Heartbreak Hotel Read Free

brass beds made for lusty couplings – adulterers welcome! His Full English Breakfast, all organic of course, would become legendary. Perhaps he could even raise his own pigs.
    Not for him the niminy-piminy B&Bs of his past experience – the nylon sheets, the pastel wallpaper, the framed silhouettes of crinolined ladies. The near-impossibility of any form of sexual congress in some twin-bedded room smelling of air-freshener. The doily-draped nest of tables with its
Reader’s Digests
. The genteel breakfast room, the tinkle of cutlery, the cruet – cruet! – the tiny sachets of his least favourite jam, strawberry.
    ‘
You
, running a bed and breakfast?’ Quentin, hiding a smirk, pressed his napkin to his lips.
    ‘I’ve seen enough of them in my time. On tour and so forth. In fact, I do believe you were conceived in one. In Kettering.’
    Quentin flinched. ‘Too much information, Dad.’
    ‘Your mother and I were playing Sybil and Elyot in
Private Lives
.’
    Buffy’s first wife – now alas dead, God bless her – had been a lusty young woman, uninhibited by the usual constraints of paper-thin walls. He remembered the lowered eyes of the other guests when the two of them, hastily washed and brushed-up, appeared for breakfast. And Quentin, a little miracle inside her, just begun.
    It was no wonder that Bridie’s lodgings were a liberation. In its heyday the house in Edgbaston had creaked with sex. He remembered glimpsing Digby Montague, now a Knight of the Realm, darting across the landing wearing only his socks. Then there was Hillers, a predatory lesbian and memorable Lady Bracknell, sitting at the breakfast table in a fug of cigarette smoke, fondling the knee of a blonde ingénue. Even the cats were at it, one of them giving birth to kittens on his eiderdown. Happy days.
    Buffy, somewhat the worse for wear, hailed a cab home. He could afford these extravagances now. His head reeled. Had he told Quentin the truth? Could he really pack up his belongings and decamp into the unknown or was he just proving to his son that there was life in the old dog yet? He felt, as one does when drunk, that events were swimmingly fitting into place. His children were long since grown and no longer needed him, if they ever had in the first place. His rent was about to be doubled. Besides, as he had told Quentin, Blomfield Mansions had changed in character. Its mouldy, net-curtained, vaguely Jewish inhabitants – tragic widows measuring out their lives with coffee spoons – had died off. Some of them had been a pain in the arse but he missed them. They had been replaced by the rich offspring of Middle Eastern businessmen who had bought the flats as bolt-holes in case their countries went up in smoke and who partied all night and revved up their sports cars outside his window. Even the doorman, Ted, had been replaced by a bunch of plastic flowers.
    Buffy’s wives were dead or long since disappeared into their subsequent lives. He was free, for better or worse. Only his dog needed him, and his dog could live anywhere. In fact, now Buffy thought of it, Fig would prefer the country.
    As night fell, Buffy walked Fig around the block. His previous dog, George, had had to be dragged along on his lead. George had looked like a hairpiece; there was something flattened and matted about him. Penny said he looked as if somebody had run over him at some point in the past. He was generally agreed to have been the laziest dog anybody had known.
    His replacement, however, was just the opposite, a hyperactive Jack Russell who jumped up and down like a tennis ball and yapped at passing cars, at passing anything. Jack Russells liked hunting rabbits; they weren’t really London dogs at all.
    Buffy thought: If I go ahead, it’ll be for Fig’s sake. This seemed as good a reason as any.

2
Monica
    Monica didn’t go along with Dress-Down Fridays. The kids in her office were half her age, of course. Everybody in the City was half her age. They looked