‘How d’you get a pompous ass like Alpheus to act devastated?’ muttered Meredith.
‘Show him a seven-figure tax bill,’ muttered back Granny.
‘Quiet!’ thundered Bernard.
In the heartbreakingly beautiful cello solo, which sets the mood of the aria, Alpheus wandered dazedly round the room, then plundered Elisabetta’s desk, which was rumoured once to have belonged to Louis XIV. As he riffled through her diary, scrutinized her itemized telephone and Amex bills, and finally rooted under the mattress of the big double bed for love letters, Rozzy Pringle gave a groan. How often had she done that at home, praying she wouldn’t stumble on more evidence of her feckless husband Glyn’s infidelities?
Alpheus then sang the first part of the aria so beautifully, and with such an air of nobility and resignation, that the crew gave him a rare round of applause.
Alpheus can act and his nose looks fine. Naughty Granny, thought Lucy indignantly.
If only it were me singing that aria, thought Granny.
Tristan was going to use the rest of the aria as voiceover when he filmed Philip forcing himself on a young, unresponsive bride.
Suddenly at the prospect of watching Alpheus and Hermione in the sack, the number of people on the set seemed to have quadrupled. Mr Brimscombe, Rannaldini’s gardener, who was always leering into the female extras’ changing room, was pretending to trim back the famous Paradise Pearl wisteria so that he could peer in through a high stained-glass window depicting St Cecilia at her organ.
The weather was still bitterly cold and the cost of heating the hall alone was putting Liberty Productions over budget. There was no way, however, that Hermione was going to risk turning blue in a shove-and-grunt scene.
Howie Denston hadn’t quite screwed up enough courage to tell Sexton and Tristan that she wouldn’t be filming in the mornings any more, but she made him ring in now to say that she had a cold. Everyone was less than amused when she promptly whizzed off to sing in an arena concert in New York, except Rannaldini who was already there and was taking a fat percentage of her hundred-thousand-pound fee. Far from chiding her, he sent the Gulf to collect her.
A demented Tristan was forced once more to reschedule. Granny, who’d been planning to go to Sense and Sensibility with Chloe, was livid to be dragged into filming the blind Inquisitor’s great dialogue with Philip and insisted on upstaging Alpheus by feeding Bonios to his guide dog, who was being played quite excellently by Sharon the Labrador.
Granny’s make-up, beetle-browed above black glasses, made him look so menacingly like Gordon Dillon that, after crossing themselves, the crew also gave Lucy a round of applause. Sexton, who’d rushed down from London to have a butcher’s at a naked Hermione, felt Granny’s makeover was so realistic that they’d better watch out for an injunction from the Scorpion.
The power struggle between Granny and Alpheus was so crucial to the plot that it took four days to film, by which time Sharon, egged on by Granny, had chewed up both of Alpheus’s blue velvet crested slippers.
Alpheus had not endeared himself to the crew. Regally bidding them all to drinks in the Pearly Gates, leading the stampede, he would grind to a halt just outside the pub to admire the mullioned windows and the variegated skyline of turrets.
‘You Brits are so lucky, your history is so old.’
By which time the first round would have been bought, and Alpheus, who had read somewhere that the Royal Family never carry money, would get away with not buying a drink all evening.
‘The least often heard words in the English language’, grumbled Ogborne, ‘are “Thank you, Alpheus.”’
‘The next least heard words are Alpheus saying, “It’s my round,”’ said Sylvestre.
Next day, Dame Hermione flew back from New York, but wanting to rest, and refusing to film in the morning, she made Howie ring in to say her throat was still playing up. Rather than waste a tropically heated hall, Tristan therefore shot a little shove-and-grunt scene between Alpheus and Chloe, which, having had plenty of practice, they did quite beautifully.
Once again in seconds, as Oscar ordered his team to rearrange their lights to cast a more diffused, romantic glow, the Great Hall was absolutely packed out. Sexton materialized from nowhere. Meredith was whisking around rearranging pieces of Sèvres on a table beside the bed on which Chloe was now lying on her back, the picture of abandonment. The fact that she had to wear an eye-patch to play the traditionally one-eyed Princess Eboli, somehow made her look even more sexy.
‘Don’t feedle with those ornaments, please, Meredith,’ begged Simone, consulting her Polaroids. ‘There were only two vases last time, not that anyone’s going to notice.’ She sighed.
The trouble with such a hot room was flat nipples. Lucy had to keep darting forward with ice-cubes.
‘Sometimes we use Blu-tack,’ she told Chloe.
‘Do you think my penis is too large?’ asked Alpheus seriously.
‘Not when Howie’s taken off his twenty per cent,’ replied Tristan.
Wolfie got the giggles.
‘Chloe’s chewed off all her lippy,’ bellowed an excited Griselda.
‘No-one’s going to notice that either,’ said Oscar, who for once had stayed awake. ‘God, look at the light on those pubes.’
‘She’s like a little Bonnard,’ sighed Simone.
‘I’ve certainly got a Bonnard-on,’ confessed Sexton, whose red-rimmed spectacles had quite steamed up.
‘Hush, or I’ll put ice down your trousers,’ chided a returning Lucy.
‘My mum wouldn’t let me do nudes,’ pouted Pushy Galore, who was dying to take her clothes off.
‘Quiet, please, everyone,’ brayed Bernard, whose face had gone an even darker shade of magenta.
‘God, this is sensational, Oscar. Dramatize the neck un peu, chérie,’ murmured Tristan, as Philip’s aria poured out of the speakers.
As Chloe raised her head, thrusting out her breasts so that the light caught her rouged, now upright nipples, an approaching Alpheus whipped off his pink and purple dressing-gown.
‘Action,’ shouted Tristan.
25
Claiming that his bronchitis had turned into pneumonia, Mikhail finally arrived and was overwhelmed by the beauty of Valhalla. A touch of rain had sent the green flames of the wild garlic sweeping over the woodland floor like a forest fire. Even Rannaldini’s lowering maze of dark yew had a blond rinse of lemon-yellow flowers.
‘You pay me for vorking in such vonderful place?’ Mikhail asked in amazement.
No-one, however, could quite work out whether he really had been ill or just moonlighting. He had turned up wearing a black Pavarotti smock, with large pockets for amassing loot. Maria, in the canteen, soon found her cutlery disappearing.
Then Mikhail started complaining that he missed Baby. Alpheus was no fun and far too expensive to drink with, and he missed his wife, Lara, even more, and kept hinting that Liberty Productions might pay for a plane ticket so she, too, could admire the ‘vonders’ of Valhalla. From New York, Rannaldini put his foot down. There was no way he was having Lara and Mikhail stripping Valhalla of his lovely new pickings.
Less welcome an arrival was Granny’s hunky black-haired boyfriend, Giuseppe, who wasn’t needed to play the ghost of Charles V for several weeks but who’d rocked up to ogle Tristan’s boys and enjoy free booze on the budget.
‘His mausoleum’s going to smell worse than the Pearly Gates,’ grumbled Ogborne.
Meanwhile, the digging up of the skeletons seemed to have disrupted the household ghosts. The night after Mikhail and Giuseppe arrived, the occupants of the north wing were woken by bloodcurdling shrieks. When a terrified Lucy, a for once quite pale-in-the-face Bernard and an unfazed Ogborne, who was eating a banana, emerged from their cell-like rooms, they found hunky Giuseppe in hysterics. Having slipped Granny a Mogadon, he was just returning from an unspecified location, when he’d seen his own part, the ghost of Charles V, stealing out of a bedroom and creeping away down the corridor.