Pandora (10 page)

‘It was a chest in
our
story,’ crowed Jupiter, adding a Mick Jagger pout beneath the Hitler moustache.

‘Having opened the box and been stung all over far worse than snakes or scorpions by the evils of the world that flew out,’ David was saying five minutes later, ‘Pandora wept and said she wished she’d listened to her husband Epimetheus – like I’m sure your mum listens to your dad.’

‘She don’t,’ said Alizarin. ‘When’s she coming back? Ouch!’ he howled as Jupiter kicked him on an ankle already purple from a croquet ball.

‘Stop it,’ exploded David.

Thank God, there was Mrs Robens coming out to lay lunch.

‘How d’you know so much about Pandora?’ asked David, getting up to inspect the sketchpads: ‘Jesus Christ!’ for Alizarin’s drawing was brilliant.

How, at only six, could he have captured the demurely lowered lashes, the calculated innocence, the nose twitching in curiosity, the deeply sensual lower lip? It was like looking in a discerning mirror.

‘Look at that!’ David seized the tray from Mrs Robens. Mrs Robens glanced from the drawing to David in wonder.

‘It’s more like you than you are yourself,’ she cried. ‘You’ll be as famous as your mum one day, Alizarin.’ Then, catching sight of the murderous expression on Jupiter’s face, ‘And yours is very good too, Jupey.’

‘A more abstract concept,’ said David, noting the Hitler moustache and the squint. Don’t rise, he told himself.

Parsifal
finished, Raymond wandered out into the garden.

‘What a lovely day. If only I didn’t have to go to London.’

‘Alizarin’s going to keep you in your old age,’ said David, who was fed up with Jupiter.

Alizarin had certainly captured David’s beauty, thought Raymond wistfully, but praising him at the expense of Jupiter only encouraged more bullying.

‘Excellent, both of you,’ he said heartily, then, as Mrs Robens staggered out bearing tomatoes green with chopped basil, new potatoes, and cold chicken blanketed with mayonnaise: ‘It all looks wonderful, Mrs R., could you possibly bring out a bottle of wine?’

‘That was great,’ David told Mrs Robens, opening the washing-up machine later, as he brought back the plates.

‘Put them on the side,’ hissed Mrs Robens. ‘Mr Belvedon’s given me that wretched dishwasher. Can’t get to grips with it at all. I’m not risking coffee cups worth five hundred pounds. After he’s gone, I’ll wash everything by hand.’

‘I’ll show you how to work it later,’ hissed back David.

After Raymond had finally dragged himself away and Robens had gone to skittles, David despatched the furious boys to bed and dined on macaroni cheese and summer pudding in the kitchen with Mrs Robens. Immediately he steered the conversation onto Jupiter.

‘The little bastard deliberately serves balls into Alizarin’s back, and yesterday hit him on the ankle with a croquet ball.’

‘Jupiter, being the first son, was the apple of everyone’s eye,’ said Mrs Robens as she filled up their glasses with cider. ‘Then Al comes along, sickly, not nearly so bonny, but his mother loved him to death. And he’s such a dear little fellow – like his dad. Raymond gave me that dishwasher because he says I work too hard.’

‘You do, it’s a brilliantly run house. Such wonderful sugar biscuits, such a shine on the furniture, I’ve never stayed in such a well-appointed spare room.’ No need to point out he’d never stayed in a spare room at all.

Mrs Robens turned pink.

‘Robbie and I came here when we first married. Old Mrs Belvedon trained me. Like Raymond she was only interested in seeing her guests were comfortable and happy. “Look after my Raymond,” she pleaded, when she and Raymond’s dad moved to France. Galena’s not a cherisher.’

After a third glass of cider, Mrs Robens confessed she only stayed because of Raymond and the boys.

Here we go, thought David happily.

‘Isn’t Galena a good wife?’

‘Not for me to say,’ said Mrs Robens and did. ‘All those letters marked
Private
piling up for her?’

‘Let’s get out the kettle and steam them open.’

‘Get on with you.’

They both jumped guiltily as the telephone rang.

David took it in the hall.

‘May I speak to Mrs Belvedon?’ It was a toff’s voice, clipped, light, yet curiously arrogant.

‘I’m afraid she’s away.’

‘When’s she back?’

‘We don’t know.’

‘Tell her Rupert rang.’

‘That must be Rupert Campbell-Black.’ Mrs Robens puffed out her cheeks, going even redder in the face. ‘He was at the Bath and West Show earlier this summer, phoned once or twice – trouble if you ask me.’

Not yet twenty-one, Rupert Campbell-Black was the
enfant terrible
of British showjumping, as beautiful as he was bloody minded.

‘Mrs Belvedon’s old enough to be his grandmother,’ said David, appalled.

‘Never stopped her in the past. He’s Jupiter’s hero.’

‘That figures, monsters attract little monsters.’

‘Would you like some coffee?’ said Mrs Robens.

Both felt they had gone too far.

‘I wish I could help,’ sighed David.

‘You have already. The boys are much happier, and Raymond’s more relaxed and staying home more. He’s such a good kind man.’

Raymond might be the ‘parfit gentil knight’, thought David disapprovingly, but, like the knight in chess, he slid to one side to avoid confrontation. He should have beaten the hell out of Jupiter for terrorizing Alizarin, and out of Galena for neglecting both the boys and himself.

Gradually, David set about making himself indispensable to his new boss, opening bottles, collecting newspapers, helping him with research for an Old Masters exhibition, boosting Raymond’s shattered self-esteem by asking his advice.

‘How does one get rid of girls without hurting them?’

He also took charge of the telephone, fending off collectors, artists and hostesses who, avid for a handsome spare man now Galena was away, were equally demanding.

‘Mr Belvedon’s been overworking, he needs peace,’ David told all of them.

He also saved Raymond hurt, fielding calls from Galena’s admirers, trying to distinguish the different accents: French, German, Cornish and clipped upper-class: ‘Where the fuck is she?’ which he assumed was Rupert Campbell-Black again.

Filled out with Mrs Robens’s good food, David drifted round in shorts, his smooth skin warming to the colour of butterscotch.

‘Let me run you a bath, Raymond,’ he would suggest, or, having persuaded Raymond to take off his shirt, ‘Let me oil you,’ and feel Raymond quivering with longing beneath his languid tender caresses.

How could he ever have thought David’s Yorkshire accent boorish? wondered Raymond. It was such a long time since he’d been stroked by anyone. Did he imagine it, or during tennis games, did David bend over a fraction too long retrieving a ball, to show off white jutting buttocks above tanned thighs? Aesthetically offended by David’s cheap wardrobe, Raymond threw out a lot of old Harvie & Hudson shirts, which had gone in the collar.

Flush with his new salary David bought Raymond the latest recording of Debussy’s
Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune
, with its haunting theme of emerging sexuality on a hot summer afternoon.

Unfaithful to
Parsifal
, Raymond played the LP repeatedly, dreaming of David joining the gallery when he came down from Cambridge in a year’s time. What a joy and asset he’d be.

At the beginning of the third week, deciding he couldn’t justify any more time at home, Raymond flew to Aberdeenshire, where some bachelor laird had died, leaving a large collection of pictures. The boys were spending the day with friends. The Robenses had the day off. David decided to snoop. He was irked to find the door to the Blue Tower was locked.

Thwarted, he explored Galena’s dressing room below, removing the stopper of a big bottle of Mitsouko, breathing in its sweet, musky, disturbing smell. He opened Galena’s wardrobe, billowing with brilliantly coloured silks and taffetas, then jumped out of his sweating skin, as the telephone rang.

‘Dear boy’ – it was Raymond calling from Scotland – ‘if only you were here, such marvellous watercolours, I’ll be home around seven, but in case I forget, can you put a date in the diary? Sir Mervyn Newton and his daughter Rosemary are driving up from Cornwall on Thursday week to buy a picture for his wife’s sixtieth birthday. He’s bought Casey Andrews and Etienne de Montigny before, so we must remember to hang a few on the walls. But he might go for an Old Master this time. I’ve invited them to supper.’

Just as David was writing ‘Supper Sir Mervyn Newton’ on the wall calendar in the study, Raymond telephoned again in complete panic.

‘Galena’s just rung, she’s landing at Heathrow at four o’clock. It’s an Air France flight from Paris. I don’t get into Birmingham until six. Can you meet her? Is Mrs Robbie there?’

‘It’s her day off, but she’s left a cold supper,’ said David soothingly. ‘The boys won’t be back till after seven.’

‘Take the Rover.’

Wanting something more flash, David took the E-Type.

The country had reached the stage when it needed a good haircut. Blond grasses rusted with docks collapsed in the fields, awaiting the tractors which were in other fields sailing across bleached stubble, piling up bales like tower blocks. As the temperature soared into the nineties, the smell of new-mown hay drifted through the window each time David slowed down, which was not often. The E-Type was superb once he got the hang of it.

He was excited, yet nervous of meeting Galena. At least on the drive home he intended to give her a piece of his muddled mind – he felt she treated Raymond so appallingly. Having parked the car at Heathrow, he dived into the Gents to wash off the sweat and comb his hair. Thank God it had grown a bit and he had a great tan. Perhaps he should have worn trousers instead of frayed denim shorts, but Raymond had begged him to hurry. Out in the arrivals lounge, all the women eyed him up.

‘“In the summertime, you can reach up and touch the sky,”’ sang David happily.

Next moment he was spitting. Why hadn’t anyone told him Galena was at least eight months pregnant? She came striding through the barrier, trailing men, who were buckling under easels, canvasses, suitcases, and pushing trolleys groaning with duty free. A French army officer was even carrying her handbag.

David would have recognized her instantly, such was the force of her personality, and the wafts of the same sweet heavy Mitsouko that had hung around her dressing room this afternoon. Instead of a wedding ring on her left hand, a huge ruby glowed. A scarlet cheesecloth smock clung to her breasts and swollen belly. She looked about to pop. But unlike most heavily pregnant women, she didn’t waddle, she prowled like a huntress.

‘Mrs Belvedon?’ David approached her cautiously.

Galena looked him up and down, taking in the streaked blond hair flopping over the freckled forehead and Raymond’s blue-striped shirt, with the collar cut off, unbuttoned to reveal a smooth gold chest, and promptly bid farewell to her fleet of porters.

‘It is good being pregnant,’ she told David, ‘I was given first-class seat, champagne, and all those men carry my things.’

Despite living in England for nearly nine years, her Slav accent was still very strong, her voice deep and husky. David was worried there wouldn’t be room for all her luggage; as it was he had to make three journeys to the car park.

Only when they were safely on the motorway did he steal a second glance. Close up, she wasn’t beautiful. Her make-up was old fashioned, too much eyeliner on the heavy lids, too much blood-red lipstick. Her broad nose was too low in her face, her dark hair streaked with grey and needing washing. As well as Mitsouko, he could smell BO and brandy fumes. She’d clearly had more than champagne on the flight.

His mother would have been appalled. She didn’t approve of pregnant women drinking or wearing such short dresses. Galena had wonderful ankles although a few black hairs were sprouting on them. His cousin Denise had had hippopotamus’s ankles when she was pregnant.

Galena was now slotting a fag into her drooping red mouth, not offering him one, demanding a light, sending him fumbling round the unfamiliar dashboard.