The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous

‘Wolfie adores her,’ said Kitty, ‘and Rannaldini says she’s got a wonderful voice.’

24

Meanwhile, in counterpoint to this tragi-comedy, Rannaldini was taking advantage of the boiling hot summer and the collapse of Guy’s and Georgie’s marriage to pursue Flora. At first he made no progress. None of his witty postcards from all over the world were acknowledged. Flora was simply not interested. She was carrying a torch for Boris Levitsky, who was still teaching at Bagley Hall, but looking increasingly gaunt and miserable at having left his wife. She had loads of boys in the school after her; she had a hankering for Marcus Campbell-Black who was terribly shy and wrapped up in his piano playing, and she much preferred the tall blond Wolfgang, who was now cricket captain and a year ahead of her, to his father.

As part of his campaign, Rannaldini encouraged Natasha to make friends with Flora. Natasha, who was feeling neglected because of her mother’s affaire with the record producer, was in turn gratified that Rannaldini was suddenly taking so much interest in her schooling, even rolling up to watch her play in a tennis match one Sunday which he’d never done before.

Longing to please him, she found she could always gain his attention by talking about Flora. How she was always climbing out of her dormitory window at night and running off to a night-club called Gaslight, and how Miss Fagan, their housemistress who was always pinging bras, far from being furious, looked really excited when Flora streaked through the house for a bet, and how Flora passed her French oral.

‘The examiner asked her what her father did for a living. Flora said: “Mon pere est mort,” then he asked her what her mother did, and Flora said: “Ma mere est morte aussi,” and burst into tears. The examiner spent the rest of the exam comforting her and gave her an A. It simply isn’t fair. She’s so sexy, everything falls into her lap.’

Including Rannaldini, who, on the day Natasha had a music exam, offered Flora tickets for a concert at the Albert Hall. Flora jumped at it. Anything to get out of Bagley Hall — particularly when Rannaldini sent the helicopter for her. Arriving at the Albert Hall, she found queues hoping for returns, coiled like an ancient lady novelist’s plaits round the building.

Typically, Rannaldini delayed and delayed his entrance, so the packed audience would be panicked into thinking he wasn’t coming on. When he finally appeared, women didn’t actually scream, but they gasped, cheered, clapped, bravoed and then swooned at the incredible beauty of Rannaldini’s back on the rostrum. The gleaming pewter pelt emphasized the wide muscular shoulders beneath the impeccably cut midnight-blue tailcoat. The beautiful suntanned hands were shown off by the Kitty-whitened cuffs with the silver cuff-links, which Leonard Bernstein, whose showmanship, if not his excessive emotion, Rannaldini had greatly admired, had given him for his fortieth birthday.

And if Berlioz conducted with a drawn sword, Rannaldini conducted with a newly sharpened Cupid’s arrow. Flora was the only woman in the front row not wearing one of Catchitune’s yellow-and-purple — I LOVE RANNALDINI T-shirts. As he mounted the rostrum, she caught a whiff of Maestro and the white gardenia flown in for his buttonhole wherever he conducted.

The programme might have been chosen for Flora: Strauss’s Don Juan, followed by his Four Last Songs, sung by Hermione. Every time Rannaldini turned to bring her in with Toscanini’s ivory baton, the audience caught a tantalizing glimpse of his haughty profile.

He also took such liberties with a score, branding his own personality on it so forcefully, that afterwards his interpretation seemed to have become the true one. You felt it couldn’t be bettered, and it couldn’t be otherwise.

He and Hermione took bow after bow at the end of the first half. Her gushing ecstasy, blowing kisses and clutching Cellophaned roses to her heaving bosom, was in total contrast to Rannaldini’s cold stillness which became even colder when, glancing down, he saw Flora engrossed in Woman’s Own.

Strauss was followed in the second half by Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, which portrays a virgin, who has been offered up for pagan sacrifice, dancing herself to death, and which is difficult enough to unnerve the most sophisticated orchestra.

Having told Hermione he couldn’t see her later that evening because Kitty was in London, Rannaldini had left a note at the box office with Flora’s ticket, saying that, if she met him at Daphne’s in Walton Street at ten o’clock, he would buy her dinner.

Whizzing through The Rite of Spring even faster than Stravinsky himself, so that Toscanini’s stick was a mere blur, in order to get to Flora sooner, Rannaldini’s sexual excitement seemed to have transmitted itself to the orchestra. At the end the audience went berserk.

After a performance, Rannaldini always left the London Met rung out like a dishcloth, but there was not a drop of sweat on his forehead as he unsmilingly took his thirteenth bow. Only then did he deign to look in Flora’s direction, anticipating delirious adulation — her little hands with their bitten nails sore and scarlet with clapping. But her seat was empty. The briefest scrawl on a diary page left at the box office told him she’d had to leave before the end to meet some friends.

Rannaldini was so furious, he went back to the green room and fired ten musicians, including Beatrice, the little blond flautist whose bed he’d been intermittently warming since March. But Flora’s indifference only fuelled his lust.

Justifying his actions by saying Georgie and Guy needed space to sort out their marriage, he encouraged Natasha and the totally smitten Wolfie to invite Flora to Valhalla for half-term.

As Valhalla had many rooms on different levels, it was possible to look out of windows into rooms near by. An outraged Mr Brimscombe, who was increasingly tempted to go back to Larry, was told to leave the shaggy pink clematis montana round Rannaldini’s dressing room which had long since finished flowering, so Rannaldini could peer through it into Flora’s bedroom. But, far worse, Mr Brimscombe was then ordered to hack back from around Flora’s window a rare honeysuckle just as it was emerging into its gold-scented glory. Such was his desire that Rannaldini would have ripped out the Paradise Pearl.

Valhalla, with its tennis and squash courts, cricket pitch, which the village team was occasionally allowed to use, and huge swimming-pool protectively ringed with limes, was a paradise for teenagers. There were also horses to ride and to add excitement, the famous Valhalla Maze planted in the seventeenth century, while the abbey was briefly in the hands of the laity, by Sir William Westall for the entertainment of his descendants. Now twenty feet high, with nearly a quarter of a mile of dark, convoluted alleys, it was alarmingly easy to get lost in.

Beyond the maze, deep in the wood was Rannaldini’s tower, and beyond a path had been cut through the undergrowth to the edge of the Valhalla Estate near to Hermione’s house. This was kept clear by Rannaldini’s henchman, Clive, a sinister blond young man, given to black leather on his day off, who doubled up as his master’s dog handler. Outside the tower, Rottweilers prowled, frightening off fans, trespassers and, most of all, Kitty.

When Flora arrived at Valhalla, Rannaldini was away recording Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony in Berlin. A heat wave which had caught the country on the hop was into its second week. The darkening woods seemed to smoulder in the burning noon-day sun. The hayfields quivered. As though his battery was running down, the cuckoo called laboriously from a clump of horse chestnuts, whose candles were already shedding their white and bright pink petals. The dark maze drew the eye like a magnet.

‘It’s always more relaxed when Papa isn’t here,’ said Natasha, as she and Flora peeled themselves off the leather seats of the Mercedes in which Clive had collected them. ‘Papa’s wonderful, but when he doesn’t get his way, the whole building shakes.’

Looking up at the house, grey, brooding and secretive with its tall chimneys, Flora noticed blinds drawn on most of the windows.

‘Imagine Dracula’s victims languishing behind them, unable to take the sun.’

‘Papa likes them down during the day,’ explained Natasha. ‘Sun ruins pictures and tapestries. Beautiful, isn’t it?’