by Jilly Cooper
Nineteen months ago, merely to spite his great enemy, the very rich and arrogant Rupert Campbell-Black, whom he believed had orchestrated the break-up of his third marriage, Rannaldini had made a catastrophic fourth marriage to Rupert’s neurotic ex-wife, Helen. In return for his habitual infidelity, Helen was now busy squandering his millions and, because Rannaldini was only five foot six, deliberately dwarfing him in public by wearing very high heels.
Rannaldini was sad that his two eldest children from earlier marriages, Wolfgang and Natasha, had left home after frightful family rows. But, saddest of all, he knew his music was suffering. Accusing Rannaldini of blandness in the Daily Telegraph last Monday, Norman Lebrecht had suggested he stopped settling scores and started studying them again. Rannaldini might outwardly be the greatest conductor in the world, with orchestras in New York, Berlin and Tokyo, but he was poor in spirit and horribly alone.
Outside, rain swept across the woods like ghost armies marching on Valhalla. Although his office was tropically warm and the windows and doors were closed, an icy wind suddenly rustled all the papers and the fire died in the grate with a hiss. On the chimney-piece, a gilt and ormolu clock of Apollo driving the horses of the sun chimed twelve noon.
Valhalla was full of ghosts. They never frightened Rannaldini: they were his accomplices in terrorizing the living. But, hearing an almost orgasmic groan, he lookedup quickly at the Étienne de Montigny oil to the right of the fireplace. Entitled Don Juan in Transit, it portrayed the great lover, looking suspiciously like Rannaldini, humping a lady of the manor but distracted by the swelling bosom of her young maid hanging clothes outside in the orchard. It was the attention to detail – the yellow stamens of the apple blossom, each hair under the maid’s armpit, the pale green spring light – that made the painting so perfect.
Rannaldini smiled at his reflection in the big gilt mirror. His hair might be pewter grey but his face was still as virile and handsome as Don Juan’s in the picture. He also had two trump cards.
The first was a film of Don Carlos, which he was poised to conduct and co-produce. The nightmare of cutting a three-and-a-half-hour opera down to a manageable two hours for filming had not been helped by Rannaldini insisting that an overture, an aria, and linking passages to make the story more accessible, all composed by himself, be included. The plot of Don Carlos had been gingered up with several sex scenes and, to appeal to the pink pound, Carlos’s best friend, the gallant Marquis of Posa, would be portrayed as a homosexual.
An all-star cast, who would have screaming hysterics when they discovered any of their numbers had been cut, had been assembled for some time, because singers have to be booked several years ahead. They included Hermione Harefield, who at forty would need careful lighting to play the young Elisabetta. Nor could she act, but at least she did what Rannaldini told her, which was more than did Franco Palmieri, who was playing Don Carlos and who had grown so fat he made Pavarotti look anorexic. However, it had been written into his contract that he must lose seven stone before filming started next April.
In the past Rannaldini had often given juicier parts, in more ways than one, to his ex-wife Cecilia in lieu of alimony, but she and Hermione would have murdered each other on location. As a result, the part of the seductive, scheming Princess Eboli had gone to a ravishing mezzo, Chloe Catford. The search, though, was still on to find an unknown star to play the Marquis of Posa. Having, in his opinion, agreed to over-pay everyone else, Rannaldini was hunting for a bargain.
Opera films were seldom big box office. Why, therefore, had these vastly high-earning singers committed themselves when they knew what purgatory it was to work with Rannaldini?
The answer was Tristan de Montigny, who by driving himself into the ground to win some recognition from his father, Étienne, was now one of the hottest directors in the world. With his ravishing English-speaking version of Manzoni’s The Betrothed tipped to win several Oscars, he had spent the summer filming Balzac’s The Lily in the Valley with Claudine Lauzerte. The word on the street was that, despite being over fifty, ‘Madame Vierge’ had never looked more beautiful or acted better.
Success with actors of both sexes had been helped by Tristan’s wonderfully romantic looks: the model whom Calvin Klein loved best. At six foot two, he was too thin, and his gold curls had darkened to burnt umber, but the peat-brown, heavily shadowed eyes, the cheekbones higher than the Eiffel Tower, and the big mouth, usually smiling but of incredible sadness in repose, made everyone long to make him happy.
But it was a mistake to be fooled by Tristan’s gentleness: he could be both manipulative and monomaniac in getting the film he wanted.
He and Rannaldini were both so successful that they seldom managed to meet except for an hour snatched at an airport or a midnight dinner after a concert, but they had retained their affection for one another and their dream of working together, which at last was going to be realized.
But, sadly, too late to please Étienne. All the newspapers littering Rannaldini’s desk reported that France’s greatest painter since Monet was dying but refusing to go to hospital. Rannaldini was tempted to cancel tonight’s Barbican concert and fly out to bid his old friend farewell, but he’d get more coverage if he waited until the funeral. He couldn’t spare the time for both.
He felt a surge of hatred as he noticed an intensely glamorous photograph in Le Monde of Rupert Campbell-Black embracing his son Marcus before putting him on a plane to Moscow. If Rupert was relinquishing one child, he might consider a reconciliation with another, Marcus’s younger sister, the ravishing nineteen-year-old Tabitha. Rupert loathed Rannaldini so much that he had disinherited both Marcus and Tabitha for attending their mother’s wedding to Rannaldini.
Tabitha, however, like Tristan, was one of the few people who liked Rannaldini – not least because, when she became his stepdaughter, he had given her a large allowance and bought her a wonderful horse called The Engineer. But within a few weeks of marrying Rannaldini, Helen had caught him leering through a two-way mirror at Tabitha undressing, and packed her off to an eventing yard in America. There Tabitha was winning competitions and was already spoken of as an Olympic possible. She was also making friends.
‘I’ve been invited to fifteen Thanksgiving parties and I’m going to all of them,’ she had announced, in her last letter home.
On the other hand, she missed Rupert dreadfully. She had always been his favourite child, the one who rode as fearlessly as he did, and, like Rupert, she had hitherto dismissed her brother Marcus as a wimp.
Knowing it would unhinge her, Rannaldini played his second trump card, faxing out all the cuttings of Marcus being outed before winning the Appleton piano competition and being reunited with an overjoyed Rupert. Rupert had totally accepted that Marcus was gay and in love with the great Russian dancer, Alexei Nemerovsky. He had even flippantly told a group of reporters at Heathrow that he was looking forward to meeting Nemerovsky, and felt he was ‘gaining a daughter rather than losing a son’.
Silly, silly Rupert, thought Rannaldini, as he filled his jade pen with emerald-green ink to scribble a covering letter.
‘Dearest Tabitha, I know you will want to share your mother’s joy that your brother is both a national hero and reconciled with your father.’
Smirking, Rannaldini handed it to his new PA, Miss Bussage, who looked like being his third trump card. After only a month she had transformed his life, keeping track of children, wives, finances and his gruelling schedule. Nor did she have any compunction about feeding pleading love notes, demands from charities and bad reviews (after the author’s name had been put on the hit list) straight into the shredder.
Rannaldini dreamed of Miss Bussage giving him a bed review:
‘You were very boring in the sack last night, Maestro, please do better this evening.’
In her forties, Miss Bussage had the look of a well-regulated musk ox, with small suspicious eyes and dark, heavy hair that flicked up, sixties-style, like two horns. Her thick bo
dy was redeemed by a splendid bosom and rather good legs. Like musk oxen, she was also able to survive the arctic climate of Rannaldini’s rages, and gave off a strong, musky scent in the rutting season.
Friendly one day, downright rude the next, which Rannaldini, used to sycophancy, thought wonderful, she had now picked up his private telephone, which none of his other staff would touch at pain of thumbscrew.
‘Marcel Dupont for you.’
Dupont was Étienne de Montigny’s lawyer. He had grown rich over the years but had had his work cut out, extricating the great man from scrapes and marriages, and preserving his vast fortune.
‘What news?’ asked Rannaldini, seizing the receiver.
‘The worst.’ Dupont’s voice trembled. ‘Étienne died an hour ago.’
Glancing up as Apollo’s clock struck one, Rannaldini crossed himself. Death must have been at noon when the fire died in the grate and Don Juan in Étienne’s painting cried out in anguish. ‘I am so sorry,’ Rannaldini’s voice dropped an octave. ‘I trust the end was peaceful?’
‘Did Étienne ever do anything peacefully?’ asked Dupont. ‘Like Hercules, he battled to the end. He wanted to see another sunset. I know how busy you are, Maestro, but . . .’
‘I will certainly be at the funeral.’
Then Dupont confessed it had been Étienne’s dying wish that Rannaldini should join Tristan’s three older brothers carrying the coffin.
‘But surely Tristan . . .’ began Rannaldini.
Dupont sighed. ‘Even in death. I can trust your discretion.’
‘Of course,’ lied Rannaldini.
French law insists that three-quarters of any estate is divided between the children of the blood, with whole shares going to legitimate children and half shares to any born out of wedlock. Tristan, therefore, would automatically inherit several million. But the law also stipulates that the fourth quarter of a man’s estate can be divided as he chooses.
‘Étienne itemized everything for children, mistresses, friends, wives and servants,’ said Dupont bleakly, ‘but he left nothing personal to Tristan, not even a pencil drawing or a paintbrush. Why did he hate the poor boy so much?’
‘Poor boy indeed.’ Rannaldini was shocked. ‘I will ring him.’
‘Please do – he’s devastated, and the end was dreadful. I hope this story doesn’t leak out. Anyway, while you’re on, Rannaldini, Étienne left you two of his greatest paintings, Abelard and Héloïse and The Nymphomaniac. Both are on exhibition in New York.’
Together they were worth several million. Not such a bad day, after all, thought Rannaldini.
Having witnessed Étienne’s extremely harrowing death, Tristan had immediately fled back to his own flat in La Rue de Varenne, trying to blot out the horror and despair with work. He had been on the brink of making the one film his father might have rated, because it was with Rannaldini. Now it was too late.
Scrumpled-up paper lay all over the floor. His laptop was about to be swept off the extreme left-hand corner of his desk by a hurtling lava of videos, scores, a red leatherbound copy of Schiller’s Don Carlos, books on sixteenth-century France and Spain, sketches of scenes, Gauloise packets and half-drunk cups of black coffee. Photographs of the Don Carlos cast were pinned to a cork board on the rust walls. Over the fireplace hung one of Étienne’s drawings of two girls embracing, which Tristan had bought out of pride so that people wouldn’t realize his father had never given him anything.
He was now toying with a chess set and the idea of portraying his cast, Philip the king, Posa the knight, Carlos the poor doomed pawn, as chess pieces, but he kept hearing the nurse’s cosy, over-familiar voice.
‘Just going to put this nasty thing down your throat again, Étienne,’ as she hoovered up the fountains of blood bubbling up from his father’s damaged heart.
And Tristan had wanted to yell: ‘For Christ’s sake, call him Monsieur de Montigny.’
He also kept hearing Étienne muttering the words ‘father’ and ‘grandfather’, as he clutched Tristan’s sleeve, and the roars of resistance, followed by tears of abdication trickling down the wrinkles.
At the end only the extremely short scarlet skirt worn by his granddaughter Simone had rallied the old man. Tristan hadn’t been able to look at his aunt Hortense. It was as if a gargoyle had started weeping. He prayed that Étienne hadn’t seen the satisfaction on the faces of his three eldest sons that there was no hope of recovery.
There was no way Tristan could concentrate on a chessboard. Switching on the television, he felt outrage that, instead of leading on Étienne’s death, they were showing the young English winner of the Appleton, Marcus Campbell-Black, arriving pale and fragile as a wood anemone at Moscow airport, and being embraced in the snow by a wolf-coated, wildly overexcited Nemerovsky, before being swept away in a limo.
Rupert, Marcus’s father, had then been interviewed, surrounded by a lot of dogs outside his house in Gloucestershire.
‘Campbell-Blacks don’t come second,’ he was saying jubilantly.
God, what a good-looking man, thought Tristan. If he had Rupert, Marcus and Nemerovsky playing Philip, Carlos and Posa, he’d break every box-office record.
He jumped as Handel’s death march from Saul boomed out and the presenter switched to Étienne’s death: France was in mourning for her favourite son; great artist, bon viveur, patron saint of vast extended family.
‘Montigny’s compassion for life showed in all his paintings,’ said the reporter.
But not in his heart, thought Tristan bitterly. Étienne had never been to one of his premières, or glanced at a video, or congratulated him on his César, France’s equivalent of the Oscars.
‘Of all Étienne de Montigny’s sons,’ went on the reporter, as they showed some of Étienne’s cleaner paintings followed by clips from The Betrothed, ‘Tristan, his youngest son, has been the most successful, following in his father’s footsteps but painting instead with light.’
That should piss off my brothers, thought Tristan savagely, as he turned off the television. Dupont had rung him earlier and, like a starved dog grateful for even a piece of bacon rind, Tristan had finally asked if Étienne had left him anything other than his due share.
‘Nothing, I’m afraid.’ Then, after a long pause, ‘Maybe it’s a back-handed compliment, because you’ve done so well.’
Dupont had meant it kindly. But Tristan had hung up, and for the first time since Étienne had fallen ill, he broke down and wept.
Half an hour later, he splashed his face with cold water and wondered what to do with the rest of his life. He was roused by the Sunday Times, commiserating with him, then more cautiously probing a rumour that he was the only member of the family who had been left nothing personal.
‘Fuck off,’ said Tristan hanging up.
Fortunately this pulled him together. The bastard, he thought. All my life Papa noticed me less than the cobwebs festooning his studio. Looking at his mother’s photograph, he wished as always that she were alive, then jumped as the telephone rang.
‘Papa?’ he gasped, in desperate hope.
But it was Alexandre, his eldest brother, the judge.
‘We’re all worried you might be feeling out of it, Tristan. You’re so good at lighting and theatrical effects and knowing appropriate poetry and music, we felt you should organize the funeral. We want you to be involved.’
His brothers, reflected Tristan, chose to involve him when they wanted their christenings and weddings videoed. He wished he had the bottle to tell Alexandre to fuck off too.
Instead he said, ‘I’ll ring you in the morning.’
Without bothering to put on a jacket, he was out of his flat, driving like a maniac to the Louvre to catch the last half-hour, so that he could once more marvel over the Goyas, Velazquezes and El Grecos. Every frame in his film would be more beautiful.
When he got home there was a message on the machine. Rannaldini’s voice was caressing, deep as the ocean, gentle, recognizable anywhere.
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‘My poor boy, what a terrible day you must have had. I’m so sorry. But here’s something to cheer you up. Lord O’Hara from Venturer Television rang, and he’s happy to meet us in London the day after tomorrow. I hope very much you can make it. And I think I have found a Posa.’
Hollywood in the mid-nineties was governed by marketing men who earned enough in a year to finance five medium-budget films, who believed they knew exactly what they could sell and only gave the green light to films tailor-made to these specifications. To perform this function for Don Carlos and handle the money side, Rannaldini had employed Sexton Kemp as his co-producer.
Sexton, who had started life selling sheepskin coats in Petticoat Lane, was now a medallion man in his early forties with cropped hair, red-rimmed tinted spectacles and a sardonic street-wise face.
Sexton’s film company, Liberty Productions, so called because he took such frightful liberties with original material, always had several projects on the go. As he was driven in the back of a magenta Roller to the meeting with Declan O’Hara, Sexton was busily improving Flaubert.
Musically illiterate, he found the sanctity of opera plots incredibly frustrating. Why couldn’t the French Princess Elisabetta become an American to appeal to the US market? At least he could constantly play up the sex and violence in Don Carlos:
‘All that assassination and burning of ’eretics, and rumpy-pumpy, because we’re using lots of the singing as voiceover, while we film all the characters’ fantasies about rogerin’ each other.’
For a year now Sexton had worked indefatigably to raise the necessary twenty million to make the film. He had also organized distributors in twenty-five countries. ‘Don Carlos is not exactly a comedy,’ he would tell potential backers, ‘but very dramatical. And wiv Rannaldini and Tristan de Montigny we can offer both gravitas and a first-class seat on the gravy train.’
As a result Rannaldini’s record company, American Bravo, and French television had both come in as major players. Conversely CBS had been unenthusiastic because Don Carlos is very anti-Catholic and they were nervous about alienating America’s vast Hispanic population. For the same reason, it had been a nightmare wheedling money out of the French and Spanish governments. Sexton had promised filming in the forest of Fontainebleau to bring tourists to France and the restoration of numerous crumbling historic buildings in Spain for use as locations. But each time he neared a deal, the government would change and there would be a new Minister of Culture to win over.