Heartbreak Hotel (27 page)

Buffy himself was an invaluable source of material. Novelists were all thieves and liars, of course – the subject of one of Harold’s modules, in fact: They Lie to Tell the Truth – but Buffy was a friend and Harold would have to ask his permission to plunder his past. The visit to the newly born grandchild, for instance, was full of possibilities. Within that story lay a rich web of relationships. Relationships between people, of course, but also between themes and images (another module).
Only connect
, said E. M. Forster, himself no stranger to the straitjacket of academia.

Maybe Harold could use the image of hands as a symbol of mortality. Buffy had met his ex-wife Jacquetta beside the crib of their baby grandchild. ‘I looked at her old-lady hands – liver spots, knotted veins,’ said Buffy. ‘And next to them this little miracle, little fingers, tiny little fingernails. Then I looked at my old paws, purple like an old colonel’s, and tears sprang to my eyes. Our hands, that had once caressed each other with love …’ Buffy had broken off, his eyes moistening. Admittedly it was closing time and he had sunk a few, but the emotion had touched Harold and he had hurried back to his room above the shop and pounded away on the old laptop.

All these images swirled around but the trouble was, he hadn’t yet got the main plot. Not as such. He was just letting it flow, in the way he had taught his creative writing students to let it flow, and the results were just as hopeless. In fact, he would give himself a B minus. His writing was like a dog in the park, bounding after one scent, sniffing another and chasing after that, sniffing another one and shooting off in the other direction, crashing through the undergrowth. Harold the professor stood there holding the lead, vainly calling the dog to heel.

There were just too many characters jostling for space. Sometimes he sat in the Coffee Cup with his notebook, watching passers-by and making up their stories. After he had sent them off on their (often improbable) journeys, it gave him a jolt to see the real live person cycling past, innocent of their bigamous marriage or rediscovered twin. There was Andy, for instance, delivering the post. Shouldn’t he be in the Scottish Highlands? The dislocation was giving Harold nausea.

And then there was the larger theme. What was it? Everyone was always moaning that the British novel was parochial; he’d moaned about it himself. What was needed was a state-of-the-nation book, the sort that the big American jungle beasts wrote. Was he the man for the job? He’d thought the Welsh element would give him some breadth but in fact Knockton hardly seemed Welsh at all. Most of its inhabitants seemed to have come from somewhere else; that seemed to be the case with everywhere nowadays. Indeed, perhaps he could make that one of his larger themes, along with the breakdown of the community, the greed of the bankers, the global recession, the riots – maybe even set up an al-Qaeda training camp at Offa’s Dyke?

Harold’s head reeled. Luckily it was six o’clock; time to switch off the computer and head down to Myrtle House. It was Sunday and the cookery students would be arriving. He was looking forward to the evening; not just to the slap-up dinner but to the possibilities of new material. Residential courses, as he had discovered, were a hotbed of emotional revelations. With luck there might be another showdown that would trigger some sort of plot.

As he made his way through the darkened shop, past the shadowy drawers of ties and socks, he remembered his first wife Doris. She had been a volatile woman – Jewish, working class, blowsily tarty – and when it came to histrionics she was in a league of her own. My God the rows! The plate-smashing was on an epic, Greek-restaurant scale. He could look back on it now, however, with the detachment of a historian reflecting on the Second World War. Maybe he could work their marriage in somewhere? So many years had passed that he could surely shape it into fiction. Nowadays Doris was a matronly housewife, living in Twickenham with a B A pilot; the result of their tempestuous union was occupying Harold’s home in Hackney, with her husband and child. However, though the passage of time had long since healed the wounds he knew he couldn’t make sense of it, nor of his marriage to Pia. His own life, with all its treacherous inconsistency, slithered through his fingers like mercury; there was no way he could catch it and work it into a narrative.

A Plot At Last
: the writer’s headstone. He thought: Please God, don’t let me die before I find one.

Monica’s heart sank. She stood there, glass in hand, and gazed at her fellow students. A cookery course – a cookery course for people whose partners had done the cooking, a cookery course for total incompetents – and they were
all women
. For a mad moment she thought she had come to the wrong place. A week’s precious holiday; several hundred pounds; a four-hour drive … all to spend five days with nine females. What a fathomlessly depressing prospect.

Their host, admittedly, was a man: Russell ‘Buffy’ Buffery, an actor. She recognised him from the TV. She also remembered him playing Falstaff when she had been staying in Birmingham, years earlier, organising a conference. He still looked like a man who could carouse the night away with a cask of sack. She could recognise a fellow boozer at a hundred yards. A bit over the hill, of course. But then so was she.

Her frozen forehead fooled nobody, least of all herself. Monica had a horrible suspicion, too, that her pubic hair was thinning – not that there was any danger of anybody discovering this. The missing hairs, however, seemed to have migrated to her chin. She had only spotted this recently, after purchasing a magnifying mirror. Now she had to put on her reading specs to tweezer them out. And then there were the sudden eruptions of wind. Was there no end to the indignities of ageing?

And now another man had joined them – a writer, apparently, called Harold. Crumpled-looking, not unattractive, but his eyes had flitted past her, round the room. There were younger women in the bar, that was why – younger women, sipping their drinks; Monica was, to all extents and purposes, invisible.
Get used to it
. But it was hard, so hard. She had never been a beauty but she was stylish and striking – she was
chic
. Malcolm had said, ‘You look like the manageress of an upmarket Parisian department store. Or’ – fondling her breast – ‘a high-end brothel.’ But Malcolm had been married.

‘Have some tapas.’ Voda held out a plate. She was an androgynous-looking creature, stocky and forthright, wearing a lime-green boiler suit. She had a nose stud and multiple earrings; apparently she was a top chef and was going to be running the course.

Monica remarked in a light-hearted manner on the lack of men. ‘Maybe I should smoke in my room and get all those nice firemen round.’

‘What?’

‘I mean – oh, it doesn’t matter.’

The girl looked bemused, and moved away.

Now Monica thought of it, there probably weren’t any smoke alarms anyway. The whole place had a hilariously dated, ramshackle air. Her own room looked like the set for some 1950s farce – powder-blue washbasin, bamboo-patterned wallpaper, Bakelite light switch.
Bakelite
. She mentioned this to Buffy, who was refilling her glass. ‘I keep thinking that Terry-Thomas will jump out of the wardrobe.’

Buffy laughed. ‘I bet you and I are the only people here who remember
him
.’

‘Thanks for that,’ Monica snapped.

He clapped his hand to his forehead. ‘Oh God, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean –’

‘That’s quite all right,’ she said coldly. ‘And since we’re on the subject of decay, some sort of mushrooms appear to be growing out of my skirting boards.’

‘I know, I know. I keep meaning to do something about it.’

‘I must say, this hotel doesn’t bear much resemblance to the website.’

Buffy nodded. ‘They say that about my photo in
Spotlight
.’ He sighed. ‘Anyway, it was just an exterior shot, and taken on one of the rare occasions when the sun was shining. I’ll give you your money back if you like.’

‘Don’t be mad. I’m here now. Not that I usually read the
Express
, but I saw a copy in Caffè Nero and thought, I really ought to learn to cook.’ She drained her glass and said: ‘My husband was a marvellous cook but I’m afraid his recipes died with him.’

Buffy stared at her. ‘Heavens, I’m so sorry.’

‘That’s all right.’ Monica sighed. ‘He spoilt me, I’m afraid. Every evening when I got back from work there would be this marvellous smell coming from the kitchen, he’d be singing in there along to Radio 2, the soppier the song the better, he was such a softie, bless him. And then this delicious candlelit dinner.’

Buffy’s eyes were glistening. ‘Why isn’t marriage always like that?’

‘We were just lucky, I guess.’ Ridiculously enough, Monica’s own eyes filled with tears. What on earth was she talking about? She’d only had three glasses of wine. For some reason, she resented Buffy for believing her. ‘Anyway,’ she said irritably, ‘it’s all over now.’

But it wasn’t. During the evening this phantom marriage refused to disappear. Far from being dead, her husband was thickening up into a retired accountant called Phil, who was holding the fort back in Clapham. He was missing her, of course, but sent her jokey texts ending with
xxx
s and was using her absence to redecorate the lounge. Phil was a homebody; he spent his time looking after her, whisking the telephone bill out of her hand, seeing off the tea-towel sellers when they harangued her on the doorstep. Though balding, in her eyes Phil was still the handsome man she married thirty-five years ago. And my goodness, how they still made each other laugh!

Monica said nothing about this to her fellow diners, of course; she didn’t want to entangle herself still further in lies. But just for now she believed in it herself, it was her own warm secret. So this was how married women felt, when they were away from their husbands!

For a moment she even pitied her fellow diners, who were enthusiastically slagging off their exes. A woman called Tess said she had been married to a control freak who barred her from his kitchen. ‘It was like an operating theatre in there,’ she said. Recipes were stored alphabetically and meals were eaten in holy silence. ‘Just his sharp intake of breath when a drop of gravy fell on the table.’

A handsome black woman said: ‘Me and my ex-boyfriend couldn’t cook for toffee, we lived on takeaways. But now I’ve got together with Martin and he expects a meal on the table.’ This was greeted with groans. ‘He’s got a busy job,’ she said.

‘That old excuse,’ said Tess. ‘How busy, exactly?’

‘He runs the Foreign Office.’

Somebody else wanted to learn how to bake cakes as therapy for a broken heart. As the women regaled each other with stories of their disastrous love affairs Monica thought how different this was from a tableful of bankers. None of the City boys confessed to failure; in fact, none of them talked about anything emotional at all. The size of their bonuses was no longer discussed in public, for obvious reasons, but there was still some subtler competitive bragging – moaning about their jet lag, about the wind turbines ruining the view from their country cottage, about their hangover from some Russian crook’s birthday bash. The few women at these events usually joined in, out-machoing the males. They had to be tough, to survive.

Buffy sat at the next table, a bull surrounded by cows. Anybody who bore less resemblance to a banker was hard to imagine. He really was a frightful old ruin but he seemed to be making those ladies laugh. Maybe some of them could even find him attractive. Monica herself was not that desperate. She still didn’t understand why she had lied to him. To get his attention? His sympathy? To make him believe she had been loved with such devotion? She felt so confused that she decided not to speak to him for the rest of the week. After all, he had plenty of other women to talk to. He wouldn’t even notice.

Next morning the women gathered in the kitchen. There were nine of them on the course – some had stayed the night elsewhere – plus a latecomer who was apparently arriving at lunchtime.

Voda, her dreadlocks tied up with string, stood in front of the oven. ‘Today we’re going to make a lasagne, a meat one and a veggie one, which we’ll serve for dinner. You’ll learn how to make a cheese sauce, the basis of all béchamel sauces. You’ll also learn how to make a rich tomato sauce and how to make a bolognese, which can be used in many other dishes – cottage pie, spag bol, stuffed marrow and so on.’

Her aproned assistant, India, was grating cheese. She too was stocky, with unruly dark hair; they looked like two little tugboats. Monica, who had a hangover, sat on one of the plastic chairs that had been brought in from the bar. This morning she felt brittle and vulnerable. She’d had a restless night, disturbed by violent dreams and the flushing of the lavatory, which was next to her bedroom. Coming downstairs she had tripped over the dog and nearly fallen headlong. She imagined herself splayed in the hallway, her knickers showing. Life nowadays seemed full of minor indignities and traps for the unwary; for a horrible moment she remembered lying in a field beside the A40, a Labrador slobbering over her face.
O why do you walk through the field in gloves, fat white woman whom nobody loves?
Why am I here? she thought. I should have turned round and gone straight home.

Voda was weighing out the butter and flour. ‘Twenty-five grams butter, thirty grams flour,’ she said.

The young girl next to Monica muttered: ‘I hope I’m going to take all this in.’

‘Oh, it’s easy,’ said Monica.

The girl looked at her curiously. ‘You know how to do it?’

Monica remained silent. Tess, on her other side, was writing down measurements in a notebook. ‘I think he’s rather irresistible,’ she whispered.

‘Who?’ asked Monica.

‘Buffy, our host.’

‘Good God.’

‘Don’t you think so? Apparently he’s had lots of wives. I know he’s awfully old, but I can sort of see why.’

‘Really?’

Monica got up and joined the women who had gathered round the oven. Voda was stirring the butter and flour into a creamy paste while India stood by, holding a bottle of milk. Monica thought: They should warm the milk first.