The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous

35

Hermione’s hysterics echoed round Paradise. She wasn’t placated by the letters — fanny mail the Ideal Homo called it — that poured in after the release of Don Giovanni, nor even by offers to star in a musical of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Being Hermione, however, within twenty-four hours she was telling everyone, including Kitty, that the only thing that shocked her was Rannaldini’s appalling in-sensitivity to Kitty in casting an ex-wife as Leonore. Hermione had not forgiven Kitty for being the recipient of Georgie’s and Marigold’s confidences about their marriage problems. She might put down Georgie by praising Brickie’s dignity, but she still wanted to exceed Kitty in everything, even in being more of a brick.

But she was not prepared to concede defeat. As Rannaldini had inconveniently buzzed off to Madrid and Flora, Hermione’s first chance to confront him would be at the camera rehearsal for the Verdi Requiem which was already being trailed as the prom of the year.

Knowing Rannaldini would be stymied if she refused to go on, Hermione was determined to use this as a bargaining point to get herself the part of Leonore.

As usual Rannaldini rolled up at the Albert Hall when the rehearsal was nearly over, having left it to Heinz, the colourless Swiss, who didn’t even have one variety, who had replaced Boris Levitsky as assistant conductor. Three of the soloists, a tenor, a bass and Monalisa Wilson, a vast black mezzo-soprano with a vast voice, were well into the ‘Lux Aeterna’, exhorting the Lord to let eternal light shine on them. Hermione, who was not needed in this penultimate section, had retreated to her dressing room venting her rage at Rannaldini’s tardiness on her dressmaker. The poor woman had stayed up night after night finishing a ravishing low-cut dress made of panels of lavender and willow-herb-pink silk, specially for the occasion. Alas, she had not allowed for Hermione’s misery bingeing over the weekend and the zip wouldn’t do up.

‘You’ve skimped on the material!’ Hermione’s screeches rose above the orchestra and other soloists. ‘You cut it too small deliberately, so you’d have some spare for yourself. Those silks cost two hundred pounds a metre. Ouch! That pin stuck into me.’

Trying to appear not to be listening, the television crew wandered about looking for places to put their lights and cameras the following night. The London Met, used to Hermione’s tantrums, were fed up. It was a blistering hot afternoon; outside in the park one could hardly breathe. They’d just returned from an exhausting tour of the Eastern Bloc with Oswaldo. Rannaldini earned three hundred thousand a year as their musical director. They hadn’t seen him for three months and now he’d swanned in to impose his usual rule of divine right and brute force. They had vowed that they’d stand up to him, but now once more they were reduced to quivering jelly.

‘Lux Aeterna’ over, Rannaldini insisted on taking the orchestra without Hermione and the chorus through the final ‘Dies Irae’, with its deafening thunderclaps that came before the skirling descending flashes of lightning. The London Met knew the Requiem backwards, they had made the definitive recording with Rannaldini and Hermione in 1986, but he was determined to show even the oldest hand that their playing had become fuzzy and inaccurate. As he raised his baton, some of the orchestra started and some didn’t and they started to laugh out of nerves, and were yelled at for inattention. But soon the brass fanfares were ringing thrillingly round the hall.

‘Sounds like a completely different orchestra,’ said Cordelia, the BBC’s glamorous blond lighting camera-person.

Calling a halt Rannaldini got into a huddle with her and the director, persuading them to lower all the Albert Hall and television lights during the ‘Sanctus’ and ‘Agnus Dei’, then at the beginning of ‘Lux Aeterna’ at the words, ‘Let everlasting light shine upon them,’ to raise them dramatically.

‘What about Harefield? She’s the star,’ asked Cordelia. ‘She’ll need special lighting.’

‘No, no.’ Rannaldini gave a thin smile. ‘Light her better than Monalisa and the men and you’ll be accused of racism and sexism.’

‘Oh, right,’ said Cordelia, going pale.

‘Not even in Mrs Harefield’s last section, the “Libera Me” for soprano and chorus. In fact,’ Rannaldini leant forward so Cordelia, who had already been mesmerized by his coal-black eyes, caught a whiff of Maestro, ‘it is me who the audience have come to see. Tomorrow you will witness the rerun of the most successful classical record of all times.’

‘Oh, right,’ said Cordelia five minutes later. ‘So we’re really talking about “Rannaldini in Concert” and if the cameras focus on you throughout the evening with total darkness at the end except for your lit-up face, we won’t go far wrong.’

‘Exactly,’ smiled Rannaldini.

‘And we can always concentrate on Harefield’s cleavage in the boring bits.’

‘There will be no boring bits,’ said Rannaldini icily.

The orchestra looked at their watches. In ten minutes they’d be into overtime. Determined to hold up the proceedings but disconcerted because she hadn’t been summoned, Hermione finally emerged from her dressing room. For once she was wearing trousers, which emphasized her large bottom but covered up the bramble scratches on her ankles, caused by trying to force her way down the now unstrimmed path to Rannaldini’s tower. Ignoring him, she took up her position for the final ‘Libera Me’ on his left, with Monalisa Wilson like a great bolster between them.

‘Maestro and Maestress,’ giggled the first flautist.

Breast quivering, eyes shining with unspilt tears, Hermione’s mournful voice was soon soaring above the orchestra and chorus like a full moon above the stars, as she pleaded to be delivered from God’s wrath.

‘God’s maybe — but not Rannaldini’s,’ murmured the leader of the orchestra.

What a beautiful voice, what a beautiful lady, thought Cordelia with a shiver of pleasure, but Rannaldini had called a halt.

‘You’re dragging, Mrs Harefield,’ he said bitchily. ‘We don’t want the promenaders nodding off. There’s nowhere for them to lie down. This is a requiem in memory of the greatest Italian writer since Dante, not a lot of old horses on their way to the knackers.’

But when Hermione opened her mouth to screech a reply, Rannaldini countered by pointing at the brass as though he were plunging a skewer into a well-done turkey and started up the music again. Hermione had a powerful voice, but, supported by the heavy artillery of the orchestra and the aerial bombardment of the chorus, Rannaldini was bound to win.

‘Louder, louder,’ he yelled raising the empty air with splayed fingers. ‘I can steel hear Mrs Harefield.’

The screaming match that followed was so terrifying that the poor little tenor fell into the ferns and Monalisa Wilson snatched up the yellow duster belonging to the leader of the orchestra and tied it under her chin, mistaking it for her new Hermès scarf, before she fled.

The orchestra watched mildly interested and later heard Hermione and Rannaldini squealing in her dressing room like pigs in an abattoir, until Rannaldini stormed out.

When Hermione rang Rannaldini in his flat overlooking Hyde Park to continue the row the London secretary put her on hold so she had to listen to herself singing Donna Anna’s aria from Don Giovanni: ‘All my love on him I lavished’, on the recorded musak which made her crosser than ever.

Rannaldini spent the rest of the afternoon auditioning singers and musicians for Fidelio who had to hump their instruments up eight flights of stairs because the lift wasn’t working. He then read through a letter he had dictated to Rachel’s husband Boris, who, having waded through a mountain of unsolicited scores sent into the London Met, had weeded out half a dozen of merit, putting Boris’s Berlin Wall Symphony, dedicated to his new love Chloe, on top.

Rannaldini needed Boris. He was aware that a great conductor is assessed in part by the new music he brings into being. Boris had been invaluable on a freelance basis, pulling out the good stuff, often presenting it in a simplified form to save Rannaldini time. He didn’t want to upset Boris too much.

‘My dear Boy,’ he wrote in black ink, then reading the typing, ‘Thank you for the latest batch, from which I am returning your symphony. Since we are friends, I know you would prefer me to be frank. When I read your music, I do not hear it. For the enormous orchestra it requires, it is highly complex. No-one could sing the chorus correctly. One would have to hear it a dozen times to begin to understand it. Neither I nor the public have the time nor the inclination. The good news is that I have a series of lectures to do for BBC2 in the autumn. I shall need research done. I will call you. Best to Chloe.’

His London secretary didn’t type as well as Kitty but she was much prettier. As he scribbled ‘Yours ever, Rannaldini,’ he felt he had been very good to Boris.

Showered and scented in a new grey satin dressing-gown, having assembled some exciting sex toys, including a three-fingered vibrator bought in Paris on the way home, and several phials of amyl nitrite, Rannaldini waited for Flora. Clive was collecting her from Heathrow. Outside, the dusty plane trees were past their best and the bleached grass of the park was already covered in curled-up brown leaves and couples in T-shirts and shorts sharing a bottle before tonight’s performance. Tomorrow you wouldn’t see a blade of grass for crowds jostling to gaze at him and Hermione.

While he waited, he flipped through the Requiem. He had conducted it so many times but one must always try and bring something new and exciting to a work. His thoughts strayed to Cordelia, the blond camera-person. She was new and very exciting. Tomorrow Flora had to return to Paradise to get her trunk packed for the autumn term, so he would ask Cordelia out after the performance. Then he could invite her to light his bedroom with its shiny indigo walls and ceiling, its dark mirrors and its rich crimson four-poster. He might even offer her a job on Fidelio. He would have loved a threesome this evening, but Flora, despite her habitual cool, would never wear it. Even so he was roused out of the most erotic fantasy by crashes on the door louder than Verdi’s thunderclaps. Through the spyhole he could see Hermione.

‘Let me in, Rannaldini.’

Hermione could cry louder than she could sing, and as the editor of The Scorpion had installed a bimbo in the next-door flat, Rannaldini let her in at once.

‘I cannot bear it, Maestro. Life is too short.’

Rannaldini agreed and opened a bottle of Krug.

‘You have been behaving very badly, Carissima.’

‘I know, Rannaldini.’

‘You will ’ave to stand in the corner, and you know what that means.’

‘Yes, yes.’ Hermione’s eyes glistened with excitement; he could smell the goaty reek of her body.

‘What a peety Keety is due any minute,’ Rannaldini smiled sadistically, ‘and you must leave now.’

‘Kitty won’t mind,’ protested Hermione, ‘say we’re rehearsing.’

‘We promised to treat Keety with compassion, remember?’

Hermione remembered no such thing.

‘When we get back to Valhalla,’ briefly Rannaldini massaged her bottom, ‘it will be the punishment bell.’

He was so worried Flora would arrive, as there was no late-night shopping to hold her up, that he was forced to get dressed and go down the eight flights of stairs and bundle Hermione into a taxi.

Flora arrived twenty minutes later wearing Georgie’s emerald-green leotard, weighed down by carrier bags full of knickers and bringing him duty-free Armagnac, Givenchy for Men and a new biography of Swinburne, whom he admired. Rannaldini, who never wore any other scent but Maestro, was touched. Knowing him to be rich, women seldom gave him presents. Rather indiscreetly he told her about the screaming match.

‘You need some Hermione Replacement Therapy.’ Flora took a slug of Krug. ‘The only time the silly old bag hits top E these days is when some journalist reveals her real age.’

‘You should take your singing seriously. Then you can replace her. What d’you think of these?’

He threw half a dozen photographs on the little table beside her.

‘Uck! Who are they?’

‘You, my angel.’ Rannaldini slid his hands over her breasts. ‘Don’t you recognize yourself?’

‘My God!’ Fascinated, Flora examined her own shining pink clitoris and glistening labia lips laid back like butterfly wings.

‘I enter two prints anonymously in competition in German pornographic magazine,’ announced Rannaldini proudly, ‘you win first prize!’

‘That’s nice! As I’m obviously going to plough my A levels I can put that in my cv when I start job-hunting. It might help in times of recession.’

At a rare loose-end Hermione went back to hers and Bob’s house in Radnor Walk. Always grumbling that she never had an evening in, she now had absolutely no idea what to do with herself. Bob, still tying up all the details for tomorrow, wouldn’t be home for hours. The maid, about to go out on her evening off, made Hermione a prawn omelette and was understandably irritated to find seven-eighths of it in the bin the following morning. Having sung a lullaby over the telephone to little Cosmo, who rudely told her to piss off, Hermione picked up the score of the Requiem. She’d show Rannaldini he couldn’t do without her tomorrow when she moved the promenaders to tears and then frenzied applause. How dare he boot her out because Kitty was in London? On impulse, to reassure herself she rang Valhalla.

‘’Allo.’ It was Kitty’s breathless voice. ‘’Oo’s that?’

Hermione thought she must have rung the London number. Dropping the telephone she re-punched the Paradise number, got Kitty again and hung up.

In a fury she rang Rannaldini, who had his head between Flora’s legs and mumbled truthfully that he couldn’t talk. Then when Hermione threatened to come round, he said he would take it in another room. Having put on the mute button while he brought Flora to orgasm, he proceeded to tell Hermione he had lied to her.

‘I am with Cecilia not Keety, but I didn’t want to upset you before your big night. I want you to sleep well and ’ave beautiful dreams.’

‘Why are you seeing Cecilia?’ demanded Hermione.

‘A crisis about Natasha’s future. We have to discuss UCCA forms.’ Rannaldini lowered his voice. ‘I must go, Carissima.’

‘Why are you such a terrible liar?’ asked Flora fascinated.

‘When I was five I own up to stealing chocolate and my mother beat me, which I didn’t like. So I never bother with the truth again.’

Hermione had a terrible night. She went to bed early, passed the long lonely hours brooding about Cecilia, flicking channels and then ordering the maid and Bob to make her endless cups of camomile tea and honey when they returned. Having been persuaded by Bob to take a Mogadon she was wracked by nightmares about losing her place, forgetting the notes and arriving at the Albert Hall to find Cecilia singing in her place.

After another pill at five in the morning, she woke at midday when the maid brought her breakfast and the Daily Telegraph. The doctor would be coming round later with her Vitamin A and B jabs to give her stamina and keep the saliva going. She had just taken a large mouthful of fried bread when a picture of Cecilia on the Arts page, with a caption about a husband and ex-wife team in the forthcoming Fidelio, re-ignited her rage.

When she dialled The Savoy where Cecilia always stayed, a maid answered. Cecilia wasn’t to be disturbed.

‘Say it’s Mrs Harefield and it’s important.’

Finally, out of curiosity, Cecilia allowed Hermione to be put through and was very surprised when Hermione congratulated her with great warmth on getting the part of Leonore. ‘I know how good you’ll be.’

‘Vy, tank you, ’Ermione.’ Although placated, Cecilia was still suspicious. ‘That is large of you.’

‘Is Natasha all right?’

‘Vy should she not be?’

‘Did Rannaldini give you those tickets last night?’ asked Hermione idly. ‘I thought we might all dine together afterwards.’

‘I did not see Rannaldini last night. I only fly een this morning,’ said Cecilia. ‘He was with Keety last night.’

‘He was not,’ screamed Hermione. ‘Kitty was in Paradise. I checked. Rannaldini said he was discussing Natasha’s UCCA with you.’

‘The fucker! He no discuss UCCA wiz me,’ screeched Cecilia. ‘Ven did he tell you zat?’

But Hermione was gone, tugging on her clothes and roaring round to Rannaldini’s. The lift was still broken and a cellist was lugging his priceless Strad up the stairs, when Hermione overtook him. Shoving aside Rannaldini’s London secretary, who was holding the door open for the cellist, she barged inside.

‘Rannaldini’s not here, Mrs Harefield,’ said the London secretary aghast. ‘He’s just slipped out.’

‘Of whom?’ screeched Hermione. ‘Don’t lie to me.’

Charging into the bedroom she met Rannaldini coming out of the shower wrapped in a red towel.

‘You wicked liar,’ screamed Hermione.

Terrified she was going to knee him in the groin, Rannaldini clapped his hands over his testicles, leaving his face exposed. Next moment Hermione caught his eye with a punishing right hook. Rannaldini would have hit her back had not the cellist appeared open mouthed in the doorway, followed by a screaming Cecilia.

Very Italian, with snapping over-familiar dark eyes, an oily, olive complexion, streaked blond hair and a muscular worked-out body, Cecilia was wearing an immaculate black suit with a long collarless jacket and a short pleated skirt and looked as though she’d come straight off the catwalk with every claw out. Gathering up a bust of Donizetti with a manic jangling of bracelets, she hurled it at Rannaldini, who ducked so it shattered the mirror behind him, which had witnessed so much of their lovemaking.

‘Scellerato, scellerato,’ screamed Cecilia, echoing Donna Anna as she started working her way through a bowl of alabaster eggs.

‘Monster of vice, sink of iniquity,’ screamed Hermione, echoing Donna Elvira.

‘Bastard,’ screamed Cecilia, just missing Rannaldini’s left ear.

‘She’s right, you are a bastard,’ yelled Hermione, kicking Rannaldini’s shins and rushing out of the flat.

‘Not my Strad,’ screamed the waiting cellist as Rannaldini ran into the living room and grabbed his cello to stem the bombardment.

Cecilia had not played cricket at school but she finally caught Rannaldini on the corner of his other eye with a powder-blue egg. Storming out, she sent flying a blonde in a white towelling dressing gown who’d just emerged from the flat of the editor of The Scorpion to see what the fuss was about. At which moment, laughing her head off, Flora emerged from the shower, having witnessed the whole thing through a two-way mirror.

‘Oh dear.’ She touched Rannaldini’s two fast blackening eyes. ‘Now there are two Pandas in Paradise!’

Rannaldini had conducted with peritonitis, with snakebite, even with a sprained right wrist before now, but he refused to expose himself to ridicule. Ringing Bob he croaked down the telephone that he was dying of pneumonia. Shrouded in dark glasses and a black fedora, he flew off to a retreat in the Alps.

Over in Richmond in Chloe’s drawing room, Boris Levitsky wrestled with a two-hour lecture on Mahler, which he had to deliver at Cotchester University the following day and tried not to brood over Rannaldini’s vile letter returning his symphony.

Chloe was out recording the Alto Rhapsody, one of her first big breaks. She would probably go out to dinner with the director and the conductor afterwards and not be home for hours.

Bearing in mind Boris’s fondness for red meat and red wine and red-blooded women, she had left him a bottle of Pedrotti now being warmed by the evening sun, which he had vowed not to touch until he had finished his lecture. In the fridge was a large steak with instructions how long to grill it on each side and a pierced baked potato to put in the top right of the Aga an hour before he wanted to eat.

Chloe herself, however, had been less red-blooded since Boris moved in. As he was hopelessly impractical, she had to look after him and, as he hadn’t sold a single composition and had packed in his job at Bagley Hall, she had had to support him as well. Finally last week, with the thought: Why doesn’t the stroppy cow get off her ass? ringing through her head, she had had to write a cheque for Rachel’s maintenance.

This had been the greatest humiliation of Boris’s life, which was why he had fired off his new symphony to Rannaldini. Groaning, he wrenched his mind back to his lecture.

‘God, I could endure anything,’ Mahler had written in despair to a woman fan, after paying the Berlin Phil to perform his second symphony, ‘if only the future of my work seemed secure. I am now thirty-five years old, uncelebrated, very unperformed. But I keep busy and don’t let it get me down. I have patience. I wait.’

Boris didn’t have patience — Chloe said it was like living with a good-looking bear — nor did he have the cash to pay the London Met to perform his symphony, which that shit Rannaldini had torn to shreds. Outside, the turning trees were casting long shadows of evening across the park. A young mother with a pack of dusty, happy children walked past carrying a picnic basket. Boris groaned again. He never dreamt he would feel so guilty or miss Rachel and his children so much.

Bob Harefield, having endured Hermione’s hysterics, was now faced with the prospect of replacing Rannaldini, placating an enraged BBC and probably being lynched by a massive audience suffering from acute withdrawal symptoms. Oswaldo was in Moscow. Heinz the Swiss was on a plane to Rome. Bob was fed up with Rannaldini. There were other conductors he could have tried but he had always had a soft spot for Rachel and her husband.

Taking a deep breath, Bob dialled Chloe’s number.

‘Rannaldini’s got his whores crossed,’ he told Boris. ‘Do you want to conduct the Verdi Requiem tonight? I’m afraid there’s no time for a rehearsal.’

There was a long pause.

‘Yes, I will come. Thank you, Bob,’ said Boris, ‘but I ’ave no score, no car, no tailcoat. He is at dry cleaners. Chloe’s cat throw up on heem.’

‘I’m sending a car for you with the score in,’ said Bob, who knew Boris had been done for drink-driving and did not want to risk him getting lost, ‘and we’ll find you some tails. What size shirt are you?’

‘I look.’ Boris tugged the back of his collar round to the front. ‘Size sixteen. I thank you, Bob, from the beneath of my ’eart.’