The Ex-Wives

  ‘Well they are, aren’t they? In a manner of speaking.’ She laughed. ‘Only too real, some of them.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You really want to know?’

  The girl nodded.

  Popsi looked at her. ‘How long have you got?’

  ‘I was playing Doll Tearsheet. First day of rehearsals the director, what was his name? Lovely man. He came up to me and said, Darling, this is Russ Buffery, our Hal. And there was this fellow, black polo neck, very racy in those days, very debonair, and he took my hand and kissed it. Something clicked. My knees turned to jelly. I thought: can’t wait to see you in tights! It was danger ahead, I knew that. Spontaneous combustion. Ever felt it?’

  Celeste didn’t reply. They were sitting in the little booth; smoke wreathed up from their plastic coffee cups. Popsi took out a packet of Silk Cut. The women in the stall opposite called, ‘Popsi!’

  ‘Just telling her about my first.’

  ‘That’s your fourth,’ called the woman.

  ‘Husband, I mean,’ said Popsi. She lit the cigarette, holding it in her mittened hand, and turned to Celeste. ‘Have to smoke when I talk about Buffy. I called him Buffy, there and then, and it stuck. Oh, he was charming, the rogue! We were both so young, of course, your sort of age, pet. We had our lives ahead of us, or so we thought.’ She inhaled, and blew out smoke. ‘You don’t want to hear all this.’

  ‘I do!’

  The other woman shouted across. ‘She doesn’t, lovey. She’s just being polite.’

  ‘I’m not,’ said Celeste. ‘Honestly.’

  ‘Don’t tell her the rude bits!’ called the other woman. ‘Not till I can listen! I’ve heard it all before but I still like it.’ She turned to her customer. ‘Sweet, isn’t it? Very unusual pattern.’

  ‘Well, we fell for each other,’ said Popsi. ‘We fell in love. I’ve never been happy like that before or since. We toured all over Britain, he got lovely notices, he was a lovely Prince Hal, and, oh, he made me laugh! I adored him. So did everybody – the cast, the landladies, he could wrap them round his little finger. See, like the Bard said, he was not just witty in himself, he was the cause of wit in others. Oh, we heard the chimes at midnight all right.’ She stopped for a moment, coughing her gravelly smoker’s cough. ‘Course later, when he put on weight, he could’ve played Falstaff himself. But then . . . I thought this is my man, for life . . .’

  Celeste was sitting on a camp stool. The aisles were full of people; sometimes somebody bumped against her but none of them stopped at the telephones. Over the other side of the hall somebody was playing I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas. She seemed to have heard it before; or was it just this story that seemed so familiar?

  ‘So we’re married now, two rooms in Bloomsbury, it was a palace compared to where I’d grown up. And then our little boy was born and, well, it all started going to pieces. You know what it’s like.’

  ‘No I don’t.’ She gazed at Popsi’s rouged face. As she travelled back in time she was discovering progressively older ex-wives. Popsi, however, though the oldest, was holding out gamely against the ravages of the years. She wore a thick layer of orangy make-up and her hair was dyed an interesting colour Celeste had never seen before – if forced to pin it down, she would say mulberry. Her face was still very attractive.

  ‘Maybe it wasn’t the kid,’ she said, ‘maybe it happens. You think it’s the end of the world at the time. Anyway, Buffy and me, we started making other friends.’

  ‘Hadn’t you got any already?’

  ‘I mean, special friends.’

  Celeste paused. ‘Oh.’

  ‘We did misbehave, I admit it. Lord, the boozing and the screaming matches, and one of us slamming out, and me picking him up next morning from Bow Street station, drunk and disorderly. Then one of us moving out and going to live with someone else, then coming back and having another bash. It was the sixties, see. Everything was hanging out, hanging loose, whatever, everything was up for grabs. Didn’t know what we were doing, half the time.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You wouldn’t understand, my love. You were just a twinkle in your mother’s eye.’

  The woman opposite stepped across. ‘Got any more carriers, ducky?’

  Popsi rummaged under her chair. ‘What’s your name again, pet?’

  ‘Celeste.’

  She said to the other woman: ‘Just telling Celeste about what we got up to in the Swinging Sixties.’

  ‘Don’t listen. X certificate!’ The woman clapped her hands over Celeste’s ears. Celeste wobbled, on her camp stool. When the hands were removed I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas was playing again.

  The other woman went back to her customers. Celeste looked at Popsi’s face, her rouged cheeks and bright blue eyeshadow. The whole thing felt unreal. Outside it had grown dark; in the roof, the skylights were black. The little booths, cluttered with their props, looked like stage sets. She felt she was a child watching an incomprehensible pageant of ex-wives, a costume drama in three acts. They had been paraded before her: Penny, Jacquetta, and Popsi – the Career Woman, the Neurotic, the Good-Time Girl. So quietly did she sit, an audience of one, that nobody noticed her. What were those lines from school? They strut and fret upon the stage.

  Popsi was massaging her legs. ‘It’s the circulation that goes,’ she said. ‘Still, cold hands warm heart.’ She wore a sheepskin coat and fur-lined boots; still she shivered. ‘Funny to think of it, how it just goes. Just like that. We met off and on, of course, for Quentin’s sake. No hard feelings really, there was fault on both sides, I’d be the first to admit that. But all you have left is a few memories, and the kids.’

  ‘Kids? Was there more than one?’

  ‘Nyange was born by then, by the time we split up.’

  ‘Nyange?’

  ‘Buffy’s little girl. Weird name, isn’t it? He’d had a short sojourn with somebody called Carmella. Way out of his league, I told him so at the time.’

  Celeste paused. She fiddled with the dial on a radio, turning it to and fro. Nothing happened, of course. ‘What happened to her? Nye . . .?’

  ‘Nyange. I see her sometimes. On packets of shampoo and things.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She’s a model. She was, anyway. Ever so gorgeous. But then they often are, aren’t they?’

  Behind Celeste, a man cleared his throat. ‘Those work?’ he asked, pointing to the shelves full of phones.

  ‘Of course,’ said Popsi, ‘just plug them in.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, and went away.

  Celeste asked: ‘What do you mean, they often are?’

  ‘Half-coloured people. See, they get the best of both worlds.’

  ‘Her mother was –’

  ‘Black, dear. She was a dancer, legs up to her neck. Way out of his league, like I said.’ She sighed. ‘Wonder what happened to her. She was in the chorus of Hair. What happened to them all. Mine, his, everybody’s. You can’t help wondering, can you?’

  ‘What happened to you?’

  Popsi laughed; it sounded like pebbles being shaken in a jar. ‘You got all week?’

  Celeste looked at her watch. ‘Got to get back to London, actually.’ She looked up. ‘You had any more children?’

  ‘Depends what you mean, had.’

  There was a silence. Down the aisle some thin, reedy voices were singing Good King Wenceslas. She heard the rattle of a tin.

  ‘I don’t see,’ she said, ‘I don’t understand!’

  ‘I’ve got Maxine, of course. I had her with Terry, that’s my second husband. And there’s Quentin. But my little boy.’ Quite suddenly, her eyes filled with tears. ‘My little boy, he’d be a grown man by now.’

  The tears spilled down her cheeks; they literally spilled, as if someone were tipping a cup. Behind them the voices grew louder; the tin rattled. They were singing Oh, Come all ye Faithful now. Celeste didn’t turn. For an alarming moment she thought Buffy’s two sons might be sta
nding there, dressed in black and glaring at her. All his children, rattling tins and demanding God-knows-what.

  ‘He’d be forty this year,’ said Popsi. Her mascara was sliding down her cheeks. ‘When I see a middle-aged bloke in the street, I think that could’ve been him.’

  ‘You mean you don’t know where he is?’ Celeste had to raise her voice above the noise.

  Popsi shook her head. ‘I had a you-know-what when I was sixteen.’ She rubbed her eyes; the mascara smudged. ‘He’s still there, in my heart. And all my little unborn grandchildren. Sorry, love. When I think about him I just start to blub. I remember, once, in John Lewis’s . . .’

  A tin was thrust in front of Celeste’s face. A small girl looked at her coldly. ‘It’s for battery chickens,’ she said.

  Celeste searched in her bag. Popsi seemed in a dream. She looked at the little girl. ‘Aren’t you a poppet,’ she said, vaguely.

  Celeste gave some money to the little girl, who went away. Popsi woke, and fumbled for her purse. ‘Wait!’ she called. She heaved herself to her feet and went off down the aisle, after the carol-singer. The singing grew fainter.

  Just then the phone rang. Celeste stared at the shelves of telephones. There were at least thirty of them – cream ones, black ones, the things called candlesticks, with a separate mouthpiece on a string, like the ones you saw in Westerns. The ringing continued. She stared, panic-struck. Which phone was ringing? She lifted up the nearest one – a brown thing, covered in dust – but it was dead.

  Popsi hurried back to the stall and rescued her. She grabbed a modern phone, hidden amongst the others, and spoke into the receiver.

  ‘Ah! Guten morgen or whatever.’ She blew her nose. ‘Pardon, guten tag.’ She listened. ‘London? You can’t come down here?’ She paused, thinking. Her tears had dried now, though her face was still a mess. ‘Wait. Uno momento.’ Putting her hand over the receiver, she turned to Celeste. ‘You going back to London? Can you do me a favour?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s this dealer, see, and he’s flying to Hamburg tomorrow. There’s a couple of phones for him here. Could you take them to London and he can pick them up from your place?’

  ‘But you don’t know me.’

  ‘Oh, I’m a trusting soul,’ she said. ‘Always have been. That’s the trouble really.’

  Twenty-six

  CELESTE SAT IN her room, waiting for the phone to ring. The German man, she had forgotten his name, was supposed to be phoning before ten; he was going to come round, give her a cheque and take delivery of his two Pyramid phones, one brown and one black.

  At 10.15 the phone rang. It was Buffy.

  ‘Light of my life,’ he cried, ‘my little plumcake. Oh, I’ve been missing you! Where’ve you been all day?’

  ‘Just out.’

  ‘What’s happening? What have I done wrong? Can I come and see you?’

  ‘Not really. I’m expecting a call.’

  ‘Who from?’

  ‘Just somebody. I’ll be in the shop tomorrow.’

  She put down the phone. Her hand was trembling. It was so painful, hearing his hurt voice, but she couldn’t talk to him yet. Not yet.

  Buffy put Death and the Maiden on the record player; the slow movement always made him cry. He gazed at his glass of wine. His latest method of cutting down drinking was to buy such disgusting stuff that even he couldn’t finish the bottle.

  Why was Celeste being so cold? Christmas was only ten days away and she still wouldn’t say if they were going to spend it together or not. She had nobody to go back home to; nor did he. They were both orphans in this big, blustery world. They loved each other, didn’t they? He constantly told her how much he adored her. She never actually said she loved him but she hugged him, she sat on his knee and picked little bits of fluff out of his beard; she laughed at his jokes and she showed an all-consuming interest in his previous marriages. For the time being, this was enough. That events had not yet taken a more carnal turn had something to recommend it – after all, look what had happened to Humbert Humbert. Just sitting next to her in a tea shop filled him with joy. If for once in his life he had an unconsummated love affair, surely that meant it need never end?

  December was the cruellest month, with Christmas looming. It was a month of gathering pain. Soon the day of reckoning would arrive, the day when it became all too clear that nobody else wanted him anyway. The rest of the year he could fool himself, but not on December 25th. He was an outcast, shivering in the cold whilst all over Britain loving families sat beside the fire opening presents and playfully trouncing each other at board games.

  That it had never really been quite like this, even when he had been secure in the bosom of his various families or allied arrangements, didn’t tarnish the nostalgia with which he gazed back to the past. If he were honest, he could remember the most monumental rows. They were often sparked off by something small, but then the whole day was a tinderbox, wasn’t it, ready to flare up at any minute. Only the previous Christmas, when he had actually been allowed to have his sons (and that only because Jacquetta and Leon had gone on a second honeymoon to Israel), only the previous year the meal had disintegrated when he had, whilst berating Tobias for his table manners, leaned across him to grab a roast potato. Not a venial sin, surely, but something must have been bottled up in Penny for her to yell at him about his appalling double standards, what a pathetic example he was, how belligerantly self-righteous and he could at least have used a spoon rather than his hand. This had led seamlessly into what was known as a lively discussion on his shortcomings as a parent, even his sons chiming in – which was an improvement, he supposed, on their usual mutinous silence.

  His various Christmases had come in all permutations, most of them uncomfortable and some so disastrous that he would have preferred to have spent the day in a Salvation Army hostel. At times like that, how preferable was the charity of strangers to anything muddier! In fact, looking back, the more tenuous the link the more successful the day. This was no doubt because expectations weren’t that high to begin with. After Jacquetta had left him, and he was at one of his lowest ebbs, he had actually spent a surprisingly happy Christmas with an old lesbian aunt of hers who he had always liked and who, oh, bliss, demanded nothing of him except an inexhaustible stamina for a card game called Spit.

  Then there were the various bizarre times when he had, as it were, gone back a notch, shunting excruciatingly into his former life with a slight change of cast. This happened after a few years when the wounds had healed, or were supposed to have healed, and it was considered beneficial for the children to have some seasonal get-together. On one occasion Leon had flown to America to spend Christmas with his ex-wife, shunting back a notch himself, and Buffy had returned to his old home for a parody of Christmases past – a grand-guignol occasion which had effectively squelched any future shenanigans with the girlfriend he had brought along with him, he supposed as an act of bravado. Mercifully he could remember little of the day, except his drunken ransacking of the Christmas cards on the mantlepiece to see which of their mutual friends had sent a card to Jacquetta and whether they had included Leon in their message of goodwill.

  Another occasion, almost more desolating, was long ago when Jacquetta had temporarily deserted him and he had looked up Carmella, the Caribbean dancer with whom he had had a brief affair. After all, she had borne him a daughter. Christmas with these two comely near-strangers, in a shawl-festooned room in Deptford, had been unbolstered even by alcohol for there was nothing in the place except apple juice. They were vegetarians, too, and though Carmella had cooked him a pheasant wing Nyange kept saying, ‘poor little bird, just think it could be flying around the woods’; in the end he had had to barricade his plate from her offended eyes, propping up the book Carmella had given him as a Christmas present – a volume called Women’s Woes: A Look at Gender Tyranny.

  It was better, really, if these sorts of gatherings didn’t take place on the day itself; it placed t
oo much of a strain on everybody. Such was his network of ex-families that he had sometimes eaten several dinners on the evenings leading up to Christmas – two or three of them, like dress rehearsals for a performance from which he himself would be absent. Though reasonably festive, salmon would be served as a stand-in for turkey and fruit salad as a stand-in for the Christmas pudding; there was the unmistakable sense of everybody else eating lightly in preparation for the blow-out to come, the next day or the day after that. Unopened boxes of crackers would be waiting on the sideboard, tactlessly in full view. The children’s hand-made table decorations would only partially be finished. As he opened his small – sometimes very small – gifts, he could see the larger, more lavish parcels stacked around the base of the Christmas tree, ready for the big day when he himself would be absent.

  The problem with this, of course, was that Christmas Day itself would be left gapingly vacant, though India had once come round with a doggy bag, saying she would much rather have spent it with him. Besides, there were worse things than being alone. During his marriage to Penny he had been forced to spend the day with her parents in Ascot, an experience that had made the whole trauma of his divorce worthwhile.

  Buffy lifted up the phone. It was eleven o’clock. He couldn’t ring Celeste again. She had sounded so dismissive. Who was phoning her, that she expected their call so keenly? Her new hairstyle was a worrying sign. She looked fetching, but more tousled and beddable somehow. Almost randy, in fact. She had acquired a new mannerism to go with it – she shook her head, like a dog emerging from a pond, and then ruffled up her hair with her fingers. He didn’t trust that.

  George had farted. Buffy hurried to the window and struggled with the catch. The trouble with dogs was that, unlike humans, the process was totally silent. This meant one only became aware of it gradually and by then it was almost too late to take any action. He flung the window open and gazed across the Edgware Road at the block of flats opposite. In the windows, festive lights pinpricked the darkness. Where the rooms were lit he could see the shapes of the Christmas trees themselves, placed squarely in view to make him feel unloved. What was she doing? If he knew where she lived he could jump into a taxi and accost her, flinging himself at her feet. But what happened if he looked up, and there was a man standing beside her?