It was nonsense of course, yet oddly persuasive. Doris herself had a Mother Courage turn of mind. The land belongs to those who till it. The children belong to those who look after them. The house belongs to those who love it. Yet what had Grace ever done for Wild Oats except let the mice take over and the Agas rust, and not touch the plumbing since the day she moved in, back in eighty something.
Perhaps Barley would have her portrait painted: if the young painter – Walter Wells – came to the flat she could just about afford the time, find a window or two in her busy diary, at least it was only round the corner from work. Just to sit and be, and be appreciated. The more she thought about it, the better a deal keeping her flat seemed. Lady Juliet could be moved to the bathroom, her own portrait could take pride of place in the living room, which heaven knows had seemed attractive enough until Barley came along and dangled Wild Oats under her nose. And she needed a night or so alone from time to time. Sex with Barley was quite exhausting: it wasn’t exactly the price you had to pay with a new man, because in all fairness she enjoyed it too, but it was tiring if you were trying to run an arts programme as well.
‘Fourteen thousand,’ said Sir Ronald’s colleague, Billyboy Justice
‘Good Lord,’ came Lady Juliet’s laughing, charming voice, ‘fancy being worth so much! You’re all such flatterers.’ ‘I don’t know what’s in it for Barley Salt,’ said Sir Ronald sotto voce to his wife, ‘but if that peasant Justice thinks I’m doing him any favours because he’s buying you for his bedroom wall he’s very mistaken.’ Sir Ronald loved Lady Juliet. Everybody seemed to love Lady Juliet, that was the trouble. She was so used to adoration she couldn’t tell a come-on from a chat. He had named a range of landmines after her, in those bad old savage days when there was more money in making arms than in taking the things to bits.
‘Fifteen thousand,’ said Barley.
‘You’re so sweet to me, Barley,’ said Doris, thinking of other things.
‘Sixteen thousand,’ said Billyboy. He had started life as a chemist. His face had been burned in an explosion when he had been about to show a Defence Minister around his plant in Utah. The ecologists had got their knickers in a twist about saran emissions; the de-commissioning work itself was a simple enough process: you just cut up the weapons in a masher and then stewed them in water at forty degrees and most of the chemicals decomposed, or would were it not for the conventional propellants and explosives intrinsic to the weapons. It was these which could all too easily recombine in hot water and simply and old-fashionedly go off. Fortunately none of the Minister’s party had been injured – and the contract had gone through. But for its renewal it needed a firm lobbying hand in parliament, which Sir Ronald could provide.
‘Seventeen thousand,’ said a squat man who had come to stand next to Billyboy. A Russian accent.
Barley turned to Lady Juliet.
‘Who’s the commissar?’ he asked.
‘Billyboy brought him along. Makarov, I think his name is. He looks a bit fierce, the way these men from Moscow do, but he’s a real charmer. But then I love anyone who puts the bidding up.’
‘Eighteen,’ called out Barley.
‘That’s the way to go!’ cried the auctioneer. ‘Any advance on eighteen?’
‘Twenty,’ said a voice from the back and everyone turned to look at Grace, who blushed.
When Walter Wells went up on the little stage to say a few words about the role of art in eradicating world poverty he looked absurdly young and pretty. It was hard for anyone to take him seriously. He looked neither sufficiently corrupt for a young artist nor world weary enough for an old. He was badly in need of gravitas, thought Grace, but no doubt the passage of time would both bless and curse him with it. If youth but knew, if age but could …
Grace had assumed that Walter Wells was gay. He reminded her of her son Carmichael, now in Sydney whence he had fled from Barley. Lustrous black curls, narrow and Greek-God-ish face, lissom build, soft voice, intolerably handsome, dressed in shades and textures of black. Polo-necked black silk sweater, a waistcoat in thick, black cotton, black denim jeans; Carmichael had once told Grace all black hues were different, there was no such thing as true black; and she had been noticing this phenomenon ever since. In Walter Wells’ case, unlike Carmichael’s, as she was to discover, the layered effect was achieved with neither effort nor design by simply putting all garments through the washing machine at whatever temperature the dial happened to be pointing at. But then Walter was an artist, and Carmichael was a dress designer.
Grace’s psychotherapist, Dr Jamie Doom, had told her that she should ‘let Carmichael go’. That he had his own life to live, and had chosen wisely in going to Australia to do it, far away from his domineering father. He was not convinced by Grace’s assertion that Carmichael – christened John Carmichael Salt, he preferred to use the middle name – had assiduously developed first his stammer and then his gayness in order to annoy Barley. Grace, he said, was being unrealistic in her disappointment – that Carmichael hadn’t flown back to intervene and take his mother’s side when Doris first appeared over the domestic horizon. She was unreasonable to hope he’d be in Court to give moral support – ‘not even there to watch me being sent down!’ No doubt, said Dr Jamie Doom, from the sound of it Carmichael had his own pressing emotional problems in Sydney: perhaps, when it came to his parents, he wished a plague on both their houses. As it were.
Sometimes she suspected Dr Doom was in Barley’s pay.
As for the Manor House, where she and Barley had spent so many good years, Jamie Doom could not seem to understand why the thought of Doris Dubois changing its name to Wild Oats and tearing it to bits so upset her. ‘You told me you didn’t like the place,’ he said. ‘Too big, too gloomy and too ostentatious.’
A hundred acres and peacocks which kept them awake at night, built by an 1860 version of Barley, who had made his money in railways, and tried to design it himself, all dark panelling and echoey plumbing. They’d moved in when Carmichael was six: when Barley made his first million. She’d wanted to stay where she was, with Carmichael at the local school, friends with other parents, a small garden to record the passage of the seasons, the familiar and the safe, down-market according to her parents’ looks when they came to visit, but fine by Grace. But how Barley wanted to take the look off their faces. If he thought he’d do it by moving the family into the Manor House he was mistaken. ‘A little ostentatious, darling,’ they had said. ‘But if you like it …’
And then there’d been the matter of the two Rolls-Royces. Grace had begged Barley not to, but nothing would stop him. In the year Carmichael was born both her sisters married: Emily to an estate manager in Yorkshire, Sara to a stockbroker in Sussex. Both had big weddings. Barley insisted on arriving in a hired Rolls: it was money they could hardly afford at the time. Grace had assured her husband that there were other ways of demonstrating his worth – surely her evident happiness was enough to keep her parents in their place, just about. But he wanted to impress, to sweep away their doubts, as he swept away hers.
When she first took him home the McNabs had taken him for a man of no education, some kind of building labourer.