‘Pavarottweiler,’ said Flora disapprovingly. ‘I heard you bullied your soloists.’
‘Was the recording cancelled?’ asked Natasha hastily.
‘I made everyone rise early to beat the heat.’
Once home, Rannaldini established his ascendancy with the inevitable jackbooting. A brilliant imaginative cook, he often produced Sunday lunch himself, cooking as he conducted, keeping five saucepans going at once, mixing, tasting, stirring, ordering Kitty around like a skivvy. But today, as lunch was ready, he kept everyone waiting out of malice, sending Kitty scuttling to get him a drink, going through the synopsis she’d typed of his post, faxes and telephone messages, finding fault with everything, snarling like Tabloid, who lay panting at his feet, if she didn’t know the answer.
In his post was a letter from some distinguished composer saying the concert in the Albert Hall, out of which Flora had walked, had been the most marvellous thing he’d ever heard.
‘A peety you meesed most of it.’ Rannaldini chucked the letter across to her.
‘Expect the old sycophant wants you to commission another symphony,’ said Flora unrepentantly. ‘Basically I thought the Don Juan very self-conscious. You couldn’t hear Strauss for Rannaldini, and I’ve never liked it as music. You keep longing for that divinely soppy theme tune to be repeated and it never is. And I’m not surprised those were Strauss’s Four Last Songs, if he’d known Hermione was going to sing them. My mother’s voice is far more beautiful than that gurgling canary.’
Terrified that Rannaldini might see her laughing, Kitty gave the mayonnaise a stir to check it hadn’t curdled.
‘You will never find a more exquisite voice,’ said Rannaldini icily.
‘Passion and thrust are what matters. Hermione’s got no soul.’
Beneath the pale red fringe which was tangling with her sooty eyelashes, Flora’s cool cactus-green eyes, a mixture of Georgie’s seaweed brown and Guy’s pale azure, were scornful and utterly unafraid.
I must get that girl into bed, thought Rannaldini.
‘Are we never going to have lunch?’ he snapped, turning on Kitty, and when she had laid out a beautiful pink sea trout, a huge bowl of yellow mayonnaise, which he complained should have been sauce verte, a green salad including the tiniest broad beans, and new potatoes, he made no comment, only rejecting the bottles of Muscadet and sending her scuttling back to the dungeons, of which she was terrified, to get some Sancerre.
‘Why don’t you have a little train to get your drinks for you?’ said Flora, unfolding an emerald-green napkin. ‘Then Kitty wouldn’t have had to run around like a barmaid in Happy Hour.’
But Rannaldini was looking at The Times crossword which was normally faxed out to him wherever he was in the world, filling it in as easily as a passport form.
‘Who, Like a black swan as death came on, Poured forth her song in perfect calm?’ he asked the assembled company. ‘Presumably none of you dolts know.’
‘St Cecilia,’ said Flora, accepting a plate of sea trout from Kitty. ‘Yum, that looks good.’
‘Correct,’ said Rannaldini. ‘Unlike my children, you read books.’
‘I’m doing Auden for A level.’
Natasha was still studying the school photograph.
‘Nice one of Marcus Campbell-Black. Have you snogged him yet, Flora?’
‘Too shy. Wouldn’t mind snogging his father though.’
‘Rupert Campbell-Black was the man we voted we’d most like to lose our virginity to,’ Natasha told Rannaldini. ‘But you were second, Daddy,’ she added hastily.
Rannaldini’s vile mood returned. Although the food was delectable, he immediately emptied a sootfall of black pepper and a pint of Tabasco over his sea trout before taking a bite. Then, when he had taken one mouthful, snapped at Kitty that the fish must have died of natural causes, and gave the whole lot to Tabloid who promptly gobbled it up, then yelped, his eyes spurting tears, as he encountered the Tabasco and pepper.
‘This sea trout’s perfect,’ protested Flora. ‘You kept lunch waiting. You’re lucky it’s not old and tough, like certain people round here, and that was bloody cruel to that dog.’
Ignoring her, Rannaldini started talking in German to Wolfie. Kitty said nothing throughout lunch, as still as an extra on stage, not wanting to attract a second’s attention from the actor who is speaking. There was another explosion when Rannaldini found the Brie in the fridge.
‘I’m sorry, Rannaldini,’ stammered Kitty, ‘but it was running away in the ’eat.’
‘Don’t blame it,’ said Flora, ‘if it gets shouted at like you do.’
In the silence that followed, Natasha, Wolfie and Kitty gazed at their green ivy-patterned plates and shook.
Rannaldini glared at Flora for a moment, then laughed. ‘You have to practise this afternoon, Natasha. You have homework, Wolfie. I will show Flora the ’ouse.’
Ducking unnecessarily so as to avoid hitting his sleek grey head on the low beams, Rannaldini whisked Flora through endless twisting and turning passages and dark-panelled rooms. Occasionally from the shadows grinned the white or yellowing teeth of a grand piano. On the way Rannaldini pointed out ancient tapestries, Tudor triptychs and family portraits, belonging to other people, because sadly, his left-wing mother had flogged off those of his own family. In the great hall with its minstrels’ gallery, Rannaldini had commissioned a red-and-gold mural of trumpeters, harpists and fiddlers, and a bust of himself in front of the huge organ.
‘Something wrong there,’ said Flora slyly. ‘Surely you should be behind the huge organ?’
Ignoring the crack, Rannaldini led her up the great stone staircase, where sunlight poured through the stained-glass window of St Cecilia at yet another organ.
‘Blessed Cecilia appear in visions, To all musicians,’ murmured Flora. ‘Is that Burne Jones?’
‘A copy,’ said Rannaldini. ‘The original’s in Oxford.’
Leading the way up to the attic, stepping over stray angels’ wings and broken chalices left behind by the monks, Rannaldini pointed to a rope running down a groove in the thick stone wall.
‘What’s that?’ asked Flora.
‘The rope of the punishment bell,’ said Rannaldini caressingly. ‘The Abbot used to ring it from his study after vespers every Friday evening, telling the monks to return to their cells and flagellate themselves for the duration of the misericordia. This went on until a Father Dominic came up here and valiantly clung on to the rope, and the practice was finally stamped out.’
‘How gross!’ Flora fingered the rope with a shudder.
Through a narrow slit of window, she could see the valley lit by chestnut candles and beyond, green fields streaked with buttercups and dotted with red-and-white cows, like the backdrop to some medieval madonna. It was very cold in the attic. In some distant room, she could hear Natasha sulkily thumping out a Chopin Nocturne.
‘I suppose you use the punishment bell on Kitty,’ blurted out Flora.
‘Only when she needs it,’ said Rannaldini silkily.
Flora shivered, but was determined not to appear afraid.
‘Mum said Kitty’s terrified of a ghost here.’
‘The Paradise Lad,’ murmured Rannaldini softly. ‘He was a very beautiful young boy. A novice here, and very loving and charming and not entirely sure of his vocation. Then he fell in love with a village girl, and decided he wanted to leave the order. Denied this, he was caught with the girl. The Abbot loved the boy, and was so insane with jealousy that he threw him down in the dungeons before ordering him to be flogged and rang the punishment bell on and on, until finally the monks grew quite out of control and flogged the boy to death. Many people say they ’ave heard his ghost sobbing at night.’