The Bulgari Connection Read online

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  22

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

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

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

  The doorbell rang. Grace stiffened at once.

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

  ‘Why Walter,’ said his mother. ‘Is that you? Yes, of cou
rse it is.

  Are you all right?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I be?’ asked Walter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Grace took courage and said ‘Hi,’ from the bed and Prue and Peter turned to look at her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘Look the other way. My clothes are in the bathroom. I’m Walter’s girlfriend, Grace.’ And she got out of bed and walked to the bathroom.

  ‘What a nice figure,’ said Prue. And it was true, Grace’s figure had improved no end lately. She was positively skinny around the midriff: Walter was beginning to feed her little scraps of honeycake and almond in an attempt to fatten her up. ‘Dorothy did say apparently you had a new girlfriend, rather older than yourself, too, and a not very nice piece in the Mail about it, but they got everything wrong, the way the papers do. That’s just a slip of a girl.’

  ‘We’re not prudes or anything,’ said Peter. ‘We know how everything’s changed, we see it on TV, it’s just a new world, isn’t it, but is she actually living here, or just staying overnight?’

  ‘Living here,’ said Walter. Grace came out of the bathroom, pretty and positive in T-shirt and short skirt. All said how pleased they were to meet one another. The doorbell rang, and Grace went to open it: it was her friend Ethel from prison, wearing a combat jacket and with a cardboard prison issue suitcase in her hand.

  ‘I’ve nowhere else to go,’ said Ethel. ‘They turned me out with twelve quid and I gave it to a homeless person on the way here. He needed his drugs badly, from the look of him. I went to the address you gave me before you got out but the porter sent me on here. You’re looking good. Had a face-lift or something?’

  The phone rang but no-one liked to answer it.

  23

  Once Barley had left with Ross, Doris spent an hour on the phone. She got through to the show and asked them to contact the young art historian called Jasmine – they could find her working at Bulgari – and see if she wanted a change of job.

  She called her architect and told him to take over the builders. The architect said sorry, he was pulling out of the job – he was used to difficult clients but Doris took the biscuit. Doris said she’d rather he didn’t do that: not only were there VAT irregularities in his invoices which looked like wilful evasion to her: she had been paying the builders cash on his advice, and under the new Asylum Laws this was an offence punishable by prison. The architect eventually agreed that it was to be business as usual, except that he would visit the site daily, not once a week, and not leave it to his project manager. That was quite a long phone call.

  She called Walter Wells but he didn’t answer. That would have to stop.

  She called Lady Juliet to see if she would sell her the Egyptian Piece but got the bum’s rush. That was quite a short call.

  Reckoning that Ross would have dropped off Barley by now, she called him on his cellphone and asked him the date of Barley’s birthday, which she once knew but had forgotten. December twelfth. Six weeks from now. Sagittarius. She hoped Ross was sticking to the diet sheet. She hoped she didn’t hear him munching. There would be a weigh-in when he called for his wages on Friday. Ross said it was time he was given a proper pension and health-care plan, if she was that worried about his welfare.

  ‘It’s way too late for all that, Ross,’ said Doris.

  She went down Bond Street and called in at an antique shop she knew and bought a large and very involved reddish-black mahogany fireplace in the Scottish baronial style, to be delivered to Wild Oats the next day.

  She went back to Claridges and called the management because the maid was still in there hoovering, and complained about the standard of her work. She’d found a cherry pip stuck to the bottom of the bin and it was disgusting.

  She was not in a good mood, and even she noticed it. But that was what sexual deprivation always did to her.

  She called the designer and told him to liaise with the architect from now on. She was a public figure and owed that public her full attention. Wild Oats was to be finished by December twelfth. She was giving a surprise birthday party for Barley and everyone who was anyone would be there. The library was to be re-vamped to fit in with a big fireplace that would be delivered the next day, and pride of place given to a painting six foot by three and a half, to be delivered by December eleventh. The painting was her gift to Barley and would be unveiled during the course of the party. She did not want to hear about his problems, she just wanted the thing done.

  She called Walter Wells again; the phone was answered this time, but not by him.

  ‘Why Grace,’ said Doris, ‘fancy you! Tell your toyboy I need another sitting. I don’t think any proper artist can work from a Polaroid. He should come round to my place in Notting Hill at five this afternoon.’

  Barley should not have acted so old, and left her feeling so peculiar. Young men are not so easily affected by ‘business worries’. Barley deserved what he got, for his discourtesy to the nation’s sweetheart.

  She heard a ministerial broadcast on the radio announcing cuts in the arts budget and a concomitant increase in grants to scientific research. She called Bulgari and told them to get on with it: she would be in to choose stones at one-twenty. So, everyone would just have to forgo lunch: this was England not Italy. Personally she never ate lunch.

  She would have called girlfriends but she didn’t have any.

  24

  When I was in my early thirties and Carmichael was a little boy, and Barley was in and out of bankruptcy, and sometimes we would have to pack up and go just to be ahead of our creditors, I thought that by the time I was in my fifties life would have settled down. There would be no more anguish: no more jealousies, no more going through Barley’s pockets to find out where he’d been the night before. Never ask questions if one doesn’t want to know the answer. So my mother once told me. No finding out that Barley had set up with some stupid floozie in a flat in St John’s Wood: that kind of thing. And being appalled by his taste – I went to see her and what a whingey little whiner she was. Barley likes his women either placid – or so I always presented myself – or boldly energetic and awful like Doris who never lets a blade of grass grow if she can grind it underfoot.

  In my head I’d been waiting around for the absurdities to stop. One day Barley would grow up, and decide to play safe; and not dangerous, both financially and emotionally. He would start worrying about his virility, and not risk the indignity of failing with a new woman, and come home to me.

  I was wrong: here am I in my mid-fifties, and the roller coaster gets worse: it starts as a minor tremor, the harmonics begin to twang, join one another in surging rhythm, compounding the wave of resonance, and before you know it you’re in a Bridge Over Tacoma
Narrows situation, and the bridge is about to shake itself to pieces.

  One day I’m spending a quiet evening at home, the next Barley comes home early and says he’s in love with Doris Dubois.

  My first instinct was to laugh, which of course was quite wrong.

  ‘What’s so funny about that,’ he demanded.

  ‘Darling,’ I said, with a confidence I should not have had. ‘She could have anyone. I don’t think you’re going to have much luck.’ ‘And she’s in love with me,’ he said. ‘You always underrate me. You don’t take me seriously. I have to go outside the marriage to find someone who does.’

  And he said he wanted a divorce, and I could have the Manor House. And he was moving out, and we could all be perfectly civilised, couldn’t we?

  It was only after I lay in wait for Doris in the car park outside her place of work, and tried to murder her, that she decided to move in to the Manor House and change its name. My divorce proceeded more or less without me, since I was in prison; and though my lawyer came once or twice to visit me there he was quite traumatised by the noise and bedlam and crying children and the prohibited but nonetheless achieved sexual encounters of visiting hour, and the genuine tears and shame, and the passionate kissing during which drugs are passed from mouth to mouth. It was hard for him to concentrate; he was accustomed to the Inns of Court and, as he kept telling me, he was a specialist in divorce, not criminal law. And I, to tell you the truth, was fairly traumatised as well, and didn’t fight as hard as I should, and Doris got her way. She does get her way. Sometimes I almost admire her for it. But you have to resist that kind of thinking, as Dr Jamie Doom says. It’s victim-speak: the person tortured comes to admire the skill of the torturer: almost to fall in love.

  I have stopped going to Dr Doom. He says I am not ‘ready’, but he seems pleased for my happiness, my new roller coaster of fear and desire, and says he won’t report me to the Probation Service.