Pandora (91 page)

When reproved, Casey had announced sententiously that he could only paint as he saw with his inner eye. David was so livid he was tempted to see if the prize, due to public pressure, could be awarded instead to Emerald. She’d be so grateful, he still might get his leg over.

He and Geraldine had made wonderful love in a field on the way back to London, but he wished she wasn’t pushing quite so hard for marriage. Rosemary’s rich aunt was about to croak and leave Rosemary a very great deal of money, which David was dying to spend.

A dream had been forming in his head for the past few days. He was bidding up to £27 million for Kevin Coley, which would mean a flat fee of £100,000 in his pocket. But if the fat ape had stayed in the States, David, who two-timed his clients as blithely as his women, had been planning to arrange for Barney to bid for Minsky Kraskov, who was on a yacht in the Med, and to see which man packed it in first.

When Kevin dropped out this evening, however, David was tempted to carry on and buy the Raphael himself. Even if he ‘flipped it’, art jargon for selling on very quickly, he could make a nice little killing of two or three million – particularly as he had a new hugely rich South American client who might easily bite. The gallery was doing brilliantly, and with Rosemary’s aunt’s money and the Old Rectory recently valued at £1.5 million, there was plenty of dosh floating around.

All this rather left marriage to Geraldine out of the equation. Even so David was irked that Rosemary, who’d claimed she was going to some local wedding, had just rolled up. He hoped she hadn’t overheard the telephone conversation in which Geraldine had been asking him why on earth he’d asked Rosemary to become his wife in the first place.

‘If you marry a rich old dog,’ he had quipped, ‘you can sleep with the pretty ones in the afternoon.’

‘That’s obnoxious,’ Geraldine, who still had grass seed in her linen turn-ups, had been saying furiously. Hearing Rosemary’s step in the hall, David had rung off.

But Rosemary seemed calm enough, smiling as she examined his ticket for tonight.

‘I’d like to come to this. They’ve just predicted on the wireless that
Pandora
could make twenty million pounds. Poor Belvedons.’

Slapping Eau Sauvage on his sunburnt cheeks, David said he hadn’t been able to get her a ticket, and he had to dine with Kevin Coley later.

‘Going to be a hell of a scrum.’

‘What time are they selling her?’

David glanced at his watch.

‘About eight-twenty. You can watch it later on the news.’

He and Geraldine must remember not to stand together in front of the television cameras.

Five minutes later, he walked up Old Bond Street, past the beautiful clothes shops, the galleries and the flags swooning in the heat above the great jewellers.

England at its most elegant, thought David, his heart swelling. And there, most elegant of all, emerging as her driver admiringly opened the car door, smiling at the battalion of cameras, was Geraldine. She would be a wonderful adornment to his life. He must try and work something out.

He was gratified when the press surged forward to talk to him.

‘About Jonathan Belvedon . . .’ asked Adam Helliker.

‘One of our most exciting gallery artists,’ said David smoothly. ‘Along with Colin Casey Andrews, who of course today won the Borochova Memorial Award. Now, if you’ll forgive me.’

He and Geraldine had hardly crossed Sotheby’s threshold before an enraged Kevin Coley bore down on him.

‘Where the fuck have you been? Thing’s nearly over.’

Old Masters other than the Raphael were already selling briskly. A portrait of a court siren by Cranach the Elder and a little Grimmer winter scene of people skating, dogs barking and falling snowflakes mingling with the stars had already gone for vast sums.

Never had so many folding chairs been crammed into the main gallery. People, particularly the old, were arguing and grumbling, trying not to be moved out of seats they had wrongfully appropriated, hoping chivalry would prevail – chivalry did not. Others were crowded four deep in a great horseshoe round three of the cranberry-red walls and spilling out of the room’s two entrances.

Facing them on the rostrum, Sotheby’s charming, outwardly languid chairman, Henry Wyndham, a shaggier much taller Hugh Grant, a giraffe crossed with Michelangelo’s
David
, was flipping through his ring-binder. This gave him the number, name, reserve of each lot and the commission bids from people who couldn’t make the sale. The Raphael, the star lot at eighty-nine, would be the last to be sold, but there was an El Greco, a speculative Rembrandt and two stunning Canalettos along the way to keep people interested.

Against the right wall, a mass of photographers and television cameramen were lined up. Forbidden to film the actual punters, who might prefer to remain anonymous, they concentrated on Sotheby’s team of telephone bidders. Confined like Rupert’s thoroughbreds to a big mahogany pen with only their shoulders and tossing heads of newly washed hair on show, these beauties of both sexes were busy laughing and speaking in every language as they alerted clients in jet, boardroom, Lamborghini or in Abdul Karamagi’s case on top of his finance director’s daughter, that the picture they wanted would be coming up for sale in a few lots’ time.

David eyed them with pleasure, hailing the prettiest by name, and sat down in his favourite place, halfway up the room, on the edge of the central aisle, next to bloody Kevin, who kept nudging and plucking his sleeve and asking to be introduced to everyone. Beyond Kevin, Enid Coley, massive as a hippo in grey satin, had spread over three-quarters of snake-hipped Geraldine’s chair.

‘Did you fly back from the States in the Lear?’ asked Geraldine, who liked to show off her familiarity with jets.

‘No, no,’ said Enid crushingly. ‘The Lear is for the servants.’

At the back of the hall, Rupert Campbell-Black, in an increasingly bad mood, was watching Wimbledon on a pocket television, and wondering why the hell he’d allowed himself to be hemmed in by these popinjays.

‘That shit’ – he scowled at the back of Kevin Coley’s thatched grey head – ‘nearly broke up my best friend’s marriage. I’ve always wanted to bury him.’

‘You’ll have the perfect opportunity when he bids against us for the Raphael,’ murmured Jupiter, who believed in firing up his clients.

The El Greco went for £8 million, followed by a somewhat sugary Fragonard of a girl with a puppy which sold for £1.5 million.

‘Puppies always add ten per cent in England,’ observed Jupiter.

David was now boasting to Kevin that he was intending to bid for lot sixty-one, an exquisite van de Velde of sailing ships on a choppy grey sea.

‘A new good friend, Mr Justice Caradoc Willoughby Evans actually’ – David gave a light laugh – ‘asked me to keep an eye out.’

Bidding was brisk, hitting the van de Velde’s lower estimate right away and soaring up to £1,200,000 offered by a museum. Was David going any higher? asked Henry Wyndham.

David shook his head.

Everyone swung round, trying to read the thoughts of the dispassionate thin-faced man beside Rupert. After a long pause, Jupiter nodded.

‘One million, four hundred thousand at the back.’ Henry Wyndham looked round with polite incredulity. Was no-one going to bid further?

As the hammer crashed down, Jupiter switched on his mobile.

‘Hi, Caradoc,’ he murmured. ‘I got it. One point four million. Once it’s been cleaned, it’ll blow your mind. Talk to you later.’

Smirking slightly, ever machiavellian, Jupiter went back to firing up Rupert.

‘Did you realize that David Pulborough used to be Mum’s lover?’ he said softly. ‘And almost certainly fathered my brother Jonathan?’

‘What?’ roared Rupert, then, lowering his voice, ‘When, for Christ’s sake?’

‘Summer of 1970.’

‘Jesus,’ exploded Rupert, ‘I was in there—’ Then, remembering Taggie on his right: ‘And Casey Andrews and Etienne as well. That little toerag screwed Galena? She must have been four-timing the lot of us.’

Standing up to glare at David, Rupert nearly bid by mistake for
Five Wise Virgins
by Rubens, who were showing no sign of making their £300,000 reserve.

‘Galena and that self-regarding little tosser. I do not believe it.’

A still life of strawberries went for £50,000, making everyone realize how hungry they were. It had gone eight o’clock, only a handful of lots before the Raphael.

‘Trust that little shit Pulborough to get into cahoots with that bastard Kevin Coley,’ muttered Rupert furiously. ‘Kev probably got into Galena’s knickers as well. Jesus!’

‘Where’s Sienna?’ whispered Taggie, unsure of the cause of her husband’s wrath.

Jupiter glanced round. ‘Can’t see her anywhere.’

‘Got a boyfriend yet?’ asked Rupert.

Jupiter shook his head. ‘Difficult day for her. Jonathan getting married, she was always a bit too crazy about him.’

‘Thank Christ, I never had a sister,’ said Rupert. ‘If she’d been as pretty as my brother Adrian, I’m sure I’d have shagged her.’ Then, as a frightful picture of a courtier having his head cut off sold for £20,000: ‘That should have happened to bloody Pulborough.’

Sienna had taken refuge against the wall between a bulky NBC cameraman and an even bulkier Somerford Keynes.

To the back of the hall, on the right-hand side, half hidden from her by NBC’s camera and tripod, stood Zac. He was flanked by two of the sharp-suited lawyers who had hammered out the contract, and who now told everyone who tried to approach him to piss off. Zac quivered with the same tension – the tiger poised for the kill – that she remembered from Foxes Court.

Oh, why wasn’t she the white shirt clinging to his divine, hard body, or the cranberry-red wall against which his head had fallen back with such deceptive languor? Surreptitiously, he seemed to be searching for someone. Then, like two tiny total eclipses, his dark glasses focused on her. Perhaps she was imagining things? Perhaps he knew the NBC cameraman? But he started violently, then instantly jerked his head away, his face totally expressionless.

‘What are you working on?’ asked Somerford, bringing her back to earth.

‘A big animal rights project. It’s nearly finished, but I can’t like work out how to portray God.’

‘Like Rupert Campbell-Black?’ suggested Somerford.

Sienna laughed then moaned in despair as to loud cheers a young porter wearing a blue apron and white gloves, aware that this was his finest hour, carried in the Raphael and placed it reverently on the easel by the rostrum.

‘A lot to be desired,’ wrote Somerford in his notebook. ‘Far more ravishing in the flesh – like yourself,’ he murmured. Then seeing how dishcloth-grey she had gone, he added with rare kindness, ‘This must be hell for you.’

‘Pandora looks so small and defenceless,’ mumbled Sienna. ‘Like a gorgeous little filly that’s been dragged away from her mother at Tattersalls. I just want to take her home.’

‘Lot eighty-nine, Raphael’s
Pandora
.’ The Chairman of Sotheby’s smiled down at his excited audience, a conductor on the brink of a symphony. ‘I am starting the bidding at ten million pounds.’

Hope beamed out of the little painting.

‘You could all buy me if you tried.’

There was a long pause when all you could hear was a woodland cheeping of mobiles, and the atmosphere crackling with electricity. Then two anonymous punters started pushing the bidding up. These were actually Minsky Kraskov in a yacht off Cannes and Abdul the Amorous, who’d just rolled off his finance director’s daughter in Dubai.

Both men were barking instructions in broken English over the telephone: Minsky to russet-haired Natacha, Abdul to Patti with the ebony bob – two Sotheby’s beauties in the mahogany pen.

‘Ten million. Ten million five hundred thousand, eleven million, eleven million five hundred thousand,’ called out Henry Wyndham, his sleepy come-to-bid eyes scanning the room in case he missed anyone.

‘Eleven million, five hundred thousand on the telephone,’ he repeated. Then, noticing that the man from the Getty had removed his spectacles, indicating a bid, he turned back to beautiful Natacha in the mahogany pen, who was still gabbling away to Minsky on his yacht, saying: ‘Twelve million against you now, Natacha. At twelve million.’