The Ex-Wives

by Deborah Moggach

  That time it was a microwave cooker. Lucky he was home all day to take the stuff in. The house was filling up. At the top of the stairs was the little bedroom where he pictured their child would be; he had even papered it with a frieze of teddy bears. But they didn’t seem to be able to have a baby and now the room was stacked with things he could never imagine anyone wanting, more and more of them, piled up: a thermos-gas barbecue, a Phillips foot spa, a digitally-controlled hostess trolley. In the corner was heaped £250-worth of Marley Cushion Flooring, consolation prize in the Shake’N’Vac competition. It was impossible to open the window anymore; it was wedged shut with a boxed set of Dunlop Maxfli golf club and balls. He had never played golf. ‘Get on with you,’ said Brenda, ‘you could learn. I’ll win you lessons!’ She kept winning things for him; she thought they were in on this together and that they’d become Comping Couple of the Year. She didn’t seem to notice his lack of interest. He had hidden some of the stuff in the cupboard – trouser presses, things like that. There was £ioo-worth of Denim Men’s Toiletries in there; he got a whiff of it sometimes, when he passed.

  She didn’t notice because, like an addict, she was onto her next fix. Where did this hunger come from? Was it his fault? Maybe he had disappointed her and she was trying to fill the void. Maybe it was his fault that she hadn’t got pregnant. He didn’t dare ask; she didn’t like questions. If he asked: ‘What’s all this for?’ she would gaze at him, her eyes blank. And then he would get that hollow, lonely feeling again.

  That night, in bed, she snuggled up to him. ‘Poor Gail,’ she said, ‘she’s always going out with such awful men. They think she’s desperate, just because she’s living with her mum.’ She kissed his ear and pushed her hand inside his pyjama bottoms, caressing his buttock. ‘Aren’t I the lucky one? They all say so.’

  Her bold familiarity made him sad. He willed her to go to sleep but her fingers were working on him, she was deft and businesslike. She could still arouse him even though his mind was miles away. He remembered the first time they had made love. They had just met, at a party. They were both drunk and fumblingly passionate, in bed at his flat. The local radio station was playing rhythm and blues. Just as they were shudderingly reaching a climax the music had stopped and the 2 a.m. news came on: In Belfast, a publican and his wife were killed when an IRA gunman shot them at point blank range. Even this had not checked their ardour, not in those days.

  When they had finished, she curled herself against his shoulder and told him about the treasure hunt. It was the competition on the can of pilchards. ‘Tomorrow I’m sending off the entry form,’ she said, ‘just think of it – Hong Kong, Sydney, Disneyworld! Just the two of us!’

  She fell asleep abruptly, breathing into his neck, her leg hooked round his thigh. It was cold. He wanted to put on his pyjama bottoms but on the other hand he didn’t want to wake her up. A dual-choice question: Was this because a) he was so nice, or b) he didn’t want her to go on talking? If she won the prize, could he send her round the world all by herself?

  That night, gazing at the sodium light glowing through the curtains, he realized quite clearly that his marriage was a mistake. It was such an alarming thought that he didn’t quite put it into words, even to himself. Life was so chancy; it was chancier than any scratch-card, and much more terrifying. Looking back, he could pinpoint the exact moments when he had made the wrong choice and set in motion a series of events he had been powerless to stop. One such moment had been standing at the school noticeboard and realizing that if he kept on with physics he could get out of games. The quickening momentum of this choice had propelled him into college and from there into the research labs of Glaxo’s, six numbing years from which he had only just been rescued by redundancy. What on earth was he going to do now, with all his boats burned?

  Another such moment had been bumping into an acquaintance called Neville Bowman at an off-licence one Friday night. Neville was buying a bottle of Hirondelle to take to a party, so instead of renting a video Miles had joined him and thus set ticking the count-down to that moment when he first glimpsed Brenda in the kitchen, nibbling a gherkin. She wore a strapless top-thing that exposed her plump, creamy shoulders. How lively she was! She chatted to him non-stop. Being shy himself, or maybe just lazy, he had always been attracted to bold, talkative girls and Brenda was certainly bold. By midnight they were pressed against the wall on an upstairs landing, kissing passionately as people squeezed past on their way to the loo. Briefly he had opened his eyes and seen her waving, over his shoulder, to one of her girlfriends.

  Maybe even then it wouldn’t have gone further. But when they paused for a breather he had felt obliged to back-pedal a bit and ask her about herself, what she liked doing in her spare time and so forth.

  ‘Comping,’ she had said.

  ‘Really? So do I!’ His heart had swelled. Suddenly she was dear to him. Not just sexy, but a friend too. He had never met a girl who liked camping. They could stride across the Berkshire Downs, ruddy-cheeked; she could help him carry his equipment, which had always been too heavy for one. They could bird-watch together and then, of course, there was that good old double sleeping-bag waiting. He had kissed her with real ardour then – with love, even. And by the time he discovered that he had misheard her – comping was a word unfamiliar to him then – it was really too late.

  He lay there, his eyes open, visualizing drastic measures. A tornado swept up all the little houses in the Hazeldene Estate and blew them away, spinning, like Dorothy’s house in The Wizard of Oz. His own house landed in such a distant land he could never find it, and Brenda would live happily there with someone else. The whole thing painless.

  Or – he would simply go to sleep and realize that these past two years had been a dream. He would wake up and it would all be over. He had never gone to the party that night; he had rented the video and fallen asleep in front of the TV . . .

  Or . . . or he scratched Brenda’s back with his fingernail . . . under her skin, a message was revealed. What did it say . . . why couldn’t he make out the letters? . . . Or was it numbers, a secret combination he must unlock . . . he tried to read it but he couldn’t, and now it was blurring . . .

  Miles slept, imprisoned and released, unaware that downstairs the can of fishes was going to take the decision out of his hands, just as the biscuit tin had done for Celeste, and that his life was already moving in a direction where everything would be changed, utterly; that in the future he would indeed look back on these years with the detached and vaguely affectionate curiosity of someone who had, in fact, simply dreamed them.

  Twenty-two

  ‘SO WHAT DID you do last night, my treasure, my pigeon?’ asked Buffy. ‘I missed you.’

  ‘I went to Citizen Kane.’

  ‘Who with?’

  ‘Nobody,’ said Celeste. ‘I feel so ignorant, I want to catch up. I went by myself.’

  Could he believe her? She smiled at him – such a clear, candid face!

  ‘I wish I’d taken you,’ he said. ‘I love watching you watching things.’

  Celeste didn’t reply. They sat down in the stalls. He had brought her to the Barbican to see The Winter’s Tale. She rearranged his back-support cushion, wedging him in. Sitting in a theatre with Celeste made him realize how old he was getting – how the seats were getting smaller and harder, how the actors’ voices were becoming more mumblingly indistinct. Celeste’s youth was like a light being switched on in a house – the twilit garden was immediately plunged into darkness, her brightness edged it towards night. He was the garden, of course.

  They settled down. Normally nothing would induce him to come to the Barbican, it made him feel like a prisoner of Stalinism, but he thought that she might be moved by the play, with its magic and redemption, its possibilities of miracles. Besides, Leontes was being played by an old rival of his, a reformed hell-raiser called Dermott Metcalfe who was rapidly becoming a Grand Old Man of the Theatre – a title earned by anybody if they stuck at it long e
nough, had one lucky break and kept out of the boozer. Dermott and he had been rivals in love, too. Long, long ago, on tour with The Voysey Inheritance, they had both fallen for the DSM, a comely redhead called Serena, and though Buffy had briefly enjoyed her favours it was Dermott who had finally captured her – indeed, who had married her. Probably was married to her still. Somewhere in Sussex she would be ageing beautifully – she had a splendid bone structure – and serving tea to colour supplement journalists who had come down to interview her husband.

  The lights went down; the play began. Buffy took Celeste’s small, cool hand and pressed it to his chest.

  ‘Too hot, too hot!’ cried Leontes, ‘To mingle friendship far is mingling bloods. I have tremor cordis in me: my heart dances; But not for joy; not joy . . .’

  He had always been irritated by Leontes – what a stubborn, blustering old fool! Fancy suspecting a wife like Hermione. Anyone could see she wasn’t the sort to two-time him; she wasn’t going to plaster herself with Sudden Tan and fornicate above a pasta shop.

  ‘Inch-thick, knee-deep, o’er head and ears a forked one!’ Leontes shook his locks. ‘. . . many a man there is even at this present, Now, while I speak this, holds his wife by the arm, That little thinks she has been sluic’d in’s absence, And his pond fished by his next neighbour . . .’

  Dermott was doing the business in a sonorous, look-at-me way that seemed to go down all right with the audience, but they looked as if they all came from Kansas. Buffy turned to gaze at Celeste – the stem-like neck, the choir-boy profile. She seemed entranced.

  ‘Is whispering nothing?’ Bellowed Leontes. ‘Is leaning cheek to cheek? Is meeting noses? Kissing with inside lip? Stopping the career of laughter with a sigh?’

  He wanted to tell her it should be me up there! The trouble was, the dramas in his own life had effectively eclipsed those of his career. Too many bloody dramas on the domestic front. Rows and recriminations and, all right then, the odd blinder, but only when a chap was at breaking point . . . The chaos brought on by the defection of his various wives – Jacquetta, for instance, rushing off to Wales with that creepy Gestalt therapist when he was just preparing his Macduff. Her other escapade to Egypt. The hungover, cross-country trek to reclaim his sons from her mother, whose outrage seemed inexplicably directed at him rather than her nymphomaniac daughter . . . The bust-up with Popsi which sabotaged that film job. Only Popsi could barge into The Ivy, where he was lunching with the director, and manage to fling a bowlful of vichyssoise into the director’s lap. Her aim had always been poor . . . The bloodsucking lawyers, barely out of their teens, who summoned him to court when he should have been in rehearsal, who bled him dry and forced him to turn down the BBC and take that mini-series job in L.A. that didn’t survive the pilot. And yet nobody blamed the women. Well, they were women, weren’t they? He was a brute, an egotistical bastard, an oppressor. They weren’t, oh no! Their possession of fallopian tubes absolved them from any blame and to cap it all they stole his children too –

  Buffy blinked. Up on stage, Hermione was speaking.

  ‘Take the boy to you: he so troubles me, ’Tis past enduring . . .’

  She lifted up her son and gave him to one of her attendants – a slender, dark-skinned girl in an ochre gown. Buffy stared. Where had he seen that girl before? Waiting tables at the patisserie? She looked so familiar.

  The girl put her arm around the child. ‘Come, my gracious lord,’ she said, ‘Shall I be your playfellow?’

  Working behind the counter at some shop he frequented? Where was it?

  The girl turned, tossing her head. Buffy sat there, frozen. Oh, my God. Now he knew. Once, years ago, he had arrived at the place where she lived – a flat, three flights up, in the Elephant and Castle or somewhere. He had arrived to take her out to tea. She had opened the door to him – a skinny thing, pigtails, twelve or thirteen. She had turned, tossing her head like that, and called, ‘Mum, there’s a man here.’

  ‘Bear the boy hence!’ shouted Leontes. ‘Away with him!’

  Nyange swept off-stage, taking the child with her. Buffy sat there, rigid, until the interval lights came up. He put on his spectacles and fumblingly leafed through the programme. There she was: First Lady . . . Nyange Jamison. His own daughter.

  People were stirring. Beside him, Celeste was asking a question.

  ‘. . . wife,’ she seemed to be saying. Something about a wife.

  ‘Hermione,’ he answered abstractedly. ‘That’s Leontes’s wife. He thinks she’s being unfaithful, the old paranoid.’

  ‘No. Your wives.’

  ‘What?’ He tried to gather his scattered wits.

  ‘Your wives,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know you had so many.’

  He looked at her. ‘You never asked.’

  She shrugged. ‘It just seems rather a lot to me.’

  ‘Me too! I didn’t want it, you know. I didn’t choose to be married to lots of wives.’ He closed the programme. ‘I didn’t think – when I grow up I want to get divorced three times, what fun!’ He put his arm around her awkwardly, wedged in his seat. ‘One day you might understand, my darling girl.’

  She got up. ‘Let’s get a drink.’

  Her voice was thin and sharp, almost commanding. Maybe she had noticed his attention straying. She looked at him coolly, as if, when it came to women, he suffered from some form of incontinence. How could he tell her about Nyange now? He wanted to point out his daughter’s name in the programme but this was hardly the time to spring upon Celeste yet another instance of his supposed lack of control. In fact it had been Carmella, Nyange’s mother, who had wanted a baby in the first place but it would doubtless seem churlish to point this out.

  They moved towards the bar. He wanted to say: that was my daughter up there! Last time I heard she was a model but now look at her. Acting’s in her blood, that’s why; she got it from me. Oh, if only she had told me. I could teach her a tip or two, if she had come to me. She is my daughter, dammit.

  If Celeste wasn’t being so chilly he could put his arms around her and say: That was my daughter up there, I haven’t seen her for years. I used to take her to the Soda Fountain at Fortnum’s. I used to watch her shovelling in Knickerbocker Glory and telling me about her new stepfather, oh, the pain of it! I used to send her birthday presents until I got disheartened by the lack of response. I used to send her presents that were too young for her; I only realized that later. I sent her a box of magic tricks and the next time I saw her she was wearing lipstick. When you have lost your children you stay forever a step behind. All over the world, banished fathers are sending their children clothes that are one size too small. Maybe we want them to stay young forever. To stop the clock. Then we’ll start again and get it right this time.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Celeste held him arm. ‘Are you okay?’ She sat him down; her voice had softened. ‘You look awful.’

  During the second half he decided to brazen it out. When the curtain came down he would take Celeste round to the Stage Door and introduce them. Who knows? Celeste might even consider him racy to have fathered this exotic, dusky creature. Out of wedlock, too, for he had never been married to Nyange’s mother. Up on the stage Camillo was speaking.

  ‘I have heard, sir, of such a man, who hath a daughter of rare note: the report of her is extended more than can be thought to begin from such a cottage.’

  Of course they must meet. How piquant! Besides, he himself was longing to meet Nyange again – at last in a setting that both of them understood: the theatre. A world that could bond them together at last. Watching his daughter move across the stage, poised and solemn, he felt a curious warmth. It was such an unfamiliar sensation that for most of Act IV he couldn’t identify it. Then he realized: it was pride. He was actually proud of one of his children. Would it be asking too much for them ever to be proud of him? Yes.

  ‘You gods! Look down, and from your sacred vials pour your graces upon my daughter’s head!’

  The cast took t
heir bows to loud applause. Buffy grabbed his back-rest and ushered Celeste out.

  ‘There’s someone I want you to meet,’ he whispered.

  ‘Is this the way?’ asked Celeste.

  LEVEL 8, said the sign. TIERS 1/2.

  They hurried along a sodium-lit corridor. At the end was a gate. EMERGENCY EXIT. He rattled the bars; it was locked.

  He took her hand; they hurried down another corridor and emerged onto a windy walkway. It was freezing. Their feet clattered on the concrete.

  ‘I’m sure this is wrong,’ she panted.

  They pounded up a flight of stairs. GATE 2. Again they were stopped by a locked door. Beside it was a metal plate of entryphone buttons. NORTH STAIR. FLATS 28-46. Buffy’s heart pounded; he tried to catch his breath.

  They hurried down a ramp. LEVEL 8. An arrow pointed one way. LEVEL 7. An arrow pointed another way. FOLLOW GATE TO YOUR DESTINATION. They hurried down another corridor and pushed open a door. A stream of cars thundered by, choking them with exhaust fumes. They seemed to be in some underground road. What a nightmare this place was! Where was the Stage Door? Signs and arrows pointed them in all directions, NO ACCESS TO VEHICLES. ADVANCE BOOKING LEVEL 5. SPRINKLER STOP VALVE INSIDE. How could he get to his daughter when everything conspired to confuse him? Once, when he was visiting his sons in Primrose Hill, he had been allowed to go upstairs to Bruno’s room. On the door was a large metal sign saying NO ENTRY.

  They hurried across the carpeted, orange expanse of wherever they were, some level or other. The Barbican building was emptying. Maybe he was losing his way on purpose. Maybe he was doomed to take the wrong turning, to find himself up a blind alley. To bang on the glass while one son, Quentin, slid out of sight, disappearing into Harrods. To gaze helplessly at Nyange, unreachable on a stage.