by Jilly Cooper
‘I would,’ said Jonathan sweetly. ‘My father has a beautiful Cotman of Duncombe Park with the trees turning at home. He might be prepared to sell it.’
David was so cross he overtipped by mistake, and as the rain had stopped, suggested walking back to the Pulborough.
As they strolled along a dripping Jermyn Street, David, remembering how he had benefited from Raymond’s example in the Seventies, warmly recommended Raymond’s tailors – whom he now regarded as his own – to Si. ‘They’re excellent and very reasonable. Just mention my name,’ he added loftily. ‘What are your plans for tomorrow?’
‘Going to the art fair. I’m after a Degas drawing of a jockey.’
As they entered Cork Street, David was amused to see Jupiter and Tamzin his assistant still wearily clearing up glasses and chucking out drunks. Across the road, David’s assistant, subtle Zoe, had the coffee on and the liqueurs out.
Brandishing colour swatches, Ginny pored over half a dozen of Jonathan’s canvasses.
‘The rest are sold,’ said Zoe apologetically. ‘Jonathan’s work is rocketing in value, you’d have a real investment here.’
‘I just adore the little kid with the pink beach ball.’ Ginny turned to Pascal: ‘Perfect for the playroom.’
‘I didn’t know you had children.’ Jonathan took a swig of kümmel.
‘We’re thinking about it. Babies are so hip at the moment.’
‘Boom, why does my art go boom,’ sang Jonathan, quickstepping Zoe down the gallery. ‘Mrs Greenbridge doesn’t realize that the pink beach ball is the end of the little kid’s cock.’
‘For God’s sake don’t tell her,’ giggled Zoe.
Meanwhile, in a white-washed back room lit like a chapel hung a reclining nude by Modigliani priced at £10 million.
‘Everyone’s after it,’ murmured David, ‘the Tate, MOMA, the Getty, but I wanted to give you first look.’ Then, handing Si a glass of Napoleon brandy, which cost more than dinner, he added smoothly, ‘I’d be happy to accompany you to Grosvenor House tomorrow. Dealers at fairs can be iffy if you don’t know the ropes. Although you couldn’t do better than the Modigliani.’
Si looked at David meditatively. He might be in thrall to the daydreams of his wife’s designer, but he was not going to be patronized.
‘You can steer me into your smart tailor, David, you can tell me what knife to use, or even how to hold my dick, but not what art to buy.’
David went magenta. ‘Only making a suggestion,’ he spluttered.
‘Well, don’t,’ snapped Si, ‘the Modigliani doesn’t grab me and it’s way overpriced.’
Jonathan felt increasingly drawn to Si and wanted to stay and talk to him. But not wishing to bug David too much, and having been urged to suck up to Geraldine, he offered her a lift home.
Only when Barney had swept Pascal off to his gambling club, dropping off a weary Ginny at the Ritz on the way, did Si despatch Zoe to make him another cup of coffee, and say to David, ‘I have two Leonardo drawings at home, and one by Michelangelo, but my dream is to own a Raphael.’
David’s heart leapt. ‘My dream is to find you one. I’ll put out feelers.’
‘Keep it low key. If people figure I’m nosing around, the price will shoot up.’
Getting out his spectacles, Si got up to have another look at the Modigliani. Turning, he caught David with his hand up Zoe’s skirt as she put the coffee cup down on the table.
‘Mrs Pulboro’ doesn’t like London?’ he asked pointedly.
‘No, she’s a country gal,’ replied David heartily. ‘I can only tempt her up to town for the Chelsea Flower Show. Her father was Sir Mervyn Newton, you know.’
‘I look forward to meeting her in July.’
‘You do?’
‘Sir Raymond has asked us to visit Foxes Court.’
David was enraged but not so furious as Geraldine was later.
Although Jonathan thought her a pretentious cow, he made a detour to Hoxton to show her his pictures. All the way, Geraldine boasted about her contacts.
‘The art industry is built on relationships, Jonathan. If you play ball your oeuvre could end up on the most influential walls in Europe.’
Reaching the loft, they found a furiously growling Diggory and Choirboy having a tug of war over a Hermès scarf. Trafford, stripped to the waist, was arched over a microscope, drawing his own sperm. Geraldine was enraptured.
‘In an increasingly godless age, one’s own body is the only site of identity,’ she cried.
Trafford had been having an annual tidy-out of his bedroom, which meant using the communal studio as a waste-paper basket. In the middle rose a pile of beer cans, curry trays, Pedigree Chum tins, fag ends, twelve months of unopened bills and bank statements and torn-up photographs of models Trafford had failed to pull. On top was a dressing of pages torn out of porn mags.
Mess created by artists seems to electrify the outsider.
‘This is very fine,’ exclaimed Geraldine, walking round the pile. ‘Does it have a title?’
‘Cunterpane,’ grunted Trafford, intent on his drawing.
‘How apt! Perhaps Cunterpane One. I hate to be hard nosed, but is it for sale? Nothing ventured . . . how much?’
‘Hundred thousand,’ said Trafford, adding another tadpole.
‘A very fair price, I know half a dozen homes for which it could form a vital centre piece.’
Jonathan, getting bored, wandered off to his bedroom to find some suitable canvasses to show Geraldine. Geraldine, however, was more interested in sex. Following him, she shoved him back on the bed, attacking him like a Dyson. A minute or two later, she said tartly, ‘It isn’t a legal offence to move your tongue, Jonathan.’
She was undressing him briskly and Jonathan was wondering whether he was capable of performing at all without more Charlie, when the doorbell rang.
‘Jonathan, are you there?’ yelled a voice through the letterbox. ‘I can see your light’s on.’
It was Sophy Cartwright, monstrous crush on Jonathan unabated.
As he tugged on his trousers, Jonathan apologized to Geraldine.
‘My sister’s rolled up’ – well, it was nearly true – ‘you stay here while I get rid of her.’
Sophy had arrived with cheesecake, raspberries and a bottle of Tesco’s champagne, all of which Jonathan, who had the serious munchies, got stuck into.
‘It’s so lovely to see you,’ said Sophy wistfully.
Only when she asked him twenty minutes later what he was working on at the moment, did Jonathan remember Geraldine.
‘Kerist, you’ve just reminded me. Sorry, darling, there’s something I’ve got to finish off next door. Here’s twenty quid for a taxi.’ It was pouring with rain again. Jonathan felt a sod as he despatched a desolate Sophy into the cold, wet night.
Trafford was enraged.
‘Bloody dog in the manger. Why didn’t you pass Sophy on to me?’
‘Shut up,’ hissed Jonathan.
‘How can you prefer that stick insect?’
‘She’s a stuck insect now.’
Alas, flipping through Jonathan’s canvasses, a marooned Geraldine had been enraged to discover portraits of many of her friends in various states of undress. She hadn’t dared come out in case ‘Jonathan’s sister’ knew her or Maurice, her husband. But hearing the front door bang, she rushed out in a fury, beating Jonathan round the head with a squash racket. Collapsing on the floor, lying as still as a reclining nude, Jonathan pretended to have passed out. Luckily Diggory, who was frantically licking his master’s face to revive him, decided instead to bite one of Geraldine’s incredibly thin ankles, sending her shrieking into the night. Outside she immediately rang David on his mobile.
‘I’m stuck in Hoxton.’
‘Si’s still here,’ lied David, spitting out one of Zoe’s pubic hairs, ‘I’ll call you in the morning.’
‘Tell Si I’ve discovered an important artist.’
Having applied two more squirts of Right
Guard to ten other layers stiffening under his armpits, Trafford caught up with Geraldine in the middle of Hoxton Square. Drenched, limping, waving her thin arms, she had all the pathos of a Lowry grandmother.
‘Would you like a lift home?’ asked Trafford.
Returning much earlier, Si had found his wife awake.
‘Gotta call coming through from LA,’ he told her. ‘Go get yourself ready, baby.’
Wandering into the bedroom five minutes later, he found Ginny, her long blond hair in pigtails, naked except for a gym slip and white socks, skipping in front of a long mirror.
‘One, two, three, four,’ she counted in a shrill, childish voice, breasts bouncing, pleated skirt flying, skipping rope hissing through the air, ‘five, six, seven, eight.’ Her blond bush was darkening. She never got to twenty.
As a wet chill June grew even wetter and chiller, Alizarin Belvedon, who travelled his own road and never complained, realized with increasing horror that his sight was going. The streaked black and silver water tumbling into the trough opposite the front door at Foxes Court, which had always reminded him of Galena’s fringe, was now only a blur. Used to roaming the valley at dusk, he kept tripping over stones and missing steps. Yesterday he had smashed a treasured possession, a mug Hanna had given him. The hospital lights used by surgeons, in which he’d invested to enable him to paint through the night, were now needed all day.
At first he thought he was imagining things, but he kept having blinding headaches and the vision in his left eye was definitely narrowing, and he had so much left to paint. He was too terrified of being told to give up to go to the doctor. Instead he worked until he collapsed. Nor had he been able to sell any pictures and earned barely enough from his day a week teaching at Searston College to feed Visitor and buy paint.
The news from Kosovo and Chechnya was terrible; he should be there. But he couldn’t afford it, he loathed leaving Visitor and a still small voice queried whether he would only be going to escape from the bills, the bailiffs and his hopeless longing for Hanna. As a final injury, Raymond was giving that spoilt brat Emerald an exhibition. Alizarin groaned so loudly that Visitor woke and waddled across the room to lay a fat paw on his master’s knee.
Alizarin had grown up too fast. As a child he had known too many secrets, which he usually blocked out, but which recently had returned to him in hideous nightmares. If Galena set him free perhaps he could paint less tortured, more accessible pictures?
After the silver wedding, there had been much sly media innuendo as to who had really fathered Galena’s sons. Jupiter and Jonathan were perceived to be Raymond’s, but rumour persisted that Alizarin’s father was the late Etienne de Montigny, now regarded as France’s greatest painter, who’d been tall and thin, with a beaky nose and massive shoulders like Alizarin. A week before she died, Galena had given Alizarin one of Etienne’s ravishing drawings of herself, which hung in the Lodge beside Galena’s palette and which Alizarin wouldn’t have sold for the world. Alizarin had been nine when Galena died, the same age as Dicky and Dora today. He had spent a lot of time, since Emerald arrived, comforting them both.
‘Ouch,’ shouted Alizarin, as Visitor clawed his thigh with his paw. ‘OK, let’s go to London.’
Visitor, who adored jaunts, thumped his tail.
The jaunt started humiliatingly. None of the galleries Alizarin dropped into were remotely interested in his pictures.
‘You’ll have to become a guide dog sooner than you think,’ he told Visitor.
Heavy rain had slowed down the traffic, and it was late afternoon before Alizarin braved the Belvedon. Raymond had gone to the BBC. Jupiter was in the back office sorting out another of his father’s cock-ups. A man called Baxter, who’d arrived with a Rolls-Royce and a chauffeur, and who claimed to be staying at the Savoy, had been allowed by Raymond to borrow a charming Millais for a few hours to show his wife. It now transpired there was no Baxter staying at the Savoy and no sign of the Millais.
Tamzin, Raymond’s assistant, yet another comely well-bred halfwit, whom Jupiter referred to as the ‘Dimbo’, had been ordered not to disturb him. She also didn’t recognize Alizarin.
‘Mr Belvedon hasn’t time to look at unsolicited work,’ she told him disdainfully. ‘Why don’t you send in some transparencies with a stamped addressed Jiffy bag?’
Alizarin’s roar of rage flushed even Jupiter out of the inner sanctum, but he only allowed his younger brother five minutes, not even offering him a drink.
‘We’ve got too much of your stuff taking up space already.’
Then, flipping and wincing his way through half a dozen of Alizarin’s recent canvasses, he added, ‘You must make your work more collector friendly. I’ll take that little watercolour of Visitor, if you’re really strapped.’
‘Fuck off,’ howled Alizarin.
He was so angry he drove all the way down a one-way street, ignoring frantic hooting and waving of fists. For a second he rested his aching head on the steering wheel. It would take him three or four hours to get back to Limesbridge in the rush hour.
Thoroughly depressed, he drove east to Hoxton where Diggory and Visitor greeted each other joyfully and where he found Jonathan in high spirits if under siege.
‘David keeps hassling me to finish things, and has just buggered off to Geneva to top up his tan and shove more millions into his Swiss bank. Trafford’s been arrested for punching a photographer; I offered to bail him, but he said he needed the rest and that having a record will increase his street cred. He had a tidy-up last week, although you wouldn’t know it.’
At least the pile of rubbish topped with porn magazines had disappeared to a more elevated location.
‘What brings you to London?’ asked Jonathan as he rootled under a chaos of love letters and sketches for a corkscrew.
‘Not selling pictures, particularly to the Belvedon.’ Cussedly Alizarin chucked the watercolour of Visitor that his elder brother had liked into the waste-paper basket. ‘Jupiter’s a shit, isn’t he?’
‘Foul,’ agreed Jonathan. ‘I’m painting a group of people I most dislike including Casey Andrews and Somerford Keynes and calling it Millennium Buggers. I’m thinking of adding Jupiter. He’ll never forgive you for pushing the frontiers forward and because he knows Hanna admires you more than him.’
Then, as Alizarin blushed and muttered something self-deprecating, Jonathan continued, ‘He does too. And he’ll never forgive Emerald for conning him into asking her to the silver wedding. I think he even convinced himself she fancied him. How is she?’ he asked casually.
‘Disrupting the household.’
‘Has that Yank boyfriend turned up again?’
Alizarin shook his head. ‘Probably what’s making her so tetchy.’
Unable to find a corkscrew, Jonathan rinsed a mug and a teacup and filled them both with whisky.
Both brothers, particularly in the face of current family ructions, felt absurdly happy to be friends again. As Jonathan put on the Alpine Symphony, in which Richard Strauss depicts a day on a mountain, starting with basses growling around before sunrise, Alizarin noticed that his brother was looking particularly smart, in a new very white shirt with the creases still in and a dark blue Sixties rock-star suit with a faint cerulean check.
As he topped up Alizarin’s glass, Jonathan became very thoughtful.
‘Look, I’ve got myself into a jam.’
‘I haven’t got any money,’ said Alizarin flatly.
‘No, for once it isn’t that. I’ve got a sitting in an hour with Hermione Harefield. I daren’t cancel. Later I’ve arranged to see Geraldine Paxton, I daren’t cancel her either, or I’ll never get anything in the Tate. I’ve also got a commission to deliver first thing tomorrow morning – a nude. I’ve already had twenty thousand pounds up front, but there’s still forty thousand to come, which I’ll split with you if you paint it for me.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ exploded Alizarin, thinking what he could do with £20,000. See a decent eye s
pecialist, stock up on canvasses and paint, mend the hole in the roof, buy a new collar for Visitor or even dinner for Hanna when Jupiter was in London.
The Alpine Symphony was growing louder and louder: the sun was about to burst forth on the snowy peaks.
‘Oh please, Al, I’m desperate. You could always copy anyone’s style. I’ll be reduced to paying a forger.’
‘Don’t be fucking stupid.’
‘I’ll give you twenty-five grand.’
‘Who is she?’
The doorbell rang.
‘That’ll be her now.’
Richard Strauss’s sun appeared in majestic descending octaves as Sophy’s beaming face came round the door. She was wearing her mother’s tweed coat over a bright yellow strapless dress, and was weighed down by three bottles of white, smoked salmon, a quiche and a packet of chocolate biscuits for Diggory, who greeted her delightedly, all four feet off the ground.
‘Sophy, darling!’ Jonathan’s manner was unnaturally hearty; he couldn’t meet her eyes.
Sophy had a despairing feeling he’d only summoned her because he needed the rest of Abdul’s money, but she put on a cheery front as Jonathan launched into the rigmarole of his predicament, leaving out this time, Alizarin noticed, any mention of Geraldine.
‘All you’ve got to do is to sit for my unbelievably talented brother instead,’ Jonathan said soothingly, ‘I’ve drawn the short straw. I’ve got to paint Dame Hermione in the buff. It’s going to be called Expectant Madonna. She’s eight months gone so I’ve really got to motor. Hope it doesn’t pop out, I was never a good slip catch, and that I’ve got enough paint. She’s absolutely vast.’
Sophy, who was feeling vast herself, after misery eating too many chocolates, was not only desperately disappointed, but appalled and embarrassed at having to strip off instead in front of this gaunt angry giant. Seeing her distress, Alizarin wanted to back out. But Jonathan was so charming and persuasive.
‘You’ve got to dogsit anyway, both of you, Diggory chews up canvasses if he’s left on his own.’ Then, whispering to Sophy: ‘I’ll be back later, keep the bed warm,’ and murmuring to Alizarin: ‘Off to ride my trustee steed,’ he sidled out.