by Jilly Cooper
‘Am I big enough for you?’ he had begged her on their honeymoon, to which she had mockingly replied:
‘If you have small villy, you must become genius at sucking off.’
A mortified Raymond had tried so hard, but, putting his mouth to Galena’s gaping red, not very well-washed gash, he found himself gagging, which Galena in turn construed as rejection, and their sex life deteriorated. Sometimes, to help him get it up, she would describe what another wonderful lover looked like or had done to her, which made Raymond come immediately and Galena in turn more scornful.
Most men would have cuffed her, or walked out, but it was the Sixties when everyone was far too cool to admit rage or heartbreak. And, like his hero, King Arthur, whose world collapsed because of his wife’s infidelity, Raymond still loved her.
For when she smiled, the flowers came out. She could be enchanting, funny, playful, affectionate. She was a glorious, imaginative cook. She painted wonderful murals in strong Slav colours all over the house, and she told marvellous stories to little Jupiter and Alizarin, who absolutely adored her. Raymond in turn doted on his boys. There was no way they were going to be subjected to a divorce. Finally he felt it his duty, like Theo Van Gogh, who had so heroically bolstered and bankrolled his mad tragic brother, to keep Galena on an even keel to create the masterpieces of which he knew she was capable.
One of the lowest points in his marriage was in early July 1970. At four o’clock in the morning, still trembling from a row the night before, he lay on the edge of the crimson-curtained four-poster listening to the piping of Tennyson’s ‘half-awakened birds’, and imagining the icicles of white light between the carelessly drawn dark blue curtains were being plunged into his heart.
For a start, he was convinced Galena had a new lover. He had left a bottle of champagne in the fridge, which was gone when he returned yesterday from a couple of days in Venice. The orchids in the drawing room had certainly not come from the garden. There was also a pretty new Lalique bowl on her dressing table.
As clinching evidence, she had been grumbling nonstop about Alizarin and Jupiter being home from school for an eight-week summer holiday, getting under her feet. After the over-excited little boys had been sent to bed, Raymond and Galena had had a drink outside in the twilight. A fresh soapy smell of meadowsweet drifted up from the river. White and pale pink roses cascaded frivolously over the dark green shoulders of the yews.
As he wandered round the terrace, deadheading geraniums and stepping over Maud, who was stretched out soothing her stiff old bones on the still warm flagstones, Raymond broke the good news, that he had employed an undergraduate for the summer to amuse the boys and teach them to draw, leaving Galena free to paint.
‘Vere did you meet him?’ asked Galena silkily as she topped up her third drink.
‘At Cambridge when I gave that lecture on the Pre-Raphaelites. This boy, David Pulborough, ex-grammar school, reading history of art at King’s, was assigned to look after me. Later, at dinner’ – Raymond swatted a midge on his forearm – ‘we talked about Arthurian legend, painting and the awful factory jobs he’s been forced to take in the vac to make ends meet. Parents live near Leeds. Sound a bit repressive.’ Fingering the dry earth in a tub of white agapanthus, Raymond reached for the watering can. ‘Father’s in local government, regards art as sissy, wanted David to read law or medicine.’
Raymond didn’t add that David Pulborough had wavy tawny hair to his shoulders, big navy blue eyes and a fair skin that flushed easily. Nor did he say how touched he’d been that David, obviously short of money, had tried to pay for dinner.
‘He’s a sweet boy. You’ll like him,’ Raymond went on, then, appealing to Galena’s fondness for comparing people in real life with those in paintings, he added, ‘Looks exactly like St John Evangelista in Raphael’s painting of St Cecilia.’
‘Ven does he arrive?’
‘Tomorrow in time for supper.’
At first he thought Galena’s silence was delighted assent. Then she went berserk. How could Raymond spring this surprise on her, then push off to London, probably abroad, leaving her to entertain some boorish youth in the evenings?
‘How dare you employ pop squeak to spy on me and to teach the boys to draw? Do you want their paintings to hang on Green Park fences?’
Maud, who loathed rows, beat a limping retreat into the house.
The intensity of Galena’s rage indicated that she had other mischief planned for the first weeks of the holidays, particularly when she yelled at Raymond that she was off to France first thing. No doubt to stay with Etienne de Montigny, thought Raymond despairingly.
‘And you can bloody vell stay down in country, to velcome your little queer when he arrives tomorrow,’ was her final shot. ‘Are you sure you’re safe leaving the boys viz him?’
As she slammed the french windows behind her, she had broken two panes.
It was now growing light in the Blue Tower. Raymond, listening to the rusty key-jangling cries of the jackdaws in the tall chimneys, was still shaking. Alizarin and Jupiter were almost more obsessed with the Raphael than with their mother, and, oblivious of grubby sheets that had harboured God knew who, took every opportunity to creep into their parents’ bed in the early mornings and wait for Hope, Pandora and the rest of the gang to creep out of the shadows. Raymond, who longed to make love to his wife, tried not to resent the boys.
He was amazed Galena could sleep so deeply after such a shattering row. Possessed of earthy charms that in early life don’t need much upkeep, she was a couple of stone heavier than the boyish pirate he had first married. But she still attracted him unbearably and he couldn’t resist putting a hand on her breast. Galena stirred, smiling sleepily, not yet identifying the hand. If only he could psych himself into getting it up . . . but the next moment there was a crash on the door and the boys charged in. Sighing, Raymond threw a towel over their mother.
Jupiter at eight had just finished his first term away from home at prep school, and was consequently tougher, steelier, more withdrawn. With his cool turned-down sage-green eyes, dark brown hair and thin freckled face, he was like Raymond, but without Raymond’s openness and generosity. As conniving but colder than his mother, Jupiter wished he had inherited her talent.
Alizarin, on the other hand, had Galena’s looks: black brows, slitty dark eyes, high cheekbones and straight dark flopping hair. Gangling and unco-ordinated, as tall as Jupiter, he had inherited his father’s sweet nature and anxiously commuted between his parents trying to keep the peace.
Knowing their mother would soon be off to paint, or, worse, to London, the boys always tried to waylay her and weave stories round the Raphael. This morning Jupiter collapsed on the bed snoring loudly.
‘Which deadly sin am I?’
‘Sloth,’ smiled Raymond.
‘Who am I?’ Alizarin put a finger under his long greyhound nose, pushing it into the air. ‘I’m Pride.’
He looked so absurd, Raymond and Galena burst out laughing.
‘I’m Envy,’ snapped Jupiter, pinching his younger brother savagely on the arm. ‘Don’t be a drip,’ he hissed as Alizarin started to cry.
Jupiter was extremely jealous of his brother, whom he surpassed in everything except art, which he knew meant more to their mother than anything else. He detested the way Galena doted on Alizarin, calling him her little Slav. Jupiter intended to make Alizarin his little slave all summer.
Alizarin admired and feared his brother, who after a term of prep school cricket and swimming seemed ten times more powerful.
‘Tell us about Pandora,’ he begged as he crept under the sheet.
‘She was a beautiful woman, cruelly treated by the Gods, who married a feeble husband’ – Galena shot a malevolent look at Raymond – ‘who couldn’t control her.’
‘Tell us about the lion of Prague with two tails,’ asked Jupiter, but, seeing the clock, Galena had leapt out of bed, not even bothering to keep the towel round her.
‘Haven
’t got time, got a plane to catch.’
Alizarin’s tears, despite Jupiter’s thumping, lasted for over an hour. Galena was always cruellest to those who loved her the most.
David Pulborough’s summer with the Belvedons began disastrously. Bidden to arrive around six in the evening of the Thursday morning Galena had fled, he had left home near Leeds too late and run into holiday traffic. The second-hand Ford he’d paid too much for in order to escape from Foxes Court in the evenings proceeded to overheat all down the recently opened M1. To stop his fashionable new flared trousers flapping on the ground, he had invested in some high-heeled boots, in which he soon discovered he couldn’t drive, so he had resorted to bare feet. These swelled up so much in the heat that he couldn’t get into his boots again when, having forgotten Raymond’s map, he had to keep diving into pubs and garages to ask the way.
Worst of all, he had agreed under parental pressure to have a haircut before Auntie Dot’s funeral last Saturday. No doubt tipped off by David’s father, who thought his son looked sissy with long flowing locks, the local barber had waited until David was immersed in ‘Jennifer’s Diary’, dreaming of being part of that gilded set, to give him a hideous short back and sides.
David also had grave doubts about committing himself like Jane Eyre to eight weeks at Foxes Court. Would he be expected to eat in the kitchen or in his room or alone with his two charges? Would tall, dark and extremely handsome Raymond turn into Mr Rochester, and jump on him all summer? Probably not, now – like Samson – he had lost his dark gold locks.
The charm of Limesbridge with its higgledy-piggledy houses clustered at all levels round the High Street was totally lost on David. Grunting and belching, the Ford only just made it up the drive as the church clock struck eight-fifteen.
‘Some awful drip’s rolled up,’ announced Jupiter, who was as outraged as his mother at the prospect of a stranger monitoring his every move this summer.
Having been allowed to stay up for an early dinner at seven, both boys were starving and irritable. But not so cross as Mrs Robens, the cook, who not only felt her dinner had been ruined but that her position, looking after the boys, had been usurped.
Distracted by the beauty of John Newcombe cruising, mahogany-limbed, through the Wimbledon semi-finals, Raymond had not minded the delay. But glancing out of the study window, his heart sank. Had he allowed the Third World War to break out within his marriage for this? St John Evangelista appeared to have turned into a sweaty, red-faced Shropshire Lad with a frightful haircut, emphasizing a goose neck and sticking-out ears. David was also wearing a club tie, a dreadful cheap blazer with a badge and a battery of pens on the breast pocket and acrylic fawn flares. Raymond the dandy shuddered.
‘Go and welcome him,’ he told the boys faintly.
‘Traffic was terrible,’ apologized David as he limped through the front door, clutching a pile of parcels and some moulting mauve roses. ‘I hope I haven’t made you late for your tea.’
‘You have. Dinner’s been ready since seven,’ said Jupiter coldly.
‘We were able to stay up later,’ added Alizarin kindly.
Confronted by two pudding-basin haircuts with posh voices, David put up his first black by assuming the taller was the older.
‘You’re obviously Jupiter,’ he said, shaking Alizarin heartily by the hand, ‘the great athlete, and you’re the arty one, Alizarin,’ as he turned to Jupiter.
‘Wrong again,’ drawled Jupiter.
Oh dear, thought Raymond coming out of the study, the boys are going to pick up the most frightful Yorkshire accent by the end of the holidays. Granny Belvedon, a fearful snob, would be demented.
Then, feeling thoroughly ashamed of himself, Raymond smiled, and shook David’s sweaty hand.
‘My poor boy, what a ghastly hot day to drive down on. You must be exhausted. Would you like a bath or a large drink?’
‘I’d love a gin, please. I’ve brought these from Dad’s herbaceous border for Mrs Belvedon.’ David brandished the roses, which he’d purchased in a motorway garage, and which promptly shed more petals.
‘My wife’s away.’ Raymond relieved him of the flowers. ‘She’ll be thrilled when she gets back.’
‘When is she coming home?’ asked Alizarin for the thousandth time.
‘Oh shut up,’ snapped Jupiter.
There were tears in Raymond’s eyes after he opened David’s present of a little red leather-bound first edition of Tennyson’s Maud.
‘My dear boy, nothing could give me greater pleasure. “Maud with her exquisite face, And wild voice peeling up to the sunny sky.” I have a passion for Tennyson, but also my ancient greyhound’ – Maud, lying languidly on the olive-green study sofa, lifted her tail a centimetre – ‘is called Maud. It’s so appropriate. Thank you, thank you.’
David had brought Alizarin a Polaroid camera. ‘Very useful when you’re painting and the light changes or someone moves their position. I’ll show you how it works tomorrow.’
Alizarin was speechless with pleasure. Jupiter was less thrilled with his metal detector.
‘Only trogs use them.’
‘Jupiter!’ growled Raymond.
‘As this is such an old property,’ said David coolly, ‘there are bound to be ancient coins in the garden and around the church.’
‘I’ll be able to find my collection money. They’re wonderful presents,’ said Raymond, sweeping David through the drawing room, where pictures covered virtually every square inch of the priceless, hand-painted, primrose-yellow Japanese wallpaper, through the french windows out onto the terrace.
‘Oh my God,’ gasped David, ‘what a stunning garden.’
Herbaceous borders on each side of the lawn were dominated by huge proud delphiniums in every shade of blue, and banks of regale lilies opening their carmine beaks and pouring forth scent. Each dark tree and yew hedge had tossed a pale frivolous boa of roses round its shoulders. In the orchard beyond, apples were reddening. Across the valley, houses were turning a soft rose and the Cambridge-blue sky was covered in fluffy salmon-pink clouds, indicating the sun was setting behind the trees, which sheltered Foxes Court from the north-west winds.
‘If only Cézanne were alive to paint it,’ sighed David, ‘you could reach out and touch those houses. Thanks.’ He accepted a huge drink from Raymond. ‘Newcombe won presumably?’
Then remembering Raymond’s passion for Tennyson, he added, ‘If they ever filmed Tennyson’s “Revenge”, John Newcombe, with those lean, hawklike features, that glossy black moustache, should play Sir Richard Grenville.’
‘You’re right,’ said a delighted Raymond. ‘That is such a good poem: My Lord Howard and his five ships of war, melting like a cloud in the silent summer heaven.’
‘Bor-ing.’ Jupiter rolled his eyes.
‘I love tennis.’ David, who had been in the team at Sorley Grammar School, saw a chance to shine. ‘I’ll have to teach you to play, Jupe and Aly.’
‘My name’s Jupiter, I can play,’ snapped Jupiter, ‘and I’m starving.’
‘Let David get his breath back,’ said Raymond sharply.
A great deal of ice and tonic had not disguised the brute strength of the gin in David’s glass. He was perking up.
‘Can I use your toilet before dinner?’
The downstairs lavatory was a shrine to the sporting achievements of generations of Belvedons. There was Raymond’s father playing hockey for Cambridge, Viridian hitting a six in the Rugby–Marlborough match at Lord’s, and a framed telegram from the Forties, its pencil message fading: ‘Raymond 120 not out against Uppingham today.’ On the left of the mirror was a newly framed photograph of Jupiter already in a cricket team at Bagley Hall. David decided he must try and win the little sod over.
As they sat down to dinner, he smiled at Jupiter: ‘See you made the under-nines.’
‘I’m captaining them,’ said Jupiter haughtily.
‘That’s great, what are you going to do when you grow up?’
; ‘Run the country.’
‘Ted’s already doing a grand job,’ said David, who’d been euphoric last month when Edward Heath had been the first grammar-school boy to become prime minister.
‘Too keen to push us into Europe,’ said Jupiter dismissively. ‘As an island, it’s better for England to remain autonomous.’
Wow! thought David, who was just about to tuck his napkin into his collar to protect his new blazer, when he noticed Raymond and the boys had laid theirs over their knees. All round the walls, portraits of Belvedons gazed snootily down checking his table manners.
The large lugubrious Mrs Robens, struggling in with a shiny dark gold chicken dripping in butter and tarragon, might sigh like a force eight gale, but she was a brilliant cook. Her roast potatoes were crisp and brown as crème brûlée on the outside, her new peas and tiny carrots had a minty sweetness that never came out of a packet. The feathery light bread sauce bore no resemblance to the stodgy porridge run up by his mother. Apple pie and thickest cream followed. David, who’d survived on a diet of baked beans and sliced bread all term, had seconds of everything.
Dinner was interrupted by several telephone calls. Each time Alizarin leapt up, longing to learn his mother had arrived safely, then drooped when it was some man wanting to speak to her or no-one there. What a waste of divine wine, thought David, as Raymond mopped up spilt Pouilly-Fumé with a desperately shaking hand.
‘Did you come through Cheltenham?’ he said to David.
‘That’s the third time you’ve asked him that,’ taunted Jupiter.
I must pull myself together, thought Raymond. Were David’s parents interested in pictures? he enquired.
‘Not very,’ sighed David.
His mother, he explained, was kept so busy running her boutique in a fashionable part of town. His father was in charge of traffic in Leeds, which had become dreadfully congested with so many more cars on the road.
Alizarin was yawning his head off.
‘Bed,’ said Raymond firmly.
‘We were going to show him round,’ protested Jupiter.