Leon did. Leon understood her creative unconscious, her needs and her insecurities, her fragile sense of self. He understood how, through her disastrous relationships with men, she was trying to make contact with the child in herself, the small girl trying to gain the love of the cold and distant father who had in all likelihood abused her in the past. Leon had explained it. How she needed constant reassurance from the men who she chose unerringly for the damage they would do to her. How she had to break those old childhood patterns. In the group she went to, they called it Rewriting the Family Script.
The problem with Leon, if there was a problem, was that he understood too much. This was something else they discussed in the group. She had once had an affair with her gynaecologist – she had gone to him about her painful periods – and quite apart from the fact that he had turned out to be yet another sadistic bastard she had had the feeling that he was more familiar with her erogenous zones than she was herself. This had left her feeling helpless and disempowered, as if she were a bystander while he and her sexual organs just got on with it. Sometimes she felt that Leon was doing this, with her head.
He was wonderful, of course. He was a suave and accomplished lover; he was a regular visitor to their local gym and unlike some men she had known he hadn’t degenerated into an overweight slob. That he earned a large amount of money wasn’t important to her, she wasn’t into possessions, but his wordly success made him content and she was happy to see that because she was a giving and generous Sagittarian.
The trouble was, he understood everybody. That was his profession. He called himself an enabler, a locksmith. He didn’t give people the keys, of course. He enabled them to forge the keys themselves; working out their own combination was part of the process. From the upstairs window she could see the tops of his patients’ heads as they made their way down the steps to his consulting rooms. After fifty minutes they emerged white-haired; older and wiser. This was no doubt caused by the falling plaster dust – there were usually builders around, for one reason or another – but for a visual person like-herself those departing white heads made a vivid symbolic statement.
He almost understood too much. This was a ridiculous thing to say, she knew that, but sometimes she felt like a struggling novelist living with somebody who knew how to write the story better than she did. He knew the main character so well; he was aquainted with all her early traumas and subsequent patterns of behaviour. She couldn’t get angry with him for this – how could she? Besides, Leon never got angry. He would gently explain exactly what she thought and then ask, ‘Are you comfortable with that?’ Sometimes she remembered the rows she had had with other men and felt wistful, like a retired matador missing the stench of sawdust and blood.
No wonder she had such powerful sexual fantasies about her builders – priapic Greeks, ruddy young Geordies who would require nothing of her except her compliant, middle-aged body, who smoked roll-ups and talked about football teams she had never heard of. Who wouldn’t understand her at all. Watching them toiling in her house, their chests slippery with sweat, made her insides melt. The rawness, the vigour, the muscles moving under their skin as they heaved up a floorboard! She was always thinking up ways of improving the house. She had had three bathrooms installed already and was going to get a fourth put in, for India.
This was one of the things she discussed with her group. There were six of them, all women, and they met in a room above a video shop in Muswell Hill. She could talk to them about Leon, her need for builders, everything. She didn’t need to feel disloyal, because Leon understood why she went there. When she told him they did psychodrama – all of them acting him, in turn – he wasn’t threatened, only interested. Besides, there were less and less opportunities to tell him things anyway because he was always so busy.
Sometimes she did something which she knew was just a cry for attention, a need for some sort of primal response. She was just recovering from a short but intense affair with her conservatory architect. He had the keys to a show flat in Battersea and they used to go there after hours. The place was exhilaratingly unhers – ruched curtains and Interiors laid out on the coffee table. Freed from the needs of her children, the puppet-string pulls of her life, the total comprehension of her husband, she had felt thrillingly liberated. There was plaster fruit in the kitchen and she had felt like Hunca Munca in the Beatrix Potter story, lawlessly exploring a toytown home.
There had been other episodes, quite a few actually, mostly with the disenchanted husbands of women she knew, and once with her pottery teacher. When she tearfully confessed, Leon understood. He always did. He took her in his arms. He told her the thing with her architect was quite natural, that we all needed our own private show flats in our heads, that in fact he had written a paper on it and read it out to an audience of two thousand psychotherapists in Baden-Baden.
Buffy, of course, would have bellowed and spluttered and got raging drunk. Other men she had known would have hit her. Leon just stroked her cheek and went downstairs, where he was dictating his latest book to his secretary. He had written several best-sellers. The Blame Game and How We Play It had been translated into twelve languages and his latest, Guilt: A User’s Guide, had just been published. He was intensely proud of what he called his babies. Almost touchy, actually. Last Monday he had been on Start the Week and she had forgotten to tape the programme for him – she had been doing her postural meditation at the time – and he had almost got angry.
She had the vague feeling that he was going on TV this evening, in fact. Outside it was freezing cold. She could see the grey breath of the builders as they huffed and puffed in the garden, dragging panes of glass wrapped in brown paper. She was upstairs in her studio – her own room, her sanctum. This was her working time. She was working.
She sat at her desk. The trouble was, she had too many ideas. She had just been on a creative writing course and she thought she might write some prose-poems based on the seasons at their Tuscan house – a sort of contemporary Book of Hours – and illustrate them with drawings. The thing was, she had only been to their Tuscan house in the summer. Another idea that had been brewing for some time was an ecological children’s story based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, but she had to be in the right mood for this. Various projects connected with her aromatherapy course, maybe with dolphins featuring somewhere, had also been simmering. Maybe she should ask her group if she were ready for this.
She was interrupted by the ring of the doorbell. Nobody else seemed to be around so she left her studio and went downstairs. She passed Bruno’s bedroom door. There was a sign on it saying STOP!!! DO NOT ATTEMPT TO MOVE THIS CAR!!! It was one of those car-clamp stickers. They were always stealing things from the street – plastic cones, hideous objects like that – bringing them home and not knowing what to do with them. Adolescent boys . . . She couldn’t begin to understand them. They were such an alien species that she sometimes forgot about them for days.
She negotiated the builders’ planks, stacked in the hall, and opened the front door. A pale young woman stood on the step.
‘Hello’ she said. ‘I’ve come about the rabbits.’
Jacquetta was miles away. It took her a moment to gather her wits.
‘The sign outside,’ said the young woman. ‘Baby Rabbits Free to a Good Home. I was just, you know, passing by and I saw it. I love rabbits.’
‘So do I. It’s awful to get rid of them but my husband insisted.’
A waif on her doorstep! The girl looked freezing. Her face was blanched white; only her little nostrils were pink. Jacquetta led her into the kitchen where she stood in front of the Aga, warming her hands. She was actually trembling with cold. Her coat fell open and Jacquetta noticed a tiny gold fish around her neck.
‘It’s the Year of the Fish,’ she said, pointing to it. ‘At least I think it is. Or maybe it’s the Year of the Monkey. They go past quicker and quicker, the years, as one gets older. It’s quite frightening.’
The young woman
was still staring at her. Jacquetta wondered if she had a blob of paint on her nose. She took off her specs and the room blurred; she put them back on again. How dark and lustrous the girl’s eyes were! Haunted. She had a delicate bone-structure too, like a ballet dancer. She would be marvellous to draw. The girl gazed around the kitchen as if she had never seen anything like it before – the dresser full of Jacquetta’s pottery, the Georgia O’Keefe calendar. Despite the conventional clothes there was a vividness about her, an intensity, that Jacquetta felt she could identify with.
‘Can I have a glass of water?’
Maybe she was going to faint. Jacquetta filled a glass and gave it to her. The girl’s hand trembled; as she lifted it to her lips the glass dropped from her grasp and fell onto the floor.
‘Oh, gosh, I’m sorry!’
Jacquetta picked it up. It hadn’t broken; the builders’ dust sheets had saved it. ‘It’s the last glass from a set I bought in Venice,’ she said. ‘On one of my honeymoons, actually.’
‘One of them?’
For a moment Jacquetta couldn’t remember which man it was. She adored Venice and had been so many times. ‘Ah, yes. My second husband.’ Russell. He had spent his whole time eating. In Venice. One didn’t go to Venice to eat. She should have realized, then, that the two of them were totally incompatible.
‘What was he like?’
What an odd thing to ask! ‘A Taurus. Hopeless for me.’
Jacquetta put on her cloak and they went down the steps into the garden. It was freezing cold and the light was beginning to fade. The builders were packing up for the day.
‘What a bore,’ said Jacquetta, looking at the rabbit hutch. ‘They’ve got out again.’
‘They’re under there somewhere,’ said the oldest builder. She had an idea he was called Paddy. He was pointing at the frozen earth. ‘They’ve made a burrow.’
‘What shall we do?’
‘Come on lads!’ he said, ‘Let’s dig ’em out.’
The ground was frozen too hard, however. One of them suggested boiling a kettle, which they did. They poured it onto the earth. Steam rose. They started digging again.
The one called Paddy pointed to the ground. ‘Know what we’ve got in there? Some hot cross bunnies!’
Jacquetta sighed, huddled in her cloak. When one had children, everything was so complicated. Even disposing of their pets turned out to be a major operation. And then the boys would probably make a fuss, when they came home from school. She sometimes wished she could just pack her paints and go to Goa or somewhere, somewhere simple, and just be. She gazed at the flushed sky. The sound of the spades seemed far away.
‘Steady on, Stavros! Don’t want to hurt the buggers.’
She loved this time of evening. The light from the kitchen, shining on the struts of her conservatory, reminded her of the temple at Karnak. She had gone to a son et lumière there once, with a man called Austin. Just for a while, he had seemed the man she had been looking for all her life; she was prone to these romantic impulses. She had sat there, in the Egyptian twilight, with his arm around her. Suddenly Buffy’s voice had boomed out. ‘It is said that, long ago, when Thebes was at its zenith, when gods were men, when Isis, she of the mischievous eyes, was beloved of Osiris . . .’ What a shock it was, to hear his voice! How rudely it had shattered her mood! Even worse, she had been married to him at the time. ‘Let us journey into the past, let us unroll the scrolls of time and consider again these avenues, built by Rameses II and restored by the Ptolemies . . .’ She’d had no idea he had recorded the soundtrack. How tactless of him! For a moment she had thought he had planned it just to spoil her tryst amongst the ruins.
‘Got one of them! Here, Mrs Buckman.’
A struggling rabbit was shoved into her arms. One of the men was lunging after another one which was hopping away in the dusk. Her husband, disturbed by the shouts and whoops, had appeared in the doorway of his consulting rooms.
‘What on earth’s happening?’
She had temporarily forgotten why they were doing this. Then she caught sight of the young woman. She sat like a spectre on the steps of the skeletal conservatory; her head swivelled from Leon to Jacquetta. She seemed to have no interest in the rabbits at all.
‘Two down,’ cried Paddy, ‘one to go.’
‘Don’t catch the two big ones,’ said Jacquetta, ‘the parents. They’re staying here.’
She looked at the girl again. I know, she thought. She’s like a child, an unborn child, sheltered within the ribcage of an all-embracing mother. I shall paint that. I have been a child, a mother too. I shall paint her boldly, in acrylics. The struggling rabbit scratched her wrists but she only discovered this later. At the time she was so fired with creativity that she didn’t notice.
The three baby rabbits were finally caught. Jacquetta and the young woman carried them into the kitchen and put them on the table. They lolloped around, their whiskers sparkling. They raised themselves on their hind legs and sniffed the copper candlestick; they sat on the Independent, washing their faces with their paws.
‘Look at the light shining through their ears!’ cried Jacquetta. ‘The tracery of veins. Aren’t they beautiful! This is the end of my boys’ childhood, the last of their pets to go. Really, I can hardly bear you to take them.’
‘You’ve still got the mother and father. The big ones.’
‘Don’t you see how symbolic it is? The young leaving; just a sad old mother left behind.’
‘We all have to leave home. I did.’
‘How could you know about loss?’ said Jacquetta. ‘You’re far too young.’
‘I’m not.’
The girl was sitting in the Windsor chair, looking at her intently. How abrupt her voice was! With a funny flat accent. Jacquetta looked at the strong, raised eyebrows; the pointed face. In the room nothing stirred except the pendulum of Buffy’s old grandfather clock, swinging from side to side, and the rabbits on the table. One of them had found a piece of apple rind, from lunch, and was nibbling it.
The builders clomped through the kitchen on their way home. ‘Cheerio!’ they called. In the hall they addressed each other loudly. ‘What’re you having for dinner, Stavros?’ ‘Rabbit kebabs! And you, mate?’ ‘My old lady’s cooking my favourite.’ ‘And what might that be?’ ‘Bunnyburgers and chips!’ The front door slammed.
‘I’m glad you came today,’ said Jacquetta. ‘You’ll never realize how momentous this is.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked the girl.
‘It’s a turning point for me. It’s important to mark these moments, validate them.’ The young woman listened intently. It was nice. Sometimes, in the group, Jacquetta had the feeling that the other members looked as if they were listening, but they were really just waiting their turn. ‘My whole life’s been geared to my kids, you see. Dictated by their needs.’
‘How many have you got?’
‘What?’
‘Children.’
Jacquetta thought for a moment. It was so complicated. ‘Three, basically.’
‘Basically? What do you mean, basically?’
‘Well, there’s all those stepchildren and things.’
‘How many?’
‘Oh, lots.’ Jacquetta gazed at the apple rind disappearing into the rabbit’s hinged mouth. ‘But today I’ve been released. I’m starting the process of separation, you see, of returning to myself. After all these years of being seen in terms of other people.’ She paused, and then she announced. ‘Now, I’m sure, I’m going to be able to paint.’
Seventeen
THE FRONT DOOR slammed and two adolescent boys came in. They were dressed in black, and carried school bags.
‘It’s fucking freezing out there,’ said one of them. ‘What happened to global warming?’
For a moment Celeste didn’t dare look at them. They stomped through the kitchen and opened the fridge.
‘Half a tin of bleeding Whiskas. There’s no fucking food in this place. There’s never any fuc
king food.’
Buffy’s sons. She looked at them now. They were poking their heads like crows into the fridge. They turned. Their faces were chalk-white, and spotty.
‘You’re a crap mother.’
‘I’ve been working,’ said Jacquetta.
‘Oh yeah? You never work.’
One of them had his hair shaved at the back and a series of chains in his ear, looped together, like a little link fence. The other one had matted black hair tangled like a cat’s coughball. Neither of them looked anything like Buffy, but then she hadn’t known him when he was young. Their long skinny wrists protruded from their sleeves.
Jacquetta pointed to the table. ‘This person, sorry I don’t know your name, she’s going to take your baby rabbits.’
‘What rabbits?’
‘Your pets.’
They looked at the baby rabbits, which now sat huddled together panting. There was a puddle on the newspaper.
‘Don’t be upset,’ said Jacquetta.
‘I’m not,’ said one of the boys.
‘Didn’t know they’d had any babies,’ said the other. He turned to his mother. ‘Give us some dosh.’
‘Why?’
‘Going to get my nose pierced.’
The older one laughed – a startling, harsh sound like a corncrake. ‘Nobody gets their noses pierced anymore. Only people who live in East Finchley.’
‘The Tuaregs do,’ said their mother.
‘They live in East Finchley?’
‘Africa,’ she said. ‘They’re a tribe. Or maybe it’s the Nubans. Incredibly statuesque and beautiful.’
‘Tasmin Phillpott’s got a ring through her nose,’ said one of the boys. ‘She looks like a pig.’
The Ex-Wives Page 11
