The Bulgari Connection

by Fay Weldon

  In the four month gap between Doris sending in Flora to do the research for the show in which Barley was to feature and the actual taping of the programme Barley had come to realise just how inadequate, uneducated and ignorant he was. Talk of Brunelleschi or the Van Eycks, or Medici patronage and Barley had no idea what anyone was going on about, or even what century. Grace never had much of a clue but knew a bit more than Barley did: and that had disconcerted him too. Who was Savonarola? Some kind of salami sausage, Barley thought. But no. Some religious geezer way back then. Flora knew, Doris knew. Grace guessed but got it wrong: she thought he wassome kind of Marxist philosopher. Barley just made a fool of himself.

  One of the reasons he had married Doris, Barley didn’t deny it, was to rid himself of the feeling that he was not the equal of the architects, the politicians, the planners with whom he dealt daily and who had all been to University, many even to Oxford or Cambridge. Sure, Barley had the knack of making money at a level that they for the most part did not, but they mysteriously won more of the world’s respect and he wanted part of it.

  He was not ready to hear Doris criticised – she was his wife, after all – and to her credit Flora did not indulge her obvious anger. She told him over the croutons that she had been fired by Doris, and was now unemployed.

  ‘She is quite good at firing people,’ said Barley, cautiously. ‘It’s her strength. She even got Grace fired,’ and he laughed a little. He asked Flora what the reason was: there must be some kind of reason. She must have done something wrong. Even Ross had refused to lose weight; if he’d had any self-discipline he would have lost at least a pound or so. So what was it? ‘I wore a white dress to your wedding and my legs are better than hers,’ said Flora promptly. ‘I upstaged the bride.’ Barley automatically looked down to see if they were – she had them rather fetchingly tucked round the feet of her chair – and it was true they were supple and shapely, with perhaps a little more flesh around the calf than Doris sported. Doris’s legs were very long, but a little too thin for perfection. And Flora had delightful knees.

  ‘Oh come off it,’ said Barley. ‘That’s stupid talk.’

  ‘And you looked at me too long,’ said Flora, ‘and she caught you at it.‘You just looked so nice,’ said Barley helplessly. ‘Why now, then? If you’re right and this is the reason, why has she waited until now to pounce?’

  ‘Because she thought she’d found someone else to do the job,’ said Flora. ‘Only she hasn’t. Jasmine Orbachle. I went to art college with her. She works at Bulgari now, but before that she was doing research on ancient jewellery. I’ve warned her off so now she’s staying put and that means Doris doesn’t have anyone.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Barley. It was difficult to know what side he was on. ‘That’s bad.’

  ‘It is particularly bad,’ said Flora, ‘because of the Leadbetter business coming up. The show’s backing Leadbetter to get the Turner and he simply isn’t going to. The public have gone right off all that Culture of Disgust stuff. The critics will follow like lambs. There’s going to be a seismic shift and Doris will have three whole programmes in the can about yuck art.’ ‘The show’s allowed to make a mistake sometimes,’ said Barley. ‘It’s normally spot-on. It’s famous for it.’ ‘Because of me,’ said Flora. ‘Not because of Doris. Doris is good at knowing everyone who’s anyone in the art world but she can’t tell a good painting from the back of a bus. She’s dreadfully insecure, you know.’

  Barley’s mouth fell open. A waiter asked if everything was all right. He said it was. ‘The knives are out for her,’ said Flora. ‘In the end you can make too many enemies. She’s not the only one just waiting for an excuse to fire people. The thing is, she needs me, and I want you to tell her so. For her sake: because you can get quite fond of Doris even though she is a monster.’

  Barley said he knew that. Flora said it was strange how and why you loved and liked people: it was seldom because theywere good. Except for a few people like Grace. She had wept buckets when the marriage split up, and had been to see Grace in prison but Grace wouldn’t see her.

  ‘She did a lot of not seeing people,’ said Barley.

  ‘I pray for her,’ said Flora.

  ‘Keep it up,’ said Barley. ‘Because I reckon she’s quite happy.’ He would have liked Flora to pray for him too but felt too embarrassed to say so. He felt like crying, which was not what grown men in the Ivy often did. There was a table a couple along at which were sitting four new peers of the Realm, from the worlds of art, architecture, opera and cultural television. They were drinking pink champagne – a magnum – and seemed very cheerful. He thought they might well not be if the rumours about the new ascendency of Science were true. But they waved happily at Barley, who had met all of them at many a meeting about Opera Noughtie. He waved agreeably back. No doubt they thought Flora was his mistress. Too bad. The women the Lords were with tended not to spend too much time on their appearance. They wore long drippy flat clothes: much as they would have done in the Sixties. The miniskirt had simply passed them by while they thought of more important things. Very few women got it right. Grace felt easy in clothes which would have suited a vicarage garden back in the Fifties. Doris’s were whatever Tatler said they should be. Flora’s face was way back in Medici times, so far back it made her pale, but her clothes and her style were of the effortless Now. He liked that. And her wrists were so thin.

  32

  Ethel Handy is thirty-nine, or so she says. She has a neat small-featured face and dark short hair. She looks competent and is good at figures. She wears tidy blouses and well-fitting skirts. She embezzled £80,000 from her employers, a chain of bookmakers and got three years when discovered. She was trying to pay off her mortgage and a man who was blackmailing her about some rude photographs taken when she was sixteen, which he threatened to show her aged parents. He had been the photographer. She thought her employers exploited both her and the public. She thought that if she gave him what he wanted he would go away, but he didn’t. He went to the police about the fraud and vanished with her best friend and the money. The mortgage company foreclosed. She was sentenced to three years inside. The prison authorities were more soft-hearted than the judge and gave her as many privileges as they could.

  When I was in prison Ethel was a good friend. She stood between me and the other girls. Grace can’t help speaking the way she does, she’d tell them. She’s a doctor’s daughter.

  She can’t help crying. She loves her husband and her husband ditched her. Yes, she’s the woman in the papers who tried to murder the husband’s mistress. No, she doesn’t want drugs. It’s not her fault Sandy (one of the women guards) fancies her. She doesn’t like being touched up either, she just doesn’t spit and snarl like the rest of you animals. No, Grace, if it’s Lancaster Stew on the menu don’t have it, someone once found a sheep’s eye in it, take the vegetarian instead. No, she’s not going to give her visitors letters to take out of the prison. Her visitors get searched just like anyone else.

  I owe Ethel.

  Ethel nurtured me and answered for me until my wits were back and I stopped the weeping, which was when, on Ethel’s advice, I stopped taking the tranquillisers. We were locked up in our cells for sometimes seventeen or eighteen hours a day. The trick was, I learned, to think in terms of ‘we’ not ‘me’, and the authorities as ‘them’. The attempt to see yourself as apart, as some kind of specially sensitive and innocent victim of circumstances, was pointless. I’d been in with the M and M’s, the murderers and molesters, the really spooky ones, for a couple of weeks, but they must have decided I was harmless and moved me out of that wing and in with the petty offenders, the ones who’d been through the magistrates’ courts, not the High Courts: forty-year-olds in for brawling and seventeen-year-olds for shop-lifting lipsticks: lots for drug offences, and one seventeen-year-old with a month-old baby now in care, in for three months for stealing a prawn cocktail. ‘The magistrate had it in for me: I had him in the back of a car once, the filthy
mean old git.’ We could look at TV, I got to know Richard and Judy well. We could go to cookery and childcare classes: everyone did their best but the sum of anyinstitution is always worse than the sum of its parts. The place smelt of urine and disinfectant and was never quiet: even at three in the morning sudden animal shrieks and bellows and wails would shake the air, born of rage or despair. There was a male guard everyone hated who did random strip-searching: he had a fleshy face and piggy eyes and a slack body and he’d look at us with contempt and desire, both. Ethel said, ‘Think of him with no clothes on,’ which made me giggle. I owe Ethel all right.

  All the same. When Walter and I went round to Tavington Road and asked Mr Zeigler for Harry Bountiful’s tape of Walter’s encounter with Doris he said he’d given it to Ethel to take round to me. And there was no sign of Ethel in the flat or out of it, and her suitcase was gone. And Walter said sadly he supposed she’d use it for blackmail. I’d rashly told Ethel the story of Walter, Lady Juliet, the portrait and the Bulgari jewels of Doris’s desire. She had seen the portrait on the easel. And of course she already knew about Barley and Doris Dubois, from the time when we were both in prison and frankly I could talk about little else. She had told me that the cure for one man is another man and she had been right. Embezzler and fraudster Ethel might be, and an outcast of society, but she was wise and, I had thought, good.

  ‘She won’t do that to me,’ I said. ‘Not Ethel. She’s my friend.’ ‘Oh yes she would,’ said Walter. ‘I know life, I know what people do. If they pray not to be led into temptation, it’s because temptation is what they can’t resist. My father told me that.’

  ‘Oh Walter,’ I said. ‘You sound so old. Just like your father.’ ‘And you’re so young and full of hope,’ he said, rather dryly. And I could see that if it went on like this I would lose him. He needed me to be worldly-wise.

  33

  ‘Doris, listen to me,’ said Barley to Doris over breakfast at Claridges. He had insisted on bacon and eggs with fried bread, sausages and tomatoes. She was horrified, but he said he had a hard day in front of him. Breakfast arrived, not on a large tray but on a trolley with heated plates and metal covers, which had to be wheeled into the room and served by waiters. ‘Are you really going on with this Leadbetter business? Because I have reason to believe he isn’t going to win the Turner Prize, and you like me can afford to be wrong about a few things but not about everything. Just don’t enthuse too wildly about him.’ She studied him from beneath her fringe of wild hair. She had not had it cut recently. ‘Barley,’ she said. ‘You know one or two things about art since I have taken you in hand, but not enough to know this. Who have you been speaking to? It could be that bitch Lady Juliet, who hates me; it could be your ex-wife Grace who’s shacked up with next year’s winner, Walter Wells. Or it could be Flora Upchurch.’

  ‘It’s none of these people,’ he said, but she was not a good person to lie to. He had lied to Grace with impunity, and though she had often known he was lying, she had usuallybeen prepared to accept his judgement, that the lie would do less harm than the truth. Grace could tolerate what Doris could not, that we all move in a world full of less than perfect solutions, of least worst options.

  Doris yawned in a languorous way and said, ‘Darling, I know perfectly well that you had lunch with Flora at the Ivy, and that you chose not to tell me about it.’

  And instead of being angry, and barely waiting for the last of the room-service staff to leave, she dragged him to the bed and was so enthusiastic and sudden in her lovemaking that he did not have time to be apprehensive, and performed to her evident satisfaction, and his own great relief, before he had time to think, or worry. ‘How did you know?’ he asked.

  ‘No-one goes to the Ivy for secrecy,’ she said. ‘They go to be seen.’

  ‘Flora only wanted me to warn you about Leadbetter,’ Barley said.

  ‘No she didn’t,’ said Doris. ‘She wants her job back. Well, she can have it.’

  Afterwards she wanted to go down to Bulgari to hurry them up about her necklace, but Barley, emboldened by his protein and fat-rich breakfast, said he couldn’t spare the time, and added as an afterthought that she was not to go down there to give Jasmine Orbachle a hard time. ‘Otherwise what?’ asked Doris, eyes narrowed. ‘Otherwise nothing,’ said Barley, prudently, thinking he had got away with quite enough for one day, and so he had.

  Doris went straight to the studio instead of spending the morning on the phone and shopping, which put her in abad mood. When she got to reception there were two visitors waiting to see her. A plain, spotty woman who had obviously nothing to do with the arts or the media, and a rather glam man from abroad with a camel hair suit and a gold tiepin in the shape of Concorde. They introduced themselves as Ethel and Hashim and said they would like a word with her in private. Doris said she was very, very busy and perhaps they could make an appointment. They said no, it was in her interest to see them now. They were wearing the security badges given out at the front desk so Doris assumed they had at least some kind of clearance. She took them through into the studio, and on to the set. She had found in the past that if you spoke to bailiffs – her spending habits had in the past led her into some financial difficulty – on set, that is to say in the world according to TV, with its great dim-vaulted ceilings above slung with gantries, its brilliant, hot artificial lights below, duck-boarded electrical cables tripping up the unwary, and then (cynosure of all eyes) the glowing harmonies of the set itself: the glossy table, unnaturally clean, the comfortable armchairs, and the sense of the whole world watching – that they lost the thread of what they were after, and would often simply stumble from the place in search of reality and sanity, leaving Doris in peace.

  She had a feeling that these two betokened trouble, though exactly what she could not be sure. Perhaps to do with something going on at Wild Oats? The architect and designer were balking at the deadline of December twelfth, now only two weeks away, and she had made her lawyer write stiff letters to them, explaining in no uncertain terms that according to the terms of their contract – yes, certainly in the small print, but surely they read the small print? She always did – if they did not finish in time they would get no more money at all from her, and would be obliged to remit such funds as she had alreadypaid over to them. And that since also, under the terms of the contract, if they brought in new builders they were obliged to pay any excess from their own pockets, they would be best advised to put pressure on Belgradia Builders to deliver.

  Barley was going to be sixty on the twelfth of December and she loved Barley and would give him a birthday to remember.

  But her horoscope in the Daily Mail had warned her against any extreme action in defence of the righteousness of her cause, saying the velvet glove was always better than the iron fist, and though Doris had never before found this to be the case, she rather trusted the Mail‘s astrologer and so was going a little prudently. She was hopping mad about Jasmine letting her down and pretty sure that Flora had had a hand in it, and totally enraged that Barley had taken Flora to the Ivy so sneakily but she had been very velvet-gloved about it all.

  Had she not? The Mail would be proud of her. And she would be velvet-gloved with this pair too. People out of the blue, events that surprised you, were often sent by Fate, she found, either for good or bad. The Bulgari people had stood out against her wishes, which had certainly surprised her, but see how it had led to her encounter with Walter Wells and the revenge on Lady Juliet which she had in mind. If you couldn’t achieve an effect one way you could in another. She must remember to confirm with the Manhatt. Gallery that they would be there to film a week before Christmas. She kept her promises. Walter Wells would be famous by next Spring, and as enamoured of her, Doris, as Barley had ever been. She would see how the Opera Noughtie project worked out before she decided whether or not to keep Barley on as a husband.

  These days it didn’t do to be seen to have affairs: this was the age of openness, secrecy was a no-no. You could
achieve legitimacy in your sex life, and variety as well, so long as you paid off the lawyers.

  ‘This is Hashim,’ said the one who called herself Ethel. She looked vaguely familiar. ‘He is a member of the Royal Family of Jordan. He is descended from the Hashemites, from which the word assassin comes.’

  ‘How very interesting,’ said Doris, casually. Did he carry a knife, a gun? ‘I did a programme on the art treasures of Jordan once, and quite magnificent they were. How can I help you?’ ‘We’d like you to listen to this tape,’ said Ethel. ‘I expect with all this equipment about you can sort that out. It’s a tape of you and Walter Wells having a conversation, well, kind of, with you making all the running, and I don’t think you’d want your bosses to hear it. Or your nice new husband, for that matter.’

  ‘I see,’ said Doris, thinking fast. Her flat was bugged. Why? How? Who? It was routine enough for news-anchors and political correspondents, and no-one cared much, but arts presenters did not usually warrant such attention. Probably a private matter.

  Grace? Possibly. Well, an eavesdropper hears no good of themselves. And at least she had got the old bat to sit up and take notice of something. ‘How much do you want for it?’

  No point in beating about the bush. Barley would probably pay up, anyway. If the worst came to the worst she could accuse him of fancying Flora and say she was driven into someone else’s arms by her extreme distress. Actually, she would hate it if there was anything going on, really hate it. She probably did love Barley, just a bit. It was odd how these things crept up on you. She could do so much morefor Barley than Grace ever could. Why couldn’t Grace just accept it?

  Hashim shifted in his deep armchair, the one designed to make guests feel helpless, and the gold of his Concorde tiepin caught the light and glittered. If he had been a guest Make-Up would have asked him to remove it before the show. But he wasn’t a guest, he was a blackmailer. Sometimes it was a little difficult to remember what was real life and what was studio, and when one intruded into the other like this you could feel a trifle disoriented yourself. He was sweating a little, his dark eyes unreadable. She hoped he was emotionally stable.