The Ex Factor
Grocery shopping should be like a heist. In, get the haul, then exit, sharpish; that's my modus operandi every Saturday morning. Last month, though, I was foiled by a makeover of the drinks aisle. Somebody had unhelpfully removed the sauvignon blanc from the special offers section and while I was scouting the shelves trying to find it, I heard the clinking behind me, an ominous sound.
Twenty bottles, that's how many were in the trolley behind me. Twenty or thereabouts – I couldn't count them all, it would have been too rude. They were jostling for position and the fussily dressed pilot of the trolley was adding one more – a pinot noir – to the clinking pyramid. Mumbling to herself, while she steered her precious cargo towards the spirits section. Annoyed by this distraction I looked away, but not in time: an excited cry of recognition erupted behind me.
"Kathleen! Kathleen Grainger!"
So I looked round again, this time more guiltily. The face staring back at me was both familiar and unfamiliar, and prematurely aged. Skin hung loose and pouchy on it like withered fruit and the make-up – still the trademark cherry on the lips and coral around the eyes – had been applied with an obviously shaky hand. Like a child straying over the lines with crayons.
"Muriel," I said, struggling to hide my disbelief. "It's been a long time."
"Hasn't it just!"
With Muriel Carnwath an exclamation never went to waste. She'd always spoken in an outsized, semi-theatrical way, one of the many things I couldn't stand about her. We had nothing in common, really, apart from that unfortunate business with our husbands five years ago. Our ‘shared humiliation and betrayal', as she'd called it. "Mortifying!" she'd yelped down the phone to me. "It's completely mortifying and unbelievable, isn't it, Kathleen?"
Yes, it had been completely mortifying, but I'd moved on. I'd even forgiven David, sort of. Muriel, though, wasn't the forgiving type. My sideways glances into her trolley, at her cargo of drinks, did not go unnoticed.
"Oh entertaining, it's such a chore isn't it? Friends are always descending on me and exploiting my hospitality. Boozehounds, that's what I call them!"
And then she started on that subject I'd hoped to avoid. I knew it was coming: her face went funny and flushed and a thin flame of anger flickered in her voice. After all these years she was still as obsessed and embittered as ever.
"You know they've moved again, don't you? They've moved into a little cottage by Gardenston, just the two of them. Imagine! People won't like that in their village, if you ask me. And they also..."
"Not here, Muriel."
I glanced nervously around the aisle, but there was no one listening. She came a step closer and her fumy breath crowded me with its notes of desperation and monomania. Good God, I thought, I need to get out of here. With a sudden resolution I made a determined move towards the checkout.
"Wait!"
She put her hand out, obstructing my trolley.
"Don't you want to hear where they went on holiday?"
At the checkout I smiled forbearingly, and plotted my getaway, as she prattled away at my side. Their holidays, their new car, their trips to the windsailing club: nothing, it seemed, was off her heat-seeking radar. Her haul of alcohol came to a grand total of one hundred and twenty pounds and while she fumbled in her purse I slunk towards the exit, but the clinking followed me out to the car park.
"Kathleen, wait, I need your phone number!"
Now she'd left the store she'd whipped out a pair of dark sunglasses, to hide her eyes, which were puffier and more incriminating in broad daylight.
"We must stay in touch, Kat. Here, you give me your number and I'll give you mine. Have my address as well."
But I had nothing to write it on.
"Your shopping list, I can write it on the back of that."
Cornered, I told her I was going away on holiday soon.
"After you come back," she insisted. "We can meet up then."
I go on holiday on my own now. Out of choice, rather than necessity. The first time was rough, I felt like a little island in a sea of complacent married couples. A stony, forsaken little island. Then I realised it was just my mind playing tricks on me and I was able to relax. Holidays with David were always a fraught affair, trying to spark up a conversation or else defuse a mutual tetchiness. One summer we brought along the Carnwaths with us to Greece, it was his idea. He knew Philip from work, they were both in the accounts department.
"And you can have Muriel for company," he said.
It sounded like a neat and perfectly natural arrangement, but the reality was somewhat different. While he and Philip went off together – surfing, deep-sea diving, gymming – Muriel and I festered together on the balcony or on sun-loungers, a forced "friendship", which the hot, empty days strained rather than strengthened. Very early on we established that David was under-manager of the accounts department whereas Philip was senior under-manager: a small but critical distinction. It meant, for one thing, that she didn't work, apparently Philip wouldn't hear of it.
"He hates to think of me employed, you know. Even the housework ages me, he says. He says it makes my hands all peasanty and prunish."
This was a dig at my own disgracefully prunish hands. When I told her I liked a spot of gardening she nearly fell off her lounger.
"Really? Don't you have hired help to do that?"
Apart from the rampant snobbery she annoyed me in other ways as well. She was the kind of woman for whom hyperactivity was second nature: if she wasn't lacquering her toenails or mixing herself another martini she was fiddling with her little pocket radio or fidgeting with the recliner. Up-down, up-down, like a child bent on knackering a toy. Other times she would sit pontifical at the breakfast bar with a glass of vodka at her side (a ‘problem' tooth, apparently). And she was forever hymning the virtues of her sainted, devoted husband.
"Is David the only man you've ever been with? Philip's the only man I've ever looked at. And he swears he's never looked at another woman, he says he wouldn't dream of it."
At the end of the day he and David would return from their boys' outings and Philip would adoringly massage her back and shoulders and legs, right down to the yellow crinkly soles of her feet. Then he'd go and fetch her a magazine or top up her glass like a fussy waiter. It was all a bit slavish to my mind, a bit showy and a bit desperate. David's inattentiveness annoyed me, but at least it wasn't part of a choreographed performance.
"My God, that's a terrible woman you've stuck on me," I complained one evening, as we were getting ready for dinner. "Can't we do something together instead?"
Sleeping together, of course, was out of the question, we hadn't done that in months. The Carnwaths were putting us to shame, we were letting the side down in this connubial competition. At the poolside I received regular updates about their nocturnal activities, all delivered in a loud ‘whisper' heavy with implication.
"Honestly I'm so worn out, Kat, I'm not used to all this exercise."
Spare me the details, I thought, hiding my face beneath a magazine. Had it not been so transparently rude I would have put some headphones on and turned the volume up all the way to block her out. Why, I wondered, was I babysitting someone's wife? Or was she meant to be babysitting me? More often than not I ended up with a headache just lying there thinking about it.
"It's this sun, dear," Muriel said. "If you don't mind me saying, it's making you a bit frazzled."
On the second last day there was a glimmering, an inkling of something: a sudden illumination that chased away the illusions. It happened after a trip to Delphi, although no oracle spoke to me there. After returning to the hotel I trudged up to my room to wait for David to return from another outing with Philip; that day it was rock-climbing, and the day before it had been sail-boating. He seemed in a good mood when he breezed into the room, even listening indulgently to my stories about Muriel and the tour guide spatting over Greek goddesses. Then his attention wandered to a souvenir I'd bought and suddenly the mask slipped.
"What's that?"
It was a cheap vase, a black-necked amphora thing. Traders were flogging them outside the ruins.
"Oh, that's for your mother."
Now he looked really mad.
"I'm not giving her that."
Why? He'd never objected to my holiday purchases before, he'd been more than glad for me to do the souvenir shopping for the two of us. There was a strange, inexplicable tightness in his voice that I'd never heard before.
"What's wrong with it, David? I know it's cheap, but..."
"It's tat. I'm NOT giving her that."
While he stalked off into the bathroom I examined the vase properly, for the first time. Its design hadn't struck me before: lithe, loosely robed men entwined, like sea gods, in one another's arms. An insignificant detail, perhaps, except for those with a guilty conscience. I swaddled it in paper and stuffed it in a box but by the time it had arrived back in Britain it had broken, shattered into several pieces. As had our marriage. The Carnwaths kept up appearances a little longer, mostly because Muriel clung on for dear life. The phone calls started at three o'clock in the morning, an outpouring of woe and disbelief operatic in its intensity.
How could they have kept this from us?
Why hadn't we read the signs?
What were we going to tell the neighbours?
How on earth were we going to save face?
The ‘we' business annoyed me, it seemed to imply a comradeship I didn't feel. A fake marriage was one thing, but I wasn't going to get sucked into a fake sisterhood founded on grievance and victim status. Nor was I bothered about ‘saving face' or becoming a secret-sharer: after a long period of shadows and lies I finally felt some sunlight was entering into my life.
******
"Hello Kat."
I check all my voicemail messages as soon as I'm back in the country, but as soon as I heard that one I hit the delete button. My life was busy, I didn't need old ‘friends.' Not ones who were sloshed half the time, anyway. For a couple of weeks I didn't even think about her, I was too busy settling into my old routine and catching up with the day-to-day stuff. Then last Saturday I was loading bags into my car when I felt something scrunched in my pocket: an old shopping list with an address scribbled on the back. Rubbish, of course. I looked at the address again and an inconvenient emotion stirred in me just as I was about to dispose of it. Should I? I wondered. It was only twenty minutes' drive away, and I had promised her, sort of. With a certain resignation I got into the car, mentally preparing myself for the ordeal ahead like you do for going to the dentist.
Her house, the one she'd moved into after the divorce, was down a cul-de-sac, the very last one with the wine door and the blinds drawn, and a bay tree outside. The bay tree looked rather dried up and neglected, I thought. I stood there ringing the chiming doorbell again and again, but no one answered. A man from next-door saw me and waved.
"No use ringing there, love. You won't get an answer."
"Why? Is she away on holiday?"
"Holiday?" He looked baffled and rather embarrassed, scratching his head.
"No, no, she's away."
Still uncomprehending, I stared back at him.
"You know, away. Gone. Really sad, if you ask me. Couldn't help herself, that was the pity of it. The woman from across the road found her three weeks ago."
For some reason I still had my hand hovering over the doorbell, as if the act of ringing could somehow magically summon her to appear. He stood there shaking his head, stiff and awkward-seeming, as if unpractised at being the bearer of bad news.
"A friend, were you? You'll know why she was driven to drink, then. That husband of hers, what a tragedy."
"She told you all about it?"
"Oh yes, she told me all about the car accident. Two years after they got married. I don't think she ever got over it. When you lose someone like that it changes everything, doesn't it?"
I nodded, absently, and got back into the car, driving all the way home in a daze. Back in my familiar surroundings I was still fuddled, putting the frozen yogurt in the vegetable rack and the crisps in the freezer. Then I sat down, and pulled out a postcard I had half-finished writing to her. Dear Muriel, Having a fantastic time. Weather great. Must catch up with all your news.
It wasn't news she'd wanted to share with me, it was that secret she'd nursed by her side, clinging to it and refusing to let it go. Again that image floated to my mind of myself as a stony island, rebuffing the waves.
I sat back and poured myself another glass of wine.
