Pandora (23 page)

‘My husband’s late wife had many unsuitable men friends with whom she indulged in – well, orgies at Foxes Court. Do we really want our village associated with that sort of thing? The press so love muck-raking and Ay cannot have Sir Raymond upset. After all, he is no longer young.’

If Galena had lived, Anthea thought fretfully, she’d now be sixty-six, a bloated old wino living in Cardboard City, who’d never have coped with her frightful children. But because she was dead everyone idolized her. And there was ghastly Rosemary Pulborough, still in her gardening clothes, with an Alice band rammed into her electrocuted haystack hair, fanning the flames.

Whatever jokes Anthea and David made about Rosemary, nicknaming her the ‘Wardress’ because she was always watching them, it irritated the hell out of Anthea that her stepchildren were all unaccountably devoted to Rosemary.

Not wanting to snore or dribble in front of Robens, Raymond fought sleep. He should never have accepted that third glass of claret. As the Bentley rolled down Rupert’s drive, he observed the Stubbs-like serenity of sleek, beautiful horses grazing beneath amber trees, and thought wryly of the worry Galena’s children caused him: Sienna, drinking too much, sleeping around, rowing with Anthea; Alizarin, tormented and unapproachable; Jonathan always in trouble. He’d started conducting with his cock during a boring television programme last week. Worst of all was Jupiter, constantly questioning his father’s every decision, implying it was high time Raymond retired.

‘“A doubtful throne is ice on summer seas,”’ sighed Raymond.

Jupiter’s eye, alas, was not as good as David’s, nor was he as adept at buttering up clients and wooing young artists – which was one of the reasons the Belvedon was in danger of dropping behind the Pulborough. Odd how it still upset him to see David.

Lying back, Raymond shut his eyes. Tomorrow he would ring the National Gallery about Rupert’s Rubens, and perhaps that ravishing child with green eyes would turn up to sculpt his head.

Quoting his favourite Tennyson:

‘Death closes all: but something e’er the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with gods.’

Raymond fell asleep.

Emerald Cartwright, the girl with green eyes, had been adopted as a very small baby by parents who had adored and hopelessly indulged her for the past twenty-five years. Despite being brought up in a beautiful Georgian house in Yorkshire with stables, tennis courts, a long drive and fields, despite being sent to a smart boarding school in the south, and later to art college in London, where she had been bought a sweet little house in Fulham to share with her sister Sophy, Emerald felt fate had dealt her a cruel hand.

A great fantasist, who regarded herself as a cross between Carmen and Scarlett O’Hara, Emerald imagined she was a princess’s daughter who’d been kidnapped at birth. She hadn’t fallen in love with any of the hordes of men who ran after her because in her dreams she was saving herself for the prince or great artist she knew to be her real father.

Rupert Campbell-Black had had legions of women before falling for his second wife, Taggie. Maybe while he’d been married to his first wife, thought Emerald longingly, he’d had a fling with some dark beauty too proud to tell him she was pregnant, who had given her baby girl up for adoption.

Always the winner of any head-turner prize, Emerald was unfazed by everyone staring at her as she wandered round the house. She was only interested in catching sight of Rupert and looking at his pictures.

Emerald was small, only five feet. As the crowds in front of her suddenly became a screaming mob, desperate for a glimpse of their idol, she wailed that she couldn’t see. Next moment a pair of hands closed round her tiny waist, lifting her up, and she saw the back of Rupert’s sleek blond head as he vanished like the White Rabbit through another door.

‘Hell, I’ve missed him again.’

Breathing in expensive aftershave which she recognized as CK One, Emerald glanced down and noticed the hands were suntanned and ringless. Returned to earth, she swung round and gasped because the man towering over her was twenty years younger than Rupert but almost as handsome. Her eyes were level with his breast bone. Between the second and third button of his black shirt, she could see a silver Star of David. A charcoal-grey bomber jacket emphasized wide shoulders, black jeans showed off lean gym-honed hips and long legs. Glancing up she saw black stubble on a square jaw, a jutting pudgy lower lip, hawklike Mephistophelean features, a smooth olive complexion, thick dark lashes fringing unblinking yellow eyes. Although his black glossy close-cropped hair was flecked with grey, he didn’t look a day over thirty.

Wow, thought Emerald, he’s like Bagheera in
The Jungle Book
.

He then introduced himself in Bagheera’s deep purring voice as Zachary Ansteig, an American journalist doing a piece on Rupert’s open day for a New York art magazine called
Mercury
.

‘This guy’s like the Pied Piper,’ he drawled. ‘If he walked into that lake over there, there wouldn’t be a faggot or a woman left in England. What’s his interest in art?’

‘Mostly dynastic,’ said Emerald. ‘He chiefly commissions contemporary portraits of his family and his animals. The rest are Old Masters handed down by previous generations.’

‘Lot of Borochovas,’ observed Zac, turning to Galena’s drawing of Shrimpy. ‘She’s getting really big in the States. I guess she and Rupert were an item.’

Emerald, who didn’t want to think of Rupert being an item with anyone but herself, was thrilled nevertheless that Zac was following her round.

But although she showed off her knowledge of art, making risqué remarks about the pictures and regaling him with gossip about Casey Andrews and Somerford Keynes, who nearly put his neck out gazing at Zac as he passed them, Zac didn’t react. There was a sinister stillness about him. He seemed only interested in examining each picture, and kept diving into cordoned-off rooms for recces, until Rupert’s minions chucked him out. He made no notes for his piece.

‘Are you a burglar?’ asked Emerald.

‘Maybe,’ said Zac.

She found it disconcerting that the crowds, perhaps as compensation for not seeing Rupert, gazed at Zac, rather than herself, and was gratified when a passing David Pulborough gave her an undressing glance behind Geraldine Paxton’s immaculately tailored back.

‘I should have done a number on that guy,’ she taunted Zac, ‘he’s rumoured to be even better hung than his pictures and the Pulborough’s hotter for young artists than the Belvedon these days. That’s his mistress with him – one of the great movers and shakers of the art world.’

They had reached the last room on the tour. As anxious to see Rupert as Emerald, the sinking sun was peering in through the jasmine-covered window, casting lace patterns on a lovely Constable of Cotchester Cathedral. Outside the crowds could be seen trailing disconsolately towards the car park.

‘Let’s try and get to see him,’ Emerald begged Zac, ‘I’m sure he’d give you a quick interview if you plugged his racehorses and the yard.’

Glancing at his watch, Zac shook his head.

‘I’ve got to catch a train to Paddington. Great meeting you.’

Irked by his indifference, Emerald was amazed to find herself offering Zac a lift back to London, when she was in fact headed for a dance in Dorset.

As they walked towards her car, a young boy on a muddy grey pony came hurtling across the fields, flying over stone wall and fence, haughtily scattering the crowds on his way into the yard.

‘That must be Xavier, Rupert’s adopted son,’ said Emerald in excitement.

This is the world I belong to, she told herself firmly.

Reaching her car, a Golf convertible which smelled like she did of violets, she plugged in a CD of Abigail Rosen playing Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto and kicked off her shoes. She was so small, her car seat had to be pushed so far forward that the long-legged Zac found himself addressing the back of her head.

He also clocked the emerald earrings, the Tiffany cross, the Cartier watch with diamond numbers, the black leather Dunhill case in the back. She was a fast but excellent driver. Her mobile rang the whole time, all men with trembling voices asking for dates.

‘I guess that’s the reason there’s a man shortage in London,’ mocked Zac, ‘all the guys are calling you.’

Away from Rupert’s pictures he became more chatty. Without eye contact, Emerald also found herself expanding under his questioning, explaining that like Rupert’s younger children, she was adopted, but had never felt she fitted in.

‘Plato believed in adoption,’ observed Zac. ‘He said kids were much better raised by other people, whose expectations weren’t so high.’

‘I just feel I’m with the wrong family,’ sighed Emerald. ‘My adoptive parents are so straight and horsey, and I
hate
horses, and they’re so buttoned up about their feelings. They’ve been good to me, so it seems ungrateful to ask about my natural parents.’

‘Who were they anyway?’

‘My natural father didn’t have the guts to sign the birth certificate,’ said Emerald bitterly.

‘Perhaps he was a God who turned into a swan or a shower of gold to impregnate your mom,’ teased Zac. ‘You look kinda goddess-like. He could hardly put Shower of Gold on a birth certificate.’

Emerald was not in the mood for jokes.

‘I often think he could have been high profile, and not wanted a scandal. My mother worked in an art gallery.

‘If you want to know what it’s like to be blind, walk around with your eyes shut,’ she added bitterly. ‘But if you want to find out what it’s like to be adopted, go on the tube and look at any couple sitting next to you, smart, ugly, arguing, holding hands – they could be your parents. Any guy I go out with could be my brother or my father. I feel like an unstarted symphony.’ Emerald’s voice was rattling now. ‘I have no past.’

‘It’s your future that matters.’

As Abigail Rosen launched into the last stampeding movement of the Tchaikovsky, Emerald reached the motorway, and symbolically rammed her foot down.

‘I always feel as though I’m hurtling into a future without knowing where I’ve come from. You’ve no idea how hard that is.’ She glanced round at Zac: so fit, tanned and elitist. ‘I bet you come from a glamorous family.’

‘They were mostly wiped out in concentration camps,’ said Zac flatly, ‘I’ve got no past either, that makes two of us.’

‘Oh God, I’m sorry.’ Jolted out of her self-absorption, Emerald felt ashamed. ‘They always tell you adopted children are chosen, so I’m a member of the Chosen Race too.’

Then she nearly drove off the road as Zac lifted her cascade of hair and laid a warm, caressing hand on the back of her neck.

‘I was teased at school for being adopted,’ she gabbled. ‘They told me the reason I was small was because I hadn’t come out of my mother’s tummy.’

‘I was beaten up for being a “Yid”,’ countered Zac, ‘and, because I had a slight Austrian accent (which they assumed was German), for being a Nazi as well. Then the rabbi arranged for me to have judo lessons. No-one beat me up again,’ he added grimly.

‘You’re Austrian?’ said Emerald in surprise. ‘I must say you don’t conjure up cheery images of the Blue Danube, Glühwein and
The Sound of Music
.’

Turning to him as they reached the outskirts of London, she noticed Zac’s strange gleaming cat’s eyes, his face orange from the glare of the street lights, and felt unsettled and wildly attracted to him.

‘When are you going back to America?’ she asked and was shocked at her desolation when he said, ‘Tomorrow.’

He was yawning now and talking about getting an early night. Emerald couldn’t bear it. She must keep him interested.

‘Did you see Raymond Belvedon? He’s such a duck, he gave me his card, he wants me to sculpt his head.’

‘We get his programmes on PBS,’ said Zac. ‘They just adore him in the States. He used to be married to Borochova, that explains why he was there.’

‘His next programme’s on Raphael.’

As they reached Hammersmith, Emerald was again astounded to hear herself, who never made the running, asking Zac if he’d like to come back to Fulham for a drink.