Читать книгу The Bulgari Connection - Fay Weldon - Страница 7

‘The fact is that your ex-wife does not deserve your name,’ said Doris after breakfast. Once she got an idea into her head it tended to stay there. ‘She is violent and aggressive and full of hate and spite.’

They ate on the terrace, in the early sun. Doris had to be at the studio by ten, and Barley at a meeting of the Confederation of British Industry likewise. Doris’s Philippine maid Maria served decaff and fruit, calories carefully weighed and counted by Doris’s nutritionist. Barley’s chauffeur Ross would have a flask of real coffee and a bacon sandwich ready in the back of the car when he turned up to collect Barley.

‘I hear you,’ said Barley, whose lawyer had told him it would look better in the divorce courts if he could claim to have seen a counsellor. The law these days favoured those who put in an appearance of wanting to save their marriages, and the suggestion of a basic incompatibility with Grace would be more helpful to his case than the simple wanting to go off with Doris Dubois, a younger woman. As ever, Barley hadturned time otherwise wasted to good account, and was now adept at the language of understanding and compassion. ‘Best to let it out. And I feel for your distress. But you did emerge from the incident more or less undamaged.’

And indeed, Doris Dubois was the least damaged creature he had ever seen, let alone taken to bed: long lean tanned limbs; centred by the kind of full, well nippled bosom most skinny women achieve only after implants, but for Doris a blessing of birth – her breasts still retaining the warm consoling texture of human flesh. Her mouth curved sweetly: she had wide blue eyes into which Barley could stare without embarrassment. Doris had developed the media art of paying attention to something else altogether while looking and smiling and nodding; he could hold her eye without actually holding it, as it were, and he found that liberating. Intense love can so often have its own embarrassments. She was widely informed: he liked that. He had spent too much of his life with Gracie, who never read a novel and whose idea of a conversation was ‘yes, dear’, and ‘what did you say, dear?’ and ‘where were you last night?’, who lay passively and compliantly on her back during sex. He had forgotten what the life of the mind was like. Most women, he had noticed, whose looks assure them of acceptance and approval from infancy, neglected their intelligence and sensitivities, as did Grace – but not so Doris: Doris could hold her own at any dinner party in the land. She was perhaps a little humourless, but like a Persian rug of great quality, there must be some flaw in the design, or else God will be offended.

‘All that aside,’ observed Doris Dubois, ‘– and not that I want to marry you, marriage being such an old-fashioned institution, and I would always rather be known as Doris Dubois, rather than Doris Salt, I couldn’t bear to be so near the end of the alphabet – nevertheless, if I were to be your legal married wife, and not just your partner, I would not want there to be another Mrs Salt around.’

Barley Salt felt his heart contract with joy. He had done the best he could with the cards dealt to him at birth – but there were still dinner tables at which he felt inadequate, at which he felt people laughed at him, for the rude, crude fellow he had been born. If the conversation turned to opera, or literature, or art, he felt at a loss. To be actually married to Doris Dubois, so at ease in all these areas of life, would be triumph indeed. And she, for all her disclaimers, had brought the matter up, not he.