The Ex-Wives (32 page)

‘Exactly,' said Buffy. ‘One never lies. One just grows up.'

‘In her case, pretty fast,' said Penny. ‘She'd hardly got her skis on and whoosh! She was off down the Black Run.'

There was a general stirring. It was six o'clock and the three exes were preparing to rejoin their other lives. Back at their homes food was waiting to be cooked, presents to be unwrapped. Their Christmases, stilled by Celeste's urgent phone-call, were waiting to be re-activated. Buffy tried to get to his feet, bellowed with pain, and flopped back on the floor.

‘Happy Christmas to you all, my dears,' he said, waving them goodbye. ‘My loves, my better halves, my lost delights . . .'

‘All right, all right,' said Penny.

One by one they filed into the little hall, and started putting on their coats. Lorna opened the door. Snow blew in and swirled around. She flinched back.

Outside, in the darkness, the garden was deep in snow. A foot, at least. It had fallen while they were
busy talking; it must have been falling for hours. There were mounds where the bushes had been; in the distance, larger humps where the cars were parked. It was eerily beautiful, and utterly, utterly silent. No murmur, even, from the main road beyond the hill.

There was no way they could get out. They couldn't possibly drive their cars up the track in these conditions.

They were snowed in.

THEY WENT BACK
into the living room and took off their coats.

‘What are we going to do?' asked Lorna.

‘This is what Catholics must feel,' said Penny, looking down at Buffy. ‘When they want to get divorced. Permanently snowed in. For life.'

‘There's hardly anything to eat,' said Lorna. ‘There's hardly anything in the larder.'

‘We could always cook Buffy,' said Penny. ‘There's enough of him.'

‘Shut up!' he yelled.

‘Char-grill him over the fire,' she said, ‘and save one little piece for the doggy bag.'

‘Shut up!' He struggled to move. ‘This isn't some avant-garde feminist film.'

Penny laughed. ‘
Lord of the Flies
, divorce style.'

Jacquetta said: ‘Can't we phone for help? Leon'll be worried.'

‘Oh, no he won't' said India, ‘he'll be too busy. Don't you remember? Christmas is so traumatic all his patients phone him up.'

‘That's true,' said Jacquetta.

India went on: ‘Sometimes they're in such a state he has to open up his consulting rooms for a special session.'

Celeste nudged her. ‘Ssh!' she whispered.

Lorna lifted the phone but the line was dead. ‘Oh, Lord. The wires must be down.'

The kitchen was crammed with women. They opened cupboards and pulled out drawers.

‘There's some fish fingers in the fridge,' said Lorna.

‘Have you got a wok?' somebody asked.

‘There's some sausages somewhere,' said Lorna. ‘I got them from work, but I think they're date-expired.'

Popsi sighed. ‘I know the feeling.'

‘There may be some hamburger stuff,' said Lorna.

‘I'm a vegetarian,' said Jacquetta.

‘You would be,' said Penny. ‘Why are difficult people always vegetarian?'

Popsi had put on an apron. ‘Come on girls, its loaves and fishes time.' She looked in the fridge. ‘A bit of cheddar cheese, one strawberry yoghurt, Lordy, these sausages are old.' She turned to Penny. ‘Penny for Them?'

‘Want to add some zip to that tinned cannelloni? Try mixing it with a little boot polish!'

‘Want to stretch that tagliatelle a little bit further? Try adding kitty litter, for a real family treat!'

‘And the left-overs make a super potting-compost!'

Jacquetta peered in the larder. ‘Here's some chick peas, but they take three and a half hours.'

Lorna stood there helplessly. ‘I'm afraid I'm not very domesticated.'

‘Lucky you,' said Penny, ‘you haven't had to be.'

Popsi was rummaging amongst some vegetables. She pulled out a small, wizened carrot. ‘Remind you of anyone, girls?'

They burst out giggling, even Jacquetta. Nobody had ever heard her laugh before; they all turned and stared.

At that moment Quentin came in, rolling up his sleeves. ‘Leave it to me, dears,' he said.

Outside, the windows shone in the dark. In the garden Bruno and Tobias were having a snowball fight. They had lost their teenage languor, they were
children again. Whooping and shrieking, they clawed up the snow, handfuls of it, and flung it at each other.

India opened the cottage door. Light spilled out onto the snow. ‘Come in!' she called. ‘Mum says you'll freeze!'

But they didn't hear. Suddenly she waded out. ‘Nyange!' she called. ‘Come out! It's wonderful!'

Buffy and Celeste were alone in the living room. She sat, propped up against his stomach. Outside in the garden they could hear whoops and yells. From the kitchen came bursts of laughter.

‘Sounds like Dorm Night in there,' said Buffy.

‘They seem to be getting on pretty well,' said Celeste.

‘They shouldn't. It's unseemly.'

‘They do have something in common.'

‘I know.' He paused, listening to a burst of raucous laughter. ‘That's what worries me.' He tried to sit up, to listen better, and fell back. ‘Pass me my cigarettes, sweetie.'

‘You shouldn't smoke.'

‘Do you mind? Do you really care?'

She stroked his beard. ‘Of course I do, silly.' It was painful, to watch him making this huge readjustment towards her. She had known for months that it lay
ahead of him, like a major operation he was unaware that he had to face. She had meant to prepare him for it more gradually – more ceremoniously too, with a gentle talk culminating in a Christmas dinner
à trois
, back at her flat – but the unexpected events in the wood had thrown the whole thing into disarray. ‘Look, I'm awfully sorry.'

‘I adore you. You know that.'

‘I adore you, too,' she said. ‘So is that all right?'

He nodded. He took her hand and kissed the fingers, one by one. He laid her palm against his cheek. In the kitchen the bursts of laughter and the clatter of pans seemed far away. Here there was no sound except the shifting of a log as it settled in the embers of the fire.

‘You're got glitter in your beard,' she said.

‘You've got some on your jumper.'

‘You know I'll never be able to call you Dad. It makes me feel too funny.'

‘That's fine by me. Hasn't done me much good up to now.'

She pulled away. ‘Listen!' She glared at him. ‘You're not a failure! I've seen your boys with Jacquetta, they're just as horrible with her. They're adolescents! I've been in all your lives. I've heard how they all speak about you, your ex-wives, India, everybody, I'm probably the only one who has. I've been
like a fly on the wall. Don't you understand? They wouldn't be so rude about you if they weren't fond of you. It's a compliment, in a funny way.' She paused for breath. She had been meaning to say this all day. ‘You've not been a failure, Buffy! You've just had more of a past to be a failure
in!
And look – they're all here, aren't they? All your exes. They all rushed down, on Christmas Day too! Listen to them. And your children too.'

They paused. A snowball thudded against the window. Outside, yells echoed over the countryside – all the Christmases he had never had, they were happening here, now. They echoed across the dark, locked countryside.

‘You've brought them all together, bless you,' he said. ‘You're the only one who could do it.'

‘That's not true! I just helped it happen. Don't you see, you silly? I think the reason you can't act anymore is that you're too busy acting out this, this,
scenario
.'

‘What scenario?'

‘Of poor old Buffy. Poor old battered Buffy, all abandoned and divorced. Penny's right. You've got sort of locked into it and it's not really true! You're not that old. You haven't even got anything wrong with you, not really. It's, like, you've written a part for yourself and those are the only lines you know.'

Just then Jacquetta came into the room. She wore his trilby hat, at a rakish angle, and she had tucked a
Historic Sights of Kent
tea towel into her waistband. She was still giggling. ‘Sorry to interrupt,' she said, ‘but do you two want baked beans with yours?'

Afterwards they all said, to whoever would listen, that it was certainly the most bizarre Christmas dinner they had ever had, and they should know – they had had some bizarre ones in the past. They ate a concoction of stir-fried tinned ravioli, cabbage, onions, sausages and baked beans with, as Lorna said in her supervisor's voice
your choice of tomato ketchup or piccalilli.
This was washed down with half a bottle of tawny port, a litre bottle of Cinzano somebody had discovered in the back of the larder and three cans of date-expired Budweiser Lorna had bought for some men who came a long time ago to fit her new boiler.

They ate on Buffy. One of his hundred uses, as an ex-husband, was to provide a convenient dining-table. He wasn't allowed to laugh or move, however, or the plates slipped off. Celeste fed him. They sat around on the floor, eating off their laps and off Buffy. They all had Happy Eater napkins, there were plenty of those. Popsi had put a sprig of mistletoe in her hair. Lorna had found, hidden away, a Dizzy
Gillespie record. She put it on. Nearly a quarter of a century earlier she had danced to this with Buffy, little knowing that their embraces would lead, after such a long hiatus, such a long, waking sleep, to the presence of this flushed young woman tenderly lifting his grizzled head and shovelling food in. A daughter, popped up from nowhere! As they all became drunker this fact struck them as both wonderfully strange and utterly inevitable.

Even Jacquetta had drunk a tumblerful of Cinzano. She looked down at Buffy. ‘Remember those picnics in Provence, when Bruno and Tobias were babies? Remember the smell of lavender and camembert?'

‘I remember everything,' said Buffy.

‘Even when you were too drunk to remember,' said Penny.

He tapped his head. ‘It's all in here. In my as yet unwritten memoirs. Even as you sit here, like hyenas around the carcass of an old water buffalo.'

Celeste looked at the three ex-wives. ‘Say it was worth it! You can't just switch it off, can you? Say it was all worth while!' She drained her glass; her brain buzzed. ‘Say you miss him.'

Penny raised her hand. ‘Only if we don't have to have him back.'

‘I just want to know,' said Celeste. She had such
a long, laborious past to recover, it had to mean something. All of it. Otherwise what was the point?

‘I miss you.' Penny looked down at Buffy. ‘I miss you when I want to go to the theatre. Thingy never goes to the theatre. I miss you when I've got something to say that only you'll understand. Something about tennis balls, for instance; I was thinking about rich people's tennis balls the other day. There are things I'll never have a reply to, now.' She munched, thoughtfully. ‘I don't miss your dog, though.'

Popsi said: ‘I was thinking about you only last week, pet. They'd pinned up this sign saying
More Stalls Upstairs.
You once said to me that there were two signs that always made you feel depressed, though you didn't know why. One was
More Stalls Upstairs
and the other was
Light Refreshments will be Served
.'

‘You remember that?' asked Buffy.

She nodded.

‘I don't,' he said.

‘You weren't even that bad in bed,' said Penny. ‘We were only joking, about the carrot.'

‘What carrot?' demanded Buffy.

‘We had our moments, didn't we?' she said. ‘At least you
talked
afterwards. And during. Sometimes you talked so much we had to stop.'

‘Ssh!' said Popsi, ‘not in front of the children.'

Jacquetta gazed at a piece of ravioli, stuck on the end of her fork. ‘I miss the person I was, with you. When somebody goes, the person you were, with them, that person disappears too. Nobody else can bring that person back. When a marriage breaks up, it's two people you've lost.'

There was a silence. ‘That's deep,' said Popsi. The mistletoe had slid below her ear.

‘It doesn't end, does it?' asked Celeste. ‘Look, we're here! We're here now!'

They sat there, in tipsy contemplation. The meal was finished. They screwed up their napkins and threw them into the fire; the flames flared. They lifted their plates off Buffy's stomach. Celeste turned to her mother. ‘Did you miss him?'

Lorna stood up, holding a handful of plates. Behind her, a piece of holly slipped beneath the picture frame and fell to the floor. She shook her head. ‘Not really.' She stepped over Buffy, on her way to the kitchen. ‘But I missed you.' She turned to Celeste. ‘I missed you all the time. When I worked in Selfridges I thought you'd come in to try on a jumper. Then I moved to Dover and started a little flower shop. Weddings and christenings, we made up these bouquets. I thought – who knows? One day? Silly really, but I always hoped. Then they knocked us down to build a car park and the only job I could get
round here was in catering. Not my thing really, but I thought – all those people passing through, surely one of them might be you? All those years, feeding other people . . . I thought you'd walk in the door and somehow I'd recognize you. I thought you'd be wearing the same sort of clothes I liked wearing, even the shoes. Which was ridiculous. I just thought I'd know who you were.' She paused, at the door. ‘Oh, I missed you all right.'

Outside stood a snowman. Large and shapeless, it stood in the middle of the lawn. It wore Buffy's trilby hat and his overcoat. It stood facing the glowing curtains of the cottage. The conker eyes gazed sightlessly as the snowman stood facing the music. Dizzy Gillespie played, echoing down the years. Music to dance to, to fall in love to; music for sex and for love. The snowman stood there, freezing hard. Around it, the ground was scuffed and muddied by the children's feet.