‘Well now, and how does this wonderful garment yield up its treasures?’ he enquired, fingering the top of the corset, lightly touching the vertebrae running from her neck into the white lace.
‘Hooks and eyes,’ she whispered. ‘Dozens of them.’ She wondered what his reaction would be when he saw her naked breasts. She judged she could give his skinny wife at least four inches in bust measurement.
Patiently Xavier undid the seemingly unending hooks and eyes. He was beginning to feel weary. It had been a trying day and the visit to the hospital had laid some sort of cloud over him.
Dutifully, politely he removed the lace garment, tossing it to lie with the rest of her clothes. There was a long pause. She now wore only a lacy thong.
He surveyed her dispassionately. She was a perfect specimen of western womanhood. The body could not be faulted. It was the embodiment of an image; an ideal which countless women strove to emulate. Long legs, a soft mound of hips and buttocks, a curved waist, breasts as firm as oranges, bones as delicate as the wood carvings in an altar screen.
And clearly she was eager. He could hear her breathing - a little jerky, a touch increased in tempo. He brushed his hands over her nipples and let them trace a line over the skin from there to her manicured toes. Lifting her into his arms he laid her tenderly on the sofa.
She looked up at him, her face silvered in the moonlight. Her arms reached out. ‘Come to me!’ she urged.
Somehow her insolence in presuming to command him made things easier. He ran a skilled finger down the centre line of her chest, over her navel and down into her thong which he now removed in one single graceful movement. Parting her legs with ceremonial courtesy he allowed his finger to skim inside the pink fleshy lips.
She cried out, slippery with desire.
He thought of Georgiana’s dry crotch and that last occasion when he had forced his way into her. And this beautiful young woman was dripping with lust for him.
Xavier stared down at her for a long moment. ‘Thank you for a perfect finale to a splendid evening,’ he told her, his voice cool and even. ‘Please feel free to have another drink.’ As she stared up at him, puzzled and anxious, he handed her a business card. ‘And please feel free to use the services of this private hire company. Charge the fare to my account.’
She opened her mouth, but no words came out.
‘There is no rush of course,’ he reassured her. ‘But perhaps you would excuse me now. I have two concerts in the next week. There is work to be done.’
Turning his back on her he closed the door quietly behind him and went upstairs to his room, took a brisk shower and fell into bed, his skin still damp. Within seconds he was deeply asleep.
CHAPTER 5
The day marking Xavier’s fortieth birthday was significant for Tara also.
It started in carefree happiness with her and Bruno whiling away the morning in bed. When they eventually rolled out the bedcovers had the appearance of a rugby scrum having taken place in them.
‘Let’s take a day off!’ Tara suggested impulsively.
Bruno attempted a protest. ‘I’ve lectures this afternoon.’
‘Live dangerously – cut them!’
They spent the day like tourists, taking a leisurely walk along the embankment, impulsively jumping on a train bound for the Surrey countryside and discovering a little inn that served beer well into the afternoon. Afterwards they made love beneath a fiery autumn sun in the corner of a stubble field before returning to the inn for a supper of sausages and chips.
It was approaching eleven when Tara arrived back at her hall of residence. The night porter let her in. She was rather a favourite of his and never got any stick about being late and not having a special pass key.
‘The phone’s been hot for you, love,’ he told her.
Tara glanced up at him, her heart quickening. Something was wrong.
‘Since last night,’ he went on, his face kind but faintly chiding.
‘Oh God!’ She stared up at him, anxiety seizing her.
‘Your mother needs to talk to you,’ he said. ‘You’d better ring right away. Use the phone in my little cubby-hole behind the desk. You’ll have a bit of privacy there.’
Her hands shaking Tara dialled the number of her parents’ house in Kent.
Her mother’s voice answered. ‘Tara! Where the hell have you been?’ She sounded beside herself with anger.
Tara felt suddenly disoriented and bewildered. ‘Out - on the river. I was out,’ she repeated lamely.
‘You’ve been incommunicado for twenty-four hours. Did you know that?’
‘I didn’t think –‘
‘No, that’s your problem. You never think. Not about the important things.’
‘Mum, tell me! What is it? What’s the matter?’
‘Daddy. He had a heart attack.’
Tara gripped the receiver. ‘When?’
‘Last night, just after I picked him up from the concert. In the car.’
‘Oh no!’
‘I took him straight to the nearest hospital. He was asking for you. All the time, he was asking for you,’ her mother said bitterly.
Already Tara knew the worst. Her heart was even now trying to absorb the blow.
She heard her mother’s voice again, flat with resignation and despair. ‘He had a second massive coronary at four this afternoon. That was it. Dead.’
Tara shut her eyes tight, trying to ward off the shock and pain. ‘Look, I’m coming home – right away. I’ll get a taxi.’
‘No point. I’ve taken two sleeping pills. I’ll be flat out in a few minutes. Come tomorrow. Or better still, go to your lectures for a change and come home at the weekend.’
‘Mum!’
The line clicked off. The dialling tone purred in Tara’s ear. She started to punch the buttons again, and then thought better of it.
‘Bad news?’ the porter asked sympathetically as she walked, zombie-like, back to the desk in the lobby.
‘Yes, my father. He had a heart attack.’ She stared unseeingly ahead, appalled at the tragic waste of it. Fifty-two and such a wonderful person. Such a brilliant instrumentalist, far too good to have been buried in the second row of the violins all these years. And now there would be nothing else for him, his future cruelly snuffed out.
The porter shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, love.’
‘Have you any children?’
‘Just the three lads. Your father was lucky having a girl like you.’
If only you knew, Tara thought with bitter self reproach.
‘Are you going home then?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘That’s right. No good dashing off now. Go and get some sleep – best healer in this world.’
Tara forced a smile, then walked to the stairs with leaden legs. It seemed difficult to imagine ever sleeping again. She lay in the narrow bed, her arms by her side, cold and stiff as though she too were dead.
Her father had gone. She kept hearing her mother’s voice: ‘That was it. Dead.’
Dead. His body would be lying in a bag, stacked in a cabinet for corpses. His body was there just a few miles away from her. She could go there and seek it out and embrace it as she used to when she was a little girl. She could embrace it through eternity, but he would not be there. Where was he? Where had he gone? How could all that spirit and talent and skill suddenly be nothing? How could a life be rubbed out so swiftly?
There were no answers to the torturing questions. And there was no sleep either. She sat up and wrapped her arms around her knees and rocked to and fro, softly moaning his name. Daddy, Daddy.
Bruno travelled home with her. She told him she couldn’t face her mother on her own. My mother is a widow, she thought in horror, fearful of the change she might see in the parent she had always considered the most psychologically tough member of the family.
But her mother was reassuringly the same; not openly ravaged by grief, nor pink-eyed and tearful.
She welcomed B
runo in a pleasantly neutral manner, told him to call her Rachel and fed him hot buttered muffins and slabs of chocolate cake. She said she had been keeping herself occupied cooking and shopping in preparation for the probable stream of sympathy callers who would need to be offered snacks. Keeping her numbed brain busy.
Bruno and she got on famously. She insisted that he stayed on over the weekend and got up at six to drive him to the station to take the early train to London on the Monday morning.
‘I’ve invited him to come to the funeral,’ she told Tara over breakfast.
‘Thanks.’
‘Is it serious? You and Bruno?’
Tara frowned, considering.
‘He seems to think so,’ her mother observed. ‘I just hope you don’t hurt him.’ Rachel stared hard at her daughter before rising to clear the table.
‘Like I hurt Daddy. Is that what you’re trying to say?’ Tara demanded, stung and resentful.
‘You’re very powerful, Tara. You grab at life and squeeze it as though it were a great big juicy orange.’
‘What the hell does that mean?’
‘It means you’re capable of being very selfish and ruthless.’
Tara gasped. ‘Thanks for the character assassination. You were always rather good at that, Mum.’
‘You needed squashing by someone, from around the age of eighteen months.’
‘God! Now I know why I left home and didn’t come back.’
‘You left home because your father finally confronted you with some harsh realities about yourself.’
Tara breathed deeply as anger burned inside her. She knew she had been wayward and self-centred. She knew she had been bolshie and difficult. They had expected so much. He had expected so much. She had felt stifled, harnessed and handcuffed. She didn’t think they had ever had any idea of how she felt.
It was all Freddie’s fault. If Freddie hadn’t gone and died when he was only ten, they wouldn’t have been so fragile and bitter. They wouldn’t have needed to make her so precious and special, to mould her into the genius who would tread in her father’s musical footsteps and far beyond. All in honour of her dead brother.
Tara’s large green eyes swam with tears as she confronted her mother’s dignified, weary face. ‘Don’t let’s fight, Mum. Please.’
Her mother gave a rueful smile. ‘Well it’s too late now.’ She sighed. ‘Too late to mend the past.’
‘If I’d any idea he was going to be ill, I’d never have stayed away. I just didn’t know how to build a bridge back.’
‘I know,’ her mother agreed absently. ‘I just wish he could have seen you before he died.’
Tara thumped the table with her fist. ‘Oh God! DON’T!’
‘No, I’m sorry.’
Tara wanted to jump up and wrap her arms around her mother and for them to weep together. But her mother was being very brave and controlled and it seemed important not to disturb the outer shell of calm self-possession.
A fragile truce held until the day of the funeral.
Tara put on a navy dress which had been a favourite of her father’s. It flared softly from the waist and had wide white lapels. With it she wore simple black courts which she had bought in a charity shop close to the university.
Her mother was in dark burgundy, a neat suit with a cream silk blouse underneath. Tara thought she looked both lovely and noble.
‘I hope I’ll be able to sing,’ Tara said, feeling a thick choking sensation in her throat as she sat beside her mother in the vast black saloon car and watched the hearse, with the flower-decked coffin, move sedately in front of them on its journey to the church.
Bruno was there with them, a solid and comforting presence, already bolted on to the nucleus of the family.
‘I should hope you will,’ her mother responded drily. ‘It was you made such a fuss about doing it. The organist will be pretty fed up if he’s been practising day and night and doesn’t get to play his party piece after all.’
‘Daddy would have been pleased,’ Tara said, suddenly feeling like a small girl desperate to please a beloved parent. ‘Wouldn’t he?’
Her mother smiled. ‘Yes, he would.’ She sighed, a long quivering expulsion of air.
‘Oh, God! This is so awful!’ Tara wailed, fearful of exploding in a storm of unstoppable weeping.
‘Yes, it’s called mortality,’ her mother said in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘It shouldn’t happen to one’s own darlings. They should live for ever. But in time I suppose we’ll adapt to the idea.’
Tara looked at her mother’s composed, almost serene face and wondered if losing a child made you almost immune to every other thing that life threw at you afterwards.
The church was crammed with people. Tara felt her heart curiously soothed and uplifted to see this outward sign of the way her father’s life had been valued. She found herself able to sing the hymns without faltering and when it came to the time for her solo, following the vicar’s address, she mounted the altar steps with a feeling of resolute calm.
It was the Pie Jesu from Faure’s Requiem which she had chosen, a piece for which her father had always expressed a great fondness. She remembered how he would play his 1950s recording to her when she was a small child. The themes lingered in her mind, triggering off those fragile childhood feelings that were perhaps more commonly aroused by Away in a Manger.
Her light, pure soprano voice sprang out into the still cool air of the church, creating a ripple of feeling and bringing a lump of regretful sensation to a great many throats.
‘Pie Jesu, Domine, dona eis requiem; dona eis requiem sempeternam’ Blessed Jesus, O Lord, grant them rest; grant them everlasting rest. She recalled the English translation as she sang. Oh yes, let him rest, she thought. He’d had a pretty hard time of it all in all. ‘Don’t I ever get a moment’s peace?’ he used to joke.
Rest now Daddy. There’ll be peace stretching on for ever and ever.
Her voice swelled with feeling as she faced the congregation, free now of all apprehension or restraint. As her glance swept along the rows a figure seated alone in a side pew beneath the stained glass windows seemed to spring out at her, demanding attention. A coil of shock spun inside her as she recognized the great conductor Xavier; austere, remote, chillingly inscrutable.
Her composure faltered for a second and there was a small break in her voice as she lingered on the closing note.
Returning to her pew, her task completed, the tears began to roll unrestricted down her cheeks. Her mother pressed her hand and smiled, her own eyes dry still. From the edge of her vision she was painfully aware of the dark rigid form of Xavier. A satanic figure at my father’s wake, she thought with quite unfounded aggression.
Back at the house the rooms seemed to be thronging with people: family, neighbours, players with the Tudor Philharmonic.
Her mother started opening wine bottles, a task which Bruno instantly offered to take over. ‘Pour large ones,’ she instructed him. ‘I can’t bear all that hushed whispering.’
Tara circulated, dutifully greeting relatives, gritting her teeth as she attempted to absorb their sympathy, deftly fielding the inevitable questions on the progress of her studies and her future career.
Yes, she was studying philosophy. Yes, it was fascinating. No, she didn’t quite know yet what one did with philosophy. She was sure something would turn up.
As she conversed her attention was caught by the high-pitched whine of a car’s engine passing the house. Glancing through the window she registered a granite grey Porsche, glimpsed a flash of red wraparound stripes.
Moments later the doorbell rang. Throwing open the door Tara stared up at the tall grim-faced man, taking in the familiar saturnine features which adorned the sleeves of millions of discs. It seemed curious to see them here in close up, in the flesh.
‘Saul Xavier,’ he said, extending his hand courteously. ‘And you are Richard’s daughter.’
It was a statement, not a question.
‘Ye
s’. She was curiously unnerved by the effect of his proximity. When his strong fingers unclenched from hers she felt dampness in her palms and her heart was bounding. It was ridiculous. She had met plenty of famous people before, but had never been the slightest overawed.
She ushered him in and went to find her mother. ‘The King of the Maestros is here,’ she announced. ‘Correction – Emperor.’
‘Xavier?’ Her mother appeared unsurprised. ‘He phoned earlier to say he hoped to be able to come.’ She smiled. ‘Well, well!’
Tara watched her mother walk up to the great man and allow her hand to be sympathetically retained in his as he inclined his dark head to her fair one.
‘Rachel, my dear,’ Tara heard him say. ‘Georgiana sends her very deepest condolences. We both remember Richard’s playing from way back.’
‘God, he’s smooth,’ Tara hissed to Bruno who was eyeing the conductor with undisguised wonder. ‘Positively glistening.’
Bruno patted her affectionately in a ‘there-there’ kind of way. He loved her when she was indignant. ‘It’s good of him to come. Your mother will be really pleased.’
Tara grabbed a nearby glass of wine and drained it in one gulp. She felt exhausted and dangerously on edge after these few days at home, trying to be the kind of daughter her parents had always wanted. She watched her mother talking with Xavier as though they were guests at some elegant cocktail party and felt a growing dislike for him. Her father used to tell stories of his occasional brutality at rehearsals; singling out individual players and humiliating them, creating an atmosphere of fear rather than comradeship. Although she recalled that her father had always considered that the ends justified Xavier’s means.
She doubted that her father had ever had anything to fear from the likes of Xavier. He had been a superbly technically skilled player, although sadly never one of the lucky few who had that extra spark of talent that lifted them from the grinding ranks of the orchestra into the sphere of glittering stardom.
‘Bruno,’ her mother called, beckoning him towards her. ‘Come and meet one of Richard’s old sparring partners.’
The Maestro's Mistress Page 4