The Penultimate Chance Saloon Read online

  ‘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.

  Chapter Six

  ... 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.

  Then there was Maria. Though normally good with names, the Scotch or his nervousness made it hard for Bill to fix the identities of the other guests. He remembered all the names he’d been given on introduction, but he couldn’t be precise about which was attached to which guest. With Maria, though, he had no problems.

  She was a short – what his mother would have called ‘petite’ – woman with sparkling brown eyes in a face Oil-of-Olayed into a fine sheen and then cunningly touched with make-up. Her skin was tanned from a recent visit to somewhere more exotic than the British Isles, but was taut, without that crumpled look sun-browning can give to an older woman. Her body was thin, but her breasts full, with an endearing crinkle of flesh between them. She wore a light silk print dress and high heels which flattered her slender legs. There was a lot of gold jewellery, which didn’t include a wedding ring.

  She had worked in PR – or maybe still did work in PR Bill hadn’t quite got that clear. Maybe he hadn’t been concentrating, or maybe Maria had deliberately left such details obscure.

  Obviously she recognised him as Bill Stratton from the television. Everyone over a certain age did. And within minutes of meeting, she had mentioned his ‘by way of contrast’ catchphrase. Again, everyone over a certain age did.

  This prompted him to tell her a few choice gems from the BWOC collection. They were mostly lines he had trotted out on chat- shows when promoting the books, but he was surprised how well he remembered them. Maybe Sal’s idea of his converting them into after-dinner speaking material wasn’t so daft after all.

  Maria didn’t seem to know the other guests very well, though she had the social skills demanded by her profession, and could clearly maintain a conversation with anyone about anything. But in fact she spent most of the pre-dinner drinks being amused by Bill. And when it came to eating, the serendipity of the seating plan also put him next to her. As he drank more and presented his BWOC lines to a more general audience, he was aware of showing off for Marias benefit, of gauging her reactions, and feeling gratified when he gained a big laugh from the assembled throng.

  The insistent feeling came to Bill that perhaps life with Andrea had suppressed his social skills. Her circle of friends never wanted to hear anything funny and, since all he knew of NHS iniquities was what Andrea had told him, he rarely had much to contribute to their conversation. Whereas at Sal Juster’s dinner party, the consensus seemed to be that Bill Stratton was rather a witty fellow.

  Maria certainly seemed to appreciate his compan
y.

  Bill couldn’t believe how quickly the evening passed – he seemed only just to have arrived when the young wife and her haunted husband began murmuring about babysitters and leaving. Then the other guests started looking at their watches too.

  Nor could Bill believe how smoothly things were going between him and Maria. When it came to Sal calling cabs, geographical logic dictated that, since they were both going South, Bill and Maria should share one down as far as her flat near Marble Arch, from whence he would continue to Pimlico. But then, when they arrived outside her block and she suggested his coming in ‘for a final drink’, continuing to Pimlico didn’t seem so important. Any disquiet the cabbie might have felt about the shortened trip was dissipated by an absurdly generous tip (although that still didn’t wipe the smug, knowing smile off his face).

  Bill didn’t care, anyway. In the lift Maria seemed to stumble against him, and it made sense to put his hands on her shoulders to steady her. Then her fragrant hair seemed very close to his face, and giving her a gentle kiss on the forehead was entirely natural. When her face turned up to his, their lips automatically engaged.

  The interior of Maria’s flat had recently been done by a very exclusive designer, but Bill didn’t take in much of the makeover. The minute they were inside the door, Maria’s mouth and his re-engaged, their hands started to scrabble at the frontiers of cloth and flesh, and all he was really aware of was overpowering lust.

  He tried to remember when he’d last felt lust on that scale. The routine of sex with Andrea had regulated his passion to a kind of twice-a-week supply-and-demand basis. When she showed reluctance to continue, he had reconciled himself to the ending of that particular phase of his life. And though, like most men, he could still be suddenly inflamed by a cleavage on a poster or a flash of thigh on the tube, most of the time his lust was subdued into a kind of half-life. Lacking the expectation of fulfilment, his sex-drive had gone into neutral.

  But touching Maria had brought it back to life in turbocharged splendour. The fact that everything still appeared to work made him feel wonderful. Or he would have felt wonderful were it not for the sensation of intense urgency.

  She separated herself far enough away from him to ask, ‘Shall I get that drink?’

  ‘Do you think we’ll need it?’

  ‘Be as well.’ And she’d slipped out of his grasp into the kitchen. Bill stood disconnected. For a moment he contemplated sitting down, but decided it would be too painful.

  She appeared from the kitchen with an open bottle of champagne and two glasses. With a knowing wink, she led the way to her bedroom.

  After hurried gulps of champagne, they entangled together on the bed. Fingers scrabbled, poppers popped, zips unzipped, inhibitions melted in a silkiness of underwear.

  Fortunately alcohol worked its timeless magic, and Bill was naked and in bed with Maria before he’d time to worry about the white hairs on his chest, or his pale incipient paunch, or the purple threads of veins around his ankles. And the immediacy of lust made him equally blind to any imperfections of her body (assuming, which a gentleman wouldn’t, that there were any).

  But, to his surprise, moments before they conjoined, he found himself asking, ‘Should we?’

  ‘What do you mean – “should we”?’

  ‘Well, just ...’ He couldn’t come up with a satisfactory verbal answer, but he seemed to be coming up with an unarguable physical one, and the ‘should’ question became irrelevant.

  After nearly forty years of Andreas, another body was strange. Maria’s mouth tasted different, felt different, was at a different angle. The outline of her bottom was different, the contour of her breasts different. Everything was different.

  Different, but by no means unappealing.

  Bill Stratton was making love to another woman. And it all seemed to be going rather well.

  Or so Maria, through her moans, asserted. Bill had never really known whether or not he was a good lover. Inside a marriage like his, such a question had not arisen. Neither he nor Andrea had much grounds for comparison. And when she had had grounds for comparison – in other words, Dewi – she had given the impression there was no comparison. Dewi was ‘what she’d been looking for all her life’; he made her ‘feel like a woman’. So Bill, having failed for so long to give Andrea either of these satisfactions, concluded that he probably wasn’t a very good lover.

  But that was not the message he was getting from Maria. Even through the distractions of what his body was feeling, his mind was sufficiently detached to know that her commendation might be part of a routine. Flattery, women’s magazines insisted, was a necessary stimulus to the male libido. But Maria did sound as though she meant what she was saying.

  And Bill began to wonder whether, in fact, Andrea hadn’t taught him rather well. She had certainly known what she wanted in bed, and guided him to the actions that gave her pleasure. These involved the use of hands, lips and tongue at least as much as any other part of his anatomy. And Maria seemed to appreciate such ministrations too.

  Also, though it was only during the very earliest moments of his married life that Bill had suffered from premature ejaculation, it had to be said that, with the years, his ejaculation had become increasingly mature. And Maria seemed to appreciate that slowness too.

  At the moment when he finally came, he saw over her shoulder on the bedside table a framed photograph. Taken fairly recently from the way she looked. In a garden, with a woman who had to be her daughter, and a young man who logic dictated was her son-in-law. And four small children. Undoubtedly four grandchildren.

  But, in the haze of Maria’s carefully-lit bedroom, he didn’t feel as though he were cuddling a grandmother. Or, to put it another way, cuddling a grandmother didn’t seem like such a bad idea. Even though, after his orgasm, he became more aware of the difference of her body from Andrea’s, the different way her flesh was distributed, the different areas of hardness and softness.

  Gallantly, he disentangled himself from her only to pour them more champagne, which they drank before returning to their cuddle. They didn’t say much. There didn’t seem much to say. But the silence between them was benign.

  They must have dozed. Bill woke blearily to a totally unprecedented sensation – Maria’s hand working with some determination between his legs.

  ‘Come on,’ she murmured throatily, ‘I’m sure there a little more where that came from.’

  This was uncharted territory for Bill. Uncharted since the very early days of his marriage, when a certain rampancy had ruled. At least thirty years must have passed since he last came twice in the same session.

  Marital sex tends to stop after the orgasm. Certainly after the male orgasm (though hopefully the woman has got something out of it too). A little friendly kiss perhaps, then roll apart to continue worrying about the mortgage.

  With Maria, though, he didn’t even know if she had a mortgage. But he sure as hell knew that he didn’t have a joint one with her. Which was very comforting. As his body came reassuringly back to life, Bill realised that he knew almost nothing about Maria. Their dinner table conversation hadn’t been very revelatory. All he knew about her was that she was manipulating his body with a great deal more enthusiasm than Andrea had ever shown. He let himself go with the flow – or at least go till the flow.

  And the second flow was even more enjoyable than the first. But again, once the expressions of flattery and gratitude had been made, there didn’t seem a lot to say.

  The remains of the champagne were consumed.

  And eventually, Bill Stratton said the inevitable. ‘Well, I suppose I’d better be on my way.’

  He wasn’t sure how this was going to be taken. Maria knew he was divorced, so wouldn’t be assuming he had a wife to get back to. Equally, he didn’t feel up to the effort of inventing reasons why he had to get back to Pimlico – fictional dogs to walk, dependent aged relatives, demands of an early start in the morning.

  But Maria took it like a lam
b. ‘Yes. All been very nice, but we don’t want the magic to fade, do we?’

  ‘Well, if you want me to stay ...’ he began, not sure how he could end the sentence.

  Fortunately she didn’t give him time to. ‘No, that’s fine. Keep your illusions. I don’t look so good in daylight.’

  ‘Nor me,’ he chuckled, as he eased his body off the bed. He did now feel very tired. And the accumulated alcohol was getting to him, as well.

  He also felt awkward. No one looks good getting dressed, and he didn’t know whether to reassume his scattered clothes facing Maria or with his back to her. Facing, she’d see his white chest hair and incipient paunch. Turned away, she’d see his rather creased bottom and the little knot of bluish veins behind his right knee.

  Instinctively, Maria seemed to sense his dilemma. Lifting herself up off the bed, she moved towards the bathroom door. ‘Going to run myself a bath. Don’t know if you fancy one? Or a shower?’ She didn’t make the invitation over-pressing.

  ‘No, I’ll do that at home. Maybe just a quick wash.’

  She drew aside to let him into the bathroom. He washed a small part of him (a very small part by now). Then they changed rooms and he dressed in private.

  When he was ready he knocked on the bathroom door. Maria opened it, revealing herself dressed in a fluffy dressing gown. She had started to take off her make-up. Her brown eyes were deeper set in wrinkles. There were slight lines of puckering around her mouth, and when she smiled, he could see the skilled bridgework of her teeth.

  ‘Just wanted to say thank you for having me,’ said Bill fatuously.

  ‘The pleasure was all mine.’

  ‘I can assure you it wasn’t.’

  ‘Good. Can you let yourself out? Just make sure the door clicks shut after you.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Goodbye.’

  She puckered her lips further. He gave them a dry kiss.