The Maestro's Mistress (23 page)

‘You should take care,’ she said
to Saul with a knowing smile. ‘Middle-aged men can die of heart attacks in
trying to keep pace with a young girl.’

Dr Denton encouraged her in this
new frankness. He had told her that she should give herself permission to
listen to her inner thoughts, not to be afraid of them. Especially the thoughts
about sex.

She could tell that Saul was
startled, but he covered up well. ‘It’s kind of you to be worried about my
health,’ he said drily. ‘But there is no need.’

He fell into silence. They
progressed from the fish to the duck. He was not eating much, she noticed.

‘I want to give Alessandra a very
special present for her birthday,’ Georgiana said. She began to tell him about
her searches in little antique shops for Georgian jewellery. There was a chain
and a pendant she had seen. It would make the perfect start to a collection
that could continue through Alessandra’s childhood and youth.

Saul’s face went blank for a few
seconds. Then he smiled at her patiently. ‘There is no need for you to buy
Alessandra extravagant presents.’

‘I want to. There is nothing
wrong in that,’ Georgiana told him with sweet conviction. ‘She should have some
very special presents on her first birthday.’

‘Spend the money on yourself,’ he
said dismissing the subject with that floppy wave of his hand she had seem him
employ to dismiss countless orchestras on countless occasions. His smile
indicated that the subject was really of little importance or interest to him.

Georgiana was not dismayed. She
would do exactly as she liked.

The pudding arrived. Some
exquisite dessert wine also.

‘Georgiana, I want a divorce,’
Saul said softly.

Georgiana froze. Her eyes widened
and the irises shivered. Slowly she picked up her spoon and inserted a blob of
lemon soufflé. She decided to say nothing.

‘Did you hear me?’ His eyes were
hard.

She nodded.

‘Well?’

She shrugged. Ate another
spoonful of soufflé. If she focused carefully on savouring the lemon tang, then
the words Saul wanted to drop into her ears would simply float away into the
air. They would have no meaning, no consequence.

‘Tara is expecting another baby,’
he stated evenly. He said these words in such a way as to suggest that they
explained everything.

Her eyes slid from his in panic.
Her breathing became jagged and jerky. Tara was having another baby. Georgiana
must have a divorce. As simple as that.

Georgiana saw splinters of
iridescent red light dance in front of her eyes. She blinked, feeling her
insides swoop and glide in dizzy confusion. She stared at her plate, examining
the scrolls of silver chasing on the handle of the spoon she had just laid
down.

She screwed up her eyes,
following the lines of one of the scrolls and detecting the shape of a feather.
A perfectly symmetrical feather, the fronds precisely balancing on each side of
the central spine. Beautiful, orderly and perfect. The red lights began to
fade, and after a few moments went away altogether. She continued with her
pudding.

The muscles in Saul’s jaw
twitched with irritation. ‘Georgiana, you can’t just ignore this.’

She looked across to him and
smiled, her blue gaze wide and fixed. ‘No,’ she said, agreeable and vague.

He sighed, reining in his
mounting anger. ‘Do you want time to think about it?’ he asked. ‘I shall be
more than generous with the settlement. You would be a very rich woman.’

She gave another shrug. Money was
not an issue. She had always had plenty. ‘Yes, I will think about it,’ she said
finally. She was pleased with the dignified way she had said that. Dr Denton
would have been proud of her.

‘Thank you for the lunch,’ she
told Saul as she offered him her cheek to kiss as they prepared to     part.

‘And you will consider what I
have said very seriously,’ he urged.

‘Oh yes.’ She laid an
immaculately manicured hand on his arm and then she was gone.

Tara prowled the house; opening
doors, going into rooms, coming out again, picking up a book, putting it down
again. Settling to nothing.

She felt cruelly trapped –
snared, netted and caged. She did not want to be pregnant again, not just now.
She knew the exact moment of the conception. A new career and a new baby had
been launched on the same fate-laden night – that of her concert debut.

She wondered if Saul had
engineered it deliberately, recalling the roller coaster sex they had shared
that night when she had been so swept away by his passion she had forgotten
everything else, including birth control.

And if he had planned things to happen
this way she had to admire his tactics. If he had wanted to keep her tied to
him at home he could hardly have been more successful. Being pregnant, feeling
sick for half the day and finding it hard to keep up her practice schedule had
made the prospect of a budding career as a solo violinist vanish into a
distressingly distant future.

Moreover her doctor had advised
her against having sex, at least until the first few months were safely past.

Life was looking rather less rosy
than it had for some time.

‘He wants to cut me out of his
life,’ Georgiana told Dr Denton. ‘He can’t bear it that I’m friendly with the
girl and wanting to buy the baby presents.’

Dr Denton pondered on Georgiana’s
persistence in placing herself at the centre of things, how it did not occur to
her to consider her husband’s many other motives in wanting a divorce. All
those hours the doctor had spent with her and still she was as purely and unequivocally
self-centred as a small child.

Whilst he waited for Georgiana to
expand on her theme he took the opportunity to admire once again her elegant
streamlined body which transformed even the simplest clothes into haute
couture. He imagined the way heads would turn when she entered a room. She had
exceptional physical beauty. And he was sure that what she possessed beneath
her clothes was equally inspiring.

This afternoon her blonde hair
was like an incandescent stream of gold lit from behind by the summer sun. She
wore a dress of soft silk chiffon in a delicate pattern of fawn and ivory swirls.
Her eyes were shaded with soft russet shadow and her shoes, lying beneath the
chaise, were an absurd confection of creamy coloured straps perched on five-inch
heels. Around her neck was a single serpentine chain of gold. She epitomized
the essence of restrained good taste.

‘How can it be bad to buy
presents?’ she continued. ‘My parents used to say giving beautiful presents was
a way of demonstrating love. I remember once when we went to the seaside house
in Cornwall my mother bought me a wonderful doll that walked and talked. It was
to keep me company so that I would never be lonely in my strange bed when I
went to sleep at night.’

‘You were their child,
Georgiana,’ Dr Denton said softly. ‘That is why they gave you beautiful
presents.’

‘Alessandra is Saul’s child,’ she
replied. ‘And I am his wife.’ Her thin fingers plucked nervously at the folds
of her skirt, betraying considerable agitation. The skin between her eyebrows
puckered as they met in a frown of puzzlement. It was as though she were
straining to hear whispered words that were just too faint to comprehend.

‘Tara is having another child,’
she announced suddenly. ‘Alessandra will have a little brother or sister.’

There was a silence which lasted
for seven minutes. Dr Denton timed the period and declined to say anything. The
light on his tape machine winked as it recorded emptiness.

‘Tara played at the Royal Albert
Hall a few weeks ago,’ Georgiana volunteered. ‘People say she was quite good.’

Dr Denton saw an involuntary
spasm cross her face. Despair? Envy? True pain?

‘But they say she would be
nowhere if it wasn’t for Saul pulling strings for her behind the scenes.’

‘And what does Georgiana say?’

Another long silence. ‘I wasn’t
there,’ she said eventually in a flat voice.  She rubbed her hands across her
forehead. ‘Saul’s agent wants her to build a career, to play at concerts all
over the world.’

‘How does that make you feel?’ Dr
Denton asked.

She appeared not to have heard
his question. Her breathing was light and shallow: she was almost panting. Her
fingers folded into tight balls and kneaded her closed eyelids. ‘I can see
lights,’ she said. ‘They’re red and blue and gold – furry like the lights my
mother hung on our Christmas tree at home.’

‘Do you have a headache?’ Dr
Denton asked.

She shook her head. In a sudden,
entirely uncharacteristic surge of activity she swung her legs over the side of
the chaise and stood upright. Beads of sweat glistened on her face and the skin
of her forearms. ‘May I have a drink of cold water please?’

‘Of course.’ Dr Denton crossed to
the small refrigerator in a corner of the room and took out a bottle of mineral
water. He filed a glass and gave it to her.

She drained it in one gulp.

He had not seen her so agitated
before, flushed and in some disarray with her skirt tucked up nearly to her
buttocks where the fabric still connected with the edge of the chaise. The
sight of her like this had the effect of making him experience very
unprofessional feelings towards her.

‘I think you should come again
tomorrow,’ he told her.

She turned to look at him. She
was like someone returning from a long airplane flight, disoriented and
temporarily detached from reality. ‘Yes. Yes, I will.’

Sometimes she was astonishingly
obedient Dr Denton thought. And very suggestible. It would be the simplest
thing in the world to put her under hypnosis and seduce her right here in his
consulting room.

‘You are very safe, Georgiana,’
he would tell her. ‘With someone who loves you dearly. Who would never do you
any harm.’

He imagined himself talking very
softly to her, crooning and rhythmic, his voice a mistily penetrating
anaesthetic. He saw himself slipping his hand along the length of her calf,
over her knee, up the taut slender thigh. Reaching beyond, finding the moist
rosy flesh. Dropping words into her ear that would make that flesh wet with
longing.

The thought provided him with
some mild amusement directed against his own shockingly salacious feelings
towards his most beautiful, supposedly frigid client. Feelings, of course,
which must remain secret and undemonstrated.

He looked at Georgiana with a
mingle of professional and personal concern. ‘Are you feeling better now?’

She had wriggled her dress down,
stroked the folds into immaculate smoothness. She was slipping into her shoes,
her long slender feet like those of a ballet dancer. She looked up at him and
he was surprised to see her face suddenly transformed. A smile curved her lips
and her eyes shone with an excitement and purpose he had never seen before.

‘Yes,’ she said simply.

‘Would you like my secretary to
call a taxi?’

‘No. I think I’ll walk?’

‘Are you sure you are all right?’
He was startled to register the depth of concern he felt. Even though now she
was smiling and outwardly quite recovered.

She gave a little chuckle and
shook her head as though to say that there was no need to be worried on her
behalf. As her fingers closed around the brass doorknob, she turned to him and
said, ‘I’ve just thought of the most wonderful present to give Alessandra on
her birthday.’

CHAPTER
20

‘God, I hate being a bloody brood
mare again!’ Tara said, raging as she surveyed the mouth-watering buffet that
Mrs Lockwood had prepared and felt the immediate need to throw up.

‘My darling, you’re such a little
lioness when you’re pregnant.’ Saul came up behind her and slipped his arms
around her hips, sliding them upwards and cradling her breasts with tender
hands.

She wrenched herself from his
grasp. ‘I’m going to be sick,’ she gulped, desperately swallowing down the wave
of nausea. She raced to the bathroom and hung over the bowl retching. Only a
thin white dribble emerged but she felt bruised as if she had coughed up a
three-course dinner.

Groaning, she turned the
washbasin taps on full, scooping up handfuls of fresh water to splash over her
face and wash away all the grim traces. The face looking at her from the mirror
was putty grey and decidedly unappealing. The symptoms of this pregnancy were
far more pronounced than her former one. Already her waist had disappeared and
her stomach had begun to swell. Her breasts seemed as big and hard as
grapefruits.

Heaving a sigh she squirted
herself liberally with
Miss Dior
and went back to the drawing room which
was now filling up with guests. Xavier had arranged a special party to
celebrate the Tudor Philharmonic’s triumphant appearances at the Proms which
had been ecstatically received by both the audience and the critics. His
ambitions for the orchestra were turning into reality. Engagements and
recording contracts were rolling in. And the sales on existing recordings had
soared, bringing handsome financial reward to the players. The company was in
decidedly buoyant mood. Tara glanced out of the window to count the number of
Mercedes.