a man accustomed all his life to fried fish and chips and peas, but he supposed the canapés at the Randoms’ would be plentiful and nourishing: not everything can be low fat.
‘My God,’ said Doris, after she had changed and made her entrance; all expensive simplicity. ‘I do believe that’s your ex-wife over there. How on earth does she get into a do like this?’ Lady Random in her niceness had let Doris change in her, Lady Random’s dressing room, where Doris had much admired various bottles of scent, but kept quiet about the décor, which favoured Fauve, and looked to her rather too like the TV backdrop from which she presented her book reviews on the programme. Literature was considered a worthy subject, but the set design was calculated to liven things up as much as possible. The two women had a brief conversation before Lady Random tactfully left Doris alone to change, in which Lady Random said to Doris that she and Barley must come to dinner some time, and Doris had invited them down to Wild Oats (as she had re-named Barley’s, and formerly Grace’s manor house home in the country) for the August weekend, if they were not to be in the Bahamas. But there was something about Lady Random’s attitude which annoyed Doris: Doris had been definite about dates: Lady Random had not. Doris felt she was snubbed and was not accustomed to it. ‘Barley,’ she said now, ‘get your ex-wife out of this room or I can’t stay in it. Fetch the police or something. She’s a murderess.’
‘Darling,’ said Barley, waving across the room at Grace, ‘she is murderous and a would be murderer, Judge Tobias agreed with you there, but she has done her time and I don’t imagine she is going to attack you right here and now.’ ‘Hell hath no fury,’ said Doris, but subsided for the time being, because a young man of extraordinary beauty was now standing in front of a portrait he had apparently painted. It was of Lady Juliet Random and it made her appear kind, beautiful, intelligent and serene, if in a slightly Rubensesque way. This was how Doris would have preferred to look: sometimes legs can be too long, faces too narrow, hair cuts too Princess-Di-ish for comfort. Too TV all round, in fact. The world might currently reckon Doris the hottest thing since microwaved jam, what with her new British-made millionaire husband, but Doris herself had her doubts. You could do so much with style and pizzazz and move so fast no-one had time to perceive the flaws, but Lady Juliet could still look good when calm and reposed. And she would never go out of fashion as Doris could, and Doris knew it. One day the world would sigh when they saw Doris on TV and say not her again. Doris must lay up treasure and self-confidence against that day.
Round Lady Juliet Random’s firm and flawless painted neck was a rare, colourful Bulgari piece, a necklace in red gold and steel, bright porcelain and deep ruby, and Doris knew she must have it. She and Barley had seen one like it, but not quite like it, in the Bulgari store that afternoon: and decided against it, and chosen instead the one she now wore round her neck, a piece not so vivid, perhaps, more muted, more somehow now, for what were Barley and Doris but now. It had been a fraction of the price, moreover, £18,000 not £275,000, and Doris sincerely hoped that this factor had not entered Barley’s judgement. She had been talking about paying him back, of course, but he surely realised this was not really on the cards. She was a working girl, he was a wealthy man, and he loved her and must prove it. There was nothing she hated more than a mean man. She loved the necklace she had on, with its ancient Roman coins and its contemporary Roman flair, of course she did, it was just that now she wanted Lady Juliet’s as well.
In fact she could not remember wanting anything so much since the time twenty years ago when her father Andrew the jobbing builder from Yugoslavia had bought her mother Marjorie the waitress a diamond ring from Ratners, to celebrate their wedding anniversary. That had been on Doris Zoac’s thirteenth birthday. Her father had married her mother just in time for the birth: in fact it had been as Marjorie said ‘I will’ that she had gone into labour. Or so the family story went. So Doris felt very much part of the marriage, and had somehow craved a diamond ring as well, but had been given only a dressing-table in horrid orange plastic to celebrate; in effect shut out, sent back to her room. We all have our problems.
The auction had started. She pulled Barley’s arm. ‘Barley,’ she said, ‘I want that necklace. The one in the painting.’ He felt a tremor of annoyance, much as he loved her. Want, want, want! He remembered what his mother used to say to him when he was a child, and had wanted a pair of shoes which didn’t let water, or a piece of bread before he went to school. ‘Then want must be your master.’
Grace at least had understood poverty: she had never experienced it herself, of course: she was the daughter, the eldest of three, of a Harley Street doctor of good family. She had never gone hungry, never known physical hardship, the pinch of cold or the wet shoes that must be worn because there are no others. Her parents had been good and kind, if unimaginative. They had liked Barley well enough when she brought him home, and he had given them an opportunity to congratulate themselves on their lack of snobbishness. They had admired his looks, his drive and his energy, but he was not quite what they had wanted in a husband for Grace. They were vague enough about exactly what it was that they did want – ‘all we want is for you to be happy‘ – but they had expected the source of her happiness to be someone with a title or at least a good accent. They had brought their daughters up to have social consciences: now perhaps they saw the consequences of their actions. Children have a way of listening to what their parents say and taking it at face value, not noticing the subtext. Spout egalitarian principle and the young take it to heart. When not at their boarding schools the girls would vie with one another as to who in the holidays could work with the most deprived groups in society. Battered wives, disadvantaged children, dysfunctional estate families. All three had picked up boyfriends in the back streets, but only Grace had stayed the course.
‘What these families need,’ Barley would say during the days of their courtship, in the backs of cars and down alleyways, ‘is not some middle-class girl telling them what’s what, it’s a sodding cheque for ten thousand pounds straight up.’
Be that as it may, he could see that Grace had still ended up understanding more than Doris ever would about the tribulations life can bring. Doris believed everyone was like her, only with less talent and less money. She felt pity for no-one, except perhaps for size twelve girls, who could not get down to a size ten. She felt lust, and ambition, and happiness, and possibly love, but not charity. Yet Barley loved her and admired her for what she was: he loved the flattery of her attention, the way celebrity rubbed off like gold dust on all around. It was absorbing, a freedom from responsibility, it was no less than he deserved, and the only penalty had been hurting Grace, if Grace cared for him at all. In the long term he had done her a favour. She would be okay again within the year, everyone had told him so. She would get going, and rediscover herself and start a new life. She would flourish the way everyone said women did after their long-term husbands had gone. Marriage was not for life. Grace by her manner and demeanour had demonstrated that she meant to go early and gracefully into old age and he did not and that was that. Now she sat alone on the other side of the room with her strange familiar half smile, and seemed not to see him, and did not respond when he waved.
He had been with her to this very room some twenty times, he supposed, over the years: he had cleaved unto her, as it suggested in the marriage ceremony, but who could take all that stuff seriously any more? And now she was a stranger to him, a wave across a crowded room, and that, after all, was what he had set out to achieve. Grace seldom asked for anything: if he gave her money she would only send it to Carmichael in Australia, who was better off fighting his own way through the world, if fight was in him, which he doubted. But Carmichael had to be given a chance.
And then Grace had gone and spoiled what he had planned as an amicable divorce and tried to run down Doris Dubois, the great Doris Dubois, in a car park. He had gone to visit her in prison, which had caused a dreadful row with Doris, and then Grace had actually refused to see him.
As for Doris, he had spent just about twenty thousand pounds on her during the course of the day and now she was escalating her expectations tenfold. He had once set up a mistress in a nice little flat: it had been the same thing. Poppy had droned on
