Pandora (7 page)

Or as Somerford Keynes pointed out to a fulminating Casey Andrews: ‘Those desirous of grandchildren do not look a gift whore in the mouth.’

Casey was so angry he would have left the Belvedon and moved to another gallery, if it hadn’t meant less access to Galena.

‘There’s no way one man’s enough for her,’ he roared at Raymond. ‘You’ll be forced to share her.’

Joan Bideford, relieved that Galena hadn’t run off with Casey, was more philosophical.

‘Of course we can go on seeing each other, darling,’ she told Galena as she smothered poached salmon with Hollandaise sauce during lunch at the Ritz. ‘But try not to hurt Raymond, he’s a nice man, and we don’t want anything to distract him from selling our pictures. The only thing that worries me is the money. You’ve coped so brilliantly with being destitute, sweetie. I’m not sure how you’ll handle being rich.’

‘I must be free spirit,’ insisted Galena, waving for another bottle of champagne.

Maybe it was the result of gazing at erotic paintings in the Blue Tower, but within a year, Galena had delighted Raymond and (almost more) her new in-laws by producing a beautiful heir, called Jupiter. A second son, Alizarin, named after Galena’s favourite colour, alizarin crimson, arrived two years later.

Raymond returned the compliment by ensuring Galena’s first exhibitions were both critical and commercial successes. After the monotony of the Czech countryside, Limesbridge and the surrounding Silver Valley haunted her like a passion. Wandering in a trance, she had captured the wooded ravines, mist from the river merging into white orchards, the locals in the Goat in Boots, Foxes Court serene and golden behind its armoury of ancient trees, in joyful light-filled paintings that Raymond sold as soon as she produced them.

The gallery profits soared throughout the Sixties. But as Joan Bideford had predicted, Galena coped with riches far less well than poverty. Professing a scorn for commercialism, she claimed no great painting had ever sold in its lifetime. Denied the need to work, she started drinking heavily, ranting at Raymond that he had taken away the hunger necessary to a great artist.

Even worse, during the crushing of the Prague Spring by the Communists in 1968, a young friend of hers had died setting fire to himself in protest against Russian brutality. Galena suffered appalling guilt, and her paintings became violent and tortured again.

Why, she stormed, had Raymond forced her to abandon her fellow artists? Why had Chamberlain sold the Czechs down the river in the first place? Why was she trapped in a gilded cage? Over and over she portrayed as prison bars the trunks of the trees round Foxes Court with herself screaming and anguished at every window. This gave her the excuse to escape to London, lounging around with Casey and Joan on big silk cushions smoking dope and – since she was now an extremely expensive spirit as well as a free one – gorging on caviare, foie gras and crates of priceless wine.

These days of lethargy and excess would eventually be followed by more guilt and frenzied work sessions when she would yell at anyone, particularly the little boys and Raymond, if they disturbed her.

The Belvedon Gallery in fact did spectacularly well in the Sixties because Raymond was working night and day to forget the horror of his marriage. For in addition to the drunken ranting, the ingratitude and the overspending, Galena was sadistically unfaithful.

From the first, she had deliberately picked Raymond’s gallery artists. These included not just Casey and Joan but also Etienne de Montigny, the handsome Frenchman whose semi-pornographic paintings Raymond had been hanging the night he met Galena. All of their revenue Raymond would have lost if he had refused to represent them any more. Plenty of other lovers soon joined the circus.

‘I need new men,’ shouted Galena, ‘I get tired of drawing the same one.’

Raymond might have retaliated in kind, if she hadn’t so demoralized him sexually.

‘Am I big enough for you?’ he had begged her on their honeymoon, to which she had mockingly replied:

‘If you have small villy, you must become genius at sucking off.’

A mortified Raymond had tried so hard, but, putting his mouth to Galena’s gaping red, not very well-washed gash, he found himself gagging, which Galena in turn construed as rejection, and their sex life deteriorated. Sometimes, to help him get it up, she would describe what another wonderful lover looked like or had done to her, which made Raymond come immediately and Galena in turn more scornful.

Most men would have cuffed her, or walked out, but it was the Sixties when everyone was far too cool to admit rage or heartbreak. And, like his hero, King Arthur, whose world collapsed because of his wife’s infidelity, Raymond still loved her.

For when she smiled, the flowers came out. She could be enchanting, funny, playful, affectionate. She was a glorious, imaginative cook. She painted wonderful murals in strong Slav colours all over the house, and she told marvellous stories to little Jupiter and Alizarin, who absolutely adored her. Raymond in turn doted on his boys. There was no way they were going to be subjected to a divorce. Finally he felt it his duty, like Theo Van Gogh, who had so heroically bolstered and bankrolled his mad tragic brother, to keep Galena on an even keel to create the masterpieces of which he knew she was capable.

One of the lowest points in his marriage was in early July 1970. At four o’clock in the morning, still trembling from a row the night before, he lay on the edge of the crimson-curtained four-poster listening to the piping of Tennyson’s ‘half-awakened birds’, and imagining the icicles of white light between the carelessly drawn dark blue curtains were being plunged into his heart.

For a start, he was convinced Galena had a new lover. He had left a bottle of champagne in the fridge, which was gone when he returned yesterday from a couple of days in Venice. The orchids in the drawing room had certainly not come from the garden. There was also a pretty new Lalique bowl on her dressing table.

As clinching evidence, she had been grumbling nonstop about Alizarin and Jupiter being home from school for an eight-week summer holiday, getting under her feet. After the over-excited little boys had been sent to bed, Raymond and Galena had had a drink outside in the twilight. A fresh soapy smell of meadowsweet drifted up from the river. White and pale pink roses cascaded frivolously over the dark green shoulders of the yews.

As he wandered round the terrace, deadheading geraniums and stepping over Maud, who was stretched out soothing her stiff old bones on the still warm flagstones, Raymond broke the good news, that he had employed an undergraduate for the summer to amuse the boys and teach them to draw, leaving Galena free to paint.

‘Vere did you meet him?’ asked Galena silkily as she topped up her third drink.

‘At Cambridge when I gave that lecture on the Pre-Raphaelites. This boy, David Pulborough, ex-grammar school, reading history of art at King’s, was assigned to look after me. Later, at dinner’ – Raymond swatted a midge on his forearm – ‘we talked about Arthurian legend, painting and the awful factory jobs he’s been forced to take in the vac to make ends meet. Parents live near Leeds. Sound a bit repressive.’ Fingering the dry earth in a tub of white agapanthus, Raymond reached for the watering can. ‘Father’s in local government, regards art as sissy, wanted David to read law or medicine.’

Raymond didn’t add that David Pulborough had wavy tawny hair to his shoulders, big navy blue eyes and a fair skin that flushed easily. Nor did he say how touched he’d been that David, obviously short of money, had tried to pay for dinner.

‘He’s a sweet boy. You’ll like him,’ Raymond went on, then, appealing to Galena’s fondness for comparing people in real life with those in paintings, he added, ‘Looks exactly like St John Evangelista in Raphael’s painting of St Cecilia.’

‘Ven does he arrive?’

‘Tomorrow in time for supper.’

At first he thought Galena’s silence was delighted assent. Then she went berserk. How could Raymond spring this surprise on her, then push off to London, probably abroad, leaving her to entertain some boorish youth in the evenings?

‘How dare you employ pop squeak to spy on me and to teach the boys to draw? Do you want their paintings to hang on Green Park fences?’

Maud, who loathed rows, beat a limping retreat into the house.

The intensity of Galena’s rage indicated that she had other mischief planned for the first weeks of the holidays, particularly when she yelled at Raymond that she was off to France first thing. No doubt to stay with Etienne de Montigny, thought Raymond despairingly.

‘And you can bloody vell stay down in country, to velcome your little queer when he arrives tomorrow,’ was her final shot. ‘Are you sure you’re safe leaving the boys viz him?’

As she slammed the french windows behind her, she had broken two panes.

It was now growing light in the Blue Tower. Raymond, listening to the rusty key-jangling cries of the jackdaws in the tall chimneys, was still shaking. Alizarin and Jupiter were almost more obsessed with the Raphael than with their mother, and, oblivious of grubby sheets that had harboured God knew who, took every opportunity to creep into their parents’ bed in the early mornings and wait for Hope, Pandora and the rest of the gang to creep out of the shadows. Raymond, who longed to make love to his wife, tried not to resent the boys.

He was amazed Galena could sleep so deeply after such a shattering row. Possessed of earthy charms that in early life don’t need much upkeep, she was a couple of stone heavier than the boyish pirate he had first married. But she still attracted him unbearably and he couldn’t resist putting a hand on her breast. Galena stirred, smiling sleepily, not yet identifying the hand. If only he could psych himself into getting it up . . . but the next moment there was a crash on the door and the boys charged in. Sighing, Raymond threw a towel over their mother.

Jupiter at eight had just finished his first term away from home at prep school, and was consequently tougher, steelier, more withdrawn. With his cool turned-down sage-green eyes, dark brown hair and thin freckled face, he was like Raymond, but without Raymond’s openness and generosity. As conniving but colder than his mother, Jupiter wished he had inherited her talent.

Alizarin, on the other hand, had Galena’s looks: black brows, slitty dark eyes, high cheekbones and straight dark flopping hair. Gangling and unco-ordinated, as tall as Jupiter, he had inherited his father’s sweet nature and anxiously commuted between his parents trying to keep the peace.

Knowing their mother would soon be off to paint, or, worse, to London, the boys always tried to waylay her and weave stories round the Raphael. This morning Jupiter collapsed on the bed snoring loudly.

‘Which deadly sin am I?’

‘Sloth,’ smiled Raymond.

‘Who am I?’ Alizarin put a finger under his long greyhound nose, pushing it into the air. ‘I’m Pride.’

He looked so absurd, Raymond and Galena burst out laughing.

‘I’m Envy,’ snapped Jupiter, pinching his younger brother savagely on the arm. ‘Don’t be a drip,’ he hissed as Alizarin started to cry.

Jupiter was extremely jealous of his brother, whom he surpassed in everything except art, which he knew meant more to their mother than anything else. He detested the way Galena doted on Alizarin, calling him her little Slav. Jupiter intended to make Alizarin his little slave all summer.

Alizarin admired and feared his brother, who after a term of prep school cricket and swimming seemed ten times more powerful.

‘Tell us about Pandora,’ he begged as he crept under the sheet.

‘She was a beautiful woman, cruelly treated by the Gods, who married a feeble husband’ – Galena shot a malevolent look at Raymond – ‘who couldn’t control her.’

‘Tell us about the lion of Prague with two tails,’ asked Jupiter, but, seeing the clock, Galena had leapt out of bed, not even bothering to keep the towel round her.

‘Haven’t got time, got a plane to catch.’

Alizarin’s tears, despite Jupiter’s thumping, lasted for over an hour. Galena was always cruellest to those who loved her the most.