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Pandora

• ISBN: 9780552148504
• Author: Jilly Cooper
• Description:
  Jilly Cooper's ritzy, riotous new novel takes the lid off the international art world - where successful young artists strut around like rock stars, where artful and crafty dealers indulge in every kind of gallery-pokery, and where the more beautiful the painting, the greater the backstabbing. No picture ever came more beautiful than Raphael's Pandora. Discovered by a dashing young lieutenant, Raymond Belvedon, in a Normandy Chateau in 1944, she had cast her spell over the Belvedon family - all artists and dealers - for fifty years. Hanging in a turret of their lovely Cotswold house, Pandora witnessed Raymond's tempestuous wife Galena both entertaining a string of lovers and giving birth to her four children. These children grow up into chilly, manipulative Jupiter, who runs the family gallery, Alizarin the high-handed loner, Jonathan, who blithely beds every beauty he paints, and superbrat Sienna, shortlisted for the Turner Prize. Pandora, meanwhile, has been locked away in her turret, increasing her colossal value by the second. Then an exquisite stranger rolls up, claiming to be a long-lost daughter of the family and setting the three Belvedon brothers at one another's throats. Accompanying her is Zach, her fatally glamorous American Jewish boyfriend, whose very different agenda includes an unhealthy interest in the Raphael. During a firework party, the painting is stolen. The hunt to retrieve it takes the reader on a thrilling journey to Vienna, Geneva, Paris, New York and London. After a nail-biting court case and a record-smashing Old Masters sale at Sotheby's, passionate love triumphs and Pandora is restored to her rightful home. From the Publisher Love, high living, intrigue and a missing painting in the sparkling new novel from the nation’s best-loved writer. From the Back Cover No picture ever came more beautiful than Raphael's Pandora. Discovered by a dashing young lieutenant, Raymond Belvedon, in a Normandy Chateau in 1944, she had cast her spell over his family - all artists and dealers - for fifty years. Hanging in a turret of their lovely Cotswold house, Pandora witnessed Raymond's tempestuous wife Galena both entertaining a string of lovers, and giving birth to her four children: Jupiter, Alizarin, Jonathan and superbrat Sienna. Then an exquisite stranger rolls up, claiming to be a long-lost daughter of the family, setting the three Belvedon brothers at each other's throats. Accompanying her is her fatally glamorous boyfriend, whose very different agenda includes an unhealthy interest in the Raphael. During a fireworks party, the painting is stolen. The hunt to retrieve it takes the reader on a thrilling journey to Vienna, Geneva, Paris, New York and London. After a nail-biting court case and a record-smashing Old Masters sale at Sotheby's, passionate love triumphs and Pandora is restored to her rightful home. About the Author Jilly Cooper is a well-known journalist, writer and media superstar, and is the author of many number one bestselling novels, including Riders, Rivals, Polo, The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous, Appassionata, Score!, Pandora and Wicked.Jilly and her husband live in Gloucestershire. She was appointed OBE for services to literature in the 2004 Queen's Birthday Honours List. Excerpted from Pandora by Jilly Cooper. Copyright © 2002. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1961Raymond 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. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

• Pages: 752
• Format: Paperback
• Genre: General
• Rating: Not yet rated

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