Heartbreak Hotel

  Fig’s yapping announced the return of Voda from the cash ‘n’ carry. India jumped up and helped her unload tins of paint. The two young women had taken an instant liking to each other, and as he watched them Buffy noticed their physical resemblance – both stocky and purposeful, with unruly dark hair. India, however, had a Londoner’s pallor while Voda’s cheeks were even redder than usual. So, in fact, were her lips. Was it possible that she was wearing make-up? There was a skittish air about her, too, which was unusual – the way she giggled at something India said and clapped her hand to her mouth. Did she have the hots for one of his sons? Hopefully not for Bruno who had a girlfriend already and a pregnant one at that. His girlfriend’s resentment at his skiving off when she was seven months gone had surfaced in a series of texts which had briefly beeped to life when his mobile got a signal on the way to Knockton, and disappeared again.

  Buffy told them about the front room, which he was going to convert into a bar and lecture theatre for his students. This was situated on the other side of the hallway from the dining room; until recently it had been used as a storeroom by a friend of Bridie’s who collected railway memorabilia – boxes of timetables and assorted junk.

  ‘He’s an old boy called Lenny,’ said Buffy. ‘I think she had a thing with him.’

  ‘Nobody has a thing with a railway enthusiast,’ said Bruno. ‘That’s why they’re railway enthusiasts.’

  ‘Bridie wasn’t too picky, bless her,’ said Buffy, hoping that this hadn’t applied to himself. ‘Anyway, I let him keep the room for old times’ sake but he’s had to sell the lot off to pay for his care home. We’re going to tart it up with a lick of paint.’

  His sons were driving back to London that afternoon but to his surprise India offered to stay on and do some wallpaper-stripping. Buffy helped Tobias and Bruno gather up their vast collection of clothes, some of which were draped over the bushes in the garden, bade them goodbye and padded off for his snooze.

  When he emerged, promptly at the cocktail hour, he heard shrieks of laughter coming from the room downstairs. He paused on the landing. The evening sun shone through the fanlight. Already he could imagine the convivial clink of glasses, the rapt silence as he shared his wisdom with rows of blokey, unreconstructed men who’d only spoken to women in monosyllables, the burst of applause as he finished with a flourish. There would be amusing anecdotes from his own past – even humiliating ones (plenty to choose from, there) – and of course he’d crack some jokes to break the tension. I don’t think I’ll get married again. I’ll just find a woman I don’t like and give her a house.

  Buffy went down to the front room. India and Voda were sitting side by side on the floor smoking roll-ups. He looked at Voda in surprise; he had no idea she smoked. One wall was half scraped; strips of paper hung down, lolling like tongues.

  ‘I was telling her about my stepfather,’ said India.

  ‘Not me, I hope,’ Buffy.

  ‘Of course not you. I wouldn’t slag you off in your own home. We were talking about Leon.’

  ‘He sounds a right tosser,’ said Voda.

  Leon was the celebrity shrink to whom Jacquetta had confided her marital woes – in other words, Buffy’s hopelessness as a husband – and with whom she eventually absconded, taking his Ivon Hitchens with her.

  ‘I was trying to explain our family,’ said India. ‘Who was married to who, and who had children with who, but she’s got a bit lost. In fact, so have I.’

  ‘One really needs a paper and pencil,’ said Buffy.

  ‘No,’ said India. ‘A bloody wall chart.’

  ‘Wish my parents had got divorced,’ said Voda, stubbing out her cigarette. ‘Then I wouldn’t have had to hear them shagging in their bender.’

  ‘Or them hear you,’ said India.

  ‘And the rows,’ said Voda. ‘Even worse than Conor and me.’ She sighed. ‘He’s such a moody bugger. Like, he even gets irritated by the way I wash up. He can sulk for weeks, long after I’ve forgotten what it was all about.’

  ‘Like a child who stomps off with its suitcase and nobody notices it’s gone so it has to crawl back home,’ said India. ‘I did that once.’

  ‘Did you?’ asked Buffy.

  ‘But then Mum never noticed anything. I could’ve been away for months.’

  Voda sat there, deep in her own thoughts. ‘It’s ever so peaceful with him in prison,’ she said. ‘No temper tantrums when the van doesn’t start, no fag ends in the loo. And he would have made me drown the kittens. To tell the truth, I’m dreading him coming out.’

  Buffy raised his eyebrows. Voda had never spoken so openly before. But then Buffy was her employer, and a bloke – doddery, portly, unthreatening, but still unmistakably a bloke. It was India who had loosened her inhibitions.

  The two women carried on stripping the wall. They looked so companionable together; they even seemed to be scraping in unison. He was glad they were getting on so well. Voda was telling India about her brother’s squint, and how the commune briefly tried to cure it with their cult chant – to no avail, surprise surprise. How Aled had found solace in cows, the only creatures that had given him real affection. From there they segued seamlessly, as women so often did, onto the subject of their disastrous love lives, with particular reference to India’s hopeless exes.

  Buffy heard this with interest; they seemed to have forgotten that he was there. He thought: Funny, isn’t it, that no woman needs a course called ‘Talking to Women’. They just do it all the time.

  A makeshift bar was installed in the corner of the room. It was a battered mahogany counter that Voda had found in a skip outside a community hall when playing a darts match in Brecon. A stack of plastic chairs was purloined, following a tip-off that, due to the cuts, the local drop-in centre was closing down. The room was taking shape. To add a personal touch, Buffy hung the walls with framed playbills which he had found stacked in the cellar. They included a production of The Rivals in which he had played the lead. His younger, slimmer self, bewigged with corkscrew curls, gazed out from the photograph. The raised eyebrow, the insolent smirk – what a swagger there was to him then! For the first – and last – time, he had seen his name in lights on Shaftesbury Avenue. Now, however, damp had crept beneath the glass; a tea-coloured stain corrugated half his face, like a birthmark.

  Gazing at his image, Buffy thought of the characters he had played, from Sir Anthony Absolute to Hammy the Hamster. They belonged to another life. Actors might strut and fret upon the stage but they were basically children dressing up in costumes. He was now the proprietor of a guest house with a licence for alcohol to be consumed on the premises. At long last, indeed at the ripe old age of seventy-one, he almost felt like a grown-up.

  His plans were taking shape; the search was now on for tutors. Later that day he was meeting a chap called Nolan in the pub. Nolan, like the drop-in centre, was a victim of the cuts; until recently he had worked as a labourer for the local council but had now been made redundant. His passion, however, was cars. Apparently he had two lock-ups near the bypass that were charnel houses of dismembered vehicles; this, and a sunny disposition, made him a possible candidate for the car maintenance course.

  There was also the question of advertising. Buffy was pondering this as he walked around the bedrooms replenishing the freebies – shampoo miniatures, tea bags, biscuits. Needless to say they were always pocketed – even, pathetically enough, the sachets of sugar.

  Should he put an ad in a lonely hearts page, an upmarket one like the London Review of Books? Were lovelorn bluestockings his core clientele? More to the point, did he want to fill his house with them? Penny would know what to do. Standing in the Pink Room, Buffy suddenly had a pang for his ex-wife. She was a journalist, a hack to her core, with a wily lateral mind that had proved useful in the past. Not always, it had to be said, to his advantage. Particularly not, when it concerned her adultery. He remembered Penny’s ‘press trips’ abroad, how she returned suntanned, how she amused him with stori
es about her fellow freeloaders while unpacking gifts of exotic foodstuffs. How in fact she had simply gone to ground in her lover’s Soho flat, hastily slapping on the bronzer and buying pasta from Camisa’s before breezily returning home in a taxi ‘from the airport’.

  One had to admire her chutzpah. He hadn’t then, of course. But it was all so long ago, the years had passed and it all seemed like a dream. Buffy stood there, watching a spider lowering itself from the ceiling. It did it with such insouciance; did it really know where it was going, and did it really want to get there?

  Penny did. She was smart and ruthless, with a nose for a story. When some friend burst into tears, confiding some childhood trauma, she would stiffen like a fox scenting a rabbit – could she write a piece about it? Nothing was wasted, from sexual abuse to a dropped hem. Penny could always cobble together a thousand words, and bung it off to anything from the Daily Mail to one of the glossies. One had to admire her for it. She was also fun – a lot more fun than her predecessor Jacquetta, of whom she was furiously jealous. Buffy remembered Penny’s first visit to his country cottage, where the cesspit was being cleaned out. ‘Thank God,’ she had said. ‘I don’t want any old wife’s droppings in there.’

  ‘Lunch!’ Voda yelled up the stairs. Buffy jumped. Was it really that late? How long had he been standing there, clutching a box of UHT milk pots? This happened more and more often nowadays. Voda called him a lazy old sod but he was just ambushed by the past. There was so much of it, waiting to immobilise him in a sunlit bedroom.

  As he walked downstairs Penny’s voice was still in his head. Don’t waste your money on an ad, silly. Get someone to write a piece about it.

  Roy was a raddled old hack who worked for the Radnorshire Echo. Buffy had bumped into him some months earlier, when their respective dogs were relieving themselves in the churchyard. He knew where to find Roy – in the bar of the Knockton Arms Hotel, at the far end of town. Buffy usually avoided the place due to Daffyd the barman’s insistence on addressing him in the squeaky voice of Voley, a joke which had long since run out of steam, if it had had any in the first place. Today, however, a monosyllabic Latvian was on duty. The place was empty except for Roy, who sat at the bar attempting to engage the chap in conversation.

  He turned, relieved, when Buffy came in. ‘Hello, old cock! What brings you to this den of iniquity?’

  They sat down in the snug with a couple of sharpeners. In his youth Roy had been a Marxist firebrand, firing off rabble-rousing polemics in the Manchester Guardian. Moving to London, and to the right, he had worked for the red tops in the good old days of Fleet Street, propping up the bar at El Vino’s and picking up gossip for the showbiz pages. Buffy had glimpsed him at various watering holes and indeed been interviewed by him when cast in a Morse, a cameo that had subsequently hit the cutting-room floor. Roy had long since retired to Wales with his wife, a tough old bird whose skin was kippered by the fags and with whom he dined at four-star hostelries in exchange for shameless puffs in the local paper.

  Buffy told him his plan.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Roy said. ‘It’s the silly season after all, they’re gagging for stories. You want one of the nationals, of course – big readership, someone might bite. Nobody round here would be stupid enough to pay for one of your courses.’ He thought for a moment. ‘The Daily Express owes me one. Managed to blag my way into the green room at the Hay Festival and fed them a very tasty little item.’ He chuckled. ‘Caught one of the PM’s aides in the khazi, stuffing Bolivian marching powder up his nostrils.’

  ‘Do I want Daily Express readers?’ asked Buffy.

  ‘You old snob. Anyway, you’d be surprised who reads it. They all say it was lying around at the doctor’s, of course.’

  Roy was right; it had to be a national. Buffy suspected that nobody read the local paper unless their runner beans were up for a prize. News items ranged from ‘Mystery of the Mobility Scooter’ which had been spotted in someone’s front garden, the only clue to its ownership a pair of gentleman’s gloves, to the rumour of a panther roaming the countryside under cover of darkness. A reporter, wearing night goggles, was dispatched to lie in wait, only to discover after a week of staking it out that it was an overweight tom. This story, apparently, cropped up every summer.

  So Roy wrote a piece for the Daily Express. It was accompanied by a photo of Buffy, bearded and beaming in his panama hat, standing outside Myrtle House, a No Vacancies sign displayed prominently in the window.

  Viewers of a certain vintage might remember him as the gaff-prone landlord in TV’s Bed and Board, shamefully pulled after one series. Now, however, retired actor Russell Buffery, 71, has taken on the role for real. A year ago a dear friend bequeathed him her B&B in the picturesque town of Knockton. ‘It was a bolt from the blue,’ says Russell ‘Buffy’ Buffery, relaxing in the garden of the period property. ‘But I was ready for a new challenge, away from the hustle and bustle of the city.’ Swapping the greasepaint for the paintbrush, he set about restoring the handsome Georgian building to its former glory and it was soon up and running as a thriving business. ‘Every actor likes to play to a full house,’ he jokes, ‘and I was set for a long run.’

  However, never content to rest on his laurels, the energetic thesp has hit on a novel idea. Himself no stranger to the marriage-go-round – ‘Shame there are no repeat fees,’ he jokes, ‘or I’d be a rich man’ – he has now set up Courses for Divorces. ‘So you’ve split up,’ he says. ‘It happens to the best of us. But marriage is a division of labour and chances are you’ve relied on your better half for something you can’t do yourself – fixing the house, sorting out the finances. When they’ve gone, you’re as helpless as a baby. Enrol at Myrtle House and in a week you’ll be able to stand on your own two feet. This, plus the beautiful countryside and three-course dinners with locally sourced products, will set you on the road to recovery.’ The first course, ‘Basic Car Maintenance’, starts on 15 September. ‘It’s cheaper than therapy,’ he adds, with his trademark chuckle. ‘And who knows? Maybe it won’t just be the spark plugs that ignite.’

  11

  Amy

  ‘I’VE NEVER READ the Express before,’ said Rosemary. ‘I happened to see it at the dentist’s.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Amy. ‘At the doctor’s.’

  The two of them had checked in at the same time. It turned out they were sharing a twin-bedded room.

  ‘Our host looks vaguely familiar,’ said Rosemary. ‘Perhaps I’ve met him somewhere before.’

  ‘He’s an actor,’ said Amy. ‘I did his make-up once, for a Miss Marple. I’ve only just realised.’

  ‘Is that what you do? How glamorous!’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘I adore Miss Marple. Especially when what’s-her-name plays her.’ Rosemary unzipped her suitcase and started pulling out her clothes. ‘I haven’t shared a room with anyone but Douggie for forty years,’ she said. ‘Still, I don’t mind if you don’t. As long as you don’t snore.’

  ‘I don’t think I do,’ said Amy. ‘Nobody’s complained.’

  ‘Douggie did, like a warthog in labour. Had to jab him with my elbow.’ Rosemary pulled out her sponge bag. ‘At least we’ve got our own sink.’ She looked at the washbasin. ‘Haven’t seen avocado since Edward Heath was PM. Before your time, dear.’

  Amy was relieved to have a room-mate of senior years. Some willowy creature in a thong would make her feel even more inadequate than she felt already. Rosemary was a big-boned woman from Aldershot; she wore a navy skirt and floral blouse. Her husband had apparently been in some regiment or other before he had retired and promptly decamped with the waitress at his golf club. ‘What an utter ass,’ Rosemary said. ‘No fool like an old fool. God knows what she sees in him.’ All this Amy had gathered before they had dumped their suitcases on the beds.

  In truth, Amy was glad of the company. The recession had hit the film industry; she hadn’t had a job for six months and had been spending far too long alone i
n her flat. Worse still, the illegal immigrants upstairs had disappeared and been replaced by a couple with a baby. At night its wails morphed into the cries of her own dream-baby, newborn and snuffling at her nipple. A tiny Neville, it gazed up at her with such love that her insides melted. And then she woke up to the desolate reality. She was thirty-five, with no boyfriend and the clock ticking.

  ‘I’ve brought my gardening trousers,’ said Rosemary, carrying them to the wardrobe. ‘I presume we’ll get covered with oil, fiddling under a bonnet or something. They’ve already been demoted from my going-to-the-shops trousers, they’re pretty disgusting.’

  Amy had just brought another pair of jeans. This was lucky as there were only four mismatched hangers in the wardrobe, and Rosemary had bagged three. She had, however, brought along a couple of spare jumpers as Wales was rumoured to be cold. It was chilly; the sash window seemed to be jammed, slightly open, at an angle. Rosemary had found a blow heater which blasted out a smell of singed fur.

  The room must once have been gracious. Now, however, a piece of hardboard blocked the fireplace and the floral wallpaper had faded. On the wall hung a photograph of John Gielgud as Prospero (studio lighting, plenty of slap), signed with a flourish to dearest Bridie. It was on the top floor; she could see over the rooftops to the hills, where the sky was heaped with bruised, mutinous clouds.