Last Fling Read online

  THIS IS THE first short story collection from an acclaimed novelist with a wide and loyal readership. Many of the stories have won prizes, been published or broadcast; some are new, written especially for the collection.

  Several feature artists, and are set in the past in a rural England; others are contemporary: stories set in London or Europe, of love glimpsed, lost, or longed for. ‘In Bratislava’ is the brief encounter between a lonely businessman and young student in the aftermath of communism. Two or three look at illness and mortality: in ‘Last Fling’, the title story, a dying woman places a lonely hearts ad.

  All these stories are written with Sue Gee’s insight, precision and delicacy of style and tone. Her last novel, Reading in Bed (2007) was a Daily Mail Book Club Selection; her next will be published in 2012. Poignant and haunting, immensely readable, Last Fling is the perfect book between the two.

  Praise for Sue Gee

  “Sue Gee is best known for novels such as Earth and Heaven, The Hours of the Night and The Mysteries of Glass, but she demonstrates the same flair in this debut collection of short stories. She writes with great compassion about love lost and found, regret, missed opportunities and mortality.” — The Independent

  “Sue Gee’s stories are remarkable for their precision and economy – she establishes a character in a few lines, conjures up an entire situation with an allusion, an aside. She has that enviable quality of telling most by saying least – this is a lovely collection, sometimes sad, sometimes funny.” — PENELOPE LIVELY

  “Irresistible … Last Fling – is about the unexpected nature of consolation … Other [stories] deal with crisis – a mother realises her husband is planning to leave her when their son finishes school, a woman agonises over whether a lifetime friend should become her lover. But all of them seem to be saying that only an honest understanding of the past provides the clue to a happier future.” —CHRISTENA APPLEYARD, Daily Mail

  Last Fling

  SUE GEE, is an acclaimed and established novelist. Reading in Bed, (2007) was a Daily Mail Book Club selection; The Mysteries of Glass (2005) was long listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction. She ran the MA Creative Writing Programme at Middlesex University from 2000-2008 and currently teaches at the Faber Academy. Sue Gee has also published many short stories, some of which have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. She lives in London and Herefordshire.

  Last Fling

  SUE GEE

  LONDON

  Published Salt Publishing Ltd

  Acre House, 11–15 William Road, London NW1 3ER, United Kingdom

  All rights reserved

  © Sue Gee, 2011

  The right of Sue Gee to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Salt Publishing.

  Salt Publishing 2011

  Created by Salt Publishing Ltd

  This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  ISBN 978 1 84471 885 6 electronic

  For Jamie, the very best

  In Bratislava

  THE TRAIN TOOK all morning, and most of the afternoon, to roll through Czechoslovakia. He sat in a corner seat, his bag and briefcase up in the rack, the carriage empty. Silver birches lined the track; he looked out on to sunlit cornfields, red-roofed wooden churches, distant hills. Blue-nosed lorries from the fifties rumbled through villages; he saw stork, grazing in open fields; he saw a girl on a bicycle, riding down an avenue of shimmering poplars, her hair streaming behind her.

  Sometimes he read; sometimes he stood in the corridor, feeling the rush of air on his face at the open window, feeling crowded Prague slip away. There was no buffet, there were few passengers — workmen got off at Brno, old women clambered on at country stations. Everyone visited Prague; few left the Czech Republic, crossing the border into Slovakia, newly independent, straining towards the future.

  He went back into the carriage, opened his flask of coffee. Used to a crowded schedule of flights and conferences, he rarely had journeys like this. Ahead lay meetings in an unknown city: time now, in slow, unfolding hours, to consider his life, and what he might do with the rest of it, now everything had changed.

  In the centre of the city, needing to change Czech to Slovak crowns, he found that the banks had closed. So, late afternoon, had the bureau de change, and the girl in the Cedok travel agency was unhelpful.

  — Amex? she suggested with a shrug, and a glance at his Liberty tie.

  He nodded and felt for his wallet again, with its international credit cards, his company card, and the photograph of Ella.

  — Is not a problem. The girl was reaching for her bag beneath the desk, her shift ending.

  He nodded and walked out into the street again. People were shopping after work, queuing for coffee and cakes at the kavernia, waiting at tram stops. The bus from the station had brought him past rundown post-war estates, scrubby grass and balconies hung with washing; here, walking along Jesenskeho Street, he reflected that the queues were not as long as they had used to be in Warsaw, or any of the Eastern European cities he had visited, in a difficult market, before the Wall came down. Now the market was opening everywhere, and here in Bratislava he had appointments with directors from three companies, anxious for foreign exchange.

  His hotel, not far from the American Consulate, was on the river front; he waited at the busy intersection by the National Theatre for the lights to change. The light was fading; the air had a wintry chill. He saw a couple coming towards him, arms round one another, deep in conversation. She stopped for a moment to push strands of hair from her eyes; small earrings glinted; her lover stopped with her, and tilted her face, smoothing the hair, his mouth seeking hers, as people came and went.

  He turned away, making for the glass and concrete tower of the hotel.

  His room was on the sixteenth floor. He opened the window, looked out across the broad stretch of the Danube, at the hideous suspension bridge slung across it, the density of tower blocks beyond. He thought of Prague, and bells, and tiled rooftops, domes and pinnacles. He thought of London, of Ella, of turning his key in the lock and calling out into the silence, dropping his bags and frowning, calling again.

  Clouds were gathering over the river. Street lights came on. He kicked off his shoes and lay on the bed as the room grew dark, his clothes still in his bag, tomorrow’s papers locked in the briefcase. Time enough. He closed his eyes and the girl on the bicycle, fleetingly seen from the train, came swimmingly towards him, became the lovely girl in the street, drawn into a close embrace. He thought: women for me now are glimpses, dreams. I have come to a turning point: I must do nothing, and wait.

  He sank into sleep.

  The dining room was endless, half-empty, neon-lit. Muzak played through enormous speakers. He ordered a beer, and goulash, and looked through the papers for tomorrow’s meeting. Bratislava, once coronation city for Hungarian kings, now refined crude oil, made petrochemicals and plastics, pumped sulphuric acid into the Danube. Tomorrow morning he would meet Jan Sloboda, Ivan Kozia, Milos Razusovo, with whom he had corresponded. Cheap labour, cheap chemicals, growing more expensive as east met west. Cash in while we can, they’d agreed in London.

  Around him other men sat smoking and drinking, reading the papers. He was used to this way of life,
he understood it, even though he had not expected to become what he was: a buyer, a businessman, always on the move. You came, you expected little, you were gone in a couple of days. When you were home you thought about the next trip; travelling, you thought of home.

  This is an empty marriage, wrote Ella, in the letter he had found on the kitchen table. He had loosened his tie; he read it standing up. Spotlights lit the humming fridge, the plants, her writing.

  We have grown so far apart …

  I no longer feel …

  I have met someone who …

  He poured a drink, fed the cat, read the letter again, frowning. The silence of the house stretched limitlessly away, then pressed upon him, as he himself had come and gone, leaving and returning. Trains and boats and planes and a book, a man living one life when he might have lived another: at home in a study, reading and writing and thinking, stopping for lunch with his wife, taking her to bed in the afternoons, having children.

  He put down the letter, picked up the cat. She leapt away from him, made for the unlit upper floor.

  Restless, unable to face his room or the bar, he walked along the waterfront, beneath trees, past the Slovak National Gallery, and nineteenth-century houses. Leaves blew about at his feet. He came to a sweep of road, leading left into the city — billboards, evening traffic, cafés closing. On the right, another bridge, with a footpath. He began to walk across, the air above the water soon even colder, and full of petrol fumes. Cars went past him; he turned and looked down.

  Blue light danced in the racing oily water; a Dobermann chained on a piece of wasteland strained and barked up at him, guarding wrecked cars. A shrouded barge rocked in the wake of a riverboat, a half-moon hung in a hazy sky. How fast the river ran.

  At length, the far side, a plaque on a wall. 1944. Built to commemorate the liberation of the city by the Red Army — with a few, guidebook words, it wasn’t hard to work that out. Beyond the end of the bridge was only darkness: no street lamps, few houses, only another sweep of road, towards Vienna. He turned to look back at the city, saw the castle, high on a hill to the west. In Prague the castle was floodlit, magical. This was a box, a fortress, functional and implacable.

  The cold from the river, the windswept bridge, the fumes, all made his eyes sting. He walked back, tasting something metallic, turning his collar up. The sunlit autumn journey had vanished, as if in a dream; crowded, familiar Prague and his house in London, which had been his home — they, too, felt immeasurably distant.

  The morning was bright and cold. He went to the bank, took a tram to his first appointment, in a leafy suburb near the Slovak Parliament. The offices were furnished in sixties chrome and veneer; he was shown to a conference room and listened to a presentation in enthusiastic English, shown graphs and flow charts and prices of plastic granules.

  Mr Sloboda was confident; along the table a bleached blonde woman in a suit snapped open a briefcase. His head ached, but he knew what he was doing: he smiled and signed the contract, and everyone shook hands. Clouds blew past the plate-glass window; two more meetings lay ahead. The smartly-dressed woman gave him her card; he slipped it into his wallet and thanked her, knowing he would not call.

  He spent the rest of the day in meetings, lunching on a beer and sandwich. Back at the hotel, he showered, watched black and white television while he dressed. Government speeches, advertisements for non-stick pans and condoms. When he looked across to the window he saw that it had begun to snow — just a few fine flakes, but there, caught in the lights on the embankment, glistening far below, vanishing into the darkness of the river. It was the only beautiful thing he had seen since his arrival. He thought of the neon-lit dining room, with its muzak, and men alone; he sat in a plastic chair and dialled London, and Ella, and home. The phone rang and rang, and went on to voicemail; he hung up, took his coat and his book and went out, walking away from the river, and up towards the Old Town.

  Beneath the flyover of the bridge, where traffic roared past the Cathedral, the last of the medieval city wall bordered the narrow streets. It was bitterly cold; snow shone on the cobbles. He found a square; he found a Hungarian restaurant, small and crowded and candlelit. As someone swung out of the door he smelt charcoal smoke, beer and spices; inside, the manageress at the till pointed him to a corner seat. Warmth, candlelight, a sizzling grill at the back.

  — Prosim?

  The waitress was young, with dark hair in a clip and eyes thick with black liner. He ordered a beer, fried potatoes and sausages; he spent the evening reading and watching her, as people talked around him. Now and then their eyes met, then he went back to his book. Snow fell past the window, it got late, the restaurant emptied.

  The young man grilling meat at the back poured himself a beer and lit a cigarette. The waitress came over.

  — Soon we are closing.

  — Yes. He put down his book. — May I buy you a drink?

  She hesitated. — Okay.

  — A brandy?

  — Okay.

  He watched her go up to the bar, and reach for the bottle. Reflected light in the mirror touched her dark hair, her earrings. He thought: women for me are glimpses, dreams, but this is someone I could care for. He felt this instinctively, without knowing why.

  She brought the drinks on a small metal tray. They sat opposite one another, the candle between them down to a stub. People hurried past the window, laughing in the snow. She waited for him to speak.

  He asked her to tell him about her life. In formal English she told him she was studying law at the Komensky University, near the Old Bridge. He frowned: this must be Red Army Bridge, last night’s place of desolation. Yes, she told him: it had been renamed in 1992. Of course, it was not so old, this bridge, but — she made a gesture; he understood. Everything had changed; new countries looked back for their sense of a future.

  She was working in the vacations, hoping to travel abroad. No, she had never been to London. Her travelling had been mostly in Eastern Europe, though last year she had been for the first time to West Berlin.

  And he?

  He told her he had been travelling always, though this was his first visit to Slovakia, that he had not really planned this life — he turned the glass in his hand, watching the swirl of gold in the candlelight — but it was what he did, it was too late to change.

  His family must miss him, she said, and he saw her glance at his ring.

  He said: — My marriage is over, and gave a gesture, a shrug, turning away to watch the snow. — These things happen, he said.

  — There are children?

  — No. He drank, imagining them. — Unfortunately we —

  There was a silence. The manageress, counting out notes at the till, banged it shut. The young chef wiped down the grill and hung up his knives. The smell of wine and candles and charcoal hung in the air. They looked at one another.

  She said: — You were faithful to your wife?

  — Always, he said, and it was true, though it had not been enough.

  — And now?

  — Now it does not matter. He finished the brandy, put down his glass. — And you? You are —

  — I have no intention to marry. I must study for a long time.

  — Of course. Well — He drew a breath, feeling his heart begin to hammer. — I must go.

  She looked at him directly.

  — Which is your hotel?

  He lay on his back and she bestrode him, her unclipped hair falling across her face, his face, falling through his fingers as he reached for her, drawing her down towards him, craving her mouth on his. Beyond her, at the uncurtained window, the snow was swirling through the night. He felt himself drawn into a place at the heart of the world, where everything began and ended; he closed his eyes, came holding her blindly, and weeping.

  Afterwards he held her tenderly, smoothing the thick dark hair from her face, covering and stroking her, kissing her forehead.

  She said: — You are still in love with your wife, I think.
>
  He could not answer her, he could not look.

  In the morning the city was silent and dazzling. Grit was thrown down, but trams and trolleybuses moved slowly and few people were out. There was no traffic on the river. She told him she was going to walk home, to her apartment; the friend she shared with had gone to the mountains with her family; no one would have missed her. He pictured her climbing stone stairs, felt the cold of her empty rooms, thought of her making coffee on an electric ring, drinking it alone, with her law books on the table; sleeping before she went back to the restaurant tonight.

  He held her close as they walked through the silent streets. He had one more meeting, at eleven. If the trains were running, he would go back to Prague; take the bus to the airport next morning, fly back to London.

  And then?

  — Let me buy you breakfast.

  They drank scalding coffee, with slightly sour milk, in a kavernia on Tobrucka Street. There were rolls and jam, but no butter.

  — Things are easier now, but still — She broke her roll in pieces, dunking it in the coffee. — Still we have a little way to go.

  He watched her, pale and drawn but composed. All night they had been naked together. He reached for her hand.

  — You are completely beautiful.

  She drank her coffee, regarding him.

  — Let me come home with you. We are just at the beginning. I can come back —

  She shook her head. — These situations can be very painful, I think. There are many things I want to do with my life. I do not want — She did not finish the sentence.

  Out in the street he kissed her, folding her hands in his. Their faces were frozen.

  — Thank you. You made me feel — He closed his eyes, drawn back at once into darkness and whiteness and she above him, a different woman, abandoned and entrancing.

  Cold lips brushed his cheek. — We remember one another.

  She walked away, not looking back.

  He went to his meeting, then checked out of the hotel. The snow lay thick on the ground, but the trains were running. He sat in the restaurant car, lit all the way down by rose-coloured lamps, drinking and thinking as they pulled away.