Cupid's Dart Read Online Free PDF Page B

was not an hotel that even its brochure could describe as intimate.
    I had been given room 393. Does that surprise you? Have you not formed a picture of a man who is always given the room furthest from the lift? This one will do. He won't cause trouble. He won't make a fuss. We'll give him 393.
    I cannot describe the long walk from the lift to Room 393 as stimulating. It involved traversing two sides of the square building, along carpets designed not to show marks where people had thrown up on them, past forty-five identical doors to a forty-sixth, past bleak walls broken up only by eight sad paintings. In this dark, claustrophobic world, only the red fire extinguishers shone.
    Nevertheless, just as I passed Room 378, my bag getting heavier by the second, I stopped dramatically, struck by a thought. If things went well this evening, I might be bringing her back here, to this. Oh God.
    I tried to dismiss this wonderful, terrible thought. I couldn't possibly get that far. I had never got that far. Even with Rachel I hadn't got that far. Especially with Rachel I hadn't got that far. I would have had more chance of breaking into Fort Knox than of having intercourse with Rachel. I thought her knickers were welded on to her body.
    I couldn't understand why I had suddenly begun thinking of Rachel after thirty years. I think now, looking back on it, that it was because Ange's loveliness brought home to me how stupid I had been to waste seventeen months of my young life in such a futile and half-hearted pursuit of an utterly sexless young woman.
    I searched in my pockets for my silly little plastic room key. At last I found it. If, when I slid it into the narrow slot provided, a green light flashed briefly and the door of my room opened to reveal the ghastly sterility within, then she would come back with me that night. If, as usually happened, a red light flashed and I had to return to Reception to get the wretched thing reprogrammed, she wouldn't come.
    A green light flashed, immediately signifying nothing, but
    I smiled wryly as I removed the plastic from the slot, wondering if anyone
    had ever used one of those bloody little keys as a phallic symbol before.
    I dumped my bag on the bed. The mattress sagged and creaked. This was a bed made for sciatica, not sex.
    I went into the cramped, claustrophobic bathroom. It had two cracked tiles and a bath designed for midgets. I lifted the lavatory seat, noting that it was loose, and did what had to be done. As I washed my hands – I'm fanatical about washing my hands, don't like touching money without washing them afterwards – I looked in the mirror, and saw a neglected face.
    My eyebrows had been left to their own devices for far too long. My hair had never been cut stylishly. For twenty years I had gone to the same barber because he was cheap and because he didn't make conversation. My abhorrence of small talk was due entirely to the vast areas of ignorance that it exposed. Football, cricket, our dreary politicians, motor cars, pubs, foreign holiday destinations, pop music, theatre, cinema, television, animal life, bird life, insect life, gardens, DIY – you name it, I didn't know anything about it.
    I recalled with horror the one time when, due to circumstances beyond my control, I found my hair being cut by a trendy young man, who said to me, 'Are we planning anything interesting today, sir?' I had only just resisted an absurd temptation to shock him by saying 'Yes, I'm going home to slash my wrists in the bath.' There hadn't been any point. He wouldn't have cared, might even have tried to sell me a razor.
    Why did I think of that now? Because I was wondering what on earth I could possibly talk to Ange about. Because I was in a complete and utter panic. What on earth had possessed me to ask her out to dinner? Why on earth had I chosen, of all places, L'Escargot Bleu?
    Because it was the only London restaurant I had been to in the last two years. Ashley Coldthrop had taken me