by Jilly Cooper
‘This is my stepmother,’ announced Nastasha disdainfully, dumping two carrier bags of washing on the floor at Kitty’s feet. ‘And please handwash my purple flares. You shrunk my red pair last time.’
‘I thought stepmothers were supposed to be wicked,’ said Flora. ‘My mother has never handwashed anything in her life. You’re bloody lucky, Natasha. How d’you do?’ she smiled at Kitty.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ Kitty wiped a red hand on her apron. ‘Blimey, it’s ’ot.’
‘I’m afraid these melted in the car.’
Giving Kitty a squashed box of Terry’s All Gold, Flora reflected that Kitty reacted as though they really were gold, going even brighter red with pleasure.
‘’Ow very kind of you, Flora, that’s really fortful.’
‘Not really,’ said Natasha bitchily. ‘Wolfie gave them to her, but she doesn’t want any more zits.’
‘That was another box,’ snapped Flora.
‘How are yer mum and dad?’ asked Kitty.
‘OK, but Mum’s getting horribly thin. These are hers although she doesn’t know it.’ Flora held out the bottom of the slate-grey shorts she was wearing with a pale pink camisole top. ‘They’re part of a size ten suit, and they’re already miles too big for her.’
‘They’re gorgeous.’ Natasha took a bottle of wine from the fridge and sloshed it into two glasses. ‘I wish I had a mother over here who was trendy enough to nick clothes from.’
Flushing, Kitty asked her how work was going.
‘Boring, and even more boring talking about it.’ Natasha handed a glass to Flora. ‘I’ll show you your room. I don’t know why you’re bothering about lunch, Kitty. It’s much too hot to eat.’
‘I’m starving,’ said Flora. ‘See you in a bit, Kitty.’
Later she and Natasha sprawled in the window-seat looking at old photographs.
‘Isn’t Papa ravishing?’ sighed Natasha.
‘Quite.’ Flora examined a coloured photograph of Rannaldini shooting in the bracken. ‘He’s a bit urban, as though he pays some peasant to throw mud over his gumboots every morning, and tread in his new Barbour in the autumn like grapes. He is good looking for a wrinkly though,’ she added kindly. ‘What’s his Christian name?’
‘Roberto.’
‘I shall call him Bob,’ said Flora, draining a second glass of wine.
‘I wouldn’t,’ said Natasha. ‘An American baritone called him Bob at a dress rehearsal, and never made the opening night.’
‘Bob Harefield’s a sweet man,’ said Flora giggling. ‘That ghastly Hermione isn’t short of a few Bobs, is she? Oh Christ!’ Flora suddenly remembered Kitty, who fortunately seemed to be preoccupied, putting peeled prawns and sliced cucumbers round a sea trout.
‘I’m starving now.’ Natasha grabbed a chunk of Cheddar from the fridge and, removing the clingfilm, took a bite, before smoothing away the toothmarks with her thumb. ‘Thank God! Here’s Wolfie; we can have lunch.’
Having been given a Golf GTi for his eighteenth birthday, Wolfie Rannaldini insisted on driving everywhere. Blond, ruddy complexioned, beaky nosed, solemn and ambitious, when he wasn’t training for various school teams, he was swotting for his A levels. He had taken after Rannaldini’s German side, while the volatile, histrionic, over-emotional Natasha seemed all Italian. Unlike his sister, he gave Kitty a hug, before pulling Flora up from the window-seat, seeking her mouth and letting his hand slither under the pink camisole top for a quick squeeze. Having dismissed love as a girl’s concern, he had been knocked for one of the sixes he was always hitting by Flora.
‘Did you beat Fleetley?’ asked Kitty.
‘Slaughtered them.’ Wolfie got a can of beer out of the fridge.
‘Any runs?’
‘A hundred and twenty, and three wickets.’
‘But that’s wonderful.’
Kitty is nice, thought Flora, who could never work up an interest in cricket.
‘They were pissed off,’ went on Wolfie. ‘When we got out of the bus, the Fleetley XI sneered at us, and said: “What’s it like being at a second-rate public school?” I said: “I don’t know, I’ve only just arrived,” and then we buried them. This is seriously funny.’ He unrolled a long school photograph. Flora and Natasha screamed with laughter, for there grinning in the third row, just behind Miss Bottomley was Flora wearing a gorilla mask.
‘They’ve printed six hundred and sent most of them out without checking,’ said Wolfie in amusement. ‘Bottomley will go ape-shit.’
‘Gorilla-shit,’ said Flora. ‘Come and look, Kitty.’
Kitty giggled so much she had to remove her glasses and wipe her eyes.
She’s not much older than us, thought Flora in surprise, and on closer examination decided that if Kitty wasn’t remotely beautiful, she had a sweet crumpled face, and certainly wasn’t the total dog Natasha made out.
‘You look nice, Tasha,’ she said, turning back to the photograph.
Too voluptuous at present, despite long thin legs, Natasha had shaggy black curls, Rannaldini’s heavy-lidded dark eyes, a big pouting mouth like a frog, and a sly, sliding, slightly Asiatic face, giving off the possibility of great glamour to come. Watching the three of them laughing together and seeing Wolfie’s hand creep round Flora’s slim waist to find her breast again, Kitty felt a wave of envy. Then she turned in terror and nearly dropped the potato salad, as the room was plunged into darkness by the unexpected arrival of Rannaldini’s helicopter blotting out the sun.
‘Fuck,’ said Wolfie, who’d been planning to spend the afternoon in the long grass with Flora.
‘Just then flew down a monstrous crow, as black as a tar-barrel,’ said Flora.
Only Natasha was delighted when five minutes later the house was flooded with Mahler and Rannaldini stalked in. He was followed by Tabloid, his favourite and more ferocious Rottweiler, who would have plunged his teeth into Nastasha, when she rushed forward to hug her father, if Rannaldini hadn’t shouted and given the dog a vicious kick in the ribs, which triggered off a serious of howls.
‘Pavarottweiler,’ said Flora disapprovingly. ‘I heard you bullied your soloists.’
‘Was the recording cancelled?’ asked Natasha hastily.
‘I made everyone rise early to beat the heat.’
Once home, Rannaldini established his ascendancy with the inevitable jackbooting. A brilliant imaginative cook, he often produced Sunday lunch himself, cooking as he conducted, keeping five saucepans going at once, mixing, tasting, stirring, ordering Kitty around like a skivvy. But today, as lunch was ready, he kept everyone waiting out of malice, sending Kitty scuttling to get him a drink, going through the synopsis she’d typed of his post, faxes and telephone messages, finding fault with everything, snarling like Tabloid, who lay panting at his feet, if she didn’t know the answer.
In his post was a letter from some distinguished composer saying the concert in the Albert Hall, out of which Flora had walked, had been the most marvellous thing he’d ever heard.
‘A peety you meesed most of it.’ Rannaldini chucked the letter across to her.
‘Expect the old sycophant wants you to commission another symphony,’ said Flora unrepentantly. ‘Basically I thought the Don Juan very self-conscious. You couldn’t hear Strauss for Rannaldini, and I’ve never liked it as music. You keep longing for that divinely soppy theme tune to be repeated and it never is. And I’m not surprised those were Strauss’s Four Last Songs, if he’d known Hermione was going to sing them. My mother’s voice is far more beautiful than that gurgling canary.’
Terrified that Rannaldini might see her laughing, Kitty gave the mayonnaise a stir to check it hadn’t curdled.
‘You will never find a more exquisite voice,’ said Rannaldini icily.
‘Passion and thrust are what matters. Hermione’s got no soul.’
Beneath the pale red fringe which was tangling with her sooty eyelashes, Flora’s cool cactus-green eyes, a mixture of Georgie’s seaweed brown and Guy’s pale azu
re, were scornful and utterly unafraid.
I must get that girl into bed, thought Rannaldini.
‘Are we never going to have lunch?’ he snapped, turning on Kitty, and when she had laid out a beautiful pink sea trout, a huge bowl of yellow mayonnaise, which he complained should have been sauce verte, a green salad including the tiniest broad beans, and new potatoes, he made no comment, only rejecting the bottles of Muscadet and sending her scuttling back to the dungeons, of which she was terrified, to get some Sancerre.
‘Why don’t you have a little train to get your drinks for you?’ said Flora, unfolding an emerald-green napkin. ‘Then Kitty wouldn’t have had to run around like a barmaid in Happy Hour.’
But Rannaldini was looking at The Times crossword which was normally faxed out to him wherever he was in the world, filling it in as easily as a passport form.
‘Who, Like a black swan as death came on, Poured forth her song in perfect calm?’ he asked the assembled company. ‘Presumably none of you dolts know.’
‘St Cecilia,’ said Flora, accepting a plate of sea trout from Kitty. ‘Yum, that looks good.’
‘Correct,’ said Rannaldini. ‘Unlike my children, you read books.’
‘I’m doing Auden for A level.’
Natasha was still studying the school photograph.
‘Nice one of Marcus Campbell-Black. Have you snogged him yet, Flora?’
‘Too shy. Wouldn’t mind snogging his father though.’
‘Rupert Campbell-Black was the man we voted we’d most like to lose our virginity to,’ Natasha told Rannaldini. ‘But you were second, Daddy,’ she added hastily.
Rannaldini’s vile mood returned. Although the food was delectable, he immediately emptied a sootfall of black pepper and a pint of Tabasco over his sea trout before taking a bite. Then, when he had taken one mouthful, snapped at Kitty that the fish must have died of natural causes, and gave the whole lot to Tabloid who promptly gobbled it up, then yelped, his eyes spurting tears, as he encountered the Tabasco and pepper.
‘This sea trout’s perfect,’ protested Flora. ‘You kept lunch waiting. You’re lucky it’s not old and tough, like certain people round here, and that was bloody cruel to that dog.’
Ignoring her, Rannaldini started talking in German to Wolfie. Kitty said nothing throughout lunch, as still as an extra on stage, not wanting to attract a second’s attention from the actor who is speaking. There was another explosion when Rannaldini found the Brie in the fridge.
‘I’m sorry, Rannaldini,’ stammered Kitty, ‘but it was running away in the ’eat.’
‘Don’t blame it,’ said Flora, ‘if it gets shouted at like you do.’
In the silence that followed, Natasha, Wolfie and Kitty gazed at their green ivy-patterned plates and shook.
Rannaldini glared at Flora for a moment, then laughed. ‘You have to practise this afternoon, Natasha. You have homework, Wolfie. I will show Flora the ’ouse.’
Ducking unnecessarily so as to avoid hitting his sleek grey head on the low beams, Rannaldini whisked Flora through endless twisting and turning passages and dark-panelled rooms. Occasionally from the shadows grinned the white or yellowing teeth of a grand piano. On the way Rannaldini pointed out ancient tapestries, Tudor triptychs and family portraits, belonging to other people, because sadly, his left-wing mother had flogged off those of his own family. In the great hall with its minstrels’ gallery, Rannaldini had commissioned a red-and-gold mural of trumpeters, harpists and fiddlers, and a bust of himself in front of the huge organ.
‘Something wrong there,’ said Flora slyly. ‘Surely you should be behind the huge organ?’
Ignoring the crack, Rannaldini led her up the great stone staircase, where sunlight poured through the stained-glass window of St Cecilia at yet another organ.
‘Blessed Cecilia appear in visions, To all musicians,’ murmured Flora. ‘Is that Burne Jones?’
‘A copy,’ said Rannaldini. ‘The original’s in Oxford.’
Leading the way up to the attic, stepping over stray angels’ wings and broken chalices left behind by the monks, Rannaldini pointed to a rope running down a groove in the thick stone wall.
‘What’s that?’ asked Flora.
‘The rope of the punishment bell,’ said Rannaldini caressingly. ‘The Abbot used to ring it from his study after vespers every Friday evening, telling the monks to return to their cells and flagellate themselves for the duration of the misericordia. This went on until a Father Dominic came up here and valiantly clung on to the rope, and the practice was finally stamped out.’
‘How gross!’ Flora fingered the rope with a shudder.
Through a narrow slit of window, she could see the valley lit by chestnut candles and beyond, green fields streaked with buttercups and dotted with red-and-white cows, like the backdrop to some medieval madonna. It was very cold in the attic. In some distant room, she could hear Natasha sulkily thumping out a Chopin Nocturne.
‘I suppose you use the punishment bell on Kitty,’ blurted out Flora.
‘Only when she needs it,’ said Rannaldini silkily.
Flora shivered, but was determined not to appear afraid.
‘Mum said Kitty’s terrified of a ghost here.’
‘The Paradise Lad,’ murmured Rannaldini softly. ‘He was a very beautiful young boy. A novice here, and very loving and charming and not entirely sure of his vocation. Then he fell in love with a village girl, and decided he wanted to leave the order. Denied this, he was caught with the girl. The Abbot loved the boy, and was so insane with jealousy that he threw him down in the dungeons before ordering him to be flogged and rang the punishment bell on and on, until finally the monks grew quite out of control and flogged the boy to death. Many people say they ’ave heard his ghost sobbing at night.’
Rannaldini’s face was enigmatic, but there was a throb of excitement in his deep voice.
‘That’s horrific,’ said Flora, utterly revolted.
‘And probably apocryphal,’ said Rannaldini, idly examining a battered cherub, wondering if it could be restored. ‘The wind howl down the chimneys ’ere. That’s probably all the screaming people ’ear. Let’s go and play tennis.’
Rannaldini’s passion for Flora was severely tested on the tennis court. Unaware of the honour of being his partner, she simply didn’t try, and ducked, collapsing with laughter, each time Wolfie and Natasha, both powerful, much-coached players, hit the shocking pink balls straight at her. She and Rannaldini ended up in a screaming match.
‘Your father’s insanely competitive,’ she grumbled, as she and Wolfie cooled off in the big blue swimming-pool which was tiled like a Roman bath.
When he simmered down, Rannaldini was reduced to watching her through binoculars while she sunbathed topless, envying the Ambre Solaire Wolfie was rubbing into her high freckled breasts. At bedtime, peering through the montana, he caught a tantalizing glimpse of her undressing before she slipped on the outsize pyjamas which had come into fashion that summer. He imagined his hand stealing under the trouser elastic. With her cropped red hair, she’d be just like a schoolboy. Next moment he heard Wolfie’s door open and shut, followed by creaking floorboards, then Flora’s door opening and shutting. Then the light went out. Rannaldini was demented.
Stalking along the landing, he barged into Kitty’s bedroom without knocking. She was wearing a high-necked white cotton nightgown and knitting a custard-yellow jersey for her mother’s Christmas present. On the shelf were little bottles of shampoo, moisturizers and transparent bathcaps in cardboard packs which Rannaldini brought her from hotel bedrooms on trips abroad. She never threw out anything he gave her. Looking up at her husband in fear and longing, she waited for the next hammer blow.
‘Time for the real thing,’ said Rannaldini, dropping Danielle Steel on the floor.
Returning to the kitchen after waving goodbye to Natasha, Wolfie and Flora the following evening, Kitty gasped in horror. Flora had added a moustache, a squint, some long earrings and a mass
of tight curls to Rannaldini’s poster on the cork board. Underneath she had written: STOP BEING SHITTY TO KITTY. Kitty removed it only just in time.
25
Over the next few weeks the heat wave intensified and so did Rannaldini’s obsessive passion; but whenever he flew home he found Wolfie and Flora wrapped round each other like Labrador puppies. He was in despair. Then, on the last Saturday in June, in the middle of Wimbledon fortnight, having despatched Kitty to stay with her excruciatingly dull, suburban mother, so he could install a two-way mirror between his dressing room and the spare room into which Flora had been moved, Rannaldini dropped in for a drink with Georgie and Guy.
As the sun had lost a little of its heat they sat out on the terrace, gazing down on a valley lit by white elderflower discs and garlanded by wild roses that shrivelled in an afternoon. Only docks, nettles and ragwort had been left by the ravenous sheep and cows. Both lake and river below it were dangerously low. Dinsdale panted gloomily under Georgie’s deck-chair.
Georgie, in a pair of oatmeal Bermuda shorts and a sage-green T-shirt, which showed the skin falling away from her upper arms and thighs, gazed into space. She had dried up like the valley around her. Great cracks split the footpaths. The ivy round the house was showering down yellow leaves and the lawns of Angel’s Reach, because Guy, unlike Rannaldini, observed the hose-pipe ban, had already turned brown.
Georgie and Guy were just reeling from another frightful row. While Guy was fussing around making Pimm’s, Georgie unbuttoned to Rannaldini.
‘Guy says he hasn’t seen Julia since her exhibition. Then he buggers off for two hours this afternoon and returns with poor Dinsdale utterly exhausted and reeking of Je Reviens. The shoe-maker’s children may be the worst shod, but adulterer’s dogs have the sorest paws.’
‘My dear, I cannot theenk why you’re upset.’ Rannaldini put a soothing hand on her razor-sharp shoulder. ‘You are cross with Guy so he seeks approval elsewhere. Having an affaire is like going on television, one gets the chance to talk at length about oneself in front of an admiring audience.’