by Jilly Cooper
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 Withdrawn, cold eyed, he was still desperately jealous of his younger brother.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.
Raymond’s six children, who now included the twins, Dicky and Dora, born to him and Anthea in 1990, referred to Barney and David as ‘Punch and Judas’. Raymond, who’d been devastated by David’s defection, still loved him, but there was spiky and bitter competition between the two galleries and the two adjoining households in Limesbridge.
1998
As Sir Raymond Belvedon prepared to leave Foxes Court on a chilly October morning in 1998, gold leaves were tumbling thickly out
of the lime trees, symbolizing the money his gallery had made and the spiritual riches his programmes had brought to so many viewers. Having consolingly patted his brindle greyhound, Grenville, who was sulking on the bed, Raymond briefly admired his reflection in his dressing-room mirror. Still spare and splendid looking at seventy-four, with bright blue eyes and a shock of silvery white hair, Raymond had, as a result of his second wife’s constant flattery and expert laundering, become even more of a dandy, with a penchant for pastel ties, mauve silk handkerchiefs wafting Extract of Lime and slightly waisted pearl-grey suits.
This flamboyance, together with a belief that you must entertain any audience in front of you, and an ability to listen and gently draw out the most difficult artist or critic, had made him in the last ten years a great hit on television.
On the doorstep, Raymond said goodbye to his eight-year-old twins, Dicky and Dora, who were on half-term, and to his wife. Soft and fragile in pearls and cornflower-blue cashmere, Anthea at forty-five was still enchantingly pretty without a wrinkle or a grey hair. Raymond gave her a special hug, knowing she was dying to accompany him. Wild horses, however, couldn’t have dragged Anthea away from a meeting that afternoon of the Limesbridge Improvement Society in which a Galena Borochova Memorial would be discussed yet again.
As Galena had immortalized Limesbridge and stopped developers slapping houses all over the Silver Valley (which was now designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty), there was a desire in the village to honour her memory with a statue in the High Street. There was also pressure on Raymond to transform one of his nicer cottages into a museum of Galena memorabilia.
Anthea, who had a hang-up about Raymond’s first wife, had managed to quash any public recognition of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Galena’s death last week. She was also opposing any statue on the false grounds that it would evoke painful memories for Raymond and Galena’s four children. There was no way she was going to let the pro-Galena faction gain ground behind her back, and so she reluctantly waved her husband and his chauffeur-cum-head gardener Robens off in the Bentley.
‘Cheerio, cheerio.’ Anthea’s once squeaky little voice had become very grand over the years, particularly since she had become Lady Belvedon when Raymond was knighted last April.
Great mirth had been caused earlier in the month when Anthea had gone into the crowded village shop, asked for The Times, then, opening it on the social page, had shrieked, ‘Oh heavens, how embarrassing, they’ve remembered my birthday.’
Nor was she amused now when Rosemary Pulborough, in awful gardening clothes, reared up over the wall of the Old Rectory next door and sarcastically asked the departing Raymond to give her love to David, if he saw him later.
‘David definitely told me he was going to Penscombe,’ Anthea called out to Rosemary. It gave her pleasure to remind Rosemary that she and David confided on a regular basis. Serve Rosemary right for supporting the idea of a memorial to Galena.
Raymond sighed and closed the window. At the bottom of the drive Robens turned right past the Lodge where Alizarin lived, with its garden full of nettles, past the approaching scarlet post van buckling under Raymond’s fan mail, past Visitor, Alizarin’s rotund, grinning yellow Labrador, rustling purposefully through the leaves. Thursdays were dustbin days: all sorts of goodies would be forthcoming inside punctured black bags.
Raymond sighed again. The Limesbridge Improvement Society this afternoon would no doubt complain yet again about Alizarin’s nettles and Visitor’s binning habits.
The whole day was bound to stir up painful memories. There had been much fuss in the press recently about owners of national treasures reneging on pledges to make them accessible to the public in return for huge tax benefits.
Rupert Campbell-Black, for example, had stalled and stalled, but today had finally agreed to put his stunning collection of pictures on show in his beautiful house in nearby Gloucestershire. Raymond was covering the event for the BBC and as an old friend of Rupert, who had sold the odd picture to pay for a horse or a Campbell-Black wedding, was being allowed a preview before the crowds poured in. He smiled slightly when he heard, on the car wireless, that there was a ten-mile tailback on the M4, caused by busloads of eager women and gays storming down from London to gaze at the divinely handsome Rupert rather than his paintings.
Raymond turned to his morning ritual, checking the three Ds: Divorce, Deaths and Debtors in his beloved Times, sussing out who might suddenly be flush or needing money, or getting rid of an important picture.
Ever since he had comforted Rupert’s ex-wife Helen after the murder of Roberto Rannaldini, her famous conductor husband, in 1996, and been rewarded with the task of selling the Murillo Madonna which he had achieved at a record price, Raymond had been nicknamed ‘the widow’s mate’. Beside him on the back seat was a delicious cake in a beribboned striped box, which, after visiting Rupert, Raymond would take on to the recently widowed Clemency Waterlane at Rutminster Hall, urging her to eat to keep up her strength, and gently persuading her that parting with the Waterlane Titian would be the easiest way out of estate duty.
A great favourite with the Queen Mother and Lady Thatcher, Raymond had long advised both the royal family and the Tories, and was currently looking for an artist to paint Prince William.
And there was Rupert’s house, lounging like a voluptuous blonde against its orange pillow of beech woods. In the early Eighties Rupert had switched from showjumping to national hunt racing, branching out into flat racing as well in the early Nineties. His extremely successful yard lay to the west of the house.
Rupert, not wanting to be ogled by the masses, had clearly done a bunk. Raymond was relieved to be able to walk through the rooms admiring the often dirty and badly lit pictures on his own, overwhelmed by a sick, churning, very painful excitement as so much of Galena’s past returned.
At the top of Rupert’s stairs hung a huge oil by her long-term lover, Etienne de Montigny. This showed Galena as Circe turning men into swine. There had been a row at the time, because Rupert had complained the pigs were saddlebacks, a breed not invented in 2000 BC, and demanded his money back.
Next door was A Storm on Exmoor by Casey Andrews, who with brutal insensitivity was, even twenty-five years after Galena’s death, giving interviews claiming to be her greatest love. Raymond was ashamed he hadn’t sacked Casey as a gallery artist, but as poetic justice he had at least made a killing out of the disgusting old goat.
And there in the dark of the landing – Raymond caught his breath, heart pounding – was Galena’s ravishing drawing of a naked Rupert asleep in the crimson-curtained four-poster in the Blue Tower. Raymond so clearly remembered that warm summer evening when Sir Mervyn and Rosemary had arrived unexpectedly and Galena had ordered Rupert to remain upstairs.
Galena had later described how Rupert had made love to her and on occasions even allowed Raymond, through the two-way mirror she had had installed in the Blue Tower door, to watch her with Rupert or other lovers. This had been the greatest turn-on of Raymond’s life. He had been so happy with Anthea, she had put him first, built up his career and confidence. He owed her everything, but she had never turned his loins to liquid as Galena had done.
To discourage the crowds, Rupert had turned off the central heating. Raymond shivered, then jumped as his mobile rang. He was due to join his television crew in a minute, but it was Anthea checking he was all right.
‘Newsnight wondered if you’d be in town this evening, Melvyn wants you on the South Bank Show next month, and you’ll never guess: Good Housekeeping want to interview me,’ Anthea giggled, ‘for a feature on wonderful wives. I can’t think why.’
‘I can, my darling, you are wonderful.’
‘Well, don’t forget to give my special love to Rupert.’
‘I won’t, and, Hopey, don’t forget to turn on the alarm when you go out.’
Alizarin, glowering like Cerberus at the bottom of the drive, was not a sufficient deterrent to burglars. Now Raymond had b
ecome a cult figure, they couldn’t be too careful.
Raymond was glad Anthea had not accompanied him. She had a totally unreciprocated crush on Rupert, who could be embarrassingly curt with those he didn’t like. And she would certainly have acted up at the number of Galena’s pictures on the walls. This caused Raymond pain of a different kind. Galena’s work had rocketed in value since her death. What a tragedy that on Anthea’s insistence he’d sold so many of them back in 1974. They’d be worth a fortune today. He’d also tragically let Anthea paint over Galena’s murals. The fiercely protected children’s rooms were about the only ones left intact.
As he moved towards the film crew at the end of the long gallery, admiring on the way the Lucian Freud of a muscular nude lying beside a whippet striped like a humbug, Raymond found himself still trembling. Galena’s end had been so terrible, what with the ghastly haemorrhaging, and baby Sienna screaming herself blue, and Alizarin never mentioning his mother’s name again, and Raymond himself discovering blood-baths in the Blue Tower as well as the bottom of the stairs, and all with the Raphael smiling serenely down.
‘Oh Christ.’ Raymond sucked in his breath.
For there on the wall was Galena’s adorable drawing of Shrimpy, her little Jack Russell, who’d been found bloodstained and whimpering under her skirts.
After her death, Raymond couldn’t face the thought of sleeping in the Blue Tower so Anthea, with the help of Mary Fox Linton, had knocked through walls to make a beautiful bedroom on the floor below. The Raphael, on the other hand, had remained locked away in the Blue Tower, so no-one saw it except the children when they asked permission, or he and Anthea when less and less frequently they made love up there.