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Lover

Page 6

by Anna Raverat

“I talk underneath and you talk on top,” I say into the dark space in front of me.

  “I didn’t talk over you!”

  “That’s not what I meant. What I’m trying to say is that you’ll often say things and mean them literally, and I’ll often say things and mean them—well, not literally.”

  “Ri-ight…”

  “When you say you want a peaceful journey, I think you mean you don’t want to talk.”

  “Well, what is it that you want to say?” he asks, sounding frustrated.

  “It’s not that I want to say something in particular, it’s that we need to be able to talk, and we’re not.”

  “But we’ve been getting on much better, haven’t we?”

  “Yes, and that’s good, but…”

  “You’re going to have to help me out here, Kate, because I don’t understand—I don’t know what you want.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, scrambling about for whatever it was I’d intended. “I don’t know either.”

  Adam switches on the radio. We each retreat. I cast around for reassurance that returning to London is the right thing. Three indicators of a healthy relationship: talking, satisfying sex, time together. These seem right, but Rosenfeld and Abrahams meant that a couple should do all three and I couldn’t help feeling that the sex was filling up the time we might otherwise have had in bed together, talking. Daytime is the missing piece. We need some time when I’m not at work and we’re not with Adam’s family. Going home is the right thing. A song comes on that we both like and Adam reaches out and puts his hand on my leg and gives me a reassuring squeeze. “I do love you, you know,” he says.

  “I know,” I say. “And I love you.”

  8

  We come home from his parents’ laden with goods and not just Christmas presents: two rugs they don’t want anymore, his mother’s old food processor in a big plastic box, six matching Marks & Spencer mugs, a set of power tools that his dad no longer uses. There’s no floor space so Adam lays the rugs down on top of other rugs and rams the mugs into the cupboard so that it’s as tightly packed as honeycomb.

  * * *

  I take Hester and Milla to the bookshop to spend their book tokens from Aunties Vera and June. The woman there greets us warmly and asks the girls about their favorite Christmas presents. The nice man comes in with two Starbucks and I suddenly feel more awake, as if I’ve just downed a double espresso myself. I hope this isn’t apparent, especially to the girls, but they’ve already made themselves cozy in the armchairs at the back of the shop, reading. I study the shelves. In the Philosophy/Self-Help section, Paul McKenna is still promising that he can make me thin and presents evidence by way of before-and-after photographs. They are all fairly drastic cases. It shouldn’t be too hard to lose three or four pounds, maybe four or five, if I follow his golden rules, but before I get to them the girls start bickering and lasso me in.

  “I found it first!” says Hester, holding on tight to one of the Wimpy Kid books.

  “But, Mummy, she’s not reading these ones!” says Milla, making a grab for it.

  “I can if I want!” Hester squeals. Hester’s too young for Wimpy Kid so I distract her with a whole new series, the Jewel Fairies, and tell her she can afford four. She fetches the whole lot down off the shelf and makes three piles: most wanted; nearly most wanted; wanted. Milla sits on the Wimpy Kid to hide it from her sister and starts reading Flat Stanley. Seconds later, the fight forgotten, she’s absorbed, transported by the book.

  I’d like a new book but I’m too exhausted to pick one. Next to me is a stand of Mr. Men titles, which reminds me of our wedding. The best man structured his whole speech around them, holding up each book as he extolled Adam’s virtues: Mr. Tall, Mr. Strong, Mr. Clever, Mr. Busy, Mr. Grumpy. He invented a new one to describe Adam’s finest quality: Mr. Loyal. Hester asks me to help her choose which Jewel Fairies to take home and I join her cross-legged on the floor. The books are now in two piles, almost equal in height: “the ones I want most,” and “the ones I really, really want as well.” Her criteria seem to be the name of the fairy and the picture on the front cover, and the help she needs is really just a witness to the minute calibrations of her own process. She goes through them in pairs and eventually whittles it down to Diamond, Garnet, Sapphire, and Topaz. Milla buys Flat Stanley, The BFG, and the Wimpy Kid book.

  At home, Charlie is coughing in his basket. Adam is using the power tools to put up shelves so that we have somewhere to put the power tools, which seems like a double negative, but then I’ve had other moments lately where things warp like this: I heard a woman say “some affairs” when actually she’d meant “summer fairs,” and the other day a man in the office complained loudly, “My wife is broken.” I looked around, shocked, only to realize he’d said “Wi-Fi.”

  I start making turkey soup from the leftovers wrapped in tinfoil that his mum sent us home with. Her old food processor is in the corner; there’s nowhere to put it and I know I’ll never use it, but declining wasn’t an option. Adam’s parents needed us to take it so they could justify their purchase of a brand-new one. The new shelves are going on the back wall of the side return where Adam keeps his Ducati. Over them he’s putting a makeshift roof of corrugated plastic, completely absorbed in his own world.

  The turkey soup bubbles on the hob. I sit on the kitchen table with my feet on a chair and watch Adam through the window drilling in the dusk. He doesn’t look in. The radio is on outside and I can hear muffled voices through the wall.

  PART TWO

  I have been to hell and back.

  And let me tell you, it was wonderful.

  —Louise Bourgeois

  9

  When I get back to work in the New Year there’s something to distract me from my marriage: Trish has got together with Don Mitchell, the Executive Vice President for HR and Legal, to hire consultants to facilitate both their teams on a “back-to-the-floor” day. We are packed off in minibuses and parceled out to various PHC London hotels.

  I am sent to the Regal on Park Lane and given some brand-new navy blue overalls with the company logo stitched in gold thread on the breast pocket. As I’m getting changed I think about the Frenchman embroidering his white shoes high above the Hudson River; how simple things can be when you just do something you love, or spend time with someone you love.

  I make my way up to the twenty-seventh floor as instructed, carrying my real clothes in a carrier bag. The consultants didn’t think about footwear so I’m wearing tights and tan slingbacks with a kitten heel; stupid shoes for January but I like them. Waiting by the lifts is one other person in box-fresh overalls like me and I’m delighted to discover that it’s Richard Robertson—six feet four inches tall, seventy but still trim, his bearing upright, his hair silver and smooth. Before he moved into the corporate side of the company and became president, Richard had been general manager of the Regal on Park Lane and, among other famous guests, once welcomed Princess Grace of Monaco, who reportedly developed a crush on him.

  “Hello, Richard. I didn’t expect to see you here,” I say.

  Richard smiles. “Why ever not?” he replies. “Trish and Don invited me along. Things like this are wonderful; any day spent in one of our hotels is a good day, especially this one.”

  Park Lane, as the old hotel was affectionately called by all who knew her, was the world’s first five-star hotel, the hotel that set the standard that others aspired to, the hotel that inspired the game of Monopoly, PHC’s best-known and best-loved hotel, and Richard’s favorite.

  People say that he would have been happy to stay on as general manager there and that he only took the job as president of PHC because the company had started to fail; the incumbent had made a mess of it and set the organization on a very bad course. A couple of months in, PHC hit an iceberg. Shareholders summoned Richard to the City and instructed him to make immediate savings on expenditure by reducing the workforce: seventy-five mid-level managers were to go from head office and if things did n
ot drastically improve there would be another hundred. Richard refused: “This is not of their making. Sell a hotel.”

  At that time, the shareholders hoarded hotels the way dragons protect treasure. They rose up against him in their boardroom lair. Gone was their etiquette and old-school charm. Money was being lost hand over fist, their money. Do it or we’ll have your head on a platter, they breathed. It’s them or you.

  Richard shut himself in his office. A man in his prime, he didn’t deserve to be cut down like this and finished. Neither did seventy-five of the people under his care, but if he didn’t do it, the shareholders would. He sat at his big oak desk, head in his hands at the thought of those seventy-five people, their seventy-five families, their seventy-five homes.

  Every hour his secretary, Valerie, brought tea—picking up the previous cup, cold and untouched, and setting down a fresh one. She did this five times. He drank the fifth cup and started to pace. He drank the sixth and demolished the sandwiches she’d provided, asked for his senior team and discussed his idea with them for an hour. When she brought the seventh cup he asked Valerie to arrange an all-staff briefing, immediately.

  People were nervous and skittish. At the back two young bucks jostled, one tipped over a chair, an older manager made him pick it up again. With his senior advisors standing around him, Richard explained the situation; set it out clearly and proposed this: instead of sacking seventy-five people, he would sack everyone and rehire them the next morning on slightly lower salaries. When things improved, salaries would go up again. If they turned things around, everyone would receive a bonus to cover the amount they had forfeited. Anyone could opt out, but only a handful did. The highest paid took the greatest pay cuts; Richard halved his.

  The effect was startling: the atmosphere in the company went from doom to determination; petty differences were put aside as people took heart and aligned behind a single purpose. Eight months later PHC was full sail to the wind and after another five months the bonuses were paid in full. People say it wasn’t the plan that inspired them, though it was bold and brave; Richard’s openness and honesty mattered more. That was the beginning of the glory years for PHC, the era of Richard’s rule. The shareholders were pleased about the profit return and they had to admit that Richard had done something extraordinary, but they never forgave him for standing up to them nor for seeing them as they really were.

  * * *

  A slightly officious woman who must be one of the facilitators exits the lift and interrupts us to explain that we are going to be working with Mel, one of the guys from the maintenance and engineering team. We will be descaling showerheads. Mel’s late, so the facilitator lady informs us that every single shower in the PHC estate has to be descaled four times a year. In all the larger hotels, any with seven hundred or more rooms, descaling showerheads is a full-time job, and in the Regal on Park Lane this job belongs to Mel from Barnsley. Richard smiles benignly through her short lecture.

  “You knew all that, didn’t you?” I say to him when she leaves us.

  “Yep,” he replies.

  * * *

  Under Mel’s supervision, we unscrew the first showerhead and dismantle it, soak the component parts in a solution of chlorinates, then clean and rinse each piece before putting the showerhead back together and reattaching it.

  “I’m very methodical,” Mel tells us. Floor by floor he works his way around the 812 bedrooms, and when he’s finished at the top he starts again at the bottom. “Like painting the Forth Bridge,” he says.

  Elevenses is instant coffee and a Penguin. I tell Richard and Mel that I’m worried about spilling bleach on my nice shoes and that I’d like to nip back to the office to pick up the trainers I keep under my desk, for the lunchtime sport I rarely do. Richard says he’s been thinking the same thing about his brogues and would I be so kind as to collect his tennis shoes, which makes me feel all right about having raised it. Mel shakes his head at us and goes on with his work.

  * * *

  I find my trainers, pull them on, and go up to fetch Richard’s shoes. It’s unusually quiet upstairs; the secretaries must be on “Back to the Floor” as well since it’s too early for lunch. As I walk from the lift to Richard’s office, I see into the boardroom: Don at the head of the table, Trish by his side, and twelve other very smartly dressed people. That’s odd, I think, recognizing several as shareholders. Why are they meeting without Richard? Perhaps they’re planning a surprise for his retirement, but that’s a whole year away. Since I can’t very well go in and ask, I open the closet in Richard’s office and find his white leather Reeboks. As I make my way back to the lift, Trish comes quietly out of the boardroom.

  “How’s it going?” she asks brightly.

  “Surprisingly good fun, actually,” I reply. Then I add, “You’re busy here then?”

  “Yes—an emergency board meeting.”

  “What’s the emergency?” I ask.

  “Oh,” says Trish, “not a real emergency—nothing to worry about. But it is confidential. For now, anyway. And, um…” She hesitates. “I hope you’ll respect that. Completely. Don and I are dealing with this.”

  “Oh,” I say, “right.”

  “Thank you, Kate. I knew I could rely on you,” she says, patting my arm. She calls the lift, and when it arrives she turns and walks back to the boardroom. I keep my finger on the doors-open button and watch as she reenters the room.

  In the short cab ride back to the hotel, I go over what just happened. It doesn’t feel quite right, but on the other hand, neither does running to Richard after Trish asked me not to. Telling him what, anyway? I push it to the back of my mind—there’s enough other stuff in there to bury it.

  * * *

  Over the next few hours Richard, Mel, and I disassemble and reassemble showerheads and do other jobs in between; changing lightbulbs, fixing TV aerials, nailing down the long red carpets where they have curled up or bunched along the corridors. Because we have actually been helpful—unlike most people from head office, Mel says—he gives us each a small bottle of the chlorinates to use at home: “Industrial strength, can’t buy it in the shops—it’ll make your shower run like a monsoon,” he says.

  I learn three other things from Mel:

  1) Dirty linen put into the laundry chute on the twenty-seventh floor reaches a speed of 100 mph by the time it bursts out in the basement. If housekeeping gets a plate or a whiskey glass wrapped up in the sheets by mistake the resulting force is enough to take someone’s hand off. Because of an accident in which a cleaner’s thumb was broken by a wet towel, the maintenance team constructed a caged area around the bottom of the chute.

  2) Maintenance and engineering run something called Window Bingo, an annual sweepstake on what the win-dow cleaners have seen throughout the year: couples having sex, naked or half-naked people, men dressed in women’s underwear, that kind of thing. Mel tells me this while Richard is on a loo break and later I ask Richard, delicately, how much he thinks he is aware of what goes on.

  “I’ve worked in hotels for fifty-two years, Kate,” he says. “Started as the bellboy in the Queen’s Hotel in Leeds city center and worked my way up and around from there—I think I have a fairly good idea of most things that go on. It’s not all good, I know that, but what’s the alternative? I don’t want to police people.”

  3) In addition to back of house, the official area for staff in a hotel, there are unofficial places too: internal, unseen, like the dips and hollows, tubes and cavities inside a body, vital space needed for expansion and contraction, for the lungs to breathe, the heart to beat. Maintenance and engineering have a sort of den shared with housekeeping behind the clean linen store in the basement. They’ve got a three-piece suite down there, a fridge and a dartboard. Upstairs in the reception area the concierges have transformed their poky little office no bigger than a broom cupboard into a refuge decked with plastic flowers and pictures of bright blue seas and skies. This is mainly the work of Ernesto, the head concierge from Cub
a, but his colleagues—Jockey from Sri Lanka and Benjamin from Newcastle-upon-Tyne—wholly approve and regularly add to the collage so that it covers the walls and ceiling entirely. They keep it private, but sometimes, if you’re standing in just the right place when the door opens, you glimpse a flash of cobalt like a kingfisher darting down a riverbank.

  10

  “Hello, Kate! Hello, Gérard!” says Sam, coming over to our desks.

  “Hello, Sam, how are you?” I say.

  “I’m walking the world,” she says, marching on the spot, “with the global marketing team—we’re doing the whole world in four months, and the brand team are walking from LA to Las Vegas in two months. It’s an idea to get people moving more, and to build team spirit. We each have to take ten thousand steps a day. It gets a bit obsessive, we’re checking our pedometers all the time—” Still marching, she looks down at hers, clipped on to her belt. “If you’re interested, they do one where you climb mountains—you could get a group together and climb K2 if you like, or Everest. Something in the Himalayas might be nice.”

  “Hmm,” I say, “I’ve never really fancied that. Bit cold.”

  “Kilimanjaro then!”

  “I’d rather sail the seven seas,” says Gérard. Gérard is not handsome but he’s got presence, which is partly due to the fact that he’s tall, with a great bulk of a body—not fat, just big: big hands, big feet, and a big face with crumples that deepen when he laughs.

  “I don’t know if they do boat ones,” says Sam. “How would you measure it, in a boat?”

  “Couldn’t we just sit at our desks and pretend it was a boat?” I say, doing a rowing movement. It feels quite nice to stretch my arms out and I remember that I never actually checked the gym schedule. “I’d quite like to cross the Atlantic.”

  “They might think you’re a bit weird if you do that,” says Sam, nodding over to Trish’s office, where she and Don are close in conversation, door closed.

 

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