by Fay Weldon
‘Twenty thousand,’ said Grace. Walter turned to look at her; blushing, he saw, from nerves?
‘How disgusting,’ said Doris Dubois, rather loud and clear. ‘That must be a hot flush. Can’t she even take hormones?’
The bidding stopped, as if having startled itself out of existence.
The hammer fell.
‘Sold to Mrs Salt,’ said the actor-auctioneer, who had dined at the Manor House once or twice in the old days, and clicked that he recognised his one-time hostess. He remembered her with affection. She would serve prawn cocktails followed with steak-and-kidney pie when you were grimly resigned to another dose of sun-dried tomatoes, rocket salad, and seared tuna.
‘I’m Mrs Salt,’ said Doris Dubois.
‘My name is Grace McNab,’ said Grace, firmly.
‘I’m sorry,’ said the actor-auctioneer, confused, but everyone makes mistakes, and it wasn’t as if he was being paid for this.
‘Sold to the lady in the red velvet dress.’
Walter Wells heard Barley Salt say to Grace, ‘You can’t afford it, Gracie. You’ll have to touch your capital. Let me do it.’ He heard Grace say, ‘No. If I have to live my own life not ours I’ll live it my way. Go away.’ Walter knew then he would have a hard time wresting her emotions away from Barley and towards himself; but he also knew he meant to do it. ‘Please can we go now, Barley,’ said Doris Dubois. ‘I really can’t waste any more time.’
‘Why, Doris,’ said Grace – McNab or Salt? – sweetly, ‘the price tag is still on your dress.’ And so it was, saw Walter, a much bar-coded card hanging out the almost-collar at the back of the orange silk. Doris was a rose unfurled and bright, not blown, like Grace: the kind his mother sometimes bought at Woolworth’s. ‘To add colour,’ she’d say. ‘Cheap but cheerful – they’ve had such a struggle against odds to live, they sometimes do it very well.’
Doris Dubois turned to Grace and said ‘Bitch!’ rather loudly.
‘Oh come on now,’ hissed Barley, ‘Don’t let’s have a scene. Can’t we all settle down and be friends?’
‘Are you joking?’ asked Doris Dubois.
‘Are you mad?’ asked Grace McNab.
Lady Juliet trotted up decorously with some nail scissors, and said reproachfully: ‘Poor Grace was only trying to be helpful.’ And in full view of all the room – plus a camera crew which had just happened to stop by for the London Nite programme – she snipped off the tag, while Doris stood furious and tried to laugh it off, saying: ‘Six hundred pounds! The Little Children, Everywhere could do with that – as worn by Doris Dubois.’ ‘She’s not stripping off in public,’ said Barley, ‘but it’s okay by me. Sell away!’
So Doris Dubois went upstairs spitting and fuming to change into jeans and an LC,E T-shirt someone conjured up, and put her dress up for auction. In one way she was pleased: it was what Hollywood stars did, and suggested that the magic of her fame was being properly acknowledged. But she didn’t want to lose the dress her Bulgari necklace had been chosen to match; nor did she like the way Barley had leapt to his ex-wife’s defence; least of all did she like how Lady Juliet had strong-armed her – albeit in the interests of Little Children, Everywhere, whose needs must be respected, certainly in public. Not that Doris liked children, anywhere, one bit. But there were too many witnesses for her to be able to defy Lady Juliet safely. She would have her revenge.
11
Once I had bought the painting I didn’t know what to do with it. I wrote a cheque for it, and filled out the stub, and felt quite proud of myself. For years I’d left that kind of thing to Barley. The painting was taller than me and twice as wide. The frame was gilded, and so heavy I wasn’t going to be able to lift it and tuck the thing under my arm. With Lady Juliet’s smile glimmering above it, the Bulgari necklace shimmered with ruby light, and the image seemed a miraculous object, like a Byzantine icon that was about to bring so much benefit to everyone. The money would go to Little Children, Everywhere and here I was, in possession of the concentrated essence of so much time and skill: the very soul of Lady Juliet distilled onto canvas. Walter Wells was also very good at the texture of fabric and the glittery depth of precious stones. I liked it that he was. More, I had answered Doris Dubois back. I might yet do more of it. And Barley had shown concern for me. I was elated.
Which was how Doris Dubois ended up selling her new dress at a charity auction and it was on TV that night, with her wearing T-shirt and jeans and frankly looking a trifle odd in the ornate company she was keeping. She would have put me in prison for the rest of my life if she could have. The dress fetched £3250, having gone up in jumps of £250 and nice Lady Juliet was very grateful, and so no doubt were the Little Children, Everywhere. But Doris was not grateful to me at all. These victories were small and silly but they were victories. And nothing as to what was to come.
‘Can I help you with that?’ asked the young painter, startling me. His eyes were so bright and attentive. Once, I remembered, many men had looked at me like that. But after you have been married for a while they stop, and you forget. Perhaps a certain kind of woman catches the essence of man in marriage: the female body picks up the smell and texture of the partner if only as a consequence of so much physical contact, so much acceptance and absorption of what are tactfully called body fluids. In these days of safe sex I daresay it doesn’t happen so much. But here I was, all that reversed, stopped, my own separate self emerging, seventeen-year-old Dorothy McNab again: no longer Dorothy Salt. I had slept and now I had woken, to find three decades and more had passed, and here was a young man gazing at me as if I were an object of delight.
‘Well yes you can help,’ I said. ‘I was going to take it home in a black cab, but I don’t know whether it will fit inside, or how I will hang it on the wall once I’m home.’
‘Oh it will fit,’ he said. ‘It will fit very well. We could take it back to my place and hang it on my wall.’
‘It would seem more appropriate to hang it on mine,’ I said, ‘since I have paid so much for it. One is expected to get the value, surely?’
‘Move in with me,’ he said, ‘and let us get the value together. We can turn Lady Juliet’s face to the wall, we can stack her amongst the landscapes, when we want our privacy, which I imagine will be often.’
We went back to his place together in his van, he hung Lady Juliet on the wall and I stayed to get the value of it. And I had thought he was gay.
12
‘It is too bad,’ said Doris Dubois, ‘that your bitch of an ex-wife should own a painting which is mine by rights.’ Their sheets were pink satin – as chosen by Paul the designer – but Doris didn’t think they were truly satisfactory. Sex in satin sheets was fine in principle but crap in practice. They were cool when you first laid your head on them but too soon got hot and clammy, and worse, slippery, putting her in mind of the cod-liver oil her mother Marjorie Zoac had made her daughter take every morning.
‘Now there’s nothing for it, darling – unless you get me the real necklace from that other bitch, Lady Juliet.’
‘It’s not as we had any use for the painting,’ said Barley. ‘As you pointed out yourself, it wouldn’t have fitted in here at all. My ex-wife should have had her portrait done when I asked her, seven years ago, back in the old days, when a wall was a wall and had a picture rail.’
‘More fool you bidding for it, then.’ She was in a bad mood. Barley seldom got the brunt of it – she reserved this for the camera crew and occasionally some literary guest or other on her book show. She had once reduced a young writer to tears on live TV by describing her sensitive novel as a load of self-pitying crap. It had done wonders for sales, as she had pointed out to the hundreds who wrote and phoned and e-mailed – e-mail could be a terrible burden: so much instant communication – in protest. And somebody had to keep the flame of literary criticism alive.
‘I liked the look of that young painter,’ said Doris, more to feel the sudden tautness of Barley’s body beside her than because she
did.
‘I suppose you fancied him,’ said Barley, hurt to the quick. A pang to the heart that felt almost physical. Grace had never hurt him like this. But that only proved his relationship with Grace had never been truly intense; more like a cosy kind of friendship. Love hurt, everyone knew.
Doris had remarked that Grace really looked her age all of a sudden, in that dreadful old dress, and it was true enough. He remembered her wearing that particular outfit once to a rather important dinner party; something to do with Carmichael, when Carmichael was small and used to embarrass everyone by coming down to family dinner in a dress. If he’d been allowed to punish Carmichael there and then he might have knocked some of the cissy nonsense out of him, but the therapists had been brought in and that was the end of that. He could not forgive Grace for the way she had colluded, for what she had in effect done to his son: stripped him of his manhood. He couldn’t say so to Doris, of course: any mention of Carmichael was met by sulks and stares, almost worse than when he referred to Grace. She wanted him to have started his life the day he met her. He remembered those dinners; Grace would never bring in the professionals, and insisted on doing the cooking herself, and hovering over tables of smart and useful people, sweaty and busy and nervous. Doris knew how to make the most of these occasions.
What a struggle it had all been: how wonderful it was to be shot of her, to have Wild Oats made what it ought to be, could always have been, were it not for Grace’s obstructionist ways. They were a power couple, he and Doris, and their background should reflect it, and Doris was making sure that it would. He shuddered sometimes at the bills and was sure the contractors Doris used were ripping him off, but she assured him that £200,000 for a carpet for the hall and stairs was nothing these days. And that was just the carpets. The trouble was, his mind was on a bigger game. All things depended at the moment on a make or break deal in Edinburgh: a new opera house development with a major art gallery attached – the Opera Noughtie it was to be called, a major celebration of the first ten years of the Government’s Century in the Arts project – and a worldwide-web tie-in. It was falling nicely into his lap, and being with Doris certainly helped. The deal was now a ninety-nine per cent certainty and would bring him in almost a billion, no worries. If it didn’t, if the one per cent won through, he’d be skint – he’d need a lot more than a couple of hundred thousand to get him straight again. But he was on a lucky streak: meeting Doris, falling in love, actually marrying her, having her in his bed nightly and by rights – how could anything go better? When the house was finished, the drain on the purse would be over.
He could almost hear Grace’s voice saying, ‘What do you mean, when the house is finished? It was finished in 1865.’ Doris was right, Grace could be as bitchy as the rest of them. Now Doris’s hand was roving, her fingers tugging ever so gently at the hairs on his chest. She gave each of his nipples a quick kiss. Grace never paid him this sort of attention in the morning.
‘Of course I didn’t fancy him,’ said Doris. ‘Why, do you want me to? Are you after a threesome? You, me and him. One has to be careful in case the press gets a hint, of course, but if that’s what you want.’
Barley was shocked.
‘Of course that’s not what I want,’ he said.
‘I was only teasing, darling,’ she was quick to reply. ‘Some men do like that kind of thing, you’d be surprised.’
‘Two girls and one man,’ said Barley, ‘I can see the point of that, but why would any man want another man?’
‘If he truly loved his wife he might,’ said Doris. ‘If for example he was rather old and she was rather young and he couldn’t satisfy her but still wanted to be involved. Why then he might make the sacrifice.’
‘You’re not suggesting,’ said Barley, who had, he supposed satisfied his new wife twice that night already, ‘that this applies to me?’
Doris laughed merrily, and tugged his chest hair some more. It was going a little grey and wiry.
‘If there was the slightest suggestion of that,’ she said, sounding quite offended, ‘I would hardly have brought the subject up. I don’t suppose I’d even be with you. Don’t worry about it, you’re better than most men of your age.’
Some questions, Barley had learned, it is better not to ask, in case you don’t like the reply. Doris had of her own declaration slept with her boss on several occasions but that had only, she assured him, been to get her own programme. And when she had been a student there had been several forays into experiment with other students but that was only to be expected these days. He thought he would probably kill anyone she dared look at now. Grace had last been seen leaving the Sir Ronalds’ with the painting plus the artist in an old van: so Ross the chauffeur had heard on the grapevine. Barley had not told Doris that; it would complicate his life too much.
He doubted he’d ever get to be Sir Barley now, not after the episode of Grace in the car park. But you never knew. The public had short memories; think of the Prince and Camilla.
‘But darling,’ Doris said now, her hand wandering down and patting his tummy, ‘I do think we have to work a little harder at the gym to get the extra pound or so off. Nothing that ages a man so much as a beer belly.’
This was ridiculous; Barley had no beer belly. A beer belly was when you looked down and couldn’t see your knees, and he was nowhere near as bad as that. He could perfectly well see his knees when he looked down: he was sure it was more than Sir Ronald could do, and certainly more than Billyboy Justice could. He wondered if he should move over into arms de-commissioning rather than property: but it was dangerous work, not just because of explosions, look at what had happened to Billyboy’s face, but people in the field did tend to get folded into the trunks of cars, dead. He would stick to the world-wide-web, as his gesture towards global peace and understanding.
‘I love you, darling,’ said Doris Dubois, firmly replacing his hand, as it strayed, ‘no matter what shape or size you are. It is you I adore, the one and only Barley Salt in all the world. Now if you’re too bashful to make Lady Juliet a straight offer on her necklace, can we please stroll down to Bulgari tomorrow and see about them making me up one just like hers.’
‘I don’t think they’d do that, darling,’ said Barley. ‘I think they may have rules about exclusivity in commissioned work, things like that.’
‘You’re just too mean to buy it for me, darling. You’re trying to get out of it.’
Well, she was right about that.
‘In six months’ time, Doris. If you can hang on for six months.’
‘Anything can happen in six months,’ she complained. ‘The whole world can change.’
She was right about that too, but neither of them knew it at the time.
‘I want that same young artist to paint me,’ said Doris, ‘If Sir Ronald can do that for his horrid Juliet, surely you can do it for me.’
‘Yes, but Doris,’ said Barley, ‘you did say we couldn’t have a traditional portrait in the new style Wild Oats.’ ‘Yes but,’ complained Doris, ‘how you do yes but me all the time. We’ll make a concession and have just one room with a picture rail. The library, I think. Of course that means redoing the floors for an antique effect, and probably replacing the panelling, which will have to be restored because they made rather a mess of it taking it out, but it will be worth it.’
Her hand moved downwards. He gasped with pleasure. ‘I don’t want you to have a necklace too like Lady Juliet’s,’ he said. ‘And I don’t want a portrait too like hers, either. Does it have to be by what was his name, Walter Wells? Really I would prefer it if it wasn’t.’ The hand retreated.
‘What is this apparently peculiar business going on between you and Sir Ronald and the man with the odd name? Contracts and ministries and backhanders and all that?’ She was keeping this one in reserve. He sighed. It was terrible how transparent others could be in their attempts to manipulate, and even more terrible how you simply accepted it, as you grew older and women grew younger.
This was the first Barley had heard of a relationship with Dicey Railton, who was a backbench MP, an embarrassment to the Government by virtue of the awkward questions he was so good at asking, especially when it came to matters of the arms trade and sanction breaking.
‘I’d rather you weren’t too close to Dicey Railton, Doris,’ he said. ‘You are my wife. We don’t want the papers getting hold of it and nor do you.’
‘True enough,’ she said, regretfully. ‘But this much is for sure, I don’t intend doing Lady Juliet any favours. Not after she made me take my dress off and sell it. Does she hate me? Why did she ask your ex-wife to the same function as she asked us? Whose side is she on anyway?’