by Anna Raverat
“Oh, my goodness—he’s talking!” I said.
Ronnie shook his head. “Piped up about a week ago, sweetheart. Now we can’t shut him up. We thought it was a silent parrot, but it opened its mouth—I mean beak—and you should have heard what it came out with—it was effin’ this and effin’ that and you effin’ bastards, and that was just the start of it.”
“WHISKEYFAGS,” called Toto, remarkably clearly.
“Wow,” I said, “that’s amazing. I’ve never heard a parrot talk before. You didn’t teach him to smoke, did you?” I said.
“No, darling, no—I would never do a thing like that,” said Peter, lighting his fag.
“WHISKEYWHISKEYWHISKEYFAGSFAGSFAGS,” shrieked Toto.
“Oh, my God, he’s off on one,” said Ronnie.
“YOUFUCKINGWAAANKERRR,” shouted Toto.
“Blanket, Ronnie. Quick!” said Peter. Ronnie rummaged in one of the saggy cardboard boxes under the trestle table, pulled out an old gray blanket, and threw it over Toto’s cage.
“Get him inside, Peter!” said Ronnie.
“I’m going, I’m going,” said Peter, lifting the cage and shuffling into the shop. Ronnie shut the door behind him.
“FUCKINGASSHOLEBASTARDCAAAANT,” came Toto’s shriek from inside the shop.
“That’s really loud,” I said.
“It’s a terrible parrot, his language is. We don’t know what to do with him,” said Ronnie. He changed the record, turned the volume up. “Is that all there is?” sang a gorgeous female voice. Ronnie crooned along.
“I love Peggy Lee, darling, don’t you?” Ronnie said. As I walked down the alley, I could hear the mellifluous voice echoing after me. “Is that all there is…?”
51
By September, the general feeling in head office seemed to be that the company had gone to the dogs, and that they had discovered that dogs can’t run a company.
“We”—Trish paused after the majestic plural—“have reason to believe things are getting worse and we don’t know why. That’s a worry.”
“We need to increase the margin,” said Don. “And we need to do it fast.”
“More upselling, that’s one thing we should do,” said Trish. “Induce people to spend more. When a guest asks for a coffee the waitress should say, ‘The special?’ because it’s more expensive than bog-standard house coffee, and when a guest orders vodka the barman should reply, ‘Absolut? A double?’ because branded goods yield more profit than the no-name equivalent.”
Simple enough in theory, but I had seen upselling in one of the London hotels and it worried me. A family of five came into the lobby just after 9:00 a.m. The father asked, “Do you have a room?” The receptionist and I looked at the screen and we both saw that, yes, there was a family room available.
“No, but let me see what I can do,” said the receptionist, whose name was Karolina. “And in the meantime, why don’t you go and have breakfast—I can give you a discount voucher.” She gave them five vouchers and pointed them in the direction of the restaurant. The family thanked her and obediently trotted off. Karolina entered her commission on the breakfasts she’d just sold in the daily log. Twenty minutes later, while the family was sitting at their bacon and eggs, she went to tell them she had found a room.
“A perfect example of upselling,” said Trish.
“But she lied!” I said.
“Look. The family wanted a room—they got a room,” said Trish.
“But she could have given them the room straightaway. Instead, she sold them five breakfasts for fifty pounds, which she earned commission on!”
“Smart girl,” said Trish.
“Five cooked breakfasts for fifty pounds is a good deal for London,” said Don.
“That’s not the point—” I started, but Gérard came in.
“I think Kate’s just saying that this particular individual may have got it wrong.”
“Perhaps, but we can’t go on with these holes in our pockets,” said Don.
* * *
In the lift, Gérard said, “I told you, they’ve drunk the company Kool-Aid.”
* * *
Trish wanted to reduce the workforce—in numbers and also by making them less of a force. Inevitably, a company-wide reorganization was announced, but Trish also wanted to introduce Branded Behavior.
She’d just come back from Chicago, where they were setting up a Hotel Village—an “innovation” that she and Don came up with, though I didn’t see what was so innovative; it was just four hotels within three blocks of each other—but anyway, Trish told us about something that had happened in Chicago. She was looking for the Magnificent Mile, where she’d parked her hire car, and as she was walking past the back of the Ritz-Carlton two chefs were outside smoking on their break, so she asked them if they knew where it was.
“Yes, ma’am, we’ll walk you there,” said the first chef.
“That’s OK—just point me in the right direction,” replied Trish.
“Oh, no, ma’am, we’re Ritz-Carlton—we don’t point, we walk you there.”
“But I’m not even staying here,” said Trish.
“It doesn’t matter,” said the second chef.
“So you see, it is possible,” said Trish. “Those guys were on their break, for goodness’ sake! They had no idea who I was, I wasn’t even a guest in their hotel, but they walked me to my car because they were Ritz-Carlton!”
I preferred to think that the Ritz-Carlton chefs acted that way because they saw it as the right thing to do, because they were true hoteliers. The whole history of the hospitality industry is about providing care for strangers as they pass through. It is the host’s duty to honor their guests no matter what time of night they arrive, no matter how muddy and wet, how exhausted their horses, how broken their carriage. Hospitality is about giving and providing, it’s about taking care of someone; it has something to do with love, maybe only the outer reaches, but still.
* * *
And so they introduced rules that described how staff should behave. New Brand Standards for Behavior instructed hotel staff to speak only when spoken to, never to initiate eye contact, to incline the head as a mark of respect. They described not people but droids. The assault on individuality didn’t end there. Admittedly, it was a mistake to tell Trish about my savage dejunking, because she latched on to the idea.
“I’ve already dejunked the staff—I expect that’s the best place to start?”
She decreed that we were no longer to have any clutter or personal detritus on our desks, and when we didn’t take enough notice of this she introduced an obligatory system of hot-desking.
Now that we weren’t allowed to sit in the same spot for two days running, nobody knew where to find anybody else. All the enjoyable aspects of being in an office disappeared; conversations and banter were replaced entirely with emails as people traipsed about with huge bags, a vacancy behind their eyes, their own agency gradually being eroded.
Gérard refused to give up his wooden fruit bowl and the silver-framed photograph of him and his cousin, carried them faithfully in a bulging briefcase and set them out in each day’s new location. But after a couple of weeks he switched to Tupperware and a light Perspex frame. In the diaspora, I sometimes saw Sam with her wish-board under her arm.
“I need to have it in sight all the time or it won’t come true.”
It became harder to tell your whereabouts, because without personal touches to go by—family photographs, Gérard’s fruit bowl, Sam’s wish-board, postcards, snow globes, and teddy bears—the office became a nightmare of white ceilings, glass walls, thin beige carpets, watercooler and coffee machine in exactly the same position on every floor, the same temperature everywhere.
* * *
Working off Trish’s latest obsessions, I saw a chance for something I’d wanted to do ever since I’d visited the Belgravia Palazzio.
“I’ve dejunked that old ballroom,” I told her. “Raised ten thousand pounds by selling th
e minibars, and I’ve found a community project that wants to come in and replace the parquet flooring, restore the wood paneling, fix up the chandeliers, and retouch the paintwork. The hotel really wants to upsell. They want to introduce ballroom-dancing evenings and host wedding parties, as they used to, and they only need another thirty grand, which is such a small amount compared to what we’ve spent on the brand refresh that I told them I was sure it would be fine with you. Is it?”
“Oh!” said Trish. “I suppose so.”
52
“I’ve been asked out four times,” I told Adam. I was counting Henri the Ostend lawyer, Abs—aka Mr. Sainsbury’s—Alastair the silver fox, and Ronnie the old-age pensioner.
“Have you?” said Adam.
“You don’t need to sound quite so surprised,” I said, offended. I didn’t mention my ongoing emergency crush on Ben, though I was still a regular visitor at the bookshop. I went in to buy The Lost Rivers of London. The title was already a revelation; I thought there was only one. Once part of the capital’s daily life, many of these rivers still flowed underground; they hadn’t petered out completely.
I couldn’t find it on the shelf, so I asked Ben. While he was at the front of the shop he picked out another book to show me.
“Look at this—beautiful, isn’t it? It’s about wood.” That made me smile, but there was no innuendo intended, I am sure. He handed me the book, a large white hardback with simple woodcuts of trees on the front, very high quality and tastefully done. Since things were going well, I also ordered Love’s Work, a book of philosophy. I had already read it but it belonged to Yvette. I wanted my own copy, and besides, I thought it would make me look poetic and philosophical.
“It’s out of print, I’m afraid. We can’t get it, but you might get it on Amazon or from a bigger bookshop.”
I blushed at the mention of Amazon, as though I’d been caught out. I bought The Lost Rivers of London and ordered The Principles of Uncertainty in order to demonstrate my loyalty.
* * *
My mother came. I had been putting her off, but Noreen encouraged me to welcome her so I did. The visit started badly.
“Where is everything?” she said, alarmed by the echo and the spaces where furniture, crockery, clothes had been.
“I’ve been having a clear-out,” I said lightly, as if it were nothing. I had taken the day off work, regretted it already.
“But, Kate, the house is practically empty!”
“I know,” I said. “Good, isn’t it?”
“No,” she said. “It’s out of hand. I should have come before, but you keep saying you’re OK. Clearly you’re not.”
“The house was so full of stuff, though,” I said. “Adam was such a hoarder.”
“So now you’re getting rid of everything that reminds you of him, I suppose? What about the children?” she said. “Are you going to throw them away too?”
* * *
On the first night of her visit I had a conference call, which I took in the bedroom with the door closed, but I soon heard shouting and crying and doors slamming downstairs.
“Is someone in a market or a gym or something? There’s a lot of noise in the background,” complained Trish. I finished the call with a pillow wedged between the wall and my head to muffle the sounds of my household. When it was over I went downstairs to see what was going on and found my mother stormy and upright on a kitchen chair and the girls sitting cross-legged on the sitting-room floor, watching an episode of Diego and Rosita.
“What happened?” I asked the girls.
“Grandma snatched the remote out of Milla’s hand,” said Hester, not taking her eyes from the screen.
“What happened?” I asked my mother.
“They were fighting over the TV and when I tried to sort it out they wouldn’t give me the remote. They’re very disturbed, Kate.”
“No, they’re not! Well, maybe they are, but…”
“I’ve never been very good with small children,” said my mother quietly.
* * *
The following night was a Wednesday and Adam had the girls, as usual.
“Let’s get a takeaway,” suggested Mum, even though the fridge was full of vegetables waiting to be cooked. “They’ll wait another day. Make a big soup tomorrow. Come on, let’s have a night off.”
We sat waiting for Chinese food to arrive. My mother drummed her fingers on the table. The kitchen seemed too bright and too empty. It wasn’t that there was nothing to say but that we couldn’t seem to find a way to start saying it. I lit candles, opened some wine, turned off the bright lights. We talked about my brother and his family and their life in Boston; we talked about my dad’s retirement; we talked about her school; we talked about Adam’s new job; we talked about my job.
“Would you like me to come and look after the children, sometimes, when you go away?” she said.
“Thanks, but I’ve already set it up with Noreen and Adam.”
I thought she looked a bit crestfallen, but the doorbell rang just at that moment.
* * *
With Mum staying I couldn’t do my usual night rounds—she was a very light sleeper—so I leafed through The Lost Rivers of London and soon fell in love with the whole idea of these rivers, hidden underground like buried treasure. The Falcon and Fleet, the Tyburn, Ravensbourne and Westbourne, the rivers Effra and Peck, Stamford Brook, Walbrook, Wandle: I wanted to see these rivers with lyrical and faintly exotic names. The Effra apparently flowed somewhere underneath our house, and I wanted to tell the girls about that and about all of the other rivers and brooks and streams—especially the ones that sounded like pirates: Beverley Brook, Black Ditch, Parr’s Ditch, Counter’s Creek, the Neckinger.
A foldaway map showed all the lost rivers and how they connected with each other, and with the Thames or other overground rivers. I looked at all the places I habitually went in London; there were rivers under all of them.
That night I dreamed that I dropped jewels into drains that led not to sewers but to underground rivers with fabulous names: Wintersbourne, Sittingbourne, Snowdrop, and Flight.
53
Adam texted to ask if I would like to go out for a meal for my birthday. I told him I already had plans, and then hurriedly made some. I planned a dinner. My mother was still staying so I included her and invited Jo, Yvette, Gérard, David, and Edward. Edward didn’t come.
“He’s out with the younger man,” said David, glum.
“Bastard,” said Jo.
“You can’t say that. He’s not, actually. He’s just in love with someone else,” said David.
As he said it I realized I felt the same way—Adam had acted atrociously, but it hurt Milla and Hester to hear him condemned, and it wasn’t just for their sakes that I refrained. I didn’t yet want to go out for dinner with him, but I’d loved Adam enough to marry him; he was the father of my children and that still counted for something.
My mother, who had been sitting quietly, sipping her wine—rather quickly, I’d noticed—piped up: “Kate’s father had an affair, years ago, and when it all came out I was angry with him—extremely, and hurt, of course—called him a few names myself, but it felt wrong. He was the father of my children, after all. Do you see what I mean?”
“I was just thinking exactly the same thing, Mum!” I said. “And you know what, it was brilliant that you never slagged him off. That would have been awful for me and Greg.”
“Well, it’s good to know I got one thing right,” said Mum.
“You got more than one thing right,” I said, and gave her a hug. She reciprocated by patting me with a flat hand.
“Oh, Mum,” I said. A hard pat was the best she could do. I’d been so critical of her for so long that I’d lost sight of the fact that she’d struggled with the same overwhelming situation that I was now facing. She’d done her best. “You did really well,” I told her, and this time she hugged me stiffly back.
“So are you, darling,” she said.
“You ne
ed a bit of practice at hugging, though,” I said, which made her cry a little.
Someone changed the subject to a topic safer than good mothers and unfaithful lovers. There was talk about finding a good dentist. “The most important thing is how he treats you,” said Gérard. “Actually, that’s not just for dentists, that’s for lovers too,” he added, and the conversation came back around.
* * *
After dinner, Yvette brought out a birthday cake.
“Bother. I should have thought of that,” said Mum.
“It’s OK, Mum. I’m thirty-nine now, you don’t have to do cakes anymore.”
When they sang “Happy Birthday” there was an echo in the kitchen. I felt self-conscious about the house being so empty and said so.
“You can borrow my piano, if you like,” said Gérard. “I’m going to leave PHC. Things are getting worse there and I’m not enjoying it. I’ve always wanted to go to Australia, so I’m going.”
“Oh, no! I won’t survive without you,” I said.
“Oh, wow!” said David. “I’m always so impressed when people change their lives. Good for you, Gérard. I wish I could do something dramatic like that.”
“You can,” Gérard replied to David. “You will,” he said to me.
* * *
Later, when they’d all gone home, Mum and I finished the wine and talked some more. I asked her how she forgave my father.
“I don’t know really—it took a while, but eventually I understood his side of it. When I found out, he told me everything. He answered every single question I had—and I had many, as you can probably imagine. We sat at the kitchen table for hours—it was horrible, but necessary. I could see it pained him to tell me details, to admit the ways in which he’d lied, but he did because that’s what I needed—to hear all of it; the whole truth. Eventually, we became friends again.”
When she said that I felt sad, and scared—her way back couldn’t be mine because it had never been like that with me and Adam. I hadn’t married my friend; I’d married my lover.