Pandora (43 page)

As a wet chill June grew even wetter and chiller, Alizarin Belvedon, who travelled his own road and never complained, realized with increasing horror that his sight was going. The streaked black and silver water tumbling into the trough opposite the front door at Foxes Court, which had always reminded him of Galena’s fringe, was now only a blur. Used to roaming the valley at dusk, he kept tripping over stones and missing steps. Yesterday he had smashed a treasured possession, a mug Hanna had given him. The hospital lights used by surgeons, in which he’d invested to enable him to paint through the night, were now needed all day.

At first he thought he was imagining things, but he kept having blinding headaches and the vision in his left eye was definitely narrowing, and he had so much left to paint. He was too terrified of being told to give up to go to the doctor. Instead he worked until he collapsed. Nor had he been able to sell any pictures and earned barely enough from his day a week teaching at Searston College to feed Visitor and buy paint.

The news from Kosovo and Chechnya was terrible; he should be there. But he couldn’t afford it, he loathed leaving Visitor and a still small voice queried whether he would only be going to escape from the bills, the bailiffs and his hopeless longing for Hanna. As a final injury, Raymond was giving that spoilt brat Emerald an exhibition. Alizarin groaned so loudly that Visitor woke and waddled across the room to lay a fat paw on his master’s knee.

Alizarin had grown up too fast. As a child he had known too many secrets, which he usually blocked out, but which recently had returned to him in hideous nightmares. If Galena set him free perhaps he could paint less tortured, more accessible pictures?

After the silver wedding, there had been much sly media innuendo as to who had really fathered Galena’s sons. Jupiter and Jonathan were perceived to be Raymond’s, but rumour persisted that Alizarin’s father was the late Etienne de Montigny, now regarded as France’s greatest painter, who’d been tall and thin, with a beaky nose and massive shoulders like Alizarin. A week before she died, Galena had given Alizarin one of Etienne’s ravishing drawings of herself, which hung in the Lodge beside Galena’s palette and which Alizarin wouldn’t have sold for the world. Alizarin had been nine when Galena died, the same age as Dicky and Dora today. He had spent a lot of time, since Emerald arrived, comforting them both.

‘Ouch,’ shouted Alizarin, as Visitor clawed his thigh with his paw. ‘OK, let’s go to London.’

Visitor, who adored jaunts, thumped his tail.

The jaunt started humiliatingly. None of the galleries Alizarin dropped into were remotely interested in his pictures.

‘You’ll have to become a guide dog sooner than you think,’ he told Visitor.

Heavy rain had slowed down the traffic, and it was late afternoon before Alizarin braved the Belvedon. Raymond had gone to the BBC. Jupiter was in the back office sorting out another of his father’s cock-ups. A man called Baxter, who’d arrived with a Rolls-Royce and a chauffeur, and who claimed to be staying at the Savoy, had been allowed by Raymond to borrow a charming Millais for a few hours to show his wife. It now transpired there was no Baxter staying at the Savoy and no sign of the Millais.

Tamzin, Raymond’s assistant, yet another comely well-bred halfwit, whom Jupiter referred to as the ‘Dimbo’, had been ordered not to disturb him. She also didn’t recognize Alizarin.

‘Mr Belvedon hasn’t time to look at unsolicited work,’ she told him disdainfully. ‘Why don’t you send in some transparencies with a stamped addressed Jiffy bag?’

Alizarin’s roar of rage flushed even Jupiter out of the inner sanctum, but he only allowed his younger brother five minutes, not even offering him a drink.

‘We’ve got too much of your stuff taking up space already.’

Then, flipping and wincing his way through half a dozen of Alizarin’s recent canvasses, he added, ‘You must make your work more collector friendly. I’ll take that little watercolour of Visitor, if you’re really strapped.’

‘Fuck off,’ howled Alizarin.

He was so angry he drove all the way down a one-way street, ignoring frantic hooting and waving of fists. For a second he rested his aching head on the steering wheel. It would take him three or four hours to get back to Limesbridge in the rush hour.

Thoroughly depressed, he drove east to Hoxton where Diggory and Visitor greeted each other joyfully and where he found Jonathan in high spirits if under siege.

‘David keeps hassling me to finish things, and has just buggered off to Geneva to top up his tan and shove more millions into his Swiss bank. Trafford’s been arrested for punching a photographer; I offered to bail him, but he said he needed the rest and that having a record will increase his street cred. He had a tidy-up last week, although you wouldn’t know it.’

At least the pile of rubbish topped with porn magazines had disappeared to a more elevated location.

‘What brings you to London?’ asked Jonathan as he rootled under a chaos of love letters and sketches for a corkscrew.

‘Not selling pictures, particularly to the Belvedon.’ Cussedly Alizarin chucked the watercolour of Visitor that his elder brother had liked into the waste-paper basket. ‘Jupiter’s a shit, isn’t he?’

‘Foul,’ agreed Jonathan. ‘I’m painting a group of people I most dislike including Casey Andrews and Somerford Keynes and calling it
Millennium Buggers
. I’m thinking of adding Jupiter. He’ll never forgive you for pushing the frontiers forward and because he knows Hanna admires you more than him.’

Then, as Alizarin blushed and muttered something self-deprecating, Jonathan continued, ‘He does too. And he’ll never forgive Emerald for conning him into asking her to the silver wedding. I think he even convinced himself she fancied him. How is she?’ he asked casually.

‘Disrupting the household.’

‘Has that Yank boyfriend turned up again?’

Alizarin shook his head. ‘Probably what’s making her so tetchy.’

Unable to find a corkscrew, Jonathan rinsed a mug and a teacup and filled them both with whisky.

Both brothers, particularly in the face of current family ructions, felt absurdly happy to be friends again. As Jonathan put on the Alpine Symphony, in which Richard Strauss depicts a day on a mountain, starting with basses growling around before sunrise, Alizarin noticed that his brother was looking particularly smart, in a new very white shirt with the creases still in and a dark blue Sixties rock-star suit with a faint cerulean check.

As he topped up Alizarin’s glass, Jonathan became very thoughtful.

‘Look, I’ve got myself into a jam.’

‘I haven’t got any money,’ said Alizarin flatly.

‘No, for once it isn’t that. I’ve got a sitting in an hour with Hermione Harefield. I daren’t cancel. Later I’ve arranged to see Geraldine Paxton, I daren’t cancel her either, or I’ll never get anything in the Tate. I’ve also got a commission to deliver first thing tomorrow morning – a nude. I’ve already had twenty thousand pounds up front, but there’s still forty thousand to come, which I’ll split with you if you paint it for me.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ exploded Alizarin, thinking what he could do with £20,000. See a decent eye specialist, stock up on canvasses and paint, mend the hole in the roof, buy a new collar for Visitor or even dinner for Hanna when Jupiter was in London.

The Alpine Symphony was growing louder and louder: the sun was about to burst forth on the snowy peaks.

‘Oh please, Al, I’m desperate. You could always copy anyone’s style. I’ll be reduced to paying a forger.’

‘Don’t be fucking stupid.’

‘I’ll give you twenty-five grand.’

‘Who is she?’

The doorbell rang.

‘That’ll be her now.’

Richard Strauss’s sun appeared in majestic descending octaves as Sophy’s beaming face came round the door. She was wearing her mother’s tweed coat over a bright yellow strapless dress, and was weighed down by three bottles of white, smoked salmon, a quiche and a packet of chocolate biscuits for Diggory, who greeted her delightedly, all four feet off the ground.

‘Sophy, darling!’ Jonathan’s manner was unnaturally hearty; he couldn’t meet her eyes.

Sophy had a despairing feeling he’d only summoned her because he needed the rest of Abdul’s money, but she put on a cheery front as Jonathan launched into the rigmarole of his predicament, leaving out this time, Alizarin noticed, any mention of Geraldine.

‘All you’ve got to do is to sit for my unbelievably talented brother instead,’ Jonathan said soothingly, ‘I’ve drawn the short straw. I’ve got to paint Dame Hermione in the buff. It’s going to be called
Expectant Madonna
. She’s eight months gone so I’ve really got to motor. Hope it doesn’t pop out, I was never a good slip catch, and that I’ve got enough paint. She’s absolutely vast.’

Sophy, who was feeling vast herself, after misery eating too many chocolates, was not only desperately disappointed, but appalled and embarrassed at having to strip off instead in front of this gaunt angry giant. Seeing her distress, Alizarin wanted to back out. But Jonathan was so charming and persuasive.

‘You’ve got to dogsit anyway, both of you, Diggory chews up canvasses if he’s left on his own.’ Then, whispering to Sophy: ‘I’ll be back later, keep the bed warm,’ and murmuring to Alizarin: ‘Off to ride my trustee steed,’ he sidled out.

Alizarin was absolutely livid.

Sophy found taking her clothes off the worst part. At least she was super-glammed up for Jonathan, with pink-painted toenails, shining hair, body lotion rubbed into every acre of her body and no shoulder strap or knicker elastic marks, because Jonathan had ordered her not to wear any underwear.

Alizarin kicked Visitor and Diggory off the big sofa and, spreading a blue sheet over it, arranged Sophy on top. For a second, she fought back the tears, when she saw the plaster on her leg, where in her excitement she’d cut herself shaving. But once Alizarin got going, he was so kind and so quiet. She noticed he kept polishing his spectacles, his tummy kept rumbling, and twice he apologized to her shoes thinking he’d stumbled over Diggory.

Worried she might be cold on such a dank, cold evening, he whacked up Jonathan’s central heating, but she noticed how this made him pour with sweat, obviously not used himself to such warmth. When he whipped off his checked shirt, which had lost most of its buttons, and then his dark green T-shirt, she noticed how little flesh there was on his huge frame.

I wish I could feed him up, she thought, admiring at the same time the endless legs in the ripped jeans. She was dying to ask him what he thought of Emerald, but she didn’t want to distract him. Alizarin didn’t talk much except to ask if she were all right and occasionally tell her she had a lovely body.

‘Too much of it,’ sighed Sophy. ‘I expect in Saudi Arabia, where Abdul lives, there’s lots of sand to stretch out on.’

‘How long have you known Jonathan?’

‘Four weeks and three days.’ She blushed. ‘I ought to have seen the writing on the wall. The last time he made love to me, the foreplay was so fantastic, I didn’t realize till afterwards he’d been watching
The Bill
with the sound turned down.’

That bloody charm, thought Alizarin furiously, which gets away with things again and again.

‘One good thing,’ admitted Sophy, ‘I wanted to have something interesting to talk to him about this evening, so I went to an exhibition of Raphael’s drawings at Buckingham Palace. They were so wonderful’ – Sophy stretched joyfully – ‘and I had no idea that so many Raphaels were painted by so many different people.’

‘Like Jonathan’s pictures,’ said Alizarin drily.

‘But the ones Raphael did himself are so much greater. He seems to paint people as they really are, the pupils’ stuff looks chocolate boxy by comparison, as if they were trying too hard to flatter. Sorry, you know all this.’

As the windows darkened, she told him about the children she taught, and Alizarin told her about his students.

‘They’re so trusting. Once you win their confidence, you could tell them to jump through fire. They’ve been so short changed,’ he went on roughly. ‘A whole generation of students has never been taught how to draw or paint because it’s unfashionable. Video and the installation are all, and, even more important, marketing. My old college is run by bank managers.’

‘I wish my bank manager would go off and run an art college,’ sighed Sophy.

Increasingly, she marvelled at Alizarin’s obsessive concentration, the tension in his body, and the fire in those long screwed-up eyes.

Four times they were interrupted by a wrong number. Not wanting Sophy to alter her position, Alizarin answered it, on each occasion getting less polite.

‘It’s some man asking for a Mrs Greenbridge,’ he told Sophy.

The telephone rang again. Throwing down his brushes and palette for the fifth time, Alizarin stalked across the room and picked up the telephone.

‘No, I’m very sorry, Mrs Greenbridge is upstairs being fucked by the window cleaner,’ he snapped and hung up.

Sophy giggled.

‘Goodness knows what I’ve started,’ grunted Alizarin. And then he smiled for the first time, which lifted his harsh features, showed off beautiful teeth, and softened the suspicious, angry eyes. He’s not ugly at all, thought Sophy in amazement.