The Bulgari Connection
A fast-moving, elegant novel set in contemporary London in the glittery world of charity auctions, big business, high art, and more than enough money to spare.Take one wealthy businessman fresh on his second marriage to an avid, successful young woman, one artist and a portrait for sale, two women wearing Bulgari necklaces, add a touch of the supernatural, a big dose of envy, stir, and see what happens.
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FAY WELDON
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The Bulgari Connection
Contents
Doris Dubois is twenty-three years younger than I am. She is slimmer than I am, and more clever. She has a degree in economics, and hosts a TV arts programme. She lives in a big house with a swimming pool at the end of a country lane. It used to be mine. She has servants and a metal security gate which glides open when her little Mercedes draws near. I tried to kill her once, but failed.
When Doris Dubois comes into a room all heads turn: she has a sunny disposition and perfect teeth. She smiles a lot and most people find themselves returning the smile. If I did not hate her I expect I would quite like her. She is, after all, the nation’s sweetheart. My husband loves her, and can see no fault in her. He buys her jewels.
The swimming pool is covered, warmed, and flanked by marble tiles and can be used summer and winter. Trees and shrubs in containers have been placed all around the pool area. In photographs – and the press come often to see how Doris Dubois lives – the pool seems to exist in a mountain grotto.
The water has to be cleaned of leaves more often than any pool of mine ever did. But who’s counting cost?
Doris Dubois swims in her pool every morning, and twice a week my ex-husband Barley dives in to swim beside her. I have had them watched by detectives. After their swim servants come and offer warmed white towels into which they snuggle with little cries of joy. I have heard these cries on tape, as well as other more important, more profound, less social cries, those noises men and women make when they abandon rationality and throw in their lot with nature. ‘Cris de jouissance‘, the French call them. Défense d’émettre des cris de jouissance, I read once on a bedroom wall in a French hotel when Barley and I were in our heyday, and went on our humble holidays so happily together. In the days when we thought love would last forever, when we were poor, when joy was on the agenda.
Défense d’émettre des cris de jouissance.They had a hope!
Barley has aged better than I have. I smoked and drank and lay in the sun during the years of our happiness, on this Riviera and that, and my skin has dried out dreadfully and the doctor will not let me take what he calls artificial hormones. I get them through the Internet but do not tell either my doctor or my psychoanalyst this. The former would warn me against them and the latter would tell me to find my inner self before attending to the outer. Sometimes I worry about the dosage I take, but not often. I have other things to worry about.
‘It’s too bad,’ said Doris to Barley as they lay beside one another in a tumbled pile of white cotton and lace bedclothes, in a vast bed whose elegant top and tail had been designed, even though not made, by the great Giacometti himself, ‘that that murderess should still be using your name.’
‘Murderess might be too strong,’ said Barley amiably, ‘Murderous, was how the Judge described her.’
‘The difference is only marginal,’ said Doris. ‘The fact that I am still alive is due to me and not to her. My foot still hurts. I think you should get your lawyers on to it. It’s absurd that after divorce women should be allowed to keep their husband’s name. They should revert to the one they had before they married: they should cut their losses and start over. Otherwise the mistakes of one’s youth – like marriage to the wrong person – can hang around to haunt you forever. I speak for her sake, as well as my own, and indeed yours. While she calls herself Salt she is bound to attract headlines.’
‘It seems a little hard to take away Gracie’s name,’ said Barley. ‘I was the only claim to fame she ever had. She was a schoolgirl extract I met her: a schoolgirl she remained, at heart. A man such as myself needs a little sophistication in his partner.’ ‘I hate it when you call her Gracie,’ said Doris. ‘I want you only ever to refer to her as your ex-wife.’
Grace Salt had started life as Dorothy Grace McNab, but Barley had preferred Grace to Dorothy, Dorothy reminding him of Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, so Grace she had become.
Doris had not started life as Doris Dubois but as Doris Zoac, right down there at the end of the alphabet where no-one looks except the taxman, and had changed it by deed poll the better to further her media ambitions. She had never got round to telling Barley this, and the longer she put it off the harder it got to say.
‘It seems a little hard to take my ex-wife’s name away,’ said Barley, obediently. He, who exercised power over so many, took particular pleasure in being bossed around by Doris. They both giggled a little, from the sheer naughtiness of it all, of being happy.
Doris Dubois wore her jewellery to bed, for Barley. He loved that. He loved not just the sight of it, white gold and pavé diamonds, cold metal intricately, beautifully worked, lain heavily against the cool, moist flesh of wrist and throat, but he loved the feel of it. Last night as his hand had strayed over her breasts, their nipples peaked in reassuring response, and up to feel the tenderness of her mouth, his fingers had encountered the smooth, hard edge of metal, and his whole body had been startled into instant response. Sometimes Barley was mildly worried by the people who said to him, vulgarly, ‘Oh well, what does age matter, there’s always Viagra when the newness wears off,’ but eighteen months on there was no sign of it doing so. Doris kept Barley young: and the gifts he gave her were by the very nature of their giving returned – not by way of bribe or payment, but as tokens of simple adoration. Barley was fifty-eight years old, and Doris was thirty-two.
