Jilly Cooper - Score!

That should piss off my brothers, thought Tristan savagely, as he turned off the television. Dupont had rung him earlier and, like a starved dog grateful for even a piece of bacon rind, Tristan had finally asked if Étienne had left him anything other than his due share.

‘Nothing, I’m afraid.’ Then, after a long pause, ‘Maybe it’s a back-handed compliment, because you’ve done so well.’

Dupont had meant it kindly. But Tristan had hung up, and for the first time since Étienne had fallen ill, he broke down and wept.

Half an hour later, he splashed his face with cold water and wondered what to do with the rest of his life. He was roused by the Sunday Times , commiserating with him, then more cautiously probing a rumour that he was the only member of the family who had been left nothing personal.

‘Fuck off,’ said Tristan hanging up.

Fortunately this pulled him together. The bastard, he thought. All my life Papa noticed me less than the cobwebs festooning his studio. Looking at his mother’s photograph, he wished as always that she were alive, then jumped as the telephone rang.

‘Papa?’ he gasped, in desperate hope.

But it was Alexandre, his eldest brother, the judge.

‘We’re all worried you might be feeling out of it, Tristan. You’re so good at lighting and theatrical effects and knowing appropriate poetry and music, we felt you should organize the funeral. We want you to be involved.’

His brothers, reflected Tristan, chose to involve him when they wanted their christenings and weddings videoed. He wished he had the bottle to tell Alexandre to fuck off too.

Instead he said, ‘I’ll ring you in the morning.’

Without bothering to put on a jacket, he was out of his flat, driving like a maniac to the Louvre to catch the last half-hour, so that he could once more marvel over the Goyas, Velazquezes and El Grecos. Every frame in his film would be more beautiful.

When he got home there was a message on the machine. Rannaldini’s voice was caressing, deep as the ocean, gentle, recognizable anywhere.

‘My poor boy, what a terrible day you must have had. I’m so sorry. But here’s something to cheer you up. Lord O’Hara from Venturer Television rang, and he’s happy to meet us in London the day after tomorrow. I hope very much you can make it. And I think I have found a Posa.’

Hollywood in the mid-nineties was governed by marketing men who earned enough in a year to finance five medium-budget films, who believed they knew exactly what they could sell and only gave the green light to films tailor-made to these specifications. To perform this function for Don Carlos and handle the money side, Rannaldini had employed Sexton Kemp as his co-producer.

Sexton, who had started life selling sheepskin coats in Petticoat Lane, was now a medallion man in his early forties with cropped hair, red-rimmed tinted spectacles and a sardonic street-wise face.

Sexton’s film company, Liberty Productions, so called because he took such frightful liberties with original material, always had several projects on the go. As he was driven in the back of a magenta Roller to the meeting with Declan O’Hara, Sexton was busily improving Flaubert.

Musically illiterate, he found the sanctity of opera plots incredibly frustrating. Why couldn’t the French Princess Elisabetta become an American to appeal to the US market? At least he could constantly play up the sex and violence in Don Carlos :

‘All that assassination and burning of ’eretics, and rumpy-pumpy, because we’re using lots of the singing as voiceover, while we film all the characters’ fantasies about rogerin’ each other.’

For a year now Sexton had worked indefatigably to raise the necessary twenty million to make the film. He had also organized distributors in twenty-five countries. ‘ Don Carlos is not exactly a comedy,’ he would tell potential backers, ‘but very dramatical. And wiv Rannaldini and Tristan de Montigny we can offer both gravitas and a first-class seat on the gravy train.’

As a result Rannaldini’s record company, American Bravo, and French television had both come in as major players. Conversely CBS had been unenthusiastic because Don Carlos is very anti-Catholic and they were nervous about alienating America’s vast Hispanic population. For the same reason, it had been a nightmare wheedling money out of the French and Spanish governments. Sexton had promised filming in the forest of Fontainebleau to bring tourists to France and the restoration of numerous crumbling historic buildings in Spain for use as locations. But each time he neared a deal, the government would change and there would be a new Minister of Culture to win over.

Even the last Spanish minister, a Señora Mendoza, who had a black moustache, hadn’t fazed Sexton.

‘One bottle of bubbly and a tube of Immac and we was away.’

Unfortunately, shortly after this, Señora Mendoza had fallen from office and for Sexton, and was never off the telephone angling for another seeing-to. Contrary to Señora Mendoza’s forward behaviour, there was also a real problem of filming nudes and sex scenes in Catholic countries.

A substantial sum had been promised by a group of Saudi gun-runners, who wanted to raise their profile by having their names on the credits. (Unknown to the Saudis, Sexton was busy dealing with the Iranians.)

His greatest coup, however, was to enlist the support of the recently ennobled Declan O’Hara who was managing director of Venturer Television and a complete Don Carlos freak. Unknown to his tone-deaf partner and son-in-law, Rupert Campbell-Black, Declan had pledged ten million towards the film’s costs.

London had an untidy look on that chill mid-October morning. Grey and brown plane leaves littered the pavements and clogged the gutters. Brake-lights were reflected like flamingos’ legs in the wet road ahead as the traffic slowed in Park Lane.

Excited at the prospect of meeting a real lord, Sexton was glad he, Tristan and Rannaldini were going to work out a plan of action before Declan arrived. Rannaldini could rub people up the wrong way.

Sitting in Rannaldini’s exquisite flat overlooking Hyde Park, Tristan felt warmth creep back into his veins. He had just lunched on the fluffiest Parma ham omelette, sorrel salad, quince sorbet, black grapes, gently dissolving Camembert, excellent claret and very black coffee. It was the first food he had eaten in three days.

After the meeting, Rannaldini, Sexton and he were off to Prague to see the possible Posa: a Russian with lungs of steel called Mikhail Pezcherov.

Tristan was already mad about Sexton, who was now hoovering up black grapes with a big hand, gut spilling over his waistband, his face absolutely still, only his eyes swivelling in thought as he tried to persuade Rannaldini of the benefits of accepting laundered Russian money from the Iranians.

‘Don’t worry your pretty swollen head over that one, Ranners. The Saudis need never know.’

In preparation for meeting Declan, Tristan had whiled away last night’s insomnia speed-reading Declan’s massive biography of Yeats, which had just received ecstatic reviews. Declan had also once interviewed Étienne on one of his vastly watched, prestigious programmes. The two had clashed. Declan had accused Tristan’s father of meretriciousness and pornography.

‘That you’re a genius makes the whole thing more reprehensible.’

Étienne had stalked off the set. Tristan was ashamed how drawn he was to people who had seen through his father.

As Sexton and Rannaldini were still arguing about money, Tristan was glad there was so much to look at in Rannaldini’s sitting room. On the vermilion walls hung numerous portraits of Rannaldini. On every surface were silver-framed photographs of Rannaldini and the famous, dominated by one of him getting his knighthood, and another of him smiling at a very blonde girl. What a beauty. Tristan made a mental note to ask Rannaldini to introduce him: what wonderful things the camera could do with her face.