Pandora (8 page)

David Pulborough’s summer with the Belvedons began disastrously. Bidden to arrive around six in the evening of the Thursday morning Galena had fled, he had left home near Leeds too late and run into holiday traffic. The second-hand Ford he’d paid too much for in order to escape from Foxes Court in the evenings proceeded to overheat all down the recently opened M1. To stop his fashionable new flared trousers flapping on the ground, he had invested in some high-heeled boots, in which he soon discovered he couldn’t drive, so he had resorted to bare feet. These swelled up so much in the heat that he couldn’t get into his boots again when, having forgotten Raymond’s map, he had to keep diving into pubs and garages to ask the way.

Worst of all, he had agreed under parental pressure to have a haircut before Auntie Dot’s funeral last Saturday. No doubt tipped off by David’s father, who thought his son looked sissy with long flowing locks, the local barber had waited until David was immersed in ‘Jennifer’s Diary’, dreaming of being part of that gilded set, to give him a hideous short back and sides.

David also had grave doubts about committing himself like Jane Eyre to eight weeks at Foxes Court. Would he be expected to eat in the kitchen or in his room or alone with his two charges? Would tall, dark and extremely handsome Raymond turn into Mr Rochester, and jump on him all summer? Probably not, now – like Samson – he had lost his dark gold locks.

The charm of Limesbridge with its higgledy-piggledy houses clustered at all levels round the High Street was totally lost on David. Grunting and belching, the Ford only just made it up the drive as the church clock struck eight-fifteen.

‘Some awful drip’s rolled up,’ announced Jupiter, who was as outraged as his mother at the prospect of a stranger monitoring his every move this summer.

Having been allowed to stay up for an early dinner at seven, both boys were starving and irritable. But not so cross as Mrs Robens, the cook, who not only felt her dinner had been ruined but that her position, looking after the boys, had been usurped.

Distracted by the beauty of John Newcombe cruising, mahogany-limbed, through the Wimbledon semi-finals, Raymond had not minded the delay. But glancing out of the study window, his heart sank. Had he allowed the Third World War to break out within his marriage for this? St John Evangelista appeared to have turned into a sweaty, red-faced Shropshire Lad with a frightful haircut, emphasizing a goose neck and sticking-out ears. David was also wearing a club tie, a dreadful cheap blazer with a badge and a battery of pens on the breast pocket and acrylic fawn flares. Raymond the dandy shuddered.

‘Go and welcome him,’ he told the boys faintly.

‘Traffic was terrible,’ apologized David as he limped through the front door, clutching a pile of parcels and some moulting mauve roses. ‘I hope I haven’t made you late for your tea.’

‘You have. Dinner’s been ready since seven,’ said Jupiter coldly.

‘We were able to stay up later,’ added Alizarin kindly.

Confronted by two pudding-basin haircuts with posh voices, David put up his first black by assuming the taller was the older.

‘You’re obviously Jupiter,’ he said, shaking Alizarin heartily by the hand, ‘the great athlete, and you’re the arty one, Alizarin,’ as he turned to Jupiter.

‘Wrong again,’ drawled Jupiter.

Oh dear, thought Raymond coming out of the study, the boys are going to pick up the most frightful Yorkshire accent by the end of the holidays. Granny Belvedon, a fearful snob, would be demented.

Then, feeling thoroughly ashamed of himself, Raymond smiled, and shook David’s sweaty hand.

‘My poor boy, what a ghastly hot day to drive down on. You must be exhausted. Would you like a bath or a large drink?’

‘I’d love a gin, please. I’ve brought these from Dad’s herbaceous border for Mrs Belvedon.’ David brandished the roses, which he’d purchased in a motorway garage, and which promptly shed more petals.

‘My wife’s away.’ Raymond relieved him of the flowers. ‘She’ll be thrilled when she gets back.’

‘When
is
she coming home?’ asked Alizarin for the thousandth time.

‘Oh shut up,’ snapped Jupiter.

There were tears in Raymond’s eyes after he opened David’s present of a little red leather-bound first edition of Tennyson’s
Maud
.

‘My dear boy, nothing could give me greater pleasure. “Maud with her exquisite face, And wild voice peeling up to the sunny sky.” I have a passion for Tennyson, but also my ancient greyhound’ – Maud, lying languidly on the olive-green study sofa, lifted her tail a centimetre – ‘is called Maud. It’s so appropriate. Thank you, thank you.’

David had brought Alizarin a Polaroid camera. ‘Very useful when you’re painting and the light changes or someone moves their position. I’ll show you how it works tomorrow.’

Alizarin was speechless with pleasure. Jupiter was less thrilled with his metal detector.

‘Only trogs use them.’

‘Jupiter!’ growled Raymond.

‘As this is such an old property,’ said David coolly, ‘there are bound to be ancient coins in the garden and around the church.’

‘I’ll be able to find my collection money. They’re wonderful presents,’ said Raymond, sweeping David through the drawing room, where pictures covered virtually every square inch of the priceless, hand-painted, primrose-yellow Japanese wallpaper, through the french windows out onto the terrace.

‘Oh my God,’ gasped David, ‘what a stunning garden.’

Herbaceous borders on each side of the lawn were dominated by huge proud delphiniums in every shade of blue, and banks of regale lilies opening their carmine beaks and pouring forth scent. Each dark tree and yew hedge had tossed a pale frivolous boa of roses round its shoulders. In the orchard beyond, apples were reddening. Across the valley, houses were turning a soft rose and the Cambridge-blue sky was covered in fluffy salmon-pink clouds, indicating the sun was setting behind the trees, which sheltered Foxes Court from the north-west winds.

‘If only Cézanne were alive to paint it,’ sighed David, ‘you could reach out and touch those houses. Thanks.’ He accepted a huge drink from Raymond. ‘Newcombe won presumably?’

Then remembering Raymond’s passion for Tennyson, he added, ‘If they ever filmed Tennyson’s “Revenge”, John Newcombe, with those lean, hawklike features, that glossy black moustache, should play Sir Richard Grenville.’

‘You’re right,’ said a delighted Raymond. ‘That is such a good poem: My Lord Howard and his five ships of war, melting like a cloud in the silent summer heaven.’

‘Bor-ing.’ Jupiter rolled his eyes.

‘I love tennis.’ David, who had been in the team at Sorley Grammar School, saw a chance to shine. ‘I’ll have to teach you to play, Jupe and Aly.’

‘My name’s Jupiter, I can play,’ snapped Jupiter, ‘and I’m starving.’

‘Let David get his breath back,’ said Raymond sharply.

A great deal of ice and tonic had not disguised the brute strength of the gin in David’s glass. He was perking up.

‘Can I use your toilet before dinner?’

The downstairs lavatory was a shrine to the sporting achievements of generations of Belvedons. There was Raymond’s father playing hockey for Cambridge, Viridian hitting a six in the Rugby–Marlborough match at Lord’s, and a framed telegram from the Forties, its pencil message fading: ‘Raymond 120 not out against Uppingham today.’ On the left of the mirror was a newly framed photograph of Jupiter already in a cricket team at Bagley Hall. David decided he must try and win the little sod over.

As they sat down to dinner, he smiled at Jupiter: ‘See you made the under-nines.’

‘I’m captaining them,’ said Jupiter haughtily.

‘That’s great, what are you going to do when you grow up?’

‘Run the country.’

‘Ted’s already doing a grand job,’ said David, who’d been euphoric last month when Edward Heath had been the first grammar-school boy to become prime minister.

‘Too keen to push us into Europe,’ said Jupiter dismissively. ‘As an island, it’s better for England to remain autonomous.’

Wow! thought David, who was just about to tuck his napkin into his collar to protect his new blazer, when he noticed Raymond and the boys had laid theirs over their knees. All round the walls, portraits of Belvedons gazed snootily down checking his table manners.

The large lugubrious Mrs Robens, struggling in with a shiny dark gold chicken dripping in butter and tarragon, might sigh like a force eight gale, but she was a brilliant cook. Her roast potatoes were crisp and brown as crème brûlée on the outside, her new peas and tiny carrots had a minty sweetness that never came out of a packet. The feathery light bread sauce bore no resemblance to the stodgy porridge run up by his mother. Apple pie and thickest cream followed. David, who’d survived on a diet of baked beans and sliced bread all term, had seconds of everything.

Dinner was interrupted by several telephone calls. Each time Alizarin leapt up, longing to learn his mother had arrived safely, then drooped when it was some man wanting to speak to her or no-one there. What a waste of divine wine, thought David, as Raymond mopped up spilt Pouilly-Fumé with a desperately shaking hand.

‘Did you come through Cheltenham?’ he said to David.

‘That’s the third time you’ve asked him that,’ taunted Jupiter.

I must pull myself together, thought Raymond. Were David’s parents interested in pictures? he enquired.

‘Not very,’ sighed David.

His mother, he explained, was kept so busy running her boutique in a fashionable part of town. His father was in charge of traffic in Leeds, which had become dreadfully congested with so many more cars on the road.

Alizarin was yawning his head off.

‘Bed,’ said Raymond firmly.

‘We were going to show him round,’ protested Jupiter.

‘Come down and say goodnight in your pyjamas.’

‘I’d love,’ said David, ‘to see some of the pictures.’

To Raymond’s amazement, David identified ninety per cent of them: Raymond’s grandfather by Orpen, his father by Augustus John, Viridian, carelessly romantic and death defying, by Rex Whistler.

‘That’s an Etienne de Montigny, isn’t it?’ David paused in front of a drawing of Galena. ‘What a striking woman.’

‘That’s my wife.’

‘Painted before you were married,’ observed David archly. ‘No wedding ring.’

‘Etienne was reluctant to paint it in.’ Raymond tried to make a joke of it.

‘Montigny divorces sex from the soul,’ said David dismissively. ‘I admire him as a painter, but he never touches my heart.’

David would have seen passionate gratitude on his new boss’s face if he hadn’t turned to a portrait of Raymond himself in a dark blue open-necked shirt, sleeves rolled up to reveal suntanned arms, a happy, confident, amused smile playing round the greeny-blue eyes.

‘John Minton clearly adored you,’ observed David. ‘Was that painted while you were at King’s?’

‘No, shortly before I was married.’

Christ, he’s aged, thought David, that was only nine years ago. Things are not right in this marriage.

In the next oil, the artist had transformed great hanging clumps of violet aubretia into portly bishops in Lenten purple. Slumped against a Cotswold stone wall, they were swigging beer out of bottles, having a fag, and eyeing up some young nuns. The picture was bitchy, blasphemous and strangely beautiful.

‘This is distinctly disturbing’ – David shook his head – ‘but that picture reminds me very much of a marvellous Czech artist called Galena Borochova.’

As the boys returned, wearing only striped pyjama bottoms, because of the heat, Jupiter said, ‘That’s our mother.’

‘When’s she coming back?’ asked Alizarin.

‘Your mother’s Galena Borochova?’ said an astounded David, then he took in the wild doodles beside the telephone, the rich sapphire-blue sofas, the exotic Eastern European preponderance of gilt and clapped his hand to his forehead.

‘Of course, she showed at the Belvedon last year. I never put two and two together.’ Then, turning back to the aubretia bishops: ‘This is a masterpiece.’

‘It is,’ said Alizarin proudly, taking David’s hand. ‘Come and see our rooms. Mummy painted Noah’s Ark in mine. Jupiter’s is Orpheus with all the animals.’

‘I can tell him,’ snarled Jupiter.

Raymond shook his head as David was led off. He must have been seriously drunk that evening at King’s. He was sure he’d told David he was married to Galena. Still, it was good the boys had taken to him.

Then another icicle was plunged into his heart as he noticed yet another bottle of champagne flung casually in the waste-paper basket. In summer, Mrs Robens did the big downstairs rooms every Monday. Some admirer of Galena’s must have looked at the pictures since then.

Once the boys were in bed, Raymond took David and a bottle of Armagnac out on the terrace. He knew he shouldn’t tank the boy up on his first night, but he needed company and the comfort.

The Good Friday Music from
Parsifal
was now drifting out of the study window. Rose petals floated down in the windless air like freefall butterflies. Ravishing scents wafting in from all over the garden reminded David of how his mother used to drag him as a little boy through Marshall and Snelgrove’s perfume department, claiming she had no time or money to waste on such dangerous frippery.