Heartbreak Hotel (15 page)

And a necessary one. The problem was, he had to make some money, and fast. The roof was leaking, the window sashes were rotting. Maybe he could set up a course in ‘Basic Home Repairs’! Nyange’s visit, a few weeks earlier, had faced him with the grim reality. Of course he had owned houses before, but none as vast or ramshackle as this – the gas bill itself was jaw-dropping. Besides, in the past he had earned some sort of income – a fluctuating one, to be sure, but in his prime his mellifluous tones were much in demand; his voice-over for Dyno-Rod had redecorated his house in Primrose Hill. And, oh the joy of the returning series! Though First Usher in
Crown Court
was by no means a major role, that old sod Andrew Cruikshank having nabbed the part of Judge, it did fund his sons’ progress through the private schools that Jacquetta had insisted they attend, even though they emerged with a cannabis habit and Estuary accents.

Fig’s yapping announced the return of Voda from the cash ‘n’ carry. India jumped up and helped her unload tins of paint. The two young women had taken an instant liking to each other, and as he watched them Buffy noticed their physical resemblance – both stocky and purposeful, with unruly dark hair. India, however, had a Londoner’s pallor while Voda’s cheeks were even redder than usual. So, in fact, were her lips. Was it possible that she was wearing make-up? There was a skittish air about her, too, which was unusual – the way she giggled at something India said and clapped her hand to her mouth. Did she have the hots for one of his sons? Hopefully not for Bruno who had a girlfriend already and a pregnant one at that. His girlfriend’s resentment at his skiving off when she was seven months gone had surfaced in a series of texts which had briefly beeped to life when his mobile got a signal on the way to Knockton, and disappeared again.

Buffy told them about the front room, which he was going to convert into a bar and lecture theatre for his students. This was situated on the other side of the hallway from the dining room; until recently it had been used as a storeroom by a friend of Bridie’s who collected railway memorabilia – boxes of timetables and assorted junk.

‘He’s an old boy called Lenny,’ said Buffy. ‘I think she had a thing with him.’

‘Nobody has a thing with a railway enthusiast,’ said Bruno. ‘That’s why they’re railway enthusiasts.’

‘Bridie wasn’t too picky, bless her,’ said Buffy, hoping that this hadn’t applied to himself. ‘Anyway, I let him keep the room for old times’ sake but he’s had to sell the lot off to pay for his care home. We’re going to tart it up with a lick of paint.’

His sons were driving back to London that afternoon but to his surprise India offered to stay on and do some wallpaper-stripping. Buffy helped Tobias and Bruno gather up their vast collection of clothes, some of which were draped over the bushes in the garden, bade them goodbye and padded off for his snooze.

When he emerged, promptly at the cocktail hour, he heard shrieks of laughter coming from the room downstairs. He paused on the landing. The evening sun shone through the fanlight. Already he could imagine the convivial clink of glasses, the rapt silence as he shared his wisdom with rows of blokey, unreconstructed men who’d only spoken to women in monosyllables, the burst of applause as he finished with a flourish. There would be amusing anecdotes from his own past – even humiliating ones (plenty to choose from, there) – and of course he’d crack some jokes to break the tension.
I don’t think I’ll get married again. I’ll just find a woman I don’t like and give her a house
.

Buffy went down to the front room. India and Voda were sitting side by side on the floor smoking roll-ups. He looked at Voda in surprise; he had no idea she smoked. One wall was half scraped; strips of paper hung down, lolling like tongues.

‘I was telling her about my stepfather,’ said India.

‘Not me, I hope,’ Buffy.

‘Of course not you. I wouldn’t slag you off in your own home. We were talking about Leon.’

‘He sounds a right tosser,’ said Voda.

Leon was the celebrity shrink to whom Jacquetta had confided her marital woes – in other words, Buffy’s hopelessness as a husband – and with whom she eventually absconded, taking his Ivon Hitchens with her.

‘I was trying to explain our family,’ said India. ‘Who was married to who, and who had children with who, but she’s got a bit lost. In fact, so have I.’

‘One really needs a paper and pencil,’ said Buffy.

‘No,’ said India. ‘A bloody wall chart.’

‘Wish my parents had got divorced,’ said Voda, stubbing out her cigarette. ‘Then I wouldn’t have had to hear them shagging in their bender.’

‘Or them hear
you
,’ said India.

‘And the
rows
,’ said Voda. ‘Even worse than Conor and me.’ She sighed. ‘He’s such a moody bugger. Like, he even gets irritated by the way I wash up. He can sulk for weeks, long after I’ve forgotten what it was all about.’

‘Like a child who stomps off with its suitcase and nobody notices it’s gone so it has to crawl back home,’ said India. ‘I did that once.’

‘Did you?’ asked Buffy.

‘But then Mum never noticed anything. I could’ve been away for months.’

Voda sat there, deep in her own thoughts. ‘It’s ever so peaceful with him in prison,’ she said. ‘No temper tantrums when the van doesn’t start, no fag ends in the loo. And he would have made me drown the kittens. To tell the truth, I’m dreading him coming out.’

Buffy raised his eyebrows. Voda had never spoken so openly before. But then Buffy was her employer, and a bloke – doddery, portly, unthreatening, but still unmistakably a bloke. It was India who had loosened her inhibitions.

The two women carried on stripping the wall. They looked so companionable together; they even seemed to be scraping in unison. He was glad they were getting on so well. Voda was telling India about her brother’s squint, and how the commune briefly tried to cure it with their cult chant – to no avail, surprise surprise. How Aled had found solace in cows, the only creatures that had given him real affection. From there they segued seamlessly, as women so often did, onto the subject of their disastrous love lives, with particular reference to India’s hopeless exes.

Buffy heard this with interest; they seemed to have forgotten that he was there. He thought: Funny, isn’t it, that no woman needs a course called ‘Talking to Women’. They just do it all the time.

* * *

A makeshift bar was installed in the corner of the room. It was a battered mahogany counter that Voda had found in a skip outside a community hall when playing a darts match in Brecon. A stack of plastic chairs was purloined, following a tip-off that, due to the cuts, the local drop-in centre was closing down. The room was taking shape. To add a personal touch, Buffy hung the walls with framed playbills which he had found stacked in the cellar. They included a production of
The Rivals
in which he had played the lead. His younger, slimmer self, bewigged with corkscrew curls, gazed out from the photograph. The raised eyebrow, the insolent smirk – what a swagger there was to him then! For the first – and last – time, he had seen his name in lights on Shaftesbury Avenue. Now, however, damp had crept beneath the glass; a tea-coloured stain corrugated half his face, like a birthmark.

Gazing at his image, Buffy thought of the characters he had played, from Sir Anthony Absolute to Hammy the Hamster. They belonged to another life. Actors might strut and fret upon the stage but they were basically children dressing up in costumes. He was now the proprietor of a guest house with a licence for alcohol to be consumed on the premises. At long last, indeed at the ripe old age of seventy-one, he almost felt like a grown-up.

His plans were taking shape; the search was now on for tutors. Later that day he was meeting a chap called Nolan in the pub. Nolan, like the drop-in centre, was a victim of the cuts; until recently he had worked as a labourer for the local council but had now been made redundant. His passion, however, was cars. Apparently he had two lock-ups near the bypass that were charnel houses of dismembered vehicles; this, and a sunny disposition, made him a possible candidate for the car maintenance course.

There was also the question of advertising. Buffy was pondering this as he walked around the bedrooms replenishing the freebies – shampoo miniatures, tea bags, biscuits. Needless to say they were always pocketed – even, pathetically enough, the sachets of sugar.

Should he put an ad in a lonely hearts page, an upmarket one like the
London Review of Books
? Were lovelorn bluestockings his core clientele? More to the point, did he want to fill his house with them? Penny would know what to do. Standing in the Pink Room, Buffy suddenly had a pang for his ex-wife. She was a journalist, a hack to her core, with a wily lateral mind that had proved useful in the past. Not always, it had to be said, to his advantage. Particularly not, when it concerned her adultery. He remembered Penny’s ‘press trips’ abroad, how she returned suntanned, how she amused him with stories about her fellow freeloaders while unpacking gifts of exotic foodstuffs. How in fact she had simply gone to ground in her lover’s Soho flat, hastily slapping on the bronzer and buying pasta from Camisa’s before breezily returning home in a taxi ‘from the airport’.

One had to admire her chutzpah. He hadn’t then, of course. But it was all so long ago, the years had passed and it all seemed like a dream. Buffy stood there, watching a spider lowering itself from the ceiling. It did it with such insouciance; did it really know where it was going, and did it really want to get there?

Penny did. She was smart and ruthless, with a nose for a story. When some friend burst into tears, confiding some childhood trauma, she would stiffen like a fox scenting a rabbit – could she write a piece about it? Nothing was wasted, from sexual abuse to a dropped hem. Penny could always cobble together a thousand words, and bung it off to anything from the
Daily Mail
to one of the glossies. One had to admire her for it. She was also fun – a lot more fun than her predecessor Jacquetta, of whom she was furiously jealous. Buffy remembered Penny’s first visit to his country cottage, where the cesspit was being cleaned out. ‘Thank God,’ she had said. ‘I don’t want any old wife’s droppings in there.’

‘Lunch!’ Voda yelled up the stairs. Buffy jumped. Was it really that late? How long had he been standing there, clutching a box of UHT milk pots? This happened more and more often nowadays. Voda called him a lazy old sod but he was just ambushed by the past. There was so much of it, waiting to immobilise him in a sunlit bedroom.

As he walked downstairs Penny’s voice was still in his head.
Don’t waste your money on an ad, silly. Get someone to write a piece about it
.

Roy was a raddled old hack who worked for the
Radnorshire Echo
. Buffy had bumped into him some months earlier, when their respective dogs were relieving themselves in the churchyard. He knew where to find Roy – in the bar of the Knockton Arms Hotel, at the far end of town. Buffy usually avoided the place due to Daffyd the barman’s insistence on addressing him in the squeaky voice of Voley, a joke which had long since run out of steam, if it had had any in the first place. Today, however, a monosyllabic Latvian was on duty. The place was empty except for Roy, who sat at the bar attempting to engage the chap in conversation.

He turned, relieved, when Buffy came in. ‘Hello, old cock! What brings you to this den of iniquity?’

They sat down in the snug with a couple of sharpeners. In his youth Roy had been a Marxist firebrand, firing off rabble-rousing polemics in the
Manchester Guardian
. Moving to London, and to the right, he had worked for the red tops in the good old days of Fleet Street, propping up the bar at El Vino’s and picking up gossip for the showbiz pages. Buffy had glimpsed him at various watering holes and indeed been interviewed by him when cast in a
Morse
, a cameo that had subsequently hit the cutting-room floor. Roy had long since retired to Wales with his wife, a tough old bird whose skin was kippered by the fags and with whom he dined at four-star hostelries in exchange for shameless puffs in the local paper.

Buffy told him his plan.

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Roy said. ‘It’s the silly season after all, they’re gagging for stories. You want one of the nationals, of course – big readership, someone might bite. Nobody round here would be stupid enough to pay for one of your courses.’ He thought for a moment. ‘The
Daily Express
owes me one. Managed to blag my way into the green room at the Hay Festival and fed them a very tasty little item.’ He chuckled. ‘Caught one of the PM’s aides in the khazi, stuffing Bolivian marching powder up his nostrils.’

‘Do I want
Daily Express
readers?’ asked Buffy.

‘You old snob. Anyway, you’d be surprised who reads it. They all say it was lying around at the doctor’s, of course.’

Roy was right; it had to be a national. Buffy suspected that nobody read the local paper unless their runner beans were up for a prize. News items ranged from ‘Mystery of the Mobility Scooter’ which had been spotted in someone’s front garden, the only clue to its ownership a pair of gentleman’s gloves, to the rumour of a panther roaming the countryside under cover of darkness. A reporter, wearing night goggles, was dispatched to lie in wait, only to discover after a week of staking it out that it was an overweight tom. This story, apparently, cropped up every summer.

So Roy wrote a piece for the
Daily Express
. It was accompanied by a photo of Buffy, bearded and beaming in his panama hat, standing outside Myrtle House, a
No Vacancies
sign displayed prominently in the window.