by Jilly Cooper
Helen had mixed feelings. Tab could have done infinitely better and it would mean the press raking up her affaire with Isa’s father, Jake, but she’d enjoy showing everyone at the wedding how much better she looked than Tory, the wife Jake had gone back to. She must book in for a few days at Champney’s.
Finally there was undeniable pleasure in how much the whole thing would enrage Rupert, and at least it meant that Tab, who had draped a banana skin on Psyche’s head only that morning, would move out. And Rannaldini wouldn’t run after her any more if she married Isa, who looked capable of knifing any competition — or so Helen thought.
8
Meanwhile, rehearsals for Don Carlos were supposed to have started in a defunct WI hall in North London. Tristan, however, grew increasingly frustrated when all his stars, headed by Fat Franco who was singing Otello at La Scala, failed to turn up. This meant that poor Mikhail, whose hotel bill was being picked up by Liberty Productions, had no-one to rehearse with except his voice coach, who found it a great strain having to squawk Hermione’s and Chloe’s parts, let alone growling like an old bear pretending to be Alpheus. The reason for this mass absenteeism was that top singers hate rehearsing because they don’t get paid for it. ‘Why should we roll up because Mikhail Pezcherov hasn’t sung the part in English before?’ they chorused. ‘We’re only going to be reading our parts at the recording anyway, and could be whizzing round the world avoiding tax and making fortunes elsewhere.’
‘Franco and I never met when we did Tristan and Isolde,’ protested Hermione, on a very crackly call from a Florida beach. ‘I just put on cans and recorded the entire opera from the orchestral track.’
‘That’s why it was so lifeless and boring,’ yelled a furious Tristan, but Hermione had hung up.
Tristan also spent a lot of time on the telephone shouting at Rannaldini.
‘How the fuck can I direct individual rehearsals when there aren’t any individuals to direct?’
‘I am shocked at them all,’ lied Rannaldini, and to placate Tristan, he invited him down to Valhalla the following Saturday. ‘Then we iron out every problem. I also invite that Australian tenor, Baby Spinosissimo,’ Rannaldini added airily. ‘He’s coming down to see his jockey, Isa Lovell, who by an extraordinary coincidence happens to be my jockey. Why don’t you drive down together?’
Rannaldini rubbed his hands in glee. What frisson it would add if Tristan, and particularly Baby, were present at the wedding! Thank goodness, Clive, his bodyguard, had discovered that on the big day Rupert would be out of the country with his son Xavier.
Poor Xav had not only had to endure Cosmo’s horrible bullying. Rupert had also found his little son sobbing his heart out because he’d been scrubbing his face for hours trying to get it as white as Rupert’s. Rupert had struggled not to weep too. Instead he decided to give Xavier some sense of identity by taking him back to Colombia. Here, Xav could meet the nuns in the Bogotá convent in which he’d spent his first two years, and see something of the ravishing surrounding countryside. Taggie, Rupert’s wife, and Bianca, Xav’s younger sister, would have gone as well if Bianca hadn’t caught measles.
At midnight on the eve of the wedding, therefore, an unsuspecting Taggie was at Penscombe, filling up the deep freeze for Christmas. Bianca, whose temperature was down, was fast asleep upstairs. The six dogs, except for Gertrude the mongrel who always kept an eye open for scraps, slept in their baskets. Two huge moussakas for the staff party were complete, except for the cheese topping which was bubbling on the Aga.
Having laid the big scrubbed table for the grooms’ and jockeys’ breakfast tomorrow, Taggie had left space at the end to wrestle with her Christmas cards. Very dyslexic, she found proper names a nightmare. She was dickering over whether to send a card to Rupert’s ex-wife, Helen, to heal the breach, and make it easier for Rupert to see Tabitha again, but she wasn’t sure how to spell ‘Rannaldini’. Hearing the strange strangulated croak of a fox’s bark she glanced out of the window. A car was lighting up the trees as it sped along the opposite side of Rupert’s valley when the telephone rang.
Oh, bliss, it must be Rupert. He hated her working late. She must remember to sound sleepy.
‘Is that Taggie?’ asked a slurred voice, so like Rupert’s. ‘Look, I’m getting married to Isa Lovell at five o’clock tomorrow — no, today. Will you come? I’d like some family there, apart from Mummy.’
‘Oh, no, Tab, you can’t.’ Taggie collapsed in horror on the window-seat.
Tab burst into tears. It was several moments before Taggie could elicit the fact that her stepdaughter was having Isa’s baby and Rannaldini, being angelic, had masterminded the wedding and that Tab was madly in love with Isa.
‘But he’s so busy race-riding five days a week and helping Jake’ — at the dreaded name, Taggie jumped as though she’d been stung — ‘with his yard that I don’t see much of him. He doesn’t need me as much as I need him.’
As Tabitha was obviously getting cold feet, Taggie beseeched her to postpone the wedding.
‘You don’t have to marry him, darling. Have the baby here. We’ll all help you look after it.’
‘Daddy wouldn’t allow that,’ sobbed Tab.
‘Of course he would. It’ll kill him, Tab. Anyone else but Isa! You know how he feels about the Lovells — and not having the wedding at Penscombe will break his heart. He was just about to ring you and make it up.’
‘Put him on, then,’ demanded Tab.
‘He’s in Bogotá with Xav.’
Immediately, Taggie knew she’d said the wrong thing, as Tab, who was as jealous of Xavier and Bianca as she was of Marcus, slammed down the telephone.
A disgusting smell of burnt cheese sauce brought Taggie back to earth, as Gertrude the mongrel wandered over stiffly and laid her head on her mistress’s knee. ‘Oh, Gertrude, what am I going to do?’ sobbed Taggie.
‘Is your name really Spinosissimo?’ asked Tristan, as he edged his navy blue Aston on to the M4.
‘Course not,’ said Baby. ‘I got it out of a rose catalogue. My real name’s Brian Smith. But you can’t have Smith alongside the Pavarottis and Domingos on a record sleeve.’
Outrageous, incredibly glamorous, Baby Spinosissimo had burnt-sienna curls, thickly lashed debauched grey eyes, a beaky little nose and a pouting, but wickedly determined, mouth. Slightly plump already, he finished a whole box of Quality Street on the way down, chucking his sweet papers out of the window. He also spent a lot of time on Tristan’s telephone talking to his bookmaker.
Responding to Tristan’s ability to listen, Baby was soon telling him about his sex life. Women ran after him in droves, but the only person he was remotely interested in was his trainer and jockey Isa Lovell.
‘He’s got such a capacity for menace. I can’t sleep at night for imagining him gripping me as he grips those horses.’
Baby also confessed that buying horses for Isa to train had screwed him up with the taxman.
‘Jan one, and the debtor’s prison looms.’
In return Tristan told Baby about his problems with Don Carlos.
‘Fat Franco won’t rehearse.’
‘He’s got half Colombia up his nose, for a start,’ said Baby dismissively. ‘And he hates the part of Carlos. Thinks it’s very difficult and not important or sympathetic enough. Domingo feels the same. He dismisses Carlos as a wimp with one solo.’
‘What d’you think?’ asked Tristan.
‘If the part was decently acted by someone hugely attractive…’ Baby smoothed his curls. ‘What else are you up to?’
The Lily in the Valley was nearing its final cut, said Tristan. Tomorrow he was nipping over to Paris to re-do some dialogue with Claudine Lauzerte.
‘Are you pleased with it?’
‘Yes,’ admitted Tristan, ‘but one has no idea what will happen when it faces an audience.’
‘Claudine Lauzerte,’ Baby rolled his eyes, ‘is a terrific gay icon in Oz.’
They were in deep country now.
The sun hadn’t appeared for days, probably singing Otello in Milan. But despite bare trees and lowering skies, the winter wheat spilling like a jade sea over the rich red ploughed fields gave a feeling of spring.
Driving through the russet cathedral town of Rutminster approaching some traffic lights, they drew level with a black Mercedes driven by a young girl. She was wearing a Stop Puppy Farming T-shirt but her pale blonde hair was fantastically garlanded with pink and white flowers like a Botticelli angel. A Labrador puppy as yellow as her hair lay across her thighs. Her seat-belt was undone and she was unashamedly taking slugs out of a vodka bottle. Tristan, who knew he’d seen her before, nearly ran into the car in front.
‘Ke-rist on a Harley-Davidson!’ gasped Baby.
‘Oh, Don Fatale,’ muttered Tristan, because the girl had one of those faces that makes everyone else’s look commonplace.
‘Where are you going to, Mademoiselle?’ shouted Baby, lowering his window.
‘It’ll be Madame in an hour or two,’ shouted back Tabitha, lifting the vodka bottle to her lips and driving on.
At the edge of town, she gave them the slip.
‘That’s one for the divorce courts,’ said Baby. Then, to Tristan’s surprise, he admitted he had been married briefly when he was twenty-one. ‘My brother had such a beaut stag party I wanted one too. So I had to get spliced. My stag party was so great, I only just made the wedding, passed out as soon as I got to the reception and didn’t wake up till next day. My mother-in-law never forgave me, and nor did my wife. It only lasted a few weeks.’
Baby told the story so wickedly that Tristan couldn’t help laughing, but neither could he stop thinking about the girl at the traffic lights. Then he remembered. He’d seen her in a silver frame on Rannaldini’s piano.
Across the world in Bogotá, Rupert had returned from a marvellous day out. Xavier had totally captivated the nuns, who had not seen him since Rupert and Taggie had adopted him four and a half years ago. He was so tall, straight-backed and confident now, and proudly showed them photographs of Taggie, Bianca — who’d come from the same convent — Bogotá his black Labrador, Gringo his pony, already covered in rosettes, and finally of his big brother, Marcus, winning the Appleton.
‘We read about Marcus in the papers,’ said Mother Immaculata. ‘You must be so proud — and what about your sister Tabitha?’
‘We don’t see her any more, thank God,’ said Xav flatly.
‘She’s in America, eventing,’ explained Rupert hastily, vowing to telephone her the moment he got back to England.
Returning to the Hilton, he found a message to ring Taggie urgently. When he heard the news he went berserk.
‘What time is it in England?’
‘About three thirty.’
‘We’ve got to stop it. Rannaldini’s set the whole thing up in revenge for Marcus winning the Appleton and the rows over Don Carlos. Gimme his number.’ Then, for once forgetting his wife’s reading problems, ‘For Christ’s sake, move it.’
As Tabitha breezed in from the hairdresser, a purring Rannaldini told her that her father was on the line. For a second her face lit up. Then, picking up the telephone, she was scalded — even thousands of miles away — by the lava of Rupert’s rage. If she really went ahead and married Isa, he would never speak to her again, never allow her back to Penscombe, never give her a penny.
‘So what else is new?’ screamed Tabitha. ‘You said exactly the same thing when Mummy married Rannaldini. I love Isa. It’s not just because I’m having your grandchild.’
‘Won’t be any bloody grandchild of mine! It’s spawn of the devil!’
‘Bollocks! You’re the devil. I know what you got up to — terrorizing Jake at school, and Tory when she was a deb, making Jake’s life a misery on the show-jumping circuit, pinching Revenge from him. I’d no idea that Revenge started off as Jake’s horse, or the reason Macaulay wouldn’t go for you in the World Championship was because you’d beaten him to a pulp in the past, just as you beat up Mummy.’
‘I bloody fucking didn’t!’
‘Yes, you did! You’re the biggest bastard that ever walked.’
‘You ain’t seen nothing yet!’ howled Rupert. ‘I’ll destroy your marriage and bring down Rannaldini and the entire Lovell family.’
‘Oh, go screw yourself!’ A shattered Tab slammed down the receiver.
Rupert was straight on to Taggie. ‘I can’t get back in time to stop the marriage but I’ll get it annulled tomorrow, and I’ll strangle you if you go to the wedding.’
The moment Rupert hung up, Tabitha called Taggie and begged her to go.
‘Christ! Look at Hammerklavier House of Horror,’ shivered Baby as, after extended drinks at the Pearly Gates, he and Tristan drove towards Valhalla. Rooks rose out of a shroud of mist, thickened by bonfires of wet leaves. Sinister, conspiratorial as its owner, the great grey house lurked behind its mighty army of trees. Its tiny deep-set windows, thought Tristan, were like the eyes of medieval scholars grown small from poring over learned texts lit only by a flickering candle.
As Rannaldini had wanted maximum publicity without alerting Rupert, he had waited until midday to invite the leading gossip columnists, who had dropped everything to be there. The rest of the paparazzi, in black leather jackets and dark glasses, tried to storm the electric gates, as they opened to admit Baby and Tristan. Remembering Étienne’s funeral, Tristan ducked in horror. Baby, on the other hand, waved happily.
At the end of a long drive through dark woods and deer-haunted parkland, Tristan and Baby were directed through the omnia vincit amor gates. Rannaldini’s all-devouring smile welcomed them at the front door. Inside they found Tabitha. Except for the puppy-farming T-shirt and the flowers in her hair, she was unrecognizable, her swollen eyes redder than carbuncles, her face grey, except where it was covered in blotches. Despite having thrown up after her terrible row with Rupert, she was still attacking the vodka.
Delighted by the turn of events, Rannaldini was about to introduce her, when Tab gave a cry of relief, and shoving Baby and Tristan aside ran towards a dark girl, who had followed them into the house. ‘Oh, Lucy, thank God you’ve come!’
One glance at Tab’s blubbered woebegone little face told it all.
‘Has your dad been horrible to you again?’
‘Horrible, horrible,’ sobbed Tab, as she led Lucy upstairs.
Lucy Latimer was Tabitha’s greatest friend. They had met when they became involved in animal rights. A vegetarian and a make-up artist, Lucy was very careful not to use cosmetics that had been tested on animals. Extremely successful because she combined a painter’s eye with a sympathetic, soothing nature, she fortunately had a spare day between filming to make up Tab and provide moral support.
‘Come on, Latimer.’ Tab gazed at the wreckage in her bedroom mirror. ‘This is the greatest challenge you’ll ever face.’
‘Don’t you worry.’ Lucy unpacked a roll of brushes, sponges and assorted bottles. ‘I’ll have you stunning as ever in a trice.’
‘And talking of stunning, did you see that man in the hall?’
‘Couldn’t miss him, really,’ sighed Lucy, ‘but you’ll have to put all that behind you now.’
Only a streak of saffron on the horizon gave a clue the sun was setting, but apple logs burned merrily in the Summer Drawing Room.
Rannaldini, looking very good in a morning coat, because the grey waistcoat matched his pewter hair, handed Tristan and Baby glasses of champagne, and apologized that they had run into a wedding.
‘Who’s getting married?’ asked Baby.
‘My stepdaughter, Tabitha.’
‘She doesn’t seem very keen on the idea,’ said Tristan, wincing at his father’s painting over the piano, of a leering man undressing a very young girl.
‘Just last-minute nerves.’ Rannaldini seemed to be killing himself over some private joke.
‘Who’s the lucky guy?’ asked Baby.
‘My dear boy, I thought you’d have known. It�
�s your jockey, Isa Lovell.’
The colour drained from Baby’s suntanned face. He seemed to shrink, like a larky March hare suddenly looking down a gun barrel.
‘Christ, he can’t be,’ he stammered. ‘What about Martie? He was talking of marrying her after Crimbo.’
Rannaldini always got a charge out of inflicting pain.
‘He’ll be in in a minute to tell you himself. He was irritated not to be riding at Cheltenham today.’
Tristan felt desperately sorry for Baby and put a hand on his rigid shoulders.
‘This happen very quick. You told me she only came home the day of the Gramophone Awards.’
‘Ah,’ sighed Rannaldini. ‘When one is young, love work like lightning. Like Carlos and Elisabetta.’
‘Carlos and Elisabetta happen so quick because they were giddy with relief an arranged marriage had turned out so well,’ protested Tristan.
‘I believe in arranged marriages,’ said Rannaldini warmly. After all, he had arranged this one.
‘I hope you’ll stay for the wedding,’ he begged. ‘You might even sing something during the signing of the register.’ He smiled at Baby who, having drained his glass of champagne, had got a grip on himself. ‘Dame Hermione is singing “Panis Angelicus”,’ went on Rannaldini. ‘Ah, here comes the bridegroom.’
And in strolled Isa, still in old cords and a tweed jacket.
‘Hi.’ He smiled almost mockingly at Baby, who found it impossible to act normally as he blushed and couldn’t speak. Isa always had this effect on him.
‘Hadn’t you better get changed?’ snapped Tristan.
‘Plenty of time,’ said Isa coolly. ‘I thought Baby might like to see round your yard, Rannaldini.’
It wasn’t long before Baby found his tongue again.
‘Why the hell didn’t you marry Tabitha’s brother Marcus?’ he hissed. ‘At least he’s the right sex. I suppose you knocked her up.’
‘This is a very nice mare.’ Isa opened a half-door.
‘She’ll lose it if she goes on hitting the vodka. I suppose it’s also for the money.’