The Penultimate Chance Saloon (19 page)

She was laying on the irony, but he knew there was an under- lying truth in what she said. Part of him wanted to tell her that he'd progressed even further than that, that he was currently enjoying sex with a woman for whom he was beginning to have quite strong feelings. But the other part of him fortunately realised that such confidences might be better unshared.

With the lightning speed that her profession had refined in her, Ginnie's manner changed from mocking to intimate. ‘Love often arises where you least expect it,' she breathed. ‘I mean, the
coup de foudre
is wonderful – seeing someone for the first time across a room and just feeling this huge surge of necessity, the knowledge that you want to be with them. But it's not the only way. Increasingly I'm coming round to the view that the other kind is better.'

‘What other kind?'

‘The love that grows slowly. The person you've known forever, whom you suddenly see with new eyes. I have a director friend,' she murmured, ‘who maintains that there is no relationship between a man and a woman that does not have a sexual element, that if you find you go on wanting to see a member of the opposite sex, then there's going to be an element of fancying there.'

‘Mmm.' Bill looked deep into the famous eyes. ‘Well, I've never pretended that I don't fancy you.' Then, feeling this might be too direct, he lightened his declaration by adding, ‘But then every man in the country fancies you.'

Ginnie's voice was even throatier as she said, ‘There's a big difference between being admired as an abstract image, and being admired for oneself, as a real woman.'

He didn't trust himself with anything more than another ‘Mmm.'

She leant across the table and laid her hand gently on top of his.

The band was playing “I've Got My Love To Keep Me Warm”, and Bill was thinking boldly that they might have a dance after dinner.

It must have been the movement of Ginnie's hand that made him look suddenly across the room. Up until then he'd been cocooned, hermetically sealed in the force field between their eyes. But as Ginnie put her hand on his, Bill's peripheral vision glimpsed a matching gesture at another table.

He looked across. On the other side of the dance floor, like a mirror image, another man and woman sat at a table. The woman had just placed her hand over the man's, and was tickling along the top of it with her middle finger.

The man he'd never seen before in his life. But the woman was Leigh.

The man – who, Bill noticed with some chagrin, was a good fifteen years younger than him – laughed in response to her tickling. He rose and, taking her by the hand, led Leigh out of the restaurant. As they left the room, he put his arm around her waist in a way that contrived to be both comforting and intimate.

Bill looked back, open-mouthed, to find Ginnie's hazel eyes fixed curiously on him. Both her hands were back on her lap. ‘Someone you know?'

‘I thought it was, but, er, no ... I must have made a mistake.'

The evening was ruined. Whatever intimacy had built up between them quickly seeped away. They talked in generalities. Gin- nie entertained Bill with stories of hilarious doings on the set of her Sister Saga, and he even found himself quoting ‘by way of contrast' lines at her. Their conversation was bright and brittle, they laughed a lot and at the end of the evening, they didn't dance.

* * *

By the time he got back to his Pimlico flat, Bill Stratton was feeling wretched. The broken tooth ached, and his mood was not improved by a message on the answering machine. He immediately recognised the irritating prissy Welshness of Dewi's voice.

‘Bill, Andrea wanted me to let you know that she's in hospital.'

... and, by way of contrast,

a member of a French swimming team was too

embarrassed to turn up for a regional competition

because he had been experimenting with Viagra the night before.

Bill rang through to Dewi's surgery the following morning.

The receptionist said Dr Roberts would be with patients until about eleven, but she would pass on the message.

It was nearly half-past twelve when the call came. While he waited, Bill was uncharacteristically twitchy. He wasn't really worried about Andrea, though her hospitalisation added another layer of unease to his feelings. Mostly, his discomfort sprang from what had happened the night before. He felt doubly unfortunate. The growing closeness of his relationship with Ginnie had been put into reverse, and God only knew where he stood with Leigh. He thought of ringing her, but he didn't want to risk missing Dewi's call back. Also he wasn't quite sure what he would say if he did get through to her.

His mood wasn't improved by the fact that he had a dull, dry hangover. Over-compensating for the diminishing sense of intimacy with Ginnie, he had ordered one bottle too many, and drunk most of it himself. The face that had bleared out of his shaving mirror at him that morning, with its white fuzz of bristles, had been that of an old man.

On top of that, the broken tooth was really hurting now. He'd have to make an appointment with his dentist, a procedure he never particularly relished. At one stage of the morning, he picked up the phone to do the deed, but replaced it quickly, still worried about missing Dewi.

When the call finally came, Bill's ex-wife's husband made no pretence of wanting to talk to him. ‘I'm only calling because Andrea insisted. She said you ought to know.'

‘Well, yes, if she's in hospital, I'd want to know.' But was that true? He'd thought so little about Andrea in the eighteen months since the divorce that perhaps the details of her life really were of no interest to him. ‘So what's she done? Broken something?' He hoped the tone of his enquiry contained the right mix of lightness and concern.

‘No, it's rather more serious than that.' Dewi's voice was full of righteous reproof. No doubt Andrea had talked to him at great length about her ex-husband's ‘shallowness'. Bill Stratton couldn't be expected even to take serious things seriously.

‘What is it then?'

‘Andrea has cancer.'

‘God.' He felt winded by the answer, and struggled for his words. ‘What, but I mean ... where?'

‘The lungs.'

‘Lungs. But Andrea never smoked.'

‘Lung cancer is not always smoking-related.' It was the medical man's rebuke to the non-specialist.

‘But ... I mean ... how bad is it?'

‘Bad enough.' Dewi managed almost to sound smug as he said the words. ‘She's had a course of chemotherapy which it's hoped has reduced the tumour. She's in hospital at the moment for some tests to see whether they're going to have to operate.'

‘Oh, God. But when ...? How long ago was it diagnosed?'

‘Four months.'

‘Why on earth didn't anyone tell me before?'

‘There was a general view ...' said Dewi, building up an image of Bill being discussed at Roberts' family councils, ‘that you wouldn't be interested.'

‘Of course I'd be interested. I was married to Andrea for nearly forty years.'

‘Hmm.' There was a wealth of disapproval in the monosyllable.

‘So ... Dewi ...' He managed to bring himself to use the name ‘... what's the prognosis?'

‘Andrea's not my patient,' came the prim response.

‘No, but you must have some idea.'

‘Her future is very much dependent on the outcome of these tests. Depends how effective the chemo has been. We'll have to see what her consultant says.'

‘But ... how is she?' As soon as he said it, he knew it was a stupid question.

‘Nobody tends to be at their best when they've got lung cancer.'

‘I know that. Still, how is – ?'

‘Well, of course Andrea's a wonderfully strong woman. She's being very brave, doing everything not to upset the children.'

Yes, of course, the Roberts brood would be involved too. ‘But she's being looked after all right, is she?'

Dewi took that as a direct insult. ‘I can assure you she is! She's having the best medical care available. I go and see her every day, and the children have worked out a rota of visiting. Andrea is in very good hands.'

‘I'm sure she is, yes. I didn't mean to give the impression that –'

‘Well, you did.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘Now I do have a surgery to run, so –'

‘Dewi ...' The name didn't get any easier to say ‘Would it be possible for me to see Andrea?'

There was a sharp intake of breath from the other end of the line. ‘I don't see why that should be necessary.'

‘Please ... I would like to see her.'

‘She might not want to see you.'

‘I agree, she might not. But would you ask her?'

The idea clearly didn't appeal. ‘Bill, if I'd had my way, I wouldn't be speaking to you now. I'm only doing so because Andrea asked me to. That's what she wanted.'

‘In just the same way, she might want to see me.'

‘I doubt it.'

‘Please. Will you ask her?'

‘I'll discuss it with the children. See what they think.'

God, thought Bill as he put the phone down. Another bloody Roberts family council will be summoned to discuss more of my shortcomings.

He was shocked by the news of Andrea's illness, but he felt so detached from her life that it hardly seemed real to him. On his shelf was a small medical dictionary which had somehow survived the dispersal of belongings from the Putney house. There was no specific entry for the lung variety, just a general piece on cancer. One sentence from the article stood out. ‘Some cancers can be caused by physical factors; a broken tooth or badly fitting denture can give rise to a chronic mouth ulcer which does not heal and undergoes malignant change.'

He tried not to think about it. He made an appointment with his dentist and decided to find some undemanding company over lunch in the pub. Then, in an attempt to drive out thoughts of death by thoughts of continuing life, he rang Leigh. Yes, she'd like to meet. She was free that evening.

Neither of them mentioned being at Cruising the previous night.

* * *

There were a million reasons why it could have happened, but he had a feeling that the real one was the news about Andrea. But he couldn't tell Leigh that. She'd think he was just fishing for sympathy. Up until that point the evening had followed its usual pattern. A pleasant dinner in an obscure restaurant, idle conversation, and back to the house in Clerkenwell.

It was only when they got into bed that everything went wrong. Bill, like most men, had had occasional bouts of impotence during his marriage. General tiredness or excessive booze had from time to time taken their toll. Remarkably, though, during his sexual encounters in anonymous hotels since the divorce, the problem hadn't arisen ... and fortunately something else had. But he'd never before encountered what happened that night in Leigh's bed.

Or rather what didn't happen.

Nothing.

The beauties of her body, the murmuring dirtiness of her voice, the urging of her hands and ... nothing. Bill ransacked his memory for ever more obscene images to rouse him to some kind of action, but the transmission cable between brain and groin appeared to have been permanently severed. When it became finally clear that her efforts were having no effect, Leigh rolled away from him.

‘I don't quite know ...' Bill began hesitantly.

‘It happens.' Her tone was even, not exactly unsympathetic, but hardly encouraging.

‘I suppose I could try Viagra,' he suggested, in a way that he hoped sounded humorous.

‘I don't care what you do, so long as it works...' She touched him lightly. ‘Which this currently doesn't.'

‘No.'

She turned her pale blue, Irish-looking eyes on him. ‘Is this something to do with last night?'

‘What?'

‘Cruising. We were both there with other dates.'

‘I didn't know you'd seen me.'

‘Of course I did. You were only the other side of the dance floor.'

‘Yes.'

‘Well, is this something to do with that?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Oh, God knows the way you men's minds work. But the fact that you saw me with someone else last night might ... I don't know, bring on performance anxiety ... make you jealous ...'

Bill saw a potential way out that would leave him with some honour intact. ‘Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I –'

Leigh raised a hand to silence him. ‘I don't want to hear any of it. I'm not in this to mend your bruised ego or cure your feelings of inadequacy. That's what I do all day at work. In my social life I don't want to hear about people's complications.'

‘But, Leigh ...' He wasn't going to throw away the excuse she had offered him. ‘It was quite a shock for me to see you with another man.'

‘Why? Have we ever had an agreement that involves fidelity? Have we ever even discussed the subject? I don't ask you what you do with your life when you're not with me, and I think you should allow me the same freedom. Sauce for the goose or something of the sort.' ‘Yes, that's fine, but just ... well, seeing you with someone else...' He decided to try the sentimental escape route ‘...I suppose it made me realise how much you do mean to me.'

‘Crap. What I mean to you is that I'm someone you have good sex with. It's like meeting someone with whom you have a good game of squash.'

‘No more?' he asked, knowing he sounded pathetic.

‘No. You've got a nerve, anyway. I don't know why you're getting at me. I have as much right to go out with who I want to as you do.'

‘Yes, of course.'

‘And I'm afraid I don't buy that gender difference argument. You can behave like that because you're a man, whereas I'm a weak feeble sentimental woman –'