Pandora (20 page)

‘I vant a drink, give me those reviews.’ Galena glared at Anthea and then round the gallery.

‘And vot are all those flowers doing? It looks like funeral shop!’

‘They’ve been sent to me. It’s my birthday,’ simpered Anthea, opening the drinks cupboard. ‘We’ve only got sherry or Armagnac, that’s Mr Belvedon’s tipple.’ The old cow might say happy birthday.

‘Mr Belvedon and David have just taken me out for a nice meal,’ she went on. ‘It was a scream because he and David gave me the same gift, a lovely Hermès scarf with famous painters on. David’s was navy, Raymond’s baby blue. And Casey sent me those lovely chrysanths. Isn’t he a sweetheart?’

Galena, who had endured Casey’s lack of sympathy last night, went on reading her cuttings.

‘Even Somerford sent me a PC,’ sighed Anthea. ‘I think one just has to know how to handle him, Galena, and look at this lovely lacy little card from Raymond.’

‘“Dearest Hopey, Thank you for bringing sunshine into my life”,’ read Galena. ‘“Hopey”?’ she asked ominously.

‘After a fairy called “Hope” in an Old Master in your house.’ Anthea poured Galena a tiny Armagnac.

‘I felt really choked this morning, reaching nineteen. It seems
so
old. My last year in my teens.’ Then, looking at Galena solicitously: ‘Would you like to sit down? Come and rest on the sofa. Do you like the new covers? I chose ones that would be nice and feminine for your exhibition. Let me carry your glass.’

Anthea was like a small and very skilled picador plunging darts into a lumbering old bull. Finally, having no idea that David was a long-term admirer of Galena, she added: ‘David is
such
a naughty boy, he keeps trying to get me into bed. He said the moment he saw me, he’d met his Waterloo. He knew I was going to break his heart, because I was out of his league. And he’s only just back from honeymoon. I know Rosemary’s very old, at least thirty, and no oil paintin’, but he rang her from here the other night, saying, “I’m in Suffolk with an artist. Can’t you hear the birds singing and all the little squirrels crunching their nuts?” I was shocked, Galena. The moment he put the phone down, he rubbed his hands and asked me out for a drink. He’s so suave and charming. I said I’d got to get back to Purley; he said, “I’ll drive you. It’s a warm night, we’ll have the roof down.” He sent me this lovely card of a Constable, with such lovely words inside.’

‘She was a phantom of delight When first she gleamed upon my sight’, read Galena. Quivering with rage, she filled up her glass with Armagnac until it spilled over.

‘Pity you missed your do,’ sighed Anthea. ‘It was such a good party. Rupert Campbell-Black bought a painting and was very attentive. He’s only twenty-two you know, same age as David, who got quite cross when Rupert asked me out for a noggin.’ Then, as Galena drained her glass and refilled it, ‘I think you’ve had enough, Galena.’

‘And you are the face of hell,’ said Galena, and picking up a little bronze Degas dancer, she hurled it with a sickening crash through the gallery’s front window.

Like most wildly promiscuous people, Galena couldn’t tolerate infidelity in others. Maddened with jealousy, she insisted Raymond sack Anthea, not least for her gross impertinence.

‘She couldn’t have meant it nastily,’ pleaded Raymond, ‘she’s only a child.’

‘So once was Adolf Eichmann.’

In an agonizing, tearful renunciation scene, Raymond told a devastated Anthea she must leave the gallery at once:

‘Galena wants to try again. I can’t desert her after a flop like this and I can’t abandon the boys, particularly when she’s so unstable. I’m so dreadfully sorry.’

‘Just like Tristan and Sharon,’ sighed David, highly delighted by the turn of events, as he watched Anthea sobbing all the way down Cork Street.

As if trying to disguise the death of an apple tree by growing a rambler rose over it, Raymond and Galena’s attempt at reconciliation was fleeting. Galena was of the pre-pill generation and invariably forgot to put her Dutch cap back in its box. As a result of the rubber being punctured by Shrimpy’s sharp teeth, she was enraged in February to find herself pregnant again. But abortions were not on the cards for healthy married women, unless you could prove mental instability – which admittedly would not have been difficult.

As the nine months passed, Galena sank deeper into depression. Her doctor had banned alcohol; but finding his desperately needed glass of whisky having no effect in the evenings, Raymond discovered the Bell’s bottle had been three-quarters filled with water. The following day, he found Galena swigging green mouthwash from the bottle. This turned out to be crème de menthe. During previous pregnancies, Galena had decorated a bedroom for each child, but this time no Orpheus and his bewitched entourage sprang to life on the walls of the new baby’s room.

Lovers also fell away. Casey and Joan were painting in Australia, Etienne de Montigny had a new mistress, Rupert had married an American beauty appropriately called Helen, a great fan of Galena’s, who even wanted a picture as a wedding present.

‘Fuck off,’ had screamed Galena.

Her inability to forgive him for trying to bed Anthea had also soured her relationship with her little lapdog David. This was highly embarrassing, as he and Rosemary had been bought the Old Rectory next door by Sir Mervyn. David avoided Foxes Court by spending most of his time working in London. Rosemary, busy supervising builders, however, saw a lot of Galena. Rosemary was about to give birth herself, but found time to play with Jonathan and read to Alizarin who, still ill, was bearing the brunt of his mother’s histrionics.

Jupiter, when he came home from Bagley Hall, worried Rosemary the most. Withdrawn, cold eyed, he was still desperately jealous of his younger brother. Winning the history prize and scoring endless tries for the second fifteen were no substitute for being the centre of his mother’s constant if neurotic attention.

Galena spent a lot of time scribbling dark thoughts in her diary. Right up to the birth, which she insisted on having at home so she could continue to drink, she also carried on painting: producing doomladen landscapes dominated by thunderclouds and birds of prey, eerily reminiscent of the black crows in Van Gogh’s last cornfields.

On 7 October 1973, she gave birth to a beautiful six-pound daughter, Sienna Sylvie, who did not emerge, as Rupert Campbell-Black predicted, with a glass of red in one hand and a fag in the other.

Two days later, whilst Mr and Mrs Robens were having an afternoon off, Galena unaccountably despatched the maternity nurse to the cinema. Alone at Foxes Court with Alizarin and the baby, she haemorrhaged and was found dead in a sea of blood at the bottom of the stairs.

People were alerted to the tragedy by the hysterical yapping of a blood-stained Shrimpy and the screams of Alizarin who, having been unaccountably locked in his room, despite his arthritis, had somehow clambered onto the roof. Utterly traumatized, he was unable to tell the police what had happened.

Poor Raymond was arrested for twenty-four hours and then released. There was no proof of misconduct. No-one had picked up on the fact that Galena had clean hair and was wearing scent and make-up for the first time in months. Her diary, which might have provided clues, and which on her instructions was not to be read before October 2000, had been seized and hidden by Raymond’s elder sister Lily, who had recently moved into the cottage overlooking the river. Suicide was suspected but could not be proved. The coroner recorded a verdict of death by misadventure.

At midnight a week later, Anthea Rookhope was returning from a very spartan package holiday in Spain, where none of the men were as gentlemanly as Raymond. It was over a year since she’d joined the Belvedon Gallery and enjoyed the happiest weeks of her life. Poor darling Raymond, she prayed every day that he would have the courage to leave that awful bitch. But he was so vague, he’d probably lost her address, particularly now that dopey Fiona was back working for him.

Barcelona Airport had been on strike and at midnight was still unbearably hot, with the flights all up the creek. Anthea had already waited three hours.

‘Go away,’ she hissed at a leering porter, ‘I don’t want anything carried.’

Tomorrow, she’d have to start looking for a job, though it’d be simpler to go into a convent. She was desperately hungry and thirsty, but only had enough money for her fare back to Purley. If she reached England before the trains started she couldn’t afford a taxi.

Flipping through a discarded
Sunday Express
, she gave a shriek and collapsed onto a luggage trolley. Galena, it appeared, had killed herself falling down the stairwell. Drunk again, thought Anthea. Her heartbroken husband had evidently been left with three little boys and a new-born baby.

‘My sister-in-law had been depressed,’ Raymond’s sister, Lily, was quoted as saying, ‘but she was thrilled to have a daughter. We are all convinced it was an accident.’

There was a photograph of Raymond looking devastated and devastating outside Foxes Court, and another earlier one of him, with the three boys and Galena, who had turned into a monster with several heads in Anthea’s imagination, but who here appeared both happy and beautiful.

Even venomous Somerford Keynes was quoted as saying: ‘Galena was one of the most exciting painters since the war, tragically cut off in her prime.’

‘Not what you wrote this time last year,’ muttered Anthea.

Then, abandoning her suitcase, she rushed round begging for change.

‘A friend has passed away, I must phone home.’

The Foxes Court number was engraved on her thumping heart. Perhaps she shouldn’t ring so late, people always thought there’d been an accident. But no worse accident could have befallen those poor little children.

‘Hello, who’s that?’ The deep musical voice was hoarse with tears and telling the press to bugger off.

‘Raymond, it’s Anthea, I’m so sorry.’

‘Oh Hopey, I need you, please come at once.’

Anthea left all her luggage and her old life in Barcelona. Robens met her at the airport. The sun was just creeping over the horizon, warming the great golden limes as she arrived at Foxes Court.

Running out of the front door, feeling as if he’d been stung by every misfortune in the world, Raymond saw his own Hope emerging from the dark depths of the Bentley. Anthea looked so thin, pale and ill, that he realized in wonder, despite his anguish, that she had missed him quite as much as he had missed her.

‘Oh my darling, never leave me again.’

No-one was remotely surprised when they were quietly married at Searston Register Office on Raymond’s fiftieth birthday in May 1974. Anthea was twenty.

In a very happy marriage, one of the only setbacks was in 1987, when the Boy David, who was nearing forty, came to the realization that Raymond, who believed in primogeniture, would eventually hand over the entire business to his eldest son, Jupiter, who had joined the gallery after coming down from Cambridge.

David couldn’t face working for steely, arrogant Jupiter. He was also fed up with being patronized and told to go off and open a bottle if he suggested a painting was ‘wrong’. He also felt Raymond had taken too much credit for an Etienne de Montigny retrospective at the Tate for which David had done all the leg work.

In turn, Raymond and Jupiter felt too many people, when they rang the gallery, were asking for the Pulborough. David was getting far too much post and too many critics were putting ‘the Belvedon and the Pulborough’ in reviews, three extra words which would be better employed saying, ‘staggeringly beautiful pictures’, observed Jupiter.

In 1987, therefore, David had walked out of the Belvedon with all Raymond’s contacts and mailing lists, taking with him several of the gallery’s biggest artists.

As Sir Mervyn had died in 1986, Rosemary’s inheritance had been plundered to start up David’s own gallery, which was named the Pulborough and which was defiantly situated right opposite the Belvedon in Cork Street. Both galleries did well in the art boom of the Eighties, survived the disastrous slump of the early Nineties, but by 1998, the Pulborough, to Jupiter’s fury, was edging ahead of the Belvedon.

In 1995, David had been joined in the business by his son Barney, a fat pinstripe-suited slug, who also had shares in a Mayfair gambling club, which came in useful laundering any of the Pulborough’s shadily gotten gains. Barney was very dodgy indeed.