towel, showing off a still suntanned and increasingly svelte torso and smirking worse than Rannaldini emerging from Jasmine Cottage.
‘Black and no sugar for me,’ said Ferdie, getting a carton of unsweetened grapefruit juice out of the fridge. ‘I’ve got a terrific job coming up for you in Brazil in a couple of weeks.’
Lysander refused to admit how furious he felt.
Kitty was not the kind of person one got jealous about. He was even more irritated at the relief which overwhelmed him when Kitty rushed downstairs ten minutes later.
‘I feel shockin’. Poor Ferdie ’ad to sleep in the armchair in his room, an’ he must have turned off his alarm clock, because we’ve really overslept.’
When they finally got back to Valhalla around midday, she found the tape on the answering machine exhausted by increasingly outraged calls from Rannaldini.
‘Where zee fuck are you, Keety? Ring me at the Beverley Wilshire the eenstant you get in. Zee next time you rush off to your mother’s, leave a number.’
Even thousands of miles away, he terrorizes her, thought Lysander angrily, watching the frantically fluttering pages as Kitty fumbled through the Los Angeles telephone directory. Then she stopped, remembering it would be 2 a.m. in LA and Rannaldini would be asleep or more likely coiled round some female musician.
The last message on the machine, however, made Lysander forget everything. The voice was clipped, light, drawling and decidedly amused: ‘This is Rupert Campbell-Black ringing from Venturer Television for Rannaldini. We gather you’re doing a nativity play at Valhalla. We were wondering if we could come and film and put it out on Christmas Eve?’
Lysander gave a Tarzan howl of joy. ‘At last Rupert will have a chance to meet Arthur.’
46
Paradise was thrown into a complete tizz. Suddenly, at the prospect of millions of viewers and Rupert Campbell-Black in the audience, what Hermione airily described as ‘Making sweet sacred music together for the delight of a few friends’ had become a Steven Spielberg spectacular. Rannaldini, who’d always been insanely jealous of Rupert’s success both with money and women, was driven to a frenzy of rivalry. The rows were pyrotechnic.
‘You cannot put hanging baskets outside the Inn in the middle of winter. Bethlehem’s not competing for the Best-Kept Village,’ screamed Meredith who, in charge of sets, was now dragging the manger an exciting shade of raspberry pink.
‘Well, your stable’s more like the braidle suite at the Ritz,’ screamed back Marigold who’d been unusually ratty of late.
‘This play is supposed to be topical. With a recession on, Mary and Joseph would have been able to get into any hotel they chose,’ snapped Meredith, twitching the pink damask curtains flanking the stable window into place. ‘But we’re not having those,’ he went on, tugging down a washing-line and four towelling nappies Rachel had strung across the set. ‘Baby Jesus has only just been born in this scene. There’s no way he’d have got through four nappies.’
‘Put those back,’ shouted Rachel furiously. ‘We’ve got a chance to tell millions of viewers, perhaps twelve million if it’s networked, that disposable nappies take five hundred years to biodegrade, whereas cotton towelling ones can be—’
‘Oh, shut up,’ screamed Marigold and Meredith in unison.
Kitty, who as usual had to do everything, had retreated to the kitchen to retype, on recycled paper, Georgie’s script which everyone kept changing.
Ten minutes later Lysander rushed in hidden inside the front half of the donkey with Jack and Maggie hanging, furiously growling, on the uninhabited back half.
‘Oh Kitty, Kitty,’ he cried despairingly from his furry depths, ‘the vicar and Meredith and Natasha all want to play my back half. I don’t want to be groped by any of them.’
Wrenching off the donkey’s head he fumbled for a cigarette. Even scarlet with indignation, his hair all ruffled, he looked adorable.
‘Don’t worry.’ Kitty handed him a lump of sugar on the flat palm of her hand as he had taught her. ‘Rannaldini’s due back tonight and he’ll change everyfink.’
‘Oh dear.’ Lysander’s face fell. ‘Then it won’t be nearly such fun.’
There had also been furious spats over the casting, with all the Paradise ladies angling for the coveted role of the Virgin Mary in order to wow Rupert Campbell-Black. Hermione got the part — natch — and insisted on four changes of blue silk robe and a becoming gold halo designed by David Shilling. In the only moment during the entire production when Hermione was in agreement with Rachel, they decided Mary must be seen to breast-feed the doll which had been flown down from Harrods with the Christmas caviar, to play Baby Jesus.
‘Trust the old tart to grab any chance to flash those great tits in public,’ grumbled Meredith.
Rannaldini had turned down the suggested role of Herod and was leaving the conducting of the orchestra (hand-picked members of the London Met) to Bob. Instead, he insisted on riding in on the viciously volatile Prince of Darkness as the First of the Three Kings.
He had co-opted Rachel, because of her long legs and because she looked disturbingly sexy with a cork moustache and beard, to play the Second King, but had vetoed Rachel’s suggestion that she should hand over a free-range turkey instead of frankincense. Lysander was able temporarily to forgive Rannaldini who, having cast Marigold, also because of her great legs, as the Third King, then because of Marigold’s nervous disposition, had signed up Arthur to play her horse.
Guy, who had a fine bass voice and a lifetime of singing loudly in the church choirs, was cast as St Joseph, which gave him a legitimate excuse to grow a beard and no longer use plastic razors, which took even longer than nappies to biodegrade.
At Hermione’s suggestion, the script had been rewritten to portray Joseph as ‘deeply in love with his young wife’ and now included several long clinches under the mistletoe and Guy’s repeatedly professed delight at being present at the birth.
‘Why don’t you have a bonk and make it really authentic?’ snapped Georgie, who was playing the chief shepherd and was fed up with her script being messed about. If Guy was absolutely not Hermione’s type, as Hermione had told Georgie after the church fete, she was concealing her prejudice extremely well.
Larry, who’d been cast in the key role as the innkeeper, kept cutting rehearsals due to the ‘pressure of work’ which explained Marigold’s increasing twitchiness.
The casting of the vicar reduced Meredith to more hysterics.
‘You can’t let that fat queen play Gabriel. Give Lysander the part. He’s got the angel’s face.’
‘Lysander’s tone-deaf and he really can’t act,’ said Georgie kindly.
‘Then he can play one of your shepherds,’ said Hermione pointedly. ‘He and you are
‘Not any more,’ spat Lysander, glaring at Georgie.
It was at this point that he was demoted to the front legs of the donkey. Lysander, in fact, was feeling as though his life had been churned up like a ploughed field. After the things Georgie had said about his mother, he couldn’t bear to be in the same room with her, but he was desperate for Rupert to meet Arthur and increasingly felt the need to protect Kitty from everyone.
As Kitty had predicted, Rannaldini breezed in that evening, completely rewrote the script, re-arranged the music and, taking one look at the furry ox and the donkey, whose front legs were doing a soft-shoe shuffle at the time, replaced them with real animals to give the play authenticity. By the following day there were also live sheep. Maggie, Jack and Dinsdale had got parts as sheepdogs and even Tabloid was enrolled to guard the Inn. At Rachel’s prompting, chickens and a fearsome turkey were freely ranging the set.
