Pandora (38 page)

‘No-one has asked me how I feel about Mummy and Daddy’s love child,’ she told them soulfully. ‘My brother Dicky was sick four times last night, Visitor was sick three times.’ Visitor thumped his tail approvingly. ‘My new sister’s being sick upstairs at the moment. Sienna says my mother’s a slapper, but she only slapped me once when I bit her because she wouldn’t let me watch
Brookside
.’

Gazing down from an upstairs Old Rectory window, David was so furious the Belvedons were receiving so much media attention that he rushed down and suffused the area in a disgusting smell by throwing his wife’s left gumboot on the bonfire.

Sienna cried most of the way back to her studio in the East End. One of Thatcher’s children, she had been taught at college to know her true worth and market herself. To control the art world, you had to be a nuisance because you would only be appreciated for your ability to shock and behave badly.

More seriously she was now working on a huge canvas of animals in hell: bears in China, monkeys in laboratories, veal calves in crates. She could only do a little at a time because it made her cry so much.

Beneath her aggression, Sienna was a little girl lost, who blamed herself for her mother’s death. She drank too much and slept with too many men to blot out the fact that she was hopelessly in love with her brother Jonathan. It had always been them against the world. Now she was truly terrified. She had seen Jonathan’s reaction to Emerald, and knew life would never be the same again.

Oo-ah!
magazine were incensed the following morning to find themselves pre-empted by the
Daily Mail
, which contained a double page exclusive headed: ‘Lady Belvedon’s Love Child’.

Having reported Raymond’s gushings at length, they also included a telephone interview with Emerald:

‘I’ve found the end of the rainbow at last. My adopted parents tried, but I always felt an outsider. If they wanted me so much why did they pack me off to boarding school? My real mum and I are so alike. We love clothes and making houses beautiful. We’re both size eight, arty, obsessively tidy, terrified of horses and suffer from migraine. My mother was six years younger than I am now when she courageously gave me up for adoption and went on to become a wonderful stepmother to four children. I am very proud of her. I feel I have come home.’

By eight o’clock, the queue of press and television outside Foxes Court’s firmly locked gates stretched as far as the High Street.

‘This is a much better turnout,’ announced Dora, waving happily at cameramen as Robens the gardener drove her to school. With any luck further revelations might buy her a new bridle or even a second pony.

An enraged David Pulborough, on his way to the station and the London train, was tempted to return home and put his wife’s right gumboot on the bonfire.

Alizarin, who’d been trying to paint since first light, was equally incensed by the hooting din. As the gates were shut, the reporters rang the bell of the Lodge instead, so Alizarin tipped buckets of water over them. Visitor, who loved publicity even more than Dora – camera crews meant biscuits – was whining to be let out. Any moment he’d be handing out cups of tea, thought Alizarin sourly.

His mother’s child, Alizarin, who was as dedicated to righting wrongs as his sister Sienna, was now painting a scene of appalling torture in a Serbian police HQ. One young Albanian was being electrocuted in a revolving chair so he could be flogged at the same time, another was having his fingers broken in a metal vice. On the torturers’ faces was sexual excitement; on that of the cleaner scrubbing down the walls, mild curiosity. You could hear the screams and smell the blood.

Every brushstroke was anguish, but Alizarin felt someone had to tell the world. On other canvasses stacked against the walls were further atrocities: human shields; starving Albanians in concentration camps; civilians riddled with bullets, frozen to the hillside. Alizarin had only returned from Macedonia last week, he must get it on canvas before the horror faded.

The room reeked of turps and damp dog. Like a surgeon, Alizarin worked under powerful hospital lights. On the wall, resting like a butterfly with wings of glowing crimson, bright blue, rich green and stinging yellow, hung Galena’s palette. Beside it was a beautiful charcoal drawing of Galena herself.

Bloody hell, someone else was hammering on the door. Alizarin was about to empty another bucket out of the window when he recognized the dishevelled black curls of his brother Jonathan. The press were going crazy. As Alizarin let him in, Jonathan announced that he’d just heard the cuckoo.

‘Must be Emerald settling into her new nest.’

In fine form after a very long sleep, Jonathan was off to London to prove that Emerald wasn’t Raymond’s. Accompanying him was Diggory, his extremely self-regarding Jack Russell, who was now yapping round Visitor, grumbling because he’d been shut away during the silver wedding party in case he bit people.

‘These are knockout.’ Sighing and shuddering, Jonathan examined Alizarin’s canvasses. ‘But gruesome I’d squeal in a second if anyone did that to me.’

Alizarin was now holding up a big magnifying glass as he scraped paint off a torturer’s face.

‘What d’you want?’ he asked ungraciously.

‘To talk about our new sister.’

‘I’m working.’

Jonathan then made the mistake of showing his brother his latest nudes of Sienna.

‘Content’s bound to raise a few eyebrows.’

‘Content’s fine,’ snapped Alizarin, who couldn’t praise where he didn’t admire. ‘It’s the execution that’s so bloody vulgar. Frankly, you’re too self-obsessed to be any good as a portrait painter.’

‘I’ve always thought of you as Pride,’ snapped back a wounded Jonathan, ‘but you’re getting more and more like Envy, and you should stop painting the working classes, they never pay.’

Gathering up Diggory and his canvasses, he stalked out.

Alizarin put his throbbing head in his hands. He
was
jealous of Jonathan’s effortless success, and was ashamed of himself for being so belligerent, but he couldn’t throw off his black mood.

Pulling a baseball cap over his nose, Jonathan stormed his Ferrari towards the motorway. Along the verges, cow parsley like some white-faced religious group was being whipped into a frenzy by a vicious east wind. Rain lashed the windows.

Fucking Alizarin doesn’t even realize, thought Jonathan furiously, that I only went over to the Pulborough because Jupiter was refusing to show Al’s pictures any more.

‘It’s because you don’t want Alizarin making money and taking Hanna back off you,’ Jonathan had shouted at Jupiter.

‘Bollocks,’ had howled back Jupiter, ‘it’s because I can’t sell the bloody things.’

‘Then you’re not selling me either,’ Jonathan had yelled. ‘Al’s a genius, it’s only a matter of time.’

Raymond, who had not been told the reason for Jonathan’s defection, had been devastated.

Jonathan Belvedon had always been adored slightly too much. Spoilt by nannies, teachers of both sexes and later by women, he tended to take the easy option. Smoking dope one afternoon on his bed at boarding school, he had decided the best way to pull the most glamorous women in the world was to become a portrait painter.

Now, at twenty-eight, he had socialites, models and actresses queuing up to be painted. Poor Alizarin slogged away for days on a picture. Jonathan dashed things off in half an hour, often from a photograph or a video taken by an assistant. Like Nijinsky, he was a superb and instinctive artist, ‘to whom technique is only a servant’.

Jonathan lived in a loft in Hoxton, where droves of young artists, mostly pretty girls in various states of undress, completed all kinds of work – landscapes, installations, as well as portraits that he had started. Recently he’d been too busy modelling Armani suits for
GQ
, punching critics and getting his dick out on television to do much work.

Jonathan never had any money because he was constantly snorting, drinking or buying dinner for his friends. He and Alizarin had once been inseparable, painting or hell-raising all night, then lying on the studio floor listening to the Alpine Symphony as the sun rose. Now they were separated by Jonathan’s runaway success and Alizarin’s utter failure. But this didn’t stop Alizarin castigating Jonathan for selling out and producing rubbish.

Ringing Sienna when he got held up in traffic at the Chiswick flyover, Jonathan was depressed to find her also working.

‘I was so pissed off by bloody Emerald in the
Mail
,’ raged Sienna, ‘I had to get stuck into something.’

She was now channelling her rage against the Filipinos who tied dogs’ broken legs behind their backs and rammed their snouts into tins before flogging them as meat in the market place.

‘It’s like so fucking cruel!’ Sienna was sobbing with anger. ‘Where are you off to?’

‘To take the piss out of David. D’you think Willy of the Valley’s Emerald’s father?’

‘I wouldn’t wish that fate even on her.’

Diggory meanwhile, who got wildly jealous when Jonathan spent too long on the telephone, had started yapping furiously.

‘I’ll call you later,’ yelled Jonathan over the din. ‘Let’s have supper.’

David Pulborough had always been ahead of the game– still driving the bus with ‘Further’ on the front. As the supply of Old Masters dried up, he increasingly concentrated on young artists. These he kept on their toes by never letting them feel quite sure he was retaining them, by not allowing them sufficient advance to get smug, and by putting on group exhibitions to foster a competitive spirit. He had also copied the Belvedon’s habit of producing a much admired Pulborough calendar, which each month featured a painting and a small photo of its artist. Anyone who underperformed or was playing up was left out. David also went berserk if any of his artists sold their work privately.

Jonathan, a free spirit, had no desire to be owned, advised or shaped by David. He just wanted maximum money for minimum work. Having captured Jonathan, David expected all his starry entourage to follow him. He’d have such fun bringing that stroppy little bitch Sienna to heel and Trafford, Jonathan’s loftmate, was unlikely to stay at the Belvedon after being banished from the silver wedding party.

The nice thing about young artists was that even the unsalubrious ones like Trafford were always surrounded by pretty girls. Over the years, David had been a serial humper, a ladies’ man for all seasons. Thank God the sofa in the back office couldn’t talk. He was still Lust in the Seven Deadly Sins, but gradually snobbery was taking over from lechery. The Pulborough had been so successful that he was no longer largely dependent on Rosemary, but he needed her to add gravitas if he were going to have a room in the Tate named after him and to achieve his ambition in 2000 of becoming High Sheriff of Larkshire. And if he left Rosemary, what excuse would he have not to marry all his other girlfriends, including Geraldine Paxton, who had proved so invaluable at securing grants and commissions for his protégés?

This had been his game plan, but suddenly Emerald had rolled up and spoiled everything.

Jonathan reached the Pulborough at midday. Zoe, David’s assistant, slim and understated so as not to upset Geraldine, was typing catalogue blurbs. She had a terrific crush on Jonathan and was mortified that her light brown bob had been whipped into a bird’s nest after a weekend sailing.

David believed in giving buyers little choice. On the far wall of the ground-floor gallery hung a lone Pissarro of a couple by a river. Peach-pink lupins in a copper vase on a nearby table – a trick he’d learnt from Raymond – picked up the coral of the woman’s dress.

In a back room, a restorer was bent over a large oil, painting out the vixen being torn apart by two hunt terriers, and replacing her with a tartan scarf.

‘People won’t buy anything to do with blood sports these days,’ sighed David. ‘But I’ve got a terrier-mad actress who might give me two grand for that. She’d buy that dog of yours.’ David glared at Diggory, who glared back.

‘I wish you wouldn’t bring him in here,’ went on David fussily, as Diggory briskly rearranged the purple silk cushions and curled up on the white sofa in David’s office.

On David’s splendid oak desk was a photograph not of Rosemary nor gay Barney, but of his daughter Melanie, who, like David, had married up and for money. On Melanie’s right on the pale green Lutyens bench sat a smug David, bouncing a plump grandson on his knee and looking twice as young as his son-in-law on Melanie’s left, who owned the large, ravishing Elizabethan house in the background.