Pandora Read online

  It was already hot and close, but Raymond couldn’t stop shivering. It wasn’t just from butterflies over the task ahead. The day before yesterday, during a lull in the fighting, he had been scribbling a letter to Viridian, who was serving with the regiment in Italy, about the deflection of the sniper’s bullet.

  ‘Your birthday present stood me in further stead’, he had written, when he became aware of the wireless operator receiving a signal, which he had immediately taken to the adjutant.

  Raymond had noticed them talking gravely, then wondered if he had failed the company in some way, as the adjutant approached him with a solemn face.

  But instead he had said, ‘Awfully sorry, Raymond. Got some bad news.’

  Viridian had been killed near Cassino. As yet there were no details.

  The worst part was imagining the village postmistress pedalling up the drive with the fatal telegram and not being able to ring home to comfort his parents.

  For how would they ever recover from the loss of such a golden boy? Viridian, as the elder son, would have inherited Foxes Court and its fifty acres and the family business, the art gallery in Cork Street, both of which he would have run effortlessly and with such panache.

  Now the task would fall to Raymond, who had long dreamt of a gentle academic career, writing books on art, and who felt less equipped to run a business than Hereward the dog. Raymond had been so sorry for poor shy, stammering George VI, having to step into the polished brogues of the glamorous, adored Edward VIII. Now he was in the same position.

  And how would he himself survive without Viridian, whom he had loved so dearly, and who had been so fearless and certain of life, always shielding Raymond from bigger boys, never embarrassed to have a much younger brother hanging around?

  Raymond glanced back at his volume of Tennyson, and at Viridian’s strong, sunburnt, laughing face in the photograph, and quoted despairingly: ‘“Death has made his darkness beautiful with thee.”’

  Oh lucky, lucky death. Raymond had thought he was bearing up awfully well until last night, when he had stumbled on a poor lone cow on the verge of a road. Refusing to abandon her dead calf, whose back legs had been blown off, unmilked for several days, she was bellowing in pain and desperation. Having been brought up with animals, Raymond settled down to milk her. Only as he finished did he realize her reddy-brown flank, where his dark head had rested, was soaked with tears.

  His platoon, most of whom had been recruited from Larkshire or next-door Gloucestershire and who knew Viridian and his parents, had been so kind. They hadn’t said much, but Private Treays, who was the son of the local blacksmith, had given him a four-leaf clover, Private Turner had handed over the remains of a bottle of Calvados, and Lance-Corporal Formby, who had the charm of the devil, had wheedled three brown eggs out of a nearby French farmer, which had been scrambled for Raymond’s supper last night.

  On the other hand, the anguish of losing Viridian had made Raymond even more aware of his responsibility to bring his men safely through the coming action.

  Beside him Private Treays had fallen asleep, head on his knapsack. From the faint pink glow in the east, rose doré mixed with a touch of raw sienna, Raymond could see the boy’s thin face darkened with stubble, long lashes drooping over purple shadows, a half-eaten apple browning in his hand. Raymond wished he had pastels and paper.

  ‘You must draw for at least a quarter of an hour a day,’ his father was always telling him. ‘Then you’ll realize how bloody difficult it is for the artists.’

  Once again Raymond wondered how he would ever live up to Viridian, who had so charmed both artists and collectors. He had never felt more lonely nor more inadequate.

  Unknown to Raymond, however, his platoon sergeant, John ‘Spider’ Webster, whose face was so round and red it could have risen instead of the sun, was keeping an eye on him. Raymond’s fortitude worried Sergeant Webster. The lad pushed himself too hard, constantly living in Viridian’s shadow, worrying he wouldn’t be up to the job. In fact he was first rate, brave as a lion and loved by officers and men alike. Some of those young subalterns were such berks, but Raymond was so kind, so modest, so unaware of his good looks, so outwardly unflappable. Spider had only once seen the boy lose his temper – when Private Turner, mistaking a big black hound silhouetted in a doorway for a ferocious guard dog, had shot it dead.

  Raymond glanced at his watch, and shoved Tennyson back into his breast pocket. Nearly time to attack; he had better wake the others. The fields, heavy with dew, gleamed like sheets of silver in the half light; a slight breeze bent the corn. Beyond the village on the far side of a little river, rising out of the mist, he could see the grey pointed turrets of the château, which was rumoured to be occupied by a Nazi gauleiter, one of Goering’s favourites.

  Just before five a.m., his platoon moved off. Raymond’s task was to attack on the right, advancing stealthily through orchards and back gardens. The distant chatter of Spandaus suggested that the other platoons had already made contact. There was no time to lose.

  ‘“Into the jaws of Death, Into the mouth of Hell,”’ muttered Raymond. He had always worried he wouldn’t be able to kill the enemy, but with Viridian gone, he had no compunction and was soon shooting everything in his path in a blind fury.

  Hearing shells exploding and the chilling swish of rockets, which indicated both the Artillery and the RAF were pitching in, Raymond battled his way choking through a smoke-filled café out into the high street, which had been reduced to rubble. Passing a little girl sobbing over a dead kitten, he gathered her up, shoving her into the arms of an old woman, also weeping in a doorway, and ran on.

  By midday, after ferocious fighting, the village was in British hands. Germans had been winkled out of every other building. In a barn near the river, the other platoons had cornered forty prisoners. As they approached with their hands above their heads, Raymond was struck by how young they were and how old they looked; their hair prematurely grey with dust from the rubble, their faces seamed with despair and exhaustion like a defeated boat-race crew.

  A delighted Lance-Corporal Formby, for whom needles leapt out of haystacks, had discovered a bottle of schnapps in an abandoned German staff car and gave Raymond a swig. A highly satisfied Company Commander was conferring with Spider Webster, his red face now blackened with smoke. Spider put a hand on Raymond’s shoulder: ‘You did very well there, sir.’

  Delighted but embarrassed by such praise, Raymond quickly asked if everyone had been accounted for.

  ‘I’m afraid Private Treays bought it, sir. Corporal Turner was hurt, but only a flesh wound, thank God. The rest of us got through.’

  Noticing Raymond’s face working and his sudden pallor beneath the grime, Spider pointed to the château across the river, parts of which were now ablaze after a direct hit.

  Disappointingly, however, no Nazi gauleiter had emerged.

  ‘The bird seems to have flown,’ observed the Company Commander. ‘Just check if there’s anyone inside, could you, Raymond?’

  Numbly remembering how often Private Treays’s father had shod his pony when he was a little boy, Raymond pushed open the rusty gates of the château and ran across a shaggy yellowing lawn. Kicking in a door, he wandered into a deserted drawing room where he found a cigar stubbed out in a Sèvres plate, with a three-quarters-drunk bottle of Calvados beside it, and some exquisite Louis-Quatorze furniture.

  He was about to empty several bullets into Hitler’s portrait over the fireplace, when his heart stopped at the beauty of a painting hanging on the right-hand wall. Drawing closer, he realized the subject was Pandora’s Box. Pretty Pandora, in her sky-blue dress, and her rather insipid husband were writhing from the stings of the world’s evils, newly released from a highly polished oak chest. To their left, the clearly defined Seven Deadly Sins were lumbering out of a side door, grumbling like drunks evicted from the pub. To the right, through a window, shone the full moon, bathing in light the iridescent rainbow-clad figure of Hope. She was
so lovely, so serene, so radiant with promise of another world, compared with the bloody carnage and loss around Raymond.

  The painting, particularly of the oak chest, was so wonderful, the colours so glowing, the faces so vivid, that Raymond, having been brought up with pictures, suspected it could be a Raphael. Drawing closer, he noticed a Latin tag, ‘Malum infra latet’, painted in gold letters along the bottom of the picture, meaning ‘Trouble lies below’.

  Trouble was also breaking out above as crashing beams and the warning shouts of his comrades brought him back to earth. He couldn’t leave Pandora to burn, or fall back into the hands of the Nazis, who had after all just murdered Viridian and Private Treays, and only a philistine would hang a Raphael over a radiator.

  Draining the Calvados, Raymond whipped out his knife and cut the picture out of its frame as his father had taught him. It was small, only twenty-two inches by eighteen, and easy to roll up, picture-side outwards, so as not to crack the paint. Glancing round for something in which to hide it, Raymond found a German First World War shell case holding fire-irons – the ideal solution and souvenir.

  As the building collapsed, Raymond escaped into the sunlight.

  1961

  Raymond succeeded beyond everyone’s wildest dreams. After the excitement of liberating Europe and a brief stint at Cambridge, he found equal thrills in transforming the respectable but slightly sleepy family gallery, the Belvedon in Cork Street, into one of the most successful in London.

  To begin with, he worked all hours to blot out the horror of Viridian’s death, but gradually he began to enjoy himself, developing a distinctly buccaneering attitude to art. Draconian export laws he felt deserved to be broken. Nor should one question too closely where a beautiful picture came from. Many a masterpiece was soon being smuggled abroad in the false bottom of his briefcase or brought home in the hold of the boat in which he took holidays each summer. Winter saw him with a permanent ski tan acquired while depositing illegal currency in the gallery’s Swiss bank account.

  Back in London, collectors fainted when given the occasional peep at the Old Masters stored in the Belvedon vaults. Raymond knew where to find a treasure and where to place it. Each time he was invited to stay in some great house, he left a less faded square on the damask wallpaper, having gently convinced his hostess that this was the optimum time to part with the Velásquez.

  As the gallery’s success increased, so did Raymond’s eligibility. Invitations poured in for dances, but as Raymond circled the ballrooms of the Hyde Park Hotel and Claridge’s, fluttering the hearts of the debs and their mothers, he made sure he got his name in the address book of the fathers: aristocrats who might want to flog a Gainsborough to pay for the season, nouveau riche businessmen who needed guidance on adorning the walls of their big new houses.

  Raymond was such a charming chap, so unsnooty, he could be relied on to act as an advisor and to sell you something really good when it came along – even if sadly he showed no signs of marrying your daughter.

  Only in the same area had Raymond disappointed his parents. At nearly thirty-seven, he had still failed to marry and produce an heir. Raymond’s mother had a weak chest and his father, who was champing to retire permanently to the house in Provence, was threatening to hand Foxes Court, the main family home, over to Raymond’s elder sister and her husband, who was thinking of leaving the diplomatic service, if Raymond didn’t get a move on. But Raymond was a romantic. He could no more marry a woman he didn’t love than exhibit an artist whose work he didn’t admire.

  Raymond, who had a flair for anticipating changes in taste, had specialized not only in Old Masters and Pre-Raphaelites, which were beginning to rise in value, but also living artists. Two of the latter were a married couple in their thirties: Colin Casey Andrews and Joan Bideford. Casey Andrews’s huge part-abstract landscapes of the Cornish coast were already selling well and in early May 1961, Joan had just completed such a successful debut show at the Belvedon that she had felt justified in throwing a party to celebrate.

  She chose a beautiful Saturday evening – Viridian’s birthday, in fact – Viridian the virile, who would have produced half a dozen heirs by now, had he not been blown to bits leading his men at Monte Cassino without even a grave on which to put flowers.

  Having taken down Joan Bideford’s exhibition on the Friday before her party, Raymond and Eddie, his packer, had spent hours hanging the paintings of Raymond’s latest discovery, a Frenchman called Etienne de Montigny, for the private view on Monday. Was it deliberately to eradicate the memory of Viridian’s death that, at two o’clock in the morning, a sleepless Raymond had wandered down from the flat above the gallery and, deciding the pictures looked irredeemably garish and vulgar, had summoned Eddie the packer from the warmth of his girlfriend’s bed in Battersea to repaint the stark white walls behind them?

  Against a background of two coats of Prussian blue emulsion, the pictures looked sensational, like lit-up liners in a night-dark sea. Nor had Eddie minded labouring all night and through Saturday. At seven shillings an hour, he could take his girlfriend out on the toot this evening, and sleep it off tomorrow.

  And Raymond was such a lovely bloke to work for, even if he did have mad notions and was picky about pictures being hung a millimetre too far to the left. He was so appreciative. He never talked down, and the tales he’d told Eddie about the Gods and Goddesses as they rehung the paintings would make your hair curl.

  ‘That nymph being poked by that bull, Eddie, is actually the wife of the French Minister of Agriculture.’

  Having showered upstairs and emerged beautiful as the evening star in his dinner jacket, Raymond had been distracted by a small oil of a languid youth admiring his white naked reflection in a pond.

  ‘Exquisite,’ he murmured.

  ‘He’ll get sunburn if he don’t put on his shirt, and you’re going to be late for that party,’ chided Eddie, taking a pale pink rose from the vase on the reception desk and slotting it into Raymond’s buttonhole. ‘I’ll lock up. Don’t let Joan and Casey Andrews bully you. Invitation said bring a bottle.’

  ‘Oh hell.’

  ‘Here, take the Jack Daniel’s that Yank brought you.’

  ‘Thanks, Eddie.’ Raymond gazed round happily. ‘That blue’s made all the difference. I can’t thank you enough. See you Monday.’

  As he emerged from the white-fronted eighteenth-century terrace house, with the dark blue Belvedon Gallery sign swaying in the warm breeze, the prostitutes who plied their trade along Cork Street wolf-whistled.

  ‘Who’s the lovely toff?’ shouted a handsome blonde.

  A pretty brunette started singing a pop song called ‘Wooden Heart’, imploring Raymond not to break hers.

  Raymond laughed and danced a few steps with her before coiling his long length into his bottle-green E-Type. The girls were his friends, whom he often sketched and invited into the gallery on cold nights for a glass of brandy. Last Christmas they had clubbed together and given him a bottle of Armagnac.

  As he drove towards Hampstead, he found the sudden heatwave had brought out good-looking couples, laughing outside pubs or wandering hand in hand along pavements strewn with pink and white blossom. Knowing she’d be desolate remembering Viridian, he’d rung his mother earlier.

  ‘You’re such a dear, Raymond,’ her voice had trembled, ‘you’d make such a wonderful husband.’

  In the spring, the not-so-young man’s fancy, reflected Raymond heavily, turns to thoughts of love.

  He felt as though he’d been imprisoned in the gallery for so long he’d missed the spring. The creamy-white hawthorns were turning brown in the parks, the chestnut candles already over. But as he passed houses garlanded in cobalt-violet wisteria and breathed in a heady scent of rainsoaked lilac, it was impossible not to feel optimistic. He had sold a Reynolds to the National Gallery and a fine Zoffany to a Canadian collector, and Joan Bideford’s nudes had gone so well that the big bumpy freckled nose of her far more famous husband was tho
roughly out of joint.

  Casey, as he was usually known, and Joan were such a repulsive couple: greedy, egotistical, sexually predatory, insanely jealous of one another and other artists, that, as an escape route, Raymond had arranged to dine at nine o’clock back in Mayfair with a rich collector and some of his friends – hence the dinner jacket. Later he would take them in wine-jolly strip-club mood back to the gallery for large drinks and a preview of Etienne de Montigny’s erotic pictures.

  Arriving at Joan and Casey’s red-brick Victorian house, Raymond tripped over bicycles and a CND placard in the hall. At a recent demo, Joan had been arrested for socking a policeman. It was rumoured that during a subsequent stint in Holloway, she had developed a taste for her own sex.

  Judging by the uproar, the party had been going on for several hours. People were crammed into a double-roomed studio with big sash windows opening onto the Heath. Lights like striped snowballs had just been turned on. Even on their walls Joan and Casey slugged it out. The only paintings on view were Joan’s nudes and Casey’s lowering seascapes, bright yellow cliffs over Antwerp-blue seas.

  Raymond had forgotten the party was fancy dress. He could hardly see the paint-stained floorboards for Whistler’s Mothers, florid Rembrandt self-portraits, Bardots, John F. Kennedys and Macmillans with drooping moustaches and winged grey hair. A famously drunken sculptor was causing howls of mirth because he’d arrived as Margot Fonteyn complete with white tulle tutu and ballet shoes but had refused to shave off his beard or wear tights over his hairy legs.

  Raymond was desperate for a decent drink before he tackled the crowd, but the common denominator of the bottles lined up on the sideboard beside sweating cheese and greying pâté was their cheapness and nastiness. Some still had raffle tickets attached. Clinging to his bottle of Jack Daniel’s, Raymond searched for a glass, but his hostess saw him first.