At dawn he chucked his signet ring into the lake. Would that it could have been himself but the water had almost dried up in the drought. Beautiful, pale, like a sadistic marquis, totally untroubled and unmarked by his night of vice, the moon on its side lay over Rannaldini’s woods.

The rising sun was already gilding the little wood that formed a halo round Magpie Cottage. His halo had gone. Tristan longed to level with Tab, but the truth was too hideous and he couldn’t bear to read the sickened distaste in her eyes, or to listen to her lame excuses as she backed off. She needed perfect children to carry on the beauty of her family. She deserved only the best.

Tab had waited up all night. When he told her he wasn’t coming back, her howled ‘Oh, no!’ were the most agonizing words he’d ever heard.

‘It’s not anything you’ve done, my darling. It’s my fault. You’re married. Try and make a go of it with Isa. I’m no good to you. One day I’ll explain.’ Then, when there was total silence, ‘Tabitha?’

‘I’ve just lost another father,’ whispered Tab, and hung up.

Lucy didn’t want people to hear her crying, so as soon as shooting had finished the night before she retreated to her caravan. James, who was upset by tears, curled himself into the tiniest russet ball on one of the window-seats, letting out occasional deep sighs to rival Rannaldini’s.

At first when Tristan hammered on her door, she thought he was drunk: his shirt and jeans were ripped, his face was covered in scratches, his eyes rolled wildly. He was shaking so violently that she wrapped him in her duvet. As he sobbed his heart out, gabbling in French, often quoting Don Carlos and occasionally laughing inanely, he was difficult to understand, but gradually she pieced together what Rannaldini had told him.

Lucy was furious.

‘The bastard.’ She handed Tristan a cup of black coffee into which she’d poured a miniature Drambuie. ‘He knows you’re bats about Tab, and Tab is bats about you.’

Oh, why was she cutting her own throat?

‘He’s jealous you saved Tab’s life and she was so frantic for you to take her home. You’re a Montigny, sure as oeufs is oeufs. I can tell by your bone structure and your mouth and the height of your eyes in your face. Why don’t you nip back to France and ask Auntie Hortense?’

‘Non, non, non.’ Tristan shook his head back and forth. ‘It’s all in the letter. I am very fashionable, incest is hot, as Sexton keeps saying.’ His wild laughter turned into sobs.

Sitting down beside him on the bench seat, Lucy gathered him up, stroking his hair, trying to still his desperate shuddering.

‘I love Tab so much, Lucy. Last night she was Holy Grail in my arms.’

‘I know, I know.’

Even a worried James leapt down, and nudged him with his long nose.

‘Dear James.’ Avoiding his sore palms, Tristan smoothed the shaggy head with the side of his hand. ‘I can’t stop thinking of that monster raping my mother. She had no-one to turn to. If only she’d had an abortion.’

‘No!’ shouted Lucy, clutching him even tighter. ‘That would have deprived the world of a fantastic director.’ She gave a sob. ‘People forget you’re only twenty-eight, and you’ve kept this bloody great show on the road. You’re exactly the same person today as you were before Rannaldini told you all that junk. It’s what you are that matters.’

‘But what can I do about the money I put into Carlos?’

‘Nothing. Your fat-cat brothers aren’t exactly skint. Carlos is going to be such a smash hit you’ll easily be able to pay them back afterwards.’

‘“You have the heart of an angel,”’ quoted Tristan wearily. ‘“But mine sleeps forever closed to happiness.” Promise you won’t tell anyone.’

He refused to be comforted.

Tab was equally distraught. She had been offered a glimpse of Paradise. What was it about her that no-one could love?

Rannaldini moved in swiftly. ‘My poor child, but you know Tristan’s track record. He cannot commit himself. He ’ave you so he dump you.’

Wolfie was more hands-on. Woken by a pitiful telephone call from Tab, he hunted down Tristan as he was leaving Lucy’s caravan, and sent him crashing to join the debris of cigarette butts, skeins of hair and cotton buds on the grass outside Make Up.

‘How dare you lead her on, you smarmy Frog?’ Then, as Tristan staggered to his feet, Wolfie hit him again.

Hearing the din, Lucy emptied James’s water-bowl over Wolfie.

‘Stop it, you revolting bully.’

Slumped against the steps of Lucy’s caravan, Tristan told Wolfie he had never meant to hurt Tab, but he had learnt something last night that meant he was useless to her, or to any other woman. When he wouldn’t explain what it was, Wolfie stormed off unconvinced.

By this time heads, including Meredith’s and Rozzy’s, both in rollers, were emerging from windows so Lucy patched Tristan up, dressed his hands and sent him back to the set, where he heroically carried on directing. But everyone noticed he wasn’t all there and the spark had gone. Soon rumours were flying around that he’d blown Tabitha out, that she’d blown him out, along with all the old chestnuts that he was gay, impotent, violent and incapable of commitment.

Rozzy was angry and hurt Lucy wouldn’t confide in her.

‘I thought we were friends. Can’t you trust me?’ Then she stormed off, when Lucy couldn’t.

It really irritated Lucy, the reproachful way Rozzy instantly topped up James’s water-bowl and tested the earth of her plants whenever she came into the caravan. Even more maddeningly, there were tears in Tristan’s eyes later that afternoon, when he told Lucy that ‘Knowing we are haemorrhaging money, Rozzy offer to work for nothing. She is so sweet.’

‘Sweet,’ agreed Lucy, bitterly remembering James Benson’s bills. Even darling Rozzy’s getting on my nerves, she thought, in despair.

But that evening, as she put a patch of a greyhound’s head over one of the rips in Tristan’s jeans, there was a knock on the door. It was Wolfie, looking desperately tired.

‘Sorry, I flipped this morning. We had a whipround for the greyhounds in Spain.’ He handed her a jangling brown envelope. Inside was nearly three hundred pounds.

‘Oh, Wolfie.’ Fighting back the tears, Lucy hugged him. ‘Come in. Oh, thank you ever so much.’ As she poured him a glass of wine, she said she couldn’t tell him what Tristan had found out, but if it were true she understood why he’d had to dump Tab.

‘She is destroyed.’

‘So’s Tristan. He needs you.’

She also didn’t want to upset Wolfie by letting on to him the part Rannaldini had played.

From then on Wolfie carried Tristan, which aroused the enmity of Bernard, Oscar, Sexton, even of Rannaldini, and most of all the women, because he was so clearly now le favori du roi.


34


June melted into July. The birds fell silent. The heatwave intensified. Legend had it that when the ponds of Valhalla dried up, the head of the house would die. Hoovering up shrivelled petals on the burnt lawn, Mr Brimscombe noticed the dangerously low level of the pond near the rose garden and moved the gasping carp to the mere beside the maze. He was just making a note to fill up both from the house mains, when he was called away to round up the cows who, in search of grass, had forced their way into the woods near Rannaldini’s watchtower.

‘We’ll have to raise the voltage on the electric fences,’ Rannaldini told Tabitha.

‘Pity Mummy can’t do that to keep you in.’

‘Stony limits cannot keep in love, my darling.’

Tristan missed Tab desperately, but they were still so frighteningly behind schedule and over budget that he plunged into work, driving himself and the crew to a point of collapse.

He was incredibly forgetful, not finishing sentences or remembering names. Before, he’d kept the whole script almost to the line in his head; now Wolfie had to remind him what scene he’d shot an hour before.

His nights were racked by drenching sweats, and hideous dreams of rape, torched flesh and a black cobra curling evilly round the neck of Tabitha, who would suddenly become his lovely, naked mother. How could he blame Maxim for brutal, incestuous lust, when he was tortured himself by the same shaming desires for Delphine?

Often he was seen wandering round Paradise at dawn, muttering, ‘Rannaldini doesn’t know what he’s doing.’

He was still stonewalling about the introductions. The plot was now so cartoon simple he felt that constant reappearances by Rannaldini, explaining what was going on, would hold up the action. It would also mean agonizing cuts of other stuff, paring people like Colin Milton, Granny and Giuseppe down to nothing.

Not up to a tussle, however, he agreed that the Great Hall should be turned into an opera-house with a royal box. Rannaldini would then sweep in in his tails to conduct his overture.

Only two incidents marred the filming of this opening. Meredith was sacked because a falling piece of scenery missed Rannaldini by inches and Lucy, after everyone had raved that her make-up of Granny and the characters in the royal box would win her an Oscar, found an adder coiled in her make-up basket. A terrified Lucy told only Baby, whom she had to make up immediately after her discovery.

‘Must have crawled in by itself.’ Baby tried to cheer her up. ‘Adder in the basket’s better than chicken.’

Tristan had already shot two endings: Schiller’s, in which Philip hands Carlos over to the Inquisition, and Verdi’s, which has the ghost of Charles V, played by Granny’s boyfriend Giuseppe, emerging from his tomb (which looked, according to Granny, like a ‘public lavatory in Morocco’) and drawing a terrified Carlos inside.