The Ex-Wives (11 page)

She sat on the bed – they had got rid of the futon now. Gazing at the now-empty expanse of carpet she remembered one afternoon last summer, when she had still been married. She and Colin were making love in a field and she had suddenly burst out laughing. ‘What's the matter?' Colin had asked, put off his stride. She was remembering something Buffy had said when they were discussing those yellow fields of oilseed rape. ‘They smell like ovulating gerbils,' he had said. She couldn't tell Colin this, of course. She had simply replied: ‘I'm so happy.' Which was true. It was just that two men happened to be making her happy at the same time: one in her head and one in her body.

Adultery: The Positive Aspect
. She could write a piece about it. Soon, maybe. Just now it was too painful.

‘
WASN
'
T IT YOU
I heard on the TV last night?' asked Mr Woolley. ‘I recognized the voice.'

Buffy was lying in a flat in Hans Crescent. He was having his prostate probed. Hunched on his side, staring at the moquette wallpaper, he felt Mr Woolley's warm finger goosing him. This was far from dignified, but not entirely unpleasant either.

‘I said to my wife: that's him. Advertising something or other . . . relax . . . that's better. What were you extolling the virtues of this time?'

‘Barbecued Niblets,' said Buffy.

‘I never remember what it is, do you? Wonder anyone remembers what to buy.' His finger slid deeper.

‘What's it like?' asked Buffy.

‘Enlarged, yes. Feel that?'

Buffy nodded.

‘Enlarged, but not inordinately so.'

Buffy had explained to him in detail his difficulties when passing water – a vaguely Biblical phrase he liked using with medical men. How the whole process, the scattered grapeshot nature of it, took so long nowadays that by the time he was finished it was practically time to start all over again. Mae West said
I like a man who takes his time.
But this was ridiculous.

‘And then there's the dry rot.'

‘What?' Buffy froze.

‘Dry rot, isn't it? Rising damp, that sort of thing.'

‘What? Where?'

‘Always a problem, in old buildings. Dry rot, wet rot.'

For a moment Buffy thought he was being addressed in some hideous metaphor. Was the fellow trying to tell him something? Then he realized.

‘Ah,' he said. ‘The advertisements, you mean. Rot-Away Damp Proof Courses.'

‘Must keep the wolf from the door. I said to my wife, I said with that voice our Mr Buffery could sell diet pills to the Somalians.'

Buffy's breathing had returned to normal. Not for the first time, he wondered why private consultants
made such terrible jokes. The more expensive they were, the more tasteless their sense of humour. They looked so pleased with themselves, too, with their shiny faces and bow ties. Not surprisingly, really. How could one answer back if one's mouth was stuffed with cotton wool or one's spine was being ruthlessly pummelled? How could one interrupt the unfunny patter for which one was paying, as it were, an arm and a leg? He had had a wide experience with consultants – his heart, his teeth, his gums, his waterworks. Just when you thought everything was all right another bit of the old body packed up. He was familiar with all the properties for sale in
Country Life,
read tensely in waiting rooms from Knightsbridge to Wigmore Street. He even knew which Right Honourable was marrying which.

‘No need for any further action at this point,' said. Mr Woolley, ‘but see me again in six months.'

‘What further action had you in mind?'

‘You really want me to describe it?'

‘No, no!' said Buffy hastily.

Mr Woolley's finger was withdrawn; the glove crackled as it was peeled off.

‘Haemorrhoids okay?' asked Buffy.

‘Fine. Nothing much the matter with you, really, old chap. Only the things one would expect . . .'

‘. . . at my age. I know, I know.'

Buffy paid a large cheque to the receptionist and emerged into the sunshine. Outside Jaguars waited, their engines throbbing. He felt both relieved and obscurely disappointed that there was nothing really wrong with him. Just the ordinary depredations of age.

He walked down the street. One didn't exactly grow old; it wasn't as simple as that. One just felt a growing irritation with a whole lot of things which nowadays seemed designed to baffle and frustrate, like the impossibly-sealed plastic around a Marks and Spencer sandwich. The way that books seemed to be published with smaller and smaller print. The way that when he switched on Radio 3 and got settled into something it promptly changed to organ music. It probably had in the past, but not with such crowing regularity. Did other people feel any of this, or was he entirely alone? Why, when he paid for something with a £20 note, did the sales assistant hold it up to the light and give it such a hostile and lengthy examination? Was there something wrong with him? There seemed no end to the small indignities of the modern world; each day another popped up, like the paving stones, to trip him over. Only yesterday he had gone to his local bottle-bank – he was a late but enthusiastic convert to this – and while he was flinging in his empties, glaring at the man next to
him who was putting his green bottles into the clear receptacle, he had suddenly felt a trickle of cold wine travelling down his sleeve. He had ended up soaked; who would have thought bottles had so much left in them? Especially
his
bottles.

Even without meeting Celeste he would have felt this, but she threw the whole business into sharper focus. The thing was, she made him feel both incredibly young and yet incredibly old. Both at the same time. There was that leaping, breathless possibility of renewal which was so rejuvenating. The world reborn through her fresh young eyes, the miraculous prospect of the old engine coughing into life, as if he were a dusty Hispano-Suiza mouldering away in some garage; she had pulled off the wraps, polished him up and lo and behold! He roared into life. There was all this – the way she listened, wide-eyed, to the anecdotes that everybody else had got bored of by now. All this. Yet her very youth taunted him. He had taken her to Covent Garden, the week before, to hear
Cosi,
and the way she had bounded up the stairs, as lithe and thoughtless as a colt . . . How elderly he felt as she waited for him to dodderingly join her. And when she asked what the Home Service was he suddenly felt utterly alone.

He was aware of the sugar-daddy aspect of all this; of people either thinking he was a lucky old pervert
or else simply out on the town with a doting niece. The plain fact was: nothing had really happened yet. He had known her for two weeks now. They kissed; she stroked his beard; he ran his hands over her firm young body – oh, her skin! So smooth, so elastic! But then she slithered like a fish from his embrace and said she must be getting home. Though inflamed by her – he was only flesh and blood, after all – he was also secretly relieved. How could he compare with the young men she must have known? (He couldn't bring himself to ask about them). Of course he had a wealth of experience behind him, marriages and liaisons galore, but he suspected that this didn't count anymore. The old body wasn't what it was; besides, maybe they did things differently now. Through Penny, and through his many hours spent in doctors' waiting rooms, he was thoroughly
au courant
with what went on in women's magazines, and he was only too aware that nowadays the sexual demands of young women were, well, demanding. The vigour of them, the shrill and taunting battle-cries! The strident right to multiple orgasms achieved by ever-more-gymnastic methods. Hadn't they heard of a hernia?

Celeste wasn't like this, of course. She didn't read
Cosmopolitan.
This was one of her attractions. But he still felt there was something to be said for a
Dante-and-Beatrice-type relationship of unfulfilled yearnings. Possibilities, after all, were as infinite as the solar system; they had no boundaries and there was nothing to bring you down to earth. With no destination there need be no endings, and he had had a bellyful of those. By golly he had. Botched, ugly, drunken, keeping you up all night on the endless carousel of recriminations and home truths; neither participants possessing the energy to halt the mechanism and get off. There was a lot to be said for a soft-focus kind of celibacy, and a nice mug of Horlicks. He knew a turning-point had been reached the year before, actually, when he had taken Penny to a musical called
Blues in the Night
. When a delicious black girl had come on stage dressed in peachy silk underwear he had whispered to his wife: ‘Couldn't we have stuff like that for the living-room curtains?'

He walked along Knightsbridge. Upper-class, rosy girls loped past. Shoppers were accompanied by tiny dogs. In this area you could even glimpse that endangered species, a woman in a fur coat. Sometimes he felt that this street was his spiritual home. He too could have been a man of leisure, living in Montague Square and buying
objets d'art
at lunchtime, if he hadn't been crippled by alimony. Prosperous-looking continental couples paused to look in the windows of Jaeger; the men wore leather trench-coats and the
women looked pampered and ruthless, with burnished hair and Gucci boots. They were bound to have lovers. Why were the French so efficient in matters of the heart? They dealt with it as efficiently as they dealt with their digestive systems. Compared to theirs, his life seemed such a muddle – a Flodden Field compared to their Garden of Versailles.

On the other hand, what a rich full life he had had, the lucky bugger. One could look at it that way, the Chimes at Midnight way. That a marriage ends, does that make it a failure? After all, life itself ends, at some point or another. Does this make life a failure too?

It was in this reflective mood, always brought on by a visit to a doctor, that he downed a malt whisky in a mock-mahogany pub somewhere off Beauchamp Place. Two solicitors sat nearby. ‘. . . not a lot of legroom, but that's the Nips for you,' said one of them. Buffy could spot a solicitor a mile off; he had known so many. These two were only about twelve years old, of course, but that was par for the course now. During their divorce proceedings, Jacquetta's solicitor was so young that Buffy had suggested he went to the lavatory before they started. Neither of them had laughed, but then Jacquetta had never been blessed with a sense of humour.

Solicitors, flat-rental agencies and removal men –
how well he had got to know them over the years, what a good and trusty client he had been! Pickford's Head Office even sent him a Christmas card.

He downed another Glenfiddich. He would buy Celeste a present – something wildly extravagant, at Harrods. A nice repeat fee had come through that morning and he was feeling flush. It was funny; every now and then he earned quite a lot of money, usually for something he couldn't remember doing, but it didn't last long. All his wives had complained about his sojourns in the betting shop. ‘It's so stupid!' they said. ‘It's not betting that's stupid,' he had replied, ‘it's losing.'

He emerged from the pub. It was already dusk. How quickly darkness fell, in the winter! He passed a Boots and thought fondly of Celeste, toiling away in her nylon overall. When he got to know her better he would take her away from all this, if she would let him. The whole strategy was rather vague so far because he didn't really know what she wanted. She spoke very little about herself. In fact he hadn't told her much about his own life, either, though she had asked him rather a lot about Penny. This seemed more encouraging than any amount of endearments.

What an adventure, to start again! A new woman, a new life. He felt optimistic and energised now. So energised, in fact, that he had another little drink to
celebrate, in a hostelry across the street. He could hear about her past. Once again he would memorise the names of relatives, and hear about a childhood he painfully wished he had witnessed from a fly-on-the-wall position. He would learn that her father had never shown her enough affection – every woman he had ever known said that. He would become acquainted, through her upbringing, with a corner of England he had never known existed, but which would become a warm, glowing spot on the map – even when his relationships collapsed these places retained a tarnished sort of significance. First bikes; first bras. He loved hearing about all that. He would learn, agonizingly, of early crushes on the boy-next-door, and even more agonizingly of first affairs with men he might have sat next to, unknowingly, on the bus.

How mysterious they were, these forays into the past! Through women he had entered into a gambolling-over-the-hills childhood in the Brecon Beacons, into a fraught and chilly household in Leamington Spa. It was the most tender sort of history lesson. The cumulative effect was like
Old Macdonald Had a Farm
; one story added to another, a
quack-quack
here and a
bow-wow
there, more and more as time went on, wife after wife, until the song was so long it was
quite a strain to memorise it. Especially after a few peerlessly unblended malts.

Buffy made his way across the street. He would become young again, he would get his mojo working, whatever that meant. He would even go dancing, if that was what she wanted, and make a complete prat of himself. And in return he would initiate her into the bliss of opera, in his experience totally unappreciated by the young – not that all the women he had loved had been as dewy as Celeste but none of them had understood the joys of Verdi, they had that in common. Thanks to him, there were at least seven women currently at large who could hum whole chunks of
Rigoletto
. That was an achievement of sorts, wasn't it?

He approached Harrods and stopped dead. Behind one of the windows a young man was busy working on the Christmas display; he adjusted a ball gown over the cleavage of a mannequin and stood back to look at the effect. It took Buffy a moment to recognize him.