Appassionata Read Online Free

rescued mongrel.



Appassionata
    OVERTURE

ONE

    In the second week of April, Taggie Campbell-Black crossed the world and fell head over heels in love for the second time in her life. The flight to Bogotá, delayed by engine trouble at Caracas, took fifteen hours. Taggie, who’d hardly eaten or slept since Rupert broke the news of their journey, could only manage half a glass of champagne. Nor, being very dyslexic, was she able to lose herself in Danielle Steel or Catherine Cookson, nor even concentrate on Robbie Coltrane camping it up as a nun on the in-flight movie. She could only clutch Rupert’s hand, praying over and over again: Please God let it happen.
    By contrast Rupert, concealing equal nerves behind his habitual deadpan langour, had drunk far too much as he sat thumbing through a glossary at the back of a Bogotá guide book.
    ‘I now know the Colombian for stupid bugger, prick, jerk, double bed, air-conditioning, rum and cocaine, so we should be OK.’
    At El Dorado Airport, the policemen fingered their guns. Seeing an affluent-looking gringo, the taxi-driver turned off his meter. As they drove past interminable whore-houses and dives blaring forth music, past skyscrapers next to crumbling shacks, Rupert’s hangover was assaulted as much by the shroud of black diesel fumes that blanketed the city as by the furiously honking almost static rush-hour traffic. There was rubbish everywhere. On every pavement, pimps with dead eyes, drug pushers carrying suitcases bulging with notes, tarts in tight dresses pushed aside beggars on crutches and stepped over grubby sloe-eyed children playing in the gutter. How could anything good come out of such a hell-hole?
    As Taggie couldn’t bear to wait a second longer, they drove straight to the convent. Now, quivering like a dog in a thunderstorm, she was panicking about her clothes.
    ‘D’you think I should have stopped off at the hotel and changed into something more motherly?’
    Rupert glanced sideways. No-one filled a body stocking like Taggie or had better, longer legs for a miniskirt.
    ‘You look like a plain-clothes angel.’
    ‘My skirt isn’t too short?’
    ‘Never, never.’ Rupert put a hand on her thigh.
    By the time they reached the convent, a sanctuary amid the squalor, appalling poverty and brutal crime of the slums, the fare cost almost more than the flight. The Angelus was ringing in the little bell-tower. The setting sun, finding a gap in the dark lowering mountains of the Andes, had turned the square white walls a flaming orange. A battered Virgin Mary looked down from a niche as Rupert knocked on the blistered bottle-green front door. But no-one answered.
    ‘We should have rung first to check they were in,’ said Taggie, who, despite the stifling heat of the evening, was trembling even more uncontrollably. She looked about to faint.
    ‘I can’t imagine they’re out at some rave-up.’ Gently Rupert smoothed the black circles beneath her terrified eyes. ‘It’ll be OK, sweetheart.’
    He clouted the door again.
    Now that he was in Cocaine City, Rupert had never more longed for a line to put him in carnival mood to carry him through the interview ahead. His longing increased a moment later when the door was unlocked and creaked open a few inches and he had a sudden vision that Robbie Coltrane had got in on the act again.
    A massive nun, like a superannuated orang-utan, with tiny suspicious eyes disappearing in fat, a beard and hairy warts bristling disapproval, demanded what they wanted. She then insisted on seeing their passports, and looked as though she would infinitely rather have frisked Taggie than Rupert, before grudgingly allowing them in.
    By contrast the Mother Superior, Maria Immaculata, was femininity and charm itself. She had a round, almost childish face, like a three-quarters moon, smiling, slanting brown eyes and a cherished olive complexion set off by a very white linen wimple. As she moved forward with a rustle of black silk, the