Score!

Tristan paced in torment up and down his baking, airless veal crate of a cell. The light was fading outside his frosted window, but he could see nothing except the inside of his own heart. He knew that a gentleman never named the women he had slept with. Montignys didn’t fuck and tell, as Rannaldini had, although Étienne had fucked and painted enough.

For the last three years he had been having an affaire with Claudine Lauzerte, so discreetly that not even Rannaldini’s secret service had rumbled them. He had fallen in love with her back in 1977 when she’d joined their table, the first time Rannaldini had taken him to Don Carlos.

His dream had come true in 1993 when he’d cast her as the object of a young man’s adoration in Le Rouge et Le Noir. As she had grown in beauty under Oscar’s lighting and his direction, so had their passion for one another. At first she had held off. Only when he had found her sobbing wildly over a newspaper report that he was sleeping with some starlet had he broken down her defences and they’d become lovers.

But at what price? Claudine’s husband Jean-Louis, the appropriately named Minister of Cultural Affairs, was universally acknowledged to be a brute.

And that was another reason why Tristan had identified with Carlos. He had experienced all the hell of loving a married woman, with a stern, undemonstrative, unfaithful yet possessive husband. He could never drop in on Claudine unannounced, never expect her to ring him in case the telephone number showed up on a bill closely scrutinized by Jean-Louis’s accountants, never ring her at home in case one of the spying servants answered. Nor could he write because Jean-Louis or his secretary, also a spy, frisked the post.

As Claudine became even more adored because of Tristan’s films, and was voted the Most Admired Woman in France, Jean-Louis’s jealousy increased, and so did the interest of the press who followed her every move.

At first she had been reckless and while they were on location spent all night in Tristan’s arms. This had compensated for the endless taunts that he was a closet gay, impotent, incapable of sustaining a relationship. He had also had to endure the hostility of beautiful women like Chloe and Serena, who couldn’t understand why he rejected their advances, not to mention the endless matchmaking of his brothers’ wives.

He had prayed Claudine would leave Jean-Louis and move in with him or, better still, marry him. He didn’t give a toss about the twenty-four-year age gap. Sometimes, when life became unbearable, she had come near to it.

But just before Étienne’s death, one of Claudine’s friends had rung to say a newspaper was on to her and Tristan and about to blow her saintly Madame Vierge image sky high. Claudine had no desire to relinquish the moral high ground, so she had retreated into her arid marriage. Gradually, for Tristan, hope had died, but he couldn’t stop loving her.

Until suddenly he had been jolted by Tab, and believed, by some miracle, there might be life and love after Claudine. But Rannaldini had promptly stamped on that flower.

In his most despairing thoughts since then, Tristan had dreamt that Claudine, having four children of her own, might not mind that he couldn’t give her children. He had so longed to see her again at the screening of The Lily in the Valley: he knew Jean-Louis was in Tuscany and was devastated when she’d failed to show up, on the excuse that filming commitments in Wales were too heavy.

He had forced himself to go to Hortense’s party the next day, but the sight of numerous Montignys, a tribe to which he no longer belonged, milling around the lawn — Aunt Hortense in navy blue pinstripe, the Croix de Guerre in her lapel, his self-regarding brothers and their braying wives, and the smell of crayfish drifting over the white rose hedge — had sent him fleeing back to Valhalla.

Here he collected the address book with Claudine’s telephone number in Wales, showered, changed into the peacock-blue shirt and the jeans she had given him, and on which Lucy had put the patch of a greyhound’s head, and set out for the sleepy village of Llandrogan.

He had rung from Valhalla to say he was on his way, his mobile cutting out before Claudine could say no. He had driven like the devil and arrived while she was getting ready, her hair, which she hadn’t had time to wash, still in rollers, with only one eye made up and her tummy still blown out from an early supper.

As he bounded upstairs like Tigger, she had sent him down again to pour himself a huge drink, which, by the time she had joined him, had become two. She had looked so exquisite, he had swept her back up to bed, which had not been a success. He had come instantly. In the old days, he would then have made love to her with his tongue and his hands, until he was raring to come again. Now he sensed her relief.