The Ex-Wives (26 page)

It was better, really, if these sorts of gatherings didn't take place on the day itself; it placed too much of a strain on everybody. Such was his network of ex-families that he had sometimes eaten several dinners on the evenings leading up to Christmas – two or three of them, like dress rehearsals for a performance from which he himself would be absent. Though reasonably festive, salmon would be served as a stand-in for turkey and fruit salad as a stand-in for the Christmas pudding; there was the unmistakable sense of everybody else eating lightly in preparation for the blow-out to come, the next day or the day after that. Unopened boxes of crackers would be waiting on the sideboard, tactlessly in full view. The children's hand-made table decorations would only partially be finished. As he opened his small – sometimes very small – gifts, he could see the larger, more lavish parcels stacked around the base of the Christmas tree, ready for the big day when he himself would be absent.

The problem with this, of course, was that Christmas Day itself would be left gapingly vacant, though India had once come round with a doggy bag, saying she would much rather have spent it with him. Besides, there were worse things than being alone.
During his marriage to Penny he had been forced to spend the day with her parents in Ascot, an experience that had made the whole trauma of his divorce worthwhile.

Buffy lifted up the phone. It was eleven o'clock. He couldn't ring Celeste again. She had sounded so dismissive. Who was phoning her, that she expected their call so keenly? Her new hairstyle was a worrying sign. She looked fetching, but more tousled and beddable somehow. Almost randy, in fact. She had acquired a new mannerism to go with it – she shook her head, like a dog emerging from a pond, and then ruffled up her hair with her fingers. He didn't trust that.

George had farted. Buffy hurried to the window and struggled with the catch. The trouble with dogs was that, unlike humans, the process was totally silent. This meant one only became aware of it gradually and by then it was almost too late to take any action. He flung the window open and gazed across the Edgware Road at the block of flats opposite. In the windows, festive lights pinpricked the darkness. Where the rooms were lit he could see the shapes of the Christmas trees themselves, placed squarely in view to make him feel unloved. What was she doing? If he knew where she lived he could jump into a taxi and accost her, flinging himself at her feet. But what
happened if he looked up, and there was a man standing beside her?

He hadn't rung. He wouldn't now, it was 11.30, far too late. He had obviously decided to forget about the whole thing and go back to Germany.

What did it all mean? What did anything mean? Celeste hadn't moved for some time. She was sitting on the carpet, freezing cold. Already, her afternoon seemed as lurid and unlikely as a dream. Had she really been in Hastings? She could have been to the moon. Events were so out of control that she felt paralyzed. Another batch of baby rabbits had been born. She had put cardboard boxes on either side of the room, like hi-fi speakers, and filled them with torn-up newspaper. Bits of paper had already spilled onto the carpet; within the boxes the bedding moved as the babies stirred. The first lot – six of them – were stronger now, lifting their blind blunt heads. Soon they would be shakily venturing forth.

Along the edges of the room were stacked the recycled items – a jumble of plastic containers, lampbases, hair curlers – like an insane obstacle course. The room was starting to smell. What was she doing with all these relics from Buffy's past? The rabbits, the colander, the two silent phones – what meaning was locked within them? Her life was
slipping into confusion and squalor. Her heart beat fast and she could scarcely breathe; she felt as if she were underwater, trying to swim to the surface. The water pressed down on her, filling her lungs.

She struggled to her feet, put on her coat and left the flat. Music thumped from behind a closed door. Why, when the place was so obviously full of tenants, did she never see anybody? She hurried into the street. The cold air hit her. Suddenly she was wide-awake.

BUFFY OPENED THE
door. He was wearing pyjamas and a very old dressing-gown.

‘Celeste, my love!' He put his arms around her. It was midnight; he looked surprised but delighted. ‘How wonderful to see you!'

She disentangled herself and inspected him. How seedy he looked! Grey and unshaven – even though he was bearded he managed to look unshaven.

‘So this is where you live.' She looked around. ‘Crikey.'

‘I would've tidied it up if I'd known.' He hugged her again. ‘My tonic, my life! My heart implant, you little ticker.'

‘Don't be silly. Can I have a drink?'

‘Don't try that wine, it's disgusting. Let's have a scotch.'

She negotiated her way into the room. It was a terrible mess; worse, even, than his sons'. There were things all over the floor. It looked as if he were camping here. Perhaps that was all he had ever done – just camped. She cleared away some newspapers and sat down in an armchair. Dirty grey dog hairs were matted into the fabric.

‘There's a funny smell in here,' she said.

‘I know. Don't know where it comes from. I need somebody to look after me.'

‘Aren't you old enough to look after yourself?'

‘Nobody's old enough to look after themselves.'

Women must have said that to him so many times. She thought of all the quarrels he must have had – everything she accused him of must be so familiar to him by now. How exhausting it must be! No wonder old people looked so old. It was all the repetition. She herself had had hardly anything duplicated yet – words of love or words of blame.

He gave her a glass of whisky. ‘I want to sit close to you and lay my head on your knee, but my back hurts.' He sat down in the other chair; beneath him, the stuffing had disgorged onto the floor. He patted his knee. ‘Come and sit on mine, you little sparrow.'

She didn't budge. She looked at him, across the
littered hearthrug. ‘Who did you love the most?' she asked.

‘What?'

‘Of all of them?'

He got up and came over. He pulled her to her feet. ‘You silly.'

‘Tell me about them.'

‘They don't mean anything.'

‘Well they should!' Her loud voice startled her. The dog pricked up its ears. ‘You married them, didn't you?'

‘Who have you been talking to? What have they been saying about me?' He put his hands over her ears, like the woman had done that afternoon. ‘Don't listen to them,' his muffled voice said.

She removed his hands. Everyone seemed to be treating her like a baby. He gripped her; they collapsed into the armchair.

‘Did you tell them all the same things?' she asked. ‘Are you just a clever actor?'

‘My dear girl, if I was a clever actor I'd be getting some work.'

They were wedged awkwardly in the chair; he was a big man. She spoke to an egg stain on his dressing gown. ‘I don't know what to believe anymore.'

‘Don't be jealous of anybody. Ever.
This
is
important.
This. Us
.' He lifted her face and looked at her. ‘Nothing else matters.'

‘But don't you see? It should! I want them to matter. I want all of them to matter! Else, what's the point?'

She had never really needed a drink in her life, or known she had needed it, until tonight. Trouble was, she couldn't reach her glass. She was wedged in. Oh, the great breathing bulk of him, smelling of warmth and tobacco. When he talked she could feel the reverberations, like the tube running beneath her room.

He said: ‘Everything matters, but nothing matters that much. You'll learn this, one day. It's not depressing, sweatheart, it's not depressing at all. But you might not understand yet. When I die, I want you to put it on my gravestone –
Everything matters, but nothing matters that much
. Will you promise?'

‘That's not fair, talking about dying.'

‘Looking at you makes me think about it. Since I met you I think about it all the time.'

She struggled out, from under him, and walked to the mantlepiece. She suddenly felt stagey, as if a director had told her to stand there.

‘All right,' she said. ‘Let's just talk about the
everything matters
bit. If that's the case, who were you with, say, in the summer of 1968?'

‘Who? You mean, a woman?'

She stared at her reflection in the mottled mirror – her set jaw, the floppy mop of hair. She nodded.

‘Well,' he said. ‘I was sort of married to Popsi.'

‘Sort of. What do you mean,
sort of
?'

‘Sweetie-pie, you've never been married.'

‘No.'

‘Well, then.'

‘So
sort of
means somebody else,' she said. ‘Who was it?'

He sat there. His eyebrows went up and down, as he frowned. He was thinking.

‘I know,' he said. ‘I was married to Popsi, but I was vaguely with Lorna.'

She turned from the mirror and stared at him. ‘What do you mean,
vaguely with Lorna
?'
Basically
, that was what Jacquetta had said:
Basically I've got three children
. What had Popsi said?
How many children? Depends what you mean
. ‘Vaguely! Basically! What on earth do you all mean?'

He sat, slumped in his chair. ‘You're young,' he said. ‘Certainty is the luxury of the young. When you get older there's no such thing as a straight sentence. It's all qualifiers. Parentheses sprout out all over the place.' He pointed to his ears. ‘Like hair, sprouting out of these.'

‘I just want to know what vaguely means. Who was she?'

There was a pause as he lit a cigarette. ‘She was a lovely girl. Very young, younger than you. Very ambitious.' For a moment, his face was obscured by smoke.

‘Ambitious for what?'

‘For the same thing I was. Fame, success, all that. She was going to be a great classical actress.'

‘Was she? Is she?'

He shook his head. ‘The world's full of people who're going to be great actors. Now they're, I don't know, running country hotels and writing cookery books and . . .'

‘Selling antiques.'

‘Selling antiques. And getting divorced and doing all the things everybody does.' He smiled at her. ‘Trying to make beautiful young girls fall in love with them. Life's a very time-consuming business. You have to be super-humanly talented or ruthless to push through all that. If you're not superhumanly talented or ruthless, but only a bit, then everything else comes flooding in. All the parentheses. The
vaguelys
and
sort ofs.
If you see what I mean.'

There was a silence. She took a sip of whisky; it burned her throat. She looked across at him. He raised his eyebrows. His hair was greying, his beard
even more so, but his eyebrows were still black. His thinking bits, moving up and down to the fluctuations within. Puppet eyebrows, worked from machinery that was dear to her. She loved him very much, but she didn't move towards him; she stayed at the mantelpiece. She hadn't finished with him yet.

‘What was her whole name?'

He had to think for a moment. ‘Lorna Kidderpore.'

‘Lorna Kidderpore.'

‘Her father was a distinguished something or other. Mathematician.'

‘How long did you know her?'

‘Just a month or two.'

‘Did you love her?'

‘Of course,' he said. ‘I'm not a womanizer, darling, I'm a romantic. A romantic falls in love for life. Trouble is, they know no past and no future. They learn from nothing and anticipate nothing. That's what they share with the very stupid, who in many ways they resemble. A romantic actually believes in possibilities. That's why my life's been such a mess.'

‘What happened?'

‘She was offered a job. Touring Europe with some theatre company. She had to choose between the job and me and she chose the job.'

‘What happened to her?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Did you ever see her again?'

‘Once. I saw her once.' He flung his cigarette into the grate. It was full of old cigarette butts.

‘When?'

‘Five, six years ago. In Dover. Penny and I were taking my boys on holiday, to France. Not a great success. In fact, an unmitigated disaster. Penny got food poisoning and Bruno got into trouble with this gendarme, and then the car broke down –'

‘Get back to Dover.'

He smiled. ‘That's what I always imagined my children saying.'

‘What children?'

‘The ones I never met. The ones who listened to me on the radio. You should've seen all the letters I got, the cards coloured with crayons, hundreds of them! They loved me much more than my own kids did, but that's because they didn't know me.'

‘We did! You made us feel we did. You told us stories. Our parents just told us to mind our table manners. Tell me the story. Tell me about Dover.'

The dog got to its feet, padded over to Buffy and sat down again, next to his bedroom slippers. ‘Are you sitting comfortably?' said Buffy.

‘Yes' said Celeste, though she was standing.

‘Then we'll begin. It was a bright sunny morning and Buffy and his family were going on holiday.
Gosh, what an adventure! They were off to meet the frogs. The two little animals in the back were fighting as usual. “
Stop it, you little scallywags
!” said Buffy, with a twinkle in his eye. Just then, as they were driving through Dover Town, lo and behold! Bless my cotton socks! There was his ex-mistress, coming out of a greengrocer's shop.'

‘What happened?'

He took a sip of whisky. ‘I shouted at Penny to stop and she did, but everybody hooted at us. And by the time she had found somewhere to park and I'd rushed out, well, Lorna had gone. Disappeared.'