by Jilly Cooper
Zac chucked a pile of photostats down on the table.
‘So the four elder Belvedon kids,’ he continued, ‘probably aren’t your blood relatives, but you’ve got a young half-brother and -sister, Dicky and Dora. It’s a bit blurred on that stat, but they must be about eight and awfully cute. Also I bought this round the corner.’
It was a feature on Anthea in April’s Good Housekeeping. ‘Little woman, good wife’, said the headline.
‘Omigod, I recognize her.’ Emerald’s tears spattered the pages as she pored over the pictures, frantic for likenesses. ‘Of course, Lady Belvedon! She’s always in Hello and Tatler. God, she’s pretty, and tiny like me, look how much smaller she is than Raymond. I wonder who my father was. If Raymond had been my dad, they’d surely have gone to court and got me back. Shall we drive down and give her the thrill of her life?’
Then, catching a glimpse of her reflection in a huge mirror, Emerald decided she first needed a haircut. Far down below, she could see the crimson blur on the trees in Hyde Park turning to buff and green. As an omen, the clouds suddenly stopped going east, and surged westwards towards Limesbridge.
‘I guess we ought to take things slowly,’ said Zac, topping up Emerald’s glass. ‘I know it’s hard, but let Anthea get used to the idea.’
‘But she’ll be over the moon.’
Zac shook his head.
‘It was only in 1976 that adopted kids were given the right to have access to their records. You were born in 1973, that puts Anthea in the frame of women who would never expect to be contacted. She may not have told Raymond about you.’
‘In a happy marriage, that’s lasted nearly twenty-five years?’ scoffed Emerald, who was back studying the Good Housekeeping photographs. ‘Of course he must know about me.’
In the end Zac agreed to write Anthea a private and confidential letter.
‘I’ll make it kind of neutral. Just saying “I know of a young woman called Charlene Rookhope, who was born on 7 July 1973, who thinks she might be related to you. It may not be your branch of the family, but if it is, she’d love to get in touch.” I’ll give your mobile as a contact number. If she calls at an awkward moment, you can always say you’ll call her back.’
Emerald insisted they post the letter straight away, kissing the envelope before she popped it in the pillar box, then flinging herself into Zac’s arms.
‘You are so brilliant. Let’s go back and go to bed to celebrate.’
Fucking Emerald, reflected Zac, as Emerald drifted off to sleep beside him, was rather like cycling in the Rockies: wonderful views, but you had to do all the work yourself.
Emerald was still in raging high spirits when she later floated back to Shepherd’s Bush. Sophy, who was eating baked beans and reading Bridget Jones’s Diary, was amazed to see her sister so cheerful. After their parents had gone to bed, Patience exhausted, Ian plastered, Emerald told Sophy about tracking down Anthea. Sophy was appalled and begged Emerald to come clean.
‘Daddy and particularly Mummy will want to support you through this, they’ll be gutted if they’re left in the dark.’
‘Zac’s helping me, that’s all I need,’ said Emerald defensively. ‘Let me find my mother in my own way, then I’ll tell them. They’ll be happy if I’m happy. I need to discover my roots.’
‘Whenever I discover mine, I take them straight to the colourist.’
‘Why d’you always make stupid jokes, just like Zac?’ replied Emerald through gritted teeth. ‘I need to find my real mother.’
‘Bollocks!’ Sophy lost her temper. ‘Your real mother was Mummy who fed, clothed, and looked after you when you were ill, and put up with your tantrums.’
‘Don’t you have any desire to find your family?’ demanded Emerald.
‘I don’t need another family,’ snapped Sophy, ‘I’ve got a perfectly good one already.’
Emerald, who expected Anthea to be on the telephone next morning, or at least on the doorstep by midday, rushed out first thing to have her hair done, then spent the afternoon trying on different clothes to wear to meet her new mother.
But as the days passed with no reaction, she became increasingly uptight. Zac’s big hands had to do a lot of soothing, massaging oil into her tense tiny body, lighting candles round the scented double bath, bringing her to orgasm to make sure – just in case Anthea got in touch the following day – that she got her nine hours’ beauty sleep. Meanwhile, he paced the floorboards next door.
Despite this solicitude, Emerald’s mood swings became increasingly extreme.
‘It was your idea to get in touch with her in the first place,’ she would storm, then, two minutes later: ‘Of course I can handle any response. All I want from Anthea is information, who my father is, what medical problems she had. Naturally, I’ll respect her desire for privacy.’
But alas, the course of maternal love never runs smooth.
Anthea neither replied to Zac’s letter nor telephoned. By the end of a fortnight, Emerald was in a frenzy of disappointment, snatching at her mobile.
‘It’s worse than waiting for you to ring,’ she raged at Zac, who sat down and wrote a second letter: ‘Your daughter, Charlene, would like to meet with you. You will be very proud of her.’ He signed himself Daniel Abelman.
When there was no answer to this and April moved into May, he winkled Raymond’s ex-directory number out of a fellow art correspondent, and called Foxes Court. A furious Anthea hung up on him. Next day, a recorded delivery arrived with a Limesbridge postmark. Inside was a brief letter.
Dear Mr Abelman,
I gave Charlene up for adoption more than twenty-five years ago, and have now closed the book. Your getting in touch has unleashed memories of an extremely traumatic time in my life that were buried long since. I wish Charlene well but have no desire to see her. If she gets in touch with me again, I shall have no option but to seek the advice of my solicitors.
Anthea’s handwriting, Zac decided, was very shaky.
‘She clearly hasn’t told Sir Raymond or the rest of the family.’
‘I cannot believe it,’ whispered a devastated Emerald. ‘This isn’t a can of worms, it’s a can of adders, all hissing out of Pandora’s Box. Anthea rejected me, giving me up as a baby, now she’s kicking me in the teeth a second time.
‘We should have approached her through social workers,’ she turned on Zac furiously, ‘then she wouldn’t be worried about blackmail or fraud. She probably thinks we’re a couple of con artists, particularly with you signing yourself “Abelman”.’
Her hysteria was rising so rapidly that Zac was tempted to hit her, or throw her out, but being a journalist he wanted to know the end of the story.
‘We are not giving up so easily.’
Zac had also noticed a paragraph in Oo-ah! magazine, whose circulation was creeping up on that of Hello and OK, announcing that Sir Raymond and Lady Belvedon were giving a big party in late May, to celebrate Raymond’s seventy-fifth birthday. They were also intending to reaffirm their marriage vows in a silver wedding ceremony in St James, Limesbridge, beforehand. No wonder Anthea didn’t want her little pre-marital lapse popping out of the woodwork at a time like this.
‘You and I are getting into Foxes Court another way,’ Zac told Emerald.
‘I’m not sure I want to after that horrible letter.’
‘Sure you do. Have you still got that card Raymond gave you?’
‘I lost it.’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
Zac, to Emerald’s horror, proceeded to ring up the Belvedon and made an appointment for her to show Raymond her portfolio at twelve-thirty the following Tuesday.
‘But I haven’t done any proper work for months.’
‘Time you did,’ said Zac. ‘Get your ass into gear.’
‘Can I draw you over the weekend?’ Which would at least give her more time with him.
‘Only if I have the test match on.’
One beautiful drawing brought Emerald’s confidence back. At c
ollege, her party trick had been to take a piece of clay and sculpt someone’s head in two hours.
‘I’m going to try this on Raymond.’
‘Your idol will have a head of clay,’ said Zac.
Jupiter Belvedon had abandoned a career as a sculptor and joined his father in the gallery because he realized his brothers and sister had much more talent. Nor did Jupiter have Raymond or David’s eye, but he had excellent business sense and was a genius at hanging and lighting pictures. He was also driven crackers by his father’s kind heart and the time he wasted giving free advice.
Tall, fine featured, too thin both in face and body, Jupiter looked effete, but a passer-by who’d tried to steal a Caravaggio from the gallery had been hit halfway down Cork Street. A control-freak, Jupiter loved bashing things into shape. He utterly dominated Hanna, his stunning blonde wife. He had plans to open a satellite gallery in the East End, concentrating on contemporary artists, but his real ambition was to oust William Hague and totally resculpt the Tory Party and later the country.
On the morning of Emerald’s appointment, Jupiter was not in carnival mood. Nor for that matter was Emerald. As the taxi bowled down Bond Street, then turned left and left again into Cork Street, she reflected how often, nearly twenty-seven years ago, her real mother must have walked the same way. There was the pretty Regency terraced house with the green-and-white-striped awning and a Casey Andrews in the window. Here Anthea must have come with love in her heart, thought Emerald as, quaking with nerves, she lugged her folding table, her tools, her lump of clay and her portfolio through a glass-fronted door flanked by two bay trees.
She found the gallery in disarray. Casey Andrews’s huge oils were coming down, Daisy France-Lynch’s delicate portraits were going up, canvasses were stacked against every wall.
I’m going to faint, thought Emerald in panic, but I can’t do a runner with all this stuff.
‘Yes?’ A tall haughty-looking man, probably in his late thirties, and very like the Duke of Wellington painted by Thomas Lawrence, shot out of the inside office.
‘I’ve come to see Sir Raymond Belvedon.’
‘Well you can’t,’ snapped Jupiter.
Raymond had just buggered off to do a television programme he’d forgotten clean about. Tamzin, their dozy assistant, was having a sickie, probably a hangover, and Jupiter had been left manning the gallery. In five minutes he was expecting a major client, an American arms-dealer called Si Greenbridge. Jupiter was about to lock up and take him to lunch.
He was therefore extremely unfriendly, telling Emerald to buzz off and come back and see his doddering old father another day. Enraged, Emerald tried to talk her way in. This austere, handsome crosspatch might after all be her first blood relation.
‘Just let me show you my portfolio,’ she pleaded, opening a huge shiny black book, almost as big as herself.
Jupiter noted glowing testimonials from Chelsea College of Art and Brighton College, both admittedly from men, and that her heads were astonishingly good. There was however no market for heads, unless they were of someone important.
She was also astonishingly pretty, and with her short upper lip, crazed eyes and rippling dark hair, a dead ringer for Rossetti’s Pandora.
‘I can’t give you any more time,’ he said curtly. ‘The client coming here any second has walls which need pictures. If I can get inside his head for ten minutes, I can sell them to him, but he’s got so much else to occupy his mind, it’s taken me three months to pin him down today.’
Jupiter would never have bothered with these explanations if the girl hadn’t been so attractive. Just for a second Emerald’s eyes hardened: a tantrum hovering.
My first bloody relation, she thought.
‘Go on, beat it,’ said Jupiter.
But as he opened the glass door, about to dump her stuff outside, the telephone rang. Keeping his eyes on her, in case she swiped a picture, he retreated to the reception desk.
‘Belvedon Gallery. It’s Jupiter here.’ Not by a flicker as he flipped through some Polaroids did he show how furious he was.
‘Sure. I understand. Traffic’s been awful all day. Shall we make another appointment? OK, you call me when you’ve got a moment. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,’ said Jupiter, wondering if the fucks had started before he’d hung up. He didn’t care.
‘He cancelled?’ asked Emerald.
Jupiter nodded. ‘He got away.’
‘You were right to show him you didn’t give a stuff, he’ll ring again.’
‘With half the dealers in the world trailing their wares?’ sighed Jupiter. ‘Si Greenbridge is so newly crazy about art, he’s slinging out all his racehorses so he can hang pictures in their boxes.’
‘I’m very sorry.’
Emerald was now ensconced on the pale grey velvet sofa, showing off her pretty legs beneath a tight leather mini. Jupiter had only had black coffee for breakfast. An enticing smell of Irish stew drifted over from Mulligan’s oyster bar, where he’d booked a table for himself and Si.
‘Would you like some lunch?’ he was amazed to hear himself saying.
‘Have you got time?’
‘I have now.’
‘I’d rather sculpt your head.’
‘What?’
‘It’ll only take a couple of hours, I promise you. I was going to do your father anyway.’
In no time at all, Emerald had tied back her hair with a violet silk scarf, set up her folding table in the back office, and on a revolving podium placed a lump of clay, already formed into a head with rough features. On a side table was more clay in a white pie dish and her tools: knives, pointed sticks and sticks with wire loops on the end like fairy dog-catchers. Jupiter meanwhile had opened a bottle of red, locked the outside door and put on the answering machine.
‘Could you possibly keep your face still and not talk too much,’ begged Emerald, ‘just to begin with, so I can see what’s coming out?’
This man is perhaps my brother, she thought as she gazed into his cool fern-green eyes as if into a mirror. He had the complex, ascetic, ruthless face of a Robespierre or a young Italian cardinal on the make in fifteenth-century Rome. Unable to stop herself, she reached out like a blind man and ran a trembling hand over his features. Jupiter flinched. Perhaps she was a stalker or a nutter. She was deathly pale now.
‘I’m sorry.’ Emerald blushed. ‘It helps me to feel the faces I’m sculpting.’ She ran a finger down the long, gritted curve of his jaw. ‘I want my work to be touched as well as looked at.’
They both jumped as the telephone rang. It was Casey Andrews fulminating away on the machine like one of the giants in The Ring. Casey’s latest reviews and sales had not been as good as hoped.
‘All art correspondents write about these days is the stratospheric price of Impressionists and my brother Jonathan’s sex life,’ grumbled Jupiter.
Sitting opposite him, Emerald applied wooden callipers to Jupiter’s temples, to the sides of his aquiline nose, to the distance from brushed eyebrow to smooth hairline, from nose to ears, ears to mouth, then transferred each measurement to the lump of clay. The Guardian had described him as ‘thin lipped’ last week. Jupiter tried to make his mouth fuller.
‘Wonderful eyes, wonderful strong face,’ murmured Emerald. ‘So nice to sculpt someone older,’ then, with a smile: ‘I’m so used to doing boring students.’
Jupiter was amazed by her total concentration. For the first time in years, he looked at someone else’s face for more than two minutes. Emerald’s green eyes, practically hidden by narrowed feathery dark lashes, looked through him and at him, flickering constantly back to the head as she modelled and gouged, adding then removing little sausages of clay.
Her slightly parted black knees were an inch away from his. The E set with emeralds, practically the only piece of Cartwright jewellery unpawned, rose and fell on her cashmere bosom. As she worked she told him about the disaster that had befallen her family and how her father had been cruelly ousted by a boardroom
coup.
Jupiter wryly wished he could get shot of Raymond as easily. As Emerald crawled round on the carpet to catch different views of him, he was amazed to find himself offering to introduce her to other dealers and clients. Pouring himself another glass of wine, he tried to persuade her to join him, but she still would only accept water.
‘Do you mind coming a bit nearer?’
Jupiter edged his chair forward, their knees almost touching. He could smell violets and the sweetness of her breath. The milky green of her jersey was the colour of the dewy lawn at Limesbridge.
To start with he had kept glancing impatiently at his watch, but now he wanted time to go slower and slower, fascinated to see the head emerging more human than himself. That man had mortgage problems, and shouldn’t have bought a big house in Chester Terrace to impress the Tory Party. That man needed to nail Si Greenbridge, curb his father’s excesses and sell more than David Pulborough.
Jupiter loved his wife Hanna, but he was suddenly filled with lust for this girl with her black legs apart, the soft curve of her breast and her darting eyes.
‘You’re very good at keeping still.’ She smiled at him adorably, head on one side. ‘Apparently the person with the stillest face is the Duke of Edinburgh. I haven’t made your eyes deep set enough.’
Telephone messages for Raymond from Greyhound Rescue, from television producers and newspapers, from the NSPCC wanting him to open a fête, from artists wanting money, piled up on the machine.
Emerald was now doing Jupiter’s thick dark locks – his one vanity – applying clay in a frenzy. The sculpture took on even more reality with his hair. Emerald’s eyes were darting quicker and quicker, her little hands and nails burnt umber like his Aunt Lily’s after gardening.
I’ve met this girl before, he thought. Next moment she leant back, stretching and flexing her aching fingers and shoulders.
‘OK. Thanks awfully.’
It was a few moments before they realized the bell was ringing insistently accompanied with banging. Outside was Kevin Coley, a petfood billionaire, whom the Belvedons nicknamed Mr Ditherer, because of his infuriating habit of buying paintings after a good lunch and changing his mind next day.
