The Ex-Wives

  She crossed the next field and climbed over the gate – she preferred climbing gates to opening them. A container lorry thundered past. She had emerged onto the A2 dual carriageway. Each morning she felt shy, suddenly coming into the public like this. She smoothed down her coat, and walked along the verge.

  The Happy Eater stood a hundred yards up the road: a brightly-lit cube against the brightening sky. It stood alone on the windy ridge – it, and its large plastic elephant slide. The sun shone on the dome of the elephant’s head. A few cars were already parked outside. She made her way round them, and pushed open the Staff Only door. Inside, dazzling strip light; the Forest Pine fragrance of the rest rooms. She unwound her scarf and pulled off her gumboots.

  Sixty miles away, in London, Celeste was nibbling a croissant. She was sitting in Maison Bertaux. Penny has breakfast there each morning. Each time the door opened, with a rush of cold air, Celeste’s heart thumped. She looked up – not at the door but at the mirrored wall that reflected it. Each time she saw a mirrored stranger. Nobody she recognized, anyway, from the photo. She saw her own face – blank, peaky, glistening with sweat.

  She fingered the chain around her neck. She had removed the crucifix, now; in its place she had threaded the tiny, gold fish. The fish she had found in the envelope.

  ‘Two portions of toast, one Farmhouse Breakfast, one Yankie Do . . .’

  Lorna carried the plates through the steamy kitchen. She spoke to Klaus, his face glistening under his paper cap. She worked automatically; her hands had a life of their own. She could do this in her sleep.

  ‘One sausage and french fries, one hash browns . . .’

  She was a dreamer; she dreamed up stories about people. They were like the birds in her veranda, flying in, swinging on the string as they pecked at the bacon rind, flying off. Each day it awed her, that there were so many unknown people in the world. For half an hour they warmed their plastic seat and then they were off again. Fuelled by a fry-up they disappeared from her life for ever, on their way to London one direction or Dover the other, to points beyond, to points anywhere, leaving a scraping of ketchup and a scrumpled paper napkin. Some of them were foreigners. She had to explain the menu to them; they counted out the strange coins, laboriously, for her tip. There were men in business suits who wolfed down the sort of breakfasts nobody’s wives made anymore. Where were they driving, in their company cars? They left behind book matches from the Orion Hotel, Bridlington, and copies of the Daily Express with pencilled sums in the margin. They called her ‘love’ but this time tomorrow they’d be in Humberside. How many times, between then and now, would she have wiped this table clean? Even the waitresses came and went, girls called Peg and Gwen; they drifted through, their faces vague above their black bow ties. She was forever getting new name badges printed.

  Meanwhile the rising sun was warming her garden; the mist was dispersing in the frogspawn meadow. She had worked here for two years but it never failed to surprise her, that she could step out of the countryside into this seasonless box whose Muzak played the same tunes all the year round, tunes she almost recognized but never quite.

  She squirted a table and wiped it down; she laid out the cutlery. It was half past eleven but breakfast and lunch were all the same here. Customers ate the Traditional English Breakfast at two in the afternoon and the Gammon Steak at teatime. When people stepped in here time was suspended, as if they were in a plane. In fact a burly businessman was sitting down right now and ordering Scampi Tails. He had a sheaf of papers with him. Outside, his Ford Granada was spattered with mud, though she couldn’t see that. He was muttering into a portable phone but she didn’t catch the words. In fact she didn’t notice because she was ringing up the till and it was Audrey who was serving him.

  Besides, she was day-dreaming. As she re-stocked the lollipop jar she was thinking it’s only a matter of time. As she tidied the courtesy newspapers she was thinking someone I recognize, they’ll come through the door. A blast of cold air, a face puzzlingly familiar, like the familiar chords in the Muzak. Surely, if you stayed in one place long enough, by the law of averages it must occur? There must have been countless people already who had touched her life at some point, if only she knew it, somewhere along the way. In fact, only the day before a man who had buggered Buffy at public school had stopped here for a Danish pastry but she wasn’t to know that.

  All her life things had slipped through her fingers. Men; other things. Things she thought about in the middle of the night. Jobs, too. At her age she should be doing something more demanding than this but she had never got the hang of how people did it – the planning, the known destination. When she was younger she hadn’t listened to anybody’s advice, she was wild and wayward, and now she was in her forties nobody gave her any advice at all. People didn’t, at her age.

  Business was slow. The scampi eater had long since gone, unnoticed by her. She re-stocked the wall holders with leaflets. They listed Happy Eater Restaurants. All of them seemed to be situated on roundabouts and motorways – Ripley By-Pass. M50 Junction 5 (Northbound). A55 Interchange, Clwyd. Bit like her, really. People thundering past, knowing exactly where they were going, nobody stopping for long. Got to get back to the wife.

  She went off-duty at three, clomping away in her gumboots. Outside the sun cast a golden light on the Happy Eater logo: a fat red face pointing to its open mouth. A man and a woman were arriving in separate cars; rural trysts took place here because there was bound to be nobody local around. At weekends other couples converged here; divorced couples who sat in the smoking section, they always smoked, while their child played listlessly with the complimentary Lego. At the end of the meal the child would be passed from one to the other, like a baton in a relay race; on the Sunday they would reappear and the child would be passed back.

  Don’t think of it.

  She walked along the verge. Traffic rushed past. She was heading for some farm buildings half a mile away, to do some photocopying.

  Sprockett’s Farm had been converted into retail units. It was called The Sprockett’s Farm Country Mall. Conveniently sited on the A2, within easy access of the M2, it was in a prime position to draw in customers from a fifty-mile radius. The canny farmer had realized this, when he sold the land to the developers, and he had now retired to the Canary Islands. The orchard had been tarmacked over to provide parking for four hundred cars. Various outbuildings, picturesquely lopsided, housed various business concerns – the Threshing Barn Travel Agency, the Old Piggeries Video Rental. There was even a food store, of sorts. In the local village the shop had long since disappeared, killed by the megastores, so when Lorna needed some marmalade she had to walk here, to Quality Country Fayre, and buy a ludicrously expensive pot topped with a gingham mob cap and really made in a factory in Southall.

  The Rank Xerox Copy Shop was housed in the old hen house. Beneath the ancient beams machines hummed – fax, photocopiers, printers. On the wall were clocks displaying the time in Tokyo and New York. Lorna went in. When she had first lived here there had been real chickens pecking around but now the floor was covered with beige carpet tiles.

  Keith, the manager, was on the phone; he was always on the phone. His family had once owned a smallholding, across the valley, but it had been turned into a dry-ski slope and he had become a wheeler-dealer. He nodded at the photocopier and Lorna opened it. She had some staff documents to copy.

  The last piece of paper, from the preceding customer, was still under the lid. She took it out. The scampi-eater had been the last customer but she didn’t know this. She just glanced at the sheet of paper, automatically, as one glances at a postcard on someone else’s doormat.

  She read it once. Then she read it again. Keith was still on the phone. ‘Bring Barry along on Tuesday,’ he muttered, ‘we’ll have that pow-wow about the hot-dog franchise.’ He had seen nothing.

  She stared at the piece of paper. It was the last page of a memo concerning a planning application. She stared at it, her heart
knocking against her ribs. Then she bundled the piece of paper into her pocket.

  Twelve

  THE FLAT WAS so damned small; that was the trouble. As a love-nest in Soho it had been deliciously romantic, how did that John Donne thing go, and make our little room an everywhere . . . Penny had to admit it; she had been hoist with her own petard. It was fine when she and Colin were grappling on the bed, but once they started walking about and doing normal things they kept bumping into each other. It was a trendy conversion, all uplighters and granite worktops, but it was far too trendy to have any storage space and she and Colin kept tripping over each other’s stuff. That was why she had jettisoned most of her possessions back in Blomfield Mansions. The bathroom here was so tiny that whoever was sitting on the lavatory found themselves jammed into a foetal position. Colin had suggested cutting two cat flaps in the door, so the person’s knees could poke through, but he hadn’t got a saw to do it with because there was nowhere to keep it.

  At least Colin didn’t read, so there were no books cluttering up the place. Maybe he couldn’t read. She realized, with surprise, that despite their intimacy she had never seen what his handwriting looked like. He did everything on the phone, or else he punched in messages on his personal organizer. He was a child of the microchip era, and entirely visual. This, however, brought problems. His kitchen was a style statement and he didn’t like Nescafé jars and things cluttering it up and blocking the view of his Phillipe Starck lemon-squeezer, which stood alone, spotlit like a museum specimen. Sometimes, when she wanted a laugh, she tried to imagine what this flat would be like if Buffy lived in it.

  How weird, how totally absorbing it was, stepping from one life into another, from one man’s arms to another’s! The difference between their bodies was the big shock at first, the big, guilty thrill, but she had got used to this by now. She had surrendered herself entirely to Colin – his stubble, the scent of his breath, his limbs slippery with sweat during their vigorous and ever-more-inventive lovemaking. He was such a stylist in this, too. An animal and a stylist. He had changed her, she became different creatures for him. Sometimes she was an eel, sliding all over him insinuatingly, her own boneless gymnastics astonishing and impressing her. Sometimes she became a boy for him, juddering and perverse. Oh, and more, more. Their bodies went on such adventures together in the dark; the next morning she blushed to think of it. Of course, she remembered Buffy but she felt disloyal to compare them – Buffy’s frequently fruitless huffings and puffings, the things he said that suddenly made her giggle, the companionability and occasional joint success. The sudden freeze when he got a twinge in his back. She was a different woman now, drugged with sex, smiling at shopkeepers. Maybe she was like this during the early years of her marriage but she could no longer remember that, she didn’t want to. Life with Buffy in the big, peeling flat was in the past, and she was slowly getting used to another man. His domestic habits and routines were becoming familiar to her. She readjusted to him without thinking now, as if she had gone to France and had learnt to drive on the right side of the road.

  But the flat stayed small. That was why she liked to go out for breakfast. Besides, it made her feel continental. Buffy had introduced her to Bertaux’s. He had gone on about Soho being a village, the good old days, Bohemia and all that, actors and their floozies. However, she herself hardly ever met anyone she knew; the only salutations she received were the Triple X cans waved at her from the doorway of a defunct boutique. A row of men sat there and whooped at her when she passed.

  She usually breakfasted alone. Colin either got up early to go out on a shoot or else he slept late, obliterated like a teenager, his face buried in the pillow and his shoulders criss-crossed with the marks of her fingernails. She bought her usual pile of newspapers, went into Bertaux’s and sat down. Like most journalists she speed-read all the papers and never remembered a word of them afterwards.

  She was just dipping her croissant into her coffee when she heard a voice.

  ‘Excuse me, are you Penny Buffery?’

  ‘Penny Warren, actually.’ Buffy had recently asked her, sourly, why all his exes, the moment they left him, dropped his name with such unseemly haste and reverted to their old ones. She had told him she had always worked, as a journalist, under her maiden name. Besides, who wouldn’t drop Buffery if they had the chance. ‘It’s ancient Huguenot!’ he had said. ‘It’s terribly distinguished.’ A lie, of course.

  ‘Do you mind me butting in?’

  ‘Of course not. Sit down.’

  It was a pale young woman with a pointed chin and thick, surprised eyebrows that needed plucking. Pretty enough but, oh, Lord the clothes! So terribly anodyne. She was wearing a fluffy pastel sweater, the type of thing somebody would wear if they sung in a provincial choir. That complexion cried out for strong colours.

  ‘How amazing, seeing you here!’ said the girl. ‘You’re the journalist, aren’t you?’

  Penny nodded modestly.

  ‘Gosh! How wonderful. You see, I’ve read a lot of your things. Articles and things.’

  Later, Penny would wonder how she knew she was a journalist if she had got her name wrong. Later, much later, she realized that the whole meeting had been engineered. At the time, however, she just felt ridiculously flattered.

  ‘They’re really great,’ said the girl.

  ‘How nice.’ She laughed. ‘You probably remember them better than I do.’

  ‘Have you got any tips?’

  Penny looked at her. Boxy shoulders would set off the neck; emphasise the gamine.

  ‘You know, tips on writing,’ said the girl.

  ‘Don’t tell me you want to be a journalist.’

  The girl nodded. She didn’t seem more than a girl, though she was probably in her twenties. There was a dateless, fashionless air about her that made her look young and . . . Penny searched for the word. Innocent. It took her a moment to find it because it had been so long since she had met anybody to whom it could be applied. How sweet! She felt a warm rush of motherliness – a new sensation.

  ‘You sure?’ she asked. ‘Karl Kraus said journalists write because they have nothing to say, and they have nothing to say because they write.’

  ‘Is that true?’

  ‘I’ve never had time to work it out.’ She laughed. ‘The thing is, do you believe what you read in the papers?’

  ‘I used to. I don’t know what I believe in now.’

  ‘Ah! The first qualification for a journalist. That’s a good start.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What you have to do is believe in it while you’re writing it. Like a man murmuring nonsense to a woman while he’s in bed with her. Each piece you write, it’s a little seduction.’

  The girl looked shocked. ‘That’s ever so cynical.’

  ‘I find it rather bracing,’ said Penny. ‘Still want to do it?’

  The girl nodded. She was looking at her with a fixed intensity that Penny found gratifying. She seemed to be devouring every detail of her. In her Kenzo jacket Penny felt chiselled and experienced, a woman of the world with this young Candide.

  They talked for a while. Penny told her how she herself had started. The girl seemed refreshingly eager to learn about the business. She also looked biddable. What a stroke of luck, to have bumped into her! Or was it the other way round?

  Beckoning for the bill, she asked: ‘Want to start right now? Want to do a job for me?’

  She took Celeste back to the flat; she had learnt her name by now. Celeste wore track-suit bottoms and pink trainers, dear oh dear. The sort of thing a children’s TV presenter would wear on a Fun Run. Penny would have to sort her out. She felt like a mother, taking her daughter in hand. Motherhood was another thing she had been too busy writing about to ever get round to doing herself.

  ‘It all started with my column Penny for Them. Ever read it? It’s in Mine.’

  ‘Mine?’

  ‘The magazine. You read it?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’
said Celeste. ‘Yes, of course.’

  She certainly looked like a typical Mine reader. C/D Socio-economic group. Mine was a reasonably downmarket women’s weekly, created to rival Best and Chat. Recipes, showbiz gossip and for God’s sake nothing longer than 1.5 column inches. Mine readers had the attention-span of gnats. Penny for Them was a nice little earner because all Penny had to do was to reply to readers’ tips. These were suggestions like: To make that casserole stretch, mix the stewing steak with tinned macaroni for a family supper Italian style! Or Buffy’s favourite, To make wet concrete more workable, add a little washing-up liquid when mixing it. For this, readers received a £5 postal order and all Penny had to do was write: Great idea, Mrs B of Bolton! or I agree, but for a low-cal treat try substituting yoghurt. Buffy, of course, had found the whole thing hysterical and made up his own, like: ‘Wondering what to do with those worn-out diaphragms? Try using them as handy kneeling pads when gardening!’

  They walked up the stairs and Penny unlocked the front door. ‘I thought I’d tap my readers’ ingenuity. Recycling’s the thing nowadays but it’s so terribly dowdy, isn’t it? So I thought that they could send in suggestions and Colin and I would do a book on it. Recycle with Style, something like that. Colin’s going to take the pics. He’s a super photographer.’

  ‘Recycling what?’

  ‘Anything.’

  ‘What sort of things?’

  ‘Things you don’t need anymore.’ Penny laughed. ‘Like old husbands. I know! 100 Uses for an Ex-Husband. Lay him on the floor, he makes a great draught excluder! Put him on all fours, to create a super bedside table!’

  Celeste was staring at her. ‘Really?’

  ‘Only joking.’ Penny laughed. ‘No, it’s things like how to grow avocados in your old Ford Escort.’ She led her into the bedroom. The door wouldn’t open properly. ‘You see, I asked readers to send in their ideas and they did. We’re being absolutely inundated.’ The door was blocked by a large pile of packages. ‘We can’t move. Colin’s kicking up such a stink. Have you got somewhere with a bit of room?’