The Bulgari Connection (6 page)

They mean to humiliate me with their happiness, was what she thought: Barley so smooth and well-suited, his teeth newly remade: Doris in the fabulous flame-coloured dress and the Bulgari necklace with the burnished coins set in heavy gold.

Only two years back and Barley had offered to buy Gracie, his then wife, just such a gift for her birthday, but she'd refused, having rung the shop to find out how much it cost. He'd taken it as a snub: he felt her resistance to what he was, obdurate in her preference of the stony past they had once shared over the soft comfort of the uneasy present. Somewhere she was still Grace McNab, not Gracie Salt, she was her parents' daughter. Dr McNab the Harley Street surgeon was well enough off, but what was left at lunch would be eaten for dinner:
waste not want not
filled the air as yesterday's cold sprouts were fried for breakfast. The faint smell of antiseptic from the surgery below, the bleakness of the high, cold waiting rooms with their polished furniture and harsh red Persian rugs, their neat copies of
Country Life;
the stoicism of dull patients, their pain and dereliction of the body so bravely borne – these things she took to be ordinary; the base from which all other conditions departed.

Forever she tried to re-create her childhood home: forever Barley tried to thwart her. Barley was in flight from the poverty of his; she longed to return to the careful respectability of hers. So much Dr Jamie Doom had taught her. It was her role to thwart Barley's wishes. She tried not to but she couldn't help it. The more Barley craved luxury and extravagance the more uneasy she felt; the more, to save his very soul, she would insist on cooking for his smart dinner guests herself and not get in expensive caterers – what was an Aga for, but to bake her own cheese straws for parties – murmuring that surely everyone appreciated home cooked food? And he'd grow pink and desperate in his new Jermyn Street finery, and she'd be in a dress from Marks and Sparks, Marble Arch. Of course he'd got fed up with her.

She should have done so much so differently, but how could she? She was the person she was. Other women seemed able to turn themselves into something they had not been born to – Doris Dubois had started life as Doris Zoac, and had honed herself into new shape – but that skill was beyond Grace. She had once turned from Gracie McNab to Grace Salt, and now she was turning back perforce and that was bad enough.

The money that should have been Carmichael's was going round Doris's neck and on a painting that was pleasant enough, but if the painter had only been paid £300 a week for painting it, as he'd assured her, why should it fetch so much? It didn't make sense.

‘Up we go!' enthused the auctioneer whose face everyone knew but whose name no-one could remember. ‘Any advance on eighteen thousand?'

‘Twenty,' Grace said, before she could stop herself, and then felt insecure because all faces turned towards her and so she blushed.

Walter Wells was gratified. Grace Salt wanted to buy his portrait of Lady Juliet, and for such a sum! It occurred to him that she must have money to spare and that was no bad thing because he was certainly short of it.

Lady Juliet had jumped up and down with pleasure when Barley Salt came in and said ‘Now we'll see some real action. But if they meant to come why didn't they say so, and I wouldn't have asked Grace. How embarrassing!' Apparently the telly diva Doris Dubois – for Walter recognised her: her programme which had started with a book bias was increasingly casting its eye over the visual arts – was his new wife in place of Grace. He could see the attraction – he would quite like to paint her, he thought: the definitions of her outline were interestingly hard, sharp and clear: most people tended towards such fuzziness of being it was hard to tell where the edges were. His attention drifted towards Barley Salt, who had come into the bidding as well; he and the wonderfully louche South African, Billyboy Justice, were fighting it out.

‘Twenty thousand,' said Grace. Walter turned to look at her; blushing, he saw, from nerves?

‘How disgusting,' said Doris Dubois, rather loud and clear. ‘That must be a hot flush. Can't she even take hormones?'

The bidding stopped, as if having startled itself out of existence.

The hammer fell.

‘Sold to Mrs Salt,' said the actor-auctioneer, who had dined at the Manor House once or twice in the old days, and clicked that he recognised his one-time hostess. He remembered her with affection. She would serve prawn cocktails followed with steak-and-kidney pie when you were grimly resigned to another dose of sun-dried tomatoes, rocket salad, and seared tuna.

‘I'm Mrs Salt,' said Doris Dubois.

‘My name is Grace McNab,' said Grace, firmly.

‘I'm sorry,' said the actor-auctioneer, confused, but everyone makes mistakes, and it wasn't as if he was being paid for this.

‘Sold to the lady in the red velvet dress.'

Walter Wells heard Barley Salt say to Grace, ‘You can't afford it, Gracie. You'll have to touch your capital. Let me do it.' He heard Grace say, ‘No. If I have to live my own life not ours I'll live it my way. Go away.' Walter knew then he would have a hard time wresting her emotions away from Barley and towards himself; but he also knew he meant to do it. ‘Please can we go now, Barley,' said Doris Dubois. ‘I really can't waste any more time.'

‘Why, Doris,' said Grace – McNab or Salt? – sweetly, ‘the price tag is still on your dress.' And so it was, saw Walter, a much bar-coded card hanging out the almost-collar at the back of the orange silk. Doris was a rose unfurled and bright, not blown, like Grace: the kind his mother sometimes bought at Woolworth's. ‘To add colour,' she'd say. ‘Cheap but cheerful – they've had such a struggle against odds to live, they sometimes do it very well.'

Doris Dubois turned to Grace and said ‘Bitch!' rather loudly.

‘Oh come on now,' hissed Barley, ‘Don't let's have a scene. Can't we all settle down and be friends?'

‘Are you joking?' asked Doris Dubois.

‘Are you mad?' asked Grace McNab.

Lady Juliet trotted up decorously with some nail scissors, and said reproachfully: ‘Poor Grace was only trying to be helpful.' And in full view of all the room – plus a camera crew which had just happened to stop by for the
London Nite
programme – she snipped off the tag, while Doris stood furious and tried to laugh it off, saying: ‘Six hundred pounds! The Little Children, Everywhere could do with that – as worn by Doris Dubois.' ‘She's not stripping off in public,' said Barley, ‘but it's okay by me. Sell away!'

So Doris Dubois went upstairs spitting and fuming to change into jeans and an
LC,E
T-shirt someone conjured up, and put her dress up for auction. In one way she was pleased: it was what Hollywood stars did, and suggested that the magic of her fame was being properly acknowledged. But she didn't want to lose the dress her Bulgari necklace had been chosen to match; nor did she like the way Barley had leapt to his ex-wife's defence; least of all did she like how Lady Juliet had strong-armed her – albeit in the interests of Little Children, Everywhere, whose needs must be respected, certainly in public. Not that Doris liked children, anywhere, one bit. But there were too many witnesses for her to be able to defy Lady Juliet safely. She would have her revenge.

Once I had bought the painting I didn't know what to do with it. I wrote a cheque for it, and filled out the stub, and felt quite proud of myself. For years I'd left that kind of thing to Barley. The painting was taller than me and twice as wide. The frame was gilded, and so heavy I wasn't going to be able to lift it and tuck the thing under my arm. With Lady Juliet's smile glimmering above it, the Bulgari necklace shimmered with ruby light, and the image seemed a miraculous object, like a Byzantine icon that was about to bring so much benefit to everyone. The money would go to Little Children, Everywhere and here I was, in possession of the concentrated essence of so much time and skill: the very soul of Lady Juliet distilled onto canvas. Walter Wells was also very good at the texture of fabric and the glittery depth of precious stones. I liked it that he was. More, I had answered Doris Dubois back. I might yet do more of it. And Barley had shown concern for me. I was elated.

Which was how Doris Dubois ended up selling her new dress at a charity auction and it was on TV that night, with her wearing T-shirt and jeans and frankly looking a trifle odd in the ornate company she was keeping. She would have put me in prison for the rest of my life if she could have. The dress fetched £3250, having gone up in jumps of £250 and nice Lady Juliet was very grateful, and so no doubt were the Little Children, Everywhere. But Doris was not grateful to me at all. These victories were small and silly but they were victories. And nothing as to what was to come.

‘Can I help you with that?' asked the young painter, startling me. His eyes were so bright and attentive. Once, I remembered, many men had looked at me like that. But after you have been married for a while they stop, and you forget. Perhaps a certain kind of woman catches the essence of man in marriage: the female body picks up the smell and texture of the partner if only as a consequence of so much physical contact, so much acceptance and absorption of what are tactfully called body fluids. In these days of safe sex I daresay it doesn't happen so much. But here I was, all that reversed, stopped, my own separate self emerging, seventeen-year-old Dorothy McNab again: no longer Dorothy Salt. I had slept and now I had woken, to find three decades and more had passed, and here was a young man gazing at me as if I were an object of delight.

‘Well yes you can help,' I said. ‘I was going to take it home in a black cab, but I don't know whether it will fit inside, or how I will hang it on the wall once I'm home.'

‘Oh it will fit,' he said. ‘It will fit very well. We could take it back to my place and hang it on my wall.'

‘It would seem more appropriate to hang it on mine,' I said, ‘since I have paid so much for it. One is expected to get the value, surely?'

‘Move in with me,' he said, ‘and let us get the value together. We can turn Lady Juliet's face to the wall, we can stack her amongst the landscapes, when we want our privacy, which I imagine will be often.'

We went back to his place together in his van, he hung Lady Juliet on the wall and I stayed to get the value of it. And I had thought he was gay.

‘It is too bad,' said Doris Dubois, ‘that your bitch of an ex-wife should own a painting which is mine by rights.' Their sheets were pink satin – as chosen by Paul the designer – but Doris didn't think they were truly satisfactory. Sex in satin sheets was fine in principle but crap in practice. They were cool when you first laid your head on them but too soon got hot and clammy, and worse, slippery, putting her in mind of the cod-liver oil her mother Marjorie Zoac had made her daughter take every morning.

‘Now there's nothing for it, darling – unless you get me the real necklace from that other bitch, Lady Juliet.'

‘It's not as we had any use for the painting,' said Barley. ‘As you pointed out yourself, it wouldn't have fitted in here at all. My ex-wife should have had her portrait done when I asked her, seven years ago, back in the old days, when a wall was a wall and had a picture rail.'

‘More fool you bidding for it, then.' She was in a bad mood. Barley seldom got the brunt of it – she reserved this for the camera crew and occasionally some literary guest or other on her book show. She had once reduced a young writer to tears on live TV by describing her sensitive novel as a load of self-pitying crap. It had done wonders for sales, as she had pointed out to the hundreds who wrote and phoned and e-mailed – e-mail could be a terrible burden: so much instant communication – in protest. And somebody had to keep the flame of literary criticism alive.

‘I liked the look of that young painter,' said Doris, more to feel the sudden tautness of Barley's body beside her than because she did.

‘I suppose you fancied him,' said Barley, hurt to the quick. A pang to the heart that felt almost physical. Grace had never hurt him like this. But that only proved his relationship with Grace had never been truly intense; more like a cosy kind of friendship. Love hurt, everyone knew.

Doris had remarked that Grace really looked her age all of a sudden, in that dreadful old dress, and it was true enough. He remembered her wearing that particular outfit once to a rather important dinner party; something to do with Carmichael, when Carmichael was small and used to embarrass everyone by coming down to family dinner in a dress. If he'd been allowed to punish Carmichael there and then he might have knocked some of the cissy nonsense out of him, but the therapists had been brought in and that was the end of that. He could not forgive Grace for the way she had colluded, for what she had in effect done to his son: stripped him of his manhood. He couldn't say so to Doris, of course: any mention of Carmichael was met by sulks and stares, almost worse than when he referred to Grace. She wanted him to have started his life the day he met her. He remembered those dinners; Grace would never bring in the professionals, and insisted on doing the cooking herself, and hovering over tables of smart and useful people, sweaty and busy and nervous. Doris knew how to make the most of these occasions.

What a struggle it had all been: how wonderful it was to be shot of her, to have Wild Oats made what it ought to be, could always have been, were it not for Grace's obstructionist ways. They were a power couple, he and Doris, and their background should reflect it, and Doris was making sure that it would. He shuddered sometimes at the bills and was sure the contractors Doris used were ripping him off, but she assured him that £200,000 for a carpet for the hall and stairs was nothing these days. And that was just the carpets. The trouble was, his mind was on a bigger game. All things depended at the moment on a make or break deal in Edinburgh: a new opera house development with a major art gallery attached – the Opera Noughtie it was to be called, a major celebration of the first ten years of the Government's
Century in the Arts
project – and a worldwide-web tie-in. It was falling nicely into his lap, and being with Doris certainly helped. The deal was now a ninety-nine per cent certainty and would bring him in almost a billion, no worries. If it didn't, if the one per cent won through, he'd be skint – he'd need a lot more than a couple of hundred thousand to get him straight again. But he was on a lucky streak: meeting Doris, falling in love, actually marrying her, having her in his bed nightly and by rights – how could anything go better? When the house was finished, the drain on the purse would be over.