cocaine hit at the dealers’, Rupert knocked the policeman across the street, leaving him minus two front teeth, and went off and bought a gun and a money belt.
On the way to pick up Taggie, the taxi broke down. Having asked Rupert to give him a push, the driver proceeded to drive off with Rupert’s briefcase, containing the emeralds and all the adoption papers and medical reports, stamped both in Petty France and by the Ministry in Bogota.
As Rupert proceeded to shoot the taxi’s tyres out with his new gun, two more policemen smoking joints on the pavement, totally ignored the incident. Retrieving his briefcase, finding excellent use for all the Colombian swear words he’d learnt on the flight over, Rupert went off and hired a bullet-proof Mercedes, which made him half an hour late picking up Taggie, which in turn resulted in a sharp dressing-down from Sister Mercedes.
Taggie, she said, had been worried and Rupert had missed a chance to bath and feed Bianca. Rupert tried not to look relieved. As the old monster waddled off to fetch Taggie, he reflected that in a battle with his bullet- proof Mercedes, Sister Mercedes would win hands down.
Taggie reeled out in manic mood.
‘Oh Rupert, she’s so sweet, she’s wearing one of the dresses we brought, and she drank all her bottles, and Sister Angelica said she cried much less today, and I’m sure she smiled at me, although it was probably wind. And Sister Mercedes was really friendly and sat next to me at lunch.’
‘Mercedes Bent,’ said Rupert.
After a surprisingly good dinner at the Red Parrot, of shell-fish stew and mango-and-guava ice cream, enhanced by a bottle of Chilean Riesling, they were just drinking to little Bianca, when Taggie turned green and lurched upstairs. Glued to the only lavatory on the landing, Niagara at both ends, she threw up and up and up into a bucket until she was only producing yellow froth and specks of blood. A local doctor, summoned by a demented Rupert, said it was only altitude sickness and prescribed rest.
In the morning, when Mother Immaculata popped in with a bunch of roses from the convent garden and a bottle of water flavoured with lemon-juice and sugar, she was happy to report back to the nuns that never had she seen a husband more devoted or worried than Rupert.
By the evening Taggie was delirious, raging with fever, too ill to be moved as various doctors supplied by Salvador trooped in and out. Trusting none of them, Rupert was onto James Benson, his doctor in Gloucestershire.
‘I don’t give a fuck if it’s three o’clock in the morning, I want you out here.’
‘Give it another twenty-four hours, altitude sickness often takes this form.’
‘You’ve given her the wrong jabs, you overpaid clown.’
Upstairs, he could hear Taggie screaming. ‘I’ll ring back.’
Red-hot pokers were gouging out Taggie’s brain, she was being bombed by massive cockroaches, the blades of the electric fan crept nearer and nearer like the Pit and the Pendulum. It was getting hotter by the minute, not a breath of wind moved the gum trees outside, the rains were expected any day.
In her more lucid moments, Taggie screamed for Bianca. ‘Don’t take her away, I hate you, I hate you.’ She was pummelling at Rupert’s chest.
Then at three in the morning, Colombian time, as he was changing her soaking nightgown, he thought he was hallucinating too, and that Taggie had turned into his first wife, Helen, whose slender body had been covered with freckles. Then he realized it was a rash, and was on to the hospital in a flash, yelling at them. Twenty minutes later, an old man arrived, yawning, with his suit over his pyjamas.
‘Just shut up and leave me alone with your wife.’
He was out in five minutes. He had given Taggie ajab to sedate her and curb the itching. When the blisters developed she would need calamine.
‘And you got me out of bed for this,’ he glared at Rupert.
‘What is it, for Christ’s sake?’
‘Virulitis.’
A little Spanish is a dangerous thing. Rupert went ashen.
‘Smallpox,’ he whispered. ‘Oh God, don’t let her die.’
‘Chicken pox,’ grunted the doctor.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Quite; pretty uncomfortable in older patients. Now keep her quiet and stop her scratching. Pity to spoil such a lovely face.’
Dizzy with relief, Rupert belted back to the bedroom, only to find Taggie sobbing her heart out.
‘Angel, you’re going to be OK.’ Rupert took her burning body in his arms. ‘But you mustn’t scratch.’
‘The doctor says I c-c-can’t see Bianca for a fortnight or go near the convent in case I give the babies chicken pox. They’ll think I’m not healthy enough to be a mother, they’ll give her to someone else. Oh Rupert, I can’t bear it.’
‘I’ll sit with her, I’ll go every day, I promise.’
Despite Sister Mercedes’ furious chuntering, Maria Immaculata was most understanding. Of course Rupert could take Taggie’s place. His was the side of the marriage of which she was unsure. It would be good to study him at close range.
TWO
As Sister Mercedes grimly predicted, Rupert caused havoc among the nuns. Anyone would have thought a high-ranking archangel, if not the Messiah, had rolled up as they made endless excuses to pop into the orphanage to gaze in wonder at this edgy, sunlit stranger, whose cold eyes were bluer than Mary’s robes, and whose hair brighter gold than any medieval fresco. He also appeared to be poring over endless medieval scrolls.
Soon pale lips were being reddened by geranium petals, habits bleached to new whiteness, eyelashes darkened by olive oil from the kitchen, and beards and moustaches disappearing for the first time in years. Even Maria Immaculata discreetly wafting
The medieval scrolls were, in fact, reports on Rupert’s racehorses, his television company, and his various enterprises faxed out to the Red Parrot from England.
Other faxes read more like an illiterate serial in a woman’s magazine as Lysander, Rupert’s jockey, who was even more dyslexic than Taggie, joyfully chronicled the escape of his great love, Kitty Rannaldini, from her fiendish husband’s clutches.
Kitty had evidently made her getaway on The Prince of Darkness, Rannaldini’s most valuable and vicious racehorse and managed to stay on his back until she reached Lysander’s cottage. The horse had carried on into the village and trampled all over the vicar’s crown imperials. Rannaldini, even more incensed than the vicar, had retreated to New York to take over the New World Symphony Orchestra, vowing vengeance.
Aware of Sister Mercedes’ massive disapproving shadow blocking out his light, Rupert hastily scrumpled up the fax.
Despite being the object of every other nun’s adulation, Rupert often wondered how he endured those long days at the convent. There were only Sister Angelica and two novices to look after twenty babies in the orphanage, which was part of the old chapel and had high windows out of which you couldn’t see. The din was fearful and when the rains came, to the incessant crying of babies, was added a machine-gun rattle on the corrugated roof.
Rupert was also exhausted. Having come to the end of a punishing racing season, masterminded the entire trip to Bogota and worried himself into a frazzle over Taggie’s illness, he was woken all through the night by calls from Tokyo, Kentucky and the Middle East. Like Bogota, the bloodstock market never slept.
