Pandora (83 page)

‘I expect the Grim Reaper will soon be doing it with his scythe,’ murmured Raymond wryly.

‘Don’t be morbid, Dad, you’re not dying at all. Do you want a drink?’ Then, when Raymond didn’t, Jonathan refilled his own glass and, pulling up a chair, took Raymond’s hand.

‘I’ve always loved this room.’

Every inch of the wall was covered with favourite pictures: portraits of the family, past sporting achievements, dogs on the lawn, sketches of Raymond by friends: Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, William Nicholson. In the wardrobes were countless beautiful suits, a rainbow of coloured shirts, dashing hats. In the bookcases, poetry. On the dressing table, silver-backed brushes nestled with a pottery Cheshire cat Jonathan had modelled at prep school.

A faint smell of Extract of Lime hung over the room. The Good Friday Music was on the CD player. Viridian’s dilapidated lichen-green leather volume of Tennyson lay on the bedside table beside a saxe-blue vase of cowslips and kingcups, picked by Lily.

Although putty grey and shrunken in the face, Raymond’s smile was as sweet as ever. ‘Good, Larkshire bowled out Rutshire.’

‘Do you want the commentary?’ Jonathan glanced at his watch. ‘It’ll be on in a minute.’

‘No, I want to talk. Jupiter and Alizarin are good fellows but not brilliant at cherishing. I worry about Lily. I’ve left her her house, but she may not have enough to live on. Jupiter’s awfully tight with money, and I don’t think he’ll allow darling Anthea to buy many clothes. Do encourage her to marry again. So pretty, needs a nice young chap to take care of her, someone who’ll be kind to Dicky and Dora.’

‘Dad, stop it,’ said Jonathan gently.

‘And I worry about Sienna, so loving and sweet lately, and dear little Emerald, I wish I’d got to know her better, I’m so sorry about her and you, all my fault.’ A tear trickled down the crow’s-feet; Raymond was having difficulty breathing. ‘And don’t let poor Grenville starve, Anthea’s not his greatest fan.’

‘Dad, you’re not dying.’

‘So they tell me, but I don’t feel very well.’

‘I’ll look after everyone. I’ll become the Van Dyck of the twenty-first century and make a fortune.’ Jonathan felt wiped out by tiredness.

‘No, no, you have too much talent. You must paint what you want to. If Jupiter sells one or two pictures, that should be enough.’

The smell of crab-apple blossom and clematis was drifting through the window, honey sweet yet sharp, taking Jonathan back to Le Brun’s garden. Perhaps he wasn’t so lousy an artist – Le Brun had liked his stuff.

‘See that my post’s answered,’ begged Raymond. ‘Jupiter likes to bin everything, but if people are kind enough to write, tell them I’m so dreadfully sorry I let them down.’

‘You didn’t. Listen, there’s the cuckoo.’

‘How good of him to turn up.’ Raymond lay back in ecstasy. ‘That pastel of my father’s awfully good, he was such fun. I let him down too. Oh dear, I worry about you all, particularly little Viridian. The ozone layer, and now the Arctic Circle melting. I don’t want Germans running Europe, or even worse the Chinese overrunning the world. You will look after Robens and Esther? I don’t know if Jupiter will keep them on.’

Raymond was gasping for breath.

‘Don’t talk, I’ll read to you.’ Jonathan pressed the repeat button on the Good Friday Music, and picked up Tennyson. The gold-tipped pages fell open at ‘The Passing of Arthur’, who, like Raymond, was looking back on a world that was coming to an end.

‘I found Him in the shining of the stars,’ read Jonathan,

‘I marked Him in the flowering of His fields,

But in His ways with men I find Him not.’

You could say that again, he thought, or He wouldn’t have made me and Emerald brother and sister.

All day Diggory slept off his excesses on Jonathan’s knee, while Raymond, watched by a yawning Grenville, drifted in and out of sleep. Waking, he was delighted Larkshire were 270 for 2.

‘Zac liked cricket, you know, can’t be entirely bad, all his relations wiped out, have to feel sorry for the poor boy.’

‘I don’t,’ snapped Jonathan.

‘Difficult to underestimate the importance of roots,’ sighed Raymond. ‘Look at that lot on the wall. Take them for granted, but you know where you are. Poor little Emerald’s torn between us and the Cartwrights. I’ve left her a little money. You will look after her?’

Jonathan smiled crookedly, lit a cigarette and got up to blow the smoke out of the window. At this time of the evening and the year, the slanting sun behind the trees revealed ebony branches beneath the pale mist of green, reminding one of death. Robins and blackbirds sang to distract him.

‘St John Evangelista,’ muttered Raymond as his son turned back from the window. Jonathan had such a lovely face, hollowed cheeks, sweet, sensitive mouth, curly hair, even curlier eyelashes, around sloe-dark soulful eyes – so like a Raphael.

‘When you’re dying—’ he whispered.

‘You ain’t.’

‘“Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.” You were always my favourite – by miles. Alizarin, Jupiter, Sienna – all awfully tricky and critical. I dote on Dicky and Dora, but you were such a dear little boy.’

‘I wasn’t a very good little boy.’

‘Maud was my favourite too,’ whispered Raymond, spreading his stroking fingers to block Grenville’s ears. ‘I shouldn’t say it in front of him, but Maud was so sweet guarding your playpen. Her only crime was sticking her long nose through the bars and selecting the occasional toy like a cocktail snack.’ Racked by a fit of coughing, Raymond continued, ‘That Gauloise reminds me of your mother. Not sure I feel up to meeting her yet.’

Jonathan stubbed out his cigarette and, sitting on the bed, took his father’s hand.

‘Maud and Visitor are up there, they’ll guard you. I can just see you riding through heaven in the Bentley, with Maud and Visitor beside you, reading your own obituary in
The Times
.’

Raymond smiled faintly.

‘The Bentley’s failed its MOT,’ he mumbled. ‘Time for us both to go.’

Suddenly he gave a stifled cry, shuddered, went rigid and stopped breathing.

‘Dad,’ yelled Jonathan in panic. ‘Dad!’

Leaping up, Grenville nudged his master frantically, whimpered, then threw back his brindled head and howled. As Diggory joined in Anthea burst into the room.

‘What’s going on?’

‘I think he’s gone.’ A stricken Jonathan was cradling Raymond in his arms.

‘You should have called us, shutting us all out not giving us a chance to say cheerio . . .’ Anthea started to scream.

Jonathan was utterly devastated, sobbing his heart out, deranged with grief.

‘Far too distraught,’ observed Aunt Lily, ‘just for the death of a father . . .’

Anthea was also shattered. She’d always got more attention than any of the children, and had tantrums if she didn’t get her own way. Who would indulge her now? There were, however, compensations. She looked lovely in black. Everyone was fussing over her and for once her stepchildren, even Sienna, were being nice to her. Letters also flooded in. Anthea skipped the guff about Raymond, reading out the bits about herself.

‘You were such a wonderful wife to Sir Raymond, Lady Belvedon, you kept him young.’

‘How am I not going to throttle her?’ muttered Sienna to Knightie.

What really upset Anthea, however, was the conspicuous absence of David. He had been so charming and attentive earlier in the year, when he’d wanted to muscle in on the Borochova Memorial Award. Now he and Geraldine had control, he had no time for her.

‘You always said if anything happened to Raymond you and Ay would end up together,’ she sobbed.

If you’d managed to hang on to the Raphael, we might have, thought David.

A great sadness for the Belvedons was that Margaret Cassidy, MP for Searston, a jolly backslapping Tory predictably known as ‘Butch’, had died the same day as Raymond and bagged the more flattering obituaries. Even Raymond’s adored
Times
criticized his shameful lying and breaking down in court and implied an intemperate scattering of seed, as they pointed out he had left behind a second wife and seven children.

The good news was that Margaret Cassidy had vacated a possible safe seat for Jupiter. During his trip to London, he had missed his father’s death, but as ample compensation, his sleeper had turned out to be a lovely little Constable, which, after a clean, should fetch the odd million, which would help him and Hanna with death duties.

Margaret Cassidy’s funeral in Searston Cathedral was on the same afternoon as Raymond’s, but far less well attended. Not an inch of St James, Limesbridge, was unoccupied. The press, having poured down from London in anticipation of high drama, found the Belvedons in tears of hysterical laughter. The local flower shop, overwhelmed with orders, had muddled the two funerals. Raymond as a result had received several wreaths for ‘Darling Butch, ever in our thoughts’, and even a bunch of lilies for ‘A Dear Godmum’.

The Belvedons needed a laugh. They were all so sad.

‘Darling Butch,’ sighed Aunt Lily, ‘would have loathed the weather,’ which was bitterly cold with a vicious east wind once again stripping off his beloved blossom.

‘Why can’t families all die on the same day?’ sobbed Dora. ‘And why can’t Loofah come into church if Diggory and Grenville are allowed?’

‘Because Grenville hasn’t eaten since Dad died,’ said Sienna.

David Pulborough was furious – not just at even more media than ever concentrating on Foxes Court, but because an equally heartbroken Robens and Eddie the packer, rather than he, had been asked to join Jupiter, Jonathan and Dicky in carrying Raymond’s coffin. Anthea had made Dicky hide his shaven head under his school cap.

‘Everyone’ll think he’s got ringworm,’ hissed Dora.

So many of her media contacts were in church, she couldn’t decide who to sell the latest titbits too.

The organ played Raymond’s favourite hymns and the Good Friday Music. People read poems and made careful speeches. Jonathan was only aware of a ravening press who had crucified his father a week ago, who were now scribbling away or muttering into their tape machines. There was a bleep on his mobile. His heart lightened briefly as he read:
Darling Jonathan, I’m so sorry. Say goodbye to Raymond for me. Still all my love, Emerald
.

Dropping Diggory on Sienna’s knee, startling the vicar who was poised to launch into the final prayers, black hair curling over his navy blue overcoat, eyes blazing in a deathly pale face, Jonathan stalked up the steps of the pulpit.

Oh God, what’s he going to do next? wondered the Belvedons, as he adjusted the mike and waited until the rumble of excitement had faded.

‘Tennyson was my father’s favourite poet,’ he began quietly, ‘but today an earlier poet, Shelley, seems more appropriate.

‘“He has outsoared the shadow of our night . . .”’ Jonathan spoke very slowly, emphasizing every word.

‘Envy and calumny and hate and pain,

And that unrest which men miscall delight,

Can touch him not and torture not again;

From the contagion of the world’s slow stain

He is secure.’

Glaring round, Jonathan gripped the sides of the pulpit.

‘Here we go,’ muttered Jupiter.

‘I’d like to know what you’re all doing here,’ asked Jonathan softly. ‘Last week you carved up my father in your newspapers and on your programmes. The rest of you from the art world’ – he scowled particularly at Somerford – ‘have been gloating over his downfall in restaurants, pubs and galleries. In a minute you’ll all pour into his house to guzzle his champagne.’

There was total silence, as Jonathan plucked a yellow rose from the branch of Canary Bird decorating the pulpit.

‘My father worked harder than anyone I know,’ he said defiantly. ‘Charisma is an impossibly overworked word, used to describe rock stars and YBAs who turn heads when they roll up drunk at parties. In fact it comes from the word “Charites” – or rather “the Graces”. It means goodness and whatever bestows the gift of grace. Predictably my father was born, nearly seventy-six years ago, on a Tuesday; Tuesday’s children are proverbially always full of grace.’