The Bulgari Connection (9 page)

Walter Wells sees no ugliness in this. ‘I love you,' he says. ‘You are so beautiful.'

‘You think I am,' I protest. ‘You know I'm not really. Everything looks better when it's young, and I'm not young.'

But he likes the blown rose not the bud, he tells me so. The bud is full of expectation that must end; there's so much sorrow and disappointment held up in store.

I look at myself in the mirror and I see certain changes I can't quite believe. My eyes begin to brighten. I would think I was growing young again, that nature had reversed its processes, that God had relented in his dire and doomy scheme of things, simply on my account. But of course it can't be. It's just a rush of oestrogen through the capillaries. Love: must be.

The Bloomsday Gallery has sold four of Walter's paintings – landscapes – to a dealer in New York, a director of the Manhatt. [sic] Centre for the Arts. They actually managed to get their prices up to £1000 each. Sixty per cent of £4000 is £2400 – give or take a bit, as Barley would say; he being quick if cavalier with figures. ‘Give me the ballpark, give me the ballpark,' was his constant cry, whether buying properties for millions or a joint of meat for Sunday dinner.

The Manhatt. want to mount a one-man exhibition of his work, and Walter to go over to New York for the private view. He paints with a rare maturity for someone so young, they say. ‘You have been
discovered
!' I say. ‘I believe I have,' he says, wreathed in smiles.

Lady Juliet is on the wall, staring down at us. She has a sweet expression, and the necklace, with its sometimes brilliant, sometimes glowing colours, changing as the autumn sun moves across the skylight, glitters and flickers emerald-green and blue-sapphire and red-ruby in the good North light, and seems to move on her flesh. She could almost be breathing.

Walter Wells was indeed over the moon. Everything in his life seemed to be going right. He had met the love of his life, and she didn't mind the cold, she understood what he was talking about, entranced him physically, and let him get on with his work. She didn't chatter or talk about herself endlessly. She had a son, but he was grown up and safely in Australia, and such was his vague understanding of genetic technology he imagined that if they ever wanted a child age would not stop her: if the scientists could clone a sheep, they could do anything. She sat for her portrait. She wore the crimson velvet dress. ‘It has a distressed quality,' he said. ‘It's just right for you.' He seemed to think she had suffered greatly in her life. She denied it. ‘Estranged parents, a brush with bankruptcy, a gay son, a faithless husband, a spell in prison, a divorce – this hardly adds up to martyrdom, Walter.' But he insisted. She must have suffered for him to save her: he had taken her life in his hands and she had blossomed and bloomed like a rosebud when the sun came out. She didn't argue with him any more than she had with Barley.

She paid his bills, and he never had to ask her to. She did not interfere, or try to tidy up or impose her way of living on his. She took their washing home to her apartment to do it there so it didn't pile up in heaps in the bathroom. It was a dreary, over-heated, enervating place, and he could use it for the overflow of all the things he loved to have but in the end there would be no space for if they were to get from the door to the bed, and he liked a clear area round his easel.

‘Whenever you go out,' she remarked, ‘you come back with some new treasure.' He would find bits and pieces in skips, or in junk shops, or behind gates; or sometimes total strangers would hand them to him – a broken vase, a chipped plate, a three-legged chair, a ragged rug, a pewter mug, a tallboy with a door missing; all once perfect things he liked to live with the better to save them from the world's disregard, as others took in lost cats or dogs.

They went walking on a beach, and he found washed up on empty sands an old ship's figurehead left there by last night's gale – seventeenth century, Walter reckoned – a bleached wooden lady with her nose worn away; her breasts smooth and round as Pamela Anderson's, proud to face storms. ‘The universe offers you gifts,' she suggested. ‘I am one of nature's scavengers,' he said. ‘That's all. I'm here to sweep up gold dust. I just see what others could if only they had eyes for it.'

He introduced her to his friends. She was nervous. He so young and she so old. But word got round that she was Grace Salt, famous, the millionaire's wife, the one in the papers for trying to mow down the mistress; hadn't she gone to prison? And she must be rich. So many factors entered in, ordinary judgements hardly applied. Mostly they viewed her through a pleasant dope haze, anyway. They tended to be late-twenties, out of art school or jazz courses: they stuck together, fuzzily, in the too hard-edged consumerist world their parents had made for them. Grace was sweet, she was pretty, she smiled a lot: she made their friend www:/ happy and now he had a show of his own in New York. Little flashes of envy and spite sometimes shot across their horizons like shooting stars in a dawn sky, but not often.

At Bulgari the Italian lady of a certain age with the really good simple suit and the well coiffed hair looked after them. They sat in a softly lighted cubicle, and had her full attention to themselves, and were served tea and macaroons. If she wanted to show a piece of jewellery she nodded gently to an assistant, an obliging, pretty girl with good legs but not as good as Doris's, and it appeared within minutes. Certainly, it was not out of the question, though very unusual, for the firm to contact Lady Juliet and see if she wanted to relinquish ownership of the very special piece she had in her possession. They did not object to being used as an intermediary, such was their concern for their customers, and they might charge a small commission for the service – unless of course Lady Juliet wanted a piece to replace it, in which case commission would be waived. But Barley and Doris must realise that it was rather like asking a mother to give up a loved child for adoption and not likely to happen.

Lady Juliet's piece was known as ‘The Egyptian', they were told: it was an important piece, seminal to the jewellery design of the early seventies. Naturalistic motifs – lotus flowers, for example – were contained within geometric forms: quite a branching out for Bulgari.

‘Sounds great,' said Doris brightly, but she hadn't really been listening.

‘The introduction of Egyptian style into our cultural consciousness,' observed the assistant, suddenly ‘that is to say extreme stylisation combined with a strong chromatism, happened after the Tutankhamun exhibition made its impact across Europe in the early seventies. It was much the same as the effect the invasion of Egypt by Napoleon a couple of hundred years back. Nobody knew why they were doing it, everyone just did it.'

Her boss raised an eyebrow at her and she shut up and blushed. ‘I just so much like the look of it,' said Doris. ‘Forget the back story.' And she quite liked the look of the assistant, Jasmine, who had the pale, translucent skin and haunted eyes of the dedicated student of art history: Doris wondered if she mightn't go far as a TV researcher. As it happened, Doris was looking for a new one for the programme. Flora Upchurch, who had been working on the show for a couple of years, was going to have to go. She was getting above herself. There had been an incident at a Requisitions Meeting lately in which Flora had pointed out to Doris that she had got Rubens and Rembrandt muddled up. Flora should not have done that. And she would not find herself forgiven for having come to Barley and Doris's wedding all long legs and short white dress, and upstaged the bride; and been caught catching and keeping Barley's eye a second too long. Doris was biding her time. But soon the axe would fall. There might be some trouble with the Head of Department, because Flora was a sly puss and had wormed her way in to everyone's good books but no-one could tell Doris how to behave any more: her ratings were too high. Doris did as she pleased. Flora would go as soon as someone halfway decent turned up – this Jasmine might just be the one. She had the right kind of tough delicacy. And she would not be working for this lot if she wasn't top notch.

But Doris should be thinking about herself, not others. She was not pleased to be told now that it was not possible to make the exact copy of a piece made exclusively for another client: something similar, of course, could be contrived. Miss Dubois was quite right: there was no inevitable moral ownership invested in every element of a jewellery design, but a law-suit to prove it might cost more than the jewellery in question. Was it the stones, or the design, or the shape which so appealed, as a matter of interest?

‘Miss Dubois is accustomed to having what she wants,' said Barley, mildly.

Miss Dubois asked how long it would take to make up a piece based on the Egyptian design with as few variations as Bulgari could tolerate – they were talking a good half million here by now and if you were paying that much you deserved something, surely, and Bulgari said they could bring the time down to four or five months but craftsmen could not and would not and should not be hurried. They were quite firm, while remaining impeccably polite. The older lady even nodded to the younger, who slipped away and came back with the Director: some customers would take from men the bad news they could not accept from women.

The order was placed. Doris would wait, or said she would.

On the way home she said to Barley, ‘There must be some way round this,' but Barley, quite honestly, was thinking of other things.

Walter Wells put down his paintbrush and looked at his finished composition. He was pleased with it. Grace shone out from the canvas; she'd said he flattered her and made her look younger than she was. He'd said he painted only what he saw. He took a turpentine-soaked rag and wiped some titanium white off his fingers. He had achieved the presence and colour of his loved one's velvet dress by glazing, then daring to fleck Roman red oils with tips of pink-white acrylic, rather as if they were waves of the sea; there was movement and texture there and he felt what he thought Van Dyck must have thought when he finished the portrait of Charles I and Henrietta Maria with their two eldest children in 1632, lace ruffs, cloth of gold and all: if I can do this I can do anything.

Wiping his fingers had made matters worse, not better, for the rag was already sodden with assorted paint, from Lady Juliet's portrait right back to a seascape finished a year ago, and though it removed white, it left a smear of greeny grey behind instead. He tissued the smear off and noticed, to his pleasure, that his hands no longer seemed pale and tender like a child's – they were a man's hands, strong and decisive. Since he'd met Grace he'd grown up.

Grace was round at her service flat in Tavington Road doing their washing. He was used to going to the launderette and shoving everything in at once and putting the temperature to ninety: she liked to separate whites from blacks and do everything at forty degrees. She was like his mother. He would take her down to visit his parents soon: he had told his mother on the phone that he ‘had met someone' and now he would have to follow through. But his parents, Prue and Peter, lived in the old world of cottage gardens and retired clergy: they had a little house near the Cathedral Close in Salisbury: having an artist son was excitement enough. But if he had taken up with an older lady, an ex-jailbird, a woman of notoriety, however passing, and of considerable wealth, they would doubt both her character and his motives. They would wonder, as he did not, where their grandchildren were going to come from, and they had lived the kind of life in which they had given up a great deal for the future of the world – they were good people, in fact – and he could see that now to have no stake in that future would for them be hard indeed. He lived in the
now, now, now
world. They did not. And the solution of cloning was hardly going to appeal. GM crops seemed shocking enough.

They would be pleased that he had been taken up by a New York gallery, but would not understand the implications, not just for himself but for art in general. It was a good gallery indeed, which normally specialised in art installations, unmade beds as art objects and so on: this was an unexpected reversal for them, back to paintings you could hang on a wall. The decision might be more dictated by demands of space in Manhattan than anything else – the new art tended to require a lot of floor in which to spread itself – but never mind. He might end up in the Met as the new Edward Hopper, or Balthus – or good Lord, just himself: Walter Wells.

He would like there to be a Mrs Wells – not that there was much point in marriage any more, none of his partnered friends had gone through any form of ceremony, and if Grace remarried she lost her alimony. Alimony, it seemed, was payment for domestic services rendered, in this case to the capitalist monster Barley Salt, on condition that after the contract was terminated no further employment was to be sought. Very strange.

One day when Grace was away at her flat doing their washing, what looked like a raven alighted on the skylight above him. The light was going, so probably he'd done as much as he could to her portrait – it really needed to be taken down from the easel and a blank canvas put up in its place, ready for the next inspiration, but he liked just seeing her there: it was company when she was out. He was eating a baked potato – Grace had put it in the microwave for him, so all he had to do was work out the timer: he felt the need to eat as soon as he had put down his brush – a matter of input out and input in, one art, the other food – when this dark shadow moved over him, yellow eyes gleamed at him, and there was the raven, a giant black bird, staring down at him. He was accustomed to crows – his father had even been driven to go shooting them, whilst claiming that he hated taking the life of any living thing but they'd nest in the tall trees and drive out the song birds and the sparrows – but this creature, this presumed raven of myth and legend and the Tower of London, was on an altogether different scale from a mere crow. He decided, as it flew off, that its image had been magnified by some happenstance of glass and light, and felt oddly relieved. All the same he shivered. Then he thought that since the portrait was finished – he'd used a mixture of acrylics and oils, and the white flecks were in acrylic and would have dried by now – he'd throw its protective cloth over it – a length of light natural linen cloth he was accustomed to using for this purpose.