Score!

Unhampered by scruples, Rannaldini didn’t give a stuff that Isa was already living just outside Melbourne with a tough little tomboy called Martie. They had invested in a yard that had done brilliantly its first season but which still needed capital. For this reason, Isa had come home to make serious money in the National Hunt season and also to help his father, Jake, now increasingly debilitated by the polio he’d had as a child. Rannaldini had several horses in training with Jake, and had invited Isa over to try out two mares he had bought in France and to plan for the future.

As usual Rannaldini had another motive. During the winter in Melbourne, Isa had won three of Australia’s biggest races, including their Grand National, for Baby Spinosissimo, the young tenor, whom Rupert had suggested should play Don Carlos. Isa would know if Baby was sufficiently broke to accept the part for a quarter of Fat Franco’s fee.

There was nothing youthful about Isa Lovell. Money had always been tight when he was a child: at six he was helping in the yard and jumping at shows, at eight coping with very public trouble in his parents’ marriage, and his mother’s attempted suicide. Despite having been champion jockey three times, he was aware at twenty-six that he would soon have to support his parents, and was therefore considering moving into training.

Isa had trendily tousled black hair, lowering black brows, and slanting, suspicious dark eyes dominating a pale, expressionless face. He looked like the second murderer in Macbeth and had a Birmingham accent you could cut with a flick-knife. But at five foot eight, he was tall for a jockey, with an undeniable brooding gypsy glamour. Not above dirty tricks on the course, where he was nicknamed the Black Cobra, he was as arrogant as Tabitha and, as champion jockey, had had his pick of the girls.

After fourteen hours’ sleep, a long, scented bath and a raid on her mother’s bedroom Tab, unaware Isa was coming to lunch, wandered into the Blue Living Room. She reeked of Helen’s favourite scent, Jolie Madame. She was wearing Helen’s new dark green cashmere polo-neck, which turned her turquoise eyes almost emerald. Her newly washed hair flopped arctic blonde over her white forehead, as she sidled over to the drinks tray to get stuck into the vodka.

‘That is not a suitable breakfast and that’s my roll-neck,’ began Helen furiously.

‘Shut up,’ murmured Rannaldini, but with such venom that any further reproach froze on Helen’s lips. ‘We have a guest. Tabitha, my dear, I don’t think you’ve met Isaac Lovell.’

Tab halted, tossing her head so haughtily Isa could see up the nostrils of her long Greek nose and the curling blonde underside of her lashes. But as he breathed in her scent, he was so unaccountably overwhelmed by foreboding that he found himself trembling.

Tab in turn saw a young man as dark and narrow as the gallows, and as still as the embracing Cupid and Psyche on the plinth beside him. His eyes were filled with hostility and in his hand was a glass of tomato juice as blood red as the feud between the two families.

‘What the hell’s he doing here?’ she demanded in outrage.

‘Discussing my horses,’ said Rannaldini.

Everyone jumped as the door crashed open and a furiously growling Sharon the Labrador backed into the room frantically worrying a sheepskin slipper. Hanging on to the other end, growling equally loudly but looking more sheepish than the slipper because he knew the drawing rooms were out of bounds, was Tabloid, Rannaldini’s senior Rottweiler.

‘Get them out of here,’ screamed Helen, as a rose-garlanded Chelsea bowl circa 1763 smashed into a hundred pieces. ‘You know those uncontrollable brutes aren’t allowed in the house.’

‘How did he get in, then?’ spat Tab, scowling at Isa.

‘Don’t be so goddam rude,’ shouted Helen.

Ignoring such brawling, Isa picked up Rannaldini’s Times and turned to the racing pages.

Lunch was predictably unrelaxed. Isa, who had the conversational skills of a Trappist monk, who had never visited Sydney Opera House or seen the Nolans and the Boyds in any of the art galleries, and who had never forgiven Helen for nearly destroying his parents’ marriage, turned his back on her and talked horses with Rannaldini. Watching his weight, he drank only Perrier, picked the bits of lobster out of the delectable mango and shellfish salad and had no tartare sauce or vegetables with his Dover sole. Tab just drank vodka and, horrified she was so violently attracted to Isa, disagreed with everything he said. Rannaldini watched them in delight, an evil smile flickering over his lips like a snake’s tongue.