The Bulgari Connection (20 page)

As we left, the clinician came out of his surgery and said, ‘Ha! Good to see brother and sister together.' Which made me think perhaps he had not quite understood our predicament, but Walter had not heard and I did not mention it. ‘More like magic than science,' he said mistrustfully on the way home, and I shivered. I do not like messing with magic. Perhaps someone had put a curse on us? Who? There was a young girl from Haiti in prison with me, who accused me of staring at her, and poked two fingers at me as if I were the devil and wished misery on me. I had been staring, it is true, if only because she looked so desperate and beautiful, a great knot of glossy black tumbling hair on top of her head with a red ribbon in it, which nobody dared take away in case she bit them, a slender, glossy body and a lovely face. But I didn't think it was her. She was insane and howled a lot and practised voodoo in her cell. I didn't think the curses of the insane could make much impact. It could be Doris but she had more obvious ways of expressing her obsession with me, such as trying to seduce Walter. And it would be her instinct to age me, rather than the opposite.

When we got back to the studio, Ethel and a man whom she introduced as Hashim were sitting on the stairs. I was so pleased to see her, to know that she hadn't been planning to blackmail me – on the contrary, it seemed to have been their impulsive plan to blackmail Doris. I could have told her thiswas not likely to work, but they had found out the hard way. Hashim, whom she seemed to have picked up in the street outside Heals, and taken back to Tavington Court in order to earn some money, turned out to be a security guard at the TV company where Doris worked, and no friend of hers. She was popular with the public, it seemed, but not with colleagues.

Walter was rather shocked to find that Ethel ‘walked the streets' as he put it, in a rather Victorian way, but I had to explain that in prison one just learns to be practical. After they've strip-searched you a couple of times what happens to what part of your body ceases to be disconcerting. Having babies has much the same effect: everything in public view, teams of doctors and nurses, male, female and in-between. What's the odds thereafter. I was sure Ethel wasn't going to make a practice of it. She'd had beginners' luck, as it happened, and found Hashim, who seemed to want to stick, so now she preferred to offer her services for nothing. And in a way it had been my fault – if fault there was. I had lent Ethel the flat but not bothered to ask if she had enough money to buy food or drink, and there was next to nothing in the fridge.

I didn't ask them what was on the tape. I kind of knew. I also knew that Walter had recovered from whatever vague miasma of longing Doris had cast over him, and which was what had so drawn Barley to her. To be a
femme fatale,
it seems, a woman doesn't have to be in the least mysterious, sultry or sleepily exotic: there just has to be a gap between her and nothingness which is greater than it is in most other women. Such creatures do stalk the world and it is one's misfortune to run into them. They know no morality, or only that of self-interest. She had cost me my marriage but given me Walter. Her portrait was finished now, and stood with its face to the wall. The body hadbeen slimmed down satisfactorily, and the Bulgari necklace still glowed from Lady Juliet's white and perfect bosom. Walter said he was not proud of the work, but neither was he ashamed. He felt at one with Goya. The shifting and loosening of the paint had stilled: Doris kept the face Walter had given her, repaired and steadied with a prophylactic layer of varnish.

Walter had resolved not to tell Doris the portrait was finished until he absolutely had to: she might try to beat him down because the transformation had been too quickly achieved. When people buy a painting they like to feel they are buying a piece of the artist: his genius, his life, his time, his agony. If it's easy they don't want to know. Whistler, asked how long it took to paint his mother, replied, ‘a lifetime'. He knew better than to respond in terms of weeks, let alone days. Besides, it was true.

The Manhatt. Gallery had asked Walter to ship over another six canvases, early work if possible, but since most of these canvases had been sold, except a few he could not bring himself to part with, he was now faking his own early style, a process he found fascinating, though from time to time he would mutter ‘puerile' as he applied his brush.

We boiled up our Chinese distillations over the course of three days and dutifully swallowed the dark and turgid liquid. It made not the slightest difference to anything. I went on looking lovely in the mirror and Walter looked more and more responsible. It may have not been that the medicine was a failure: it might have been that we got the saucepans mixed at some stage, and Walter drank the stuff that was meant for me, and I for him, and one way or another we neutralised the effect. We did the boiling up and reducing over at Tavington Court, so powerful and aromatic were the fumes, and Mr Zeigler came knockingat the door, asking what witches' cauldron we were brewing up now.

It was hard for either of us to concentrate for long on the peculiar nature of our ageing patterns: or maintain any level of anxiety in relation to them. There was so much good in every day the problem could at best only drift in and out of our minds; and besides, it seemed like bad luck to focus on it too much. If we did nothing it would go away, if it was there in the first place. It was only when someone like Carmichael turned up or Mr Zeigler made some telling remark that we actually did something about it: or half did.

And then my sister Emily turned up, sent on to the studio by Mr Zeigler. Emily, now aged fifty-two, fresh from the Yorkshire moors, smelling of out-of-doors, dogs, husbands and wood fires, horse-faced, long yellow buck teeth, grey-haired, shapeless tweed suit, sensibly shod, with a squirming golden Labrador at her heels. My little sister Emily! The dog ran past me and straight into the studio, sniffing into all corners, inspecting everyone present, puzzled a little by Hashim, who shrank back in alarm at the enquiring cold nose, and finally sniffing out Doris where she stood facing the wall, confined to canvas. He growled and backed off, his hair standing on end, but then quickly turned his attention to the remains of a Hawaiian pizza, still in its box, left over from the night before and on the floor, devouring pineapple chunks and some of the cardboard before realising what it was. Dogs too must live in the real world, and pay attention to matters of the flesh and not the spirit.

‘Why Dorothy,' said my little sister Emily, ‘what have you been and done? This won't do. Look at you! You are altogether unGraced!'

‘Darling,' said Doris to Barley, ‘I'm giving you a surprise party for your birthday on Wednesday. Do you think it would be a nice gesture if I invited Grace? Just to show the world we're friends?'

Barley looked at her cautiously. His birthday was only five days away. They were lying fully dressed on the Giacometti bed at Wild Oats. Ross had driven them down for a tour of inspection. Barley had to agree that the builders had done an amazing job.

‘I just took a firm hand with them,' said Doris, ‘and then I brought in a team of TV set-designers from work. So now the architects can whistle for their money. TV builders can put up a whole house in a week, did you know that? I don't know why everyone makes such a fuss. It only gets a temporary licence from the building regs. people, of course, three months or so, but who needs more? We have to live more centrally, this place is way too far from the hub, and the suite in Claridges is quite perfect for everything except big parties. I'm hiring a fleetof cars to bring the guests in from London. Everyone who's anyone, and I'm sure some of them would be ever so pleased to see dear old Grace. We don't want bad feeling buzzing around. Not good for karma.'

‘I can see what you mean by a surprise party,' Barley observed, and she giggled and nudged him like a naughty little girl. ‘And she can bring along that young man of hers, you know, the painter?'

‘Walter Wells,' said Barley. ‘I don't know that I'd like that.' ‘That sounds suspiciously like that old anthropological thing, mate-guarding,' said Doris, suddenly tearful, ‘and Grace McNab is no longer your wife. I am. That really hurts me. You should be happy to welcome her boyfriend into your life.' He was always taken by surprise at how vulnerable she was, beneath the brisk, confident shell. And now also at how upsetting he found the thought of Grace in bed with Walter Wells.

‘If it makes you feel more secure, darling, invite away,' said Barley, nobly. ‘Invite whoever you want.'

Doris had not told Barley about the attempt to hold her to ransom at the studio, and he had not told her about the attempt to run him down. Some things are just too complicated to take in, let alone explain, and their lives were increasingly busy. It was especially good just to lie upon the bed for fifteen minutes and relax. Barley noticed that there was a patch of damp on the newly decorated and star-studded ceiling – the stars in the shape of the constellations Sagittarius and Scorpio, in honour of the marital bed – but he did not mention this to Doris in case it set off another manic round of refurbishment.

If Opera Noughtie didn't come through he was finished. There would be no money to start again. None. That is to say noteven taxi money across town. And how would their love stand up to that?

‘I suppose if we have to have Walter Wells we have to ask Grace,' said Barley. ‘But she might be a bit surprised by some of the changes here.' ‘It is a surprise party,' said Doris.

The hands of the art-installation waterfall clock had moved to six and it was Friday, and time for Ross's weigh-in, and indeed his, and their fifteen minutes' rest was over. If Doris had once agreed not to subject Ross to the humiliation of standing on the scales she had forgotten: indeed she had now decided to extend the ceremony to her husband. Drastic weight-gain required drastic action, and she wanted him looking good for his surprise party. He'd fallen in with it because he was feeling bad about the Bulgari necklace which would not be ready in time for the very special event which was his birthday party, and the lack of which she was being so good about.

Mary House was in Windsor, on the flight path out of London. It was to this convent that Emily now took her sister Grace, convinced that there was something fishy about Grace's over literal return to herself-before-marriage. They were to consult their Aunt, the once young and flighty Kathleen McNab, now the nun Mother Cecilia, aged ninety-eight, who could surely distinguish, if anyone could, what was sent by the Devil and what was sent by God.

They stopped at a garden centre, and Grace bought a wicker basket which she filled with flowers and fruit. This she would give to Mother Cecilia. It was over Grace's arm when she entered the old woman's cell.

It was Emily's custom to visit Aunt Cecilia once every six months. More frequent visits were seen as causing altogether too much excitement. As for Grace, she had allowed the exigencies of her own life to erase all but the vaguest remembrance of her aunt's very existence. The nun in the family had not beenmuch talked about during Grace's childhood: Kathleen had had a baby by her own uncle when she was eighteen, and how is that to be explained to children? The baby died and Kathleen forsook the world, the flesh and the devil and became Cecilia, Bride of Christ, and a source of vague embarrassment to the family. But Emily was dutiful, and visited, and had for thirty years, and now took Grace along.

‘If you can visit an old nun, why couldn't you visit me in prison?' demanded Grace on the way.

‘I daresay it would have been helpful at the time,' said Emily, ‘but afterwards it would have spoiled our relationship. No-one wants to be seen at their worst. I am sure everyone is at their worst in prison.'

‘There wasn't much of a relationship anyway,' said Grace. ‘You wouldn't speak to me for years.'

‘Well you wouldn't sell your bloody Rolls-Royces and help us out of trouble after your Barley had got us into it.' ‘The re-sale price is so bad,' said Doris, feebly. They bickered as if they were children again. It was quite consoling. But Grace had noticed, or thought she did, as she changed into skirt and blouse to go convent visiting, that her breasts were shrinking into themselves. It was one thing to be seventeen, she thought now in panic, but who wanted to be thirteen again? Or perhaps she was just thinking herself into it. She didn't feel intellectually thirteen: how could she? She had not forgotten the past, though many had advised her to on her divorce, saying ‘now you must look forwards not backwards', and decades of experience must always add up to something. But emotionally perhaps she did. It might just have been her sister's company, of course, and a harking back to the days when they had travelled to convent school together daily, in just such a train as the one which now trundled to Windsor.

‘It was the gesture we wanted,' said Emily, ‘but you wouldn't give it. You were besotted by ghastly Barley.' ‘At least when I was with him I could grow old gracefully,' said Grace. A group of builders at Paddington, working on the gantries, had looked down and wolf-whistled at her: she took some comfort from that.

They had left the dog with Walter for the day: he'd had one like it when he was a child, which he remembered with affection. Ethel and Hashim had both gone down to the Job Centre to find jobs, though how she was to explain her absence from the workscene for three years, and he was to explain his sudden departure from the TV company neither was quite sure. Life can get very complicated, both complained; these days there is no avoiding the personal data that follow after you, from exam results to medical records to driving history to credit-rating to criminal penalty: starting afresh in the name of love can be difficult. They refused to take money from Grace. The tiepin was real gold: it would fetch about seventy-five pounds in an emergency.