MY EX HUSBAND
I WAS NINETEEN when Colin and I met at a friend’s party. He was nearly the same age and had a job in the navy. Though not in uniform and not remarkably handsome he was well dressed and carried himself handsomely without seeming arrogant. His conversation was good humoured, with a pleasant touch of shyness. He was also interested in me: the first to be interested since my father’s death seven years earlier. We decided to marry. I had a good secretarial job. We raised a joint loan that let us buy a nice house in a pleasant street.
Shortly before the wedding I discovered he expected me to marry his mother too, so was terrified by the thought that our marriage might be a lasting one. In 1960s Scotland this was not an absurd idea. At that time the law made divorces too expensive to be usual in working-class districts where the few divorced men were widely pitied because they must now cook their own meals and wash their own clothes. The divorced women were thought easy meat by men and public dangers by other women. I hated the idea of a divorce but knew I could not live till death parted us with a man who expected me to eat with his relations. I had no mother, having been orphaned in my teens. My only relatives were two aunts who prided themselves on their intelligence and avoided me because I was cleverer than their own children. I was therefore shocked to find Colin expected us to visit his mother almost every night of the week and his married sister every weekend. He said the meals they made were more normal than mine. Here is an example of that normal.
Chicken Soup, made by boiling a chicken in water with salt but nothing else. The resulting liquid, ladled into deep plates, had a layer of chicken fat on top. I made a hole in this with my spoon and tried to drink the soup through it, but the layer of fat still kept the fluid underneath scalding. It had to be sipped slowly: so slowly that when the bird’s carcass arrived as a main course it was nearly cold. As were the sprouts and totties served with it. As were the tart and congealed custard that followed. The meal was also delayed by my mother-in-law or her daughter washing, drying and putting away the last course’s cutlery before serving the next. They did that swiftly, but to enjoy some remaining warmth in the second and third courses we had to eat them at a gallop. Despite causes of delay I once shared a family Christmas dinner, with crackers and funny paper hats, where three courses and every sign of us having eaten them vanished in half an hour.
Perhaps that was the kind of food and way of eating Colin enjoyed at sea. I could not provide such normality and refused to eat with his family more than once a week. I tried persuading him to dine with me in Italian, Indian and Chinese restaurants, but he found them too exotic. I suppose our marriage lasted for years because he was usually at sea. When at home – I mean the home we shared – he usually watched television while sipping lager in our sitting room. We only quarreled once. Friends had visited me on a local political matter. The television was playing at a low volume so I exchanged a few quiet words with them in a corner of the room. After they left Colin declared that, before inviting others in, I should have picked up and hidden the empty beer cans he had strewn over the carpet. I pointed out that I was a wage-earner like himself, not a house serf like his mother.
Soon after this he moved back in with her, having left the navy and found work in our town as a security guard. She was certainly tidier than me. Divorce in Scotland was now as cheap and frequent as in other places, so we divorced. I raised another bank loan and paid him for his share of the house. I heard later that he bought a flashy car, a Reliant Scimitar with the money, but never told his mother where he got it, so she came to think I had cheated him. That is my only grudge against him.
Thank goodness we had no children.
NO BLUEBEARD
BEFORE TALKING ABOUT TILDA I’ll mention earlier wives. Wife I was an ordinary tidy home-lover. We met at secondary school and after leaving it she let us make love then refused to allow any more of that unless we married. So we married. Wife 2 was a bossy manager, wife 3 very quiet and messy. I married all of them because it made us feel more secure for a while and separated from them without fuss or fighting, so I am obviously no Bluebeard. Indeed, most of my life has passed in sexual loneliness which makes me hopeful when a new affair looks like starting, as happened a year ago.
In the park near my home I saw a couple stand quarrelling under a tree. No one else was in sight but they were yards away from me and I expected to pass without being noticed. Instead the woman rushed over to me saying, “Please help me, sir, that man is frightening me.”
“Good riddance!” shouted the man and hurried away leaving us facing each other.
She was in her late teens or early twenties, big and beautiful in a plain undecorated way, with short brown hair and a determined expression that showed she was no victim. Victims don’t attract me. Her clothes were of very good quality and conventional in a smart country-wear style, yet seemed slightly odd, either because they did not perfectly match or were more suited to an older woman. The silence between us grew embarrassing. I asked if she would like a coffee. She seized my hand saying, “Lead the way,” and I found us walking toward a hotel outside the park gates, gates through which the man who had shouted at us was rapidly vanishing without a backward glance. We walked side by side so easily that I thought she was leading me, though later I found she knew nothing of the neighbourhood. I asked her name. She said, “Mattie or Tilda, take your pick.”
“Surname?”
“That,” she said emphatically, “is what they want me not to advertise. The less said about that the better you cunt.”
Her loud clear voice had the posh accent that strikes most Scottish ears as English. I decided she was an eccentric aristocrat and suddenly, because I am a conventional soul, had no wish to take her to a hotel lounge or anywhere public. I suggested going to my place. She said, “Lead on,” so I did.
We had not far to go and as we swung along she murmured, “Cunt cunt. Cunt cunt,” very quietly to herself as if hoping no one heard. That excited me. My flat is a large bed-sitting room, workroom, bathroom and kitchen. She stood in the largest room and announced, “This is certainly more salubrious than that other man’s place.”
As I helped to remove her coat she whispered, “You cunt,” which I took as an invitation to help her out of more garments. She muttered, “Right, carry on.”
I led her to the bed. What followed was so simple and satisfying that afterwards I lay completely relaxed for the first time in years, almost unable to believe my good luck.
“And now,” she said, lying flat on her back and talking loudly as if to the ceiling, “I want apple tart with lots and lots of cream on top. Ice cream.”
“Your wish is my command,” I said jumping up and dressing.
The nearest provision store was a street away. I returned in less than fifteen minutes and found her in the middle of the floor, clutching her hair and dressed as if her clothes had been thrust on in panic. She screamed, “Where have you been?”
“Buying what you ordered,” I said, displaying tart and ice cream. She slumped grumpily into a chair while I prepared them in the kitchen. Later, while eating, I asked what had made her hysterical. She said, “You left me alone in this strange house and I thought you would come back hours later stinking of whisky and wanting us to do it again.”
I did want us to do it again but was not greedy enough to insist. I told her I was a freelance programmer who worked at home and I detested booze because my dad had been alcoholic. She looked pleased then said slowly and slyly, “Regarding the dad situation, ditto. Ditto but if disorder is confined to the family apartments others do not notice. And if you too detest alcohol and work at home like all sensible people it is possible, cunt, that you may be possible.”
I laughed at that and said, “Possibly you are too. Where are you from?”
“I have already said they do not want me to say.”
I explained that I was not interested in her disgustingly snobbish family but assumed she had not been long in Glasgow. She said cauti
ously, “Until the day before yesterday, or maybe the day before that, I occupied a quite nice caravan in a field of them. People came and went. Mostly went.”
“There must have been a town or village near your caravan park.”
“There was a village and the sea but neither was convenient. I ate in a hotel called The Red Fox. I met the man who brought me here in The Red Fox. He turned out to be most unpleasant, not my sort at all.”
“Have you things in his house? Things you want to collect?”
“What things?”
“A nightgown? Clothes?”
“No. Certainly not. Not at all. Please don’t be a …” She hesitated then said quickly, “cunt give me a glass of milk.”
It is almost impossible to judge the intelligence of someone from an alien culture so I have never discovered exactly how stupid or mad Tilda is. She behaved as if she expected to live with me. I wanted that too so it was hardly a sign of her insanity. Lunatics are supposed to have delusions. Tilda had none. She said what she meant or expected in a few clear words that always made sense. Only secrecy about her family and her compulsion to say cunt were inexplicable at first, and from remarks she passed in the following two weeks I soon pieced together an explanation.
Her “people” (she never said father or mother) ran a residential hotel or nursing home for “people of our own sort”. They seemed a pernickety sort because “everything has to be just so.”
I asked what just so meant. She said, “Exactly right forever and ever world without end amen. Dinner was awful. We had to dress.”
“In tuxedos and black ties?”
“Tuxedo is an American word. We British say evening dress. Female evening wear is less uniform than male attire but more taxing. Little hankies are an endless ordeal. I fidgeted with mine which is not the done thing, in fact utterly wrong, in fact a rotten way to carry on and I became quite impossible when I started (cunt) using (cunt) that word (cunt cunt).”
Tilda’s use of that word had obviously been an unconscious but sensible device to escape from bullying relations. They had lodged her in a caravan park very far from them (“half a day’s car ride away”) and made her promise not to mention their name because “if word gets around it will be bad for the business and we aren’t exactly rolling in money.”
This made me think their business was a sanatorium for rich mental defectives whose guardians might have doubts about the establishment if they knew people on the staff had an eccentric daughter. I suspected too that Tilda’s people were less posh than they wished. The few very posh people I have met care nothing for elaborate etiquette and swear like labourers. But Tilda’s family had given her worse eccentricities than that Anglo-Saxon word.
Next day I arose later than usual, made breakfast, gave Tilda hers on a tray in bed and got down to business. At ten she came into the workroom wearing my dressing gown and sat on the floor with her back to the wall, placidly watching figures and images I manipulated on the screen. Shortly after eleven she announced that she wanted a coffee. I said, “Good idea. Make me one too.” She cried indignantly, “I can’t do that! I don’t know how!”
“I’ll tell you how,” I said, treating the matter as a joke, “In the kitchen you will see an electric kettle on a board by the sink. Fill it with tap water and switch on the heat. There is also a jar of instant coffee powder on the board, a drawer of cutlery below, mugs hanging on hooks above. Take two mugs, put a small spoonful of powder in each, add boiling water and stir. Add milk and sugar to yours if you like, but I take my coffee black.”
She stamped out of the room and shortly returned with a mug she slammed down defiantly on my worktop. It contained lukewarm water with brown grains floating on top. When I complained she said, “I told you I can’t make coffee.”
I found that Tilda could wash and dress herself, eat and drink politely, talk clearly and truthfully and also (though I didn’t know how she learned it) fuck with astonishing ease. Everything else had been done for her so she stubbornly refused to learn anything else.
Despite which our first weeks together were very happy. She added little to my housework. Former wives had insisted on making meals or being taken out for them. Tilda ate what I served without a word of complaint, nor did she litter the rooms with cosmetic tubes, powders, lotions, toilet tissues, fashion magazines and bags of shopping. She hated shopping and refused to handle money. I gathered that “her people” had never given her any, paying the caravan rent and Red Fox food bills by bank order. She brought to my house only the clothes she wore, clothes passed to her by someone of similar size, I think an older sister. By threatening to chuck her out unless she accompanied me and by ordering a taxi I got her into the women’s department of Marks and Spencer. Buying her clothes was not the slightly erotic adventure I had hoped as she cared nothing for what she wore and would have let me dress her like an outrageous prostitute had the garments been comfortable. But there is no fun in buying sexy clothes for folk who don’t feel sexy, so I bought simple, conventional garments of the kind her sister had given, but more modern and in better-matching colours. I did not then notice that her attitude to clothes and making love were the same. She never restricted the pleasures I had with her in bed once or twice a night, so only later did I see she was indifferent to them.
Being together outside bed was also easy because we had no social life and did not want one. Since expulsion from her people’s “rather grand place” her only society seemed to have been fellow diners in The Red Fox, and she would not have eloped with “that other man” if she had liked them much. My own social life once depended on friends met through my wives and a job in local housing, but during the last marriage I had become a freelance working at home, which perhaps drove away wife number 3. Since then I had managed without friends, parties et cetera. I like films and jazz I enjoyed in my teens. I play them on my computer and discuss them over the internet with fellow enthusiasts in England, Denmark and America so need no other society. An afternoon stroll in the park kept me fit. Tilda managed without even that. Apart from the Marks and Spencer’s visit she has only left the flat once since entering it.
Our daily routine was this. After an early morning cuddle I rose, made breakfast, gave Tilda hers in bed, laid out her clothes for the day, put dirty clothes in the washing machine, started work. Tilda arose around ten, I made coffee for us at eleven thirty and a snack lunch at one. Then came my afternoon stroll and shopping expedition which she bitterly resented. I insisted on being away for at least ninety minutes but had to mark the exact minute of return on the clock face, and if I was a single minute late she got into a furious sulk. Then came a cup of tea and biscuit, then two or three hours of more programming, then I made the evening meal, we consumed it, I did some housework, internetted for a little and so to bed. And wherever I was working Tilda sat on the floor, looking perfectly relaxed, sometimes frowning and pouting but often with a strange little satisfied smile. I assumed she was remembering the people and place she had escaped from. I once asked what she was thinking about and she murmured absentmindedly, “Least said soonest mended. Curiosity killed the cat.”
I asked if she would like a television set? A Walkman radio? Magazines? She said, “A properly furnished mind cunt is its own feast cunt and does not need such expensive and foolish extravagancies.”
But she did not often use the cunt word now and when she saw an arresting image on my screen sometimes asked about it. I always answered fully and without technical jargon. Sometimes she heard me out and said “Right”, sometimes cut me short with a crisp “Enough said”, so I never knew how much she understood. When someone speaks with the accent and idiom of British cabinet ministers and bank managers and company directors it is hard not to suspect them of intelligence. I sometimes think even now that Tilda might be trained to use a computer. Many undeveloped minds take to it easily, having nothing to unlearn.
But during our mid-day snack one day the entryphone rang very loud and long. Tilda stared at me i
n alarm.
“A parcel delivery,” I said to reassure her, but without believing it. Part of me had been expecting such a ring. A crisp voice on the phone said, “I am here to see Matilda and if you try to stop me I will summon the police.”
I opened the door to a tiny old woman who looked nothing like Tilda except for the determined look on her terribly lined face.
“You are?” I asked, thinking she was a grandmother or aunt. She walked past me into the lobby saying, “Where?” I pointed to the sitting-room doorway and followed her through.
Tilda sat at the end of a sofa where I had left her but her arms were now folded tightly round her body and she had turned to face the wall.
“Well!” said the little woman. Standing in the middle of the floor she drew a deep breath and thus addressed the back of Tilda’s head.
“You will be pleased to hear, delighted to know, ecstatic to be informed that it has cost us a very pretty penny in private detectives to track you here. A small fortune. More than a family not exactly rolling in wealth can afford, you ungrateful, inconsiderate, selfish, shameless, debauched what? What shall I call you? Slut is too mild a word but I refuse to soil my lips with anything more accurate. And you, sir!” – she turned to me – “You cannot alas be sued for abducting a minor but we have lawyers who will make you wish you had never been born if you try to get as much as a farthing out of us. Not a chance. No dice. Nothing doing sonny boy.”
I told her I had no intention of getting money out of Tilda or her family. She said, “Fine words butter no parsnips. Are you going to marry her?”
I said we had not yet discussed that. She told the back of Tilda’s head, “Make him marry you. It’s your one chance of security.” She then strolled round my flat as if she was the only one in it, fingering curtains and furnishings and examining ornaments while I stared in amazement. Returning from an inspection of workroom, kitchen and lavatory she spoke as firmly but less fiercely.
Every Short Story by Alasdair Gray 1951-2012 Page 60