Lover

by Anna Raverat

  * * *

  The sailor carried very little, had only a few instruments: an almanac for celestial navigation—which got soaked and disintegrated early in the voyage—a compass, and a waterproof watch. She learned to pay attention to what she noticed, to use herself as an instrument. Mid-ocean, after many days and nights of being surrounded by sea and sun and stars, she noticed how serene she felt, despite her extreme vulnerability to the elements. This was not a false sense of security, she said, this was a secure sense of security. She realized the call-and-response nature of things. She had the feeling that something bigger than herself was including her—had been, all along. Greater Forces, and she didn’t just mean the weather. She jettisoned everything that now seemed superfluous. It wasn’t only that she didn’t need them anymore; they were actually getting in the way. She dropped the watch in the sea, feeling only a brief regret as it sank quickly out of sight.

  * * *

  At 3:00 a.m. I went on Amazon and had a quick “Look inside” a few more books for tips. Get Over Your Ex advised meeting new people. For those who couldn’t get out much, such as full-time working mothers like me, they recommended making online friends—insomniacs, presumably, or friends in different time zones. My 3:00 a.m. was 10:45 a.m. for someone in Western Australia, 10:00 p.m. for someone in La Paz, 7:30 a.m. in Gujarat. But I didn’t want to find people online and it wasn’t only Adam’s Internet adventures that put me off; it seemed like a form of shopping and I didn’t want to buy and sell people like that and I didn’t want to be bought and sold.

  Shuffling about in the near-dark so as not to wake my daughters, sleeping in my bed, I opened his wardrobe to look, yet again, at his clothes hanging there. Mostly shirts, suits, and jackets; smart clothes he didn’t wear very often but looked so handsome in. A small white feather rested on the shoulder of one of his suits: such gentleness; I didn’t disturb it. I smoothed his lapels, stroked his sleeve. The thing I’d been working very hard not to admit finally poked through. All my activity was a furious attempt to avoid it, bury it, deny it, but I’d known all along; hearts do break.

  I let out a sigh and my breath lifted the feather up off Adam’s suit shoulder to twirl slowly down to the ground, a reminder that there was such a thing as grace.

  41

  There were problems completing the purchase of the Ambassade chain. Someone, somewhere, had miscalculated PHC’s buying power and that person was sacked, along with all of his team. Trish and Don went ahead with the deal regardless—they canceled the Immersion Hotel and resold the Belgian palace to help pay for it.

  “Ostend really isn’t a premier destination,” said Trish. “Not from a global perspective.”

  “And the idea, while quite innovative, requires a great deal of seed money to get it off the ground. I think we’ll stick with normal hotels for now,” said Don.

  “The return would have been much higher than for a ‘normal hotel,’” I said. “And actually the initial layout was only twenty percent more than conversion to a straight hotel would have been.”

  “Well, we simply can’t afford that right now,” said Don.

  I was really disappointed. Embarrassed too, when I had to stop the historians’ research and pay off the film production company, and I noticed that Trish and Don didn’t stop spending vast amounts of money on other things. In any case, I decided to work on something quieter, something that wouldn’t cost much and therefore wouldn’t be scrapped. In my original job description, one of the points I’d most warmed to was: “To be a passionate ambassador and focal point for ensuring intelligence from staff is used when developing new products, projects, and services.”

  Six hundred and thirty-three thousand people in a hundred countries: so much creative potential in PHC’s human resource. Richard had always encouraged hotel staff at all levels to interact with guests, talk with them, find out what they liked and what they needed—what better way to gain insight into the Guest Experience than by asking the people who looked after them? I decided to set up a modern-day equivalent of a staff suggestion box—which did exist, physically, in some hotels. Suggestions tended to stay in the hotel, though, and sometimes they even just stayed in the box.

  Working with Tyler from IT, we came up with a digital version; a hybrid between a suggestion box and a betting shop. We called it “The Ideas Fair”: people could submit ideas and they could also place virtual tokens on the ones they thought were the best; there would be cash prizes for the best ideas and for betting correctly on them.

  Trish’s sign-off was needed before anything new could be launched. “Kate, the bottom line is conversion rate—is this ideas sweepstake going to get more people to book hotel stays? Because if not, and I highly doubt it, it’s not worth it.”

  “But ideas can come from anywhere, and from anyone—we don’t know what might come out of this because PHC has never had an effective outlet for people’s views and ideas before. Most of the work has been done, and once you approve it we could have it up and running within a day.”

  Trish made two amendments before she agreed; ideas could only be submitted if the person’s name, job title, and location were also given, and as well as tokens for the best ideas, she decreed that tokens should also be placed on the worst ideas.

  “Green for good, red for bad,” she said. “A traffic-light system.”

  “I thought there were no bad ideas?” said Sam, who was helping with branding.

  “That’s ‘no stupid questions,’” I corrected.

  “You’re both wrong,” said Trish. “There are plenty of bad ideas and no end of stupid questions. I hear them all the time.”

  After Trish’s conditions and Sam’s branding and Tyler’s final tweaks, we launched it: Global Ideas Derby—Back the Winning Horse!

  * * *

  Along with many other business sectors, the hospitality industry was suffering from the global financial crisis. At PHC, bookings dropped by 40 percent and that’s disaster territory because hotels are highly geared operations. Profits were down; stress was high. The weird thing was that profits were down in areas they really shouldn’t have been: possibly something to do with the “informal economy” operating in the hotels, mainly illicit use of rooms—staff living temporarily in the hotels. Many lower-level employees are itinerant, students far away from home, migrant workers at varying levels of legality, ex-convicts with no fixed abode. Sometimes rooms are let for cash. The extent of it is not known but bits poke through here and there. The accountants unearth a bone or the IT people smell something funny.

  Undeclared double-sell was one theory. Hotels double-sell rooms all the time; a good bookings agent can achieve 150 percent occupancy rate by selling rooms twice for the same date: meetings during the day (maintenance shove the bed in the bathroom and lock the door) and reconverting to bedrooms when the business day is done, or to an airline night crew followed swiftly by a day crew. The turnaround time between one bunch leaving and another arriving can be less than an hour, so the hotel has to be operating at a high level—front desk, maintenance, and cleaners all in communication with each other and fast. Cleaners say that even when they’ve stripped the linen and put new sheets on, sometimes the beds are still warm from the previous guest as the next is checking in downstairs.

  42

  “We need to change the mind-set,” Trish said.

  “Great!” I said. “So you want to make the culture more innovative, more entrepreneurial?”

  “Less.”

  * * *

  Trish and Don planned to script and choreograph as many jobs as possible, especially housekeeping. Their justification was efficiency; if all the cleaners did the same thing in the same order it would save time, which saves money. But that made no sense because even if the rooms are identical, each guest is different and they bring their world with them. Trish and Don seemed to want robots, but really, cleaners are more like anthropologists. Each time they unlock a door they dip into someone’s reality: one guest pulls the furnit
ure to the wall to clear space for prayer or exercise, another washes his clothes in the sink and leaves them to drip-dry all over the furniture, another has a bunch of bananas ripening in a sunny spot by the window. A good cleaner treats each guest as they are: individual.

  * * *

  In April, only four months after Richard died, they decided to sack Jean the cleaner, not for playing the piano but for sitting down too often while he was working.

  “Routine footage of CCTV—” began Don.

  “Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “That’s what you said last time, but something’s just occurred to me—what’s ‘routine’ about having CCTV cameras tracking the cleaners? We shouldn’t be doing that, surely?”

  “It’s a gray area,” said Don.

  “I’m not sure I’m in full agreement with that statement, Don,” I said.

  “Don’s absolutely right. Legally, it is a gray area,” said Trish.

  “The law may allow for interpretation but isn’t it our responsibility to interpret it correctly? Fairly, I mean. And, with all due respect, many people would feel this to be … ahm, well … a bit unkind.”

  “It’s too late to worry about that now,” says Trish. “It’s done.”

  * * *

  Disgusted, I went to the Belgravia Palazzio anyway. Stanley, head of security, was there. “We’d better go in here so they don’t see us,” he said, opening a door into the old ballroom.

  “What do you mean?” I said. “Spies?”

  “Cameras.” Stanley lifted down two chairs with velvet seats from a tall stack and went to make us a cup of tea. I waited for him in the abandoned ballroom. No more dancing now—the parquet flooring was in a terrible state, and at least half the room was filled with broken minibars.

  “Too expensive to renovate,” he told me. “They use it to store the dead fridges from all the London hotels, until a contractor picks up the job lot,” he said.

  Stanley told me what happened with Jean. “Three blokes turned up, and Don sent a personal message—a nasty touch, don’t you think?”

  “What about Jean’s son?”

  “We had a whip-round, raised enough for his airfare, and the aunt took him back to Brazil. Jean can’t support them without work. It was unnecessary, the way they did it. Three of them, I ask you! Jean wouldn’t have made any trouble—he wasn’t going to fight them. One would have been enough. Don’s message said that he’d been ‘sitting down on the job,’ and it was ‘unacceptable,’ and they took him away.”

  * * *

  When I went in the following day, Trish had no lament for the minibar graveyard. “They’re expensive to run and they don’t last,” she said. “We’re phasing them out gradually. We plan to replace them with vending machines next to the ice dispensers located on every floor, and we’re introducing a fee for the ice.”

  “But minibars are so good—they’re so tempting,” I protested. “I love minibars! One of the best things about coming into a new hotel room is opening them to see what’s inside.”

  “They’re outdated,” said Trish. “And anyway, you cannot ‘love’ minibars, Kate. That’s not love—that’s nostalgia.”

  43

  A room was laid out in the alley outside Peter’s shop: a large red rug spread over the tarmac and on it a small sofa, two beanbags nestled against the wall, a brown armchair, and a side table with a horrible lamp. I found it disconcerting to see an inside on the outside and then realized this was because they were my insides: my rug, my sofa and beanbags, my armchair, my horrible lamp on my side table. I’d never liked these things, had dejunked them with gusto, but they’d been in my house for years, and confronted with them now like this, I felt eviscerated. Peter was smoking in the armchair, Toto’s cage next to him, Ronnie reclining on the sofa drinking beer. They might as well have been sitting on my lungs and kidneys.

  * * *

  Ronnie asked if I’d seen the new Belgian café next to the Tube station. “You’ve got moules, and you’ve got frites. And you can have them for nine ninety-nine. And if you like a drink, you’ve got Belgian beers—you’ve got blond beer and brunette beer but no redheads.” He laughed deeply and went on. “And you can have the beers for three ninety-nine each. Or if you like they do a meal-deal at lunchtime and you can have the whole lot for twelve ninety-nine, sweetheart. What do you think of that?”

  Was this Ronnie asking me out?

  “It sounds nice,” I replied in a noncommittal way, wondering how to end this encounter with everyone’s dignity intact. Then I saw Peter drink from my old blue cup with the broken handle; he’d glued it back together.

  “You mended it,” I said, as if mending was a new and revolutionary idea.

  * * *

  Not everything went to Peter or in the bin. I took the rest of the jewelry Adam had given me and distributed it down various drains across London: I let the gold earrings slide down a grating at the edge of Hyde Park, said goodbye to the silver bracelet as it plopped into a gutter by King’s Cross station, and the river pearls I let go down a drain in a Pimlico side street.

  44

  Adam called, crying. “Charlie’s dying,” he heaved. It was May. Charlie had lasted much longer than anyone predicted, but that was no consolation now. Milla and Hester would be as distraught as Adam.

  “I’m not there and I should be—I should be there with him, to hold him.”

  “Then go,” I said, hearing the pain in his voice.

  “I won’t make it in time, he suddenly got worse. He’s suffering. Mum said he can hardly breathe. Dad’s taking him to the vet this morning.”

  “Go right now, this minute, you might make it,” I said.

  “The train takes two hours. It’s too late,” he said, sobbing.

  * * *

  When he came to collect the girls later that week he stood in the doorway, pale and haggard. I invited him in. He was edgy, dancing about in the hallway like a boxer in the ring. A surge of compassion rushed through me; it must have been horrible, coming as a visitor to what had been his home, unsure of his welcome. I laid my hand on his arm. It was the first physical contact we’d had for months and it startled both of us. He stopped jigging and looked at me, full of sorrow. I could feel his regret, as complete and unequivocal as heat from the sun. I wasn’t sure what he saw in my eyes, but at that moment all I felt was sadness. I moved toward him. We put our arms around each other and held each other tight.

  Milla came downstairs. “Does this mean you’re friends again?” she asked.

  We moved apart again, but not very far. Adam waited for me to speak, an act of courtesy like holding the door open: I suppose he dared not confirm her hopes, or his own, or mine.

  “I think it means we’re trying to be friends,” I said cautiously, but that was enough for Milla; she rushed forward and put us back into hug position as if she were arranging dolls.

  * * *

  “Please, Kate, let’s try again,” said Adam, and I wanted to—the books said it was possible, my own parents were living proof. I could hear Adam’s suffering in every syllable, see it in the slight stoop in his shoulders, a flatness of step as though his arches had fallen, and I felt for him. After all, we were still married; we had our children to think of.

  The mess we’d made affected Milla and Hester deeply. They brought home their annual school photo: the photographer had positioned their heads close together and buttoned up their collars; Milla smiled obediently for the camera, Hester gave a gappy grin. Their cheeks were chubby, their faces clean, soft hair brushed, but there was no shine around their eyes where their smiles should have reached.

  “It’s lovely,” I said to them, and filled out the order form for two: one for me, one for Adam.

  * * *

  At 3:00 a.m., when the girls were sound asleep, I looked at their sad eyes in the school photograph and was able to cry. I didn’t want sleep so much as a general anesthetic.

  I knew how sorry Adam was, but sorry doesn’t actually do anything—doesn’t chan
ge things, doesn’t make things un-happen or go away. Gérard was right; grief is slow. Incredibly, intolerably slow. A glacier crossing continents, its movement is imperceptible. And yet, something new was happening. I could feel it, bubbling, coming up from under.

  45

  Houses, like hotels, have different characters. It’s easy to anthropomorphize a house: the front door can be the mouth, the two upstairs windows eyes, with lintels as eyebrows, and if there’s a chimney pot with smoke rising, that can be a thought bubble; the house dreaming. Our house spoke to us: the bedroom doors creaked when I opened them first thing in the morning and afterward you could hear the occasional mutter as the wood eased into the day. The fridge hummed, the oven mumbled, and when the boiler started up at 5:00 a.m. it sounded like a stomach gurgling. It was like living with a kindly old person who was stiff on rising, slightly cranky at certain times of day.

  I got to know our home better, simply because I was paying attention. After living there for ten years, I finally figured out the strange noise the bath made; it was the sound of water slowly leaking out because the plug was ever so slightly too small. Draining away, all these years. Once I realized, all it took was a quick trip to the hardware shop on the high street to buy a new one that fitted snugly.

  * * *

  The girls had taken the news of Charlie’s death better than I thought they would, but I was worried. One night, after they had been quiet for a suspiciously long time in their room, I gently pushed the door open: they were sitting on the floor, Milla with the kitchen scissors, Hester with a pair of nail scissors, soft toys strewn around and a great deal of stuffing on the floor.