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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 and on about the central heating not working and asking for a better fridge and so forth, and he had got fed up with that; but this! Not £129 for a gas bill: you could put three noughts on the 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