by Jilly Cooper
Anthea sighed. What a tragedy the women this evening wouldn’t be able to admire the new décor when they left their coats on the bed, but there were too many precious things in the house to let guests rove unsupervised.
Anthea had pandered to her husband’s every whim over the last twenty-five years, as she was fond of saying. But last night, to ensure nine hours’ sleep before their special day, she had banished Raymond, who snored, to the dressing room. Raymond had been rather relieved. It had enabled him to read Tennyson into the small hours and have Grenville the greyhound on his bed.
In an hour or so, after she’d done her exercises, Anthea would creep downstairs and load up a tray with presents, a posy of lilies of the valley, freshly squeezed orange juice, and a half-bottle of champagne, and sing ‘Happy Birthday, Sir Raymond’ outside his door.
Anthea stretched. One of Raymond’s sex games, early on in the marriage, had been to take her out of a specially built glass case, and examine and caress her as if she were a Sèvres milkmaid. The case, which stood by the window, was now filled with pieces of Anthea’s favourite porcelain. On the rare times that she and Raymond made love, they would climb the stairs to the Blue Tower, which still seemed to arouse Raymond. As Anthea dutifully slid up and down his cock, she would gaze up at the Raphael and at her nicknamesake emerging from Pandora’s Box.
Anthea gave a shiver as reality reasserted itself. Never more had she needed the help of the Radiant Fairy.
‘Oh please, Hope and God too’ – Anthea fell to her knees – ‘please make Charlene go away.’
As most art galleries are undercapitalized, and Raymond and Anthea were not as flush as they appeared, Anthea had brokered a wizard £100,000 deal – a Silver Wedding in a Silver Valley – with Oo-ah! magazine. Oo-ah! were not only picking up the bill for her £6,000 wedding suit, £3,000 hat and £10,000 ball dress for the dinner dance afterwards, but also paying for bridesmaid and page clothes in fashionable lilac for Dicky and Dora.
In addition, Anthea had dropped a line to guests saying untruthfully that she and Raymond had been so bombarded with requests as to what they wanted as silver wedding presents that they had arranged a list at Asprey’s. They would particularly like pieces of their beloved ‘Violets’ dinner service, on which Anthea’s favourite flower, the violet, had been hand-painted. Everyone had belted off there and bought ‘Violets’ mugs which at £48 were the cheapest thing on the list.
Anthea had hired a lilac-and-white-striped marquee, with an Old Masters theme inside, which practically covered the big lawn which Robens had spent so many weeks perfecting. Robens was also hopping, as was Raymond, at Anthea’s last-minute decision to disrupt the exquisite pastel harmony of the herbaceous border by planting a bloody great battalion of red geraniums to add a splash of colour.
Anthea had made more enemies by her decision to use the tent again the following day for a drinks party for the village and friends considered too second eleven to be asked to the silver wedding. These included the local doctor, who had not been forgiven for suggesting Anthea’s panic attacks could be the onset of the menopause.
As the day grew hotter and more muggy with a forecast of thunder, tempers were further inflamed by an interview Anthea had defiantly given to Lynda Lee Potter, which had appeared in the Mail that morning.
After slagging off Galena: ‘If your hubby’s first wife hurt him by taking lovers, you make sure you are quadruply faithful and loving,’ which enraged her stepchildren, Anthea had then been quoted as saying her life was made complete eight years ago by the arrival of the twins: ‘our little autumn crocuses. Oh, the wonder of holding one’s first born in one’s arms.’
This enraged not only Emerald, working herself into a frenzy back at Lancaster Gate, and the twins, already mutinying about their frightful lilac wedding clothes, but also Oo-ah!, who felt they’d been scooped.
Determined to get their kilo of flesh, Oo-ah! had photographed Anthea flapping around her newly decorated bedroom; shoving vast flower arrangements in front of Galena’s few remaining pictures; seated at the ‘pe-arno’ playing Chopin (‘I am one of nature’s accompanists’); and posing by a terrifyingly good new portrait of herself in a silver tunic by Emma Sergeant. This she had given to Raymond as a joint birthday and silver wedding present. The portrait was now hanging in the hall upstaging the Matisse, and ready to be admired by arriving guests, before they were shepherded out through a side door into the garden and the marquee.
The seating plan was also driving Anthea crackers. Somerford Keynes had attacked Colin Casey Andrews in The Times that morning, so those two could no longer sit at the same table, and Somerford’s burglar boyfriend, Keithie, a heavily tattooed bit of rough trade, had to be kept away from Anthea’s porcelain collection. Keithie carried such huge handbags.
Anthea was livid that her very good friend and next-door neighbour, David Pulborough, was bringing his ugly wife, Rosemary, as well as Geraldine Paxton from the Arts Council. They had far too many spare women as it was. Thank God there were tons of gays in the art world, which would at least give an illusion of even numbers in the photographs.
‘What a tragedy Rupert Campbell-Black has influenza,’ she was now telling Harriet, the svelte henna-haired reporter from Oo-ah!, ‘such a very old friend. And who on earth are Emerald Cartwright and Zachary Ansteig?’ she shrieked.
‘Friends of Jupiter’s, Lady B.,’ said Jean Baines, the vicar’s wife and Anthea’s best friend, who helped out at Foxes Court when things got too hectic.
‘Oh, that’s all right then.’
Jupiter’s friends, reflected Anthea fondly, could be relied on to be charming and not cause trouble, which was more than could be said for Alizarin, Jonathan and Sienna’s.
Anthea might have tried hard at first with her stepchildren, but she had tended to make beds rather than allowances. She had doted on Jonathan as a little boy, but gone off him as he grew wilder and less respectful. Alizarin was a left-wing bum, living rent free in the Lodge, which Anthea longed to renovate for holiday lets, and Sienna, with her wide drooping mouth, long heavy-lidded eyes and thick dark hair the colour of Marmite, was the image of Galena and quite beyond the pale, calling Anthea ‘Hyacanthea Bucket’ to her face.
Even on their father and Anthea’s special day, none of the three had lifted a paint-stained finger to help. Alizarin was no doubt labouring away at some hideous canvas you wouldn’t hang in a slaughterhouse – how he had the nerve to be so arrogant when his last exhibition had been a complete flop . . . And because she had banned his best friend Trafford (who was always sick and broke the place up) from the party, wretched Jonathan had deliberately poached Anthea’s extremely comely cleaner, Esther Knight, to pose naked for him in her lunch hour. Mrs Knight and Jonathan were no doubt now getting stoned.
Even worse, Sienna had just stormed by on her motorbike to get some cigarettes. And all the workmen putting the finishing touches to the marquee had dropped their hammers, because apart from her tattoos and studs in her belly button, ears, nose and tongue, Sienna had been completely in the nuddy. Only wrapping herself in the Limesbridge Echo before going into the village shop, she had on the way back pinched a bottle of champagne from the caterer’s ice bath.
The twins Dicky and Dora were also acting up. Dicky had been teased at school about being an autumn crocus, and Dora wanted to take her delinquent pony Loofah to a gymkhana. Anthea was fed up with the lot of them. She must keep calm.
‘“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,”’ she murmured, rehearsing the poem she was reciting in church.
How could she get herself into the mood for an exchange of vows and a celebration of true love when she was even fed up with Raymond? Annoyed that Anthea had badmouthed Galena in the Mail, dismissing the party as women’s business, he had disappeared to the tennis court to play his traditional birthday match with his three eldest sons. He was then furious because he and Alizarin had been well beaten for the first time by Jupiter and an already drunk Jonathan. Alizarin kept missing the
ball, until Raymond had been captured by Oo-ah! yelling at his middle son.
‘This is the loveliest time of the year,’ Raymond announced every month, but looking out of his dressing-room window as he changed after tennis, he decided that late May had the edge and nature was really putting on her glad rags for Anthea’s party. Roads, fields and the churchyard frothed with cow parsley. Wild garlic, hawthorn and cherry blossom all added bridal whiteness. Beyond the pink foam of the orchard, proud trees admired their pale green reflections in the lazily winding river, and beyond that Galena’s wild-flower meadow was streaked with cowslips and buttercups. In the muggy heat, the scent of lilac was overpowering.
Raymond was painfully reminded that it was at this time of year he had first brought Galena to Foxes Court. The candles lighting the great horse chestnuts were so askew, Galena could have clipped them on when she was plastered.
Gazing down, he was pleased with his flower beds, except for Anthea’s clashing geraniums. He should have banned them as he should have curbed her spending in every direction. She was so competitive. David, living next door, was even worse. If ever a film crew came down to Foxes Court, the sound would instantly be blotted out by the Old Rectory mowing machines at full throttle. Below, Raymond could see David’s gardener lobbing snails over their dividing wall as he also rerouted the best rambler roses and clematis over to the Pulborough side. And David has stolen my beloved Jonathan, thought Raymond dolefully.
A shriek from Anthea brought him back to earth. She was clean out of vases to contain the flowers that kept arriving to wish her and Raymond a happy day. Next moment henna-haired Harriet from Oo-ah! had butted in:
‘We’re taking a lunch break, Lady Belvedon. Can we photograph you getting dressed for the church service immediately afterwards?’
‘Why don’t you like take them upstairs to admire the Raphael?’ mocked Sienna, who’d rolled up to steal another bottle.
‘Shut up,’ hissed Anthea. ‘And who’s put cow parsley on that table? I will not have it shedding in the house. Where on earth’s Knightie? She should be back by now.’
‘Knight and Day you are the one,’ sang Jonathan as he foxtrotted a naked Mrs Knight round his studio.
Armed with her bottle, Sienna noticed Dicky’s football on what was left of the big lawn.
‘Ball-ee,’ she cried, kicking it deep into Anthea’s geraniums, sending Visitor the Labrador flatfooting after it.
‘Why, you look younger than the day I married you, Sir Raymond,’ cried Anthea, straightening her husband’s dove-grey tie.
‘And you look even more beautiful,’ said Raymond truthfully.
The church, through an ancient gate and a hundred yards across the grass from Foxes Court, also looked beautiful, decorated with forget-me-nots and cow parsley, which here Anthea didn’t mind shedding at all.
Waiting to welcome her and Raymond was dear Neville Baines, the vicar of St James, Limesbridge, a beaming happy clappy in his early fifties, known predictably as ‘Neville-on-Sundays’. His beady wife, Jean, who found working occasionally for Lady Belvedon infinitely more exciting than being married to a clergyman, was acting as matron-of-honour. Appropriately dressed in droopy olive green, she was locally nicknamed ‘Green Jean’ because of her extreme ecological correctness. Jonathan and Sienna’s inability to recycle their bottles drove her to a frenzy. In fact, thought Jean furiously, out of Raymond’s six children, only Jupiter, who walked his stepmother up the aisle before taking his place beside his wife Hanna in the family pew and later reading: ‘Sweet is the breath of morn’, from Paradise Lost, behaved with any respect.
Galena’s other three, spurning the family pew, sat in a truculent row at the back. Sienna, menacing in a leather catsuit, was reading out Anthea’s interview with Lynda Lee Potter:
‘“Ay always bowled to may stepsons in the hols.” Did she?’
‘A wicket stepmother,’ said Jonathan, taking a slug out of his bottle of champagne, and falling about at his own joke.
Alizarin, tieless as always, had put his old Rugbeian tie on Visitor, the Labrador who sat grinning in the pew beside him.
The moment Neville-on-Sundays started his pep talk on the sanctity of marriage, the incensed bridesmaid and page belted back to sit with their half-brothers and -sister. Dora, livid she had been banned from bringing Loofah into church, dropped her bouquet and said, ‘Bugger.’
Dicky was still seething over his lilac suit. If his mother had worn a veil, he’d have broken her neck treading on it. As it was, Alizarin only just stopped him letting off a stink bomb.
‘We could always have said Visitor had farted,’ said Jonathan.
The entire pew rocked with giggles.
Poor, poor Anthea, to be saddled with such fiends, thought Green Jean who, as a curate’s wife, had never forgiven Galena for pelting her with rotten kumquats.
Anthea, enchanting in Lindka Cierach’s harebell-blue suit and David Shilling’s cloche, composed of pale pink roses, had never forgiven her Rookhope relations for not supporting her when she gave birth to Charlene, and had therefore not asked them to the silver wedding. This was no hardship because they were all fearfully common. As a result there were no undry eyes in the church, except Raymond’s who always blubbed when he recited Tennyson.
‘“One praised her ankles, one her eyes, One her blond hair and lovesome mien,”’ declaimed Raymond in his beautiful lilting voice, gazing into Anthea’s eyes, and briskly editing as he went along:
‘So sweet a face, such angel grace,
In all that land had never been:
Sir Raymond swore a knightly oath:
This perfect maid shall be my queen!’
‘Dad wasn’t a knight like when he first met Anthea,’ hissed Sienna. ‘Silly old tosser.’
‘I’m very disappointed by the turnout,’ announced a frowning Dora, when she discovered the Limesbridge Echo and Oo-ah!, clinging tenaciously onto their exclusive, were the only photographers outside the church. ‘I expected all Fleet Street to be here.’
‘That child’s the most frightful applause junky,’ muttered Sienna.
‘Who d’you think she gets it from?’ asked Jonathan as, watched by a tight-lipped Green Jean, who also disapproved of wasting paper, henna-haired Harriet from Oo-ah! threw confetti over Raymond and a dimpling Anthea.
And there’s Mum in the graveyard, thought Alizarin bleakly, how can she rest in peace with this din going on?
By eight o’clock, guests invited to the church were getting stuck into the Veuve Clicquot, exclaiming that Raymond’s irises were even more exquisite than Van Gogh’s and admiring the blow-ups of Old Masters, including the Waterlane Titian, in the marquee.
They were soon joined by influential members of the art world, livid at being banished from the house and denied a look at Raymond’s pictures, by clients and glamorous celebs who might buy pictures or want their portraits painted and by some dowdy and worthy members of the local gentry: the Bishop and the Lord-Lieutenant and their wives, whom Anthea felt raised the tone.
A string orchestra booked to play light classics and golden oldies, because Anthea loved ballroom dancing, was already belting out gems from Oklahoma. After dinner they would alternate with a heavily vetted pop group.
Raymond, who had swapped his morning coat for a dinner jacket, welcomed new arrivals alone until his wife, having been photographed changing by Oo-ah!, put in an appearance. Anthea had looked enchanting in church but really took the breath away as she floated down the stairs in clinging ivory silk shot through with rainbows. Her boyish curls had been swept up into a plaited hairpiece studded with rubies and intertwined with gold leaves – the exact replica of Hope in the Raphael.
Everyone in the crowded hall on their way to the garden clapped and cheered. Raymond couldn’t speak for a moment.
‘Oh Hopey,’ he muttered, ‘what a wonderful thing to do.’
Jupiter was less happy, not wanting the world to know that there was a Raphael hidden upstairs.
> ‘Brilliant, Anthea’ – he kissed her gold-dusted cheek – ‘you’ve never looked more stunning. All the same’ – he dropped his voice – ‘on the grounds of security, it’s better not to tell Oo-ah! who you’re supposed to be.’
‘Understood.’ Anthea smiled up at him. ‘This was for your father.’
‘Abandon Hopey, all ye who enter here,’ murmured Jonathan, catching sight of his stepmother.
Despite the warm night air soft as cashmere on her skin, Anthea shivered as she went into the garden. There was security on the gate, but so many other ways, through the woods or over the river, to crash the party.
Oh please, don’t let Charlene roll up unexpectedly.
Many of the guests had retreated from the midges into the marquee and were examining the seating plan. Some were already settled in their allotted places. But not the Belvedon children, who had commandeered their own table in defiance of any placement and, all extremely arrogant, were yakking away, making private jokes.
The waitresses, having read of his laddish pranks, were very taken by Jonathan, who was as naughty and manipulative as he was extraordinarily handsome. Deathly pale with thick ebony curls, a big sulky mouth, a long nose and huge, dark, restlessly roving eyes, he exuded trouble like a thoroughbred colt about to bolt across a motorway. He was now wickedly caricaturing guests on a pile of paper napkins. Each time he finished a drawing, a waitress grabbed it, aware it might keep her in her old age.
Harriet from Oo-ah! was equally captivated: ‘What artists do you most admire?’ she asked earnestly.
‘Amanda, my ex-girlfriend, could have told you,’ sighed Jonathan, ‘but alas we’ve split up.’
‘Oh dear, why was that?’
‘I’m dumb-blonding down, and she hated me falling asleep on the job. I need my eight hours a night.’
‘Your eight whores,’ growled Alizarin disapprovingly.
Tall and thin, despite massive shoulders, Alizarin had short, spiky dark hair, gaunt craggy features, Galena’s high cheekbones, her slanting dark eyes framed by big black spectacles and the suppressed outrage of someone who had struggled to the top of Everest to find it wasn’t there.
