The Ex-Wives (7 page)

Celeste had been working in the shop for a week before Buffy came in. It had been so simple; she had walked by, seen a
Salesperson Wanted
sign in the window, gone in and got the job. By the second day she had felt part of the fixtures and fittings. There was a lot to learn but it was only bottles and packets and things you could grasp. She was a whizz at the till; after all, she had done the accounts at Kwik-Fit, she was over-qualified for this. She liked stocking the shelves and pricing things,
pzzz, pzzz,
with her pricing gun. She liked the photos of lustrous women on the display cases, their pouting beauty invited her to accompany them to a place of which she was only dimly aware. She wasn't ready, yet. The outside world confused her but Mr Singh ran a tight ship and his shop was an oasis of perfumed confidentiality.

Alpha Pharmacy was in a parade of shops just off the Edgware Road. Blocks of mansion flats rose up
behind it; down the road stretched the creamy crescents of what she discovered was Little Venice. She could walk to work each day; it was only a mile from the chaos of Kilburn but it was like stepping into another world. She felt stabilized; a hand steadied her on the playground swing. The shops sold exactly what they said they did, and she was working in one of them. She was in a middle-class neighbourhood where people knew what they wanted. She hadn't met Buffy yet, and she didn't know what he wanted, but she sensed a certain thrust and confidence in the air. Things didn't shift, and disappear overnight. The wine merchants opposite said
Est. 1953
on its sign and there they were every day, the same bottles in the window. Buffy, she was to discover, bemoaned the changes in their locality but she only noticed the reassuring continuity; such is the seeking magnet of our needs. Even the drilling in the street outside didn't impinge, not while she was punching the numbers on her bleeping till. She liked it when the shop was busy and she didn't have time to think.

That day. What was special about that day? A Friday, and by lunchtime the city was quickening. She had felt this each week since she had arrived. In schoolrooms, unknown children fidgeted at their desks. Out in the hinterlands, in the factories, people listened restlessly for the hooter. Down the road, still
unknown to her, Buffy was sipping his late scotch in The Three Fiddlers.

‘Malcolm's taking me bowling,' said Nesta, ‘after we've had a snack. You ever been bowling?'

Celeste shook her head.

‘Got to find you a boyfriend, preferably with wheels,' said Nesta.

Celeste was standing on a chair, stocking a shelf with nasal sprays. She was remembering her dream, from the night before. She had pricked her mother with a pin,
hssssss
. . . The body deflated into a folded packet of plastic. She mustn't think of these things. Dreams were like those shops in Kilburn; their displays were so jumbled up it gave you a jolt, to look.

‘Be good, girls,' said Mr Singh, ‘I'm popping out to the post office.'

He left. An elderly lady called Mrs Klein came in. Celeste was becoming familiar with customers' bodily disorders. When people passed by the window she felt intimate with their hidden organs, like a plumber looking at a bathroom he had worked on and knowing the layout of the pipes. She was getting to know the regulars. Underneath Mrs Klein's musquash-clad exterior there lurked an irritable colon. The man in the wine merchants opposite had, beneath his polished brogues, a chronic attack of
athlete's foot. In this city full of strangers women were emerging whose contraceptive methods were to become more familiar to Celeste than to their own nearest and dearest. Already she knew that the check-out girl at Cullens was on the Pill, and that the big, disordered-looking blonde at the framer's shop used an Ortho-Diaphragm size
75
, plus jelly.

‘You going out tonight?' asked Nesta.

Celeste shook her head; she always seemed to be shaking her head. She never went out; she didn't know anybody, she only knew what ointments they used. She wrapped Mrs Klein's purchases, then she sank to her knees and started to refill a shelf with Clairol Hair Tones. Another customer had arrived; she was talking to Nesta about rejuvenating face packs.

‘My problem's a greasy panel,' said the woman, ‘so I need two types in combination.'

Ping
. Someone else came in.

‘. . . it has its own tingle scrub . . .' Nesta was saying.

Celeste climbed to her feet. ‘Can I help you?'

He was a large, florid, bearded man, well muffled up in a checkered scarf. He wore a beret. The first things she noticed were his eyebrows: thick black caterpillars with a life of their own. He was
accompanied by a small dog. It was flat and matted, as if it had been run over at some point in the past.

She thought, at first, he might be an artist. Some local character, anyway. Bit of an eccentric. He had twinkly eyes and, when he spoke, a really beautiful voice – deep and resonant.

‘Anusol Suppositories, please.'

For a moment she thought he was talking in some foreign language – he did look vaguely continental. Then he explained himself.

Looking back, she tried to remember what they said. He made her laugh, she remembered that.
Uncle Buffy.
It was him, how incredible! The voice inside her radio, inside her head. He had told her so many stories already. The musty scent of the armchair where she had curled up, picking at the bits of skin around her fingernails . . . The faint pop-pop of the gas fire. Her hands, smudgy from school. Hammy's squeaky falsetto,
‘'pon my soul!,
as she fiddled with her plaits, pulling at the elastic bands. He was a whole company of furry creatures, her friends; squeaks and grunts from her lost past.

Her throat closed. She felt dizzy, momentarily. But she was chatting quite normally, though there was a roaring in her ears. She wrapped up his parcels; she told him her name, Celeste. And now there was another man standing in front of her.

‘Got any disclosing fluid?' he asked.

‘Disclosing?'

‘For these.' He opened his mouth and tapped his teeth.

LOVE
,
AH LOVE.
Warm sap rising through his wintry branches. What a miracle! Who would believe, at sixty-one, that such a miracle was possible? An old has-been like him, a discontinued model consigned to the scrap-heap. A man, spurned and cuckolded. A man who had seen his ex-wives, wearing their familiar clothes, in the company of unfamiliar men. He was an old pit pony, put out to grass. A noble monument, vandalized and corroded, fallen to ruin. All these, and more, if he could think of them.

Celeste had flung open the doors to his heart, dazzling him with her sunlight. A slip of a thing in a pink nylon overall. Looking back over his life, he wondered if he had ever felt like this before and decided he hadn't. Not like this, for love makes
amnesiacs of us all. Besides, the break-ups of his marriages had spreadingly infected the past, like poisonous chemicals leaking from a shattered container, and even his early months with the various women he thought he had loved, when things should have been all right, were already tainted with something he should have recognized spelt danger ahead.

Take Jacquetta's moody, I'm-so-spiritual behaviour in Venice, on their honeymoon. The way she had stood for hours in front of that Titian painting, oblivious to his fidgety glances at his watch and longings for lunch. At the time he had been impressed by her rapt stillness, by the way other people washed over her but she remained, like a rock each time the waves receded. She had also looked very fetching in her velvet cape. But already there was something ostentatious in her solitude; she was making him feel lowly and coarse, preoccupied with his stomach and excluded from the higher plane inhabited only by the Venetian painters and herself. She had a knack of doing this, a knack which developed as the years passed. When she started sleeping with her shrink she actually managed to make him feel excluded from a twosome too sensitive for him, a twosome which alone breathed the rarified air of her psyche. It was
Titian all over again. Worse, of course, but the same sort of thing.

Then there was Popsi's behaviour in John Lewis, when they were buying curtains. Popsi, his first wife. Years and years ago, this was, back in the sixties. They were both hopelessly undomesticated but they had just moved into two rooms in Bloomsbury and were making an effort. Popsi was a cheerful, accommodating girl; she was usually cast in walk-on parts as a country wench, bursting out of her bodice. That day she had failed an audition and had sunk a few on the way to the store. First she had stilled the department with her rendering of ‘There was a young lady from Bristol.' Then, in an abrupt mood-switch, tears streaming down her cheeks, she had told the elderly salesman about her abortion, how his cutting scissors reminded her, how she was only sixteen at the time and how it would have been a strapping boy by now. Taking her arm and steering her towards the fabric rolls, Buffy had realized that even if there wasn't going to be trouble ahead, there was bound to be a fair amount of embarrassment.

Celeste wasn't like any of them. In fact, she wasn't like any girl he had ever met. She was fresh and unused. She was like a shiny new exercise book in which he would begin writing his most entertaining thoughts in his best italics. Her youth made him feel
wise and experienced, and about time too. Where women were concerned he had always been susceptible; well, foolish sometimes. But she really was enchanting, the way she gazed at him in her forthright way and asked him questions. It was the next day and he had brought in a roll of film to be developed. She really seemed pleased to see him.

‘What are these then?' she asked. ‘Holiday snaps?'

‘Photos of the pavement.'

‘The pavement?'

‘The dug-up bits,' he said.

‘Why've you taken photos of the pavement?'

‘I'm going to send them off with a letter of complaint. Nearly broke my neck again this morning.' He handed her the film. ‘It was already in my camera. Must've been there for ages, God knows what else is on it.'

‘What do you think is?' She looked at him, frowning.

‘Something embarrassing, probably. Something that's better left there undeveloped, like a thought you don't put into words.'

Yesterday she had been some blurred vision, as radiant and featureless as an angel. Today he saw her more clearly. Cropped hair, brown eyes, thick eyebrows – a delicate face but also a face of character and determination. There was a small pimple on her
chin; her forehead was shiny, it was hot and stuffy in the shop. These minor imperfections made her human – more intimate and dear to him. He felt ridiculously familiar with her already.

‘The past is mostly embarrassing,' he said. ‘You haven't had enough of it yet to find out. It's there, ready to put out its foot and trip you up from behind.'

She paused. ‘You're right, actually,' she said. ‘I didn't realize that till lately. You think you know everything, that it's all what you think it is, then – whoosh!'

‘What do you mean?'

She didn't reply. She looked at the order form in her hand. ‘Matt or glossy?'

‘I don't know. My wife was the camera expert.'

‘Wife?'

‘Ex-wife.'

They weren't divorced yet but to all extents and purposes she was an ex. Soon would be, anyway.

‘What's happened to her?'

‘She ran away last summer. With a photographer, appropriately enough. A gorilla called Colin. Christ knows what they find to talk about. Exposures or something.'

‘Where do they live?'

‘Above a pasta restaurant in Soho.' He snorted. ‘Hope she's putting on weight.'

‘You look terrible,' said Celeste. ‘Here, sit down.' She indicated the chair which was set aside for old dears waiting for their prescriptions.

‘When's your tea break?'

They sat in the patisserie down the road. From time to time she bent down and fed George pieces of buttered bun. ‘He's the most slobbery dog I've ever met,' she said, fascinated. She wiped her hand on the tablecloth.

‘What I don't understand about dogs,' he said, ‘is why, when they only eat meat, does their breath smell of fish?'

‘I know. Funny, isn't it. How're the piles?'

‘Better.'

‘Did you go to the pictures?'

He nodded. ‘Have you noticed something? How, when they show a huge list of songs at the end of a film, Brahms and Diana Ross and the Beatles, there's always much more of them than you actually heard in the film itself?'

She paused, considering. There was a crumb on her lip. He leant across and wiped it off with his napkin, as if she were one of his children. How many times – hundreds, thousands – had he sat with his
children in teashops, through marriage and separation, wiping their faces and trying to answer those totally unanswerable yet vaguely cosmic questions children ask, like ‘
How many people in the world have the same birthday as me?
' Now some of them shaved, his children and his step-children, and had driving licences, and still their questions hadn't been answered.

‘Tell me things,' she said. ‘I don't know anything.'

‘Ask me a question.'

‘Tell me about your wife.'

‘Ex-wife.' He paused. He didn't really want to talk about Penny. She was like a room full of disgusting clutter one kept from the visitors. Nor did he want to do that throbbing, poor-me number that had once, all those years before, proved so effective with Penny herself. Celeste deserved better. He looked at her, fondly. Extraordinary thing, love. A miracle, after all he had been through, that he could feel the first stirrings of it, like the first stirrings of hunger after an appalling attack of food poisoning.

‘What does she look like?'

‘Not like you,' he said. ‘Glossy and thoroughbred, in an impervious sort of way. As if water would run off her. She's a journalist, you see.'