The Belle Hotel

by Craig Melvin

  He stood at the three-way crossroads on Ship Street and squinted the better to see her, and because smoke was getting in his eyes. A handsome Belle Epoque building: wrought iron, sandstone and rose-tinted glass. Beautiful. Bloody awful name though. Franco’d have to think on that. He watched with satisfaction as the flat-capped workman banged the sold sign over the door of his hotel. His hotel. Franco’s eyes watered and this time it wasn’t from the sunshine or the smoke.

  ‘Right, let’s get to work.’

  It was 1973 and the United Kingdom was under the decree of the Conservative government, conserving electricity to beat the striking miners, and working a three-day week. Franco knew who was doing the other four. Lazy sods. Work was in short supply, the dole queue got longer, rubbish piled up in the gutter and everybody blamed the government. Franco whistled a show tune, one of Larry’s, as he sauntered home to wait for the small hours.

  Four am on a three-day weekday. Franco’s up with the larks. At Brighton railway station Franco slowly backed the Granada under the British Rail sign and backwards up the ramp. The 3.5 GL strained for a moment as the uneven automatic gearbox got used to the gradient.

  ‘Now then, quietly, Franco,’ he muttered to the no one he hoped was about, ‘nemo nos impune lacessit.’

  A memento from Franco’s war. No one fucks with Franco. They can capture him and half starve him to death for the duration of the war, but he’ll bounce back stronger. The lumbering hulk of the Granada levelled out on the platform, brake lights flashing the silent carriages in a shock of red.

  He cut the engine and felt his way along the bunch of keys for the longest one in the sudden darkness. The car was about as close to the locked galley door as was humanly possible. He’d done this a thousand times before, usually in broad daylight, then loading things on. This morning things were going the other way. Stealing. No, taking what was his by right. Bric-a-brac. No use to British Rail. Nationalised nonsense, he could hear Larry declaring over his kippers as they rushed through Haywards Heath. Nationalised nonsense that had put a stop to decades of decadent travel between Brighton and the Metrop.

  Franco listened in silence. Nothing. An hour at least before the milk and papers went into Smiths. Another before the first bleary-eyed commuters pitched up for the six o’clock express.

  He unlocked the galley door and felt hissing water drip onto his feet. Normally by now Franco would have been up and into his tool bag, adjusting the temperamental boiler, tinkering with the carriage’s ancient plumbing. Not now. No point. The two beautiful Pullman carriages were off to the sidings this afternoon to be left to rot. Well, Franco was going to bloody well have what he was owed, and who else needed Belle-embossed cruet anyway?

  Half an hour of steady, methodical work and the Granada’s capacious boot was filled with crockery and silver. He fetched his Phillips screwdriver from the tool bag already waiting for him on the front seat, and went off to unscrew his favourite pictures.

  The irony of this action was not lost on Franco. Once a week, on a Monday, he’d toured the two carriages giving each of the simple scenes, Balcombe Viaduct in Spring and Brighton Station in the Snow, a little tighten to the right. The undeniably ropey track shook each picture to its hinges until enough of a gap was opened to create an irritating rattle.

  ‘Franco,’ Larry would bellow from behind his Times. ‘Rat-a-tat-tat.’

  Out came Franco with his trusty turner and the weekly cross-carriage chat about the importance of the crosshead screw design and its self-centring properties.

  ‘Phillip’s major contribution was in driving the concept forwards to a point where it was adopted by screwmakers and car manufacturers.’

  ‘Henry F. Phillips, 1889 to 1958, Portland, Oregon. I once received a film script based on the man’s life. He lost his patent in 1949, you know, never came back from it. Fucking Yanks. I say, Franco, what about a screwdriver?’

  The watercolours safely back against the carriage walls, Franco would return to the galley and prepare a gleaming tray of vodka, ice and freshly squeezed oranges for the whole carriage. A tidy sum went onto Larry’s bill and straight into Franco’s pocket. Well, the job had to have its perks, and where did they think the Granada came from, steward’s wages?

  Franco made a final trip back to the galley once he’d loaded the pictures onto the back seat. Trays, the trays… he piled the battered silver salvers onto the counter. That’d give his hotel a flying start. Hot food coming out on gleaming platters and no more swaying train. Oh, yes, Franco was looking forward to this hotel lark. About time he made his mark. Now then, time to beat a hasty retreat.

  He jumped down from his former place of work, a nimble leap for a man in his sixties, swung the wooden door shut and slung the lock. He didn’t want thieves getting in, now, did he?

  Franco eased himself into the smooth polyurethane driver’s seat, flicked out a John Player Special from the packet on the dash and took the time to light it from the flush-fitted cigar lighter mounted by his gearstick, electric red ignited Virginia leaf, and with that, Franco marked with a deep, satisfying drag his transition from steward to hotelier.

  *

  Hookes Bank

  Franco Sheridan

  Belle Hotel

  Ship Street

  Brighton

  25 January 1973

  Dear Franco,

  Congratulations on the opening of Belle Hotel, that was quite a party! This letter confirms the following transactions on your newly opened account.

  +£100,000 Funds transfer from L.O.

  –£75,000 Purchase of twenty-bedroom Ship Street hotel property with pub and restaurant.

  –£10,000 Bar stock, Rhône Wine, Krug Champagne, Talisker Whisky. Transfer from Tooley St Bonded Vintners

  –£2,500 1000 Cohiba Robusta Cigars (kind permission Fidel Castro) 10,000 packs of Benson & Hedges cigarettes.

  –£2,500 One Wurlitzer Jukebox, purchased from Bar Italia, Frith Street.

  –£10,000 Habitat c/o Terence Conran design, soft and hard furnishings for the Belle Hotel bar

  Hookes have proudly banked The Savoy for a century and now Belle Hotel. I look forward to assisting you now and into the future.

  Yours,

  Paul Peters

  The twenty-bedroom property came with an internal garage that gave directly onto the cellar: handy when it came to offloading contraband. Franco had already taken a day trip to Dieppe and come back with a boot full of extra liquor to add to the stock of his padded bar.

  Larry was the first to christen it, on the day of his retirement from the National, with a very good bottle of Krug. ‘To Belle Hotel and freedom!’

  They raised glasses and Larry gave Franco the most precious memento of his time on the South Bank, the framed review by Kenneth Tynan that he’d hung on the wall to make the bad ones more bearable.

  Laurence Olivier at his best is what everyone has always meant by the phrase ‘a great actor’. He holds all the cards; and in acting the court cards consist of (a) complete physical relaxation, (b) powerful physical magnetism, (c) commanding eyes that are visible at the back of the gallery, (d) superb timing, which includes the ability to make verse swing, (e) chutzpah – the untranslatable Jewish word that means cool nerve and outrageous effrontery combined, and (f) the ability to communicate a sense of danger.

  These are all vital attributes, although you can list them in many orders of importance (Olivier himself regards his eyes as the ace of trumps); but the last is surely the rarest. Watching Olivier, you feel that at any moment he may do something utterly unpredictable; something explosive, possibly apocalyptic, anyway unnerving in its emotional nakedness. There is nothing bland in this man. He is complex, moody and turbulent; deep in his temperament there runs a vein of rage that his affable public mask cannot wholly conceal. I once asked Ralph Richardson how he differed, as an actor, from Olivier. He replied: ‘I haven’t got Laurence’s splendid fury.’

  Franco accepted the gift and put it up on the shel
f next to Brighton Station in Snow. From the first day of its opening, Belle Hotel had a touch of glamour that the old hotels, The Grand and The Metropole, just couldn’t touch – something about the spirit of the joint, its chutzpah, that made it the place you wanted to be when you were in Brighton.

  The theatrical connection helped. Franco did a shrewd deal with the Theatre Royal within his first month of opening. He’d take the casts of all the touring productions at B&B rates, just for the glamour they brought into the building. Glamour, sex and money. Soon Belle Hotel was bursting at the seams with wine, women and song. Franco hummed along, if I were a rich man, and kerchinged the recently decimalised notes into his cash register. The place had a tantalising whiff of old and new money meeting for debauchery. George IV, Brighton’s patron saint of fucking and eating, would have been proud.

  The early days of January 1974, as Cinderella played its final few performances, saw Belle Hotel at its most divinely decadent: Larry at the piano, giving the room his best Archie Rice, an ugly sister on each arm.

  Franco, the fabled poor man, had found the goose that laid the golden egg. All he had to do was keep every other fucker from killing it and depriving him of the gain he’d worked tooth and nail for. It was his name above the door: Franco Sheridan Licensed to Sell Intoxicating Liquor. His name, not British bloody Rail. Franco let it go to his head. Finally, Franco had a pot to piss in. In fact, he had about twenty of them, and he wasn’t minded to go back to stewarding any time soon. No thank you. Let him mind his own business and other folk kindly mind theirs.

  HMRC Tax Demand

  5 April 1974

  Franco Sheridan t/a Belle Hotel

  £8,247

  Then Franco was in for a bit of a shock. With the arrival of his first tax demand some of the partying had to stop. Same mood, but stricter controls, just when he’d had his eye on the new E-Type V12 Roadster, a drop-top Jag with a bodyline to die for. The Granada was getting a little battered, what with all those day trips to France. Franco was screwing every last farthing – sorry, ten pence – out of liquor. It was time to turn his attention to those other high-profit areas, rooms and food.

  For rooms, he’d need to use to his son and daughter-in-law. Johnny, the son he’d largely ignored since the end of the war, apart from setting him up as a bellboy at The Grand once Johnny had flunked out of school at sixteen; and Janet, the chambermaid who’d caught Johnny’s eye in The Grand staff canteen. They’d been married at Brighton Registry Office, Franco grumbling about having to take a day off from the trains to attend. Married but a handful of years, Johnny already had the pallor of a man twice his age and Janet, knocked up with Charlie on the night of Belle Hotel’s opening party, had her hands full to say the least. In a purely selfish move, Franco poached them both from The Grand and set them hard at the task of making the bedrooms pay for their board and lodging, and his Jag.

  Food, Franco knew about. A steward since the war, he knew all about buying food, doing it up and flogging it on a padded chair for profit. Sod it, he’d do the food himself. Let young Janet run the bar, after she finished cleaning the bedrooms. Franco was going to make his fortune out of food.

  He knew all the best dishes by heart – British classics, either by conquest or by design. He needed to write those down somewhere, but then he still had to look elsewhere for inspiration when it came to new food. Franco found salvation in Fanny Craddock. Her cookbook, Modest but Delicious, had been a Christmas gift from Larry. The great man was getting hungry for somewhere to spend his evenings now that he was down by the sea most of the time and it looked like Fanny had the answer.

  Franco had been a fan of her television programmes for many years, used to watch them of an evening with his dear, departed Vera. Little did he know at that point that Fanny was, in turn, inspired by Escoffier, the granddaddy of all good food. The first celebrity chef, Fanny had, with sheer brute force, raised the culinary bar for British housewives from the 1950s onwards. Her influence on their eating habits crept out of the home and into the commercial catering arena. If they were being introduced to canapés and prawn cocktails on the box, then they wanted them again when they went out for something posh.

  If people wanted Fanny’s food when they went out to eat, then Franco was going to damn well give it to them. He mastered crêpes Suzette, even cajoled Johnny into swiping one of those flaming trolleys from the dining room at The Grand.

  ‘They won’t miss it and, anyway, they owe us something, after working you two to the bone all that time,’ said Franco, handing Johnny and Janet their list of the day’s tasks.

  Franco ordered himself three sets of chef’s whites from the catalogue, thirty-inch waist from boy to man, and set about expanding his repertoire. Learning from Fanny about taste, flavours and presentation. Trusting himself for the right balance of sweet, sour, salty and bitter.

  Fanny’s lobster was a bit rich for Franco’s tastes, so he took out some of the cream and added more fish stock. Franco knew his onions and noticed the tang of allium added a certain something to the dish. It certainly was easier cooking at the giant hob with a solid floor, swept by Janet, under his feet than in the swaying galley of his formative food years.

  Modest but Delicious

  French Trifle

  This is served quite frequently in simple French bistros as a pudding, and is immensely popular with small fry too. You can make it in a small bowl for two persons with four slices of roll cut ½ inch thick, or a big family one with a quart syrup fruit jelly and a whole Swiss roll filled with either jam or jelly. You serve it from its glass container and it will be the talk of any dinner party or special occasion.

  1¼ pints any sweetened fruit syrup from bottled fruits

  1 oz powdered gelatine

  4 tbsp cold water

  6 slices of fresh or stale Swiss Jam roll

  Franco looked up chocolate in the index. He needed a signature sweet to sit there alongside the apple crumble and crème brûlée. There, that was it. Chocolate torte. Johnny bustled about in the larder, gathering ingredients to Fanny and Franco’s command.

  ‘Three ounces of milk chocolate. Four ounces of caster sugar, quarter pint double cream. So much cream, Fanny, you’re costing me a bleedin’ fortune. One egg white. We’ll keep the yolk for glazing. There. In that cup.’

  Johnny watched in silence as Franco melted the chocolate in a bain-marie. The water bath was improvised from a Pyrex in a boiling pan of water, no money for fancy kitchen gadgets in those days. Franco poured the fluff into a tart tin, tutting at the brown specks that dotted his jacket – Janet would have to give that a scrub before service. Ten minutes later and the three of them were sitting in the dining room tasting the torte with a pot of tea.

  ‘Yes,’ said Franco, ‘that’s going on the menu. With a white chocolate sauce and raspberries. We can freeze the rasps and pull out a handful as we need them. Janet, love, I need raspberries.’

  Franco joined the Hospitality Guild, the caterers’ industry body, and before too long got himself made Grand Master. Larry had pulled strings, the rest of Brighton’s hoteliers grumbled. Franco ignored them and made friends with Albert Roux, a fellow Grand Master and holder of the UK’s first Michelin star.

  ‘Michelin star,’ muttered Franco to himself on the train on the way home, high on camaraderie and cognac, ‘I’m having me one of those.’ As Franco slept the Balcombe Viaduct flew by beneath him. Franco knew that a star was beyond his reach, Albert had told him as much. Need to be at the craft from apron height. But in his dream, Franco saw a Michelin star over Belle Hotel’s door. He saw the star and he knew who’d be getting it for him.

  One day Franco stripped back decades of boarding-over and crumbling plasterwork to reveal some mint condition, belle époque panelling across the ground floor. Curvilinear forms and nature-inspired motifs danced tantalisingly between the restaurant and bar.

  ‘It may not be in vogue right now but it’s better than that flocking wallpaper. Come on, Johnny, grab that h
ammer, we’re going to see what’s behind this wall.’

  Jaguar Motor Car Company

  Receipt

  E-Type V12 Convertible

  £3,343 paid in cash in full with thanks

  Rummaging about in the cellar, Franco came across a dusty box of Masonic ornaments. He’d already thrown out the throne, didn’t want any of that lot in Belle Hotel. Now he took the solid gold mumbo-jumbo straight round to the pawnbroker’s, dusty cardboard grating along the narrow lane, and flogged the lot for the price of his Jag.

  As he was leaving the pawnbroker’s, a grandfather clock struck noon. Clock, Belle Hotel needed a clock for the lobby. Something to keep the place running like the trains. Franco bought the clock on the knock and carried it home on his shoulder. It was taller, by far, than the old man himself, though it weighed not a pennyweight more. Lumbering down Ship Street, Franco was back in El Alamein, fallen comrade a dead weight as he scrambled over the slippery sandbank to safety.

  The clock was a stunner. Eighteenth-century Kieninger Triple. Chime, date and time. Perfect, even if it was a kraut clock.

  22 June 1976

  12.30pm

  Tick-tock. Tock-tick.

  Roar.

  The sound of Franco’s new Jag as he fired her up in Belle Hotel’s garage. Janet could feel the rumble four floors up. Now that was a beautiful car. Made his Granada feel like a truck. He took his grandson Charlie out in it for a treat one Sunday between services, dashing along the Sussex lanes to Ditchling, the young fellow strapped in deep into the seat beside him. Charlie’s podgy hands holding out an imaginary steering wheel as he aped the old man. Made the dry old desert rat weep.

  By that blazing summer of 1976, Belle Hotel was firing on all cylinders. The bar bustled with seaside and conference trade, rooms full to bursting with dirty weekenders, and the restaurant had become the place to see and be seen. Franco’s passion for food and doing things properly had travelled far and wide. He found himself sitting at the head table at Guild dinners next to Albert Roux and the head chefs of The Dorchester and The Savoy.