The Ex-Wives

by Deborah Moggach

  Even Jacquetta had drunk a tumblerful of Cinzano. She looked down at Buffy. ‘Remember those picnics in Provence, when Bruno and Tobias were babies? Remember the smell of lavender and camembert?’

  ‘I remember everything,’ said Buffy.

  ‘Even when you were too drunk to remember,’ said Penny.

  He tapped his head. ‘It’s all in here. In my as yet unwritten memoirs. Even as you sit here, like hyenas around the carcass of an old water buffalo.’

  Celeste looked at the three ex-wives. ‘Say it was worth it! You can’t just switch it off, can you? Say it was all worth while!’ She drained her glass; her brain buzzed. ‘Say you miss him.’

  Penny raised her hand. ‘Only if we don’t have to have him back.’

  ‘I just want to know,’ said Celeste. She had such a long, laborious past to recover, it had to mean something. All of it. Otherwise what was the point?

  ‘I miss you.’ Penny looked down at Buffy. ‘I miss you when I want to go to the theatre. Thingy never goes to the theatre. I miss you when I’ve got something to say that only you’ll understand. Something about tennis balls, for instance; I was thinking about rich people’s tennis balls the other day. There are things I’ll never have a reply to, now.’ She munched, thoughtfully. ‘I don’t miss your dog, though.’

  Popsi said: ‘I was thinking about you only last week, pet. They’d pinned up this sign saying More Stalls Upstairs. You once said to me that there were two signs that always made you feel depressed, though you didn’t know why. One was More Stalls Upstairs and the other was Light Refreshments will be Served.’

  ‘You remember that?’ asked Buffy.

  She nodded.

  ‘I don’t,’ he said.

  ‘You weren’t even that bad in bed,’ said Penny. ‘We were only joking, about the carrot.’

  ‘What carrot?’ demanded Buffy.

  ‘We had our moments, didn’t we?’ she said. ‘At least you talked afterwards. And during. Sometimes you talked so much we had to stop.’

  ‘Ssh!’ said Popsi, ‘not in front of the children.’

  Jacquetta gazed at a piece of ravioli, stuck on the end of her fork. ‘I miss the person I was, with you. When somebody goes, the person you were, with them, that person disappears too. Nobody else can bring that person back. When a marriage breaks up, it’s two people you’ve lost.’

  There was a silence. ‘That’s deep,’ said Popsi. The mistletoe had slid below her ear.

  ‘It doesn’t end, does it?’ asked Celeste. ‘Look, we’re here! We’re here now!’

  They sat there, in tipsy contemplation. The meal was finished. They screwed up their napkins and threw them into the fire; the flames flared. They lifted their plates off Buffy’s stomach. Celeste turned to her mother. ‘Did you miss him?’

  Lorna stood up, holding a handful of plates. Behind her, a piece of holly slipped beneath the picture frame and fell to the floor. She shook her head. ‘Not really.’ She stepped over Buffy, on her way to the kitchen. ‘But I missed you.’ She turned to Celeste. ‘I missed you all the time. When I worked in Selfridges I thought you’d come in to try on a jumper. Then I moved to Dover and started a little flower shop. Weddings and christenings, we made up these bouquets. I thought – who knows? One day? Silly really, but I always hoped. Then they knocked us down to build a car park and the only job I could get round here was in catering. Not my thing really, but I thought – all those people passing through, surely one of them might be you? All those years, feeding other people . . . I thought you’d walk in the door and somehow I’d recognize you. I thought you’d be wearing the same sort of clothes I liked wearing, even the shoes. Which was ridiculous. I just thought I’d know who you were.’ She paused, at the door. ‘Oh, I missed you all right.’

  Outside stood a snowman. Large and shapeless, it stood in the middle of the lawn. It wore Buffy’s trilby hat and his overcoat. It stood facing the glowing curtains of the cottage. The conker eyes gazed sightlessly as the snowman stood facing the music. Dizzy Gillespie played, echoing down the years. Music to dance to, to fall in love to; music for sex and for love. The snowman stood there, freezing hard. Around it, the ground was scuffed and muddied by the children’s feet.

  The Dizzy Gillespie record finished with a click. They sat there in the silence. After a moment they realized it wasn’t completely quiet; there was a low humming sound. Maybe it was the record-player motor.

  They sat very still. Popsi belched. ‘Whoops,’ she said, ‘pardon.’

  They listened. There was a far rumbling sound, the sound of an engine. They held their breath; they felt like castaways, hearing the drone of an approaching airplane.

  It was getting louder. Suddenly they jumped up and hurried to the window. Crowding around it, jostling each other, they pulled open the curtains. A sheep’s skull fell to the floor.

  They pressed their faces against the glass. Outside, a pair of headlights shone in the darkness.

  ‘It’s Leon,’ said Jacquetta. ‘Just when I was starting to enjoy myself.’ She turned round and said to Buffy. ‘He’s always been jealous of you.’

  ‘He hasn’t!’ said Buffy, from the floor. ‘Has he?’

  ‘Why do you think he writes all those books?’

  Penny stared into the dark. Torchlight was approaching, bobbing across the garden. ‘It’s Colin, being all manly,’ she said. ‘do you know, he’s never said he loves me. This is his inarticulate way of showing it.’

  ‘I used to say I loved you!’ said Buffy. ‘All the time.’

  Quentin nudged Penny aside and pressed his nose against the glass. The torchlight was closer now, dazzling him. ‘Maybe it’s Talbot,’ he said. ‘But I don’t think so somehow. Anyway he can’t drive.’

  The doorbell rang. Lorna went out to answer it. The other women waited. For some reason they looked sheepish, as if they had been caught in flagrante. They heard a man’s voice, in the hall. They heard the rumble of motors and more men’s voices, out in the garden. They smelt exhaust fumes.

  Lorna came back in. She spoke to Celeste. ‘It’s that man we met in the wood last night.’

  Celeste stared at her. ‘What?’

  ‘That man who took such a fancy to you. The man with the awful wife.’

  ‘He’s here?’

  ‘What an angel,’ said Lorna. ‘He’s come to resuce us. He’s got them to bring the snowplough down the lane.’ She turned. ‘Celeste?’

  But Celeste had gone. She had stumbled over Buffy and rushed out into the hall.

  Thirty-two

  THE NEXT DAY the snow melted. In the wood the trees dripped; secret sighs and creaks. A soft thud as the snow loosened and fell from a bough. In Lorna’s garden the snowman was melting. Gradually, Buffy thawed. The burly shape dwindled, perspiring in the sunshine. The overcoat sagged; the hat sank into its shoulders. As the hours passed it subsided gently into its own pool of water.

  The next day, all that remained was a bundle of empty clothes on the scuffed and muddy grass. A puddle, surrounded by the skiddy footmarks of its children.

  Thirty-three

  LATER, MONTHS LATER, when Celeste and Miles were living together, he said to her: ‘Just think. A little tin of fishes led me to you, my gorgeous. Pilchards! I don’t even like them. Do you?’

  She shook her head. A little gold fish had led her, too – back into the past and forward into the future. Sometimes, when she looked back to the events of that winter it all seemed like a fairy story. If she went back to the antiques arcade Popsi’s booth would be shuttered up with a metal grid. Who? Nobody of that name here. Who has a name like that anyway? If she opened the paper and read a travel piece by Penny who could believe it? Had Penny really sipped a daiquiri in Barbados or was she lying on somebody’s floor spinning her own dreams? The recycling book was never published; the Leisure Experience was never built.

  Waxie and the other squatters had long since moved into her flat and changed the locks. In fact she had never gone back at all. The rabbit
s and telephones and colanders; they had never really belonged to her. They were just props that had helped her form this new character, Celeste; props that seemed to mean something at the time, if only she had understood.

  What did it all mean, and did it matter anymore? Everyone she loved, she had them now, and they had her. She had joined them. She had even helped create an ex-wife of her own – Brenda, languishing in Swindon. She felt so guilty about this that she had started to read Leon’s book. She had joined them all right, her tumultuous new family.

  And that afternoon she was meeting Buffy for tea. They were going to plan his delayed sixtieth birthday party, to which everyone was invited. They had to meet early because he was working that night. He was playing Mr Hardcastle in She Stoops to Conquer and, what with the wig and whatnot, the make-up took ages.

  Read on for the first chapter of Deborah Moggach’s brilliant new novel Something to Hide

  Pimlico, London

  I’ll tell you how the last one ended. I was watching the news and eating supper off a tray. There was an item about a methane explosion, somewhere in Lincolnshire. A barn full of cows had blown up, killing several animals and injuring a stockman. It’s the farting, apparently.

  I missed someone with me to laugh at this. To laugh, and shake our heads about factory farming. To share the bottle of wine I was steadily emptying. I wondered if Alan would ever move in. This was hard to imagine. What did he feel about factory farming? I hadn’t a clue.

  And then, there he was. On the TV screen. A reporter was standing outside the Eurostar terminal, something about an incident in the tunnel. Passengers were milling around behind him. Amongst them was Alan.

  He was with a woman. Just a glimpse and he was gone.

  I’m off to see me bruv down in Somerset. Look after yourself, love, see you Tuesday.

  Just a glimpse but I checked later, on iPlayer. I reran the news and stopped it at that moment. Alan turning towards the woman and mouthing something at her. She was young, needless to say, much younger than me, and wearing a red padded jacket. Chavvy, his sort. Her stilled face, eyebrows raised. Then they were gone, swallowed up in the crowd.

  See you Tuesday and I’ll get that plastering done by the end of the week.

  Don’t fuck the help. For when it ends, and it will, you’ll find yourself staring at a half-plastered wall with wires dangling like entrails and a heap of rubble in the corner. And he nicked my power drill.

  Before him, and the others, I was married. I have two grown-up children but they live in Melbourne and Seattle, as far away as they could go. Of course there’s scar tissue but I miss them with a physical pain of which they are hopefully unaware. Neediness is even more unattractive in the old than in the young. Their father has long since remarried. He has a corporate Japanese wife who thinks I’m a flake. Neurotic, needy, borderline alcoholic. I can see it in the swing of her shiny black hair. For obvious reasons, I keep my disastrous love-life to myself.

  I’m thinking of buying a dog. It would gaze at me moistly, its eyes filled with unconditional love. This is what lonely women long for, as they turn sixty. I would die with my arms around a cocker spaniel, there are worse ways to go.

  Three months have passed and Alan is a distant humiliation. I need to find another builder to finish off the work in the basement, then I can re-let it, but I’m seized with paralysis and can’t bring myself to go down the stairs. I lived in it when I was young, you see, and just arrived in London. Years later I bought the house, and tenants downstairs have come and gone, but now the flat has been stripped bare those early years are suddenly vivid. I can remember it like yesterday, the tights drying in front of the gas fire, the sex and smoking, the laughter. To descend now into that chilly tomb, with its dust and debris – I don’t have the energy.

  Now I sound like a depressive but I’m not. I’m just a woman longing for love. I’m tired of being put in the back seat of the car when I go out with a couple. I’m tired of internet dates with balding men who talk about golf – golf. I’m tired of coming home to silent rooms, everything as I left it, the Marie Celeste of the solitary female. Was Alan the last man I shall ever lie with, naked in my arms?

  This is how I am, at this moment. Darkness has fallen. In the windows of the flats opposite, faces are illuminated by their laptops. I have the feeling that we are all fixed here, at this point in time, as motionless as the Bonnard lady in the print on my wall. Something must jolt me out of this stupor, it’s too pathetic for words. In front of me is a bowl of Bombay mix; I’ve worked my way through it. Nothing’s left but the peanuts, my least favourite.

  I want to stand in the street and howl at the moon.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN 9781446496060

  Version 1.0

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  Vintage, an imprint of Vintage Publishing,

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  Vintage is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

  Copyright © Deborah Moggach 1993

  Deborah Moggach has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  First published in Great Britain in 1993 by William Heinemann

  Published by Vintage in 2006

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library