The Penultimate Chance Saloon (16 page)

He couldn't remember what that night's particular charity was; something to do with a heart scanner or a new hospital wing for sick babies. He took a perverse pleasure in not knowing the details. Being of a medical nature, it was one of the few such events at which Andrea might have joined him ... had they, of course, still been married. Except, of course, had they still been married, he wouldn't have embarked on his career in after-dinner speaking, so he wouldn't actually have been invited to .... Such speculation was pointless.

Anyway, rather than Andrea, he met Leigh. She was tiny and vivacious, with that combination of very black hair, lightly freckled skin and pale blue eyes that ought to be Irish, though in her case apparently wasn't. She wore a trouser suit that looked black until the light caught it and made it shimmer with dark green.

The first thing that distinguished her from his other women was that she had not come to the function alone. Seated next to Bill on the top table at the dinner, she introduced him to a broad bald man with glasses on her right, who seemed to have been melted down and poured into a rigid dinner suit. Bill couldn't remember the man's exact name, but it was in the Keith/Derek/Alan range. Anyway, throughout the dinner, Keith/Derek/Alan seemed surplus to Leigh's requirements. She spent the whole meal listening to Bill, laughing appropriately at his well-remembered ‘by way of contrast' lines. She laughed too as the BWOC routine was wheeled out during the actual speech, but when he sat down to his customary flurry of applause, she said, ‘You don't give much of yourself away, do you?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Lots of second-hand funny lines, nothing about the real Bill Stratton.'

‘All the punters want is a laugh. They haven't come here to hear about the real Bill Stratton. Which is just as well, because the real Bill Stratton is not particularly interesting.'

‘Difficult to know, since you won't reveal anything about him. I would have thought ...'

Her words trickled away at an admonitory look from the event's chairman, who was about to start the evening's Auction of Promises.

In a much lower voice, she murmured, ‘Let's go and have a drink at the bar.'

‘Well ...' Although he didn't have any role that evening as auctioneer, award-presenter or raffle-ticket-picker, slipping away straight after his speech was on the margins of bad form. And slipping away with a woman might cause more sniggering in Sal's post-mortem with the organisers.

But what the hell! Leigh was very attractive and ... what the hell?

The bar was empty, except for a lethargic young man who hadn't been expecting anyone until the proceedings in the dining room had finished, but still served them with reasonably good grace. Leigh opted for a malt whisky and Bill went along with the same.

‘So why is the real Bill Stratton boring?' she asked, once they were ensconced in a plushly upholstered alcove.

‘Well, I'm just ... you heard what the guy who introduced me said. I've had a fairly easy ride in career terms – and in a career that has a disproportionately high public profile – but that doesn't make me interesting.'

‘The guy who introduced you just chronicled the list of television companies who'd employed you and the different times at which you had read the news.'

‘What's wrong with that? There's nothing more to say.'

‘He didn't say anything about the
kind
of person you are.' ‘That's not his job. No one's here's interested in that stuff.'

‘I am.'

‘Oh.'

‘So come on then ... let's get the basics. Are you married?'

‘Divorced.'

‘How long ago?'

‘Coming up for a year.'

‘Children?'

‘No.'

‘On good terms with ex-wife?'

‘Not adversarial. Hardly ever see her. She remarried.'

‘Was her new husband the cause of the break-up?'

‘Yes, I suppose he was. Though, from what Andrea says about the situation ...' No, no, no need to confide that stuff. Not important.

‘Actually, there was a very good “by way of contrast” line about a divorced woman in Caracas who –'

‘I don't want to hear any more of those “by way of contrast” lines. I want to hear about you.'

And she did. To his amazement, Bill found himself telling her more than he'd told almost anyone. Andrea obviously knew greater detail, but she had received the information in a trickle effect through many years of marriage. He had never talked about himself for such a sustained period. He kept trying to divert the conversation on to Leigh and her life. He reciprocated her questions about marriages, divorces and children, but the answers didn't come. Leigh wasn't deliberately evasive; she just always asked for some other detail about his life that he couldn't resist responding to.

The Auction of Promises and subsequent money-sponging events came to an end, and the other guests drifted through into the bar, but Bill was hardly aware of them. He was caught up in Leigh's interrogation and in the translucent beam of her pale blue eyes.

At one point, a rather anxious-looking Keith/Derek/Alan broke into the aura of their conversation. ‘Leigh, I was thinking maybe it was time to be going –'

‘Fine.'

She gave no signs of moving. Keith/Derek/Alan stood loitering like a man outside a sex shop. ‘Well, erm ...' he said after a time. ‘Are you coming with me?'

‘No.' It wasn't said with any edge or vindictiveness, just as a statement of fact.

‘Ah.' The idea took a while to percolate through into Keith/ Derek/Alan's understanding. ‘Right. Well, I'll be off then.' He made two bold steps towards the door, then reassumed his loitering posture. ‘So I'll call you, shall I?'

‘Wouldn't bother.'

Though this was spoken as charmingly as Leigh's previous response, this time Keith/Derek/Alan was quicker to get the message. With a vainglorious ‘Cheerio then', he strode off through the bar.

‘A long-term relationship?' asked Bill.

‘Couple of months. Never going to go the distance. He was boring. Should have recognised it earlier. Not enough time left to waste on non-starters.'

‘How do you recognise a “non-starter”?' He was fishing, trying to gauge her reaction to him.

‘That's the problem. When you start out, you don't know they're going to be non-starters ... otherwise you wouldn't have started out, would you?'

He nodded, assimilating the logic of her words. ‘So have you ever met anyone who wasn't a non-starter?'

‘Given the fact that I am unmarried and not currently in a long-term relationship, the answer has to be no.'

That was more information than she'd given him all evening. Not currently in a long-term relationship. But maybe, five minutes before, she had been in a long-term relationship with Keith/Derek/ Alan? Did two months count as long-term?

‘But presumably you're still looking for Mr. Right?'

‘Mr Right was a concept I grew out of in my teens. The most I aspire to is Mr Right For The Time Being. And what I usually end up with is Mr Right For This Brief Moment ... shortly to be re-identified as Mr Totally And Utterly Wrong.'

‘Ah.'

‘Still, one of the very few benefits I've found in getting old is that I have lowered expectations and I'm quicker to cut and run. If something doesn't work, I no longer feel any obligation to hang around and make it work. And I wish a lot of women had caught on to that idea a good deal earlier in their lives. I wish I had, come to that. God, the time I've wasted trying to turn men into something for which they never had the basic aptitude. But now I recognise the great truth, summed up by some country and western singer: “Shoes don't stretch and men don't change.'”

‘Does that mean you're anti-men, Leigh?'

‘No, I still like them. I just don't expect much of them. That way, I am less often disappointed.'

‘But you still go out with men?'

‘Oh yes. But if there's no empathy there ... or if the sex isn't any good ... then I only do it the once.'

‘Just like a man.'

‘Yeah. Just like a man.'

The crowd of guests, their wallets emptied by an evening of charity, was beginning to thin. A few glanced towards the cocooned couple in the alcove. More sniggering to Sal on the phone, Bill thought mildly. Still, let's hope we can give them something to snigger about.

‘They'll be closing the bar soon,' he said casually. ‘Maybe we should continue our conversation up in my room?'

The pale blue eyes looked at him sceptically. ‘So that you can make a clumsy pass at me?'

‘No, no, I promise. I don't make clumsy passes. If we were both up in the bedroom ... and if we discussed sex ... and if we agreed we both wanted to ... well ...' He shrugged, in a manner that he hoped was eloquent.

‘Hmm,' she said, after a silence. ‘That sounds like a reasonably good system.'

‘Well, it makes things kind of mutual, doesn't it?'

‘Yes.'

‘Consensual.'

‘What a good word that is, Bill. Life-saver for men, isn't it? Makes them feel better about coming on to women.'

‘I don't
come on
to women.'

‘No? What've you been doing tonight?'

‘We've been talking.'

‘Mmm.' She nodded thoughtfully ‘Well, look, let's have the sex- or-no-sex discussion right here, rather than going up to your room.'

‘Fine by me. Well, I do find you very attractive –'

She smiled, and looked at him. ‘You're not without your attractions either.'

‘We're both grown-up people –'

‘And how. Neither of us will see sixty again.'

‘So...?'

‘So ...' There was a very long silence. Bill was aware of the clatter of glasses being tidied up. ‘So ... no. We don't go and make love tonight.'

‘Oh.' He wanted to ask why, but didn't.

‘But ... if you want to meet again ...' She handed him a card. ‘There's my number.'

Then Leigh leant across, kissed his cheek and, before Bill had time to reciprocate, was on her way across the bar to the exit, in a glimmering of dark green.

* * *

This was different. Bill recognised the change. If he rang Leigh, he would be entering the arena of ‘dating'. The other women he'd picked up on his after-dinner speaking jaunts had not been ‘dates' – they'd been the products of opportunism. But, by refusing the invitation up to his room, Leigh had immediately put herself into a different scenario. And Bill was not sure that it was a scenario of which he wished to be part.

Asking someone out for a ‘date' involved forward planning. The datee had to be contacted and, if she was agreeable, a mutually acceptable day and rendezvous then had to be arrived at. All of this seemed to Bill a rather stressful amount of organisation. To his surprise, the prospect also made him feel rather nervous. So many years had elapsed since he had last ‘asked someone out' that he had forgotten the volatile panics that attended such bold gestures. In a hotel bar, emboldened by alcohol and isolation, he could be glibly confident, but the formal business of picking up a phone and asking Leigh to ‘go out with him' took him straight back to the jitteriness of adolescence.

Also, going on a date' did seem terribly public. In the varied groups of businessmen, sportsmen and charity supporters amongst whom he usually strutted his after-dinner speaking stuff, there was never anyone he knew. And, although the organisers might snigger to Sal about the women he went off with, she didn't know any of the individuals involved. But if he invited Leigh out, it would have to be to a decent restaurant, where he might well be seen by someone he knew. And the news would soon get around. Bill Stratton would be seen to be dating again for the first time since his divorce. This fact, for some reason, made him feel under a lot of pressure. He wasn't really worried about the press – by now he was too far down the alphabet of lists to be of much interest to them. Unless, of course, Leigh were famous in her own right...

He realised, with a little shock, that he had no idea whether she was or not. In fact, he knew nothing about her, just about her attitude to men. But he did want to know more. The deeper worry he had about ‘going out with someone' was the fear of being defined by the person he was with. He remembered the feeling from the very early stage of his relationship with Andrea. Most of the time they had got on fine, but he recalled occasions when she had annoyed him – particularly by something she said in company – and he had wanted to disown her. He had wanted to say, No, she's not with me. I have an identity that is separate from hers. I'm not like she is. The feeling was one which, as they settled into the routine of marriage, soon dissipated, and he had completely forgotten about it until the prospect came of his being seen in public with a woman again. (Strangely, no such worries assailed him when he was with Ginnie or Sal or Carolyn. But then he'd known them and often been seen out with them while he was still married. The divorce hadn't changed anything so far as those three relationships were concerned ... or at least the public perception was that nothing had changed so far as those three relationships were concerned.)

He did find he was thinking a lot about Leigh, though. He wouldn't have dignified his feelings with the description of ‘love', but he was certainly interested. He wondered for a moment whether that was simply because she had said no to him. Though not a great expert on the psychological advice doled out in women's magazines, he did know about the recommended principle of ‘playing hard to get'. Saying no to a man was supposed to be the sure-fire way to stimulate his interest.

But other women had said no to Bill. He had gone down his after-dinner conversation route a good few times without a result. When the suggestion of adjourning up to his hotel room had arisen, there had been some who'd turned down the rich gift on offer. And, except for a mild immediate tug of frustration, he had felt and thought little more about them. But he did keep thinking about Leigh. He was going to have to ring her.