The Ex-Wives

  Celeste nodded. ‘I live in Kilburn.’

  ‘Well somebody has to, I suppose.’ She paused, and looked at her. ‘Do you want to do a job for me?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Take the stuff home and sort it into categories. I’ll pay you, of course.’

  Celeste stared at her. Slowly, she nodded.

  ‘Done.’ Penny shook her hand; it was small and surprisingly cold. What a relief! She needed to get this book finished quickly. A lot of her freelance work had dried up since the discovery of last summer’s bogus travel pieces and she needed the money. Besides, it was supposed to be a fun thing to do with Colin. But what had started out as a sure fire money-spinner, and a bit of a hoot to boot, was rapidly turning into a source of friction between them because of those damn parcels cluttering up the place.

  ‘I’ll call you a cab. Could you take them right now?’

  She was just lifting the phone when Celeste cleared her throat and asked: ‘What was your ex-husband like?’

  How did she know she had an ex? Maybe from the inventive nature of her uses for one. Penny sat down. ‘I’m rather fond of him, actually. He’s called Russell. Colin calls him a boozy old fraud but Colin can talk. He makes his living squirting washing up liquid into beer so it all froths up for the photograph.’

  ‘What’s he like?’

  ‘Colin?’

  ‘Your ex.’

  ‘Why on earth are you interested?’ asked Penny.

  ‘I just am.’

  The girl had a flat, Midlands accent. I just um. Despite the delicate appearance there was something forthright about her. Perhaps they were all like that up there, in the wilds of wherever – forthright, curious. Her colleagues weren’t curious about anything unless they were going to write a piece about it. This candid interest was rather flattering.

  ‘I’ll tell you his all-time favourite scene in a film. It’s a Truffaut film, you know Truffaut?’

  Celeste shook her head.

  ‘A babysitter arrives at an apartment one evening. She’s a young girl, very pretty. A middle-aged man opens the door and welcomes her in. He shows no sign of leaving, nor does he show her the child she’s supposed to be looking after. Finally she asks him, Where’s the baby? He smiles and replies: L’enfant, c’est moi. That’s Buffy for you.’

  Celeste had sat down on the Eames chair. She was listening intently. What an odd little thing she was, with that direct gaze! Penny was starting to enjoy this. Colin never asked about Buffy. He was either too painfully jealous of her past, or else totally uninterested. She hoped it was the former, of course, but she had her suspicions. It was nice to talk to such an eager listener. She missed the rambling, chatty conversations of her previous life.

  She settled into the sofa, remembering the first time she had met Buffy. It had been on that flight from L.A. She had been interviewing a particularly moronic film starlet and was feeling homesick for England. Californians, she had decided, all had irony bypasses. Then along came this big, twinkly man who had made her laugh.

  ‘He’s older than me,’ she said. ‘Our first date was going to the opticians to get a new prescription for his glasses.’ She remembered the dinner afterwards, followed by the invitation to try out his Rest Assured Support Mattress – such an unusual seduction line that she had gone along with it. The experience had been quite erotic actually, in a cosy sort of way. ‘I thought older meant wiser, ho ho. Just because he’d seen the original production of French Without Tears. Probably been in it, for all I know. He moved in a different world to me, that was part of the attraction I suppose. He had a Past.’

  ‘What sort of past?’

  ‘The usual sort. In other words, lots of mess. He lived in the most indescribable pigsty, till I came along. The first time I got into bed with him, I found a whole piece of toast in it.’

  ‘In the bed?’

  She nodded. ‘With marmalade on it. The lazy slob. Terribly unfit – all that smoking and drinking, he comes from the generation when everybody did, only he kept on at it. He once acted out Erich Von Stroheim being the butler in that Greta Garbo film, As You Desire Me, you ever seen it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I hadn’t, then. Well, he was showing me how Erich Thingy did it, with hardly any movements – just a flick of the wrist, a flicker of the eyes. And afterwards he was panting away as if he’d run in the Olympics.’

  ‘Did you love him?’

  Penny paused. ‘I suppose so.’ She smiled. ‘Women like him because he’s interested in the same sort of things they are. Gossiping. Sitting around talking about people.’ Buffy had said that his ideal life would be to live in a brothel as a sort of mascot, like Toulouse Lautrec but bigger, watching the girls dressing up and hearing them nattering about their clients. Or else to be a salesman in the Harvey Nichols lingerie department. He loved making up scenarios for himself.

  Her mother had adored him. She still did. Her mother thought Penny was mad, leaving him, but then she didn’t have to live with him did she? Hauling him out of the boozer at four in the afternoon, making excuses on the phone to furious producers, having his horrible dog tripping her up and weeing on the carpet.

  ‘He had this revolting little dog which looked like a hairpiece – an incontinent hairpiece. He was a terrible driver too. Weaving all over the road. When it was dusk he’d start flashing his lights at the other drivers, the belligerent bugger, and then he’d find he hadn’t put his own lights on in the first place. Typical Buffy. Or he’d try to flash them and squirt his own windscreen instead.’

  ‘You left him because he was a bad driver?’

  ‘No, no. I left him because I fell in love with Colin.’

  ‘What happened?’

  Penny looked at her. She was leaning forward, her face pale against the black leather of the chair. ‘Now I see why you want to be a journalist. Funny, you didn’t look the curious type.’

  ‘Oh dear, I’m sorry. Do you mind?’

  Penny shook her head. ‘We had this cottage in Suffolk. Still have, though it’s up for sale now. Anyway, I got a conservatory built onto it, for a feature actually. Always a danger sign, building a conservatory.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s a displacement activity. I’ve always thought divorce lawyers and conservatory architects should go into partnership together, save a lot of bother.’ She paused. Had she thought of this herself or read it somewhere? Either way, was there a piece in it? Could she stretch it out to 800 words? ‘Anyway, I had it built – classy job, carpenter called Piers, that’s how classy. And Colin came to photograph it. It was lust at first sight.’

  ‘Did you grow carrots?’

  Penny hesitated. Was this some sort of sexual euphemism?

  Celeste said: ‘I mean – I just meant – did you have a vegetable garden?’

  Penny nodded. ‘I did all the digging, of course. Buffy said he couldn’t because of his back.’ She smiled. ‘When the film Batman came out he called himself Backman. Just about to do some daring feat, music playing da-da-da-da, then he’d groan and stop. “Backman!” ‘She was laughing, now. ‘Anyway, I did all the work and he took all the credit, of course. I think he believed he actually did it. He has a bottomless capacity for self-deception.’

  ‘Has he?’

  ‘Bottomless. He can make himself believe anything. He’s an actor, you see. I forgot to tell you that. They’re even worse than journalists. They have to tell lies, and believe them. That’s how they make their living. Then – poof! – it’s all gone. In their case, into thin air. Not even wrapping up fish and chips.’

  ‘You mean he’s a liar?’ Celeste paused. ‘Can I have a glass of water?’

  ‘You do look pale.’ Penny jumped up and went into the kitchen. She opened the fridge and inspected the bottles of mineral water. ‘Carbonated, decarbonated, double decarbonated, double-double decarbonated with a twist of lemon?’ she called.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Or just tap water?’

  She ga
ve Celeste the glass of water. The girl’s hand was trembling. Maybe she was going through some traumatic affair, too. Must send myself a memo to ask her, Penny thought. She was in that sort of mood – skittish.

  The cab arrived and they carried the parcels downstairs. Celeste was driven off. Penny returned to the flat.

  Talking about Buffy had done it. On the one hand she was deeply relieved to have left him – not since she was a child had she offered up such fervent prayers of thanks. On the other hand she missed him too. Perverse, wasn’t it?

  She sat on the bed – they had got rid of the futon now. Gazing at the now-empty expanse of carpet she remembered one afternoon last summer, when she had still been married. She and Colin were making love in a field and she had suddenly burst out laughing. ‘What’s the matter?’ Colin had asked, put off his stride. She was remembering something Buffy had said when they were discussing those yellow fields of oilseed rape. ‘They smell like ovulating gerbils,’ he had said. She couldn’t tell Colin this, of course. She had simply replied: ‘I’m so happy.’ Which was true. It was just that two men happened to be making her happy at the same time: one in her head and one in her body.

  Adultery: The Positive Aspect. She could write a piece about it. Soon, maybe. Just now it was too painful.

  Thirteen

  ‘WASN’T IT YOU I heard on the TV last night?’ asked Mr Woolley. ‘I recognized the voice.’

  Buffy was lying in a flat in Hans Crescent. He was having his prostate probed. Hunched on his side, staring at the moquette wallpaper, he felt Mr Woolley’s warm finger goosing him. This was far from dignified, but not entirely unpleasant either.

  ‘I said to my wife: that’s him. Advertising something or other . . . relax . . . that’s better. What were you extolling the virtues of this time?’

  ‘Barbecued Niblets,’ said Buffy.

  ‘I never remember what it is, do you? Wonder anyone remembers what to buy.’ His finger slid deeper.

  ‘What’s it like?’ asked Buffy.

  ‘Enlarged, yes. Feel that?’

  Buffy nodded.

  ‘Enlarged, but not inordinately so.’

  Buffy had explained to him in detail his difficulties when passing water – a vaguely Biblical phrase he liked using with medical men. How the whole process, the scattered grapeshot nature of it, took so long nowadays that by the time he was finished it was practically time to start all over again. Mae West said I like a man who takes his time. But this was ridiculous.

  ‘And then there’s the dry rot.’

  ‘What?’ Buffy froze.

  ‘Dry rot, isn’t it? Rising damp, that sort of thing.’

  ‘What? Where?’

  ‘Always a problem, in old buildings. Dry rot, wet rot.’

  For a moment Buffy thought he was being addressed in some hideous metaphor. Was the fellow trying to tell him something? Then he realized.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘The advertisements, you mean. Rot-Away Damp Proof Courses.’

  ‘Must keep the wolf from the door. I said to my wife, I said with that voice our Mr Buffery could sell diet pills to the Somalians.’

  Buffy’s breathing had returned to normal. Not for the first time, he wondered why private consultants made such terrible jokes. The more expensive they were, the more tasteless their sense of humour. They looked so pleased with themselves, too, with their shiny faces and bow ties. Not surprisingly, really. How could one answer back if one’s mouth was stuffed with cotton wool or one’s spine was being ruthlessly pummelled? How could one interrupt the unfunny patter for which one was paying, as it were, an arm and a leg? He had had a wide experience with consultants – his heart, his teeth, his gums, his waterworks. Just when you thought everything was all right another bit of the old body packed up. He was familiar with all the properties for sale in Country Life, read tensely in waiting rooms from Knightsbridge to Wigmore Street. He even knew which Right Honourable was marrying which.

  ‘No need for any further action at this point,’ said. Mr Woolley, ‘but see me again in six months.’

  ‘What further action had you in mind?’

  ‘You really want me to describe it?’

  ‘No, no!’ said Buffy hastily.

  Mr Woolley’s finger was withdrawn; the glove crackled as it was peeled off.

  ‘Haemorrhoids okay?’ asked Buffy.

  ‘Fine. Nothing much the matter with you, really, old chap. Only the things one would expect . . .’

  ‘. . . at my age. I know, I know.’

  Buffy paid a large cheque to the receptionist and emerged into the sunshine. Outside Jaguars waited, their engines throbbing. He felt both relieved and obscurely disappointed that there was nothing really wrong with him. Just the ordinary depredations of age.

  He walked down the street. One didn’t exactly grow old; it wasn’t as simple as that. One just felt a growing irritation with a whole lot of things which nowadays seemed designed to baffle and frustrate, like the impossibly-sealed plastic around a Marks and Spencer sandwich. The way that books seemed to be published with smaller and smaller print. The way that when he switched on Radio 3 and got settled into something it promptly changed to organ music. It probably had in the past, but not with such crowing regularity. Did other people feel any of this, or was he entirely alone? Why, when he paid for something with a £20 note, did the sales assistant hold it up to the light and give it such a hostile and lengthy examination? Was there something wrong with him? There seemed no end to the small indignities of the modern world; each day another popped up, like the paving stones, to trip him over. Only yesterday he had gone to his local bottle-bank – he was a late but enthusiastic convert to this – and while he was flinging in his empties, glaring at the man next to him who was putting his green bottles into the clear receptacle, he had suddenly felt a trickle of cold wine travelling down his sleeve. He had ended up soaked; who would have thought bottles had so much left in them? Especially his bottles.

  Even without meeting Celeste he would have felt this, but she threw the whole business into sharper focus. The thing was, she made him feel both incredibly young and yet incredibly old. Both at the same time. There was that leaping, breathless possibility of renewal which was so rejuvenating. The world reborn through her fresh young eyes, the miraculous prospect of the old engine coughing into life, as if he were a dusty Hispano-Suiza mouldering away in some garage; she had pulled off the wraps, polished him up and lo and behold! He roared into life. There was all this – the way she listened, wide-eyed, to the anecdotes that everybody else had got bored of by now. All this. Yet her very youth taunted him. He had taken her to Covent Garden, the week before, to hear Cosi, and the way she had bounded up the stairs, as lithe and thoughtless as a colt . . . How elderly he felt as she waited for him to dodderingly join her. And when she asked what the Home Service was he suddenly felt utterly alone.

  He was aware of the sugar-daddy aspect of all this; of people either thinking he was a lucky old pervert or else simply out on the town with a doting niece. The plain fact was: nothing had really happened yet. He had known her for two weeks now. They kissed; she stroked his beard; he ran his hands over her firm young body – oh, her skin! So smooth, so elastic! But then she slithered like a fish from his embrace and said she must be getting home. Though inflamed by her – he was only flesh and blood, after all – he was also secretly relieved. How could he compare with the young men she must have known? (He couldn’t bring himself to ask about them). Of course he had a wealth of experience behind him, marriages and liaisons galore, but he suspected that this didn’t count anymore. The old body wasn’t what it was; besides, maybe they did things differently now. Through Penny, and through his many hours spent in doctors’ waiting rooms, he was thoroughly au courant with what went on in women’s magazines, and he was only too aware that nowadays the sexual demands of young women were, well, demanding. The vigour of them, the shrill and taunting battle-cries! The strident right to multiple orgasms achieved by ever-more-gymnastic
methods. Hadn’t they heard of a hernia?

  Celeste wasn’t like this, of course. She didn’t read Cosmopolitan. This was one of her attractions. But he still felt there was something to be said for a Dante-and-Beatrice-type relationship of unfulfilled yearnings. Possibilities, after all, were as infinite as the solar system; they had no boundaries and there was nothing to bring you down to earth. With no destination there need be no endings, and he had had a bellyful of those. By golly he had. Botched, ugly, drunken, keeping you up all night on the endless carousel of recriminations and home truths; neither participants possessing the energy to halt the mechanism and get off. There was a lot to be said for a soft-focus kind of celibacy, and a nice mug of Horlicks. He knew a turning-point had been reached the year before, actually, when he had taken Penny to a musical called Blues in the Night. When a delicious black girl had come on stage dressed in peachy silk underwear he had whispered to his wife: ‘Couldn’t we have stuff like that for the living-room curtains?’

  He walked along Knightsbridge. Upper-class, rosy girls loped past. Shoppers were accompanied by tiny dogs. In this area you could even glimpse that endangered species, a woman in a fur coat. Sometimes he felt that this street was his spiritual home. He too could have been a man of leisure, living in Montague Square and buying objets d’art at lunchtime, if he hadn’t been crippled by alimony. Prosperous-looking continental couples paused to look in the windows of Jaeger; the men wore leather trench-coats and the women looked pampered and ruthless, with burnished hair and Gucci boots. They were bound to have lovers. Why were the French so efficient in matters of the heart? They dealt with it as efficiently as they dealt with their digestive systems. Compared to theirs, his life seemed such a muddle – a Flodden Field compared to their Garden of Versailles.

  On the other hand, what a rich full life he had had, the lucky bugger. One could look at it that way, the Chimes at Midnight way. That a marriage ends, does that make it a failure? After all, life itself ends, at some point or another. Does this make life a failure too?