by Jilly Cooper
‘Can I get you anything?’
Zac wanted a glass of water. She loved the way he pronounced it: ‘Wot-urrr’.
‘Evian’s in the fridge, help yourself. It’s tricky putting in these clover stems.’
Hell, here was Sienna drifting in from working all night, yawning and flexing her aching shoulders. Her hair was in a plait and as usual she had got paint and clay everywhere. One of Jonathan’s discarded duck-egg-blue shirts, hardly buttoned up, showed off her long, pale legs. A stud gleamed like mercury in her belly button.
Noticing Zac taking out the Evian bottle, Sienna said, ‘Why not try tap water? We’re like not on the mains, so it comes straight from a spring up in the woods.’
Peering into the fridge, she was just about to grab a handful of prawns, when Anthea shrieked, ‘Don’t, they’re for tonight.’
Turning on the cold tap, Zac filled up a mug, then, distracted by the glimpse of a comma of pubic hair between Sienna’s thighs, took a huge gulp, and swore as boiling water scalded his tongue and throat.
‘Fuck, that’s the hot tap.’
‘You get like hot water out of both taps here,’ said Sienna evilly.
‘Very symbolic,’ snapped Zac.
‘That was wicked, Sienna,’ said Anthea in a shocked voice. ‘I’m so sorry, Zac, let the tap run for a minute, it’ll come out cold as the North Pole.’
‘Like someone else round here.’ Sienna pulled a face at Zac and, grabbing an orange, sauntered out.
‘I’d be grateful if you didn’t take any more towels out of the hot cupboard,’ Anthea shouted after her. ‘Knightie found seven in your bedroom this morning and we do have a lot of house guests. Little bitch,’ she stormed to Zac. ‘Galena’s children are so horrid to me. I tray so hard.’
‘The Jews have a legend that the serpent was Adam’s first wife,’ said Zac.
‘Oh, that’s priceless,’ giggled Anthea. ‘You understand everything.’
‘And that is such a beautiful cake,’ said Zac moving in behind her again.
‘I’m off,’ said an icily disapproving voice.
It was Emerald, who was driving all the way back to Shepherd’s Bush to put her parents and Sophy through a dress rehearsal.
What the hell was Zac doing deserting her to pick up Dicky and notch up Brownie points with Raymond and Anthea? she wondered furiously. She was their ewe lamb, not Zac.
It’s my birthday, she told herself. No-one’s allowed to be nasty to me all day. Why hadn’t Zac offered to drive her the sweltering 240 miles there and back? But she daren’t let her family arrive unsupervised. Patience had been known to make a scarecrow look like Beau Brummell.
Zac saw her off, but his goodbye kiss, in full view of the kitchen window, hardly grazed her cheek.
‘I’ll give you your birthday present when you get back. Safe journey,’ and, banging the flat of his hand on the top of her car, he loped back into the house.
Suddenly Emerald hated leaving him with Anthea. No-one warned you in the adoption manuals about your natural mother getting off with your boyfriend.
Returning to the kitchen, hearing bat on ball and clapping from the study, Zac’s long fingers met round Anthea’s minute waist. Anthea’s heart started to thump, and she found difficulty saying, ‘Sorry Emerald’s being so temperamental. She’s very smitten with you, Zac,’ and when his fingers climbed her ribs and his thumbs began caressing and lifting her little breasts, the four-leaf clover suddenly acquired a fifth leaf.
‘Oh Zac,’ sighed Anthea. She tried to move away, but he held tightly on to her. ‘I hoped you were going to marry my Charlene.’
‘Not when I’ve got the screaming hots for her mom.’ Zac buried his lips in the back of Anthea’s very clean neck.
‘We can’t hurt Charlene,’ gasped Anthea.
‘I guess not.’ Zac’s voice was so husky, his breath so warm, his stroking hands creeping inside her shirt. ‘If only we could carve out time and find a secret love nest for an hour of heaven.’
Anthea made only half-hearted attempts to finish icing the word ‘Happy’.
‘I know somewhere,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll tell Raymond and Dicky I’ve got a migraine coming on. I’ll meet you on the top landing in five minutes.’
Hearing the drone of an electric toothbrush, Zac hovered impatiently in the shadows until Anthea beckoned him into her ravishing crimson and white bedroom. She reeked of Shalimar and was still wet from the shower. A white frilly négligé clung to her body.
‘Ay can trust you, Zac.’
‘Sure you can.’
‘You must promise never to tell anyone where you’ve been or what you’ve seen.’
‘I promise, I won’t notice anything but you anyway.’
Anthea wavered. ‘I still feel awful about Emerald.’
‘Emerald’s a kid,’ urged Zac, ‘you’re a woman.’ How the clichés tripped off his forked tongue. ‘You’re what Emerald would have been if you’d reared her.’
How Anthea loved that.
‘Kiss me, Zac.’
Zac pressed his lips hard but briefly against hers.
‘Hurry please, I want you so badly.’ (Come on, you bitch, he thought.)
With a shaking hand Anthea punched out a series of numbers beside a door next to her dressing table. Nothing happened.
‘Sugar,’ she squeaked, ‘I’ve forgotten the password.’
‘What is it?’ Just keeping himself from throttling her, Zac put warm, steadying hands on her bare arms.
‘Parsifal – some stupid opera Raymond likes.’ Anthea punched again. ‘P-A-S-S—’ They could hear someone running down the landing.
‘Hurry,’ hissed Zac. ‘It’s spelt ‘P-A-R.’
This time she got it right. The door swung open. Softly closing it behind them, Anthea led Zac upstairs through a door with a mirror set into it. Inside was a bower of bliss, a heavenly little turret room with a blue vaulted ceiling scattered with stars, a faded crimson-curtained four-poster and pictures crowding the walls.
‘Ay’m afraid it smells musty.’ Anthea wrinkled her nose as she locked the door behind them. ‘But Knightie might get the wrong ideas if she cleaned up here.’
The pictures were faint making, all of naked or scantily clad men and women. Zac clocked a Watteau, a breathtaking little Titian, a wonderfully curvaceous white bottom by Boucher, and a Beardsley rake examining a naked nymph through a spy-glass.
‘Omigod,’ he said slowly.
‘Raymond believes some old Italian theory, that if you have paintings of beautiful people on the bedroom wall, you’ll produce beautiful kiddies.’
‘And you’re the loveliest of them all.’
As he buried his lips in Anthea’s, she closed her eyes in ecstasy. Zac’s, however, remained open, roving round the room, until there on the right of the bed, wham, bang, thanks at least $10 million, ma’am, he saw the Raphael, and felt ecstasy shuddering through his body at such shining beauty. He started to tremble.
How he quivers with excitement, thought Anthea, he truly cares for me.
‘Undress me, Zac,’ she whispered in Emerald’s little girl voice.
He was getting so adept at taking clothes off childlike women, he’d better get a job as a nanny. The white négligé slid to the floor like an avalanche, followed by the gingham toggle holding back her hair. She did indeed have the lovely body of a thirteen-year-old. He could hang a baseball cap on her nipples.
‘Oh Zac.’ Anthea gasped when she saw the size of his cock. ‘Raymond’s awfully little. Ay hope ay’ll be able to accommodate you.’
It’d be like an elephant getting his trunk down a mousehole.
‘Don’t worry, babe,’ murmured Zac, ‘I’ll get you so slippery. Just relax.’
Pushing her across the bed, parting her damp blond pubic hair, tongue downwards, he found her tiny clitoris, licking it languorously. Eyes upwards, he joyfully examined the Raphael in glorious technicolour for the first time, revelling in the exquisite folds of Pride’s r
ich purple cloak, in Lust leering at Pandora in her sky-blue dress, and in Gluttony snatching a red and green apple from the table.
‘Oh Zac, oh Zac.’
‘Oh darling Anthea.’
Shifting his position, coaxing two fingers in and out of her, he studied yawning Sloth on his yellow couch, being kicked in the ribs by a red-faced Wrath. Envy in scarlet glowered at Pandora’s wimpish husband and Avarice pocketed a gold candlestick as all the Deadly Sins were evicted from the room.
Anthea was so sticky now, Zac could enter her from any angle. Sitting in an armchair, with her straddled across him, he noticed Mercury in his winged hat peering in through the window.
Laying Anthea on the bed on her tummy, he slowly kissed and licked his way up her pearly white legs, till he reached her dimpled bottom, and slid an oiled finger into her anus.
‘Oh Zac.’ She gave a squeal of pleasure. ‘That is so naughty and lovely, you must stop.’
But Zac was gazing up at Pandora. And as he took Anthea from behind, gently caressing her nipples and tickling her clitoris, he noticed how beautifully drawn was Pandora’s arm, despairingly raised to ward off the stinging evils of the world.
Mechanically, almost as if he were grilling a sole, he flipped Anthea over on her back. As she bucked faster and faster beneath him, he noticed she made the same mewing noises as Emerald when she came.
But he had no difficulty in not coming himself, even when later she somewhat cautiously went down on him because it gave him the chance really to examine Hope in her rainbow dress. She was as lovely as the Botticelli Venus or even the Venus of Urbino, haloed in light, her piled-up hair glowing with rubies, and her sweet optimistic face outshining the shining moon behind her.
‘My little darling, I’m going to take you home,’ murmured Zac.
‘Oh Zac,’ mumbled Anthea with her mouth full, ‘are you truly?’
Pulling out his dick, Zac laid Anthea back on the crumpled sheets, plunged deep, humped joyfully for a moment, then with a shout of triumph exploded inside her. Anthea was in heaven – the nearest she’d been to orgasm in recent years had been when she became Lady Belvedon at Buckingham Palace.
Sated by very different pleasures, they lay back on the bed.
‘You’re exquisite, like a little Fragonard.’ Zac stroked her concave belly.
‘Raymond says I’m more like Hope.’ Anthea pointed to the Raphael, which gave Zac the excuse to leap to his feet.
‘You were wearing her dress when we first met,’ he said in pretended amazement, edging closer, frantically working out how the picture came off the wall.
What a back view, thought Anthea dreamily. Raymond was a fine figure in Savile Row pinstripe, but stripped off, he was quite pink and wrinkled. Zac wasn’t going to be the only one making arty references.
‘You’ve got a naicer botty than Michelangelo’s David,’ she cried, stroking it, then sliding her hand between Zac’s powerful thighs to cup and caress his testicles.
But as he put his hands on the gold frame to take the Raphael to the light, Anthea shrieked and her hand tightened convulsively.
‘Ouch!’ howled Zac. ‘Whadja do that for?’
‘Don’t touch the Raphael, the alarm’s wired up to the police station.’
‘How does that work?’ Zac in his excitement was oblivious of the pain.
‘There’s a little sensor at the back of the picture, which goes off if it’s moved.’
‘Like your clit.’ Reaching back, Zac put a hand between Anthea’s legs. ‘Where does it turn off?’ he murmured, his fingers becoming more insistent.
Anthea writhed with pleasure.
‘In the cellar on the left of the door.’
‘And the password?’
‘Same as the first four letters to get in here.’
‘Why Parsifal?’ asked Zac, wondering if perhaps he could clamber over the roof and get the painting out through the window.
‘It’s Raymond’s favourite opera.’ Anthea ticked the names off with her fingers. ‘And although we had to fudge a bit, it’s P for Pandora, A for Arrogance instead of Pride, S for Sloth – no, it’s spelt with an R, isn’t it, so it’s R for Rivalry instead of Envy, now S for Sloth, I for Indulgence instead of Gluttony, F for Fury, A for Avarice and L for Lust. It spells Parsifal.’
‘That’s neat,’ said Zac. Getting up, he prowled round the room. He was frantic to grab the Raphael then and there, but out of the window, through a net curtain of cobwebs, he could see men bashing in posts for fireworks, Robens mowing the top lawn yet again, and Aunt Lily’s fluffy white cat stalking butterflies in the catmint. Raymond was downstairs, Sienna somewhere; it was too risky.
‘You do really love me, don’t you, Zac?’ begged Anthea, clamouring for affection just like Emerald.
‘You have made me the happiest man in the world,’ replied Zac truthfully.
‘This is a huge thing for me.’
‘And an utterly enormous thing for me.’ Reaching into his tracksuit pocket, Zac produced a camera. ‘Honey, I’m off to the States tomorrow,’ then, when Anthea gave a wail of horror: ‘I’ll be back. May I take a picture to carry against my heart?’
Anthea even posed with her newly waxed legs apart and her hands clasped behind her head to raise her breasts.
‘Absolutely sensational,’ breathed Zac, as he aimed his lens at the Raphael above her.
Sienna often returned to stories from the Greek classics, which Raymond had read her when she was a child. Her favourite had always been about Nausicaa, a maiden who, like Sienna, had three merry bachelor brothers, who were always needing clean shirts for parties. While dutifully washing these shirts one hot afternoon by the river, Nausicaa had surprised naked in the rushes a handsome illegal immigrant called Odysseus, who had hastily slapped an olive leaf over his cock.
Zac must have been rather like Odysseus, wily, wandering, opportunistic, loving them and leaving them, reflected Sienna as she drifted off to sleep that muggy, sweltering afternoon. Waking, she gave a scream to see a dark figure towering over her. Then she realized it was the dark green curtained horizontal bar of her four-poster. Having groped shakily for a cigarette, she decided she’d never get back to sleep unless she first had a pee.
Wandering out into the landing, she was stunned to find stealing out of a bathroom a naked Zac. Seeing her, he made no attempt to cover himself with a leaf from one of Anthea’s sweetheart plants. He seemed totally unembarrassed, probably because he had such a lean mean marvellous body. For once, he was looking ecstatic.
‘I guess I should raise my dick to you,’ he murmured as he slid into his bedroom.
Quite unnecessarily for the knowing Dicky and Dora’s sake, Anthea had put Zac and Emerald in separate rooms. Sienna therefore assumed he had been returning from shagging Emerald. Bumping into Mrs Robens, who’d been checking the rooms allotted to the Cartwrights, however, she learnt that Emerald had gone to London at lunchtime.
Sienna felt sick. Could Zac have been with Anthea?
Collapsing on her bed she relived the horror of the abortion Anthea had made her have when she was sixteen.
‘We mustn’t tell Daddy,’ Anthea had kept saying.
The father of the baby had been a very attractive married man, and Anthea had had to have several lunches with him to talk about ‘the situation’, before persuading him never to see Sienna again. He had become quite nasty when Sienna had run away from school and rolled up in floods of tears at his office. Could Anthea be up to her old tricks – but this time nicking Emerald’s boyfriend?
An hour later, when Zac disappeared off to Searston in Anthea’s car, ostensibly because he’d forgotten to bring a black tie, Sienna crept into his room, breathing in sudden sweetness from the gold honeysuckle clustering round his window and the CK One in which he must have drenched himself before rushing out. Idly Sienna opened a chest of drawers and froze. Under his black evening shirt, she found a gun, a cheque for $10,000, still uncashed, from Si Greenbridge (an arms-dealer no les
s), a lot of US currency, several £50 notes, some yen and roubles, and Russian, US and Austrian passports. She also found a tattered red-leather collection of Goethe’s poems. Sienna’s A-level German enabled her to understand that the book had been inscribed in spidery black writing to someone called Jacob from his father Benjamin in 1925, and to translate the quotation: ‘At all times, pleasure and grief go together. Have faith in pleasure, meet grief with courage.’
What the hell was going on? How long had Zac known Si Greenbridge?
As Zac stormed back up the drive she could see his mobile glued to his ear, the gleam of his white teeth.
‘Tiger Tiger, burning bright In the forests of the night.’
Whatever Zac was hunting, it wasn’t Emerald.
A terrific tension was building up in the house. Dark purple clouds bruised the horizon; thunder rumbled threateningly round the valley. It was stiflingly hot. Raymond prayed rain wouldn’t douse the fireworks, and turned up the Good Friday Music to blot out Anthea’s moaning that his children had put off their allotted tasks until she was forced to do them herself.
‘There’s no point buttering bread too early, it only curls,’ protested Sienna.
Dora was crying. Having returned grubby from horse trials and been ordered to shower at once and not use up too much water, she had mistakenly drowned a woodlouse. Dicky, to distract from the fact that he’d wolfed most of the prawns in the fridge, was winding her up: ‘It was a single-parent woodlouse,’ he kept saying. ‘She’s left behind four poor motherless baby woodlice.’
Emerald was on her way down from London with the Cartwrights. Sophy was equally nervous and excited to be seeing Alizarin again. She hadn’t dared mention his painting her. Emerald had gone ballistic when she learnt from an unguarded Patience that Jonathan had taken Sophy out.
‘Trust you to muscle in on my new family.’
Nor did Emerald approve of Sophy’s black dress: far too much of Sophy spilling out. Only because she knew it would trigger off a tantrum and upset her parents had Sophy agreed instead to wear a leaf-patterned shift, a sort of shirt-no-waister which she’d bought for parents’ evenings.
