Most importantly Rannaldini had been a friend of Tristan’s mother, who had died when Tristan was a baby, and was the only person prepared to satisfy the boy’s craving for information about her.
‘She was so beautiful, so sweet, so proud of you, Tristan, and she love you so much. Her death happen in moment of madness, when she feel she cannot cope, and was unworthy of your father.’
Tristan’s father, Étienne de Montigny, was France’s most illustrious painter. He was revered for his portraits and landscapes but most famous for his erotic paintings, many of which, Salome’s Ecstasy, The Rape of Lucrece and more recently David and Jonathan, hung in the great galleries of the world, elevating near-pornography to an art form.
Étienne, outwardly a laughing giant of a man, had spawned a pack of children from three wives and numerous mistresses. Twelve years ago, when he was sixty, he had met Rannaldini, newly arrived in Paris to make his fortune as a conductor. The two had struck up a rapport, and Étienne had taken the handsome, impossibly precocious teenager under his wing. In return Rannaldini had not only milked Étienne’s contacts but also posed for him.
Part of the fun for collectors of what became known as Étienne’s ‘extremely blue period’ was to identify Rannaldini in the paintings as everyone from Apollo to the head of John the Baptist. Rannaldini had also provided beautiful young models to titillate the old goat’s palate and palette.
The most beautiful had been Tristan’s mother, the sixteen-year-old Delphine. Even Étienne’s staunchest supporters had been horrified when he had made this exquisite child his fourth wife and within a few weeks impregnated her.
Nemesis moved swiftly. A proud, delighted Étienne was busy sketching his newborn baby, Tristan, when he heard that his fourth and favourite son, Laurent, a young army officer, had been blown up in Chad. Laurent had always been a rebel, and rumours persisted that he had been taken out by his own side. Too crazed with grief even to call for an inquiry, Étienne promptly lost interest in baby Tristan, and hardly seemed to notice when, a few days later, Tristan’s young mother committed suicide. She had been suffering from postnatal depression. It was left to Étienne’s sister, Hortense, a rusty old battleaxe, to organize Tristan’s christening, at which, as one of Delphine’s last wishes, Rannaldini was a godfather.
Étienne’s indifference persisted. Tristan was the only one of his children he pointedly ignored and never praised. The boy had been brought up with the rest of Étienne’s gilded pack in Paris or at the château in the Tarn, but he was always the wistful calf which grazes away from the herd, longing for yet shying away from love.
Which was why his godfather was so important to Tristan and why on that wintry November evening in 1977 he could hardly contain his excitement as, in his first dark suit, his gold hair slicked down with water, he peered out at the galloping black clouds and frenziedly thrashing trees of the Bois de Boulogne for a first glimpse of Rannaldini’s Mercedes.
Although Rannaldini got a Machiavellian kick from singling out Tristan for attention, knowing it irritated the hell out of Étienne, he was genuinely attached to the boy. He had also been a wonderful godfather: writing from all over the world, never forgetting Christmas or a birthday, taking Tristan to concerts whenever he swept through Paris. For his confirmation he had even given him a Guarneri cello, valued at thousands, which Tristan had been practising for days hoping Rannaldini might ask him to play. Tristan had also painted him a watercolour — not too much like Degas — of polo players in the Bois.
There was Rannaldini’s Mercedes. Tristan hurtled downstairs, beating the housekeeper, slithering on a rose-patterned rug across the floorboards, shyly shaking his godfather by the hand, before submitting to a warm, scented embrace.
As usual, Rannaldini was in a hurry. As a tenth-birthday present, he was taking Tristan to Verdi’s greatest opera, Don Carlos. The curtain would rise in an hour so they were cutting it fine, but first he wanted to hear Tristan play and whisked him into the library.
Here Rannaldini paused only to admire himself on the cover of Paris-Match, and clock any new artists on the dark red walls. Over the centuries, the Montignys had increased their fortune buying paintings ahead of fashion. Rannaldini had considerably bolstered his coffers by using Étienne’s eye to build up his own collection.
Opening the piano score of Don Carlos, at the great cello solo at the beginning of Act IV, he placed it on Tristan’s music stand.
‘Try this.’
Even though Tristan was sight-reading, he played with total concentration and the sad sound blossomed as his long fingers vibrated on the strings.
‘Excellent,’ cried Rannaldini in delight. ‘You work very hard. And this is excellent too,’ he added, putting Tristan’s watercolour inside the piano score. ‘I will hang it in my study. We must go.’
‘I hope you will not be bored,’ said Rannaldini, manoeuvring the Mercedes through the pre-theatre and dinner traffic at a speed that astounded even the Parisians. ‘It is long opera but very interesting. I will briefly explain story.
‘France and Spain are ending long, bloody war. To unite the two countries, Elisabetta, the French king’s beautiful daughter, is to marry Carlos, the son of King Philip II of Spain. Understand?’
Tristan nodded. He loved the way Rannaldini never talked down to him.
‘Young Carlos reach France in disguise, wanting to see if he has been lumbered with ugly cow, but when he see Princess Elisabetta out hunting in the woods,’ Rannaldini gesticulated at the Bois de Boulogne, ‘he find her utterly beautiful, with dark hair to her waist. When he reveal he is Carlos, her future husband, she fall in love too. They will live ’appy ever after.’ Jumping a red light, Rannaldini made a V-sign at an outraged crone in a Volvo.
‘Then awful thing ’appen. Carlos’s father, Philip II, decide he want Elisabetta for himself and marries her instead. This is very selfish because King already has beautiful girlfriend called Eboli.
‘Poor Carlos, however, cannot stop loving Elisabetta even though she is now Queen of Spain, married to his father, and she still love him. But everywhere in Spanish court they are spied on. I won’t spoil the ending.’
They were approaching the opera house.
‘Rannaldini, Rannaldini,’ shouted admirers, surging forward.
A group protesting against nuclear tests was also lurking. One, a handsome but ferocious blonde, banged on the Mercedes window, which Rannaldini lowered a fraction.
‘How would you like your testicles shrivelled by radiation?’ she yelled.
‘Sounds interesting,’ murmured Rannaldini, closing the window as her furious face disappeared in a tidal wave of fans.
‘I’m getting a bodyguard,’ he complained, as a couple of doormen finally dragged him and Tristan through the stage door.
Tristan was unfazed, particularly when Rannaldini, while donning the splendour of white tie and tails, offered him a birthday glass of Krug. All down the passage, singers could be heard warming up.
A white gardenia in a glass box for Rannaldini to slot into his buttonhole was delivered to the Maestro’s dressing room. Most of the flowers arriving were for Cecilia Rannaldini, his second wife, who was singing Eboli, and who now could be heard screaming, ‘When will people learn I only like red roses,’ as she hurled everything else on to the floor.