The Maestro's Mistress (29 page)

Tara reached out her hand and
Rachel grasped it.

Alessandra’s safe,’ Rachel said.
‘She’s with Saul.’

‘Aah.’ Tara felt new warmth steal
through her body. ‘That’s all that matters.’

She registered the grinding ache
of emptiness in her belly and knew that the baby had gone. But the feeling was
nothing stronger than mild regret. Alessandra was safe. Life could continue.
Nothing would ever be so bad again.

She looked at her mother. ‘There
are so many things I need to say to you.’

Rachel smiled.

‘About the past.’

Rachel shook her head. ‘There
will be all the time in the world.’

Tara started to frame some
thoughts but the words would not come.

‘They’ll wait,’ Rachel repeated.

Suddenly Rachel dared to take her
daughter in her arms. They were clasping each other, laughing, then weeping
with joy. This is like some kind of re-birth Rachel thought.

‘Is my brain damaged?’ Tara
asked, fighting hard against the urge to drift back into a doze.

‘You need to rest now. Alessandra
is safe, and that is what you need to focus on,’ Rachel said, knowing that only
the doctors could speak to Tara about what had happened and what it meant.

After Rachel had left Tara lay
staring at the ceiling. The events of the last forty-eight hours swam in and
out of her memory; the recollections of having been in Vienna to play at the
concert jostling with the image of Alessandra in some terrifying unknown
danger.

I shall never leave her again,
she kept telling herself. Never! She had a powerful sense of her life having
swerved away from the direction in which she had recently steered it.

Saul looked through the glass
partition and saw Tara lying propped on a mound of pillows. Her face was calm,
her expression strong and accepting and brave.

She should not have to suffer
like this.

He recalled all the times he had
hurt her, holding her away from him through his need to withdraw into himself.
How he had too often silenced her need for simple affection with commanding
sex. How he had dared to smite her with his disdain on that last fateful drive.

And still she loved him. And
sadly he knew he must hurt her further.

He placed the armful of flowers
he had brought in a mound at the foot of her bed. She held out her arms to him,
tears wetting her eyelashes.

‘Where is Alessandra?’ she asked
him.

‘At home asleep. Rachel and
Donald are standing guard.’

‘I should not have gone to
Vienna,’ Tara said, angry to find that she was unable to stop crying.

‘It would have happened some
time, whether you had gone or not,’ he said, not quite believing it.

He told her what had happened.
How Georgiana had been at her old tricks of watching the house and garden from
her car, how she had seized on the brief opportunity to snatch Alessandra.

He went on to describe the scene
at the cottage. He told her about Dr Denton’s offer to ensure Georgiana
received all the care and treatment she needed.

Tara listened to the flow of
words with a sense of revulsion and horrible guilt. She looked into Saul’s face
and read the thoughts behind the carefully constructed phrases. She understood
that there would no longer be any question of a divorce. He would never say so
openly. But his heart would no longer be in it. They had destroyed Georgiana
and now they must pay for it.

So be it, Tara decided. I shan’t
make any demands. Alessandra will always be ours, and that is enough.

The next day when came he pulled
her hard against him, a gesture of deep love, an insistent desire that must make
itself known, even if it could not immediately be satisfied.

Tara put her lips against the hard
warmth of his cheek. As his fingers pressed into the bones at the base of her
neck she held herself still, schooled herself not to cry out.  The tingling
down her arm intensified, small needles of sensation stabbing like tiny
electric shocks in the tips of her three middle fingers.

Xavier stiffened. Gently he
pushed her away from him, looked deep into her face. ‘What is it?’

She shook her head. She shrugged.

‘Tara! What is it?’

‘I have this terrible stiff
neck.’

He flinched. ‘So?’

‘So, there could be damage to the
nerves in the vertebrae.’ She reached up and touched the place. ‘It’s only
minimal, nor serious. It will probably get better over time.’

She recalled the discussion with
the consultant an hour before. An analysis of the scan she had undergone the
day before and kept fiercely secret. He had talked to her for some time, his
voice low and calm.

‘A slight loss of sensitivity in
the middle three fingers of your left hand,’ he had said. ‘Maybe a little
numbness in the tips. Maybe in time very little that will bother you at all.’

‘I’m a violinist,’ she told him.
‘A concert soloist.’

She had seen the doctor frown,
finding it hard to meet her gaze for a few moments.

‘It is all right,’ she had told
him. ‘I shall deal with it. My little girl is safe – that is what matters.’

Saul touched her shoulder, his
face tense. ‘Tara, speak to me. Surely it’s treatable.’

‘No! There is nothing further to
be done. There may be some spontaneous improvement, but I get the impression
it’s unlikely. And it will make little difference to my everyday life.’ She
stared at him, steely in her courage, in her challenge and defiance.

He took her hand. Her left hand,
her precious tremolo hand that sought the strings of her violin and coaxed them
into throbbing song. The three crucial fingers looked entirely normal. But
outward appearances could be cruelly deceptive.

He looked into Tara’s face. She
shook her head as she stretched out her fingers and examined them. ‘Something
has happened,’ she said. ‘A loss of power and precision. And it’s permanent. I
just know.’

He was silent.

She smiled at him. ‘It’s very
unlikely that anyone will notice – as long as I don’t walk onto a platform and
try to play my violin.’

‘Oh, my darling!’ he groaned,
closing his eyes in grief.

‘No more concert performances,’
she said drily, wondering if deep down he would be glad. She wasn’t sure yet
what she herself felt; the shock was keeping her numb.

She had the strong sense of the
three of them having committed a sin for which they were now being punished in
various ways. Thinking of it in that light and admitting the faults of the past
brought a curious relief. And with it the freedom to begin building another life.

She knew without a doubt that it
would be necessary to build afresh. The idyll that she and Saul had shared was
over.

PART THREE - THIRTEEN YEARS LATER

CHAPTER
27

Saul Xavier was leading a seminar
of student conductors at the Music Centre in Tanglewood, Massachusetts – the
summer location of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

The cream of music students
throughout the world was drawn to Tanglewood each year, a significant
proportion of them being students of conducting.

Saul had been conducting the
young Boston players for five summers now, and between rehearsals and concerts
he would spend time with emergent young conductors as they tried out their
skills on the student orchestra.

On a vivid August morning,
heralding the start of yet another sweltering day, the students were assembling
in the theatre concert-hall, a shed-like building with corrugated steel doors,
incongruously set in the sedate greenery of the Tanglewood grounds. Having
unpacked their instruments they were now seated on the stage, excited and keyed
up. The student conductors sat in the front row close to the stage, their eyes
riveted to the music scores on their laps.

Tara, sitting on her own in the
middle of the auditorium noticed how young they all looked, most of them in
their late teens and early twenties. Every year the students looked younger as
she and Saul got older.

On the programme were Schubert’s
Fifth Symphony and Stravinsky’s Firebird. Two of the student conductors would
each conduct one work, whilst the others would watch and hopefully learn.

Exactly a minute before the starting
time of the rehearsal Saul arrived at the main entrance to the hall and made
his way down the auditorium.

Eyes fastened on him. A
reverential silence fell.

Vaulting athletically onto the
stage he went to sit beside Gustav Walter, the coordinator of the conducting
course, and instantly nodded to the first conductor to start proceedings.

The young man was a tall
beanstalk with a mop of tight auburn curls. Tara was interested to hear how he
would tackle the challenge of Schubert’s deceptively delicate music. She had
talked with the young conductor at length over a number of beers and coffees
during the past couple of days.  She liked his openness and sensitivity, loved
his wide-eyed enthusiasm. She had a strong wish for him to do well, not only
because she judged he was good, but also because she feared that she would feel
unnerved and angry if Saul were to unleash his venomous sarcasm upon the young
man’s trusting head.

She breathed a sigh of relief as
the student took the orchestra effortlessly through a sensitive, warm and
honest rendering of the piece. Not even Saul could fault that. She noted with
pleasure how the would-be conductor was openly grateful for playing that
pleased him, how he requested things of the players rather than making demands.
He preferred to coax rather than instruct. She had the impression he would go
far.

At the end the players applauded
their conductor with warm spontaneity and Saul inclined his head in gracious
acknowledgement of a task well done.

The next student set the
orchestra off with arms whirling like windmills and a bending and stretching at
the knees more suited to a rigorous exercise regime in a gymnasium than
directing from the podium. His clumsy verbal commands to the players: ‘Loud’,
‘Soft’, ‘Short’, ‘Long’, were clearly heard over the music.

Tara bent her head towards the
score balanced on her knee so as to hide her amused astonishment.

At the close of the piece Saul
and Walter summoned both students and talked them through their performances.
Tara heard Xavier’s dry, sardonic tones biting deep into the unfortunate last
performer.

‘So, I see you are an all action
man. Maybe if you don’t make it as a conductor you could pursue a successful
career directing the rush hour traffic in Trafalgar Square.’

Tara did not stay to hear any
more. She went softly out of the auditorium and into the gardens beyond. Saul
would not notice her exit. He would be entirely happy for the next hour or so.
He had one student good enough to spend time with, yet not so brilliant as to
be a threat to his own prowess, and another who was sufficiently dismal and
wooden to merit the marshalling of all the skills in his baiting repertoire.

She wondered if there would be
time to make a phone-call to Alessandra. It was now one o’clock coming up to
lunch-time. Back home it would be time for breakfast.  Alessandra would just be
coming in from her early morning ride, ravenous for an early breakfast with her
grandmother Rachel.

Alessandra had always been
greatly fond of Rachel and got on well with Donald also. She stayed with the
two of them whenever Tara was away. Soon after they married, Rachel and Donald
bought a thatched cottage in a Bedfordshire village. It had two acres of land
including a large paddock and ample grazing for two or three horses. Close to
the back of the house were an old barn and some airy loose boxes. Alessandra
preferred to keep her bay mare Tosca there rather than at the Oxfordshire
house.

Tosca was always given as the
reason for Alessandra’s increasingly frequent and ever longer stays with Rachel
and Donald. But Tara suspected that the horse was only one factor in the
equation and that Alessandra simply felt more comfortable and relaxed in the
easy going atmosphere of the Bedfordshire cottage than the more formal Oxfordshire
household.

Suddenly Tara longed to hear her
daughter’s voice. She ran up the dirt path leading towards the cafeteria beside
the main gates where the reception on her cell phone was best and punched in
the number.

Rachel’s voice answered,
miraculously clear as though she were just in the next town. She handed Tara
straight over to Alessandra, who was full of news of Tosca’s latest
achievements. Listening to the joyful enthusiasm in the girl’s voice Tara felt
a warm glow of happiness. Whatever might be wrong between her and Saul, at
least their daughter was experiencing a stretch of untroubled happiness in this
summer shortly before her fourteenth birthday.

‘Grandma and Granddad have taken
me to loads of gymkhanas. Tosca’s won absolutely masses of rosettes. We did a
three foot course yesterday. It was fabulous!’