Walter Wells went quickly to the door when he heard Grace coming up the stairs. These days she almost ran, he noticed. She would take the stairs two at a time. He’d slowed down a lot, and even got aches in the backs of his legs. His father had complained a lot of these. Perhaps it was coming to him prematurely. He wanted to forewarn Grace about what she would see when she went into the studio; he didn’t want her upset. What she would see would be Doris Dubois sitting on the chair where once Grace had so recently sat to have her portrait painted, and before that Lady Juliet Random. Now on the easel, off the wall, was Juliet’s portrait, her face already half blanked out by titanium white, which is a good background for most flesh tints and Doris, it had to be admitted, had a good, clear, healthy complexion, as energy and determination poured through every cell; it might not be an agreeable energy but it was certainly there.
He waylaid Grace on the third landing. The studio was on the fourth. He took the bag of clean washing from her. She would iron it in the studio. Neither of them wanted servants, strangers, in.‘
Now Grace,’ he stood there saying, looking very mature and trustworthy and not the least like Carmichael any more. How could she ever have thought he was gay? ‘You have to understand this: don’t scream or shout or anything, the way women do in films, but Doris Dubois is in our studio and I am painting her portrait. But not her entire portrait, only her face on Lady Juliet’s body.’
‘But why?’
‘To save me time and her money,’ said Walter. ‘Mind you, she has a very busy schedule too. She came unasked to discuss prices, saw Lady Juliet upon the wall, my easel without a canvas, and demanded that I start painting her then and there.’
Grace sat down on the stairs. She felt quite calm. She felt her future stretched in front of her, full of infinite events and variations of these events.
‘As Goya painted the Duke of Wellington’s head over that of Napoleon’s brother,’ she said, ‘when news came that the Duke of Wellington, the conquering hero, had arrived at the gates of the city. At least there is some precedent here.’
Walter Wells sat down beside her on the stairs. Grace breathed in the smell of oil paint, baked potato, tobacco, and even now, with its overtone of Doris Dubois’s favourite Giorgio perfume, which Doris had worn in court; she loved it.
‘I didn’t know Goya did that,’ said Walter.
‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘A painter has to live.’
They held hands. Hers was young and soft and helpless in his.
‘You get younger every day,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to do it but she insisted.’
‘What bribes and sanctions did she use?’ asked Grace.
‘If I do this for her she will give me a slot on her TV show.‘A whole programme to yourself or a five minutes slot? The first is something, the second is nothing.’ ‘She didn’t say. And she offered to sleep with me but of course I declined.’
‘Politely, I hope,’ said Grace, with considerable calm. ‘Hell hath no fury and she’s furious enough as it is. What were her threats?’
Grace, to her own surprise, felt encouraged rather than intimidated. She had her enemy trapped. Doris Dubois had put a foot too far and ended up unarmed in hostile territory. ‘She was not specific: just that she knew the Director of Tate Modern well, and the Summer Exhibition would close its doors to me.’
‘She is certainly a powerful person in the art world,’ said Grace. ‘I reckon we’d better go in and face her. Does she know I’m living with you?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Walter. ‘But all things are possible. She is the Gestalt of our times. She will have informers everywhere.’ And they went on in.
‘Well, well, well,’ said Doris Dubois. ‘It’s the murderess. You do get around. If I was superstitious I’d say you were the Hound of Hell pursuing me and have you put back in prison for a stalker.’
Doris Dubois sat on the plinth where her rivals Lady Juliet and Grace Salt had lately sat, draped in a length of blackout cloth. From the canvas on the easel Lady Juliet’s Bulgari necklace gleamed out, a source of power and influence.
‘I see what it is,’ said Grace. ‘You’re not trying to save money.
From what’s going on at the Manor House that is the last of your concerns. You are after Lady Juliet’s necklace. You think it’s magic. You think if you own it you will turn into a person everyone likes, whether you deserve it or not. You will even put up with Lady Juliet’s body in order to have that.’
‘I have Barley’s love,’ retorted Doris, ‘which is more than you do any more, if you ever did. I think he was only ever sorry for you. And now you are reduced to buying a younger man, a toyboy.’
Doris Dubois was a little shaken, all the same. She had expected Grace to cringe and be frightened, and afraid that she, Doris, would run off with Walter Wells as well as her husband. But no. And had Doris not just recently been polled the nation’s sweetheart, and been asked to compère the Eurovision Song Contest the following year? Everyone loved and wanted Doris, it was patently evident. Why then did Grace’s words cut her to the quick?
‘Good Lord,’ said Grace, ‘I’m sure there’s less of a gap between me and Walter than there is between you and my ex-husband.’
Grace was folding laundry in the corner of the room, busy with domestic tasks, as if Doris’s presence was neither here nor there, though indeed her injured heart was seething. As for Walter, he’d put on his Rembrandt hat, which kept his ears warm, and was checking through his squeezed, squashed, metallic tubes of paint. Label printing had flaked away beneath the assault of turpentine and hard moist fingers: he could only tell the colours by peering at the congealed ring of paint beneath the tubes’ lopsided lids. He wished he had chosen to be a poet not a painter: life seemed suddenly altogether too difficult.
‘It’s normal for a man to marry someone younger than he is. It’s not for a woman.’
‘Then it should be,’ said Grace, briskly. ‘Walter, do just get on with Doris’s head. The sooner it’s done the sooner she’ll be out of here.’
Walter took up his place at the easel. Doris let a length of very long, slim leg appear beneath the blackout cloth. Walter tried not to notice. Doris flashed him a glorious smile. ‘I shall charge you for the frame, of course,’ said Grace. ‘That Lady Juliet painting is technically mine, though everyone seems to have forgotten about that. I paid for it.’ ‘You have such a mercenary nature,’ said Doris Dubois. ‘Driving poor Barley into the ground the way you did, screwing him for everything he had. You paid, but it was Barley’s money. You live off it too, Walter, I daresay. She’s bought you.’ ‘A pity about the body,’ was all Grace said, folding away. ‘Everyone will think you’re a size fourteen.’ Doris, focused as she was on the necklace, had forgotten about that. ‘Walter will paint along edges, won’t you, and make me narrower,’ she said. For every problem Doris had a solution. Her mind worked fast. Walter murmured his assent.
‘It’s going to be a birthday present for Barley,’ said Doris.
‘Sometime in December.’
‘I bet you don’t know what day,’ said Grace.
‘Bet you do,’ said Doris, nastily. ‘You poor thing. If you’re living your reject life in this dump with Walter I think Barley should be told. It may well affect your alimony.’
‘Tell you what,’ said Walter, suddenly. ‘I could work just as well from a Polaroid: I’d be able to concentrate.’
‘Suits me,’ said Doris. ‘I’m not like Grace, I don’t have all the time in the world.’
So Walter took a Polaroid of Doris, and said the painting would be finished within the week. Grace felt quite jealous and uneasy when Walter took the photograph: it seemed too much like foreplay for comfort, as if Walter were extracting some part of Doris’s essence for his own diversion, with her consent. To paint Doris Dubois could be seen as Walter’s work and was therefore just about excusable – how many crimes seem justified not just by money but by sheer professionalism: that’s only business, says the Mafia victim as he dies: the hit man’s only doing his job. Of the public executioner on Death Row, a real professional, born to it! But for Walter to take a photograph, to watch Doris appearing out of nothing, first a blur, then clearly defined on a square of greasy paper, seemed too intimate by half. Grace knew she was being ridiculous but you felt what you felt.
After Doris Dubois had gone, trit-trotting on her smart heels down the studio stairs, Grace cried and cried as if she were a child, great pity-me sobs, she felt so polluted and robbed.
‘You were magnificent, Grace, magnificent!’ soothed Walter. Grace noticed a single white hair in his eyebrows, found her tweezers and pulled it out and soon they were happy again.