The Bulgari Connection (3 page)

Sir Ronald had charged more than once into the garden room, clouding the good North light with cigar smoke as was his habit, and doubted the wisdom of the jewels not being in the bank, couldn't Walter work from a photograph? But Lady Juliet had said authenticity was so important, lights should not be hidden in bushels, jewels could not be forever in vaults or they lost their magic, what was the point of having these things if the world didn't know about it, and so on. What was he afraid of? That Walter would run off with them? Slip the matching earrings into his pocket? Walter was too poetic a soul to run off with anything. He was an artist, everyone knew artists were above material things.

Which they obviously believed in their naivety, since Walter was being paid only £1800 to do the portrait – well, actually to do the two – and the Randoms assumed that was generous, and that they were doing him a kindness, employing and trusting a comparative unknown in the first place, introducing him to those levels of society where artists got more like £18,000 for a single fashionable portrait, than £1800 for a pair, which worked out at £300 a week for six weeks work. He would rather paint landscapes when it came to it: the weather kept changing and the light with it, but at least the landscape sat still.

‘So you want to be introduced to the woman in the corner in the crushed velvet dress,' said Lady Juliet, ever happy to oblige. The jewels in her necklace glittered and glanced where they caught the light: the thing seemed magically, beautifully alive; he hoped he had got the intensity of it on the canvas: paint and brush could do only so much. But on the whole he was pleased. The copy, he thought, had been minimally better than the original: he had really got his hand in on the precious stones second time round, but he was the only one who would notice that. Only one in a hundred ever really noticed anything.

‘You only have ten minutes before the auction begins,' said Lady Juliet. ‘I'm going to want you to go on stage and talk to them a little about art, and be altogether as languid and beautiful as you can, not that you have to try. They'll think you're photogenic and have a future and prices will triple. But do by all means talk to Grace first. I need her in a good mood. Barley gave her a good settlement, at least three million, and probably more, none of us like talking large figures in the press or they take us for fat cats, and I do so hate being called fat, even though I know I am. Little Children, Everywhere need women like Grace. The wretched of the earth could do with some of everyone's alimony. This is the growth area, the future lies in this world of multiple divorces, multiple remarriages. Not just money to charity on death, but on divorce, too, an intrinsic part of any settlement. We all live far too well, with our champagne and our canapés, don't you think? But what's to be done? The world is what it is. All we can do is change our little corner of it.'

And so Walter Wells was introduced to Grace Salt at the Randoms' charity do. There was the same difference between their ages as there was between Doris and Barley. Twenty-six years separated Grace and Walter, twenty-six years separated Doris and Barley.

Walter saw a woman with sad, dark, glowing eyes and a gentle, surprised expression, as if she was seeing the world for the first time. It was the same look a baby has, when it's about twelve months old, and has learned that in order to walk and run you have to develop an indifference to sharp corners. He thought she was perhaps about forty: older than he was at any rate but who was counting? Her dress was in crushed deep crimson velvet, a texture and colour he longed to get on canvas. She wore it buttoned up to the neck and its long sleeves ended in sedate cuffs, as if she needed what small protection from the world even fabric could bring her. She wore no jewellery, other than small pearl stud earrings, on the kind of clips which bite the ear.

Of course he had thought of roses: his mother, a clergyman's wife, had grown a wonderfully scented rose of that colour in the rectory garden where he had spent so much of his childhood. His mother had told him that its name was Flower of Jerusalem: a rather ordinary pink as a virginal bud, but deepening into crimson with every week of its flowering, until the petals were all but black, falling away, splaying, from the precious stameny centre they had once guarded so tightly.

Grace Salt sat alone, listening to the string quartet which played beneath a kind of pink plaster portico set above a blue transparent dais, lighted from beneath, which gave the players a ghostly glow. A firm called Fund Raisers Fun had provided it, along with little gold chairs, champagne and canapés, and it sat oddly indeed amongst the staid chintz, dull antiques and solid worth of the rest of the house.

He sat next to her on the green shot silk sofa. She forgot his name a second after Lady Juliet had introduced them, and gone, but politely asked him about himself. He said he was the painter of the portrait which was to be the centrepiece of the auction. She said she liked it very much: he had brought out Lady Juliet's kindness. ‘Lady Juliet doesn't want to look just kind,' said Walter. ‘She'd rather be seen as significant. I tried to make her look severe, but alas, it's the art of the portrait painter to bring out the soul of the sitter, and it is what it is.' He had developed this line only an hour ago for the benefit of the handful of gossip columnists who'd blessed the evening with their presence. Walter had thought it was perhaps rather clichéd but they'd gone for it.

‘I know Lady Juliet is kind,' said Grace, ‘because she asks me round to lunch quite often. Not kind enough to ask me to dinner, of course. But then unpartnered women, if they have no particular talent, or style, are so much a waste of an expensive place setting they quite offend the sumptuary laws.'

Walter's father the rector had often spoken of the sumptuary laws when Walter had wanted a bicycle or new trainers, which other village children could not afford. Conspicuous consumption had always been seen as an offence to God and Man: in the Middle Ages actual laws were enforced. Spend too much too loosely and you got punished. Walter had not heard mention of the sumptuary laws since his father's death, and though they had irritated him most profoundly at the time, they had now entered into the nostalgic narrative which composed the memory of his father. He felt she would understand his heart.

He said he was sure she could find a partner if she wanted one. A woman as beautiful as she. ‘You are so gallant,' she said, ‘and quite absurd. You remind me of my son Carmichael.' But she cheered up a little, and smiled at him with a kind of hazy half smile he found enchanting, and as if she now actually saw him. He liked her voice, it was croaky and deep, as if she had spent a lifetime drinking and smoking, though now she refused the waiter's offer of champagne and took mineral water instead.

He thought he would like to see her face on the pillow next to him when he woke up in the morning. Those he so often saw were brutal in their confidence and self-esteem, the smooth texture of their skin unmarked by weariness or doubt. They bored him. He felt as old as her, or older, betrayed by a body which demonstrated all the vigour of youth, ill-matched to a soul which already felt jaded and world weary. And she would not ask him questions as they did, the ones who moved into his cold attic studio, lured by his looks and his easels and the romance of squeezed oil paints on stained wooden tables, and the unmade brass bed; but who within weeks would be jealous of his attention to canvas and not to them, and implying that painting was not a proper job. Off they'd go, to their smart well-appointed offices in publishing, or PR, or advertising or wherever, for a return on their labour far greater than any he was ever likely to achieve. And one evening they would simply not come home, but within a couple of days a brother, or some gay friend, or a father would turn up to take away their possessions.

That the studio had a good North light, that crackling cold for some reason increased intensity of colour, had apparently not impressed them: the tenderness of his lovemaking could not make up for his reluctance to turn up the central heating. It had happened enough times – well, twice in as many months, within the last year – to make him feel this was to be the pattern of life and there was nothing much to be done about it. Yet he hated living alone. Art made a frugal bed companion. An older woman would surely be more sensitive as to how he lived, why he lived. It was true the skin round her jaw sagged a little, and curved lines ran between her cheeks and the corners of her mouth, and the division between lip and the rest was a trifle blurred, but she was the proper shape for a woman. He wanted to paint her. He wanted to be in her presence. He wanted her in his bed. Good Lord, he thought, this is love at first sight. He felt the need for a cigarette. He asked, nervously, if she minded. She had once, she said, been practically a chain smoker; but she had given it up in prison. It was so terrible in there it hadn't seemed to matter if it was a few degrees more terrible still. He should go ahead. She didn't mind. ‘Prison! What for …' Walter was startled. ‘Attempted murder,' she said.

Lady Juliet swooped and carried Walter Wells off, like a cat grabbing its kitten by the scruff of the neck and running off with it to safety. The auction was about to begin.

‘What exactly do you want me to say?' he asked.

‘How art benefits humanity, all that kind of thing. Don't worry about it. How you look is more important than what you say. No-one will be listening, just watching. Sometimes no-one bids at all, and the auctioneer has to take bids off the wall. That's so embarrassing. But with you and me both here we should get a good price.'

Walter Wells, who was not accustomed to public speaking, demanded at least some prompting about the way in which art could serve humanity, and on the way to the plinth Lady Juliet told him to mention both the morality of aesthetics, and how suitable it was that the haves of the luxury trades – in which fine art was included – should do their bit for the have-nots. And perhaps a mention as to how she, Lady Juliet, had given her precious time freely, as the sitter.

‘Wish me good luck,' he'd said to Grace as he went. But she hadn't replied, she was staring, along with everyone else, at a couple who had just come into the room. Even the string quartet faltered mid phrase. All eyes turned, as if to royalty, towards a good-looking older man in a very expensive suit – Walter had painted that particular Chairman of the Board type many a time, sitting behind some great burr-oak desk, or leaning up against a pillar at Company headquarters, dull, dull, dull – and a younger woman in a flame-coloured dress with a strong nose, a hard mouth, and a band of solid powerful gold around her neck; but who moved with a kind of focused energy, as if all the wind of the present, whirling around, had sought her out as its centre. Always hard to get on canvas, this kind of thing, this sense of the present made apparent, if only because those few whom fate so selected were seldom in repose. They never sat still.

Doris Dubois and Barley Salt found themselves at a loose end after their Caesar salad and sparkling water lunch at the Ivy. Barley had once been in the habit of ordering the fried fish and the thick chips and mushy peas but Doris had patted his tummy affectionately and said slenderness was youth, and a man as young at heart as he was should have a figure to go with it. It was remarkable how quickly rich and fatty foods began to seem gross; and the waist to return. He felt restless, though, as if serenity was situated somewhere in the fatty tissues, and only sexual pleasures with Doris seemed able to quell the feeling that something, somewhere, was not altogether right. It wasn't that he missed Grace: her fitful dry wit had come to seem like an evasion of real feeling; he felt reassured by Doris's earnestness and her appreciation of the higher things in life: if he missed Grace it was in the same way a young man gone off to college will miss his mother: he knows he must grow out of her, while occasionally hankering for the comforts of home.

But home, the mansion in which he and Grace had so casually lived, and had together lost all but passing interest in sex, was now, with Doris installed, a turmoil of builders, designers and security experts, too crowded by day for sex, and there was no point in going there until after seven, by which time most would have disappeared, but Doris had to be back in town by eight because she was going out live at ten. They decided to stay in town: Doris consulted her digital notepad and discovered an invitation to a charity auction at Lady Juliet's that evening.

‘Lady Juliet!' said Barley. ‘What a pleasant woman. My ex-wife and I used to be on quite good terms with the Randoms. I haven't seen much of them since the divorce. He's in rare metal recovery. Buys up de-commissioned nuclear weapons and so on and extracts the titanium.'

‘Preserving the natural wealth of the planet!' said Doris.

‘Way to go!'

‘I'm not sure that that's his prime motive,' said Barley, brutally.

‘Quite a lot of Russians get exposed to quite a lot of radioactivity on the way.'

‘Darling,' said Doris, ‘you shouldn't be so cynical. It isn't nice. Shall we trot along? There's a party at the British Library Manuscripts Room, but they're so nervous there in case you spill champagne on the Book of Kells, or something, it's no fun. A charity auction in a private house might be quite entertaining, and it's always fascinating to see how other people live.' Doris wanted to be on good terms with the Randoms. If Grace could do it, so could she.

‘They're quite dull, really,' said Barley, cautiously. ‘They don't have many books in the house, but she's such a nice woman.'

Doris did not have anything to wear, so they went to South Molton Street by cab – Barley's chauffeur Ross had a sick mother – and were dropped off at the end of South Molton Street where they strolled along to Browns, and Barley watched while Doris bought a kind of silk slip dress by a Japanese designer, in yellow and orange and gold. Tall, slinky, reserved girls attended her – ladies in waiting – and he stood and watched with his hands in his pockets. Grace never in a million years would have wasted time and money in this way; he loved it, and said as much to Doris.