The Bulgari Connection Page 6

  ‘I don’t suppose you answered her invitation,’ said Barley. ‘And I wish you wouldn’t think about it as a question of sides. This was meant to be a civilised divorce.’

  ‘I never accept invitations,’ said Doris, loftily. ‘I just turn up or I don’t. How does your ex-wife have the nerve to go out looking the way she does? Did she ever look in mirrors when she was with you? Or perhaps she found it in some charity shop. A charity dress for a charity auction, that’s the way her mind would work. Poor darling, how you must have suffered. And you know she was famous through London for serving prawn cocktails?’

  ‘What’s wrong with a prawn cocktail?’ He was baffled. She laughed, her little high perfected trill. He adored it. ‘Sweetheart, if you don’t know I shan’t tell you. Just leave it all to me and you’ll have your knighthood in no time at all. It’s absurd that Juliet gets to be a lady and I don’t.’

  There was a knock on the door. Barley had thought he had another half hour in bed with Doris, but it was the housekeeper to say the decorators had turned up and wanted to come in and measure up; and to his astonishment Doris got straight out of bed and let them in, not wanting to inconvenience them, she said.

  Decaff coffee was served on the terrace, with grapefruit juice, which was rather acid for his stomach but he didn’t like to say so, and low cholesterol croissants.

  13

  Walter Wells tells me he loves me. Walter Wells is much younger than I am. His body has a resilience mine does not. He bounds up the stairs to the studio we have shared for seven days; I go up them one at a time. He took me swimming to the local pool; he carves like a fish through the water; it parts only reluctantly for me. His body above mine is dark and sharply silhouetted as it moves with focused intent back and forth, back and forth. Mine is happy enough to receive this steady pounding, endless engine of desire, but feels surprised as if receiving what was not quite intended. I’m sure I never felt like this with Barley, who was always in rather a hurry, there was so much to be got on with. I can see that, though worldly wise I am really quite short of carnal knowledge: I daresay there are as many kinds of lovemaking as there are men. Who could I ask? If Ethel ever comes out of prison it is the kind of thing she might know. Walter Wells is still quite new to me; I am not quite sure yet what I can say or what I can’t.

  He smells of oil-paint and canvas, encrusted palettes and turpentine, cigarettes and McDonald’s, where he eats Chicken McNuggets with the sweet-and-sour dip, and of chlorine from the swimming pool, and there is some slight remembered flavour of Carmichael there when I held him against my breast, the smell of the baby boy pre-testosterone, don’t ask me why. I love it all. All I regret is the decades without it, and if I had not been without it how could I have it now? Those in love are bats, quite bats.

  Walter Wells’s full name is Walter Winston Wells. www. We see some significance in this when really there is none, but then we see significance in everything. We suppose him to be a man of the future, and he laments that he can never catch up with me. He looks forward to being old, or so he says, to be able to turn into his father and be taken seriously. I tell him I think it is unlucky to wish old age upon himself, and he points out that it’s a lot better than death. Both of us at the moment want to live forever and together.

  The Indian summer is over and the nights draw in. It is cold in the studio so I wear winter woollies. Lady Juliet’s painting has her face to the wall, in case she gets damaged, leaning up against a stack of canvases, mostly landscapes, a couple of still lifes. She is waiting merely for a wall space to become vacant. She can go up only when the next one is sold, he says. It would seem like favouritism, he says, to take down one already in place and so make way for Lady Juliet. Everything must take its turn, be done in due order. He has a very personal relationship with his paintings. If I were a different, younger, less patient person I could get quite jealous of them, he is so tender and thoughtful to them. I wonder if I should take the painting back to my flat and put it up, but we agree we like Lady Juliet and do not want her hanging there lonely in that desolate place. I have to go back sometimes for a change of clothes and a better bath than Walter can provide and to answer lawyers’ letters and so forth, but I am always pleased to leave. It seems to me that every time I climb the four flights to the studio I do it more quickly and more easily. My feet have wings.

  Walter reckons it will be only a couple of weeks before he sells a painting and Lady Juliet goes on the wall. He sells his paintings for less than a thousand pounds each. He has a gallery in Bloomsbury just round the corner from my mansion flat in Tavington Court, not far from the British Museum – coincidence! Coincidence! See how God has arranged everything for our benefit.

  It is a feature of new love that the senses grow sharper, the eye grows brighter – even my poor tired ones, in their sixth decade of being, and all things have meaning. I did the Lottery and won £92. I suppose we are ‘in love’. The public pool is more full of event and far more full of chlorine than my own ever was. Now Doris Dubois has doubled the size of the one at the Manor House, as Ross, Barley’s chauffeur, tells me she has, it will be lonelier still. Good. But I hardly think of Doris Dubois these days and of Barley even less. Hate is minimally more powerful than love, it seems, certainly harder to lose from the system, or perhaps I never loved Barley; all he ever was, was habit.

  I love Walter Winston Wells, www.iloveyou@studio.co.uknostop. The only cure for one man, as Ross pointed out, is another man. I met Ross by accident down at the swimming pool where Walter dove and I paddled. Ross was always an ally of mine: he knew what Barley could be like. Ross goes swimming to lose weight, and then goes straight to Kentucky Fries for a triple cheeseburger and baked potato with sour cream and chives. He reckons the sour cream is less fattening than butter. Ross believes what he wants to believe, and who doesn’t? He’s a great strong white-haired man with a loose jaw and big teeth, who used to be a security guard, and is now trained by Mercedes to get out of ambushes fast. Property is not the safest business in the world once you get to the top, especially now the Moscow Mafia have moved in. No such worries with Walter: I get on a bus.

  Walter Winston Wells, www, was having trouble with his telephone bill, his rent, his council tax, the bill to his paint supplier – titanium white is a shocking price – and I paid them all. Good Lord, why should a man of talent be so burdened? He sells his paintings for between £500 and £900 – except for Lady Juliet which went for £20,000 – more like its true worth – and of course he didn’t get a penny of that, Little Children, Everywhere, got it – unless the Randoms’ embezzled it, which I don’t suppose they did – and the Bloomsday Gallery takes sixty per cent and he is meant to give them everything he paints, because they once paid £400 of accumulated bills and he signed this wretched document. But of course he puts some aside and sells them privately. How else is he supposed to live? The Bloomsday is quite small and unfashionable, and Larry and Tommy who run it are weasly little creatures who speak through their noses and put VAT on the selling price including commission, so Walter has to pay more than his fair share. At least I think this is how it works – I can’t quite get my head round it.

  This morning I went swimming again and the waters opened up before me like the Dead Sea and I swam three lengths non-stop, easily. Walter made rather a meal of his normal five lengths and took a minute longer to complete the course than usual. But then we’d been at it all night. Five times, I think without a condom because of course we don’t have to worry about having babies. This is my great regret, that I can’t give him one; but I don’t think he’s worried. When I sat on the wooden bench in the cubicle to dry my feet it seemed to me that the flesh round my heels and the top edge of the soles was no longer purplish with broken veins but quite smooth and white. A little blue and sodden from the cold water – the heaters had broken down again, and as for the wave machine, forget it – but no more than that. Extraordinary what happiness can do. It speeds me up but slows Walter down, as if our bo
dies were seeking some kind of equilibrium of age. He is painting my portrait. I take that very kindly.

  14

  ‘Darling,’ said Doris Dubois to Barley Salt, as they lay side by side in bed on a morning a little chillier than usual: the Indian summer was over: the trees in St James’s Park had turned to gold, and the ducks fluffed out their feathers in the Round Pond, and Doris and Barley’s London walks were brisker and shorter than they had been. They would get as far as the Albert Memorial, and admire its gilded glory, but before they reached Sloane Street Barley would suggest they turned back. ‘Now what are we going to do about this necklace of mine?’

  ‘We’re going to wait,’ said Barley Salt firmly, ‘until various business affairs of mine are settled. Then you can have two.’

  ‘A Bulgari necklace in the hand is worth two in the bush,’ said Doris. ‘I would really like one now and another one later. Who is to say what will happen in six months from now? You might have fallen out of love with me.’

  ‘Never!’ He could not contemplate that.

  ‘My show might be taken off the air. There could be a palace revolution. Remember what happened to Vanessa Feltz.’

  ‘You’re the Queen of the ratings and Queen of my heart. No-one would dare.’

  ‘There are straws in the wind. My dress should have made more than £3000. People just don’t care any more. They’re turning against me. Everything’s going wrong. The ceiling fell down on our bed. An hour later and we would have been killed. We raved on air about Grendel’s Mother,’ – a new musical which had just bombed – ‘and now the theatre’s closing and what does that make me? A f***ing idiot, out of touch with public taste. And if Wanda Azim doesn’t get the Booker for Sister K my name is going to be mud. We’ve really pushed that novel and it isn’t honestly all that good – Dostoevsky did it better. My touch is slipping, darling, the magic’s seeping out of everything.’

  Doris was quite panicky, trembly, sitting up in bed. He’d noticed she got like this sometimes. She presented such a smooth and confident face to her public that only he, her intimate, her bed companion, knew what she went through; understood the tensions of the job and what she battled against.

  ‘£3000 plus, for a dress that cost £600 an hour earlier isn’t too bad a profit margin,’ he consoled her. ‘Five hundred per cent. Think about it, Doris. Just for having been in contact with your body.’ His sums were swift and serviceable, and convincing at a meeting, if not necessarily accurate.

  ‘The portrait of that cow Lady Juliet got at least twenty times its worth, and she’s a nonentity. I know exactly what they paid the artist. I should have done better.’

  ‘At least my ex-wife didn’t buy the dress. You wouldn’t have liked that.’

  ‘She might have,’ said Doris, frightened. ‘If she can afford to buy paintings at charity auctions you’re paying her far too much alimony. I want you to go to court and get it reduced.’

  He tried to stroke her limbs into tranquillity, move her mouth into a smile, but she stayed quivery and anxious, tossing her head from side to side. She had taken cocaine the evening before. Only a little, she said, to give her courage and pizzazz for the show, she’d never take it recreationally, only for work, but how was he to know what was a little and what was a lot? He knew nothing about drugs. He needed to be in control of his circumstances at all times.

  They were in bed in one of the guest rooms which was, miraculously, so far untouched by the decorators, and was much as Grace had left it; that is to say, full of soft chintz chairs, traditional rosewood furniture, and with flower paintings on the walls. They’d had to move out of the master bedroom a week earlier. The ceiling had fallen; a mass of old plaster and choking lime-dust had come tumbling down upon the bed and, bringing with it as it did a heavy new erotic central light fitting, sculpted in tangled wrought iron, designed by an Italian who normally made chocolate phalluses but who had lately turned her mind to art, had bent the bedstead altogether out of its expensive, elegant shape. The mattress could be salvaged, the bed itself could not. What was soft and pliant survived, as Barley pondered, what was rigid and determined seldom did.

  He doubted that the insurance company would pay out for yet another claim. Already a leaking swimming pool, a collapse of the new garage into old iron workings underground, a hundred more minor mishaps Doris had insisted on claiming for, while he told her to wait for the biggie, warned her that it was a bad idea to waste goodwill on trivia. Now the biggie had happened. Something had gone wrong when the roof of the West Wing was being lifted six inches: incompetent workmen had let slip a heavy steel beam, which had crashed through a floor left for some reason almost without supporting beams. He had tried to suggest to Doris that they move to an hotel while work was completed, but she hated hotels. This was her home and she would not let Grace drive her out.

  The last statement surprised him. What had Grace got to do with it? He had not imagined, especially after the murder attempt, that Doris felt even residual guilt about living in Grace’s old house. A lot of things had gone wrong, but when you considered the mountain tribesmen Doris insisted on employing, through an extremely dubious building firm who got its workers free through a government work experience scheme, for some reason to do with her social conscience and her reputation with the public, it didn’t require a curse from Grace to make things go wrong. Besides, he had reason to believe, from what Ross told him, that Grace was happy again. He was greatly relieved, if also surprised, to find himself acutely jealous. He had not expected this from himself.

  He could not give in to pointless emotions. Life was essentially simple. Women failed to get to the top not because of male prejudice but because they refused to treat it as simple. They looked for emotional complications, and found them. Any male executive of forty had a wife and children at home. His female equivalent seldom did. Why? She’d wasted too much time and energy being female, preening and combing in front of mirrors, talking about her feelings, and five days out of every twenty-eight grasping her stomach and groaning. How did they expect to get to the top, let alone stay there? Not their fault, and certainly not man’s: God’s, if anyone’s. Doris did not believe in God. We appeared on this earth, according to her, and then ran around a bit looking after oneself, and then winked out. And that was that. He, Barley, thought there was probably a bit more to it than that. Odd that Doris then had a concept of curses and he did not.

  In the meantime, he, Barley Salt, could not afford to give way to unreasonable emotions such as sexual jealousy, added to the conviction that this Walter Wells was after Grace’s money since he could not be after her body, Grace being past all that. Two mutually exclusive emotions. It would take up too much time trying to sort them out. He needed to focus his attention on the fact that Billyboy Justice and Co. were suddenly breathing down his neck over the Edinburgh site; they’d been caught mooting it about in government circles that it would do for some kind of chemical plant the government had to provide under international law, and quickly. Out of town, and on the estuary for contaminated shipping. He hadn’t liked the fact that Billyboy had been at the Randoms’. Sir Ron put it about that Billyboy fancied Juliet, and that his heart bled for Little Children, Everywhere, but there was probably more to it than that. Government attitudes these days switched with the latest poll: they’d been pretty much static on environment-friendly and anti-industry issues lately, and pro-development – big high-profile developments, at any rate – but they could easily swing back to pro-science-and-industry policies, and any incipient arts complex might get scuppered.

  The odds, once ninety-nine out of a hundred, were down to eighty. Not good at all. Not the kind of margin he felt safe with; he remembered the horrible meltdown when Carmichael was small and the house had had to go into Gracie’s name. She’d given it back without a murmur. He couldn’t quite see Doris doing that. Not that there was going to be much house left, the way things were going.

  In the meantime here was Doris quivering and moaning an
d weeping in his arms. He’d thrown in his life with Doris, he would see it through. That was that.

  ‘It’s my birthday next week,’ she was moaning. ‘You know how I hate birthdays. Everything going downhill, I bet you haven’t even planned a celebration, not even a surprise party, why can’t this horrible building work ever be finished, it’s all Grace’s fault, she never looked after a thing and God knows she never had anything to do, not like I have. What did she do all day? Eat, from the look of her. I hate this room, I want our proper bedroom back, you don’t love me, why should you, I’m such a mess.’

  ‘Our’ bedroom made him feel happy. He was always pleased and gratified to be included in Doris’s scheme of things. She was a Scorpio, full of charm, sexual charisma and spite. If she couldn’t find anyone to sting she would sting herself to death, if need be. He’d worked with Scorpios in his time. They could make you go dancing to your own death.

  Rashly, he asked her if she was pre-testosterone-menstrual. He knew she was, not that she let a little mess stand in the way of their pleasures. She fell upon him tooth and claw, as he had rather anticipated, and with Doris the boundaries between murder and sex were blurred. He was egged on to a powerful and determined sexual performance.

  ‘We’ll go to Bulgari tomorrow and buy the necklace,’ he said. He was already exhausted, emotionally more than physically, and the day had only just begun.

  ‘Why not today?’ she was half joking, sunshine after squalls, fitful, trying to settle back into happiness. She was six years old sometimes. He was so moved by her, he gave in. ‘Okay,’ he agreed. ‘Today.’

  He’d manage it at lunchtime. He had been meeting Random at the club, but he’d cancel. He doubted it would tip any balances. And there was nothing more fun than shopping for jewels with Doris, knowledgeable as she was about fine stones, about almost everything, come to that; nothing more soothing than the soft-carpeted opulence of Bulgari, and the attentive staff, and the hushed reverence with which they attended to the whims of their customers, with that timeless and exquisite courtesy which has been offered the rich since society began. ‘Then that’s settled then,’ said Doris. But she did add that if he was ever strapped for money she would of course give it back, and he could probably get what she wanted cheaper, if he was in the business of cheap, if he made an offer for the ruby and diamond necklace Lady Juliet had been wearing in the portrait. ‘Because of course I can do all that Lady Juliet serene style too, if I want. Simple white dress, blonde hair on top and just the one spectacular piece. Not even earrings to match.’ Did he think when she, Doris, wore the antique coin necklace with the matching earrings it was over the top? No? Good. And the conversation drifted back to how Wanda Azim had better win the Booker or her (Doris’s) name would be mud in literary circles throughout the land.