The Ex-Wives (5 page)

She went there and she stayed for a while, just looking, just telling herself she had come to the right place. She hid in a bus shelter on the opposite side of the road. She looked up at the windows of the building. Her heart thumped. Which windows were
the right ones? Soon, somehow, she would find out. She would find a way.

She walked back in the dusk, down Kilburn High Road, the street of shoes. So many shoe shops, Saxone, Dolcis, their racks on the pavement, their wire baskets filled with ladies shoes, the sort her mother used to wear,
Final Clearance Sale!
Rows of single shoes, unbunioned as yet. She stood there, trying to cry, but she was beyond tears now.
To the best Mum in the world!
she used to write. She made her Mum birthday cards, they used to take hours. She remembered the weight of her mother's hand in hers. Grown-ups were baffling, but you thought you could rely on them. They worried about stupid things but that was what they were supposed to do. It made you feel superior. Adults never realize how superior children feel, how much of the time.

Celeste went back to her flat. She felt both very old, wearily so, and at the same time infantile and bereft. Somewhere in the middle should be herself, bringing home a Birds Eye Fisherman's Pie for supper, just arrived in London and looking for a job. She must learn to be this woman, a step at a time. And she must learn how to lie.

Beside the doorbell was a note.
Waxie, I'm at Lynns
. Who was Waxie? She didn't know any of the people in the flats yet, they were just thumps and muffled
music. Opposite was a building with barred windows called Reliance House. It always looked closed, but today some men were going in and out, unloading cardboard boxes. What was everyone up to? The key to it all had been taken away from her. One letter, in a biscuit tin, had done it.

Celeste went upstairs and unloaded her shopping. Her skull ached; her insides felt heated and swollen. But it wasn't the beginnings of flu. It was anger.

‘
MADAM, I WOULD
like a shampoo and set!
'

‘Hang on.' Archie fiddled with the volume controls. ‘Okay. Once more, from the top. A bit louder.'

‘
Madam
,' boomed Buffy, ‘
I would like a shampoo and set!
'

Archie rewound the tape –
tesdnaoopmahsaekildluowi, gabble gabble
– listened and nodded. ‘Carry on.'

‘
Fill her up please, top grade
,' said Buffy, into the mike. ‘
Show me to a table where I can see the pianist's hands
.'

‘A bit more feeling on the
hands
,' said Archie.

‘What is this, the blooming Old Vic?'

It was suffocating in the little booth. The air was thick with smoke from Archie's cheroot, and the
walls were scribbled with multi-lingual graffiti, probably of an obscene or homesick nature.

‘
This wine is corked!
' said Buffy. ‘
Take it back to the cellar!
'

The St Reginald College of English was situated above a massage parlour in Balham. Archie ran it, together with a couple of seedy ex-teachers who looked as if they had been sacked for paedophilia. The embossed crest above the door fooled nobody except foreigners; Archie had copied it from a jar of marmalade. Reginald was the name of his uncle.

‘
I am a stranger to this town. Please direct me to your nearest building society!
'

The tape they were recording was compiled for East Europeans, newly-liberated fodder for Archie's language school. He called them ‘the Great Stonewashed' after he had seen newsreels of them clambering over the Berlin Wall – clambering not to freedom but to enrolment at his establishment. These tapes were a bona fide money-spinner, that was what he thought – think of the market openings! – and were peppered with queries about mortgage rates and venture capitalism.

‘
May I make a down-payment on this appliance?
' asked Buffy, choking in the smoke. ‘For God's sake, Archie, put that thing out!' He squinted at his sheet of paper
and leant towards the mike. ‘
Does this cellphone come with a written guarantee?
'

Why am I here? he wondered. To what depths have I sunk? I, who like Tiresias, have seen it all. What am I doing, stuck in a suffocating booth in Balham, teaching a lot of Lithuanians how to order shares in British Telecom? The chair was hard; his backside ached. No wonder his haemorrhoids were playing up again.

‘
Madam, kindly sell me a suppository!
'

‘What?' Archie squinted at him through the smoke.

He was doing it for the money, of course. The fee was really quite decent. Archie must be making a bomb from this place, in addition to – as he felicitously put it – dipping his wick into some fairly acceptable Commie crumpet. Ex-Commie crumpet.

But then Archie had always been a bit of a spiv. They had met during National Service when they had both been stationed in an arctic base camp near Kettering. Even then Archie had been involved in some complex manoeuvres involving petrol and bulk-order baked beans; no fool, he had been in cahoots with Warrant Officer Pickering, a key figure at the time and the springboard to a lifetime's racketeering. Bored and freezing, Buffy had loathed the entire two years and spent his time being as inconspicuous as possible, listening to Fats Waller records
on his bunk and creeping out at night to meet girls from the local chicken-gutting factory. Despite his public school education he had failed to rise above the rank of sergeant, a tribute to the good sense of those in charge. Whilst he languished, Archie thrived and left the Army a fully-fledged entrepreneur. First it was reconditioned fridges, then snooker halls and the leisure industry. ‘I got into gravel pits,' he said. ‘The genesis of the theme park should, by rights, be credited to yours truly.' Buffy hadn't seen him for decades; they had happened to bump into each other recently in the Charing Cross Road, where Buffy had been browsing in a second-hand bookshop – another sure sign of his excess leisure, like knowing the names of all the waitresses at his local patisserie.

‘It's a wrap!' said Archie in an irritating American accent. He disconnected the mike and they went into a small, leprous office. On the wall hung a framed certificate, testifying to Archie's qualifications as a senior EFL instructor. The Tippex beneath the name
Archibald Bingham
was clearly visible. Archie scratched his balls, coughed, and unlocked a drawer. From it he produced a wad of soiled banknotes and counted them out, one by one.

‘Know how to say
You're a horny tomato
in Japanese?' he asked.

‘No,' said Buffy. He took the notes. ‘Shouldn't there be another ten?'

‘My mistake, squire.' Archie reopened the drawer and passed it over.

It was lunchtime. Now he had no wife to go home to, Buffy had an impulse to ask Archie – even Archie – out for a drink. He felt this about the most unlikely people. But Archie shook his head and squirted some breath freshener into his mouth.

‘Got a date with a promising little Czech.' He grinned. ‘Play my cards right and it'll soon be Czechmate.'

A wave of desolation swept over Buffy. Not that he was excluded from this twosome, but that he was desperate enough to have issued such an invitation to Archie in the first place. He had noticed this before, with a sinking sense of recognition. Once divorced, your standards plummetted. You rang up acquaintances you hadn't seen for years; you endured whole evenings in Dollis Hill with your accountant and his wife, drinking microscopic scotches and watching videos of their Kenyan safari. You sat in a pub for hours while some near-stranger told you about all the amazing things you could do with computer graphics. It was like suddenly having no money and going back to eating tinned macaroni. Anything to delay the return to that darkened flat.

He took the bus home. In the seat behind him an inebriated Irishman sang ‘Loveboat, loveboat' all the way to Victoria, until the word lost all meaning – if, that is, it had any in the first place. Buffy didn't have the energy to shut him up. Was this all there was? Was this all he could expect, now? He thought of Prospero. His maturity fitted him for this role, he had grown into it – the noble forehead, the experience. My God, the experience. Why, now he had arrived at this bus-stop in life's journey, did nobody recognize it? Surely his past should lend him gravitas, but nowadays it was all producers half his age, drinking mineral water and getting phone-calls from their children.

All his old mates, the real characters, had gone; they had died from cirrhosis of the liver or retired to cottages in France. This young lot was sort of odourless, no patina to them. Even in its heyday the BBC didn't lend itself to dissipation but there was a certain style to things then, a Fitzrovian camaraderie, men with no discernible home life, women producers called Muriel, gruff and reckless, who were built like shire-horses and who could drink you under the table, and who knew who you might discover the next morning, snoring peacefully on your floor while the gas fire still blazed?

Buffy got off the bus at Maida Vale. The wind
whipped his face; it was November and already freezing – why did November always seem colder than any other month? An illegally-parked car was being towed away;
weeee-weeee
wailed its alarm. How helpless it looked. He felt just like that himself. What a humiliating morning!

He tried to cheer himself up. At least there was no Penny waiting, with her hoots of mirth.
Honestly, Buffy, how could you?
It was undeniably lonely, that she wasn't there to listen to his exploits at the language school, which by now he would have worked up into one of his anecdotes. On the other hand it was a relief, that she wasn't there to be all superior about it. He must remember that. She had been insufferably superior. Her greatest feat, her most awesomely mind-boggling one, was that she managed to be superior
even when it was revealed she had been double-crossing him. For months.
He, Russell Buffery, had been the totally innocent party. She had been lying and cheating, packing and unpacking, and all the time shagging herself senseless with some under-aged photographer in Soho.
And yet she had managed to still be hoity-toity about it.
The whole thing was breathtaking.

Looking back over those final explosive weeks, he couldn't remember how she did it, probably some sort of conjuring trick. But she had managed, in some
appallingly female way, to make
him
feel to blame. It was all, obviously, his fault . . .' Your infantile egocentricity . . . your drinking . . . your hypochondria . . . And another thing . . .' All his ex-wives said that,
and another thing.
You never helped with the children, you never helped with the washing-up . . . you were never supportive with my career . . .
and another thing
. . . you dropped ash on the duvet . . . you laughed at your own jokes . . . at that dinner party at the Robinsons', remember, you fell asleep in the soup,
the soup,
remember, we hadn't even started the main course, I could've
died
. . . a blizzard of
another things,
a smokescreen of them . . .

He remembered that mockingly sunny day, three months earlier. How he had unzipped her suitcase with feverish hands.

‘I told you, I changed taxis!' she had cried. ‘The cabbie from the airport, he was going on about darkies and what's the country coming to and I simply couldn't stand it. Racism is so repellent, especially when one's paying for it. So I got into another one!'

The self-righteousness of her voice, barely faltering even when she saw him taking out the bottle of Sudden Tan!

‘That's for my legs. They always take the longest to get brown, not that
you'd
notice.'

See! She had managed to put him in the wrong, even then.

‘Where's your plane ticket?' he had demanded. ‘Where's your lira?'

‘Don't be so paranoid, darling. It's bad for your blood pressure.'

Just then she stopped. He had pulled out a newspaper –
La Stampa
. It still had its sticker on:
Pat's
News and Smokes, Wardour St
. W.1.

‘Oh shit' she said.

Buffy paused outside Blomfield Mansions and looked up at the porch. Two cupids, carved in stone, were entwined above the doorway. They were portly and sooty; the private parts of one of them had chipped off. He knew how they felt. With what hopes, years before, had he once carried Penny across the threshold – well, not carried, because of his bad back, but he had lifted her, with a little hop, over the rubber doormat. How those cupids mocked him now! My God he was feeling maudlin, and he hadn't even had a drink.

He let himself into the flat, stumbling first over the dog and then over a plastic bag of empties. There was a funny smell coming from somewhere. Once he had been in the place for a bit he got used to it, but it always hit him on entering. The answerphone
showed ‘1'. Briefly, but unconvincingly, he had an image of Penny, sobbing on the other end of the line and begging to come home. Asking him to forgive her. Grovellingly telling him that for once it was her mistake and she would always love him.

He replayed the message.

‘Granada TV here, could you call back as soon as possible and ask for Gwenda.'

Granada TV! His spirits rose. He dialled the number. Maybe it was a cameo role – a fatherly family doctor, say, or a charismatic local MP. About time he was on the TV again. Maybe it was a major costume drama set in the Caribbean! They wanted him to play a plantation owner with a doting young native mistress.

By the time Gwenda's voice answered he was already making his acceptance speech at the BAFTA awards. ‘Mr Buffery?' she said. ‘Just to remind you, we don't seem to have received last month's rental on your video recorder. Would you like to pop in, or pop a cheque in the post?'