end of that, and double it.
‘What do you expect me to do?’ asked Barley. ‘Go up to Lady Juliet and offer to buy it? Write her a cheque here and now and take it from her neck and put it round yours?’ ‘If you truly loved me that’s exactly what you would do,’ said Doris, but she had the grace to giggle. ‘At the very least you could put some pressure on that dreadful little fat man she’s married to, to make her do it. He’s some sort of business associate of yours, isn’t he? He won’t want to piss you off, not the great Barley Salt.’
‘Tell you what,’ said Barley, who wanted to concentrate on the auction – bidding had started at £8000, and was moving upwards by £200 increases. The young artist was looking startled and gratified and was smiling his excitement over at Grace, for some reason. ‘I’ll buy you the painting instead.’
And he joined in the bidding.
Doris jumped up and down with irritation.
‘But I don’t want the painting,’ she said. ‘I want a real Bulgari necklace with a bit of colour in it. Why would I want to hang a painting of another woman in my house? She’s at least a size fourteen, it would be bad luck. Besides, I’ve just gone to all this expense and trouble with Wild Oats for your sake, and it’s just not the right place for paintings. Yes: half sheep in aspic. No: stuff in a frame flat on a wall. That poor sweet young artist, no wonder no-one takes him seriously.’
Hang it all, thought Barley, she’d gone to the expense? I’ve gone to the expense, and if I want a painting I’ll bloody well have one, and hang it on the wall – and carried right on bidding.
‘Twelve thousand five hundred,’ offered Barley.
‘A man with excellent taste,’ quipped the auctioneer. He was a well-known actor who did a lot for charity, and his voice boomed goodwill and bonhomie.
‘Thirteen thousand,’ said a man whom Barley recognised as a colleague of Sir Ronald’s, Billyboy Justice from South Africa. Now why? Charity? Perhaps. More likely to be brown-nosing Sir Ronald, and thinking this was the way to do it, through his wife. Probably after a government contract of some kind. Sir Ronald had close links with Downing Street. Justice had an interest in lewisite, a fast acting version of mustard gas, now in active de-commission worldwide, at least theoretically, and leaving out Baghdad, as usual. Thanks to new advances in the technology applicable to the disposal of chemical weapons, high quality pure arsenic could now be obtained from the treated gas, and sold at a good profit to the gas manufacturers worldwide. It was a good new business if you had the nerve for it, and Sir Ronald was fast moving out of nuclear recycling into chemical, as the great powers agreed to dispose of at least some of their arsenals, to make way, no doubt, for new.
‘Thirteen thousand five hundred,’ said Barley.
Oh well, thought Doris, if he wants to be such an idiot, let him. She could always put Lady Juliet in her Shepherd’s Bush flat, which she had more or less decided not to sell after all. She needed a good pied-à-terre, look at what had happened today, too far to go back home, and not all that cosy when you got there; and still with the stuffy if non-corporeal presence of Barley’s ex-wife around – it somehow seemed to have got into the wooden floors of Wild Oats. She should have had them all taken up, and not drawn back at the last moment, fearful of yet more dust and disarray. How could the living hang around haunting the way Grace did? ‘This place is mine by order of precedence.’ Like the Maoris claiming New Zealand and the Aboriginals Australia and the Palestinians, Israel. ‘We were here first.’
It was nonsense of course, yet oddly persuasive. Doris herself had a Mother Courage turn of mind. The land belongs to those who till it. The children belong to those who look after them. The house belongs to those who love it. Yet what had Grace ever done for Wild Oats except let the mice take over and the Agas rust, and not touch the plumbing since the day she moved in, back in eighty something.
Perhaps Barley would have her portrait painted: if the young painter – Walter Wells – came to the flat she could just about afford the time, find a window or two in her busy diary, at least it was only round the corner from work. Just to sit and be, and be appreciated. The more she thought about it, the better a deal keeping her flat seemed. Lady Juliet could be moved to the bathroom, her own portrait could take pride of place in the living room, which heaven knows had seemed attractive enough until Barley came along and dangled Wild Oats under her nose. And she needed a night or so alone from time to time. Sex with Barley was quite exhausting: it wasn’t exactly the price you had to pay with a new man, because in all fairness she enjoyed it too, but it was tiring if you were trying to run an arts programme as well.
‘Fourteen thousand,’ said Sir Ronald’s colleague, Billyboy Justice
‘Good Lord,’ came Lady Juliet’s laughing, charming voice, ‘fancy being worth so much! You’re all such flatterers.’ ‘I don’t know what’s in it for Barley Salt,’ said Sir Ronald sotto voce to his wife, ‘but if that peasant Justice thinks I’m doing him any favours because he’s buying you for his bedroom wall he’s very mistaken.’ Sir Ronald loved Lady Juliet. Everybody seemed to love Lady Juliet, that was the trouble. She was so used to adoration she couldn’t tell a come-on from a chat. He had named a range of landmines after her, in those bad old savage days when there was more money in making arms than in taking the things to bits.
‘Fifteen thousand,’ said Barley.
‘You’re so sweet to me, Barley,’ said Doris, thinking of other things.
‘Sixteen thousand,’ said Billyboy. He had started life as a chemist. His face had been burned in an explosion when he had been about to show a Defence Minister around his plant in Utah. The ecologists had got their knickers in a twist about saran emissions; the de-commissioning work itself was a simple enough process: you just cut up the weapons in a masher and then stewed them in water at forty degrees and most of the chemicals decomposed, or would were it not for the conventional propellants and explosives intrinsic to the weapons. It was these which could all too easily recombine in hot water and simply and old-fashionedly go off. Fortunately none of the Minister’s party had been injured – and the contract had gone through. But for its renewal it needed a firm lobbying hand in parliament, which Sir Ronald could provide.
‘Seventeen thousand,’ said a squat man who had come to stand next to Billyboy. A Russian accent.
Barley turned to Lady Juliet.
‘Who’s the commissar?’ he asked.
‘Billyboy brought him along. Makarov, I think his name is. He looks a bit fierce, the way these men from Moscow do, but he’s a real charmer. But then I love anyone who puts the bidding up.’
‘Eighteen,’ called out Barley.
‘That’s the way to go!’ cried the auctioneer. ‘Any advance on eighteen?’
‘Twenty,’ said a voice from the back and everyone turned to look at Grace, who blushed.
When Walter Wells went up on the little stage to say a few words about the role of art in eradicating world poverty he looked absurdly young and pretty. It was hard for anyone to take him seriously. He looked neither sufficiently corrupt for a young artist nor world weary enough for an old. He was badly in need of gravitas, thought Grace, but no doubt the passage of time would both bless and curse him with it. If youth but knew,
