The Ex-Wives

by Deborah Moggach

  They were silent for a while. From the bedroom came the sound of cracking bones. George must have discovered last night’s Kentucky Fried Chicken.

  ‘What about you?’ asked Buffy. ‘My Dark Continent?’

  ‘If there was anybody, you’d be the first to know. But there isn’t.’

  ‘Is everything all right?’

  India gazed down at her hands. He noticed the nicotine stains on her fingers.

  ‘I wish you didn’t smoke,’ he said. ‘It makes me feel guilty.’

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘Don’t what?’

  ‘Feel guilty.’

  ‘Heavens, nobody’s ever said that to me. Why shouldn’t I?’

  India was sitting on the floor. She pushed some crumbs into a little pile. ‘Remember when you and Mum used to have those awful, awful rows?’

  Buffy nodded.

  ‘And Bruno stood up in his cot and cried and rattled the bars,’ she said. ‘I used to lie in bed with my eyes tight shut, but it never did any good, you still went on yelling, I could still hear you.’

  ‘Don’t!’

  ‘Just like Mum was with Dad, but worse somehow. Maybe because I was older and I could understand what you were saying.’ She flattened the pyramid of crumbs with her finger. ‘Then you came in. You closed the door and sat beside my bed. And you put on Hammy’s voice – you didn’t put it on, you were Hammy. Or Voley or whoever it was, all those stupid animals. You took me somewhere else, along with you. We went off on our adventures.’ She looked up. ‘You were the only one who could do it. You let me escape.’

  He sighed. ‘So did I.’

  ‘You’re lucky. You’re an actor, you can do it all the time.’

  ‘Too bloody much of the time. That’s what they all said. Your Mum, and all the others.’

  She squashed the pile of crumbs and stood up. ‘I can’t, you see. Not any more.’ Abruptly, she pulled on her woolly hat and picked up her coat.

  ‘Don’t go!’ he cried. ‘Come out and have a spaghetti!’

  But she was at the door now. ‘Got to see someone.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Just a friend.’ She pushed aside some plastic bags and opened the door.

  Buffy got to his feet and followed her out. ‘Who?’

  She wasn’t taking the lift; she was hurrying down the stairs. Her voice echoed, as it floated back to him. ‘Someone called Waxie.’

  And she was gone.

  Buffy sank back into his chair. He suddenly felt terribly depressed. How he longed to see Celeste’s bright young face! But he didn’t know where she was. It was her day off but she had refused to go out with him; he had wanted to take her to the Tate and introduce her to Bonnard but she’d said she had something planned. Same with her day off the week before. He had rung her flat, twice, but there had been no answer.

  Maybe she was seeing someone else, a young vigorous man who wasn’t a hopeless failure, who hadn’t had the chance to be a hopeless failure. Whose future disasters weren’t even written yet. Whose inadequacies were still in embryonic form.

  Celeste was changing. She was wearing quite assertive clothes nowadays, fashionable clothes in strong colours. Last week, when he had taken her out to dinner, she had worn an almost intimidating jacket and a really rather seductive black dress. Was she just adapting to her habitat, or was there some unwelcome significance to this?

  He wished India hadn’t rushed off like that. It was five to eight. The sun was well over the yard-arm; in fact, it had been pitch dark for hours. No harm in a small scotch. He heaved himself to his feet and padded into the kitchen. It was freezing cold. He peered into the boiler. The pilot light was out.

  Blithering hell and damnation. Penny could fix the boiler but Penny wasn’t here. When halted at various obstacles in life’s path he suddenly missed the various women with whom he had cohabited, different ones according to the nature of the aggravation. When he couldn’t work the camera he thought of Penny; she would have remembered to remove the lens cap when photographing the pavement. She could get the car started, too; it was now rusting away in the residents’ parking bay, its battery long since dead. Any electrical mishaps reminded him of Phoebe, a costume designer with whom he had lived for a short and not entirely harmonious time but who had been surprisingly deft with a fusebox. When his houseplants withered – they had all withered – he thought of Jacquetta, who used to talk to them or something; whatever dotty methods she used, it did the trick. Lorna had had green fingers too . . . Lorna. Goodness, he hadn’t thought about her for years. She would be a middle-aged woman by now. Lorna . . . didn’t he say, once, that she was the love of his life?

  He drained his glass and poured himself another scotch, purely as insulation. He should have learnt how to do these things, fuseboxes and so on, when he had the chance. Trouble was, you didn’t think about it at the time and when the final explosion happened, the appalling bust-up, it didn’t cross your mind to say: By the way, before you go, could you just show me how to set the timer on the video recorder?

  What had they learned from him, and he from them? Popsi had showed him how to cook terrific mince, hers was the best of all his exes’ mince. Lorna had known the names of lots of birds, linnets and so on, she was always pointing them out, but most of the time he hadn’t been attending. A woman called Miriam had taught him the words of all the songs in Guys and Dolls. But it didn’t seem a lot, when you looked back on it. In fact, it seemed pitifully little. Maybe what he had learnt from them had been so profound that he couldn’t just at this moment put it into words.

  He looked around the kitchen. On the shelf sat Penny’s half-finished pot of Marmite. Lorna had loved Marmite too. So had nearly every woman he had known in a sufficiently domestic setting to discover this. No male acquaintance of his had liked Marmite, it seemed to be purely a female thing. He looked at the clutter of pots and jars. Would Celeste like Marmite? He would probably never know. He had been a failure, with his wives and his children and his step-children, how could he possibly crank himself up again for a lovely young creature like Celeste? How could he lumber her with someone like himself? If, that is, she wanted to be lumbered at all, which he was starting to doubt.

  Why was she constantly disappearing, and with whom? Maybe his role had just been to get her going. It was like when you rented one of those holiday apartments in the Algarve. In your room there would be one of those starter packs – a couple of teabags, a bun, maybe an orange. That was him. She had eaten him up and now she had learnt the language she was launching off into an independent life of her own.

  He made his way into the living room, knocking into India’s tea mug and slopping its contents on the floor. She had hardly drunk any of it. What was wrong with her; was it his fault, like everything else? She had sort of implied that it wasn’t, entirely; her words had deeply moved him.

  He switched on the TV. Leon’s face bloomed onto the screen.

  ‘. . . we must realize, Gavin, that for many people guilt is a fuel. They run on it, they can’t function without it –’

  The smug git. Buffy switched it off. He no longer wanted to kick in the TV, however; Leon’s face – fleshier now, and even more irritatingly handsome – no longer had the power to enrage him. It had been defused. Oh, the expense of spirit . . . They had all been defused. Even Penny, who he had recently glimpsed hailing a cab in Tottenham Court Road, even Penny had almost reverted back into a smart, glossy woman in an unfamiliar black coat. Eight years of sleeping in the same bed, of squabbling over the map in the car – eight years of everything had vaporised just like that, wasn’t it alarming? They had vaporised as if they had never happened. Or, more exactly, they had been drained of meaning, they were full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. He must never tell Celeste this, never. One must never tell such horror stories to the young; they would never get to sleep at night. Keep to the woodland creatures.

  He wasn’t inebriated. Just cosmic. He put a Brahms quartet on the record player; he put
on his overcoat and sat in front of the dead TV. A man he’d met in New York had once been walking past a record shop with Mia Farrow. The window had displayed a collection of Frank Sinatra records; she had paused, and nearly gone in to buy one. It was only then that she had realized she had been married to Frank Sinatra, once.

  He thought of all the women he had known. Of course he could remember them; the hot agonies might have vaporised but the memories remained. He could draw nourishment from them for years, like a camel with water stored in its hump. He remembered the way Popsi poured Nescafé into the lid, instead of taking it out with a spoon – a habit either endearing or irritating, depending on his mood. Did other people do this? He hadn’t met any. Penny’s schoolgirlish wriggle each morning as she pulled on her surprisingly puritanical cotton knickers. Carmella’s deft and impressive card-shuffling; their happiest hours had been spent playing gin rummy, with Nyange asleep in her cot. Who was Carmella playing card games with now? Where was his daughter, Nyange? Was Penny wearing lacier and more interesting knickers for that awful photographer, and pulling them on in a more lascivious manner?

  Sometimes he wondered if they knew what they had in common, these women whose only similarity was, to some degree, he supposed, temporarily loving him. He knew what life was like with each of them, that was his secret. He was like a computer database, with all this information stored in him. The way Jacquetta brushed her teeth, sucking moisture from the brush and spitting, never rinsing from a mug. Everybody he had lived with brushed their teeth in a different manner. Those intimate moments, in so many bathrooms! Lorna – yes, Lorna, now he remembered it – she used to dust herself with talc, a cloud of it, her hips thrust forward. She and Popsi, though they didn’t know it, had shared a cheerful lack of inhibition in the bathroom, peeing while he shaved (he was beardless then), both wiping themselves daintily from the front rather than the rear, the only two women he had known who did it that way round. Popsi even used to insert her diaphragm when he was in the room, squeezing cream onto it with the skilled insouciance of a patissiere anointing a tartelet.

  The temperature was dropping. He lit another cigarette, clumsily, with his gloved hands. Then there was the lovemaking, ah, the lovemaking. He shouldn’t think like this but he couldn’t help it. Even freezing cold, he blushed. The warm bodies, the chilly toes, the blind rapture and damp embarrassments . . . Jacquetta’s thin, strenuous body, the way she climaxed whimperingly, turning her face away as if it were too precious to share. Penny’s wholesomely gymnastic approach, at least during the early years, her smooth but hefty thighs gripping him like a vice, the surprisingly rude words she whispered into his ear, words she never used during daylight hours, like the louche company one only met in nightclubs . . . Popsi’s boozy breath and gratifyingly multiple orgasms . . . Oh, the breasts he had known, the heaviness of them in his hand, the soft stomachs and hard shoulder-blades . . . the skin . . . the fingers . . . A girl called Annabel in that hotel room in Rye . . . Desperate and adulterous copulations in the backseat of cars, the windows steaming up . . . the indignities, the bare buttocks . . . The marital companionability and giggles, the familiar adjustments of flesh against flesh, limb against limb, year after year, ouches on holiday when they were sunburnt, dear secret places where someone else was trespassing now, though they weren’t of course, he himself had trespassed since . . .

  Shut up. He could go on like this for ever. There was nobody, of course, that he could ever tell. And each woman he had loved, she held all those secrets locked within her, too – of other men who at the time he couldn’t bear to contemplate, you blocked them out. What were they doing now, Phoebe and Annabel and Popsi and all the others? They stayed, fixed, at the age he had known them; such is the egocentricity of memory. In his head they were still young women though some of them would be grandmothers now. What were they doing – making tea for somebody else; opening a tin of cat food? Ten to one they weren’t sitting in front of a blank TV thinking of him.

  In some ways it was a relief, of course. It was a relief that he no longer had to visit Penny’s testy old father in Ascot, that he no longer had to pretend to himself that Jacquetta’s paintings were any good. These were other people’s responsibilities now, and sometimes he felt a grateful warmth towards his successors. It was like passing on a troublesome car which sooner or later would start making that funny knocking noise. This wasn’t a sexist comment because he felt exactly the same about himself. My God, the complaints about his performance! Women had used him and passed him on, ruthlessly in many cases. They had ransacked him en route like departing soldiers, stripping him of his home and his children.

  Sometimes, however, he had felt barely touched. Some women, Jacquetta for instance, hadn’t really registered him at all. She had never looked at his childhood snapshots or shown the slightest interest in his past. She was either distracted or prickly. Coming home from a dinner party, for instance, he would make some mild remark like: ‘Isn’t it odd how people who’re wonderful cooks often make awful coffee, and vice versa?’ Instead of companionably agreeing or disagreeing she would bark: ‘What do you mean? I can’t cook?’ Other women, less neurotic but as healthily egocentric, had blithely let him foot the bill and slipped from him into the traffic, into other arms. Sometimes he felt like a bottle of wine that travels from one party to another, passed from host to host, a bottle so undrinkable that nobody wants to open it. Hirondelle, say, or that stuff called Red Table Wine: Product of More than One Country.

  He topped up his glass. Penny had once said: ‘You’re just an old soak. You’re not even brave enough to be an alcoholic!’ A remark he had felt was both glib and deeply meaningless; typical of a journalist.

  Lorna wasn’t like that. What had happened to Lorna the country-lover, the bird-spotter? He had loved her once. He could get quite maudlin, thinking about those missed opportunities. The right woman at the wrong time, and – my God – vice versa. No point in it, really. He was alone now. There was nobody just to be around, somewhere in the flat, when he opened his income tax demands. At certain moments even an unsupportive woman was better than nothing. He’d better go and see the blasted porter about the blasted pilot light.

  Buffy tried to raise himself from his armchair. George, who had been sitting beside him, thumped his tail and climbed to his feet. Buffy sat down again; the whole operation seemed too complicated, just now. George sank back to the floor.

  Celeste . . . oh, Celeste . . .

  Nineteen

  CELESTE SAT IN the candlelight, drinking a glass of wine. She had got the idea of the candles from Jacquetta’s house; she had bought them at the late-night shop and stuck them in saucers around the room. How magical! She could no longer see the damp patches on the wall, or the marks where the previous tenants had hung their pictures. Though she had put away her little crucifix, though the tentative faith she had once possessed had been rocked to its shallow foundations, the candles made her room feel sacred and somehow stiller than usual, even though the shadows danced elastically and the rabbits hopped around the carpet. Wine-drinking was a habit she had picked up from Penny. A glass or two in the evening, that was all. Sancerre, because that was what Penny had been drinking and Celeste didn’t know any other kind. She tipped back her glass and drained it. If Buffy’s exes could do all this, why couldn’t she?

  Since she had visited Penny, the week before, two more large boxes had been delivered. She had unpacked everything and laid out the objects on every available surface. She didn’t know where these objects were going to be photographed, or when – nobody had mentioned this or indeed how much money she herself was going to be paid – but she needed to display them so that she could write down their descriptions and divide them into groups.

  Growing Things was one. Flowerpots had been constructed from just about anything that was vaguely cylindrical, lampshades included. Seedling trays had been made out of the paper cups from boxes of chocolates and the cut-off fingers of rubber gloves. By pricking holes
in the bottom of a sports holdall someone had created a capacious Gro-Bag – with handy travel handles said the accompanying note, though it didn’t explain why one should want to take tomatoes anywhere. Safety Aids was another group. This included a pair of child’s waterwings constructed from the styrofoam shapes used to pack a hi-fi. Broken rubber bands, knotted together, provided the straps. Handy Hints was a general sort of title, used for things like coffee-cup cosies made out of discarded sweaters and a stamp-moistener made from an empty roll-on deodorant bottle.

  Just looking at them made her feel obscurely weary. She was starting to realize that no classification was really possible, even by a mind as logical as hers. Some of the objects seemed to have three or four uses and some seemed to have no use at all. Even if they had a use, she could never imagine anyone actually using them. And she still hadn’t worked out the thing with the colander. Ranged around the room in the candlelight, they resembled religious offerings donated by a deeply confused congregation. One of the rabbits was already nibbling at a bundle of cut-up tights, which had been accompanied by a long explanatory letter she seemed to have lost.

  She had a suspicion that the whole business was getting out of hand. Besides, there was something else that disturbed her, some symbolic meaning to it all that she didn’t want to examine. It seemed to be to do with Buffy, and her place in his life. What had Penny said about 100 uses for a discarded husband? Maybe he saw her as a new shoot growing from the rubbish tip of his past – a rubbish tip which daily grew in size as she discovered more about it. Old tights and all.

  She mustn’t think about this; not now. She missed him desperately; she longed to pick up the phone. But she mustn’t; not yet. Instead she looked at his sons’ rabbits. One of them was eating a digestive biscuit which she had laid out on a plate, along with some lettuce leaves and a bit of cucumber. Under the table stood their cardboard box. Its bottom was damp from their long voyage and littered with droppings like spilled raisins. The sticker saying Guilt: A User’s Guide was peeling off. Not surprisingly, the rabbits showed no inclination to go back into it. If only somebody had sent something really useful, something that could be turned into a hutch! She would have to buy one tomorrow, in her lunch hour, if she could find a pet shop. The rabbits were all black, and larger than she had thought at first; they weren’t really babies at all. But it was nice to have some company; she had always liked animals and had been devoted, as a child, to her guinea-pig Jonathan. His death had been her first acquaintanceship with grief. When she had needed to stop giggling – during school prayers, say – she only needed to picture his stiff little body to come to a shuddering halt.