Free The Bulgari Connection by Fay Weldon

wise I am really quite short of carnal knowledge: I daresay there are as many kinds of lovemaking as there are men. Who could I ask? If Ethel ever comes out of prison it is the kind of thing she might know. Walter Wells is still quite new to me; I am not quite sure yet what I can say or what I can’t.
    He smells of oil-paint and canvas, encrusted palettes and turpentine, cigarettes and McDonald’s, where he eats Chicken McNuggets with the sweet-and-sour dip, and of chlorine from the swimming pool, and there is some slight remembered flavour of Carmichael there when I held him against my breast, the smell of the baby boy pre-testosterone, don’t ask me why. I love it all. All I regret is the decades without it, and if I had not been without it how could I have it now? Those in love are bats, quite bats.
    Walter Wells’s full name is Walter Winston Wells. www. We see some significance in this when really there is none, but then we see significance in everything. We suppose him to be a man of the future, and he laments that he can never catch up with me. He looks forward to being old, or so he says, to be able to turn into his father and be taken seriously. I tell him I think it is unlucky to wish old age upon himself, and he points out that it’s a lot better than death. Both of us at the moment want to live forever and together.
    The Indian summer is over and the nights draw in. It is cold in the studio so I wear winter woollies. Lady Juliet’s painting has her face to the wall, in case she gets damaged, leaning up against a stack of canvases, mostly landscapes, a couple of still lifes. She is waiting merely for a wall space to become vacant. She can go up only when the next one is sold, he says. It would seem like favouritism, he says, to take down one already in place and so make way for Lady Juliet. Everything must take its turn, be done in due order. He has a very personal relationship with his paintings. If I were a different, younger, less patient person I could get quite jealous of them, he is so tender and thoughtful to them. I wonder if I should take the painting back to my flat and put it up, but we agree we like Lady Juliet and do not want her hanging there lonely in that desolate place. I have to go back sometimes for a change of clothes and a better bath than Walter can provide and to answer lawyers’ letters and so forth, but I am always pleased to leave. It seems to me that every time I climb the four flights to the studio I do it more quickly and more easily. My feet have wings.
    Walter reckons it will be only a couple of weeks before he sells a painting and Lady Juliet goes on the wall. He sells his paintings for less than a thousand pounds each. He has a gallery in Bloomsbury just round the corner from my mansion flat in Tavington Court, not far from the British Museum – coincidence! Coincidence! See how God has arranged everything for our benefit.
    It is a feature of new love that the senses grow sharper, the eye grows brighter – even my poor tired ones, in their sixth decade of being, and all things have meaning. I did the Lottery and won £92. I suppose we are ‘in love’. The public pool is more full of event and far more full of chlorine than my own ever was. Now Doris Dubois has doubled the size of the one at the Manor House, as Ross, Barley’s chauffeur, tells me she has, it will be lonelier still. Good. But I hardly think of Doris Dubois these days and of Barley even less. Hate is minimally more powerful than love, it seems, certainly harder to lose from the system, or perhaps I never loved Barley; all he ever was, was habit.
    I love Walter Winston Wells, [email protected]. The only cure for one man, as Ross pointed out, is another man. I met Ross by accident down at the swimming pool where Walter dove and I paddled. Ross was always an ally of mine: he knew what Barley could be like. Ross goes swimming to lose weight, and then goes