by Jilly Cooper
As they sped through deserted Farringdon and Lechlade, deeper into the country, it was like a film being played backwards. Candles once more lit the horse chestnuts, cow parsley frothed white along the roadside, hawthorn exploded in creamy fountains in the fields, and wild garlic rioted over the woodland floor mirroring the Milky Way streaming across the sky above.
Escaping from their velvet ribbon, tendrils of hair striped Galena’s face. As she took swigs of Jack Daniel’s, and sang drunken snatches of the Czech national anthem, her long muscular thighs spread at right angles, taunting Raymond to stroke them.
Never had the hundred-mile journey home passed more quickly. As they dropped into the Silver Valley, a full moon, ringed with pale flame, was shining down on the sleeping village of Limesbridge – so named because of the splendid avenue of limes on either side of the bridge over the River Fleet. There were also limes round the village green and the churchyard where all the Belvedon ancestors were buried except Viridian. Foxes Court, built in Queen Anne’s day, lay to the west of the village with two acres of walled garden, several cottages and barns and fields stretching down to the river.
Cherry trees forming a white guard of honour scattered their last petals like confetti on the E-Type as Raymond and Galena roared up the drive. Stone nymphs and cherubs peeped round yew corridors for a first glimpse. The stench of wild garlic from the churchyard next door overwhelmed the sweet delicate smell of the pink clematis which swarmed over pergolas and up the north side of the house.
Swaying like a pirate ship, a bare-footed Galena picked her way over the gravel. Inside the hall, the yellow Cotswold stone was covered in faded blue and crimson rugs, the walls with shiny dark panelling. Halfway up the stairs hung a Matisse of equally swaying green dancers.
Galena examined it closely, frantically trying not to be too impressed, nor as she reeled from room to ravishing room to get too excited over the Courbet flower girl, nor the Pissarro snow scene, nor the Leonardo drawing of a lion, nor Rossetti’s sly sketch of Tennyson, nor Rodin’s maquette of a female nude: enchantments even a dealer couldn’t bear to part with.
There was a patter of feet, and a yawning blue greyhound, claws sliding, spiny tail banging against the panelling, came bounding down the stairs.
‘This is Maud,’ said Raymond as the bitch circled him ecstatically. ‘She likes lazing on beds all day, so we spend our time yelling: “Come into the garden, Maud.”’
‘How beautiful she is.’ Galena fell to her knees, hugging Maud, smoothing her velvet ears. ‘Like Wenceslas’s dog on the Charles Bridge.’
She recognized the Matisse; she loves my dog. It was like Bassanio passing the tests set him by Portia with flying colours, thought Raymond.
The kitchen, painted cold air-force blue with fluorescent lighting, was less seductive than the other rooms. Galena, however, discovered rare delights in the refrigerator, and was soon wolfing vegetable pâté, made for tomorrow’s luncheon party, and sharing slices of chicken estragon with a delighted Maud.
‘How did you get this house?’
‘My parents live here, they’re coming back tomorrow.’
‘And the gallery?’
‘Some have greatness thrust upon them, my elder brother was killed in the war, so I inherited it.’
With her sloe-dark eyes beneath drooping eyelids and that luminous gold skin, Galena looked very like a Raphael, he thought. She was now attacking tomorrow’s pudding: pale yellow syllabub in six blue glasses, only awaiting a sprinkling of bitter chocolate.
Pondering on his next move, Raymond said, ‘Teach me some Czech.’
‘You should ask: mate znamost.’
‘What does it mean?’
‘Do you have a boyfriend?’
‘Well, do you?’
‘Not until now.’
As Raymond felt dizzy with happiness, Galena grabbed another blue glass. Out of the window, she could see a moonlit lawn as smooth as a pale grey fitted carpet disappearing into dark shrubberies.
‘This is big house with much land. Are you a lord?’
‘No, not at all.’
‘In 1949, when the Communists took over’ – another black mood swept over Galena – ‘the Czech aristocrats who lived in the big houses fetched coaches that hadn’t been used in years out of the stables, piling them up with their belongings – leaving in fine style – smiling bravely. I will never forget the silhouette of those coaches and horses going along the horizon to Austria.’
‘Why didn’t you go too?’
‘My mother vas housekeeper to one of these houses. She wouldn’t leave without my father who was away. The Communists stormed the house. They took chandeliers and central heating before starting on the wine in the cellar. Then the most drunken hurled our puppy down into the courtyard.’
Shaking violently, Galena huddled over Maud, convulsively stroking her sleek blue coat.
‘They play football with puppy, kicking him to death, laughing. Sylvie, my sister, vas such a pretty little girl that my mother hid her in our part of the house, but when she hear puppy’s howls, she rushed into the courtyard, kicking the soldiers.
‘The Cossack Colonel vas pervert, who didn’t bother with my mother. Even I vas too old at sixteen, but Sylvie vas only ten, so he raped her. My mother tried to knife him. The soldiers killed her.’
Embarrassed by such tragic outpourings, soaked with tears, Maud slid out of the room.
‘Christ, I’m so sorry.’ Removing the syllabub from Galena’s clutches, Raymond pulled her to her feet. Wailing helplessly, she collapsed against him.
‘I try to make it up to Sylvie. I sleep with Volpos, so we can escape. I thought if we reach Vest, I could paint and make a home for her. Why did she tread on mine not me?’
No wonder she had gone berserk over the photographer at the party, thought Raymond. Spying Volpos must have been behind every bush.
‘It wasn’t a millionth as bad for me.’ Raymond stroked her damp hair, trying to still her shuddering. ‘But my brother was blown up in North Italy. You feel so guilty you’re the one who survived.’
Gradually Galena’s sobs subsided enough for her to grab her glass and light a cigarette.
‘What did he look like, your brother?’
Raymond took her into the study. To the right of the fireplace was a portrait of Viridian by Rex Whistler, who had also been killed in the last war.
The Fates must have been jealous of anyone so clear-eyed and confident, thought Galena.
‘He is very handsome, like Sylvie,’ she observed, ‘but his face is not as kind, nor as clever as yours.’
Glancing up through lowered black lashes, she suddenly pressed a hand against Raymond’s cock and, pulling his head down, flickered a wine-darkened tongue along his lips.
‘Show me your bedroom, now!’
Raymond led her up two flights of stairs and along dark winding passages, but when they reached the steep uncarpeted steps up to his turret bedroom, known as the Blue Tower, she bounded ahead, flaunting her delectably high bottom like a cabin boy climbing the rigging.
Moonlight silvered the bare floorboards. Above the crimson-curtained four-poster, the dark blue vaulted ceiling had been painted with stars. As Raymond turned on a bedside light, Galena noticed the walls covered in exquisite erotic paintings.
‘It was my parents’ love nest,’ explained Raymond, unbuttoning his cork-smudged dress shirt. ‘They believed if you had beautiful things to look at, you would produce beautiful children.’
But Galena was racing round the room, gazing out of the four windows, at the gold weathercock topping the church spire, at black yew rides and ivy-clad ruins, and over a cloud of apple blossom, down to a boathouse and a gleaming silver river.
‘It is good escape tower. Ve can hide ven Casey comes. Oh my God!’ The smile froze on her face as she caught sight of the Raphael. ‘Is it yours?’
Raymond nodded, gazing in wonder at her gazing in such wonder as she fingered the folds of Pandora’s sky-blue
dress, examining each deadly sinner, stopping longest at Hope, shaking her head in bewilderment.
‘It is breath-tooking. Has it belong to your family for years?’
‘Well, quite a long time.’
Raymond had never identified so much with Lust in his vermilion coat, leering at Pandora. Unable to hold back any longer, he crossed the room; he tugged off Galena’s ribbon, so her dark hair fell like a weeping ash to her shoulders. As he took her lithe sinewy body in his arms, he could smell sweat, and feel muscles heavily developed by painting and lugging around huge canvasses. Her mouth tasted of cigarette smoke and Jack Daniel’s.
He could have picked her up in a dockland bar in Marseilles. It was illegal to prefer men to girls, and in those agonizing encounters with his own sex in the dark, when he was abroad, any ecstasy had been followed by a descent into a hell of guilt. But now there was only ecstasy.
There were no underclothes to rip off once he’d removed her hipsters and striped T-shirt. Terrified his erection might collapse, he delayed and delayed, laying her on the patchwork counterpane, kissing her big lascivious mouth, absurdly turned on by the faintest stubble where the cork moustache had been, kissing each breast and sticking-out rib. At the end of a sweep of white belly, her pubic hair rose spiky as a blackthorn copse in the snow. If there were no sea around Czechoslovakia, there was a river bubbling between Galena’s legs.
Once inside her, her muscles gripped him like an octopus, and her normally narrowed eyes stayed wide open.
‘My beautiful Raymond.’
The bed’s creaking grew faster, her gold cross bounced on her breasts, the smoky whispered endearments grew more incomprehensible. He felt she was gouging out his heart with her cutlass, as if he were a little sailing boat on the roughest sea as she bucked beneath him. Then, spitting on a nail-bitten finger, she reached round and plunged it deep inside him. Raymond gave a groan of pleasure and came. Very, very slowly, he returned to earth.
‘God, I’m so sorry. I meant you to come.’
‘I drink too much,’ mumbled Galena, ‘I’m too numb to come,’ and, laughing softly as she kissed him on the shoulder, she passed out.
Raymond was woken by the church bell ringing for early service, and the sun shining through the thickly cobwebbed eastern window. Galena, wearing only his dress shirt, was standing on the bed, gazing at the Raphael. On the bedside table was a large cup of black coffee and a half-eaten croissant smothered in butter and black cherry jam.
Grabbing her strong tawny ankle, sliding his hand upwards, Raymond apologized for sleeping so long. But Galena was preoccupied with the painting:
‘Hesiod describe Pandora as meddlesome Nosy Parker, who bring all evils of world on mankind, because she open box she vas told not to. So vot? Everyone open box. We got few presents at Christmas, but whenever my mother go out, Sylvie and I went through her drawer, to find out what we were getting. Without curiosity there is no art.
‘If Epimetheus’ – disdainfully Galena waved a hand at Pandora’s writhing, insect-covered husband – ‘had had the self-control not to marry Pandora – Prometheus, his brother had already warned him not to – none of these evils would have escaped and plagued the world.’
If Epimetheus had been overwhelmed with a quarter of my lust . . . thought Raymond, as his hand caressed the soft underside of her bottom.
‘Raphael also give La Fornarina’s face to Pandora,’ added Galena.
And Raymond was lost. No debutante he’d trundled dutifully round Claridge’s ballroom had ever heard of Hesiod or had known that La Fornarina was Raphael’s last beloved mistress.
‘“Let me not to the marriage of true minds . . .”’ he murmured.
Galena jumped triumphantly off the bed.
‘I know where I see you before,’ she cried. ‘It vas in Venice. On the left-hand side of Bellini’s Coronation of Christ, there is a portrait of Jesus, thin faced but strong jawed’ – she ran a finger down Raymond’s cheek – ‘and with thick hair that springs up if it is not keeped down with water, a beautiful mouth’ – she stroked his lower lip – ‘and the saddest eyes in the vorld. As you look at his face, you see the pain setting in. You know he’s going to suffer. It’s the only sexy Christ I ever see.’
Galena took a gulp of coffee, then, kneeling down, put her warm mouth round Raymond’s cock, sucking gently. Instantly Raymond sprang to life.
‘My God, where d’you learn these tricks?’
‘I need them to convince Volpos.’
The shadows were creeping over her face again.
‘It’s all right, darling, don’t think about them any more.’
Once again came the lightning mood switch. Running her finger along the top of her half-eaten croissant, Galena smiled wickedly: ‘I do even more exciting things with butter.’
The coffee went cold. Maud, unnoticed, pinched the rest of the croissant.
‘Will you marry me?’ asked Raymond.
Galena looked at him appraisingly.
‘I should like to live in this house, and for you to put on big exhibition of my vork and buy me my own dog. But I must be free spirit. If I paint all night, I cannot stop to cook your dinner. Don’t expect me to be housevife. Never trap me.’
Raymond pushed back her lank black hair.
‘“God gives us love”,’ he quoted slowly, ‘“Something to love he lends us”. You will always be free. No more electric fences, no watchtowers, no secret police nor mines. There’s the river.’ He pointed out of the window. ‘You can sail away whenever you want, as long as you come back.’
Raymond’s parents didn’t mind in the slightest about their ransacked lunch, and swept all their guests, including Galena, wearing another of Raymond’s shirts, out to lunch at the Lark Ascending on the Cheltenham Road.
They soon decided, particularly Raymond’s father, that Galena was adorable, and immensely talented, with just the right degree of vitality and realism to offset Raymond’s excessive kindness and dreamy romantic chivalry. Their critical faculties were slightly blurred by their relief that Raymond had finally taken the plunge.
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.
