Pandora (40 page)

After that, things became hazy. Fading cow parsley and buttercups slapped against their legs as they took Diggory and another bottle for a walk on Barnes Common.

‘If only we could have a dog,’ sighed Sophy. ‘I thought of becoming a vet, but I wasn’t sure about shoving my hand up cows.’

‘I do all the time anyway,’ said Jonathan and they collapsed with laughter.

Later they all three dropped into a casino in Mayfair. Under glittering chandeliers, people with obsessive faces gathered round gaming tables. Only the women dragged their eyes away from rattling ball or ace-laced card hand to gaze at Jonathan, whose black curls were flopping over cheekbones increasingly stained with colour.

Jonathan in turn was increasingly taken by Sophy. He liked the way her unpainted cherubic face looked as pretty at midnight as at midday. Nor was there anything to embellish it in her pink beaded handbag – only three packets of Silk Cut.

‘I hate to run out.’

‘A fag bag,’ said Jonathan, helping himself, ‘and, talking of fags, that fat slug at the bar in a dinner jacket is called Barney Pulborough. He lives next door to us in the country and sat next to your tricky sister on Saturday night. Probably fed her a lot of vitriol about me.’

‘Probably jealous.’ Sophy took another slug of champagne. ‘You’re an icon.’

‘I con the public, according to Barney’s father, who owns the Pulborough who represent me.’ Jonathan lowered his voice: ‘Barney has shares in this place, and it’s where the Pulborough launder their ill-gotten gains from dodgy deals.’

‘Blimey,’ said Sophy in excitement.

Barney in fact was very happy. Having overheard Raymond talking to Jupiter on Saturday night, he had made a killing selling the story of Lady Belvedon’s Love Child to the
Daily Mail
. For once therefore he was quite amiable to Jonathan.

‘That big Saudi at the roulette table,’ he told him softly, ‘is a client of Dad’s called Abdul Karamagi. He collects nudes and is about to launder half a million pounds – just watch him.’

The Saudi, whose huge hands were spilling over with chips, proceeded to put half on red, half on black. Round clattered the wheel, down dropped the silver ball, up came black, which paid double, so exactly the same amount of chips were returned to him.

‘If he cashes them in in a couple of hours, they’ll be as clean as Anthea’s knickers,’ said Barney.

‘What happens if zero comes up?’ asked Jonathan.

‘You just pray it doesn’t. I’ll introduce you,’ said Barney.

Abdul’s chocolate-brown eyes melted when he saw Sophy’s splendid proportions. He had also heard of Jonathan, and over another bottle and a large plate of smoked salmon for Sophy, commissioned him to paint her.

Sophy was staggered by the skill with which Jonathan brokered the deal. £80,000 might seem a lot, he explained, but pubes took for ever to draw, though as he was so taken by Abdul, he would do him a nude of Sophy for £60,000.

‘Shut up, you’ll get a cut,’ he hissed when Sophy protested, then to Abdul, ‘And I’d like an advance of twenty thousand.’

A minute later Abdul was meekly cashing in some chips. Sadly he couldn’t buy Sophy as well, commiserated Jonathan, but the portrait would be delivered in the middle of June. Once Abdul returned to the tables, Jonathan slipped Barney £4,000.

‘We needn’t tell your father?’

‘Certainly not,’ said Barney, and while standing them another drink, told them about his new boyfriend, who was a sister at Guy’s.

‘What do the patients call him?’ asked Sophy.

‘“Charge Nurse”,’ smirked Barney, ‘but he loves being called “Sister”.’

‘I think Barney’s sweet,’ protested Sophy as she and Jonathan reeled out into Berkeley Square. All round her the big dark houses seemed to be dancing a quadrille, whilst the floodlit-patterned trunks and branches of the plane trees swayed like giraffes amidst their ceiling of leaves.

Jonathan shoved £500 inside Sophy’s bra.

‘I can’t take it.’

‘It’ll pay a few bills at home. You could do with a dishwasher.’

‘I can’t pose nude.’

‘Sure you can, won’t take many sittings.’

At least it’ll be a chance to see him again, thought Sophy.

Jonathan then hailed a taxi, shoving an outraged Diggory on the floor because there wasn’t room on the seat for him and Sophy, and kissed her all the way home to his studio in a condemned warehouse off Hoxton Square. Here they found his louche flatmate, Trafford, laboriously making a picture called
Sick Joke
by sticking pieces of sweetcorn and red and green pepper onto a canvas then glazing them.

Trafford had a shaved head, ‘You won’t regret it’ tattooed across his chest and leered worse than Abdul. He reminded Sophy of a knowing old Scottie dog, just back from the butcher’s with a large bone and sawdust hanging from his fur tummy.

‘The press have been on all day about your new sister,’ he told Jonathan. ‘So has Sienna, not best pleased.’

‘Oh Christ, I forgot to ring her,’ groaned Jonathan, who was opening a tin of Butcher’s Tripe for Diggory.

‘The bitch,’ screamed Sophy, who had picked up the
Evening Standard
, where Anthea in an interview had emerged as Mother Courage.

‘“I knew Raymond loved Galena,”’ read out Sophy through gritted teeth, ‘“and only turned to me out of unbearable loneliness. The result was my Charlene. Naturally I’m grateful to Patience and Ian Cartwright for holding the fort, but I can only thank God my baby’s back where she belongs.” What a cow.’

‘Another session in the re-edit suite,’ said Jonathan, putting down Diggory’s bowl. ‘Don’t let it get to you, darling. Anthea’s just in orgasm because she’s at last found a smart relation.’

‘She’s good looking, your new sister.’ Trafford peered over Sophy’s shoulder at a blurred picture of Emerald. ‘When are you going to bring her round?’

The fumes from the glues and resins were making Sophy’s eyes water. Diggory was managing to wolf his food and simultaneously growl at a large Newfoundland puppy called Choirboy, who lay on the chaise longue chewing a Gucci slip-on and adding to the general chaos. The cork board groaned with Polaroids of women. Sophy groaned too because they all seemed so beautiful.

Drawing Trafford aside, Jonathan told him to push off.

‘I want to take Sophy to bed.’

‘Can I watch?’ asked Trafford, who’d spent much of the evening looking at porn on the internet, but who preferred the real thing.

‘Only if you waive that three hundred I owe you.’

Jonathan’s triple bed shared a room off the studio with a hundred canvasses, a large wardrobe and a stuffed polar bear hung with Jonathan’s jackets. There were scant curtains. Several windows in the houses opposite, which mostly belonged to artists, were still lit up. Jonathan shoved Trafford, armed with a torch, in the wardrobe.

‘How do I escape?’ whispered Trafford.

‘Women usually belt off to the bog afterwards,’ whispered back Jonathan, ‘you can nip out then.’

‘You on the pill?’ he asked Sophy as, in between kisses, he unbuttoned her shirt. ‘Good, I am now going to shag the arse off you.’

‘If only you could,’ sighed Sophy. ‘It’s much too big, and I’m far too fat. My last boyfriend, the one before the opera buff, nicknamed me “Sofa”.’

‘You’re my three-piece-sweetheart,’ giggled Jonathan, pushing Sophy back onto the bed. ‘I haven’t been so excited since I went on the bouncy castle at Limesbridge fête.’

Sophy was seriously big. Unable to see what was going on over her backside, Trafford started to emerge from the creaking wardrobe.

‘What’s that?’ gasped Sophy, hearing heavy breathing.

‘Probably a dog,’ mumbled Jonathan, who was blissfully losing himself in mountains of soft flesh. ‘Shut up, Diggory, shut up, Choirboy.’ He hurled a shoe across the room.

As they carried on, Trafford, frantic to distinguish some of the magnificent heaving flesh, switched on his torch.

‘Who’s that?’ cried Sophy, jumping out of her luscious dimpled skin in panic.

‘Light from the knocking shop opposite,’ whispered Jonathan soothingly. ‘“Gestapo bully” is one of their specialities, shining lights into clients’ faces and threatening to beat them up. Oh, you gorgeous thing.’

The ensuing romp so excited Trafford he nearly fell out of the wardrobe, knocking over a canvas. Furiously Jonathan kicked the door shut. But by this time Sophy was far too excited to notice. Later, as she ecstatically cradled a snoring Jonathan to her breasts, she wondered if she’d dreamt it, or had a man really slithered out across the floorboards?

Two streets away, Sienna lay on her bed smoking. Work had been interrupted all day by the telephone which she’d answered, hoping it might be Jonathan, but it was always about him – journalists wanting to know where he was and why his ravishing new sister had slapped his face. The last call had been from Dicky, who’d crept out of bed at Bagley Hall.

‘All the boys have been teasing me,’ he had sobbed. ‘Mummy won’t give me away like she did Emerald, will she?’

Switching off the telephone, Sienna had sobbed too. On the polished floor, where she had set fire to it, lay the blackened fragments of Anthea’s interview with the
Standard
. On the wall was a framed letter from Sir Nicholas Serota, congratulating her on being shortlisted for the Turner prize.

In the past, when she was sad, she had drawn comfort from visualizing sweet Hope in the Raphael, but since the silver wedding, she could only see Anthea’s smug little face. And nothing could alter the fact that Jonathan was far too preoccupied with his new sister to telephone his old one.

‘I feel shocking,’ moaned Sophy next morning as she pinched Jonathan’s most voluminous shirt to wear to school.

‘At least you look as though you’re bravely staggering in after food poisoning,’ mumbled Jonathan sleepily.

‘Thank you both for a heavenly day.’ Sophy kissed him and then Diggory.

‘We enjoyed it too. You can’t remember where I left my car, can you?’

In the middle of Geography, Sophy was called out to take an urgent call from her sister.

‘Why haven’t Mummy and Daddy rung me and begged me to come home?’ demanded Emerald.

‘Just bugger off,’ shouted Sophy and hung up.

On the Saturday after the silver wedding, Anthea was intoxicated to receive an affectionate airmail from Zac, posted in St Petersburg, apologizing for his cavalier behaviour and thanking her for a memorable party. She didn’t show the contents to Emerald, who was bitterly disappointed only to get a neutral postcard of the Hermitage. Scented by lavender bags, Zac’s letter took up residence at the back of Anthea’s underwear drawer.

It intoxicated her that her face was now in the papers as much as the other Belvedons, that she could manipulate her new daughter into setting those arrogant, defiant brothers at each other’s throats, and in addition make Sienna wild with jealousy. She also enjoyed seeing David Pulborough in a jitter. The next few weeks were going to be fun.

Jupiter Belvedon was in turmoil. A control freak, particularly where he himself was concerned, he had prided himself on his perfect marriage and, determined to safeguard it, had refused to let Hanna be parted from him for a single night. Now he was devoured with lust for a sister who had pretended to be attracted to him to gain access to Anthea.

Although he had protested to Hanna that he had merely thought of Emerald as a marketable property, Hanna couldn’t stop crying. Her tears fell on the huge watercolour she was painstakingly assembling of all the wild flowers in Galena’s meadow, creating a ravishing wet on wet effect. Jupiter, never very good at communication, couldn’t comfort her. Leaving her in the country, unable to sleep, he worked himself into the ground in London. God knew what Pandora’s Box Emerald had opened. He didn’t believe she was Raymond’s daughter any more than Jonathan did. How could they make their besotted father have a DNA test?

As the days passed, Jupiter grew increasingly fed up with journalists ringing the gallery, wanting to interview his father about the art world and the vain old bugger not realizing they were fishing about Emerald. Raymond was also getting sloppy. Revving up for a BBC programme on the High Renaissance, which meant a lot of research, he had not checked the provenance of a Turner and, having sold it to a private collector, discovered it had been stolen from a museum in Houston, who very much wanted it back. Even worse, far more punters were going into the Pulborough, which had gone above the Belvedon in the dealers’ profit parade for the first time.