older. (He secretly touched up his grey hairs with black dye.) The wobbling flesh was wrinkled and flabby. Henry was getting old, and so was I. It was the first moment in my life when I realized that time was running out for me personally as well as for other people and the planet.
Maybe it was the alcohol but I felt removed from the situation, capable of considering it as an abstract problem. I walked towards them, my bare feet soundless on the sand. I crouched a few yards away from the shuddering bodies. Suddenly they realized they were not alone. Simultaneously they turned their heads to look at me, the widow with her legs raised and those pretty shoes in the air.
Still in that state of alcoholic transcendence, I had the sense to raise the Box Brownie and press the shutter.
I don’t keep many photographs. I am afraid of nostalgia. You can drown in dead emotions.
Among the photographs I have thrown away is the shot of Henry bouncing on his widow on the beach. I knew at once that it could be valuable, that it meant I could divorce Henry without any trouble. At the time, the remarkable thing was how little the end of the marriage seemed to matter. Perhaps, I thought as I took the film out of the camera, perhaps it was never really a marriage at all, just a mutually convenient arrangement which had now reached a mutually convenient end.
I still have a snap of us by the pool in somebody’s back garden in Durban with Henry sucking in his tummy and me showing what at the time seemed a daring amount of naked flesh. There’s just the two of us in the photograph, but it’s obvious from the body language that Henry and I aren’t a couple in any meaningful sense of the word. Obvious with twenty-twenty hindsight, anyway.
In my letters to Janet I had been honest about everything except Henry. I didn’t conceal the fact that money was sometimes tight, or even that I was drinking too much. But I referred to Henry with wifely affection. ‘Must close now – His Nibs has just come in, and he wants his tea. He sends his love, as do I.’
It was pride. Janet had her Mr Perfect and I wanted mine, or at least the illusion of him. But I think I’d known the marriage was in trouble before the episode with the widow. What I saw on the beach merely confirmed it.
‘I want a divorce,’ I said to Henry when he came back to our room in the hotel. By the smell of him he’d fortified himself in the bar downstairs.
‘Wendy – please. Can’t we –?’
‘No, we can’t.’
‘Darling. Listen to me. I –’
‘I mean it.’
‘All right,’ he said, his opposition crumbling with humiliating speed. ‘As soon as you like.’
I felt sober now and I had a headache. I had found the bottle of black hair dye hidden as usual in one of the pockets of his suitcase. It was empty now. I’d poured the contents over his suits and shirts.
‘No hard feelings,’ I lied. ‘I’ll let you have some money.’
He looked across the room at me and smiled rather sadly. ‘What money?’
‘You know something?’ I said. ‘When I saw you on top of that cow, your bum was wobbling around all over the place. It was like an old man’s. The skin looked as if it needed ironing.’
In the four months after I found Henry doing physical jerks on top of his widow, I wrote to Janet less often than usual. I sent her a lot of postcards. Henry and I were moving around, I said, which was true. Except, of course, we weren’t moving around together. In a sense I spent those four months pretending to myself and everyone else that everything was normal. I didn’t want to leave my rut even if Henry was no longer in there with me.
Eventually the money ran low and I made up my mind I had to do something. I came back to London. It was February now, and the city was grey and dank. I found a solicitor in the phone book. His name was Fielder, and the thing I remember most about him was the ill-fitting toupee whose colour did not quite match his natural hair. He had an office in Praed Street above a hardware shop near the junction with Edgware Road.
I went to see him, explained the situation and gave him the address of Henry’s solicitor. I told him about the photograph but didn’t show it to him, and I mentioned my mother’s money too. He said he’d see what he could do and made an appointment for me the following week.
Time crawled while I waited. I had too much to think about and not enough to do. When the day came round, I went back to Fielder’s office.
‘Well, Mrs Appleyard, things are moving now.’ He slid a sheet of paper across the desk towards me. ‘The wheels are turning. Time for a fresh start, eh?’
I opened the sheet of paper. It was a bill.
‘Just for interim expenses, Mrs Appleyard. No point in letting them mount up.’
‘What does my husband’s solicitor say?’
‘I’m afraid there’s a bit of a problem there.’ Mr Fielder patted his face with a grubby handkerchief. He wore a brown double-breasted pinstripe suit which encased him like a suit of armour and looked thick enough for an Arctic winter. There were drops of moisture on his forehead, and his neck bulged over his tight, hard collar. ‘Yes, a bit of a problem.’
‘Do you mean there isn’t any money?’
‘I did have a reply from Mr Appleyard’s solicitor.’ Fielder scrabbled among the papers on his desk for a few seconds and then gave up the search. ‘The long and the short of it is that Mr Appleyard told him your joint assets no longer seem to exist.’
‘But there must be something left. Can’t we take him to court?’
‘We could, Mrs Appleyard, we could. But we’d have to find him first. Unfortunately Mr Appleyard seems to have left the country. In confidence I may tell you he hasn’t even settled his own solicitor’s bill.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘Not a desirable state of affairs at all. Not at all. Which reminds me …?’
‘Don’t worry.’ I opened my handbag and dropped the bill into it.
‘Of course. And then we’ll carry on in Mr Appleyard’s absence. It should be quite straightforward.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘By the way, your husband left a letter for you care of his solicitor. I have it here.’
‘I don’t want to see it.’
‘Then what would you like me to do with it?’
‘I don’t care. Put it in the wastepaper basket.’ My voice sounded harsh, more Bradford than Hillgard House. ‘I don’t mean to seem rude, Mr Fielder, but I don’t think he has anything to say that I want to hear.’
Walking back to my room along the crowded pavement I wanted to blame Fielder. He had been inefficient, he had been corrupt, but even then I knew neither of these things were true. I just wanted to blame somebody for the mess my life was in. Henry was my preferred candidate but he wasn’t available. So I had to focus my anger on poor Fielder. Before I reached my room, I’d invented at least three cutting curtain lines I might have used, and also constructed a satisfying fantasy which ended with him in the dock at the Old Bailey with myself as the chief prosecution witness. Fantasies reveal the infant that lives within us all. Which is why they’re dangerous because the usual social constraints don’t operate on infants.
When I went into the house, Mrs Hyson, the landlady, opened the kitchen door a crack and peered at me, but said nothing. I ate dry bread and elderly cheese in my room for lunch to save money. I kept on my overcoat to postpone putting a shilling in the gas meter. Since leaving Henry I had lived on the contents of my current account at the bank and my Post Office Savings Account, a total of about two hundred pounds, and by selling a fur coat and one or two pieces of jewellery.
I wasn’t even sure I could afford to divorce Henry. First I needed to find a job but I was not