The Ex-Wives (27 page)

Celeste yawned, though her heart was thumping. ‘That was a lovely story,' she said. ‘Now it's time for beddibyes.'

Buffy jumped to his feet. ‘Yes, yes!' He put his arms around her. ‘Oh, I've been longing for you to say that for the past six weeks. Ever since I saw you in your little overall.'

‘Not here.'

‘Look, I promise not to do anything. Scout's honour. I probably couldn't anyway. I peak at about ten and by five past it's all over.' He rubbed his beard against her cheek. ‘We can just sleep together. I washed the sheets last week. Last month, anyway.'

‘No, I must go.' She pulled away from him.

‘But it's half past two!'

‘I'll find a cab.'

‘You can't go alone, it's not safe.'

She grabbed her coat and made for the door, tripping over a carrier bag. It tipped over, clankingly, and empty bottles fell out.

‘I want to talk to you about Christmas!' he cried.

She kissed him, and ran downstairs.

‘What about Christmas?' His voice echoed in the stairwell, fainter and fainter.

Back in the flat, the three phones sat in a row. She picked up the receiver of her own phone, the one that worked. Music was still thumping through the walls; she heard a banging door and muffled laughter. People here stayed up all night.

So did the people at directory enquiries. ‘Which town?' asked the girl.

‘Dover,' said Celeste.

‘What name?'

‘Kidderpore, L.' Celeste spelt it out. There was a pause. She waited, tensely. This Lorna woman had probably changed her name about three times since then. Everybody else had.

But then the voice answered.

LONDON WAS REVVING
up for Christmas. There was a quickening in the air, a Friday night quickening but every day of the week now. People double-parked their cars and dashed into shops; restaurants were crammed with secretaries in paper hats. Postmen, opening postboxes, stepped back at the avalanche of envelopes and children in nativity plays squirmed inside their sheets. All this and more, dread and joy and loneliness. Stalls appeared in Kilburn High Road, selling wrapping paper, and in the shops CD players were strewn with tinsel. Buffy's wine merchant was doing brisk business. Buffy himself had bought two bottles of Leoville Lascalles '71 but was Celeste going to drink it with him? He had bought her a pair of silver earrings for her dear pierced ears
but when was he going to give them to her? Just as he and Celeste had become more intimate – the events of that night had shifted them into something more raw and personal, something that more resembled a love affair – she seemed to have gone to ground.

The next couple of days she hadn't been in the shop at all. Mr Singh said she was doing his VAT. ‘She's too good for this place,' he said, ‘she has a brain, that girl.'

‘I know that!' said Buffy. ‘Please get her to call me.'

He had phoned her, and got no reply. He had sat beside his phone like a teenager, waiting for her to ring. The next day there she was in the shop. His heart lurched.

‘Please bear with me,' she said. ‘I've got something to sort out first.'

That evening he put on the answerphone and went to a Christmas party, at which he had hoped to show her off. When he lurched home the machine said
o
. What was happening; why was she being so mysterious? From long experience, of course, he knew the answer.

All Sunday he fretted. He bought all the papers, as a displacement activity, but he couldn't concentrate. Listlessly, he turned the pages. A treasure hunt
competition had grabbed the public's imagination, with thousands of people haring all over the country searching for the prize.
My Room
was a concert pianist, with a wife and a brood of blond, smiling sons. They sat in an immaculate lounge, looking safe. The woman said ‘
My husband is my best friend
,' one of those statements that for some reason had always filled him with rage.

He took the dog for a walk, shuffling past the columned villas of Little Venice. Range Rovers, the ultimate fuck-the-rest-of-you vehicles, were parked outside; as he passed, people drew their curtains closed. He stood on the bridge, gazing down into the canal. If he threw himself in, would she care? Would any of them care? Would they even notice?

His eyes filled with tears. Does anyone love me enough, he wondered, to look in the paper when I'm abroad and see what the weather's like in the place I'm staying? That sort of thing? Have they ever?

Christmas was coming and Quentin was alone. Alone in his flat with a
Serves One
Tagliatelle. Back to serves one, back to square one. Talbot had moved out. Quentin gazed at the swagged and beribboned room, its damasks and velvets. It was his own place again; his home had been returned to him and no trace remained of Talbot – nothing, after two whole
years. At the moment this was deeply disorientating; one day, when he was feeling better, maybe he could find it invigorating. He had in the past.

The split-up had been a mutual decision really, if such things could ever be mutual. The moment someone voiced their doubts Quentin always convinced himself he had been feeling this way too, all along. He did this for self-protection. The moment someone said ‘It's not working, is it?' or ‘We've got to talk,' things were changed forever. This happened in other spheres too. Somebody once said his wallpaper was vulgar and he had never been able to look at it in the same way again. In the end he had stripped it off and redecorated the entire flat.

Quentin switched on the microwave. He hadn't told his Ma yet. He dreaded her disappointment; she had liked Talbot. ‘This one'll last,' she had said. But nothing lasted, not in his family. No wonder he found it difficult to sustain relationships; with his parents' example, who could? His past resembled some ramshackle lodging house, people coming and going, strangers installing themselves at the breakfast table and then inexplicably disappearing. His therapist called it, ‘emotionally rented accommodation'. He said that Quentin's failure to sustain relationships was his way of staying close to his father and mother. By repeating the pattern he
stayed their child forever, bonded to them. And it was true. Each time he broke up with somebody he thought about his father and wondered how he had felt. It was like an accident making you aware of all the other people who must be in hospital.

Quentin laid the table for one – he always did this properly – and uncorked a bottle of Chardonnay of which he would only drink half. Popsi, his mum, said,
look on the bright side.
She said,
every person you meet, you learn a little something.
He tried to remember what he had learnt from the men with whom he had lived. Derek? Derek had taught him how to make marmalade. He had also taught him more than he really wanted to know about old blues singers, Blind Somebody This and Blind Somebody That, to tell the truth they all sounded exactly the same to him. Talbot? Talbot had taught him the rules of American football and how to play
Take my hand, I'm a Stranger in Paradise
on the piano with one finger. Quentin was sure there must have been more than this, but the thought of Talbot was still too raw.

What had his Dad learned, from all his wives? How had he coped? He would like to see him, but by now a meeting would be so strange and artificial that he didn't want to risk the terrible sense of loss such an encounter might cause. Maybe his father was disappointed in him because he was gay. But he
didn't even know that. Big things like that, let alone the little things. A whole universe of little things which, even if they met now, it would take a lifetime to bring up in conversation.

Long, long ago his Dad used to visit. This was during the Pimlico period, when Quentin was little. When he lived above The Old Brown Mare. In retrospect, maybe his father only visited because it was a pub; maybe it was less to do with parental love than with the magnet pull of the booze. He and Ma had the most appalling rows. Then Terry, his stepdad, would storm across from the Saloon Bar and throw his father out. The bellowings in the street! The shape behind the frosted glass, banging on the window! The fist, battering against the inlaid lettering, PUBLIC BAR written the wrong way round, RAB CILBUP. The bellowings fainter and fainter as the years passed.

The visits petered out. As time went by, each meeting became a paler repetition of the one before, each one more indistinct until the image of his father almost faded away. Maybe his Dad felt the same, that Quentin gave less of himself each time, said less, until they were like two near-strangers exchanging small talk. Barely remembering, after the event, what the other person looked like. His Dad was like a
rubber stamp which was never dipped in the ink pad. Stamp, stamp, each time fainter.

Quentin sat down with his tagliatelle. What was he going to do for Christmas? Each year he dreaded it. Each year the friends his age dispersed to their families in Northumberland or Surrey; temporarily they became dutiful sons, people he would hardly recognize if he saw them, chaps who hadn't brought home a girlfriend yet but there was plenty of time for that, wasn't there dear? The men with whom he had lived, who were mostly older, had sometimes taken him somewhere hot, Morocco or somewhere, but this had often ended in tears.

Sometimes there had been nobody at all in his life and he had simply gone home to his Mum. These Christmases, though cheery and alcoholic, had often ended in tears too. It never failed to amaze him that, considering she was such a simple woman, their relationship was so complicated. Had his Dad ever felt this? Being a son was a peculiar condition with its own network of snares and traps, but then, no doubt, being a husband was a peculiar condition too. He himself had been a sort of husband to Talbot, who had been rather female in his moods. He would like to discuss this with someone. His Ma wouldn't understand. He adored her really, despite the tears,
but she would take it personally; she wouldn't understand.

His Dad would. This year, for the first time, he didn't just wonder: what will Buffy be doing? He always wondered that, briefly. This year he thought: wouldn't it be interesting if we met?

Christmas was a time of miracles. That was what Miles had been brought up to believe. Brenda believed in it too. Beneath the tree, in their little house near Swindon, the floor was spread with Ordnance Survey maps. She crouched there, muttering under her breath. How dumpy she was! Once he had considered her curvacious but his inner vocabulary had changed.
Curvacious
to
dumpy, vivacious
to
wittering
. It was the same thing, really, just lit from the other side. He wished he weren't voicing this, even to himself. It was a terrible thing to put into words.

‘Framshill . . .' Her stubby finger moved across the map. ‘Six-Mile Bottom . . .' She looked up at him, her face flushed. ‘Gail thinks it's in the Peak District but I'm keeping my trap shut.'

A gold key. That's what lay buried somewhere or other. The key to a trip of a lifetime, to a fortune, to happiness. Brenda didn't look happy; she looked flustered. Already, all over Britain, people were
tramping over ploughed fields. They were armed with torches; they went out after dark, when nobody could see them, to dig for the treasure.

‘Where's Tiverton?' she muttered. ‘Devon. Blast.' She tapped her biro against her teeth. ‘What's an anagram for
sepia
?'

‘Despair.'

‘Don't be silly, there's no town called Despair. Anyway, that's got a
d
in it. And an
r
.'

Celeste was spending the night with somebody. How did he know? Because she looked flushed and radiant – her actual features looked subtly different – and under her overall she wore the same sweater two days running. Because when he phoned her, first thing in the morning, there had been no reply. When questioned she had shrugged her shoulders – assumed nonchalance, he knew it well – and said: ‘I must've just popped out to get some milk.'

Red alert! Warning bells!
Popping out
always meant trouble. That airy, throw-away phrase, what betrayals it had concealed! Jacquetta just
popping-out
to the shops. Such housewifely diligence, how very uncharacteristic! Him running out to remind her to buy a bottle of soda and seeing her at the end of the street, in the public call box.

He was sixty-one, with a lifetime of
popping-outs
behind him; he was something of an expert on the subject. He knew when a woman was having an affair, just as he knew when a woman was pregnant. He had heard the ping of the phone extension, that tiny chime at midnight. He had seen that closed, secret look on her face; that look a child has when they have got a forbidden sweet in their mouth and stop chewing when a grown-up comes into the room. Oh, the over-elaborate explanations of where they had been! (He should have smelt a rat with Penny's trips, he had slipped up there.) The fact that they always seemed to be having a bath when he came home from work. The sudden and totally uncharacteristic acts of generosity –
no you go, you'll have a lovely time
– and lunches in town with female ex-schoolfriends whose name he didn't quite catch. The sudden alertness when the phone rang, like a fox stiffening at the sound of a hunting horn.

Oh he could go on for ever, he could give master classes in it. And here it was, starting all over again. In the season of goodwill, too.

Come and Behold Him, Born the King of Angels . . .

Five days to go. In Blomfield Mansions, Buffy was sleeping. Down the road, in one of the large houses with ruched curtains, one of the houses he passed in his walks, Annabel lay sleeping too. Annabel,
from the hotel room in Rye. He hadn't met her since; indeed, he never would. But what did it matter now? Women he had touched; women he had wanted to touch. Women who had arrived too early or too late, just missed on the stairs, just missed at the bus-stop. Women he had just glimpsed in a swing door and dreamed about later, waking in the night damp with desire, with evaporating conversations. Who cared if it never happened, what was the difference? He was alone now, asleep, with his dog snoring beside him.