The Bulgari Connection (12 page)

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.

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.

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.

I'd started by rather loathing the Manor House, when we first moved in. Barley didn't consult me before he bought it. It seemed so pretentious, so large, a challenge to the Official Receiver – but I grew to love it for its redbrick ungainliness. I knew every creepy-crawly corner of it, and had shoved my dustpan and brush along every dusty front and back stair. I knew its temperament and its habits, and that the attic stairs were haunted, and you could hear a drumming noise that shouldn't be there on Friday nights, and if you went up to find out why you'd feel a nasty chill and hear voices of people who weren't there, sometimes weeping, sometimes laughing. Other days of the week it would be okay. It never bothered me, but Carmichael would wake when he was little, and complain of a woman in white standing at the end of the bed.

And now Doris Dubois has my home and my husband to do what she wants to with them, and sleeps in the room which Barley and I once called our own. But I hear from Ross – I met him in the McDonald's next to the Health Club – that the ceiling fell down on them and they've had to flee to Claridges. She'll like that: it's nearer the shops. Ross is trying to lose weight. Doris makes him stand on scales every Friday while he collects his pay. I give him diuretic tablets – they sometimes help.

I had thought that by the time I was in my fifties I would not be suddenly confronted by shocked older people while naked in a doubtful bed, that I would always be able to get to a washbasin to clean my teeth, that jailbird friends would not turn up to call in favours. I was wrong. In youth the convulsions of fate, fortune and love come at short intervals: as one grows older the stretches of non-event are longer, but the convulsions are more extreme, and come as tidal waves in a calm sea, rather than as little peaks of fluff and foam in choppy water. That is all that happens. Nothing changes.

What I am trying not to think about is that Doris has summoned Walter to her apartment in Notting Hill and he has gone, sketchpad under his arm, laughing at my fears. It is a worse roller coaster than any I can remember with Barley, my heart is now in my mouth, now in my boots, now banging away in my chest, I am sick to my stomach. I am an old woman, she is a young one. How can I compete? This bridge, this gleaming arrow of desire, like the one that runs between Tate Modern and St Paul's, joining the present to the past, is in danger of setting up such a resonance of harmonics it will twist and torment itself to death.

Grace McNab, once Grace Salt, perhaps one day to be Grace Wells – see how down and down in the alphabet she has gone in her life – was sitting in the Harley Street waiting room of Dr Chandri the cosmetic surgeon when Lady Juliet Random came in. Grace had the five o'clock appointment, Lady Juliet the five thirty.

The waiting room was very dull: a big round table in the middle, with neat unread piles of
Country Life
and some stiff upright chairs pulled up to it. There was plumbing that showed. On the walls were before-and-after photographs of women – once with odd noses, and chins, and saggy eyes and fat-humpy backs, but now all looking at least ordinary, if not startlingly beautiful. The place smelt of old-fashioned chloroform and ether. Chandri was running late. It was already five twenty-five, according to the ornate ebony clock with its carved wounded stags and baying dogs which stood on the marble fireplace. If Walter Wells had been on time he would already have been with Doris Dubois for twenty-five minutes.

Harry Bountiful would let Grace know whether or not he had been on time, and the nature of what was said at the meeting. Grace felt ashamed of having been in touch with the private detective again, but jealousy drove her to it, just as jealousy had driven her to try to mow Doris down. Nothing was made better, but if you were a person ravaged by self-doubt, it was less painful to know than to guess. What you imagined was usually worse than what happened. In someone like Doris, whose self-esteem was sky high, it would be the other way round. Unpalatable truths would come as a surprise, not as a confirmation of worst fears. Harry Bountiful had not got round to taking the bugs out of Doris's apartment, although Grace had stopped his retainer when Doris and Barley got married. What was the point? Barley would not come back. If Barley had found out she had eavesdropped on his life, he would have laughed. She did not want Walter to find out. He would not take it well.

‘My dear Grace,' said Lady Juliet, ‘how wonderful to see you. What are you having done? I want my nose looked at. It's much too large, as I realise whenever I look at that wonderful portrait your young Walter painted. How is all that going? You look completely glorious. Personally I think it's the sex that does it, especially all that oral sex at the beginning. Nothing like it for the complexion.'

‘Walter is painting Doris Dubois' portrait,' said Grace, bleakly. ‘She made him.'

‘Doris does rather make people do things,' Lady Juliet agreed. ‘I'm sure Barley never really wanted to leave you: it was just unlucky that of all people he should run into her. Like treading on a scorpion in one's shoe: no-one's fault, but there you are, stung and screaming. Only this morning she had the nerve to call me up and try to buy my Bulgari necklace from me, the one Ronald gave me when our son was born. As if the whole thing was about money. And no doubt poor Barley's expected to pay. I explained it was the best part of a million, it wasn't one of their everyday ready-made pieces at a tenth of the price, and even that didn't put her off. I gave her short shrift, you'll be glad to hear. Poor Barley, I have the feeling he may be in for a bit of trouble soon; he really shouldn't be spending the way she makes him. The Manor House was always a fairly beastly place but I believe it's a real nightmare now. All you can do with those old places is fill them with chintz, put in a new kitchen, stick to a couple of rooms and put up with being cosy not smart.'