Pandora (4 page)

And Raymond was such a lovely bloke to work for, even if he did have mad notions and was picky about pictures being hung a millimetre too far to the left. He was so appreciative. He never talked down, and the tales he’d told Eddie about the Gods and Goddesses as they rehung the paintings would make your hair curl.

‘That nymph being poked by that bull, Eddie, is actually the wife of the French Minister of Agriculture.’

Having showered upstairs and emerged beautiful as the evening star in his dinner jacket, Raymond had been distracted by a small oil of a languid youth admiring his white naked reflection in a pond.

‘Exquisite,’ he murmured.

‘He’ll get sunburn if he don’t put on his shirt, and you’re going to be late for that party,’ chided Eddie, taking a pale pink rose from the vase on the reception desk and slotting it into Raymond’s buttonhole. ‘I’ll lock up. Don’t let Joan and Casey Andrews bully you. Invitation said bring a bottle.’

‘Oh hell.’

‘Here, take the Jack Daniel’s that Yank brought you.’

‘Thanks, Eddie.’ Raymond gazed round happily. ‘That blue’s made all the difference. I can’t thank you enough. See you Monday.’

As he emerged from the white-fronted eighteenth-century terrace house, with the dark blue Belvedon Gallery sign swaying in the warm breeze, the prostitutes who plied their trade along Cork Street wolf-whistled.

‘Who’s the lovely toff?’ shouted a handsome blonde.

A pretty brunette started singing a pop song called ‘Wooden Heart’, imploring Raymond not to break hers.

Raymond laughed and danced a few steps with her before coiling his long length into his bottle-green E-Type. The girls were his friends, whom he often sketched and invited into the gallery on cold nights for a glass of brandy. Last Christmas they had clubbed together and given him a bottle of Armagnac.

As he drove towards Hampstead, he found the sudden heatwave had brought out good-looking couples, laughing outside pubs or wandering hand in hand along pavements strewn with pink and white blossom. Knowing she’d be desolate remembering Viridian, he’d rung his mother earlier.

‘You’re such a dear, Raymond,’ her voice had trembled, ‘you’d make such a wonderful husband.’

In the spring, the not-so-young man’s fancy, reflected Raymond heavily, turns to thoughts of love.

He felt as though he’d been imprisoned in the gallery for so long he’d missed the spring. The creamy-white hawthorns were turning brown in the parks, the chestnut candles already over. But as he passed houses garlanded in cobalt-violet wisteria and breathed in a heady scent of rainsoaked lilac, it was impossible not to feel optimistic. He had sold a Reynolds to the National Gallery and a fine Zoffany to a Canadian collector, and Joan Bideford’s nudes had gone so well that the big bumpy freckled nose of her far more famous husband was thoroughly out of joint.

Casey, as he was usually known, and Joan were such a repulsive couple: greedy, egotistical, sexually predatory, insanely jealous of one another and other artists, that, as an escape route, Raymond had arranged to dine at nine o’clock back in Mayfair with a rich collector and some of his friends – hence the dinner jacket. Later he would take them in wine-jolly strip-club mood back to the gallery for large drinks and a preview of Etienne de Montigny’s erotic pictures.

Arriving at Joan and Casey’s red-brick Victorian house, Raymond tripped over bicycles and a CND placard in the hall. At a recent demo, Joan had been arrested for socking a policeman. It was rumoured that during a subsequent stint in Holloway, she had developed a taste for her own sex.

Judging by the uproar, the party had been going on for several hours. People were crammed into a double-roomed studio with big sash windows opening onto the Heath. Lights like striped snowballs had just been turned on. Even on their walls Joan and Casey slugged it out. The only paintings on view were Joan’s nudes and Casey’s lowering seascapes, bright yellow cliffs over Antwerp-blue seas.

Raymond had forgotten the party was fancy dress. He could hardly see the paint-stained floorboards for Whistler’s Mothers, florid Rembrandt self-portraits, Bardots, John F. Kennedys and Macmillans with drooping moustaches and winged grey hair. A famously drunken sculptor was causing howls of mirth because he’d arrived as Margot Fonteyn complete with white tulle tutu and ballet shoes but had refused to shave off his beard or wear tights over his hairy legs.

Raymond was desperate for a decent drink before he tackled the crowd, but the common denominator of the bottles lined up on the sideboard beside sweating cheese and greying pâté was their cheapness and nastiness. Some still had raffle tickets attached. Clinging to his bottle of Jack Daniel’s, Raymond searched for a glass, but his hostess saw him first.

‘Raymond Belvedon!’ she bellowed. ‘Have you come as a waiter, or are you pushing off somewhere else as per usual?’

Everyone swung round because they associated Raymond’s name with the gallery’s success. Then they stayed looking because of his height and beauty and the warmth of his smile, which was belied by the wistfulness in his big turned-down manganese-blue eyes.

As a jury had recently decided
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
was not obscene, Joan Bideford had dressed as Mellors the gamekeeper in breeches, lace-up boots and a tweed checked cut-away jacket with a fox fur slung over her shoulders. The fox’s eyes were marginally more glassy than hers.

On a plate, like some instrument of torture, she was brandishing a half-grapefruit bristling with cocktail sticks threaded with cubes of cheese and pineapple. Raymond could never look at her without thinking of Tennyson’s poem ‘The Revenge’, and Sir Richard Grenville’s wounded sailors: ‘Men of Bideford in Devon, And we laid them on the ballast down below.’

Raymond had no desire to lay Joan anywhere. Her big handsome face was carmine with drink. He decided against kissing her jutting oblong jaw.

‘Just dropped in to congratulate you,’ he said. ‘Exhibition went awfully well.’

‘Sold any more since yesterday?’ demanded Joan. ‘No? Well, my monthly cheque didn’t arrive this morning either.’

And I’ve just bust a gut flogging fourteen of your pictures, you avaricious bitch, thought Raymond, who had kindly paid her a retainer to live on while she produced enough canvasses for an exhibition. But it was no time to argue, Joan weighed more than he did and her beady bloodshot eyes had lighted on the Jack Daniel’s.

‘Casey and I like bourbon, don’t waste it on these gannets.’ Grabbing the bottle, she shoved it behind an African mask.

Fortunately she was diverted by the arrival of Somerford Keynes, the
Daily Post
art critic, who’d come as Oscar Wilde and who was nicknamed the Poisoned Pansy because of his lethal reviews.

‘Somerford,’ howled Joan, ‘did you bring a carbon of your piece?’

Raymond had managed to find a teacup and was just raiding the Jack Daniel’s bottle when he was accosted by two pretty girls who thought it hilarious that they’d both rolled up as Lady Chatterley. Recognizing them as the entwined nudes in Joan’s paintings, Raymond thought how much more attractive artists’ models looked with their clothes on.

‘Hello, handsome,’ giggled the first. ‘We’re not going to find any decent John Thomas here, and none of us are safe from Joan or Casey. Want to come to another party?’

‘You’d have much more fun with us,’ added the second.

‘What a pity, I’ve got to go out to dinner,’ sighed Raymond.

‘We know who you are,’ they chorused. ‘Will you tell your other artists we’re very good models? Casey and Joan are so tight.’

Then they went scarlet, because towering over them, resplendent as Neptune in a slipping loincloth, with sea horses and seaweed painted all over his mighty torso and massive thighs, was Casey Andrews.

‘Dance with you young women later,’ he boomed, whacking them on the bottom with his trident. ‘Now push off.’

With his jutting red-bearded jaw almost meeting his huge bumpy nose, his angry little eyes and vigorous russet curls, Casey looked more like Raphael’s drawing of Hercules wrestling with the Nemean lion than Neptune. But he was just as capable of causing storms.

It was strange, reflected Raymond, how the picture of Pandora, which had turned out to be by Raphael and which now hung at the top of the house at Foxes Court, influenced his judgement of people. Casey Andrews was guilty of at least six of the Deadly Sins: pride, wrath, envy, avarice, lust and certainly greed, as he devoured a huge Stilton sandwich washed down with red wine from a pint mug. Casey also felt it was his right to seduce every woman, and their privilege to capitulate. Raymond had nightmare visions of having to represent thousands of odious Casey Andrews offspring when he was a doddering old dealer.

Like Joan, Casey immediately got on to money. Had Raymond sold any pictures, had he heard from Rome and if not why not, and what about an American exhibition?

‘An American car company’s interested in that oil of St Mawes,’ countered Raymond and, when Casey looked bootfaced: ‘They’d like two more for the boardroom.’

But, as usual, Casey wasn’t happy with the price. Commercial concerns should pay twice as much.

‘Andras Kalman’s invited me to lunch,’ he said bullyingly.

‘You’ll enjoy it.’ Raymond just managed to control his anger. ‘Andras is a charmer, and runs a great gallery.’

Casey stormed off.

Nearby two art critics dressed as Roman senators were admiring Joan’s grapefruit hedgehog, which she’d abandoned on a sofa.

‘I didn’t know Bideford was tackling sculpture,’ said one. ‘That piece is very fine.’

Raymond suppressed a smile. He was so kind and courteous that the moment Casey abandoned him, the crowd moved in: artists who wanted to show him their work; collectors who wanted free advice or jobs in the gallery for their daughters; critics who wanted praise for a review. Casey returned for another row and, finding Raymond surrounded, shoved off again.

‘I can’t think how you endure those two,’ said a soft lisping voice.

It was the Poisoned Pansy, Somerford Keynes. Everything about Somerford seemed to flop downwards: his straight sandy locks from an Oscar Wilde middle parting, his droopy blond moustache concealing a large flapping upper lip, even his bow tie wilted in the heat. But he had knowing eyes, as if he were aware of secrets Raymond didn’t want divulged. Somerford’s taste for working-class louts was equalled only by his desire to be the darling of society hostesses, among whom he did not list Joan Bideford.

‘Thank you for giving Joan such a good review,’ murmured Raymond.

‘If I hadn’t been devoted to you, dear boy, I’d have annihilated her; so crude those lardlike bodies, I’ve perjured myself invoking the name of Gauguin.’

‘Stop, you’re driving me crazy,’ sang the record player.

A large tabby cat was thoughtfully licking the sardine pâté.

‘Can you chaps shove through to the next room?’ ordered Joan.

‘Got to go,’ said Raymond, meekly shuffling a few feet forward.

‘I’m meeting Francis Bacon at Muriel’s later,’ murmured Somerford, ‘why not join us after dinner?’

Raymond felt overwhelmed with tiredness, nor did he want to be sucked into Somerford’s underworld.

‘I don’t seem to have been to bed for days,’ he apologized. ‘Going to crash out the moment dinner’s over.’

But as he glanced briefly into the second room his exhaustion fell away, for lounging against the piano, dressed as a pirate, was the sexiest boy he had ever seen. He was about five foot nine, with straight dark hair hanging in a thick fringe and tied back by a black ribbon. His shoulders were broadened by the horizontal stripes of a matelot T-shirt, his hips narrowed by dark blue trousers tucked into shiny black boots. His face was dominated by long slanting sloe-dark eyes above very high cheekbones, with a black moustache and line of beard emphasizing a big sulky red mouth.

But it was the provocative thrust of his body and the disdainful lift of his head that made him so attractive, as if he were going to leap onto the deck of Sir Richard Grenville’s
Revenge
, cutlass hissing, and slay every man alive.

Oh dear, dear God, marvelled Raymond.

Then, as the pirate reached back for his glass on the window, the striped T-shirt tightened against a high breast and jutting nipple and Raymond realized that he was a girl, that her moustache and beard were of smudged cork and that several men who normally showed no interest in women were circling her as though she were covered in sexual aniseed.