The Maestro's Mistress (15 page)

Not a muscle of his face
flickered. ‘This is nothing to do with her.’

‘The house you share must be
something to do with her.’

‘I have more than one house.’

As if that were the issue. She
stared at him, astounded by this brutal, single-minded clarity of purpose.
Afraid too.

‘Tara!’ He rattled her arm. ‘What
are you thinking? You haven’t thought of killing it?’

‘Of course I have.’

‘Tara!’ His eyes were like guns.

‘I could just have done it,’ she
said, facing his relentless gaze. ‘You would never have known.’

‘So why didn’t you?’

‘It’s yours as well as mine.
Equal rights for fathers.’

He was incensed. ‘Is that a real
feeling, or something you read in a magazine?’

‘What do you think?’

He looked at her, assessing and
then understanding. His smile came from deep inside. ‘We’re going to make a
wonderful pair you and I.’

‘I hope I’m up to it,’ she said
drily.

And then, with a force entirely
out of her control, the belief that they could do this thing came suddenly
flooding in. For days she had felt herself motionless and still. She had been
the deep inanimate pool which collects at the head of a death-fall cliff. And
now she was the roaring cascade of water, all sparkle, movement and shimmer.

She and Saul  Xavier. They were
truly a pair. They matched each other, understood all that was unspoken. For
all that he was so ferociously talented, for all that the chasm between their
life experiences was formidable, they would be soul mates.

She reached out and touched his
face. ‘I want it too – more than anything. Your baby growing inside me.’

He looked at her with pure
adoration. ‘I’m forty years old Tara,’ he said in a low voice. ‘I am past my
youth.’

‘And I am nineteen,’ she replied.
‘There’s a generation between us. And that situation is unlikely to change.’
Her eyes beamed out a challenge. ‘So!’

She telephoned her mother. There
was no reply. One of Donald’s nights obviously.

Saul was heavily engaged with a
multitude of musical personnel. Tara wandered through the vast hall, renewing
acquaintance with its broad expanses and its hidden nooks and crannies,
sniffing it out in the manner of a dog long banished from its home.

A number of players recognized
her, recalling the little girl who used to trot alongside her father, Richard
Silk, holding tightly to his hand and looking around her wide-eyed at the huge
stage and the vast amphitheatre of the auditorium with its gilded balconies
banked one on top of the other.

In this curious lonely hour,
suspended between her old and new life she felt no connection with the previous
Tara: the biddable little girl, the rebellious young adult. In this hour she
felt like a latter day child bride, a Dauphine or an Infanta sent to attend on
her husband-to-be in the country of which he was ruler.

What had just taken place between
her and Saul was still in the realm of fantasy. She had not yet fully adjusted
to the incredible idea that a new life was growing inside her. To be now faced
with the unfolding of a whole new life for herself was almost too awesome to
comprehend.

Saul secured her a prime seat for
the performance. The view was magnificent.

The orchestra members came
trickling in, seating themselves and forming a vast black and white chequered
board. Tuning up commenced, that familiar confused din that had thrilled her
with anticipation from being a tiny child. Short brays from the clarinets, tiny
shrieks from the piccolos, the boom of drums and the velvet growl of double
basses underneath.

And then, as though an unseen
hand had moved over them, the noise faded and subsided. The audience stiffened,
sat upright.

She watched Saul cut a swift path
through the players: tall, upright and unsmiling, a hunter on the attack. As
was usual the applause from the audience was neither registered nor
acknowledged. It was yet to be earned.

His two taps on the rostrum
caused the hum of the auditorium to sink to a sigh. And from a sigh to total
silence.

The overture to Mozart’s
Abduction
from the Seraglio
. It started innocently enough. And then exploded into the
auditorium, all flash and dazzle, grabbing the audience by the throat, sending
electric impulses down the spine. Another sudden change and the audience were
lapped in a sweet melody. Love music from the yearning sigh of the strings, the
water-clear purity of woodwind.

The house lights went right down,
leaving only the low-intensity lights on the music stands to bathe the
orchestra in a soft glow. The neon bulb in Xavier’s podium light illuminated
the Maestro from below. Tara stared in fascination at the chilling image
created: a harsh, macabre mask darkly shadowed and menacing, its frowning eyes
glinting in the cold light like steel balls. Xavier’s mouth was drawn in a
tight thin line as he conducted and his jaw worked furiously with
concentration.

Tara felt her breath coming in
thick gasps. Then something began to happen in her belly, some horrible
crawling turbulence, a rhythmic droning that rapidly progressed from sensation
to pain. She was aware of snakes of grinding torment, dark oily trickles
sliding between her thighs.

She sat transfixed, trying to
control reality, to push away the evidence of sensation. Stop! she shrieked
silently to her disobedient body. Stop this!

Wildly she sprang from her seat,
stumbling mindlessly up the sloping aisle and out into the broad stairway,
desperate for cool air. Somehow she got herself to the foyer. Her head was
filled with terror. She lurched into the street, instantly attracting the
attention of a taxi. ‘A hospital,’ she moaned urgently. ‘Any hospital. Quickly
– please, please!’

CHAPTER
12

Rachel tried not look at the
phone. It was past midnight. Tara was not at home and this was one of her
working nights.

She’s an adult, Rachel told
herself, her mind filled with visions of rape and blood and death. She’s
probably out with friends. But what friends? Tara had been distressingly alone,
almost hermit-like since Richard’s death. Should she try and contact Bruno? She
paused, her fingers stroking the smooth plastic of the phone. Something told
her there would be nothing to be gained from that.

She tried to forget about the
phone and poured herself yet another large whisky. The liquid slid like fire
down her throat. Still her imagination continued to torture her with the maimed
mangled body of her only child.

When the doorbell sounded and she
saw Xavier standing there in the doorway, the only thing she felt was
tremendous relief. It was the arrival of a member of the police force she had
been dreading
. ‘I’m sorry madam, I have some rather bad news. May I come
in?’

‘Is she here?’ Xavier said. He
looked wild – desperate.

‘No.’ She frowned, her brain
clearing itself of the previous fears and suspicions and starting to frame
fresh ones. ‘Come and join me for a drink,’ she told him.

She watched him rotate the glass
in slow agitation. ‘Has she told you?’ he asked.

‘She tells me very little,’
Rachel commented. ‘Is she safe?’

‘I hope to God she is.’

Someone stop this agony, prayed
Rachel. She had dared to hope that Xavier would be able to reassure her on that
one thing – even if some other disaster was about to spring itself on her.

‘She was fine a couple of hours
ago at the concert,’ he said, his voice heavy with apprehension.

‘When you have a girl you worry
about murder and attack and rape and unwanted pregnancy,’ Rachel said. ‘Is that
what I should know about? Is she pregnant? I’ve had my suspicions.’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s yours!’

‘Yes.’

‘You unspeakable bastard!’ she
said flatly.

He made no reply. ‘Where would
she have gone? To that young man?’

‘No, that’s all over. He’s not
old enough yet to deal with someone like Tara.’

‘Quite.’

Rachel felt hollow and sick. When
the telephone rang she grasped it as though it were a raft in a rough sea.
‘Yes.’ She listened for no more than a few seconds. ‘Yes. I’ll come – right
away.’

She turned to Xavier. ‘She in St
Stephen’s Hospital. Bleeding; suspected miscarriage.’

‘I’ll drive you,’ he said.

‘I think I’d rather accept that
favour from anyone in the world but you,’ she said bitterly. ‘But I’m well over
the limit now – and there’s no one else is there?’

They were there in fifteen
minutes. Xavier drove like a madman. Sitting next to him in the passenger seat
Rachel began to realize that his feelings were violently aroused. A sense of
impotent desperation seemed to fill the car.

This was not the picture of a
mature man who has been fooling around with a sexy young girl and now regrets
his actions and his wife’s anger. This was a picture of a man in real pain.

She supposed she should be
grateful that at least her daughter had not been used as a casual plaything by
a man who had no appreciation of her. Or was there some other, more devious
reason?

Rachel did not know. She could
not be bothered to conjecture. All that mattered was Tara coming through this.
Regaining her strength and rediscovering her zest for living. Coming home.

‘Who takes preference here?’
Rachel asked Xavier as they progressed down the corridor towards the room the
night sister had indicated. ‘The father of the unborn child or the mother of
the suffering daughter?’

His grey eyes were utterly bleak
and Rachel saw that it would be unthinkable to play the possessive parent, even
if that had been in her nature.

Tara was lying stretched out
under the sheets. The bed was tilted so that her feet were higher than her
head. Her eyes, watery dark with the aftermath of panic and pain, leapt between
lover and mother, anxiety and defiance jostling one another for position.

She nodded towards her raised
feet. ‘They’re trying to stoop it leaking out,’ she said shakily.

Rachel was almost weeping with
the blessed relief of seeing Tara alive.

Xavier was holding back, his
massive self control stretched to the limit as he looked at this miracle of
femininity on the bed: death white, gaunt, grey crescents of puffy skin under
her eyes. Hair sticky with sweat and entirely without artifice. Utterly,
heart-stoppingly desirable.

‘It’s still there,’ Tara told
them with a tight little smile. ‘Fighting like hell to hang on.’

‘Oh God!’ said Rachel.

‘I’m sorry Mum.’ Tara looked with
appeal at Rachel. ‘I should have told you.’ Her gaze rested only briefly on her
mother and then switched longingly to Saul.

Rachel felt her heart crushed.
‘I’ll leave you two alone for a few moments,’ she said quietly, moving out into
the corridor where she walked up and down without purpose.

Tara took Saul’s hand and drew it
to her face, kissing it tenderly. ‘I’m not going to lose this baby,’ she told
him. ‘I won’t let it go. I promise you. The doctor said my cervix hadn’t
dilated so there’s every chance.

He stroked her head. Never in his
life had he experienced anything approaching the depth of emotion that was
aroused in him now. Even his greatest moments of musical elation and triumph
were eclipsed. He would move heaven and earth for this small astonishing
creature who was battling so fiercely for the life of his child.
Their
child.

‘How long will they keep you
here?’ he asked. ‘If I didn’t think it would be dangerous I’d steal you from
them right now.’

‘I don’t know. Maybe a few days;
the doctor said they had to be sure the bleeding had stopped. Not long.’

‘Far too long,’ he said with a
grim smile. ‘And then I shall take you to my house in Oxford. You’ll like it
there.’

She smiled back. She was too weak
to put up any opposition to this breathtaking masterfulness. And even if she
were stronger she doubted if she would make a stand. The temptation to be with
Saul, to exist in the glow of his presence, to rest in his arms was simply too
powerful to resist.

In the depths of her
consciousness some little spark of premonition suggested to her that some older
Tara, in some future moment, might look back on all this with tolerant
amazement.

But just now all she wanted was
him.

And like Saul, Tara had a
strength of belief in herself that allowed her to pursue her own ends long
after other people would have bowed to the demands of compromise.

The next day Rachel came to visit
on her own. She brought some early daffodils and slender sprays of mauve
freesia. Beside the five dozen red roses and the huge stargazer lilies which Saul
Xavier had sent earlier they looked somewhat insignificant.