Jilly Cooper - Score!

Next morning Lucy was terrified to discover slug pellets in James’s water bowl. Perhaps someone had just missed the window-box or perhaps, she thought wryly, people were jealous because Tristan spent so much time in Make Up — but it was only because he was desperate to talk about Tab.

She had further evidence that afternoon, when Hermione, who she was making up for her great renunciation scene with Carlos, announced she’d heard a horrid rumour that Tristan was queer.

‘Of course he’s not,’ exploded Lucy.

‘Well, that’s what they’re implying. Silly, really,’ Hermione gave her horrible little laugh, ‘that with so many pretty women to choose from, Tristan’s spending his evenings with… and also that make-up girls usually stick to their own kind and drink with the sparks and the chippies.’

Then, seeing Lucy’s face, she added, ‘But I stuck up for you, Lucy. I said you had quite a warm personality and, anyway, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Oh, Belgian chocolates!’

Lucy was about to snap that they were a thank-you present from Tristan for cutting his hair when Hermione opened the box and found one white truffle left.

‘My favourite,’ she cried. ‘Although I’ve already got a handsome hubby, and a thousand a year wouldn’t go far these days.’

She was just about to eat it, when Lucy snatched away the box. ‘James loves white truffles,’ she insisted, and opening the amazed dog’s jaws, shoved it into his mouth.

Hermione was furious.

‘When you think of Flora and that wretched terrier, and Tab drooling over that Labrador,’ she said beadily, ‘it is extra ordinary how women who cannot get it together with a man become dependent on a companion animal.’

James spat out the white truffle.

‘Bloody chippies,’ exploded Lucy.

Meredith’s carpenters, building a cathedral for the auto da fe and banging away all morning, had given her a blinding headache.

She was so cross she gave Hermione a parsnip yellow complexion, ageing grey shading, hideous violet eye shadow and a wonky lip-line. Hermione was so busy reading about her health in the Daily Mail that she didn’t notice.

Tristan did, however, and remonstrated sharply with Lucy.

‘Well, if she was about to give Carlos the push and she loved him to bits, she would look grotty,’ shouted back Lucy.

‘ Ma petite .’ Tristan looked at her in amazement. ‘This is first time I see you angry. You are so sweet,’ and he ruffled her hair.

‘Patronizing bastard,’ muttered Lucy.

She was so fed up that she knocked back nearly a bottle of white at lunchtime, and stuck Colin Milton’s bald wig on back to front. Colin was so taken by the sight of himself with a youthful fringe of grey curls nestling on his eyebrows that he would happily have let it stay. Tristan, however, went ballistic, and yelled at Lucy to stop taking the piss.

The auto da fe , which means Act of Faith, is one of the most terrifying scenes in all opera. Heretics in dunces’ caps are paraded through the streets by their executioners and followed by sinister black-cowled monks who, with the courtiers and ladies-in-waiting, take up their seats round the funeral pyre.

A newly crowned Philip comes out of the cathedral and repeats his coronation oath to defend the faith. The scene ends with his dreadful words, ‘And now on with the festivities!’ The masses are then entertained not by fireworks but by the heretics being burnt at the stake.

Lasting twenty minutes in the opera, even Tristan’s pared-down version took eight gruelling days to shoot. The harrowing nature of the subject exacerbated Rannaldini’s sadism. Meredith and his chippies had only just completed their ravishing cathedral façade, looking on to the east courtyard, when Rannaldini swept in on the first day of shooting and pronounced it utterly suburban: ‘Just like a Weybridge hacienda . Are we going to have chiming doorbells, celebrating the burning of the heretics?’

Meredith promptly burst into tears. It took all Tristan’s tact to stop him resigning. Lucy had visions of being asked to streak Meredith’s hair for yet another dinner at the Heavenly Host. Fortunately Sexton rocked up and told Meredith he thought the cathedral was just beautiful.

‘And he ought to know,’ whispered Hermione reverently. ‘Sexton did go to Eton.’

Hermione was also delighted that, after weeks of work, Griselda and Rozzy had finally sewn the last seed pearl on her ivory satin dress. Her first appearance wearing it that afternoon caused gasps of wonder and genuine applause from the crew.

A second later Rannaldini had erupted on to the set, and everyone glanced at the sky in excitement. Then, to their horror, they realized that what they had imagined as the patter of rain was the scattering of thousands of pearls, as Rannaldini ripped off the dress, and stamped it into the dust with his suede boots. Hermione, in her petticoat, screamed and screamed. Oscar crossed himself. It was like seeing a Velazquez slashed in the Prado. Tristan grabbed Rannaldini in white-hot fury.

‘What the fuck are you doing? That was the most beautiful dress I ever see.’

‘Elisabetta must wear scarlet,’ yelled back Rannaldini.

‘At her husband’s coronation?’

‘To symbolize in Philip’s crazy mind she has been unfaithful.’

‘All those pearls, all those pearls,’ whispered Rozzy, who’d done nearly all the work.

A devastated, hysterically sobbing Griselda had to be carried off the set by a buckling Lucy and Simone. Everyone was outraged. They loved Griselda: indefatigable, gossipy old trout. They knew she was good. The crew would have walked out if Rannaldini hadn’t built massive penalty clauses into all their contracts. Instead they went slow, with Oscar waking up to relight every ten minutes.

All the crew were putting in impossibly long hours, but no-one more so than Wolfie. Once again, his greatest headache was stopping Pushy Galore appearing in everything. Having waved a flag as a member of the hoi-polloi and simpered as a lady-in-waiting, Pushy was determined to star as a heretic, and was utterly incensed when Tristan chucked her out.

‘You wait till Ay tell Sir Roberto.’

Fortunately Rannaldini had flown off to Vienna and was not expected back until the evening. Pushy was even crosser when Tristan chose Tab instead. She would look so touching, a dunce’s cap on her blonde head, her deadpan face smudged. Tab was terribly excited; Wolfie less so. Supervising the filling of petrol cans with water, he couldn’t bear the thought of her beautiful body being torched.

The drought was so terrible, it was as if Meredith had carpeted the surrounding fields brown. Wild flowers that had survived were a quarter of their usual height. Wolfie disappeared in a cloud of dust as he drove his Land Rover round the park. All the cast complained non-stop about not being able to breathe. Wolfie could have burnt the lot of them on the bonfire.

It was the last set-up before lunch as, surrounded by leather-clad paparazzi, with Tristan’s four black cypresses in the background overseeing things, Granny as Gordon Dillon took up his position on the battlements of the cathedral. While the heretics were tied to the stakes below, shredded piles of the Scorpion were thrown under their bare feet.

‘As people in the sixteenth century flocked to see heretics burn, today we devour the papers and gloat over reputations being destroyed,’ explained Tristan. ‘Think of the poor Duchess of York.’

‘Think of Chloe in a week or two,’ murmured Flora to Baby.

Out in the park, through the heat haze, they could see Chloe, ravishing in palest pink, having her photograph taken for the Scorpion . Hotfoot from a very promising Samson and Delilah audition, she had returned to Valhalla for an in-depth interview with Beattie Johnson, the Scorpion ’s most dreaded columnist. Beattie had written to Chloe direct, claiming she was a long-term fan of Chloe and the opera.