Jilly Cooper - Score!

‘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 body 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.’