The Bulgari Connection (14 page)

The doorbell goes.

‘That's okay then, that's fate … Walter, come in. Sorry about the no clothes, it's like an oven in here. I'm not in this apartment all that much. Rather the same with Grace, I imagine, not very much in hers. Here, let me hang up your coat. You do smell nice, Walter. So male. Bet Grace likes the way you smell.'

The sound of clothes being moved around.

Walter's voice: ‘You asked me here. Here I am. I can work perfectly well from the Polaroid. What do you want?'

‘My hair's different. I want it the way it is now for the portrait.

You have to take another Polaroid.'

‘The way it is now is wet.'

The sound of a hair dryer. Doris's voice:

‘Not in a minute it won't be. It was all stiff and hairdressy before. Now it's going to be free and easy, like me. My true spirit. Not all Barleyfied. God, marriage does terrible things to a girl. Don't you get tied down with Grace, she's so dull, she drove Barley to tears. What do you see in her? No, don't tell me. Money, advancement. Well, we're all a bit like that.

It's a hard world, we have to survive.'

Silence. Then:

‘Hold the dryer, Walter, will you, a moment, while I get my hair up … Beneath my breasts, point it there, they're still damp from the shower …
that feels good,
as they say in the porn films.' The dryer is switched to full power, then turned to low power, then off. Walter's voice.

‘Doris, I will take a Polaroid of your new hairstyle and then I'm going home. Nothing else.'

‘You're so old and stuffy. Funny, you seemed a boy before, now you're a man. I reckon you could be as big as Picasso.

You've got such a mastery. Did I tell you, I think we're going to be able to cover your opening in New York? That's a really big deal, Walter.' ‘I'm aware of that.'

‘If all goes well, of course. I need the portrait for the twelfth December. Barley's birthday. I want you to be there. I'll have the media there for the unveiling. Can you do that? Of course you can. Lots of time. And remember I want the background really creeping in at the sides, to get the size eight, without any loss of artistic integrity. That'll be a turn-up for Lady Juliet. Her Bulgari on my bosom. That'll learn her not to mess with me. Then we'll fly the portrait over to New York for the opening on the sixteenth. I've fixed it with the gallery people. Can you dry my back, please?' ‘It's perfectly dry already, Doris.'

‘I love it when you call me Doris. So sexy and cross. All very
Déjeuner-sur-l'Herbe,
this, don't you think? Me so unclothed, you so clothed.'

‘Stand still, stop dancing about, Doris, let me take this Polaroid. Your hair is exactly the same as it was before, as it happens. Then I'm going home to Grace.' ‘Stay and have a drink. Straight from the can. Fizzy Orange? I haven't put any Rohypnol in it, I promise.' She went to the fridge and opened it and in so doing disturbed one of the magnets in which one of the bugs was concealed. After that, sound was so distorted it was hard to make out what was going on.

Ross and Harry had listened in silence. Then:

‘Did they or didn't they?' asked Ross.

‘Hard to say,' said Harry. ‘But he put up a good fight.'

‘I reckon she used the Rohypnol stunt on Barley,' said Ross.

‘Perhaps she tampers with the cans. That's what got the poor geezer going, the night she first asked him back to her place. I drove them back, after the show. He didn't come out of there for a good six hours. I thought he was drunk, but perhaps he was drugged. He did say something about being thirsty; I remember stopping at a garage for fizzy orange on the way. Perhaps you get a taste for it.'

‘But I thought with Rohypnol you were meant to forget everything. You want sex at the time, you stop being choosy, you go at it like an animal. Then you forget all about it. Sounds okay to me.'

‘Your body would remember what it liked,' said Ross, ‘even though your brain didn't. The next day he asked me who he'd been with the night before and I said with Doris Dubois, so he called her up and afterwards they didn't look back, and goodbye marriage, goodbye Grace. It's all my fault. I should have kept shtumm.'

They considered the matter of how the body could remember though the mind didn't, and Harry admired Ross for a romantic. Ross suggested that Harry get the canary a soul mate, it must be lonely on its own. Harry said he'd do it the next morning.

They had some more beer. Ross told Harry of his five years in the army, three as a mercenary, eight in store security, and his eventual training in bodyguard driving. Harry said if Ross ever decided to give up his job with Barley they could go into partnership. He was a loss to the world of the private investigation.

Harry and Ross took the tape round to old Mr Zeigler, the porter at Tavington Court, as arranged. They stopped on the way to have a spaghetti, and missed Ethel, returning with a tall gentleman from the Middle East wearing a camel coat and many gold rings, by minutes. She had moved into Grace's apartment, since that was the obvious place for her to stay while she found a job and somewhere to live; but she had to go out that night to earn her living the best way she could. As a girl does.

I hate Doris Dubois, which is reasonable, and Doris Dubois hates me, which is perverse. She wants to spoil my life. She wants what I have. She wants Barley and now she wants Walter. Just for the fun of it, to prove she can have him. Then she tosses him back to me, like a gnawed chop with a scrap of meat left on it. Why does she do it? I only met her once before she ran off with Barley. He'd given money to some arts project for disadvantaged children, and he'd taken me to the opening, and she was compèring – they paid her £5000, I later learned – and she talked to me a bit, she was being gracious. She asked me about myself and I said I didn't
do
anything, I just
was,
a housewife, waiting for her husband to come home, and yes I had a child, and house, and I liked doing the garden, and one way and another I was thoroughly boring, but I was
happy.
She said: ‘You remind me of my mother,' and stalked off in a huff which surprised me. She went straight over to Barley and asked him onto her show the following month, to talk about Why Businessmen Sponsored the arts, or some such excuse.

He was doubtful about being on film at first, and so was I. You can be made to look such a fool on those programmes. You speak honestly and truthfully to the camera but then they put you in a context you hadn't anticipated. If Doris Dubois happened to be against private sponsorship of the arts and favoured state-subsidy, then the private sponsor – Barley, that is – could end up looking like a meddling, pretentious fool. At first Barley said no, but then Doris sent along a really pleasant researcher, an art historian, Flora by name, a pale pretty girl with very thin wrists, and we struck up quite a friendship with her, Barley and I, as sometimes couples do with single women.

Flora was interested in our Friday hauntings, and had a theory that ghosts could come out of the future, too, and were not just shadows shining through from the past. She and Barley and I sat up all one Friday night in the attic with Thermoses of coffee and sandwiches, and the portable telly. Nothing happened, of course, and all Flora's instruments – ghost hunters look for changes in magnetic energy and temperature and so on – remained completely steady, but it was fun. She was a kind of catalyst, who seemed to link Barley and me together; she had a lovely, grave face, and translucent skin and white, elegant hands and good legs, but I felt not a flicker of jealousy. I liked her too much. And so mostly because of Flora, Barley consented to do the programme and that was the end of us.

I heard that Flora went to Barley and Doris's wedding, and that disappointed me. But I suppose she was just one of the number who said, ‘Oh, we don't take sides' and drifted off anyway.

‘You shouldn't have told Doris Dubois that you were happy,‘said Dr Jamie Doom. I am back with Dr Doom. ‘That was a red rag, if not to a bull, to a wounded cow. Poor Doris Dubois, she is very unhappy.'

I took a look at this man today, for the first time as if he were a human being, not a therapist. He is tall and broad and looks rather like a North London Harrison Ford. He keeps trying to make me love whom I hate and hate whom I love. Love Doris Dubois; hate Barley. He says I am perverse, but I think he's talking about himself. I feel oddly indifferent to Walter, at the moment, as if he didn't enter into any relevant equation. I hope proper feeling will return soon. I daresay I am still in shock. When I look inwards everything is jagged, the edges torn: it is hard to explain it to Dr Doom. I am wounded with too rough a sword.

After I'd been to see Dr Chandri, a spooky enough experience, which had left me with the notion in my head that I was literally growing younger: actually as well as emotionally and in the eyes of others – because what else was I to make of it? – I came home to find Walter was not there. I was too proud to call Doris's number, although Walter had left it there with me on his painting table amongst the tubes of paint and the rags and the smeared bottle of turpentine. He uses the expensive real stuff now I am with him, and no longer has to make do with the turps substitute the art students use. Ten o'clock came, eleven. Still no Walter. I drank a bottle of wine. I opened another. Midnight. Half past. Lady Juliet with her distorted face looked out at me from the easel. Walter had drawn a crude line around all her edges to slim her down to Doris Dubois. The Bulgari necklace, important and unalterable, sat serenely round the smooth neck, amidst paint mayhem.

Walter's portrait of me was now off the easel and on the wall. I did look good. Not sweet, like Lady Juliet, but somehow good. I took some comfort from it.

But I could no longer hide from myself that Doris and Walter must surely be doing more than talking about her portrait. Unless Walter had had an accident: but I knew from experience that an accident was the least likely thing. How many times, after Carmichael turned sixteen, had I not been onto the police, and the hospitals, reporting a lost child, to be met with a laugh and a don't worry, mother, he'll be doing what boys do, he'll be back. And so he was, with other boys, and I'd be worrying about Aids by then. Bonding is a terrible thing: whether it be the love of the mother for the child, or the woman for the man, it is no more than a life sentence in anxiety.

The phone rang. I rushed to it. Then held my hand. Let him wait, let him think I had gone to bed and was sleeping soundly when he deigned to call. It was not Walter, it was Doris Dubois on the phone. ‘You'd better come round and fetch your Walter. He's lying here on my floor dead drunk.'

I went round in a taxi, beyond emotion, like an automaton, as one is when the worst befalls. And she was right, he was, and naked. And beside him were strewn Polaroid photographs of Doris Dubois, also naked.

‘Just take him away,' said Doris Dubois, ‘He's a terrible nuisance.'

‘I'll tell Barley about this,' I said.

‘About what?' she asked. Well yes, about what? About how Walter Wells was doing her portrait but got drunk and lost control and Doris had to call his girlfriend to take him away?

‘These photographs,' I stumbled. Surely they added up to something.

‘Good God, those photos are years back,' she trilled. ‘I haven't worn my hair like that for years, all over my face.'

And she stared at me smirking from beneath a curtain of wild hair, defying me. And I just took Walter home. He drooped and lolled around and smelt of sick.

‘She opened the door to me with nothing on,' he said, the next morning. ‘I should have left straight away. But I was taken aback. And I don't fancy her one bit, I just thought here's this woman making a fool of herself, why doesn't she put her clothes back on? She talked about sending a team to my New York opening. After that I can't remember much,' he said. ‘But how did I get so drunk? I was only drinking fizzy orange.'

And I believed him. Does it matter what a man does if he doesn't know what he's doing, if it's not in his consciousness later? It can hardly count as infidelity. At least, not rationally. I'm just shocked, still shocked, nothing seems quite real, except the memory of Doris Dubois laughing and victorious. I can see the attraction of evil. It is so sudden and complete and effective a destruction it leaves you breathless and laughing. Good is gradual and slow and dull and takes forever. You can unknit love in the twinkling of an eye, the emergence from nothing of a Polaroid portrait. I need time to build love up again: for event and laughter to put this incident in proper perspective.

Walter is back at his easel again, gritting his teeth, studying the tilt of Doris's eye, the curve of her lovely, popular, laughing mouth. What is he thinking about? Her? There is a bit of his life missing: just three hours or so, but like the memory on a computer perhaps there is no erasing it. You can get rid of it from your screen so you'll never have to see it again, you can set more memory free for use, but everything is still there on the hard disc.

Whatever happened in that room is recorded on the tape Harry Bountiful left with the porter at Tavington Court, but I will not listen to it. I do not want to know. I would rather trust Harry. It can stay in the porter's care.

Dr Jamie Doom-I am back with Dr Doom – says Doris Dubois wants to destroy me more than she wants to have Barley. I am the one she's out to get. It's me, not Barley, who is the focus of her attentions. It was just my bad luck to be the one in her steamroller path, to get crushed. She is the woman who goes round breaking up marriages, as she couldn't break up that of her parents'. She is the child who loves her father too much, and lusts after him, and hates her mother.
Why doesn't she just die? asks the girl child, so I can look after him, I would do it so much better than she does, I could love him so much better, and the guilt of that thought will stay with her always.
So Doris is doomed to go on repeating the pattern forever. As soon as I lose interest in Barley, as soon as I relinquish him, so will she. Already she's losing interest, or she wouldn't be bothering with Walter.