Lover

by Anna Raverat

  “The Guest Experience is what holds it all together, it’s the key to brand loyalty. Gérard—could you capture this on the flip chart?”

  I’m not the only one crazy with lack of sleep and strung out on coffee and adrenaline—Trish’s hair is more firmly sprayed, her eyes more lavishly made up than usual, as if she needed to fix herself into place. I notice Trish’s eyelashes made into long spiders’ legs by thick coats of mascara, not quite hiding the puffy circles that betray a fair few nightcaps of single malt, and the silk scarf side-knotted at her throat, a kind of faux-casual air-stewardess look. It’s the faux you have to watch out for.

  Gérard writes on the flip chart What Guests Want, and underlines it.

  “We’ve done some market research on this,” he says.

  “And what does the market tell us?” says Trish.

  “Location is important. Perhaps the most important—”

  “We know that. What else?”

  “Clean room, good price…”

  “Yes, yes, of course—but those are basic. Granted, we have to get the basic things right, but every hotel has to, that’s what the guest expects. Those are Guest Expectations.” Trish pauses while Gérard writes it on the flip chart. “Beyond these, when they stay in our hotels, what experience can we give them that will make guests choose us again? What’s going to inspire brand loyalty? What Do Guests Want?”

  “What do guests want?” repeats Gérard thoughtfully.

  The $443 million question. I look at Trish’s tired skin, the shadows etched under her eyes that no amount of light-reflecting, skin-plumping, or radiance-bestowing Dior, Chanel, or L’Oréal could conceal.

  “What do guests want?” says Nick from marketing, sounding desperate.

  I feel my own eyes prickling. I didn’t close them for more than twenty minutes last night. I have drunk so much coffee that my fingertips feel wrinkled, my tongue a used doormat.

  “A good night’s sleep,” I say.

  Nick lets out a little cry of relief; his shoulders drop.

  Gérard breaks into a wide smile.

  Trish practically hugs me.

  2

  As soon as I get out of the office, profit and guests and their various experiences leave my mind. The cold evening air is a door that closes on Palazzio, the outside another room. Normally I’d be worrying about getting home in time to read a bedtime story to the girls, but tonight all I want to read is the rest of the emails between Adam and Louise Phelps. I need to see for myself how it started, and when, and where. I take the back way to the station, a narrow forgotten street, little more than an alley, longer but much quieter—just Peter and his junk shop, his friend Ronnie and their parrot. Not many office workers venture back here because there are no coffee shops or sandwich bars, but I like to get away at lunchtime and I don’t want to go to Starbucks or Subway, because when you substitute one corporate world for another you’re breathing the same stuff.

  “Shop” is probably too grand a word for Peter’s place; it’s more like a lockup with some shelf units and tables outside. Or a drinking club for bedraggled pensioners; Peter and his friends standing around in heavy overcoats in winter, reclining on deck chairs in summer; smoking and drinking whatever the weather, listening to crackly old vinyl, the record player on a foldaway picnic table against the wall. The other friends come and go but Ronnie is stalwart. Something awful must have happened to him once because his nose looks as though it were bitten off at the end, so what he’s got now is a shortened snub with alarmingly large nostrils. Ronnie is overweight and a bit thin on top, wears a flat cap to cover it, gathers the rest of his hair in a scant ponytail. He wears a gold earring and a gold signet ring and looks like he could have been a roadie touring with big bands, lifting and fighting his way around the country. Peter, a Greek-Cypriot, is as thin as a whippet with high cheekbones, lined olive skin, and a bony nose. Both of them dye their hair black and sometimes you can see white roots growing out.

  “Hello, darling,” says Peter.

  “Hello, darling,” says Ronnie.

  “Hello, boys,” I reply, and they chortle because they are long past boyhood.

  “Whiskey for you, darling?” says Peter as usual, and as usual I decline, though tonight I am tempted.

  “How’s Toto? I bet parrots don’t like the cold much,” I say. Toto is quiet in his cage just inside the door.

  “I give him whiskey,” says Peter. I hope he’s joking.

  We first spoke when I bumped into him carrying a life-sized horse’s head down the alley that he said was a bust of Shergar the kidnapped racehorse, but our acquaintance really came about because of Toto, who was left behind by a guest in the Palazzio, South Kensington, two months ago. The poor creature ended up in head office, but premises decreed that no animals could be kept on site so I took it round to Peter.

  “Where you going to take it if I say no?”

  “Battersea Dogs Home?” I said. “I’ve heard they take other animals. Well, cats anyway.”

  “Are you crazy—they will kill it!” said Peter.

  “Or we could take him to a vet, they might be able to find a home for him.”

  “I will keep it,” said Peter.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I like animals. Does it talk?”

  * * *

  I come out of the alley onto the busy main street by the Tube and am waiting to cross the road when I feel a rumbling underneath, a slight vibration in the soles of my feet. It must be an underground train, though I’ve never felt this shake here before, up through my heels and into my spine. I glance at the people standing next to me but they give no indication that they feel anything—eyes fixed on the red man on the pedestrian crossing. Everyone is on autopilot apart from a Japanese couple to my left who are pointing in a book. Everything looks so solid but it’s just a layer and there’s all this stuff underneath that I rarely think about.

  Is Adam having an affair? The couple are showing me a map that they can’t read and neither can I. The green man appears, people start to cross the road, and then comes the worst sound I ever heard, the sound of a person being hit by a car: THUdd. And a short squeal, wheels skidding.

  The woman slaps her hand over her mouth and her partner clutches her arm. The crowd crossing the road freezes. Everyone’s full attention is yanked to the spot. Everyone within hearing distance, a surprisingly wide radius, recognizes the sound instantly—one of our kind, down.

  The car, a glossy black Audi, stands still on the road, fumes rising from the exhaust, white air curling up from under the front bumper like breath. For a quarter of a second, motion all around is suspended: all ears are on full alert, all bodies calibrate, and all brains send the message that there is no immediate threat, because there isn’t a pack of rampaging Audis and this one is not about to strike again.

  Two or three people huddle over a body of which I can only see the legs, bent awkwardly, and the bottom of a pair of shoes. It’s a man, I think, judging by the soles. Perhaps the driver is one of those huddling over him, because the driver’s door is open, and the car is empty. People are moving toward the accident, to get a better look. I cross the road in order to get farther away and as I do, I see the car is not empty after all—there’s a boy of about five years old with curly hair strapped into a booster seat, wide-eyed and silent. I wonder if I should go over. Then again, it might freak him out completely to have a stranger approaching out of nowhere. I am not a doctor, I tell myself; I would probably just get in the way.

  * * *

  Drifts of music float up. There’s a busker at the bottom of the escalator, strumming a guitar and singing in a sweet voice about love. A man’s voice comes over the loudspeaker, announcing delays on other lines, the two of them in a strange, disconnected duet. The singer’s very good. I’m glad to see lots of copper, silver, and gold coins lying on the black felt lining of her guitar case like so many wishes. I’ve got to do something about those emails. I wish I knew what. I reach into my p
urse and drop in a pound.

  As I come up out of the underground, it is raining hard. Cars have their headlights on, pedestrians have their heads down, hoods and hats on. The rain-soaked road could almost be a river. A big ball of stress inside me rises and expands like dough. I have to pack for Poland but I’m upset and exhausted and I’m worried that Adam will notice and want me to explain so I detour via the bookshop, a slightly disheveled independent five minutes from our front door. I go in quite often. I’ve ordered some books to fill the holes in my Christmas gifts but there’s a queue by the till. I flip through a book by Paul McKenna that’s on display. The title shouts: I CAN MAKE YOU THIN. Great! I skim-read the chapter headings and the four Golden Rules. I look at Paul McKenna’s photograph: bright eyes, a knowing smile verging on a smirk, a good suit with a posy of chest hair poking out the top of his shirt, and an expensive gold watch—a really lovely, solid gold watch. When I realize that the main thing I’ve noticed is the gold watch, I snap out of the reverie. Can you be hypnotized by a photograph?

  The nice man on the till really is nice; he’s courteous, he looks at people properly and listens. If I had a flirtation with someone like him, that would even things out. But I know this kind of tit-for-tat thinking won’t solve our problems. I put Paul McKenna down; this is not the sort of thing I want to be seen looking at in public, especially not in my local bookshop and especially not by the nice man on the till. I am not going to buy this book.

  Instead I pick up Where in the World: The 100 Best Places to Stay, go straight to the index and look up Palazzio Hotel Corporation. I’m pleased to see that we have eighteen entries; our highest-rated is the Regal on Park Lane, at number three. I’ve never stayed the night but I spent a week of my induction there and it was fascinating. I’m proud to work at PHC, though I still haven’t got used to the corporate side of things; sometimes it feels as though I’ve joined an army by mistake.

  * * *

  The nicest hotel I ever stayed in was in Sweden, outside a village at the edge of a lake. White sails far out on the glittering water. People sitting outside a couple of busy restaurants, talking in the afternoon sunshine, boats rocking in the small harbor, masts and metal knocking against each other with a satisfyingly industrious sound.

  Sigmaholm was the name of the village and the hotel. When I arrived, a large brown dog lay sleeping in the shade, and there was a woman reading a magazine on a lichen-covered bench, a small boy happily piling pebbles at her feet. Once a monastery, some of the peacefulness had carried over into its life as a hotel. The rooms were fairly bare—white floorboards, single bed, small desk with a lamp—and yet the feeling was not of austerity but of softness, and clarity. A quilted cushion on the wooden chair, a blue-and-white-checked blanket folded at the foot of the bed, a couple of old books on the shelf, both of them in Swedish but I looked through them anyway, charmed by the near and far: here was something I could hold, smell the mildew-dotted pages, run my fingers over the knots and grooves of the paper, sense the life of them, guess at their meaning, but still never really know them. A casement window opened out onto a walled garden. Growing between the bricks were mosses and daisies and other plants, some with tiny pink flowers, so that the walls themselves were living things, truly part of the garden.

  I wanted to go back there for our honeymoon but instead we toured Ireland, staying in bed-and-breakfasts along the way. We ranked the guesthouses in our own league table; best bed award went to a place in Tralee, best breakfast in Tramore, the worst bed-and-breakfast was in a scuzzy place in Westport. Adam said it would be all right so we stayed, but the bed was a padded sinkhole. The sex that night was quick and he ended up sleeping on the floor. In the morning we were served pale sausages and eggs as lumpy as the mattress on damp toast. Adam arranged his into a cock and balls and we giggled like schoolchildren all through paying the bill, and went and had sex in the hire car. Ravenous afterward, I tormented Adam with descriptions of the breakfast at Sigmaholm: six different kinds of fresh juice and smoothie, homemade pancakes with berries and syrup, oak-smoked dry-cured bacon, organic eggs, rye toast—I love everything about hotels, but if I had to choose one thing it would be the breakfasts, Aladdin’s caves of tempting foods you’ve got to try: acacia honey—translucent, the color of sunset; a soft white roll, warm, with farmhouse butter; a small bowl of fruit salad; a couple of spoonfuls of the bircher muesli because you’ve heard about it; just one madeleine with the second pot of coffee. “Just a little bit” has been my basic approach to eating and drinking since I was a teenager. Unfortunately a little bit of everything over twenty years adds up to quite a lot.

  “Look at Mummy’s big boobies!” said Hester the other morning as I was getting dressed, which wasn’t even true—they’re so small that I don’t have to lift them to dry underneath—and “Mummy’s got a great big floppy bottom!” said Milla, more accurately.

  “Don’t be cheeky,” Adam told the girls. I would have liked him to say that he loved my bottom, thought it the best bottom in the world and that he wouldn’t be without it, but inevitably things had changed a bit since the honeymoon; less sex, more bottom, two young children, my full-time job, him running his own business from home, a mortgage that seemed too big on a house that seemed too small: the distance between us was understandable. I’d noticed, just hadn’t known what to do about it, and I knew Adam felt it too. We’d started a few projects. Last autumn I suggested we make the backyard nicer, so Adam heaved up slabs of paving and broke the ground with a pickax to make flower beds. Underneath was dense, wet clay—not crumbling earth full of goodness as I’d imagined, but anyway I planted bulbs for the spring. I didn’t think daisies would grow out of our walls because they were only one brick wide and too new, too tightly packed.

  In the middle of that walled garden at Sigmaholm was a round stone well filled with water, coins lying at the bottom. I dipped into my purse and found a penny—thought better of it and took out a gold pound instead; maybe the powers that be don’t care whether the coin is copper or gold, but I wasn’t sure about that. At dusk they lit candles all around the hotel; I could see the glow at the windows. The garden was full of birds darting down from the eaves, the hum of insects and distant cars. I made my wish. Hooves clattered past on the road outside, the unseen horses as tantalizing as a half-remembered dream.

  3

  We are arguing about what to call it. He disputes the use of “affair” because they didn’t have sex and therefore it was not an affair but an “inappropriate friendship.” I believe him about the sex but object to the wording. I think “affair” is more accurate because their “friendship” was a secret from me and from her own husband and from their normal perhaps boring but appropriate friends, and because they had kissed.

  “Ah, but the kiss was chaste,” said Adam. “Just a quick goodbye at Charing Cross station. Bob and Tim were there.”

  “Fleeting, maybe,” I said, “but not chaste. I saw the emails, Adam. She called you Prince Charming.”

  “There were other people there. Bob and Tim.”

  “You wrote in one email that you couldn’t stop thinking about her.”

  “It was a brief kiss goodbye at the station.”

  “On the lips.”

  “Yes, but brief.”

  “OK,” I said, “you can have ‘brief.’ You can’t have ‘chaste.’”

  * * *

  The girls should be in bed by now. They usually have a book at bedtime but tonight they are watching a DVD of Diego and Rosita and Adam tells me his story.

  Once upon a time, there was a man named Adam who was a director of a small to medium-sized business. He was good at his job; his staff and clients and board of directors all loved him, but he himself wasn’t happy. He couldn’t get excited about finding new ways to sell toothpaste, or orange squash, or processed cheese. It was making him die inside. And so, one day, he left that company and struck out on his own, to do some honest, more satisfying work. A year after he left, there was a leaving par
ty for an old colleague, which Adam attended, and lo and behold he wound up sitting next to his former administrator, Louise Armstrong, an extremely pretty girl ten years his junior. They talked all night. She had married and was now Louise Phelps, had a baby, had stopped work, left London and gone to live in rural East Kent, where she was bored and lonely. (She didn’t actually say she was bored and lonely but that’s what came across.) Adam listened. He felt sorry for her. Plus she was still extremely pretty, even if she had not yet lost the baby weight. And so a correspondence began, which was innocuous, and although they did meet for a drink once—with Bob and Tim—it was no big deal and not worth mentioning to their respective spouses because, although he sees that, from another point of view, mine for example, it could look quite different, they really were just good friends.

  I go up to our bedroom, not to sleep—to growl, and chew over Adam’s account, unpalatable, but the bones of it might be true. Half an hour later I make a demand: Louise Phelps’s phone number.

  “What are you going to say to her?” he asks.

  “I don’t know,” I snap back.

  * * *

  We are curt in the kitchen. The children have noticed that something is wrong and they are watching us closely. Charlie the dog, a barometer for tension in our household, looks miserable and doesn’t have to be told to stay in his basket. He has a coughing fit, and Hester, who is four, goes and puts her arms around him and says, “Poor Charlie.”

  “Yes, poor Charlie,” I say, lifting Hester out of the dog basket.

  Adam sends the girls upstairs to brush their teeth. When they have left the room he hands me a folded piece of paper. I open it. On the top half of the paper, placed centrally, tilting upward, is her name and number, written in pencil. This knocks the breath out of me—something about the clean white sheet, seeing her name in his hand.