The Penultimate Chance Saloon

by Simon Brett

  She gestured him to a large white sofa while she disappeared into the kitchen to find yet more wine. Alone, Bill was able to take in his surroundings.

  His first impression was that he was in a child’s playroom. Carefully displayed on purpose-built shelves all around the walls were figurines of characters from Disney cartoons. He recognised the lineups from 101 Dalmatians, Fantasia and Snow White. All those bloody dwarves, of whom no one can ever remember more than six at any one time. Even with the seven little figurines in front of him, Bill couldn’t get all the names right. He gazed around in bewilderment. Surely no one would actually choose to have this stuff on display?

  ‘I see you’re looking at my collection,’ said Kirstie, returning with the wine.

  ‘You collect these?’

  ‘Well, don’t say it like that. What did you think – that someone dumped them on me?’

  That had been so close to what he’d been thinking that he didn’t dare make any response. But Kirstie didn’t need any; she was keen to talk about her hobby.

  ‘My 101 Dalmatians set is almost complete.’

  Ah, really?

  ‘Yes. That “Cruella in Bed” is terribly rare. It’s one from the Walt Disney Classic Collection, obviously.’

  ‘Obviously,’ he echoed.

  ‘And those “Puppies on Newspaper”?’ Kirstie trilled. ‘How sweet are they?’

  Bill decided that this was a rhetorical question. He had been aware recently of a new syntactical interrogative creeping into the speech of younger people. Enquiries taking the form ‘How good is that?’ did not apparently expect answers. Bill didn’t understand the grammatical construction, he was just aware of it. All he knew was that if he had used that kind of sloppy speech in his newsreading days, he would have got letters.

  Still, Kirstie’s collection did seem a viable topic for conversation. He couldn’t spend the entire evening quoting ‘by way of contrast’ lines at her. And the brief forays they’d made over dinner into popular culture had not been encouraging. She knew the names of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, but only as a shorthand for a state of embarrassing geriatricity. And her own musical favourites were equally unfamiliar to Bill. In fact, only the context made him realise that she actually had been talking about musicians. The names of the acts could otherwise have been mathematical formulae, firms of estate agents or skin infections.

  And there had been an awful moment when he had managed to flood Kirstie’s face with bewildered disbelief by asking her how often she went to discos. By the time he’d realised that the right word was ‘club’, he’d decided that music was probably a good subject to keep away from.

  The cinema had proved over dinner to be an area of similar mutual incomprehension. Bill enjoyed films, but chose what he went to with care. He always based his decision on reviews by critics whom he respected. Whereas Kirstie appeared to be influenced only by a film’s pre-release hype. As a result, her cinema diet consisted of worthless comedies with pretty boys in them, failed attempts to launch the Hollywood careers of American sitcom stars, mindless blockbusters full of special effects and – worst of all – inevitably inferior remakes of movies which had been perfect the first time round. Though he’d never seen any such films, Bill Stratton knew them all to be meretricious rubbish. He decided to keep off cinema as a subject for discussion.

  So, though Kirstie’s collection of china figurines may have been inspired by cartoon films, they still provided an innocuous topic. Chiefly because Bill had no opinion about them at all (except the vague conviction that they were rather hideous), and because Kirstie seemed prepared to go on about them at great length. Until that evening, he had not known that a world of collectibles existed, nor the passion and energy that a true aficionada could invest in trawling endless websites for the vital piece of china that would complete a set.

  So he dozily sipped his wine, and issued the occasional sympathetic grunt when she explained the difficulties of tracking down Beauty and the Beast busts, the ‘Limited Edition of Cinderella’s Dress’, or a ‘Holiday Goofy with Cello Ornament’.

  This conversation – or rather, monologue – only lasted the duration of one glass of wine, but it felt longer. Then, deciding that he’d misinterpreted Kirstie’s intentions for the rest of the night, Bill took an elaborate look at his watch, yawned and said, ‘Well, perhaps I’d better be off.’

  But then she threw him totally by asking, in a slightly disappointed tone, ‘Aren’t we going to go to bed together?’

  ‘Well, yes, all right.’ As he said the words, Bill realised they could have sounded a little more gracious or enthusiastic. Nor did he feel the situation was entirely retrieved by his adding, ‘If you like.

  Still, his clumsy response didn’t appear to worry Kirstie. ‘I’ll get the wine bottle. You go through to the bedroom.’

  She was a long time getting the wine bottle. Maybe she was also making some intimate feminine preparations in one of the flat’s bathrooms. Bill sat gingerly on the edge of the bed, wondering whether he was expected to start taking his clothes off. He decided against the idea, unwilling to expose his ageing body earlier than was strictly necessary. There were rather more lights on than he might have wished.

  Feeling something of a prat, he just looked around the room, which was a shrine to Bambi, Beauty and the Beast and Winnie the Pooh. This last collection was displayed on a shelf above Kirstie’s double bed. To Bill, who’d grown up with them, E.H. Shepherd’s original illustrations were sacrosanct, and the crude Disney versions of the characters were as great an aesthetic affront as The New English Bible had been to The Authorised Version. But that was another opinion ideally not to be shared with Kirstie.

  As he waited in this Temple of Disneyana, Bill didn’t really feel lust. Just curiosity.

  When Kirstie returned and kissed him gently on the lips, she smelt of fresh perfume and tasted of toothpaste, proving that she had indeed titivated herself up for him. He wondered with mild anxiety what, after the evening’s drinking and the Italian food, his own breath smelt like.

  Still, he couldn’t bother about that. There was kissing to be done. And Kirstie did seem extremely keen on kissing. As their bodies stretched out together on the bed, lust returned, and a bit of fumbling with clothes began.

  Kirstie drew apart from him. ‘We’ll be more comfortable in bed,’ she announced practically. And then, thank the Lord, she switched off the overhead lights.

  Bill stayed seated to remove his shoes and socks. He had reached the time of life when perfect balance could not always be guaranteed, particularly after an evening of wine. Already uncomfortably aware of his age, he didn’t want to compound the stereotype by falling over.

  Kirstie’s clothes were off, and she was under the duvet, whither he crept, with some relief, to join her. For this encounter, he was really glad he had made the transition to boxer shorts.

  He looked deeply into her eyes, then realised he still had his glasses on. Deciding clear vision must be sacrificed to avoid the laughable image of a bespectacled naked man, he took them off. He wished Kirstie too had glasses to take off, so that she’d only get a fuzzy outline of his ageing body.

  ‘Have you got one with you?’ she asked suddenly.

  ‘Er, I’m sorry ... what?’ This confused him. Basic sex – the kind of sex they were about to indulge in – surely didn’t need any props?

  ‘A condom.’

  ‘Ah.’

  Do you have one with you?’

  Erm ... no, actually.’

  When he considered the matter, it was remarkable that the question had not arisen before. There were enough earnest newspaper articles and television documentaries about safe sex. Primary school children seemed to be taught condom use before they were taught their alphabet. And all this earnest advice repetitiously pointed out the condoms were not just mandatory for their contraceptive properties, but also as a means of avoiding infection.

  And yet not one of the women with whom Bill Stratton had
made love during his post-Andrea flowering had mentioned the word condom. None of them had been at risk of pregnancy, but equally none of them knew his sexual history. The first post-AIDS panic seemed to have died down. The fierce questioning about previous partners which had happened then, when a potential lover virtually had to get planning permission for each sexual encounter, seemed to have become less urgent. Certainly none of the women with whom Bill had conjoined recently had mentioned the idea of his taking a medical before congress. Or of wearing a condom.

  Probably a generational thing, he decided. For his contemporaries, condoms still had wartime connotations. They were ‘Johnnies’ or ‘French letters’, devices to protect our brave but randy boys from disease-ridden foreign whores. For the original post-pill generation, they were slightly distasteful. People whose first experiences had happened in the sixties didn’t like the idea of having their sex shrink-wrapped.

  The average heterosexual of his generation, Bill concluded, was extremely irresponsible about safe sex.

  Kirstie’s questioning did prompt another thought in him, though. She regarded him as a procreational threat. He couldn’t remember when he’d last seen himself in that role. In the very early days of his marriage he’d entertained the possibility of Andrea becoming pregnant, but since then sex for Bill had been totally separate from the idea of reproduction.

  Good heavens, he still had within him the capacity to become a father! He’d read somewhere that the sperm men produced declined in quality as they got older, but it still worked. Charlie Chaplin, Saul Bellow, Des O’Connor ... there were a whole lot of men who had become fathers at very advanced ages. Hmm. When Bill reflected on those names, he decided it was not a club that he particularly wanted to join.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Kirstie resignedly. ‘I’ve got some.’

  The readiness with which she found the packet in her bedside drawer showed how well equipped she was for life as a single woman in the early part of the twenty-first century. Deftly, she popped a latex circle out of its foil and placed it on top of the unit. ‘For when we need it,’ she said, and leant forward to kiss him.

  The kissing was again very pleasant and gentle. So was the caressing. With a slight feeling of guilt towards his other post-Andrea women, Bill couldn’t be unaware of the superior skin quality he was now touching. He began to understand why so many men worshipped at the shrine of the younger woman.

  During what he hoped would turn out to be foreplay, Bill couldn’t prevent his eyes from wandering to the shelf above the bed. Eeyore looked down at him disapprovingly. He didn’t let himself be put off by that. Eeyore disapproved of everything. In the Eeyore catalogue of unacceptable behaviour, making love to a girl less than half one’s age was no more reprehensible than Kanga losing Roo, or Tigger bouncing. Bill still wished he was looking, though, at E.H. Shepherd’s definitive images, rather than these winsome Disneyfied travesties.

  The purposeful movement of Kirstie’s hands distracted him from nostalgia. ‘I think maybe we need that protection now,’ she said.

  This was a new challenge. Though Bill Stratton was familiar with the concept, he had never actually put a condom on. And of course the important thing about putting a condom on is that there has to be something for it to be put on, and he found that, the nearer the point of putting it on came, the less there was to put it on.

  Panic began to flicker in his brain. Remarkably, in his recent glut of sex, the one thing he hadn’t encountered had been personal malfunction. Oh God, and it has to happen now, when I’m with a younger woman, a woman who spends her life surrounded by her contemporaries, men who go through life in a permanent state of semi-arousal. All the jokes he’d ever heard about old men not being able to get it up stampeded into his mind.

  But Kirstie proved a surprisingly sympathetic and generous sex therapist. From what she said, this was by no means the first time she had encountered such a problem. As vigour returned to him, a marginal sense of superiority came with it. Maybe young men of Kirstie’s age weren’t such stallions, after all.

  After the initial hiccup, everything proceeded smoothly. Bill Stratton’s first sex with a condom definitely felt different, a bit remote even, but it was perfectly satisfactory. And Kirstie’s responses seemed to suggest she got something out of the experience too.

  After a mumbled ‘Thank you’, Bill lay in silence beside her, his mind full of the automatic masculine post-coital question. How soon can I leave? Books of etiquette are sadly inadequate in defining the recommended time-lapse between an act of intercourse and the first ‘Oh, well, I’d better be on my way.’

  But here too Kirstie surprised him. And anticipated him. With a brisk look at her watch and a ‘Got to be at work in the morning’, she made it quite clear that Bill’s cue to get dressed had arrived.

  There was no resentment or edge in her tone, just practicality. She put on a bathrobe and he quickly dressed. As he did so, he found his mind focusing on Kirstie’s motivations. Was this how all of her sex life was conducted? Was it all quick pick-ups and goodbyes? Wham-bang-thank-you-sirs? And, most of all, why had she picked him? He’d been quite willing to go along with the scenario, but everything that had happened had been on her initiative.

  Politely, she led him out through the sitting room.

  ‘That was really nice,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

  His words sounded pretty flat, but they would be reinforced the next day by an Interflora bouquet with a note reading, ‘...and, by way of contrast, thank you for an unforgettable experience.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ said Kirstie. ‘I’ve never had an old man before.’

  As he looked at the figurine-loaded shelves of her sitting room, Bill Stratton knew exactly where he fitted into the scheme of things.

  And he decided that in future he’d stick to women nearer his own age.

  Chapter Ten

  ... and, by way of contrast,

  a recent survey in Canada has revealed

  that thirteen per cent of married couples

  had stopped having sex because they

  couldn’t think of anyone else to think

  about while they were doing it.

  Bill would have been lying if he said all the sex was good. But it was all sex. Sex that was his due. Sex that he should have had in his twenties, when he had instead been putting everything into a marriage which ultimately had turned out to be worthless. ‘Saving it for marriage’ had been his mother’s strong recommendation, but she had failed to warn him that investments can go down as well as up.

  Meeting so many women – albeit on a superficial level – prompted Bill to think a lot about gender differences. He kept coming back to the same question. How different are women? And he kept coming back to the same answer. Bloody different. Any man who aspires to spend time with them had better recognise that early on.

  First, there were the simple biological differences. Particularly, that strange business of menstruation. Which, remarkably, women don’t find that strange. They make much less of a fuss about menstruation than men do. Men continue to find it bizarre, imagining how they would feel if their bodies were invaded in that way on a monthly basis. Whereas women behave as if it were ... well, natural. But, with the women who shared Bill Stratton’s sexual encounters, that was no longer a problem. The menopause had sorted it all out, and Bill found that in many ways a relief. He had quite enough to think about without unpicking the chronology of menstrual cycles. He remembered back to the days of his marriage when an entire weekend’s plans could be dashed on a Friday night by the rustle of a cardboard box heard from the lavatory.

  Also, he felt the menopause put men and women back on an equal footing, like when they were children. Basically, men have never understood menstruation, and never will. They spend the major part of their lives when they’re dealing with women, thinking, ‘Oh, I shouldn’t upset her. She has/has just had/might be about to have ... her period.’ And they feel guilty. At least, Bill reckoned, the m
enopause restores a vaguely level playing field.

  Must be odd, though, having that happen to you. Though, in one sense, women are luckier than men. They have the menopause as a sort of early warning system. (‘Hello, dear, just a reminder that you’re well into the second half of your life.’) Nothing like that for the chaps. For men death is a total surprise. No signposts in the masculine life between puberty and senility.

  Oh dear, and there were so many gender issues Bill Stratton didn’t reckon he’d ever get the hang of. For instance, the fact that the end of menstruation didn’t spell the end of female difference. The divide between the way men and women thought seemed to increase with age rather than diminish. Women’s priorities remained totally at odds with those of men. For instance, women seem able to summon up infinite interest in relationships per se. Anyone’s relationship. Relationships in the abstract. Whereas the only relationships men are interested in are their own. If the world were peopled only by men, one thing that would vanish pretty quickly would be Romantic Fiction. For that to work, the reader has to give a toss who ends up with whom. And men just don’t.

  Men’s and women’s fantasies too follow totally divergent paths. The trouble with men’s fantasies is they’re all so unrealistic. Most of them involve playing for England in some sport for which you never had much aptitude, and for which you’re now far too fat and beat-up to be a contender. Whereas women’s fantasies ... encompass the possible. The romantically possible. It is just possible that you’d go to Greece and meet some stud so naif and pissed that he’d think you’re attractive. It is just possible that, after a divorce, you might find your true self by pressing olives in Tuscany.

  Unlikely, but still possible.

  And that’s before you even open the can of worms labelled ‘Sexual Fantasies’.

  What are women’s sexual fantasies about? One thing’s for sure, Bill Stratton concluded. I bet they involve a lot more talking than men’s sexual fantasies do.