The Bulgari Connection by Fay Weldon Page B

fond of Grace, or she wouldn’t have been asked to the auction. People, even in this day and age, did still seem to take sides. It had seemed such a simple idea at the time, to divorce Grace and marry Doris, and no-one’s business but their own.
    He’d been wrong, and he was not accustomed to being wrong.

15
    Walter Wells loves me. At night his hands explore my body, and it doesn’t even occur to me that he will find fault with any part of me. After years of sleeping with Barley and worrying if my tummy is too fat, am I doing the right thing, should I just lie here or should I involve myself more? His strong cool fingers move over my thigh, my back, over all my warm being, my smaller rounded compact self enclosed in his long bony self. How naked men and women complement each other in a bed: him hard, her soft, all that yin and yang stuff. So much pleasure! He pinches my flesh between finger and thumb, as if to prove it’s real, that he’s not dreaming. Yet this body of mine is all imperfection; by what magic is he so deluded? What was once smooth and resilient is now dry to the touch, and flabbier, so unfamiliar to me when my own fingers encounter it, it could belong to a stranger, a third in the bed.
    Walter Wells sees no ugliness in this. ‘I love you,’ he says. ‘You are so beautiful.’
    â€˜You think I am,’ I protest. ‘You know I’m not really. Everything looks better when it’s young, and I’m not young.’
    But he likes the blown rose not the bud, he tells me so. The bud is full of expectation that must end; there’s so much sorrow and disappointment held up in store.
    I look at myself in the mirror and I see certain changes I can’t quite believe. My eyes begin to brighten. I would think I was growing young again, that nature had reversed its processes, that God had relented in his dire and doomy scheme of things, simply on my account. But of course it can’t be. It’s just a rush of oestrogen through the capillaries. Love: must be.
    The Bloomsday Gallery has sold four of Walter’s paintings – landscapes – to a dealer in New York, a director of the Manhatt. [sic] Centre for the Arts. They actually managed to get their prices up to £1000 each. Sixty per cent of £4000 is £2400 – give or take a bit, as Barley would say; he being quick if cavalier with figures. ‘Give me the ballpark, give me the ballpark,’ was his constant cry, whether buying properties for millions or a joint of meat for Sunday dinner.
    The Manhatt. want to mount a one-man exhibition of his work, and Walter to go over to New York for the private view. He paints with a rare maturity for someone so young, they say. ‘You have been
discovered
!’ I say. ‘I believe I have,’ he says, wreathed in smiles.
    Lady Juliet is on the wall, staring down at us. She has a sweet expression, and the necklace, with its sometimes brilliant, sometimes glowing colours, changing as the autumn sun moves across the skylight, glitters and flickers emerald-green and blue-sapphire and red-ruby in the good North light, and seems to move on her flesh. She could almost be breathing.

16
    Walter Wells was indeed over the moon. Everything in his life seemed to be going right. He had met the love of his life, and she didn’t mind the cold, she understood what he was talking about, entranced him physically, and let him get on with his work. She didn’t chatter or talk about herself endlessly. She had a son, but he was grown up and safely in Australia, and such was his vague understanding of genetic technology he imagined that if they ever wanted a child age would not stop her: if the scientists could clone a sheep, they could do anything. She sat for her portrait. She wore the crimson velvet dress. ‘It has a distressed quality,’ he said. ‘It’s just right for you.’ He seemed to think she had suffered greatly in her life.