her of her son Carmichael, now in Sydney whence he had fled from Barley. Lustrous black curls, narrow and Greek-God-ish face, lissom build, soft voice, intolerably handsome, dressed in shades and textures of black. Polo-necked black silk sweater, a waistcoat in thick, black cotton, black denim jeans; Carmichael had once told Grace all black hues were different, there was no such thing as true black; and she had been noticing this phenomenon ever since. In Walter Wells’ case, unlike Carmichael’s, as she was to discover, the layered effect was achieved with neither effort nor design by simply putting all garments through the washing machine at whatever temperature the dial happened to be pointing at. But then Walter was an artist, and Carmichael was a dress designer.
Grace’s psychotherapist, Dr Jamie Doom, had told her that she should ‘let Carmichael go’. That he had his own life to live, and had chosen wisely in going to Australia to do it, far away from his domineering father. He was not convinced by Grace’s assertion that Carmichael – christened John Carmichael Salt, he preferred to use the middle name – had assiduously developed first his stammer and then his gayness in order to annoy Barley. Grace, he said, was being unrealistic in her disappointment – that Carmichael hadn’t flown back to intervene and take his mother’s side when Doris first appeared over the domestic horizon. She was unreasonable to hope he’d be in Court to give moral support – ‘not even there to watch me being sent down!’ No doubt, said Dr Jamie Doom, from the sound of it Carmichael had his own pressing emotional problems in Sydney: perhaps, when it came to his parents, he wished a plague on both their houses. As it were.
Sometimes she suspected Dr Doom was in Barley’s pay.
As for the Manor House, where she and Barley had spent so many good years, Jamie Doom could not seem to understand why the thought of Doris Dubois changing its name to Wild Oats and tearing it to bits so upset her. ‘You told me you didn’t like the place,’ he said. ‘Too big, too gloomy and too ostentatious.’
A hundred acres and peacocks which kept them awake at night, built by an 1860 version of Barley, who had made his money in railways, and tried to design it himself, all dark panelling and echoey plumbing. They’d moved in when Carmichael was six: when Barley made his first million. She’d wanted to stay where she was, with Carmichael at the local school, friends with other parents, a small garden to record the passage of the seasons, the familiar and the safe, down-market according to her parents’ looks when they came to visit, but fine by Grace. But how Barley wanted to take the look off their faces. If he thought he’d do it by moving the family into the Manor House he was mistaken. ‘A little ostentatious, darling,’ they had said. ‘But if you like it …’
And then there’d been the matter of the two Rolls-Royces. Grace had begged Barley not to, but nothing would stop him. In the year Carmichael was born both her sisters married: Emily to an estate manager in Yorkshire, Sara to a stockbroker in Sussex. Both had big weddings. Barley insisted on arriving in a hired Rolls: it was money they could hardly afford at the time. Grace had assured her husband that there were other ways of demonstrating his worth – surely her evident happiness was enough to keep her parents in their place, just about. But he wanted to impress, to sweep away their doubts, as he swept away hers.
When she first took him home the McNabs had taken him for a man of no education, some kind of building labourer. Within three months of his marriage to their daughter he’d been site foreman, within a year at business school, working and saving while Grace worked in a dress shop to pay the bills – a job at which she’d been spectacularly bad – and then into property, and able to buy two Rolls-Royces. But it was never enough for her parents, and could never be enough for Barley. Only Doris Dubois would turn out to be that.
Barley’s first crash came when Carmichael was nine. The bottom suddenly fell out of the property market. The millions vanished. He had prudently put the Manor House into Grace’s name, and the two Rolls-Royces too. Emily and Sara’s husbands had invested heavily in Barley’s business. They lost all they had too, including their houses. Grace wanted to sell the Manor House and share what there was. But Barley was against it.
‘Of course he would be,’ said Dr Doom, hearing the story. ‘You had to have somewhere to live. Others must be responsible for their own lives.’ If the Court hadn’t made going to therapy a condition of her freedom she would have got up and walked out there and then.
‘But the cars,’ she said.
‘What about the cars?’
‘Nobody needs two Rolls-Royces in the drive,’ she said. ‘It’s not as if I could drive. I wanted to sell them to help Emily and Sara, but he wouldn’t hear of it.’
‘Quite right,’ said Dr Doom. ‘The resale value of those cars is absurd.’
It was what Barley had said at the time. Since her prison sentence it had sometimes seemed to Grace that all men were the same man. It had certainly been the view of men enjoyed by most of her fellow inmates. They tended to have husbands and lovers who got drunk and beat them about, whom they wouldn’t leave because they loved them, but were nevertheless seldom inclined to speak well of men in general.
Sometimes, lately, Grace had felt nostalgia for prison. At least the place was well-peopled, albeit with a class of people to whom she wasn’t accustomed. She had even made a friend: Ethel, a bookmaker who had run off with her employer’s takings and earned three years for her pains. Ethel would be coming out in a couple of months; then Grace would find out how good a friend she was. Ethel might prefer to put the past behind her and Grace would understand it if she did.
Her own family had chosen to put any past which included her behind them, and she could understand that too. By the time Barley was declared bankrupt Grace’s sisters were not speaking to her, and her parents barely so. They felt not only justified in their initial suspicions of their eldest daughter’s husband, but that she had been tainted by him in some way. Nor did his return to prosperity impress them. They none of them came to visit her in jail. They’d felt they had put up with enough already when they opened the Telegraph one morning to find Grace’s picture staring back at them, portrayed as an aggrieved and murderous wife. She had only herself to blame.
Grace had been out of society for so long, embroiled in a divorce, a court case, a prison sentence, then the shock of the new in her gloomy, lonely apartment, that she easily misjudged what was going on around her. Even leaving Carmichael out of it, it was not surprising that she assumed Walter Wells was gay. It had become the tactic of many perfectly heterosexual young men to affect a misleading campness as if in self-defence: a softness of voice, a delicacy of movement, an all-pervasive irony of gesture. This they did to obviate the anticipated reaction of so many young women they approached. ‘Don’t you lay hands on me, you rude, crude, heterosexual beast, you macho scum, all sex is rape, stop looking at me in that disgusting way, you’re harassing me, stalking me, go away! To take on the colours of gayness was to be given time and space to charm and flirt their way in, as Walter Wells now did into Grace Salt’s comprehension. She did not turn her head away: she recognised a fellow victim, a young man who might be Carmichael, someone with whom the world was not fully at ease, and so she consented to smile and talk to him, and have fellow feeling with him, and not turn her head stiffly away. ‘We both know how to suffer.’
It was true she had wondered where exactly Walter Wells’ self-interest lay. She was not naïve. She was well aware that beautiful and fashionable young men do not talk to unfashionable women and flatter them unless there is some deeper agenda at work. They do not sit smiling and chatting out of sheer goodness of heart, not to a depressed woman of a certain age, wearing an old dress found in the bottom of a suitcase snatched from home in her hurry
