The Penultimate Chance Saloon (2 page)

Bill had always been more cynical about such matters, but he didn't share his opinions with his wife. The world needed people with her attitude, and was a better place with Andrea in it. No point in making her question the foundations of her positive approach.

Between husband and wife there was, at bottom, an ideological divide. Andrea had always believed the world was improvable. Bill had never really thought that. The world, he knew, was an irredeemable mess, and it was down to the individual – or at least to Bill Stratton – to make the best out of that depressing situation.

His rationalisation of the differences between them came in the wake of Andrea's leaving him. That shock prompted a lot of rationalisation. Though Bill Stratton's nature was not given to introspection, in the stunned weeks after her departure he indulged in more self-analysis than he had in the rest of his lifetime.

He tried to work out what had gone wrong. More than that, he tried to work out why he hadn't noticed that anything had gone wrong. There must have been signs of Andrea's discontent. And yet, if her disillusionment dated from as early in the marriage as she claimed, he had probably interpreted those signs simply as expressions of her personality. Yes, she was grumpy at times. So was he. Everyone was grumpy at times. Yes, she sometimes snapped at him. Ditto.

Then why had it gone wrong? Soul-searching was an unfamiliar exercise to Bill Stratton, and he found it intriguing as well as painful. He was also suitably modest about his soul-searching potential. The world, he knew, was full of people with souls as deep as the deepest oceans, whose exploration required the services of an emotional bathysphere. He reckoned for searching his own soul a shrimping net would probably be adequate.

He tried to identify where in the marriage he might have been at fault ... apart from just by being shallow. Shallowness was in his nature – he couldn't do much about that – but he liked to think he had shown a proper interest in Andrea's more serious pursuits. He had listened at great length and with apparent attention to bulletins about the fluctuating health of her patients. He had nodded sympathetically and continuously when she and her friends had bewailed the shortcomings of the National Health Service and their line managers.

He didn't think he'd imposed his own wishes too forcibly on his wife. Granted, in the early years of their marriage, he had been perhaps a little too assertive in the matter of holidays. His idea of bliss – an uneducated idea, he subsequently came to recognise – was a hotel on a Mediterranean shore with easy access to swimming pools, bars and restaurants. Only after three such holidays had Andrea made clear to him that she didn't enjoy spending time in ‘tourist traps, which gave an unreal and completely sanitised impression of what the life of the country was really like.'

To give himself his due, Bill had responded. From then on, he'd allowed Andrea to select their holiday destinations and, in the cause of avoiding ‘tourist traps', had suffered diarrhoea in most countries of the Third World. He had expressed appropriate interest in herbal remedies, mud baths and rebirthing rituals. As a result, though he'd felt intermittently virtuous, he'd never had much fun on holidays. But he had always thought he was behaving rather well as a husband, letting his own wishes be subservient to those of his wife.

In fact, he would have said he'd done that in most areas of their marriage. But evidently he hadn't done so enough to satisfy Andrea. He tried to think what other deficiencies he had as a human being. And he could only really come up with two major ones.

First, he had never been very pro-active; he rarely made things happen but was always quite happy for them to happen to him.

And, second, Bill Stratton suffered from that commonest and most debilitating of human failings – the desire to be liked.

Inevitably, as he trawled the shallows of his soul during this post-break-up period, sex arose, a huge bristling obvious lobster amidst the surrounding transparency of shrimps. Sex, Bill Stratton knew, from reading such unimpeachable authorities as the
Daily Mail,
was what made and broke marriages.

Well, he'd thought their sex life had been all right. Maybe more vigorous and frequent in the early years, but that was only to be expected. The attraction seemed to remain, and impotence was rare and usually alcohol-induced. They certainly weren't one of those couples from the
Daily Mail,
whose ‘marriage was a sham' or ‘a marriage only in name'. Even when they reached fifty, Bill and Andrea Stratton still made love a couple of times a week, and it was fine. Absolutely fine. Though if Bill had been asked the next morning whether they had made love or not the night before, he might have had to think about it.

Granted ... the frequency of intercourse had rather dropped off in their early fifties, but that was due to the menopause. At least, Andrea said it was due to the menopause and, like most men, Bill Stratton was too squeamish to ask for further details.

Being an only child, he had grown up in a house where his mother was the only woman, and the idea of her discussing the mystery of women's bodies with him had been unthinkable. The idea of his father discussing the subject with him was even more far-fetched, and the idea of his father discussing such matters with his mother was beyond the scope of conjecture.

As a result, the two ‘m's – menstruation and menopause – had remained unmentioned in the Stratton household. In common with most children, to the young Bill the idea of his parents having an active sex life was distastefully unimaginable. When he was sixteen, at the time of maximum hormonal confusion, the idea of people of thirty having an active sex life was unimaginable (almost as unimaginable then as the idea of he himself ever getting to the point of having a sex life).

But Bill Stratton's adolescent gleanings of incomplete information had left him with the firm conviction that the menopause definitely closed the lid down on all that stuff. If grown-ups hadn't had the decency to stop having sex before, at least the menopause would put a permanent end to their little games. Post-menopausal women would become little old ladies, like his grandmothers.

Better information gathered through his life should have dissipated this illusion. The media – particularly the
Daily Mail
– were increasingly loaded with over-frank testimonials from mature women about their continuing and flowering sexuality – but Bill was never quite convinced. The primitive beliefs of his childhood had left their imprint on his thinking. His image of the menopause remained as a big, dark, heavy shutter.

As a result, when Andrea told him the menopause had caused her to lose interest in sex, he was disappointed, but not surprised. And, to his mind rather nobly, he did not force his attentions on her. His libido was not as rampant as it had been, and, wistfully, he tried to reconcile himself to the fact that that part of his life might be over.

He was therefore not a little upset when Andrea told him the real reason she had stopped having sex with him was nothing to do with her time of life. That, rather than diminishing it, the menopause had increased her enjoyment of sex.

Sex with someone else.

He was called Dewi, which to Bill seemed only to add insult to injury. If he was going to have a love rival, at least he could have been granted one with a less silly name.

But he had to admit that her new man's profile was perfect for Andrea. A doctor throughout his career, Dewi Roberts had resisted the attractions of even the minimum of private work and devoted all of his professional life to the NHS. He had also volunteered much of his spare time for committee work, and had travelled extensively taking medical help to the world's impoverished peoples. Dewi was so worthy he made Bill want to puke.

Nor could this paragon be criticised for the seduction and abduction of Andrea. Dewi was not betraying anyone, his wife having died of emphysema five years before their meeting, leaving him with three children, all of whom were at university studying worthy subjects. He was devoted to his offspring, and, though he and Andrea were mutually in love, had insisted for a long time that it would ‘be better' if they stopped seeing each other. Dewi didn't want to have the break-up of her marriage on his conscience.

It was then, Andrea related to Bill with perhaps excessive glee, that she had told Dewi her relationship with her husband was ‘a sham' and ‘a marriage only in name'. Now she had met the right person, all she wanted to do was to divorce Bill and ‘make up for lost time'. She also wanted to ‘get to know' Dewi's children and ‘build up a relationship with the next generation that had been denied to her throughout her unfulfilled marriage'.

Andrea's logic and determination were difficult to argue with, and Bill didn't try that hard. When she was that clear about what she wanted to do, he knew from experience that there was little point in trying to dissuade her.

So, unwillingly but with as much good grace as he could muster, he bit the bullet and agreed to the divorce. Andrea said that was ‘the best present he had ever given her', a phrase that did not fill him with delight. And she wasted no time in walking back from the altar as the new Mrs Roberts.

So there Bill Stratton was, very nearly sixty, and no longer married. And, despite having had a continuous supply for nearly forty years, he had very little experience of sex. One premarital fumble with someone else, and then wall-to-wall Andrea. He knew that men tended to be more numerical than women about such things, but he couldn't help counting. At the end of his marriage, Bill Stratton's score of women made love to was ... two. Well, no, thinking back to that premarital fumble, to be accurate it was one and a half Actually, to be
generous
, it was one and a half.

And he had no idea whether, at the end of his life, that would be ‘Latest Score' or ‘Result'. But he'd be interested to find out.

During the period of the break-up and divorce Bill Stratton had felt many emotions, most of them new, and most of them unpleasant. The one he hadn't felt at any time, though, was guilt.

... and, by way of contrast,

a Mr Ablethorpe of North Yorkshire

has named his dog 'Mrs Ablethorpe',

saying, ‘It's been a darned sight more

comfort to me that my wife ever was.'

Married friends of a marriage have to be very even-handed. Conversations between couples in cars leaving after evenings spent with the marriage may be more honest, but in its presence the illusion has to be maintained that both members of each couple like each other equally When a marriage falls apart, that convention also breaks down. That's when you really find out who your friends are.

You also lose a lot of friends. Couples herd together in their detached pens like sheep, disproportionately paranoid at the idea of lone wolves prowling. A woman who, in the company of her husband at a dinner party, was cancelled out and anonymous, becomes, having shed the marital encumbrance, a potent threat to the integrity of coupledom. After one token invitation to show sympathy, she is quickly excised from the couples' dinner party list.

A recently unshackled man fares better. He gets invited out more, though not so much by the couples he used to visit with his former wife. Invitations arrive from people he didn't think he knew.

An unattached man in an urban area is like an expanding ladder or a petrol-driven garden strimmer – sooner or later everyone's going to want to borrow it.

In the fall-out of Bill and Andrea Stratton's marriage, the division of friends was predictable, working out pretty much on career lines. Those with medical connections gravitated automatically to the new Mr and Mrs Roberts. As a conversationalist, Dewi could add so much more than Bill's sympathetic nodding. He could actually contribute his own experiences of the National Health Service's shortcomings, and whinge along with the best of them.

As for Bill, he found himself still in touch with most of his media connections. This suited him well. Gossip of journalism and show business seemed incontestably more interesting than maundering on about the Trust status of hospitals, and he was genuinely amazed when, in one of her tirades building up to the split, Andrea had announced how bored she had been at endless evenings of D-List celebrity trivia'. Could she really be serious?

So Bill still had his professional circuit of friends. His social life with them involved less dinner parties, more meeting at public events, launches, awards ceremonies and so on. Conversations with such people rarely rose above amiable banter, which suited Bill extremely well. And he had a few closer friendships with a variety of individuals, whom he would meet intermittently for lunch. Andrea's social life – and, by extension, his while they were still married – had been more to do with seeing the same small circle of friends time and time again.

Bill's was also less couple-oriented ... particularly because the coupling and uncoupling amongst his media associates was more frequent than it had been with Andrea's NHS friends. Bill's divorce made little impression on his group of casual acquaintances. Few of them had been aware that he'd ever been married.

The one person with whom he was surprised to find himself still in touch was Ginnie Fairbrother. Although she worked in the theatre, he had always thought of Ginnie as Andrea's friend. That went back a long way. The two girls had known each other at boarding school and, even through the wide divergence of their careers, had stayed in touch. Andrea had gone to nursing college, Ginnie to drama school.

When Bill had become a permanent part of Andrea's life, Ginnie had become an intermittent ingredient in his. She would disappear for long periods, months away touring, filming or enjoying increasingly high-profile love affairs, but she'd always come back to share her experiences over the pine kitchen table of the Stratton's Putney home.