by Anna Raverat
* * *
Signia was serving breakfast. In one corner, a group of extremely tall young men had pushed several tables together, but they were still too big for the furniture—elbows and knees jutting out, broad shoulders sandwiched in.
“The Australian volleyball team,” said Signia.
We looked at them: six six-footers tucking into their breakfast. One, with curly brown hair and freckles over his nose and cheeks, glanced up at Signia, blushed, and looked away.
“Much better than your usual fan club,” I said approvingly. Signia reddened and smiled at the floor.
“You should tell him that you were on your national basketball team,” I said.
I didn’t want to be surrounded by pale mounds of scrambled eggs, vats of undercooked bacon, and the smell of a hundred sausages, so I asked Signia if it was all right for me to take my coffee into the lobby. “Yes, of course it is!”
* * *
Hotels are terribly intimate, like any other setting where you’re thrown together with strangers. You see a family, the teenage daughter tucking in her mother’s bra straps at the back, a couple coming down to breakfast with their fingers loosely intertwined, a single stranger standing in the lobby wondering where to go, a child trailing behind his parents humming a song from The Lion King. Bodies are porous; vulnerability slips through. Even hardened businessmen and -women, when they talk numbers, talk about loss. Despite all the armor and warpaint, humanity shows: a shirt button pops open exposing a soft, hairy belly; damp patches grow under arms or behind knees; a mottled blush rises from chest to throat; someone stammers. The business world can be brutal. Those at the top have usually had to fight a few battles to get there and you can see in their bodies the toll it’s taken.
Don and Trish arrived. They looked awful. I hadn’t seen Don for a while—he’d been touring the hotels of the Far East, evidently developed a rattling cough. They paused while he spat into a tissue and wiped his mouth; his cough was as deep as a well, judging by the spume and spittle he drew up. Trish looked frayed. Over the last few months she’d become increasingly snappish, her eyes brittle, her neck sinewy, shoulders tensed, her hair bleached so dry it looked as though it might break as she twisted it around her fingers. I waved; we greeted each other. Trish said they’d flown first class and that Angelina Jolie was on the next bed.
“Did you sleep?” I asked.
“Don’t be silly,” she replied. “Don slept and Angelina slept; I watched four movies, back-to-back.”
Don had lost an amount of weight and maybe he had started losing hair too, because he’d shaved his head. He had a scar on the back of his head, a shiny white line two centimeters long, half a centimeter wide. The shape of his skull was somehow unexpected, made him seem naked. The shareholders wanted his head on a platter; it was almost as if he were preparing it for them.
* * *
Don only stayed a couple of hours—evidently he couldn’t wait to get to Chicago—and for the rest of the day, Trish was demanding and churlish. At lunch, the water was too warm, the bread too crusty, her steak too bloody, the crème brûlée too soft. After the last meeting of the afternoon, Trish wanted to go shopping. She asked me to go with her, but I had anticipated this and arranged to finalize the conference menus, an activity for which Trish wasn’t needed. I put her in a cab for Fifth Avenue; only a fifteen-minute walk, but Trish didn’t want to arrive at Dolce & Gabbana on foot.
I agreed to everything the French chef suggested: kir royale as an aperitif, the hors d’oeuvres, the amuse-bouches between courses. Forty-five minutes later I locked the door to my room, and after I had spoken to the girls I turned off my phone and ran a bath. At Heathrow, for a bit of luxury, I’d bought myself a new bathrobe—five-star soft and velvety. I removed my earrings and stayed in the warm water for a long time, floating, sloshing, becoming a little softer myself. Afterward I lay on the bed, listening to the sounds as the day outside ended and the evening began. I could hear cars in the street below, heels clacking along the pavement, a dog barking, someone shouting in the distance. Closer, I could hear someone walk down the carpeted corridor, the lift going up and down in the shaft, other gurgles in the building. I fell asleep for a couple of hours and awoke in the dark, hungry. The phone by the bed had one of those spiral wires like an umbilical cord. I ordered soup and fish pie with mashed potato, food that barely needed chewing, ate cross-legged on the bed, and afterward raided the minibar for expensive dark-chocolate pastilles and a small jar of milk-chocolate-covered roasted almonds. It was a padded existence in a womblike bubble, where I only had to think of food and it was there, everything I might need provided. I drifted off to sleep under a duvet of eiderdown, occasionally surfacing when a car cut through the night or a bottle crashed to a pavement, but these things didn’t trouble my slumber, they were so far away.
* * *
4:10 a.m.
Knocking.
* * *
Satisfaction at having slept past 3:00 a.m. was immediately superseded by irritation at having been woken. The knocking continued like a low-level headache. “Excuse me, Mrs. Kate! Wake up!” came an urgent whisper at the door. It was the night manager, bent with apology, very sorry to wake me, but he did not know what else he should do—it was Trish, she was unwell and could I please come? As I pulled on my dressing gown and shoved my feet into slippers the irritation gave way to dread: What state could Trish possibly be in that would warrant the night manager waking me to attend her? Then the irritation returned. She’s probably stubbed her toe on the bed, I thought, or dropped her phone down the toilet.
We took the lift to the honeymoon/rock-star/executive suite on the top floor, named to suit the occasion. Trish appeared at the far end of the corridor, barefoot but thankfully wearing a nightgown, with a long silk dressing gown, unbelted, hair loose around her shoulders. In a pantomime gesture, the night manager put his finger to his lips. By now incredibly pissed off, thinking of the Good Night’s Sleep I was missing, I wanted to shout, What the hell is this? Some kind of elaborate and very shit joke? But something about the stance of Trish’s body stopped me; it was so weird—drifting skyward as if waiting to be beamed up. She let out a moan and then I understood: she was sleepwalking.
Never wake a sleepwalker: this is cardinal, the golden rule. I whispered this to the night manager, who accepted it without discussion, and frankly, it was a relief: bad enough witnessing the discharges of a disturbed psyche without having to wake it.
* * *
At breakfast, Signia brought a pot of steaming black coffee, which I drank as if it were an elixir. When Trish sat down at the table I still didn’t know how to tell her, only that I must.
“How was your night?” I asked after she’d finished her first coffee, laced with hot milk.
“Terrible, as usual—I never feel rested. I’ve got some new pills from the doctor but they’re giving me nightmares.”
“You were sleepwalking,” I blurted. “The night manager found you in the corridor and he woke me just after four. We watched over you until you went back to bed, which was just after five.”
Trish blanched as I spoke, put down her cup, folded her napkin, pushed out her chair. “I shall have to go back to the doctor and get something stronger,” she said.
72
A badly run hotel is like a marriage that’s not being cared for: it might look all right to a casual observer, but there are signs. The ghost trees, the blood-streaked drip in the kitchen, the small turd in the stairwell: the Ambassade was a wrong choice. I tried to articulate this to Trish before she left to join Don in Chicago.
“Oh, don’t worry,” she replied. “Don’t worry about the fading wallpaper, the silly white twigs, the animal droppings—these are all things that can be fixed or removed. Remember the top three criteria. Location. Location. Location. In the hotel world, location is everything and the Ambassade has it.” She had a point.
At the end of the day, after all my meetings were done, I remembered not visiting
the Tivoli Gardens, fetched my coat, and went out. As I crossed over Central Park West an advertisement on a passing cab shouted, INSOMNIA COOKIES—fresh baked cookies delivered anywhere in Manhattan, all through the night, which struck me as a wonderful idea. Instead of a couple of dry digestives from a packet, warm cookies with gooey middles, syrupy oats, melty chocolate chips. I started fantasizing: Insomnia Cookies London. All you needed was a large urban population with a bit of cash and a high percentage of students, parents of young children, and stressed-out executives with no work-life balance. It could work anywhere! Insomnia Cookies Bristol. Insomnia Cookies Birmingham. Des Biscuits d’Insomnie Paris. Galletas Insomnio Madrid. Kekse Schlaflosigkeit Berlin. Biscotti Insonnia Rome. I could be the European president, the managing director of Insomnia.
By the time I looked up from my daydream I was in the middle of Central Park—it was green and open, all the horizons had changed, the skyscrapers shoved to the sides as if the city had dejunked a part of itself to clear a space for running, skating, freewheeling. I thought of Adam flying along on his motorbike. I’d believed he needed that time to feel free, but he’d used it instead to be with someone else—in fact, to be someone else. How is it that you can live with a person for ten years, see them every morning and every night, be familiar with the main coordinates of their life, and still not know what’s really going on inside them? Then again, people don’t always know the contents of their own hearts; we are such secrets, even from ourselves.
* * *
Back in the lobby, a crowd was slowly congregating around the lifts, which weren’t working properly. In many hotels it’s the lifts that keep everything moving, pumping people round—bedroom to bar, gym to breakfast, lobby to spa—all the vital circuits. The bellboy was apologizing. “This is an old hotel,” I heard him say, but the Ambassade wasn’t old, just middle-aged. People thronged in the lobby and stairwells, bags and cases piled outside rooms in the corridors, blocking passages. The hotel was having a heart attack. Guests started laboring up and down the stairs with their luggage, making very slow progress because they were not used to the exercise. I feared there could be a few actual heart attacks, so I took off my coat and joined the bellboy and concierge in helping guests shift luggage into taxis, up and down the stairs. It didn’t take long; within thirty minutes everything was working smoothly again.
* * *
The last rays of sunshine were coming in through the windows, which could have done with a clean, but still. I would like to say I sank into the armchair, but it wasn’t real leather so it was more of a slither and a slide. There were two photographs on the wall opposite, both of roads: freeways at dusk or dawn—I couldn’t tell which—but low in the pinking sky was a huddle of small gray clouds; a soft-focus traffic light glowed emerald, and road lights twinkled like seven-pointed stars. A feeling of deep contentment came over me—uncomplicated, unexpected, and very, very welcome. I don’t know quite what happened to bring it about: I know that I found the photographs magical, that I’d enjoyed helping the guests, and that when Signia saw me flopped out in the lobby and came over to ask if I’d like some coffee—decaf so as not to interfere with the possibility of sleep—she did so with real warmth. Experience is like the weather; moves in its own way, changeable, impossible to guarantee.
We were on some wrong path with the Guest Experience thing. You can’t manufacture a true experience. You can’t dismantle it into component parts. You can study and predict, arrange things just so, have consistent branding, color schemes, and logos, but it will never be more than a wager because experience doesn’t live in concrete things. The paint can be fresh, the carpets vacuumed, the surfaces dust-free. Pillows plumped, duvet turned back. Pristine uniforms, fragrant flowers in the lobby, smooth, soundless elevators, clean windows—but the most important thing is how you’re treated. Hospitality is the relationship between guest and host. It’s a matter of kindness, care, and respect. No matter how fleeting, it’s the relationship that really matters, and relationships require presence. They don’t come flat-packed with instructions and you can’t assemble them; you actually have to be there. Even if everything else is in place, if the staff are wearing smiles but not feeling them, if there’s no real presence, the Guest Experience still won’t be good.
I thought of Richard. He would have been proud of me and he would have done the same; rolled up his sleeves and carried people’s bags, smiling and chatting and making everyone feel all right, I thought tenderly. I hadn’t known Richard for long, yet he’d given me so much.
Signia brought the coffee and poured out a cup. Just then I was grateful: for Signia, for Richard, the pleather chair, the hot decaf, my job, my mother, Adam, my children—all of it.
73
I woke to a strange cry in the night—an owl perhaps, more likely a soul. It came again. I wondered if it was Trish; she and Don would be back by now, ready for the conference tomorrow. I wondered if I should go and look, in case she was sleepwalking in the corridors again and had hurt herself or terrified a guest, but she was with Don and he must have known her habits by now.
Since I couldn’t get back to sleep I checked my inbox. The Ideas Derby was seething with discontent, as usual. There were twelve new items for me to read. I’d learned by now to follow the sailor’s advice and sort them into three buckets:
— Things that required my immediate attention
— Things I needed to keep an eye on
— Things I couldn’t do a damn thing about
The third category held the most items by far: I couldn’t sort out the halitosis of the general manager of the Empire Express in Denver, Colorado, even if it was making guests physically recoil, and there was not much I could realistically do to intervene in the theft of lightbulbs and toiletries from the storeroom of the Palazzio in Düsseldorf.
I called Insomnia Cookies. The guy on the other end of the line sounded half-asleep, which was reasonable given the hour.
“Ma’am, d’you want the Cookie Box or the Deluxe Cookie Box?” he mumbled.
“What’s in the Deluxe?” I asked.
“Triple Chocolate Chunk, Chocolate Peanut Butter Cup, Oatmeal Raisin, and Snickerdoodle.”
“Isn’t that a kind of dog?”
“Uh, excuse me?”
“The ‘doodle’ one—it sounds like a dog, but maybe that’s just because it sounds like ‘poodle.’”
“Actually, you’re right—there is a breed called Labradoodle,” said the cookie guy, sounding more alert now. “My aunt has one! But a Snickerdoodle is basically a cinnamon-sugar cookie. I guess maybe you don’t have them in England, right? They’re delicious, especially warm. They’re all so good, the cookies here—I’ve gained, like, ten pounds since I started.”
“How long have you worked there?”
“Four weeks.”
“Oh dear, that does sound dangerous. I’m glad I don’t live in New York, in that case, and since I won’t be doing this again, I’ll have the Deluxe.”
“An excellent choice, ma’am. And I’ll sneak an extra Snickerdoodle in there for you.”
While I was ordering the cookies, another alert came in: a lengthy email describing in detail how PHC was actively colluding with two of the world’s biggest booking websites, BookYourBestHotel.com and RitzyPackage.com. At last, something serious that required my immediate attention. Someone, somewhere, was accusing Don and Trish of price-fixing.
74
By 7:30 a.m. the breakfast area was overrun with PHC conference delegates; the Australian volleyball team were huddled in the same corner as before, Signia chatting to them. Mehmet and Doris, two legal colleagues from the London office, were taking plates of food back to their table.
“We’re just having something to eat,” said Doris. The term “something to eat” was very broad: Mehmet had a pile of scrambled eggs, two rashers of bacon, two slices of bread, three sausages, a big puddle of ketchup, and three pancakes with maple syrup; Doris had a croissant.
* * *
Outside the conference room, delegates gathered with their countrymen and -women, conducting conversations in their own languages. Walking around, I couldn’t distinguish all of them—was that Portuguese or Russian, with those guttural noises and hard stops? And was that Dutch or possibly Afrikaans? Mandarin or Cantonese? Hindi or Panjabi? Norwegian, Swedish, or Danish? I recognized French, Italian, German, and Spanish. With these I slowed down, lingered if I heard a few words I could understand—like looking through the curtains of someone else’s home.
Trish was nowhere to be seen. I texted her, I called her, I went downstairs to look for her, called her room from the lobby but there was no answer. I imagined she was having a hair crisis, unless the unthinkable had happened and she’d derailed. The conference began at 9:00 a.m. as planned, and because the morning sessions were all with external speakers, it was less obvious that Trish and Don hadn’t even shown up yet.
* * *
During the midafternoon break, Doris and Mehmet came over to speak to me.
“We’re very sorry but we won’t be able to attend the conference this afternoon because there’s something we need to deal with,” said Mehmet.
“Something very bad has happened in one of our hotels,” said Doris.
“We can’t say which one,” said Mehmet.
“What’s happened?” I asked. They glanced at each other.
“A guest has been attacked,” said Doris.
“Oh, no!” I said.
“And we may be liable. There’s a bit of a gap.”
“What do you mean, ‘a bit of a gap’?” I said.
“Well, it happened in a public area—one of the back corridors, late last night—so the CCTV should have picked it up, but the cameras were trained … ahm, elsewhere, so the police may not be able to catch the perpetrator.”
“The cameras were trained on the staff,” I said.
“At that particular moment in time,” said Doris.