dull, dull, dull – and a younger woman in a flame-coloured dress with a strong nose, a hard mouth, and a band of solid powerful gold around her neck; but who moved with a kind of focused energy, as if all the wind of the present, whirling around, had sought her out as its centre. Always hard to get on canvas, this kind of thing, this sense of the present made apparent, if only because those few whom fate so selected were seldom in repose. They never sat still.
Doris Dubois and Barley Salt found themselves at a loose end after their Caesar salad and sparkling water lunch at the Ivy. Barley had once been in the habit of ordering the fried fish and the thick chips and mushy peas but Doris had patted his tummy affectionately and said slenderness was youth, and a man as young at heart as he was should have a figure to go with it. It was remarkable how quickly rich and fatty foods began to seem gross; and the waist to return. He felt restless, though, as if serenity was situated somewhere in the fatty tissues, and only sexual pleasures with Doris seemed able to quell the feeling that something, somewhere, was not altogether right. It wasn’t that he missed Grace: her fitful dry wit had come to seem like an evasion of real feeling; he felt reassured by Doris’s earnestness and her appreciation of the higher things in life: if he missed Grace it was in the same way a young man gone off to college will miss his mother: he knows he must grow out of her, while occasionally hankering for the comforts of home.
But home, the mansion in which he and Grace had so casually lived, and had together lost all but passing interest in sex, was now, with Doris installed, a turmoil of builders, designers and security experts, too crowded by day for sex, and there was no point in going there until after seven, by which time most would have disappeared, but Doris had to be back in town by eight because she was going out live at ten. They decided to stay in town: Doris consulted her digital notepad and discovered an invitation to a charity auction at Lady Juliet’s that evening.
‘Lady Juliet!’ said Barley. ‘What a pleasant woman. My ex-wife and I used to be on quite good terms with the Randoms. I haven’t seen much of them since the divorce. He’s in rare metal recovery. Buys up de-commissioned nuclear weapons and so on and extracts the titanium.’
‘Preserving the natural wealth of the planet!’ said Doris.
‘Way to go!’
‘I’m not sure that that’s his prime motive,’ said Barley, brutally.
‘Quite a lot of Russians get exposed to quite a lot of radioactivity on the way.’
‘Darling,’ said Doris, ‘you shouldn’t be so cynical. It isn’t nice. Shall we trot along? There’s a party at the British Library Manuscripts Room, but they’re so nervous there in case you spill champagne on the Book of Kells, or something, it’s no fun. A charity auction in a private house might be quite entertaining, and it’s always fascinating to see how other people live.’ Doris wanted to be on good terms with the Randoms. If Grace could do it, so could she.
‘They’re quite dull, really,’ said Barley, cautiously. ‘They don’t have many books in the house, but she’s such a nice woman.’
Doris did not have anything to wear, so they went to South Molton Street by cab – Barley’s chauffeur Ross had a sick mother – and were dropped off at the end of South Molton Street where they strolled along to Browns, and Barley watched while Doris bought a kind of silk slip dress by a Japanese designer, in yellow and orange and gold. Tall, slinky, reserved girls attended her – ladies in waiting – and he stood and watched with his hands in his pockets. Grace never in a million years would have wasted time and money in this way; he loved it, and said as much to Doris.
‘Yes but then darling you must remember I am a perfect size ten and your ex-wife is a very imperfect size fourteen, probably sixteen, and women like that don’t much go for shopping.’ Doris would have been a size eight but the BBC insisted that she not be too thin. Programme presenters had to send the right message to the nation. Otherwise she would have had the plain salad not the Caesar salad, with its croutons and plentiful dressing, for lunch. The dress cost £600, and Barley paid. But Doris was selling her flat in Shepherd’s Bush and insisted that she would pay the money back, in time. Being spoiled was wicked, but she liked her independence.
Afterwards they took a walk through Grosvenor Square, watching as some Japanese children chased pigeons till their mother called them away, then strolled on to Bond Street and the peaches and cream décor of Bulgari, where even more charming girls, and men too, showed them jewellery under strong lights, and they decided on a sleek modern piece, a necklace, stripes of white and yellow gold, but encasing three ancient coins, the mount following the irregular contours of the thin worn bronze, which somehow went perfectly with the Japanese dress, though out of such different cultures, and Barley paid £18,000 for it, and they took it away with them. Doris fell silent at this point about paying him back. But what was money for but to be spent? Barley had done very well when the Canary Wharf complex had been constructed. Taken a risk everyone (including Grace) said he shouldn’t, and it had paid off, and these days money just made money. It mounted and mounted. Doris was like him, a risk taker. A stroll to Heywood Hill bookshop where Doris was on first name terms with the knowledgeable and courteous gentleman who ran it, to receive their recommendations for her Out of the Past clip, and then it was time for Lady Random’s. They made every minute of the time they had: it was in both their natures – Grace tended to sit about dreamily doing nothing – and Barley did feel a little tired when they got to the stolid cream house with pillars. Caesar salad is not much to sustain a man accustomed all his life to fried fish and chips and peas, but he supposed the canapés at the Randoms’ would be plentiful and nourishing: not everything can be low fat.
‘My God,’ said Doris, after she had changed and made her entrance; all expensive simplicity. ‘I do believe that’s your ex-wife over there. How on earth does she get into a do like this?’ Lady Random in her niceness had let Doris change in her, Lady Random’s dressing room, where Doris had much admired various bottles of scent, but kept quiet about the décor, which favoured Fauve, and looked to her rather too like the TV backdrop from which she presented her book reviews on the programme. Literature was considered a worthy subject, but the set design was calculated to liven things up as much as possible. The two women had a brief conversation before Lady Random tactfully left Doris alone to change, in which Lady Random said to Doris that she and Barley must come to dinner some time, and Doris had invited them down to Wild Oats (as she had re-named Barley’s, and formerly Grace’s manor house home in the country) for the August weekend, if they were not to be in the Bahamas. But there was something about Lady Random’s attitude which annoyed Doris: Doris had been definite about dates: Lady Random had not. Doris felt she was snubbed and was not accustomed to it. ‘Barley,’ she said now, ‘get your ex-wife out of this room or I can’t stay in it. Fetch the police or something. She’s a murderess.’
‘Darling,’ said Barley, waving across the room at Grace, ‘she is murderous and a would be murderer, Judge Tobias agreed with you there, but she has done her time and I don’t imagine she is going to attack you right here and now.’ ‘Hell hath no fury,’ said Doris, but subsided for the time being, because a young man of extraordinary beauty was now standing in front of a portrait he had apparently painted. It was of Lady Juliet Random and it made her appear kind, beautiful, intelligent and serene, if in a slightly Rubensesque way. This was how Doris would have preferred to look: sometimes legs can be too long, faces too narrow, hair cuts too Princess-Di-ish for comfort. Too TV all round, in fact. The world might currently reckon Doris the hottest thing since microwaved jam, what with her new British-made millionaire husband, but Doris herself had her doubts. You could do so much with style and pizzazz and move so fast no-one had time to perceive the flaws, but Lady Juliet could still look good when calm and reposed. And she would never go out of fashion as Doris could, and Doris knew it. One day the world would sigh when they saw Doris on TV and say not her again. Doris must lay up treasure and self-confidence against that day.
Round Lady Juliet Random’s firm and flawless painted neck was a rare, colourful Bulgari piece, a necklace in red gold