The Ex-Wives (3 page)

‘At night they wander the streets, watching young men buying bunches of flowers at the Top Price Late Nite Store; young men, clutching a bottle of wine, eagerly springing up front steps and pressing the bell of their beloved. They pass pubs whose windows, nowadays tactlessly unfrosted, display tableaux of loving couples who, between kisses, argue playfully about what film they're going to see that night,
ringing their choices with biro in their outspread copies of
Time Out
.'

Her eyes were moist; so were his. When she switched on her tape recorder, her fingers trembled. ‘Tell me about your little room,' she said.

It wasn't little, actually; it was quite large. But she was obviously deeply affected. He had her now; he was an actor, after all. George Kaufman had said: if you hook your audience in the first ten minutes, you've got them for the play. And dammit, this story was true. He himself was quite overwhelmed.

‘Of course, she kept most of the furniture,' he said, kicking aside some takeaway containers as he crossed the room. ‘Except one or two family heirlooms even
she
didn't have the gall to nick, mostly because they're so hideous,' He pointed to the sideboard. ‘That was my granny's. The door's broken, where she kicked it in.'

‘Your granny?'

‘No no. Jacquetta. My ex-wife. We were having a row.' He pointed to the wall. ‘This is the only picture she let me keep. An incredibly dull lithograph of my old Oxford college.'

Penny nodded. ‘It is dull, isn't it.' She picked up a piece of pizza crust. ‘Shall I throw this away?'

He nodded. ‘I always leave the edge, don't you?' He pointed out the curious china object that the cast
had given him when he had played
Lear
in Hartlepool; could she make out what it was? She couldn't.

He went to the mantlepiece, moved aside a bottle of Bells, and pointed to a photo. ‘These are my sons, Bruno and Tobias.'

‘Aren't they sweet!'

‘I've got some more, somewhere.'

‘More what?'

‘Children. Older than this, though.'

She looked at the two smiling faces in the tarnished frame. ‘When do you see them?'

‘Weekends. When she lets me.'

She pointed to a glass tank. ‘What's this?'

‘Their stick insects.'

She peered into the wilting foliage. ‘Where are they?'

‘Difficult to spot them. You see, they keep quite still and they look just like sticks. Sometimes I look in there and think: maybe that's the way to go through life – in camouflage, not moving. The only way to avoid the pain.'

That did it. She was his. And within a month she had moved in.

Pulling George behind him, Buffy made his way along the parade of shops. Eight years had passed since then. Abercorn Hardware had become the
Video Palace. There were Arabic newspapers at the newsagents, and kiwi fruit, each with a little 50p sticker on it, outside what was once a proper greengrocers but was now Europa Food and Wine. 5op each! Schoolboys sauntered, sucking ice lollies; they seemed to be let out at all hours of the day, now. One of them said: ‘It was him what stole it. I was well gutted.'

What did he mean by that?
Well gutted.
Buffy had to keep in the swim, for the sake of his sons. Bruno and Tobias were teenagers now; they had put stick insects behind them. They mustn't think of him as an old fuddy-duddy. He had a suspicion they found him vaguely dated and irrelevant, like an ionizer.

It was hot. The workmen had gone, leaving paving stones stacked like dominoes and treacherous pits of sand. George suddenly stopped, pulling Buffy back; he lifted his leg and relieved himself against a length of plastic piping. The sign above him said:
Sorry for Any Inconvenience.

Buffy chuckled. He must remember to tell Penny that. She would be home soon, and everything would be all right. He was hopeless at being alone. Without her invigorating company he felt rudderless and bereft . . . Had any of his wives ever felt the same way about him?

For some reason this made him feel irritable again.
He glared at a car, double-parked outside the dry cleaners. It was empty; its engine was running, filling the air with exhaust fumes. There was a baby seat inside. On the back window was a sticker saying:
Keep Your Distance! Give My Child a Chance!

Buffy stood, transfixed. He read it again. Car stickers in general irritated him, of course – from the leery
Honk If You Had It Last Night
to the prissy
I'm Lead-Free, Are You?
But this one, for some reason, filled him with an almost apoplectic rage. It was so bloody self-righteous, that was why.

A woman came out of the dry cleaners, carrying a plastic bag. She stopped, and stared at him. ‘Can I help you?' She looked him up and down. He looked down. It was only then that he realized he was still wearing his bedroom slippers.

PENNY WASN
'
T IN
Positano. She was in a flat in Soho, three miles up the road, lying spreadeagled over a man called Colin. He was asleep. Sun glowed through the blinds; the room was bathed in that soupy twilight known only to invalids and adulterers. She wasn't the sort of person who usually went to bed in the afternoon. The street sounds below – a car door slamming, the idling mutter of a taxi cab, waiting for somebody – they had a sharp, tinny echo. Guilt did that. The sounds could come from another country. In fact, she was supposed to
be
in another country. She had spread out her guide books, fan-wise, on the rush matting of Colin's floor. Berlitz, Baedeker, Penguin. Glancing at them, she wrote in her notebook.

Positano, the haunt of sybarites and sun-worshippers, is still the Med's best-kept secret. Its winding, cobbled streets offer breathtaking vistas of the wine-dark ocean
. . . Down below a car alarm sounded,
hee-haw . . . Braying donkeys tippety-tap down the lanes, carrying picturesque panniers of local produce
. . . Lazily, she ran her finger over Colin's hard, broad shoulder.
Towering, majestic cliffs
. . . she wrote,
terraced with vineyards and olive groves, and charming pink dwellings
. . . She ran her finger down his back . . .
dropping to a rocky shore far below
. . . She slid her hand between his legs. . . .
where boulders nestle between the luxuriant foliage of the bougainvillea
. . .

Colin grunted, and shifted. She moved, her skin unsticking from his. It was very hot; the Pentel was slippery in her hand. She had arrived at Naples now,
bustling and cosmopolitan, home to superb museums and 499 churches, a city that bestows its favours generously but that only opens its heart to the cognoscenti
. . . She sipped her tea; it was stewed.
Sitting at a bustling pavement café in the Palazzo Reale I treated myself to a welcome glass of their refreshing local wine, Lacryma Christi del Vesuvio
. . .

She thought:
Penny Warren took a mid-week bargain break, departing Gatwick and flying to Soho, still London's best-kept secret, where she travelled from the bedroom to
the bathroom, returning from the bathroom to the bedroom courtesy of Sunspot Holidays Ltd
. . .

Colin mumbled into the pillow: ‘Your elbow's digging.'

‘Sorry.' She removed her arm. She was so apologetic with him; despite her hard elbows she felt softer, more yielding.

‘Where've you got to?'

‘Sorrento.'

She lay slumped across his hard buttocks, her Pentel poised. The sheer
thisness
of what was happening made her stomach contract. Until she met Colin she hadn't committed adultery; she hadn't had time. She had written lots of pieces about it, of course:
Infidelity, Do's and Don'ts. Lipstick on his Collar
, God, how corny.
It's Your Affair – the Cosmo Guide to Extra-Marital Manners
. But then she had written pieces about everything. She mostly wrote for women's magazines and the women's pages of newspapers, cunningly disguised as
You
or
Living
though everyone knew that only women read them. She had been doing it for twenty years now. She was brisk and reliable, or she had been until recently. She knew where to lunch, and what sort of mineral water to order. She knew the difference between collagen and silicone. She thought she knew everything. She ruthlessly plundered her friends' lives for copy and
cross-questioned their adolescent children about the latest trends. Despite her Sloaney shoes and Conran suits she knew what ‘well gutted' meant. She knew all the fashion designers by their first names and went to the memorial services for their boyfriends. She held the fort in editorial offices when somebody took time off briefly – very briefly – to have a baby, or when they took a bit longer off to write a sex-and-shopping novel they got their colleagues to plug. This was what she was like, this Penny who took the tube to work and taxis at lunchtime, who breezed through London unaware, who juggled a demanding husband and a busy freelance career, who thought she knew everything.

Until now. She didn't know about this. She had no idea it would feel like this. The simple fact of another man's hands on her skin, the smell of him. The pole-axing body of him. His breath in her ear. His damp balls beneath her tenderly kneading fingers. All this. The other Penny he awakened, who was always there but she didn't know it, who surrendered herself up to him – softer, more yielding, nicer. Who charted his moles between her outstretched forefinger and thumb, wondering at anything so humdrum, but not humdrum to her. Who rubbed her chin against his stubble. What was this, pheremones? Had she written a piece about them yet? It was
exhilarating to be so lost, and yet discovered. It was terrifying.

This simply wouldn't do, she knew that. Her mother would be appalled; she would advance on Colin with her secateurs. Buffy would be – she mustn't think of Buffy. Even calling him a demanding husband made her feel guilty. Demanding was much too simple a word, even she knew that; marriage was more complicated than that. But you tried to make your husband simple, the equation an understandable one. When Colin called Buffy a boozy old fraud she bristled with hastily-assembled loyalty, but she was grateful, too. It made her position clearer, as if it were printed in one of her magazines.
P. W. – let us call her that – is a successful career woman and has been married eight years to a man fifteen years her senior. Once a well-known Shakespearean actor, his career had suffered a decline, due to domestic complications and a reputation for drink, and he was now known mainly for his mellow tones extolling the benefits of Rot-Away Damp Proof Courses. Was his a huge talent tragically squandered or a very small talent ruthlessly exploited? Time alone will tell. All P. W. discovered was that as her career prospered, his stagnated, that while she changed and grew, becoming a strong, independent woman in charge of her own life,
etc etc, how many times had she written this,
he needed
more from her than she was prepared to give. Like many men, a seemingly strong exterior
(in his case, pretty fat)
concealed inner insecurities and a man out of touch with his feelings. As the years passed she realized that instead of marrying a father-figure she had in fact married a child
.

Oh, God, this made her feel even more guilty. It was a wholly new sensation, like the first twinges of shingles. She wasn't used to having a conscience. She was a
journalist.
Journalists are born without a conscience, like certain car engines are constructed without a fan belt. She was tough, wasn't she? From strangers, she had extracted humiliating personal confessions; from public figures she had dug out revelations of bisexual encounters. One of her best friends hadn't spoken to her since being featured in one of her most successful series,
Me and My Depression.
That's what journalists
did.
They fiddled their expenses; they never paid for a holiday in their lives. It was part of their job description. She had had the country cottage totally redecorated, and a large Victorian conservatory added, for a feature that she had never got round to writing at all.

Poor Buffy. She was really very fond of him. Like communism in Eastern Europe, her marriage was suddenly crumbling so fast that she couldn't keep up with it. She was betraying her husband with chilling efficiency. She had been away on six trips now,
packing her suitcase with suitable clothes for the South of France or the Norwegian fjords, ostentatiously – probably too ostentatiously – hunting for her passport, casually dropping the names of the imaginary hacks whose drunken exploits she would catalogue upon her return. Kissing Buffy goodbye, with Judas lips, and hailing a cab in the Edgware Road.

She travelled straight here, of course, to her other life. If it was an early morning flight Colin would still be in bed. Dumping her luggage on the floor she would tear off the clothes she had just put on and joyfully join him on his futon. For the three or four days of her trip she didn't dare leave the flat, in case somebody saw her. It was Colin who went out for supplies, and to buy the relevant guide books for her to crib. She had once written a piece about a man with two families, neither of which knew about the other's existence. She had called it
The Man who Ate Two Christmas Dinners.
In fact, he had to eat so many meals twice that he put on three stone and both women finally fell out of love with him and ran away with other men. But she had learnt some valuable tips about the mechanics of the whole operation. The alibis. Well, lies. The construction, in her head, of a whole scenario she came to half-believe in herself, with its own cast of colourful characters. She felt like Trollope, or someone. There was Shirley from
Family
Circle
, and Coral from
Chat
who always went down with migraine. Then there was Hamish Dimchurch – God knows how she had thought up the name but she felt she knew him quite well by now. Hamish Dimchurch was a sozzled old freeloader who worked for
Catering Today
and who cropped up in all her stories simply because Buffy always asked about him – maybe he recognized a kindred spirit. ‘Was that old rogue Hamish there?' he would ask eagerly.