The Bulgari Connection

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.