The Ex-Wives

  She couldn’t ask Jacquetta questions now. She must have muttered something about it getting cold because the paints were being packed away and now Celeste was hurrying up the spiral staircase, clatter clatter, into the kitchen. She stood beside the Aga. How could she find out what she needed to know when at any moment Leon might come upstairs? He didn’t know she had seen anything, of course, but she did and that was bad enough.

  She was standing there when the front door banged and Bruno, the other son, came in. He was dragging a large, battered metal sign. It said BUSES ON DIVERSION.

  ‘Yo,’ he said. ‘Want to help me get this up to my room? It’s for my collection.’

  She lifted up the back end of the sign – it was surprisingly heavy – and they started upstairs.

  ‘What’re you going to do with it?’ she asked breathlessly.

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘What’s going to happen to the buses? Won’t they go off in the wrong direction?’

  They stood on the landing, panting. All over the city wolves howled, rabbits juddered and buses careered into blind alleys. How did anyone cope? Quite apart from the other, much more embarrassing thing. She should have been warned when India told her about the condoms.

  They had reached Bruno’s bedroom. He pushed open the door – he had to push hard, there was so much stuff crammed against it – and switched on the light.

  For a moment she thought the place had been ransacked. Clothes and lager cans were strewn ankle-deep all over the floor. Half-open drawers spilled more clothes. Have I got children? I must have left them somewhere, look in the chest of drawers. She stumbled over an empty vodka bottle and knocked into a traffic cone. Though basically a rubbish dump, the traffic signs gave it the air of a London Transport depot. There was a curious smell hanging in the air, too – a smell like burnt dung.

  ‘Gosh,’ she said. She thought: Buffy used to tiptoe into this room and kiss this boy goodnight. What earthquakes had happened since then! ‘What a horrible mess!’

  ‘Good, isn’t it. Once I was asleep here for two days. There, under that stuff on the duvet. They couldn’t find me. They ended up calling the police.’

  In Melton Mowbray teenagers weren’t like this. They didn’t have his matted hairstyle and stupefied look. And, she was sure, his disgusting living quarters. The more money people had, it seemed, the more untidy they became. Back home people complained about their teenagers, of course, because they got on their mountain bikes and did wheelies around the phone kiosks. But overnight they turned into sober young wage-earners in Tesco’s overalls. They had to.

  ‘It’s almost as good as my Dad’s place,’ he said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘You should see it.’

  ‘Should I?’

  He smiled affectionately. ‘He’s hopeless, the old fuck-face.’

  ‘You shouldn’t talk about him like that.’ She dumped the sign on the bed. ‘Haven’t you any respect?’

  ‘With my parents?’

  Just then there was the clump of boots on the stairs and the other one came in. Tobias.

  ‘Hi,’ he said. Then he sniffed and turned to his brother. ‘What’ve you been smoking? Where did you get it?’

  ‘Mum. I scored her some and she gave me a bit. My tithe.’ He turned to Celeste and added, kindly: ‘I know about tithes because we’ve been doing the Middle Ages.’

  What was he talking about – his mum giving him cigarettes? Celeste gazed at the walls. They were black. Skulls and posters of leather-clad women hung there, along with signs saying ALTERNATIVE ROUTE and POLICE NOTICE:ACCIDENT. She felt weak, but there was nowhere to sit down. Her life was sinking into chaos, signs sending her off in all directions, the wrong directions, one-way streets and cul-de-sacs, rabbits eating her belongings and people’s husbands getting up to you-know-what in basement rooms. Her feelings about Buffy were getting more confused every minute.

  Who could she talk to now? His boys, maybe. She had a feeling they were more intelligent than they pretended. But not here. Besides, they had put on some deafening music and her head was throbbing.

  There was only one person left, only one hope. She shouted at them: ‘Where’s India?’

  Tobias laughed his corncrake laugh. ‘Go to Pakistan and on a bit.’

  ‘What?’

  He turned down the noise. ‘Just kidding. Sorry. She’s out.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘At work.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  Celeste, emerging from Leicester Square tube station, was assaulted by drunken yodelling and the smell of hot-dogs. A spotty youth was playing a saxophone. She walked briskly past him. Buffy had once said: ‘Why does one only stop and listen to buskers when one’s on holiday?’ She stepped over a prone body; she hurried, bent double, past a Japanese man who was aiming with a video camera. By now she was learning the Londoner’s duck and scurry, the swerves to avoid a drunk, the little skip over a puddle of sick. Only three weeks ago she had wandered dazed around Soho, flinching at the noise and smells. Only three weeks; how she had hardened up since then!

  It was a big cinema, not one of the cupboards Buffy had complained about. She had meant to ask the manager if she could speak to India but Citizen Kane was showing, and Buffy had told her it was really good, so she simply bought a ticket and went in.

  The ads were playing – a blue-jeaned rump was swaying on the screen, accompanied by loud music. Celeste paused in the dark. Somebody took her ticket; it wasn’t India. But in the darkness other torches were weaving and dipping, up and down the auditorium. Which one belonged to her?

  Celeste was shown to a seat. Once her eyes had grown accustomed to the dark she saw that the cinema was only half full. The curiously meaty smell of popcorn was in the air. Up on the screen the film began; an iron gate, turrets against rushing black and white clouds. One or two people were still arriving; in the aisles the torches still swivelled, shining on an empty seat here, an empty seat there. They flashed like fireflies. Soon they would be gone; the usherettes would disappear to wherever usherettes went. Where did they go? They just melted away.

  She had never thought about this. She had never thought about so many things. Up on the screen a voice spoke boomingly. The audience breathed; they sighed, en masse, like a great dark sponge, settling down. They had ceased to function; the actors lit their faces, dancing across their irises. Celeste didn’t really watch the film. For the first time she wondered what it must be like to be an actor. She hadn’t really thought about this before. This was what Buffy did. He put on fancy dress and became somebody different. He escaped into it, leaving his various families in the dark, fumbling around while he entertained everybody else.

  This wasn’t fair. The seat next to her was empty. If only Buffy were here, he would explain. He would sit there, his bear-hand on her knee; he would feed her pieces of Bourneville chocolate. He would lead her into the story, into an adventure. Perhaps he would protest that he wasn’t escaping; that he was returning people to themselves. He was filling their heads with reflections of themselves, he was filling them with answers. If not answers, then dreams. Who knows? He wasn’t here.

  India was, somewhere. Celeste couldn’t concentrate on the film; she got up and went to look for her. There was nobody in the lobby except a bored-looking man selling hamburgers. He lounged beside the bubbling tank of orange juice. She went up the wide, carpeted stairs to the upper floor.

  India was standing in the doorway marked Circle. Celeste could recognize her from the back, even in her maroon uniform. She was watching the film. Celeste tapped her on the shoulder.

  India turned. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘What’re you doing here?’

  Celeste shrugged. ‘I heard it was good.’

  ‘I’ve seen it about a zillion times. My stepdad – Buffy – ex-stepdad – he used to take me to the pictures all the time. Specially the old ones. He knew the names of the actors; he used to whisper to me and everyone told us to shut up.’ She tensed. ‘Watch this
bit.’

  Celeste watched for a moment. India took her arm and led her to a seat. They sat down. There was nobody else up here, in the circle. India glanced around and took out a pack of cigarettes. ‘Hope Mr Nathan doesn’t see us. He’s tried to sack me twice.’ She lit a cigarette and sat back. She pointed to the screen, whispering: ‘People don’t really get old like that. Poor old Orson Welles had no idea what was in store. Bunged on a few wrinkles and whitened his hair.’ She exhaled smoke. ‘Little did he know that he was going to blow up like a balloon and his career crumble into pieces.’

  Down below, actors bloomed on the screen. They lit India’s face and her wreathing cigarette smoke. Celeste asked: ‘So you came to these films with your step-dad?’

  India nodded. ‘It was our secret skive. L’Atalante, Les Enfants de Paradis, the only French I learnt was through subtitles.’

  ‘When did he meet your mum?’

  India grinned. ‘At a health farm. Mum was meditating in the garden, and he was creeping out to go to the pub. He was trying to squeeze under some barbed wire but his trousers got caught. She had to rescue him.’

  ‘No, I mean how long ago?’

  India put her feet up on the seat in front. ‘She was married to my real Dad then. To Alan.’

  ‘What about Buffy? Was he married?’

  ‘Oh, Buffy’s always married.’

  ‘Is he?’

  ‘He’s such a romantic. Rather sweet really.’ She inhaled deeply. She didn’t seem to think it odd, Celeste questioning her like this. Maybe she was full of drugs and everything seemed natural. ‘He was married to Popsi.’

  ‘Popsi?’

  ‘Popsi Concorde. Daft name, isn’t it? Mum thought so, but I suppose she would.’ She stopped, and gazed at the screen. Orson Welles was smashing up bedroom furniture. ‘She was obsessed with her for a bit. As much as Mum can be obsessed with anybody except herself. Retrospective jealousy, I suppose. She kept on going on about how vulgar and brassy she was.’ She blew out a plume of smoke. ‘All I knew was Mum kept taking me to this pub.’

  ‘What pub?’

  ‘The pub Popsi worked at. She’d moved in there with her new boyfriend or husband or whatever.’ The voice of Orson Welles boomed like Buffy’s, boomed echoing from the past. It caressed the audience. India tapped the ash off her cigarette and turned to Celeste. ‘Why’re you so interested?’

  ‘I just am. My life’s so boring.’

  ‘Don’t you want to watch the film?’

  ‘This story’s much better,’ whispered Celeste. ‘Go on.’

  ‘We’d take the tube to Sloane Square. Gosh, I haven’t thought about it for years. I was just little. Dunno why they let me in but Popsi was the easygoing type. It was called The Old Brown Mare, I remember the sign. I liked horses.’

  They watched the film for a while. At least, Celeste pretended to watch it. Afterwards she couldn’t remember a thing that had happened in it. She only remembered India sitting beside her, with the torch lying in her lap and the bluish light from the screen playing over her face. ‘What was she like, Popsi?’

  ‘Peroxide blonde, Barbara Windsor type. Buffy said she was the sort of woman who always had one too many buttons undone. I remember seeing her reflection in all the little mirrors around the bar. Mum would just sit there, watching her. She probably didn’t even know who Mum was. I ate lots of crisps.’ She laughed. ‘The funny thing was, mum doesn’t even drink. She never goes to pubs. Not usually. But jealousy makes people do peculiar things, I suppose. They get unhinged.’

  Celeste hadn’t noticed that the film had finished. There was a stirring, downstairs. Just then a man appeared, in a dinner jacket. He seemed to be shouting something at India.

  When Celeste turned round, India had gone. Just a gauzy layer of smoke remained, hanging in the air. And then the lights came up.

  Twenty-one

  MILES PUSHED THE trolley down the aisle. Muzak burbled, to sooth his troubled soul. Every now and then he consulted Brenda’s list. Snicker Bars. Fiesta Kitchen Towels. Vosene Silk Hair Conditioner. Diet Tizer. He was never in the right aisle, but then her list wasn’t in any sort of order. He kept retracing his steps and bumping into people coming the other way. Mostly women; it was the middle of the afternoon.

  He was in a huge Tesco’s just outside Chippenham. They were building a whopping Sainsbury’s further up the road, too, in the middle of a field. They all had belfries and gables and clock towers; they were big brick leeches sucking the town dry. He’d said to Brenda: ‘Just think. In hundreds of years archaeologists will say – what was that great religious revival? All those huge, huge churches. Vast car parks! We must have got it wrong, that it was a Godless age.’ But Brenda hadn’t listened, she had spotted a ladder in her tights.

  Tesco Malted Wheats. He flung the packet into the trolley. Neither he nor Brenda ate Malted Wheats but that wasn’t the point. He felt exhausted; his legs ached like a housewife’s.

  He made his way to the tinned fish. This was the big one, the one she had gone on about. Trouble was, they were clean out of pilchards. The word must have got around.

  He loaded the groceries into his car and drove to Gateway’s, the other side of Swindon. He searched along the maze of aisles. Pilchards. He almost whooped. He cradled the tin in his hand. To Brenda, this wasn’t a can of Abbey Vale Pilchards in Tomato Sauce. It was a British Airways Round-the-World Trip of a Lifetime for Two, with £100,000 thrown in.

  He must have spent hours shopping, driving along ring roads from one supermarket to the next. By the time he got home it was dark and Brenda was back from work. From the sound of it, she had her friend Gail with her. He heard their voices in the lounge.

  ‘So we’re sitting in the cinema,’ said Gail, ‘and he started sort of sliding his hand up my skirt. Just a bit at a time. He thought I wasn’t noticing.’

  ‘Was that your pleated skirt from Marks and Spencers?’ asked Brenda.

  He dumped the shopping on the kitchen floor. Brenda was beside him in a flash.

  ‘Did you get the pilchards?’ she asked breathlessly. He nodded. ‘And the other things?’ She kissed him on the cheek. As she did so he noticed that the sink was full of water. Bottles lay submerged in it, to soak off their labels.

  She carried the tin of pilchards, like a trophy, into the lounge. Gail’s voice rose. They started giggling.

  He stood there in silence. In the water the labels uncurled; some of them had already risen to the surface. The plastic bags sighed as they settled themselves around his feet. More and more strongly, nowadays, he felt as if he had wandered into the wrong house. These little starter homes all looked the same, it was an understandable mistake. He had actually done it once; he had sauntered, whistling, into the house next door and surprised the Widdicombes eating a fondue. He could just walk into another front door and begin all over again.

  Did other men feel like this? He hadn’t been a husband for long, only two years. He should have got used to it by now, but in fact the opposite seemed to be happening. Maybe it was the inside-out nature of their lives, Brenda working and him not. That was the most reasonable explanation. But he had started to feel this some time before he had been made redundant.

  He started to put stuff away in the larder. On the shelves sat rows and rows of tins, stripped of their labels. They glowed, dully. Large ones, smaller ones, flattish ones. Choosing something to eat made him and Brenda seem like a blind couple; there was a dotty sense of adventure to it. You opened a tin and what would it be? Sponge pudding? Butter beans? There were ten cans of Bachelor Mushy Peas amongst that lot which nobody was ever going to eat. Brenda had only bought them for their labels – ten, so she could send off a multiple entry.

  The whole house was silting up with things they were never going to eat, or condition their hair with, or squirt the furniture with. By now the larder was so packed he could hardly close the door. It made him feel breathless and congested, as if he had indigestion. Her craze for competitions was getting out
of hand; it was an addiction, really. She quite cheerfully admitted that. And how could he have the heart to stop her?

  She had such a boring job. Eight hours a day she sat at a console, tubes plugged into her ears as if she were in intensive care, staring at a screen that gave her a headache. How could he cut off her escape routes? All her friends at work were compers. During their lunch hour they scratched away at their scratch-pads of magic numbers. They washed butter wrappers. They collected bottle-tops as proof of purchase and squashed them under their chair-legs to make them flat enough to send off. They dreamed of cars and dishwashers and holidays for two in Bali; they dreamed of trips to the stars. They dreamed of the Long White Envelope sliding through their letterbox; they spoke of this in hushed and reverent initials – the LWE.

  In the evenings they sat in each others’ lounges and made up slogans. Hovis and Half-Fat Anchor taste so good together because . . . BP Lubricants are the sportsman’s choice because . . . It Asda be Asda because . . . If they were in his house he could hear the sudden bursts of laughter, the excited voices as one of them was suddenly possessed with what they called Winspiration. Before he met Brenda he had presumed that slogan-writing was a solitary activity, like masturbation, but she and her girlfriends did it together, a chaste orgy of voices chiming with insincere tributes to the goods they never used. . . . because their porkers are corkers . . . because it keeps your food eatable at a price that’s unbeatable . . . They were experts. They knew the combinations of flattery and humour that would win; they sneered at the tired old clichés like Experts perfect them and connoisseurs select them. One had to admire them for it. He did, actually. They won a lot. Only last September one of them, Phyllis, had calculated how many packets of Opal Fruits were piled up inside a Ford Escort GTi; she had won the car and all the sweets and had her photo in the local paper.

  Oh, yes, they won. Brenda, in particular. That was the trouble. She was always hauling him off to presentations in hotels hundreds of miles away in the north of England, Stockport, places like that, where toupéed TV personalities whose programmes he had never seen put their arms around Brenda and called her my love. Then there were all the deliveries. Last week he had had the fright of his life when he had answered the doorbell to a man in green overalls who said: ‘Hi there, I’ve come from Mars.’