Heartbreak Hotel (2 page)

‘So useful to have an accountant in the family,’ he said, little knowing how true that would turn out to be.

It wasn’t a toby jug. Nor was it the framed reproduction of
Highland Cattle in the Snow
that had hung next to the payphone, and to which Buffy had had a sentimental attachment. Bridie had left him her house: her B&B in Wales.

He was still dazed with the shock of it. Unable to settle, he wandered around the flat, picking things up and putting them down again. He mislaid his wallet and discovered it in the fridge. At night he dreamed of journeys where he struggled through the rain, stark naked, and returned to find Blomfield Mansions had been demolished and replaced by a Garden of Remembrance. He woke drenched in sweat, his heart pounding.

Of course he felt gratitude towards Bridie – profound gratitude. This recognition of their lifelong affection, from beyond the grave, moved him deeply. It physically pained him that he could no longer throw his arms around her in thanks.

‘Why not you, you old bugger?’ she would chuckle. ‘Wish I was there to see his face.’ He being her brother, the more obvious beneficiary, who lived back in Ireland. Apparently he was a staunch Catholic who had disapproved of his sister’s rackety lifestyle. But her brother didn’t need the money, having speculated during the property boom, covering County Limerick with hideous mansions, all pillared porches and marble en suites; the tumbleweed now blew through them but he didn’t care, he had got out before the crash.

That Bridie had no other family, nobody closer than himself, made Buffy feel strange, his own life having been somewhat entangled on the domestic front. It had thrown their differing circumstances into sharp relief. But she had chosen to live that way, she was a free spirit beholden to nobody.

‘I didn’t even know she was ill,’ Buffy told his son Quentin. ‘She never mentioned it in her letters.’

‘I didn’t even know she existed.’

‘I don’t know what to do.’ They were having lunch at a restaurant in Frith Street.

‘Your money problems are over, that’s for sure,’ said Quentin.

‘You mean I should sell it?’

Quentin smiled. ‘I can just picture you, stuck in the pouring rain two hundred miles from Soho.’

It wasn’t a smile, it was a patronising smirk.

‘Why on earth not?’ asked Buffy irritably.

‘
Dad
.’

That did it. Later, Buffy saw this as a turning point.
I’ll show him
. Men had gone to war for less. Of course he was used to his children’s affectionate contempt. Well, their contempt. What fun to startle them.

‘I’m tired of London,’ Buffy said. ‘I’m tired of my horrible neighbours and never having anywhere to park. Nyange and I had to have tea in her car last week. I’m tired of cyclists knocking me over on the pavement.’

‘We don’t cycle on the pavement,’ said Quentin. He and his partner James were pious citizens, biking to farmers’ markets with their jute shopping bags.

‘I’m tired of everybody being so rude unless they’re foreigners,’ Buffy said, getting into his stride. ‘I’m tired of being irritated all the time, it makes me feel so elderly – I
am
elderly. But I don’t feel it, until London irritates me. It’s too full of memories and too many of my friends are dead.’

‘You really mean you’d
live
there?’ Quentin raised his eyebrows. Were they plucked? Quentin was gay; Buffy wouldn’t put it past him.

‘I want a change.’ As Buffy said it, he knew it was true.

Their lunch had arrived. Quentin removed the pieces of celery from his salad and put them on the side of his plate. They had both agreed, some time in the past, that celery was a pointless vegetable. It was one of the things they had discovered in common.

‘So where is this place?’ asked Quentin.

‘Knockton. It’s in the Welsh Marches, apparently.’ Buffy added defensively ‘almost in England’, as if it wasn’t such a big thing to go there. He already felt the beginnings of loyalty towards this unknown town.

‘So you haven’t even seen it yet?’

Buffy shook his head. ‘I’m going to go down there next week.’

Quentin raised his eyebrows again. An anchovy hung from his fork like a little leather strap. Since moving in with James, Quentin had thickened out. Happiness had done this. The two of them had met while window-dressing at Harrods but it had been years of
Sturm und Drang
until they had found domestic peace in Crouch End.

So many upheavals in both their lives but now here they were, he and his forty-five-year-old son, munching obscure and peppery salad leaves tossed by a celebrity chef. Quentin’s greying (greying!) hair was clipped into one of those crew cuts sported by the gay fraternity in Old Compton Street.

Buffy remembered a rare family gathering, Nyange and Quentin sitting side by side, the black girl and the homosexual. Penny, his wife at the time, had gazed at them. ‘Very Channel 4,’ she had mused. ‘Now all we need is the physically challenged.’ She had glanced down at Buffy, who had ricked his back and was lying on the floor, propped up by cushions. ‘Oh oh, there he is.’

‘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.

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, awaydays, 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 out, 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 pheromones.’ 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!’