Pandora (48 page)

Anthea was so frustrated she could scream. Emerald’s return had unleashed a torrent of past emotions: shame, guilt, resentment, heartbreak, and above all deep longings, stirrings of sensuality which she had suppressed during her marriage to Raymond.

Zac didn’t help by smiling speculatively into her eyes, asking too many questions, touching her whenever possible.

Anthea had also married a much older man in the hope of never suffering from jealousy again. Now she was eaten up by it, because Raymond, her dear confrère David, her favourite stepson Jupiter, evil Jonathan and even Dicky were all clearly obsessed by Emerald. One should not be wildly jealous of one’s own daughter.

She wished Raymond wouldn’t keep talking about settling large sums on Emerald for all the years she’d missed out on cultural stimuli.

‘Imagine that precious flower growing on waste ground.’

Anthea would have liked to have shown off by making Emerald’s dress for the birthday party, but, short of time, she’d whisked herself and Emerald off to Lindka Cierach. On the Tuesday before Wednesday’s party, they went up to London for final tweakings and to pick up their dresses. This gave Raymond the opportunity to visit his lawyer in Searston – which made his other children extremely twitchy.

It also left Zac free to prowl round the garden, the boathouse and the woods, studying Foxes Court and all the outbuildings for blocked-up windows and unaccounted-for spaces. Towards dusk he jogged through the village and collected some bottles of red and a steak and kidney pie from the Goat in Boots, where he admired Jonathan’s newly hung nude of Sienna. Ending up at the Lodge, he dropped in on Alizarin.

Alizarin in fact had had a very bad day. Hanna, increasingly miserable with Jupiter, was looking to him for love and protection, which he felt he could no longer offer her because he was going blind. For the same reason, he had tried to knock on the head his very real liking for Sophy.

Overwhelmed by guilt that he’d been working flat out for weeks and had done nothing to help Raymond with the forthcoming party, he had risen earlier even than usual and tried with a long fork to fish the algae out of the lily pond, a task he’d always loved doing as a boy, rather like tugging skeins of hair out of the plug hole. Alas, his sight was so bad he pulled up most of the water lilies instead and Anthea had screamed at him like a raped vixen.

Returning home dejected to the Lodge, he had found a beaming Visitor sharing a pork pie with Eddie the packer, who’d just apologetically arrived from London with all Alizarin’s pictures from the gallery.

‘We can’t wait any longer for a discerning buyer,’ Jupiter had replied coolly when Alizarin had rung him in a fury. ‘Frankly, they’re taking up too much space. At least you’ve got firewood for the winter.’

The Lodge front garden was still an army of nettles – as likely to sting as he himself. Frantically painting to catch the last of the daylight, Alizarin swore as he tripped over canvasses littering stairs and hall, stumbling downstairs to answer the door.

‘Whadja want?’ he snapped.

‘To look at your pictures.’ Zac waved a clanking plastic bag: ‘And I figured you might like a late lunch.’

Alizarin, who was feeling dizzy with hunger, was won over by the smell of hot steak and kidney.

‘Come in.’

Upstairs, having located two plates, knives and forks and a couple of paper cups, he turned back to his easel. He was painting a human shield, a Serb tank with crying babies strapped to its front – each little face was portrayed with such tender anguish. In the background, black smoke and flames poured out of a burning village.

As Zac divided the pie, giving seven-eighths to Alizarin, and poured red wine into paper cups, he noticed cuttings on the Balkans, Sierra Leone, Chechnya and Northern Ireland carpeting the floor, rising in stalactites on every surface, lying along the top of the books. Putting a cup and plate on the table beside Alizarin, out of reach of a drooling Visitor, Zac settled down to look at the pictures, and was absolutely blown away.

He had never seen anything so powerful, nor heartrending. Poking around, clambering over Galena’s furniture which had been chucked out by Anthea, taking canvasses to the fading light so the mysteries and subtleties of colour could be revealed, he was soon unearthing earlier work influenced by the Holocaust, along with the occasional exquisite landscape or portrait.

Having studied them for nearly an hour in silence, he pulled out a last canvas entitled
After the Anschluss
, which was when Hitler brutally annexed Austria in 1938. The painting was of a wood of tall, bare skeletal trees, lashed by rain and gales. Only the occasional beech sapling or little yellow hazel had hung on to their orange and gold leaves.

If you kept below the parapet, you could sometimes hide your treasures from the Nazis, thought Zac.

‘These are awesome, absolute masterpieces,’ he told Alizarin, with tears in his eyes. ‘I’m going to call my old boss, Adrian Campbell-Black, who runs the best contemporary gallery in New York.’

Alizarin, who up to now hadn’t been at all sure about Zac, took a lot of persuading; but, gradually succumbing to Zac’s enthusiasm and understanding of pictures, he melted, ridiculously touched, almost childlike in his gratitude. Noticing Alizarin had wolfed the pie and drunk most of the red, Zac opened another bottle, and sat down on the corner of the ancient rickety sofa not taken up by cuttings and Visitor.

As they talked, Alizarin abandoned the human shield and idly sketched Zac. As he was losing his sight, his other senses had become more acute: he could hear tones in voices, smell desires.

‘Why are you here?’ he asked.

‘What d’you mean?’

‘It’s nothing to do with Emerald.’

Zac took the deepest breath. Somehow he trusted Alizarin.

‘My great-great-grandfather, Reuben Abelman, built up a furniture business in Vienna,’ he said carefully. ‘His son Benjamin’s even greater success allowed him to indulge his passion for fine art. Shortly after the Anschluss, two Nazis turned up with guns and took Benjamin to party HQ where they threatened to shoot him if he didn’t hand over his pictures and sculptures. His collection and the Rothschilds’ were to be the first great acquisitions of Hitler’s Führer museum. My great-grandfather refused to comply. He was found the next morning clubbed to death. My great-grandmother was sent to the death camps.

‘Having stripped Benjamin’s house, the Nazis turned their attention to his sons. They stopped my grandfather Tobias practising law, so he committed suicide.’ Zac’s deep, husky voice was quivering now, as desolate as the rumble of a distant train. ‘And they confiscated the pictures from my Great-uncle Jacob’s art gallery and sent him to Mauthausen.

‘All the Abelmans were wiped out by the Holocaust, except my Great-aunt Leah, Jacob’s wife, who escaped early in the war to New York, and my mother, who as a child somehow survived Theresienstadt and joined my great-aunt when she was four.’

Alizarin put down his pencil and, groping for the bottle, filled up Zac’s paper cup, missing slightly, so the wine ran like blood down the side.

‘My mother never got over the guilt of surviving,’ went on Zac. ‘At first, my Great-aunt Leah mixed with other artistic Jewish people in New York, as she waited and waited for Jacob. After the war, she heard he’d escaped from Mauthausen, but been murdered by the Gestapo.’

Zac had a beautiful face, thought Alizarin. The scars were all on the inside.

‘When I was a kid’ – Zac’s voice was almost a whisper, a muscle leaping beneath his smooth gold cheek – ‘Great-aunt Leah used to show me photographs of our house in Vienna in a smuggled-out family album. The floors were covered with Aubusson and Persian rugs, the rooms filled with eighteenth-century French furniture. On shelf and alcove was beautiful porcelain: Meissen, Sèvres and Dresden. But it was the pictures that excited me. In the hall were a Frans Hals and a Bonnard, in the dining room a Renoir and a Cranach.’

Only Visitor snoring, the tick of the clock, the scratch of Alizarin’s pencil, broke the silence. Zac’s suntan had taken on a grey tinge.

‘Over my great-grandmother’s desk in the living room hung the Raphael. My great-grandfather bought it to help out a friend, a profligate count, in whose family the painting had been for two hundred and forty years, who needed to pay his gambling debts. It’s small, just twenty-two inches by eighteen. I’ve only seen it in black and white but I dream of it in colour.’ Zac’s words were tumbling out in a rush now. ‘I’ve given up on the other pictures, they may or may not surface, but I’ve searched the world for the Raphael.’

Zac didn’t tell Alizarin that he’d picked up clues since he’d been at Foxes Court. On the nursery wall was a framed cast list for a ‘Pro-Raphaelite’ Christmas play dated 1975. There was Raymond’s nickname for Anthea, ‘Hopey’, and Anthea’s rainbow-woven dress, which was hard to identify in a black and white photo.

‘Have you tried the Art Loss Register?’ asked Alizarin.

Zac shook his head.

‘I’m shit-scared of raising the alarm and sending the picture underground. Got to be certain before I make a move.’

Alizarin’s eyes were jet black, his face expressionless, as he picked up a magnifying glass to examine his drawing more closely. Zac’s jaw needed more strength, the yellow eyes should be closer together, removing any suggestion of innocence. Squinting at Zac he said, ‘A lot of looted art’s in museums, who won’t give it back.’

‘Like asking the Mafia to regulate their behaviour,’ shrugged Zac. ‘I meet stone walls everywhere. Problem is time’s running out. Owners of looted art know survivors of the Holocaust are getting thin on the ground and are likely to die off before they can claim. And if you’re not a Rothschild,’ he went on wearily, ‘you’re unlikely to get satisfaction through the courts.’

Alizarin began to paint, dipping his brush in a tin which said ‘Butchers’ Tripe, Lamb and Vegetable Flavour’ on the outside. He wondered which ochre to use for Zac’s skin, which now had a green tinge. His eyes had retreated into hollows.

‘What’s the subject of the painting?’ asked Alizarin, knowing the answer.

‘Pandora’s Box,’ said Zac.

As the pause went on for ever, Alizarin drenched the paper with water to get a weeping effect.

‘It’s got a Latin tag along the bottom: “Malum infra latet”,’ added Zac.

‘Which means: “Trouble lies below”,’ said Alizarin. ‘You could be getting warm. That’s all I’m going to tell you.’

‘Thanks – I sure appreciate this.’ Zac was near to tears again. ‘I’ll talk to Adrian Campbell-Black about you next week.’

‘It wasn’t a trade-off,’ said Alizarin roughly, ‘I just believe in justice.’

Trying to keep the quiver of excitement and jubilation out of his voice, Zac asked, ‘Why’s your sister so screwed up?’

‘Like your mother’ – Alizarin warmed Zac’s cheeks with a touch of rose madder – ‘she suffers the guilt of the survivor. Sienna was two days old when Mum died.’ He went on carefully, ‘Mum had decorated rooms for me and my brothers before we were born, but done nothing for Sienna. We pretended Mum was thrilled to have a daughter, but she was really too drunk by then to mind what sex she had. Drink can make a baby undersized, can damage her organs. Sienna looks OK, but I guess it’s taken a toll on her heart.’

Alizarin clearly had great difficulty talking about his mother. He suddenly looked, under those punishing hospital lights, as drawn and drained as a surgeon after a nine-hour operation.

‘Sienna works so hard,’ he went on. ‘She feels huge responsibility for the world, particularly for animals.’

Visitor thumped his tail in approval.

‘Have you met Emerald’s sister?’ asked Alizarin casually.

‘The roly-poly Rottweiler,’ said Zac. ‘Not my greatest fan. Mistrusts my motives.’

‘With reason,’ retorted Alizarin.

The second bottle was empty. A car turned into the drive. Anthea and Emerald were back.

‘I must go,’ said Zac, ‘and I really am crazy about your pictures.’

If Alizarin’s eyes had been better, and he’d looked out of the window, he would have seen Zac waltzing up the drive in ecstasy, his face satanic in the moonlight.

The morning of Emerald’s birthday was infinitely sunnier than the mood of Anthea’s servants. Having been paid nothing for the fête, they had been forced to bull up the house for days, and now would have to work until God knew what hour this evening.