Lover

by Anna Raverat

  “Are they happy?”

  “It’s a good question. Albert and Paola have lived separately for most of their marriage. He had a child with another woman—secretly—and there have been other rumors. So maybe they are happy separately but perhaps not together. As for the others, Baudouin always smiles in photographs. You never see him not smiling. The rest of them keep private lives—they only come out for weddings and funerals—so I don’t know. I hope so.”

  “I hope so too,” I say, leaning over the floor plan in order to hide my face, and I can tell he hears what I haven’t said.

  He raises his glass and says, “To happiness, wherever we may find it.”

  We toast, and I say, “We found the treasure, we don’t need the map.” Henri says I’m right and folds the floor plan away just before the waitress brings a tray with two wide bowls of hot soup topped with Gruyère melted onto toast. The onions are caramelized and soft and the soup is dark brown, salty, and delicious.

  “Do you like being a lawyer?” I ask. “I used to want to be one.” Adam always said I should have been a lawyer because of my natural pedantry.

  “It’s a good job and I do like it,” says Henri, “but it wasn’t my first love. What I really wanted to do was skate. I was really good at it—I made it to the Winter Olympics in Austria in 1976 but I didn’t get a medal and so I became a lawyer. I had a deal with my parents about that. But I still like to skate. Last winter, one very cold afternoon, I was driving back from court and I saw this huge sheet of ice in a field. I took off my camel-hair coat and put on my skates. I was just in a suit jacket, on my skates. And I flew.” His eyes are glowing, he laughs softly. “The wind was blowing in from the North Sea, like today. With the wind behind you, you can lay yourself into impossible angles that you never could walking or running. You lay yourself at a forty-five-degree angle, your elbows virtually touching the ice as you’re in a turn. Incredible! You’re breaking the bounds of gravity. Nobody was there. I could wheel and dive and turn—I was free as a bird. I was really happy. I’ll do that until I die, I hope. Oh, I was free!” Each time he smiles the wrinkles disappear and his whole face seems to lift.

  Over coffee, I show him a picture of the girls on my phone. It’s one I took last autumn, an ordinary Sunday afternoon, the girls on their bikes on the common, Charlie waddling behind, Adam getting cross with the kite because there wasn’t enough wind. To make up for the technical failure, I’d bought them huge ice creams with strawberry sauce and the photo shows Milla and Hester beaming down at their cones like two saints. As I look at their smiling faces I’m flooded with a mixture of pride and sadness. It’s a powerful sensation. I don’t quite know what to do with it.

  “Beautiful children too,” says Henri, and that “too” is the best compliment I’ve had for a long time.

  Suddenly he says, “Come and live with me! I have a wife already but she won’t mind. The kids will love it, there’s so much for them to do—I’ll teach them to skate!” He stops and adds, “My wife is a lovely woman. She loves children—ours have grown up and left. She’s lost without them. Her name is Marcella.”

  I love how he says “the kids” as if he already knows them, and that he’s loyal to his wife even if his enthusiasm got the better of him for a minute, and it’s really good to know that my mini-crush has been reciprocated.

  “And there’ll be rainbows, and trampolines, and we’ll finally know the truth,” I say, smiling. Henri smiles back. There’s a touch of regret—another time, another place—but the moment ends gracefully enough.

  23

  The night I return from Belgium I wake just after 4:00 a.m. and go downstairs. In the shadows I notice a few dark spatters on the floor. I turn on a light, the better to examine them, but am mystified until Charlie wheezes in his basket and coughs up little spots of fresh blood. “Poor old Charlie,” I say. In dog years he is an octogenarian. His black fur has lost its sheen and turned white around his muzzle. His coat bunches under my hand as I stroke him; dogs get wrinkles too. I wipe the crust from his eyes and give him some milk to soothe his throat, though it probably doesn’t make any difference. I start to wipe up the blood so that the children won’t see it, and then stop because I realize they need to.

  * * *

  At 7:00 a.m. the girls examine the faint sprays around Charlie’s basket: blood on the kitchen floor is impressive but they aren’t convinced it’s his.

  “How do you know it’s Charlie’s?” says Milla.

  “Because it’s around his basket, and some of it is actually in his basket—see?—and because I saw him cough it up,” I say.

  “Is he going to die?” asks Hester.

  “Well, he’s very old for a dog, sweetheart. His body is all worn out.”

  “What about his medicine?”

  “That won’t save him, I’m afraid. We should probably say goodbye.”

  * * *

  “Why are they crying?” asks my mother when she gets up.

  “It’s Charlie.” I gesture toward Charlie’s basket, where both girls are draped over him, weeping. They hug and kiss him while he coughs and splutters and trembles. I think he might give out on the spot.

  “Oh, I see. Yes, that’s upsetting for them, but it’s very unhygienic, what they’re doing.”

  “It is, Mum, but they need to say goodbye, so maybe you should just turn away.”

  “He smells terrible.”

  “Yes, I suppose he does,” I say. “I’d stopped noticing.”

  * * *

  On the phone, Adam suggests taking Charlie to his parents’ house—he can’t have a dog where he’s staying, and I’m worried it will be really upsetting for the girls to watch Charlie getting slowly worse. We agree that he’ll do this today and my mum and dad can be in charge of handing him over. I decide to take the girls to school myself: I should tell their teachers what’s happened. We all cry a bit as we say goodbye to Charlie, and hug him even though he does stink.

  * * *

  The school is only a minute’s walk from our front door, yet we still manage to be late at least once a week. Today, though, I make sure to get us there good and early. Hester runs into her classroom and hangs her coat on a peg labeled with her name and a picture of the sun she’s colored in. She goes off to announce Charlie’s imminent departure to her friends and I go off to announce it to her teacher. “Oh, dear, not that lovely dog that your husband brought in, with the chicken-liver toothpaste?” I explain the situation and then steel myself for a second telling.

  Milla’s teacher, Ms. Ashwani, crosses the playground to collect her class. I take her to one side. “There’s a couple of things,” I say. “Our family dog is leaving, so that might upset her—she’s known him since she was a baby—and as well, her father and I have separated, rather suddenly. So all of that might have an effect on her at school.”

  “Actually, she’s already told us about you and her dad.”

  “She has? When?”

  “We had a sharing session. The children were invited to talk about their Christmases, and Milla stood up and shared with the class what happened.”

  “Oh, my goodness.”

  “The class were very supportive. And Milla was very strong. One boy stood up and told her, ‘It’s OK, my dad left in Year One.’ Afterward, I hugged her because I was so proud of her—it was such a brave thing to do.”

  I nod, dumb.

  24

  On Monday, I’m due to see the therapist for the first time. I’ve taken the day as holiday but Trish calls me at 10:30 a.m. “There’s a problem—I need you to come in right away.” I pause for a moment to take stock. On the one hand, it’s outrageous that Trish expects me to drop what I’m doing and go into work on my day off. On the other hand, I am in my house calling my estranged husband every hour to scream at him and the appointment with Elisabeth isn’t until 3:00 p.m. I agree to go in.

  The problem is that the cleaners in Los Angeles have walked out on strike and it’s being reported globally. The cat
alyst was the death of a minor movie star in the Regal on Sunset Boulevard who killed himself in the penthouse suite. The cleaner who found him was traumatized, naturally enough, but hotel management sacked her a few days later for failing to clean the room properly and when challenged they said they hadn’t realized it was the same woman. The union called a strike. “Their workforce are Latino. They depend on us, yet they think we all look the same—if they look at us at all!” shouts the union leader on Sky TV. “We are invisible to them, they don’t care!”

  “Damn them,” says Trish, slamming her office door. “We’ve got to turn this around, Kate—we’re getting crucified. What was the manager thinking? You can’t clean a carpet when it’s stained with blood—of course it won’t come out! The whole carpet needs to come out!”

  * * *

  It’s true that as a cleaner you become invisible. I remembered this from my first job, in a country hotel called the New Inn even though it was three hundred years old. They took me on as a weekend chambermaid. I never quite got used to knocking on the doors of vacant rooms to make sure they really were empty; the slight trepidation of unlocking and calling, “Housekeeping!” and the oddly lonely moment you confirm that yes, there’s no one there.

  Big Sue, the hotel manager, lived there with a rather pathetic husband called Leonard, who didn’t do anything. But maybe he was that way because Sue was a force of nature. If she liked you, it was like having the wind on your side. Big Sue was great, but most of the guests ignored me. Many people don’t acknowledge the cleaner, maybe because it makes them uncomfortable that this person is seeing all their mess; the skid marks they leave in the toilet, used condoms in the bin, period-stained towels, blobs of unguents around the sink.

  I used to cycle to the New Inn on a road that stretched for miles across a high moor and then descended through green fields into the village. When I was old enough, Sue offered me extra hours behind the bar, and at the end of the night she’d lift my bike into the back of her estate car and drive me home. At first I was nervous about moving from cleaning rooms to what Sue called a “front-of-house” job, but fascinated too—I’d never thought of the hotel that way but it made complete sense: there were times you were in role and onstage, and times when you were backstage. Sue showed me how to pull a proper pint of ale and nice full measures of wine and spirits, and when the beer pumps bubbled and ran dry, it was Big Sue, not Leonard, who went down into the cellar and changed the barrel. As well as showing me what to do, Big Sue showed me how to be. She pointed out the rules of the world I’d just entered—she didn’t try to justify them, just made sure I was aware of what I needed to know to get on. In the hotel bar, she showed me how to treat regulars and welcome newcomers, how to accept tips graciously and rebuff come-ons so that the drinkers stayed at arm’s length. If ever any of them tried to get closer Sue herself would deal with them, physically if necessary—once she threw an old lech out the front door and banished him, told him never to return. I received six proposals of marriage in that job and Sue treated each one as a trophy on my behalf, each time telling me I could do better.

  Sometimes people would ask for food late in the evening when the chef had gone home and Sue would send me off to the kitchens to warm up an apple pie or put together a ham-and-cheese sandwich. I loved to move around the big steel kitchen, so clean and orderly, and know just where to find things and where to put them back. I enjoyed being in the hotel much more than being at home because Sue was so different from my mother. Perhaps it was just that Sue was less busy, or that she had one son who was fourteen years old and not interested in the hotel, whereas I was interested in everything; I was her understudy, a hotel-swot from the start.

  * * *

  Modern hotel rooms are designed to take the least possible amount of time to clean—for the benefit of the company, not the cleaner. In thirty minutes four members of staff can do sixteen rooms between them. Not long, but it’s set up that way: cupboards have doors to reduce the need for dusting, and if there’s no bathtub it’s because showers are quicker to clean. Every month there’s a deep dive—eighteen to twenty minutes per room. But there’s one thing that never gets cleaned: the TV remote.

  Walk along the corridors of any hotel and you’ll see a cleaning cart parked neatly by an open door, perhaps glimpse a figure bending over the bed shaking out the duvet or changing the pillowcases. There’s a pile of wet towels on the floor, a collection of coffee cups, yesterday’s paper, dirty plates on a room-service tray. Often the equipment is labeled so that the cleaners know whose is whose—once I saw a vacuum called Valentina, the letters handwritten in blue felt-tip, the label fixed with an abundance of tape. Such a lovely name, Valentina, and so un-British. I wondered where she was from, how she got here, and what she looked like, because although I saw her machine, I didn’t see the woman.

  Paltry pay and minuscule breaks don’t help, and sometimes the workforce gets angry and walks out—like the cleaners in Los Angeles—or gets sloppy and cuts corners; you should always wash the cups in your room before you use them because some cleaners just wipe them with the same cloth they use on everything else. I can’t really blame them; being overlooked is not good for people.

  This same tumbleweed feeling blows through many lives; carers, hospital orderlies, street sweepers, and bin men know it. Parked wives know it. Mothers know it and so do many fathers, especially if they are at home a lot, because looking after a home and children, despite being difficult to do well, is low-status and the lack of recognition can sap self-esteem.

  When Adam and I got together we were equals in the world’s eyes and in our own, but when I stopped work to look after our babies there was a subtle shift. My main activity became wiping. Tables, floors, hands, mouths, cheeks, and bottoms. Feet after they’d been in the sand-pit. Charlie’s muddy paws, the television screen smudged with fingerprints, walls smeared by little hands dipped in yogurt. Cleaning is hard physical work. PHC once had a lawsuit from a cleaner claiming repetitive strain injury in the wrists. She lost.

  * * *

  Branton trots in, dapper in a new suit.

  “The strike isn’t legal. They can’t actually do this,” he says.

  “They are actually doing it, though,” I say, “and good for them. They’re standing up for themselves and nobody else is doing that—least of all us, apparently. So, good for them.”

  “Well, I suppose you could look at it that way,” replies Branton, taken aback.

  “Kate was supposed to be on a day off, but Trish called her in,” says Sam apologetically.

  “But I have to go at three,” I say. They both look at me, nodding and smiling, and I wonder what I am doing that’s making people behave like grinning idiots.

  * * *

  The truth is, the cleaners are right and everyone feels a bit guilty. Just before 3:00, I go into Trish’s office, where she is consulting with Branton, and tell them what I think.

  “We made a mistake and we should own up to it,” I say. “The poor woman who found the body should get time off and counseling—like train drivers when they hit someone—and we should make this a policy, not just a one-off. Housekeeping clean two rooms in the time it takes us lot in head office to tie our shoes. We should make this an opportunity to do something for all our staff, because that’s the right thing to do.”

  “Weren’t you supposed to be having a day off?” says Trish.

  * * *

  As I walk to the Tube, I realize I’ve left my hat and gloves on my desk but daren’t go back after my outburst.

  I call Adam. He doesn’t pick up and I remember he has a job interview this afternoon; he’s finally admitted that his business isn’t viable, but instead of this being a relief it feels like discovering that the disease is worse than anyone thought. And yet I keep prodding and poking; I can’t leave him alone. I hate him and I miss him and I still love him and it all courses through me, making my blood toxic, making my veins ache, making me sick. It’s a horrible feeling, as though
my cells are turning on themselves. I don’t know what to call it, but whatever it is, I am riddled with it.

  25

  “It’s grief,” says the therapist, later that afternoon.

  “Well, that’s a relief, I thought it was cancer,” I say, only half joking. I can tell right away that Elisabeth knows a lot more than I do about where I am. Even filling her in on the backstory seems to introduce a bit of perspective. I lose it as soon as I leave, but for a few minutes, sitting on the wide yellow armchair opposite Elisabeth, it felt better.

  * * *

  When I get home the girls are clingy and my parents are stiff and formal, which means they’ve had another row. Apparently, Your Father went out for a drink with Your Estranged Husband, and this did not go well.

  “What did you expect?” I say to both of them, taking in the state of the kitchen. They’ve been staying with us twice a year for ten years and evidently still don’t know where the pans go. The girls have had beans on toast and ask if they can watch TV. I say yes so that I can hear about Adam.

  “What did you say to him?” I ask my father.

  “I told him the problem wasn’t so much that he’d been a lying shit, but that he’d been a weak man.”

  “And how did he take that?” I ask.

  My mother rolls her eyes and I imagine Adam storming out of the pub.

  “He didn’t say anything.”

  I picture Adam sitting on a pub stool, chastened, and can’t help feeling sorry for him.

  “People do get over things like this,” I say.

  “They do,” agrees my father. My mother remains silent.

  We eat Indian food. If Adam were here he’d be fussing about turmeric staining the wood, but Adam’s not here.

  “Your Father and I think we should come and live nearby,” says my mother, “to help.”

  “But what about your work?” I say, alarmed.