FAY WELDON

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The Bulgari Connection

Contents

Cover

Title Page

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Also by Fay Weldon

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

Doris Dubois is twenty-three years younger than I am. She is slimmer than I am, and more clever. She has a degree in economics, and hosts a TV arts programme. She lives in a big house with a swimming pool at the end of a country lane. It used to be mine. She has servants and a metal security gate which glides open when her little Mercedes draws near. I tried to kill her once, but failed.

When Doris Dubois comes into a room all heads turn: she has a sunny disposition and perfect teeth. She smiles a lot and most people find themselves returning the smile. If I did not hate her I expect I would quite like her. She is, after all, the nation’s sweetheart. My husband loves her, and can see no fault in her. He buys her jewels.

The swimming pool is covered, warmed, and flanked by marble tiles and can be used summer and winter. Trees and shrubs in containers have been placed all around the pool area. In photographs – and the press come often to see how Doris Dubois lives – the pool seems to exist in a mountain grotto.

The water has to be cleaned of leaves more often than any pool of mine ever did. But who’s counting cost?

Doris Dubois swims in her pool every morning, and twice a week my ex-husband Barley dives in to swim beside her. I have had them watched by detectives. After their swim servants come and offer warmed white towels into which they snuggle with little cries of joy. I have heard these cries on tape, as well as other more important, more profound, less social cries, those noises men and women make when they abandon rationality and throw in their lot with nature. ‘Cris de jouissance‘, the French call them. Défense d’émettre des cris de jouissance, I read once on a bedroom wall in a French hotel when Barley and I were in our heyday, and went on our humble holidays so happily together. In the days when we thought love would last forever, when we were poor, when joy was on the agenda.

Défense d’émettre des cris de jouissance. They had a hope!

Barley has aged better than I have. I smoked and drank and lay in the sun during the years of our happiness, on this Riviera and that, and my skin has dried out dreadfully and the doctor will not let me take what he calls artificial hormones. I get them through the Internet but do not tell either my doctor or my psychoanalyst this. The former would warn me against them and the latter would tell me to find my inner self before attending to the outer. Sometimes I worry about the dosage I take, but not often. I have other things to worry about.

2

‘It’s too bad,’ said Doris to Barley as they lay beside one another in a tumbled pile of white cotton and lace bedclothes, in a vast bed whose elegant top and tail had been designed, even though not made, by the great Giacometti himself, ‘that that murderess should still be using your name.’

‘Murderess might be too strong,’ said Barley amiably, ‘Murderous, was how the Judge described her.’

‘The difference is only marginal,’ said Doris. ‘The fact that I am still alive is due to me and not to her. My foot still hurts. I think you should get your lawyers on to it. It’s absurd that after divorce women should be allowed to keep their husband’s name. They should revert to the one they had before they married: they should cut their losses and start over. Otherwise the mistakes of one’s youth – like marriage to the wrong person – can hang around to haunt you forever. I speak for her sake, as well as my own, and indeed yours. While she calls herself Salt she is bound to attract headlines.’

‘It seems a little hard to take away Gracie’s name,’ said Barley. ‘I was the only claim to fame she ever had. She was a schoolgirl extract I met her: a schoolgirl she remained, at heart. A man such as myself needs a little sophistication in his partner.’ ‘I hate it when you call her Gracie,’ said Doris. ‘I want you only ever to refer to her as your ex-wife.’

Grace Salt had started life as Dorothy Grace McNab, but Barley had preferred Grace to Dorothy, Dorothy reminding him of Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, so Grace she had become.

Doris had not started life as Doris Dubois but as Doris Zoac, right down there at the end of the alphabet where no-one looks except the taxman, and had changed it by deed poll the better to further her media ambitions. She had never got round to telling Barley this, and the longer she put it off the harder it got to say.

‘It seems a little hard to take my ex-wife’s name away,’ said Barley, obediently. He, who exercised power over so many, took particular pleasure in being bossed around by Doris. They both giggled a little, from the sheer naughtiness of it all, of being happy.

Doris Dubois wore her jewellery to bed, for Barley. He loved that. He loved not just the sight of it, white gold and pavé diamonds, cold metal intricately, beautifully worked, lain heavily against the cool, moist flesh of wrist and throat, but he loved the feel of it. Last night as his hand had strayed over her breasts, their nipples peaked in reassuring response, and up to feel the tenderness of her mouth, his fingers had encountered the smooth, hard edge of metal, and his whole body had been startled into instant response. Sometimes Barley was mildly worried by the people who said to him, vulgarly, ‘Oh well, what does age matter, there’s always Viagra when the newness wears off,’ but eighteen months on there was no sign of it doing so. Doris kept Barley young: and the gifts he gave her were by the very nature of their giving returned – not by way of bribe or payment, but as tokens of simple adoration. Barley was fifty-eight years old, and Doris was thirty-two.

3

I must face the truth about Doris Dubois. She reflects fame and status on my husband, as he does on her, and he cannot resist it. What chance have I? She is the darling of the media: now they are an item Barley has his picture in Hello! and Harper’s & Queen, and a fine handsome couple they make. She with her bosom hanging out of Versace and her throat so white and elegant, ringed with bright jewels: he with his thick grey hair, broad shoulders and strong industrial jaw. When Barley was with me he never rose above The Developers’ and Builders’ Bulletin, although once he did make the cover. But he is ambitious: it was not enough for him: he can’t stay still. It was Hello! or bust.

Barley is one of those well-built men with graven features who rise to positions of great power: his jaw has grown squarer through the years. Even his hair has stayed thick as it greys. He is a master of men, and it shows. If the world is ever to see the cloning of humans, these are the pair that should be chosen to make it a better place. I said as much to my psychotherapist, Dr Jamie Doom, the other day and he congratulated me on my insight.

Twelve months after our parting, six months after our divorce, I have stopped trying to convince myself and others that in losing Barley I have lost nothing of value. I no longer describe him to others, after the vulgar manner of so many deserted spouses, as selfish, bullying, mean, unreasonable, hopelessly neurotic, even insane. He is none of these things. Barley, like Doris, is kind, good and perceptive, clever and handsome, and capable of great love. It’s just that he gives it to her, not me.

4

‘The fact is that your ex-wife does not deserve your name,’ said Doris after breakfast. Once she got an idea into her head it tended to stay there. ‘She is violent and aggressive and full of hate and spite.’

They ate on the terrace, in the early sun. Doris had to be at the studio by ten, and Barley at a meeting of the Confederation of British Industry likewise. Doris’s Philippine maid Maria served decaff and fruit, calories carefully weighed and counted by Doris’s nutritionist. Barley’s chauffeur Ross would have a flask of real coffee and a bacon sandwich ready in the back of the car when he turned up to collect Barley.

‘I hear you,’ said Barley, whose lawyer had told him it would look better in the divorce courts if he could claim to have seen a counsellor. The law these days favoured those who put in an appearance of wanting to save their marriages, and the suggestion of a basic incompatibility with Grace would be more helpful to his case than the simple wanting to go off with Doris Dubois, a younger woman. As ever, Barley hadturned time otherwise wasted to good account, and was now adept at the language of understanding and compassion. ‘Best to let it out. And I feel for your distress. But you did emerge from the incident more or less undamaged.’

And indeed, Doris Dubois was the least damaged creature he had ever seen, let alone taken to bed: long lean tanned limbs; centred by the kind of full, well nippled bosom most skinny women achieve only after implants, but for Doris a blessing of birth – her breasts still retaining the warm consoling texture of human flesh. Her mouth curved sweetly: she had wide blue eyes into which Barley could stare without embarrassment. Doris had developed the media art of paying attention to something else altogether while looking and smiling and nodding; he could hold her eye without actually holding it, as it were, and he found that liberating. Intense love can so often have its own embarrassments. She was widely informed: he liked that. He had spent too much of his life with Gracie, who never read a novel and whose idea of a conversation was ‘yes, dear’, and ‘what did you say, dear?’ and ‘where were you last night?’, who lay passively and compliantly on her back during sex. He had forgotten what the life of the mind was like. Most women, he had noticed, whose looks assure them of acceptance and approval from infancy, neglected their intelligence and sensitivities, as did Grace – but not so Doris: Doris could hold her own at any dinner party in the land. She was perhaps a little humourless, but like a Persian rug of great quality, there must be some flaw in the design, or else God will be offended.

‘All that aside,’ observed Doris Dubois, ‘– and not that I want to marry you, marriage being such an old-fashioned institution, and I would always rather be known as Doris Dubois, rather than Doris Salt, I couldn’t bear to be so near the end of the alphabet – nevertheless, if I were to be your legal married wife, and not just your partner, I would not want there to be another Mrs Salt around.’

Barley Salt felt his heart contract with joy. He had done the best he could with the cards dealt to him at birth – but there were still dinner tables at which he felt inadequate, at which he felt people laughed at him, for the rude, crude fellow he had been born. If the conversation turned to opera, or literature, or art, he felt at a loss. To be actually married to Doris Dubois, so at ease in all these areas of life, would be triumph indeed. And she, for all her disclaimers, had brought the matter up, not he.

5

What is this? A letter through the post from Barley’s solicitors? He wants to deny me my name? He wants to rob me of my very self? I must no longer be Grace Salt? Extra alimony offered – £500 a week – if I revert to my maiden name? (At least he bribes, he doesn’t threaten.) I must hurl myself back to my unmarried state and be seventeen again and that long lost creature Grace McNab? I can’t remember who she was. How can this be, what have I done, am I so worthless that he can’t endure me to have so much as a past that’s linked with his? I must wink out of existence altogether? Well, I can understand it. Look at me! Described as murderous by the Judge, labelled a would-be murderer: Barley must feel he is entitled to protect himself and her. Of course he wishes to obliterate me. What am I but an hysterical woman who once performed a senseless and gratuitous act of violence – I quote the Judge – and deserve no better. A man may seek the authenticity of his feelings, as our one-time marriage counsellor described my husband’s love for Doris Dubois, but a woman must not.

‘Judge Rubs Salt into Grace’s Wounds,’ said the headlines.

‘Lovesick Drama of Fat-Cat Spouse,’ and so on. ‘TV Culture Queen Stole My Man, alleges Salt Wife’. A hundred faces crowding in on me with phallic lenses and popping bulbs as they hurried me, distraught and disgraced, blanket over my head, to the police cells. By the time I emerged, greyer and fatter by a year and a quarter, the media had lost interest; only a couple of film crews, some local journalists, and a woman’s group wanting a donation were waiting. The authorities kindly let me out the back entrance, so that even my lawyer missed me, and I had to make my own way home. Or what I now was to call home: Tavington Court, a great block of apartments in Victorian red brick behind the British Museum, where sad divorcées hide, and little old ladies grateful for the protection of the resident porter, and widows living their leftover lives in genteel loneliness. It takes up a whole street and those who have grandchildren to visit are lucky. I am not so lucky. My son Carmichael is not likely to oblige.

All my conversations at the time were with lawyers and accountants and all they seemed to want me to think about was the prospect of age and infirmity and death in the future. I was victorious, but only to live my leftover life alone. And I didn’t suppose Carmichael wanted me out in Sydney – ‘to be near my son’ – embarrassing him.

The media have lost interest in me altogether now. They are happy for Barley and Doris’s happiness. They were married last week. The wedding was in Hello!, and I hear put the circulation up no end. My plight becomes yesterday’s fish and chip wrappings. As Doris would be the first to point out, how that dates me! Fish and chips are not eaten from newsprint now, the EC would never allow it, but if sold at all, out of recyclable polyethylene cartons. I don’t like eating alone in restaurants, sitting there with my book, feeling the pity of others. It is quite astonishing how few people I know. My married life revolved around Barley: the people we knew, knew us as a couple. I was just the tag-along. They feel sorry for me now and when the kind people, as I think of them, do ask me round, it is to lunch not dinner and we normally eat in the kitchen. It is better than nothing.

I have lost the art of conversation. Once I was quite good at it, but after years of living with Barley who always waxed so noisy and indignant if ever I said anything more than yes dear, no dear, I learned the prudence of silence, and in the end he took me for a fool. And there certainly wasn’t much snappy dialogue in prison and for awhile after I came out I was struck quite dumb, and had to search for words with which to express my thoughts at all.

Doris Dubois is anything but dumb. I do not watch her show: it is too painful for me: but sometimes flicking through the channels I forget and come across her, fronting her highly successful Artsworld Extra. It’s on twice a week. Nine o’clock peak time Thursdays. Late night repeat, Mondays. Her perfect figure, the bouncy, short cropped hair, her startling smile, the ease with which she handles ideas, the evident intelligence, the breadth of information, the flying sound bites – the worst you can say about her is that she looks like a Captain of Hockey on speed. And why, unless you have special reason, should you say the worst of her? Even I have trouble doing so.

Doris Dubois now has Barley’s name – though I notice she doesn’t even bother to use it – as well as his love, his time, his attention and his money. I have the couple followed from time to time by a detective, one Harry Bountiful. What asplendid name! I chose him because of it, flicking through the Yellow Pages. Doris and Barley will meet up in Aspreys in Bond Street, then drift over to Gucci’s where Barley will perhaps buy a pair of loafers, the better to walk through St James’s Park and feed the ducks. Then perhaps they will call in at Apsley House, address No.1, London, built for the Duke of Wellington, the one who defeated Napoleon. There they will see the fine equestrian painting of the Duke by Goya. If they look hard they will see the faint shadow of a tricolor hat beginning to show through the surface paint. The portrait was originally of ‘King’ Joseph Bonaparte of Spain, Napoleon’s brother. But the Duke and his victorious troops were at the gates of Madrid, the usurper had fled, so Goya prudently painted a new head on the body, and sold it to the Duke. An artist has to live. Why waste a perfectly good horse?

Or perhaps Barley and Doris, hand in hand, will drift off to Bulgari in Sloane Street, to stare at some ruby imbedded steel circlet for her slim arm, wondering whether they will or whether they won’t, but mostly that they will. Because she deserves it. Because she is her. They will stroll along to South Ken., and the Victoria and Albert Museum to study, say, the Sèvres dinner service (1848) that was once Queen Victoria’s own, and Doris will explain its fineness to him, and the curator will even let them handle the settings. They are an important couple, and she has friends in high cultural places.

It is thanks to his new wife that Barley can now judge the quality even of the plates set before him, tell china from pottery, and understand how the two can never merge. He knows now where camp begins and crassness stops. Doris is Barley’s living Fine Arts programme. They are in love; perhaps they give more time and attention to each other than either can spare. Her ratings drop just a little: his dividends falter. Because meanwhile, as Harry Bountiful puts it, the real world goes on. But this couple, newly discovered to one another, is blessed. Strokes of good fortune come their way. Last week Doris got five numbers in the lottery and won twelve hundred pounds. Barley’s latest office block won an architectural prize. Perhaps Doris was close to one of the judges.

I tried to explain to the Court that it was not that I hated Doris, just that I wanted Barley to realise the intensity of my distress and desperation.

‘You really thought,’ enquired Judge Tobias Longue, ‘that if you ran down your husband’s mistress in a car park he would be sorry for you? Then you have lived a long time yet don’t know men very well. Good Lord, woman, he will have every excuse now for leaving you. You played into his hands.’ Tobias Longue was one of those lawyers who write thrillers, and had only recently been promoted to the bench. He had an eye and an ear for drama. He was both on my side, and not. There had been no witnesses. It was Doris’s word against mine. At the very worst, I told the Court, Doris had wrenched her ankle as she leapt out of the way of my Jaguar: but see how now she limped into court, pale and grave and prattling forgiveness.

‘She’s not in her right mind,’ Doris told Judge Tobias Longue. ‘I caught a glimpse of her face through the windscreen, her teeth bared, her mad eyes staring, just as the wheel went over my foot, and I felt this terrible pain and passed out. My fear as I fell was that she’d reverse back over me and crush me to death beneath that heavy car. She needs treatment, not punishment. She is unbalanced to the point of paranoia, an obsessive-compulsive. She suffers from pathological jealousy. I first met her husband when he appeared on my cultural review show: we are involved as colleagues in the setting up of a Cable TV company. But that’s all there is to it: good heavens, Barley Salt is a quarter of a century older than I am, and I regard him as a father.’

She spoke eloquently and persuasively, as was her trade. I stumbled through my few words. Of course she was believed.

Later she said to the Press, ‘Poor Mrs Salt. I’m afraid she belongs to the past, one of those prurient women who assume that if a man and a woman are alone in a room together, something sexual’s bound to happen.’ The Press forgot conveniently, when writing up the wedding, that at the time of the trial Barley and Doris vehemently denied any romantic involvement. Of course there was, starting from the very beginning in the Green Room, after everyone else had gone home, after she’d had him on her show, talking about the necessity of sponsorship of the arts by big business. I had watched that interview as a proud wife should, and seen the way she looked at him, the way his body inclined towards hers. He didn’t come home until early morning, and when he got into bed he smelt of TV studios, static electricity, sex and something else sickly and evil I couldn’t identify.

The prosecution asked for five years, I got three and served only fifteen months. In the event the Judge was less vindictive than anyone else around. At least he acknowledged the provocation. He said in his summing up it was a silly attempt with a car outside a supermarket and that Doris had jumped easily enough out of the way. And it’s true, she has perfect knees, being only thirty-three years old. At fifty-five, I already have one that is arthritic, though I didn’t let it stand in my way when I put the accelerator down. The pain in the heart is always worse than the one in the body.

It has taken me a year with Dr Jamie Doom the TV psychotherapist – he does take a few patients privately – to be able to face the facts of the matter. Doris Dubois is a superior human being to myself in every way and no sane man would not prefer her to me, in bed or out of it, as wife, partner or mistress. I face myself in the mirror, I look at my fading eyes and know that they have seen too much, and that there is no brightening them. What ages us is experience: there can be no forgetfulness.

‘But aren’t you angry?’ asks Dr Jamie Doom, ‘You must try to find your anger.’ But I can’t.

Perhaps God will reward me for having come to terms, as Dr Doom puts it, with my distress. I am sure no-one else will. This evening I am going to a party given by a pair of the kind ones, Lady Juliet Random and her husband Sir Ronald. It’s a charity auction in aid of ‘Lost Children Somewhere’. I am invited not just out of kindness but because I might be able to give a hundred pounds or so to Lady Juliet’s cause. Nothing compared to the thousands others give – I am only fifth or sixth division wealth now that I live on alimony – but no doubt still worth the champagne and canapés which I’ll consume. At least I don’t have to worry about meeting Doris and Barley at Sir Ronald’s: they move in more elevated artistic and political circles now. The parties they go to are attended by Arts Ministers, Leisure Gurus, Museum Moguls, Dotcom-Millionaires, Monarchs of the BBC and so forth. I tell you what, every now and then I could take Barley by surprise and make him laugh. I think Doris can do everything for Barley but that. She is too intent on pleasuring herself and him to have time for much mirth. But I daresay with age even my laughter, which once Barley loved, will turn into a witch’s cackle.

6

‘Who is the woman sitting in the corner?’ young Walter Wells asked Lady Juliet.

He had been studying her. She sat at rest as though posing for a portrait. He thought she looked lovely, whoever she was. She was not as young as she had been, it was true, but this gave her looks a kind of lush and wistful melancholy: he had been much taken in his childhood by images of the blown rose, of battered scarlet velvet petals, tempest tossed. Walter Wells thought perhaps he had been born a poet almost as much as an artist. Though now, at twenty-nine, he earned a living painting portraits, he sometimes felt that his heart was in language rather than in the image. But a man, however multi-talented, can’t do everything and the image paid better than words in the new century. So many languages it was only polite to learn, from Urdu to Serbo-Croat, that everyone had settled for symbols. A flat hand to stop you crossing the road was better than the word STOP, a green running man to show you the way out preferable to the word EXIT. So he had been practical and gone to art college, only to find the artist was as likely to live in a garret as the poet, unless he was very lucky.

It was in pursuit of luck that he was here at this charity auction today, where he knew no-one and felt altogether out of his generation. He it was who had painted the portrait of Lady Juliet Random, which was any minute now to be auctioned for the sake of Little Children, Everywhere, Lady Juliet’s favourite charity. He liked Lady Juliet and wanted to oblige her, she was good looking and relaxed and easy to paint and had only good things to say about everyone. She was quite voluptuous, and Walter Wells wished more of his sitters were like her. A good curve painted well, but in his experience if you blessed your sitters with a roundness of line on the canvas they only accused you of making them look fat.

‘Who can you mean?’ asked Lady Juliet. ‘The woman in the crushed velvet dress? Good Lord, that kind of fabric went out thirty years ago. But I’m glad to see she’s making an effort. It’s poor Grace Salt, the one who tried to mow down Doris Dubois in her Jaguar in a supermarket car park. You must have heard of her? No?’

‘No.’

‘Oh, you artists! Snug in your garrets, safe from the world.’ Walter’s portrait of Lady Juliet was to be the centrepiece of the auction. He had actually painted two, one which Lady Juliet would keep, the other a copy for the auction, painted for free, his gift in kind to Little Children, Everywhere. Lady Juliet had twisted his arm and melted his heart, as she was so good at doing, her soft mouth imploring, her eyes beseeching: he had done the extra work and not complained, though she had not even offered to pay for paint or canvas. People did not realise that these things cost money. The Randoms were pleased with the painting: they would hang it in pride of place on the wall of their library in their Eaton Square house, one of those stoic well-built cream-painted places with stolid pillars and steps and an air of infinite dullness, but at least he would know where it was. The copy would go to an unknown home. He did not like that.

‘The Salt scandal was in all the papers,’ said Lady Juliet, taking his arm, as she did at every opportunity. She was looking magnificent and charming both: such an art to be so grand and yet loveable, and thus to inspire in others more admiration than envy. She had a smooth, untroubled childish face, with small even features and a curved mouth given to laughter, and if she had nothing nice to say she kept silent, which was more than most in her circle did. She was dressed tonight as she had been for the portrait, in simple slinky white and her plentiful probably blonde hair twisted on top of her head. Clasped round her neck, falling in roundels of bright colour against her firm, creamy skin was a Bulgari necklace, steel and gold set with cabochon emeralds, rubies, sapphires and brilliant cut diamonds, made in the sixties, and insured for £275,000, a sum Walter had heard mentioned as he worked.

Sir Ronald had charged more than once into the garden room, clouding the good North light with cigar smoke as was his habit, and doubted the wisdom of the jewels not being in the bank, couldn’t Walter work from a photograph? But Lady Juliet had said authenticity was so important, lights should not be hidden in bushels, jewels could not be forever in vaults or they lost their magic, what was the point of having these things if the world didn’t know about it, and so on. What was he afraid of? That Walter would run off with them? Slip the matching earrings into his pocket? Walter was too poetic a soul to run off with anything. He was an artist, everyone knew artists were above material things.

Which they obviously believed in their naivety, since Walter was being paid only £1800 to do the portrait – well, actually to do the two – and the Randoms assumed that was generous, and that they were doing him a kindness, employing and trusting a comparative unknown in the first place, introducing him to those levels of society where artists got more like £18,000 for a single fashionable portrait, than £1800 for a pair, which worked out at £300 a week for six weeks work. He would rather paint landscapes when it came to it: the weather kept changing and the light with it, but at least the landscape sat still.

‘So you want to be introduced to the woman in the corner in the crushed velvet dress,’ said Lady Juliet, ever happy to oblige. The jewels in her necklace glittered and glanced where they caught the light: the thing seemed magically, beautifully alive; he hoped he had got the intensity of it on the canvas: paint and brush could do only so much. But on the whole he was pleased. The copy, he thought, had been minimally better than the original: he had really got his hand in on the precious stones second time round, but he was the only one who would notice that. Only one in a hundred ever really noticed anything.

‘You only have ten minutes before the auction begins,’ said Lady Juliet. ‘I’m going to want you to go on stage and talk to them a little about art, and be altogether as languid and beautiful as you can, not that you have to try. They’ll think you’re photogenic and have a future and prices will triple. But do by all means talk to Grace first. I need her in a good mood. Barley gave her a good settlement, at least three million, and probably more, none of us like talking large figures in the press or they take us for fat cats, and I do so hate being called fat, even though I know I am. Little Children, Everywhere need women like Grace. The wretched of the earth could do with some of everyone’s alimony. This is the growth area, the future lies in this world of multiple divorces, multiple remarriages. Not just money to charity on death, but on divorce, too, an intrinsic part of any settlement. We all live far too well, with our champagne and our canapés, don’t you think? But what’s to be done? The world is what it is. All we can do is change our little corner of it.’

And so Walter Wells was introduced to Grace Salt at the Randoms’ charity do. There was the same difference between their ages as there was between Doris and Barley. Twenty-six years separated Grace and Walter, twenty-six years separated Doris and Barley.

Walter saw a woman with sad, dark, glowing eyes and a gentle, surprised expression, as if she was seeing the world for the first time. It was the same look a baby has, when it’s about twelve months old, and has learned that in order to walk and run you have to develop an indifference to sharp corners. He thought she was perhaps about forty: older than he was at any rate but who was counting? Her dress was in crushed deep crimson velvet, a texture and colour he longed to get on canvas. She wore it buttoned up to the neck and its long sleeves ended in sedate cuffs, as if she needed what small protection from the world even fabric could bring her. She wore no jewellery, other than small pearl stud earrings, on the kind of clips which bite the ear.

Of course he had thought of roses: his mother, a clergyman’s wife, had grown a wonderfully scented rose of that colour in the rectory garden where he had spent so much of his childhood. His mother had told him that its name was Flower of Jerusalem: a rather ordinary pink as a virginal bud, but deepening into crimson with every week of its flowering, until the petals were all but black, falling away, splaying, from the precious stameny centre they had once guarded so tightly.

Grace Salt sat alone, listening to the string quartet which played beneath a kind of pink plaster portico set above a blue transparent dais, lighted from beneath, which gave the players a ghostly glow. A firm called Fund Raisers Fun had provided it, along with little gold chairs, champagne and canapés, and it sat oddly indeed amongst the staid chintz, dull antiques and solid worth of the rest of the house.

He sat next to her on the green shot silk sofa. She forgot his name a second after Lady Juliet had introduced them, and gone, but politely asked him about himself. He said he was the painter of the portrait which was to be the centrepiece of the auction. She said she liked it very much: he had brought out Lady Juliet’s kindness. ‘Lady Juliet doesn’t want to look just kind,’ said Walter. ‘She’d rather be seen as significant. I tried to make her look severe, but alas, it’s the art of the portrait painter to bring out the soul of the sitter, and it is what it is.’ He had developed this line only an hour ago for the benefit of the handful of gossip columnists who’d blessed the evening with their presence. Walter had thought it was perhaps rather clichéd but they’d gone for it.

‘I know Lady Juliet is kind,’ said Grace, ‘because she asks me round to lunch quite often. Not kind enough to ask me to dinner, of course. But then unpartnered women, if they have no particular talent, or style, are so much a waste of an expensive place setting they quite offend the sumptuary laws.’

Walter’s father the rector had often spoken of the sumptuary laws when Walter had wanted a bicycle or new trainers, which other village children could not afford. Conspicuous consumption had always been seen as an offence to God and Man: in the Middle Ages actual laws were enforced. Spend too much too loosely and you got punished. Walter had not heard mention of the sumptuary laws since his father’s death, and though they had irritated him most profoundly at the time, they had now entered into the nostalgic narrative which composed the memory of his father. He felt she would understand his heart.

He said he was sure she could find a partner if she wanted one. A woman as beautiful as she. ‘You are so gallant,’ she said, ‘and quite absurd. You remind me of my son Carmichael.’ But she cheered up a little, and smiled at him with a kind of hazy half smile he found enchanting, and as if she now actually saw him. He liked her voice, it was croaky and deep, as if she had spent a lifetime drinking and smoking, though now she refused the waiter’s offer of champagne and took mineral water instead.

He thought he would like to see her face on the pillow next to him when he woke up in the morning. Those he so often saw were brutal in their confidence and self-esteem, the smooth texture of their skin unmarked by weariness or doubt. They bored him. He felt as old as her, or older, betrayed by a body which demonstrated all the vigour of youth, ill-matched to a soul which already felt jaded and world weary. And she would not ask him questions as they did, the ones who moved into his cold attic studio, lured by his looks and his easels and the romance of squeezed oil paints on stained wooden tables, and the unmade brass bed; but who within weeks would be jealous of his attention to canvas and not to them, and implying that painting was not a proper job. Off they’d go, to their smart well-appointed offices in publishing, or PR, or advertising or wherever, for a return on their labour far greater than any he was ever likely to achieve. And one evening they would simply not come home, but within a couple of days a brother, or some gay friend, or a father would turn up to take away their possessions.

That the studio had a good North light, that crackling cold for some reason increased intensity of colour, had apparently not impressed them: the tenderness of his lovemaking could not make up for his reluctance to turn up the central heating. It had happened enough times – well, twice in as many months, within the last year – to make him feel this was to be the pattern of life and there was nothing much to be done about it. Yet he hated living alone. Art made a frugal bed companion. An older woman would surely be more sensitive as to how he lived, why he lived. It was true the skin round her jaw sagged a little, and curved lines ran between her cheeks and the corners of her mouth, and the division between lip and the rest was a trifle blurred, but she was the proper shape for a woman. He wanted to paint her. He wanted to be in her presence. He wanted her in his bed. Good Lord, he thought, this is love at first sight. He felt the need for a cigarette. He asked, nervously, if she minded. She had once, she said, been practically a chain smoker; but she had given it up in prison. It was so terrible in there it hadn’t seemed to matter if it was a few degrees more terrible still. He should go ahead. She didn’t mind. ‘Prison! What for …’ Walter was startled. ‘Attempted murder,’ she said.

Lady Juliet swooped and carried Walter Wells off, like a cat grabbing its kitten by the scruff of the neck and running off with it to safety. The auction was about to begin.

‘What exactly do you want me to say?’ he asked.

‘How art benefits humanity, all that kind of thing. Don’t worry about it. How you look is more important than what you say. No-one will be listening, just watching. Sometimes no-one bids at all, and the auctioneer has to take bids off the wall. That’s so embarrassing. But with you and me both here we should get a good price.’

Walter Wells, who was not accustomed to public speaking, demanded at least some prompting about the way in which art could serve humanity, and on the way to the plinth Lady Juliet told him to mention both the morality of aesthetics, and how suitable it was that the haves of the luxury trades – in which fine art was included – should do their bit for the have-nots. And perhaps a mention as to how she, Lady Juliet, had given her precious time freely, as the sitter.

‘Wish me good luck,’ he’d said to Grace as he went. But she hadn’t replied, she was staring, along with everyone else, at a couple who had just come into the room. Even the string quartet faltered mid phrase. All eyes turned, as if to royalty, towards a good-looking older man in a very expensive suit – Walter had painted that particular Chairman of the Board type many a time, sitting behind some great burr-oak desk, or leaning up against a pillar at Company headquarters, dull, dull, dull – and a younger woman in a flame-coloured dress with a strong nose, a hard mouth, and a band of solid powerful gold around her neck; but who moved with a kind of focused energy, as if all the wind of the present, whirling around, had sought her out as its centre. Always hard to get on canvas, this kind of thing, this sense of the present made apparent, if only because those few whom fate so selected were seldom in repose. They never sat still.

7

Doris Dubois and Barley Salt found themselves at a loose end after their Caesar salad and sparkling water lunch at the Ivy. Barley had once been in the habit of ordering the fried fish and the thick chips and mushy peas but Doris had patted his tummy affectionately and said slenderness was youth, and a man as young at heart as he was should have a figure to go with it. It was remarkable how quickly rich and fatty foods began to seem gross; and the waist to return. He felt restless, though, as if serenity was situated somewhere in the fatty tissues, and only sexual pleasures with Doris seemed able to quell the feeling that something, somewhere, was not altogether right. It wasn’t that he missed Grace: her fitful dry wit had come to seem like an evasion of real feeling; he felt reassured by Doris’s earnestness and her appreciation of the higher things in life: if he missed Grace it was in the same way a young man gone off to college will miss his mother: he knows he must grow out of her, while occasionally hankering for the comforts of home.

But home, the mansion in which he and Grace had so casually lived, and had together lost all but passing interest in sex, was now, with Doris installed, a turmoil of builders, designers and security experts, too crowded by day for sex, and there was no point in going there until after seven, by which time most would have disappeared, but Doris had to be back in town by eight because she was going out live at ten. They decided to stay in town: Doris consulted her digital notepad and discovered an invitation to a charity auction at Lady Juliet’s that evening.

‘Lady Juliet!’ said Barley. ‘What a pleasant woman. My ex-wife and I used to be on quite good terms with the Randoms. I haven’t seen much of them since the divorce. He’s in rare metal recovery. Buys up de-commissioned nuclear weapons and so on and extracts the titanium.’

‘Preserving the natural wealth of the planet!’ said Doris.

‘Way to go!’

‘I’m not sure that that’s his prime motive,’ said Barley, brutally.

‘Quite a lot of Russians get exposed to quite a lot of radioactivity on the way.’

‘Darling,’ said Doris, ‘you shouldn’t be so cynical. It isn’t nice. Shall we trot along? There’s a party at the British Library Manuscripts Room, but they’re so nervous there in case you spill champagne on the Book of Kells, or something, it’s no fun. A charity auction in a private house might be quite entertaining, and it’s always fascinating to see how other people live.’ Doris wanted to be on good terms with the Randoms. If Grace could do it, so could she.

‘They’re quite dull, really,’ said Barley, cautiously. ‘They don’t have many books in the house, but she’s such a nice woman.’

Doris did not have anything to wear, so they went to South Molton Street by cab – Barley’s chauffeur Ross had a sick mother – and were dropped off at the end of South Molton Street where they strolled along to Browns, and Barley watched while Doris bought a kind of silk slip dress by a Japanese designer, in yellow and orange and gold. Tall, slinky, reserved girls attended her – ladies in waiting – and he stood and watched with his hands in his pockets. Grace never in a million years would have wasted time and money in this way; he loved it, and said as much to Doris.

‘Yes but then darling you must remember I am a perfect size ten and your ex-wife is a very imperfect size fourteen, probably sixteen, and women like that don’t much go for shopping.’ Doris would have been a size eight but the BBC insisted that she not be too thin. Programme presenters had to send the right message to the nation. Otherwise she would have had the plain salad not the Caesar salad, with its croutons and plentiful dressing, for lunch. The dress cost £600, and Barley paid. But Doris was selling her flat in Shepherd’s Bush and insisted that she would pay the money back, in time. Being spoiled was wicked, but she liked her independence.

Afterwards they took a walk through Grosvenor Square, watching as some Japanese children chased pigeons till their mother called them away, then strolled on to Bond Street and the peaches and cream décor of Bulgari, where even more charming girls, and men too, showed them jewellery under strong lights, and they decided on a sleek modern piece, a necklace, stripes of white and yellow gold, but encasing three ancient coins, the mount following the irregular contours of the thin worn bronze, which somehow went perfectly with the Japanese dress, though out of such different cultures, and Barley paid £18,000 for it, and they took it away with them. Doris fell silent at this point about paying him back. But what was money for but to be spent? Barley had done very well when the Canary Wharf complex had been constructed. Taken a risk everyone (including Grace) said he shouldn’t, and it had paid off, and these days money just made money. It mounted and mounted. Doris was like him, a risk taker. A stroll to Heywood Hill bookshop where Doris was on first name terms with the knowledgeable and courteous gentleman who ran it, to receive their recommendations for her Out of the Past clip, and then it was time for Lady Random’s. They made every minute of the time they had: it was in both their natures – Grace tended to sit about dreamily doing nothing – and Barley did feel a little tired when they got to the stolid cream house with pillars. Caesar salad is not much to sustain a man accustomed all his life to fried fish and chips and peas, but he supposed the canapés at the Randoms’ would be plentiful and nourishing: not everything can be low fat.

‘My God,’ said Doris, after she had changed and made her entrance; all expensive simplicity. ‘I do believe that’s your ex-wife over there. How on earth does she get into a do like this?’ Lady Random in her niceness had let Doris change in her, Lady Random’s dressing room, where Doris had much admired various bottles of scent, but kept quiet about the décor, which favoured Fauve, and looked to her rather too like the TV backdrop from which she presented her book reviews on the programme. Literature was considered a worthy subject, but the set design was calculated to liven things up as much as possible. The two women had a brief conversation before Lady Random tactfully left Doris alone to change, in which Lady Random said to Doris that she and Barley must come to dinner some time, and Doris had invited them down to Wild Oats (as she had re-named Barley’s, and formerly Grace’s manor house home in the country) for the August weekend, if they were not to be in the Bahamas. But there was something about Lady Random’s attitude which annoyed Doris: Doris had been definite about dates: Lady Random had not. Doris felt she was snubbed and was not accustomed to it. ‘Barley,’ she said now, ‘get your ex-wife out of this room or I can’t stay in it. Fetch the police or something. She’s a murderess.’

‘Darling,’ said Barley, waving across the room at Grace, ‘she is murderous and a would be murderer, Judge Tobias agreed with you there, but she has done her time and I don’t imagine she is going to attack you right here and now.’ ‘Hell hath no fury,’ said Doris, but subsided for the time being, because a young man of extraordinary beauty was now standing in front of a portrait he had apparently painted. It was of Lady Juliet Random and it made her appear kind, beautiful, intelligent and serene, if in a slightly Rubensesque way. This was how Doris would have preferred to look: sometimes legs can be too long, faces too narrow, hair cuts too Princess-Di-ish for comfort. Too TV all round, in fact. The world might currently reckon Doris the hottest thing since microwaved jam, what with her new British-made millionaire husband, but Doris herself had her doubts. You could do so much with style and pizzazz and move so fast no-one had time to perceive the flaws, but Lady Juliet could still look good when calm and reposed. And she would never go out of fashion as Doris could, and Doris knew it. One day the world would sigh when they saw Doris on TV and say not her again. Doris must lay up treasure and self-confidence against that day.

Round Lady Juliet Random’s firm and flawless painted neck was a rare, colourful Bulgari piece, a necklace in red gold and steel, bright porcelain and deep ruby, and Doris knew she must have it. She and Barley had seen one like it, but not quite like it, in the Bulgari store that afternoon: and decided against it, and chosen instead the one she now wore round her neck, a piece not so vivid, perhaps, more muted, more somehow now, for what were Barley and Doris but now. It had been a fraction of the price, moreover, £18,000 not £275,000, and Doris sincerely hoped that this factor had not entered Barley’s judgement. She had been talking about paying him back, of course, but he surely realised this was not really on the cards. She was a working girl, he was a wealthy man, and he loved her and must prove it. There was nothing she hated more than a mean man. She loved the necklace she had on, with its ancient Roman coins and its contemporary Roman flair, of course she did, it was just that now she wanted Lady Juliet’s as well.

In fact she could not remember wanting anything so much since the time twenty years ago when her father Andrew the jobbing builder from Yugoslavia had bought her mother Marjorie the waitress a diamond ring from Ratners, to celebrate their wedding anniversary. That had been on Doris Zoac’s thirteenth birthday. Her father had married her mother just in time for the birth: in fact it had been as Marjorie said ‘I will’ that she had gone into labour. Or so the family story went. So Doris felt very much part of the marriage, and had somehow craved a diamond ring as well, but had been given only a dressing-table in horrid orange plastic to celebrate; in effect shut out, sent back to her room. We all have our problems.

The auction had started. She pulled Barley’s arm. ‘Barley,’ she said, ‘I want that necklace. The one in the painting.’ He felt a tremor of annoyance, much as he loved her. Want, want, want! He remembered what his mother used to say to him when he was a child, and had wanted a pair of shoes which didn’t let water, or a piece of bread before he went to school. ‘Then want must be your master.’

Grace at least had understood poverty: she had never experienced it herself, of course: she was the daughter, the eldest of three, of a Harley Street doctor of good family. She had never gone hungry, never known physical hardship, the pinch of cold or the wet shoes that must be worn because there are no others. Her parents had been good and kind, if unimaginative. They had liked Barley well enough when she brought him home, and he had given them an opportunity to congratulate themselves on their lack of snobbishness. They had admired his looks, his drive and his energy, but he was not quite what they had wanted in a husband for Grace. They were vague enough about exactly what it was that they did want – ‘all we want is for you to be happy‘ – but they had expected the source of her happiness to be someone with a title or at least a good accent. They had brought their daughters up to have social consciences: now perhaps they saw the consequences of their actions. Children have a way of listening to what their parents say and taking it at face value, not noticing the subtext. Spout egalitarian principle and the young take it to heart. When not at their boarding schools the girls would vie with one another as to who in the holidays could work with the most deprived groups in society. Battered wives, disadvantaged children, dysfunctional estate families. All three had picked up boyfriends in the back streets, but only Grace had stayed the course.

‘What these families need,’ Barley would say during the days of their courtship, in the backs of cars and down alleyways, ‘is not some middle-class girl telling them what’s what, it’s a sodding cheque for ten thousand pounds straight up.’

Be that as it may, he could see that Grace had still ended up understanding more than Doris ever would about the tribulations life can bring. Doris believed everyone was like her, only with less talent and less money. She felt pity for no-one, except perhaps for size twelve girls, who could not get down to a size ten. She felt lust, and ambition, and happiness, and possibly love, but not charity. Yet Barley loved her and admired her for what she was: he loved the flattery of her attention, the way celebrity rubbed off like gold dust on all around. It was absorbing, a freedom from responsibility, it was no less than he deserved, and the only penalty had been hurting Grace, if Grace cared for him at all. In the long term he had done her a favour. She would be okay again within the year, everyone had told him so. She would get going, and rediscover herself and start a new life. She would flourish the way everyone said women did after their long-term husbands had gone. Marriage was not for life. Grace by her manner and demeanour had demonstrated that she meant to go early and gracefully into old age and he did not and that was that. Now she sat alone on the other side of the room with her strange familiar half smile, and seemed not to see him, and did not respond when he waved.

He had been with her to this very room some twenty times, he supposed, over the years: he had cleaved unto her, as it suggested in the marriage ceremony, but who could take all that stuff seriously any more? And now she was a stranger to him, a wave across a crowded room, and that, after all, was what he had set out to achieve. Grace seldom asked for anything: if he gave her money she would only send it to Carmichael in Australia, who was better off fighting his own way through the world, if fight was in him, which he doubted. But Carmichael had to be given a chance.

And then Grace had gone and spoiled what he had planned as an amicable divorce and tried to run down Doris Dubois, the great Doris Dubois, in a car park. He had gone to visit her in prison, which had caused a dreadful row with Doris, and then Grace had actually refused to see him.

As for Doris, he had spent just about twenty thousand pounds on her during the course of the day and now she was escalating her expectations tenfold. He had once set up a mistress in a nice little flat: it had been the same thing. Poppy had droned on and on about the central heating not working and asking for a better fridge and so forth, and he had got fed up with that; but this! Not £129 for a gas bill: you could put three noughts on the end of that, and double it.

‘What do you expect me to do?’ asked Barley. ‘Go up to Lady Juliet and offer to buy it? Write her a cheque here and now and take it from her neck and put it round yours?’ ‘If you truly loved me that’s exactly what you would do,’ said Doris, but she had the grace to giggle. ‘At the very least you could put some pressure on that dreadful little fat man she’s married to, to make her do it. He’s some sort of business associate of yours, isn’t he? He won’t want to piss you off, not the great Barley Salt.’

‘Tell you what,’ said Barley, who wanted to concentrate on the auction – bidding had started at £8000, and was moving upwards by £200 increases. The young artist was looking startled and gratified and was smiling his excitement over at Grace, for some reason. ‘I’ll buy you the painting instead.’

And he joined in the bidding.

Doris jumped up and down with irritation.

‘But I don’t want the painting,’ she said. ‘I want a real Bulgari necklace with a bit of colour in it. Why would I want to hang a painting of another woman in my house? She’s at least a size fourteen, it would be bad luck. Besides, I’ve just gone to all this expense and trouble with Wild Oats for your sake, and it’s just not the right place for paintings. Yes: half sheep in aspic. No: stuff in a frame flat on a wall. That poor sweet young artist, no wonder no-one takes him seriously.’

Hang it all, thought Barley, she’d gone to the expense? I’ve gone to the expense, and if I want a painting I’ll bloody well have one, and hang it on the wall – and carried right on bidding.

‘Twelve thousand five hundred,’ offered Barley.

‘A man with excellent taste,’ quipped the auctioneer. He was a well-known actor who did a lot for charity, and his voice boomed goodwill and bonhomie.

‘Thirteen thousand,’ said a man whom Barley recognised as a colleague of Sir Ronald’s, Billyboy Justice from South Africa. Now why? Charity? Perhaps. More likely to be brown-nosing Sir Ronald, and thinking this was the way to do it, through his wife. Probably after a government contract of some kind. Sir Ronald had close links with Downing Street. Justice had an interest in lewisite, a fast acting version of mustard gas, now in active de-commission worldwide, at least theoretically, and leaving out Baghdad, as usual. Thanks to new advances in the technology applicable to the disposal of chemical weapons, high quality pure arsenic could now be obtained from the treated gas, and sold at a good profit to the gas manufacturers worldwide. It was a good new business if you had the nerve for it, and Sir Ronald was fast moving out of nuclear recycling into chemical, as the great powers agreed to dispose of at least some of their arsenals, to make way, no doubt, for new.

‘Thirteen thousand five hundred,’ said Barley.

Oh well, thought Doris, if he wants to be such an idiot, let him. She could always put Lady Juliet in her Shepherd’s Bush flat, which she had more or less decided not to sell after all. She needed a good pied-à-terre, look at what had happened today, too far to go back home, and not all that cosy when you got there; and still with the stuffy if non-corporeal presence of Barley’s ex-wife around – it somehow seemed to have got into the wooden floors of Wild Oats. She should have had them all taken up, and not drawn back at the last moment, fearful of yet more dust and disarray. How could the living hang around haunting the way Grace did? ‘This place is mine by order of precedence.’ Like the Maoris claiming New Zealand and the Aboriginals Australia and the Palestinians, Israel. ‘We were here first.’

It was nonsense of course, yet oddly persuasive. Doris herself had a Mother Courage turn of mind. The land belongs to those who till it. The children belong to those who look after them. The house belongs to those who love it. Yet what had Grace ever done for Wild Oats except let the mice take over and the Agas rust, and not touch the plumbing since the day she moved in, back in eighty something.

Perhaps Barley would have her portrait painted: if the young painter – Walter Wells – came to the flat she could just about afford the time, find a window or two in her busy diary, at least it was only round the corner from work. Just to sit and be, and be appreciated. The more she thought about it, the better a deal keeping her flat seemed. Lady Juliet could be moved to the bathroom, her own portrait could take pride of place in the living room, which heaven knows had seemed attractive enough until Barley came along and dangled Wild Oats under her nose. And she needed a night or so alone from time to time. Sex with Barley was quite exhausting: it wasn’t exactly the price you had to pay with a new man, because in all fairness she enjoyed it too, but it was tiring if you were trying to run an arts programme as well.

‘Fourteen thousand,’ said Sir Ronald’s colleague, Billyboy Justice

‘Good Lord,’ came Lady Juliet’s laughing, charming voice, ‘fancy being worth so much! You’re all such flatterers.’ ‘I don’t know what’s in it for Barley Salt,’ said Sir Ronald sotto voce to his wife, ‘but if that peasant Justice thinks I’m doing him any favours because he’s buying you for his bedroom wall he’s very mistaken.’ Sir Ronald loved Lady Juliet. Everybody seemed to love Lady Juliet, that was the trouble. She was so used to adoration she couldn’t tell a come-on from a chat. He had named a range of landmines after her, in those bad old savage days when there was more money in making arms than in taking the things to bits.

‘Fifteen thousand,’ said Barley.

‘You’re so sweet to me, Barley,’ said Doris, thinking of other things.

‘Sixteen thousand,’ said Billyboy. He had started life as a chemist. His face had been burned in an explosion when he had been about to show a Defence Minister around his plant in Utah. The ecologists had got their knickers in a twist about saran emissions; the de-commissioning work itself was a simple enough process: you just cut up the weapons in a masher and then stewed them in water at forty degrees and most of the chemicals decomposed, or would were it not for the conventional propellants and explosives intrinsic to the weapons. It was these which could all too easily recombine in hot water and simply and old-fashionedly go off. Fortunately none of the Minister’s party had been injured – and the contract had gone through. But for its renewal it needed a firm lobbying hand in parliament, which Sir Ronald could provide.

‘Seventeen thousand,’ said a squat man who had come to stand next to Billyboy. A Russian accent.

Barley turned to Lady Juliet.

‘Who’s the commissar?’ he asked.

‘Billyboy brought him along. Makarov, I think his name is. He looks a bit fierce, the way these men from Moscow do, but he’s a real charmer. But then I love anyone who puts the bidding up.’

‘Eighteen,’ called out Barley.

‘That’s the way to go!’ cried the auctioneer. ‘Any advance on eighteen?’

‘Twenty,’ said a voice from the back and everyone turned to look at Grace, who blushed.

8

When Walter Wells went up on the little stage to say a few words about the role of art in eradicating world poverty he looked absurdly young and pretty. It was hard for anyone to take him seriously. He looked neither sufficiently corrupt for a young artist nor world weary enough for an old. He was badly in need of gravitas, thought Grace, but no doubt the passage of time would both bless and curse him with it. If youth but knew, if age but could …

Grace had assumed that Walter Wells was gay. He reminded her of her son Carmichael, now in Sydney whence he had fled from Barley. Lustrous black curls, narrow and Greek-God-ish face, lissom build, soft voice, intolerably handsome, dressed in shades and textures of black. Polo-necked black silk sweater, a waistcoat in thick, black cotton, black denim jeans; Carmichael had once told Grace all black hues were different, there was no such thing as true black; and she had been noticing this phenomenon ever since. In Walter Wells’ case, unlike Carmichael’s, as she was to discover, the layered effect was achieved with neither effort nor design by simply putting all garments through the washing machine at whatever temperature the dial happened to be pointing at. But then Walter was an artist, and Carmichael was a dress designer.

Grace’s psychotherapist, Dr Jamie Doom, had told her that she should ‘let Carmichael go’. That he had his own life to live, and had chosen wisely in going to Australia to do it, far away from his domineering father. He was not convinced by Grace’s assertion that Carmichael – christened John Carmichael Salt, he preferred to use the middle name – had assiduously developed first his stammer and then his gayness in order to annoy Barley. Grace, he said, was being unrealistic in her disappointment – that Carmichael hadn’t flown back to intervene and take his mother’s side when Doris first appeared over the domestic horizon. She was unreasonable to hope he’d be in Court to give moral support – ‘not even there to watch me being sent down!’ No doubt, said Dr Jamie Doom, from the sound of it Carmichael had his own pressing emotional problems in Sydney: perhaps, when it came to his parents, he wished a plague on both their houses. As it were.

Sometimes she suspected Dr Doom was in Barley’s pay.

As for the Manor House, where she and Barley had spent so many good years, Jamie Doom could not seem to understand why the thought of Doris Dubois changing its name to Wild Oats and tearing it to bits so upset her. ‘You told me you didn’t like the place,’ he said. ‘Too big, too gloomy and too ostentatious.’

A hundred acres and peacocks which kept them awake at night, built by an 1860 version of Barley, who had made his money in railways, and tried to design it himself, all dark panelling and echoey plumbing. They’d moved in when Carmichael was six: when Barley made his first million. She’d wanted to stay where she was, with Carmichael at the local school, friends with other parents, a small garden to record the passage of the seasons, the familiar and the safe, down-market according to her parents’ looks when they came to visit, but fine by Grace. But how Barley wanted to take the look off their faces. If he thought he’d do it by moving the family into the Manor House he was mistaken. ‘A little ostentatious, darling,’ they had said. ‘But if you like it …’

And then there’d been the matter of the two Rolls-Royces. Grace had begged Barley not to, but nothing would stop him. In the year Carmichael was born both her sisters married: Emily to an estate manager in Yorkshire, Sara to a stockbroker in Sussex. Both had big weddings. Barley insisted on arriving in a hired Rolls: it was money they could hardly afford at the time. Grace had assured her husband that there were other ways of demonstrating his worth – surely her evident happiness was enough to keep her parents in their place, just about. But he wanted to impress, to sweep away their doubts, as he swept away hers.

When she first took him home the McNabs had taken him for a man of no education, some kind of building labourer. Within three months of his marriage to their daughter he’d been site foreman, within a year at business school, working and saving while Grace worked in a dress shop to pay the bills – a job at which she’d been spectacularly bad – and then into property, and able to buy two Rolls-Royces. But it was never enough for her parents, and could never be enough for Barley. Only Doris Dubois would turn out to be that.

Barley’s first crash came when Carmichael was nine. The bottom suddenly fell out of the property market. The millions vanished. He had prudently put the Manor House into Grace’s name, and the two Rolls-Royces too. Emily and Sara’s husbands had invested heavily in Barley’s business. They lost all they had too, including their houses. Grace wanted to sell the Manor House and share what there was. But Barley was against it.

‘Of course he would be,’ said Dr Doom, hearing the story. ‘You had to have somewhere to live. Others must be responsible for their own lives.’ If the Court hadn’t made going to therapy a condition of her freedom she would have got up and walked out there and then.

‘But the cars,’ she said.

‘What about the cars?’

‘Nobody needs two Rolls-Royces in the drive,’ she said. ‘It’s not as if I could drive. I wanted to sell them to help Emily and Sara, but he wouldn’t hear of it.’

‘Quite right,’ said Dr Doom. ‘The resale value of those cars is absurd.’

It was what Barley had said at the time. Since her prison sentence it had sometimes seemed to Grace that all men were the same man. It had certainly been the view of men enjoyed by most of her fellow inmates. They tended to have husbands and lovers who got drunk and beat them about, whom they wouldn’t leave because they loved them, but were nevertheless seldom inclined to speak well of men in general.

Sometimes, lately, Grace had felt nostalgia for prison. At least the place was well-peopled, albeit with a class of people to whom she wasn’t accustomed. She had even made a friend: Ethel, a bookmaker who had run off with her employer’s takings and earned three years for her pains. Ethel would be coming out in a couple of months; then Grace would find out how good a friend she was. Ethel might prefer to put the past behind her and Grace would understand it if she did.

Her own family had chosen to put any past which included her behind them, and she could understand that too. By the time Barley was declared bankrupt Grace’s sisters were not speaking to her, and her parents barely so. They felt not only justified in their initial suspicions of their eldest daughter’s husband, but that she had been tainted by him in some way. Nor did his return to prosperity impress them. They none of them came to visit her in jail. They’d felt they had put up with enough already when they opened the Telegraph one morning to find Grace’s picture staring back at them, portrayed as an aggrieved and murderous wife. She had only herself to blame.

9

Grace had been out of society for so long, embroiled in a divorce, a court case, a prison sentence, then the shock of the new in her gloomy, lonely apartment, that she easily misjudged what was going on around her. Even leaving Carmichael out of it, it was not surprising that she assumed Walter Wells was gay. It had become the tactic of many perfectly heterosexual young men to affect a misleading campness as if in self-defence: a softness of voice, a delicacy of movement, an all-pervasive irony of gesture. This they did to obviate the anticipated reaction of so many young women they approached. ‘Don’t you lay hands on me, you rude, crude, heterosexual beast, you macho scum, all sex is rape, stop looking at me in that disgusting way, you’re harassing me, stalking me, go away! To take on the colours of gayness was to be given time and space to charm and flirt their way in, as Walter Wells now did into Grace Salt’s comprehension. She did not turn her head away: she recognised a fellow victim, a young man who might be Carmichael, someone with whom the world was not fully at ease, and so she consented to smile and talk to him, and have fellow feeling with him, and not turn her head stiffly away. ‘We both know how to suffer.’

It was true she had wondered where exactly Walter Wells’ self-interest lay. She was not naïve. She was well aware that beautiful and fashionable young men do not talk to unfashionable women and flatter them unless there is some deeper agenda at work. They do not sit smiling and chatting out of sheer goodness of heart, not to a depressed woman of a certain age, wearing an old dress found in the bottom of a suitcase snatched from home in her hurry to leave, a dress she wore on her honeymoon. (A shake and a cloud of dust and it had seemed to Grace as fit to wear as anything ever would.) But what could the agenda be? She did not look rich or important. She was not hung with jewels. She did not look like the kind of person who would commission a painting of herself, sitting as she did lonely and neglected in a corner, trying to be invisible. And besides, men did that: husbands, fathers, lovers, the kind of men Grace now, perforce, did without. Perhaps she reminded him of his mother? She decided that was it. He was a young man of charm and talent, lucky enough to have Lady Juliet’s sponsorship and attention, but he was sensitive and edgy, the artist amongst patrons, and insecure as befitted his age; and thus he had sought her out, dull and dowdy as she was.

When Barley had entered the room with Doris, flushed and pleased, and all conversation was stilled in acknowledgement of their presence, their celebrity status, Grace had felt what she later described as the ‘thickening of the blood in her veins’. Doris saw her, but looked through her as if she did not exist; which was to be expected. But Barley saw her and waved, and in this gesture Grace read the end of all intimacy. He did not even have the interest left to hate her. Her heart faltered; it could hardly get the blood round her body it was so sluggish, as if she’d gone out of a warm room into the sudden sharp and horrid cold of a blizzard. It was the cold of disappointment, the knowledge that Barley was gone from her forever. If it was not one painful truth which dawned in upon her, it was another.

How hard it was to rid herself of the feeling that Barley was somehow still on her side. That when the chips were down he would leave this room with her, not Doris, and the joke would be over. And then it would be her turn to play, and perhaps she would toss her head and say no! who? you? who are you to me? and go home with someone else. Or perhaps not. Barley had been to visit her in prison, but she had refused to see him. Some few powers prisoners do have, and this was one of them. Simply to snub. Except as the long hours dragged by, locked in her cell – so many staff were engaged in the attempt to forestall the passage of drugs by kiss, or embrace; to dampen down hysteria, or cart back the screaming, and the distracted and the lost-it to their quarters, that those without visitors must stay locked up – the spasm of pride had seemed mere folly. And now! Locked in her head, her body, her mouth smiling; while the few people who remembered she was there at all turned to see how Grace once Salt, now Grace McNab, reacted to the entrance of the noted celebrity lovers.

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.

10

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.’

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