The Penultimate Chance Saloon Read Free Page A

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.

Chapter Two
    ... 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