He hadn’t rung. He wouldn’t now, it was 11.30, far too late. He had obviously decided to forget about the whole thing and go back to Germany.
What did it all mean? What did anything mean? Celeste hadn’t moved for some time. She was sitting on the carpet, freezing cold. Already, her afternoon seemed as lurid and unlikely as a dream. Had she really been in Hastings? She could have been to the moon. Events were so out of control that she felt paralyzed. Another batch of baby rabbits had been born. She had put cardboard boxes on either side of the room, like hi-fi speakers, and filled them with torn-up newspaper. Bits of paper had already spilled onto the carpet; within the boxes the bedding moved as the babies stirred. The first lot – six of them – were stronger now, lifting their blind blunt heads. Soon they would be shakily venturing forth.
Along the edges of the room were stacked the recycled items – a jumble of plastic containers, lampbases, hair curlers – like an insane obstacle course. The room was starting to smell. What was she doing with all these relics from Buffy’s past? The rabbits, the colander, the two silent phones – what meaning was locked within them? Her life was slipping into confusion and squalor. Her heart beat fast and she could scarcely breathe; she felt as if she were underwater, trying to swim to the surface. The water pressed down on her, filling her lungs.
She struggled to her feet, put on her coat and left the flat. Music thumped from behind a closed door. Why, when the place was so obviously full of tenants, did she never see anybody? She hurried into the street. The cold air hit her. Suddenly she was wide-awake.
Twenty-seven
BUFFY OPENED THE door. He was wearing pyjamas and a very old dressing-gown.
‘Celeste, my love!’ He put his arms around her. It was midnight; he looked surprised but delighted. ‘How wonderful to see you!’
She disentangled herself and inspected him. How seedy he looked! Grey and unshaven – even though he was bearded he managed to look unshaven.
‘So this is where you live.’ She looked around. ‘Crikey.’
‘I would’ve tidied it up if I’d known.’ He hugged her again. ‘My tonic, my life! My heart implant, you little ticker.’
‘Don’t be silly. Can I have a drink?’
‘Don’t try that wine, it’s disgusting. Let’s have a scotch.’
She negotiated her way into the room. It was a terrible mess; worse, even, than his sons’. There were things all over the floor. It looked as if he were camping here. Perhaps that was all he had ever done – just camped. She cleared away some newspapers and sat down in an armchair. Dirty grey dog hairs were matted into the fabric.
‘There’s a funny smell in here,’ she said.
‘I know. Don’t know where it comes from. I need somebody to look after me.’
‘Aren’t you old enough to look after yourself?’
‘Nobody’s old enough to look after themselves.’
Women must have said that to him so many times. She thought of all the quarrels he must have had – everything she accused him of must be so familiar to him by now. How exhausting it must be! No wonder old people looked so old. It was all the repetition. She herself had had hardly anything duplicated yet – words of love or words of blame.
He gave her a glass of whisky. ‘I want to sit close to you and lay my head on your knee, but my back hurts.’ He sat down in the other chair; beneath him, the stuffing had disgorged onto the floor. He patted his knee. ‘Come and sit on mine, you little sparrow.’
She didn’t budge. She looked at him, across the littered hearthrug. ‘Who did you love the most?’ she asked.
‘What?’
‘Of all of them?’
He got up and came over. He pulled her to her feet. ‘You silly.’
‘Tell me about them.’
‘They don’t mean anything.’
‘Well they should!’ Her loud voice startled her. The dog pricked up its ears. ‘You married them, didn’t you?’
‘Who have you been talking to? What have they been saying about me?’ He put his hands over her ears, like the woman had done that afternoon. ‘Don’t listen to them,’ his muffled voice said.
She removed his hands. Everyone seemed to be treating her like a baby. He gripped her; they collapsed into the armchair.
‘Did you tell them all the same things?’ she asked. ‘Are you just a clever actor?’
‘My dear girl, if I was a clever actor I’d be getting some work.’
They were wedged awkwardly in the chair; he was a big man. She spoke to an egg stain on his dressing gown. ‘I don’t know what to believe anymore.’
‘Don’t be jealous of anybody. Ever. This is important. This. Us.’ He lifted her face and looked at her. ‘Nothing else matters.’
‘But don’t you see? It should! I want them to matter. I want all of them to matter! Else, what’s the point?’
She had never really needed a drink in her life, or known she had needed it, until tonight. Trouble was, she couldn’t reach her glass. She was wedged in. Oh, the great breathing bulk of him, smelling of warmth and tobacco. When he talked she could feel the reverberations, like the tube running beneath her room.
He said: ‘Everything matters, but nothing matters that much. You’ll learn this, one day. It’s not depressing, sweatheart, it’s not depressing at all. But you might not understand yet. When I die, I want you to put it on my gravestone – Everything matters, but nothing matters that much. Will you promise?’
‘That’s not fair, talking about dying.’
‘Looking at you makes me think about it. Since I met you I think about it all the time.’
She struggled out, from under him, and walked to the mantlepiece. She suddenly felt stagey, as if a director had told her to stand there.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘Let’s just talk about the everything matters bit. If that’s the case, who were you with, say, in the summer of 1968?’
‘Who? You mean, a woman?’
She stared at her reflection in the mottled mirror – her set jaw, the floppy mop of hair. She nodded.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘I was sort of married to Popsi.’
‘Sort of. What do you mean, sort of?’
‘Sweetie-pie, you’ve never been married.’
‘No.’
‘Well, then.’
‘So sort of means somebody else,’ she said. ‘Who was it?’
He sat there. His eyebrows went up and down, as he frowned. He was thinking.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I was married to Popsi, but I was vaguely with Lorna.’
She turned from the mirror and stared at him. ‘What do you mean, vaguely with Lorna?’ Basically, that was what Jacquetta had said: Basically I’ve got three children. What had Popsi said? How many children? Depends what you mean. ‘Vaguely! Basically! What on earth do you all mean?’
He sat, slumped in his chair. ‘You’re young,’ he said. ‘Certainty is the luxury of the young. When you get older there’s no such thing as a straight sentence. It’s all qualifiers. Parentheses sprout out all over the place.’ He pointed to his ears. ‘Like hair, sprouting out of these.’
‘I just want to know what vaguely means. Who was she?’
There was a pause as he lit a cigarette. ‘She was a lovely girl. Very young, younger than you. Very ambitious.’ For a moment, his face was obscured by smoke.
‘Ambitious for what?’
‘For the same thing I was. Fame, success, all that. She was going to be a great classical actress.’
‘Was she? Is she?’
He shook his head. ‘The world’s full of people who’re going to be great actors. Now they’re, I don’t know, running country hotels and writing cookery books and . . .’
‘Selling antiques.’
‘Selling antiques. And getting divorced and doing all the things everybody does.’ He smiled at her. ‘Trying to make beautiful young girls fall in love with them. Life’s a very time-consuming business. You have to be super-humanly talented or ruthless to pu
sh through all that. If you’re not superhumanly talented or ruthless, but only a bit, then everything else comes flooding in. All the parentheses. The vaguelys and sort ofs. If you see what I mean.’
There was a silence. She took a sip of whisky; it burned her throat. She looked across at him. He raised his eyebrows. His hair was greying, his beard even more so, but his eyebrows were still black. His thinking bits, moving up and down to the fluctuations within. Puppet eyebrows, worked from machinery that was dear to her. She loved him very much, but she didn’t move towards him; she stayed at the mantelpiece. She hadn’t finished with him yet.
‘What was her whole name?’
He had to think for a moment. ‘Lorna Kidderpore.’
‘Lorna Kidderpore.’
‘Her father was a distinguished something or other. Mathematician.’
‘How long did you know her?’
‘Just a month or two.’
‘Did you love her?’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’m not a womanizer, darling, I’m a romantic. A romantic falls in love for life. Trouble is, they know no past and no future. They learn from nothing and anticipate nothing. That’s what they share with the very stupid, who in many ways they resemble. A romantic actually believes in possibilities. That’s why my life’s been such a mess.’
‘What happened?’
‘She was offered a job. Touring Europe with some theatre company. She had to choose between the job and me and she chose the job.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Did you ever see her again?’
‘Once. I saw her once.’ He flung his cigarette into the grate. It was full of old cigarette butts.
‘When?’
‘Five, six years ago. In Dover. Penny and I were taking my boys on holiday, to France. Not a great success. In fact, an unmitigated disaster. Penny got food poisoning and Bruno got into trouble with this gendarme, and then the car broke down –’
‘Get back to Dover.’
He smiled. ‘That’s what I always imagined my children saying.’
‘What children?’
‘The ones I never met. The ones who listened to me on the radio. You should’ve seen all the letters I got, the cards coloured with crayons, hundreds of them! They loved me much more than my own kids did, but that’s because they didn’t know me.’
‘We did! You made us feel we did. You told us stories. Our parents just told us to mind our table manners. Tell me the story. Tell me about Dover.’
The dog got to its feet, padded over to Buffy and sat down again, next to his bedroom slippers. ‘Are you sitting comfortably?’ said Buffy.
‘Yes’ said Celeste, though she was standing.
‘Then we’ll begin. It was a bright sunny morning and Buffy and his family were going on holiday. Gosh, what an adventure! They were off to meet the frogs. The two little animals in the back were fighting as usual. “Stop it, you little scallywags!” said Buffy, with a twinkle in his eye. Just then, as they were driving through Dover Town, lo and behold! Bless my cotton socks! There was his ex-mistress, coming out of a greengrocer’s shop.’
‘What happened?’
He took a sip of whisky. ‘I shouted at Penny to stop and she did, but everybody hooted at us. And by the time she had found somewhere to park and I’d rushed out, well, Lorna had gone. Disappeared.’
Celeste yawned, though her heart was thumping. ‘That was a lovely story,’ she said. ‘Now it’s time for beddibyes.’
Buffy jumped to his feet. ‘Yes, yes!’ He put his arms around her. ‘Oh, I’ve been longing for you to say that for the past six weeks. Ever since I saw you in your little overall.’
‘Not here.’
‘Look, I promise not to do anything. Scout’s honour. I probably couldn’t anyway. I peak at about ten and by five past it’s all over.’ He rubbed his beard against her cheek. ‘We can just sleep together. I washed the sheets last week. Last month, anyway.’
‘No, I must go.’ She pulled away from him.
‘But it’s half past two!’
‘I’ll find a cab.’
‘You can’t go alone, it’s not safe.’
She grabbed her coat and made for the door, tripping over a carrier bag. It tipped over, clankingly, and empty bottles fell out.
‘I want to talk to you about Christmas!’ he cried.
She kissed him, and ran downstairs.
‘What about Christmas?’ His voice echoed in the stairwell, fainter and fainter.
Back in the flat, the three phones sat in a row. She picked up the receiver of her own phone, the one that worked. Music was still thumping through the walls; she heard a banging door and muffled laughter. People here stayed up all night.
So did the people at directory enquiries. ‘Which town?’ asked the girl.
‘Dover,’ said Celeste.
‘What name?’
‘Kidderpore, L.’ Celeste spelt it out. There was a pause. She waited, tensely. This Lorna woman had probably changed her name about three times since then. Everybody else had.
But then the voice answered.
Twenty-eight
LONDON WAS REVVING up for Christmas. There was a quickening in the air, a Friday night quickening but every day of the week now. People double-parked their cars and dashed into shops; restaurants were crammed with secretaries in paper hats. Postmen, opening postboxes, stepped back at the avalanche of envelopes and children in nativity plays squirmed inside their sheets. All this and more, dread and joy and loneliness. Stalls appeared in Kilburn High Road, selling wrapping paper, and in the shops CD players were strewn with tinsel. Buffy’s wine merchant was doing brisk business. Buffy himself had bought two bottles of Leoville Lascalles ’71 but was Celeste going to drink it with him? He had bought her a pair of silver earrings for her dear pierced ears but when was he going to give them to her? Just as he and Celeste had become more intimate – the events of that night had shifted them into something more raw and personal, something that more resembled a love affair – she seemed to have gone to ground.
The next couple of days she hadn’t been in the shop at all. Mr Singh said she was doing his VAT. ‘She’s too good for this place,’ he said, ‘she has a brain, that girl.’
‘I know that!’ said Buffy. ‘Please get her to call me.’
He had phoned her, and got no reply. He had sat beside his phone like a teenager, waiting for her to ring. The next day there she was in the shop. His heart lurched.
‘Please bear with me,’ she said. ‘I’ve got something to sort out first.’
That evening he put on the answerphone and went to a Christmas party, at which he had hoped to show her off. When he lurched home the machine said o. What was happening; why was she being so mysterious? From long experience, of course, he knew the answer.
All Sunday he fretted. He bought all the papers, as a displacement activity, but he couldn’t concentrate. Listlessly, he turned the pages. A treasure hunt competition had grabbed the public’s imagination, with thousands of people haring all over the country searching for the prize. My Room was a concert pianist, with a wife and a brood of blond, smiling sons. They sat in an immaculate lounge, looking safe. The woman said ‘My husband is my best friend,’ one of those statements that for some reason had always filled him with rage.
He took the dog for a walk, shuffling past the columned villas of Little Venice. Range Rovers, the ultimate fuck-the-rest-of-you vehicles, were parked outside; as he passed, people drew their curtains closed. He stood on the bridge, gazing down into the canal. If he threw himself in, would she care? Would any of them care? Would they even notice?
His eyes filled with tears. Does anyone love me enough, he wondered, to look in the paper when I’m abroad and see what the weather’s like in the place I’m staying? That sort of thing? Have they ever?
Christmas was coming and Quentin was alone. Alone in his flat with a Serves One Tagliatelle. Back to serves one, back to square one.
Talbot had moved out. Quentin gazed at the swagged and beribboned room, its damasks and velvets. It was his own place again; his home had been returned to him and no trace remained of Talbot – nothing, after two whole years. At the moment this was deeply disorientating; one day, when he was feeling better, maybe he could find it invigorating. He had in the past.
The split-up had been a mutual decision really, if such things could ever be mutual. The moment someone voiced their doubts Quentin always convinced himself he had been feeling this way too, all along. He did this for self-protection. The moment someone said ‘It’s not working, is it?’ or ‘We’ve got to talk,’ things were changed forever. This happened in other spheres too. Somebody once said his wallpaper was vulgar and he had never been able to look at it in the same way again. In the end he had stripped it off and redecorated the entire flat.
Quentin switched on the microwave. He hadn’t told his Ma yet. He dreaded her disappointment; she had liked Talbot. ‘This one’ll last,’ she had said. But nothing lasted, not in his family. No wonder he found it difficult to sustain relationships; with his parents’ example, who could? His past resembled some ramshackle lodging house, people coming and going, strangers installing themselves at the breakfast table and then inexplicably disappearing. His therapist called it, ‘emotionally rented accommodation’. He said that Quentin’s failure to sustain relationships was his way of staying close to his father and mother. By repeating the pattern he stayed their child forever, bonded to them. And it was true. Each time he broke up with somebody he thought about his father and wondered how he had felt. It was like an accident making you aware of all the other people who must be in hospital.
Quentin laid the table for one – he always did this properly – and uncorked a bottle of Chardonnay of which he would only drink half. Popsi, his mum, said, look on the bright side. She said, every person you meet, you learn a little something. He tried to remember what he had learnt from the men with whom he had lived. Derek? Derek had taught him how to make marmalade. He had also taught him more than he really wanted to know about old blues singers, Blind Somebody This and Blind Somebody That, to tell the truth they all sounded exactly the same to him. Talbot? Talbot had taught him the rules of American football and how to play Take my hand, I’m a Stranger in Paradise on the piano with one finger. Quentin was sure there must have been more than this, but the thought of Talbot was still too raw.
The Ex-Wives Page 20
