The Ex-Wives Read online

  She walked home, across the street. Behind her it darkened; the porch light was switched off, in Wanda and Douggie’s house. She let herself into the empty hallway. Silence. This was the worst part; coming home. If she had switched on the radio she would have heard Buffy’s voice reading the Book at Bedtime (‘Ivanhoe’) but she never listened to Radio 4. She went upstairs, past the closed door of her mother’s bedroom, and brushed her teeth. Wanda was right; she was alone in the world now, she could do anything. She could give in her notice at Kwik-Fit Exhausts. The overall’d men there, joshing around, seemed big and oily and threatening now; the word ‘fuck’ made her flinch.

  Suddenly she felt dizzy. She sat down, abruptly, on the lavatory seat. This panic, it had struck her several times in the past few days. It resembled the panic she felt when she repeated the same word – ‘basin’, say, or ‘sausages’ – over and over until it became meaningless, except it applied to every word in her head. It was as if knitting had been unravelled and she couldn’t work out how to bundle it together again and push it back into some kind of shape. Oh, for those safe days of cats’ cradles! She gazed at the tiles her Dad had plastered around the bath. Every third, and sometimes fifth, tile had a shell printed on it. As a child she had tried to work out the inexplicable, adult reason for this but she had never asked him; the minute she had left the bathroom she had forgotten all about it and now it was too late. Her own name, Celeste, seemed strange to her. Celeste. So utterly unlikely.

  It was a stifling night. Across England, people slept fitfully. Buffy grunted, exhaling a rubbery snore. He was dreaming of toppling columns. Children had kicked off their duvets; they lay, breathing hoarsely, their damp hair painted onto their foreheads. Dogs lay on downstairs rugs, their legs twitching with the voltage of their hunts. Celeste lay, dewy between her chaste white sheets, unaware of the clock that was already ticking, that would transform both her past and her future, and take the decision about going to London out of her hands.

  The next morning, two days after the funeral, she knew she could put it off no longer. She had to tackle the stuff in the sideboard drawer. Shoeboxes and envelopes and tins full of paperwork. She lifted them out and spread them over the floor – old bills and letters, yellowing guarantees for long-vanished appliances. Careful, biro’d sums in her mother’s writing. Now she knew why she had been so reluctant to start this. It made her mother so completely dead.

  She opened a biscuit tin – Crawford’s Teatime Assortment. Inside it were some old post office books, Spanish pesetas, odds and ends. And an envelope. Celeste.

  Later, she would remember the moment when she picked up the envelope. The ache in her thighs from kneeling on the floor; the sunlight on the carpet. The thud, thud of a ball in the street outside; it was a Saturday, she was only aware of it then. The different, ringing thud when the football bounced on a car.

  She opened the envelope. Inside it was a letter in her mother’s handwriting. And a small gold fish.

  Three

  NONE OF THE usual doddery old regulars was in the pub that day – the four or five men who made even Buffy feel sprightly. He drained his glass and walked out, blinking, into the sunshine. Penny was due back from Positano the next day, flying into Heathrow at some time or other. Eight years ago, that was how they met. They had both been what was coyly called ‘between relationships’ at the time – i.e., in his case, bloody lonely. He had been in L.A., the loneliest place on earth, working on a pilot for a TV series that in fact never got made.

  He noticed her on the plane: shiny chestnut hair, cut in a bob; it swung when she moved. Silk blouse. Her head bent over one of those portable computer things hardly anybody had then. A look of high-powered, total absorption in what she was doing that posed a challenge to a chap. Very attractive.

  After the meal he had made his way to the loo, and got pinioned against her seat by the duty-free trolley; even in those days he was by no means slim enough to squeeze past. He had bent down to her and whispered: ‘Why is it, when the duty-free trolley comes round, is it pushed by a steward you’ve never seen before. And never see again? During the entire flight?’ She had laughed and whispered ‘They keep them in a special storage compartment.’

  The plane landed and they bumped into each other in the terminal. He was trying to smuggle in some particularly fine bottles of Napa Valley claret and, approaching the Nothing to Declare part of customs with his clanking carrier bags, he had tapped her on the shoulder. ‘Be a sport, and bring these through.’ She was a sport, she did. For all she knew the bags could have been full of IRA guns. Full marks to her; she carried them through with that upper-class confidence, that stop-me-if-you-dare, little man look which he had always found impressive in a woman, especially when directed at someone else.

  Once safely through he had introduced himself. ‘Russell Buffery,’ he said, shaking her hand.

  Her face lit up. ‘I thought I recognized the voice! Golly, you don’t look like I expected.’

  People were always saying that. What did they mean? What on earth were they expecting? He had never liked to ask.

  ‘You were such a marvellous Mr Pickwick,’ she said. ‘I was in bed with glandular fever, I heard all the episodes. Glandular fever takes that long.’

  So they shared a cab into London. She said she was a journalist and she wanted to do him for one of those My Room things in one of the colour supplements. He gave her his address: a mansion block in Little Venice. Well, Maida Vale.

  On the appointed day she turned up, with a photographer. She wore a white linen suit; she looked as brisk and businesslike as a staff nurse. He adored nurses. On the threshold of the living room she stopped and stared. ‘My God, what a pigsty!’ She wandered around the room, stepping over the various items strewn on the carpet. Her eyes were wide with wonder – admiration, almost. ‘People usually clean up for days before we arrive.’

  It looked perfectly all right to him – in fact, he had tidied it up a bit – but he sensed he was onto something here. Something powerful. Pity. It was here to be tapped.

  ‘My ex-wife threw me out, you see. I ended up in this place. Blomfield Mansions is full of redundant husbands, a human scrap heap.’ His voice rose, his rich brown voice. Molasses, tawny port, liqueur chocolate dripped through honeycomb – all these comparisons had been made. His voice-box had brought pleasure to thousands, seen and unseen – millions, maybe. It was without a doubt his most reliable organ, where women were concerned. ‘They fester here, crippled by alimony,’ he throbbed. ‘They sit alone in the pub, gazing at polaroid photographs of their childrens’ birthday parties they’ve been banished from attending. They sit in the launderama watching, through the cyclops eye of the washing machine, their single, bachelor bedsheet turning, entwined with their pair of Y-fronts, a parody of the embraces they had once known . . .’ He stopped. Maybe this was a bit over the top. But no; her face had become softer, blunter somehow. Even the photographer had sat down heavily in the one good armchair and was fumbling for his cigarettes.

  ‘At night they wander the streets, watching young men buying bunches of flowers at the Top Price Late Nite Store; young men, clutching a bottle of wine, eagerly springing up front steps and pressing the bell of their beloved. They pass pubs whose windows, nowadays tactlessly unfrosted, display tableaux of loving couples who, between kisses, argue playfully about what film they’re going to see that night, ringing their choices with biro in their outspread copies of Time Out.’

  Her eyes were moist; so were his. When she switched on her tape recorder, her fingers trembled. ‘Tell me about your little room,’ she said.

  It wasn’t little, actually; it was quite large. But she was obviously deeply affected. He had her now; he was an actor, after all. George Kaufman had said: if you hook your audience in the first ten minutes, you’ve got them for the play. And dammit, this story was true. He himself was quite overwhelmed.

  ‘Of course, she kept most of the furniture,’ he said, kicking aside some takeaway
containers as he crossed the room. ‘Except one or two family heirlooms even she didn’t have the gall to nick, mostly because they’re so hideous,’ He pointed to the sideboard. ‘That was my granny’s. The door’s broken, where she kicked it in.’

  ‘Your granny?’

  ‘No no. Jacquetta. My ex-wife. We were having a row.’ He pointed to the wall. ‘This is the only picture she let me keep. An incredibly dull lithograph of my old Oxford college.’

  Penny nodded. ‘It is dull, isn’t it.’ She picked up a piece of pizza crust. ‘Shall I throw this away?’

  He nodded. ‘I always leave the edge, don’t you?’ He pointed out the curious china object that the cast had given him when he had played Lear in Hartlepool; could she make out what it was? She couldn’t.

  He went to the mantlepiece, moved aside a bottle of Bells, and pointed to a photo. ‘These are my sons, Bruno and Tobias.’

  ‘Aren’t they sweet!’

  ‘I’ve got some more, somewhere.’

  ‘More what?’

  ‘Children. Older than this, though.’

  She looked at the two smiling faces in the tarnished frame. ‘When do you see them?’

  ‘Weekends. When she lets me.’

  She pointed to a glass tank. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Their stick insects.’

  She peered into the wilting foliage. ‘Where are they?’

  ‘Difficult to spot them. You see, they keep quite still and they look just like sticks. Sometimes I look in there and think: maybe that’s the way to go through life – in camouflage, not moving. The only way to avoid the pain.’

  That did it. She was his. And within a month she had moved in.

  Pulling George behind him, Buffy made his way along the parade of shops. Eight years had passed since then. Abercorn Hardware had become the Video Palace. There were Arabic newspapers at the newsagents, and kiwi fruit, each with a little 50p sticker on it, outside what was once a proper greengrocers but was now Europa Food and Wine. 5op each! Schoolboys sauntered, sucking ice lollies; they seemed to be let out at all hours of the day, now. One of them said: ‘It was him what stole it. I was well gutted.’

  What did he mean by that? Well gutted. Buffy had to keep in the swim, for the sake of his sons. Bruno and Tobias were teenagers now; they had put stick insects behind them. They mustn’t think of him as an old fuddy-duddy. He had a suspicion they found him vaguely dated and irrelevant, like an ionizer.

  It was hot. The workmen had gone, leaving paving stones stacked like dominoes and treacherous pits of sand. George suddenly stopped, pulling Buffy back; he lifted his leg and relieved himself against a length of plastic piping. The sign above him said: Sorry for Any Inconvenience.

  Buffy chuckled. He must remember to tell Penny that. She would be home soon, and everything would be all right. He was hopeless at being alone. Without her invigorating company he felt rudderless and bereft . . . Had any of his wives ever felt the same way about him?

  For some reason this made him feel irritable again. He glared at a car, double-parked outside the dry cleaners. It was empty; its engine was running, filling the air with exhaust fumes. There was a baby seat inside. On the back window was a sticker saying: Keep Your Distance! Give My Child a Chance!

  Buffy stood, transfixed. He read it again. Car stickers in general irritated him, of course – from the leery Honk If You Had It Last Night to the prissy I’m Lead-Free, Are You? But this one, for some reason, filled him with an almost apoplectic rage. It was so bloody self-righteous, that was why.

  A woman came out of the dry cleaners, carrying a plastic bag. She stopped, and stared at him. ‘Can I help you?’ She looked him up and down. He looked down. It was only then that he realized he was still wearing his bedroom slippers.

  Four

  PENNY WASN’T IN Positano. She was in a flat in Soho, three miles up the road, lying spreadeagled over a man called Colin. He was asleep. Sun glowed through the blinds; the room was bathed in that soupy twilight known only to invalids and adulterers. She wasn’t the sort of person who usually went to bed in the afternoon. The street sounds below – a car door slamming, the idling mutter of a taxi cab, waiting for somebody – they had a sharp, tinny echo. Guilt did that. The sounds could come from another country. In fact, she was supposed to be in another country. She had spread out her guide books, fan-wise, on the rush matting of Colin’s floor. Berlitz, Baedeker, Penguin. Glancing at them, she wrote in her notebook.

  Positano, the haunt of sybarites and sun-worshippers, is still the Med’s best-kept secret. Its winding, cobbled streets offer breathtaking vistas of the wine-dark ocean . . . Down below a car alarm sounded, hee-haw . . . Braying donkeys tippety-tap down the lanes, carrying picturesque panniers of local produce . . . Lazily, she ran her finger over Colin’s hard, broad shoulder. Towering, majestic cliffs . . . she wrote, terraced with vineyards and olive groves, and charming pink dwellings . . . She ran her finger down his back . . . dropping to a rocky shore far below . . . She slid her hand between his legs. . . . where boulders nestle between the luxuriant foliage of the bougainvillea . . .

  Colin grunted, and shifted. She moved, her skin unsticking from his. It was very hot; the Pentel was slippery in her hand. She had arrived at Naples now, bustling and cosmopolitan, home to superb museums and 499 churches, a city that bestows its favours generously but that only opens its heart to the cognoscenti . . . She sipped her tea; it was stewed. Sitting at a bustling pavement café in the Palazzo Reale I treated myself to a welcome glass of their refreshing local wine, Lacryma Christi del Vesuvio . . .

  She thought: Penny Warren took a mid-week bargain break, departing Gatwick and flying to Soho, still London’s best-kept secret, where she travelled from the bedroom to the bathroom, returning from the bathroom to the bedroom courtesy of Sunspot Holidays Ltd . . .

  Colin mumbled into the pillow: ‘Your elbow’s digging.’

  ‘Sorry.’ She removed her arm. She was so apologetic with him; despite her hard elbows she felt softer, more yielding.

  ‘Where’ve you got to?’

  ‘Sorrento.’

  She lay slumped across his hard buttocks, her Pentel poised. The sheer thisness of what was happening made her stomach contract. Until she met Colin she hadn’t committed adultery; she hadn’t had time. She had written lots of pieces about it, of course: Infidelity, Do’s and Don’ts. Lipstick on his Collar, God, how corny. It’s Your Affair – the Cosmo Guide to Extra-Marital Manners. But then she had written pieces about everything. She mostly wrote for women’s magazines and the women’s pages of newspapers, cunningly disguised as You or Living though everyone knew that only women read them. She had been doing it for twenty years now. She was brisk and reliable, or she had been until recently. She knew where to lunch, and what sort of mineral water to order. She knew the difference between collagen and silicone. She thought she knew everything. She ruthlessly plundered her friends’ lives for copy and cross-questioned their adolescent children about the latest trends. Despite her Sloaney shoes and Conran suits she knew what ‘well gutted’ meant. She knew all the fashion designers by their first names and went to the memorial services for their boyfriends. She held the fort in editorial offices when somebody took time off briefly – very briefly – to have a baby, or when they took a bit longer off to write a sex-and-shopping novel they got their colleagues to plug. This was what she was like, this Penny who took the tube to work and taxis at lunchtime, who breezed through London unaware, who juggled a demanding husband and a busy freelance career, who thought she knew everything.

  Until now. She didn’t know about this. She had no idea it would feel like this. The simple fact of another man’s hands on her skin, the smell of him. The pole-axing body of him. His breath in her ear. His damp balls beneath her tenderly kneading fingers. All this. The other Penny he awakened, who was always there but she didn’t know it, who surrendered herself up to him – softer, more yielding, nicer. Who charted his moles between her outstretched forefinger and th
umb, wondering at anything so humdrum, but not humdrum to her. Who rubbed her chin against his stubble. What was this, pheremones? Had she written a piece about them yet? It was exhilarating to be so lost, and yet discovered. It was terrifying.

  This simply wouldn’t do, she knew that. Her mother would be appalled; she would advance on Colin with her secateurs. Buffy would be – she mustn’t think of Buffy. Even calling him a demanding husband made her feel guilty. Demanding was much too simple a word, even she knew that; marriage was more complicated than that. But you tried to make your husband simple, the equation an understandable one. When Colin called Buffy a boozy old fraud she bristled with hastily-assembled loyalty, but she was grateful, too. It made her position clearer, as if it were printed in one of her magazines. P. W. – let us call her that – is a successful career woman and has been married eight years to a man fifteen years her senior. Once a well-known Shakespearean actor, his career had suffered a decline, due to domestic complications and a reputation for drink, and he was now known mainly for his mellow tones extolling the benefits of Rot-Away Damp Proof Courses. Was his a huge talent tragically squandered or a very small talent ruthlessly exploited? Time alone will tell. All P. W. discovered was that as her career prospered, his stagnated, that while she changed and grew, becoming a strong, independent woman in charge of her own life, etc etc, how many times had she written this, he needed more from her than she was prepared to give. Like many men, a seemingly strong exterior (in his case, pretty fat) concealed inner insecurities and a man out of touch with his feelings. As the years passed she realized that instead of marrying a father-figure she had in fact married a child.

  Oh, God, this made her feel even more guilty. It was a wholly new sensation, like the first twinges of shingles. She wasn’t used to having a conscience. She was a journalist. Journalists are born without a conscience, like certain car engines are constructed without a fan belt. She was tough, wasn’t she? From strangers, she had extracted humiliating personal confessions; from public figures she had dug out revelations of bisexual encounters. One of her best friends hadn’t spoken to her since being featured in one of her most successful series, Me and My Depression. That’s what journalists did. They fiddled their expenses; they never paid for a holiday in their lives. It was part of their job description. She had had the country cottage totally redecorated, and a large Victorian conservatory added, for a feature that she had never got round to writing at all.