Jilly Cooper - Score!

‘Franco and I never met when we did Tristan and Isolde ,’ protested Hermione, on a very crackly call from a Florida beach. ‘I just put on cans and recorded the entire opera from the orchestral track.’

‘That’s why it was so lifeless and boring,’ yelled a furious Tristan, but Hermione had hung up.

Tristan also spent a lot of time on the telephone shouting at Rannaldini.

‘How the fuck can I direct individual rehearsals when there aren’t any individuals to direct?’

‘I am shocked at them all,’ lied Rannaldini, and to placate Tristan, he invited him down to Valhalla the following Saturday. ‘Then we iron out every problem. I also invite that Australian tenor, Baby Spinosissimo,’ Rannaldini added airily. ‘He’s coming down to see his jockey, Isa Lovell, who by an extraordinary coincidence happens to be my jockey. Why don’t you drive down together?’

Rannaldini rubbed his hands in glee. What frisson it would add if Tristan, and particularly Baby, were present at the wedding! Thank goodness, Clive, his bodyguard, had discovered that on the big day Rupert would be out of the country with his son Xavier.

Poor Xav had not only had to endure Cosmo’s horrible bullying. Rupert had also found his little son sobbing his heart out because he’d been scrubbing his face for hours trying to get it as white as Rupert’s. Rupert had struggled not to weep too. Instead he decided to give Xavier some sense of identity by taking him back to Colombia. Here, Xav could meet the nuns in the Bogotá convent in which he’d spent his first two years, and see something of the ravishing surrounding countryside. Taggie, Rupert’s wife, and Bianca, Xav’s younger sister, would have gone as well if Bianca hadn’t caught measles.

At midnight on the eve of the wedding, therefore, an unsuspecting Taggie was at Penscombe, filling up the deep freeze for Christmas. Bianca, whose temperature was down, was fast asleep upstairs. The six dogs, except for Gertrude the mongrel who always kept an eye open for scraps, slept in their baskets. Two huge moussakas for the staff party were complete, except for the cheese topping which was bubbling on the Aga.

Having laid the big scrubbed table for the grooms’ and jockeys’ breakfast tomorrow, Taggie had left space at the end to wrestle with her Christmas cards. Very dyslexic, she found proper names a nightmare. She was dickering over whether to send a card to Rupert’s ex-wife, Helen, to heal the breach, and make it easier for Rupert to see Tabitha again, but she wasn’t sure how to spell ‘Rannaldini’. Hearing the strange strangulated croak of a fox’s bark she glanced out of the window. A car was lighting up the trees as it sped along the opposite side of Rupert’s valley when the telephone rang.

Oh, bliss, it must be Rupert. He hated her working late. She must remember to sound sleepy.

‘Is that Taggie?’ asked a slurred voice, so like Rupert’s. ‘Look, I’m getting married to Isa Lovell at five o’clock tomorrow — no, today. Will you come? I’d like some family there, apart from Mummy.’

‘Oh, no, Tab, you can’t.’ Taggie collapsed in horror on the window-seat.

Tab burst into tears. It was several moments before Taggie could elicit the fact that her stepdaughter was having Isa’s baby and Rannaldini, being angelic, had masterminded the wedding and that Tab was madly in love with Isa.

‘But he’s so busy race-riding five days a week and helping Jake’ — at the dreaded name, Taggie jumped as though she’d been stung — ‘with his yard that I don’t see much of him. He doesn’t need me as much as I need him.’

As Tabitha was obviously getting cold feet, Taggie beseeched her to postpone the wedding.

‘You don’t have to marry him, darling. Have the baby here. We’ll all help you look after it.’

‘Daddy wouldn’t allow that,’ sobbed Tab.

‘Of course he would. It’ll kill him, Tab. Anyone else but Isa! You know how he feels about the Lovells — and not having the wedding at Penscombe will break his heart. He was just about to ring you and make it up.’

‘Put him on, then,’ demanded Tab.

‘He’s in Bogotá with Xav.’

Immediately, Taggie knew she’d said the wrong thing, as Tab, who was as jealous of Xavier and Bianca as she was of Marcus, slammed down the telephone.

A disgusting smell of burnt cheese sauce brought Taggie back to earth, as Gertrude the mongrel wandered over stiffly and laid her head on her mistress’s knee. ‘Oh, Gertrude, what am I going to do?’ sobbed Taggie.

‘Is your name really Spinosissimo?’ asked Tristan, as he edged his navy blue Aston on to the M4.

‘Course not,’ said Baby. ‘I got it out of a rose catalogue. My real name’s Brian Smith. But you can’t have Smith alongside the Pavarottis and Domingos on a record sleeve.’

Outrageous, incredibly glamorous, Baby Spinosissimo had burnt-sienna curls, thickly lashed debauched grey eyes, a beaky little nose and a pouting, but wickedly determined, mouth. Slightly plump already, he finished a whole box of Quality Street on the way down, chucking his sweet papers out of the window. He also spent a lot of time on Tristan’s telephone talking to his bookmaker.

Responding to Tristan’s ability to listen, Baby was soon telling him about his sex life. Women ran after him in droves, but the only person he was remotely interested in was his trainer and jockey Isa Lovell.

‘He’s got such a capacity for menace. I can’t sleep at night for imagining him gripping me as he grips those horses.’

Baby also confessed that buying horses for Isa to train had screwed him up with the taxman.

‘Jan one, and the debtor’s prison looms.’

In return Tristan told Baby about his problems with Don Carlos .

‘Fat Franco won’t rehearse.’

‘He’s got half Colombia up his nose, for a start,’ said Baby dismissively. ‘And he hates the part of Carlos. Thinks it’s very difficult and not important or sympathetic enough. Domingo feels the same. He dismisses Carlos as a wimp with one solo.’

‘What d’you think?’ asked Tristan.

‘If the part was decently acted by someone hugely attractive…’ Baby smoothed his curls. ‘What else are you up to?’

The Lily in the Valley was nearing its final cut, said Tristan. Tomorrow he was nipping over to Paris to re-do some dialogue with Claudine Lauzerte.

‘Are you pleased with it?’

‘Yes,’ admitted Tristan, ‘but one has no idea what will happen when it faces an audience.’

‘Claudine Lauzerte,’ Baby rolled his eyes, ‘is a terrific gay icon in Oz.’

They were in deep country now. The sun hadn’t appeared for days, probably singing Otello in Milan. But despite bare trees and lowering skies, the winter wheat spilling like a jade sea over the rich red ploughed fields gave a feeling of spring.

Driving through the russet cathedral town of Rutminster approaching some traffic lights, they drew level with a black Mercedes driven by a young girl. She was wearing a Stop Puppy Farming T-shirt but her pale blonde hair was fantastically garlanded with pink and white flowers like a Botticelli angel. A Labrador puppy as yellow as her hair lay across her thighs. Her seat-belt was undone and she was unashamedly taking slugs out of a vodka bottle. Tristan, who knew he’d seen her before, nearly ran into the car in front.

‘Ke-rist on a Harley-Davidson!’ gasped Baby.

‘Oh, Don Fatale,’ muttered Tristan, because the girl had one of those faces that makes everyone else’s look commonplace.

‘Where are you going to, Mademoiselle?’ shouted Baby, lowering his window.

‘It’ll be Madame in an hour or two,’ shouted back Tabitha, lifting the vodka bottle to her lips and driving on.