Pandora (52 page)

‘You’ve got to see this guy’s work. It’s awesome.’

Anthea, hardly able to conceal her dislike of Alizarin, was over in a trice.

‘Must break up you big lads,’ she simpered. ‘Si, come and meet our greatest art critic, Somerford Keynes.’

Somerford promptly drew Si aside, urging him on no account to buy Alizarin’s pictures.

‘You’re a serious collector. Don’t waste your money.’

Jupiter, overhearing, was ashamed how gratified he felt. He’d been so right to shunt back Alizarin’s canvasses.

It was only a fortnight after Midsummer’s Eve, but the light was fading and the first stars appearing in the drained blue sky. Ian was having a lovely time swapping friends in common with Aunt Lily. David had drawn Si into a yew glade.

‘So sorry about Ginny,’ he said. ‘Let’s do dinner next week. To help you forget her, I’ll lay on some amazing young woman.’

‘Again,’ mocked Jonathan as he sidled up to refill Si’s glass. Si laughed. David looked absolutely furious.

Priding herself on being a good hostess, Anthea had introduced dowdy Patience and fat Sophy to skeletal Geraldine – ‘You all live in town’ – who didn’t seem to have anything in common. Desperate to escape, Geraldine’s eyes were swivelling like lottery balls.

Awfully gauche, those Cartwrights, thought Anthea, who was floating on happiness. It was priceless the way Zac was feigning indifference to fool people. She wondered if they dare nip up to the Blue Tower for a quickie during the fireworks. Charlene was looking lovely too. Si, Jupiter and even Somerford had been vying for her attention, which made Anthea feel much less guilty about annexing Zac. She’d better go and organize the first course.

‘Run down to the boathouse and light the candles,’ she ordered poor rheumaticky Mrs Robens.

She did hope Aunt Lily wouldn’t be too tiddly to walk the three hundred yards from the terrace down to the river.

Down they trooped, somewhat unsteadily, to the boathouse, breathing in an innocent smell of meadowsweet and new-mown hay.

On the river bank a string quartet was playing ‘Strangers in Paradise’.

David sang along but actually felt more in hell. How could Anthea not have put him on her right or at least left? Now he wouldn’t be able to chat up Si across her throughout dinner. When he was High Sheriff things would be different.

‘You’re here, Mummy,’ Emerald called to Patience.

I’m
her mother, thought Anthea with an explosion of jealousy, then she realized that utterly bloody Jonathan had been fiddling with the seating plan. For starters he’d swapped over Zac and Somerford, so she’d have the silly old fairy up her end between Sienna and Lily.

Secondly, he’d switched his own place with Alizarin’s, which put Alizarin next to Hanna, which would send Jupiter, who was supposed to be familiarizing Geraldine Paxton with the top Belvedon gallery artists, into orbit. Jonathan would now be sitting between Sophy and her sister, which would enable him to indulge in some serious Emerald-baiting.

Sienna clocked Jonathan’s move in anguish. He was clearly still obsessed with Emerald. Sophy felt equally miserable. Her father had started to bray with laughter, a sure sign he was drunk. Her mother looked terrified, like a second-class passenger who’s strayed into first class, and hopes she won’t get caught if she keeps still enough, and Alizarin, after initially smiling at her, was now acting as though he hardly remembered her. She supposed he painted lots of people.

As a final straw, Sophy had taken out a loan this week in order to give Emerald a purple pashmina for her birthday, telling her, ‘You can change it, I’ve kept the bill.’

‘Thanks a lot,’ Emerald had said casually, ‘not entirely sure purple’s my colour. It’s a bit draining. I’ll see what it goes with.’

Sophy wanted to cry with frustration. Why do I always fall for it? Why do I always imagine Emo’ll be any different? She must take after her natural mother, Sophy was appalled to find herself thinking. Anthea was absolute hell.

‘Move in, Fatso, I can’t get past,’ ordered Emerald as she edged behind Sophy’s chair to sit next to Jonathan, then, hardly lowering her voice: ‘Aren’t Anthea and Raymond lovely?’

Dinner was decidedly scratchy. The setting was exquisite with the boathouse newly painted duck-egg blue, lit with dark green candles and opened up on one side to the River Fleet, whose flowing water rippled the gold paths cast by flambeaux all along the bank. The table was decorated with jasmine and philadelphus entwined with palest green ivy and enhanced by mauve napkins and the delicate and charming green and purple ‘Violets’ dinner service.

Anthea made sure everyone knew she’d done the cooking: kicking off with salmon tartlets, untopped admittedly by prawns, and Hollandaise sauce.

‘Start at once,’ she ordered Patience, ‘and tell me what you think.’

Everyone except Alizarin, Jonathan and Sienna dutifully said it was absolutely delicious.

‘The tartlet with the heartlet of gold,’ murmured Jonathan, who was as high as the glinting weathercock on the church steeple.

Tartlets were followed by very rich lamb and asparagus in cream sauce, which Patience felt uneasily churning round inside her alongside Jonathan’s green cocktails. She took a slug of red wine. Raymond, on her left, had been so complimentary about Emerald, Patience wondered rather disloyally if they were talking about the same person. Emerald had been so cruelly unappreciative of Ian and Patience’s birthday present of a seed pearl necklace, which had been in the family for generations and which was now the only jewellery unsold. But she supposed they couldn’t compete with the Belvedon emeralds.

On Patience’s right, in unrelieved black, was Zac, not her favourite person for orchestrating the finding of Anthea. He made no attempt to engage her in conversation, chatting about pictures to Jupiter’s wife, Hanna, on his right who, despite a blue satin butterfly fluttering gaily in her piled-up blond hair, looked even unhappier than Patience felt.

I’ve been such a bad wife compared with Anthea, she thought despairingly. Maybe Ian wouldn’t have failed in business if I’d made the house prettier, and ingratiated myself with his customers and colleagues. Look at Anthea dimpling up at the rich and powerful Si Greenbridge. What an asset!

Anthea was so like Emerald in looks and mannerisms, Patience longed to like her. Ian clearly thought her an absolute poppet.

‘You and Emerald are just like sisters,’ he kept saying. He was looking exactly like Sohrab, their old golden retriever, when he’d met a bitch. Any moment Patience expected a gold plumey waving tail to burst out of his DJ trousers. Oh please, God, she prayed, let me one day have another dog.

‘OK, Mrs Cartwright?’ shouted Jonathan, who was busy feeding all his lamb to Diggory and Visitor.

Emerald was delighted that Ian was getting on so well with Anthea and was now nose to nose with Si yakking about the latest lethal weapons. He seemed his own self again, a father she could be proud of.

‘Cartwright isn’t at all a typical cab driver,’ whispered Raymond to Rosemary on his left. ‘Got an MC in Korea. Captained the Combined Services at cricket. Likes Matthew Arnold, had a dog called Sohrab, knows about lilies – nice chap.’

‘He does seem nice,’ whispered back Rosemary, ‘I’m sure I’ve seen her before, it’s such a good idea to have them here.’

Beaming up the table, she was amazed to find Si Greenbridge beaming back at her. Buxom Knightie must be hovering behind her offering second helpings of lamb to attract such an approving glance. But when Rosemary glanced round, no Knightie was there and Si was still smiling – perhaps she had asparagus on her teeth.

Hanna, who’d already had far too much to drink, was in a low voice telling Zac, the inspired listener, how desperate she was to have a baby.

‘I’m thirty-eight and Jupiter’s the eldest son – there’s such pressure to produce an heir.’

‘Ever thought of adopting?’ asked Zac idly.

‘Christ, no!’ Hanna looked across at Emerald in horror, then, realizing what she’d said, blushed crimson. ‘God, that was bitchy. I’m so sorry, she’s your girlfriend.’

She was relieved yet unnerved to see Zac was laughing. Didn’t he care in the least that Jupiter was devouring Emerald alive with his eyes?

Down the river beyond the wild-flower meadow, people were drifting out of the Goat in Boots, making ‘fucking nob’ noises as they caught sight of the Belvedon party. Mosquitoes, encouraged by the impossibly hot, humid night, were now biting the guests as voraciously as the evils of the world once fed on Pandora and Epimetheus.

‘Such excitement at the West London Gallery,’ Somerford was telling Sienna and Lily. ‘A ravishing Botticelli loaned by a museum in Venice for their Renaissance Exhibition was withdrawn this very morning because a French-Jewish family are claiming the Nazis stole it from their grandfather in Paris in 1942.’

‘Bad luck if you’d forked out millions for a picture only to find it had been looted fifty years before and you’d got to give it back,’ grumbled Lily.

‘Hits both ways,’ agreed Somerford. ‘From now on both museums and dealers are going to check the provenance of their stock to see if it’s looted.’

‘I’d love to own a Botticelli,’ sighed Lily.

‘I’m a Raphael freak myself,’ confessed Si from across the table. ‘My ambition is to own a Raphael.’

Suddenly the table went quiet.

He told me not to tell anyone, thought David in fury.

‘Dinner tonight is in honour of Raphael as well as Emerald,’ announced Raymond, who loved to impart information. ‘Agostino Chigi, a well-known Rome businessman who used to bankroll the Popes and actually provided the rubies for Julian II’s tiara, was also a great patron of the arts – like one of our guests of honour tonight.’ Smiling, Raymond raised his glass to Si. ‘Chigi had a villa on the river with a loggia in which he used to hold grand dinner parties. On one occasion, to save washing up, the guests were encouraged to chuck all the gold plate into the river.’

‘We’re not going to squander our lovely “Violets” plates,’ simpered Anthea who, having admitted Zac to the Blue Tower earlier, was unnerved by any reference to Raphael. ‘Do fill up Patience’s glass, Sir Raymond.’

But utterly bloody Sienna couldn’t let the subject rest.

‘How does Raphael like come into it, Dad?’

‘Chigi had commissioned him to paint a mural on the loggia walls. But Raphael kept moonlighting and not getting down to work. Mind you, he was strutting round Rome like a rock star by this time.’

‘Like someone else we know, same birthday.’ David tipped back his chair to smile at Jonathan, who ignored him.

‘Now the boathouse has been painted, which of you is going to provide our mural?’ Raymond glanced happily around at his children.

‘I’ve got too much on,’ said Jonathan flatly. ‘Perhaps Alizarin?’

But Alizarin, who’d been hitting the red and was spoiling for a fight, was too busy arguing with Jupiter about earlier looting of art.

‘Elgin stole those marbles,’ he growled.

‘Elgin took the marbles because the Greeks weren’t remotely interested and considered them worthless,’ replied Jupiter coolly. ‘Elgin claimed rightly that it was his divine calling to preserve such treasures for posterity.’

‘Ought to be returned to the Greeks, they belong to the Greeks.’

‘Not if one believes art is of primary importance,’ said Jupiter disdainfully. ‘The British Museum cherishes the marbles, and this way more people see them.’

Alizarin’s huge hands gripped the table. Then he roared, ‘So if I make your wife happier, look after her better and allow more people to admire her, I’m entitled to steal her, am I?’

‘Touché,’ hiccuped a delighted Lily, who was not a fan of Jupiter.

‘I said Si should have brought guards,’ murmured back an even more delighted Somerford, as both brothers jumped furiously to their feet.

‘You keep your hands off my wife,’ said Jupiter in a low, furious voice.

‘Where did you say your family lived in Vienna?’ Hanna turned desperately to Zac.

‘My great-uncle had a gallery and an apartment in a beautiful old building on the corner of Singer Strasse and Kärtner Strasse, overlooking St Stephen’s Cathedral,’ drawled Zac, who was highly amused by the turn of events and who could see Hanna’s imploring hand on Alizarin’s quivering thigh. ‘The Allies bombed it to bits,’ he went on. ‘There are shops and offices there now. My great-grandfather also had a fabulous house in the fourth district in Schwindgasse overlooking the Schwarzenberg Palace.’