The Bulgari Connection (11 page)

‘Good Lord,' said Grace, ‘I'm sure there's less of a gap between me and Walter than there is between you and my ex-husband.'

Grace was folding laundry in the corner of the room, busy with domestic tasks, as if Doris's presence was neither here nor there, though indeed her injured heart was seething. As for Walter, he'd put on his Rembrandt hat, which kept his ears warm, and was checking through his squeezed, squashed, metallic tubes of paint. Label printing had flaked away beneath the assault of turpentine and hard moist fingers: he could only tell the colours by peering at the congealed ring of paint beneath the tubes' lopsided lids. He wished he had chosen to be a poet not a painter: life seemed suddenly altogether too difficult.

‘It's normal for a man to marry someone younger than he is. It's not for a woman.'

‘Then it should be,' said Grace, briskly. ‘Walter, do just get on with Doris's head. The sooner it's done the sooner she'll be out of here.'

Walter took up his place at the easel. Doris let a length of very long, slim leg appear beneath the blackout cloth. Walter tried not to notice. Doris flashed him a glorious smile. ‘I shall charge you for the frame, of course,' said Grace. ‘That Lady Juliet painting is technically mine, though everyone seems to have forgotten about that. I paid for it.' ‘You have such a mercenary nature,' said Doris Dubois. ‘Driving poor Barley into the ground the way you did, screwing him for everything he had. You paid, but it was Barley's money. You live off it too, Walter, I daresay. She's bought you.' ‘A pity about the body,' was all Grace said, folding away. ‘Everyone will think you're a size fourteen.' Doris, focused as she was on the necklace, had forgotten about that. ‘Walter will paint along edges, won't you, and make me narrower,' she said. For every problem Doris had a solution. Her mind worked fast. Walter murmured his assent.

‘It's going to be a birthday present for Barley,' said Doris.

‘Sometime in December.'

‘I bet you don't know what day,' said Grace.

‘Bet you do,' said Doris, nastily. ‘You poor thing. If you're living your reject life in this dump with Walter I think Barley should be told. It may well affect your alimony.'

‘Tell you what,' said Walter, suddenly. ‘I could work just as well from a Polaroid: I'd be able to concentrate.'

‘Suits me,' said Doris. ‘I'm not like Grace, I don't have all the time in the world.'

So Walter took a Polaroid of Doris, and said the painting would be finished within the week. Grace felt quite jealous and uneasy when Walter took the photograph: it seemed too much like foreplay for comfort, as if Walter were extracting some part of Doris's essence for his own diversion, with her consent. To paint Doris Dubois could be seen as Walter's work and was therefore just about excusable – how many crimes seem justified not just by money but by sheer professionalism:
that's only business,
says the Mafia victim as he dies:
the hit man's only doing his job.
Of the public executioner on Death Row,
a real professional, born to it!
But for Walter to take a photograph, to watch Doris appearing out of nothing, first a blur, then clearly defined on a square of greasy paper, seemed too intimate by half. Grace knew she was being ridiculous but you felt what you felt.

After Doris Dubois had gone, trit-trotting on her smart heels down the studio stairs, Grace cried and cried as if she were a child, great pity-me sobs, she felt so polluted and robbed.

‘You were magnificent, Grace, magnificent!' soothed Walter. Grace noticed a single white hair in his eyebrows, found her tweezers and pulled it out and soon they were happy again.

‘Barley darling,' said Doris Dubois to her husband, ‘Do you think I'm a nice person?'

Barley considered this question with care. They lay in a big bed with an elaborate headboard and pale brocade curtains in Claridges Hotel, in Brook Street, Mayfair, and waited for breakfast. Outside, London roared by. The bathroom was marble and its fixtures heavy and pale: water gushed from the taps, and there was no danger of the ceiling falling in. They could relax.

‘It's not the first word I'd use to describe you,' he said. ‘But what's the problem? A woman doesn't have to be nice to be loved by a man. Look at Grace, I'm sure she's the nicest woman in the world but I love you, not her.' ‘I'd quite like people to like me,' she said. ‘All the same.'

‘Your public love you,' he said. ‘Look at your ratings.'

But he knew what she meant. Barley only made enemies when he had to – otherwise he worked on the principle that you were helpful to the elevator boy on the way up because you were very likely to meet him on the way down. But it was in Doris's nature to cut swathes through people's ordinary desire to be co-operative and do their best, however imperfect that best might be. She had made an enemy of Ross the chauffeur by giving him a diet sheet, and saying if he didn't lose weight Barley was going to have to fire him. The incompetence of Belgradia Builders, as they called themselves, was exacerbated by her reporting one of their number to the Immigration Authorities. The daily cleaner Grace and he had employed for fifteen years, Helen, had finally walked out, partly out of loyalty to Grace but mostly because Doris refused to pay her in cash, and then when Helen went to Barley for help, reporting her to Inland Revenue for tax fraud.

He'd liked Helen. She was stout and plain and stubborn which was why Doris couldn't put up with her. When he told her he was marrying Doris she'd shrugged and said, ‘Don't worry about me, I don't care who lies in the bed, I just get to make it.' The teams of professional cleaners Doris now brought in to service Wild Oats sucked the soul out of the new carpets with their industrial vacuum machines, and wore the new paintwork away by the energy of their efforts, cost ten times what Helen had done, and for all he knew were as sharp of tongue as Helen but he did not understand the many languages they spoke. And why were the carpets down, in any case, while Belgradia Builders were still trampling in and out, which so far as he could see would be forever? They spent more time on their cellphones talking to Amnesty International than they did actually building anything. He would never have employed them himself, but Doris wouldn't be told.

Here all was peace and quiet. Claridges seemed better able to control its workforce than Doris did hers, as even she was beginning to admit. As Barley had predicted, there was now trouble with the Insurance Company, to the tune of some £250,000, funds better spent getting back on his feet should the Opera Complex scheme collapse. In the small print of the policy was a clause requiring that major renovation be undertaken only by approved builders recognised by the Guild of Master Builders, and of course the firm chosen by Doris – on the grounds that they'd presented the lowest tender had never so much as heard of this body.

Doris's assertion that what was being done to Wild Oats could in no way be described as ‘major' – ‘major' surely meant stripping a house to its foundations, which everyone should know Doris had in her time done – met with raised eyebrows and stony faces. Not even Barley's cheery greetings and bonhomie could move them, in their august and impassive buildings in Holborn.

‘You know how it's the Insurance Companies are funding so much of this anti-social, élitist research into longevity,' said Doris to her friend the Producer at work. ‘How about a hard-hitting documentary on the subject? We could get the law changed.' But even this did not serve to make them change their mind. Barley Salt might be a power in the land of development, and in his time had been to tea both at the Palace and Downing Street, and Doris Dubois might be an opinion-former
par excellence,
but Insurance kept its own counsel and had its own rules, which applied to influential and celebrity clients just as it did to anyone else.

But here in Claridges these bothers could be forgotten. There were white fluffy towels in abundance, traditional water-colours on the wall, complimentary champagne, exotic fruit in the glass bowl with a gold-embossed card from the management bidding them welcome. After a night's wild sex and the happy sleep that follows it, they now lay back naked side by side against plump down pillows, lace-trimmed, he so male and broad and hairy, she so soft and narrow and pliant, and talked about this and that. Really, thought Doris, it's okay here. I could live the simple life.

They would not go back to Wild Oats until Belgradia Builders were finished, she told Barley: in the meantime Doris would leave everything to the architect she had now brought in to supervise them, or rather his Project Manager, who would just have to get on without her help.

But after this exchange, after the waitress had removed the orange juice and fat-free yoghurt and decaff on which they had breakfasted in bed, after the flow of maids and minibar attendants had died away, after the
Do Not Disturb
notice had been put on the door handle and they could turn their attention to making love again, delight failed them. For some reason Barley's body failed to respond to his mind's inclinations: no matter how Doris coaxed and teased his languid member, it remained uninterested: Doris, a fever of expectation herself, remained unsatisfied, indeed, actually un-entered. Their day had to begin, for once, without the intoxication of sex.

She did not show her disappointment to Barley. She knew there were troubles looming in his business life, to do with Lady Juliet, Lord Random and Billyboy Justice, and that they were worse than he'd imagined. She'd had a rather worrying conversation in the Green Room after the show with the new Minister for Culture – whose department's ever-changing department brief now included Sports, Scientific Research and Waste Disposal – to the effect that the Lottery was pulling out of Arts and putting its funds into New Science and technology. She'd said nothing to Barley. Sexual malfunction was often to do with ‘business worries'. It would probably be all right in the end. But he was rather older than her; and it was beginning to show.

Barley showered and dressed, and Ross the chauffeur called up from the Lobby. Barley had a meeting at eleven with the building contractors in relation to the Opera Noughtie project. There was a certain amount of Russian money – which these days meant Mafia money – already invested. He suspected it was because they had translated ‘Noughtie' as ‘Naughty' and believed they were into some kind of new State Brothel project: as it was, it was meant to be a celebration of the first ten years of the
New Millennial Century in the Arts.
The joke gave him no cause to be amused. Things were tricky enough with the Russians anyway: if the project fell through there would be real trouble and Ross would have to brush up his security driving and even get a licence for a Kalashnikov or something similar, at least when they travelled abroad.

Walter and Grace lay wrapped in each other's arms in bed in the studio. The cotton sheets were clean and crisply ironed. They had been on the ‘extra dry' cycle but, as Walter pointed out: ‘You watered them with your tears.' Doris's portrait was covered with a cloth so her face could not be seen to be watching them. Walter had made her really ugly as he painted, to make Grace laugh.

‘She'll be all right on the day,' he'd said. ‘We can't afford to upset the client no matter how much we want to.'

‘You don't need the money,' Grace had argued. ‘Everything I have is yours. Just call her and say you've changed your mind.' But he had said he couldn't live off Grace, his pride would not allow it, he had to get his career going, £5000 was not to be sneezed at. And so on. Besides, the problem intrigued him. Put Doris's head on Lady Juliet's body? What sort of chimera would you produce: would a simple narrowing of the body create the illusion of slimness, or a grotesquerie? The oddness of it was strangely erotic but he didn't mention that to Grace.

The doorbell rang. Grace stiffened at once.

‘Stay there,' said Walter, pulling on his kimono and going to the door. ‘Whoever it is I'll send them away.' But when he opened the door it was to his mother and father. It was not possible to send them away, and besides, he was pleased to see them. His mother was wearing her best coat, and the uncomfortably shiny shoes she wore to town. Peter wore a jacket that he'd bought in the Seventies, and was still perfectly good; though it had seemed muted at the time, it now seemed was quite bright. But his friendly, short-sighted eyes and beakish nose were traditional enough, and his hair was sparse, as befitted a man of nearly seventy. Walter had come along late in the marriage.

‘Why Walter,' said his mother. ‘Is that you? Yes, of course it is.

Are you all right?'

‘Why shouldn't I be?' asked Walter.

‘You look so old. Peter, doesn't Walter look old all of a sudden? Well, not exactly old, just not a little boy any more. Mature. Very handsome.'

‘Hair's beginning to recede,' said Peter. ‘Takes after me, poor fellow – more's the pity!'

In the bed, Grace pulled the sheet up to her chin. Her clothes were in the bathroom but there was no way she could get there without being seen: and she needed to clean her teeth, but you could not get to the washbasin, because the rescued ship's figurehead was in the way, so you had to use the bath. ‘Mother, father –' Walter began.

‘Sorry to turn up so early,' said Peter, ‘But your mother insisted on coming up by coach to save money, and they don't keep social hours.'

Prue had gone to the easel and was looking at the portrait, with its deformed if so far sketchy version of Doris's head where Juliet's should be.

‘How very peculiar,' she said. ‘Is this the kind of thing you're selling to New York? I bet that piece of jewellery costs a lot. I must say it is quite well done, Walter, that bit at any rate. I always thought you had more talent for words than pictures, but Dorothy – you remember the friend I met in hospital when I was having you – rang me last night and said she'd read a snippet in the
Mail
about you being the rage in America. The oddest people read the
Mail
.'