The Penultimate Chance Saloon (7 page)

‘Oh, you may think that, but you haven't. I read in this book,
The Relationship Amoeba: Splitting and Starting a New Life
, that to get over a divorce, it takes a month for each year that you were married.'

‘Maybe I'm one of the lucky ones, who gets off more lightly than that.'

‘I do worry about you, Bill.'

‘That's very kind of you, and it's much appreciated. But it's not necessary.'

He grinned across at his agent. Sal Juster was small, with short dark hair, and rather endearingly stained teeth from the cigarettes she kept giving up and going back to again. Her navy-blue eyes were surrounded by wrinkles of permanent anxiety. She wasn't just anxious for herself, she was anxious for everyone else, and particularly for her clients. Her role in life was as a Little Miss Fixit. If she saw something was wrong with the circumstances of one of her friends, then her God-given mission was to sort it out. The trouble was that her friends were often totally unaware of the problems that she set out to fix for them.

Still, Bill appreciated her as a good agent and a pleasant lunch companion. She didn't look as old as the sixty years which mere mathematics dictated she must have lived. And she never talked of retirement; ‘Agents don't retire,' she said. Her make-up was heavy, with punctiliously defined lips and eyebrows. She was full-breasted, and would probably have been plumper but for the ever-changing regimes of dieting and exercise to which she subjected her body.

Her emotional life had been chequered – indeed positively tartan – and she changed partners as frequently as she changed belief systems. Given her history of relationship disasters, she remained surprisingly optimistic. Just as she continuously believed she would one day find the perfect lifestyle, so she was certain she would eventually find the perfect man (or woman – she'd tried both).

In spite of her moments of sheer loopiness, Bill liked Sal, and in his newly-awoken state, found himself wondering what it would be like to go to bed with her. Interesting, certainly – he felt sure she'd put as much research into sexual technique as she had to all other aspects of her life. No, the sex would be fun. What might not be quite so much fun would be the inevitable deconstruction of the act afterwards. And the quotations from all the books she would have read on the subject.

‘I still don't believe you,' Sal went on. ‘You must be bottling up a lot of resentment.'

‘Why?'

All those years with Andrea. “The corrosion of continuity.'”

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘It's a quotation from a book called
Throttling the Individual: An Analysis of Marriage.
It says how destructive living with someone totally unsuitable for you can be.'

‘You're saying Andrea was totally unsuitable for me?'

‘Always. Totally.'

Another to add to the list of gloomy commentators on
his
marriage. If they all thought that, why had none of them said
anything
before? He suspected there might be an element of hindsight here He knew the divorce had polarised his and Andrea's friends. Those who had decided to join his faction perhaps felt they needed to be extravagantly anti-her. And possibly, gathered round a sizzling nut cutlet in the Roberts household in Muswell Hill, Andrea and Dewi's friends were equally dismissive of Bill Stratton.

‘Yes, well, if you don't mind, Sal, I'd quite like to move off the subject of my marriage. When I arrived here today, I was feeling quite good about it, had come to terms with the situation, but now –' ‘Ah, no, you only
think
you've come to terms with the situation. There's a very good bit on that in this book
Front-Loading: Tht Masks We Make for
–'

He raised both hands in supplication. ‘Please. Could we just talk about anything other than my marriage?'

‘Like what?'

‘Well, why not my so-called “career”? You are my agent, after all.'

‘Yes...' Sal hesitated for a moment, unwilling to give up the opportunity of sorting out Bill's post-divorce trauma, but decided she could always come back to that. All right, I did want to talk to you about work, anyway. I think the moment has come for us to get pro-active.'

‘Oh?'

‘Now you no longer have Andrea holding you back, it's time for us to maximise your earning potential.'

‘Just a minute. I wasn't aware that Andrea ever “held me back”.'

‘Of course she did. She disapproved of you capitalising on your commercial appeal.'

‘She never said that.'

‘She didn't have to say anything. She'd just wrinkle her nose at the idea of you being paid for opening supermarkets or handing out prizes at awards ceremonies.'

When he thought about it, Bill realised that Sal was probably right. Andrea had always been dismissive of celebrities ‘prostituting themselves', and she had been pretty sniffy about the personal appearances - or ‘PAs', as they were known in the business – that he had done. The further he got away from the marriage, the more he could sympathise with the outsiders' views of it. Andrea and he really had had very little in common.

‘She thought that stuff was beneath you, Bill.'

‘Maybe.'

‘But you don't, do you?'

‘God, no. I might question the sanity of someone who'd be prepared to pay me for doing that kind of stuff, but I have no reservations about doing it.'

‘Good. I'll do some ringing round. Lots of people always looking for PAs – any name from the television, doesn't matter who it is.' Bill had known this reality for so long that it had no power to wound him. ‘And I really do think it's time you were launched on the after- dinner speaking circuit. You always used to say your evenings were sacrosanct, you liked spending them with Andrea ...'

‘Yes.'

‘Though from various other things you said, I gather she was out most evenings doing health service committee work and what- have-you ...'

Once again, Sal had come very close to the truth. There had certainly been more busy evenings for Andrea towards the end of I the marriage. Idly, Bill wondered whether they had been genuine health service committees, or ‘what-have-you' cover-ups for evenings spent with Dewi. Presumably the affair had started with clandestine, snatched moments and paroxysms of guilt. Bill wondered how much the knowledge would have worried him if he'd been aware at the time. It certainly didn't worry him now. He seemed to be coming round to the consensus view, that the only thing remarkable about his marriage was that it had lasted as long as it did.

‘Anyway, now you don't have that problem, I can really start building up the after-dinner bookings for you.'

‘Whoa, whoa, Sal, just a minute. One thing you're forgetting is that I've never done an after-dinner speech in my life.'

Not technically, but for heaven's sake, you've spent
your
entire professional life talking in public.'

‘Reading
in public. Big difference.'

‘No, it's not. For an after-dinner speech, you just learn what you would otherwise have read. Easy-peasy.'

‘But people who do after-dinner speaking are usually people who've done something with their lives. So they have something to talk about.'

‘A lot of them have never done anything. They're just people who the audience recognises from the television, who stand up, drop a few names, and tell a few jokes. You fit the profile perfectly.'

‘Thank you. I would point out, though, that I don't know any jokes.'

‘Bill, you have the biggest archive of jokes of anyone I know. ‘How do you mean?'

Are you being deliberately dense? BWOC'

‘Oh.'

What is BWOC but an infinite resource of funny stories?'

‘I suppose you're right. I'd never thought of using it in that

way.'

‘Really, Bill. You have the commercial instinct of a frozen pea Of course you can use it. All tried and tested lines –'

And all – however unlikely they sound – genuine news stories.'

‘Exactly. They're perfect. Combining humour and journalistic integrity – what a formula. They'd go down a storm on the after-dinner circuit. And also, the great thing is, that's what the audience expects of you. They see your name and they immediately think “by way of contrast”. The fact that you then tell a stream of “by way of contrast” stories is exactly what they want from you.'

‘Hmm...' He was rather coming round to the idea.

‘Tell you what. I'll make one booking for you some time in the next few weeks, just as a try-out. You knock together twenty minutes of BWOC stories – or get Carolyn to do it for you – and we'll give it a go.'

Well ...'

‘If you're really scared, I'll come and hold your hand for the first one.'

‘I might be glad of that. By the way, Sal, can I ask ... what sort of money would we be talking for doing this stuff?'

She told him. It seemed a ridiculously large amount. ‘But then of course, as you get better known, we can ask for quite a lot more.'

The waitress offered him more chilli sauce on his Iskender Kebab, and he accepted. But it wasn't the spiciness that brought a glitter to Bill Stratton's eye. It was the feeling of a new life – or perhaps a whole number of new lives opening up in front of him.

‘Ooh, another thing, Bill...'

‘Mmm?'

‘Could you come to dinner on Saturday?'

‘Dinner? Where?'

‘My place.'

Though he'd know Sal for more than ten years, they'd always met at lunchtimes, in the anonymity of restaurants. To be invited to his agent's home for an evening was another new departure.

Sal seemed to read his thoughts. ‘I never invited you before, because of Andrea.'

‘What was so wrong with Andrea?' But it was a token protest; rather than leaping, he was shuffling to his ex-wife's defence.

‘You
know.
She was just so worthy. She'd make me and my friends feel unworthy about being obsessed by the media. She'd make us all feel guilty.'

Bill pondered this. Maybe that was what Andrea had done ill through their marriage, made him feel guilty ... Made him feel guilty for what, though? Back to his being shallow, he supposed. He hadn't been aware of feeling guilty during the marriage, but distance was certainly giving him a new perspective.

He also began to wonder why Sal had issued this sudden invitation. Had she interests in him beyond the purely professional? Had she found some book in the ‘Mind, Body and Spirit' section about mixing business with pleasure?

But the notion was dispelled by her next words. ‘It's a dinner party I'm giving on Saturday night. Got odd numbers.'

‘And I can even them up?'

‘Yes,' she replied with disarming frankness. ‘You see, Bill, you have now become something even more useful than a Swiss Army Knife.'

‘A spare man?'

‘Exactly.' She smiled smugly at him. ‘I'm going to use you shamelessly.'

‘Oh.'

‘Dinner parties, meals out, theatre, cinema ... you can be my tame companion.'

‘How do you know I'd be tame?'

Because I know you, Bill.'

Fair enough. She was probably right.

‘You can be my front.'

‘Front for what?'

‘Front to stop people asking me if I'm in a relationship or not.'

And are you in a relationship? Or not?'

The wrinkles between the navy-blue eyes deepened at the difficulty of the question. ‘Oh, these things are so difficult to be specific about, Bill. There's a very good chapter on “The Definition of Twoness” in a book called
What We Mean When We Say What We Mean ...
'

And so the lunch continued.

... and, by way of contrast,

a matchmaker in New York gave up

the business after one of his clients

went off with his wife.

Sal Juster's flat was in a mansion block in Maida Vale, a surprisingly spacious set of interconnecting rooms that seemed to go on for ever. Because he was making his first visit there, Bill Stratton was unaware how frequently the positioning of the flat s furniture was changed, according to Sal's latest readings of
feng shui
or other lifestyle advocacies.

What he saw, however, looked very opulent. He didn't flatter himself that Sal could afford such luxury on fifteen per cent of his earnings, but he knew she had many other higher profile, and therefore more lucrative, clients.

To his surprise, he'd felt quite nervous at the prospect of the evening, marking as it did a change from the purely professional relationship he'd hitherto enjoyed with Sal. Though not an excessive drinker, he had fortified himself with a couple of large scotches in Pimlico, and Sal's introductions over welcoming champagne went by in something of a haze.

There were three couples there. Two were married, but even the unmarried set carried that unmistakable air of coupledom about them. One pairing was clearly second time around for the man. The wife had to be twenty years younger, and there was much talk of children. In the husband's old eyes, pride in his trophy wife had long since given way to sheer horror at the thought of going through small children and school fees again.

To Bill's surprise, there was also a guest who had a distinctly proprietorial attitude to Sal. Had he not announced the fact to everyone, his grey straggling ponytail would have proclaimed him to be something in the music business. He spoke dated black slang in an accent from which he had not totally managed to eradicate his public school education. He announced that he was called Eli, but the challenging way he did so suggested that it probably wasn't the name he had been christened with. From what was said during the evening, his relationship with Sal was relatively new. And, Bill suspected, unlikely to get very old.