Bruno hurried forward, a flush springing to his smooth, youthful cheeks. Tara heard the word “Sir” as he shook Xavier’s hand.
Turning away she went into the kitchen and started on the task of rinsing the glasses. She felt dizzy and disoriented. The wine was already doing its work in her brain and there was an insistent humming in her ears. She reached across to the table and picked up another full glass.
The party began to disperse. Tara skated in and out of the kitchen, smiling gamely while an assortment of now jolly people kissed her cheek.
‘Are you all right, darling?’ Bruno murmured, sliding out of the departing crowd and winding an arm around her.
‘Fantastic,’ she snapped. ‘Never better.’
Following her into the kitchen he picked up a cloth and started on the task of drying the chaotic pile of crockery and cutlery stacked on the draining board. This helpfulness had the effect of exasperating Tara beyond endurance.
‘Oh, for God’s sake! Leave me to do it. Go and comfort my mother. You do it much better than I seem to manage.’
Bruno ignored her. He understood her only too well.
‘Xavier was asking about my musical exploits,’ he told her. ‘He thought there might be an opportunity to do some playing in the Tudor Philharmonic. The percussion section sometimes needs stand-ins.’
Tara glared at him. ‘Grow up Bruno. There’ll be a waiting list a mile long to stand in at the Tudor Phil. You’ve only been playing the kettle drums for a year. He’s just being polite. Or most likely showing off how powerful he is to impress my mother.’
‘No,’ Bruno countered mildly. ‘The timpanist is here and Xavier got him over to talk to me. A really nice old chap – he’s invited me to go and have a session with him in the next week or so.’
Tara looked up at Bruno’s boyish eager face and melted. ‘Oh, that’s marvellous. I’m sorry I’m being such a rat.’
Bruno smiled. ‘Xavier’s a splendid chap. Really he is!’
‘OK. But for goodness sake stop calling him “sir”.’
‘Sorry! It just keeps slipping out.’
‘I don’t like him being here. It’s all a sham.’
‘No. He truly admired your father. And he is pretty fantastic.’
‘Stop being so impressed.’
‘Sorry.’
‘And stop saying sorry!’ they chorused in unison, breaking into laughter.
Her mother came in. ‘Xavier’s staying for supper. Bruno – be a darling and fish out a couple of bottles of claret from the crate in the cellar. You’ll have grub about in the dust!’
‘That’s Daddy’s claret,’ Tara blazed.
Her mother gave her a curiously arch look. Calmly she turned to open the fridge and inspect the contents.
Tara was on fire with feeling. She drained yet another glass of wine. Alcohol never made her incompetent or slurred her speech, in fact Bruno frequently marvelled at her capacity to put away the drink and stay remarkably lucid. What it did to Tara was connected more to feelings than reasoning, which was why she now felt about to explode with churning emotions.
Her mother laid four thick slices of steak on the table and prepared a vinaigrette dressing to dribble over them. Then she took a knife and began to slice an onion with steady precision.
Tara looked into her mother’s face. Even poised over an onion her eyes were still entirely moisture-free. ‘Why does he have to stay?’ she hissed, rounding on her mother like an angry snarling terrier. ‘What has he to do with us? This should be a night when you and I can be together and grieve.’
Her mother looked up. Her face was still and strangely serene.
‘Why can’t you weep?’ Tara demanded furiously. ‘Why are you so blasted cool and collected?’
Her mother turned back to the onion.
‘You bitch!’ Tara yelled. ‘You bloody cold-hearted bitch, with your neat highlighted blonde hair and your nice little job with that greasy doctor. No wonder Daddy felt he had to make the final exit!’
Her mother straightened up and faced her daughter, her face a wasteland of emotional wounds.
Xavier, standing silently in the doorway, stepped forward and took Tara by the arm. ‘Stop it,’ he told her softly.
He guided her through into the sitting room where Tara shook him off and swore under her breath.
‘I want to howl,’ she said. ‘I want to roar and sob and moan. Right from here.’ She thumped the base of her stomach.
Hr looked down at her, his eyes stripped of any readable feeling. ‘Go on then. Initiate a flood. It will prevent years of painful and futile leaking in the future.’
Even in her rage, Tara saw the sense in his words. But she had no intention of weeping at his command. ‘Not here, not now,’ she said coldly.
‘Whilst I’m here?’
‘Yes.’ Tara glared fiercely up at him.
Xavier, who was invariably attracted to cool slender blondes, felt a primitive blast of sexual heat radiating from this small, volatile elf who had eyes like peridots and breasts as round and firm as peaches.
He stared down at her, commanding his face to be blank. She would think he scorned her; that he held only contempt for a young woman who was indulging in a small temper tantrum at her father’s funeral. Turning away from her he walked over to the fine Bechstein upright piano that had originally belonged to Tara’s grandfather. Its inlaid walnut top was submerged under a mass of flowers – gifts of condolence, still in their cellophane wrappings. Beside them was the battered case in which lay her father’s latest, most precious, violin. Idly Xavier tapped his fingers on the battered leather. Slowly he opened the case, took out the instrument and stroked its gleaming belly thoughtfully.
‘He never made it to a Stradivarius or a Guarneri,’ Tara remarked bitterly.
Xavier plucked the strings. ‘This is a very close relation. A most beautiful instrument. Your father was an excellent player, a true and loyal servant of music.’
‘He played his guts out in that orchestra,’ Tara said angrily.
Xavier raised his eyebrows. ‘Many players do. That is what they choose.’
‘They get paid peanuts, slaving away day after day in rehearsals, night after night at concerts. And what do you do? Stand in front of them waving a stick, then pick up your great fat fee and fly off to some far flung corner of the world to bully the next lot of poor suckers.’
Tara felt enormously pleased to have got that off her chest. She bitterly resented Xavier’s continued presence. He should have pushed off with the rest of the guests – or whatever you called people at a funeral bash. Did he truly believe he was above ordinary human conventions, that he had no need to observe the social niceties on these occasions? Scrutinizing his carved aristocratic features she was certain that he imagined himself to exist in some sort of atmosphere far above ordinary mortals, breathing rarefied air.
‘The cost of you car would probably represent double his annual salary,’ Tara continued, unstoppable, vaguely remembering fragments from a debate in the student’s union concerning the uneven distribution of wealth in Britain. ‘Whilst my mother will probably have to sell his violin to cover the costs of this funeral and make ends meet.’
‘Not at all,’ her mother said, coming into the room and regarding her angry daughter with long-suffering resignation. ‘Your father left that to you. I shall never sell it, and neither will you.’
‘If it’s mine then I can do what I like with it,’ Tara fumed. ‘I’ll sell it and give you the money. And then I’ll be free.’
‘From what?’
‘Trying to be something I’ll never be. Never being good enough.’
‘Tara, what is all this about?’ Rachel asked in genuine bewilderment.
‘I don’t know.’ Tara fell silent. Her throat filled with remorse and grief.
‘So – Richard’s daughter is not only a singer,’ Xavier commented, looking interested. ‘I meant to compliment you on your singing in church by the way,’ he told Tara. �
��I always prefer the boy treble sound in Faure’s Pie Jesu rather than the full blown soprano.’
‘You think I sounded like a boy treble/’ Tara demanded.
‘Very so much so. Charming.’ His voice was laced with mockery. No aspiring singer over twenty should sound like a boy treble.
‘You are absolutely right. Tara is no singer,’ her mother stated flatly. ‘She’s a violinist.’
Xavier glanced sharply at Tara from beneath his cowled eyelids. ‘Ah.’
‘No!’ Tara bit fiercely into her lip.
Bruno came in bearing bottles of claret and cut glass goblets on a silver tray. ‘She’s terribly good,’ he said fondly.
‘Yes. She just won’t practise, that’s the problem,’ her mother said evenly.
‘Mum! For goodness sake.’
‘Goodness has nothing to do with it. You could have been a brilliant player. As good as your father, if not better. Instead you decided to let your stubborn, mulish, wilful behaviour stifle all your potential.’
Tara gasped. ‘Why are you attacking me like this?’
‘As a last ditch attempt to stop you throwing yourself into life’s dustbin.’ She turned to Bruno and Xavier. ‘Shall we eat?’ she suggested pleasantly.
The unease caused by Tara’s outburst was rapidly dispelled during the meal by Xavier’s smooth flow of anecdotes about the famous and quirky in the world of music.
Bruno was agog, his face shining with enthusiastic interest. Xavier’s eloquence and charisma, together with the consumption of generous quantities of white wine and claret, made him wonder how he would ever get back to his law books.
Tara’s mother listened with quiet appreciation, smiling abstractedly from time to time.
Tara, her eyes seemingly fastened to Xavier’s carved face by invisible wires, found herself smouldering with inner turbulence.
She was furious to have to admit that Xavier was compellingly magnetic, that an almost tangible psychological power emanated from him. There was something softly menacing about him also, something stealthy and cat-like which both alarmed and stimulated her.
Damn him to hell! she thought, liking to get the measure of people and then stick to it.
Over coffee the conversation turned to the art of conducting.
‘Isn’t that whole thing about Maestro power just a myth?’ Tara declared. ‘I mean look at poor old Otto Klemperer. He would sit in front of the orchestra like a man under anaesthetic whilst the players followed the first violinist and asked each other now and again if the conductor was dead.’
Rachel sighed and raised her eyebrows heavenwards.
‘Daddy used to tell that story,’ Tara told Xavier sweetly. ‘It’s absolutely true.’
‘I do apologize for my daughter,’ Rachel interposed. ‘I’d like to say that she’s not herself tonight – but unfortunately she is just that. I’m afraid she needs taking firmly in hand.’
‘I’m working on it,’ Bruno said gamely.
Xavier leaned back in his chair and narrowed his eyes reflectively. ‘You know when I was a young music student I once had the good fortune to attend a lecture in Milan given by Arturo Toscanini.’
‘Before he went gaga I hope,’ Tara muttered under her breath.
‘Just before his final illness in fact. When he was a very old, very experienced and very wise man,’ Xavier countered, throwing Tara a mildly admonishing glance.
‘Sorry, go on,’ she said grudgingly.
‘He still had the energy to curse and rage about German and Austrian conductors who ruined Mozart’s two/four time works by beating four beats in a bar instead of two. Toscanini himself always beat two you see.’
Xavier hummed a Mozart tune from one of the composer’s later symphonies. ‘You know it?’ he asked his interested audience. ‘Of course you do. Now – Tara, Bruno, you sing it for me and follow my beat.’
Fixing them with his penetrating grey eyes and using just one long curved finger, he conducted their singing, first beating with the accent coming on each fourth note, then more slowly with the accent coming on the second note.
As she sang Tara understood in a moment why Xavier had this power over orchestras. Watching his moving, mesmerising finger she had the growing sensation that a steel belt had been placed around her waist, a slightly flexible steel belt which allowed her to be held on the point of that finger, making it impossible for her singing to deviate more than the tiniest fraction within the sparse amount of liberty he was permitting.
The sensation of intense control brought an equally intense excitement. She found herself wanting to be free and at the same time longing to be held more firmly.
She wondered if Bruno felt the same, but they were not able to compare notes as Bruno gratefully accepted Xavier’s offer of a lift back to London, anxious to make preparations for his nine o’clock tutorial the next morning.
Tara accompanied the two men out into the road, where she embraced Bruno lovingly. As she listened to the high whine of the Porsche’s engine accelerating into the distance she let her fingers move over the stiff white card which Xavier had unobtrusively placed in her hand as he stepped outside the door. She considered tearing it up without even looking to see what it said.
Having dropped the younger man off at his college, Xavier turned his car towards home and Georgiana.
He felt deeply satisfied. He had done the young man a good turn: the meeting which had been set up with the timpanist at the Tudor would most likely turn out favourably, and anyway the young man had a career in law all mapped out. Xavier need not concern himself with him further.
It was that small fireball of green-eyed rebellion which interested him.
Ah yes, there was much to be mulled over in respect of that feisty nymph; delightful manoeuvres to contemplate. And he judged he had already set the ball rolling very nicely.
As he navigated the night-time streets of London he felt himself energized and revitalised, his spirits surging with a sense of anticipatory exhilaration which he had begun to despair of ever recapturing.
CHAPTER 6
Georgiana lay on the chaise longue, her body and limbs tension free as she looked out of the window of her therapist’s consulting room to the line of cherry trees beyond. Their few remaining leaves had turned to vivid lime gold.
‘I had such a beautiful sleep last night,’ she told him. ‘Ten whole hours. There were no dreams, just perfect peace. It was the kind of sleep I used to have when I was a child.’
Dr Denton – MBChb, Member of the Institute of Psychoanalysis – who was sitting just behind her head, made no immediate response, giving Georgiana the time to reflect on her statement, the opportunity to make some analysis of her own – even though he seriously doubted her capacity to do so. His eyes rested on her narrow feet and her gazelle-slim ankles before moving slowly over her body, alluringly draped in a cunningly fitting dress of some soft jersey fabric which clung to every contour.
After a short interval of silence he asked, ‘You have not slept like that since you were a child?’
Her eyes stared unseeingly ahead. Ignoring the question she continued with her own thoughts. ‘After I lost the baby I had these terrible nightmares. They were full of blood and pain – ghastly, horrible. I used to force myself to like awake so they wouldn’t come again.
Yes, she had told him that before. She had been coming to him for some weeks now, at first once a week and now twice. She raked constantly over the ashes of her miscarriage. In fact she was reluctant to talk of much else. He had to admit that he was not making much progress with her. But it was early days yet. There was time – weeks and months of it stretching ahead. And the prospect of sitting quietly just out of her view, with all the freedom in the world to let his eyes linger over her delicious person was distinctly pleasing.
‘Tell me about your dreams when you were a child?’ he asked, wondering if she might at long last be persuaded to speak of her childhood. Usually his patients were only too eager to delve into the
ir past. After all in this, fast-moving, wealth acquiring society it was a luxury to be granted the licence to talk at length about oneself. Especially to someone who listened without interrupting, but seemed to care.
In the four years of his practice as a psychoanalyst (leaning more towards the theories of Carl Jung than those of Sigmund Freud) Dr Denton had heard countless stories of childhood – most of them unhappy and brutal. This was hardly surprising as his patients came to him because they had problems, the underlying causes of which were inevitably rooted in their childish past. The problems which rose to the surface – alcoholism, drug abuse, anorexia, depression, poor sexual performance - were merely symptoms of something far deeper. It was his job to discover the demons in the hidden caverns of their unconscious and gently reveal them to the patient in an attempt to purge their power. He judged that his degree of success was satisfactory and steadily improving.
‘Just sometimes I would dream,’ she said suddenly. ‘I used to see my parents’ faces. They would be smiling at me, just as they did when I was awake. They were the gentlest parents, the most loving. We were all so happy.’
Dr Denton looked across at the winking red light on his tape recorder on the desk. He would be interested to listen to those words played back when she had gone. Statements of that kind were simply too good to be true. What was she concealing from him – or from herself?
‘My mother was very beautiful. Golden-skinned, lovely ash blonde hair. Not as tall as me, but everyone said we were unmistakably mother and child.’ She smiled, taking obvious pleasure in the memory, closing her eyes like a cat responding to a soft caress.
Dr Denton directed his attention to her face. She was indeed beautiful with her firm jaw-line, her high cheek-bones and her fashion model’s straight nose. Beneath her bronze-shadowed lids were eyes as blue as a summer sky and her baby soft hair was a thick, creamy shade which he assumed must be entirely natural.
‘She’s still alive,’ Georgiana continued. ‘In her late sixties now and still very lovely.’ Another smile.
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