The Ex-Wives

by Deborah Moggach

  Celeste nodded. ‘I know.’

  ‘When Buffy was out one day, I found a photo of her sunbathing on the lawn. I burnt it. Then the next day I dug a vegetable patch there, to get rid of her.’

  ‘Where you grew the carrots?’

  ‘And later I got the conservatory built. The final exorcism. Fumigation. Whatever. But by then she’d sort of dissolved anyway, she’d lost her power, because I’d fallen out of love with Buffy.’ Suddenly she jumped up. ‘Gosh, I wish you’d taken notes. I must write all this down, before I forget.’

  ‘Why?’

  But Penny wasn’t listening. ‘Sally’s gone to New Woman, hasn’t she,’ she muttered, searching for a pen, ‘or was it Woman’s Journal? She liked my thing on the Redundant Penis. Cut it to ribbons, of course, but still . . .’ She grabbed a notepad. ‘There’s always Louise, she owes me one after that debacle over the menopause piece . . .’ She stopped. ‘Shit, they’ve sacked her.’ The peeling mask gazed thoughtfully through Celeste. ‘Options might want it. I gave them lots of names for that How I Lost my Virginity thing . . .’ She tapped the Pentel against her teeth.

  Celeste got up. ‘Shall I just get on with it then?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The recycling thing.’

  ‘Sure, sweetie. Some more arrived this morning. I biked them round.’

  Celeste made her way to the door. The floor rocked gently from side to side as if she were standing on a swing. ‘Bye, then.’

  ‘Wait!’ Penny disappeared, and came back with a jacket. ‘Have it. It’s Saint Laurent.’

  ‘I couldn’t!’

  ‘It’s all right, it didn’t cost me anything. We did some fashion shots. It’d look much better on somebody young.’ She did, in fact, look ancient this evening, her face cracking like a monument.

  ‘You sure?’

  Penny put it on her. ‘Boxy shoulders. I knew you’d look good in it. Power dressing!’

  Celeste managed to climb onto the bus. The sliding doors hissed shut. Clinging to a pole, she swung herself into a seat. She thought: What’s happening to me? I’m drunk. I’m wearing an ex-wife’s clothes. I’m learning things I had no inkling of.

  The man in the seat next to her leant towards her and said: ‘Let’s have a look at those titties.’

  ‘Go fuck yourself!’ she replied loudly.

  He got off at the next stop and she sat there, blushing. How could she have said that? She had never sworn in her life. Where did those words come from? She started giggling and put her hand over her mouth.

  She made her way up Kilburn High Road, past the boisterous Irish pubs and the glowing, rosy curtains of the Society Sauna and Massage. It was nine o’clock. A Rastafarian leant against a lamp-post, eating a drooping triangle of pizza. London alarmed her less, now. She was learning to deal with it. She stopped outside her flat and fished for her keys. I’m learning to lie, she thought, marvelling at herself. Well, I’m learning to keep quiet about the truth. I’m learning to drink Sancerre and wear power jackets.

  In the hallway she stumbled over a large parcel. A note was sellotaped to it: Whose is this? Waxie. She carried it upstairs and switched on the light. But she didn’t open the package, or even look at the heaps of objects arranged around the floor like the items for some demented jumble sale. She went straight to the phone directory, and opened it at ‘B’.

  In one sense, things were becoming more confusing. But she was learning to cope. Buckman, Leon. She found the address, in Primrose Hill Road, and sat still for a moment. Her heart thumped. She looked down at her jacket; it was a rich midnight blue and beautifully cut, even she could see that. She had never worn anything like it. Back home the neighbours wouldn’t recognize her; they would think she had come to do a survey or something.

  She fingered the stiff lapel. This was what actors did; they dressed up and became somebody else. Buffy knew how to do it; that was his job.

  Suddenly she was ravenous. She made some toast, heated up some baked beans and poured them over it. As she sat she looked at her new self, hanging over the back of the chair. She felt strong and resourceful. Shy? No, not now. Not any longer.

  Fifteen

  IN HIS BASEMENT consulting room, Leon was listening to a patient. Outside, children whooped on Primrose Hill. Indoors, there was a long, shuddering breath.

  ‘I’m ready to talk about my father now,’ his patient was saying.

  Leon nodded. ‘What do you want to tell me?’

  ‘I’ve kept it buried, you see, all these years. What he did to me. I know he did it to me because I can’t remember it.’ She took a drag of her cigarette. ‘I’ve buried it, I realize that now. I’ve denied it to myself, because it’s so painful . . .’

  She sat, wreathed in smoke. Here we go again, Leon thought. He wondered, for a moment, if the time would come when his two grown-up daughters in America would suddenly accuse him of sexual abuse, and take his protests as further proof of guilt. Everyone was muscling in on it now. Even Jacquetta had had a go, telling him she was sure now that her father, a mild, stammering academic, had fondled her in her bath when she wasn’t looking. It reminded him of the sixties, when practically every woman he met had claimed some sort of sexual contact with Jimmy Hendrix.

  ‘. . . he used to sit me on his knee, you see, and read me Winnie the Pooh. He used to read to me every night. I should have realized that was a danger sign. He wanted me close to him, he wanted power over me . . .’

  The front door banged. There was a dragging noise along the ceiling. He and Jacquetta had the builders in. Well, Jacquetta had the builders in. They were building her a conservatory in the garden. A distant voice bellowed: ‘Stavros! Where the fuck’s those two-by-fours?’

  His patient lit another cigarette. ‘I see it now, of course, since I’ve been coming here. All my victim-dictated behaviour stems from that time when I sat there, his arms around me, giving me a hug and a kiss when he closed the book . . .’ Her voice trembled.

  Leon shivered. There was a draught in the room. Had somebody left the back door open?

  She started to cry. ‘That hug. I know now it wasn’t just a hug. Oh no. It was a sort of rape, an assertion of his power over me, his male power, abusing my trust, my little girl’s trust . . .’

  Leon looked up. A man had come into the room. He wore overalls and was covered in dust.

  ‘Sorry, mate. Just looking for a plug for me extension lead.’

  Leon and Jacquetta didn’t quarrel; they talked things through. When he went upstairs for lunch she was pouring boiling water onto her ginseng tea-bag. He went up to her and kissed her lightly on her forehead.

  ‘Sweetheart, we really must do something about the noise.’

  ‘I should, you mean.’

  A mixture of hammering and Capital Radio floated in from the garden. He opened the oven. Maria had heated him up some cannelloni. God bless the Portuguese. His wife was too spiritual to cook. Too spiritual to pay her parking tickets either, he thought, as he glimpsed another couple of them amongst the opened mail on the table. He put them into his pocket and sat down.

  ‘The builders, they’ve been using the patients’ lavatory,’ he said. ‘The seat was up and there was a cigarette butt floating in it.’

  ‘I knew you didn’t want me to have the conservatory built. I knew you thought it was too expensive.’

  ‘I didn’t say that, actually.’ At the time, he had just asked her if she was sure she wanted it. There had been a piece in the paper, only yesterday, about conservatories being a warning signal of marital unrest. On the women’s page. Something about architects combining with divorce lawyers. He had only read it because it was next to an article about the dysfunctional orgasm, one of his specialities.

  ‘You don’t understand, Leon. You can seal yourself off in your, your . . .’ She pointed towards the basement. ‘. . . your ivory tower. I’m a woman. I have children. Things are needed from me all the time, little pieces of me. It’s give, give, give. This place . . .�
� She gestured around the expanse of the kitchen . . . ‘I feel hemmed in, Leon. Closed in.’ She pointed out of the window, to the green slope of Primrose Hill. ‘. . . that concrete jungle out there, all those people. I need to be just myself sometimes. I need somewhere to be alone, with growing things.’

  ‘But you can’t be alone in a conservatory. That’s the point of them. Everybody can see you.’

  She sighed. He noticed, for the first time, the grey threads in her hair. Not for the first time, exactly, but it always gave him a shock to see them. She was still a handsome woman – strained, fine-boned – but there was no doubt that they were growing old together. His own mane of hair had turned grey quite suddenly soon after he had married her. But he still had a certain Norman Mailer glamour to him, one of his female patients had remarked on this only recently. She was still in transference.

  Jacquetta turned away, her beads swinging. She was wearing a mulberry, knitted two-piece he had bought for her in Monsoon. After they had married he had tried, gently, to tone down her wardrobe. This was for her sake as much as for his, she surely didn’t want to be seen as a wrinkled Flower Power child at some conference in Stockholm. But then it turned out that she had no intention of coming on his conference trips anyway. Not for her, the role of appendage. Or, to put it another way, the role of supportive wife.

  ‘I know we’re not supposed to exist up here,’ she said. ‘I know we’re not supposed to have a life. I couldn’t bear you having a life, when I was your patient. I remember hearing the radio through the wall. Your incredibly dreary wife listening to The Archers.’

  ‘It wasn’t her. She never listened to The Archers. It was the home help.’ His ex-wife, in fact, was now a senior investment analyst on Wall Street but Jacquetta didn’t like to be reminded of this. Even now, after nine years, she never called his ex-wife by her name. Jacquetta had an awe-inspiring capacity for self-deception, something they were just starting to do some good work on when their relationship slid from the professional to the personal, he had joined her on his couch (the floor, actually) and the analysis had to be prematurely terminated.

  Jacquetta was nibbling a piece of celery in her abstracted way, as if she wasn’t really doing anything as boring as eating. Sometimes he found this endearing; it depended on his mood. He loved her, he was sure, but on the other hand he was a man of science. What was love? A muscular spasm? A reassurance of the self? A need for lit windows when you returned home in the dark? He couldn’t talk about this because she would take offence. She was extremely touchy. Fiery, he had thought at first, artistic temperament, but now he thought, touchy. Difficult was only something other people said. Despite all sorts of things, he still found her lovable. Contrary, but lovable. If, after all this time, he knew what love was.

  He had been through so many marriages and so had she. That at least was something they shared. It brought them close, like children of army parents who had been brought up in trouble spots all over the world. Of course he felt the odd tweak of jealousy, but by hosting a Channel 4 series on the subject he had finally drained it of meaning, even for himself. Sometimes he still felt uncomfortable, too, living in her old marital home and working in the bottom of it, like a miner digging away in the depths of its subconscious, digging away at his seam of gold. But it was in a prime location, crammed with money and neurotic wives, and she had managed to hold onto the property with her own vague sort of ruthlessness, as if it were humdrum and somehow demeaning for anyone else, in this case poor old Buffy, to battle over the vulgar subject of money. She had managed it the way she nibbled the celery, vaguely disclaiming responsibility for what she was doing. Being on the profiteering end of this – his own wife having kicked him out, subsequently sold the house and gone back to the States – he had failed to ally himself with Buffy in any us-men-together sort of way. He wasn’t that sort of pubby chap anyway. He had always been better with women. Besides, he had been sleeping with the man’s wife.

  He scraped his plate clean and stacked it in the dishwasher. Jacquetta was standing at the window, peering at the building site in their back garden. She wasn’t wearing her glasses; she was always losing them somewhere around the house. Hunting for her spectacles was the only indoor activity that all the family shared. The workmen had suddenly disappeared, the way workmen do. Maybe for lunch, maybe for weeks. She was twirling a piece of hair around her finger. She was either spoiling for a fight or just waiting for him to leave.

  ‘I know India’s being difficult,’ she said, ‘but you could be more supportive.’

  ‘I’m very fond of India. I’m very fond of all your children.’

  ‘You hate her using our bathroom.’

  ‘Only because she’s in there such ages.’

  ‘She’s insecure about her looks. That’s why.’

  ‘I just wish she’d be insecure in the boys’ bathroom.’

  ‘She can’t. It’s too disgusting.’

  That was true. Even Maria, their treasure, wouldn’t go into the boys’ bathroom. She wouldn’t go into their bedrooms any more, either. Last week, ignoring a Quiet Please! Examination in Progress sign Bruno had stolen from school and pinned to his door, she had gone into his room and found him in bed with the girl from the dry cleaners.

  ‘She is trying to find a flat,’ said Jacquetta.

  India won’t move out, thought Leon. Not if she has any sense. Nobody’s children move out anymore. In fact he was fond of India. She was the product of Jacquetta’s first marriage to a man called Alan. They had been hippies together in the sixties; Leon had seen some painful but hilarious snapshots of them in bellbottoms. Their daughter was called India because she had been conceived in an ashram near Bangalore. He sometimes wondered if India’s subsequent problems stemmed, in some measure, from this continuous reminder of the sexual activity that had produced her, twenty-three years previously. At the very least, it seemed embarrassing. Her father, Alan, had since gone into software.

  ‘It’s not India,’ he said, ‘it’s the boys. One of them’s been using my computer. I tried to call up a file yesterday – a patient’s file, she was just about to arrive – and instead I got The Pros and Cons of Bismark’s Foreign Policy.’

  Jacquetta twitched her shoulders, as if a midge were bothering her. She wasn’t really listening.

  He went on: ‘For people who don’t ever talk to us they make an extraordinary amount of noise. And we’ve got to do something about their rabbits.’

  ‘We can’t get rid of the rabbits. They’re theirs.’

  ‘But they never go near them,’ he said. ‘They never even go in the garden. They never even open their curtains. They’ve forgotten they exist.’

  ‘They wouldn’t if they went. They’d be terribly upset, you know that. Remember what happened with their stick insects.’

  ‘That was Buffy’s fault,’ he said. ‘Anyway, they could’ve been dead for years by then. They were mummified. Everyone had forgotten about them.’

  ‘The boys were traumatized, Leon! I talked it through with my group. I couldn’t let it happen again.’

  ‘But the things keep breeding, sweetheart, and getting out of their hutches. It’s pandemonium out there, since the workmen arrived. Last week one of my patients was just starting to open up for the first time – five months it’d taken. She was just starting to talk – to freely talk – when this baby rabbit hopped into the room and started to wash its ears.’

  Jacquetta gazed out of the window. ‘All right. But we can’t get rid of the original pair. Not for children of a broken home. That would be too symbolic.’

  Sixteen

  THAT NIGHT THE temperature dropped. The wood next to Lorna’s cottage, already so thin and wintry, closed in on itself. Water froze in the ruts. Nothing stirred; the place was locked. The first frost, when it arrives, locks the senses; it is impossible to imagine anything changing. But Lorna, lying in bed, knew otherwise. She had read the sheet of paper, plucked from the photocopier. She didn’t need to sleep to sta
rt this particular nightmare, for it was starting right now, without her. My wood, my secret wood, she repeated to herself, how can they? She turned over, and stared at the ceiling. How can they bulldoze it up and turn it into a Leisure Experience?

  Brenda was dreaming of leisurewear, the flip-flip of the catalogue pages. She never remembered her dreams, the next day. Well, there was so much to do, wasn’t there? It was all go, go, go.

  Beside her, Miles slept. He had spiralled airily down into a place she could never reach. Nobody could meet him there except his uninvited guests, each night so eyebrow-raising yet so inevitable. He lay, trapped by Brenda and released by his dreams; outside the drone of cars, the arc lights. Beyond the ring road, Swindon slumbered.

  He slept, dead to the world. He dreamt from the store of his past; none of the people in this story were alive for him yet though, who knows, he may have brushed against the shoulder of somebody who had brushed against one of them; he himself might have brushed against one of them. A car carrying somebody who had made love to one of them might even now be circling the roundabout whose sodium lights filtered through the curtains and bathed Brenda’s humped shape in a flat and shadowless glow.

  Way above the starter homes, above the orange glow of Swindon, the moon shone. It shone on the wood next to Lorna’s cottage, its own reflection blurred in the frozen puddles. It shone on the white bones of Jacquetta’s conservatory, curved like whale ribs over the black, matted garden. There is nowhere as secret as a London garden. Closed in by the cliffs of the surrounding houses, whose lights switched off one by one, it guarded its memories – of Buffy’s children and the children before them, children who themselves had grown old and died. Beyond the houses, over in the Zoo, the wolves howled.

  Jacquetta’s dreams were incredibly vivid and powerful. She was proud of them, like a mother is proud of her surprisingly athletic children; the next morning she liked to recount them in detail to whoever she was living with at the time. Her first husband, Alan, used to roll his eyes and say ‘Wow’, but he said wow to everything. A man called Otto tried to interrupt and tell her his. Buffy, after they had been married for a while, used to get impatient. ‘Bloody hell,’ he would say, ‘I’ve forgotten who everybody is. Hang on a bit. It’s like some blooming Norse saga.’ But then Buffy had never really understood her.