The Maestro's Mistress (7 page)

She doubted that her father had
ever had anything to fear from the likes of Xavier. He had been a superbly
technically skilled player, although sadly never one of the lucky few who had
that extra spark of talent that lifted them from the grinding ranks of the
orchestra into the sphere of glittering stardom.

‘Bruno,’ her mother called,
beckoning him towards her. ‘Come and meet one of Richard’s old sparring
partners.’

Bruno hurried forward, a flush
springing to his smooth, youthful cheeks. Tara heard the word “Sir” as he shook
Xavier’s hand.

Turning away she went into the
kitchen and started on the task of rinsing the glasses. She felt dizzy and disoriented.
The wine was already doing its work in her brain and there was an insistent
humming in her ears. She reached across to the table and picked up another full
glass.

The party began to disperse. Tara
skated in and out of the kitchen, smiling gamely while an assortment of now jolly
people kissed her cheek.

‘Are you all right, darling?’
Bruno murmured, sliding out of the departing crowd and winding an arm around
her.

‘Fantastic,’ she snapped. ‘Never
better.’

Following her into the kitchen he
picked up a cloth and started on the task of drying the chaotic pile of
crockery and cutlery stacked on the draining board. This helpfulness had the
effect of exasperating Tara beyond endurance.

‘Oh, for God’s sake! Leave me to
do it. Go and comfort my mother. You do it much better than I seem to manage.’

Bruno ignored her. He understood
her only too well.

‘Xavier was asking about my
musical exploits,’ he told her. ‘He thought there might be an opportunity to do
some playing in the Tudor Philharmonic. The percussion section sometimes needs
stand-ins.’

Tara glared at him. ‘Grow up
Bruno. There’ll be a waiting list a mile long to stand in at the Tudor Phil.
You’ve only been playing the kettle drums for a year. He’s just being polite.
Or most likely showing off how powerful he is to impress my mother.’

‘No,’ Bruno countered mildly.
‘The timpanist is here and Xavier got him over to talk to me. A really nice old
chap – he’s invited me to go and have a session with him in the next week or
so.’

Tara looked up at Bruno’s boyish
eager face and melted. ‘Oh, that’s marvellous. I’m sorry I’m being such a rat.’

Bruno smiled. ‘Xavier’s a
splendid chap. Really he is!’

‘OK. But for goodness sake stop
calling him “sir”.’

‘Sorry! It just keeps slipping
out.’

‘I don’t like him being here.
It’s all a sham.’

‘No. He truly admired your
father. And he is pretty fantastic.’

‘Stop being so impressed.’

‘Sorry.’

‘And stop saying sorry!’ they
chorused in unison, breaking into laughter.

Her mother came in. ‘Xavier’s
staying for supper. Bruno – be a darling and fish out a couple of bottles of
claret from the crate in the cellar. You’ll have grub about in the dust!’

‘That’s Daddy’s claret,’ Tara
blazed.

Her mother gave her a curiously
arch look. Calmly she turned to open the fridge and inspect the contents.

Tara was on fire with feeling.
She drained yet another glass of wine. Alcohol never made her incompetent or
slurred her speech, in fact Bruno frequently marvelled at her capacity to put
away the drink and stay remarkably lucid. What it did to Tara was connected
more to feelings than reasoning, which was why she now felt about to explode
with churning emotions.

Her mother laid four thick slices
of steak on the table and prepared a vinaigrette dressing to dribble over them.
Then she took a knife and began to slice an onion with steady precision.

Tara looked into her mother’s
face. Even poised over an onion her eyes were still entirely moisture-free.
‘Why does he have to stay?’ she hissed, rounding on her mother like an angry
snarling terrier. ‘What has he to do with us? This should be a night when you
and I can be together and grieve.’

Her mother looked up. Her face
was still and strangely serene.

‘Why can’t you weep?’ Tara
demanded furiously. ‘Why are you so blasted cool and collected?’

Her mother turned back to the
onion.

‘You bitch!’ Tara yelled. ‘You
bloody cold-hearted bitch, with your neat highlighted blonde hair and your nice
little job with that greasy doctor. No wonder Daddy felt he had to make the
final exit!’

Her mother straightened up and
faced her daughter, her face a wasteland of emotional wounds.

Xavier, standing silently in the
doorway, stepped forward and took Tara by the arm. ‘Stop it,’ he told her
softly.

He guided her through into the
sitting room where Tara shook him off and swore under her breath.

‘I want to howl,’ she said. ‘I
want to roar and sob and moan. Right from here.’ She thumped the base of her
stomach.

Hr looked down at her, his eyes
stripped of any readable feeling. ‘Go on then. Initiate a flood. It will
prevent years of painful and futile leaking in the future.’

Even in her rage, Tara saw the
sense in his words. But she had no intention of weeping at his command. ‘Not
here, not now,’ she said coldly.

‘Whilst
I’m
here?’

‘Yes.’ Tara glared fiercely up at
him.

Xavier, who was invariably
attracted to cool slender blondes, felt a primitive blast of sexual heat
radiating from this small, volatile elf who had eyes like peridots and breasts
as round and firm as peaches.

He stared down at her, commanding
his face to be blank. She would think he scorned her; that he held only
contempt for a young woman who was indulging in a small temper tantrum at her
father’s funeral. Turning away from her he walked over to the fine Bechstein
upright piano that had originally belonged to Tara’s grandfather. Its inlaid
walnut top was submerged under a mass of flowers – gifts of condolence, still
in their cellophane wrappings. Beside them was the battered case in which lay
her father’s latest, most precious, violin. Idly Xavier tapped his fingers on
the battered leather. Slowly he opened the case, took out the instrument and
stroked its gleaming belly thoughtfully.

‘He never made it to a
Stradivarius or a Guarneri,’ Tara remarked bitterly.

Xavier plucked the strings. ‘This
is a very close relation. A most beautiful instrument. Your father was an
excellent player, a true and loyal servant of music.’

‘He played his guts out in that
orchestra,’ Tara said angrily.

Xavier raised his eyebrows. ‘Many
players do. That is what they choose.’

‘They get paid peanuts, slaving
away day after day in rehearsals, night after night at concerts. And what do
you do? Stand in front of them waving a stick, then pick up your great fat fee
and fly off to some far flung corner of the world to bully the next lot of poor
suckers.’

Tara felt enormously pleased to
have got that off her chest. She bitterly resented Xavier’s continued presence.
He should have pushed off with the rest of the guests – or whatever you called
people at a funeral bash. Did he truly believe he was above ordinary human
conventions, that he had no need to observe the social niceties on these
occasions? Scrutinizing his carved aristocratic features she was certain that
he imagined himself to exist in some sort of atmosphere far above ordinary
mortals, breathing rarefied air.

‘The cost of you car would
probably represent double his annual salary,’ Tara continued, unstoppable,
vaguely remembering fragments from a debate in the student’s union concerning
the uneven distribution of wealth in Britain. ‘Whilst my mother will probably
have to sell his violin to cover the costs of this funeral and make ends meet.’

‘Not at all,’ her mother said,
coming into the room and regarding her angry daughter with long-suffering
resignation. ‘Your father left that to you. I shall never sell it, and neither
will you.’

‘If it’s mine then I can do what
I like with it,’ Tara fumed. ‘I’ll sell it and give you the money.  And then
I’ll be free.’

‘From what?’

‘Trying to be something I’ll
never be. Never being
good enough.’

‘Tara, what is all this about?’
Rachel asked in genuine bewilderment.

‘I don’t know.’ Tara fell silent.
Her throat filled with remorse and grief.

‘So – Richard’s daughter is not
only a singer,’ Xavier commented, looking interested. ‘I meant to compliment
you on your singing in church by the way,’ he told Tara. ‘I always prefer the
boy treble sound in Faure’s
Pie Jesu
rather than the full blown
soprano.’

‘You think I sounded like a boy
treble/’ Tara demanded.

‘Very so much so. Charming.’ His
voice was laced with mockery. No aspiring singer over twenty should sound like
a boy treble.

‘You are absolutely right. Tara
is no singer,’ her mother stated flatly. ‘She’s a violinist.’

Xavier glanced sharply at Tara
from beneath his cowled eyelids. ‘Ah.’

‘No!’ Tara bit fiercely into her
lip.

Bruno came in bearing bottles of
claret and cut glass goblets on a silver tray. ‘She’s terribly good,’ he said
fondly.

‘Yes. She just won’t practise,
that’s the problem,’ her mother said evenly.

‘Mum! For goodness sake.’

‘Goodness has nothing to do with
it. You could have been a brilliant player. As good as your father, if not
better. Instead you decided to let your stubborn, mulish, wilful behaviour
stifle all your potential.’

Tara gasped. ‘Why are you
attacking me like this?’

‘As a last ditch attempt to stop
you throwing yourself into life’s dustbin.’ She turned to Bruno and Xavier.
‘Shall we eat?’ she suggested pleasantly.

The unease caused by Tara’s
outburst was rapidly dispelled during the meal by Xavier’s smooth flow of
anecdotes about the famous and quirky in the world of music.

Bruno was agog, his face shining
with enthusiastic interest. Xavier’s eloquence and charisma, together with the
consumption of generous quantities of white wine and claret, made him wonder
how he would ever get back to his law books.

Tara’s mother listened with quiet
appreciation, smiling abstractedly from time to time.

Tara, her eyes seemingly fastened
to Xavier’s carved face by invisible wires, found herself smouldering with
inner turbulence.

She was furious to have to admit
that Xavier was compellingly magnetic, that an almost tangible psychological
power emanated from him. There was something softly menacing about him also,
something stealthy and cat-like which both alarmed and stimulated her.

Damn him to hell! she thought,
liking to get the measure of people and then stick to it.

Over coffee the conversation
turned to the art of conducting.

‘Isn’t that whole thing about
Maestro power just a myth?’ Tara declared. ‘I mean look at poor old Otto
Klemperer. He would sit in front of the orchestra like a man under anaesthetic
whilst the players followed the first violinist and asked each other now and
again if the conductor was dead.’

Rachel sighed and raised her
eyebrows heavenwards.

‘Daddy used to tell that story,’
Tara told Xavier sweetly. ‘It’s absolutely true.’

‘I do apologize for my daughter,’
Rachel interposed. ‘I’d like to say that she’s not herself tonight – but
unfortunately she is just that. I’m afraid she needs taking firmly in hand.’

‘I’m working on it,’ Bruno said
gamely.

Xavier leaned back in his chair
and narrowed his eyes reflectively. ‘You know when I was a young music student
I once had the good fortune to attend a lecture in Milan given by Arturo
Toscanini.’

‘Before he went gaga I hope,’
Tara muttered under her breath.

‘Just before his final illness in
fact. When he was a very old, very experienced and very wise man,’ Xavier
countered, throwing Tara a mildly admonishing glance.

‘Sorry, go on,’ she said
grudgingly.

‘He still had the energy to curse
and rage about German and Austrian conductors who ruined Mozart’s two/four time
works by beating four beats in a bar instead of two. Toscanini himself always
beat two you see.’

Xavier hummed a Mozart tune from
one of the composer’s later symphonies. ‘You know it?’ he asked his interested
audience. ‘Of course you do. Now – Tara, Bruno, you sing it for me and follow
my beat.’

Fixing them with his penetrating
grey eyes and using just one long curved finger, he conducted their singing,
first beating with the accent coming on each fourth note, then more slowly with
the accent coming on the second note.

As she sang Tara understood in a
moment why Xavier had this power over orchestras. Watching his moving,
mesmerising finger she had the growing sensation that a steel belt had been
placed around her waist, a slightly flexible steel belt which allowed her to be
held on the point of that finger, making it impossible for her singing to
deviate more than the tiniest fraction within the sparse amount of liberty he
was permitting.