The Ex-Wives (14 page)

‘She is trying to find a flat,' said Jacquetta.

India won't move out, thought Leon. Not if she has any sense. Nobody's children move out anymore. In
fact he
was
fond of India. She was the product of Jacquetta's first marriage to a man called Alan. They had been hippies together in the sixties; Leon had seen some painful but hilarious snapshots of them in bellbottoms. Their daughter was called India because she had been conceived in an ashram near Bangalore. He sometimes wondered if India's subsequent problems stemmed, in some measure, from this continuous reminder of the sexual activity that had produced her, twenty-three years previously. At the very least, it seemed embarrassing. Her father, Alan, had since gone into software.

‘It's not India,' he said, ‘it's the boys. One of them's been using my computer. I tried to call up a file yesterday – a patient's file, she was just about to arrive – and instead I got
The Pros and Cons of Bismark's Foreign Policy
.'

Jacquetta twitched her shoulders, as if a midge were bothering her. She wasn't really listening.

He went on: ‘For people who don't ever talk to us they make an extraordinary amount of noise. And we've got to do something about their rabbits.'

‘We can't get rid of the rabbits. They're
theirs
.'

‘But they never go near them,' he said. ‘They never even go in the garden. They never even open their
curtains.
They've forgotten they
exist
.'

‘They wouldn't if they went. They'd be terribly
upset, you know that. Remember what happened with their stick insects.'

‘That was Buffy's fault,' he said. ‘Anyway, they could've been dead for years by then. They were mummified. Everyone had forgotten about them.'

‘The boys were traumatized, Leon! I talked it through with my group. I couldn't let it happen again.'

‘But the things keep breeding, sweetheart, and getting out of their hutches. It's pandemonium out there, since the workmen arrived. Last week one of my patients was just starting to open up for the first time – five months it'd taken. She was just starting to talk – to freely talk – when this baby rabbit hopped into the room and started to wash its ears.'

Jacquetta gazed out of the window. ‘All right. But we can't get rid of the original pair. Not for children of a broken home. That would be too symbolic.'

THAT NIGHT THE
temperature dropped. The wood next to Lorna's cottage, already so thin and wintry, closed in on itself. Water froze in the ruts. Nothing stirred; the place was locked. The first frost, when it arrives, locks the senses; it is impossible to imagine anything changing. But Lorna, lying in bed, knew otherwise. She had read the sheet of paper, plucked from the photocopier. She didn't need to sleep to start this particular nightmare, for it was starting right now, without her.
My wood, my secret wood
, she repeated to herself,
how can they?
She turned over, and stared at the ceiling.
How can they bulldoze it up and turn it into a Leisure Experience?

Brenda was dreaming of leisurewear, the flip-flip of
the catalogue pages. She never remembered her dreams, the next day. Well, there was so much to do, wasn't there? It was all go, go, go.

Beside her, Miles slept. He had spiralled airily down into a place she could never reach. Nobody could meet him there except his uninvited guests, each night so eyebrow-raising yet so inevitable. He lay, trapped by Brenda and released by his dreams; outside the drone of cars, the arc lights. Beyond the ring road, Swindon slumbered.

He slept, dead to the world. He dreamt from the store of his past; none of the people in this story were alive for him yet though, who knows, he may have brushed against the shoulder of somebody who had brushed against one of them; he himself might have brushed against one of them. A car carrying somebody who had made love to one of them might even now be circling the roundabout whose sodium lights filtered through the curtains and bathed Brenda's humped shape in a flat and shadowless glow.

Way above the starter homes, above the orange glow of Swindon, the moon shone. It shone on the wood next to Lorna's cottage, its own reflection blurred in the frozen puddles. It shone on the white bones of Jacquetta's conservatory, curved like whale ribs over the black, matted garden. There is nowhere as secret as a London garden. Closed in by the cliffs
of the surrounding houses, whose lights switched off one by one, it guarded its memories – of Buffy's children and the children before them, children who themselves had grown old and died. Beyond the houses, over in the Zoo, the wolves howled.

Jacquetta's dreams were incredibly vivid and powerful. She was proud of them, like a mother is proud of her surprisingly athletic children; the next morning she liked to recount them in detail to whoever she was living with at the time. Her first husband, Alan, used to roll his eyes and say ‘Wow', but he said wow to everything. A man called Otto tried to interrupt and tell her his. Buffy, after they had been married for a while, used to get impatient. ‘Bloody hell,' he would say, ‘I've forgotten who everybody is. Hang on a bit. It's like some blooming Norse saga.' But then Buffy had never really understood her.

Leon did. Leon understood her creative unconscious, her needs and her insecurities, her fragile sense of self. He understood how, through her disastrous relationships with men, she was trying to make contact with the child in herself, the small girl trying to gain the love of the cold and distant father who had in all likelihood abused her in the past. Leon had explained it. How she needed constant reassurance from the men who she chose unerringly for the
damage they would do to her. How she had to break those old childhood patterns. In the group she went to, they called it Rewriting the Family Script.

The problem with Leon, if there was a problem, was that he understood too much. This was something else they discussed in the group. She had once had an affair with her gynaecologist – she had gone to him about her painful periods – and quite apart from the fact that he had turned out to be yet another sadistic bastard she had had the feeling that he was more familiar with her erogenous zones than she was herself. This had left her feeling helpless and disempowered, as if she were a bystander while he and her sexual organs just got on with it. Sometimes she felt that Leon was doing this, with her head.

He was wonderful, of course. He was a suave and accomplished lover; he was a regular visitor to their local gym and unlike some men she had known he hadn't degenerated into an overweight slob. That he earned a large amount of money wasn't important to her, she wasn't into possessions, but his wordly success made him content and she was happy to see that because she was a giving and generous Sagittarian.

The trouble was, he understood everybody. That was his profession. He called himself an enabler, a locksmith. He didn't give people the keys, of course.
He enabled them to forge the keys themselves; working out their own combination was part of the process. From the upstairs window she could see the tops of his patients' heads as they made their way down the steps to his consulting rooms. After fifty minutes they emerged white-haired; older and wiser. This was no doubt caused by the falling plaster dust – there were usually builders around, for one reason or another – but for a visual person like-herself those departing white heads made a vivid symbolic statement.

He almost understood
too much
. This was a ridiculous thing to say, she knew that, but sometimes she felt like a struggling novelist living with somebody who knew how to write the story better than she did. He knew the main character so well; he was aquainted with all her early traumas and subsequent patterns of behaviour. She couldn't get angry with him for this – how could she? Besides, Leon never got angry. He would gently explain exactly what she thought and then ask, ‘Are you comfortable with that?' Sometimes she remembered the rows she had had with other men and felt wistful, like a retired matador missing the stench of sawdust and blood.

No wonder she had such powerful sexual fantasies about her builders – priapic Greeks, ruddy young Geordies who would require nothing of her except
her compliant, middle-aged body, who smoked roll-ups and talked about football teams she had never heard of. Who wouldn't understand her at all. Watching them toiling in her house, their chests slippery with sweat, made her insides melt. The rawness, the vigour, the muscles moving under their skin as they heaved up a floorboard! She was always thinking up ways of improving the house. She had had three bathrooms installed already and was going to get a fourth put in, for India.

This was one of the things she discussed with her group. There were six of them, all women, and they met in a room above a video shop in Muswell Hill. She could talk to them about Leon, her need for builders, everything. She didn't need to feel disloyal, because Leon understood why she went there. When she told him they did psychodrama – all of them acting him, in turn – he wasn't threatened, only interested. Besides, there were less and less opportunities to tell him things anyway because he was always so busy.

Sometimes she did something which she knew was just a cry for attention, a need for some sort of primal response. She was just recovering from a short but intense affair with her conservatory architect. He had the keys to a show flat in Battersea and they used to go there after hours. The place was exhilaratingly
un
hers
– ruched curtains and
Interiors
laid out on the coffee table. Freed from the needs of her children, the puppet-string pulls of her life, the total comprehension of her husband, she had felt thrillingly liberated. There was plaster fruit in the kitchen and she had felt like Hunca Munca in the Beatrix Potter story, lawlessly exploring a toytown home.

There had been other episodes, quite a few actually, mostly with the disenchanted husbands of women she knew, and once with her pottery teacher. When she tearfully confessed, Leon understood. He always did. He took her in his arms. He told her the thing with her architect was quite natural, that we all needed our own private show flats in our heads, that in fact he had written a paper on it and read it out to an audience of two thousand psychotherapists in Baden-Baden.

Buffy, of course, would have bellowed and spluttered and got raging drunk. Other men she had known would have hit her. Leon just stroked her cheek and went downstairs, where he was dictating his latest book to his secretary. He had written several best-sellers.
The Blame Game and How We Play It
had been translated into twelve languages and his latest,
Guilt: A User's Guide,
had just been published. He was intensely proud of what he called his babies. Almost touchy, actually. Last Monday he had been
on
Start the Week
and she had forgotten to tape the programme for him – she had been doing her postural meditation at the time – and he had almost got angry.

She had the vague feeling that he was going on TV this evening, in fact. Outside it was freezing cold. She could see the grey breath of the builders as they huffed and puffed in the garden, dragging panes of glass wrapped in brown paper. She was upstairs in her studio – her own room, her sanctum. This was her working time. She was working.

She sat at her desk. The trouble was, she had too many ideas. She had just been on a creative writing course and she thought she might write some prose-poems based on the seasons at their Tuscan house – a sort of contemporary
Book of Hours
– and illustrate them with drawings. The thing was, she had only been to their Tuscan house in the summer. Another idea that had been brewing for some time was an ecological children's story based on
The Tibetan Book of the Dead,
but she had to be in the right mood for this. Various projects connected with her aromatherapy course, maybe with dolphins featuring somewhere, had also been simmering. Maybe she should ask her group if she were ready for this.

She was interrupted by the ring of the doorbell. Nobody else seemed to be around so she left her
studio and went downstairs. She passed Bruno's bedroom door. There was a sign on it saying
STOP!!! DO NOT ATTEMPT TO MOVE THIS CAR!!!
It was one of those car-clamp stickers. They were always stealing things from the street – plastic cones, hideous objects like that – bringing them home and not knowing what to do with them. Adolescent boys . . . She couldn't begin to understand them. They were such an alien species that she sometimes forgot about them for days.

She negotiated the builders' planks, stacked in the hall, and opened the front door. A pale young woman stood on the step.

‘Hello' she said. ‘I've come about the rabbits.'

Jacquetta was miles away. It took her a moment to gather her wits.

‘The sign outside,' said the young woman. ‘
Baby Rabbits Free to a Good Home
. I was just, you know, passing by and I saw it. I love rabbits.'

‘So do I. It's awful to get rid of them but my husband insisted.'

A waif on her doorstep! The girl looked freezing. Her face was blanched white; only her little nostrils were pink. Jacquetta led her into the kitchen where she stood in front of the Aga, warming her hands. She was actually trembling with cold. Her coat fell
open and Jacquetta noticed a tiny gold fish around her neck.

‘It's the Year of the Fish,' she said, pointing to it. ‘At least I think it is. Or maybe it's the Year of the Monkey. They go past quicker and quicker, the years, as one gets older. It's quite frightening.'

The young woman was still staring at her. Jacquetta wondered if she had a blob of paint on her nose. She took off her specs and the room blurred; she put them back on again. How dark and lustrous the girl's eyes were! Haunted. She had a delicate bone-structure too, like a ballet dancer. She would be marvellous to draw. The girl gazed around the kitchen as if she had never seen anything like it before – the dresser full of Jacquetta's pottery, the Georgia O'Keefe calendar. Despite the conventional clothes there was a vividness about her, an intensity, that Jacquetta felt she could identify with.