‘Where? Where?’ said Sexton, looking round the control room in excitement.

‘Her top notes, you bloody idiot.’ Serena slammed down the receiver.

Rannaldini decided to take a break and listen to the playback. Tristan bore George off for ‘a cup of tea and a piece of shortbread for Trevor’.

Smarmy frog even knows the name of my dog, thought George ungratefully.

‘And then you can sit in the control room,’ added Tristan.

‘No, he can’t,’ snapped Serena, who’d nipped down to the canteen to grab a cup of tea, and who hadn’t forgiven George for choosing to live with Flora rather than her. ‘Our singers’ weaknesses and how we conceal them are entirely our secret.’

‘Weaknesses?’ squawked Hermione, who, having clocked Rannaldini’s preference for Serena, had been spoiling for a fight. ‘What weaknesses? How dare you, you patronizing hussy?’ Grabbing cups and saucers, she started smashing them on the floor.

‘Pull yourself together, Hermione,’ said Serena bossily. ‘My little Jessie wouldn’t behave like that.’

Appearing in the doorway, Rannaldini ducked to avoid a milk jug and frogmarched a screaming Hermione off to her dressing room. Three minutes later, he came out zipping up his flies.

‘She’ll be OK now.’

‘But we’re going to have to drop in someone else’s top notes,’ whispered Serena.

Tristan decided to placate George with a large whisky instead and bore him off to find one.

‘Flora is wonderful,’ he said enthusiastically. ‘She is determined not to betray her panic to Elisabetta, but listen to the tension in her voice.’

‘She’s not having to act,’ snarled George, ‘and who’s that damn sight too good-looking boy playing Carlos?’

‘Baby Spinosissimo. He’s sublime, but extremely gay.’

The ladies of the chorus, who were not needed in the finale, were drifting away. Pushy’s hard little heart was breaking as she knocked on Rannaldini’s door.

‘Ay’ve just come to say goodbay, Maystro.’

‘My dear, can you keep a secret on pain of death?’

‘Of course,’ lied Pushy, wriggling inside.

‘How would you like to sing Dame Hermione’s top notes?’

At last the recording was over. Tristan heaved a sigh of relief that Rannaldini would now whizz off round the world out of their hair, allowing himself, Serena and Sylvestre to get on with the editing.

But, to his horror, Rannaldini went nowhere, hogging the edit suite, putting his stamp on everything, causing endless rows over which take was used, twiddling knobs so some singers sounded less good and others better than they had at the recording. Granny, getting to the end of his career, needed careful editing. Hermione, as Rannaldini’s mistress and more importantly because of their mutual record sales, couldn’t sound less than perfect. Sylvestre dropped in Pushy’s top notes so no-one could detect the join.

Still disappointed that Tristan hadn’t made a move, Serena put it down to the fact that she had supported Rannaldini on every artistic decision. She had also, reluctantly, become very smitten with her Italian stallion. It was so sweet of Rannaldini on the last day of editing, because her involvement in the film was ended, to invite her, Sylvestre and Tristan back to his flat overlooking Hyde Park for a farewell dinner.

As Serena was leaving to relieve the babysitter, because it was Nanny Bratislava’s night off, she handed Rannaldini a picture her daughter Jessie had painted specially for her ‘Uncle Roberto’.

‘How charming of Jessie,’ Rannaldini wiped away a tear, and as he ushered Serena into her minicab, promised he would call her later.

Bounding back into the house, however, he rolled up Jessie’s picture, plunged it into the drawing-room fire and lit his cigar with it.

‘What are you doing?’ demanded Tristan in horror.

‘Now the recording is sewn up,’ Rannaldini inhaled happily, ‘I have no more need to ingratiate myself with little Jessie’s mother.’

There were more fireworks in March when members of the cast were issued with cassettes of themselves singing so they could learn the words to which they had to mime on location and time their movements to them. Then they discovered how much Rannaldini had doctored the recording. Chloe was incensed by the cuts in the ‘Veil Song’ and in ‘Don Fatale’.

Rannaldini blithely blamed Serena.

‘Anyway, those numbers don’t add much to the plot, my darling.’

Baby was outraged he’d been so often drowned by Hermione. Alpheus felt Rannaldini had consistently favoured the orchestra and every other singer. It was sacrilege to cut his great solo in Act IV and his character didn’t ‘garner sufficient sympathy’.

Mikhail was so cross, he rang up Rannaldini in the middle of the night. ‘Why did you not use my third and best take in death of Posa?’

‘Because it was too slow,’ said Rannaldini coolly. ‘Serena wanted to get Acts Four and Five on to one CD for when the record comes out.’

‘At this rate my billing will be so small and low down, only snails and mice will be able to read it,’ sighed Granny, who’d also been savagely cut.

‘Think of poor Verdi,’ snarled Rannaldini. ‘He had to drop the entire first act of Don Carlos, because the Parisians couldn’t get their last trains home.’

‘And directors have been putting it back ever since,’ said Granny drily.

Sylvestre, the handsome French sound engineer, felt Hermione’s performance had been so enhanced by subtle additions that he sent her her cassette with utter confidence. In a frenzy Hermione returned the tape by taxi, shrieking down the telephone and threatening legal action. ‘You have rejected every single take I wanted and my top notes sound terrible.’

Sylvestre waited four days, wrote to Hermione saying he’d laboured all round the clock on a new tape, and sent her back the old one. By return of post, he received from Hermione a letter, which he framed, saying, ‘You have worked miracles.’ Also included was an invitation to luncheon, which lasted twenty-four hours.

There was great consternation when a hatchet job, on the horrors of recording with Rannaldini, appeared in the Sunday Times, written by little Christy Foxe. As Christy subsequently turned out to be Rupert Campbell-Black’s godson, and the son of Janey Lloyd-Foxe, a very dangerous columnist, Rannaldini and Tristan wondered uneasily if this were the first round in Rupert’s war of attrition.


16


One of the secrets of Rannaldini’s success was that he knew when he had pushed those he needed too far. Immediately the editing was finished he suggested he, Tristan and Meredith, the set designer, should recce the state rooms at Buckingham Palace.

Rannaldini and Meredith went back a long way. They had done up numerous houses together without falling out. Aware that Meredith had been the lover of Hermione’s charming husband, Bob Harefield, for fifteen years, Rannaldini had never outed them because he was fond of Meredith, and Bob, as orchestral manager of Rannaldini’s old orchestra, the London Met, had made life incredibly easy for him.

Neither Rannaldini nor Hermione, on the other hand, had made life easy for Bob, who’d pretended he was far too stretched in Australia setting up a new opera company, to come home and organize Don Carlos for them.

Meredith, a hugely successful interior designer, had turned down a mass of work to create the sets for Don Carlos, but he intended to screw a vast fee out of Liberty Productions, and although missing Bob a great deal, he was very excited about working with such an enchanting Frenchman.

On the day of the proposed trip to the Palace, so many builders’ lorries and cars belonging to outraged planning officers were already whizzing in and out of Valhalla that the Fancy Fish frozen foods van slipped through the gates unnoticed. Famed for his cheeky, cheery manner, which could sell shellfish à la King to a barmitzvah party, Terry, the Fancy Fish rep, had long had designs on Valhalla, particularly now rumours were spreading of a film crew rolling up at the end of March.

Harriet Bussage, Rannaldini’s PA, had tipped Terry off that Sir Roberto was in rare residence. On his way to make his pitch Terry decided to pop into Bussage’s cottage, which nestled in a copse half-way up Valhalla’s drive, to deliver a cardboard box of sole Véronique as a thank-you present. Loading up other boxes, in case Bussage was tempted to place an order (Terry never missed a sales opportunity), he was just admiring the snowdrops and aconites in her little garden when he heard a male voice, sepulchral and terrifying:

‘How dare you spell Spinosissimo wrong!’ followed by a great thwack and a shriek.

‘I’m sorry, Maestro.’ It was a woman’s voice now, quavering, pleading. ‘Please don’t hurt me.’

‘How dare you put a comma in that letter to Lord Gowrie, when I dictated a semi-colon,’ intoned the man’s voice.

More thwacks were followed by even more piercing shrieks:

‘Punish me, Maestro, I’m so sorry.’

Rushing to the rescue through the back door, Terry froze with shock. A naked Miss Bussage was spread-eagled face down on the kitchen table, with wrists and ankles strapped to each wooden leg.

Beside her, an equally naked Rannaldini, with an erection rivalling the tower of Pisa, was laying into her reddening but surprisingly trim bottom with a hunting whip. Watching them with indifference was a large fluffy white cat.

Next moment sole Véronique, garlic king prawns, not to mention jumbo crispy cod fingers, destined for Little Cosmo, went flying all over the kitchen and Terry had fled.