Pandora

by Jilly Cooper

  Zac didn’t help by smiling speculatively into her eyes, asking too many questions, touching her whenever possible.

  Anthea had also married a much older man in the hope of never suffering from jealousy again. Now she was eaten up by it, because Raymond, her dear confrère David, her favourite stepson Jupiter, evil Jonathan and even Dicky were all clearly obsessed by Emerald. One should not be wildly jealous of one’s own daughter.

  She wished Raymond wouldn’t keep talking about settling large sums on Emerald for all the years she’d missed out on cultural stimuli.

  ‘Imagine that precious flower growing on waste ground.’

  Anthea would have liked to have shown off by making Emerald’s dress for the birthday party, but, short of time, she’d whisked herself and Emerald off to Lindka Cierach. On the Tuesday before Wednesday’s party, they went up to London for final tweakings and to pick up their dresses. This gave Raymond the opportunity to visit his lawyer in Searston – which made his other children extremely twitchy.

  It also left Zac free to prowl round the garden, the boathouse and the woods, studying Foxes Court and all the outbuildings for blocked-up windows and unaccounted-for spaces. Towards dusk he jogged through the village and collected some bottles of red and a steak and kidney pie from the Goat in Boots, where he admired Jonathan’s newly hung nude of Sienna. Ending up at the Lodge, he dropped in on Alizarin.

  Alizarin in fact had had a very bad day. Hanna, increasingly miserable with Jupiter, was looking to him for love and protection, which he felt he could no longer offer her because he was going blind. For the same reason, he had tried to knock on the head his very real liking for Sophy.

  Overwhelmed by guilt that he’d been working flat out for weeks and had done nothing to help Raymond with the forthcoming party, he had risen earlier even than usual and tried with a long fork to fish the algae out of the lily pond, a task he’d always loved doing as a boy, rather like tugging skeins of hair out of the plug hole. Alas, his sight was so bad he pulled up most of the water lilies instead and Anthea had screamed at him like a raped vixen.

  Returning home dejected to the Lodge, he had found a beaming Visitor sharing a pork pie with Eddie the packer, who’d just apologetically arrived from London with all Alizarin’s pictures from the gallery.

  ‘We can’t wait any longer for a discerning buyer,’ Jupiter had replied coolly when Alizarin had rung him in a fury. ‘Frankly, they’re taking up too much space. At least you’ve got firewood for the winter.’

  The Lodge front garden was still an army of nettles – as likely to sting as he himself. Frantically painting to catch the last of the daylight, Alizarin swore as he tripped over canvasses littering stairs and hall, stumbling downstairs to answer the door.

  ‘Whadja want?’ he snapped.

  ‘To look at your pictures.’ Zac waved a clanking plastic bag: ‘And I figured you might like a late lunch.’

  Alizarin, who was feeling dizzy with hunger, was won over by the smell of hot steak and kidney.

  ‘Come in.’

  Upstairs, having located two plates, knives and forks and a couple of paper cups, he turned back to his easel. He was painting a human shield, a Serb tank with crying babies strapped to its front – each little face was portrayed with such tender anguish. In the background, black smoke and flames poured out of a burning village.

  As Zac divided the pie, giving seven-eighths to Alizarin, and poured red wine into paper cups, he noticed cuttings on the Balkans, Sierra Leone, Chechnya and Northern Ireland carpeting the floor, rising in stalactites on every surface, lying along the top of the books. Putting a cup and plate on the table beside Alizarin, out of reach of a drooling Visitor, Zac settled down to look at the pictures, and was absolutely blown away.

  He had never seen anything so powerful, nor heartrending. Poking around, clambering over Galena’s furniture which had been chucked out by Anthea, taking canvasses to the fading light so the mysteries and subtleties of colour could be revealed, he was soon unearthing earlier work influenced by the Holocaust, along with the occasional exquisite landscape or portrait.

  Having studied them for nearly an hour in silence, he pulled out a last canvas entitled After the Anschluss, which was when Hitler brutally annexed Austria in 1938. The painting was of a wood of tall, bare skeletal trees, lashed by rain and gales. Only the occasional beech sapling or little yellow hazel had hung on to their orange and gold leaves.

  If you kept below the parapet, you could sometimes hide your treasures from the Nazis, thought Zac.

  ‘These are awesome, absolute masterpieces,’ he told Alizarin, with tears in his eyes. ‘I’m going to call my old boss, Adrian Campbell-Black, who runs the best contemporary gallery in New York.’

  Alizarin, who up to now hadn’t been at all sure about Zac, took a lot of persuading; but, gradually succumbing to Zac’s enthusiasm and understanding of pictures, he melted, ridiculously touched, almost childlike in his gratitude. Noticing Alizarin had wolfed the pie and drunk most of the red, Zac opened another bottle, and sat down on the corner of the ancient rickety sofa not taken up by cuttings and Visitor.

  As they talked, Alizarin abandoned the human shield and idly sketched Zac. As he was losing his sight, his other senses had become more acute: he could hear tones in voices, smell desires.

  ‘Why are you here?’ he asked.

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with Emerald.’

  Zac took the deepest breath. Somehow he trusted Alizarin.

  ‘My great-great-grandfather, Reuben Abelman, built up a furniture business in Vienna,’ he said carefully. ‘His son Benjamin’s even greater success allowed him to indulge his passion for fine art. Shortly after the Anschluss, two Nazis turned up with guns and took Benjamin to party HQ where they threatened to shoot him if he didn’t hand over his pictures and sculptures. His collection and the Rothschilds’ were to be the first great acquisitions of Hitler’s Führer museum. My great-grandfather refused to comply. He was found the next morning clubbed to death. My great-grandmother was sent to the death camps.

  ‘Having stripped Benjamin’s house, the Nazis turned their attention to his sons. They stopped my grandfather Tobias practising law, so he committed suicide.’ Zac’s deep, husky voice was quivering now, as desolate as the rumble of a distant train. ‘And they confiscated the pictures from my Great-uncle Jacob’s art gallery and sent him to Mauthausen.

  ‘All the Abelmans were wiped out by the Holocaust, except my Great-aunt Leah, Jacob’s wife, who escaped early in the war to New York, and my mother, who as a child somehow survived Theresienstadt and joined my great-aunt when she was four.’

  Alizarin put down his pencil and, groping for the bottle, filled up Zac’s paper cup, missing slightly, so the wine ran like blood down the side.

  ‘My mother never got over the guilt of surviving,’ went on Zac. ‘At first, my Great-aunt Leah mixed with other artistic Jewish people in New York, as she waited and waited for Jacob. After the war, she heard he’d escaped from Mauthausen, but been murdered by the Gestapo.’

  Zac had a beautiful face, thought Alizarin. The scars were all on the inside.

  ‘When I was a kid’ – Zac’s voice was almost a whisper, a muscle leaping beneath his smooth gold cheek – ‘Great-aunt Leah used to show me photographs of our house in Vienna in a smuggled-out family album. The floors were covered with Aubusson and Persian rugs, the rooms filled with eighteenth-century French furniture. On shelf and alcove was beautiful porcelain: Meissen, Sèvres and Dresden. But it was the pictures that excited me. In the hall were a Frans Hals and a Bonnard, in the dining room a Renoir and a Cranach.’

  Only Visitor snoring, the tick of the clock, the scratch of Alizarin’s pencil, broke the silence. Zac’s suntan had taken on a grey tinge.

  ‘Over my great-grandmother’s desk in the living room hung the Raphael. My great-grandfather bought it to help out a friend, a profligate count, in whose family the painting had been for two
hundred and forty years, who needed to pay his gambling debts. It’s small, just twenty-two inches by eighteen. I’ve only seen it in black and white but I dream of it in colour.’ Zac’s words were tumbling out in a rush now. ‘I’ve given up on the other pictures, they may or may not surface, but I’ve searched the world for the Raphael.’

  Zac didn’t tell Alizarin that he’d picked up clues since he’d been at Foxes Court. On the nursery wall was a framed cast list for a ‘Pro-Raphaelite’ Christmas play dated 1975. There was Raymond’s nickname for Anthea, ‘Hopey’, and Anthea’s rainbow-woven dress, which was hard to identify in a black and white photo.

  ‘Have you tried the Art Loss Register?’ asked Alizarin.

  Zac shook his head.

  ‘I’m shit-scared of raising the alarm and sending the picture underground. Got to be certain before I make a move.’

  Alizarin’s eyes were jet black, his face expressionless, as he picked up a magnifying glass to examine his drawing more closely. Zac’s jaw needed more strength, the yellow eyes should be closer together, removing any suggestion of innocence. Squinting at Zac he said, ‘A lot of looted art’s in museums, who won’t give it back.’

  ‘Like asking the Mafia to regulate their behaviour,’ shrugged Zac. ‘I meet stone walls everywhere. Problem is time’s running out. Owners of looted art know survivors of the Holocaust are getting thin on the ground and are likely to die off before they can claim. And if you’re not a Rothschild,’ he went on wearily, ‘you’re unlikely to get satisfaction through the courts.’

  Alizarin began to paint, dipping his brush in a tin which said ‘Butchers’ Tripe, Lamb and Vegetable Flavour’ on the outside. He wondered which ochre to use for Zac’s skin, which now had a green tinge. His eyes had retreated into hollows.

  ‘What’s the subject of the painting?’ asked Alizarin, knowing the answer.

  ‘Pandora’s Box,’ said Zac.

  As the pause went on for ever, Alizarin drenched the paper with water to get a weeping effect.

  ‘It’s got a Latin tag along the bottom: “Malum infra latet”,’ added Zac.

  ‘Which means: “Trouble lies below”,’ said Alizarin. ‘You could be getting warm. That’s all I’m going to tell you.’

  ‘Thanks – I sure appreciate this.’ Zac was near to tears again. ‘I’ll talk to Adrian Campbell-Black about you next week.’

  ‘It wasn’t a trade-off,’ said Alizarin roughly, ‘I just believe in justice.’

  Trying to keep the quiver of excitement and jubilation out of his voice, Zac asked, ‘Why’s your sister so screwed up?’

  ‘Like your mother’ – Alizarin warmed Zac’s cheeks with a touch of rose madder – ‘she suffers the guilt of the survivor. Sienna was two days old when Mum died.’ He went on carefully, ‘Mum had decorated rooms for me and my brothers before we were born, but done nothing for Sienna. We pretended Mum was thrilled to have a daughter, but she was really too drunk by then to mind what sex she had. Drink can make a baby undersized, can damage her organs. Sienna looks OK, but I guess it’s taken a toll on her heart.’

  Alizarin clearly had great difficulty talking about his mother. He suddenly looked, under those punishing hospital lights, as drawn and drained as a surgeon after a nine-hour operation.

  ‘Sienna works so hard,’ he went on. ‘She feels huge responsibility for the world, particularly for animals.’

  Visitor thumped his tail in approval.

  ‘Have you met Emerald’s sister?’ asked Alizarin casually.

  ‘The roly-poly Rottweiler,’ said Zac. ‘Not my greatest fan. Mistrusts my motives.’

  ‘With reason,’ retorted Alizarin.

  The second bottle was empty. A car turned into the drive. Anthea and Emerald were back.

  ‘I must go,’ said Zac, ‘and I really am crazy about your pictures.’

  If Alizarin’s eyes had been better, and he’d looked out of the window, he would have seen Zac waltzing up the drive in ecstasy, his face satanic in the moonlight.

  The morning of Emerald’s birthday was infinitely sunnier than the mood of Anthea’s servants. Having been paid nothing for the fête, they had been forced to bull up the house for days, and now would have to work until God knew what hour this evening.

  ‘It’s worse than getting the place clean enough for the caterers, and it’s bleedin’ hot,’ grumbled Knightie when Jonathan rang in for a progress report. ‘Emerald and Zac are still in bed, your dad’s supervising the fireworks, and Robens has practically mowed the lawns bald.’

  ‘Where’s Anthea?’

  ‘Having her legs waxed in Searston.’

  ‘Hopey de-furred,’ said Jonathan joyfully.

  ‘Don’t forget your dinner jacket.’

  ‘Alizarin will have to wear a strait-jacket to stop him thumping Somerford. I cannot tell you how much I’m looking forward to this evening.’

  Zac answered the next telephone call. A furious, tearful Dicky had broken up, and no-one had remembered to collect him. Scribbling a note for Anthea and Raymond, Zac borrowed Emerald’s new Golf and set off for Bagley Hall. Zac, typically American, was charming with children, and on the way home past sun-bleached stubble and bright pink clumps of willow herb, Dicky was soon confessing how fed up he was with life.

  He loathed all the publicity about Emerald in the papers. He was very defensive about Anthea, because people took the piss out of her. Did Zac think she’d forgotten to collect him because she was still cross about him dying his hair blond, or because he’d bought Alizarin’s Upside-Down Camels?

  ‘That was a good buy,’ said Zac, overtaking an Aston Martin. ‘Hang on to that painting, it’ll be worth a fortune one day.’

  Dicky became even more confiding, admitting he was teased at school because he was small, like Anthea.

  ‘There’s no such thing as equal rights. Why is it OK for women to be small and not men, and why do I have to go to boarding school and not Dora? I want to be at home like her and not miss things. All Dad and Mummy ever think about is Emerald. I wish she’d go away.’ (Or speak to me occasionally, thought Dicky wistfully.)

  Stopping for petrol, Zac bought Dicky a family pack of wine gums and a computer game and, driving on, told him about a secret room in his great-grandfather’s house in Vienna.

  ‘That’s nothing,’ scoffed Dicky. ‘There’s a secret passage in Foxes Court going from the landing down a staircase out of the house into the garden, and’ – Dicky looked furtive, he really liked Zac – ‘promise not to tell anyone?’

  ‘Sure, sure, Scout’s honour.’

  ‘There’s a secret room, known as the Blue Tower, above Mum and Dad’s bedroom. There’s a staircase leads up to it. And I heard Knightie and Mum saying Dad’s first wife’ – Dicky blushed – ‘used to have lots of men there.’

  ‘How d’you get into this Blue Tower?’ asked Zac, ultra casually.

  ‘Dunno.’ Dicky went vague. ‘There’s a password, but I don’t know what it is. The room’s haunted by Dad’s first wife, so no-one wants to go up there.’

  When Zac returned with Dicky, Raymond and Anthea, back from the beauty parlour, were effusive in their thanks. Dicky promptly dragged his father and Zac off to play tennis. In the kitchen, Anthea was icing Emerald’s cake and wrestling with tonight’s seating plan. She’d put herself opposite her two admirers, David and Zac, so they could marvel at her beauty in her ravishing new Lindka. The weather was getting very close, but if she got too hot, she could always whip off the little shrug and show off her pretty shoulders. Emerald’s replacement father, Ian, she supposed, had better go on her right – perhaps he’d give her a minicab discount next time she was in town – then she could have Si, who was the real guest of honour, on her left.

  Si’s wife Ginny was much too busty and predatory to be put anywhere near Zac: she could go next to Jonathan; and Geraldine, the pretentious bitch, could go on Jonathan’s other side. Ghastly Casey Andrews, who had this terrible crush on Emerald, had been angling for an invite all wee
k. Raymond had manfully resisted all his hints, then forgotten and instead invited that vindictive Somerford who was bound to bring Keithie the burglar. Alizarin must therefore be put as far away from Somerford as possible or he might chuck the sarcastic old pansy into the river.

  It was such a long time since petfood billionaire, Kevin Coley, Mr Ditherer, had got out his cheque book at Alizarin’s first private view to buy a couple of oils, and Somerford had sidled up hissing that they were rubbish. Kevin, as was his wont, put his cheque book away and Alizarin had hit Somerford through Raymond’s glass door, as his mother had once hurled the Degas. With Somerford spewing poison, Alizarin’s career had ended before it began. Serve Alizarin right really.

  And where could she put Rosemary Pulborough? She and Alizarin were very fond of one another – so Anthea wasn’t going to give them the pleasure of sitting together. It was stupid to waste heterosexuals on someone as plain as Rosemary. She could go between Keithie and Dicky – although from the way Dicky was gazing at Emerald . . . Anthea supposed it was a relief Dicky wasn’t going to turn out gay.

  Oh good, here were Zac and the boys back from tennis, not long on the court, it was so stiflingly hot. Having arranged the damp tendrils on her forehead more becomingly, Anthea turned to the more caring pastime of icing Emerald’s cake.

  ‘Don’t mess up any of the lounges, Dicky,’ she called out.

  Although the guests probably wouldn’t go inside at all. That was the maddening thing about summer, all that time wasted polishing and doing flowers people never saw. Perhaps she could lure Patience inside for a liqueur.

  ‘Dicky,’ bellowed Raymond from the study, ‘come and fix Sky, and we can watch the cricket.’

  That was them sorted for three-quarters of an hour, thought Anthea. Obviously with the same idea, Zac slid into the kitchen. Even though he hadn’t removed his black tracksuit top to play tennis, he was hardly sweating.

  ‘Her first birthday at home,’ quavered Anthea, as she put a green four-leaf clover on the snow-white icing.

  ‘Beautiful.’ Zac was standing much too close behind her. ‘You’re a great mom.’