Heartbreak Hotel Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Deborah Moggach

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Author’s Note

  Copyright

  About the Book

  After the far-flung charms of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Deborah Moggach moves to the Welsh countryside in her hilarious new comedy.

  At Myrtle House, the twin beds have never been so busy …

  The irrepressible Russell ‘Buffy’ Buffery has upped sticks from London and moved to a decrepit B&B in rural Wales. He needs to fill the beds, and what better way than with ‘Courses for Divorces’, his new money-making wheeze.

  Those checking in include: Harold, whose wife has run off with a younger woman; Amy, who’s been unexpectedly dumped by her (not-so) weedy boyfriend and Andy, the hypochondriac postman whose girlfriend is much too much for him to handle.

  Under Buffy’s tutelage, these casualties of the marriage-go-round find themselves re-learning all those skills never thought they’d need again, and a whole lot more besides …

  About the Author

  Deborah Moggach is the author of many successful novels including Tulip Fever and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which was made into a top-grossing film starring Judi Dench, Bill Nighy and Maggie Smith. Her screenplays include the film of Pride and Prejudice, which was nominated for a BAFTA. She lives in North London.

  Also by Deborah Moggach

  You Must be Sisters

  Close to Home

  A Quiet Drink

  Hot Water Man

  Porky

  To Have and To Hold

  Driving in the Dark

  Smile and Other Stories

  Stolen

  The Stand-In

  The Ex-Wives

  Changing Babies

  Seesaw

  Close Relations

  Tulip Fever

  Final Demand

  In the Dark

  The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

  (first published as These Foolish Things)

  For Mark, and his town.

  Heartbreak Hotel

  Deborah Moggach

  Cut out and keep for handy reference.

  Russell ‘Buffy’ Buffery has been married three times.

  First to Popsi (deceased), with whom he had a son, Quentin.

  Then to Jacquetta (now married to her shrink, Leon), with whom he had two sons, Tobias and Bruno. Jacquetta already had a daughter, India.

  His third wife was Penny, who ran off with a photographer. They had no children.

  However, Buffy had a daughter, Celeste, with an actress called Lorna.

  And another daughter, Nyange, with a dancer called Carmella.

  Keep up at the back.

  Or find out more by reading all about them in The Ex-Wives.

  1

  Buffy

  IT ALL CAME flooding back. Buffy put the letter on the table and sat down heavily. Bridie’s laughter; her gravelly smoker’s cough. She could be bustling around him now in her stained landlady’s kimono. He remembered her veined ankles in her bedroom slippers; the dear, massive bulk of her as she fried bacon. The past was in his nostrils; he could smell the lino and the cats, the woozy fumes from the Ascot that hung above the bath. Those were the days of eiderdowns, the gas fire popping, her stockings drying on the fender.

  Bridie ran a theatrical boarding house in Edgbaston. Buffy had lodged there, year in, year out, mutating from a lithe Hotspur to a portly Falstaff, when he worked in Birmingham Rep. Age, however, could not wither Bridie. Like most fat people she remained the same, year after year. Grey roots appeared in her hennaed hair, she was given two new knees, but she still resembled the girl he knew when he looked good in tights.

  Once, when drunk, he had proposed marriage.

  ‘Darling, not only are you married already but I’ve got my family here, thank you very much.’ She sloshed more whisky into his mug. ‘Lodgers are a lot less trouble than children, even when they’re actors, and besides, they pay me.’

  ‘There’s a lot to be said for it. The deep peace of the marriage bed, tra-la, after the hurly-burly of the chaise longue.’

  ‘Deep peace my foot. We’d start arguing about the guttering.’

  ‘Actually, now you mention it, you should get it seen to –’

  ‘Shut up, you silly cunt.’

  She was right, of course. They were happy as they were. Who knew what she got up to when he wasn’t there? He remembered the crocodile-skin case in which she kept her Dutch cap, a gift from a gentleman admirer. She was a warm-blooded woman with an obliging nature, and actors on tour were no slouches in the leg-over department. After all, when you’d seen a stuffed badger in the local museum what else was there to do?

  And now Bridie was dead. Buffy longed to cry. He was an actor, he could do it on cue. And by God he had had plenty to cry about. But grief is fiercest when muddied by conflicting emotions – recrimination, guilt, resentment. Bridie was one of the few women about whom he felt no guilt at all. In fact, to be perfectly honest, they had rather lost touch since she had moved to Wales. That he had been in her mind – hence the letter from some solicitor in Builth Wells, she must have left him a little something in her will – gave him his first, and last, twinge of guilt where she was concerned. Gratitude too. Due to his advanced age Buffy had lost many friends, and one ex-wife. These snuffings-out had made it clear to him, if proof were needed, that dying was a self-absorbed business. The last thing on anyone’s mind seemed to be those who were left behind. Any recognition of this would be welcome, just a token. Even something hideous, like a toby jug.

  Buffy heaved himself to his feet and padded into the kitchen. He had foolishly left the window open and the air was bedimmed with plaster dust. Two years earlier some Russian oligarch had bought the house next door. Since then it had been sheathed in plastic; behind this the building shuddered and rumbled as its bowels were excavated to create a gym, swimming pool and cinema in which the tycoon could watch his pornographic films.

  This was happening throughout the neighbourhood. Blomfield Mansions, where Buffy lived, was a block of flats on the Edgware Road. Behind it lay Little Venice; to the front St John’s Wood. Both areas housed the super-rich and perennially absent. Away on their yachts, or drilling in the Arctic, or whatever they did, they left their neighbours to suffer the major refurbishments to which they subjected their property investments. Buffy walked his dog through a babel of East European voices, past hammerings and bangings and double-parked cement mixers, past signs telling him Hard Hats Must Be Worn. The old neighbourhood had vanished and even his local boozer, still relatively unscathed, now served blithering Thai food, assembled in an industrial unit in Park Royal and boiled in a bag. The Scotch egg was finally extinct. Some people, of course, would say high time too.

  Buffy tore open a packet of biscuits. His daughter Nyange was coming to tea. She was bound to be late. She had caught it from her mother, a Ghanaian dancer with whom Buffy had had a brief fling when he could still struggle into, and out of, 32-inch trousers. Sauntering in after he had given up hope, Nyange would explain her tardiness as AMT, African Mean Time. Something about her breeziness implied that it was his problem, that p
unctuality was some vague relic of colonial oppression and plunder. It was his hour that she had stolen, of course, but Buffy didn’t have the heart to tell her.

  Nyange was indeed an hour late but this time she had an excuse.

  ‘I can’t find a fucking parking space!’ her voice crackled on the intercom. She turned aside to bellow at a parking warden. ‘Piss off! I’m coming!’

  In the end Buffy had to admit defeat and bring the tea out to his daughter’s car. They sat there, tray jammed on his knee, the plate of biscuits on the dashboard. This wasn’t the first time he had had to leave his flat empty and entertain his guest in some freezing Honda Civic out in the street.

  ‘Sorry about this,’ he said. ‘I’d even cleaned up the place in your honour. I’d even laid the table. Bloody parking warden vultures.’

  ‘London sucks,’ said Nyange. ‘Kid got shot in my local offie last week.’

  They were parked on a double yellow line, jammed between a delivery lorry and a large 4x4 with tinted windows. One of the windows slid open and a hand flung out an empty Badoit bottle.

  Buffy sighed. ‘These used to be proper shops. Butcher. Greengrocer.’ He pointed to a Snappy Snaps and a Foxton’s estate agents (ha ha, empty of customers). ‘Oh the good old days. Have a HobNob.’

  A traffic warden appeared. Nyange cursed. Tea slopping, she jerked into gear and drove round the block, past idling lorries and skips full of rubble.

  ‘Still,’ said Buffy, ‘When a man’s tired of London –’ He stopped. Nyange wouldn’t know about Dr Johnson. Besides, he wasn’t quite sure of its truth any more. What was wrong with tiring of London? Everything about it was conspiring to get on his nerves. He had a vision of himself in a cottage garden, a grizzled patriarch in a panama hat, his grandchildren bringing him jam jars full of tadpoles.

  Nyange came to a shuddering halt at a bus stop, the only available parking space. The biscuits slid off the dashboard.

  ‘This is ridiculous!’ she snapped. Nyange was a feisty young woman – not young, actually, almost middle-aged. He had middle-aged children. The thought always gave Buffy a jolt. Today she was looking startlingly businesslike. The last time they met, her hair was braided with tiny beads and buttons. Today it was cut into a Louise Brooks bob and gleamed with lacquer. Perhaps it was a wig. He resisted the urge to touch it, like an elderly perv.

  On the other hand, he was her father. The trouble was that contact in the past had been somewhat intermittent. He remembered a low-key Christmas with Nyange and her mother, two comely near-strangers in a shawl-festooned room in Deptford. They had grudgingly cooked him a pheasant portion – they were both vegetarians – and he had broken his tooth on a shotgun pellet.

  ‘So how are you?’ she asked. ‘It’s been ages. I was in the district.’

  ‘Actually, a dear friend of mine has just died,’ he said.

  ‘I suppose they’re all doing that.’

  ‘Hang on, I’m only seventy. It’s the new forty.’

  Behind them, a bus honked. People, shuffling past to board it, glared into the car. Nyange pulled away, drove round the corner and double-parked behind a Tesco’s van – You Shop, We Drop.

  ‘One of your old actors?’

  ‘A theatrical landlady,’ said Buffy. ‘I used to stay with her in the glory days of rep. She moved to Wales a few years ago and started a B&B.’

  Put like this it sounded so bald. But why should Nyange be interested? He suddenly felt lonely in the cramped, cluttered car, in a world with no Bridie in it. No more letters in his mailbox. And nobody who knew who he was talking about except a few raddled thesps who might stagger along to her funeral.

  ‘She was my oldest friend,’ Buffy said, and suddenly – at last – his eyes filled with tears. ‘Through thick and thin.’ He gazed down at the tray, now slopped with tea.

  ‘Poor Dad.’ She stroked his hand. ‘You must be gutted. Oh fuck it.’

  The Tesco van pulled away to reveal another parking warden. He was eyeing their number plate.

  Nyange leaned out of the window. ‘Piss off!’ she shouted. ‘This old man’s a cripple. He’s having a seizure!’

  The traffic warden ignored her and took out his notebook. Nyange snorted and started the engine. She drove down the street, accelerated through an amber light and turned right into the Edgware Road. It was heavy with rush-hour traffic. She stopped on a red line.

  ‘This is hopeless, I’d better let you out here.’ She put the biscuit plate on the tray. ‘I just came to tell you I’ve passed my exam. I’m now a fully-fledged ACA.’

  Buffy, jammed in with his tray, couldn’t give her a hug. Awkwardly, he turned and found himself kissing her brittle helmet of hair. It smelt of musk, the Proustian aroma of the sixties. ‘You brilliant girl – woman.’

  Nyange already looked the part. Gone were the cornrows and leggings; today she wore a black trouser suit and what used to be called court shoes. Buffy gazed at her with awe. Even more surprising than producing a black daughter was producing an accountant. Every other woman he knew, when changing careers, became a therapist of some sort or another. God knew who went to them when they were all therapists themselves.

  ‘So useful to have an accountant in the family,’ he said, little knowing how true that would turn out to be.

  It wasn’t a toby jug. Nor was it the framed reproduction of Highland Cattle in the Snow that had hung next to the payphone, and to which Buffy had had a sentimental attachment. Bridie had left him her house: her B&B in Wales.

  He was still dazed with the shock of it. Unable to settle, he wandered around the flat, picking things up and putting them down again. He mislaid his wallet and discovered it in the fridge. At night he dreamed of journeys where he struggled through the rain, stark naked, and returned to find Blomfield Mansions had been demolished and replaced by a Garden of Remembrance. He woke drenched in sweat, his heart pounding.

  Of course he felt gratitude towards Bridie – profound gratitude. This recognition of their lifelong affection, from beyond the grave, moved him deeply. It physically pained him that he could no longer throw his arms around her in thanks.

  ‘Why not you, you old bugger?’ she would chuckle. ‘Wish I was there to see his face.’ He being her brother, the more obvious beneficiary, who lived back in Ireland. Apparently he was a staunch Catholic who had disapproved of his sister’s rackety lifestyle. But her brother didn’t need the money, having speculated during the property boom, covering County Limerick with hideous mansions, all pillared porches and marble en suites; the tumbleweed now blew through them but he didn’t care, he had got out before the crash.

  That Bridie had no other family, nobody closer than himself, made Buffy feel strange, his own life having been somewhat entangled on the domestic front. It had thrown their differing circumstances into sharp relief. But she had chosen to live that way, she was a free spirit beholden to nobody.

  ‘I didn’t even know she was ill,’ Buffy told his son Quentin. ‘She never mentioned it in her letters.’

  ‘I didn’t even know she existed.’

  ‘I don’t know what to do.’ They were having lunch at a restaurant in Frith Street.

  ‘Your money problems are over, that’s for sure,’ said Quentin.

  ‘You mean I should sell it?’

  Quentin smiled. ‘I can just picture you, stuck in the pouring rain two hundred miles from Soho.’

  It wasn’t a smile, it was a patronising smirk.

  ‘Why on earth not?’ asked Buffy irritably.

  ‘Dad.’

  That did it. Later, Buffy saw this as a turning point. I’ll show him. Men had gone to war for less. Of course he was used to his children’s affectionate contempt. Well, their contempt. What fun to startle them.

  ‘I’m tired of London,’ Buffy said. ‘I’m tired of my horrible neighbours and never having anywhere to park. Nyange and I had to have tea in her car last week. I’m tired of cyclists knocking me over on the pavement.’

  ‘We don’t cycl
e on the pavement,’ said Quentin. He and his partner James were pious citizens, biking to farmers’ markets with their jute shopping bags.

  ‘I’m tired of everybody being so rude unless they’re foreigners,’ Buffy said, getting into his stride. ‘I’m tired of being irritated all the time, it makes me feel so elderly – I am elderly. But I don’t feel it, until London irritates me. It’s too full of memories and too many of my friends are dead.’

  ‘You really mean you’d live there?’ Quentin raised his eyebrows. Were they plucked? Quentin was gay; Buffy wouldn’t put it past him.

  ‘I want a change.’ As Buffy said it, he knew it was true.

  Their lunch had arrived. Quentin removed the pieces of celery from his salad and put them on the side of his plate. They had both agreed, some time in the past, that celery was a pointless vegetable. It was one of the things they had discovered in common.

  ‘So where is this place?’ asked Quentin.

  ‘Knockton. It’s in the Welsh Marches, apparently.’ Buffy added defensively ‘almost in England’, as if it wasn’t such a big thing to go there. He already felt the beginnings of loyalty towards this unknown town.

  ‘So you haven’t even seen it yet?’

  Buffy shook his head. ‘I’m going to go down there next week.’

  Quentin raised his eyebrows again. An anchovy hung from his fork like a little leather strap. Since moving in with James, Quentin had thickened out. Happiness had done this. The two of them had met while window-dressing at Harrods but it had been years of Sturm und Drang until they had found domestic peace in Crouch End.

  So many upheavals in both their lives but now here they were, he and his forty-five-year-old son, munching obscure and peppery salad leaves tossed by a celebrity chef. Quentin’s greying (greying!) hair was clipped into one of those crew cuts sported by the gay fraternity in Old Compton Street.

  Buffy remembered a rare family gathering, Nyange and Quentin sitting side by side, the black girl and the homosexual. Penny, his wife at the time, had gazed at them. ‘Very Channel 4,’ she had mused. ‘Now all we need is the physically challenged.’ She had glanced down at Buffy, who had ricked his back and was lying on the floor, propped up by cushions. ‘Oh oh, there he is.’