The Ex-Wives Read Free

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’sbedroom, 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. Hewas 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 aSaturday, 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.

Three
    NONE OF THE usual doddery old regulars was in the pub that day –