Ring Road

by Ian Sansom

  * ‘Louise rolled away from under Martin once again, revolted and unsatisfied. The only thing that kept them together, she realised, was his money: without it, as a man, as a lover, as a father to her three beautiful children, Martin was nothing. She couldn’t understand why she had ever left Derek, who was sexier (even though he was balding and a little bit fat), funnier (even though he could admittedly be quite moody and uncommunicative), braver (even though he had failed to stand up to the builders that time who had clearly overcharged them), stronger (even though he never took any exercise and had let himself go and could hardly lift the coal bucket), a really very talented journalist (even though he only worked for a local paper) and a great cook (even if he only ever made spaghetti bolognese). He understood her needs as a woman and as a teacher of the blind. She resolved once again to return to him and beg him to have her back. But would he forgive her?’

  † Both of which are readily available, actually, for a small fee – concessions available – from Robert McCrudden in Creative Writing (Drama) 1 at the Institute, Thursdays 7.30–9. There is a handout.

  11

  The Quality Hotel

  At midway, an apparent digression

  A hundred years of weather has done its best, has done its work on the Quality Hotel, a building which is no longer in the full flush of its youth, a building which might properly be described as weather-beaten, a building sick, defeated and on its last legs: there is penetrating damp, rising damp, dry rot, wet rot, moulds, fungus, spores, weevils and beetles of every kind. It’s a building with water in its lungs and a loss of strength in its limbs. It is a poor, poor palsied building, feeble, full of fractures, incontinent and immune-deficient. Life has been hard on the Quality Hotel. It has sustained a lot of knocks. Frankly, it’s a miracle the place is still standing. The scaffolding helps.

  It was built in 1873. Or, at least, work began in 1873. Like most things in our town the Quality Hotel has been a perpetual work-in-progress, a good idea, a dream and a conception rather than a thing complete and in and of itself, a place in whose beginning was its end, which promised more than it ever delivered and which is now long past its best. The Quality Hotel was never really completed and now it’s nearly finished.

  It was perhaps fitting that the architect of the Quality Hotel was a man named More O’Ferral, a talented daydreamer and a full-time blusterer, a man whose exaggerated claims for his professional achievements were matched only by his sketchy knowledge of fundamental engineering principles, a man of whom portraits show a weak, nervous, weaselly face hidden behind a vast, impressive and deeply suspicious beard.

  After building the Quality Hotel More O’Ferral was appointed the town’s first Clerk of Works, a position he held until his death. His portrait hangs to this day in the council chambers, the big bushy beard and the beady eyes overseeing proceedings – the timeless face of the patriarch and of the professionally shifty.

  The records show that More O’Ferral was born locally, right here in town, up on Fitzroy Avenue, into a chinless, wealthy family of bankers and merchants. He was a sickly child, of an artistic bent of mind, and when he was sixteen he left home, determined to flee to Paris to pursue an artistic career, but by the time he arrived in London en route, he’d already run out of money, and in one of those compromises masquerading as practical common sense for which our townsmen are well known, he decided to abandon his dreams of painting nudes in Montmartre and drinking absinthe with bohemians at the Moulin Rouge, and he became apprenticed instead to a Clerk of Works in Tower Hamlets. He lied about his skills, his knowledge and his experience: his career as an architect had begun.*

  More O’Ferral’s largest project before taking on the Quality Hotel had been the building of a Turkish Baths in Bethnal Green in London, a project which, if certain of the burghers of our town had known about it, might have caused some objections and concern about More O’Ferral’s involvement with any building project here. But needless to say no one from our town had ever been to the Turkish Baths in Bethnal Green in London and More O’Ferral was better known – or at least, had let it be put about by his family and friends – for designing a chapel and a small arcade of shops, neither of which projects had actually been built, but for which the plans existed and were simply going to waste. The Quality Hotel, therefore, when it was built featured, naturally, a large Turkish Baths, a chapel and a small arcade of shops.

  These features at the time had been unique in their combination, if not eccentric, and were never quite completed. The Turkish Baths, for example, had been ornately tiled and plumbed, fitted with its own small boiler house and decorated with various curious carved marine and piscine specimens, mainly porpoises, which were easier to shape in sandstone than fish – scales are tricky – but the Baths had a short lifespan of just a few weeks before problems with leaks of steam into the bedrooms shut it down. Guests initially mistook the heat and humidity for passion, but even the most ardent of lovers eventually noticed the aromatic fog and the unusual damp, and the condensation on the mirrors. The carpenter for the chapel, meanwhile, a Mr Fitzsimmons, a renowned local craftsman, had died unexpectedly, chisel in hand – he’d slipped and carved out an artery, bleeding to death on an unfinished altar rail – and so the necessary pews and pulpit somehow never materialised, and the chapel was never consecrated and never found the role for which it was destined, but was furnished instead with occasional chairs, a double-end settee and an ottoman, and became the room where the hotel’s lady guests sometimes took their coffee and spoke of suffrage. The tradesmen – the tobacconist, the stationer, the confectioner, the tailor – who had taken the opportunity to open up business in the miniature arcade of shops, with its beautiful high glazed vault connecting the hall and lobby of the hotel with the dining rooms, had soon found that trade was seasonal and had closed.

  The owners and founders of the hotel, the McCreas, had done their best to make the most of More O’Ferral’s inspirations and follies in their advertising, in handbills and newspaper copy that can now be consulted in the local history archive, upstairs in the library on the Windsor Road, under the watchful gaze of Philomena, or Maureen, or Anne, or one of the legion of our other woolly-jumpered part-time librarians. Schoolchildren are in fact the only people who actually do consult the archives, for the purposes of school projects, but like God and Diet Coke, and helpful lady librarians, it’s good to know they’re there, in case we ever need them.*

  According to the historical evidence, and despite their obvious mistake in employing O’Ferral in the first place, the McCreas had enough sense to see that it was necessary to advertise the peculiar charms of the Quality Hotel as offering distinctively different things to different people. Thus, depending on which publications you read – there’s an advertisement in The Times, for example, and one also in the Impartial Recorder, surely one of the only occasions on which these two journals have been united in common purpose – the Quality Hotel was either a ‘First-class Family Hotel’ or a set of ‘Cheap Billiard Rooms Offering Private Dinners on the Shortest Notice’. Courting couples were wooed with the promise of ‘Special Rooms for Wedding Breakfasts’, well-to-do and progressive young women were drawn in by the ‘Ladies’ Coffee and Meeting Room’ and others, perhaps, by promises of ‘A Porter Up All Night’ and ‘Every Comfort Requisite’. The hotel was even, apparently, and presumably on the strength of the leaky Turkish Baths, ‘A Hydropathic Establishment’, and then again and also, presumably on the employment of a local doctor, a suitable place of recuperation for ‘The Nervous, Hypochondriacal, Dipsomaniacal, or Strictured’. Each type and variety of advertisement, however, ended with the same boast, which had been dreamed up by John McCrea and to which John’s wife Nora had added an important coda: ‘Good Cooking and Extreme Cleanliness’, each advert concluded, ‘Limited Numbers Received’. This hint of exclusivity, Nora felt, represented the very meaning of quality itself. A liberal table and starched sheets meant nothing if meant for everyone.

  Nora
was a black-haired country girl, the daughter of a local landowner, who had always had ideas above her station. She was the driving force behind the establishment of the Quality Hotel. She it was who had persuaded her husband John and the brothers McCrea, successful tobacco merchants, to put their money into a hotel in the first place. Nora it was who had visited the south of France and Italy, and stayed in beautiful, golden hotels, lit by the Mediterranean sun and dappled by cypresses and bays, so different from the uniform grey of our own town, and Nora it was who’d returned from these trips with an expanded waistline, new shoes, trunks full of trinkets and souvenirs, and a vision to change for ever the face of our solemn little town, with its occasional sycamore and rowan, and not a single fine restaurant or high-class clothing shop. She wasn’t the first person who thought she could turn the place around and she would not be the last.

  John McCrea had determined that if his wife had to have a hotel here – a place where, let’s be honest, no hotel should naturally be – then it needed to blend in and be something that at least looked like a linen mill, say, or a soapworks, but Nora had insisted on the Italian palazzo style, and of course More O’Ferral had ideas of his own, and together the three of them, John, Nora and O’Ferral, had argued and fought over almost each door and window and stone in the building, so that in the end the Quality Hotel gloried in every classical column type, and in huge industrial corner chimney stacks, wrought-iron balconies, a terrace and Italianate gardens. With the final addition, at More O’Ferral’s insistence, of dozens of carved stone birds and snakes, in homage to John Ruskin, and Nature, and St Patrick, the place had ended up as a kind of demented vision of Anglo-Hiberno-Pan-European-Colonial-Imperial luxury – six storeys of pink and yellow sandstone, with whimsical wrought-iron palm tree grilles on the windows and an entrance like the steps to a workhouse. Even in its heyday the Quality Hotel had the appearance of a palace designed by the confused and built by the tired and emotional, the whole thing a monument to divided loyalties, strong personalities, and the variable and occasionally questionable skills of our own local tradesmen and builders.*

  Nora had wanted to crown the whole thing with bronze sculpted medallions showing portrait reliefs of herself and John over the entranceway, but More O’Ferral had managed to dissuade her. There were some kinds of ugliness which even he could not tolerate, although he had made an exception for Nora herself, in the flesh, whose face and whose considerable years, he found, belied her youthful and energetic body, and who had become briefly his lover, on the terrace, in the Turkish Baths and the arcade, and, to O’Ferral’s eternal shame, in the putative chapel. Nora’s reputation among the workmen at the Quality Hotel was legendary – she had adopted ‘foreign practices’ it was said – although she never stooped lower than a mason and to the bricklayers her charms were only a rumour.

  More O’Ferral was just twenty-four years old when he began work on the hotel, a bearded boy, really, but his professional reputation had preceded him. The McCreas had heard much about this brilliant local young man and his achievements, mostly from More O’Ferral’s own family, with whom they occasionally dined. Of course, neither of the families could have foreseen the great turbulence that was to befall More O’Ferral’s personal life, and which was to affect his work and was to determine, for better or for worse, the design and building of the Quality Hotel, our town’s remaining one great landmark and our link with the past.

  Shortly after his appointment as architect to the McCreas, More O’Ferral’s young wife had died unexpectedly in childbirth. This was the reason his drawings and designs for the Quality Hotel had taken such a dark and unusual turn, people said: it was owing, they said, to his grief. What they didn’t know was that it was owing also to his increasing reliance upon opium, which he was using to help him overcome his sense of loss and to rediscover inspiration. He was stuck, frankly, for ideas, and he couldn’t think about anything except his wife and Nora’s constant interfering and entreaties, and the hotel he was designing, on paper and in his head, was becoming more and more like a monument to his marriage, a phantasmagoric place of remembrance and longing, and when it was built, for all of its fripperies outside, it remained within a dark, crypt-like building, opening out into vast and inexplicable spaces. Sigmund Freud, if he’d been around in town at the time, would undoubtedly have had something interesting to say about More O’Ferral’s state of mind, and he might have warned the McCreas not to employ a man clearly suffering from several kinds of complex. Down the years, visitors to the Quality Hotel often remarked that the black marble columns in the hall and lobby made the place look more like a mausoleum than a hotel and indeed, if it weren’t for the domed stairway, one of Nora’s suggestions, and the eventual introduction of electric light, the entire entrance hall would have been lit by only two iron lamps bearing flames by the door, creating the illusion of walking into an underground vault. The Quality Hotel, from the moment of its conception, was a monument to money ill spent, to sex and to death.

  More O’Ferral himself was dead by the time he was fifty, dead, they say, from the overwork and strain caused by his last project – the designing of a moving covered walkway intended to facilitate easier shopping on our town’s busy streets, a project far ahead of its time and doomed to failure, but which eventually found its fulfilment in Bloom’s, the mall, more than a hundred years later, with its escalators and its famous motto, ‘Every Day a Good Day, Regardless of the Weather’. His visionary project exhausted him. And the ferocious drug habit and an attack of syphilis probably did not help.

  Uncovered and exposed, the vision that originally shaped the Quality Hotel has also long since faded and died. People’s ideas of what is or what is not an aspect of quality changes, and so over the years More O’Ferral’s Turkish Baths were transformed into a palm court, where people could take tea and listen to the music of string quartets, and then eventually the palm court itself became a lounge area where people could take afternoon Nescafe and listen to muzak, or Abba. The dining room, with its vast leaded windows overlooking the Italianate garden, was briefly an art deco ballroom and later a dance hall with a sprung floor. Rooms had been modernised piecemeal over the years, most of them cut in half and then in half again, until the hotel had over 300 tiny rooms with identical orange carpets and more stud walls than originals. The chapel became a library and eventually a games room. The arcade of shops, which at first offered perfumes and tobaccos of every kind and combination, became an arcade filled with slot machines, video games and vending machines. By the 1960s people even from our town had begun holidaying abroad, where they could be guaranteed warm weather and cheap food, and so quality no longer meant what it used to: there was no longer a desire for refinement. There was a desire, indeed, for the opposite. What we desired in our town, as elsewhere, was more and cheaper.

  The hotel accommodated itself accordingly. A large neon sign was erected over the carved entrance, stating, simply, ’QUALITY’ and then, soon,’QUALIT’ then ’QUA IT’, and then finally just ’QU IT.’ There was the concrete back-bar and disco extension. During the 1980s there was even a short-lived attempt to turn the hotel into a conference facility, the chapel becoming a room with a slide projector and stackable chairs, but apart from the local council, who used the facilities for some town-planning enquiries, our town did not support a business community which could utilise such state-of-the-art facilities.

  After the conference failure came the weekend antiques and collectables fairs, and the record fairs, and the psychics and healers, and briefly, Frank Gilbey’s jazz festival, which attracted no more than a couple of dozen punters to turn out and listen to some pot-bellied men play Dixieland in the remains of the lounge, which now resembled the day room of an old people’s home.

  For all its recent history of inevitable decline, though, there is not a resident in town above the age of consent and below the high tide of senility who doesn’t have some fond memory of the Quality Hotel. One of our oldest residents, Mrs Malone, who
lives in the Gables – by far the most prestigious of our many old people’s homes, which boasts residents’ parking, landscaped gardens and views over the People’s Park, all of which are, strictly speaking, surplus to requirements, since most of the residents are half blind and none of them any longer owns a car – claims that she can remember being at the Quality Hotel when she heard news of the outbreak of World War One in 1939.

  ‘No, Mother,’ Gerry her son would always say. ‘The First World War began in 1914.’ As a history teacher Gerry was accustomed to correcting.

  ‘I know what I know,’ she’d say.

  ‘The Second World War began in 1939,’ he’d insist.

  ‘Well, we shall have to agree to disagree, Gerard,’ she would say and fall into another gentle sleep.

  Mrs Malone is shrivelled now, has emphysema, looks like an oven-ready bird and is about the weight of a sparrow, but back in the old days she’d been glamorous in a way that no one these days is glamorous, and no one has been for about fifty years. Photographs of her with the late Mr Malone outside the Quality Hotel, arriving for a Masonic Ladies’ Night, show him with hair that looks as though it has been glued into place and a three-piece suit, and her in a borrowed stole and long gloves, staring proudly at the camera – and they were just average people, they were nothing special – and if he was honest Gerry would have to admit that one of the reasons he’d taken up the study of history was to try to understand that look, and to try to recover some of that glamour, and that confidence. Gerry wore a leather jacket and listened to music by the Grateful Dead, but he intended, as he got older, to switch to suits and a fob watch, and maybe a panama hat in the summer. Gerry is now nearly sixty years old, so he’s taking his time. The leather jacket, in the meantime, was meant to evoke T. E. Lawrence rather than James Dean, but this was a fine distinction that was lost on the people of our town. Gerry’s area of specialisation was the 1930s – that period when his parents were young adults and the Quality Hotel was still, just, a place of wonders.