Scrumpled-up paper lay all over the floor. His laptop was about to be swept off the extreme left-hand corner of his desk by a hurtling lava of videos, scores, a red leatherbound copy of Schiller’s Don Carlos, books on sixteenth-century France and Spain, sketches of scenes, Gauloise packets and half-drunk cups of black coffee. Photographs of the Don Carlos cast were pinned to a cork board on the rust walls. Over the fireplace hung one of Étienne’s drawings of two girls embracing, which Tristan had bought out of pride so that people wouldn’t realize his father had never given him anything.
He was now toying with a chess set and the idea of portraying his cast, Philip the king, Posa the knight, Carlos the poor doomed pawn, as chess pieces, but he kept hearing the nurse’s cosy, over-familiar voice.
‘Just going to put this nasty thing down your throat again, Étienne,’ as she hoovered up the fountains of blood bubbling up from his father’s damaged heart.
And Tristan had wanted to yelclass="underline" ‘For Christ’s sake, call him Monsieur de Montigny.’
He also kept hearing Étienne muttering the words ‘father’ and ‘grandfather’, as he clutched Tristan’s sleeve, and the roars of resistance, followed by tears of abdication trickling down the wrinkles.
At the end only the extremely short scarlet skirt worn by his granddaughter Simone had rallied the old man. Tristan hadn’t been able to look at his aunt Hortense. It was as if a gargoyle had started weeping. He prayed that Étienne hadn’t seen the satisfaction on the faces of his three eldest sons that there was no hope of recovery.
There was no way Tristan could concentrate on a chessboard. Switching on the television, he felt outrage that, instead of leading on Étienne’s death, they were showing the young English winner of the Appleton, Marcus Campbell-Black, arriving pale and fragile as a wood anemone at Moscow airport, and being embraced in the snow by a wolf-coated, wildly overexcited Nemerovsky, before being swept away in a limo.
Rupert, Marcus’s father, had then been interviewed, surrounded by a lot of dogs outside his house in Gloucestershire.
‘Campbell-Blacks don’t come second,’ he was saying jubilantly.
God, what a good-looking man, thought Tristan. If he had Rupert, Marcus and Nemerovsky playing Philip, Carlos and Posa, he’d break every box-office record.
He jumped as Handel’s death march from Saul boomed out and the presenter switched to Étienne’s death: France was in mourning for her favourite son; great artist, bon viveur, patron saint of vast extended family.
‘Montigny’s compassion for life showed in all his paintings,’ said the reporter.
But not in his heart, thought Tristan bitterly. Étienne had never been to one of his premières, or glanced at a video, or congratulated him on his César, France’s equivalent of the Oscars.
‘Of all Étienne de Montigny’s sons,’ went on the reporter, as they showed some of Étienne’s cleaner paintings followed by clips from The Betrothed, ‘Tristan, his youngest son, has been the most successful, following in his father’s footsteps but painting instead with light.’
That should piss off my brothers, thought Tristan savagely, as he turned off the television. Dupont had rung him earlier and, like a starved dog grateful for even a piece of bacon rind, Tristan had finally asked if Étienne had left him anything other than his due share.
‘Nothing, I’m afraid.’ Then, after a long pause, ‘Maybe it’s a back-handed compliment, because you’ve done so well.’
Dupont had meant it kindly. But Tristan had hung up, and for the first time since Étienne had fallen ill, he broke down and wept.
Half an hour later, he splashed his face with cold water and wondered what to do with the rest of his life. He was roused by the Sunday Times, commiserating with him, then more cautiously probing a rumour that he was the only member of the family who had been left nothing personal.
‘Fuck off,’ said Tristan hanging up.
Fortunately this pulled him together. The bastard, he thought. All my life Papa noticed me less than the cobwebs festooning his studio. Looking at his mother’s photograph, he wished as always that she were alive, then jumped as the telephone rang.
‘Papa?’ he gasped, in desperate hope.
But it was Alexandre, his eldest brother, the judge.
‘We’re all worried you might be feeling out of it, Tristan. You’re so good at lighting and theatrical effects and knowing appropriate poetry and music, we felt you should organize the funeral. We want you to be involved.’
His brothers, reflected Tristan, chose to involve him when they wanted their christenings and weddings videoed. He wished he had the bottle to tell Alexandre to fuck off too.
Instead he said, ‘I’ll ring you in the morning.’
Without bothering to put on a jacket, he was out of his flat, driving like a maniac to the Louvre to catch the last half-hour, so that he could once more marvel over the Goyas, Velazquezes and El Grecos. Every frame in his film would be more beautiful.
When he got home there was a message on the machine. Rannaldini’s voice was caressing, deep as the ocean, gentle, recognizable anywhere.
‘My poor boy, what a terrible day you must have had. I’m so sorry. But here’s something to cheer you up. Lord O’Hara from Venturer Television rang, and he’s happy to meet us in London the day after tomorrow. I hope very much you can make it. And I think I have found a Posa.’
3
Hollywood in the mid-nineties was governed by marketing men who earned enough in a year to finance five medium-budget films, who believed they knew exactly what they could sell and only gave the green light to films tailor-made to these specifications. To perform this function for Don Carlos and handle the money side, Rannaldini had employed Sexton Kemp as his co-producer.
Sexton, who had started life selling sheepskin coats in Petticoat Lane, was now a medallion man in his early forties with cropped hair, red-rimmed tinted spectacles and a sardonic street-wise face.
Sexton’s film company, Liberty Productions, so called because he took such frightful liberties with original material, always had several projects on the go. As he was driven in the back of a magenta Roller to the meeting with Declan O’Hara, Sexton was busily improving Flaubert.
Musically illiterate, he found the sanctity of opera plots incredibly frustrating. Why couldn’t the French Princess Elisabetta become an American to appeal to the US market? At least he could constantly play up the sex and violence in Don Carlos:
‘All that assassination and burning of ’eretics, and rumpy-pumpy, because we’re using lots of the singing as voiceover, while we film all the characters’ fantasies about rogerin’ each other.’
For a year now Sexton had worked indefatigably to raise the necessary twenty million to make the film. He had also organized distributors in twenty-five countries. ‘Don Carlos is not exactly a comedy,’ he would tell potential backers, ‘but very dramatical. And wiv Rannaldini and Tristan de Montigny we can offer both gravitas and a first-class seat on the gravy train.’
As a result Rannaldini’s record company, American Bravo, and French television had both come in as major players. Conversely CBS had been unenthusiastic because Don Carlos is very anti-Catholic and they were nervous about alienating America’s vast Hispanic population. For the same reason, it had been a nightmare wheedling money out of the French and Spanish governments. Sexton had promised filming in the forest of Fontainebleau to bring tourists to France and the restoration of numerous crumbling historic buildings in Spain for use as locations. But each time he neared a deal, the government would change and there would be a new Minister of Culture to win over.