by Jilly Cooper
‘But I don’t understand,’ pleaded Georgie. ‘If he needs her, why does he insist on sleeping with me all the time? I locked myself in the spare room last night and he broke the door down.’
‘Quite seemple,’ Rannaldini smiled. ‘He feel guilty and he know eef he stop fucking you, you will suspect something, and if he ees thinking so much of Julia, he needs the release.’
‘Ooo!’ said Georgie in anguish. ‘Is that the reason?’
‘My dear child, Guy will only really want you again when you find yourself a new man.’ He paused as Guy came out with a clinking tray.
‘Sorry, Rannaldini, I’d forgotten Pimm’s takes such a long time. Do you think Becker’s going to win?’
Guy, who always became more military when he sensed combat, had had a too short haircut. Rannaldini noticed with a stab of pain that Guy’s newly revealed, rather pointed, ears were very like Flora’s, as were his flat cheek-bones and square jaw. But Flora’s luminous white skin, her earthy animal features and big sulky mouth were all Georgie’s.
‘How’s my friend Kitty?’ asked Guy, putting a piece of mint in everyone’s glass.
‘Staying with her mother, a pair of clacking false teeth in an armchair, and sorting out my VAT,’ said Rannaldini.
‘Kitty’s a saint,’ said Guy heartily. ‘They always say behind every famous man there’s a clockwork wife.’
‘And behind every famous woman there’s a wildly unfaithful husband,’ snarled Georgie.
Turning puce, Guy shot a see-what-I-have-to-put-up-with glance at Rannaldini. Fortunately the telephone rang and Guy bounded in to answer it.
‘I found a bill for Janet Reger under the lining paper of his pants’ drawer,’ hissed Georgie. ‘Do you think he’ll claim VAT — virtue annihilated tax — on that? When in silks, paid for by Guy, my Julia goes, Christ!’
‘You are on form this evening,’ murmured Rannaldini noticing Georgie go quiet, trying to work out if Guy was talking in code.
‘Hallo, Sabine,’ he was saying. ‘Did you beat Radley yesterday?’
‘Single-handed, I should think,’ said Rannaldini.
Guy returned looking absolutely furious.
‘Sabine’s had to suspend Flora until the end of term for three offences: drinking in a pub, smoking in church — in church! — and being caught half-naked behind a combine harvester this afternoon with your son, I’m afraid, Rannaldini.’
‘L’après-midi d’un fornicator,’ said Rannaldini, enviously.
‘Hell, it’s only a few fags, half a bottle of Sancerre and a roll in the hay,’ said Georgie, who thought it was funny. ‘At least she’s gone astray with the right sort of chap.’ She clinked her glass against Rannaldini’s. ‘Has Wolfie been suspended, too?’
‘Evidently not. He wasn’t caught smoking and drinking and the XI’s got a needle match against Marlborough tomorrow and Wolfgang still has two A levels to take. Flora shouldn’t have got caught,’ said Guy disapprovingly.
‘That’s always been your attitude,’ said Georgie flaring up.
‘I never did anything wrong,’ snapped back Guy.
Rannaldini was ecstatic. At last a chance to get Flora on her own while Wolfie and Natasha were still incarcerated.
‘And Sabine says Flora’s got a singing exam in ten days,’ said Guy, taking such a large gulp of Pimm’s he tipped cucumber and apple over his face. ‘I’d better go and collect her.’
And pop in on Julia on the way, thought Georgie despairingly. She shouldn’t have made those bitchy remarks, she’d have to crawl later.
‘Send Flora over to me,’ said Rannaldini. ‘I’ll go through her songs and give her a bit of coaching.’
Returning from a tele-recording in a suffocatingly hot London studio two days later, Rannaldini went straight into the shower. On the white porcelain floor lay a huge spider. A second later Rannaldini had assassinated it with a boiling jet of water. In almost intolerable sexual excitement he took a long time choosing what to wear, then opted to show off the depth of his tan and the broadness of his shoulders with an ivory silk shirt, tucked into cream chinos. Having brushed his hair till it gleamed, combed his black brows, which could splay like centipedes, and drenched himself in Maestro, he went downstairs to the summer parlour.
Here the cheerful serenity of primrose-yellow curtains and walls and drained blue and white striped sofas and chairs was somewhat marred by savage hunting scenes of lions and bears fighting off packs of dogs and men with spears. Rannaldini had just switched on Wimbledon and his own magnificent recording of Shostakovich’s Tenth, when Flora rolled up looking sulkier than ever.
‘Christ, I didn’t come all this way to watch Becker. He’s got white eyelashes like Dad, and why’d you always listen to your own records? D’you spend hours conducting in the mirror?’
For a second Rannaldini listened to the growling brass.
‘I’m playing this in New York next week. It’s important not to repeat oneself. Shostakovich wrote thees music to encourage the Russians to resist the Germans.’
‘You’re half-German — I don’t need any encouragement to resist you,’ said Flora rudely.
Unfazed by her sniping, Rannaldini handed her a glass of Krug.
The sunshine, which had browned everyone else, had merely sprinkled a few freckles on Flora’s turned-up nose. She wore no make-up, but at least she had washed her hair. Her cornflower-blue espadrilles were trodden down at the back. Her lighter blue skirt had been shredded round the hem by her bicycle. A black shirt of Wolfie’s was knotted under her breasts.
‘You look good in black.’
‘Matches the blackheads. Where’s Kitty?’
‘With her mother.’
‘Then I’m off,’ said Flora crossly. ‘I’m not staying here unchaperoned.’
‘Don’t be silly.’ Rannaldini took her and the bottle of Krug down some stone steps on to the terrace around which the Valhalla garden had reached perfection.
Sprinklers undulated languidly like strippers casting off rainbows of light over the emerald-green lawns. Old roses in every pastel shade, tawny honeysuckle, regale lilies, single and double white philadelphus, pale yellow lime blossom all seemed to be dabbing their sweetest scent on the pulse spots of the valley. Like women in their Ascot finery jostling forward to watch a big race, the herbaceous border was overcrowded with white-and-pink phlox, dog daisies, red-hot pokers, foxgloves, yellow snapdragons and soft blue cathedral spires of delphinium. A strange, very clear light heightened every colour, the smell of each flower intensified by the hot muggy air.
For a while neither Rannaldini nor Flora spoke, watching black-and-white cows like scattered dominoes in the fields below and listening to the tetchy bleating of sheep and the rattling hoof-beats of Rannaldini’s horses as, maddened by flies, they galloped about neighing. A red tractor chugged back and forth cutting Rannaldini’s hay. Swallows dived after insects.
‘It’s going to thunder,’ Flora said finally. ‘Mum’s got a ghastly headache.’
‘Perhaps she doesn’t want to sleep with your father.’
Rannaldini flipped through Flora’s music. ‘D’you want to sing to me?’
‘No.’
On the inside page of ‘The Magnet and the Churn’ she had written Flora Seymour, Lower Sixth A.
‘Beautiful trochaic name, Flora.’
‘It’s gross. How’d you like to have flat-stomached men mouthing your name across supermarket freezers? And as for Interflora, you can imagine what the boys at Bagley Hall made of that.’
Black clouds were edging round the sinking sun. Saying he had to walk his dogs, Rannaldini took Flora round the garden which seemed deliberately designed for love. Despite the drought, streams still hurtled through narrow ravines. Naked statues were strategically placed in sheltered glades. A little summer-house here, a white seat under a weeping ash there, beckoned dalliance. As he passed, Rannaldini let his hands rove suggestively over each romping nymph.
‘It’s like a nudist colon
y,’ grumbled Flora.
She was more charmed by Rannaldini’s Rottweilers who bounded ahead, muzzles covered in grass seed, soothing their thistle-pricked, nettle-stung paws in the streams, attacking clods of wet turf and wood, shaking and worrying them, emerging with dirty wet faces, giving skips in the air and bouncing fatly away.
‘Avant-garde dogs — they’re sweet.’ Flora hugged Tabloid.
‘To people who are not afraid,’ observed Rannaldini. Passing under a pergola fantastically entwined with pale pink roses and acid-green hop, they reached a frantically rushing stream, almost a river, but narrowed to a width of six feet between dark, drenched, very slippery rocks.
‘The sounding cataract ’aunted me like a passion,’ said Rannaldini softly, gazing down into the white churning water. ‘This whirlpool is called the Devil’s Lair. In the eighteenth century the young Westalls and their friends had bets eef they were brave enough to jump across. Several young men were keeled.’
Springing across like a great cat, Rannaldini turned towards her.
‘Come, leetle Flora.’
‘It’s a hell of a long way,’ snapped Flora, as the Rottweilers, distraught at being separated from their master, but not brave enough to jump, whimpered and barged round her legs. ‘Unlike you, I’m much too young to die.’
‘Life ees about taking risks,’ whispered Rannaldini, his dark eyes glittering, his teeth gleaming in the half-light. ‘Jump, leetle animal, or are you scared?’
Refusing to be beaten, Flora took a great leap, slipped on the damp moss and was only just pulled to safety in time. For a second Rannaldini held her shaking with fury and terror.
‘Let me go, you fucker,’ she screamed, ‘I want to go home.’
Releasing her, Rannaldini trailed a warm caressing hand over the goose-flesh of her bare waist.
‘Why you fight me?’
‘Because I really like Kitty, because I’m not into gerontophilia and because I’m sleeping with your son.’
‘And he satisfies you?’
‘He’s known as Trunch at Bagley Hall,’ spat back Flora.
‘Hush.’ Rannaldini put a finger, which smelt of wild mint, over her mouth. ‘I want confirmation not details.’
‘And if that weren’t enough,’ went on Flora, ‘you’re utterly unselective. Natasha told me about Hermione and jumping on her mother every time she hits London, and bonking every female musician in the London Duodenal, not to mention choral sex with all those panting groupies in their — I LOVE RANNALDINI T-shirts. You just pick them off.’
They had reached a little bank, covered in pink-spotted orchids. A blushing sun was retreating behind the wood. Kicking off her espadrilles Flora cooled her dusty feet in the long wet grass. Like Rannaldini, his sprinklers went everywhere.
‘I am Don Juan,’ said Rannaldini, sticking to the path above which made him taller, ‘or, being Italian, Don Giovanni. I seek the perfect woman and always despair of finding her because all women are the same. You would be different. You are not classically beautiful, but you light up when you smile.’
‘Dad doesn’t smile when I light up.’
‘You shouldn’t smoke when God has given you a voice.’
‘I’d rather he gave me Boris Levitsky,’ taunted Flora, disappearing into the fringed depths of a weeping ash.
‘Boris not Goodenough,’ said Rannaldini chillingly.
‘Why did you marry Kitty?’ Flora emerged from the far side of the weeping ash. ‘Was it an act of deliberate sadism? Did they toll the punishment bell at your wedding? Did the Paradise Lad howl on the first night?’
Rannaldini gave a shrug. ‘Kitty run my life. She was brought up by elderly parents so I seem like spreeng chicken, and she help her mother look after other people’s children.’
‘So she has no problem with your brat-pack?’
‘Correct.’ Rannaldini moved off down the ride, pausing to caress the upturned face and breasts of a naked wood nymph, then letting his hands stray downwards.
‘Eef one is going to run more than one woman,’ he continued, ‘one must have a loving wife rather plain so one’s mistresses don’t get jealous, rather working class, so women think Keety is fortunate to be plucked from her humble origins and to have landed such a mesmerizing — ’ Rannaldini paused mockingly over the word — ‘husband that she cannot expect heem to be faithful to her.
‘Above all,’ he went on with a satanic smile, ‘Keety is the perfect alibi. Eef Hermione is being difficult and I want to see Cecilia, I tell Hermione that Keety is in town so I cannot get away. Eef I want to see someone else, you, for example’ — briefly he touched her cheek — ‘I tell both Hermione and Cecilia, Keety is in town. If I want to drop someone I say: “I am so sorry, my dear, Keety has found out, and I cannot ‘urt Keety.” If a woman suddenly refuses to get out of my bed or one of my ’ouses, I say: “Keety is due any minute, you must go.” Finally eef any of them are foolish enough to want to marry me I tell them I cannot leave Keety, she do nothing wrong, it would be like throwing a freshwater fish into the sea.’
He has got the most beautiful voice, thought Flora, husky, caressing, anodyne. Perhaps it was an essential of adulterers because so much of their campaigning was done on the telephone.
‘You’re such a shit,’ she said fascinated.
‘Like Byron.’ Gently Rannaldini fingered the crutch of the wood nymph. ‘We love our men of genius not because they are perfect but because they are great.’ Then, running his hand over the wood nymph’s bottom, ‘Still warm from the sun as though she has been given a spanking, I would love to spank all the bad temper out of you, leetle Flora.’
‘You bloody wouldn’t.’ Outraged, yet excited, Flora plunged back into another weeping ash. As she emerged Rannaldini drew two ropes of fronds round her neck, trapping her.
‘I ’ave a ’ole in my heart from Cupid’s arrow,’ he whispered, tightening the fronds. Aware that he could throttle her, Flora gazed into his mocking, sensual, infinitely cynical, face.
‘My father was a Spanish Captain,’ she sang softly,
‘Went to sea a month ago,
First he kissed me, then he left me,
Bid me always answer No.’
She paused so long on the high note that Rannaldini felt the hair rising on the back of his neck, then she smiled and went on:
‘Oh no Juan, no Juan, no Juan no.’
Rannaldini’s straight black eyebrows underlined a forehead almost without lines. Not a man who worries or who suffers from guilt, thought Flora. His lips were absolutely on a level with hers. She was sure he was going to kiss her and shut her eyes. Then he laughed and moved away.
‘Come and see my tower.’
Flora could hear the distant hum of a tractor trying to get the hay cut before the storm. The sun had set, but the heat was still murderous. As they moved through the wood Rannaldini held back nettles and brambles and, having climbed a stile overgrown with elder, turned to help her. The starry elderflowers that fell into her hair were as creamy as her skin. Overcome with lust, Rannaldini let his hand stray over her right breast testing its soft springiness.
Leaping away, livid with her heart for pounding like the hoof-beats of Rannaldini’s horses, Flora hurled a clump of goosegrass at him to lower the tension.
‘Clinging but instantly detachable, like the perfect woman,’ said Rannaldini, peeling it off his silk shirt and throwing it back at Flora who ducked and ran down the path. As she reached the clearing a crack of lightning lit up Rannaldini’s tower, then thunder boomed like a twelve pounder. The Rottweilers collided against their master’s legs in terror. Rannaldini just had time to kick them into their kennel and bustle Flora into the tower when the heavens opened.
The ground floor, where Rannaldini worked, was completely walled by records, tapes and editing equipment.
‘It’s soundproof, so however much you scream—’
‘It won’t sound as awful as Hermione,’ mocked Flora.
As the soundtrack of Ran
naldini’s film of Don Giovanni flooded the tower and its surrounding woodland, Flora bounded up a sprial staircase into a sitting room furnished with pale grey sofas and chairs and two high footstools covered in buttercup-yellow and crimson silk.
Flora looked up at the bright scarlet walls and ceiling. ‘Like being wrapped in the flames of Don Giovanni’s hell,’ she said.
On a side table beside a shoal of silver photographs of Rannaldini being congratulated by the famous, including Gorbachov and Princess Diana, stood a big yellow bowl overflowing with pink-and-green grapes, peaches, mangoes, persimmons and fruit so exotic Flora had never seen it before. A yellow Aubusson carpet swimming with roses and oak leaves caressed her bare feet. The only pictures were an Eric Gill panel of an ambiguous-looking madonna offering a perfect breast to a rather too-knowing and adult baby and a Picasso girl whose eye squinted over Rannaldini’s ivory-silk shoulder as he opened another bottle of Krug.
The bathroom, also in pale grey and scarlet with a mirrored ceiling and walls, was dominated by a vast Jacuzzi.
‘Mother Courage’s famous Ju-Jitzu bath,’ giggled Flora. ‘I can’t tell you how much I admire her, she makes my father’s shirts look as though Dinsdale’s slept in them and she told Mum that Mrs ‘Arefield ’ad just had her back passage painted bottle green. You should know presumably.’
Even though a faint smile flickered at the corner of Rannaldini’s mouth Flora decided not to tell him about Rattledicky.
‘I could listen to her for hours.’
‘Unlike Boris Levitsky’s compositions,’ said Rannaldini handing her a glass. ‘To us.’
‘To my guardian devil.’ Trying to suppress her surging excitement Flora sauntered next door into a bedroom which was all bed, with a mural above it of an endlessly applauding opera audience, beautiful bare-shouldered women in wonderful jewels, handsome men in dinner-jackets, all cheering and clapping so realistically you could smell the carnations in their buttonholes and hear the bravoes ringing out.