Score!

‘Please do — he’s devastated, and the end was dreadful. I hope this story doesn’t leak out. Anyway, while you’re on, Rannaldini, Étienne left you two of his greatest paintings, Abelard and Héloïse and The Nymphomaniac. Both are on exhibition in New York.’

Together they were worth several million. Not such a bad day, after all, thought Rannaldini.

2

Having witnessed Étienne’s extremely harrowing death, Tristan had immediately fled back to his own flat in La Rue de Varenne, trying to blot out the horror and despair with work. He had been on the brink of making the one film his father might have rated, because it was with Rannaldini. Now it was too late.

Scrumpled-up paper lay all over the floor. His laptop was about to be swept off the extreme left-hand corner of his desk by a hurtling lava of videos, scores, a red leatherbound copy of Schiller’s Don Carlos, books on sixteenth-century France and Spain, sketches of scenes, Gauloise packets and half-drunk cups of black coffee. Photographs of the Don Carlos cast were pinned to a cork board on the rust walls. Over the fireplace hung one of Étienne’s drawings of two girls embracing, which Tristan had bought out of pride so that people wouldn’t realize his father had never given him anything.

He was now toying with a chess set and the idea of portraying his cast, Philip the king, Posa the knight, Carlos the poor doomed pawn, as chess pieces, but he kept hearing the nurse’s cosy, over-familiar voice.

‘Just going to put this nasty thing down your throat again, Étienne,’ as she hoovered up the fountains of blood bubbling up from his father’s damaged heart.

And Tristan had wanted to yell: ‘For Christ’s sake, call him Monsieur de Montigny.’

He also kept hearing Étienne muttering the words ‘father’ and ‘grandfather’, as he clutched Tristan’s sleeve, and the roars of resistance, followed by tears of abdication trickling down the wrinkles.

At the end only the extremely short scarlet skirt worn by his granddaughter Simone had rallied the old man. Tristan hadn’t been able to look at his aunt Hortense. It was as if a gargoyle had started weeping. He prayed that Étienne hadn’t seen the satisfaction on the faces of his three eldest sons that there was no hope of recovery.

There was no way Tristan could concentrate on a chessboard. Switching on the television, he felt outrage that, instead of leading on Étienne’s death, they were showing the young English winner of the Appleton, Marcus Campbell-Black, arriving pale and fragile as a wood anemone at Moscow airport, and being embraced in the snow by a wolf-coated, wildly overexcited Nemerovsky, before being swept away in a limo.

Rupert, Marcus’s father, had then been interviewed, surrounded by a lot of dogs outside his house in Gloucestershire.

‘Campbell-Blacks don’t come second,’ he was saying jubilantly.

God, what a good-looking man, thought Tristan. If he had Rupert, Marcus and Nemerovsky playing Philip, Carlos and Posa, he’d break every box-office record.

He jumped as Handel’s death march from Saul boomed out and the presenter switched to Étienne’s death: France was in mourning for her favourite son; great artist, bon viveur, patron saint of vast extended family.

‘Montigny’s compassion for life showed in all his paintings,’ said the reporter.

But not in his heart, thought Tristan bitterly. Étienne had never been to one of his premières, or glanced at a video, or congratulated him on his César, France’s equivalent of the Oscars.

‘Of all Étienne de Montigny’s sons,’ went on the reporter, as they showed some of Étienne’s cleaner paintings followed by clips from The Betrothed, ‘Tristan, his youngest son, has been the most successful, following in his father’s footsteps but painting instead with light.’

That should piss off my brothers, thought Tristan savagely, as he turned off the television. Dupont had rung him earlier and, like a starved dog grateful for even a piece of bacon rind, Tristan had finally asked if Étienne had left him anything other than his due share.

‘Nothing, I’m afraid.’ Then, after a long pause, ‘Maybe it’s a back-handed compliment, because you’ve done so well.’

Dupont had meant it kindly. But Tristan had hung up, and for the first time since Étienne had fallen ill, he broke down and wept.

Half an hour later, he splashed his face with cold water and wondered what to do with the rest of his life. He was roused by the Sunday Times, commiserating with him, then more cautiously probing a rumour that he was the only member of the family who had been left nothing personal.

‘Fuck off,’ said Tristan hanging up.

Fortunately this pulled him together. The bastard, he thought. All my life Papa noticed me less than the cobwebs festooning his studio. Looking at his mother’s photograph, he wished as always that she were alive, then jumped as the telephone rang.

‘Papa?’ he gasped, in desperate hope.

But it was Alexandre, his eldest brother, the judge.