The Ex-Wives by Deborah Moggach Read Free Book Online Page A

– a fatherly family doctor, say, or a charismatic local MP. About time he was on the TV again. Maybe it was a major costume drama set in the Caribbean! They wanted him to play a plantation owner with a doting young native mistress.
    By the time Gwenda’s voice answered he was already making his acceptance speech at the BAFTA awards. ‘Mr Buffery?’ she said. ‘Just to remind you, we don’t seem to have received last month’s rental on your video recorder. Would you like to pop in, or pop a cheque in the post?’
    It was that sort of day. Well, year. Gloomily, he put George on his lead and left the flat. He stopped at The Three Fiddlers for a pint. His piles were so painful that he didn’t sit down; he stood at the bar. In this position the weight on his feet made his corns throb but this was marginally preferable to the otherthing. He had wedged cotton wool as well as corn plasters against his toes but they still pressed against the sides of his espadrilles, the thinking man’s bedroom slippers.
    None of his ex-wives had understood a simple fact: he didn’t want to be a hypochondriac – nobody did – he just happened to have a lot of things wrong with him, mostly of a vaguely undignified but not life-threatening nature. He didn’t seek the bloody things out. He didn’t
want
them. Bitterly, he remembered Penny’s shrill giggle when she first opened his bathroom cabinet. ‘What’re they all
for
? No, don’t tell me!’ Strong and vigorous, she had no patience with any sort of infirmity, and less so as their marriage progressed. Erotic back-rubs became brisk ones; brisk ones became progressively brusquer until they ceased altogether. ‘Well they don’t do much good, darling, do they? Why don’t you go to your funny little osteopath?’ When he was bedridden, the approaching rattle of the supper-tray took on an accusatory clatter, a
still-in-bed?
clatter, and she started forgetting the pepper mill.
    It was a shame she wasn’t ill herself more often because he was wonderful with ill women. Like many so-called hypochondriacs he was as interested in other people’s symptoms as his own. In fact some of the most tender moments of his previous marriageto Jacquetta had come each month when she suffered her crippling period pains. She had had migraines too, an affliction Penny had airily dismissed as neurotic. ‘Christ,’ she’d said, ‘you must’ve been a right couple of crocks.’ That was long ago, when she was still interested enough in his past to be jealous.
    It was late. The pub was empty except for Buffy, the bitter aftertaste of his various marriages and a couple of old girls called Una and Kitty, who always bagged the seats near the fire. They had men’s voices and the compacted, pressed-meat complexions of serious boozers. Buffy was fond of them, but their wrecked faces always made him uneasy – did he look like that, or would he soon? Besides, he didn’t feel like any sort of conversation today, even the amiable but minimal kind he would have with them.
    He walked up the street, pausing briefly to enter the smokey inferno of Ladbrokes to see if his horse, Genie Boy, had won. It hadn’t.
    In the months to come he tried to recollect his state of mind that Friday afternoon. Bitter and gloomy, oh, yes. Vaguely cosmic too. His company had been spurned by Archie Bingham, and you couldn’t get lower than that. His exes were living with other men, more harmoniously than they had ever lived with him, they made that perfectly plain, and his childrenwere growing up without the benefits of his jovial good nature and panoramic breadth of experience. Did none of them realize what they were missing? He nearly tripped; the blithering pavement had been dug up, yet again. This time it was something to do with British Telecom. A pit was revealed; within it hung a knotted tangle of wires. You opened up