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.
‘Yes but then darling you must remember I am a perfect size ten and your ex-wife is a very imperfect size fourteen, probably sixteen, and women like that don’t much go for shopping.’ Doris would have been a size eight but the BBC insisted that she not be too thin. Programme presenters had to send the right message to the nation. Otherwise she would have had the plain salad not the Caesar salad, with its croutons and plentiful dressing, for lunch. The dress cost £600, and Barley paid. But Doris was selling her flat in Shepherd’s Bush and insisted that she would pay the money back, in time. Being spoiled was wicked, but she liked her independence.
Afterwards they took a walk through Grosvenor Square, watching as some Japanese children chased pigeons till their mother called them away, then strolled on to Bond Street and the peaches and cream décor of Bulgari, where even more charming girls, and men too, showed them jewellery under strong lights, and they decided on a sleek modern piece, a necklace, stripes of white and yellow gold, but encasing three ancient coins, the mount following the irregular contours of the thin worn bronze, which somehow went perfectly with the Japanese dress, though out of such different cultures, and Barley paid £18,000 for it, and they took it away with them. Doris fell silent at this point about paying him back. But what was money for but to be spent? Barley had done very well when the Canary Wharf complex had been constructed. Taken a risk everyone (including Grace) said he shouldn’t, and it had paid off, and these days money just made money. It mounted and mounted. Doris was like him, a risk taker. A stroll to Heywood Hill bookshop where Doris was on first name terms with the knowledgeable and courteous gentleman who ran it, to receive their recommendations for her Out of the Past clip, and then it was time for Lady Random’s. They made every minute of the time they had: it was in both their natures – Grace tended to sit about dreamily doing nothing – and Barley did feel a
