She poured herself another glass of wine. She needed to talk to Buffy, soon. His voice was inside her head. He was so familiar that she felt she had known him all her life, that his voice had been there since she had sat in the armchair sucking her thumb. All the questions swimming around her brain, he could answer them or at least have a go. She loved him for that; she had never known a chatty man. Why do people’s Walkmen always seem to be playing the same tune? Last summer she had wondered this, briefly; nobody she had met, then, would have been equipped with any sort of reply. Why do all French people’s handwriting look the same? (Her whole class, at one time, had had French pen-pals).
But there were questions much more urgent than these, questions so painful that her stomach clenched. The trouble was, she couldn’t ask them. He would just think her insane – insane with jealousy. He wouldn’t even be flattered. Why are you so obsessed with my ex-wives? She couldn’t tell him the reason – not yet.
There was only one person she could ask: Jacquetta. Jacquetta would know.
She could phone. She knew the number. A rabbit, sitting on its haunches, was nibbling one of her spider plants. Celeste sat beside the phone, not moving. Nine o’clock came and went. Footsteps thumped up and down the stairs. India had come and gone but she didn’t know that. Time passed. The ceiling creaked; music played. Her building was a-whisper with transactions.
Celeste didn’t phone; she didn’t dare. She blew out the candles and went to bed. In the house of secrets she lay, her eyes closed, vibrating gently to the underground trains. In the other room the rabbits were busy. At some point she heard the muffled thud of a plant pot, one of her spider plants no doubt, as it fell to the carpet.
The next day, energised by the bright shop, by being at work, she felt emboldened. There was a buzz in the air. Mr Singh’s oldest daughter was sitting the exam for a private school, and he kept rushing to the phone to see if she was home yet. On their display stands the women’s faces filled Celeste with courage. Such beauty, such miracles. Be a Vamp! Be a Blonde! Get into private school! Shake a bottle and anything could happen. Each package was filled with possibilities. She could change her life, change her accent . . .
Mr Singh put down the phone. She asked if she could use it.
She paused, her hand on the receiver. Her courage drained away. What excuse could she use this time? At some point, surely, even Jacquetta might get suspicious.
It was then, as she stood there, that the door pinged and a long black figure entered the shop. Its matted hair stood up, like a surprised person in a cartoon.
It was Tobias. Or was it Bruno? One of Buffy’s sons. Just for a moment, as he stood there in the harsh strip lighting, she saw the resemblance – the nose, the posture.
‘Oh,’ he mumbled, surprised. ‘Hello.’
Tobias had been going to visit his Dad. He did this secretly, creeping out of the house like a married man committing adultery. It was not that his Mum and Leon disapproved. Far from it. Leon in fact encouraged him to maintain a relationship with his father – the main reason, of course, for him to never let on that he did. Leon! What a wanker.
His half-sister India visited Blomfield Mansions quite a lot, he knew that. But it was only recently that he had begun to see why. His Dad’s life was such a mess, that was partly why. It made even him feel sorted-out. There was something about his Dad’s glaring inadequacies that made him, Tobias, feel miraculously mature. Besides, now Penny was gone he felt sorry for the old tosser. There was something sort of simple about his Dad’s ramshackle life. At home everything was so muddy – his Mum so tricky and abstracted, his stepdad so fucking understanding. What do you do when a bloke gives you condoms? Where do you go from there? Didn’t Leon realize that the point about being sixteen was to be misunderstood?
Oh, it was more than that. It was lots of things. He didn’t want to analyse it, they had enough of that psychological crap at home. Basically, he was skiving off school and he needed some dosh. His Dad always lent him money – if he had any – because he was a soft touch and anyway he always felt guilty about being such a rotten father. There was a quid pro quo here.
So when Tobias rang the doorbell and just got the barking dog he felt disappointed, for several reasons, that his father wasn’t at home. (In fact Buffy, who had a splitting hangover, was down at the BBC narrating a documentary about pygmies but nobody else knew that.)
Tobias took the lift to the ground floor, went out, and walked round the corner to the local chemists. He needed to buy some Phisomed for his pimples. He opened the door and came face to face with the person who had taken his rabbits.
‘Oh, hello,’ he grunted. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand and shuffled his feet. How fucking embarrassing. The point of buying zit stuff at this shop was that nobody knew him. Now, if he were buying some spray, say, to curb the powerful sexual scent he gave off, something like that . . .
He edged towards the other assistant, the big plain one. She was sitting on a stool reading a women’s magazine. He looked over her shoulder at the article: The Pros and Cons of Stomach Stapling. But it was no good; the other one came up to him.
‘Hello.’ She smiled at him. ‘Your rabbits are doing really well. Bigger every day. Is there anything I can get you?’
Tobias felt his face heating up. You try to be cool and then what happens? You frigging blush. What a divhead! He liked her. She was older than the girls he knew, of course; she must be, like, early twenties. But it was the girls his age who seemed the old ones, with their boots and their loud dismissive voices and the way they looked bored all the time even when they were laughing about something he didn’t understand. The way they wore badges saying I Practise Safe Sex and totally ignored him. He had grown up with some of them, he had been to primary school with them, but by now they looked as if they’d never been young at all.
He couldn’t ask for the pimple lotion, not now. So he mumbled something he had heard the last time he had been listening to anybody at home.
‘My Mum was talking about you,’ he muttered. ‘She said she wanted you to sit for her.’
‘Sit for her? Where?’
‘Like . . .’ He rolled his eyes. He always did this when he talked about his Mum’s work. ‘Like, she wants to paint you.’
She stared at him. She blushed now – a pink glow that spread up her face and matched her overall. ‘She does? Really?’
Twenty
AT THE HAPPY Eater it was lunchtime all day, breakfast time too, anytime. Meals looped and repeated themselves like the Muzak, ravelling and unravelling. Lorna walked from the kitchen to the tables, the tables to the kitchen. Her head was swimming with the names of plants. Birds she knew about, but plants . . . plants she was just learning. Her legs ached. She was getting too old for this.
Way across England, somewhere near Swindon, Miles sat in a Little Chef. He was mopping up ketchup with a piece of bread. Outside, traffic droned. He swallowed the last mouthful and lit up a cigarette. He had started smoking again. He knew it was unfair, to blame this on his wife, but that’s what he did. After all, there was nobody to stop him. His marriage was like a cot-death. Barely begun, it had turned over on its face and stopped breathing. Nobody noticed, least of all his wife. Around him people carried on shovelling in mouthfuls of peas.
Meanwhile, in London, Penny sat in the Groucho Club nibbling a goat’s cheese pizza. She was interviewing a blockbuster writer. As he droned on she watched the looping ribbon of her cassette recorder. Round and round it went, filling itself with his words. He was telling her about his Cotswolds mansion. As he talked about his tennis court she suddenly thought: Rich people never have to write their initials on their tennis balls. This struck her as so true, so witty, that she thought: Must tell Buffy tonight. Then she realized that she couldn’t. This sensation still hit her. Months, it had been, and it still hit her.
Outside, a wintry sun shone. A mile away, shoppers in Knightsbridge were heading for sandwich bars. One of them was a mi
ddle-aged woman Buffy had slept with a quarter of a century earlier, an incident forgotten by both of them. She was emerging from Harrods, where she had just bought a party dress for her grand-daughter. Her reflection flashed against the window; behind the glass stood the mannequins Quentin had arranged. Her reflection flashed, and was gone.
Nearby, Quentin himself sat in a cappuccino place. He often came here in his lunch hour. Black and chrome, sharp and stylish, it made everybody look well-designed. It drained them of their past and recreated them as fashion statements. Stirring his coffee, he remembered when he was a little boy and how he pretended he had a limp. His ma, Popsi, would get exasperated and walk on ahead. Passers-by would murmur poor little mite and glare at her – glare at his mum, the most warm-hearted soul in the world. He knew he was making some sort of point, even then; that he was getting at her in some way. He closed his eyes, to concentrate. He must bring this up with his therapist. Closing his eyes, he pictured a shadowy figure – a man, striding ahead with his mother, turning to bellow at him to buck up. Was this Buffy, or one of the fathers who had come after him?
Quentin folded the fluff into his coffee. Talbot, the man he lived with, he always scooped off the froth first. For some reason this was starting to be irritating. Like the way his own ma, Popsi, poured instant coffee into the lid and flung it into the mugs without measuring it out with a spoon.
Quentin looked up and met the eye of a tall, good-looking man with a box of photographic equipment. Nope. No blip on the radar screen. Besides, he was too young. Quentin was irresistibly drawn towards older men. He knew why, of course; he hadn’t spent a fortune on therapy for nothing. I’m looking for my father; all these years, I’ve been limping to get his attention.
Across the room Colin gazed, briefly, at the bloke who sat with his eyes closed. Good bone-structure; light him well and he could be a model. He gazed with the same detached interest at the Gubbio coffee-machine and wondered if he could ever fit one into his kitchen. ‘There’s no room for anything!’ Penny cried. ‘There’s no room for me! If only I was hinged, you could fold me up and keep me in a box.’ She was a tall woman, she needed to stride about. That’s what had made her so attractive in the first place. Sometimes he wondered if he was going to be able to cope with her.
Buffy sat in his local, The Three Fiddlers. He was eating a Scotch egg. Well, a grey, loose piece of breadcrumbed cardboard that fell off a small, bluish, rubbery ball that had probably been hardboiled when he was still married to Jacquetta. Why hadn’t he learned his lesson about Scotch eggs; why did he still order them? A bit like marriage really; you’re hungry, you think it’ll be different this time, it can’t be as bad as the last one.
On the TV some satellite, Sky or something, was showing tennis. In November. Satellite TV, like central heating, rendered the seasons meaningless. Watching the ball fly, Buffy remembered watching a Wimbledon final long ago. Connors, was it? Or even Arthur Ashe? Years ago. Jacquetta was away, supposedly visiting her aunt in Dorset. Funny, then, that as he sat there he saw her quite clearly amongst the spectators in the Centre Court. Just to the left of the umpire. She was sitting next to a man. Their heads turning one way, then the other. And then turning to each other.
And she didn’t even like tennis. In fact, she hated it. That was the worst thing of all. Oh, where was Celeste, who knew nothing of these things? Celeste his innocent girl, his comfort and joy? Not in the shop. Mr Singh said it was her day off. Where was she? His old heart ached.
Celeste sat, hunched on the concrete. Her buttocks were numb. Here in the garden it was freezing; the wintry sun had slipped behind the house and the conservatory lay in shadow. Wind whistled through the skeletal struts; the place hadn’t been glazed yet and the workmen seemed to have disappeared. According to Jacquetta they had been gone for days. ‘Builders!’ she sighed. ‘They always let you down in the end. Believe me. I know.’
Jacquetta was painting. Her hair was pulled back in a rubber band; she wore a spattered pair of dungarees which she said had belonged to a plumber of her acquaintance. ‘What a man!’ she said. ‘Built like a shire-horse!’ Her face was pinched with concentration; her arm flicked the paint to and fro in bold brush strokes. As she worked she hummed – a low, tuneless sound which for a while Celeste couldn’t locate. Then she realized that it stopped when Jacquetta rinsed her brush.
Behind her spectacles, Jacquetta inspected her. If she knew what I was thinking! But Celeste guessed that she herself was just an arrangement of shapes and colours. She was just an object to be painted.
With Penny, too, she was just as unknown – a willing pair of hands, a person to wear Penny’s cast-off clothing and deal with other people’s cast-offs. Both women wanted something from her but neither of them had the foggiest idea what she wanted from them. It was funny, the way neither of them questioned the way she had popped up into their lives. Instead they just found ways of making her useful. Which was lucky, of course. Their lack of curiosity made the whole thing easier. No, not easier. None of this was easy. But for the moment it made everything more possible to manage.
Celeste sat in the conservatory, as instructed, her arms around her knees. Behind Jacquetta reared up the family home. Buffy had lived in there. He had eaten thousands of breakfasts with this woman. She, Celeste, had never even seen him eat breakfast. She didn’t want to think about it. Now he was so familiar to her the thought of his unknown lives, so many of them, was becoming horribly painful.
Her arms ached, from gripping her knees. ‘I want you foetal,’ Jacquetta had said. ‘What I’m seeing is a child, waiting to be born in the ribcage of her mother.’
Through the ribs the wind blew. Far away, wolves howled. Now Celeste knew they were wolves it made the sound even more desolate. It echoed around the world. She was lost; more and more lost as time went by. She gazed at the cliff-face of the house; at the curtained French windows of Leon’s consulting room down in the basement. It was all closed,, to her. Nearby, in their hutch, the two remaining rabbits were mating. They had been at it for hours, judder judder, the hutch rocking. The female’s eyes were glazed in an enduring-it sort of way, but at least they had each other.
I must talk to her. Celeste opened her mouth to speak, but just then Jacquetta said: ‘You make me feel quite broody. I’d love to have had another daughter. Sons are so . . . well, so male.’ The brush flicked to and fro. ‘But then Leon says daughters are so female. He’s got some, you see.’
He’s got some. It sounded like cufflinks. He’s got some somewhere, can’t quite remember where. In the chest of drawers? To these people children seemed to be produced with the carelessness of rabbits and scattered God knew where. Was it being middle-class and educated that made people so profligate? They didn’t have to hoard because there was always more where that came from. And here she was, using words like profligate. She was changing. Buffy and his world were changing her.
‘Leon’s put in a lot of time with them. His daughters,’ said Jacquetta. ‘He knows how important that is. He’s seen so much damage, that’s why. Dysfunctional relationships. That’s his speciality. I was very damaged when I met him, you wouldn’t believe. Well, if you’d met my then husband you would.’ Jacquetta paused. ‘Er, can you keep still?’
Celeste was staring over Jacquetta’s shoulder. She stared at the basement curtains. They weren’t quite closed. In the gap, inside the consulting room, something was moving.
‘He works on the child within,’ said Jacquetta. ‘We all have a child within us, a child we need to reach. That’s what I’m trying to reach too, in my own work.’ She squinted at Celeste. ‘You’re leaning to the side. Can you sit straight?’ She went on painting. ‘He’s wonderful with his patients. It takes a lot of work, of course. Years, maybe, with some of them. They can be so resistant, you see. So terribly defended.’
Celeste stared, mesmerized, at the gap between the curtains. A pale shape rose and fell, rhythmically, as if it were being pumped by a pair of bellows.
&n
bsp; ‘He’s very persistent, very sensitive. He thinks of himself as a locksmith, an enabler. He’s there to help them help themselves. It can be very exhausting. He gives so much of himself, you see. He works incredibly hard. When he comes upstairs, sometimes, he looks quite drained. The poor love.’
Frozen, Celeste watched. The pale shape was pumping up and down, faster now. She heard a faint cry, or was it just the wolves?
‘Straighten up, can you lovey? You’re leaning again.’ Jacquetta’s brush hesitated. She started to turn round. ‘What is it?’
‘Nothing!’ Celeste pointed to the hutch. ‘It’s just the rabbits.’
‘Ah. You’re not embarrassed are you?’ Jacquetta laughed. ‘That’s what I like about animals. They’re so honest.’ She paused. ‘Excuse me, but could you open your eyes?’
Celeste had to get out of there. Anyway it was getting dark. When she opened her eyes a light had been switched on behind the curtains. They had been closed now; a mere slit of brightness shone between them, just a crack. Hadn’t he realized that anyone was out here in the garden?
The Ex-Wives Page 14
