by Fay Weldon
Walter Wells, who was not accustomed to public speaking, demanded at least some prompting about the way in which art could serve humanity, and on the way to the plinth Lady Juliet told him to mention both the morality of aesthetics, and how suitable it was that the haves of the luxury trades – in which fine art was included – should do their bit for the have-nots. And perhaps a mention as to how she, Lady Juliet, had given her precious time freely, as the sitter.
‘Wish me good luck,’ he’d said to Grace as he went. But she hadn’t replied, she was staring, along with everyone else, at a couple who had just come into the room. Even the string quartet faltered mid phrase. All eyes turned, as if to royalty, towards a good-looking older man in a very expensive suit – Walter had painted that particular Chairman of the Board type many a time, sitting behind some great burr-oak desk, or leaning up against a pillar at Company headquarters, dull, dull, dull – and a younger woman in a flame-coloured dress with a strong nose, a hard mouth, and a band of solid powerful gold around her neck; but who moved with a kind of focused energy, as if all the wind of the present, whirling around, had sought her out as its centre. Always hard to get on canvas, this kind of thing, this sense of the present made apparent, if only because those few whom fate so selected were seldom in repose. They never sat still.
7
Doris Dubois and Barley Salt found themselves at a loose end after their Caesar salad and sparkling water lunch at the Ivy. Barley had once been in the habit of ordering the fried fish and the thick chips and mushy peas but Doris had patted his tummy affectionately and said slenderness was youth, and a man as young at heart as he was should have a figure to go with it. It was remarkable how quickly rich and fatty foods began to seem gross; and the waist to return. He felt restless, though, as if serenity was situated somewhere in the fatty tissues, and only sexual pleasures with Doris seemed able to quell the feeling that something, somewhere, was not altogether right. It wasn’t that he missed Grace: her fitful dry wit had come to seem like an evasion of real feeling; he felt reassured by Doris’s earnestness and her appreciation of the higher things in life: if he missed Grace it was in the same way a young man gone off to college will miss his mother: he knows he must grow out of her, while occasionally hankering for the comforts of home.
But home, the mansion in which he and Grace had so casually lived, and had together lost all but passing interest in sex, was now, with Doris installed, a turmoil of builders, designers and security experts, too crowded by day for sex, and there was no point in going there until after seven, by which time most would have disappeared, but Doris had to be back in town by eight because she was going out live at ten. They decided to stay in town: Doris consulted her digital notepad and discovered an invitation to a charity auction at Lady Juliet’s that evening.
‘Lady Juliet!’ said Barley. ‘What a pleasant woman. My ex-wife and I used to be on quite good terms with the Randoms. I haven’t seen much of them since the divorce. He’s in rare metal recovery. Buys up de-commissioned nuclear weapons and so on and extracts the titanium.’
‘Preserving the natural wealth of the planet!’ said Doris.
‘Way to go!’
‘I’m not sure that that’s his prime motive,’ said Barley, brutally.
‘Quite a lot of Russians get exposed to quite a lot of radioactivity on the way.’
‘Darling,’ said Doris, ‘you shouldn’t be so cynical. It isn’t nice. Shall we trot along? There’s a party at the British Library Manuscripts Room, but they’re so nervous there in case you spill champagne on the Book of Kells, or something, it’s no fun. A charity auction in a private house might be quite entertaining, and it’s always fascinating to see how other people live.’ Doris wanted to be on good terms with the Randoms. If Grace could do it, so could she.
‘They’re quite dull, really,’ said Barley, cautiously. ‘They don’t have many books in the house, but she’s such a nice woman.’
Doris did not have anything to wear, so they went to South Molton Street by cab – Barley’s chauffeur Ross had a sick mother – and were dropped off at the end of South Molton Street where they strolled along to Browns, and Barley watched while Doris bought a kind of silk slip dress by a Japanese designer, in yellow and orange and gold. Tall, slinky, reserved girls attended her – ladies in waiting – and he stood and watched with his hands in his pockets. Grace never in a million years would have wasted time and money in this way; he loved it, and said as much to Doris.
‘Yes but then darling you must remember I am a perfect size ten and your ex-wife is a very imperfect size fourteen, probably sixteen, and women like that don’t much go for shopping.’ Doris would have been a size eight but the BBC insisted that she not be too thin. Programme presenters had to send the right message to the nation. Otherwise she would have had the plain salad not the Caesar salad, with its croutons and plentiful dressing, for lunch. The dress cost £600, and Barley paid. But Doris was selling her flat in Shepherd’s Bush and insisted that she would pay the money back, in time. Being spoiled was wicked, but she liked her independence.
Afterwards they took a walk through Grosvenor Square, watching as some Japanese children chased pigeons till their mother called them away, then strolled on to Bond Street and the peaches and cream décor of Bulgari, where even more charming girls, and men too, showed them jewellery under strong lights, and they decided on a sleek modern piece, a necklace, stripes of white and yellow gold, but encasing three ancient coins, the mount following the irregular contours of the thin worn bronze, which somehow went perfectly with the Japanese dress, though out of such different cultures, and Barley paid £18,000 for it, and they took it away with them. Doris fell silent at this point about paying him back. But what was money for but to be spent? Barley had done very well when the Canary Wharf complex had been constructed. Taken a risk everyone (including Grace) said he shouldn’t, and it had paid off, and these days money just made money. It mounted and mounted. Doris was like him, a risk taker. A stroll to Heywood Hill bookshop where Doris was on first name terms with the knowledgeable and courteous gentleman who ran it, to receive their recommendations for her Out of the Past clip, and then it was time for Lady Random’s. They made every minute of the time they had: it was in both their natures – Grace tended to sit about dreamily doing nothing – and Barley did feel a little tired when they got to the stolid cream house with pillars. Caesar salad is not much to sustain a man accustomed all his life to fried fish and chips and peas, but he supposed the canapés at the Randoms’ would be plentiful and nourishing: not everything can be low fat.
‘My God,’ said Doris, after she had changed and made her entrance; all expensive simplicity. ‘I do believe that’s your ex-wife over there. How on earth does she get into a do like this?’ Lady Random in her niceness had let Doris change in her, Lady Random’s dressing room, where Doris had much admired various bottles of scent, but kept quiet about the décor, which favoured Fauve, and looked to her rather too like the TV backdrop from which she presented her book reviews on the programme. Literature was considered a worthy subject, but the set design was calculated to liven things up as much as possible. The two women had a brief conversation before Lady Random tactfully left Doris alone to change, in which Lady Random said to Doris that she and Barley must come to dinner some time, and Doris had invited them down to Wild Oats (as she had re-named Barley’s, and formerly Grace’s manor house home in the country) for the August weekend, if they were not to be in the Bahamas. But there was something about Lady Random’s attitude which annoyed Doris: Doris had been definite about dates: Lady Random had not. Doris felt she was snubbed and was not accustomed to it. ‘Barley,’ she said now, ‘get your ex-wife out of this room or I can’t stay in it. Fetch the police or something. She’s a murderess.’
‘Darling,’ said Barley, waving across the room at Grace, ‘she is murderous and a would be murderer, Judge Tobias agreed with you there, but she has done her time and I don’t imagine she is going to attack yo
u right here and now.’ ‘Hell hath no fury,’ said Doris, but subsided for the time being, because a young man of extraordinary beauty was now standing in front of a portrait he had apparently painted. It was of Lady Juliet Random and it made her appear kind, beautiful, intelligent and serene, if in a slightly Rubensesque way. This was how Doris would have preferred to look: sometimes legs can be too long, faces too narrow, hair cuts too Princess-Di-ish for comfort. Too TV all round, in fact. The world might currently reckon Doris the hottest thing since microwaved jam, what with her new British-made millionaire husband, but Doris herself had her doubts. You could do so much with style and pizzazz and move so fast no-one had time to perceive the flaws, but Lady Juliet could still look good when calm and reposed. And she would never go out of fashion as Doris could, and Doris knew it. One day the world would sigh when they saw Doris on TV and say not her again. Doris must lay up treasure and self-confidence against that day.
Round Lady Juliet Random’s firm and flawless painted neck was a rare, colourful Bulgari piece, a necklace in red gold and steel, bright porcelain and deep ruby, and Doris knew she must have it. She and Barley had seen one like it, but not quite like it, in the Bulgari store that afternoon: and decided against it, and chosen instead the one she now wore round her neck, a piece not so vivid, perhaps, more muted, more somehow now, for what were Barley and Doris but now. It had been a fraction of the price, moreover, £18,000 not £275,000, and Doris sincerely hoped that this factor had not entered Barley’s judgement. She had been talking about paying him back, of course, but he surely realised this was not really on the cards. She was a working girl, he was a wealthy man, and he loved her and must prove it. There was nothing she hated more than a mean man. She loved the necklace she had on, with its ancient Roman coins and its contemporary Roman flair, of course she did, it was just that now she wanted Lady Juliet’s as well.
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.’