The Penultimate Chance Saloon (11 page)

The one big change he made was to his underwear. He found the small black briefs, variations of which he'd worn throughout his married life, were greeted too frequently in bedrooms with suppressed giggles. In boxer shorts he felt less tethered, but they did get fewer laughs ... which was actually strange to Bill, because when he'd been growing up, the only times he'd seen boxer shorts were in American cartoons, on men who were meant to look funny in them.

And as for negative feelings – the suspicion that there might be something rather sad about a sixty-year-old man whose relationships were reduced to sexual scalp-counting – he managed to force such thoughts out of his mind. Bill Stratton had always been good at forcing unwelcome thoughts out of his mind.

... and, by way of contrast,

an eighteen-year old woman in Macedonia

has been granted a divorce from her

ninety-seven-year-old husband on the

grounds of his unreasonable sexual demands.

Bill Stratton did not let his sex life impinge on his friendships. He still saw Carolyn at the BWOC office, had lunches and the occasional dinner party with Sal, and downed mournful pints in The Annexe with Trevor – but he never mentioned his sexual encounters. Carolyn probed with her customary innuendo. Sal – in her Miss Fixit role – tried to set up new trysts and get the low-down on old ones. But it seemed to Bill that he had no difficulty in deflecting their enquiries. And, of course, Trevor was no problem. Like most men, he was entirely uninterested in anyone's sex life but his own. Since that appeared to be moribund, he just maundered on about his past failures with women, which, transformed in the telling, increasingly took on the form of past glories.

And Ginnie ... Bill didn't see much of Ginnie during that period. She had taken over the part of Mother Superior in a long- running television series about medieval nuns that was shooting in Croatia, where the cheapness of locations and labour made recreating the England of the Middle Ages much more attractive to television producers than it would have been in England. As a result, Bill and Ginnie had little contact other than snatched telephone conversations when she briefly touched base back in London. Bill was, in many ways, quite relieved about that. He had no problem in keeping his sex life secret from his other friends; he didn't know, though, whether he'd be able to withstand interrogation from the famous hazel eyes of Virginia Fairbrother.

There was no curiosity about his new lifestyle from his ex-wife. Andrea showed no interest in him at all. Occasional necessary phone-calls about final financial details were conducted quickly, without animosity, but neither of them volunteered information about themselves. Presumably, Andrea was enjoying Muswell Hill and domestic vegetarian bliss in the company of Dewi, which brought with it a licence for unbridled whingeing about the NHS. She had reached her nirvana.

Only once did Bill feel tempted to share some of the secrets of his new emancipation. And that was, surprisingly, with Trevor. They were sitting in the inevitable Annexe, and Trevor was working through his inevitable depression about how old he felt.

‘... and you keep asking yourself, “What's the point?” Why should one go on when there's nothing left to look forward to? I mean, I see my body decaying by the minute. Every morning there are more dead, irreplaceable hairs on my pillow. My teeth feel more brittle every time I brush them. The veins on my legs look like the Piccadilly and Metropolitan Lines have taken over the entire tube map.' He took a long swig of beer, luxuriating in his misery. ‘Even this is having less effect. It takes more booze to dull the pain, and the more booze you have, the more pain you feel when you wake up the next morning, which means you need even more booze to ...' He sighed with satisfaction at the completeness of his despair. And there are so many things you just know you're never going to achieve ... so many ambitions that will never be realised ... I mean, I used to dream of being alone in a bedroom with a girl in her twenties ...'

And as Trevor lifted his unfocused gaze towards his beer-tinted horizon, Bill Stratton felt really tempted to say, ‘Actually, I've done that ...'

But of course he didn't.

Not least because he did feel a degree of embarrassment about the whole episode.

* * *

The younger woman was encountered at a book launch. She worked, in some capacity Bill never quite established, for the company which had taken over his original publisher. (The enterprising young publisher who had seen the potential of the
By Way Of Contrast
books had, in the way of enterprising young publishers, sold out to one of the big publishing conglomerates. He kept some minor advisory role in the business, but mainly he just enjoyed spending the huge amount of money he had made from the deal. And in the way of big publishing conglomerates, the big publishing conglomerate which had bought his company for its flexibility, low overheads and ability to react quickly to the market, proceeded to make their new purchase inflexible, to increase its overheads, and make it as slow to react to the market as all the other publishing houses under its umbrella.)

The girl's name was Kirstie, and her job was something to do with ‘rights'. Rights in what, or whose rights, or rights to do what, Bill never did find out. But she seemed happy to chat to him at the launch. She said she vaguely recognised him from the television, from when she used to ‘watch with her parents'. Bill wasn't very good at judging the ages of people younger than himself, but he reckoned she couldn't yet have reached thirty.

The conversation followed a predictable format. He entertained her with some of his well-remembered ‘by way of contrast' stories, in the constant expectation that she would shortly move away to join some of her contemporary colleagues. But she didn't. She seemed more than happy to stay listening to him, and they were still together when the trickle of departing guests became a gush. Asking her to join him for a bite to eat seemed an entirely logical next step.

They'd both had quite a lot to drink at the launch, and they continued to drink throughout their dinner at a convenient nearby Italian. Precisely the sequence of words that led to Kirstie suggesting that they should adjourn afterwards to her flat Bill could not remember. But again, logic seemed to be on their side. The idea made perfect sense to both of them.

As soon as the cab deposited them outside her block - it was clear that Kirstie had a private income. Nothing anyone did with publishing rights would earn enough to pay for a flat in that neighbourhood of Fulham. Rich parents would be the probable explanation, but Bill didn't ask. He had no wish to hear that the girl's parents were younger than he was.

The interior of the flat confirmed the impression of wealth. So, now Bill came to think of it, did Kirstie's vowels. Their cut glass had been engraved to a very expensive standard by all the right schools.

She gestured him to a large white sofa while she disappeared into the kitchen to find yet more wine. Alone, Bill was able to take in his surroundings.

His first impression was that he was in a child's playroom. Carefully displayed on purpose-built shelves all around the walls were figurines of characters from Disney cartoons. He recognised the lineups from
101 Dalmatians, Fantasia
and
Snow White.
All those bloody dwarves, of whom no one can ever remember more than six at any one time. Even with the seven little figurines in front of him, Bill couldn't get all the names right. He gazed around in bewilderment. Surely no one would actually
choose
to have this stuff on display?

‘I see you're looking at my collection,' said Kirstie, returning with the wine.

‘You collect these?'

‘Well, don't say it like that. What did you think – that someone dumped them on me?'

That had been so close to what he'd been thinking that he didn't dare make any response. But Kirstie didn't need any; she was keen to talk about her hobby.

‘My
101 Dalmatians
set is almost complete.'

Ah, really?

‘Yes. That “Cruella in Bed” is terribly rare. It's one from the Walt Disney Classic Collection, obviously.'

‘Obviously,' he echoed.

‘And those “Puppies on Newspaper”?' Kirstie trilled. ‘How sweet are they?'

Bill decided that this was a rhetorical question. He had been aware recently of a new syntactical interrogative creeping into the speech of younger people. Enquiries taking the form ‘How good is that?' did not apparently expect answers. Bill didn't understand the grammatical construction, he was just aware of it. All he knew was that if he had used that kind of sloppy speech in his newsreading days, he would have got letters.

Still, Kirstie's collection did seem a viable topic for conversation. He couldn't spend the entire evening quoting ‘by way of contrast' lines at her. And the brief forays they'd made over dinner into popular culture had not been encouraging. She knew the names of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, but only as a shorthand for a state of embarrassing geriatricity. And her own musical favourites were equally unfamiliar to Bill. In fact, only the context made him realise that she actually had been talking about musicians. The names of the acts could otherwise have been mathematical formulae, firms of estate agents or skin infections.

And there had been an awful moment when he had managed to flood Kirstie's face with bewildered disbelief by asking her how often she went to discos. By the time he'd realised that the right word was ‘club', he'd decided that music was probably a good subject to keep away from.

The cinema had proved over dinner to be an area of similar mutual incomprehension. Bill enjoyed films, but chose what he went to with care. He always based his decision on reviews by critics whom he respected. Whereas Kirstie appeared to be influenced only by a film's pre-release hype. As a result, her cinema diet consisted of worthless comedies with pretty boys in them, failed attempts to launch the Hollywood careers of American sitcom stars, mindless blockbusters full of special effects and – worst of all – inevitably inferior remakes of movies which had been perfect the first time round. Though he'd never seen any such films, Bill Stratton knew them all to be meretricious rubbish. He decided to keep off cinema as a subject for discussion.

So, though Kirstie's collection of china figurines may have been inspired by cartoon films, they still provided an innocuous topic. Chiefly because Bill had no opinion about them at all (except the vague conviction that they were rather hideous), and because Kirstie seemed prepared to go on about them at great length. Until that evening, he had not known that a world of collectibles existed, nor the passion and energy that a true
aficionada
could invest in trawling endless websites for the vital piece of china that would complete a set.

So he dozily sipped his wine, and issued the occasional sympathetic grunt when she explained the difficulties of tracking down
Beauty and the Beast
busts, the ‘Limited Edition of Cinderella's Dress', or a ‘Holiday Goofy with Cello Ornament'.

This conversation – or rather, monologue – only lasted the duration of one glass of wine, but it felt longer. Then, deciding that he'd misinterpreted Kirstie's intentions for the rest of the night, Bill took an elaborate look at his watch, yawned and said, ‘Well, perhaps I'd better be off.'

But then she threw him totally by asking, in a slightly disappointed tone, ‘Aren't we going to go to bed together?'

‘Well, yes, all right.' As he said the words, Bill realised they could have sounded a little more gracious or enthusiastic. Nor did he feel the situation was entirely retrieved by his adding, ‘If you like.

Still, his clumsy response didn't appear to worry Kirstie. ‘I'll get the wine bottle. You go through to the bedroom.'

She was a long time getting the wine bottle. Maybe she was also making some intimate feminine preparations in one of the flat's bathrooms. Bill sat gingerly on the edge of the bed, wondering whether he was expected to start taking his clothes off. He decided against the idea, unwilling to expose his ageing body earlier than was strictly necessary. There were rather more lights on than he might have wished.

Feeling something of a prat, he just looked around the room, which was a shrine to
Bambi, Beauty and the Beast
and
Winnie the Pooh.
This last collection was displayed on a shelf above Kirstie's double bed. To Bill, who'd grown up with them, E.H. Shepherd's original illustrations were sacrosanct, and the crude Disney versions of the characters were as great an aesthetic affront as
The New English Bible
had been to
The Authorised Version.
But that was another opinion ideally not to be shared with Kirstie.

As he waited in this Temple of Disneyana, Bill didn't really feel lust. Just curiosity.

When Kirstie returned and kissed him gently on the lips, she smelt of fresh perfume and tasted of toothpaste, proving that she had indeed titivated herself up for him. He wondered with mild anxiety what, after the evening's drinking and the Italian food, his own breath smelt like.

Still, he couldn't bother about that. There was kissing to be done. And Kirstie did seem extremely keen on kissing. As their bodies stretched out together on the bed, lust returned, and a bit of fumbling with clothes began.

Kirstie drew apart from him. ‘We'll be more comfortable in bed,' she announced practically. And then, thank the Lord, she switched off the overhead lights.

Bill stayed seated to remove his shoes and socks. He had reached the time of life when perfect balance could not always be guaranteed, particularly after an evening of wine. Already uncomfortably aware of his age, he didn't want to compound the stereotype by falling over.