The Ex-Wives (2 page)

CELESTE. CHARMING NAME
, charming girl. Celeste, handing round chicken sandwiches. It was a hot day in July; the day of her mother's funeral.

Celeste lived in Melton Mowbray. She was twenty-three, an only child, now orphaned by her mother's final shuddering breath. She had an only child's tended look, and indeed had been dearly loved. She smelt of soap. Her hair was cropped short, and there were small gold studs in her ears. Her fragile grace and inky eyes gave her the look of an antelope, startled by an intruder, but like all impressions this was partially misleading. In fact she had a stubborn streak, and was very good at maths. Her nimble fingers had made her Cats Cradle Champion at her primary school. She was logical. Columns of figures
were to be one of her few reassurances in the tumultuous year that lay ahead. Buffy was deeply impressed, when he first saw her, by the way she cupped a phone to her ear, wedging it with her shoulder, whilst with her free hands she wrapped his numerous pharmaceutical purchases in plastic bags and rang them up at the till. He was hopeless at that sort of thing.

In those days Celeste wore angora sweaters in pastel colours. Sometimes, when she cycled, she wore a track suit. Fashion, that collusion of narcissists, did not engage her interest for she was a solitary person and her pleasures were solitary ones – swimming in the local baths, her stinging eyes blind to the gaze of the lifeguard; bicycling; biting the bits of skin around each of her fingernails, one by one. If she had neuroses she was unaware of them, for her family had no words for stuff like that, nor sought them because they were nothing but trouble. They led a quiet life. She wore a gold crucifix around her neck but the reason for this, the fathoms of faith it crystalized, were so far largely unexamined too. She was an innocent, something still possible in Leicestershire.

The lounge was crowded with mourners.
Mourners.
She had to fit this unfamiliar word to the faces. Some of them were relatives she had never seen
before, and would never see again. Amongst the people there were several large men from Ray-Bees Plumbing Services. They fingered the mantlepiece ornaments that from now onwards, for ever, it would be her job to dust. Though chronically unreliable – ‘Don't get rabies!' was a cry that had once confused her – they had turned up
en masse
for the funeral, probably as a skive. Her mum used to clean their offices.

Celeste went into the kitchen to fetch the stuffed eggs. She unpeeled the cling film; it shrivelled, and stuck to the down on her arm. She wanted to ask her mother the names of the relatives in the other room, but simultaneously she knew this was impossible. Post still arrived for her mother, wasn't this strange? Envelopes addressed to Mrs Constance Smith, one of them offering her the exciting chance of winning a Vauxhall Astra. There was a burst of laughter from the next room; funerals can be surprisingly jovial affairs. She longed for them all to go, and yet she dreaded the moment when they would leave.

She carried the stuffed eggs into the lounge. The noise changed; under the voices she could hear the low murmur of condolence, like another instrument, a cello, being added to an orchestra. ‘Let me take those.' ‘Why don't you sit down?' ‘Budge up, Dennis!' She was Connie's little girl and what was
she going to do with herself now?
Orphan
was like mourner, a new word she had to fit to herself. A word she had to be fitted up with, like a surgical implant, for life.

The air thickened with cigarette smoke. ‘Little mole on his cheek,' she heard. ‘Brand new candelabra.' There was a stirring. ‘What time did you order that minicab, Irene?' Upstairs, in the wardrobe, hung her mother's clothes. They would remain there, hanging. Each time she visited they would remain in exactly the same order. If, that is, she could bring herself to open the door. She had no idea it would be like this; that death would change all her mother's possessions – transform each one of them into something charged and motionless. Objects that were meaningless and yet impossible to touch, as if a spell had been put on them.

In the end, of course, she had to do something about it all. She took a week off work, to sort things out. Shoes were the saddest, with their dear, empty bunion bumps. Scrawled recipe cards were the worst, in her mother's handwriting. So was anything her mother had repaired doggedly, with bits of sellotape. So was everything. Celeste felt frail and elderly; she did it slowly, and had to sit down a lot. Outside there was the blast from a radio as Stan next door repaired his car; she didn't even know what day of
the week it was. She emerged like an invalid, blinking in the sunshine. She was numb but surprisingly enough she still noticed things, as if she had a secretary beside her, taking notes. What was this new cereal called Cinnamon Toasts? Why did the scratchy beat of Walkmen always sound the same, as if everyone was listening to exactly the same pop song, all over Britain? Who could answer her questions now?

She was basically a cheerful sort of person and grief was like a foreign and alarming country, visited by other people but never by herself. The death of her father didn't really count because she was only six at the time. She must be in that country now, though it didn't affect her as she had imagined, the landscape didn't look like the brochures, and she couldn't recollect the exact moment when she had crossed the frontier. In some ways she felt exactly the same, though Wanda, who lived opposite, said she looked awful and how about coming over for a spot of supper, they were having Turkey Thighs Honolulu? Douggie was cooking it, with tinned pineapples not fresh, but what else could you expect in a dump like this?

Celeste ate heartily. She had always had a good appetite and it seemed to persist through everything, like traffic lights still working when a city has been evacuated. Wanda wore a purple leotard; below her
freckled cleavage her breasts looked as tight and glossy as plums. She was a bit of a goer; her husband Douggie had had a vasectomy.

‘Why don't you go to London?' she asked.

‘Why?' asked Celeste.

‘Why not? Want to be stuck
here
all your life? God, I'd do anything to get away.' She sighed. People confided in Celeste nowadays, more than they used to do. Her bereavement had made them readier to pour out their own complaints, maybe to keep her company. She had learnt a lot about other people's troubles these past few weeks. ‘Sub-let the maisonette' said Wanda.

Celeste felt nauseous. ‘I can't decide things like that.' She couldn't decide what
clothes
to wear in the mornings. Such an effort. Tonight she felt stupid and sluggish, like an amoeba; like some lowly, spongey form of life that only flinched when prodded. She felt sleepy all the time. Was this grief?

She walked home, across the street. Behind her it darkened; the porch light was switched off, in Wanda and Douggie's house. She let herself into the empty hallway. Silence. This was the worst part; coming home. If she had switched on the radio she would have heard Buffy's voice reading the Book at Bedtime (‘Ivanhoe') but she never listened to Radio 4. She went upstairs, past the closed door of her mother's
bedroom, and brushed her teeth. Wanda was right; she was alone in the world now, she could do anything. She could give in her notice at Kwik-Fit Exhausts. The overall'd men there, joshing around, seemed big and oily and threatening now; the word ‘fuck' made her flinch.

Suddenly she felt dizzy. She sat down, abruptly, on the lavatory seat. This panic, it had struck her several times in the past few days. It resembled the panic she felt when she repeated the same word – ‘basin', say, or ‘sausages' – over and over until it became meaningless, except it applied to every word in her head. It was as if knitting had been unravelled and she couldn't work out how to bundle it together again and push it back into some kind of shape. Oh, for those safe days of cats' cradles! She gazed at the tiles her Dad had plastered around the bath. Every third, and sometimes fifth, tile had a shell printed on it. As a child she had tried to work out the inexplicable, adult reason for this but she had never asked him; the minute she had left the bathroom she had forgotten all about it and now it was too late. Her own name, Celeste, seemed strange to her.
Celeste
. So utterly unlikely.

It was a stifling night. Across England, people slept fitfully. Buffy grunted, exhaling a rubbery snore. He
was dreaming of toppling columns. Children had kicked off their duvets; they lay, breathing hoarsely, their damp hair painted onto their foreheads. Dogs lay on downstairs rugs, their legs twitching with the voltage of their hunts. Celeste lay, dewy between her chaste white sheets, unaware of the clock that was already ticking, that would transform both her past and her future, and take the decision about going to London out of her hands.

The next morning, two days after the funeral, she knew she could put it off no longer. She had to tackle the stuff in the sideboard drawer. Shoeboxes and envelopes and tins full of paperwork. She lifted them out and spread them over the floor – old bills and letters, yellowing guarantees for long-vanished appliances. Careful, biro'd sums in her mother's writing. Now she knew why she had been so reluctant to start this. It made her mother so completely dead.

She opened a biscuit tin – Crawford's Teatime Assortment. Inside it were some old post office books, Spanish pesetas, odds and ends. And an envelope.
Celeste
.

Later, she would remember the moment when she picked up the envelope. The ache in her thighs from kneeling on the floor; the sunlight on the carpet. The thud, thud of a ball in the street outside; it was a
Saturday, she was only aware of it then. The different, ringing thud when the football bounced on a car.

She opened the envelope. Inside it was a letter in her mother's handwriting. And a small gold fish.

NONE OF THE
usual doddery old regulars was in the pub that day – the four or five men who made even Buffy feel sprightly. He drained his glass and walked out, blinking, into the sunshine. Penny was due back from Positano the next day, flying into Heathrow at some time or other. Eight years ago, that was how they met. They had both been what was coyly called ‘between relationships' at the time – i.e., in his case, bloody lonely. He had been in L.A., the loneliest place on earth, working on a pilot for a TV series that in fact never got made.

He noticed her on the plane: shiny chestnut hair, cut in a bob; it swung when she moved. Silk blouse. Her head bent over one of those portable computer things hardly anybody had then. A look of
high-powered, total absorption in what she was doing that posed a challenge to a chap. Very attractive.

After the meal he had made his way to the loo, and got pinioned against her seat by the duty-free trolley; even in those days he was by no means slim enough to squeeze past. He had bent down to her and whispered: ‘Why is it, when the duty-free trolley comes round, is it pushed by a steward you've
never seen before
. And
never see again?
During the entire flight?' She had laughed and whispered ‘They keep them in a special storage compartment.'

The plane landed and they bumped into each other in the terminal. He was trying to smuggle in some particularly fine bottles of Napa Valley claret and, approaching the
Nothing to Declare
part of customs with his clanking carrier bags, he had tapped her on the shoulder. ‘Be a sport, and bring these through.' She was a sport, she did. For all she knew the bags could have been full of IRA guns. Full marks to her; she carried them through with that upper-class confidence, that stop-me-if-you-dare, little man look which he had always found impressive in a woman, especially when directed at someone else.

Once safely through he had introduced himself. ‘Russell Buffery,' he said, shaking her hand.

Her face lit up. ‘I thought I recognized the voice! Golly, you don't look like I expected.'

People were always saying that. What did they mean? What on earth were they expecting? He had never liked to ask.

‘You were such a marvellous Mr Pickwick,' she said. ‘I was in bed with glandular fever, I heard all the episodes. Glandular fever takes that long.'

So they shared a cab into London. She said she was a journalist and she wanted to do him for one of those
My Room
things in one of the colour supplements. He gave her his address: a mansion block in Little Venice. Well, Maida Vale.

On the appointed day she turned up, with a photographer. She wore a white linen suit; she looked as brisk and businesslike as a staff nurse. He adored nurses. On the threshold of the living room she stopped and stared. ‘My God, what a pigsty!' She wandered around the room, stepping over the various items strewn on the carpet. Her eyes were wide with wonder – admiration, almost. ‘People usually clean up for days before we arrive.'

It looked perfectly all right to him – in fact, he
had
tidied it up a bit – but he sensed he was onto something here. Something powerful.
Pity.
It was here to be tapped.

‘My ex-wife threw me out, you see. I ended up in this place. Blomfield Mansions is full of redundant husbands, a human scrap heap.' His voice rose, his
rich brown voice. Molasses, tawny port, liqueur chocolate dripped through honeycomb – all these comparisons had been made. His voice-box had brought pleasure to thousands, seen and unseen – millions, maybe. It was without a doubt his most reliable organ, where women were concerned. ‘They fester here, crippled by alimony,' he throbbed. ‘They sit alone in the pub, gazing at polaroid photographs of their childrens' birthday parties they've been banished from attending. They sit in the launderama watching, through the cyclops eye of the washing machine, their single, bachelor bedsheet turning, entwined with their pair of Y-fronts, a parody of the embraces they had once known . . .' He stopped. Maybe this was a bit over the top. But no; her face had become softer, blunter somehow. Even the photographer had sat down heavily in the one good armchair and was fumbling for his cigarettes.