It was in this reflective mood, always brought on by a visit to a doctor, that he downed a malt whisky in a mock-mahogany pub somewhere off Beauchamp Place. Two solicitors sat nearby. ‘. . . not a lot of legroom, but that’s the Nips for you,’ said one of them. Buffy could spot a solicitor a mile off; he had known so many. These two were only about twelve years old, of course, but that was par for the course now. During their divorce proceedings, Jacquetta’s solicitor was so young that Buffy had suggested he went to the lavatory before they started. Neither of them had laughed, but then Jacquetta had never been blessed with a sense of humour.
Solicitors, flat-rental agencies and removal men – how well he had got to know them over the years, what a good and trusty client he had been! Pickford’s Head Office even sent him a Christmas card.
He downed another Glenfiddich. He would buy Celeste a present – something wildly extravagant, at Harrods. A nice repeat fee had come through that morning and he was feeling flush. It was funny; every now and then he earned quite a lot of money, usually for something he couldn’t remember doing, but it didn’t last long. All his wives had complained about his sojourns in the betting shop. ‘It’s so stupid!’ they said. ‘It’s not betting that’s stupid,’ he had replied, ‘it’s losing.’
He emerged from the pub. It was already dusk. How quickly darkness fell, in the winter! He passed a Boots and thought fondly of Celeste, toiling away in her nylon overall. When he got to know her better he would take her away from all this, if she would let him. The whole strategy was rather vague so far because he didn’t really know what she wanted. She spoke very little about herself. In fact he hadn’t told her much about his own life, either, though she had asked him rather a lot about Penny. This seemed more encouraging than any amount of endearments.
What an adventure, to start again! A new woman, a new life. He felt optimistic and energised now. So energised, in fact, that he had another little drink to celebrate, in a hostelry across the street. He could hear about her past. Once again he would memorise the names of relatives, and hear about a childhood he painfully wished he had witnessed from a fly-on-the-wall position. He would learn that her father had never shown her enough affection – every woman he had ever known said that. He would become acquainted, through her upbringing, with a corner of England he had never known existed, but which would become a warm, glowing spot on the map – even when his relationships collapsed these places retained a tarnished sort of significance. First bikes; first bras. He loved hearing about all that. He would learn, agonizingly, of early crushes on the boy-next-door, and even more agonizingly of first affairs with men he might have sat next to, unknowingly, on the bus.
How mysterious they were, these forays into the past! Through women he had entered into a gambolling-over-the-hills childhood in the Brecon Beacons, into a fraught and chilly household in Leamington Spa. It was the most tender sort of history lesson. The cumulative effect was like Old Macdonald Had a Farm; one story added to another, a quack-quack here and a bow-wow there, more and more as time went on, wife after wife, until the song was so long it was quite a strain to memorise it. Especially after a few peerlessly unblended malts.
Buffy made his way across the street. He would become young again, he would get his mojo working, whatever that meant. He would even go dancing, if that was what she wanted, and make a complete prat of himself. And in return he would initiate her into the bliss of opera, in his experience totally unappreciated by the young – not that all the women he had loved had been as dewy as Celeste but none of them had understood the joys of Verdi, they had that in common. Thanks to him, there were at least seven women currently at large who could hum whole chunks of Rigoletto. That was an achievement of sorts, wasn’t it?
He approached Harrods and stopped dead. Behind one of the windows a young man was busy working on the Christmas display; he adjusted a ball gown over the cleavage of a mannequin and stood back to look at the effect. It took Buffy a moment to recognize him.
Then he realized. It was Quentin, his son.
How tall he was! Tall and lithe. Neither Buffy nor Popsi had been slim, even then; how miraculous that this willowy creature had sprung from their loins. Quentin was dressed in black, like a modern dancer. His mouth glinted with pins.
Buffy hadn’t seen him for some months now. Well, years. For a moment, the weirdness of his own son’s name struck him anew. Popsi had insisted on it. At the birth – from which Buffy was of course absent but all chaps were in those days, they went to the pub – at the moment of birth Popsi had apparently said ‘That’s Quentin.’ Not in general a stubborn woman, she hadn’t budged on this one. ‘He just is.’
Buffy waved, but his son didn’t see him through the glass. He was about to shout Quentin but suddenly felt self-conscious. A couple, arm-in-arm, stopped to stare. Maybe they thought he was some pathetic old poofter, trying to attract the attention of this comely window-dresser.
Quentin knelt to fix a piece of fabric with some sort of staple gun. He looked graceful, and totally absorbed. The window was a tableau of family Christmases past – a handsome pair of mannequin parents, plus three offspring in velvet knickerbockers, flanked by reproduction furniture. Fake candlelight shone on their shiny, sightless faces. The smallest hint of a smile seemed to play around their lips as they gazed past Buffy. How superior they looked! Standing in the dark, he tried to collect his thoughts: last time he had seen Quentin he had been at St Martin’s Art School, hadn’t he? Was it really that long ago?
Buffy waved again but his son didn’t look up. He tapped on the glass, but no response. Quentin was pinning up some ribbon, his head cocked sideways, his back to the window. He was totally sealed off in his aquarium. Remember me? Buffy wanted to shout. Look, it’s your father!
Some more people stopped and stared. He hadn’t really shouted it, had he? The traffic rumbled past. He tapped on the glass again but his son was speaking, wordlessly, to another young man who had just appeared, carrying a length of red ribbon. They nodded to each other, laughed, and just as Buffy was about to tap again, louder this time, Quentin slipped away behind a partition and was gone.
Buffy was in Harrods now, pushing through the shoppers. A woman stepped out, pointed something at him and sprayed him with perfume. How could he get to the window, inside the shop? All he could see were scarves and handbags and solid walls filled with shelves full of scent bottles. ‘Can I help you?’ somebody asked. He knocked over a stand of leather gloves, they fell like leaves around him. Maybe he wasn’t even on the right side of the shop; he had lost his sense of direction. It was never that reliable, even at the best of times. He found himself squeezing behind a counter.
‘Excuse me, sir.’ A man in uniform took his arm.
Buffy laughed. ‘Just looking for the exit.’
Now he seemed to be out in the street, hailing a taxi. He sat in the back, utterly exhausted, as it drove him home. Anyway, he could see Quentin anytime. He could pop round one evening for a glass of wine. Quentin lived in Leytonstone, didn’t he? Or was that Maxine, Popsi’s daughter by what’s-his-name, the man she married after him, Terry? Buffy’s head span; just for the moment he couldn’t quite work it out. How many children had he actually got? There was Nyange, of course, his daughter Nyange. He hadn’t seen her for quite a while, either. She lived somewhere awful too, almost as bad as Leytonstone. Where was it? Carmella, her mother, had told him when he had bumped into her in Shaftesbury Avenue, he was sure he had written down the address on a piece of paper . . .
He stopped the cab on the corner of his street. Suddenly, desperately, he wanted to see Celeste. Just to see her, even if he didn’t talk to her. Just to see her face.
He hurried across the road to the chemist’s shop. It was closed, of course; he had already realized that. He looked at his watch: 6.20. He stared into the shadowy interior of the shop. Nothing stirred. Women’s faces stared at him, from the rows of packets. He tapped on the glass. No point in doing that, of course, but he had
to do something. He seemed to have been tapping on windows a lot today.
‘Left something in there?’ Paddy, one of the regulars at The Three Fiddlers, had stopped to look in the window too.
‘Yes!’
‘By Jesus, the stink on you! You smell like a whorehouse!’ said Paddy, flinching back. ‘Coming for a drink?’
Fourteen
WHILE BUFFY WAS sitting in the pub that evening Celeste was in Frith Street, ringing Penny’s doorbell. She didn’t know her phone number, that was her excuse for coming round like this. Thank goodness Penny was at home. She opened the door; her face was plastered with yellow stuff.
‘It’s all right. It’s mud from the Nile. Don’t make me laugh or cry, else it’ll all flake off.’ She took Celeste upstairs. ‘How nice to see your pure young face. It’s been a perfectly ghastly day.’ She opened the fridge and got out a bottle of wine. She was wearing a towelling robe with Hotel Cipriani embossed on the pocket. ‘Everything’s broken down. The expresso machine, the fax machine.’
‘Perhaps you could grow mustard and cress in them.’
She laughed; her hand flew to her cheeks. ‘Don’t!’
‘I opened all the parcels last night,’ said Celeste.
‘Already? How marvellous.’
‘Some of them are ever so ingenious. There’s a shower cap made out of a baby’s plastic pants, stapled together. But it’s going to take a bit of time. A lot of them are rather complicated. There’s something made out of a colander and old hoover bags that I haven’t got the hang of at all.’
‘You’re an angel. I can see you’re going to be quite indispensible.’
It was easier somehow, talking to this masked woman. She looked so impervious. Celeste decided to plunge straight in.
‘Talking of growing things, did you and your exhusband, what was his name?’
‘Buffy.’
‘Did you and Buffy have any children?’
‘God, no! He was a terrible father!’
Celeste paused. ‘What do you mean? Was he married before?’
‘Was he married? Taking over Buffy was like taking over a house full of sitting tenants.’ She poured out two glasses of wine. ‘All of them wanting rate rebates.’
‘Who was he married to?’
‘A ghastly, neurotic woman called Jacquetta. They had two delinquent sons who used to come round every weekend and wreck the place. I had to be nice to them, of course. Wicked stepmother and all that. All good copy, I suppose. Got a lot of pieces out of it.’
‘What were they like?’
‘Lounging in front of the TV all day watching Neighbours, amazing they haven’t grown up with Australian accents. Crisp wrappers everywhere, horrible sticky things under the cushions. Table manners like baboons, of course. When they were little it was toys scattered all over the place with endless dead batteries, Buffy used to buy them terribly complicated things, guilt of course, but he never put them together, he was hopeless at that, and all the instructions were in Taiwanese or something. Then it was Walkmen, I kept treading on the headphones, and them being bored all the time and leaving the bathroom like a marsh, how do people get towels so wet? Adolescents! Lying on the floor, great bare feet, flicking the TV channels with their horrible horny toes.’
She paused, panting. Hotel Cipriani rose and fell on her breast. Celeste stared at her. Asking Penny questions was like pulling the lever on a fruit machine – masses of money poured out. She couldn’t be lonely, could she? A sophisticated woman like Penny. She couldn’t feel the way Celeste did when she sat alone in her flat, listening to the sounds upstairs from Waxie.
Penny took a gulp of wine. ‘And nicking my hair mousse. And cleaning their fingernails with my forks.’ She screwed her eyes shut. ‘And the phone. They were always on the phone, nobody else could get through, mumbling in monosyllables in their awful cockney accents. They live in Primrose Hill, you see. Everybody’s children have cockney accents there.’
‘Is it a poor area?’
She laughed. Flakes of the mask fell, like plaster. ‘Christ, no! Full of rich, liberal parents. That’s why they have these awful children. Luckily the boys didn’t come round so much towards the end, they said it was so boring. They wanted to go out with their friends. Trails of silent friends, all in black overcoats like undertakers, sliding into the flat. Totally silent! Long, black coats. They’d all go off to Camden Lock, masses of them, like a great black oil slick. Honestly Celia, it’s such a relief now.’
‘Celeste.’
‘Sorry. Celeste.’
‘What was she like, his ex-wife?’
Penny groaned. ‘Oh, God. Jacquetta.’ There was a pause.
‘Jacquetta.’
‘She ended up marrying her shrink, you know. Saved on bills, I suppose. Like an alcoholic marrying their wine merchant. He’s quite famous – Leon Buckman, heard of him?’
Celeste shook her head.
‘He’s always on the box. When I first met Buffy his TV was broken. He’d kicked it in when Leon was on some programme about sexual dependency.’ She dipped her finger in her wine, lifted out a flake, and wiped it on her robe. ‘It’s funny, I can talk about her now. She doesn’t mean anything anymore. It’s like looking at a photo of Cliff Richard.’
‘She looked like Cliff Richard?’
‘No, no. It’s just, years and years ago, when I was young, he used to bring me out in goosepimples, I lusted after him so much, and now he’s just a creepy old Christian covered in Panstick. You can’t believe these feelings could die, can you, they’re so fierce at the time.’
‘Jealousy, you mean?’
Penny nodded. ‘You ever been jealous?’ Celeste opened her mouth to reply, but Penny went on. She had gathered momentum now. She talked in a rush, as if she hadn’t talked to anyone in a long time. ‘I used to drive past her house.’
‘In Primrose Hill?’
‘That’s right. Buffy’s old house, where they used to live together. Where she still lives. If her car was parked outside I looked into it, at the stuff on the back ledge. Apple cores. Leaflets for holistic centres in Crouch End. Whatever they were, even her kids’ stuff, they were sort of charged. They made me feel faint. You probably think I’m silly –’
‘No, I don’t actually.’
‘I’ve never told anyone this. Funny, isn’t it? I used to look up at the house and imagine their life in it. The bedroom was on the second floor. I’d look at the window and try to work out how many times they must’ve made love in there. Hundreds? Thousands? Seven years, 365 days, say, on average twice a week . . .’
‘That’s 728 times.’
‘But say they’d done it more often the first couple of years. Say, five times a week for the first three months . . .’
‘That’s sixty times.’
‘Gosh!’ Penny grimaced. ‘And, say, three times a week for the next eighteen months . . .’
‘216,’ said Celeste, ‘which plus the sixty makes 276 in total, for the first two years.’
‘Hey, you’re fast!’ Penny looked at her with admiration. ‘A mathematical genius. What a surprising girl you are.’ She laughed. ‘If you knew Buffy you’d think how ridiculous, but I was in love with him then, you see. I thought: maybe he’d been a lot more vigorous then, maybe she was marvellous in bed. I wondered whether he compared us. What her body was like.’ She stopped. ‘This is stupid. You’re not interested in this.’
‘I am. Go on. Hadn’t you seen her?’
‘Oh, yes. A few times. When I brought the children back. Gosh, this is fun. I’m glad Colin’s not here.’ She drained her glass. ‘Don’t usually drink, either.’
‘What did she look like?’
‘Rather beautiful, I must admit. I didn’t want to admit it, of course. Though in a funny way it made Buffy more attractive, that he’d been married to a beautiful woman. She was sort of bony and soulful. Thick, curly mane of hair when mine had always been boring and straight. I couldn’t see much of her body because she wore so many l
ayers, awful arty clothes, cobwebby shawls, Miss Haversham meets the Incas. But I imagined it. I wondered if her thighs were slimmer than mine. If she was, you know, tighter inside because of all her t’ai chi.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Chinese martial arts. Terribly seventies.’ She refilled the glasses.
Celeste’s head was swimmy. She tried to catch everything Penny was saying, but she talked so fast. Larger pieces of her face pack had now flaked off, revealing areas of skin beneath.
‘It was much worse in the cottage, of course,’ said Penny.
‘The place in Suffolk? With the carrots?’
Penny nodded. ‘There were all these relics of her there, and I had to live with them. Things she’d planted in the garden, that always reminded me of her. Trees and things, that I couldn’t pull up. I tried, once, but the roots were too deep.’ She sighed. ‘Curtains she and Buffy had chosen together. Stuff they’d got at auctions when they were probably happy, or as happy as you could be with such a self-absorbed cow as her. I had the whole place redecorated, of course – I did this feature on updating your second home, so I got it done for nothing. I even had the cesspit emptied. I said to Buffy I don’t want any old wife’s droppings in there.’
They sat in silence for a moment. Down in the street cars hooted, stuck in the traffic. Below them, people must be shovelling in pasta. Everyone was busy having an evening out. Celeste willed this Colin man not to come home yet.
‘I threw out everything I found in cupboards and drawers, of course,’ said Penny. ‘Hairpins, boxes of Tampax, her dusty old packets of mung beans. Cassettes with her slopey handwriting on them. Joan Baez, honestly!’
‘Who’s she?’
‘Soppy folksinger. Typical Jacquetta. You’re too young to know about Joan Baez.’ She paused, remembering. ‘Shells from family holidays, and old espadrilles with sand still in them. Photos, of course. They’re the worst.’