The Maestro's Mistress (42 page)

His glance moved from one of them
to the other. ‘I walked through fields for days and days. Slept up against
walls or in barns. A tramp.’

‘You must have been concussed.
You were ill!’ Tara exclaimed.

‘That is likely. But as you both
know I was already in some disarray before the accident.’

Tara bit down hard on her lip,
could not bear either to speak or look at either of her two loved ones.

‘I eventually ended up in a smart
anonymous hotel near Henley. A place for business conferences – an internet
connection in every room, piped Vivaldi through the speaker system. No one
recognized me.’

‘Were you wearing a bag over your
head?’ Alessandra asked.

He smiled. ‘I lay low, wore a
baseball cap I found abandoned in the bar.’

‘No!’ Alessandra opened her mouth
wide in grinning disbelief.

‘The hotel used to be a private
house,’ he said evenly. ‘My uncle’s house, where I spent my childhood.’

Tara reached out a hand to him.
‘Oh, Saul!’

His eyes hardened. ‘There is no
need for pity. I was not desperately unhappy there. I had the perfectly
standard life of the child of a minor aristocrat. I was looked after by nannies,
I was given an expensive boarding education. And my uncle was a devotee of
music; it was all around, all of the time. Live performances in the drawing
room, recordings on the record player and then the Hi Fi system.’

Alessandra shifted in her chair.

Her father turned to her, his
smile gritty and ironic. ‘I can tell when I’m boring people. The pouring out of
human frailty isn’t the most exciting topic.’

Alessandra began to protest. He
cut in: ‘Look it’s enough that we all still love each other.  You don’t have to
stay and listen to this stuff. Go and feed that great snorting horse. I’ll come
and join you in a minute.’

Alessandra got up. She kissed her
father on the forehead. She looked at the pink and grey bruises on his
cheekbone and shook her head. Passing Tara she murmured, ‘Nobel Peace Prize
withdrawn.’

Tara smiled briefly. She was
watching Saul intently.

‘This is something I want to say
just to you, Tara. I went to that place because there was something I needed to
remind myself of. It was there that I learned to be totally reliant on myself,
to be fiercely self-sufficient, utterly contained.’

‘How old were you when you
learned that?’

‘About six. I’d already started
on music lessons. My uncle was not a loving man you see, but he was an
excellent musician. He didn’t offer warmth, but he did offer the gift of music.
I grabbed on to music as my emotional lifeline.’

Tara closed her eyes. She studied
her fingers, flexing them, recalling her own childish isolation after Freddie
died. And she had had the benefit of loving parents. ‘You were so alone,’ she
told him. I suppose that’s why you married so young.’

‘Georgiana was the perfect wife
for a man who needed a beautiful mate. A mate who wouldn’t penetrate that
fragile inner part of him that needed to be closed and secret.’

Tara nodded, understanding at
least some of what he was telling her.

His eyes glinted. ‘You were
dangerous, Tara. You pierced the container I’d sealed inside me. You made me
vulnerable, exposed me to neediness again.’

‘And, oh God, you were sometimes
so angry with me,’ she cried.

‘Yes. Because I love you so
fiercely, so hopelessly.’

She put her arms around him and
rocked him as one would a child. ‘And when you heard Bruno trying to claim that
Alessandra was his. What then?’

‘Internal hell broke loose.’

‘You didn’t believe it,’ she
challenged him, her eyes blazing.

‘Of course not. I know Alessandra
is mine. But seeing you with that nice, open young man, thinking of what you
had shared together. And thinking of what a pleasant easy time you could have
had with him —’

Tara cut in, savage and
insistent. ‘I didn’t want an easy time. I wanted to be engulfed and bewitched.
To be with you in the rapids, steering my precarious little craft, negotiating
the rocky shoal, never knowing from one minute to the next how deep it was 
underneath – infinite or just a few dangerous inches. Oh God - how I loved
you!’ She held him tight. ‘And how I still do, God help me!’ She let out a
sigh. ‘My darling, it was right that you came back. If only because Alessandra
is your very own flesh and blood. And no one can take that from you, whatever
happens.’

He raised his head. His face was
chilling and austere. ‘Alessandra must have her own life. She doesn’t belong to
me – to either of us. She is her own person. It is
you
who are my flesh
and blood. You and me – sex, flesh, birth, blood. Man and wife. One flesh.’

She groaned as he gripped her
upper arms in fingers of steel and pressed his lips over hers. ‘I am not your
wife, Saul,’ she murmured.

‘Oh yes. In spirit you are my
wife. And you will be soon in reality. If Georgiana won’t finalize the divorce
I think I shall kill her.’

Through the intensity of her
emotions an impish smile broke out on Tara’s face. Saul looked at her
outraged. 

She told him the news; that
Georgiana wanted to marry again. Some doctor or other. That she was sporting a
handsome ruby on her wedding finger.

He considered for a few moments
and then offered no comment. Tara did not press him. She had always known there
was a part of him which must be left secret and untouched. But there was more
than enough that he had given in return.

They walked out into the garden
making for the stable block Saul had had built for Tosca the year before. Soon
the world would crowd in: the press, Roland Grant, the rebuilding of an established,
dazzling career, the construction of an embryonic one and new furrows to
plough. But just now she had him to herself.

She pulled his arm around her. He
held her very close.

Alessandra was invited to a
friend’s house. Saul said he would drive her there in Tara’s Jaguar.

Tara went out with them and
wagged a warning finger at him. ‘No rally driving in my car!’ She looked
pointedly at Alessandra as she said so. ‘Precious cargo,’ she mouthed at him,
her eyes then travelling meaningfully over his own person.

On his return to the house Tara
heard him go down to the basement. She followed on, hesitant and apprehensive.
She knew there would always be that anxiety with Saul and because of it she
would always be drawn to him, held irresistibly.

He had the recording system up
and running. Three differing images glowed on the screens. ‘You have done all
this,’ he said, fingering the container of completed and edited film, whilst
staring at the three faces of the tortured Maestro Xavier conducting.

‘I did it because I thought you
were dead,’ she told him with an upsurge of new anger.

‘You did all this for me. Even
though you knew it was the sick work of a man intent on destroying everything
he loved. You and Alessandra. My art. Your generosity makes me feel humble,
Tara.’

He swung round on his stool. They
looked at each other. Tara turned away.  The power of his feeling overwhelmed
her.

‘Do you remember at your father’s
funeral that you said you wanted to roar and howl?’ he asked her.

‘You told me to weep a flood,
told me it would prevent years of painful leaking later. I’ve always remembered
that.’

‘It was something I heard from a
famous psychiatrist I met when I was on tour in Austria years ago. It stuck in
my mind.’ He looked down, his long arms hanging slack.

‘Saul?’ Tara called to him,
bringing him softly back to the here and now.

‘When I was walking in those
fields the days just after the accident, that’s what I was doing. Sobbing and
howling. It just happened. I would force myself to stop. And then it would start
again.’

She gathered up his hands and
held them protectively in her own. ‘What were you sobbing for? The little
lonely boy in the big house doing his piano practice?’

‘My uncle didn’t want me there. I
was there on sufferance.’

‘What do you mean?’

He gave a harsh, gritty laugh.
‘My aristocratic forbears, with their international pedigree, were not quite as
they seemed. My paternal grandfather was a Spanish wine grower who had a home
in both northern Spain and southern England.  My father was Oxford educated and
well connected, and my mother was indeed Grecian and beautiful. It was just
that she was the household’s parlour maid who my very young father made pregnant
whilst on a visit to my uncle’s house.  She died of a haemorrhage just hours
after producing me. My father then got a commission in the army, went off on
active service to Korea and was killed.

‘My very much older and wiser
uncle was left holding the baby so to speak. He was a hero, I suppose. He did
not turn the Grecian parlour maid away, or parcel off the child to be adopted
when she died. But I don’t think it was ever possible that he could love me.
Nevertheless he did do his best.’

Tara wondered if the uncle
believed himself to be the baby’s father. Why else would he care for the
Grecian maid, and not give the child up. It made no sense. But in end it did
not matter. The child had been destined for greatness, and had seized life with
both hands. ‘So little Saul  Xavier decided that he could take on the world all
on his own,’ she said to him gently. ‘That he needed no one, except himself and
his music?’

‘Oh yes. And he did very well for
quite some time. Perhaps until he met someone he couldn’t stop himself from
loving.’

He turned away from her
confronting the stilled images of himself on the three screens. He made a sound
of disgust. ‘I was beginning to loathe myself,’ he told her. ‘I fancied that
everything I did led to a plunge into disaster. I was a downhill racer,
hurtling on to the destruction of everything I cared for.’

He picked up a snake of film from
the floor and pulled it through his fingers, his face savage. ‘I felt myself
growing older; terrified I’d lose all I had struggled for in those years when I
just relied on myself. So there was only one person left to destroy. Myself.’
He glanced at the distorted, harsh faces on the screens. ‘I began to tear at
the essence of my being. I would seize my precious art by the throat and
squeeze. You see, Tara, if you destroy all that is precious then nobody else
can step in and do it on your behalf. And when everything is torn down there is
nothing more to fear.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Tara. ‘I see that
very well.’

He turned away from her, his face
rigid and set. He wrenched the ribbons of film from the three parallel rollers
and flung them on the floor in a shiny heap, grinding at them viciously with
his foot.

He swung back to Tara. ‘Now I
start building again.’

‘Yes,’ she agreed quietly. ‘Yes.’

He saw her weariness, her need
for comfort after all she had endured for him. He took her in his arms. ‘Only you
can help me do it, Tara.’

‘I will,’ she said. ‘And I cannot
imagine how much courage it must have taken to come back.’

He held her close against him
‘You know it’s not in my power to change, don’t you? The essence of me, the Saul
 Xavier you first got to know, I can never change that.’

Tara considered. Warmth stole
through her. ‘Which of us can change ourselves? Rebuilding is far more real and
precious.’

It was the winter of the same
year. Morning frosts were laying a crusty white covering over the ground and
each evening the sun sank in a blaze of rose and gold.

On the day before Tara and Saul
were to be married, the bride-to-be went in search of her daughter. She carried
two pairs of gloves in her hand, wanting Alessandra to help her decide which
would be the most suitable to complement her simple cream bridal suit.

Approaching Tosca’s stable she
saw Alessandra brushing straw from Tosca’s tail – always a tricky task – and
Saul standing at the horse’s head, two fingers hooked into each side of the
head-collar.

‘Try to make her keep still,
Daddy.’

‘I am.’

‘You’re pretty good with her. She
kicks terribly sometimes.’

‘I might take up riding. I can’t
remember being up on a horse for years.’

‘No,’ said Alessandra.

‘No?’

‘You’d be desperately good at it
after about five lessons and start coming home with rosettes and silver
tankards. Do keep her still!’

‘Mmn.’

There were some moments of
silence.

‘Daddy?’

‘Yes.’

‘You know the Schubert Impromptu
in A?’

‘Yes.

‘Well, I was listening to a
couple of old recordings of it. Your vinyl discs. Brendel and Barenboim.’

‘So?’

‘They each use an entirely
different tempo in the first movement.’