by Jilly Cooper
‘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.
‘So lucky to be able to play music loudly,’ said David enviously.
‘We’ve got a very deaf old parson in the rectory next door.’
‘Marvellous pictures inside. What’s the secret of being a good dealer?’
‘Tremendous energy,’ sighed Raymond, remembering his sleepless night, ‘no stone unturned, even though one uncovers a lot of woodlice. A good eye. Proof of that is how much more you sell the picture for in twenty years’ time. We’re lucky we’ve got lots of storage space here. My father bought Turners before the war, kept them until the early Sixties and made a killing. I’m hoping to do the same with the Pre-Raphaelites. Basically it’s the same as shares, hold on to the good ones, sell at the top of the market.’
In the dusk David looked beautiful again, his face no longer red from the heat, his eyes huge and trusting.
‘How did you enjoy the summer term?’ asked Raymond. ‘I was at King’s just after the war. One was so glad to be alive, we talked all night, forging such strong friendships.’
‘I found it a let-down,’ grumbled David, ‘no-one talks about their feelings any more,’ then paused, hoping Raymond might confide in him about his marriage.
‘I imagined you whooping it up.’
‘You can’t swing if you haven’t any money,’ said David bitterly. ‘I’ve never been to a nightclub, nor got stoned. I was so green when I arrived, a girl handed me a joint, I thought it was a fag and stubbed it out.’
‘You shouldn’t have bought us so many presents,’ protested Raymond.
The Good Friday Music had just given way to the March of the Knights.
‘So beautiful,’ sighed David. ‘I’d love to have heard Melchior in the title role.’
Overhead the clouds had rolled away, leaving the stage to the stars.
‘“Now glowed the firmament With living sapphires”,’ quoted David. Throwing back his head, delectable brandy trickling down his throat, he idly identified the various constellations.
‘There’s the Swan flying past, the Eagle, the Lyre, the Herdsman, Hercules striding in the wrong direction and there’ – David tilted his chair back even further – ‘is the tail of the Great Bear disappearing into the wood.’
Admiring the lovely curve of David’s neck, Raymond decided he did look good with short hair. What an incredibly accomplished young man, he thought hazily, such a knowledge of stars, music, pictures, poetry, particularly Tennyson.
‘I can’t imagine a more w-w-w-wonderful place.’ David often emphasized a slight stammer to sound more vulnerable and appealing. ‘That evening in Cambridge changed my life and the boys are great,’ he added, only fifty per cent truthfully.
‘I’d be glad if you kept an eye on Jupiter,’ murmured Raymond, ‘he’s going to be form prefect next term, and poor Alizarin’s the only person he can practise on.’
‘I can handle Jupiter.’ David suppressed a yawn.
‘Go to bed,’ said Raymond.
David’s bedroom was perfect. The dark green silk curtains of the four-poster were repeated on either side of a window situated above the front door. Intensely nosy, David would thus be able to monitor all comings and goings. Across a sweep of gravel, a waterfall tumbled into a water trough.
Inside the room, Galena had covered the Nile-green walls with dryads, satyrs and nymphs in various states of undress peering out from the trees. Hares and deer frolicked in the ferns. To avoid the attentions of Apollo, Daphne was turning herself into a laurel.
Also on the walls were a John Bratby of Galena surrounded by birds, a Samuel Palmer of flowering cherries under an orange moon, and a bluey-mauve Sickert of Battersea Power Station. On the dressing table paced a proud little Degas horse. A wardrobe large enough to accommodate an army of lovers contained only Raymond’s morning coat with a cornflower shrivelling in the buttonhole.
In the chest of drawers lined with yellowing art magazines David found lavender bags, and bloody hell! his clothes all neatly folded. Mrs Robens must have nipped upstairs between courses and unpacked for him. Racing across the room, David unzipped the pocket in the top of his suitcase and gasped with relief. The pile of cuttings and Xeroxes were undisturbed.
Heart still thumping, David flipped through them. The big piece, from a 1965 Sunday Times colour magazine, had told him everything about Galena and Raymond. There was also an excellent Ideal Home feature on Foxes Court detailing its wo
nderful pictures, particularly those by Galena and other Belvedon artists, an Observer review of Galena’s last exhibition, and a huge profile of Raymond in the Telegraph.
Other goodies included details of the night sky in July from The Times, which David had memorized last night, and a photostat of Tennyson’s ten-page entry in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations from which David had been learning thirty lines a day. Listening to Raymond on Desert Island Discs had familiarized him with his new boss’s taste in music. Lives of the Pre-Raphaelites would stand him in good stead when Raymond showed him the rest of the pictures tomorrow.
‘Hey diddly dee, a dealer’s life for me,’ sang David.
What dividends had been reaped from a couple of days in Leeds Library – and he must learn to rhyme ‘one’ with ‘fun’ rather than ‘gone’ in future.
He was so proud of the delighted surprise in his voice: ‘Galena Borochova’s your mother!’ That little sod, Jupiter, was going to need watching, he was much too sharp. Lifting up a rug, David found a loose floorboard and shoved the cuttings underneath it.
David Pulborough was heterosexual but extremely self-seeking, and so anxious to escape from the stultifying world of lower-middle-class Sorley (where his mother actually worked in a draper’s shop and his father as a clerk in the traffic department at the Town Hall) that he was prepared to use his looks to achieve his own ends with either sex.
Women were drawn to his rather spiritual beauty, particularly as he had perfected a technique of standing very close, gazing into their eyes, and flattering them outrageously. He had also realized that an almost effortless way up the social scale was to become the plaything of some rich, grand old queen, and with luck be remembered in his will.
In his first two years at Cambridge, unbeknownst to each other, he had been enjoying the favours of his homosexual tutor and that tutor’s good-looking unsatisfied wife. He had only needed to let a slender arm rub against the shoulders of the former during tutorials to gain excellent marks, along with invitations to smart parties and the task of looking after the famous Raymond Belvedon when he visited the college.
The tutor’s wife, Petra, was very demanding in bed. In fact young David had improved so dramatically under her tuition that she was threatening to leave her husband. David had countered this move, which would have caused an awful scandal and jeopardized his degree next summer, by persuading Petra to lend him her running away money of £500 to pay off his pressing end-of-term debts. Instead he had blued the money on the second-hand Ford, which appeared to be a write-off, new clothes and presents for the Belvedons.
David knew that Raymond was attracted to him, but Raymond was not an old queen, he was hugely glamorous, and could introduce David to everyone in the art world.
For two months, I am going to live on the fat of the land, thought David as he soaked in a green-scented bath. The waterfall outside sounded like a running tap. What bliss not to be shouted at for leaving it on. As he dried himself on a soft emerald-green towel, admiring his slender body, which would look even better when he had a tan, he could hear Raymond talking loving nonsense to Maud as he took her out for a last walk.
Happily David slid between cool white linen sheets. On his bedside table was a Collected Tennyson, a wireless switched to Radio Three and a harebell-blue enamel box filled with pink iced biscuits.
‘Not after you’ve cleaned your teeth.’ He could hear his mother’s reproof, as he defiantly bit into one.
Poetry recited last thing at night could often be retained perfectly in the memory the following morning.
‘Till last by Philips farm I flow
To join the brimming river,’ mumbled David,
‘For men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever.’
As the waterfall outside converged with Tennyson’s ‘Brook’, he fell into a deep sleep.
For the next few days David absorbed the wonder of Foxes Court: the glorious pictures, the vast library of books and records, the romantic garden, the barns and cottages, the prettiest of which he had earmarked for himself in the future, and Galena’s studio off to the left through ancient woodland.
He helped Alizarin dam the stream which ran through the water trough under the house, down the garden to the river, which gave him ample opportunity to quote Tennyson’s ‘Brook’. He taught Alizarin to crawl in the swimming pool, the bottom of which was all looking-glass. In addition, he bowled endlessly to Jupiter, and let the little beast beat him at tennis, croquet and chess – not difficult with the hangovers he had most mornings after drinking and talking long into the night with Raymond.
As he suspected, his new boss was under colossal strain and, despite his sweetness, had a short temper. He would shout if anyone forgot to fill up Maud’s water bowl, or opened his beloved Times in the morning before he did. When he wasn’t working in his study, Raymond spent a lot of the day masterminding the garden like Leonardo, yelling from top-floor bedrooms, ‘We need more vermilion over there, Robbie, and a splash of purple lake to the right next to those crimson phlox.’
Robbie the gardener, Mrs Robens’s husband, a lech with a good body and wandering eyes, was very jealous of Raymond’s partiality for David. Nor was he pleased when his plump, gloomy wife couldn’t praise the lad enough.
‘Room’s neat as a new pin, makes his bed, brings in plates from the garden, gave me a box of chocolates for unpacking his clothes and he really keeps those boys amused.’
Having been employed to teach Jupiter and Alizarin to draw, David put this into practice one morning before lunch, escaping from the heatwave into the shade of a vast oriental plane on the edge of the lawn.
Bumblebees hung upside down in the catmint. Maud inspected her master’s delphiniums, trying to remember where she’d buried a pork chop. The Good Friday Music floated once more out of the study, where Raymond had retreated with a pile of transparencies to write catalogue blurbs.
‘What shall we draw?’ asked Alizarin.
‘You can draw me,’ said David.
‘Boring, boring, drawing’s boring,’ intoned Jupiter.
‘Not if you find something new in my face, there’s always a different way of looking at things.’
Jupiter smirked and drew a Hitler moustache. Alizarin chewed his pencil, dark eyes intent, tongue slightly out.
‘Tell us about Pandora,’ he asked.
‘Pandora’s troubles all began because the Gods invented fire,’ explained David. ‘They didn’t want to share this fire with humans who they thought would burn themselves like children or, worse still, set fire to Heaven where the Gods lived.’
‘This isn’t Pandora,’ scoffed Jupiter, training David’s hair to the right over one eye and giving him sticking-out ears.
‘It is. Prometheus, who was very brave, raided Heaven and stole fire like an Olympic torch. Your namesake, Jupiter’ – David raised an eyebrow – ‘the King of the Gods, was so angry that in revenge he created the most beautiful woman ever seen.’
‘Like Mummy,’ piped up Alizarin.
‘Only when she dresses up,’ sneered Jupiter.
‘And he called her Pandora,’ went on David, ‘and ordered Mercury, his messenger, to deliver her to the house of Prometheus’s younger brother, Epimetheus.’
‘Ah, your story begins differently.’ Jupiter put down his pencil to listen. Alizarin, frowning, looking constantly up and down from his pad to David’s face, carried on drawing.
‘And Prometheus pleaded with his younger brother, who he protected, just as you protect Alizarin,’ said David so sarcastically that Jupiter blushed. ‘He pleaded: Don’t accept anything from Mercury. But when Mercury rolled up with such a stunning girl, Epimetheus couldn’t resist marrying her – on one condition that she never opened the casket on the shelf.’
‘It was a chest in our story,’ crowed Jupiter, adding a Mick Jagger pout beneath the Hitler moustache.
‘Having opened the box and been stung all over far worse than snakes or scorpions by the ev
ils of the world that flew out,’ David was saying five minutes later, ‘Pandora wept and said she wished she’d listened to her husband Epimetheus – like I’m sure your mum listens to your dad.’
‘She don’t,’ said Alizarin. ‘When’s she coming back? Ouch!’ he howled as Jupiter kicked him on an ankle already purple from a croquet ball.
‘Stop it,’ exploded David.
Thank God, there was Mrs Robens coming out to lay lunch.
‘How d’you know so much about Pandora?’ asked David, getting up to inspect the sketchpads: ‘Jesus Christ!’ for Alizarin’s drawing was brilliant.
How, at only six, could he have captured the demurely lowered lashes, the calculated innocence, the nose twitching in curiosity, the deeply sensual lower lip? It was like looking in a discerning mirror.
‘Look at that!’ David seized the tray from Mrs Robens. Mrs Robens glanced from the drawing to David in wonder.
‘It’s more like you than you are yourself,’ she cried. ‘You’ll be as famous as your mum one day, Alizarin.’ Then, catching sight of the murderous expression on Jupiter’s face, ‘And yours is very good too, Jupey.’
‘A more abstract concept,’ said David, noting the Hitler moustache and the squint. Don’t rise, he told himself.
Parsifal finished, Raymond wandered out into the garden.
‘What a lovely day. If only I didn’t have to go to London.’
‘Alizarin’s going to keep you in your old age,’ said David, who was fed up with Jupiter.
Alizarin had certainly captured David’s beauty, thought Raymond wistfully, but praising him at the expense of Jupiter only encouraged more bullying.
‘Excellent, both of you,’ he said heartily, then, as Mrs Robens staggered out bearing tomatoes green with chopped basil, new potatoes, and cold chicken blanketed with mayonnaise: ‘It all looks wonderful, Mrs R., could you possibly bring out a bottle of wine?’
‘That was great,’ David told Mrs Robens, opening the washing-up machine later, as he brought back the plates.
