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programme as well.
    â€˜Fourteen thousand,’ said Sir Ronald’s colleague, Billyboy Justice
    â€˜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.
    â€˜Fifteen thousand,’ said Barley.
    â€˜You’re so sweet to me, Barley,’ said Doris, thinking of other things.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜Seventeen thousand,’ said a squat man who had come to stand next to Billyboy. A Russian accent.
    Barley turned to Lady Juliet.
    â€˜Who’s the commissar?’ he asked.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜Eighteen,’ called out Barley.
    â€˜That’s the way to go!’ cried the auctioneer. ‘Any advance on eighteen?’
    â€˜Twenty,’ said a voice from the back and everyone turned to look at Grace, who blushed.

8
    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