The Maestro's Mistress (6 page)

Tara gripped the receiver.
‘When?’

‘Last night, just after I picked
him up from the concert. In the car.’

‘Oh no!’

‘I took him straight to the
nearest hospital. He was asking for you. All the time, he was asking for you,’
her mother said bitterly.

Already Tara knew the worst. Her
heart was even now trying to absorb the blow.

She heard her mother’s voice
again, flat with resignation and despair. ‘He had a second massive coronary at
four this afternoon. That was it. Dead.’

Tara shut her eyes tight, trying
to ward off the shock and pain. ‘Look, I’m coming home – right away. I’ll get a
taxi.’

‘No point. I’ve taken two sleeping
pills. I’ll be flat out in a few minutes. Come tomorrow. Or better still, go to
your lectures for a change and come home at the weekend.’

‘Mum!’

The line clicked off. The
dialling tone purred in Tara’s ear. She started to punch the buttons again, and
then thought better of it.

‘Bad news?’ the porter asked
sympathetically as she walked, zombie-like, back to the desk in the lobby.

‘Yes, my father. He had a heart
attack.’ She stared unseeingly ahead, appalled at the tragic waste of it.
Fifty-two and such a wonderful person. Such a brilliant instrumentalist, far
too good to have been buried in the second row of the violins all these years.
And now there would be nothing else for him, his future cruelly snuffed out.

The porter shook his head. ‘I’m
sorry, love.’

‘Have you any children?’

‘Just the three lads. Your father
was lucky having a girl like you.’

If only you knew, Tara thought
with bitter self reproach.

‘Are you going home then?’

‘Tomorrow.’

‘That’s right. No good dashing
off now. Go and get some sleep – best healer in this world.’

Tara forced a smile, then walked
to the stairs with leaden legs. It seemed difficult to imagine ever sleeping
again. She lay in the narrow bed, her arms by her side, cold and stiff as
though she too were dead.

Her father had gone. She kept
hearing her mother’s voice: ‘That was it. Dead.’

Dead. His body would be lying in
a bag, stacked in a cabinet for corpses. His body was there just a few miles
away from her. She could go there and seek it out and embrace it as she used to
when she was a little girl. She could embrace it through eternity, but he would
not be there. Where was he? Where had he gone? How could all that spirit and
talent and skill suddenly be nothing? How could a life be rubbed out so
swiftly?

There were no answers to the
torturing questions. And there was no sleep either. She sat up and wrapped her
arms around her knees and rocked to and fro, softly moaning his name. Daddy,
Daddy.

Bruno travelled home with her.
She told him she couldn’t face her mother on her own. My mother is a widow, she
thought in horror, fearful of the change she might see in the parent she had
always considered the most psychologically tough member of the family.

But her mother was reassuringly
the same; not openly ravaged by grief, nor pink-eyed and tearful.

She welcomed Bruno in a
pleasantly neutral manner, told him to call her Rachel and fed him hot buttered
muffins and slabs of chocolate cake. She said she had been keeping herself
occupied cooking and shopping in preparation for the probable stream of
sympathy callers who would need to be offered snacks. Keeping her numbed brain
busy.

Bruno and she got on famously.
She insisted that he stayed on over the weekend and got up at six to drive him
to the station to take the early train to London on the Monday morning.

‘I’ve invited him to come to the
funeral,’ she told Tara over breakfast.

‘Thanks.’

‘Is it serious? You and Bruno?’

Tara frowned, considering.

‘He seems to think so,’ her
mother observed. ‘I just hope you don’t hurt him.’ Rachel stared hard at her
daughter before rising to clear the table.

‘Like I hurt Daddy. Is that what
you’re trying to say?’ Tara demanded, stung and resentful.

‘You’re very powerful, Tara. You
grab at life and squeeze it as though it were a great big juicy orange.’

‘What the hell does that mean?’

‘It means you’re capable of being
very selfish and ruthless.’

Tara gasped. ‘Thanks for the
character assassination. You were always rather good at that, Mum.’

‘You needed squashing by someone,
from around the age of eighteen months.’

‘God! Now I know why I left home
and didn’t come back.’

‘You left home because your
father finally confronted you with some harsh realities about yourself.’

Tara breathed deeply as anger
burned inside her. She knew she had been wayward and self-centred. She knew she
had been bolshie and difficult. They had expected so much.
He
had expected
so much. She had felt stifled, harnessed and handcuffed. She didn’t think they
had ever had any idea of how she felt.

It was all Freddie’s fault. If
Freddie hadn’t gone and died when he was only ten, they wouldn’t have been so
fragile and bitter. They wouldn’t have needed to make her so precious and
special, to mould her into the genius who would tread in her father’s musical
footsteps and far beyond. All in honour of her dead brother.

Tara’s large green eyes swam with
tears as she confronted her mother’s dignified, weary face. ‘Don’t let’s fight,
Mum. Please.’

Her mother gave a rueful smile.
‘Well it’s too late now.’ She sighed. ‘Too late to mend the past.’

‘If I’d any idea he was going to
be ill, I’d never have stayed away. I just didn’t know how to build a bridge
back.’

‘I know,’ her mother agreed
absently. ‘I just wish he could have seen you before he died.’

Tara thumped the table with her
fist. ‘Oh God! DON’T!’

‘No, I’m sorry.’

Tara wanted to jump up and wrap
her arms around her mother and for them to weep together. But her mother was
being very brave and controlled and it seemed important not to disturb the
outer shell of calm self-possession.

A fragile truce held until the
day of the funeral.

Tara put on a navy dress which
had been a favourite of her father’s. It flared softly from the waist and had
wide white lapels. With it she wore simple black courts which she had bought in
a charity shop close to the university.

Her mother was in dark burgundy,
a neat suit with a cream silk blouse underneath. Tara thought she looked both
lovely and noble.

‘I hope I’ll be able to sing,’
Tara said, feeling a thick choking sensation in her throat as she sat beside
her mother in the vast black saloon car and watched the hearse, with the
flower-decked coffin, move sedately in front of them on its journey to the
church.

Bruno was there with them, a
solid and comforting presence, already bolted on to the nucleus of the family.

‘I should hope you will,’ her
mother responded drily. ‘It was you made such a fuss about doing it. The
organist will be pretty fed up if he’s been practising day and night and
doesn’t get to play his party piece after all.’

‘Daddy would have been pleased,’
Tara said, suddenly feeling like a small girl desperate to please a beloved
parent. ‘Wouldn’t he?’

Her mother smiled. ‘Yes, he
would.’ She sighed, a long quivering expulsion of air.

‘Oh, God! This is so awful!’ Tara
wailed, fearful of exploding in a storm of unstoppable weeping.

‘Yes, it’s called mortality,’ her
mother said in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘It shouldn’t happen to one’s own
darlings. They should live for ever. But in time I suppose we’ll adapt to the
idea.’

Tara looked at her mother’s
composed, almost serene face and wondered if losing a child made  you almost
immune to every other thing that life threw at you afterwards.

The church was crammed with
people. Tara felt her heart curiously soothed and uplifted to see this outward
sign of the way her father’s life had been valued. She found herself able to
sing the hymns without faltering and when it came to the time for her solo,
following the vicar’s address, she mounted the altar steps with a feeling of
resolute calm.

It was the
Pie Jesu
from
Faure’s
Requiem
which she had chosen, a piece for which her father had
always expressed a great fondness. She remembered how he would play his 1950s
recording to her when she was a small child. The themes lingered in her mind,
triggering off those fragile childhood feelings that were perhaps more commonly
aroused by
Away in a Manger.

Her light, pure soprano voice
sprang out into the still cool air of the church, creating a ripple of feeling
and bringing a lump of regretful sensation to a great many throats.

‘Pie Jesu, Domine, dona eis requiem;
dona eis requiem sempeternam’  
Blessed
Jesus, O Lord, grant them rest; grant them everlasting rest. She recalled the
English translation as she sang. Oh yes, let him rest, she thought. He’d had a
pretty hard time of it all in all. ‘Don’t I ever get a moment’s peace?’ he used
to joke.

Rest now Daddy. There’ll be peace
stretching on for ever and ever.

Her voice swelled with feeling as
she faced the congregation, free now of all apprehension or restraint. As her
glance swept along the rows a figure seated alone in a side pew beneath the
stained glass windows seemed to spring out at her, demanding attention. A coil
of shock spun inside her as she recognized the great conductor Xavier; austere,
remote, chillingly inscrutable.

Her composure faltered for a
second and there was a small break in her voice as she lingered on the closing
note.

Returning to her pew, her task
completed, the tears began to roll unrestricted down her cheeks. Her mother
pressed her hand and smiled, her own eyes dry still. From the edge of her
vision she was painfully aware of the dark rigid form of Xavier. A satanic
figure at my father’s wake, she thought with quite unfounded aggression.

Back at the house the rooms
seemed to be thronging with people: family, neighbours, players with the Tudor
Philharmonic.

Her mother started opening wine
bottles, a task which Bruno instantly offered to take over. ‘Pour large ones,’
she instructed him. ‘I can’t bear all that hushed whispering.’

Tara circulated, dutifully greeting
relatives, gritting her teeth as she attempted to absorb their sympathy, deftly
fielding the inevitable questions on the progress of her studies and her future
career.

Yes, she was studying philosophy.
Yes, it was fascinating. No, she didn’t quite know yet what one
did
with
philosophy.  She was sure something would turn up.

As she conversed her attention
was caught by the high-pitched whine of a car’s engine passing the house.
Glancing through the window she registered a granite grey Porsche, glimpsed a
flash of red wraparound stripes.

Moments later the doorbell rang.
Throwing open the door Tara stared up at the tall grim-faced man, taking in the
familiar saturnine features which adorned the sleeves of millions of discs. It
seemed curious to see them here in close up, in the flesh.

‘Saul  Xavier,’ he said,
extending his hand courteously. ‘And you are Richard’s daughter.’

It was a statement, not a
question.

‘Yes’. She was curiously unnerved
by the effect of his proximity. When his strong fingers unclenched from hers
she felt dampness in her palms and her heart was bounding. It was ridiculous.
She had met plenty of famous people before, but had never been the slightest
overawed.

She ushered him in and went to
find her mother. ‘The King of the Maestros is here,’ she announced. ‘Correction
– Emperor.’

‘Xavier?’ Her mother appeared
unsurprised. ‘He phoned earlier to say he hoped to be able to come.’ She
smiled. ‘Well, well!’

Tara watched her mother walk up
to the great man and allow her hand to be sympathetically retained in his as he
inclined his dark head to her fair one.

‘Rachel, my dear,’ Tara heard him
say. ‘Georgiana sends her very deepest condolences. We both remember Richard’s
playing from way back.’

‘God, he’s smooth,’ Tara hissed
to Bruno who was eyeing the conductor with undisguised wonder. ‘Positively
glistening.’

Bruno patted her affectionately
in a ‘there-there’ kind of way. He loved her when she was indignant. ‘It’s good
of him to come. Your mother will be really pleased.’

Tara grabbed a nearby glass of
wine and drained it in one gulp. She felt exhausted and dangerously on edge
after these few days at home, trying to be the kind of daughter her parents had
always wanted. She watched her mother talking with Xavier as though they were
guests at some elegant cocktail party and felt a growing dislike for him. Her
father used to tell stories of his occasional brutality at rehearsals; singling
out individual players and humiliating them, creating an atmosphere of fear
rather than comradeship. Although she recalled that her father had always
considered that the ends justified Xavier’s means.