The Bulgari Connection (2 page)

‘Judge Rubs Salt into Grace's Wounds
,' said the headlines.

‘Lovesick Drama of Fat-Cat Spouse
,' and so on. ‘TV Culture Queen Stole My Man, alleges Salt Wife'. A hundred faces crowding in on me with phallic lenses and popping bulbs as they hurried me, distraught and disgraced, blanket over my head, to the police cells. By the time I emerged, greyer and fatter by a year and a quarter, the media had lost interest; only a couple of film crews, some local journalists, and a woman's group wanting a donation were waiting. The authorities kindly let me out the back entrance, so that even my lawyer missed me, and I had to make my own way home. Or what I now was to call home: Tavington Court, a great block of apartments in Victorian red brick behind the British Museum, where sad divorcées hide, and little old ladies grateful for the protection of the resident porter, and widows living their leftover lives in genteel loneliness. It takes up a whole street and those who have grandchildren to visit are lucky. I am not so lucky. My son Carmichael is not likely to oblige.

All my conversations at the time were with lawyers and accountants and all they seemed to want me to think about was the prospect of age and infirmity and death in the future. I was victorious, but only to live my leftover life alone. And I didn't suppose Carmichael wanted me out in Sydney – ‘to be near my son' – embarrassing him.

The media have lost interest in me altogether now. They are happy for Barley and Doris's happiness. They were married last week. The wedding was in
Hello!,
and I hear put the circulation up no end. My plight becomes yesterday's fish and chip wrappings. As Doris would be the first to point out, how that dates me! Fish and chips are not eaten from newsprint now, the EC would never allow it, but if sold at all, out of recyclable polyethylene cartons. I don't like eating alone in restaurants, sitting there with my book, feeling the pity of others. It is quite astonishing how few people I know. My married life revolved around Barley: the people we knew, knew us as a couple. I was just the tag-along. They feel sorry for me now and when the kind people, as I think of them, do ask me round, it is to lunch not dinner and we normally eat in the kitchen. It is better than nothing.

I have lost the art of conversation. Once I was quite good at it, but after years of living with Barley who always waxed so noisy and indignant if ever I said anything more than yes dear, no dear, I learned the prudence of silence, and in the end he took me for a fool. And there certainly wasn't much snappy dialogue in prison and for awhile after I came out I was struck quite dumb, and had to search for words with which to express my thoughts at all.

Doris Dubois is anything but dumb. I do not watch her show: it is too painful for me: but sometimes flicking through the channels I forget and come across her, fronting her highly successful
Artsworld Extra.
It's on twice a week. Nine o'clock peak time Thursdays. Late night repeat, Mondays. Her perfect figure, the bouncy, short cropped hair, her startling smile, the ease with which she handles ideas, the evident intelligence, the breadth of information, the flying sound bites – the worst you can say about her is that she looks like a Captain of Hockey on speed. And why, unless you have special reason, should you say the worst of her? Even I have trouble doing so.

Doris Dubois now has Barley's name – though I notice she doesn't even bother to use it – as well as his love, his time, his attention and his money. I have the couple followed from time to time by a detective, one Harry Bountiful. What asplendid name! I chose him because of it, flicking through the Yellow Pages. Doris and Barley will meet up in Aspreys in Bond Street, then drift over to Gucci's where Barley will perhaps buy a pair of loafers, the better to walk through St James's Park and feed the ducks. Then perhaps they will call in at Apsley House, address No.1, London, built for the Duke of Wellington, the one who defeated Napoleon. There they will see the fine equestrian painting of the Duke by Goya. If they look hard they will see the faint shadow of a tricolor hat beginning to show through the surface paint. The portrait was originally of ‘King' Joseph Bonaparte of Spain, Napoleon's brother. But the Duke and his victorious troops were at the gates of Madrid, the usurper had fled, so Goya prudently painted a new head on the body, and sold it to the Duke. An artist has to live. Why waste a perfectly good horse?

Or perhaps Barley and Doris, hand in hand, will drift off to Bulgari in Sloane Street, to stare at some ruby imbedded steel circlet for her slim arm, wondering whether they will or whether they won't, but mostly that they will. Because she deserves it. Because she is
her.
They will stroll along to South Ken., and the Victoria and Albert Museum to study, say, the Sèvres dinner service (1848) that was once Queen Victoria's own, and Doris will explain its fineness to him, and the curator will even let them handle the settings. They are an important couple, and she has friends in high cultural places.

It is thanks to his new wife that Barley can now judge the quality even of the plates set before him, tell china from pottery, and understand how the two can never merge. He knows now where camp begins and crassness stops. Doris is Barley's living Fine Arts programme. They are in love; perhaps they give more time and attention to each other than either can spare. Her ratings drop just a little: his dividends falter. Because meanwhile, as Harry Bountiful puts it, the real world goes on. But this couple, newly discovered to one another, is blessed. Strokes of good fortune come their way. Last week Doris got five numbers in the lottery and won twelve hundred pounds. Barley's latest office block won an architectural prize. Perhaps Doris was close to one of the judges.

I tried to explain to the Court that it was not that I hated Doris, just that I wanted Barley to realise the intensity of my distress and desperation.

‘You really thought,' enquired Judge Tobias Longue, ‘that if you ran down your husband's mistress in a car park he would be sorry for you? Then you have lived a long time yet don't know men very well. Good Lord, woman, he will have every excuse now for leaving you. You played into his hands.' Tobias Longue was one of those lawyers who write thrillers, and had only recently been promoted to the bench. He had an eye and an ear for drama. He was both on my side, and not. There had been no witnesses. It was Doris's word against mine. At the very worst, I told the Court, Doris had wrenched her ankle as she leapt out of the way of my Jaguar: but see how now she limped into court, pale and grave and prattling forgiveness.

‘She's not in her right mind,' Doris told Judge Tobias Longue. ‘I caught a glimpse of her face through the windscreen, her teeth bared, her mad eyes staring, just as the wheel went over my foot, and I felt this terrible pain and passed out. My fear as I fell was that she'd reverse back over me and crush me to death beneath that heavy car. She needs treatment, not punishment. She is unbalanced to the point of paranoia, an obsessive-compulsive. She suffers from pathological jealousy. I first met her husband when he appeared on my cultural review show: we are involved as colleagues in the setting up of a Cable TV company. But that's all there is to it: good heavens, Barley Salt is a quarter of a century older than I am, and I regard him as a father.'

She spoke eloquently and persuasively, as was her trade. I stumbled through my few words. Of course she was believed.

Later she said to the Press, ‘Poor Mrs Salt. I'm afraid she belongs to the past, one of those prurient women who assume that if a man and a woman are alone in a room together, something sexual's bound to happen.' The Press forgot conveniently, when writing up the wedding, that at the time of the trial Barley and Doris vehemently denied any romantic involvement. Of course there was, starting from the very beginning in the Green Room, after everyone else had gone home, after she'd had him on her show, talking about the necessity of sponsorship of the arts by big business. I had watched that interview as a proud wife should, and seen the way she looked at him, the way his body inclined towards hers. He didn't come home until early morning, and when he got into bed he smelt of TV studios, static electricity, sex and something else sickly and evil I couldn't identify.

The prosecution asked for five years, I got three and served only fifteen months. In the event the Judge was less vindictive than anyone else around. At least he acknowledged the provocation. He said in his summing up it was a silly attempt with a car outside a supermarket and that Doris had jumped easily enough out of the way. And it's true, she has perfect knees, being only thirty-three years old. At fifty-five, I already have one that is arthritic, though I didn't let it stand in my way when I put the accelerator down. The pain in the heart is always worse than the one in the body.

It has taken me a year with Dr Jamie Doom the TV psychotherapist – he does take a few patients privately – to be able to face the facts of the matter. Doris Dubois is a superior human being to myself in every way and no sane man would not prefer her to me, in bed or out of it, as wife, partner or mistress. I face myself in the mirror, I look at my fading eyes and know that they have seen too much, and that there is no brightening them. What ages us is experience: there can be no forgetfulness.

‘But aren't you angry?' asks Dr Jamie Doom, ‘You must try to find your anger.' But I can't.

Perhaps God will reward me for having come to terms, as Dr Doom puts it, with my distress. I am sure no-one else will. This evening I am going to a party given by a pair of the kind ones, Lady Juliet Random and her husband Sir Ronald. It's a charity auction in aid of ‘Lost Children Somewhere'. I am invited not just out of kindness but because I might be able to give a hundred pounds or so to Lady Juliet's cause. Nothing compared to the thousands others give – I am only fifth or sixth division wealth now that I live on alimony – but no doubt still worth the champagne and canapés which I'll consume. At least I don't have to worry about meeting Doris and Barley at Sir Ronald's: they move in more elevated artistic and political circles now. The parties they go to are attended by Arts Ministers, Leisure Gurus, Museum Moguls, Dotcom-Millionaires, Monarchs of the BBC and so forth. I tell you what, every now and then I could take Barley by surprise and make him laugh. I think Doris can do everything for Barley but that. She is too intent on pleasuring herself and him to have time for much mirth. But I daresay with age even my laughter, which once Barley loved, will turn into a witch's cackle.

‘Who is the woman sitting in the corner?' young Walter Wells asked Lady Juliet.

He had been studying her. She sat at rest as though posing for a portrait. He thought she looked lovely, whoever she was. She was not as young as she had been, it was true, but this gave her looks a kind of lush and wistful melancholy: he had been much taken in his childhood by images of the blown rose, of battered scarlet velvet petals, tempest tossed. Walter Wells thought perhaps he had been born a poet almost as much as an artist. Though now, at twenty-nine, he earned a living painting portraits, he sometimes felt that his heart was in language rather than in the image. But a man, however multi-talented, can't do everything and the image paid better than words in the new century. So many languages it was only polite to learn, from Urdu to Serbo-Croat, that everyone had settled for symbols. A flat hand to stop you crossing the road was better than the word STOP, a green running man to show you the way out preferable to the word EXIT. So he had been practical and gone to art college, only to find the artist was as likely to live in a garret as the poet, unless he was very lucky.

It was in pursuit of luck that he was here at this charity auction today, where he knew no-one and felt altogether out of his generation. He it was who had painted the portrait of Lady Juliet Random, which was any minute now to be auctioned for the sake of Little Children, Everywhere, Lady Juliet's favourite charity. He liked Lady Juliet and wanted to oblige her, she was good looking and relaxed and easy to paint and had only good things to say about everyone. She was quite voluptuous, and Walter Wells wished more of his sitters were like her. A good curve painted well, but in his experience if you blessed your sitters with a roundness of line on the canvas they only accused you of making them look fat.

‘Who can you mean?' asked Lady Juliet. ‘The woman in the crushed velvet dress? Good Lord, that kind of fabric went out thirty years ago. But I'm glad to see she's making an effort. It's poor Grace Salt, the one who tried to mow down Doris Dubois in her Jaguar in a supermarket car park. You must have heard of her? No?'

‘No.'

‘Oh, you artists! Snug in your garrets, safe from the world.' Walter's portrait of Lady Juliet was to be the centrepiece of the auction. He had actually painted two, one which Lady Juliet would keep, the other a copy for the auction, painted for free, his gift in kind to Little Children, Everywhere. Lady Juliet had twisted his arm and melted his heart, as she was so good at doing, her soft mouth imploring, her eyes beseeching: he had done the extra work and not complained, though she had not even offered to pay for paint or canvas. People did not realise that these things cost money. The Randoms were pleased with the painting: they would hang it in pride of place on the wall of their library in their Eaton Square house, one of those stoic well-built cream-painted places with stolid pillars and steps and an air of infinite dullness, but at least he would know where it was. The copy would go to an unknown home. He did not like that.

‘The Salt scandal was in all the papers,' said Lady Juliet, taking his arm, as she did at every opportunity. She was looking magnificent and charming both: such an art to be so grand and yet loveable, and thus to inspire in others more admiration than envy. She had a smooth, untroubled childish face, with small even features and a curved mouth given to laughter, and if she had nothing nice to say she kept silent, which was more than most in her circle did. She was dressed tonight as she had been for the portrait, in simple slinky white and her plentiful probably blonde hair twisted on top of her head. Clasped round her neck, falling in roundels of bright colour against her firm, creamy skin was a Bulgari necklace, steel and gold set with cabochon emeralds, rubies, sapphires and brilliant cut diamonds, made in the sixties, and insured for £275,000, a sum Walter had heard mentioned as he worked.