Yesterday she had been some blurred vision, as radiant and featureless as an angel. Today he saw her more clearly. Cropped hair, brown eyes, thick eyebrows – a delicate face but also a face of character and determination. There was a small pimple on her chin; her forehead was shiny, it was hot and stuffy in the shop. These minor imperfections made her human – more intimate and dear to him. He felt ridiculously familiar with her already.
‘The past is mostly embarrassing,’ he said. ‘You haven’t had enough of it yet to find out. It’s there, ready to put out its foot and trip you up from behind.’
She paused. ‘You’re right, actually,’ she said. ‘I didn’t realize that till lately. You think you know everything, that it’s all what you think it is, then – whoosh!’
‘What do you mean?’
She didn’t reply. She looked at the order form in her hand. ‘Matt or glossy?’
‘I don’t know. My wife was the camera expert.’
‘Wife?’
‘Ex-wife.’
They weren’t divorced yet but to all extents and purposes she was an ex. Soon would be, anyway.
‘What’s happened to her?’
‘She ran away last summer. With a photographer, appropriately enough. A gorilla called Colin. Christ knows what they find to talk about. Exposures or something.’
‘Where do they live?’
‘Above a pasta restaurant in Soho.’ He snorted. ‘Hope she’s putting on weight.’
‘You look terrible,’ said Celeste. ‘Here, sit down.’ She indicated the chair which was set aside for old dears waiting for their prescriptions.
‘When’s your tea break?’
They sat in the patisserie down the road. From time to time she bent down and fed George pieces of buttered bun. ‘He’s the most slobbery dog I’ve ever met,’ she said, fascinated. She wiped her hand on the tablecloth.
‘What I don’t understand about dogs,’ he said, ‘is why, when they only eat meat, does their breath smell of fish?’
‘I know. Funny, isn’t it. How’re the piles?’
‘Better.’
‘Did you go to the pictures?’
He nodded. ‘Have you noticed something? How, when they show a huge list of songs at the end of a film, Brahms and Diana Ross and the Beatles, there’s always much more of them than you actually heard in the film itself?’
She paused, considering. There was a crumb on her lip. He leant across and wiped it off with his napkin, as if she were one of his children. How many times – hundreds, thousands – had he sat with his children in teashops, through marriage and separation, wiping their faces and trying to answer those totally unanswerable yet vaguely cosmic questions children ask, like ‘How many people in the world have the same birthday as me?’ Now some of them shaved, his children and his step-children, and had driving licences, and still their questions hadn’t been answered.
‘Tell me things,’ she said. ‘I don’t know anything.’
‘Ask me a question.’
‘Tell me about your wife.’
‘Ex-wife.’ He paused. He didn’t really want to talk about Penny. She was like a room full of disgusting clutter one kept from the visitors. Nor did he want to do that throbbing, poor-me number that had once, all those years before, proved so effective with Penny herself. Celeste deserved better. He looked at her, fondly. Extraordinary thing, love. A miracle, after all he had been through, that he could feel the first stirrings of it, like the first stirrings of hunger after an appalling attack of food poisoning.
‘What does she look like?’
‘Not like you,’ he said. ‘Glossy and thoroughbred, in an impervious sort of way. As if water would run off her. She’s a journalist, you see.’
‘I’ve never met a journalist. Never met an actor, either. Back home, the high spot of the week was having our meter read.’
He laughed. Under her coat she wore a white fluffy jumper. There was a tiny gold crucifix around her neck. She was soft and feminine – the way girls should look, but never did anymore. Sort of absorbent. The opposite of Penny. He pictured a working-class home, factory hooters, a headscarved mother. Celeste, fragrant and solitary amongst the back-to-backs. She was too young to have seen A Kind of Loving. Oh, there was so much to tell her!
‘Do you still see her?’
‘Who?’
‘Your ex-wife.’
‘Not if I can help it. She has breakfast at Bertaux’s every morning, I bumped into her there once, so now that’s out of bounds. One of my favourite places too.’ Bitterly, he lit a cigarette. ‘They don’t just steal your money and your furniture and your house, oh, no. They even steal your favourite tea shop, that you introduced them to in the first place.’ He started coughing; his eyes watered.
Actually, Penny hadn’t been so rapacious as some people he could mention. They had put the country cottage on the market but when it was sold she was only going to claim half. So decent of her, considering he had bought it in the first place. The Blomfield Mansions flat was rented so she couldn’t get her claws on that. No, she had simply moved out, taking her designer clothes and her cookery books. Not even all of those. This was even more of a snub, of course. She was obviously far too preoccupied, too blithely happy, to bother about mere possessions. Too sexually sated to argue. Once the rows were over and the decision taken she had been rather kind, actually – more considerate and generous than she had ever been before. Nauseatingly condescending, in fact. Once she had actually asked: ‘You sure you’re going to be all right?’ Like a torturer bringing you a cup of tea after they had just been pulling out your toenails.
He couldn’t involve Celeste in all this; it was far too sordid for her. Look at her now, munching her second Viennese slice! The resilience, the appetite! The miraculous possibility of renewal! His past was a ditch clogged with half-submerged debris and broken prams. She was a lotus flower, rising out of it, unfolding her petals one by one.
‘Have I got cream on my chin?’ she asked anxiously.
He shook his head; he couldn’t speak.
‘What’re you looking at?’ she asked.
‘Just you.’
Ten
THE NEXT DAY, her day off, Celeste took the bus down to Soho. In their woollen gloves, her hands were clammy. She lives above a pasta restaurant. She felt nauseous yet excited, as if she were about to step onto a stage. She also felt furtive – a new sensation, this; one of the many new sensations that were assaulting her nowadays. This one wasn’t unpleasant, however; it was like a feather duster stroking her insides, heating her face and tingling her eardrums. As she neared her destination the buildings changed. They became pregnant with meaning; they almost bulged with it. She, Penny, had seen them. Maybe she walked past them each day.
Celeste got off in the Charing Cross Road. Thank goodness Buffy couldn’t see her. He would think it really odd. They hardly knew each other and yet here she was, tracking down his ex-wife! Somebody pointed her in the right direction. Soho. She pictured strip clubs and scantily-clad women lounging in doorways. Want a good time? For a mad moment she pictured Buffy’s ex-wife in a suspender belt and patent leather boots, blowing cigarette smoke at passing men. Soho was such a wicked word that her parents would only have spoken of it in lowered voices. If, that is, it had ever come up. The naughtiest thing in their street was Wanda’s lurex leggings.
It was ten in the morning and a light drizzle was falling. Celeste stood, undecided, in Old Compton Street. Men approached her, one by one. They didn’t want her body, however, they wanted her money. ‘Got fifty pence?’ A hand stretched out. ‘Got some change for a cup of tea?’ A purple face loomed close. ‘A quid, God bless you, miss?’ She couldn’t see any women at all; maybe they emerged at dusk, like slugs. The only person she could see in a doorway was so bundled up she couldn’t tell what sex it was; it sat there, surrounded by carrier bags.
She walked past boutiques selling clothes so unwearable-looking they must be fashionable. A lot of shops were closed
, with To Let signs on them. On a corner, some Japanese tourists were standing around looking pinched. It was a chilly day. In the doorway of the Prince Edward theatre there was a large cardboard box with Sony on it; inside it, somebody was stirring. Soho wasn’t how she imagined, but then none of London was how she imagined. There weren’t any strip clubs, as far as she could see. None at all. Only pasta restaurants.
Lots and lots of pasta restaurants. Pasta Fina. Fasta Pasta. Pasta’N’Pizza. Fatso’s Pasta Palace. Above them were rooms, she could see that all right. Lots of rooms, lots of flats. Windows with blinds on them, windows with curtains.
Which one was Penny’s? How on earth could she hope to spot her? She couldn’t possibly hang around outside every pasta restaurant in Soho waiting for somebody to emerge from the flat above. She didn’t even know what this Penny looked like. She was probably out at work anyway.
Celeste walked into Soho Square. She sat down heavily on a bench. A one-legged pigeon hopped away. It was hopeless. She should have realized that.
Back home there was another note to Waxie, sellotaped to the door. ‘See you at Bim’s at 5.’ In this huge city, so huge she could never glimpse the edge of it, people were connecting up. Unknown people called Waxie and Bim, even with names like that they were finding each other. In the flat upstairs, music was playing. Footsteps thudded across the ceiling. Through the walls they laughed their loud Waxie laughs and left notes for each other.
She wasn’t lost; she mustn’t panic. She had stepped out of the past into this windy city, she had woken up from the long, false sleep of her youth. She had sub-let the maisonette back in Willow Drive, she had finished with all that, and finally she had found Buffy. He had embraced her outside the patisserie, holding her in a bear hug. His girth, his warm tobacco breath . . . He seemed to need her. He had mumbled into her hair ‘I want to dissolve you in water and drink you up.’ At least that’s what it had sounded like. Did he really say that? Was it possible?
It was all so confusing. She had never felt like this before. Oh, she had felt desire – the flush and moistness of it, the dryness and the dizzy spells, the whooping clarity of the streets. She had kissed men in cars and she had even been to bed with one or two of them, but nobody had really entered her. With Buffy it was different. She didn’t know what she was feeling, she didn’t dare to think, but the next day, at work, there she was watching the door and waiting for him to come in. She borrowed a tester and rubbed blusher into her cheeks; she applied more lipstick. Still he didn’t come. She stayed in at lunchtime; she just ate a sandwich in the back room, pausing when she heard the ping of the door and casually leaning forward to look into the shop.
No time passes more slowly than an afternoon in an empty shop. Nesta didn’t notice anything, but then Nesta never did. Her friend from Nautilus Fitness down the road came in – business was slow there too – and took out her wedding photos. Nesta spent a long time over each one, sighing. It was four o’clock now. Celeste made up little ploys. If she went out to the lavatory he would come in . . . If she closed her eyes and counted to ten . . . Suddenly, ridiculously, she needed him. Maybe he had forgotten all about her. Maybe that tea had meant nothing.
‘Shame his little face is out of focus,’ said Nesta. Celeste turned. For the first time, she looked at what they held in their hands. Photos.
The package from the photographic lab was delivered at 4.30. It was her job to take out the individual wallets of photos and put them into the desk drawer, ready to be collected by the customers.
At six o’clock Nesta cashed up. Mr Singh opened the door to let the last customer out. In the street, the Honda puttered to a halt. Celeste slipped behind the counter, opened the big beige envelope and took something out.
She walked home along Kilburn High Road, past closed shops with their ghostly displays of shoes, past the illuminated pavement stalls selling jewellery. The bracelets winked at her confidingly. She felt like a criminal with a bomb in her pocket. She felt guilty, and deeply embarrassed, that she had borrowed Buffy’s photos. It seemed such an intrusion into his life. She hadn’t looked at them yet; she was putting it off, almost luxuriously, until she got into her flat. She passed Afro-Caribbean Hair Beauty, a big, busy place advertising 100% Human Hair Sold Here. It was still open; within the shop, veils of hair hung from the ceiling like seaweed. She crossed the road, clutching her coat to her chest. In her pocket lay pieces of Buffy’s life. It was amazing that nobody guessed what she had in there. Not amazing really, but she felt that. She paused at her doorway, fumbling for her keys. The charity shop was dark. Behind the window the mannequin leant towards her; today it was wearing a pillbox hat, set crooked on its bald head.
Upstairs she took out the wallet of photos and spread them over the table. The photos of the pavement hadn’t been developed. He was either such a hopeless photographer that they hadn’t come out or the lab had presumed they were a mistake, and too boring to print. She leant on her elbows, staring at the others. A train passed, way below. The table shook, as if there was a séance going on.
There were several photos of a country cottage; it had a conservatory, with a blurred figure inside it. In other photos various people lay around on rugs in the garden; Buffy was amongst them, fast asleep. He wore a red shirt and baggy blue trousers. Her throat tightened; looking at old snapshots always made her want to cry. Buffy, on some golden afternoon, raising his wine glass at the camera. Probably his wife was taking the photo. He looked younger, but then people in photos always did. Some teenagers, looking sullen. She couldn’t spot a family resemblance but maybe they weren’t his, she didn’t even know if he had any children.
And one photo of Buffy, standing in a vegetable garden holding up a bunch of carrots. A bunch of carrots! How unlikely. He wore a panama hat and a floppy cravat; there was a broad smile on his face. His arm around a woman with shiny chestnut hair.
Celeste sat there for a long time, looking at the photo. The sun on the two faces; the woman’s half in shadow, but distinct enough. His wife; you could tell, by the way they stood together. Chestnut hair, cut in a bob; jeans, white blouse.
Celeste sat there for a long time, gazing at this lost summer’s afternoon, fixed forever. A whole life she knew nothing about. Buffy, holding up the carrots like a trophy. His hand on his wife’s shoulder. The woman’s lips were parted. What was she saying? Something even they had long ago forgotten. A moment between them, frozen. From time to time a tube train passed beneath the house; Celeste shook, the table shook, her teeth chattered. She gazed at Penny. Now she knew what she looked like. She could memorize the face, now. And she was going to find her.
Eleven
THE HOUR BEFORE dawn, damp and dark outside, blackness pressing at the windows. In homes all over Britain nothing stirred except the glowing flip of digital clocks, keeping vigil in slumbering rooms. Couples slept back to back, dreaming their separate dreams whose wacky stories would dissolve in the morning like Alka-Seltzer in water. Children’s noses were cold. A click, in a bedroom, as a light was switched on. A click, in a kitchen, as a boiler hummed into life. Lorna was getting ready for work. The floorboards creaked as she crossed the room; behind the plasterwork, pipes hissed as she turned on the taps in the bathroom.
She lived alone, deep in the countryside. As the sky lightened her cottage grew solid, detaching itself from its surroundings as if it were stepping forward. Behind it rose the shoulder of a hill. This was dotted with grey rocks which, as the light grew, revealed themselves as sheep. Below it lay a wood; tangled trees and the inkier clots of conifers. A fox slipped from it and crossed the lawn. Birds pecked at the swinging gibbets of bacon rind; they flew off when she emerged and reappeared when she left. She had lived here for years but she had always felt like a transient, tolerated by the animals who were the real inhabitants of the place. She didn’t mind this; in fact she found it reassuring.
She bundled herself into her overcoat and scarf, pulled on her gumboots and set off through the wood. She
was only middle-aged but from a distance she looked like an ancient crone in a fairy story. An old tramp, even. Who cared? She didn’t.
Spiders’ webs wreathed the bushes. She knew every inch of this path – the bleached, flattened grass; the rotting plank over the ditch. Above her the bare branches rose imploringly to the sky. It wasn’t a large wood; she was familiar with most of the trees, as a teacher might be with her pupils. Some more than others, of course, one couldn’t help having favourites. They had grown older, just as she had, but in their case they had grown taller too. Brambles choked their ankles and some had fallen, slantingly, and come to rest against their neighbours. She passed the dark, hushed fir trees; between their trunks the silence was thick enough to touch. The air there held its breath; nothing stirred.
She emerged from the wood and walked along the edge of a ploughed field. Peewits rose and wheeled around her, crying. They did this every morning; you’d think they would have got used to her by now. A few rosehips still clung to the hedge. The earth in the field was so freshly-turned, so sharply-cut that it gleamed like flesh. The sun was still low. Why, she wondered, did the clouds lie motionless on the horizon yet race at the top of the sky? There was nobody to reply to this but she didn’t mind. Usually she didn’t. She had always been a solitary person and was accustomed to making up conversations in her head. It was like cooking for one – at least you knew what you were going to get.
She wriggled through the barbed wire and crossed the next field: a sheep meadow with a puddled, rushy pond in the middle. In the spring she found frogspawn in it. Each year, when she discovered the grey tapioca knobbling the surface, she felt the same electric jolt she had felt as a child; it was one of the few surprises that never wore off. The low sun cast a pearly pink light on the trunk of an ash tree. Below her lay the valley, sunk in mist. It was a lost, secret valley. Nothing disturbed it, not even the hum of the main road beyond the gate. Far away, a dog barked.
The Ex-Wives Page 6