by Anna Raverat
Mehmet nodded.
“Who was attacked?” I asked. “Were they badly hurt?”
“A female guest,” said Mehmet.
“It was very bad. We can’t really talk about it,” said Doris.
“For legal reasons,” said Mehmet.
“The good thing was that it wasn’t one of our employees who did it. It was another guest,” said Doris.
“Who allegedly did it,” said Mehmet.
“What do you mean?” I said, frustrated by their obfuscation.
“It’s a four-letter word,” said Doris.
“It begins with ‘R.’ I’m afraid it’s the ‘R’ word,” said Mehmet.
“Oh, my God!” I said.
“We know,” they said, nodding.
“A woman has been raped in one of our hotels—and this is how we talk about it?” I said, letting my disgust show. Doris and Mehmet looked at each other, puzzled.
“No,” said Doris.
“We can’t talk about it,” said Mehmet.
* * *
Not all companies stupidize people, I told myself. Not all companies take soft, rounded humans and force them into straight lines and strange language. Not all bosses are myopically self- and profit-obsessed, borderline personality disordered, I thought as I looked, again, for mine.
We allowed this to happen, I realized; as a company, we were failing on every count. A host’s duty is not only to provide food and shelter, but also to make sure that their guests do not come to harm.
* * *
I went back into the conference room, as big as an auditorium. Still no sign of Trish, but Don had arrived, head bent, shuffling through papers, preparing to give his address. The chairs swiveled and had a handle to lower and raise the seat, and the plastic arms could also go lower or higher and you could move them separately. People were playing with arm heights and seat heights, shifting their weight around in the chairs. Outside, the weather was unseasonably warm, more like May than March; there was birdsong, and sunlight and gentle air, but since Don was about to give a PowerPoint presentation the windows were closed and the blinds pulled down.
Don stood in the middle of the room, mumbling and then spluttering, delegates seated around him in a big circle. His cough was a channel that connected him to a very bad place. We waited for him to speak. Only the chairs made a sound, rocking and creaking like trees. A fly was shut in the room, zigzagging in a crazy circuit around the heat and light of the projector.
“Someone kill it,” came a voice. It might have been Trish, but it was dark and there were seventy people in the room so I wasn’t sure. Don started talking in a very low voice; only snippets came through, but we all heard when he said, “The company is in the hands of the receivers.”
A moment of shock, then a voice piped up, “Richard would never have let this happen. We were in safe hands with him.”
Don looked up as if to answer. He had visibly shifted from one state to another and was now entering a third. He said, “Many of us will lose our jobs. It could happen very quickly.”
People started to rise, tutting and swearing.
“A couple of months; maybe weeks. I’m not giving in without a fight. I don’t expect any of you to stay and fight with me, but I will fight.” Don spoke more clearly now, stood more upright, as if finding something recognizable in himself at last.
* * *
I’d had enough. I needed to go home; to see my children, hold them, breathe in the smell of them, and not go away again like this. I was sick of Palazzio Hotel Corporation, sick of putting on my work face every morning, sick of the corporate code, and traveling for work all the time, missing whole days and nights at home. I was sick of being one of Trish’s people, and sick of working for a company that kept getting it so wrong. Location is not the main thing; the top three criteria for hotels are the same as they are for dentists, as they are for any other relationship—friends, parents, employers, governments, spouses, and lovers:
1. How they treat you
2. How they treat you
3. How they treat you
I left the conference and walked downstairs. Sure enough, on the second-floor landing the daily turd had been delivered in the suggestion of a forest by the animal I hadn’t seen. In the lobby, the bellboy was apologizing to some guests by the lifts, which were having another seizure.
I had three calls to make, all to London. The first was to the Office of Fair Trading, which was very interested in the alleged price-fixing. They explained it could be a long process but that from what I’d told them, they could launch an investigation. They asked if I had considered whether I was really willing to see this through and if so, when could I come in and see them to go through the allegation in more detail and start the paperwork. “Monday morning at nine,” I said.
Next I called the Information Commissioner’s Office again and told them how CCTV had missed recording a violent crime because it was being used to spy on staff.
“Is that serious enough for you?” I asked angrily.
“I’m very sorry it has come to this,” the case officer said. “But yes, we can look at this now. As far as I know it’s unprecedented, but there may well be a case.”
The third call was to my mother.
“I’m quitting my job,” I told Mum. “Well, actually, it may be quitting me, but either way I’m leaving.”
“Isn’t that a bit—rash?”
“It may seem rash but in fact I’ve been thinking about it for ages. I’m coming home right now—I’m on my way.”
“But I thought your flight wasn’t until tomorrow evening—”
“I’ll get another one. Airplanes are like buses, Mum—you can just turn up and buy a ticket, you know.”
“That’s very extravagant, Kathryn. Can’t you wait?”
I ignored that comment and said instead, “By the way, I’ve taken a lover. He’s twelve years younger than me.”
That shut her up.
PART FOUR
I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don’t have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along.
—William Stafford
75
Where I work now—the Mythos Suites Hotel, a five-star forty-room boutique hotel on the South Bank—we have an arrangement with the homeless hostel down the road; any unoccupied rooms, we put people up for the night who have nowhere else to go. Two hostel workers come and help get people settled in. They have to come in the staff entrance and we take them to the rooms in the service lift because although the guests are pleased enough to know about such a scheme, they don’t actually want to see—or smell, or hear—it in operation. We can’t take the addicts, but we can take the working girls—give them the night off—and the young runaways, the bankrupt businessmen, the broken wives and their frightened children. It’s not a lot, two or three rooms a night, because the hotel is popular, but it’s something. Manos, the hotel owner, is a sixty-two-year-old Greek shipping magnate who left his home in the Peloponnese at the age of fourteen, arrived in Athens with a few drachmas and nowhere to stay. Manos built an empire, but he knows that most people in that situation do not; that many people end up enslaved in one. And that’s if they’re lucky.
I love being the hotel manager. Eleni, Julie, and Andy, my coworkers, are Greek as well and of course speak Greek when I’m not around; they switch to English for my benefit, but I’ve started learning the language so that I can join in with them a little bit. I’m also learning a simplified version of the aria from the Goldberg Variations. Even dumbed down, Bach is beautiful. Linda the piano teacher told me that Bach composed the Variations for the Russian ambassador Count Keyserling, who suffered from insomnia, and that Goldberg, a young music student in the count’s employ, had to sleep in an antechamber and play the clavier to the count during his sleepless nights. It must have been very soothi
ng for Count Keyserling to hear the music, less so for poor Goldberg to be roused in the middle of the night to play.
* * *
I knew it wouldn’t last forever with Branton, though to begin with it felt as though it could. After the hormone high of the first few months wore off, he drifted back toward other interests, the chief of which was sports. He played, and if he wasn’t playing he watched—rugby, football, athletics, tennis, golf, darts, whatever was going. Formula One was what I liked least—all those whining cars. To begin with, it was nice to cuddle up on the sofa and then after the game, race, bout, or match ended have sex, which was also nice to begin with, but slowly it dawned on me that for Branton sex was also a sport and he liked to watch himself perform it. I couldn’t blame him, he was an Adonis, but I did start to lose interest when I realized it was his own arms he was caressing, his own chest he was admiring. When I started getting boredom headaches, I knew it was over.
* * *
Yvette seemed relieved when I told her I’d stopped seeing Branton. I think that my being single somehow consoled her about her own situation; as if being unhappily married was better than not being married at all. I tried to tell her: the end of a relationship isn’t a catastrophe and you don’t need another in order to be all right, but she didn’t want to hear it. I understood—people used to try telling me things about Adam but I shrugged them off.
* * *
I see Adam when he collects or drops off the girls; more often than either of us would choose, but we are still linked through our children. We fight sometimes, but mostly we manage. The girls say it’s a good thing we divorced. I agree and point out that it was also a very good thing we married in the first place: How else would we have them? They get that. They get all of it really, and in fact I’m often slightly alarmed at how savvy and sophisticated they are. Milla despises boy bands; she likes punk rock. She was telling me all about emo and screamo music, style, and culture—completely foreign to me.
“How do you know these things?” I asked her.
“How do you not know?” Milla said, equally incredulous.
* * *
My sleep still has a few holes in it. It’s like jet lag from a very long flight. I used to fret so much: I can’t sleep, I’m not sleepy, I can’t get to sleep. Sleep was always this thing that I had to strive for and reach, but it’s slowly improving. I’ve learned that I don’t have to be the active ingredient. In Greek you can say, “Me perni o ipnos”—Sleep is taking me over. I like that.
76
The cakes on the counter all look delicious: a Victoria sponge with generous amounts of jam and cream; a lemon-and-almond cake, shiny and deep yellow; a rich-looking plum cake, golden on top with amber edges, purple plums sunk deep in the dense pale base. I sit at one of the square, solid tables, order a pot of English Breakfast, extra strong, and a piece of the plum cake. “Buy yourself a cup of coffee and some cake on me,” Gloria had said in the taxi once upon a time in New York. I didn’t think she’d mind me switching to tea.
I let the tea stew until it’s as brown as the Arizona desert and sample the cake. The first mouthful stops me in my tracks—vanilla, nutmeg, plum; this cake is incredible. I eat it bite by slow bite, cutting it with big sips of tea, looking at my plate so as to experience the cake fully—visually as well as its taste and texture, the weight of each mouthful on my fork, the delicious smell.
“This cake!” I say to the waitress.
“I know,” she replies, with feeling. I ask her for the recipe, but she says it’s a secret, so I buy three slices to go, one more for me and one each for the girls.
By the time I get home the cardboard box has gratifyingly wide grease spots on the bottom. I peer at the cake, studying its nature. The defining qualities are a large, soft golden crumb, vanilla sweetness, buttery moisture, the scent of nutmeg, and a puckering tartness of the heavy plums at the bottom.
* * *
Rising at 3:00 a.m., I search in my recipe books and online for “plum cake,” “plum, nutmeg, vanilla cake,” and “vanilla cake with plums and nutmeg,” find several versions that look as though they could do the job, and take bits from each to make my own.
My night kitchen is clean and calm. I move quietly to match the stillness. The kitchen is at the back of the house, away from the street, private and sheltered. I grease a cake tin, line it with paper. In a beige ceramic mixing bowl I cream together butter and sugar with the back of a wooden spoon, add two teaspoons of vanilla extract, whisk three eggs, and add them too. In a small pan the plums bubble in a slow-cooking syrup of water, sugar, cinnamon, cardamom, and clove. I leave them to steep while I sift the flour, tapping the sieve against my palm rather than the side of the bowl, because it makes less noise. This is a quiet cake. I grate half an oval nutmeg onto a board, bringing the leftover piece up to my nose for the warm, woody spice, combine the nutmeg with the other dry ingredients, add them to the bowl, and tip in the plums, mixing well, then pour the batter into the prepared cake pan and slide it into the hot oven.
As I wait for the cake to bake I clear up, make tea, read a bit. Our house at night is a changed place; sounds magnified, shadows deepened, time slowed. Still rather empty, but we’re used to that now and in fact we quite like it. Dejunking was not the answer to all of my problems, but clearing the space did help somehow, if only by making room to accommodate all of those thoughts and feelings—so perhaps those books weren’t completely ridiculous, and perhaps I wasn’t either.
When the cake is done the kitchen is warm from the oven and smells like heaven. I let it cool in the tin for half an hour, before turning it out on a plate. When I do this, I see I’ve burned the bottom, tut a bit, and slice off the charred layer, taking some blackened plum with it, then leave the cake to cool a little longer.
I stare out of the window at the changing light. It’s nearly 5:00 a.m. I feel satisfied, and grateful—which may not be exactly the same thing as happy but must be part of it.
* * *
At 6:00 a.m., I inspect my work. The cake smells good and seems to have the right color and the right weight. Sampling it, I know I’m off. It doesn’t quite have the depth of the original, but that’s OK, it’s my first attempt. I may be off but I’m very, very close.
77
It’s nice and industrious in the bookshop today, like a library or a reading room. I’ve got a couple of cookbooks open on the shelf. Ben has four or five titles piled up by the till and he’s reading the top one; there’s a woman perusing the card selection and an au pair flicking through gardening books with her young charge standing placidly by, munching his way through a bag of cheese-and-onion crisps. None of the celebrity chefs have quite what I’m looking for but there’s an untrendy book that looks as though it’s been on the shelf for quite a while with a couple of recipes I like the sound of: Upside-Down Plum Cake and Sussex Plum Heavies. The Lardy Johns sound good too.
The little boy sends up a great wail. He’s spilled his crisps all over the floor. His au pair says, “Oh, Christopher,” in a cross tone. Christopher starts picking up the crisps and putting them back in the bag.
“You can’t eat those now, they’re dirty!” she scolds.
“Want!” Christopher retorts.
“No!” says the au pair. Christopher reaches down, grabs a little fistful of broken crisps from the floor, and crushes them into his mouth.
“Naughty!” says the au pair, and yanks him out of the shop.
* * *
“Poor Christopher,” I say to Ben.
“He moved pretty fast—he was well within the five-second rule,” says Ben.
“I thought it was the ten-second rule,” I say, thinking of all the dropped biscuits I’ve let the girls pick up and eat—never from a pavement, but sometimes those biscuits stayed longer than ten seconds on the kitchen or sitting-room floors.
“That’s something else, I think,” says Ben.
* * *
The woman looking at cards has gone. Ben fetches a dustpan and
brush, and while he sweeps up, I sneak a peek at his pile of books. The top one is open so I can’t see the title but the others are: 500 Words You Should Know, The Way of Tenderness, and The Happiness Solution Project: The Ultimate Guide to Feeling Happy Now and Forever. Despite my wide reading on the subject I hadn’t come across that one. Most of the self-help books I’d read talked about Happiness as if it were a trophy or the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but surely the rainbow itself is the magical thing? Often, feelings arrive two or three together; mixed, brawling, but if you could get all those unruly feelings to line up, there would be a spectrum, each fading into the next. Green, blue, indigo, violet. Sadness, tenderness, gratitude, joy. You can’t just select one and delete the rest.
“I don’t think it’s possible to be happy all the time,” I say.
“No, I know,” replies Ben. “I just thought I’d have a look though, see if there’s any useful tips.”
“What’s the one you’re reading?” I ask, pointing to the open book.
He closes it to show me the cover: Suddenly Single: A Lifeline for Anyone Who Has Lost Love.
“Oh! Ouch,” I say. Feelings flood in. Red, orange, yellow. Shock, surprise, compassion.
“It’s not too bad,” he says. “We were coasting really, more out of habit than anything else.”
Another feeling shows up. One that probably shouldn’t be here, but I let it in anyway. I change the subject to hide my elation. “Of the five hundred words, what’s your favorite so far?”
Ben thinks for a moment. “It’s not in the book, but I like ‘aver.’ And I like ‘windowsill.’ And ‘loop.’”
“Those are very good. I like ‘plum.’ In fact, I’m looking for a recipe for plum cake,” I say, and tell him about the wondrous cake. Ben knows the café I’m talking about.
“Maybe we should loop round there sometime and have some plum cake,” he says.
“By the windowsill,” I say, playing along.