogany from ten days studying scores in the Caribbean sun. Wading through the leaves like a surfer he handed Helen a big bunch of tabasco-red freesias. Then he briefly put his arms round her so she could enjoy the muscular springiness of his body and its sauna-warmth as though he had indeed emerged from hell-fire.

  ‘I know exactly how tired and lonely and cold you feel all the time,’ he murmured, then stepping back and staring deep into her eyes. ‘But nothing dim you great beauty. No wonder autumn ees in retreat when you upstage heem like this.’

  Rannaldini had always been able to lay it on with a JCB. Blushing redder than the freesias Helen invited him in while she put them in water.

  Better than a film star, thought Mrs Edwards, kicking the study door further open as she rubbed Antiquax into the blue damask arm of a chair.

  As Helen belted off to find a vase and slap on another layer of Clinique foundation, Rannaldini explored the charming drawing-room, with its apricot walls, faded grey silk curtains and glass cases containing Helen’s porcelain collection. One would have to break the glass to reach her as well, reflected Rannaldini.

  He thought it a particularly beautiful room because of the preponderance of his records and because of a photograph of Tabitha on the piano. Bareback, astride an old grey pony, her hair was in a blond plait and her eyes were as cool and disdainful as Rupert’s.

  The elm is a patient tree, it hateth and waiteth, thought Rannaldini lasciviously.

  Malise had had a good eye for paintings. Rannaldini admired a Cotman and a little Pisarro, but what had possessed him to hang that frightful oil of poplars against a sunset with a cow which looked more like a warthog in the foreground? Then he read the rather obtrusive signature: Helen Gordon.

  On a side table was an open poetry book.

  Who would have thought my shrivel’d heart

  could have recovered greenness? read Rannaldini.

  In the desk the green leather blotter wouldn’t close round the sheaf of bills. Flipping through them Rannaldini saw that Helen really was in trouble. The Cotman and the Pisarro would soon be off to Sotheby’s.

  Hearing her footsteps as she returned with the freesias in a saxe-blue jug, he turned back to her painting.

  ‘This is excellent.’

  ‘Oh, how darling of you. Malise liked it. I didn’t have much time but perhaps now-’ Helen’s voice trailed off, then pulling herself together she picked up a file on a side-table.

  ‘You said you’d like to see Malise’s unpublished work. Have you really got time?’

  ‘It is huge honour, I will make time,’ lied Rannaldini.

  Mrs Edwards was polishing the hall table now to have a better look. The Colonel had been a real gentleman, although rather frail towards the end, but this fellow looked as though he had three or four more pints of blood pumping round his veins and that lovely Boris Chevalier accent.

  ‘You help Malise?’ asked Rannaldini.

  ‘I made suggestions,’ said Helen eagerly.

  ‘How lucky to have someone to share one’s life work.’

  Rannaldini’s deep sigh fluttered the pages as he returned them to the file.

  ‘It’s fascinating how the flute was given the cold shoulder by musicians in the nineteenth century,’ began Helen earnestly, ‘because it lacked sufficient expressive range.’

  ‘May I?’ To shut her up, Rannaldini took Malise’s flute out of its case, tuned for a second and started to play.

  ‘Prokofiev. Malise played that.’ Helen’s eyes filled with tears.

  ‘I am sorry. I will stop.’

  ‘No, no, I never dreamt I’d hear it again so soon. Do you play other instruments?’

  ‘Piano, oboe, trumpet, bassoon, violin, teemps.’

  ‘Goodness, with so many accomplishments what made you become a conductor?’

  Rannaldini laughed.

  ‘Because at heart every man wants to be a fuhrer. We must go to lunch. I take you home.’ Then seeing the apprehension in Helen’s eyes, added, ‘Don’t worry, my secretaries, my gardener, my ‘ousekeeper and her ‘usband, my driver, Uncle Tom Cobbley and probably his grey mare will all chaperone you.’

  As the helicopter circled the Old Rectory before turning south, Helen could see Mrs Edwards belting down the drive twenty minutes early and gave a wail.

  ‘I forgot to put on the alarm, I’m so scared of being burgled.’

  Rannaldini smiled at her. It’s already too late, my darling.

  Orange leaves of beech, saffron flames of larch still flickered in the umber woods as they flew over the little village of Paradise up the River Fleet to Rannaldini’s house, Valhalla, lurking pigeon-grey and wrapped in its conspirator’s cloak of trees.

  Helen had a heady glimpse of tennis-courts, a swimming-pool, the dark serpentine coils of a yew-tree maze, wonderful gardens, horses out in their rugs in fields sloping down to the river and deep in the wood, the watch-tower, where Rannaldini worked and seduced. Valhalla itself, narrow-windowed and brooding had been built before the Reformation.

  ‘I’ve been reading a fascinating book on the dissolution of the monasteries,’ began Helen.

  Not wanting another lecture, Rannaldini whisked her down dark passages, past suits of armour, tattered banners and tapestries into a red drawing-room.

  ‘How pretty,’ gasped Helen.

  ‘Meredith Whalen decorate it and
the kitchen when I was married to Keety. You ’ave such exquisite taste, I pay you to theenk up new colour schemes.’

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t take your money.’

  ‘My child,’ purred Rannaldini, ‘I know you need eet, as I need your help to exorcize bad memory of my life with Keety. Next week I go to Prague for ten days. By the time I return you must think up something wonderful.’

  But Helen was crying again.

  ‘Malise and I were going to Prague on 21 November for our anniversary. Malise tried to get tickets for a production of Don Giovanni at the Stasis Theatre. Mozart premièred it there in November 1787, you know, and that was where they made Amadeus. But it was sold out.’

  ‘Because I am conducting,’ smirked Rannaldini.

  ‘Of course, how stupid of me,’ said Helen appalled. ‘Since Malise died I don’t remember anything.’

  ‘Eet ees shock. It’ll come back.’ Rannaldini poured her a glass of Pouilly-Fumé. ‘You shall come to Prague with me instead.’

  ‘But I can’t leave Marcus and I can’t afford it,’ babbled Helen.

  ‘You will be my guest. I stay in flat. I book you room in nice hotel. I will send you plane ticket and ticket for Don Giovanni just for twenty-four hours, you deserve a treat.’

  Putting a warm hand on her neck as comforting as a wool scarf just dried on the radiator, he led her down more passages to the big kitchen whose walls were covered in a glossy green paper, populated by jungle animals and birds.

  ‘I certainly couldn’t improve on this,’ sighed Helen.

  ‘I want eet changed,’ said Rannaldini chillingly. ‘Keety loved the parrots and the humming-birds. I want eet out. Sit down. I will make your lunch.’

  ‘A bowl of soup will do,’ stammered Helen. ‘I can’t eat at the moment.’

  ‘Then you will start.’

  From a next-door office, despite faxes billowing out like smoke, four telephones constantly ringing and the raindrop patter of expensive computors, Rannaldini’s secretaries, who’d all read The Scorpion, kept finding excuses to pop in and gawp at Helen.

  Princess Margaret’s office had rung, they said; Domingo wanted advice on an interpretation; Sir Michael Tippett wondered if Rannaldini had had a moment to look at his latest opera; Hermione had rung four times. Rannaldini said he would call them all back later.

  As he cooked, checking rice, throwing pink chunks of lobster into sizzling butter, then laying them tenderly on a bed of shallots, tarragon and tomatoes, separating eggs, boiling down fish stock, Helen talked. Her tongue loosened by a second glass of wine, she told him about her money problems, the big house she couldn’t afford to keep up, Marcus’s asthma and her worries about his friendship with Flora. She was delighted when Rannaldini dismissed Flora as ‘an evil little tramp’.

  ‘We will take Marcus to the mountains,’ he went on warmly, then his voice thickened like the eggs in the double saucepan. ‘How about your daughter?’

  ‘Quite out of control.’ Helen didn’t want to tell him how incensed she had been about the appropriation of the olive-green cashmere. So she added: ‘At half-term Tabitha borrowed my credit card saying she needed some school books, then used it to buy a pair of jeans and spend the afternoon on a sunbed. I cannot stand such vanity and such lies.’

  Rannaldini, who was no stranger to lies and would have been quite out of control on a sunbed with Tabitha, expressed his disapproval. Topping a cloud of white rice with butter and putting it in a slower part of the Aga, he gave the lobster sauce a stir, and started chopping up chives for a salad of lettuce hearts.

  ‘How can you do so many things at once?’ marvelled Helen.

  ‘I am conductor.’

  Helen wandered over to the screen which Kitty, over the years, had lovingly covered with photographs of Rannaldini and the famous.

  ‘Everyone’s here,’ she cried, thinking what fascinating people she would meet if Rannaldini became her — er — friend.

  ‘Why d’you record in Prague?’

  ‘Because it’s ten times cheaper than London or New York. Not speaking ill of your country, Helen, but I am tired of New York. Last time I record a Haydn symphony the shop steward sit watching second ‘and go round, four seconds to go, eight bars from the end, he leap on to the stage. “All right, you guys, it’s over.” I tried to keel him. I had to be pulled off. Eet takes an act of congress and then of God to get rid of musicians over there.

  ‘I am almost broken man,’ sighed Rannaldini, belying it by removing his suede jacket to show off his splendid physique. ‘But I must not talk any more, I will burn your lunch.’

  Putting a white mountain of rice on each emerald-green plate, he spooned over the sizzling lobster mixture, then poured on the buttery sauce, topping it with a dash of cayenne.

  ‘Voila!’

  ‘This is too much,’ protested Helen.

  ‘You weel eat every bit, even if I have to feed you.’

  Rannaldini filled up her glass again.

  How wonderfully easy to give dinner parties, if one were living with Rannaldini, mused Helen, and think of the guest list. Her eyes strayed again to Kitty’s screen.

  ‘It is quite, quite delicious,’ she said in awe.

  As he told her his plans for the future Rannaldini’s warm eyes never left her face.

  ‘The leaves tumbling down remind me of new leaf I must turn over. I am tired of jetting round world. I must settle down in this lovely house, write music and build up a great orchestra of wonderful musicians, who would not be always chasing engagements and money like the London orchestras or threatening strike action like the guys in New York.’

  ‘You could be another Simon Rattle,’ said Helen warmly.

  Rannaldini scowled.

  ‘The CBSO is second-rate provincial orchestra,’ he said haughtily.

  ‘You can’t say that. Malise always felt-’

  Fortunately Rannaldini’s third secretary popped her head round the door to say the Princess of Wales was on the line.

  ‘My dear,’ Rannaldini took the telphone, ‘may I ring you back in one hour.’ He’d be leaving for the Albert Hall to conduct Turangalila around five o’clock.

  Helen was so speechless with admiration that this great Maestro should find time for her she forgot about Simon Rattle.

  ‘Why don’t you come with me this evening?’ asked Rannaldini, playfully spooning the last of her lobster into her mouth.

  ‘I must get back for Marcus.’

  ‘Eef only I had had a mother like you.’

  ‘Will Hermione Harefield be singing in Prague?’ asked Helen. ‘This salad is so good.’

  ‘No, she sing in Aida in Rome, and elephant run away with her. Nellie the Elephant pack her trunk and run away with Hermione,’ sang Rannaldini. His face was expressionless but he gave Helen a wicked side-glance and she burst out laughing.

  ‘Poor Hermione. I have to confess,’ Helen went on, ‘I do have reservations about Don Giovanni as an opera. The Don reminds me so much of Rupert,’ she gave a shiver, ‘and the way he used to get his best friend Billy Lloyd-Foxe to cover for him like Leporello.’

  ‘I know,’ Rannaldini slid his hand over hers. ‘Jake Lovell talks of you often, how terribly unhappy Rupert made you.’

  ‘How kind of Jake,’ said Helen, touched.

  ‘Jake threw you life-belt when you needed it,’ said Rannaldini. ‘But long term he would have bored you, you are much too bright for him.’

  Machiavellian, Rannaldini pressed every organ stop of Helen’s vanity.

  ‘That’s why he let you go,’ he added, knowing perfectly well that Jake had dumped Helen.

  ‘Do you think he’s happy with his wife?’

  ‘Jake dream of you often,’ lied Rannaldini, selecting a ripe peach, caressing its downy curves, ‘And who would not?’ Picking up a knife, he laid bare the gold flesh.

  Helen found herself not only sharing the peach with him but, after another glass, agreeing to come to Prague.

  Rannaldini’s secretary
then brought in a pile of fan mail.

  ‘Have you sewn that button on my tail-coat?’ he called after her shapely departing back.

  ‘People think being a conductor,’ he continued as in dark green ink he scribbled his name on each letter, ‘is all helicopters, jets and princesses, but eet consist of worry where you’ll stop long enough to get your laundry done.’

  ‘Genius shouldn’t have to worry about clean shirts and missing buttons,’ said Helen shocked. ‘Rupert never bothered to answer fan mail,’ she added.

  ‘That appal me,’ Rannaldini signed a couple of photographs. ‘Eef by writing back to these young people I can lead them on to a lifetime of loving music, it is small thing.’

  ‘What a genuinely good man you are,’ Helen suppressed a belch. ‘How people have misjudged you.’

  ‘Come for a walk,’ said Rannaldini, putting his huge wolf coat round her shoulders. ‘How it become you, a leetle lamb in wolf’s clothing.’

  As they walked up a path behind the house, the low afternoon sun kept parting the clouds, shining through yellow-and-orange leaves, so they glowed like amber and topaz. Rannaldini picked up a red beech leaf and held it against a soft brown wand of ash leaves.

  ‘You must always wear brown with your red hair,’ he told her. ‘Black is too hard.’

  As they passed a monk’s graveyard, Helen noticed a little pink flower with bright crimson leaves growing out of the wall.

  ‘What a dear little plant.’

  ‘It ees called Herb Robert, all the year it flower, the monks used the leaves to staunch flow of blood.’

  ‘Herb Roberto,’ teased Helen, as they stopped to lean on a mossy gate. ‘Such a beautiful name, why don’t you use it?’

  ‘My mother, who reject me, call me that.’