The Ex-Wives Read online

  ‘I’m going to the cinema tonight’ he said, suddenly reckless, ‘and it’s agony sitting down.’ Come with me. Come out tonight. Like all ruins, I look best by moonlight.

  ‘What’s on?’

  ‘About six different films. Have you noticed how lovely, big things like cinemas have been divided into little cupboards, yet lovely little cupboards, like grocery shops, have been made into enormous big Waitroses? All the wrong way round, in my opinion. Still, you’re too young to remember.’

  ‘We only had a tiny cinema anyway, where I come from.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘Melton Mowbray. Me and pork pies.’ She fetched down a packet. ‘Twelve or twenty-four?’

  ‘Twenty-four. And I need some Algipan and some Multivite . . .’ He fished in his pocket. ‘And I’ve got some repeat prescriptions here . . .’

  ‘Mr Singh will be back in a tick.’ She took the bits of paper. ‘Simvastatin,’ she read.

  ‘That’s for my heart.’

  ‘Fibogel,’ she read.

  ‘That’s for my bowels.’

  She gazed at him. He felt her tender curiosity bathing his internal organs. His embarrassment disappeared; he surrendered to her. He was all hers – his body, and all it was still capable of.

  ‘What I really need is a complete set of new parts,’ he said. ‘Trouble is, the guarantee’s expired.’

  She laughed. ‘I know about Algipan,’ she said, fetching the bottle. ‘My Mum was prescribed it.’

  ‘Did it work?’

  ‘Well, she’s dead now.’ Suddenly, her eyes filled with tears.

  ‘Oh, Lord.’ He fumbled in his pocket but all he brought out was a sort of compost – a sediment of disintegrated bus tickets and so on.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she sniffed. ‘Don’t know why I said that.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  She nodded. She wiped her nose, like a child, on the back of her hand, and bent her head to look at the prescriptions.

  There was silence. Something had happened. When she looked up, her face was drained.

  ‘Russell Buffery,’ she whispered.

  ‘That’s me.’ He gazed at her. ‘What’s the matter?’

  She didn’t reply. At that moment the other assistant strolled over, smiling.

  ‘Hello.’ She turned to the girl. ‘This is one of my favourite customers. Isn’t he nice? Remember Uncle Buffy, on Children’s Hour?’

  The girl stared at him. Then she slowly nodded.

  ‘Uncle Buffy and his Talking Hamster.’

  ‘Hammy,’ said the girl.

  ‘I didn’t make up the name,’ said Buffy. ‘They did.’

  The girl said: ‘I used to listen to you, with my milk. That was you?’

  Buffy nodded. ‘Both of me.’

  ‘Go on,’ said the other assistant, ‘do Hammy for her!’

  ‘Why not Buffy?’ He had always felt hurt, that Hammy used to get more fan mail than he did. He had grown to loathe his little sidekick. ‘I can do other animals, you know. Hens. Grasshoppers.’ He made a small, scraping sound with his teeth. ‘I can do a marvellous W C Fields.’

  ‘Do Hammy!’

  He sighed. Oh, well, at least he was famous for something. And it was delightful, that he had spoken to this girl when she was little, even if it had been through a radio. He raised his voice to a squeak. ‘Well bless my cotton socks! Who’s that coming through the dell? That rough little fellow with the twinkle in his eye?’

  ‘That was Voley,’ said the girl. ‘The rough little fellow with the twinkle in his eye.’

  ‘You remember?’

  She nodded. ‘The vole. He was a burglar. He stole all the squirrels’ nuts. Once I tried to open the radio, to see if you were all inside.’

  ‘Never a good idea,’ said Buffy, thinking of the knotted British Telecom wires.

  ‘You were famous,’ she said.

  ‘Except all my fans were under five.’

  ‘I used to wonder what you looked like.’ Tilting her head, she inspected him. ‘You’re not like I thought.’

  ‘Why? My ears aren’t all furry?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said, and sighed. When she looked up her eyes were glistening with tears again. Why? ‘What happened, anyway?’

  ‘The writer had a nervous breakdown. Couldn’t handle all the sex and violence in the stories. So they got rid of us and brought in –’

  ‘Timmy McTingle and his Little Red Choo-Choo Train.’

  ‘Bit Freudian, I always thought.’

  ‘I never liked him as much.’ Her face cleared; she smiled again. It was extraordinary, watching the weather-changes on her face. Suddenly the shop was flooded with sunlight. Ping. Some customers came in. Just then the music started and they all broke into song, Pennies from Heaven, the bottles dancing on their shelves, lights chasing around L’Oreal and Dispensary. The spongebags, bellows-like, grunted the rhythm; on their display cards, the golden hairclips clattered their applause.

  They did, in his middle-aged, susceptible heart. She had stepped into him, like a deer into a thicket, turning round and round until she had made herself the warmest of nests. He felt her there, lodged in him, even as she answered the phone, cupping it against her shoulder, and another customer came in and asked for something or other. It was the strangest sensation.

  He walked down the street. There was a lift in the air, a quickening of London’s pulse. Cars hooted, buses were crammed, the sodium lights flickered on, one by one, down the Edgware Road. For the first time in months he didn’t feel excluded; he felt he had rejoined the bright, sliding stream of the city. She probably thought he was a boring old fart. Maybe she was a dream. Next time she wouldn’t be there. But just now he was so utterly undone he had even forgotten to buy the Standard.

  Eight

  THINGS AREN’T AS they appear. Celeste was learning this. Take Kilburn High Road; the shops in it. You thought they were selling one thing and they turned out to be selling something totally different as well. The florist’s shop sold discount videos. The window of the post office was heaped with porcelain shepherdesses and packets of chamois leathers. She was surrounded by tricks and illusions. Some of the shops lied outright. Matthews Greengrocers was full of office equipment; a shop that said it sold office equipment was full of saris and canteens of cutlery. She walked past them on her way to work, past men holding cans of lager in front of them like votive offerings, at 8.30 in the morning! When she came home the shops had mysteriously been replaced, like stage props; windows were barred and new stalls had appeared on the pavement selling bin liners and Irish leprechauns. She couldn’t get a grip on the place. The neighbourhood seemed like a pack of cards being shuffled behind her back. Got you! it sniggered.

  She didn’t like the way men looked at her, either. In the evenings they still carried cans of lager, but they were more pressing. It didn’t do, to dawdle. She walked briskly even when she had nowhere to go. Sometimes she had to dodge into shops, the hot breath of them blowing onto her face, the can I help you’s. She felt sickly and bewildered. Even her body was something she had to re-learn. Men fixed their eyes on it but it was not quite her own, not yet. Her arms hung from her shoulders, her toenails were there, okay, but she felt she had been taken apart and reassembled. She had to check that everything was in place.

  Nesta helped her; Nesta at work. ‘It’s one thing to be pale and interesting,’ she said, ‘but honestly, Celly, you look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’ She sat her down. ‘You’ve got a bone structure to die for,’ she said. ‘Build on it.’ Nesta had worked in the shop for a year and she was familiar with all the new products. ‘I’d give my right arm for your eyes,’ she sighed. In the mid-afternoons, when the place was quiet, she held a mirror up to Celeste’s face and gave her make-up lessons. It was soothing. At work, Celeste became reacquainted with her skin and dusted powder onto it. ‘Cleanse, tone, nourish,’ chanted Nesta, like a prayer. ‘They’ll be around you like bees round a honeypot.’ Her
voice was wistful; she herself was plain and plump, though she had a devoted boyfriend who arrived each day at six o’clock prompt and loaded her onto his Honda.

  Celeste had been working in the shop for a week before Buffy came in. It had been so simple; she had walked by, seen a Salesperson Wanted sign in the window, gone in and got the job. By the second day she had felt part of the fixtures and fittings. There was a lot to learn but it was only bottles and packets and things you could grasp. She was a whizz at the till; after all, she had done the accounts at Kwik-Fit, she was over-qualified for this. She liked stocking the shelves and pricing things, pzzz, pzzz, with her pricing gun. She liked the photos of lustrous women on the display cases, their pouting beauty invited her to accompany them to a place of which she was only dimly aware. She wasn’t ready, yet. The outside world confused her but Mr Singh ran a tight ship and his shop was an oasis of perfumed confidentiality.

  Alpha Pharmacy was in a parade of shops just off the Edgware Road. Blocks of mansion flats rose up behind it; down the road stretched the creamy crescents of what she discovered was Little Venice. She could walk to work each day; it was only a mile from the chaos of Kilburn but it was like stepping into another world. She felt stabilized; a hand steadied her on the playground swing. The shops sold exactly what they said they did, and she was working in one of them. She was in a middle-class neighbourhood where people knew what they wanted. She hadn’t met Buffy yet, and she didn’t know what he wanted, but she sensed a certain thrust and confidence in the air. Things didn’t shift, and disappear overnight. The wine merchants opposite said Est. 1953 on its sign and there they were every day, the same bottles in the window. Buffy, she was to discover, bemoaned the changes in their locality but she only noticed the reassuring continuity; such is the seeking magnet of our needs. Even the drilling in the street outside didn’t impinge, not while she was punching the numbers on her bleeping till. She liked it when the shop was busy and she didn’t have time to think.

  That day. What was special about that day? A Friday, and by lunchtime the city was quickening. She had felt this each week since she had arrived. In schoolrooms, unknown children fidgeted at their desks. Out in the hinterlands, in the factories, people listened restlessly for the hooter. Down the road, still unknown to her, Buffy was sipping his late scotch in The Three Fiddlers.

  ‘Malcolm’s taking me bowling,’ said Nesta, ‘after we’ve had a snack. You ever been bowling?’

  Celeste shook her head.

  ‘Got to find you a boyfriend, preferably with wheels,’ said Nesta.

  Celeste was standing on a chair, stocking a shelf with nasal sprays. She was remembering her dream, from the night before. She had pricked her mother with a pin, hssssss . . . The body deflated into a folded packet of plastic. She mustn’t think of these things. Dreams were like those shops in Kilburn; their displays were so jumbled up it gave you a jolt, to look.

  ‘Be good, girls,’ said Mr Singh, ‘I’m popping out to the post office.’

  He left. An elderly lady called Mrs Klein came in. Celeste was becoming familiar with customers’ bodily disorders. When people passed by the window she felt intimate with their hidden organs, like a plumber looking at a bathroom he had worked on and knowing the layout of the pipes. She was getting to know the regulars. Underneath Mrs Klein’s musquash-clad exterior there lurked an irritable colon. The man in the wine merchants opposite had, beneath his polished brogues, a chronic attack of athlete’s foot. In this city full of strangers women were emerging whose contraceptive methods were to become more familiar to Celeste than to their own nearest and dearest. Already she knew that the check-out girl at Cullens was on the Pill, and that the big, disordered-looking blonde at the framer’s shop used an Ortho-Diaphragm size 75, plus jelly.

  ‘You going out tonight?’ asked Nesta.

  Celeste shook her head; she always seemed to be shaking her head. She never went out; she didn’t know anybody, she only knew what ointments they used. She wrapped Mrs Klein’s purchases, then she sank to her knees and started to refill a shelf with Clairol Hair Tones. Another customer had arrived; she was talking to Nesta about rejuvenating face packs.

  ‘My problem’s a greasy panel,’ said the woman, ‘so I need two types in combination.’

  Ping. Someone else came in.

  ‘. . . it has its own tingle scrub . . .’ Nesta was saying.

  Celeste climbed to her feet. ‘Can I help you?’

  He was a large, florid, bearded man, well muffled up in a checkered scarf. He wore a beret. The first things she noticed were his eyebrows: thick black caterpillars with a life of their own. He was accompanied by a small dog. It was flat and matted, as if it had been run over at some point in the past.

  She thought, at first, he might be an artist. Some local character, anyway. Bit of an eccentric. He had twinkly eyes and, when he spoke, a really beautiful voice – deep and resonant.

  ‘Anusol Suppositories, please.’

  For a moment she thought he was talking in some foreign language – he did look vaguely continental. Then he explained himself.

  Looking back, she tried to remember what they said. He made her laugh, she remembered that. Uncle Buffy. It was him, how incredible! The voice inside her radio, inside her head. He had told her so many stories already. The musty scent of the armchair where she had curled up, picking at the bits of skin around her fingernails . . . The faint pop-pop of the gas fire. Her hands, smudgy from school. Hammy’s squeaky falsetto, ‘’pon my soul!, as she fiddled with her plaits, pulling at the elastic bands. He was a whole company of furry creatures, her friends; squeaks and grunts from her lost past.

  Her throat closed. She felt dizzy, momentarily. But she was chatting quite normally, though there was a roaring in her ears. She wrapped up his parcels; she told him her name, Celeste. And now there was another man standing in front of her.

  ‘Got any disclosing fluid?’ he asked.

  ‘Disclosing?’

  ‘For these.’ He opened his mouth and tapped his teeth.

  Nine

  LOVE, AH LOVE. Warm sap rising through his wintry branches. What a miracle! Who would believe, at sixty-one, that such a miracle was possible? An old has-been like him, a discontinued model consigned to the scrap-heap. A man, spurned and cuckolded. A man who had seen his ex-wives, wearing their familiar clothes, in the company of unfamiliar men. He was an old pit pony, put out to grass. A noble monument, vandalized and corroded, fallen to ruin. All these, and more, if he could think of them.

  Celeste had flung open the doors to his heart, dazzling him with her sunlight. A slip of a thing in a pink nylon overall. Looking back over his life, he wondered if he had ever felt like this before and decided he hadn’t. Not like this, for love makes amnesiacs of us all. Besides, the break-ups of his marriages had spreadingly infected the past, like poisonous chemicals leaking from a shattered container, and even his early months with the various women he thought he had loved, when things should have been all right, were already tainted with something he should have recognized spelt danger ahead.

  Take Jacquetta’s moody, I’m-so-spiritual behaviour in Venice, on their honeymoon. The way she had stood for hours in front of that Titian painting, oblivious to his fidgety glances at his watch and longings for lunch. At the time he had been impressed by her rapt stillness, by the way other people washed over her but she remained, like a rock each time the waves receded. She had also looked very fetching in her velvet cape. But already there was something ostentatious in her solitude; she was making him feel lowly and coarse, preoccupied with his stomach and excluded from the higher plane inhabited only by the Venetian painters and herself. She had a knack of doing this, a knack which developed as the years passed. When she started sleeping with her shrink she actually managed to make him feel excluded from a twosome too sensitive for him, a twosome which alone breathed the rarified air of her psyche. It was Titian all over again. Worse, of course, but the same sort of thing.

  Then there was Popsi
’s behaviour in John Lewis, when they were buying curtains. Popsi, his first wife. Years and years ago, this was, back in the sixties. They were both hopelessly undomesticated but they had just moved into two rooms in Bloomsbury and were making an effort. Popsi was a cheerful, accommodating girl; she was usually cast in walk-on parts as a country wench, bursting out of her bodice. That day she had failed an audition and had sunk a few on the way to the store. First she had stilled the department with her rendering of ‘There was a young lady from Bristol.’ Then, in an abrupt mood-switch, tears streaming down her cheeks, she had told the elderly salesman about her abortion, how his cutting scissors reminded her, how she was only sixteen at the time and how it would have been a strapping boy by now. Taking her arm and steering her towards the fabric rolls, Buffy had realized that even if there wasn’t going to be trouble ahead, there was bound to be a fair amount of embarrassment.

  Celeste wasn’t like any of them. In fact, she wasn’t like any girl he had ever met. She was fresh and unused. She was like a shiny new exercise book in which he would begin writing his most entertaining thoughts in his best italics. Her youth made him feel wise and experienced, and about time too. Where women were concerned he had always been susceptible; well, foolish sometimes. But she really was enchanting, the way she gazed at him in her forthright way and asked him questions. It was the next day and he had brought in a roll of film to be developed. She really seemed pleased to see him.

  ‘What are these then?’ she asked. ‘Holiday snaps?’

  ‘Photos of the pavement.’

  ‘The pavement?’

  ‘The dug-up bits,’ he said.

  ‘Why’ve you taken photos of the pavement?’

  ‘I’m going to send them off with a letter of complaint. Nearly broke my neck again this morning.’ He handed her the film. ‘It was already in my camera. Must’ve been there for ages, God knows what else is on it.’

  ‘What do you think is?’ She looked at him, frowning.

  ‘Something embarrassing, probably. Something that’s better left there undeveloped, like a thought you don’t put into words.’