Heartbreak Hotel

  ‘Everyone asks her that,’ said India. ‘She’s fed up with it.’

  Buffy looked at India in surprise. How did she know? And why take such a proprietorial tone?

  Voda frowned at India. Why? There was something going on between them but Buffy was blessed if he knew what.

  India changed the subject. ‘I’m amazed anyone actually pays for this room.’ Arms full of sheets, she was gazing at the dressing table, whose broken leg was propped up with a copy of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. They were in the Blue Bedroom, the one that leaked. As it wasn’t raining, the bucket was tucked discreetly under the washbasin.

  ‘You sound like Nyange,’ Buffy said. ‘Anyway, if these courses are a success I’ll be able to fix the roof.’

  At that moment the doorbell rang. Buffy hurried downstairs to find an early arrival on the doorstep.

  ‘God, I’m sorry,’ said the man. He pulled out a crumpled piece of paper and looked at it. Check-in time 2 p.m. onwards. ‘Shall I go away again?’

  ‘Of course not.’ Buffy looked at his watch. Five to twelve. ‘Come in and have a drink.’

  Buffy still hadn’t got over the novelty of having his own bar, where he could pour his own drinks and not pay for them. There was a transgressive thrill to it. One day he would get a proper contraption where the bottles hung upside down; as it was, they were simply lined up on a sideboard.

  The man, who had introduced himself as Harold Cohen, was looking at the posters. ‘I thought I recognised you,’ he said. ‘You’re an actor, aren’t you? I saw you in that thing with Anna Massey. You were a Lebanese pimp.’

  Buffy passed him a gin and tonic. ‘Not my finest hour,’ he said. ‘Slight case of miscasting.’

  They sat down. ‘Pia, my ex, was in the theatre,’ said Harold. ‘But dance was more her thing, the more obscure and foreign the better.’

  ‘I had a wife like that,’ said Buffy. He remembered Jacquetta dragging him along to see Pina Bausch’s troupe, where a lot of flat-chested women threw chairs at each other. This was followed by a heated argument in Pizza Express and a week-long sulk, on both sides.

  Harold heaved a sigh. ‘Bit of a girls’ thing,’ he said. ‘As I found, to my cost.’ He had a lugubrious, Jewish face and an unkempt air. Buffy recognised a fellow refugee from the marital battlefield; the frayed cuffs and defeated slope to the shoulders were a giveaway. He was already warming to the chap.

  ‘I’m glad I spotted the article,’ said Harold. ‘Not that I read the Express – I found it on the Tube. But things had been getting a bit out of hand.’

  ‘In the garden?’

  He nodded. ‘I was sort of inundated.’

  ‘I know. Wait till you see my thistles. I’m hoping you lot can sort that out.’

  ‘I mean, with people.’ Harold stirred the ice cubes with his finger. ‘I didn’t realise there was so much desperation out there. I mean, I’m desperate too, of course, in a cosmic sense. But I’m talking about women.’

  ‘Women? You lucky sod.’ Buffy inspected Harold. He looked younger than him, late fifties at a guess, but nobody could conceivably call him a babe magnet.

  ‘I know, I know,’ said Harold. ‘Thing is, I’ve got a feeling anyone would do, even an old wreck like me. Or maybe they just fancy the house. Or the hens. God knows. But I’m finding it rather awkward, especially with a couple of old friends. Things haven’t been the same since they, you know . . .’

  ‘Tried to get into your trousers? Send them down here!’

  Harold laughed. ‘Anyway, that’s why I thought I should learn to tackle the garden myself.’

  Buffy made them both a sandwich and uncorked a bottle of wine. Time seemed to be pleasantly slipping away, as it did on a soporific Sunday afternoon. The dog lay slumped in the sunlight, twitching with rabbit dreams. Buffy knew he should be helping the girls but, after all, Harold was a customer. It turned out that the chap was a blocked writer – another reason for the cuffs and the shoulders. He hadn’t written a word for months.

  ‘You’ll find plenty of material here,’ said Buffy, refilling their glasses. ‘The town’s heaving with drama. London is too, of course, but nobody knows their neighbours so who can tell? Here, the post office queue’s straight out of The Decameron. Then you’ve got the people on the course –’

  The doorbell rang.

  ‘Talk of the devil,’ said Buffy, heaving himself to his feet.

  He opened the door to three guests, smiling expectantly. They had vast suitcases, as if arriving for a month. At the same moment India thundered down the stairs, waving her mobile.

  ‘I’ve just got a text from Bruno!’ she cried. ‘Becky’s waters have broken!’

  Lavinia

  Lavinia, the course tutor, had joined the guests for dinner. When Buffy came round with the bottle, she put her hand over her glass. ‘None for me, thank you, I’ve got to give my talk.’

  ‘Er, what talk?’ Buffy asked.

  ‘My introductory talk. Nine o’clock, in the bar.’ She paused, feeling her face heating up. She took a breath and said: ‘You know, you’re to blame for me becoming a magistrate.’

  ‘Goodness, are you one?’

  ‘When I was young, I was a fan of Crown Court. I used to watch it in the school holidays. You were in it, weren’t you?’

  He nodded. ‘First Usher, for my sins. Well, fancy that!’ He paused. ‘Er, what exactly were you planning for this talk?’

  ‘I call it “Roots and Shoots”. Just basic plant structure.’

  ‘Are you sure they’ll be in the mood for that? After dinner?’

  ‘We might as well get cracking. There’s an awful lot to get through in five days.’

  Appropriately enough, Buffy was wearing a floral waistcoat. Lavinia recognised the distinctive leaves and drooping, bell-shaped flowers of Dicentra formosa. Though he had put on a lot of weight since the Crown Court days – every button doing its duty, as her mother used to say – she had felt a small frisson when they met. A real actor! She didn’t meet many – indeed, any – in her circle. In fact, this had been one of the reasons she had volunteered to run the course in the first place. Had she sounded too syrupy?

  India brought in the starters. Several people, leaning back and plucking her sleeve, asked, ‘Any news?’ That Buffy’s daughter-in-law was labouring, at this very moment, to bring his grandchild into the world seemed to have caught the guests’ imagination.

  Lavinia herself had never liked children and certainly didn’t want one now. Her husband Teddy had once or twice mildly raised the subject but she had stopped that nonsense with one of her looks. Now she was forty-eight and any danger of that was long since past, even if she and Teddy were at it hammer and tongs, which was most certainly not the case.

  Besides, her job as a magistrate had put her off any idea of procreation. Why? Need one ask? People seemed to think that the judiciary were old fuddy-duddies but nothing could be further from the truth. The things she heard would make a normal person’s hair stand on end, such was the Sodom and Gomorrah of modern family life. Emerging from the court she felt like a coal miner covered in filth; only a good wallow in the bath could wash it off.

  No, her plants were her children. After all, babies looked exactly the same as each other but each plant was different. No contest. She gave life to them by sowing the seed. She nurtured them through their frail, early weeks, then potted them on like teenagers leaving home. But they still needed her, even when settled into the big wide world of her mixed borders. Every day she walked around checking up on them, checking them for pests, for blight, for all the blows that life might fling at them. Their suffering was her suffering; the sight of a dahlia consumed by slugs gave her physical pain. And their flowering was her triumph too.

  Not that her husband noticed a thing. Teddy had no interest in the garden at all; it was just a handy site for a blaze. What was it with men and bonfires? Every autumn he waded in, slashing and burning, leaving a trail of destruction behind him. He looked such an in
offensive chap, but then so did most of the men who turned up in front of her bench, guilty of the most brutal abuse.

  That’s why Lavinia liked opening her garden to the public. At last she had an appreciative audience for her handiwork. She enjoyed standing there modestly, listening to their gasps of awe – at the house, at the grounds – and answering their questions. Yellow Book visitors were a nosy bunch, always trying to worm their way indoors on some pretext or other, usually the loo. They also helped themselves to cuttings, glancing around furtively before taking out their secateurs for a snip. Lavinia didn’t mind; she did the same thing herself.

  And at least they were interested. Lavinia was in the bar now, the chairs arranged around her in a semicircle. She was giving her introductory talk about plant structure but her pupils seemed more eager to hear about the blasted baby. ‘How much is she dilated?’ they asked India, when she brought in the coffee. ‘How many contractions per minute?’

  It was mostly women who asked, of course, but then it was mostly women in the audience. In fact, it was mostly women everywhere, and all of a certain age. Wherever one went – to church, to the theatre, to a gallery, to a garden centre, it was wall-to-wall females. The same applied to courses, to cruises, to just about anything. The only place where men outnumbered women seemed to be at the magistrates’ court or the Shropshire Agricultural Show. Lavinia had presumed that ‘Gardening for Beginners’, advertised for those who had recently broken up, would attract an equal proportion of males – more, in fact, as they were unlikely to know much about the topic – but it was the usual ratio of three men to seven women. Several of these had the bright, needy look found in solitary females of advanced years. Pathetic though Teddy was, the thought of abandoning him and joining their ranks was too ghastly to contemplate.

  India’s mobile beeped. Another text!

  ‘Do give her my love,’ said one of the women ridiculously. She didn’t know the creature!

  Someone else said: ‘I know what she’s going through, when I had my Benji it was fourteen hours of sheer hell.’

  ‘My first took a day and a night,’ said somebody else. ‘I had an episiotomy and forceps.’

  ‘Ha, you were lucky,’ said another voice. ‘I had twenty stitches. Had to sit on a rubber ring for weeks.’

  ‘Can we get back to the matter in hand?’ snapped Lavinia. She pointed to her wall chart. ‘This is the stamen, with the anther and filament, and this is the pistil–’

  ‘Read us the text!’ hissed a voice.

  India read: ‘6 cm dilated. Contractions stronger.’

  ‘Stronger!’ snorted one of the women. ‘That means bloody agonising.’

  ‘You feel you’re being split in half,’ said another voice.

  Lavinia was losing her audience. She felt a pang of sympathy for Buffy. Was this how actors felt, when trying to hold the stage?

  India sighed. ‘The poor thing,’ she said. ‘I’m never going to have a baby.’

  ‘You will, pet,’ said somebody else. ‘You’ll forget about it once it’s over.’

  ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’ asked somebody else. ‘Are you in a committed relationship?’

  India shook her head and passed round the milk jug.

  Lavinia soldiered on with her lecture. As she did, she felt something nagging at the back of her mind. One of the women, the one sitting beneath the poster of Buffy, looked familiar. A mousy specimen wearing a frilled blouse that made her resemble a piper in an Irish band. Where had she seen her before?

  When the talk was over, Lavinia took out her list of names. Searching it, she recognised one. Mary Taylor.

  The woman in question was standing at the bar, where Buffy was serving drinks. Lavinia read the address: 18 Willow Close, Ludlow. So she was local. Maybe she had just seen her in town. At that moment the woman turned. She glanced at Lavinia, who was gathering up her papers. Was that a flicker of recognition?

  It was only half an hour later, when Lavinia was driving home, that she remembered. Mary Taylor. The woman had been brought before her in court, for shoplifting.

  Buffy

  The next morning Buffy had a granddaughter. A photo had been emailed showing a crumple-faced baby. Like all babies, it bore a striking resemblance to Charlie Drake. He told India this but of course she was too young to know what he was talking about.

  Harold did. He and Buffy were discovering that they had a lot in common. They reminisced about the dwarfish, cigar-chomping comedian who they agreed was the least funny man on earth. Norman Wisdom, they also agreed, ran a close second. It was a beautiful morning. The two of them sat drinking coffee in the lounge. Outside in the garden was a sight to gladden Buffy’s heart: the entire class, busy weeding. They were tackling the far border – a row of rumps, bent over, with Gauleiter Balcombe patrolling up and down barking orders. ‘They look like pilgrims at Mecca,’ observed Harold. He had excused himself from physical exertion; like Buffy, he suffered from a bad back.

  ‘In the old days, of course, a bloke just went to the pub till it was over,’ said Buffy, remembering the birth of Quentin. Well, not remembering. In fact, he hadn’t been present for the birth of any of his progeny. Popsi had laboured alone, while he was getting drunk. Jacquetta had had both Tobias and Bruno by Caesarean section. She had unique complications, apparently – everything about her was both unique and complicated. Buffy still suspected that it was simple cowardice. The boys were delivered in a private hospital too; those were the glory days of voice-overs. Nyange’s mother was almost a stranger, while he had had no idea Celeste had even been born.

  Sometimes Buffy wondered what his third wife, Penny, would have been like as a mother. Anybody less maternal would be hard to imagine. She was a hard-boiled hack through and through; even puppies and kittens left her cold, unless she had to write a soppy piece about them for Woman’s Own. Once, sentimental old fool that he was, he had asked her why she never looked at him with the same devotion that he looked at her. She had replied: ‘I don’t do dote.’

  Harold had a daughter from his first marriage, who lived in Australia. She had recently had a baby, who burbled at him on Skype. ‘Talk about a hands-off grandfather,’ he said, relapsing into gloom. Pia, his second wife, had shown no interest in children.

  ‘It’s not too late,’ said Buffy. ‘You could start all over again. Plenty of men your age are pushing pushchairs around. Anyone here take your fancy?’

  Harold shook his head. ‘I’m finished with all that. From now onwards I’m going to devote myself to my writing and my garden. Both are in a total mess.’

  The door opened and Voda came in. ‘Sorry to disturb you,’ she said to Buffy, ‘but your BAFTA’s gone missing from the bog.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You haven’t taken it off to polish or something?’

  ‘Why on earth would I do that?’

  She looked at him. ‘No. Silly question.’

  Buffy followed her into the downstairs lavatory. His BAFTA had indeed disappeared from the windowsill.

  ‘You think it’s been stolen?’ asked Voda, wedged in there with him.

  ‘Who on earth would steal a BAFTA?’

  ‘It’s gold, isn’t it?’

  ‘Shouldn’t think so.’

  ‘It felt heavy enough.’ She squeezed past him back into the corridor. ‘I always said you should put it somewhere safe.’

  The question was: where? The bedroom cupboard would certainly have been safe, but then nobody would know he had won it. On the other hand, pride of place in the lounge would have seemed too ostentatious. The lavatory had seemed the solution – lightly ironic, even humorous, yet there for everyone to see. Due to the shortage of bathrooms, the downstairs cloakroom was heavily patronised. Besides, if various interviews were to be believed, the more stylish Hollywood stars kept their Oscars in the toilet.

  Buffy had won it for Best Supporting Actor in Read My Lips, a BBC drama about a deaf Holocaust survivor. Disability always cleaned up at the BAFTAs and the Auschwi
tz element clinched it. He had played a kindly speech therapist, sporting, for some reason, mutton-chop whiskers.

  ‘I remember that,’ said Harold. ‘You had an old Land Rover and a practice in Harley Street.’

  ‘Never quite got to grips with my backstory. I think I’d had a sheep farm at some point but they’d sacked the original writer so I never found out. There was also a puzzling reference to twins.’

  ‘Still, maybe the best performances are based on ambiguity.’ Harold paused. ‘Wish I’d thought of that to tell my students.’

  Buffy gazed thoughtfully out of the window. ‘Do you really think one of them nicked it?’

  Harold looked at the figures toiling in the garden, weeds heaped up around them. ‘Hard to believe, isn’t it? They look so middle class.’

  ‘They’re the worst.’

  ‘Maybe one of them’s a fan and wants a little piece of you.’

  ‘A big piece, excuse me. BAFTAs don’t grow on trees, you know.’

  ‘Maybe you should say something at dinner.’

  ‘I don’t want to poison the atmosphere,’ said Buffy. ‘Everyone’s getting on so well.’

  They did seem to be a harmonious bunch. The birth had given a zip to things and bound the group together. Smartphones had been passed round at breakfast by those who had already been blessed with grandchildren, and photos exclaimed over. One of the ladies had even produced her laptop, whose screensaver featured her son’s triplets. It seemed a shame to introduce an element of suspicion.

  And there was already a marked improvement in the garden. By lunchtime the bed had been cleared and, according to Lavinia, several rare shrubs had been revealed. The group tramped in, ruddy-faced and perspiring, and attacked the buffet lunch. A morning in the fresh air, they all agreed, had done them a power of good. Buffy had still not got to grips with all the names. He had got a little squiffy the previous evening and had lost his concentration. He didn’t usually touch the stuff, of course, but it wasn’t every day one celebrated a grandchild’s arrival. Whether they had all joined the course as a result of some marital break-up was not a question he felt he could ask, and besides, who cared? They were here, they were tucking in, and though it had started raining that didn’t matter as Lavinia was setting up her seed boxes in the bar, for the afternoon’s tutorial.