Heartbreak Hotel

  Business was quiet that week – in fact, they had no bookings at all. It was early November, the most miserable month of the year, and the weather had turned freezing. Talk of babies prompted Buffy to remember his own grandchild, whose photos had been emailed to him on a regular basis but who he had never actually seen. What better time than the present?

  That afternoon he looked up the train times to London. Already his heart was beating faster. Not only would he meet his grandchild, he could also talk to Nyange about her tutoring a course on personal finance and, even more enticingly, revisit the bright lights which in these dark days beckoned so seductively from all those miles away, from a world away.

  Andy

  A storm raged on the Wednesday night but Andy was unaware of it. He was staying at a Travelodge outside Leominster and his room was sealed from the elements. When he emerged in the dark, early the next morning, he found branches littering the puddled tarmac of the car park. Driving to the sorting office he had to swerve round a fallen tree.

  Why wasn’t he staying at Myrtle House? It was a lot friendlier than a Travelodge. But basically it was a B&B; Buffy had been generous during that holiday week but Andy didn’t want to presume on the man’s hospitality. As his headlights probed the darkness he knew, however, that the answer lay somewhere deeper. He needed the sanitised silence, the total absence of any human contact, to clear his head. He was in limbo, suspended between one life and another, and what better place could a chap float weightlessly than in a Travelodge? As he drove through the darkness he suddenly realised: I’m going through a midlife crisis.

  It was a relief to have the sentence deliver itself up to him, fully formed. It had been lurking at the back of his mind but until now he had only applied it to other people. I’m having a midlife crisis, I’ve joined the club. The symptoms were there: he had bailed out dramatically; he had bailed out so alarmingly it turned his bowels to water; he had bailed out, and he didn’t know what the fuck he was doing. That pretty well summed up a midlife crisis, didn’t it?

  The sun rose in a clear blue sky and now he was making his deliveries around Knockton, walking up garden paths littered with twigs, edging his way around spilled litter bins. The air was as sharp as a knife; he felt a surge of mad optimism. Later he felt it was some sort of portent. A cat streaked across the road; schoolkids jostled each other as they made their way towards St Jude’s, a school with which he was becoming familiar. He felt, weirdly, that he was living intensely in the present, and yet far memories – memories he thought he had forgotten – drifted into his head . . . A song they sang in his teenage band, when he played the drums: Take me down, baby, take me where you go. He was still a virgin then, he hadn’t a clue about anything. And yet the words whispered urgently in his ear, they whispered across the years as if they had some significance, and his life between those days and now, the great mass of his adulthood, disappeared as if it had never been. It was odd, this sense of dislocation, and yet it was strangely invigorating.

  And now he was walking up the drive of the Powys Camper Van Centre, his last delivery. It was on the edge of town – a fenced car park filled with vehicles, bunting fluttering in the wind, and a bungalow-cum-office. Among the mail was a recorded-delivery letter for Mr J. Walmer.

  Andy rang the bell. The door was opened by a young woman, her face streaming with tears.

  ‘You all right?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said, wiping her nose on her sleeve. She looked at the letter. ‘That’s for Dad. Have you got a pen?’

  ‘Sure you’re all right?’

  She looked at him and shook her head. ‘No.’ She was thin, with sallow skin and lank brown hair. ‘A tree’s smashed into his greenhouse. He’s going to go ballistic.’

  She said her father had gone away for the night and would be back later that day, that she was holding the fort. ‘Not that we’ll have any customers. Nobody buys camper vans in November, do they? I mean, would you?’

  ‘Want me to have a look?’

  She led him through the bungalow and out the back door. He saw a lawn, littered with glass, and half a greenhouse. A tree had buckled the other half.

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ said Andy. ‘It’s an act of God.’

  She stood beside him, pulling her jumper over her hands, rocking to and fro in her misery. ‘You don’t know my dad.’ She looked so small, so freezing and defenceless. He thought: What the hell!

  ‘You got a saw?’

  Andy pulled off his jacket and set to work. In an hour he had chopped up the tree – more of a sapling, to be honest – and stacked the branches against a coal bunker. She sat huddled in a blanket, watching him. How manly he felt! His arms ached but he wasn’t letting on.

  ‘When your dad comes home he won’t have such a shock,’ he said, his chest heaving. ‘It’s just to show willing.’

  ‘You’re a champ.’ She suddenly smiled – a radiant smile that lit up her pinched little face. His heart shifted.

  Her name was Ginnie. My name is Virginia. Andy remembered the snuffle of laughter, from his schooldays. Virgin for short, but not for long. He felt his face reddening. He and Ginnie cleared up the glass together and then she made some coffee. They sat in the chaotic office, warming their hands on the mugs.

  ‘Funny thing is, I’ve never been in one of them,’ she said.

  ‘A camper van?’

  ‘There’s a big wide world out there and I’m stuck here. I want to go to Tabriz.’

  ‘Where’s Tabriz?’

  ‘Search me.’

  They laughed. Ginnie scratched her arms. She said she had eczema, and that it flared up when she was anxious. Andy caught her looking at the clock. Her father was a bully, he could sense it. In a weird way, he felt he knew her life. And yet they had only just met!

  And now he was telling her about his mother, who also had eczema, and about his sister who had run away to Hull with a travelling salesman. And Ginnie was telling him how she was good at drawing and wanted to be a fashion designer but then her mother had died in a car crash and her dad had needed her in the office and to tell the truth she didn’t know one end of a camper van from the other. And he told her how he nicked his mother’s nail varnish to paint his toy soldiers and what a bollocking he got. For some reason this led on to the neurotic women he had met on the internet, how they all seemed to be in mourning for their cats. And he knew he should be returning to the depot but now it was one o’clock and still thank God her father hadn’t arrived, nor had a single customer.

  Outside the front door stood his mail cart, forgotten. As Ginnie refilled the kettle he told her about his father, how he had found love in a caravan park, and as he spoke he felt a tingling sensation in his scalp – Christ, was history repeating itself? But now he was telling her how he made up limericks while he tramped the streets and she told him a rude one about the Bishop of South Mimms, and as she made them yet more coffee he realised: my throat is dry; my voice is hoarse. I’ve been talking for two hours non-stop.

  14

  Harold

  THE ‘BASIC COOKERY’ course was planned for the last week in November. They had a full house again; hopefully this time people would actually turn up. Voda, who was doing the bookings, said that all the students appeared to be women. This had surprised Buffy, who presumed that the vast majority of useless cooks would be male. He had pictured abandoned husbands fumbling around with tin-openers. Voda told him that this was old-fashioned; nowadays most women were so busy working that they hadn’t a clue about cooking, it was neither taught in school nor did girls learn it at their mother’s knee. Boiling up some penne and slathering it with a jar of pasta sauce was about their limit. Besides, as had become apparent, it was mainly women who came on the courses in the first place.

  Harold, however, was going to join them for dinner each evening. This was partly for male solidarity and partly because the writer’s life was a lonely one and by six o’clock he was desperate for company, let alone a drink.


  He told Buffy that the novel was forging ahead. Andy the postie had now joined his cast of fictional characters. This had been prompted by the sight of Andy’s mail cart parked outside the Camper Van Centre, spotted by Harold on his lunchtime stroll. This, in turn, had resulted in a whole new plot line where the local postie, Alec (new name!), had fallen for the manager’s wife while delivering a parcel; stealing one of the camper vans they had driven off together to start a new life in the Scottish Highlands. A telling detail, the sort of detail that only a novelist could conjure up, was the sight of the abandoned mail cart as the months passed . . . blanketed with snow during the winter and – inspired touch! – nested in by a robin when spring arrived. Prompted by this, Harold wondered if he should develop the robin theme: the youngsters leaving the nest as a symbol of hope and renewal? Maybe flitting in and out of scenes as a feathered accompaniment to the action? For a while he played with the idea of some metatextual deconstruction – an unreliable avian narrator? This, however, reeked too strongly of Derrida, the French semiologist with whom Harold had baffled generations of students at Holloway College. Somewhere within him, within the warm-blooded body of the novelist, there still lurked the dry bones of the academic.

  Buffy himself was an invaluable source of material. Novelists were all thieves and liars, of course – the subject of one of Harold’s modules, in fact: They Lie to Tell the Truth – but Buffy was a friend and Harold would have to ask his permission to plunder his past. The visit to the newly born grandchild, for instance, was full of possibilities. Within that story lay a rich web of relationships. Relationships between people, of course, but also between themes and images (another module). Only connect, said E. M. Forster, himself no stranger to the straitjacket of academia.

  Maybe Harold could use the image of hands as a symbol of mortality. Buffy had met his ex-wife Jacquetta beside the crib of their baby grandchild. ‘I looked at her old-lady hands – liver spots, knotted veins,’ said Buffy. ‘And next to them this little miracle, little fingers, tiny little fingernails. Then I looked at my old paws, purple like an old colonel’s, and tears sprang to my eyes. Our hands, that had once caressed each other with love . . .’ Buffy had broken off, his eyes moistening. Admittedly it was closing time and he had sunk a few, but the emotion had touched Harold and he had hurried back to his room above the shop and pounded away on the old laptop.

  All these images swirled around but the trouble was, he hadn’t yet got the main plot. Not as such. He was just letting it flow, in the way he had taught his creative writing students to let it flow, and the results were just as hopeless. In fact, he would give himself a B minus. His writing was like a dog in the park, bounding after one scent, sniffing another and chasing after that, sniffing another one and shooting off in the other direction, crashing through the undergrowth. Harold the professor stood there holding the lead, vainly calling the dog to heel.

  There were just too many characters jostling for space. Sometimes he sat in the Coffee Cup with his notebook, watching passers-by and making up their stories. After he had sent them off on their (often improbable) journeys, it gave him a jolt to see the real live person cycling past, innocent of their bigamous marriage or rediscovered twin. There was Andy, for instance, delivering the post. Shouldn’t he be in the Scottish Highlands? The dislocation was giving Harold nausea.

  And then there was the larger theme. What was it? Everyone was always moaning that the British novel was parochial; he’d moaned about it himself. What was needed was a state-of-the-nation book, the sort that the big American jungle beasts wrote. Was he the man for the job? He’d thought the Welsh element would give him some breadth but in fact Knockton hardly seemed Welsh at all. Most of its inhabitants seemed to have come from somewhere else; that seemed to be the case with everywhere nowadays. Indeed, perhaps he could make that one of his larger themes, along with the breakdown of the community, the greed of the bankers, the global recession, the riots – maybe even set up an al-Qaeda training camp at Offa’s Dyke?

  Harold’s head reeled. Luckily it was six o’clock; time to switch off the computer and head down to Myrtle House. It was Sunday and the cookery students would be arriving. He was looking forward to the evening; not just to the slap-up dinner but to the possibilities of new material. Residential courses, as he had discovered, were a hotbed of emotional revelations. With luck there might be another showdown that would trigger some sort of plot.

  As he made his way through the darkened shop, past the shadowy drawers of ties and socks, he remembered his first wife Doris. She had been a volatile woman – Jewish, working class, blowsily tarty – and when it came to histrionics she was in a league of her own. My God the rows! The plate-smashing was on an epic, Greek-restaurant scale. He could look back on it now, however, with the detachment of a historian reflecting on the Second World War. Maybe he could work their marriage in somewhere? So many years had passed that he could surely shape it into fiction. Nowadays Doris was a matronly housewife, living in Twickenham with a B A pilot; the result of their tempestuous union was occupying Harold’s home in Hackney, with her husband and child. However, though the passage of time had long since healed the wounds he knew he couldn’t make sense of it, nor of his marriage to Pia. His own life, with all its treacherous inconsistency, slithered through his fingers like mercury; there was no way he could catch it and work it into a narrative.

  A Plot At Last: the writer’s headstone. He thought: Please God, don’t let me die before I find one.

  Monica

  Monica’s heart sank. She stood there, glass in hand, and gazed at her fellow students. A cookery course – a cookery course for people whose partners had done the cooking, a cookery course for total incompetents – and they were all women. For a mad moment she thought she had come to the wrong place. A week’s precious holiday; several hundred pounds; a four-hour drive . . . all to spend five days with nine females. What a fathomlessly depressing prospect.

  Their host, admittedly, was a man: Russell ‘Buffy’ Buffery, an actor. She recognised him from the TV. She also remembered him playing Falstaff when she had been staying in Birmingham, years earlier, organising a conference. He still looked like a man who could carouse the night away with a cask of sack. She could recognise a fellow boozer at a hundred yards. A bit over the hill, of course. But then so was she.

  Her frozen forehead fooled nobody, least of all herself. Monica had a horrible suspicion, too, that her pubic hair was thinning – not that there was any danger of anybody discovering this. The missing hairs, however, seemed to have migrated to her chin. She had only spotted this recently, after purchasing a magnifying mirror. Now she had to put on her reading specs to tweezer them out. And then there were the sudden eruptions of wind. Was there no end to the indignities of ageing?

  And now another man had joined them – a writer, apparently, called Harold. Crumpled-looking, not unattractive, but his eyes had flitted past her, round the room.There were younger women in the bar, that was why – younger women, sipping their drinks; Monica was, to all extents and purposes, invisible. Get used to it. But it was hard, so hard. She had never been a beauty but she was stylish and striking – she was chic. Malcolm had said, ‘You look like the manageress of an upmarket Parisian department store. Or’ – fondling her breast – ‘a high-end brothel.’ But Malcolm had been married.

  ‘Have some tapas.’ Voda held out a plate. She was an androgynous-looking creature, stocky and forthright, wearing a lime-green boiler suit. She had a nose stud and multiple earrings; apparently she was a top chef and was going to be running the course.

  Monica remarked in a light-hearted manner on the lack of men. ‘Maybe I should smoke in my room and get all those nice firemen round.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I mean – oh, it doesn’t matter.’

  The girl looked bemused, and moved away.

  Now Monica thought of it, there probably weren’t any smoke alarms anyway. The whole place had a hilariously dated, ramshackle ai
r. Her own room looked like the set for some 1950s farce – powder-blue washbasin, bamboo-patterned wallpaper, Bakelite light switch. Bakelite. She mentioned this to Buffy, who was refilling her glass. ‘I keep thinking that Terry-Thomas will jump out of the wardrobe.’

  Buffy laughed. ‘I bet you and I are the only people here who remember him.’

  ‘Thanks for that,’ Monica snapped.

  He clapped his hand to his forehead. ‘Oh God, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean –’

  ‘That’s quite all right,’ she said coldly. ‘And since we’re on the subject of decay, some sort of mushrooms appear to be growing out of my skirting boards.’

  ‘I know, I know. I keep meaning to do something about it.’

  ‘I must say, this hotel doesn’t bear much resemblance to the website.’

  Buffy nodded. ‘They say that about my photo in Spotlight.’ He sighed. ‘Anyway, it was just an exterior shot, and taken on one of the rare occasions when the sun was shining. I’ll give you your money back if you like.’

  ‘Don’t be mad. I’m here now. Not that I usually read the Express, but I saw a copy in Caffè Nero and thought, I really ought to learn to cook.’ She drained her glass and said: ‘My husband was a marvellous cook but I’m afraid his recipes died with him.’

  Buffy stared at her. ‘Heavens, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘That’s all right.’ Monica sighed. ‘He spoilt me, I’m afraid. Every evening when I got back from work there would be this marvellous smell coming from the kitchen, he’d be singing in there along to Radio 2, the soppier the song the better, he was such a softie, bless him. And then this delicious candlelit dinner.’

  Buffy’s eyes were glistening. ‘Why isn’t marriage always like that?’

  ‘We were just lucky, I guess.’ Ridiculously enough, Monica’s own eyes filled with tears. What on earth was she talking about? She’d only had three glasses of wine. For some reason, she resented Buffy for believing her. ‘Anyway,’ she said irritably, ‘it’s all over now.’