The Bulgari Connection (10 page)

He finished his baked potato, leaving the skin. His mother had always encouraged him to eat the skins of potatoes since that was where their Vitamin C lurked, and had the peasants not peeled them the Irish Famine would not have been so terrible a thing. The phone rang. He had finished work so he answered it. Normally he would have left it, let it ring. People soon gave up and went away if you didn't answer after one or two attempts. He did not have an answerphone, let alone a fax or e-mail. The easier communication was, he had decided, the more unnecessary the things that were communicated.

It was Doris Dubois. He recognised her voice from the TV. Hers was one of the few programmes he watched, and he quite liked her, though she bounced about rather in her enthusiasms. But at least she had them, and wasn't forever bad-mouthing everything in a supercilious way, and when on occasion she branched out from books into art what she had to say was interesting and plausible. Grace had told him – she refused to watch – that in that case Doris Dubois must have some very good researchers working for her to whom she gave no credit, but Grace, normally so kind and charitable, was not quite to be trusted when it came to Doris Dubois. She had taken off her dress and given it to auction for charity and he'd thought that was a noble gesture. She had no idea, of course, or he supposed she had not, that her husband's previous wife was now living with him. But why should she mind that? First wives can hold grievances against second wives, and there were films to prove it but, why should second wives envy the first?

‘Walter Wells the painter?'

‘Yes. Is that Doris Dubois?'

‘You recognise my voice?'

‘It's very well known.' It was always sensible to flatter a little, while playing for time.

‘Well thank you, Walter. I liked your portrait of Lady Juliet. You do jewellery and fabrics so well.' She had the same instinct, it seemed. ‘I'm looking for something to give my husband Barley Salt for his birthday – in December, he's Sagittarius though you wouldn't think it – and I thought you might do a portrait of me.'

‘What, to give to him?' asked Walter. ‘The painting is usually a present from the person in the couple who hasn't been painted.'

‘I don't see why. It means at least Barley doesn't have to pay for it. Who paid for Lady Juliet's?'

‘Her husband, of course.'

‘How much do you charge?'

He thought of the New York gallery, he thought of Grace paying his bills, he thought how nice it would be to be free of worry, to leap to the next income bracket of portrait painters; and said, ‘Twelve thousand pounds.'

There was silence at the other end. Then: ‘But that's absurd. I know for a fact that you got paid £1800 for two paintings, one for real for Lady Juliet and a copy for auctioning. Your prices can't have gone up so much in three months.'

‘Well, they have. Also it's a question of time. I can't just drop everything and do this for you by December.'

‘Can I come round and talk to you about it?'

‘No.'

‘I'm coming anyway,' she said.

I must write to Carmichael. I will tell him what has happened. The antipodes will hear of it. South of the equator will ring to the news. I will tell him his mother is happy again and has found new love with a man. He might be more excited if her new love was a woman, but never mind. Shall I also tell him that the man is scarcely older than he is? I think not. And that Walter looks like him, that I thought he was gay, until we took the painting back to this studio and he kissed me? And we ended in bed. No. That is enough to turn any son into Hamlet.

Separate the black from the white: the black T-shirts to one side, the white socks and shirts to the other. White is not the right word for them any more, years of mixed washes have left them a desolate grey, but if they are washed separately and very hot, some of their initial brightness might return. Hot means time, though, waiting. I could answer the letters that pile up this side of the door but really I can't be bothered. That old world seems so unreal. I could pray, and thank God for my blessings. If you pray ‘Dear God help me now,' on the way to prison in a mobile cell, never having given Him two thoughts before in all your life, which seems cheating, and prison does not turn out to be quite the unendurable place you thought, not quite, then perhaps you should send a word of gratitude in His direction. You might need Him again. And manners matter, as my mother would say.

A great oversized crow has just alighted on the windowsill and stared in at me with orange eyes. And then it made a kind of short sharp desperate high-pitched cry and flew off. Enough to frighten anyone. But I'd read about it in the papers. It's only some kind of overlarge jackdaw with a very long tail which has escaped from the Zoo. A special kind of magpie from the African savannah, that's all, missing home and warmth. Nothing supernatural here, it just makes one uneasy, casting so great a shadow. It's the city equivalent, the bird version, of the puma that people see in the country when they've taken too many drugs: the creature too big to be a cat that leaps through the open window and sits staring on the dressing table in the moonlight, and the minute, petrified, they get to the light switch it's gone. It's the animal loping across the lawn in the evening, might be a very big dog but it's the wrong shape. It's the feline paw prints in the mud where the sheep have been devoured in the lonely middle of the moor. Whatever it is, it's gone, thank God. Not much use reporting a sighting, birds fly where they will. It may, they say in the papers, stop haunting the borough and just fly home again to its cage. They have left the door open. There's warmth, shelter and food to be had in there. There were women in my prison who preferred it inside to out, for these three things. I wish the bird well, for all it frightened me. Few things are evil but thinking makes them so.

I want Carmichael's approval. I doubt that I'll get it. My friends, my erstwhile friends – it's true most drifted off when I went to prison and who can blame them? – would tell that sons hate it when their mothers remarry, and turn into Hamlets all. Worse, Walter is an artist, which I know Carmichael has always wanted to be, even though he has never done anything about it but took to sewing instead. Barley laughed at one of Carmichael's early paintings – a head with arms coming out where the ears should be, which is of course how three-year-olds do paint people – but Barley scoffed, and said, ‘Can't you do better than that? That looks like an octopus.' And Carmichael took offence and never painted again. Other women's children took home child art: Carmichael never gave me that pleasure. His pleasure lay, quite frankly, in stitching up his father.

Time to take the duvet out of the dryer – stretch the arms wide, bringing corner to corner, running finger and thumb along the seam to keep it straight – patience is needed, getting the edges exactly together or all faults become magnified and the end result is a bulky mess. Laundry was sent by God as moral instruction: discuss.

I no longer go to the gym. Really there isn't time. I get more than enough exercise as it is, running up and down to the studio, over to the flat and back, round the markets looking for the cheapest oranges, lugging bags of laundry, and that's leaving sex out of it. I could be young again: all I miss is a small child tugging on my arm. I have more energy than I did. So much happiness can do for you. I even bled a little at the full moon, as if my body were in acute remembrance of things past. I would always bleed at the full moon, in sympathy with the wheeling cosmos. I would have liked more children but never conceived after Carmichael, and Barley would tell me one was enough.

I remember Barley coming home one summer evening and finding Carmichael bent over a piece of cloth, sewing buttonholes. I couldn't understand at the time, knowing as he did how his father hated this kind of thing, that Carmichael, only nine, did not take himself and his work inside as soon as Barley's car appeared at the end of the drive. I supposed you couldn't expect this kind of deceit from a totally honourable nine-year-old; that he was hoping, poor child, that his father would approve, examine the button-hole and say ‘How admirable! I'm proud of you; just like your mother!' But a window broken with a cricket ball would have seemed more natural to Barley and met with more approval.

The laundry's done, the lights are off, time to go home. Mr Zeigler the porter says ‘Don't see much of you anymore, Mrs Salt.'

I say, ‘Oh, I'm staying round the corner with a friend.'

He looks at me for once as if he sees me, which is more than he usually does; we're all just different versions of the same tenant to him, forever wanting washing machines repaired, or noises stopped, or messages passed, and he could do his job a lot better if it wasn't for us, and he wishes me well.

Walter Wells went quickly to the door when he heard Grace coming up the stairs. These days she almost ran, he noticed. She would take the stairs two at a time. He'd slowed down a lot, and even got aches in the backs of his legs. His father had complained a lot of these. Perhaps it was coming to him prematurely. He wanted to forewarn Grace about what she would see when she went into the studio; he didn't want her upset. What she would see would be Doris Dubois sitting on the chair where once Grace had so recently sat to have her portrait painted, and before that Lady Juliet Random. Now on the easel, off the wall, was Juliet's portrait, her face already half blanked out by titanium white, which is a good background for most flesh tints and Doris, it had to be admitted, had a good, clear, healthy complexion, as energy and determination poured through every cell; it might not be an agreeable energy but it was certainly there.

He waylaid Grace on the third landing. The studio was on the fourth. He took the bag of clean washing from her. She would iron it in the studio. Neither of them wanted servants, strangers, in.‘

Now Grace,' he stood there saying, looking very mature and trustworthy and not the least like Carmichael any more. How could she ever have thought he was gay? ‘You have to understand this: don't scream or shout or anything, the way women do in films, but Doris Dubois is in our studio and I am painting her portrait. But not her entire portrait, only her face on Lady Juliet's body.'

‘But why?'

‘To save me time and her money,' said Walter. ‘Mind you, she has a very busy schedule too. She came unasked to discuss prices, saw Lady Juliet upon the wall, my easel without a canvas, and demanded that I start painting her then and there.'

Grace sat down on the stairs. She felt quite calm. She felt her future stretched in front of her, full of infinite events and variations of these events.

‘As Goya painted the Duke of Wellington's head over that of Napoleon's brother,' she said, ‘when news came that the Duke of Wellington, the conquering hero, had arrived at the gates of the city. At least there is some precedent here.'

Walter Wells sat down beside her on the stairs. Grace breathed in the smell of oil paint, baked potato, tobacco, and even now, with its overtone of Doris Dubois's favourite Giorgio perfume, which Doris had worn in court; she loved it.

‘I didn't know Goya did that,' said Walter.

‘Oh yes,' she said. ‘A painter has to live.'

They held hands. Hers was young and soft and helpless in his.

‘You get younger every day,' he said. ‘I didn't want to do it but she insisted.'

‘What bribes and sanctions did she use?' asked Grace.

‘If I do this for her she will give me a slot on her TV show.‘A whole programme to yourself or a five minutes slot? The first is something, the second is nothing.' ‘She didn't say. And she offered to sleep with me but of course I declined.'

‘Politely, I hope,' said Grace, with considerable calm. ‘Hell hath no fury and she's furious enough as it is. What were her threats?'

Grace, to her own surprise, felt encouraged rather than intimidated. She had her enemy trapped. Doris Dubois had put a foot too far and ended up unarmed in hostile territory. ‘She was not specific: just that she knew the Director of Tate Modern well, and the Summer Exhibition would close its doors to me.'

‘She is certainly a powerful person in the art world,' said Grace. ‘I reckon we'd better go in and face her. Does she know I'm living with you?'

‘I don't think so,' said Walter. ‘But all things are possible. She is the
Gestalt
of our times. She will have informers everywhere.' And they went on in.

‘Well, well, well,' said Doris Dubois. ‘It's the murderess. You do get around. If I was superstitious I'd say you were the Hound of Hell pursuing me and have you put back in prison for a stalker.'

Doris Dubois sat on the plinth where her rivals Lady Juliet and Grace Salt had lately sat, draped in a length of blackout cloth. From the canvas on the easel Lady Juliet's Bulgari necklace gleamed out, a source of power and influence.

‘I see what it is,' said Grace. ‘You're not trying to save money.

From what's going on at the Manor House that is the last of your concerns. You are after Lady Juliet's necklace. You think it's magic. You think if you own it you will turn into a person everyone likes, whether you deserve it or not. You will even put up with Lady Juliet's body in order to have that.'

‘I have Barley's love,' retorted Doris, ‘which is more than you do any more, if you ever did. I think he was only ever sorry for you. And now you are reduced to buying a younger man, a toyboy.'

Doris Dubois was a little shaken, all the same. She had expected Grace to cringe and be frightened, and afraid that she, Doris, would run off with Walter Wells as well as her husband. But no. And had Doris not just recently been polled the nation's sweetheart, and been asked to compère the Eurovision Song Contest the following year? Everyone loved and wanted Doris, it was patently evident. Why then did Grace's words cut her to the quick?