Читать книгу The Bulgari Connection - Fay Weldon - Страница 12

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 to leave, a dress she wore on her honeymoon. (A shake and a cloud of dust and it had seemed to Grace as fit to wear as anything ever would.) But what could the agenda be? She did not look rich or important. She was not hung with jewels. She did not look like the kind of person who would commission a painting of herself, sitting as she did lonely and neglected in a corner, trying to be invisible. And besides, men did that: husbands, fathers, lovers, the kind of men Grace now, perforce, did without. Perhaps she reminded him of his mother? She decided that was it. He was a young man of charm and talent, lucky enough to have Lady Juliet’s sponsorship and attention, but he was sensitive and edgy, the artist amongst patrons, and insecure as befitted his age; and thus he had sought her out, dull and dowdy as she was.

When Barley had entered the room with Doris, flushed and pleased, and all conversation was stilled in acknowledgement of their presence, their celebrity status, Grace had felt what she later described as the ‘thickening of the blood in her veins’. Doris saw her, but looked through her as if she did not exist; which was to be expected. But Barley saw her and waved, and in this gesture Grace read the end of all intimacy. He did not even have the interest left to hate her. Her heart faltered; it could hardly get the blood round her body it was so sluggish, as if she’d gone out of a warm room into the sudden sharp and horrid cold of a blizzard. It was the cold of disappointment, the knowledge that Barley was gone from her forever. If it was not one painful truth which dawned in upon her, it was another.

How hard it was to rid herself of the feeling that Barley was somehow still on her side. That when the chips were down he would leave this room with her, not Doris, and the joke would be over. And then it would be her turn to play, and perhaps she would toss her head and say no! who? you? who are you to me? and go home with someone else. Or perhaps not. Barley had been to visit her in prison, but she had refused to see him. Some few powers prisoners do have, and this was one of them. Simply to snub. Except as the long hours dragged by, locked in her cell – so many staff were engaged in the attempt to forestall the passage of drugs by kiss, or embrace; to dampen down hysteria, or cart back the screaming, and the distracted and the lost-it to their quarters, that those without visitors must stay locked up – the spasm of pride had seemed mere folly. And now! Locked in her head, her body, her mouth smiling; while the few people who remembered she was there at all turned to see how Grace once Salt, now Grace McNab, reacted to the entrance of the noted celebrity lovers.

They mean to humiliate me with their happiness, was what she thought: Barley so smooth and well-suited, his teeth newly remade: Doris in the fabulous flame-coloured dress and the Bulgari necklace with the burnished coins set in heavy gold.

Only two years back and Barley had offered to buy Gracie, his then wife, just such a gift for her birthday, but she’d refused, having rung the shop to find out how much it cost. He’d taken it as a snub: he felt her resistance to what he was, obdurate in her preference of the stony past they had once shared over the soft comfort of the uneasy present. Somewhere she was still Grace McNab, not Gracie Salt, she was her parents’ daughter. Dr McNab the Harley Street surgeon was well enough off, but what was left at lunch would be eaten for dinner: waste not want not filled the air as yesterday’s cold sprouts were fried for breakfast. The faint smell of antiseptic from the surgery below, the bleakness of the high, cold waiting rooms with their polished furniture and harsh red Persian rugs, their neat copies of Country Life; the stoicism of dull patients, their pain and dereliction of the body so bravely borne – these things she took to be ordinary; the base from which all other conditions departed.

Forever she tried to re-create her childhood home: forever Barley tried to thwart her. Barley was in flight from the poverty of his; she longed to return to the careful respectability of hers. So much Dr Jamie Doom had taught her. It was her role to thwart Barley’s wishes. She tried not to but she couldn’t help it. The more Barley craved luxury and extravagance the more uneasy she felt; the more, to save his very soul, she would insist on cooking for his smart dinner guests herself and not get in expensive caterers – what was an Aga for, but to bake her own cheese straws for parties – murmuring that surely everyone appreciated home cooked food? And he’d grow pink and desperate in his new Jermyn Street finery, and she’d be in a dress from Marks and Sparks, Marble Arch. Of course he’d got fed up with her.

She should have done so much so differently, but how could she? She was the person she was. Other women seemed able to turn themselves into something they had not been born to – Doris Dubois had started life as Doris Zoac, and had honed herself into new shape – but that skill was beyond Grace. She had once turned from Gracie McNab to Grace Salt, and now she was turning back perforce and that was bad enough.

The money that should have been Carmichael’s was going round Doris’s neck and on a painting that was pleasant enough, but if the painter had only been paid £300 a week for painting it, as he’d assured her, why should it fetch so much? It didn’t make sense.

‘Up we go!’ enthused the auctioneer whose face everyone knew but whose name no-one could remember. ‘Any advance on eighteen thousand?’

‘Twenty,’ Grace said, before she could stop herself, and then felt insecure because all faces turned towards her and so she blushed.