The Ex-Wives

  Beside the doorbell was a note. Waxie, I’m at Lynns. Who was Waxie? She didn’t know any of the people in the flats yet, they were just thumps and muffled music. Opposite was a building with barred windows called Reliance House. It always looked closed, but today some men were going in and out, unloading cardboard boxes. What was everyone up to? The key to it all had been taken away from her. One letter, in a biscuit tin, had done it.

  Celeste went upstairs and unloaded her shopping. Her skull ached; her insides felt heated and swollen. But it wasn’t the beginnings of flu. It was anger.

  Seven

  ‘MADAM, I WOULD like a shampoo and set!’

  ‘Hang on.’ Archie fiddled with the volume controls. ‘Okay. Once more, from the top. A bit louder.’

  ‘Madam,’ boomed Buffy, ‘I would like a shampoo and set!’

  Archie rewound the tape – tesdnaoopmahsaekildluowi, gabble gabble – listened and nodded. ‘Carry on.’

  ‘Fill her up please, top grade,’ said Buffy, into the mike. ‘Show me to a table where I can see the pianist’s hands.’

  ‘A bit more feeling on the hands,’ said Archie.

  ‘What is this, the blooming Old Vic?’

  It was suffocating in the little booth. The air was thick with smoke from Archie’s cheroot, and the walls were scribbled with multi-lingual graffiti, probably of an obscene or homesick nature.

  ‘This wine is corked!’ said Buffy. ‘Take it back to the cellar!’

  The St Reginald College of English was situated above a massage parlour in Balham. Archie ran it, together with a couple of seedy ex-teachers who looked as if they had been sacked for paedophilia. The embossed crest above the door fooled nobody except foreigners; Archie had copied it from a jar of marmalade. Reginald was the name of his uncle.

  ‘I am a stranger to this town. Please direct me to your nearest building society!’

  The tape they were recording was compiled for East Europeans, newly-liberated fodder for Archie’s language school. He called them ‘the Great Stonewashed’ after he had seen newsreels of them clambering over the Berlin Wall – clambering not to freedom but to enrolment at his establishment. These tapes were a bona fide money-spinner, that was what he thought – think of the market openings! – and were peppered with queries about mortgage rates and venture capitalism.

  ‘May I make a down-payment on this appliance?’ asked Buffy, choking in the smoke. ‘For God’s sake, Archie, put that thing out!’ He squinted at his sheet of paper and leant towards the mike. ‘Does this cellphone come with a written guarantee?’

  Why am I here? he wondered. To what depths have I sunk? I, who like Tiresias, have seen it all. What am I doing, stuck in a suffocating booth in Balham, teaching a lot of Lithuanians how to order shares in British Telecom? The chair was hard; his backside ached. No wonder his haemorrhoids were playing up again.

  ‘Madam, kindly sell me a suppository!’

  ‘What?’ Archie squinted at him through the smoke.

  He was doing it for the money, of course. The fee was really quite decent. Archie must be making a bomb from this place, in addition to – as he felicitously put it – dipping his wick into some fairly acceptable Commie crumpet. Ex-Commie crumpet.

  But then Archie had always been a bit of a spiv. They had met during National Service when they had both been stationed in an arctic base camp near Kettering. Even then Archie had been involved in some complex manoeuvres involving petrol and bulk-order baked beans; no fool, he had been in cahoots with Warrant Officer Pickering, a key figure at the time and the springboard to a lifetime’s racketeering. Bored and freezing, Buffy had loathed the entire two years and spent his time being as inconspicuous as possible, listening to Fats Waller records on his bunk and creeping out at night to meet girls from the local chicken-gutting factory. Despite his public school education he had failed to rise above the rank of sergeant, a tribute to the good sense of those in charge. Whilst he languished, Archie thrived and left the Army a fully-fledged entrepreneur. First it was reconditioned fridges, then snooker halls and the leisure industry. ‘I got into gravel pits,’ he said. ‘The genesis of the theme park should, by rights, be credited to yours truly.’ Buffy hadn’t seen him for decades; they had happened to bump into each other recently in the Charing Cross Road, where Buffy had been browsing in a second-hand bookshop – another sure sign of his excess leisure, like knowing the names of all the waitresses at his local patisserie.

  ‘It’s a wrap!’ said Archie in an irritating American accent. He disconnected the mike and they went into a small, leprous office. On the wall hung a framed certificate, testifying to Archie’s qualifications as a senior EFL instructor. The Tippex beneath the name Archibald Bingham was clearly visible. Archie scratched his balls, coughed, and unlocked a drawer. From it he produced a wad of soiled banknotes and counted them out, one by one.

  ‘Know how to say You’re a horny tomato in Japanese?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ said Buffy. He took the notes. ‘Shouldn’t there be another ten?’

  ‘My mistake, squire.’ Archie reopened the drawer and passed it over.

  It was lunchtime. Now he had no wife to go home to, Buffy had an impulse to ask Archie – even Archie – out for a drink. He felt this about the most unlikely people. But Archie shook his head and squirted some breath freshener into his mouth.

  ‘Got a date with a promising little Czech.’ He grinned. ‘Play my cards right and it’ll soon be Czechmate.’

  A wave of desolation swept over Buffy. Not that he was excluded from this twosome, but that he was desperate enough to have issued such an invitation to Archie in the first place. He had noticed this before, with a sinking sense of recognition. Once divorced, your standards plummetted. You rang up acquaintances you hadn’t seen for years; you endured whole evenings in Dollis Hill with your accountant and his wife, drinking microscopic scotches and watching videos of their Kenyan safari. You sat in a pub for hours while some near-stranger told you about all the amazing things you could do with computer graphics. It was like suddenly having no money and going back to eating tinned macaroni. Anything to delay the return to that darkened flat.

  He took the bus home. In the seat behind him an inebriated Irishman sang ‘Loveboat, loveboat’ all the way to Victoria, until the word lost all meaning – if, that is, it had any in the first place. Buffy didn’t have the energy to shut him up. Was this all there was? Was this all he could expect, now? He thought of Prospero. His maturity fitted him for this role, he had grown into it – the noble forehead, the experience. My God, the experience. Why, now he had arrived at this bus-stop in life’s journey, did nobody recognize it? Surely his past should lend him gravitas, but nowadays it was all producers half his age, drinking mineral water and getting phone-calls from their children.

  All his old mates, the real characters, had gone; they had died from cirrhosis of the liver or retired to cottages in France. This young lot was sort of odourless, no patina to them. Even in its heyday the BBC didn’t lend itself to dissipation but there was a certain style to things then, a Fitzrovian camaraderie, men with no discernible home life, women producers called Muriel, gruff and reckless, who were built like shire-horses and who could drink you under the table, and who knew who you might discover the next morning, snoring peacefully on your floor while the gas fire still blazed?

  Buffy got off the bus at Maida Vale. The wind whipped his face; it was November and already freezing – why did November always seem colder than any other month? An illegally-parked car was being towed away; weeee-weeee wailed its alarm. How helpless it looked. He felt just like that himself. What a humiliating morning!

  He tried to cheer himself up. At least there was no Penny waiting, with her hoots of mirth. Honestly, Buffy, how could you? It was undeniably lonely, that she wasn’t there to listen to his exploits at the language school, which by now he would have worked up into one of his anecdotes. On the other hand it was a relief, that she wasn’t there to be all superior about it. H
e must remember that. She had been insufferably superior. Her greatest feat, her most awesomely mind-boggling one, was that she managed to be superior even when it was revealed she had been double-crossing him. For months. He, Russell Buffery, had been the totally innocent party. She had been lying and cheating, packing and unpacking, and all the time shagging herself senseless with some under-aged photographer in Soho. And yet she had managed to still be hoity-toity about it. The whole thing was breathtaking.

  Looking back over those final explosive weeks, he couldn’t remember how she did it, probably some sort of conjuring trick. But she had managed, in some appallingly female way, to make him feel to blame. It was all, obviously, his fault . . .’ Your infantile egocentricity . . . your drinking . . . your hypochondria . . . And another thing . . .’ All his ex-wives said that, and another thing. You never helped with the children, you never helped with the washing-up . . . you were never supportive with my career . . . and another thing . . . you dropped ash on the duvet . . . you laughed at your own jokes . . . at that dinner party at the Robinsons’, remember, you fell asleep in the soup, the soup, remember, we hadn’t even started the main course, I could’ve died . . . a blizzard of another things, a smokescreen of them . . .

  He remembered that mockingly sunny day, three months earlier. How he had unzipped her suitcase with feverish hands.

  ‘I told you, I changed taxis!’ she had cried. ‘The cabbie from the airport, he was going on about darkies and what’s the country coming to and I simply couldn’t stand it. Racism is so repellent, especially when one’s paying for it. So I got into another one!’

  The self-righteousness of her voice, barely faltering even when she saw him taking out the bottle of Sudden Tan!

  ‘That’s for my legs. They always take the longest to get brown, not that you’d notice.’

  See! She had managed to put him in the wrong, even then.

  ‘Where’s your plane ticket?’ he had demanded. ‘Where’s your lira?’

  ‘Don’t be so paranoid, darling. It’s bad for your blood pressure.’

  Just then she stopped. He had pulled out a newspaper – La Stampa. It still had its sticker on: Pat’s News and Smokes, Wardour St. W.1.

  ‘Oh shit’ she said.

  Buffy paused outside Blomfield Mansions and looked up at the porch. Two cupids, carved in stone, were entwined above the doorway. They were portly and sooty; the private parts of one of them had chipped off. He knew how they felt. With what hopes, years before, had he once carried Penny across the threshold – well, not carried, because of his bad back, but he had lifted her, with a little hop, over the rubber doormat. How those cupids mocked him now! My God he was feeling maudlin, and he hadn’t even had a drink.

  He let himself into the flat, stumbling first over the dog and then over a plastic bag of empties. There was a funny smell coming from somewhere. Once he had been in the place for a bit he got used to it, but it always hit him on entering. The answerphone showed ‘1’. Briefly, but unconvincingly, he had an image of Penny, sobbing on the other end of the line and begging to come home. Asking him to forgive her. Grovellingly telling him that for once it was her mistake and she would always love him.

  He replayed the message.

  ‘Granada TV here, could you call back as soon as possible and ask for Gwenda.’

  Granada TV! His spirits rose. He dialled the number. Maybe it was a cameo role – a fatherly family doctor, say, or a charismatic local MP. About time he was on the TV again. Maybe it was a major costume drama set in the Caribbean! They wanted him to play a plantation owner with a doting young native mistress.

  By the time Gwenda’s voice answered he was already making his acceptance speech at the BAFTA awards. ‘Mr Buffery?’ she said. ‘Just to remind you, we don’t seem to have received last month’s rental on your video recorder. Would you like to pop in, or pop a cheque in the post?’

  It was that sort of day. Well, year. Gloomily, he put George on his lead and left the flat. He stopped at The Three Fiddlers for a pint. His piles were so painful that he didn’t sit down; he stood at the bar. In this position the weight on his feet made his corns throb but this was marginally preferable to the other thing. He had wedged cotton wool as well as corn plasters against his toes but they still pressed against the sides of his espadrilles, the thinking man’s bedroom slippers.

  None of his ex-wives had understood a simple fact: he didn’t want to be a hypochondriac – nobody did – he just happened to have a lot of things wrong with him, mostly of a vaguely undignified but not life-threatening nature. He didn’t seek the bloody things out. He didn’t want them. Bitterly, he remembered Penny’s shrill giggle when she first opened his bathroom cabinet. ‘What’re they all for? No, don’t tell me!’ Strong and vigorous, she had no patience with any sort of infirmity, and less so as their marriage progressed. Erotic back-rubs became brisk ones; brisk ones became progressively brusquer until they ceased altogether. ‘Well they don’t do much good, darling, do they? Why don’t you go to your funny little osteopath?’ When he was bedridden, the approaching rattle of the supper-tray took on an accusatory clatter, a still-in-bed? clatter, and she started forgetting the pepper mill.

  It was a shame she wasn’t ill herself more often because he was wonderful with ill women. Like many so-called hypochondriacs he was as interested in other people’s symptoms as his own. In fact some of the most tender moments of his previous marriage to Jacquetta had come each month when she suffered her crippling period pains. She had had migraines too, an affliction Penny had airily dismissed as neurotic. ‘Christ,’ she’d said, ‘you must’ve been a right couple of crocks.’ That was long ago, when she was still interested enough in his past to be jealous.

  It was late. The pub was empty except for Buffy, the bitter aftertaste of his various marriages and a couple of old girls called Una and Kitty, who always bagged the seats near the fire. They had men’s voices and the compacted, pressed-meat complexions of serious boozers. Buffy was fond of them, but their wrecked faces always made him uneasy – did he look like that, or would he soon? Besides, he didn’t feel like any sort of conversation today, even the amiable but minimal kind he would have with them.

  He walked up the street, pausing briefly to enter the smokey inferno of Ladbrokes to see if his horse, Genie Boy, had won. It hadn’t.

  In the months to come he tried to recollect his state of mind that Friday afternoon. Bitter and gloomy, oh, yes. Vaguely cosmic too. His company had been spurned by Archie Bingham, and you couldn’t get lower than that. His exes were living with other men, more harmoniously than they had ever lived with him, they made that perfectly plain, and his children were growing up without the benefits of his jovial good nature and panoramic breadth of experience. Did none of them realize what they were missing? He nearly tripped; the blithering pavement had been dug up, yet again. This time it was something to do with British Telecom. A pit was revealed; within it hung a knotted tangle of wires. You opened up somebody, and look at the mess inside! Divorce did that; surely it was a better idea to keep the lid on? Women were always prodding around inside him, tut-tutting like workmen, shaking their heads sorrowfully, sucking through their teeth and occasionally bursting into hysterical giggles. What was so bloody funny?

  That was how he was feeling towards women in general, towards life itself, when he stopped outside the chemist’s. He was, of course, a regular and valued customer at this shop. The same with Victoria Wine, opposite. He sometimes wondered what might happen if he ever moved away; how either establishment could possibly carry on.

  He went in; ping. A blast of warm air caressed his face; perfume filled his nostrils. He paused on the threshold. A mysterious sense of well-being flooded through him.

  Did it? Did it already? Even before he saw her? Yes!

  Or was he just a corny old romantic, a silly old fool?

  He felt it – warmth, happiness. He crossed the shop, past the racks of flowery spongebags and the cards of sparkling hairclips. Mr
Singh, the pharmacist, didn’t seem to be around, and the usual assistant was busy with a customer.

  ‘It has its own tingle scrub,’ she was saying, ‘to tighten the pores.’

  Then he heard a voice. ‘Can I help you?’

  He turned. A young woman got to her feet. She had been kneeling on the floor, stocking some shelves, that was why he hadn’t seen her.

  ‘Hello!’ His voice sounded ridiculously hearty. He felt himself blushing. At his age! ‘You’re new,’ he said stupidly, just for something to say.

  She nodded. She was enchanting. Utterly, entirely enchanting. Slender, shy, beautiful; halo’ed, somehow, in innocence. She wore the usual pink overalls; above it her face was delicate and translucent. Limpid brown eyes, pointed chin, achingly stem-like neck. My God! She was like a sapling, a silver birch. She was like a single daffodil, surrounded by coarse plastic blooms. How on earth was he going to ask her for a packet of suppositories?

  ‘Er, is Mr Singh around?’

  She shook her head. ‘He’s just popped out to the post office.’

  How could he discuss his piles with this radiant creature? If only it were the other assistant, the big motherly one, but she was still busy. It was the old French letters syndrome: why, when one wanted to buy something embarrassing, was one faced with the prettiest salesgirl? If only he could ask for something impressive – special pills, say, to curb his incredibly powerful sexual drive.

  ‘Anusol Suppositories, please,’ he said. ‘Oh, what a bag of infirmities is man!’

  ‘Anusol? What’s it for?’

  ‘Haemorrhoids. Humiliating, I know.’

  ‘It’s all right, I won’t tell anybody.’ She smiled at him. ‘Where are they?’

  He paused. ‘Er. The usual place.’

  ‘No – I mean do you know where they’re kept? The suppositories?’

  ‘Ah. Up there.’ He pointed to the cabinet behind her. She reached up. Her sleeve fell back, exposing a slim bare arm and a shadowy armpit.