Buffy had a terrible night. Insomnia, palpitations. His back ached; his loose tooth throbbed. He was falling to pieces; he had been for years but in the black depths of the night he felt himself in a state of total disintegration. Even the dog, propelled onto the floor by his tossing and turning, had deserted him and whined to be let out of the room. Buffy was utterly alone in his rotting house. Of course it was full of people but soon they would be gone. Weak with self-pity, he thought: I come first with nobody.
Monica lay sleeping on the floor above. In two days she would disappear from his life forever. Her speech the previous evening had thrown him into confusion. That cool, businesslike tone was final proof, if proof were needed, that she felt nothing for him but contempt. And yet her radical plan showed that she had put some thought into his situation. Why on earth had she bothered? Was it just her professional instincts rising to the challenge, or did she really care what happened to him and his establishment? She had looked agitated but that might have just been the alcohol. How handsome she was, though, standing there in her navy-blue trouser suit, metaphorically cracking the whip!
Buffy woke with a jerk. It was a blazingly beautiful day, though freezing cold. At this time of year the garden lay in shadow; only the top branches of the yew tree caught the sunshine. The faint sound of laughter came from downstairs where the morning’s class – puddings and desserts – had already begun.
Having no desire to meet anyone, he let himself out of the house and walked across the road to the Coffee Cup. Amy, bringing him a croissant, said: ‘If you don’t mind me saying so, you look a bit rough.’
‘You said that to me on Miss Marple.’
‘Yes, but then I could do something about it.’
Buffy nodded. ‘You and your trusty Polyfilla.’
Amy laughed. She was in love. Everybody seemed to be in love. Andy whistled on his rounds, like the postman Buffy had seen the day he arrived in Knockton; he’d got it together with the girl at the Camper Van Centre. Rosemary and Douggie had rekindled their marriage under his roof. India and Voda had fallen for each other. Even Des and Bella had jumped into the sack. Buffy himself was sort of responsible for these romances. But what about his own happy ending? Morosely, he tore off a piece of croissant and dunked it in his coffee.
It was then that he decided to go for a walk. He would drive up to the hills and stride along Offa’s Dyke. That’s what people did in this part of the world. They returned to Myrtle House, their cheeks flushed, saying My goodness, that blew away the cobwebs! It was ridiculous that in all these months he had scarcely taken the dog further than the recreation ground. Bugger his bunions. Maybe the wind would blow away the cobwebs and reveal the truth as he stood on the summit of somewhere-or-other, three counties spread below him.
Buffy drove two miles up the road, parked at the footpath sign and let out the dog. Yapping hysterically, Fig disappeared into some gorse bushes. A rabbit shot out. Buffy, bundled up in his overcoat, made his way along the path. The sun shone on the frosty, skeletal hedgerows to either side. Ahead of him, sheep were scattered like boulders across the hillside. Idly he wondered where Voda’s cottage was; in all these months he had never been invited there; maybe she thought they saw enough of each other at Myrtle House. Nor had India issued an invitation. Nyange, however, had stayed the night with the two of them and would now be on her way back to London. Buffy felt a familiar lurch of exclusion. I come first with nobody. He himself was a boulder, people washing up around him and then, at low tide, ebbing away and leaving him alone. Had Bridie felt like this? She had always seemed so cheerful, so generous and accommodating, but had panic gripped her in the depths of the night?
‘Lovely day!’ A grey-haired couple strode past, hand in hand. The man, repulsively, wore shorts. Shoot them! said Monica. Pick them off one by one!
Panting heavily, Buffy leaned against a gate. His back ached; his metatarsal throbbed. He was far too unfit for such exertions. But the view was spectacular, hills rising higher and higher into the milky distance, light shining on the uplands. There was no wind, just silence. Silence so vast he could feel it pressing against him.
He remembered a sozzled old boy in the pub, his legs wrapped in fertiliser bags and tied with twine. With surprising erudition he had talked about the Marches, how through the centuries people had fled here and never been seen again, how it had always been wild and lawless country. He had called it the Empty Quarter.
Buffy stood there in the hush. No bird sang. Somewhere in the silence he could hear Bridie’s voice. Bridie, the one that got away. The free spirit who had asked nothing of him, and given him so much. She was here, in the hills, in this landscape she must have loved if only he had bothered to stay in touch and find out. Just go for it, you silly cunt. So it’s a disaster. So what? Life’s bloody short, you can take my word for it.
It was then, miraculously, that Buffy’s head cleared and he knew just what he had to do.
‘Fig!’ he shouted.
But there was no sign of his dog.
It was mid-afternoon by the time Buffy arrived back in Knockton. A good hour had been taken up in searching for Fig. Alerted by the yapping, Buffy had finally run him to ground in the warren among the gorse bushes. Eventually Fig had emerged from a rabbit hole, wriggling backwards and covered in earth. The dog’s greeting had been distracted, even offhand, as if he had been engaged in work of great importance. By then it was two o’clock and Buffy had missed lunch.
Had Monica noticed his absence? Now he had made up his mind he felt very close to her and somehow presumed that she felt the same way towards him – that she too had realised they were each other’s last chance of happiness, and was punched breathless by the same sudden wave of tenderness. This was ridiculous, of course – mere solipsistic projection. Now he had decided to make a move, however, he needed all the confidence he could muster. Time was running out.
He had a sandwich in a pub, drove into Knockton and parked outside the gents’ outfitter’s. He would buy some new jockey shorts – had Monica seen his humiliatingly baggy underpants? – and maybe even a fresh new shirt, striped perhaps. As he crossed the pavement he glanced up at the first floor. Harold was no doubt hard at work, otherwise he would go upstairs and ask his advice. Why did love reduce a grown man – a man indeed of advanced years – into a tremulous youngster? For it was love, or the first glimmerings of such a thing, that he felt for Monica. He was a man who, having had no appetite for years, passes an open window and smells bacon frying. Suddenly he feels the first pangs of hunger, a sensation he thought was lost to him forever.
Bugger the guests; Voda and India could look after them. He would take Monica out to dinner and ask her to stay for the weekend, when the others had gone. They would have the place to themselves . . . roaring fire, buttered scones. They would be guests in his own hotel, they would be children when the grown-ups had disappeared. Maybe they’d have a jaunt to the Saturday market in Ludlow and wander around arm in arm, quaffing mulled wine and laughing at the misshapen vegetables. Maybe, just maybe . . . he was getting ahead of himself here . . . maybe the spectre of Christmas would no longer loom, freighted with its burden of loneliness and exclusion, of being the tolerated guest at the various festivities of his various sort-of families . . .
As he walked into the shop Buffy was already flying to Venice – no, to a city he had never visited, with any woman. Caracas, for instance. He and Monica, guidebook on knee, were sitting in the plane, knocking back their plastic glasses of champagne. In their luggage, wrapped in tissue paper, lay their Christmas gifts to each other – slightly inappropriate because they didn’t know each other well, but who cared? They were flying across the ocean together. Life was short and they weren’t getting any younger, an observation he would wisely keep to himself. So it’s a disaster? So what?
The gents’ outfitter’s, as usual, was empty of customers. Behind the counter the assistant was on his mobile, arguing about car insurance. Buffy inspected the glass-fronted drawers of shirt
s, searching for his size.
Just then, Penny materialised from the back of the shop. Literally materialised, like a ghost. Buffy jumped. She was easing her way past a Barbour-clad mannequin and heading for the door. Spotting Buffy, she stopped dead.
‘What are you doing here?’ She stared at him, her cheeks flushed.
‘I didn’t notice you,’ he said. ‘Were you here all the time?’
‘Of course I was!’ Penny said sharply. ‘I’ve been looking for Christmas presents, scarves, maybe a nice pair of gloves. It’s a marvellous shop, isn’t it, all this mahogany, so blissfully Are You Being Served? Thank God nobody’s turned it into a Gap.’ She rattled on, her blush deepening. ‘In fact, I might do all my Christmas shopping here in your lovely town, I adore that hippy-dippy place, did you see they still sell dreamcatchers? Dreamcatchers! Remember that friend of mine, what’s-her-name, the one you couldn’t stand? With the cats and the spider plants? She had dreamcatchers dangling everywhere, remember?’
Penny paused, her chest heaving. Buffy gazed at her with interest. That torrent of words meant only one thing – the woman had something to hide. How well he knew her! How well he remembered, on her return home from an adulterous tryst with Colin, the lengthy explanation of where she had been! Poor liars always gave out too much information.
Of course Buffy should have put two and two together. He did later, when he remembered that Harold lived upstairs. Just at that moment, however, as he gazed at the flushed, brazen face of his ex-wife – go on, challenge me! – just then the years fell away and they were back in Blomfield Mansions and Penny was unpacking her Selfridges Food Hall bag, unpacking Parma ham, and he was nuzzling the back of her neck, breathing in the biscuity scent of her skin as she abstractedly caressed his head with her spare hand. Their marriage flooded back so powerfully that he felt dizzy. How he had loved her! What good value Penny had been – entertaining, funny and, that rarest of things, a woman totally devoid of neurosis. In fact, one of the pleasures of the past few days was being in her company again.
Penny seemed to have recovered her equilibrium. She brushed back her hair. Buffy’s bracelet – a long-ago birthday present – slid down her wrist. ‘So what are you buying then?’ she asked.
‘Oh, just a shirt. Maybe you could help me.’
Penny looked at him, her eyes narrowed. ‘If you’re sprucing yourself up for Monica, it’s too late.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘She left for London, this morning.’
‘What?’ Buffy felt the blood drain from his body.
‘I’m so sorry.’ Penny put her hand on his arm. ‘I tried to stop her, I really did, but she’s gone.’
Harold
Harold, still in a state of shock, lay on his disordered bed. As Balzac said, bang goes another novel.
How on earth did that happen? Penny had only brought him an apple crumble. She had cooked it that morning and thought he would like it for his lunch. One thing, as they say, had led to another but now it seemed as unlikely as a dream, especially after her abrupt departure. ‘I’ve got a class at three,’ Penny had muttered like a truanting schoolgirl, pulling on her knickers.
He must have fallen asleep because now it was dark. Wrapping himself in his dressing gown, Harold went into the front room. On the table sat the remains of their abandoned meal, ghostly in the glow of the street lamp. He closed the curtains and switched on the light. Good God, it was half past five! He felt nauseous with a kind of jet lag, as if he had woken up in Singapore.
Taking the plates into the kitchen, he tried to remember what the one thing had been, that led to the other. He and Penny seemed to have got through a bottle of wine, though the crumble remained half eaten. In his fuddled brain he thought: I must remember to take back the bowl when I’ve finished. After all, it belongs to Buffy.
So, in a sense, did Penny. Well, she had in the past. Harold’s stomach lurched. How on earth was he going to face his only real friend in Knockton now he’d had sex with his wife? Ex-wife, but still, there was something unsettling about it, something vaguely adulterous, with more than a whiff of the homoerotic. After all, the same naked legs had wrapped around them both. In a weird way, a way he didn’t care to inspect, it made him and Buffy closer. And yet not close at all, because now he had to keep a secret.
Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe – horror of horrors – Penny was going to tell Buffy everything. They seemed to get on pretty well for divorcees. Maybe she had done it as a creepy sort of dare, to make Buffy jealous!
Harold froze, bowl in hand. Now he remembered, Penny had made the first move, almost as if the whole thing was planned. They had stopped, halfway through the crumble, so Harold could fetch his laptop and show her Old Jews Telling Jokes on YouTube. Nestled together in front of the screen Penny had said: ‘Isn’t it sad that after tomorrow we’ll never see each other again?’ Suddenly she had turned to him. Their noses were so close that it was almost impossible not to kiss. And while kissing him she had cradled his face as if it were a precious thing; no woman had done that since forever, and he was so moved that his insides melted, he was hers.
Harold dumped the bowl on the draining board. Maybe – an even worse horror – maybe the two of them had colluded! Buffy had taken pity on him, the abandoned husband, and pimp-like had offered up his ex-wife as a consolation. Penny was a sport. She had also, as Harold had discovered, a healthy sexual appetite. That would explain her sudden appearance and equally sudden departure. Job done.
No, that was too kinky. Truly, his brain was disordered. Penny had bailed out simply because she regretted what had happened. No doubt she had been repulsed by his matted chest hair and thickening waist; he seemed to remember her exploratory fingers pausing thoughtfully at various parts of his anatomy. They had talked at some point about humiliating one-night stands and this was just another one to add to the list, complete with sagging buttocks.
Deep in thought, Harold washed up. Maybe the best plan would be to stay away until Saturday, when Penny would be gone. There was a certain cowardly attraction to this idea, but how could he bear not to see her again?
For he was crazy about her. Crazy.
Penny
Before dinner, Penny had a bath. She had found the store of bubble-bath sachets in a cupboard and by squeezing three into the water had built up a decent amount of foam. Every now and then footsteps padded along the corridor and the doorknob tentatively turned. ‘Coming!’ she called, and sunk back into the water. After all, nobody else had had sex that day.
The whole thing was too hilarious to be true; maybe it hadn’t happened at all! She had dreamed up the beige, anonymous flat above the gents’ outfitters. By imagining it so many times, during the past few days, she had willed it into reality.
For now she could admit it. She had speculated on what it would be like to go to bed with Harold. Was it because he reminded her of Buffy in his younger days, reminded her of herself when they were happy? There were certain similarities between the two men, not least their chattiness during lovemaking. Colin, the last man she’d had sex with, had been entirely silent except for the grunts when he came.
It had been startling, however, to feel the softer body of an older man. Harold was pretty unfit, of course – another thing he had in common with Buffy. But no doubt all men his age were getting flabbier. As of course was she. She wished they hadn’t had to undress in broad daylight. Her attempt at slipping under the sheets while still in her underwear was thwarted by Harold’s desire to unclip her bra – he said he hadn’t done it for years and wanted to see if he still could, with one hand. Maybe Pia, his ex, was too flat-chested or lesbian to wear such a thing.
Such worries weren’t an issue, needless to say, if one had lived with somebody for years. You grew old together; each other’s bodies were imprinted with the memory of their younger, firmer selves. Two older people, however, meeting as strangers, came slap up against their own mortality, mirrored in the other’s wrinkles. If Harold had been sho
cked he was too much of a gentleman to show it, and it had indeed been gratifying to find she could still arouse a man. But once it was over – clumsy and hasty as it had been – she had felt her confidence drain away. How could she have been so bold? She had practically ravished the poor chap. They had laughed together afterwards, lying damply side by side, surprised by their own exertions, but maybe he had just been embarrassed on her behalf. No doubt he was regretting the whole business, hence her hasty exit.
Penny got out of the bath. As she dried herself she gazed at a print on the wall. Yellowed with age, it showed the ruins of some vast cathedral – gaping windows, crumbling arches; she couldn’t read the name of the place without her specs. Had Harold noticed the thread veins on her thighs, or would he have needed his glasses? More to the point, was he going to turn up for dinner, as usual?
Penny, heart pounding, dressed and went downstairs. Voices murmured in the bar. She heard a hoot of laughter from Sonia, an amusing and embittered divorcee.
India emerged from the kitchen, carrying a couple of bottles.
‘Have you seen Buffy?’ she asked. ‘Has he been upstairs with you?’
‘Why would he be upstairs with me?’
‘I want to tell him our news.’ India glanced around and lowered her voice. ‘Voda and I are going to get married!’
‘Married?’
‘Well, a civil partnership. You know.’ She scratched the stud in her nose. ‘We haven’t told anyone else yet but you’re sort of family.’
Penny kissed her. ‘How wonderful!’
‘I’m so happy, I wish everyone could be this happy. I wish you could be this happy and Buffy could be this happy. I’m going to learn to lamb and everything.’ She threw her arms around Penny, the bottles clanking together behind Penny’s back. ‘There’s something about this place. Tobias called it Heartbreak Hotel but that’s so not true. Maybe something’ll happen to you.’
‘What, with a bunch of women?’
India disentangled herself. ‘There’s nothing wrong with women.’