To top it, Taggie had enraged Rupert by asking Helen to stay for Christmas, claiming that she and Marcus couldn’t be all alone the first year after Malise’s death.

‘I suppose you’re going to serve lame duck at Christmas dinner?’ he said nastily.

And Taggie, remembering Sister Angelica’s warning about too many limping ducks, felt a cold chill.

THIRTEEN


Rannaldini planned his first telephone call to catch Helen at a particularily low ebb. She had just returned from Evensong at which Malise should have been reading the lesson. The church had always been full of admiring ladies on such occasions. Tonight they had turned up to see how his widow was coping. Not very well it seemed. Afterwards, as Helen emerged into the drizzle of a chill November evening, feeling them all shying away, she had scuttled off, black-scarfed head bowed, slipping on the yellow leaves concealing the slimy paving stones. She was too distraught to pause and to speak a word of comfort to Malise in his cold bed. Tomorrow she would bring him the pinched remnants of the rose garden.

As Marcus had gone to hear Murray Perahia playing at the Wigmore Hall, Helen had a long night ahead, terrified of sleeping alone since the black labradors had departed, even more terrified of waking to the horrors of life without Malise and a new one hundred thousand pound Lloyd’s bill.

The telephone was ringing as she came through the door. Malise? An instinctive desperate hope, but it was only a friend who’d been in church bossily summoning her to a dinner party.

‘Only ten of us, do you good to get out. Eight for eight-thirty, strictly caszh.’

Helen had never been casual in her life.

‘I’m not up to it, Annabel.’

‘Course you are, I’ve asked Meredith Whalen for you. Such a duck and when one gets to our age, I’m afraid one has to put up with gays.’

‘Why should some poor gay have to put up with me? I’m sorry, I can’t.’

Helen banged down the receiver with such force the roses on the hall table scattered dark red petals all over the flagstones, joining a shoal of leaves which the icy wind had swept in through the still open front door. The drawing-room flowers were dropping. She mustn’t let standards slip. The telephone rang again.

‘I truly can’t, Annabel,’ she shrieked hysterically.

‘Signora Gordon,’ said a deep caressing velvety voice, ‘’Ow are you. Theese ees Rannaldini ’ere.’

He was so gently solicitous that Helen found herself quite able to accept an invitation to lunch on Wednesday, when Rannaldini’s spies had made sure Marcus would be safely at the Academy.

Helen had always prided herself on her homework, but on this occasion she had no need to buy any of Rannaldini’s CDs, Malise had collected most of them, admiring their clarity, colour and controlled passion.

Helen also rewatched Rannaldini’s famous video of Don Giovanni and found it deeply disturbing as the cameras lingered on Hermione Harefield’s rosy romping nudity and even more so on the still cold face and beautifully moving hands of Rannaldini himself.

She was horrified that with Malise only two months dead she should be thrown into such a panic at the prospect of lunching with such a fatally glamorous man, or how resentful she felt towards Malise for leaving her too poor to buy a new dress. She couldn’t find her newish olive-green cashmere anywhere, wretched Tabitha must have whipped it, which meant she had to fall back on the Saint Laurent black suit she’d worn to Rupert’s and Taggie’s wedding. At least its white puritan collar would hide the dandruff which had snowed down since Malise’s death.

Wednesday morning brought more devastating bills. Helen, who’d been up at first light, spent the morning in tears tidying unnecessarily. She had felt her daily woman’s chaperonage when Rannaldini arrived was more important than the gossip Mrs Edwards would later impart round the village.

But as a final straw, Mrs Edwards rolled up, puffing with excited disapproval and brandishing a bad-taste piece in The Scorpion. Who would Helen, the most beautiful widow in England, marry now? Suggestions included Pierce Brosnan, Boris Levitsky, Richard Ingrams, Edward Heath, Julian Clary, Lysander’s father, David Hawkley — a darkly handsome headmaster who was, as The Scorpion pointed out, a dead ringer for Malise; and, horror upon horror: Rannaldini, photographed smouldering on the rostrum.

Helen couldn’t stop blushing, as she told Mrs Edwards, that by extraordinary coincidence Signor Rannaldini would be popping in that morning to look at the colonel’s unpublished work on the flute.

‘I must f-find a f-folder for it,’ she stammered, bolting upstairs.

‘And I should coco,’ muttered Mrs Edwards, taking a hefty slug of the colonel’s sloe gin before strategically positioning herself with the Antiquax in the study off the hall. Not that there was much to polish. The poor little soul couldn’t stop cleaning since the colonel had passed away.

In front of her dressing-table Helen prayed her blushes would not spread to horrible red blotches on her neck. Starting on her face, she plucked a grey hair from her left eyebrow, and five more from her temples, combing lustreless tendrils over her hair line to hide more dandruff. It would be drifting soon.

Taking her hand-mirror to the window she gasped in horror. With a compass, despair and worry had scratched new lines round her pinched mouth and reddened eyes.

Outside, the garden looked horribly untidy, half the trees stripped, half-showing rain-blackened limbs at awkward dislocated angles as they struggled out of their red-and-yellow rags. Then before her eyes a gust of wind covered the lawn with leaves again. Malise had insisted on sweeping them up at once. The leaves would break her in the end.

Glancing in the mirror she saw that tears had left a blob of mascara on her cheek-bone. As she wiped it away the skin stayed pleated. Helen gave a groan. She couldn’t face Rannaldini. Mrs Edwards would have to say she was ill.

But, bang on midday, punctual for the first time in his life, Rannaldini landed his big black helicopter on the lawn sending all the leaves swirling upwards around him as he leapt out; Don Giovanni returning from the eternal bonfire.

‘Blimey,’ said Mrs Edwards, applying Antiquax on top of Antiquax.

For Rannaldini was stained mahogany from ten days studying scores in the Caribbean sun. Wading through the leaves like a surfer he handed Helen a big bunch of tabasco-red freesias. Then he briefly put his arms round her so she could enjoy the muscular springiness of his body and its sauna-warmth as though he had indeed emerged from hell-fire.

‘I know exactly how tired and lonely and cold you feel all the time,’ he murmured, then stepping back and staring deep into her eyes. ‘But nothing dim you great beauty. No wonder autumn ees in retreat when you upstage heem like this.’

Rannaldini had always been able to lay it on with a JCB. Blushing redder than the freesias Helen invited him in while she put them in water.

Better than a film star, thought Mrs Edwards, kicking the study door further open as she rubbed Antiquax into the blue damask arm of a chair.

As Helen belted off to find a vase and slap on another layer of Clinique foundation, Rannaldini explored the charming drawing-room, with its apricot walls, faded grey silk curtains and glass cases containing Helen’s porcelain collection. One would have to break the glass to reach her as well, reflected Rannaldini.

He thought it a particularly beautiful room because of the preponderance of his records and because of a photograph of Tabitha on the piano. Bareback, astride an old grey pony, her hair was in a blond plait and her eyes were as cool and disdainful as Rupert’s.

The elm is a patient tree, it hateth and waiteth, thought Rannaldini lasciviously.

Malise had had a good eye for paintings. Rannaldini admired a Cotman and a little Pisarro, but what had possessed him to hang that frightful oil of poplars against a sunset with a cow which looked more like a warthog in the foreground? Then he read the rather obtrusive signature: Helen Gordon.

On a side table was an open poetry book.

Who would have thought my shrivel’d heart