The Bulgari Connection

by Fay Weldon

  So Grace agrees to go to her ex-husband’s party, given by the new wife, as a civilised person must in these days of frequent divorce, or how could anyone live for rancour.

  11.10a.m.

  Grace goes round to Tavington Court to find her valium, all the same, as well as do the ironing and see how Ethel and Hashim are getting on. She has not had to take tranquillisers since meeting up with Walter. She can only hope Doris hasn’t taken away too much of the Manor House’s character, but

  Ross has let slip a remark or two down at the Health Club which leads her to fear the worst.

  ‘My, you’re looking tired today,’ Mr Zeigler says to Grace when she lets herself in, by which she imagines he means she’s looking rather older than she was. But that’s okay: whatever it was has found its equilibrium at around thirty for her and forty for Walter, which could hardly be better. She feels quite confident about that: they are the lucky winners of one of life’s great and rare prizes. Call it miracle, call it what you want. Just call me Dorothy.

  Hashim has got the job with Harry Bountiful, the one Ross hasn’t taken. He is to be a private detective. He says he is applying for citizenship through the proper channels. They explained at the Job Centre that he was eligible. Ethel tells Grace she’s starting a computer-graphics course. She boldly ticked the ex-offenders box on the application form they gave her, and such is society’s current desire to rehabilitate the wrongdoer she’s been given priority status and can bypass the waiting list. Thank you, Grace, for everything.

  11.50a.m.

  ‘Your ex-hubby was over looking for you,’ says Mr Zeigler as Grace leaves. ‘That man can move fast when he has to.’ It looked like a murder attempt to him, he says. He supposes he should be grateful he didn’t have to scrape up blood and guts from the pavement. He’s been to the doctor for nausea because of the cooking smells, was she aware of that? But Grace is barely listening. ‘The Russians!’ she thinks.

  A full five years now since Grace pointed out to Barley that the Russians would assume Opera Noughtie to be some kind of government-sponsored sex show – costing only the same asthe Dome, and likely to get a better return on their investment – and be none too pleased when they found out it wasn’t. ‘Silly old Gracie,’ he’d said, and kissed the top of her head, ‘leave the worrying to me.’ Now she’s frightened for Barley, but when she gets back to the studio she doesn’t tell Walter this. At eighteen years of age she would have. At thirty-two she knows better. This is the wisdom of experience.

  2.00p.m.

  Carmichael’s flight leaves for Wellington, New Zealand. Toby has finally answered his mobile and asked Carmichael to come out to meet him. All is well.

  Emily and the dog catch a train back to York. It is as well she is amongst animal-lovers, because nerves make him pee up against the poles in the buffet area.

  Grace keeps a hair appointment at Harrods and arranges to have her nails done. It’s the only place in London where they don’t raise their eyebrows at the sight of neglected nails, and Grace has lately been helping Walter stretch canvases for the Manhatt. She means to buy a dress for the evening but when it comes to it can’t be bothered. She will wear her lucky crimson crushed velvet, the one the colour of blown roses. The fabric is coming back into fashion and doesn’t even need ironing.

  Lady Juliet goes to the bank in Knightsbridge and takes the Egyptian necklace out of her safe deposit-box, puts it in her Waitrose bag with the shopping and takes the Underground home to Victoria. If there’s one thing she hates it’s wasting money on taxis. She’ll wear the white dress she was painted in by Walter Wells.

  3 p.m.-4 p.m.

  Christmas is coming: the holiday spirit is about to take over. In offices and boardrooms everywhere people struggle to get important things done by the end of the following week. After that phones will stay unanswered, crashed computers stay unserviced, e-mail be jammed with singing greeting cards. It will be the second week in January when the schools go back before normality returns.

  At the Department of Trade and Industry a consensus is finally reached about the fate of the Opera Noughtie project. That it was under discussion in the first place is meant to be a secret, but Stock Exchange fluctuations demonstrate otherwise. Sir Ronald leaves smiling and goes home to Lady Juliet.

  They manage half an hour in bed. She doesn’t tell him she took the Underground. He’d have a fit. She doesn’t tell him that after discussion with Chandri she’s decided to have a face-lift. Not liposuction, it sounds too horrid. She’ll wait until Sir Ron’s off on some trip somewhere, and then nip into the clinic and have it done. She’s looking forward to the Salt party. She wonders what Doris will wear: she hopes Doris didn’t mind too much having her dress auctioned at the Little Children, Everywhere do. She, Lady Juliet, had rather twisted her arm. But it was in a good cause. So much was. It was time she forgave Doris for not answering the invitation but just turning up, and put her back on her party list.

  4.15p.m.

  In a quiet smoke-free boardroom top TV management is discussing breaches of security and other delicate matters, not a few of them to do with Doris Dubois. The existence of acertain tape has come to their notice. It came through the post anonymously to the head of Drama and Culture. Employees are free to do what they want with their personal lives of course, but not to bring the institution into disrepute, and certainly not to offer TV exposure in exchange for personal favours. What if the tape gets sent to the newspapers? The uproar could even affect the level of the licence fee. When it comes to the celebrities of their own creation the Corporation must be doubly careful, it goes without saying. But Doris Dubois is a public figure: if they offend her they offend the very public it is their remit to please. There’s an in-built contradiction here, as Head of Documentary and Current Affairs points out. There’s no such thing as a ‘safe celebrity’: safe people are dull people, and that’s the last thing the public wants. There is always going to be a risk of scandal. ‘Children, hold on tight to nurse‘ he quotes, ‘for fear of finding something worse.’ Everyone turns to look at him and he realises that to support Doris is from now on to be suspected of having had a relationship with her. He shuts up. He has not had a relationship with Doris, and nor have most men and women present. But reputation is reputation, and once a girl has one it’s difficult to shake off. That’s been known since Jane Austen’s time.

  The discussion moves on. The security guard who ran amok and ended up in Studio 5 – a situation which Doris handled well, and which counts in her favour: they are scrupulous, these managers – turns out to have been an illegal immigrant, and his papers blatantly falsified. The Human Resource Department must be hauled over the coals about this but warns in advance that staffing levels must be increased if they’re to reach their efficiency targets. One way and another finding the money for actual programmes begins to be a problem. Here they find theirsolution to the Doris problem. Artsworld Extra is to be pulled as too expensive per head of viewer, as it will most certainly prove to be if the quality-weighting is removed before costing. That is to say, if that old reckoning – sitting uncomfortably anyway in today’s non-élitist cultural climate – that a viewer with A-levels is worth 1.2 of a viewer without, is removed from the books. This they will do forthwith. Doris’s Head of Department, who has to break the news to Doris, leaves the meeting and is not smiling. He tries to contact Doris on her mobile but can’t raise her.

  4.35p.m.

  Doris is in South Molton Street, picking up a copy of the flame-coloured dress Lady Juliet wrested from her back at the charity auction a couple of months back. Doris has had the dress especially made up and has already had two dressmakers fired for ugly seams. The one the previous week was a rather beautiful girl from Haiti who gnashed her teeth while she worked and disconcerted the customers.

  ‘I’m sure she’s very exotic,’ Doris said. ‘But she just can’t sew. You’ll lose more customers than you gain.’ The girl had overheard and pointed two fingers at Doris and been fired
on the spot.

  Doris feels quite shivery for a moment, hoping she hasn’t had a curse put on her. She will wear the Bulgari necklace with the antique coins inset, which should be enough to ward off all evil. She laughs at herself for being so superstitious.

  It’s a pity she won’t be wearing the Egyptian necklace tonight as she had planned, or even its equivalent in terms of cost and jewels which she has on order, but the portrait will show how much better such a necklace looks on her, Doris Dubois, than on Lady Juliet. She looks forward to seeing Lady Juliet’s facewhen the painting is unveiled. Snotty old cow. She wishes she had the kind of parents you could ask along to your husband’s surprise birthday party but she hasn’t and that’s that. If it was just her father it would be okay but he won’t go places on his own, and gets angry if asked.

  4.55p.m.

  Ross picks up Barley and Doris from Claridges. They have their party clothes in the back of the Rolls. Barley is rather silent. They run into heavier traffic than they had anticipated. Ross takes a back way and they find themselves in an Asian street market hemmed in by angry traders. Ross has tried to force his way through a street where traffic is banned, to the alarm of women and children. Doris gets out to explain that she is Doris Dubois and allowed special privileges in this world but down here no-one has heard of her or recognises her. They stare at her balefully. She gets back in the car rather quickly and shouts at Ross for being a fool. Ross turns round and addresses Barley.

  ‘She’s a whore and a bitch,’ he says, ‘and she had it off with that painter geezer only the other day and we have it on tape. Why you ever threw Mrs Grace out we will never understand. Now there was a real lady.’

  Ross gets out of the car and walks off and is lost in the crowd. Barley clambers over into the front seat, takes the wheel and slowly drives forward. The crowds melt, but someone scratches a long scar into the side of the Rolls. He drives fast through a pink dusk, faster than Ross ever did, speed cameras flashing them on their way, and they get to Wild Oats only twenty minutes later than scheduled.5.50p.m.

  ‘Good riddance,’ says Doris. ‘You’re a brilliant driver, Barley. Take no notice of anything that horrid fat man said. It’s the kind of lies and calumny people in my position get. He’s a disgruntled sacked employee and at the best of times looked like the kind of man who downloads child porn onto his computer.’

  Barley says he has other things on his mind. He is waiting for a phone call on his mobile, which doesn’t come. The last thing he wants is to walk into a room full of people wearing dinner jackets and have to fake surprise. But he supposes he has to go through with it. He wonders if it is a good sign or a bad sign that Sir Ron hasn’t rung. He looks at Doris and is unenchanted. It doesn’t seem to matter in the least who she has or hasn’t had sex with, and when.

  ‘You’re being very peculiar,’ she says but has no time to elaborate. She has to run round checking the caterers and the wine and Barley isn’t to come into the drawing room until his surprise birthday gift is on the plinth and she’s still waiting for it to turn up. She’s shrieking obscenities into the cellphone about where is it after all that.

  5.50p.m.

  Walter and Grace are driving to Wild Oats as fast as his banger of a van will allow. He is in no danger of speed cameras. Smoke billows out of the exhaust. The painting of Doris is in the back. The dog must have peed against the canvas or something, because when they turned it around the face was fine, but on the body below the waist paint had started to run again and blurred into the blue background, so that she looked positively fat. Walter had to do an emergency repair before they could leave, using white spirit to thin the paintbecause he’d run out of turps, and finishing it off with Grace’s electric hairdryer. They should have checked the day before: and indeed they had after a fashion but only to make sure the face was okay, since that was where the initial problem had been.

  Grace was rather relieved by the panic: it gave her no time to be nervous. Walter kept telling her how beautiful she looked, but her dress, when it came to it, was well on the down-home side and everyone else would be dressed to the nines, especially Doris. Grace did not for one minute believe Doris’s promises of sweetness and light all round, but she would face up to the challenge and go. Walter wanted her to and she needed to warn Barley about the Russians.

  6.05p.m.

  Barley goes to have a bath, but there is no hot water. He tries all the bathrooms. It seems Doris’s TV builders haven’t the budget, let alone the time to establish this order of luxury. Cold water comes out at a trickle. Barley goes across the lawn to the guest annexe, untouched since Carmichael used to do his embroidery over there. He was too hard on Carmichael. The world has vastly changed in the ten years since the boy left home: there is altogether less premium put on masculinity, on the manly qualities. Barley can see the absurdity of his anxiety about how the boy was turning out. Carmichael was just one of the first.

  Carmichael had called Barley from the airport to say he was sorry he hadn’t had time to see him while he was over from Oz, but Hi! next time perhaps. If he could raise the fare Barley might go over to Sydney to visit him. Why should the son have to make all the effort? Why shouldn’t the father make some of the running? In Barley’s mind the Opera Noughtie project is already lost.

  There is hot water in the guest annexe bathroom, but no electricity. Barley bathes in the light from the lamp on the back porch, filtered through slatted blinds. He sees a moving shadow outside the window: it is in the form of a man loading a rifle out of sight of the main house. Barley thinks it is a hallucination, a trick of the light, but when the man can be seen to click the barrel to, and Barley hears the click he realises it is all too true. It is the Russians! He is to be assassinated, probably at the height of the party for maximum effect. He leaps from the bath with a great roar, and bounds naked through the kitchen and into the porch. He does not know what he will do when he gets there but, death no longer seems any great threat, and attack is the best form of defence. The man lets out a howl, drops the gun and vanishes into the dark. Local talent, thinks Barley, that was no trained professional. He shouts for help, a security guard comes running. Barley takes his mobile and calls the police. Doris turns up to see what all the fuss is about and, seeing Barley naked says, ‘For God’s sake, Barley, you really have to go on a proper diet. I mean a real one not just a pretend one.’ And she leaves him to get dressed, begging him to do it quickly before too many people see. She’s busy and agitated enough as it is. The white wine isn’t cold enough.

  7.40p.m.

  The police come and take the gun and make notes and go away.

  8.00p.m.

  The first guests arrive and a film crew from Artsworld Extra.

  The portrait has arrived, Doris has taken a quick look at it and announced herself pleased, and embraces Walter closely, body to body, saying for Grace’s benefit, ‘God, you understand me. We must do all that other stuff again, one night when we both have more time.’ Walter looks uneasy and pleads for understanding at Grace over Doris’s flame-coloured shoulder.

  Grace manages an answering insouciant shrug. Only the thought of the Artsworld Extra team at the Manhatt. Gallery prevents her from launching herself at Doris, hitting, spitting, scratching. If she was in a car she would run her down again, worth prison, worth everything.

  As it is she helps Doris and Walter put the canvas on its easel on the plinth and cover it with a kind of veil arrangement, which when a cord is tugged will fall aside to reveal the portrait. Doris has asked Lady Juliet to do the honours and Lady Juliet has said of course. Lady Juliet, like Grace, can always be relied upon to offer a service not a disservice if she possibly can, and besides, she is determined to forgive Doris.

  ‘How do you like the refurbishment, Grace?’ asks Doris. ‘Barley adores it.’

  ‘I think it’s fine,’ says Grace. It looks perfectly horrible, but then as she remembers now it always had. You could fill it up with chintz and Persian rugs all you liked, as
she had, or lower ceilings and go for Installation Art and Contemporary Gothic, as Doris had, but it would always defeat you. Old houses were like hermit crabs: they were a shell under which a sequence of families lived, all doing their best not to think about whoever lived there before and the fate that awaited everyone. The Manor House was just a hard and particularly obdurate shell. Doris could call it what she liked. She was welcome to the place. She was welcome to Barley too, come to that. If the Russians are after him Grace had better take Lady Juliet’s advice to heart and put No. 32 Tavington Court on the market before the official receivers try to make it their own. She might give some of the proceeds to Barley to help him out, but she might not. He should have let her sell the Rolls-Royces last time it happened. Carmichael could do with a house for himself and his Toby.

  ‘Just fine,’ she repeats.

  9.00p.m.

  Barley makes his entrance into a crowded room, and acts surprised. Everyone knows it’s an act, but clusters round warmly, wishing him a happy sixtieth birthday party. Try as he may to persuade everyone he’s only fifty-nine no-one wants to know. On top of everything else he has now lost a year of his life. Grace is there looking fantastic in a reddish dress that looks familiar. She comes forward to embrace him and everyone looks on and smiles, including Doris, and a few think Doris is a good and understanding woman, well-versed in the manners of contemporary life, but most don’t. Most do have to agree Doris is looking pretty fantastic, what with the figure, the health, the youth, the confidence, the dress and the necklace with the antique coins embedded in it, as if wherever she moved she made history, which in a way she does.

  Grace murmurs in Barley’s ear, and her soft breath is sweet and familiar, that he should be careful of the Russians and he says yes, he will be. There is no time or space to tell her more because the Artsworld Extra crew is right up there close to them filming, and the crowd is now pressing in on them. Flora is here somewhere, asked because Doris is still hoping to win her back on the programme, but Barley can’t see her though he looks.