Pandora (68 page)

After all I’ve done for that family, thought Anthea as she flounced out. And she couldn’t even ring David for sympathy.

Jupiter was back at the Middlesex by evening. He looked utterly exhausted, his face drained of colour except for huge purply crimson shadows beneath his eyes, but he was calmer. They had buried Visitor in the orchard beside Maud. Raymond had insisted on staggering out in his dressing gown.

‘I didn’t tell him Al was blind. He couldn’t handle it at the moment. Have you had anything to eat?’

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘Nor am I, but I could murder a large whisky. Let’s go and have dinner.’ Then, when Sophy looked doubtfully at a sleeping Alizarin: ‘He won’t wake for ages.’

Jupiter took her to his local: Mulligans in Cork Street. They sat side by side on a banquette, which made conversation easier. Sophy chose leek soup because it was the cheapest thing on the menu and she’d heard from Emerald that the Belvedons were broke. Jupiter told her not to be silly, so they both had Irish stew and pickled red cabbage and a lot of red wine.

Sophy kept crying; Jupiter held her hand.

‘I know I should ring Sienna and Jonathan, but I just feel it’s better if the old boy’s kept quiet at the moment,’ he said, then, taking a deep breath: ‘Look, I’ve had an idea. Casey Andrews’s exhibition was scheduled for the second half of February. But he’s walked out, so I’m going to show Alizarin instead.’

‘That’s wonderful!’ squeaked Sophy, flinging her arms round Jupiter, then recoiling in horror. She hadn’t washed since six that morning and she’d sweated so much with worry and pounding across London, she must pong worse than a skunk on a fun run.

But as she wriggled away, Jupiter clung to her.

‘Tamzin, Dad’s dimbo assistant, is showing no signs of coming back from Gstaad.’ He begged: ‘I can only do Al justice if you help me.’

‘Oh God, I’d love that. It’s half-term on the sixteenth of Feb so I’ll be free.’

Jupiter ordered a couple of large brandies.

‘You’ve got school tomorrow, I ought to take you home.’

‘The hospital says I can stay the night.’ Sophy’s voice trembled: ‘It’d be so awful if he woke up and there was no Visitor, and he didn’t know where he was.’

‘I’m so ashamed,’ muttered Jupiter. ‘Because he wasn’t with Hanna, I feel as though a great poisoned thorn has been tugged out of my side and I can love him again.’

He and Sophy were less euphoric a few days later when tests proved that Alizarin had a dangerous and very rare tumour, known as Norfolk’s Disease, which was pressing increasingly on his brain and the optic nerve. Doctors knew very little about the condition.

‘His best hope,’ Gordon Pritchard admitted privately to Jupiter, ‘would be an operation in the States, which would cost a fortune.’

The truth could probably be kept from Raymond, reflected Jupiter, but Alizarin was too intelligent and tuned into people’s voices ever to be fobbed off with lies. This made it even more important to make his exhibition a success.

With the private view scheduled for 15 February, Jupiter had just over a month to get things organized. Tipped off by Mrs Robens when Anthea and Raymond would be away, he drove Sophy and the gallery van down to Limesbridge. Crossing the bridge, he could see Foxes Court behind its prison bars of leafless trees – a frequent subject of his mother’s paintings. Had Hanna felt as trapped? The house would be his once Raymond died, but what would be the point without Hanna to share it?

His desolation increased as they passed the Lodge. In the front garden, the nettles had been replaced by neatly edged beds and a wheelbarrow planted with mauve and yellow pansies. Net curtains twitched behind a Tory poster. Alizarin would have gone ballistic. Jupiter felt even more guilty at chucking him out.

With renewed determination he and Sophy were soon dragging canvasses, often mildewed and escaping from their stretchers, from packing chests, barns, potting sheds, and outside lavatories. Having loaded these, they raided the attic, finding earlier pictures, not just of out-of-work miners and shipbuilders, but of dogs and children, even tennis parties, which had somehow escaped Anthea’s skips.

‘Thank God she’s frightened of spiders and seldom comes up here,’ said Jupiter.

‘Who’s this? She’s beautiful,’ sighed Sophy, as from behind a headless rocking horse she dragged a ravishing nude with her blond pubes cut in the shape of a heart. Then she blushed furiously, realizing it was Hanna.

Jupiter’s face was expressionless as he examined the picture.

‘When did you get married?’ stammered Sophy.

‘Ninety-four.’ Then, after a long pause: ‘You can date it by Alizarin’s paintings. They get steadily darker, no more industrial landscapes, just an obsessive catalogue of disaster, atrocity piled on atrocity.’

Hearing a step on the stairs, Jupiter glanced at his watch. He didn’t want to bump into Anthea. But it was Dora, full of plans for a Labrador puppy, which she could look after until Alizarin needed it as a guide dog.

‘What I really came to say,’ she went on, ‘is that Dicky’s seriously broke, so why don’t you put
Upside-Down Camels
into the exhibition?’

The next few weeks, when Sophy wasn’t teaching, were spent shooting out invitations and press releases, proofreading a makeshift catalogue, framing, hanging, lighting and visiting Alizarin who, because he refused to let the family pay for a private room, was now in a public ward full of eye diseases and the aftermath of dreadful operations. Locked away in darkness, the noise must have been driving him crazy.

Nor did he seem remotely roused out of his despair by the prospect of an exhibition, which would not sell enough pictures to pay for the operation. Aware that he had lowered his guard, clinging to Sophy the morning she and Jupiter found him, he was dauntingly offhand when she rolled up to read him the
Guardian
, bearing quiches rather badly baked by Patience and freesias he could smell if not see. She would have stopped coming if Alizarin’s favourite nurse, black Molly Malone, hadn’t confided how much he looked forward to her visits.

‘“Where is Sophy?” he demand all day.’

The story of Alizarin’s sleeping rough had reached the papers. His homeless friends around Charlotte Street did extremely well giving interviews about the Tender Toff. Dora also cleaned up. The
Sun
, much beguiled by her stories of Visitor’s body being flown home ‘just like Princess Diana’s’ in Rupert Campbell-Black’s helicopter, promised to give her a chocolate Labrador puppy the moment Anthea’s back was turned.

Although Alizarin’s story was rather overshadowed by a by-election and the coming out of a rock star, it had not been good for the Belvedons’ image. Not only did they harbour suspect Raphaels, but neglected their own.

Meanwhile, there was an exciting development in Hoxton. Jonathan’s seedy friend, Trafford, who was now the protégé of Geraldine Paxton, had just landed himself the £20,000 Whistler Prize for
Shagpile
. This was an eight-foot tower of male nudes engaged in the sex act, plugged into each other like Lego, which those ‘in the loop’ thought both ‘pivotal’ and ‘challenging’. There was even talk of a board game.

Although Trafford, according to Jonathan, would be willing to service a musk ox, he didn’t like Geraldine – old Needy in Toyboy Land – and yearned for the long, ringed and studded white body of Sienna Belvedon. Even more, he missed the high jinks he had enjoyed with her brother Jonathan, who was far too devastated he couldn’t marry Emerald to come home from Vienna.

One morning in late November, Trafford had taken a call for Jonathan from Abdul Karamagi. The Saudi was still so enraptured with the nude which he believed Jonathan had painted of Sophy that he wanted to fly Jonathan out to the Middle East on his private jet to paint his favourite stallion for a seven-figure sum.

Having cosily explained that Jonathan had gone permanently abroad, Trafford accepted the commission. He was also convinced that he had earned his fee. Abdul’s stallion was even rattier than Jonathan before he left for Vienna. Trafford, nevertheless, felt guilty enough to persuade Abdul, who longed for recognition as a discerning collector, to enter
Sophy of Shepherd’s Bush
, as the nude was now known, for the British Portrait Awards.

At the beginning of January, Trafford and a troupe of Jonathan’s cronies (none of whom had any idea Alizarin was the artist) collected the nude from Abdul’s house and delivered it to the British Portrait Museum in Gower Street. The winner of the £25,000 prize would be announced at a big dinner at the Dorchester on Valentine’s Day.

‘No-one’s to tell Jonathan,’ ordered Trafford, ‘then he won’t be choked if he doesn’t win.’

Also among the 700 entries was one of Alizarin’s portraits of Visitor, which Dicky and Dora had submitted as a joke.

The Awards themselves were sponsored by Doggie Dins Petfoods, whose chairman, Kevin Coley, had recently become a Labour peer. Having failed to grapple his way up the social scale through show-jumping or polo sponsorship, Lord Coley had turned in the Eighties to art and, with the help of Raymond’s eye, had built up a fine collection of pictures.

David Pulborough and Geraldine Paxton, both avid to snatch Lord Coley’s custom from Raymond, were on his judges’ panel. They spent their time manipulating the other judges, on the premise that they were ‘the experts’, and enjoying several excellent lunches together on expenses. Naturally they wanted Jonathan to win because he was a Pulborough gallery artist, but after the bollocking he’d received in October, Jonathan was refusing to answer David’s calls.

David was also furious when he saw the magnificent nude of Sophy. Jonathan had yet again failed to pass on the commission on the fat fee that Abdul must have paid him. This, however, could be rectified once Jonathan had been lured home to receive the first prize.

The other judges had already spent two days in the museum boardroom, drinking coffee, eating ridged fawn biscuits, getting on each other’s nerves, and sulkily being bullied into shortlisting four of David’s artists, including Jonathan and Casey, when yet another judge rolled up. This was Casey Andrews’s ex-wife, Joan Bideford, who’d been delayed by a freak snowstorm in Peru. Wearing a charcoal-grey suit and a Guards’ tie, roaring like a sergeant major that the entire panel was in need of a decent optician to have selected such junk, Joan chucked out three of the Pulborough artists, including her ex’s oil of Margaret Jay.

‘Gather you’ve taken on the old bugger,’ she bellowed at David. ‘You’ll regret it.’

The only entries that were worth a toffee, she went on, were Daisy France-Lynch’s portrait of Tabitha Rannaldini, Jonathan’s nude of Sophy and Alizarin’s painting of Visitor.

Kevin Coley was enchanted. Like Joan Bideford, he loved pretty women, and had bought many of Joan’s erotic nudes in the past which had rocketed in value. He trusted her opinion and longed for a wonderful dog portrait to win. He could then put Visitor’s beaming face on every tin of Doggie Dins. The rest of the judges agreed, except for David and Geraldine – the experts – who said Visitor wouldn’t dignify the competition.

‘And the dog has just passed away in rather tragic circumstances,’ said Geraldine quietly. ‘It wouldn’t be available for publicity.’

‘Nor will his master,’ insisted David, ‘chap’s unlikely to paint again.’

‘All the more reason to give it him,’ snorted Joan.

‘How much more on message would be a beautiful plump young woman, with glorious flesh tones,’ urged stick-thin Geraldine. ‘Fat is after all a feminist issue. Jonathan’s nude has greater artistic merit than his brother’s Labrador.’

Joan lit a cigar and took another look at Sophy’s sleepy smile and sand dune curves.

‘Sorry, Kev, Lab’s wonderfully painted but this does have the edge, bursting with energy, staggeringly confident. Never thought Jonathan was capable of such innocent unguarded lyricism.’

Joan mopped her brow.
Sophy of Shepherd’s Bush
was declared the winner, Visitor the runner-up, with Daisy France-Lynch, who had won last year, in third place. Joan even allowed Casey to be fourth.

‘Then I can watch the vain old tosser’s face when he doesn’t win.’

David was shocked to find himself agreeing with Joan. Casey was getting far too above himself. Geraldine belted off to ring Jonathan in Vienna. Trafford, as a lover, although vigorous, didn’t bathe enough and Jonathan had looked so handsome when he’d rolled up at the Commotion in New York.