Heartbreak Hotel

  ‘Not that vaguely,’ said Iris, emboldened by the wine.

  ‘It was just an on–off thing, she never told me she was pregnant, and then she got a job in a show and I didn’t see her again.’

  The two women listened, wide-eyed, as he told them the story of how Celeste tracked him down, how she had got a job in his local chemist’s shop and finally revealed that she was his long-lost daughter. Frieda’s eyes filled with tears. My God he was enjoying himself! A glass of wine, an appreciative audience – what more could an old performer want?

  Voda put her head through the door. ‘Just popping out.’ It was visiting day in Shrewsbury Gaol. Glancing at the bottle, at the two women who looked settled in for the duration, she caught Buffy’s eye. You old softie.

  Then there were the couples. Lance and Janet Pritchard hogged the only bathroom until half past ten one morning. Giggles and splashes could be heard in the corridor where the other guest, a timid geologist, reappeared at intervals clutching his towel. Though there were two showers, one was broken and the other attached to Buffy’s bedroom. Buffy had to finally scoop up his clothes from the floor and usher the chap into his sanctuary. At eleven, an hour after the official kicking-out time, the Pritchards appeared in the dining room, smug and flushed. Word seemed to have got around that the rules were somewhat relaxed at Myrtle House; perhaps people were Facebooking or something. Buffy didn’t have the heart to make a fuss; instead, he felt a pang for the past, for creaking beds and the raised eyebrows of proprietors less tolerant than himself.

  Besides, it was raining again. In fact, a gale was blowing. Though Knockton was only a mile from the English border its weather was unmistakably Welsh. Buffy kicked Fig into the garden and shut the door with a shudder. There was no question of a constitutional that morning and, fond though he had become of his town, it offered little by the way of diversions even on a Saturday. Shopping and a gossip were unappealing prospects in the pouring rain, and the lure of a Yes You Can Sing session at the British Legion wasn’t powerful enough to get him out of the house.

  The geologist, undaunted, had disappeared for the day. The Pritchards, however, stood side by side at the dining-room window, a stance with which Buffy was only too familiar.

  ‘We could go on that tour of eco homes,’ said Janet.

  ‘In this?’ said Lance, staring at the rain.

  ‘Or that model railway museum,’ she said. ‘In that place I can’t pronounce.’ She looked at him. ‘You like model railways, don’t you?’

  ‘Yeah, when I was six.’

  She looked at the brochure. ‘There’s a Kraft Fayre in the Assembly Rooms.’

  Lance didn’t reply.

  ‘Look!’ She pointed to the page. ‘“Shiatsu for People, Dogs and Horses”! Isn’t that funny?’

  ‘Very funny.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘We could go to Aberystwyth,’ she said.

  ‘Why the hell would we want to go to Aberystwyth?’

  ‘It’s beside the sea.’

  ‘Or we could go home,’ said Lance.

  She froze. ‘What?’

  Buffy, who was squirting Pledge on the tables, paused.

  ‘This isn’t working, is it?’ said Lance. ‘I’m packing. You coming?’ He strode across the room, bumping into a table, and briefly glanced at Buffy. ‘Sorry, pal, I’ll pay for tonight.’ And he was gone.

  Janet sat down on a chair and burst into tears.

  An hour later the three of them were in the sitting room, working their way through a second bottle of Rioja.

  ‘He’s always up a ladder doing something or other,’ said Janet. ‘He never talks to me.’

  ‘You’re the one who wanted the maisonette,’ said Lance. ‘I told you it needed work.’

  ‘We used to have a laugh,’ she said.

  ‘You sounded happy enough this morning,’ said Buffy. He was going to add in the bath, but stopped.

  ‘I do crack jokes,’ said Lance. ‘You just don’t find them funny any more.’

  ‘This weekend, it was going to be our second honeymoon,’ she told Buffy. ‘Lance had a terrible childhood. His stepfather used to lock him in the boot of the car when he went to play golf.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Buffy.

  ‘Thanks, Jan,’ said Lance. ‘Anything else you want to tell the world?’

  ‘I’m just trying to explain our problem,’ she said.

  ‘We don’t have a problem.’

  ‘That’s the problem,’ she said. ‘You’ve put your finger on it.’

  ‘What are you babbling on about?’

  ‘Why can’t we talk?’ She indicated Buffy. ‘He understands, he’s had lots of problems, you heard what he said about his wives –’

  ‘Ex-wives,’ said Buffy.

  ‘Whatever you and I are going through, he’s gone through them too. You can tell, just looking at his face.’

  ‘What’s wrong with my face?’ snapped Buffy.

  ‘You’ve lived,’ she said. ‘It’s written all over you. And you like talking about it – the stuff you’ve told us, it’s fascinating. None of Lance’s friends talk, you see. They go to the pub, they go to the footy. They don’t know how to talk.’

  ‘I do talk,’ Lance said. ‘Problem is, you’re not interested.’

  ‘You don’t talk about feelings,’ she said. ‘You’re still locked in that boot.’

  ‘Strewth, woman, give us a break.’ Lance pulled out a packet of cigarettes.

  ‘You can’t smoke in here,’ said Janet.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Buffy, ‘everyone else does.’

  ‘That’s why he went into the army,’ she said. ‘No danger of talking to women there.’

  ‘No,’ said Lance. ‘Just getting my head blown off in Helmand.’ He gazed at a damp patch on the wall and turned to Buffy: ‘Should get that seen to, mate, or there’ll be trouble later. Ten to one it’s a leak in the downpipe.’ He stood up. ‘Got a ladder? I’ll check it out if you want.’

  Janet burst into laughter. The sun had come out. It blazed through the stained glass, patterning the room with Spangles.

  For some reason, Buffy didn’t know why, peace was restored. Had he helped? Maybe it was the booze. The Pritchards disappeared upstairs. Buffy thought: They treat this place like a hotel. He didn’t mind; the chap had risked his life for his country. Exhausted, he lay down on the sofa and buried his face in a cushion. Was it his imagination or did it still smell of Bridie’s cats?

  That afternoon the Pritchards went for a walk. Buffy watched the two of them strolling down Church Street, pausing to look in the shops. The puddles glinted in the sunshine; people had emerged and were nattering on doorsteps. The town had the rinsed innocence of a Frank Capra movie, the look that had made him fall in love with the place all those months ago.

  Buffy thought about Janet’s complaint. He himself had had many problems with women, but talking wasn’t one of them. He thought: I could run a course in it. He looked in the What’s On in the Marches brochure that the Pritchards had left in the dining room. Its two pages of workshops listed the usual stuff – yoga, acupuncture – but also ‘Shamanic Soul Retrieval’ with somebody called Clare, and Qigong, which seemed to be internal martial arts, whatever that was, with Nigel in Hereford. With so many beardies around, this sort of thing didn’t surprise him. He presumed, however, that these classes took place in silence. Indeed, with ‘Metamorphic Therapy’, he read, unwanted behaviour patterns from birth and before are released without having to utter a word. None of them taught the art of conversation, that was for sure. And yet women had always complained about men’s lack of communication.

  He already saw the notices. They were pinned up in those bastions of blokeiness, the local pubs. ‘How to Talk to Women, with Russell Buffery’. It might bring in a few quid; this B&B business was not the money-spinner he had imagined.

  It didn’t turn out quite like that, but the seed was sown.

  7

  Harold

>   ‘WHAT, EXACTLY, IS your novel about?’ Pia leaned against the door frame, looking at Harold as he sat at his desk.

  ‘Novelists aren’t supposed to tell,’ said Harold. ‘Or it’s all spoilt.’

  Pia raised her eyebrows. What a handsome woman she was! Tall and rangy, a racehorse of a woman; high cheekbones, taut dry skin, now tanned from gardening. Flat dancer’s stomach. After all these years, her looks still gave Harold a jolt of pleasure.

  Pia shrugged, and walked past him to water her seedlings. There were rows of them, jammed on the window ledge. Harold hunched himself over his computer, like a child hiding his work in an exam. Behind him, she puffed at the plants with her puffer thing. A haze of water drifted onto his open notebook, which lay on a chair nearby. It was a page of jottings about one of the characters. He watched his handwriting dissolve, and the character with it, but didn’t protest. Pia would somehow imply that it was his fault, for leaving it there in the first place.

  ‘I think you’re shamming,’ she said. ‘I think you sit there downloading porn.’

  ‘All right, I’ll tell you.’ Harold took a breath. ‘It’s a comic novel written by Mary Pickford’s cat.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Movies and cats, it’s a cast-iron best-seller.’

  ‘But cats can’t speak,’ said Pia.

  ‘Nor can silent movie stars.’

  ‘Of course they can,’ she sighed. ‘You just can’t hear them. Anyway, did Mary Pickford have a cat?’

  ‘Everybody has a cat at sometime or another.’

  ‘OK, OK,’ Pia said, suddenly bored. She rubbed her nose with her finger, leaving a smudge of earth. Looking around the room, she said: ‘You really should let the cleaner in here.’

  ‘Not till I’ve finished the book.’

  The words hung in the air – And when might that be?

  Harold suspected that Pia was only mildly interested in his novel. Though she ran an arts centre she wasn’t an intellectual; dance and drama was her thing, and the more foreign the better. She was just vaguely curious about how long it was taking.

  So was he. After years of teaching the novel he had imagined that he knew the rudiments of how to do it – after all, his Introduction to American Fiction had been the most popular module at Holloway College. He could quote whole pages of Humboldt’s Gift by heart; surely some of it must have seeped into his unconscious, or wherever it was that his creativity lay. But how, exactly, did one get started? He felt like a newly trained pilot sitting in some vast, empty jumbo jet, stuck on the runway; he knew every button on the control panel but had no idea how to take off. Fear of Flying, he thought; another of the books on his set list.

  He had, in fact, started his novel many times. But the moment he had written a paragraph his inner critic kicked in and he began to deconstruct his words so ruthlessly that the whole thing fell to pieces. And where exactly did one start? With the birth of the cat? Mary Pickford’s first movie? How was this fucking cat supposed to speak anyway, with a few miaows here and there? For months Harold had sat at his desk, frozen with low-level panic; Sellotaped to the wall, photographs of America’s Sweetheart, kiss-curls and all, smirked down at him. You really think you can mess with me, you talentless little runt?

  ‘I’m off,’ said Pia.

  ‘What, now?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I thought we were having lunch.’

  Pia flushed. ‘No, sweetie, I told you. I’ve got to go to a meeting about the Arts Council cuts.’

  ‘On a Sunday?’

  ‘It’s the only time we can all get together.’

  He was going to say but you’re together all week, and stopped. Why had she called him sweetie? Pia stood there, rubbing her eyebrow with her thumb and gazing around his study in a vaguely distracted way. He could tell she was longing to leave but didn’t want to look too eager. She was caught in a shaft of sunlight – a Nordic goddess with her fair, flyaway hair and evasive blue eyes.

  ‘It won’t take long.’ She kissed the top of his head and was gone. Downstairs, the front door slammed. For some reason Harold leapt to his feet and hurried across to the bedroom. Out of the window he saw her striding down the path, zipping up her leather jacket. A cough of the engine and she was off, a helmeted Valkyrie on her Piaggio scooter.

  Recently Pia had, indeed, become somewhat distracted. He presumed it was her anxiety about the impending cuts. The banking crisis was hitting the arts and the future of the Hackney Fudge Factory, where she worked, was looking increasingly dodgy. He had his criticisms of the place; its recent Menopause Season seemed unlikely to appeal to the local populace, but he had kept his thoughts to himself out of loyalty to his wife. No, out of fear. In twelve years of marriage he had learned that any criticism, however amiably murmured, would result in hair-tossing contempt for the very fact that he was a man – surely the reason she was attracted to him in the first place. It wasn’t worth the fight.

  The doorbell rang. Harold roused himself from the bed, where he had fallen into a stupor, and ran downstairs.

  A woman stood at the doorstep. ‘Is Mrs Cohen here?’ A cardboard box sat at her feet.

  Harold explained that his wife was out. In the road a car waited, its engine running.

  ‘You’d better take them then,’ she said. ‘We’re late as it is.’ She wore a floral dress and cardy; there was the air of a geography teacher about her. You didn’t see many women like that in Hackney. She looked at him, eyes narrowed. ‘You do realise these hens are severely traumatised?’

  ‘Oh God.’ Harold stared at the box. ‘I thought they were coming on Wednesday.’

  ‘Today was more convenient, as we were passing,’ she said. ‘We’re on our way to a wedding in Sandwich.’ Out in the road, the car hooted. ‘They’ve been wormed and deloused, but remember they’re ex-bats.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Ex-battery,’ she said patiently. ‘So don’t be shocked by their appearance. The feathers should grow back in a couple of months. I do supply knitted jackets, very cute. There’s some in the car, ten pounds each.’

  ‘I’m sure they’ll be all right.’

  ‘You haven’t seen them yet,’ she said.

  A faint clucking came from the box, which shifted on the step.

  ‘I have to warn you that some of them never recover, they’ve been kept in such terrible conditions, but with any luck these girls will soon be scratching around like nobody’s business.’ She knelt down and spoke to the box. ‘Bye-bye, sweethearts.’ She got to her feet and dusted down her dress. ‘What’s the best way to the Blackwall Tunnel?’

  Harold carried the box into the back garden. It was surprisingly heavy and struggled in his arms. Needless to say, this hen business was Pia’s idea; he preferred his chickens stuffed with fennel, red onion and pancetta, his favourite recipe in the River Café cookbook. The cage was ready; one of the stagehands from the Fudge Factory had knocked it up. Inside the cage sat the henhouse, roofed with faux-gingerbread tiles from last year’s panto.

  There was a squawk from the box as he lowered it onto the ground. That bossy suburban woman seemed to think that it was she who was doing him a favour. What the hell was he supposed to do now? Why wasn’t Pia here?

  A beak pushed up through the flap. He remembered his mother’s chicken soup with knaidlach, he could smell it now. The family gathered round the table as his father lifted the lid . . . the steam, the exhalation of breath. What do you say? Thank you, Mother. His parents had worked day and night to get out of this place and into Golders Green and here he was, full circle, only half a mile from where he was born. Pia had urged him to buy a house in Hackney because it was near her work. She also liked the ethnic diversity but it was fast becoming gentrified – in fact, the people who sold them the house said, ‘This is an up-and-coming area. We’re the only black family and we’re moving out.’

  Harold heaved the box into the pen and pulled open the flaps. Three hens struggled out; clambering over each other, they ra
n off with a rolling gait, like drunks, and huddled in the corner of the pen. My God, they were completely bald! No, worse than that, they were bald everywhere except their heads and necks, which were tufted with half-hearted eruptions of feathers. Just a fleshy stump, where their tails should be. He had never seen anything so repulsive in his life.

  Harold shut the gate with a shudder. Heads tilted, the hens stood watching him malevolently with their tiny yellow eyes. No hint of gratitude, of course. Did they realise how silly they looked? He had a suspicion that Pia, like that awful woman, might call them girls. Grounds for divorce, in his opinion.

  He knew that he should be more supportive of his wife’s recent fad. The thing was, would it last? Her previous craze for keeping fit had resulted in a house crammed with discarded equipment, including an exercise bike that jabbed his ankle whenever he tried to get into the downstairs loo. This smallholding business was worse, particularly now it was the growing season. Every window ledge was crammed with seedlings. They lolled out of their little pots, parched and needy; they seemed to multiply overnight – wherever he looked there seemed to be more of the buggers, all clamouring for his attention because of course Pia was out at work all day. It was like running a bloody orphanage.

  ‘Why don’t you like gardening?’ asked Pia.

  ‘I’m a Jew,’ said Harold. ‘We’re desert people.’

  ‘Grow cactuses then.’

  ‘Cacti.’

  ‘Don’t be a pedant.’ She sighed, and started again. ‘Isn’t it satisfying, to eat our own vegetables?’

  Harold kept quiet. He didn’t like to mention the potatoes filled with slugs, the tomatoes covered with warts or the fact that, the moment their meagre crop was ready, the shops were filled with exactly the same thing but much more delicious and a fraction of the price if one factored in all the effort involved. Plus the fact that there was no room to sit in the garden any more because it was filled with rotting cabbages. And now, a hen run. ‘Do stop moaning,’ Pia said. ‘Why do you have to be so negative all the time? We’re rescuing them from a life of misery. And think of the eggs.’