Jilly Cooper - Score!

‘Shows how stupid they are,’ snarled Rupert. ‘America was hardly built, like my house,’ he glared at Rannaldini, ‘in the middle of the sixteenth century, and Hermione would have even more difficulty in passing herself off as a Red Indian than as an eighteen-year-old virgin.’

The meeting ended in uproar.

‘Who’s getting married?’ asked Tristan.

‘Lovely girl — conductor actually — called Abigail Rosen, marrying a lucky sod called Viking O’Neill,’ said Rupert, breaking off one of Rannaldini’s crimson orchids and putting it in his buttonhole.

‘Rannaldini knows Viking,’ he added nastily. ‘He’s the horn player who hit him across a hotel dining room a few nights ago. Easy as a shot-putter — or shit-putter, in Rannaldini’s case.’

But the gods were on Rannaldini’s side. As the front door banged behind Rupert, Helen Rannaldini rushed into the sitting room.

What a beautiful woman, thought Tristan, admiring the tragic, ravaged face, as he leapt to his feet. But Helen was too distraught to notice him.

‘Oh, Rannaldini, Tabitha’s on the phone. She’s been fired! I hoped I’d catch Rupert.’

‘He’s gone, let me talk to her.’ Rannaldini whisked out of the room. ‘Perhaps you could organize some drinks, my dear.’

He was sweating with excitement as he picked up the telephone. As he had predicted, his stepdaughter had flipped when his faxes had arrived. Tabitha had always been Rupert’s favourite child and suddenly Marcus, her brother, had stolen his affection. She was shocked rigid to discover Marcus was gay, and crazy with jealousy that Rupert seemed to approve of Marcus’s new love.

‘Daddy was always so foul about my boyfriends, and now he’s crawling all over some poofter. And there’s even a photograph of Marcus and Nemerovsky hugging on the front of the Washington Post — yuk!’

Having read the faxes, Tabitha had ridden in a cross-country competition, hurtling over the fences as though death were the favourable alternative, before sliding off her horse, The Engineer, fifty yards past the post. The course doctor had diagnosed her as dead drunk.

Yesterday morning she had been suspended for nine months, mostly because of her appalling language and lack of contrition. Afterwards, she had gone out and got even drunker, she had only just woken and screwed up courage to ring England. How fortunate that Rupert and she had missed each other.

Rannaldini was smiling broadly. ‘My naughty child! Come home so I can spank your bottom,’ he quivered in delighted expectation. ‘You have been away far too long. I’ll send the Gulf.’

‘I’ll make my own way. I want to travel with The Engineer. Could you possibly lend me a couple of grand?’

Euphoric at the thought of Tabitha returning, Rannaldini swept into the drawing room and promptly invited her mother to join the trip to Prague. After all, Prague had been where he had first bedded Helen on the stage of an opera-house where, earlier in the evening, he had conducted Don Giovanni , and he didn’t want her to give him a lousy press as a husband if Tabitha was coming home.

‘I can’t go,’ wailed Helen. ‘I’ve got to host a dinner for Save the Children.’

‘Bussage will cancel it, and tomorrow I will send Save the Children a large enough donation to quell any disquiet,’ said Rannaldini expansively.

‘I would love to go,’ Helen told Tristan wistfully. ‘Prague was the place—’

‘Where you and I spent our first wonderful romantic weekend, exactly one year, eleven months and three days ago,’ said Rannaldini, kissing her.

‘You remembered the exact date.’ Helen’s eyes filled with tears.

‘Of course,’ said Rannaldini smugly. It had not been difficult, it had also been his forty-fourth birthday.

‘But I haven’t packed.’

Rannaldini looked at his watch.

‘You have half an hour. Serena won’t be here until five.’

Serena Westwood was a young, ambitious record producer, who had just been poached by Rannaldini’s record company, American Bravo. Her first assignment was to produce the recording of Don Carlos .

Helen nearly refused to go to Prague when she saw Serena, who looked like a brunette Grace Kelly. Her heavy hair, drawn back into a French pleat from a snow-white forehead, was shinier than her patent leather ankle boots, and she was wearing nothing under her austerely cut pinstripe suit.

Rannaldini had clearly been saving Serena’s child as well as sending a vast cheque to Save the Children because Serena immediately kissed him, thanking him in a cool, clear voice for flying up two of Helen’s young maids, Betty and Sally, for the night to look after her four-year-old daughter, Jessie.

‘Bussage masterminded the whole thing,’ said Rannaldini smoothly, ‘and it is good for Sally and Betty to have an outing.’

‘Jessie fell so in love with them she hardly noticed me leaving,’ said Serena, turning to an outraged Helen. ‘Oh, Lady Rannaldini, I know it’s a liberty hijacking your maids, but I’ve been stuck in Rome with Dame Hermione and rushed home to find my nanny had walked out, so Sir Roberto very kindly came to my aid. But it’s you I’ve got to thank.’

‘We cannot cast Posa without Serena,’ said Rannaldini. ‘Now we have time for a glass of champagne.’

‘How was Hermione?’ snapped Helen, who detested her husband’s mistress.

Serena waited until Rannaldini had left the room to get a bottle, then said, ‘Absolutely bloody. She’s recording Arsena in Rome next week so I spent all yesterday checking out hotels with her. They were either too hot, too cold, too dark, too light, too big and not cosy enough, too poky. I kept frantically apologizing to the hotel managers — you know how sweet and obliging the Italians are. She deserves a kick up the arsena .’

‘She does,’ agreed Helen ecstatically.

‘I finally flipped and shouted at her,’ confessed Serena. ‘So, as a peace offering, I sent her some ravishing lilies and the bitch rang up shouting that they made her sneeze. “I want yellow rosebuds in future, and I’ll tell you exactly which florist to go to.”’

What a lovely young woman, thought Helen, putting her arm round Serena’s shoulders in an utterly uncharacteristic gesture of intimacy.

‘Come and meet our director, Tristan de Montigny.’

‘He’s next door phoning his auntie Hortense,’ volunteered Sexton.

Poor old Hortense was being extremely cantankerous and giving Tristan a long-distance earful. For the first time in eighty-five years, she was no longer Étienne’s little sister. As head of the family, she was feeling old, arthritic and frighteningly exposed. Tristan so wished he could comfort her.

Oh, my goodness, thought Serena, as he wandered back into the room. He was wearing a battered leather jacket, a buttoned-down peacock blue shirt, and Levi’s clinging to his lean hips. Serena immediately wanted to plunge her fingers into his shock of dark hair, and run her tongue along his rubbery jut of lower lip before burying her mouth in his. Instead, she smiled coolly, accepted a glass of Dom Pérignon, and said, ‘Tell us about this Posa, Rannaldini.’

‘He’s called Mikhail Pezcherov. Solti call me after hearing him do the role in Russian. He’s now singing Macbeth in some crappy production and making ends meet belting out songs in a nightclub.’

‘And which do we have to endure?’

‘If we leave soon, we’ll make the second act of Macbeth .’

Landing in Prague, they were driven over the cobbles of ill-lit back streets to a crumbling opera-house. Rannaldini, well known to scream at latecomers, had no compunction in sweeping his party into their seats in the middle of the banquet scene. A rumble of excitement went through the theatre and Lady Macbeth stopped singing altogether to gaze at the great Maestro.