He did wake screaming, however, as Rannaldini pulled up outside the house and Étienne, still in his painter’s smock, loomed huger and blacker than the Grand Inquisitor in the doorway. Although his father cheered up when he saw Hermione, he curtly dispatched Tristan to bed.
‘And no ducking out of school tomorrow.’
‘Good night, little one,’ called Rannaldini, then, to irritate Étienne, ‘I’ll be up in a few minutes.’
In fact it was an hour, and Tristan again woke screaming from lobster-induced nightmare as another broad-shouldered black figure loomed over him.
‘It all ’appen four hundred years ago,’ said Rannaldini as he tucked the boy in. ‘You mustn’t ’ave bad dreams.’
Looking round the bleak attic room, seeing the video camera, the red leatherbound copy of Schiller’s Don Carlos and Hermione’s carnation in a tooth-mug on the bedside table, he picked up the silver frame, containing the only photograph of Tristan’s mother, Delphine, in the house.
‘So beautiful, a little like Madame Lauzerte, don’t you think?’
‘Will she sit for Papa?’ asked Tristan hopefully.
‘I doubt it. She is very pure lady — her nickname is Madame Vierge.’
‘Did they really burn people alive in those days?’
‘They do today with electric chairs and bombs. That’s how your brother, Laurent, died,’ said Rannaldini.
But the terror in Tristan’s eyes was in case his father walked in and heard the forbidden name. Such had been Étienne’s heartbreak, no allusion to Laurent was allowed in the house.
‘Why didn’t King Philip like Carlos?’ Tristan asked wistfully.
‘Fathers and sons.’ Rannaldini brushed back the boy’s hair. ‘Philip was jealous, Carlos had whole life ahead of him — to pull the girls.’
‘Can I work for you when I grow up?’ murmured Tristan.
‘One day we will make great film of Don Carlos together,’ promised Rannaldini.
1
Eighteen spectacularly successful years later, on a wet, windy, late-October morning, Sir Roberto Rannaldini gazed down on the valley of Paradise, often described as the jewel of the Cotswolds.
Rannaldini owned many splendid houses, but the brooding, secretive Paradise Abbey, which he had somewhat hubristically renamed Valhalla after the home of the gods in Teutonic mythology, was the one he loved most.
From his study on the first floor he could admire, albeit through mist and rain, his tennis courts, swimming-pool, hangar for jet and helicopter, lovingly-tended gardens and racehorses, grazing in fields sweeping down to his lake and the river Fleet, which ran along the bottom of the valley.
To his left, coiled up like a sleeping snake, was the famous Valhalla Maze. To the right, deep in the woods, lurked the watchtower, where he edited, composed and seduced. Beyond, disappearing into the mist, was the ravishing mill house, belonging to Hermione Harefield, his mistress for the last eighteen years.
But even as Rannaldini gloated over his valley, the dying fires of autumn seemed to symbolize his own decline. For the first time ever, his massive royalty cheque was down. Last Sunday, when he was conducting at the Appleton piano competition, his favoured candidate and latest conquest, the ravishing Natalia Philipovna, had been beaten into second place, despite intense lobbying, by Rannaldini’s detested stepson, Marcus Campbell-Black.
The same evening, Rannaldini learnt he had failed in his bid to take over the Rutminster Symphony Orchestra, who had accompanied the finalists. As an ultimate humiliation at the party afterwards, the first horn had hit Rannaldini across the room — his fall had been broken only by the pudding trolley and the flaccid curves of a grisly crone from the Arts Council. The newspapers had had a field day. Rannaldini shuddered.
Like Philip II of Spain, who had exhausted himself and his nation’s coffers trying to hold his Habsburg Empire together, Rannaldini was also learning by bitter experience that his vast kingdom could be maintained only by the crippling expense of waging war on all fronts. He was currently engaged in law-suits with orchestras, unions, sacked musicians, mistresses and ex-wives.
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.