Heartbreak Hotel (25 page)

The problem was, how could he teach the course with only one pupil? He had planned some role-playing; that was now out of the question. So was his multiple-choice panel game, created for light relief. As he waited for Andy to come downstairs the whole enterprise struck him as ridiculous. No wonder only one person had turned up. How could he set himself up as an authority on relationships when his own track record was so rocky? Granted, among the litany of complaints from the various women in his life, blokeish taciturnity was the one shortcoming that hadn’t been thrown at him. He loved a natter; he was interested in clothes and always noticed what a woman was wearing; he liked weepy films; he had no interest in sport or cars; he was thoroughly domesticated and liked nothing better than sitting around chatting – though this, now he thought of it, had been condemned as sloth. Above all, however, he loved discussing all the emotional stuff that really was the basis of everything – so fathomlessly interesting, so endlessly absorbing. Why did anybody talk about anything else?

Andy came downstairs. ‘It’s going to be a funny five days, just the two of us,’ Buffy told him. ‘I should give you some sort of refund.’

‘Refund?’

‘Perhaps we could just watch some DVDs.
When Harry Met Sally
is spot on when it comes to the battle of the sexes.’

‘You mean in the evenings?’ Andy was looking at him oddly. ‘I’ll be out all day, of course, but I’ve got nothing planned for when I get back.’ They walked up the hallway. Andy, deep in thought, paused at the front door. ‘You really don’t have to entertain me, honest.’

‘But, dear chap –’ Buffy stopped. There seemed to be some missed connection somewhere.

They left the house and walked up the street. Perhaps the man was a mental defective, or had Asperger’s. He really hadn’t got the hang of the situation at all. Perhaps – oh God – his ex hadn’t told him about the course! She had enrolled him as an act of revenge. Or perhaps – a more charitable thought – she had had his best interests at heart, and wanted to give his next partner a better chance of happiness. The course was like those starter packs one found in a holiday flat – bread, eggs, sachet of Nescafé – to get one going. On consideration, this seemed too saintly to be true.

Andy stopped at a car, parked under a street lamp. ‘I was just wondering if I
should
bring my stuff in,’ he said. ‘Don’t want it to get nicked.’

Buffy peered into the back seat. In the lamplight he could make out a long, bulky object and a pair of waterproof waders.

Andy peered in with him. ‘It does look pretty tempting,’ he said.

Buffy’s head spun. The man was some kind of lunatic. ‘What do you want waders for?’ he asked.

‘Fishing, of course,’ said Andy.

There was a silence. A burst of laughter came from further up the road, where the smokers were huddled around the doorway of the pub.

‘When are you going to go fishing?’ Buffy asked faintly.

‘Tomorrow morning, bright and early. They say it’s twenty minutes’ drive to the Wye. I was going to ask, what time’s breakfast?’

Buffy laughed – a high, hysterical laugh. ‘Skiving off, are you?’

‘That’s what my wife used to say. She said I only did it to get out of the house – like, to escape her. She said all anglers were miserable bastards but that’s so not true. There’s a great camaraderie. And she said we never talk. We
do
talk. We talk about fishing.’ Andy paused for breath.

Slowly, it was sinking in. The fellow hadn’t enrolled on his course at all. He had come for a week’s fishing. Buffy said: ‘I do apologise. You must have thought I was mad. There seems to have been a bit of a mix-up with the bookings.’

Once that was cleared up, they went to the pub for a restorative pint. Talk of fishing had loosened the poetry in Andy’s soul. As they sat by the fire he waxed lyrical about salmon migration. Apparently they swam all the way to Greenland to grow up, and then swam back again to spawn in the same spot of the River Wye. He didn’t seem to mind that after all their trouble he was standing there waiting to murder them.

‘You feel the tug on the line,’ he said. ‘There’s something underneath the water but you don’t know what it is. Then it’s tugging stronger and then bugger me! Up comes three feet of silver!’

He said that his father had taught him to fish; it was the only occasion he had had his dad to himself. It was a time of the purest happiness; they would take sandwiches and stay out all day. On the way home his father would stop at a caravan park where he had business to attend to. Andy would play on the swings. Only later, when his dad had disappeared for good, did he discover his father’s mistress had lived there.

‘My wife wanted us to get a caravan but I couldn’t, could I? They were, like, tainted.’

‘What did she say when you told her the reason?’ asked Buffy.

Andy thought for a moment. ‘Don’t know. Don’t think I ever did.’

‘You never told her? Good God, man! Think of all the sympathy you could have stored up, for when times got rough.’

‘Never told anyone.’ Andy gazed into the embers. ‘Not till now. I suppose nobody’s asked.’

Buffy gazed at him with fascination. What a shame Andy wasn’t taking the course! If it had existed.

Sitting by the fire, Andy felt the strangest sensation. He was finding himself saying all sorts of things – things he didn’t even know he knew. It was partly the effect of two pints of Ludlow Gold, not to mention the wine at dinner. But it was also caused by his host. He had never met anybody like Buffy. It wasn’t like talking to his mates – one certainly didn’t have this kind of conversation at the sorting office. This bearded old gent seemed to have seen it all before, with his rheumy eyes.

‘What do women want?’ Andy asked.

‘They want a woman with a dick.’

Andy pondered this for a moment. ‘I don’t want to be a woman. I want to be a man. I want to rescue people from burning buildings.’ He told Buffy about Postman’s Park with its touching tales of everyday heroism. ‘There seems no opportunity for that sort of thing nowadays.’

‘Thank God for that,’ said Buffy.

‘My wife was much braver than me. She went bungee-jumping.’

‘The woman was insane!’ said Buffy.

‘You could rupture your spleen doing that.’

‘That true?’ Buffy asked with interest. Andy recognised a fellow hypochondriac.

‘Something nasty, anyway,’ Andy said. ‘Thing about being a postie is the pay’s rubbish but it’s safe work. Unless you catch a chill.’

‘Don’t be so sure,’ said Buffy. ‘Our postman broke his leg last week. Saw him in the high street, hobbling about on crutches.’

Buffy was right; nothing was safe. Disaster was waiting in ambush in the most ordinary places – the North Circular, even the lounge. Just now, however, in this cosy, convivial room – the roaring fire, the bonhomie – Andy felt that nothing terrible could happen. This was a proper pub, the kind you didn’t find in London any more, where they were either rammed with yelling kids drinking themselves senseless or else smartened up into gastro eateries with stuff drizzled with
jus
, whatever that was, costing a bloody arm and a leg. And ahead of him lay a week’s angling, a prospect as near to rapture as he could imagine. When Ryan was older he would bring him along and teach him to fish, as his own father did before it all went wrong.

He told Buffy about his life with Toni nowadays, how he dropped by to take Ryan to the football, how there was a new companionship between them. ‘Thing is, I’m better friends with my wife now that we’ve separated,’ he said.

‘Know that cartoon? A couple saying to each other
We were happy until you wanted a relationship
. Spot on, in my experience.’

‘There was all this, like,
pressure
. To perform, you know? To be a bloke. But she was the big achiever, she was making the money. Bit of a ball-shrivelling experience, to be honest.’

Buffy told him about one of his wives, Penny, who was a journalist and wore power suits. How she strode through life with a breezy self-confidence, glossy hair swinging; how, when his work dried up, he became the house husband and shadowy plus one in her restaurant column. ‘
My companion had the turbot
, that sort of thing. I didn’t mind, at least it was a free meal. But then she started this column for
Antiques Monthly
called “Him Indoors”. House hubby’s funny little foibles and general incompetence. You can imagine how
that
affected the old hydraulics department.’

Andy was cheered by this. He wasn’t alone! He gazed at the men leaning against the bar, sharing a joke. They looked pretty happy to him. Maybe in Knockton men really could still be men. There was wood to chop, homesteads to fortify against the storm, tractors to be driven through the mud and slurry. He pictured himself arriving home and pulling off his boots, his woman – his woman! – throwing her arms around him and tenderly removing a twig from his hair.
Welcome home, boyo
, she would say in her sing-song Welsh voice.

‘What’s so funny?’ asked Buffy.

Andy swallowed his beer. ‘Nothing.’ He indicated Buffy’s glass. ‘Fancy another?’

Myrtle House felt palpably empty. Now the course was cancelled, its unknown pupils could almost be felt by their absence. Who were those ghostly men Buffy would now never meet? Did they even know that their rooms had been prepared for them? Buffy’s annoyance at the lost income gave way to a more metaphysical loneliness as he rattled around the empty house. Voda had taken a few days off to settle India into her cottage; Andy was out all day fishing. Buffy was alone with only Fig for company, and even the dog was restless and whiny, scratching at the bedroom doors as if willing their occupants into life. The rain lashed at the windows; now the clocks had been put back it seemed to get dark soon after lunch. Once, after his nap, he had made his way downstairs in the gloaming and heard a sound in the kitchen. He was still groggy, his head full of dreams. As he paused at the door he knew, he just knew, that Bridie was in there. She was shuffling around in her kimono, putting on the kettle for their tea.

When he switched on the light, the kitchen was empty. He suddenly missed Bridie, painfully. The jokes, the whisky, the love so freely given.
We were happy until you wanted a relationship
. Bridie had never expressed any desire for such a thing, and he had believed her. Could they both have been wrong? Could she have been the love of his life? Maybe a larky companionship and tender sexual gratitude added up to the same thing.

Buffy stood there, immobilised yet again by the past. Who could he talk to? Voda, his most constant companion, was not the most curious of women. Besides, so many of the people he had loved were dead. Why should Voda be interested when he himself could hardly remember some of their faces?

But what could he do with all this stuff in his head? Without the distraction of guests it swilled around until he felt dizzy. Talking about Penny had made
her
swim back into focus. He hadn’t spoken to her for a year or so; apparently she had moved to a remote village in Suffolk. This seemed so unlikely that it made her unknown to him all over again, as if they had never met. Was she still with that foetal-aged photographer? He had no idea; with no children to bind them together she had disappeared from his life.

The bitterness had long since gone; now he remembered their years together with fondness. They had certainly lived high on the hog – meals out, trips abroad, all on expenses. Penny had been something of a legend in this respect, even among her fellow hacks. One had to admire her chutzpah; he remembered how she had got the flat in Blomfield Mansions redecorated top to toe for an article in the
Sunday Times
that only ran to four hundred words. Buffy wouldn’t have been surprised if she had claimed
him
against tax.

Those days of the freebie were long since gone, for Fleet Street as well as for himself. But it had been fun. For the first time in months Buffy felt a pang for the bright lights of London. He imagined himself leafing through
Time Out
and circling movies with his Pentel. After a saunter through Soho he would partake of a raspberry tart in Maison Bertaux, whose decor had been unchanged for the past thirty years and where that nice bloke, what’s-his-name, Belgian, would greet him as if he’d never been away. Maybe a stroll through Chinatown and down through Leicester Square, sneering at the tourists stupid enough to eat in the Angus Steak House, then back for a couple of pints at the Coach & Horses with some of his old cronies. Finally a show or a movie, ending up at a large, noisy table at Joe Allen’s, preferably with somebody else picking up the tab.

If Buffy were honest, however, this vision of his life as a
flâneur
bore little resemblance to his recent existence in London. A large part of his time, in fact, had been taken up with visits to the osteopath, the podiatrist, or the sickbeds of friends, followed by trips to their memorial services in appalling places like Penge. Seething, too, took up a good part of the day, the list being almost endless (pavement cyclists, the government, mobiles on trains, that shameless old ham Digby winning an Oscar, and so on and so forth). So did lengthy and maudlin brooding on the past, which was exactly what he was doing now.

It was Harold who came to his rescue. Late on Friday the phone rang. Harold told him he was moving to Knockton – his daughter would hold the fort in Hackney. He had rented the flat above the gents’ outfitters in the high street and would be arriving in a week’s time.

‘Might as well strike while the iron’s hot,’ he said. ‘It’s all thanks to you, old pal. Knockton’s got the old creative juices flowing – there’s something about the place; I felt it when I was buying the mite powder.’

Buffy was ridiculously pleased by this news. Harold was a man after his own heart and would bring a welcome whiff of the metropolis with him. Though Buffy had grown fond of many of his fellow Knocktonites he had yet to meet a soulmate among the old lags and sandalled beardies in the pub; besides, Harold’s marriage to Pia bore such a strong resemblance to his own fractuous union with Jacquetta that he felt their bond was forged in blood.