Invisible

by Jonathan Buckley

  It’s even hotter today than when you left. My scalp feels as though it’s got ants crawling over it and I’m dripping on the keyboard. Thunderstorms are forecast, the manager tells me. His name is Caldecott – an obliging and tactful chap whose timbre suggests someone on the lower slopes of middle age, but with an older man’s undertone of world-weariness. That’s what running a hotel does for you, I suppose.

  In the morning Charlotte is whisking me away, so I may not have time to write. Shall we speak the day after? Write me a report from Recanati, if you have the time.

  He presses a key, and the computer recites his message to him. Having corrected his mistakes, he sends the e-mail. The air in the garden is absolutely still; upstairs a door closes, then silence returns.

  Malcolm locks the door of room 48, reassured that the stain from the water tank has not spread any further across the ceiling. Tucking the key into a pocket of his waistcoat, he covers his mouth to yawn, then walks slowly towards the staircase, past the dormant rooms, none of which has had an occupant since last summer. At the head of the stairs he pauses to press a toe against the uneven seam where a length of new carpet adjoins the old and the field of plain colour behind the loops of vine changes from crimson to maroon. He descends to the landing of the first floor and turns to walk past room 20, which is vacant, as is number 18, and number 16 as well. At the door of room 14, the suite in which the great soprano Adelina Patti once stayed, he hesitates, hearing gunshots and screeching tyres. He listens, and then there’s Simon Laidlaw’s voice, approaching the door, talking on the phone.

  He moves away, past Giles Harbison’s room, then the one in which Mr and Mrs Sampson are staying, and room 9, where a Do Not Disturb sign hangs from the handle, above Mr Gillies’s brogues. He goes down the stairs and crosses the hall to turn off the lights in the lounge. On one of the tables, underneath the panel depicting a croquet game, two empty wine bottles stand by an ashtray, in which lies the stub of a cigar, with its scarlet and gold paper band still in place. He turns off the lights, and in the moonlit dusk of the lounge he regards the portrait of Walter Davenport Croombe. Late one night, in the autumn of 1861, Croombe stood on the corner of the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris, watching the bricklayers and stonemasons at work under arc lamps. He closes his eyes and tries to imagine how it must have been, to see the gangs of labourers, in the small hours of the morning, in a blaze of artificial light, unloading the carts that had hauled the stone from the quarry of St Maximin. He tries to picture the building site, illuminated by banks of gas mantles, and Croombe marvelling at this nocturnal scene, as he would marvel at the completed Grand Hôtel one year later, when he would sit in the Salle des Fêtes, with Sandrine, amid an infinity of reflected gaslights.

  Back in the hall, still under the influence of his reverie, he looks up at the galleries that Croombe built around the hall in the year he bought the hotel. Up there, in front of the bust of Prince Albert, Adelina Patti one afternoon sang an aria by Rossini, impromptu, to an Italian family that was gathering downstairs, making ready to depart for the church, for a wedding. He follows the cascade of the staircase from the upper floor to the hall, tracing the spirals of wrought-iron ivy under the sinuous black handrail, admiring the way the spirals unwind into looser strands as they tumble down the stairs. In something like a gesture of consolation, he places a hand on the rail.

  Seated at the reception desk, he once again reads the letter he has written to Stephanie:

  You ask how I’ve been. I’ve been all right. I have a good job. I like where I work and the people I work with, and that’s more than most people can say, I suspect. But I have to admit it’s been difficult, never seeing you or speaking to you. It’s tempting, very tempting, to pick up the phone right now. To hear your voice – I’ve wanted that so often. How do you sound, I wonder? You were a child last time you spoke to me and now you’re a young woman. It will be wonderful to hear you. A minute from now I could be listening to your voice, but I can’t do this – I mustn’t do it – until you’ve spoken to your mother. Nothing could please me more than to see you straight away, but we must take everyone’s feelings into account. Why don’t you talk to her and then give me a call? The number’s on the top of this letter. I’m here most of the time, Monday to Sunday.

  Actually, the Oak will be closing down very soon – less than three weeks from now, in fact. It would be nice if you could come down here for a day or two, to see where I’ve been working all these years, while you’ve been going through school. There’s a pool in the basement, a huge bath of mineral water. You won’t ever have come across anything quite like it. I’ll put a leaflet in with this letter so you can see what I mean.

  I would love to see you, Stephanie. Every day I’ve thought about you. I’ll stop now, otherwise I’ll get embarrassing, and you won’t want to come down here after all.

  Jack Naylor comes in from the garden, carrying a bottle of beer by its neck. ‘Evening, Mr Caldecott,’ he says, swinging the bottle behind his back. ‘Working late?’

  ‘Odds and ends, Jack,’ he replies. ‘Odds and ends.’

  ‘Need me for anything?’

  ‘No, Jack. Thank you. I’ll be off home in a minute.’

  ‘I’ll say goodnight then, Mr Caldecott.’

  ‘Yes. Goodnight.’

  ‘Goodnight,’ says Jack, crossing to the room that was once the office of the telegraph clerk.

  For the last time he reviews what he has written. It is inadequate, but this is only the beginning, he tells himself, putting it into an envelope with a leaflet for the Oak.

  From an inner pocket of his jacket he removes the note he has written for the morning: a copy of the Daily Mail should be put on Mr Gillies’s tray, who would like a breakfast of two fried eggs and thickly sliced ham, with well-toasted bread and strong coffee; a copy of The Times should be left at Mr and Mrs Sampson’s table in the breakfast room – it is their wedding anniversary, so congratulations might be offered; Mrs Ainsworth dislikes cut flowers, so there should be no vase on the Ainsworths’ table. He takes a paper clip from the wooden tub on the desk and attaches the memo to the cover of the register. From the glass door, under the elegant gold lettering, his weary face regards him. He turns off every light in the hall except the lamp above the desk.

  Looking at the stairs, he recalls the sight of the workmen as they chipped away the concrete in which the staircase had been encased, exposing inch by inch the wrought-iron ivy. Giles Harbison had come down from London that afternoon. Stooped under scaffolding, they admired the panels that nobody had expected to find: the tennis game, the croquet match, the archery contest. They went to the terrace, where Giles produced a pack of H.Upmann cigars and lobbed one to him. Sitting on a sack of sand, wearing white paper overalls that were too small for them, they smoked their cigars and looked at the rainwater pooling on the tarpaulins that covered the flower beds.

  From Jack’s room the sound of snoring emerges, a forthright noise, like the snoring of a bad actor. Looking through the crack between the door and the jamb, he observes Jack asleep on the camp bed. He has wound his jacket tightly and lodged it under his neck as a pillow roll, which has tilted his head back so that his nose and chin and Adam’s apple form three sharp little peaks in a row. His mouth gapes as if an oxygen mask has just been taken off him. Soundlessly he pulls the door shut.

  two

  On a big white chair, opposite the man and woman who are presenting the show, sits an actress whose face is on the cover of a magazine this week. Behind the man, on a big screen, the actress is dressed in a nurse’s uniform. They all look round at the screen, and the picture begins to move. An old man is lying in a hospital bed, with a white plastic curtain around him. Tightly he grips the nurse’s arm, then lets it go. On the screen the actress is crying; watching her cry, the woman presenter puts down her sheet of paper and looks as if she might start crying too. Facing the screen, the actress touches her hair nervously; she has very long fingers, with nails as pale as cutt
lefish bones. Her watch is the size and shape of a lemon half.

  Eloni pours the water over the tea bag. ‘Yes, totally, totally,’ the actress answers, making her eyes big, like a young girl’s. She pulls at the hem of her tiny skirt and the man looks at her legs, which are shapely and bare and very smooth. The actress puts her fingertips on her face. ‘I was like, I’m sorry? Excuse me?’ she says, shaking her head in bewilderment, and then she laughs, and the man and the woman both laugh with her.

  ‘I’m sorry? Excuse me?’ Eloni mimics, buttering her toast. From her window she looks down into the back yard, at the rusting drums of cooking oil and the bin of meat wrappers and the mound of squashed cardboard boxes, on which the pictures of tomatoes have been turned milky by the sunlight. Even with the window shut the room smells bad, because of the blood on the wrappers and the bucket of bones in the corner of the yard, which the cats get into every night, knocking the lid off. And there are big patches of trodden food on the tarmac, a stinking grey mud of vegetable leaves and peel and scraps of rind that never gets scraped away. She would complain, but that might get her into trouble, or she could offer to clean the place, but that might be the same as complaining. She takes the air freshener from under the sink and shoots a cloud of sugary rose scent into all four corners of her room.

  Before leaving for work at the Oak she irons her best blouse and the overall she wears at Burgerz. She opens her purse. It contains only coins, so she takes a £10 note from one of the plastic wallets she keeps underneath the mattress at night. She wraps the wallet tightly again, binding it with rubber bands, then extracts the other one and takes them both to the sink, and there she stuffs them into the tin of tea bags, where no thief would think of looking. On the television an expert in something to do with families is frowning deeply as he listens to a phone call from a woman in Liverpool, who has some problem with her husband. The blouse has cooled enough to put it on. She turns back the bed sheets, then switches the television off. At the door she stops to kiss the photograph of her parents, and picks up the sheaf of keys.

  This is her favourite time of the day, when the air still has a taste of dew and the whole of the High Street lies in a deep, moist shadow. Up on the highest roofs there are patches of buttery sunlight and the pale blue sky above them is as pure a colour as any precious stone. It is cool in the shadow, but the cloudless sky and the sunlit roofs are promises of the warmth of the approaching day. Singly, at an easy speed, the cars pass by, slipping between the buildings at the end of the street like fish between boulders. She walks up the High Street, looking in the windows, at washing machines and cameras and clothes she cannot afford, but today is one of the days she feels the beginnings of happiness as she looks at these things, because each of them seems to reveal a life that might be hers. Be patient, the shops seem to say to her: be patient, and work hard, and this life will be yours, in time. Resting her forehead on the cold glass, she stares into the delicatessen. On a small white table bulbous jars of fruits preserved in syrup glisten in the light from the street. Shelves recede into darkness, laden with plaques of Swiss chocolate, spices in bottles, dozens of different pots of honey and mustard, deep tins with labels that seem to have been drawn by hand. Stepping back, she looks up and down the street, to make sure that nobody has noticed her. The hands and numerals of the church clock are glowing bronze against the golden stone of the tower. A morning like this is almost enough to make her forget everything, she thinks, staring into the dazzle of the clock, then she sees the time that the hands are showing, and resumes her walk, taking her usual detour to avoid the police station.

  She strides up the hill towards the gateway of the Oak, walking in the middle of the empty narrow road, in a tunnel of leaves, on a long avenue of leaf shadows. She passes through the gate, onto the shining white drive, where she stops by the big stone flowerpot in the shape of a lion. The sun is lifting off the horizon and some bits of mist remain in the lower part of the valley, clinging like cotton to the grass where the slopes are in the shade. Above the mist, dozens of cars are on the move, up and down the long line of the road. Nose to tail, two lorries climb the incline, slowly as a caterpillar. She surveys the ranks of roses in the flower beds, these English flower beds that meet the grass at borders as straight as the edges of a carpet. She looks at the hotel, at the place she has worked for so many weeks. The stone of the façade has been turned a sweet hay-like yellow by the early sun and the windows shine like little waterfalls. On the garden side the shaggy coat of ivy that hangs from the gutter to the ground is the black-green of river moss. She looks at the stone and at the ivy, and the beautiful colours seem to soothe the sadness that is falling over her, a sadness that is for herself but also a bit for Mr Caldecott. But she must get to work, she tells herself, counting the windows in which the curtains are closed, each of which is the sign of a job to be done.

  Three cars are parked beyond the ivy, deep in the shadow of the building. Close to the wall at the far end is Mr Gillies’s handsome old car, with its thick chrome bumpers and wrinkled leather seats. On the other side of the bay, under the honeysuckle, sits Mr Harbison’s BMW. Beside it is a silver sports car, as slender as a speedboat, with a back window that’s the size of the slit of a letter box. Curious, she walks up to it, treading in the channels that its tyres have ploughed in the gravel. The windscreen is as big as a bath towel and is almost flat. It must cost more than she would earn in two years, or three years, she guesses, then she sees that a man is crouching in the passenger seat, bent double as he reaches for something in the glove compartment, which is nothing but a plain steel shelf. He sits up, holding a map, and notices her. He gets out of the car and leans on the low roof, his hands wide apart and arms locked. ‘Hi. How’s it going?’ he says, ruffling his uncombed hair. His voice is pleasing, like a newsreader’s, and he is handsome in the way that young American lawyers on TV are handsome, with a small straight nose and long jaw, and a brow that’s all straight lines. His white shirt, heavily creased and half tucked into the waistband of his vivid blue trousers, is unbuttoned to the breastbone, showing skin as smooth as a boy’s and the colour of her own skin, a colour that only rich people have in England.

  ‘Good, yes,’ she replies.

  Glints come off the face and bracelet of his watch as he raises a hand to screen the glare of the sun. ‘Beautiful morning,’ he comments, blinking at the sky. ‘Real summer.’

  ‘It’s nice,’ she agrees.

  They regard the unclouded sky for a moment. The man scrubs a hand across his hair again, making it even messier. ‘You work here?’ he casually asks.

  ‘Yes.’

  He rubs his unshaven chin, seeming to consider an idea that has occurred to him. ‘It’s quiet,’ he adds, in a tone that could mean that quietness is good, or could mean that it’s bad.

  ‘Yes,’ she says.

  ‘Very quiet.’

  ‘Very quiet,’ she replies, and the man looks at her with narrowed eyes, as though she had said something unusual. Beginning to feel embarrassed, she is relieved to hear the clang of the hotel’s glass door. Mr Caldecott appears under the porch but, seeing her talking, at once withdraws with a backwards step. She points towards the building. ‘I have to –’ she apologises to the young man.

  He looks at her and smiles again, and opens the door of the car. ‘Sure,’ he says, then lowers himself into the passenger seat and ducks down to attend to something on the floor.

  Touching for luck the coin-shaped fossil embedded in the left-hand column of the porch, as she has done every morning, she goes into the hotel. There is no one at the desk, but a note from Mr Caldecott is lying on the register. A printing machine could not make writing as fine as Mr Caldecott’s: you could lay a ruler across the tops of his capital letters, and every loop is identical, like the eyes of large needles laid in a row. She scans Mr Caldecott’s handwriting, then reads what it says and goes to the storeroom for her overall and pinafore. In the kitchen she turns on the lights and the coffee maker. S
he removes the cutlery that will be needed, giving each piece a shine before setting it down on the large metal tray, which she then takes through.

  In a corner of the dining room Mr Caldecott is sitting beside Mr Harbison, studying a sheet of paper that covers most of the table. Mr Harbison is looking out of the window, pursing his lips and grimacing, while with the fingers of his right hand he twists the too-tight ring that he wears on his left little finger. ‘Video games?’ she overhears Mr Caldecott ask sarcastically, at which Mr Harbison stops turning the ring and gives Mr Caldecott a look of glum sympathy, as if they had suffered a setback together. Pinning a finger to the sheet of paper, Mr Caldecott makes a remark she cannot hear. With one hand Mr Harbison makes a gesture of giving something away without a thought, then a frenzy of beeps starts inside his jacket. Rolling his eyes in exasperation, he gets up from the table, plunging his hand into his inner pocket. He turns away, hunching over his phone like a man trying to light a cigarette in a gale. ‘Yes,’ he says, annoyed. ‘Yes. Yes. Good. Goodgood. Yes. Right. Good. Yes.’

  Mr Caldecott signals to her, and orders a full English breakfast for both of them. Noticing her glance at the building plan, he raises an eyebrow, smiling resignedly.

  ‘And a bottle of mineral water,’ Mr Harbison whispers loudly, smothering the phone. ‘Still. Not fizzy. Thanks, Eleanor,’ he says, and then he does a peculiar wave, which she realises a second later is meant for the owner of the silver car, who is coming towards them and looking past her as if she is not there.