Heartbreak Hotel

  ‘Maybe it would do you good to have a change,’ said Quentin.

  Buffy looked sharply at his son. He wanted to get rid of him! Out of sight, out of mind. Perhaps he was becoming a liability to his children, visited out of duty, and it would be a relief all round if he banished himself to another country, which Wales practically was. He was a querulous, doddery King Lear, a part for which he had secretly prepared for years and never been offered. This was hardly surprising since he no longer had an agent. Or, indeed, a career.

  However, a new career beckoned. Mine host! Luxuriantly bearded, his cheeks ruddy with claret, Buffy could take centre stage again, welcoming guests into his charming B&B in the picturesque town of Knockton, wherever that was. Log fires, bonhomie, brass beds made for lusty couplings – adulterers welcome! His Full English Breakfast, all organic of course, would become legendary. Perhaps he could even raise his own pigs.

  Not for him the niminy-piminy B&Bs of his past experience – the nylon sheets, the pastel wallpaper, the framed silhouettes of crinolined ladies. The near-impossibility of any form of sexual congress in some twin-bedded room smelling of air-freshener. The doily-draped nest of tables with its Reader’s Digests. The genteel breakfast room, the tinkle of cutlery, the cruet – cruet! – the tiny sachets of his least favourite jam, strawberry.

  ‘You, running a bed and breakfast?’ Quentin, hiding a smirk, pressed his napkin to his lips.

  ‘I’ve seen enough of them in my time. On tour and so forth. In fact, I do believe you were conceived in one. In Kettering.’

  Quentin flinched. ‘Too much information, Dad.’

  ‘Your mother and I were playing Sybil and Elyot in Private Lives.’

  Buffy’s first wife – now alas dead, God bless her – had been a lusty young woman, uninhibited by the usual constraints of paper-thin walls. He remembered the lowered eyes of the other guests when the two of them, hastily washed and brushed-up, appeared for breakfast. And Quentin, a little miracle inside her, just begun.

  It was no wonder that Bridie’s lodgings were a liberation. In its heyday the house in Edgbaston had creaked with sex. He remembered glimpsing Digby Montague, now a Knight of the Realm, darting across the landing wearing only his socks. Then there was Hillers, a predatory lesbian and memorable Lady Bracknell, sitting at the breakfast table in a fug of cigarette smoke, fondling the knee of a blonde ingénue. Even the cats were at it, one of them giving birth to kittens on his eiderdown. Happy days.

  Buffy, somewhat the worse for wear, hailed a cab home. He could afford these extravagances now. His head reeled. Had he told Quentin the truth? Could he really pack up his belongings and decamp into the unknown or was he just proving to his son that there was life in the old dog yet? He felt, as one does when drunk, that events were swimmingly fitting into place. His children were long since grown and no longer needed him, if they ever had in the first place. His rent was about to be doubled. Besides, as he had told Quentin, Blomfield Mansions had changed in character. Its mouldy, net-curtained, vaguely Jewish inhabitants – tragic widows measuring out their lives with coffee spoons – had died off. Some of them had been a pain in the arse but he missed them. They had been replaced by the rich offspring of Middle Eastern businessmen who had bought the flats as bolt-holes in case their countries went up in smoke and who partied all night and revved up their sports cars outside his window. Even the doorman, Ted, had been replaced by a bunch of plastic flowers.

  Buffy’s wives were dead or long since disappeared into their subsequent lives. He was free, for better or worse. Only his dog needed him, and his dog could live anywhere. In fact, now Buffy thought of it, Fig would prefer the country.

  As night fell, Buffy walked Fig around the block. His previous dog, George, had had to be dragged along on his lead. George had looked like a hairpiece; there was something flattened and matted about him. Penny said he looked as if somebody had run over him at some point in the past. He was generally agreed to have been the laziest dog anybody had known.

  His replacement, however, was just the opposite, a hyperactive Jack Russell who jumped up and down like a tennis ball and yapped at passing cars, at passing anything. Jack Russells liked hunting rabbits; they weren’t really London dogs at all.

  Buffy thought: If I go ahead, it’ll be for Fig’s sake. This seemed as good a reason as any.

  2

  Monica

  MONICA DIDN’T GO along with Dress-Down Fridays. The kids in her office were half her age, of course. Everybody in the City was half her age. They looked fine in jeans and trainers but she had a fragile sense of self – she was working on this with her therapist – and felt bolstered in a suit. That sense of authority, so dearly won, would be sapped by denim. So they considered her an old fogey. Tough.

  Acme Motivation ran corporate events – banquets, away-days, bonding weekends at Cotswold hotels where bankers romped like puppies and got drunk as skunks. Monica and her assistant Rupert were organising a dinner at the Kensington Hilton for Bond Trader of the Year. Rupert, an amiable, chubby young Etonian, was speaking on the phone to their client. He wore a T-shirt saying This isn’t a Beer Gut, it’s a Fuel Tank for a Sex Machine. Of course their client couldn’t see this, he was on the phone, but surely clothes affected how one behaved – why else was there a fashion industry? She herself gazed at men differently when she was wearing her Janet Reger knickers.

  Monica thought: Underneath this power suit I’m still a sex machine. The trouble was that men no longer wanted to discover this. She was sixty-four – a fact she kept quiet about in the office – but she had always taken care of herself and today her forehead was stiff from a Botox session; so stiff, in fact, that she couldn’t raise her eyebrows at Rupert’s T-shirt, at its hilarious inappropriateness where he was concerned.

  The trouble was, the older she grew, the longer it took to assemble herself for public scrutiny and the shakier the results. In an instant, a gust of wind could transform her from smart businesswoman to bedraggled crone, barely recognisable even to herself. In a sense this didn’t matter as she had become totally invisible anyway. This was both dispiriting, of course, and a kind of freedom. Men no longer glanced at her, even briefly, in the street. Sometimes she felt as if she didn’t exist at all. Monica sat at her desk, sorting out the menu requirements – no vegetarian options for City boys, they liked tearing at animals. She thought: Will I ever have sex again? Was that last time the very last time?

  It was the end of the day. Monica walked down Threadneedle Street. Outside the pubs, drinkers spilled onto the pavement. Though partial to a drink herself, Monica found it astonishing, the amount that kids knocked back. Who would believe they were in the depths of a recession? The collapse of the economy had left no mark on their shiny pink faces – nor, it seemed, on the level of their bonuses. Only a smudge remained on the wall of HSBC, where somebody had sprayed SPAWN OF SATAN. The banking world seemed untouched by the chaos it had caused – luckily for her, or she would be out of a job. And at her age, would she ever get another?

  That was selfish, she knew. But it was a tough world out there; she had struggled hard to get where she was. Sometimes, when she was feeling shaky, it took every ounce of concentration just to keep her balance. She felt paper-thin, held together by the flimsiest of staples.

  O why do you walk through the field in gloves, fat white woman whom nobody loves?

  Tomorrow she would indeed end up in a field, in an undignified manner, but tonight she was strap-hanging on the Northern Line. She inspected the liverspots on her hands. They seemed to have appeared overnight, as mysteriously as mushrooms. She pictured her arthritic old claws fiddling with the sheet as she lay on her deathbed, a scene from countless black and white films. Who would discover her body? She no longer even had a cat to pad up and down the bed, miaowing for food and rubbing its face against her icy cheek.

  She got out at Clapham South. It had been a beautiful sunny day; she only realised it now. Somewhere a blackbird sang, the notes pouring o
ut, rinsing the world clean. On the way home she stopped at Marks & Spencer’s, a shop indeed as chilly as the grave. Her friend Rachel had once picked up a man in the Serves One section. ‘Friday night’s the best,’ Rachel said. ‘If they’re eating alone then they’re bound to be single. And A/AB socio-economic group too, of course.’

  Rachel’s affair hadn’t lasted but at least it had put roses in her cheeks. Subsequently she had fallen for a young Croatian who came to fix her boiler. Nowadays Rachel spent her evenings in a sort of dormitory filled with his fellow citizens, somewhere near Heathrow Airport, eating cold pasta from plastic bowls.

  ‘You just have to be up for it’ she told Monica. ‘They can tell by the pheremones.’ Rachel had started wearing jeans again and strode around with a motorbike helmet under her arm, her toy-boy trophy. ‘We’re sixty years young!’

  How Monica hated that phrase, the jaunty anthem of the baby boomer; there was something suburban about it. And it wasn’t that simple. Her age shifted around, she couldn’t get a grip on it. At times she felt a wizened old pensioner – she was a pensioner. At other times she felt nineteen years old, when people could smoke in the cinema and park anywhere and rent a room for three pounds a week. When buses had conductors and John Lennon was still alive. When the only frozen foods were peas and fish fingers.

  Monica gazed at the shelves of Serves One meals. A man came and stood beside her. Sixtyish, abundant hair, flat stomach – a rarity in their age group. He reached for a Beef Hotpot – no wedding ring – and turned it over in his hand as if searching for an answer.

  Why not? It could happen like this, it had happened to her friend Rachel. They would fall in love, a sweet autumnal romance, and go to live in King’s Lynn, a town Monica had never been to and thus full of possibilities. They would wonder at this late blossoming, clinking glasses in their heavily beamed living room and marvelling at that moment in M&S, when their future spun on a sixpence.

  Monica indicated the shelves; she attempted to raise her eyebrows but her forehead was set in concrete. ‘So much choice it’s dizzying,’ she said. She wanted to add: so much choice and yet only one word for love. But that would sound mad.

  ‘Tell me about it.’ The man put the packet into his basket and flashed her a smile.

  ‘It’s like all those channels on TV,’ Monica said. ‘Or apps on one’s phone.’

  ‘It is a problem,’ he sighed. ‘My wife’s a vegetarian but I can’t stand rabbit food.’ He reached for a packet. ‘Wonder if she’d like Broccoli Crispbake?’

  There was always Graham to look forward to. Graham from Norbury, wherever that was. Monica vaguely recognised the name from a railway timetable. Graham could no doubt tell her its location when they met for a coffee the next morning; it might get the conversational ball rolling.

  To be honest, she didn’t have high hopes of Graham. In his profile he said he had a good sense of humour, a sure sign that he hadn’t. Like them all he enjoyed both staying in beside a log fire and going out for long country walks. He described himself as both sensitive and assertive, a word that slightly alarmed her – did he like trussing women up? But he wasn’t bad-looking, judging by his photo, shirt-sleeved on his patio. There was another one of him in his scuba-diving gear.

  The thing was, it did give a certain zip to the weekend, this meeting with unknown men – a sort-of-date, of sorts, with somebody who was up for it. Monica could almost be nineteen again. Nowadays, she felt profoundly grateful to these males for simply being available. She was tired of being alone with her meals-for-one. She was tired of chatting to a man at some gathering, everything going swimmingly, and then some young Asian wife appearing from nowhere, lacing her fingers into his and popping a canapé into his mouth. Men her age were all married – many to a younger model, but all married. Even the notorious adulterers had hung up their spurs and returned to their long-suffering wives. It was so unfair. They were wrinkled too – a lot more wrinkled than her, in fact – but however decrepit, faithless, alcoholic, vain and self-absorbed they were – droning on about their work, their prostate problems, God forbid their golf handicap – however drooling and boring they were, there was always some woman, somewhere, who wanted to have sex with them. Not just that, to love them, to care for them and to drink orange juice at parties so they could drive them home.

  Monica poured herself another glass of wine. She thought: I want somebody to cook for. I want somebody to whisk the parking ticket out of my hand and say, ‘Don’t bother your pretty little head about that.’ I want somebody to laugh with during The News Quiz. I want somebody to protect me against rogue plumbers. I want someone to lie with, naked in bed, their arms around me.

  The phone rang. It was Graham. ‘Is that, er, Monica?’ he asked. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t make our meeting. One of my teeth has fallen out and I have to go to the dentist.’

  Next morning Monica woke with a dry mouth and pounding head. She seemed to have finished the bottle of wine. ‘Had a party, then?’ her neighbour asked, when she carried out the recycling box.

  Monica lowered it clankingly to the ground. Of course she didn’t drink too much. She just had a stressful job and needed to unwind when she got home. It was only Pinot Grigio, for Christ’s sake, hardly alcoholic at all. Besides, she was in the hospitality business, it ran on booze.

  That very Saturday, in fact, after her now-cancelled coffee-with-Graham, she was due to drive to Burford to check out a new hotel. The management would no doubt wine and dine her. It was a prospect that filled her with dread.

  For it was the same hotel, the Yew Tree. Renovated, to be sure, but the same hotel. In all the hotels, in all the world . . .

  Suddenly Malcolm was with her, his breath against her face. Day and night he dwelt with her, he was never away, and now he put on his Bogart voice, one eyebrow raised. He’d always been a rotten mimic but she didn’t care . . . Malcolm, the love of her life. Malcolm, the married man.

  Burford, Gateway to the Cotswolds, conveniently situated an hour’s drive from London (even more convenient for Malcolm, who lived in Ealing). Burford, its celebrated high street lined with olde worlde tea shops (Malcolm, tenderly wiping jam from her chin). Its antique market filled with unusual gifts and cherishable collectibles (Malcolm, goosing her as she climbed the steps to the first floor – More Stalls Upstairs). Its picturesque rambles in the local countryside (Malcolm, dropping her hand when other walkers appeared. For Christ’s sake, they were hardly going to meet anyone they knew!). Its imposing town hall, built of honey-coloured stone (Malcolm in the phone box outside, the furtive hunch of the faithless husband. These were the days before mobiles, the adulterer’s friend and – sometimes – enemy).

  Four weekends they had spent together in Burford. The first, she had been a business trip to Rouen. The next time she had been a conference in Scarborough. She had also been a visit to his old school chum. And the last time . . . Monica couldn’t remember, just that it was the last time.

  Monica parked outside the hotel, next to a row of SUVs and a Porsche. Bay trees in tubs were lined up against that familiar facade. She switched off the engine. Her times with Malcolm, here and elsewhere, each so short, each so intense, were sealed into caskets in her memory like votive objects in a tomb. On many occasions she had taken off the lids and re-examined them but they had remained preserved in formaldehyde. How could she keep that old hotel in her head, inviolate, when faced by a million-pound makeover?

  In their day the Yew Tree had been a dowdy establishment smelling of Brussels sprouts, with violently patterned carpets and a barometer in the lobby – the sort of place nobody they knew would ever visit, which was the point. The menu was hilariously old-fashioned, even then – Prawn Cocktail, Black Forest Gateau. It was the last place on earth to still serve Melba toast.

  ‘I designate this an item of archaeological interest,’ said Malcolm, picking up a slice.

  ‘So’s the waiter,’ whispered Monica.

  They smiled at each other, their feet ho
oked together under the table. How staid the other diners looked, blazered men and their lady wives! How stolidly married. And yet they were dear to Monica, included in her love, warmed in its orbit. They were her unwitting co-conspirators.

  ‘I wish I’d known you –’ Malcolm stopped. Instead, he broke off a piece of Melba toast, spread it with mackerel pâté and popped it into her mouth. ‘Let’s talk about them.’ He pointed to another diner. ‘Think he’s a Russian spy?’

  Dear God, she had loved him.

  And now she was here again. Joe, the manager, ushered her in.

  ‘The whole place was totally run-down,’ he said. ‘A dump, not to put too fine a word on it, riddled with dry rot. People must’ve been mad to stay here.’

  Joe showed her round the lobby. Grey walls, spotlit buckets of lilies, blown-up photos of American convertibles rusting in the desert. The staff, young and comely, dressed in black, moved around as gracefully as gazelles.

  Joe said: ‘There’s a bedroom free if you’d like to look it over before lunch.’

  It was one of theirs. It just would be. Bedroom 12, with the view of the church.

  ‘State-of-the-art entertainment centre,’ said Joe, pointing to a row of winking lights. ‘Bang and Olufsen. Wi-Fi of course, home cinema.’

  It was dark – charcoal walls, maroon bedspread heaped with black satin cushions. On the wall was a photograph of a ruined factory.

  ‘We aim for an unusual, voguey, sexy vibe, with our signature palette of colours.’ Joe pointed to the photo. ‘We’re particularly proud of the rust-belt art. Great feedback on that.’

  Monica tried to remember how it was. She and Malcolm naked on the disordered sheets, flock wallpaper, a brown stain on the ceiling from an old leak, a fire extinguisher in case they combusted. The church bells calling the righteous to prayer. She remembered drinking wine from their smuggled-in bottle. Malcolm was too mean to use the minibar but she didn’t mind, his faults were his wife’s concern, and anyway who cared when he was pulling her close and opening his lips against hers, the wine flooding her mouth?