Pandora (74 page)

‘You shouldn’t cry,’ he said, not unkindly, ‘salt water rusts metal, like wrecks at the bottom of the sea.’

‘I’m s-s-s-o-orry. I don’t like know what gets into me.’

‘It’s OK,’ then, as the waiter arrived: ‘You’d better make that a bottle rather than a glass.’

Waiters, used over the years to Mr Campbell-Black lunching with tearful women, obligingly rearranged the seating so he and Sienna had their backs to the room, which was transfixed with interest.

‘D’you think he’s got her pregnant?’ hissed the editor of the
Tatler
to the Chilean ambassador’s wife.

In between sobs, Sienna told Rupert of her terrors at appearing in court again.

‘I know Zac will produce some barrister who’ll tie me in knots. I acted up so much last time, Sampson’s convinced I’m a liability.’

Rupert was being so kind that after the third glass and some delectable Provençal vegetables in a tomato coulis, she was telling him everything.

‘How on earth did Zac manage to photograph the Raphael in the Blue Tower?’ asked Rupert.

Sienna’s eyes darted round the trees of Green Park for lip-reading squirrels.

‘He shagged Anthea.’

‘Christ! He must have wanted the Raphael back. Tell Zac’s lawyer that if he gives you a hard time.’

‘I can’t, it would crucify Dad. He’s awfully frail at the moment.’

Rupert looked at her meditatively.

‘Can I give you several words of advice? If you want to win that case for your father, get that hardware off your face. Frankly, you look like a scrap yard.’

‘I’m like making a statement,’ snarled Sienna. ‘You’re just out of touch.’

‘I’m sure.’ Rupert was unmoved. ‘But people my age and older, which includes Mr Justice Willoughby Evans, find it absolute hell.’

‘Why should I conform to please some old judge?’

‘Because you want the Raphael back, and because your father’s been hurt enough.’

‘That’s rich coming from you. You and Mum hurt him enough in the old days.’

There was a pause. He will walk out now, thought Sienna in despair. Longing overcame her.

‘Did you really like Mum?’

‘I adored her. She was irresistible, uncompromising, outrageous, sensational in bed – because she didn’t give a damn. Painting always mattered more. I was making it in showjumping, everything came second to winning and the horses. We were well matched, the eighteen-year age gap didn’t seem to matter at all. We enjoyed each other without clinging.’

Lucky Mum, thought Sienna.

As the waiter put two plates of fettucini with sliced truffles in front of them, Rupert wished he could tell her some of the pranks he and Galena had got up to.

Sienna picked up a fork. ‘Goodness, I am hungry after all. You gave Mum a Jack Russell called Shrimpy.’

‘So I did.’ He certainly couldn’t tell her who Shrimpy had been named after.

‘Why did you and she break up?’

‘I married, and tried to behave myself for about a week. In a way we were too alike, both damaged by our childhoods. Hers under the Communists was far worse.’

‘Like Zac’s,’ murmured Sienna, thinking aloud, and then flushing. ‘He’s too damaged by his past to commit himself.’

‘Is he attractive?’

‘Kind of, not my type really, but he’s sexy and dangerous.’ Her sudden smile lifted her sullen face, showing off wonderful teeth. ‘A bit like you.’

Rupert smirked and filled up her glass.

‘This is so divine,’ sighed Sienna, ‘I’m sure I shouldn’t be eating truffles.’

‘It’s a fungus.’

‘Think of poor pigs having to hunt for it.’

‘They enjoy it, like foxhounds,’ added Rupert slyly.

‘Oh, shut up.’ Colour flooded Sienna’s face. ‘When you made love to my mother, did you notice the Raphael on the wall?’

‘Frankly, I didn’t notice anything except your mother. Although she once said I had the same Greek nose as Pride.’

‘I wonder if any of her other lovers clocked it and tipped off Zac. Oh God . . .’ At the thought of seeing him, Sienna put her face in her hands. Rupert found the paint-stained bitten nails oddly touching.

‘If you took that chainmail off your face,’ he said gently, ‘you’d be much prettier than Galena – and much more likely to bring the Raphael home.’

‘D’you think we’ll win?’

‘Yeah. Everyone loves your father so much, he can do no wrong in a jury’s eyes, and Sampson Brunning, however much you dislike him, is ace at springing surprises.’

Rupert’s optimism, however, was misplaced. The conduct of civil cases had changed due to reforms brought in recently. The whole procedure had been speeded up. Witnesses had to produce – several weeks before the trial – written statements along with any relevant documents, birth certificates, photographs, invoices, authentications, for the other side to pick over.

After this, if neither claimant nor defendant were prepared to settle, as Zac and the Belvedons were not, the case would go to court in front not of a jury, but a single judge, who would have been given every statement and document to peruse, so he was clued up on all the material on which each side intended to rely.

Once in court, apart from calling the occasional witness to provide background, each side would be allowed only to cross-examine and try and blow huge holes in each other’s witness statements. This meant that immediately the case was under way, the producing of dramatic new evidence, Sampson’s whisking rabbits out of hats, to unnerve the opposition, was forbidden. It would only be permitted if the side in question could prove that this evidence had only just come to light, for example, a hitherto untraceable witness emerging from the woodwork.

This was supposed to be a fairer system. But for the Belvedons, it meant that Raymond could no longer wow an already well-disposed jury, nor Sampson spring surprises. It also favoured the side with the larger financial resources. Zac together with Si’s army of lawyers had spent months producing watertight evidence. In retaliation, a desperately impoverished Jonathan had been single-handedly ferreting round in dusty foreign archives, certain that Zac’s evidence didn’t stack up, promising but failing to provide a breakthrough.

This had resulted in a terrible row over the telephone on the eve of the trial, with a maddened Jupiter accusing Jonathan, who was now in Paris, of living up to his nickname of Sloth.

‘You’ve just wasted everyone’s time getting stoned in the capitals of Europe.’

‘Everything’s shut for Easter,’ yelled back Jonathan, ‘I can’t get into the public record office until tomorrow.’

‘It’s too fucking late, the case starts tomorrow. You’ve failed us yet again.’

Hearing Jupiter crashing down the receiver, Raymond retreated trembling to the church next door, taking refuge in the family pew. Despite his arthritis, he had no truck with perching on the edge of the seat. Kneeling on the pale blue hassock Anthea had embroidered with the Belvedon crest, he prayed for the return of Alizarin’s sight, for Baby Viridian to allow Jupiter and Hanna a little sleep, for Dicky and Dora who were spitting to be missing the court case, and for Sienna, Emerald and most of all Jonathan to find people to love rather than each other. Almost worse than the loss of the Raphael had been the absence over the last six months of his favourite son, whose life he knew he had ruined.

Raymond also asked God not very optimistically to curb his wife’s spending. Aware she might not be able to afford clothes afterwards, Anthea had bought new outfits from Lindka Cierach for the expected duration of the trial; she was now upstairs trying on hats.

Raymond sighed. He dreaded being cross-examined. He was getting so vague. He loathed leaving his burgeoning garden at its loveliest and particularly Grenville. It had been different in the days when Visitor’s reassuring presence had kept Grenville calm. Visitor had so looked forward to Easter – all that chocolate.

Great vases of wild cherry were already scattering their white petals on the church floor. Bluebells picked by Lily were shrivelling and fading. Like me, thought Raymond. Perhaps the case would only last a few days.

‘“Oh God of battles!, Steel my soldiers’ hearts,”’ prayed Raymond. ‘Bring my Raphael home and Hope back into my life.’

He smiled slightly as he noticed the word ‘Tits’, which Jonathan had carved on the pew with a compass during a boring sermon. Creakily rising to his feet, he heard a rhythmic thudding. Grenville, having tracked his master down, was banging his bony tail against the church door. Raymond was less able to identify the sound of clanking from the Old Rectory. Had he peered over the wall, he would have seen David Pulborough marching up and down practising walking with a High Sheriff’s sword.

The sun setting behind the wood had left an apricot flush along the horizon: an exquisite backdrop for all the differing greens of the young leaves. Admiring the sky-blue blur of forget-me-nots round the water trough, hearing a robin singing in the poplars, Raymond breathed in a heady smell of balsam. He longed to seek solace in his garden, but wearily remembered the hundreds of letters from fans, wishing him luck for tomorrow, that needed answering.

Up in London, having restlessly roamed the streets all day, Zac watched the same sunset as Raymond. Guiltily aware that he only turned to God in times of fear or anguish, he pulled a rumpled black velvet capel out of his suitcase and set out for the synagogue in Great Portland Street. He was exhausted because he and Si’s lawyers had been closeted for weeks closing every loophole in his evidence. He was sulking because he’d wanted to spend the weekend skiing high up in the Alps to clear his head and work off his aggression, but his barrister, Naomi Cohen, had put her Gucci-clad foot down.

‘A tan’ll make you look too rich.’

For the same reason, she’d ordered him to put aside his expensive clothes for his court appearance tomorrow, and buy a tacky off-the-peg suit in polyester pinstripe to wear with a cheap white nylon shirt and sickly yellow tie, like some middle-management geek. He must also leave off his Rolex and arrive in a hired Vauxhall, rather than Si’s helicopter, or even Si’s Merc. Si, although closely overseeing events, had meekly caved in when Naomi had suggested he stay away from court in the early stages.

‘If Si rocks up, you won’t appear destitute, for Christ’s sake,’ she told Zac.

Sienna would laugh her head off, thought Zac furiously. Why did she keep drifting back into his thoughts like bonfire smoke?

Evening prayers were drawing to a close as he entered the synagogue, which was filled with men, heads bowed, murmuring in accompaniment to the strong voice of the rabbi. Women seldom attended evening prayers, and, at all times, had to sit up in the gallery or behind a screen so as not to distract the men. Sienna would never agree to being sidelined like that.

The rabbi had launched into the Kaddish: the beautiful memorial prayer for the dead, intoned at the end of all services. So many dead to remember, Zac felt weighed down by their expectation – Reuben; Benjamin and Ruth; Leah and Jacob; his grandparents, Tobias and Sarah, his father and all his family and above all Rebecca, his hollow-eyed mother, as utterly emaciated as any death-camp victim before she died. Tomorrow, like a ghost army, they’d be willing him on as he rode into battle.

I will avenge you, he promised. Please God, let me bring home the Raphael.

He must harden his heart, knowing it would break Sienna’s. Her howl of anguish when they dragged Pandora away in New York had haunted him like his mom’s imagined scream when her own mother was dragged off to Auschwitz. In his wallet was a London
Times
clipping of Sienna’s trial with a photograph of the defiant defendant in torn jeans, flashing her tattoos. He was so relieved she’d not gone to prison. He couldn’t bear to think of that free spirit in chains.

Why did she get under his skin?

Dear God, bring me to my senses, prayed Zac.

The rabbi was nearing the end of the Kaddish. ‘God is our hope,’ joined in the deep voices of the congregation in Hebrew, ‘Let us put our trust in him and strive for the coming of the day, when his sovereignty will be acknowledged and his will obeyed throughout the world.’

They were still chanting as he left. He had promised to take Naomi, his barrister, out to dinner. Her parents had fled from Germany during the war. She had been born and called to the Bar in England, but half her family, like his, had been murdered by the Nazis; her legacy, a burning desire to right hideous wrongs. Although she was an expert on restituted art, and had already clawed back several Old Masters from museums for Jewish clients, she had never before handled anything so huge or so public. Zac appreciated that if barristers were any good they got impossibly strung up before a case.

All that was left of the sunset was a dark red glow in the west anticipating the blood that would be shed when they joined battle there tomorrow. Naomi was very good looking, but he hoped she wouldn’t expect him to make love to her tonight to ease her tension.