He had to ring the bell twice at length to bring Mr Gittins out of his office. The manager’s plump smooth face set not much less hard than marble as he saw Edgeworth. He was plainly unimpressed by Edgeworth’s timeliness; perhaps he thought it was a ruse to gain his favour. “I hope you’ll be doing your best to get on with your colleagues,” he said.
“Why, who’s said what?”
Mr Gittins didn’t deign to answer. He was turning away until Edgeworth blurted “Do we know if Mary Barton’s coming in today?”
“What concern is it of yours?” Having gazed at Edgeworth, Mr Gittins said “She won’t be in for some time. I’m told she can’t walk.”
Edgeworth swallowed, but his voice still emerged as a croak. “Do we know why?”
“It really isn’t something I’m prepared to discuss further.”
Mr Gittins looked disgusted by Edgeworth’s interest and whatever it revived in his mind. Edgeworth gave him a grimace that felt nothing like apologetic and dashed to the staffroom. For once the list of staff and their phone numbers on the notice board was of some use. He keyed Mary Barton’s number on his mobile and made the call before he had time to grow any more fearful. Well ahead of any preparation he could make for it a woman’s tightened weary voice said “Hello, yes?”
“I’m one of Mary’s friends at work. I was wondering how she is.” With more of an effort he managed to add “Just wondering what’s wrong with her.”
“Has it got something to do with you?”
The woman’s voice was loud and harsh enough to start two children crying, and Edgeworth felt as if the sounds were impaling his brain. “I wouldn’t say it has exactly, but—”
“If I thought you were the man who did that to Mary I’d find you and make sure you never went near a woman again. Just you tell me your name or I’ll—”
Edgeworth jabbed the key to terminate the call and shoved the mobile in his pocket. As soon as it began to ring he switched it off. He couldn’t loiter in the staffroom in case Mr Gittins wondered why, and so he ventured into the lobby, where a stray lump of popcorn squeaked piteously underfoot and then splintered like an insect. He’d hardly reached the ticket counter when the phones on it began to ring in chorus. “See who it is,” Mr Gittins said.
Edgeworth clutched at the nearest receiver and hoisted it towards his face. “Frugoplex Cinemas,” he said, trying not to sound like himself.
When he heard the woman’s voice he turned his back on the manager. While she wasn’t the caller he’d been afraid to hear or the one he might have hoped for, she was all too familiar. “Congratulations, Eric,” she said. “Three wrong means you’re our next contestant. Someone will pick you up tonight.”
He dropped the phone, not quite missing its holder, and turned to find Mr Gittins frowning at him. “Was that a personal call?”
“It was wrong. Wrong number,” Edgeworth said and wished he could believe. Mr Gittins frowned again before making for the doors as some of Edgeworth’s workmates gathered outside. Edgeworth searched their faces through the glass and struggled to think what he could say to them. Just a few words were repeating themselves in his head like a silent prayer. “You’re my friend, aren’t you?” he would have to say to someone. “Be my friend.”
The Room Beyond
As soon as Todd drove off the motorway it vanished from the mirror, and so did the sun across the moor. On both sides of the street the slender terraced houses huddled together like old folk afraid of descending the precipitous slope. Most of the shops in the town at the foot of the street were illuminated, but the streetlamps seemed oblivious of the September dusk. As he braked and braked again he saw the hotel sign across the maze of roofs.
The middle was blocked by the spire of a church, but BEL and the final E were visible. He hadn’t realised that the hotel was on the far side of town. Whenever he stayed with his uncle and aunt he’d come by train, from which they had escorted him through the back streets to their house, interrogating him and talking at him so incessantly that he’d had little chance to learn the route. It had been the same on Sundays, when they’d walked to the Bellevue for a dauntingly formal lunch. Now the town hardly seemed large enough to accommodate either route.
More than this had changed in fifty years. While the clock from beneath which figures emerged on the hour was still outside the jewellers on the High Street, the road was one way only now. It turned away from the hotel, and all the side streets leading there displayed No Entry signs. Most of the shops were either new or disused, and the Apollo, where he’d once seen an airman climbing steps to heaven, had become the Valley Bottom pub. In a few minutes Todd found himself back at the clock, which hadn’t moved on from twenty-five to six. The tarnished figures were paralysed on their track, and one stood in a miniature doorway as if he were loath to venture beyond. Shops were being shuttered, and at last the streetlamps came on, illuminating virtually deserted streets. This time Todd left the High Street ahead of the bend, but the lane he followed returned to the clock. He glimpsed Christ the Redeemer down a narrow alley, though the church was dark. He had to drive along the High Street yet again to discover that a road around the outside of the town led towards the hotel.
Was the park beside the road the one where his relatives had taken him to hear a brass band? He wouldn’t have placed it so close to the hotel. The doctor’s surgery must have been in one of the derelict houses facing the park, but Todd couldn’t identify which. He hadn’t thought of it for all these years, and he would have been happy to forget it now. He hadn’t passed a single inhabited house by the time the road brought him to the hotel.
He had to laugh, as his uncle liked him to. The long black building was less than half the size he seemed to remember. While it might have been designed to resemble a mansion, he could have taken it for some kind of institution now. A wind blundered off the moor and flapped a torn section of the canvas awning across most of the unilluminated name. A couple of cars were parked on the forecourt, under a solitary orange floodlight that turned his blue Passat as black as they appeared to be. Dead windblown vegetation splintered beneath the wheels as he parked in front of a tall window blacked out by heavy curtains. His boxy suitcase was resting on the back seat, and he trundled it to the hotel.
No uniformed doorman was waiting to sweep the massive glass door wide, and Todd might have imagined that the door itself had shrunk. Its metal corner scraped over the tiled floor with an excruciating screech that made the receptionist glower. She was a brawny broad-shouldered woman with gilded spectacles as narrow as her eyes. Her grey hair was severely waved, and the glasses seemed to pinch her features small and sharp. She kept up her frown as Todd crossed the lobby, which was lit to some extent by a few bulbs of the dusty chandelier. More than just her attitude reminded him of someone else, so that he blurted “Excuse me, did you have a mother?”
She pursed her lips so hard that the surrounding skin turned grey along with them. “I beg your pardon,” she said while doing nothing of the kind.
Her voice was hoarse and blurred, like a smoker’s who was also somewhat drunk. “Sorry,” Todd said and risked a laugh, only to wish he’d kept it to himself. “Does it run in the family, I meant to say.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”
“What you do. Admitting. Admission.” Todd’s words seemed to be straying out of his control, an unwelcome reminder of his age. “What I’m trying to say,” he said, “was she a receptionist? The one in the practice by the park round the corner.”
“That’s a graveyard, not a park.”
He could only assume she had somewhere else in mind. “Anyway,” he said, “can I have my room?”
“Have you booked?”
“I rang,” Todd said and wondered if the woman who’d taken the call had been her in a more hospitable mood. “Jacob Todd.”
“Todd.” His uncle used to greet him with a cry of “Now it’s all jake,” but Todd felt as if the receptionist had dropped his name with
a dull thud. She dragged a ledger bound in black from under the counter and plucked at the pages before repeating “Todd” like an accusation. He might have thought the pages at the back were loose with age until he realised they were registration forms, one of which she laid before him on the counter. “Fill yourself in,” she said.
Discolouration had lent the form a dark border. The print was both small and smudged, and squinting at it only left Todd more frustrated with the task it set him. “Who needs all this?”
The receptionist raised her spectacles to train her gaze on him. Her fingertips looked as earthy as the edges of the form. “You might be taken ill,” she said.
“Suppose I am, who’ll want all this information?”
“The authorities,” she said and stared unblinkingly at him.
The solitary writing instrument on the counter was a ballpoint splintered like a bone and bandaged with sticky plastic tape. As Todd strove to fit his details into narrow boxes on the form, the inky tip stumbled about like a senile limb. Last name, first name, address, date of birth, place of birth… “What’s your business in our town?” the receptionist said.
“A funeral.”
“You’ll be just round the corner.”
Even if that was indeed a graveyard, it needn’t be the only one in town. Christ the Redeemer hadn’t appeared to be anywhere near the hotel. Todd could go for a walk and find his way to the church once he’d checked into his room. Profession, driving licence number, car registration number, telephone number, email… “Will you be taking the dinner?” the receptionist said.
Todd was distracted by someone’s attempts to enter the hotel or even to locate the handle of the door. He turned to see that the door was shaking just with rain, which was surging across the moor. “When do you need to know?” he said.
“As soon as you like.” This plainly meant as soon as she did. “Cook wants to get away.”
Perhaps at least the meal would be up to the standard Todd remembered, and he could save his walk in case the rain ceased. “Put me down, then,” he said.
The receptionist vanished like a shadow into a small office behind the counter. Presumably the dim light from the lobby was all she required, for Todd heard the rattle of a telephone receiver. “One for dinner,” she said, and somewhere in the building a distant version of her voice joined in. Another hollow rattle was succeeded by a metallic one, and she reappeared with a key attached to a tarnished baton. “Are you written up yet?” she said.
Towards the bottom of the form the print was almost too indistinct to read. Method of payment, onward destination, next of kin… “That’s a blank, I’m afraid,” Todd said. He scrawled his signature, in which age had reduced the first name to resembling Jab, and unstuck his discoloured fingers from the pen while the receptionist pored over the form.
He’d had more than enough of the sight of her greyish scalp through her irregular parting—it put him in mind of a crack in weedy stone—by the time she raised her head. “Retired from what?” she apparently felt entitled to learn.
“Education.” When this didn’t lessen her scrutiny Todd added “Teaching them their sums.”
This failed to earn him even a blink. “Will you be dressing?” she said.
“For dinner, you mean?” She’d begun to remind him of his aunt, who had always found some element of his appearance to improve—a collar to tug higher on his neck, a tie to yank tighter, a handkerchief that was either lying too low in his breast pocket or standing too impolitely erect. “I’ll be changing,” he said.
“Better look alive, then. It’s nearly eight, you know.”
“Nowhere near,” said Todd, shaking the cuff of his heavy sweater back from his thin wrist. He was about to brandish the time—not much after half past five—when he saw his watch had stopped. His aunt and uncle had sent it for his twenty-first, and it had never let him down before. He drew his cuff over its battered face and found the receptionist frowning at him as if he’d betrayed some innumeracy. “Let’s have my key, then,” he said, “and I’ll be down as soon as I’m fit to kill.”
Whenever she’d finished sprucing him Todd’s aunt used to say that was how he was dressed, but perhaps the receptionist didn’t know the phrase. “You’re number one,” she informed him, planting the brass club on the counter with a blow like the stroke of a hammer. “You’ll have to work the lift yourself.”
Todd couldn’t tell whether she was apologising for the attendant’s absence or reminiscing about the hotel’s better days. As he headed for the gloomy alcove that housed the entrance to the single lift, a wheel of his suitcase dislodged a loose tile. The receptionist watched with disfavour while he replaced it in its gritty niche, and he didn’t linger over deciphering the blurred letters on the underside of the tile—presumably some firm’s trademark. Once he dragged open both latticed doors of the lift he struggled over shutting them. The wall of the lift shaft inched past the rusty mesh, and at last the floor of a grudgingly illuminated corridor sank into view, although the lift fell short of aligning with it. Todd had to clamber up and haul his suitcase after him before he could make for his room.
It was at the far end of the left-hand stretch of corridor, where a window above a fire escape showed the town reduced to runny mud by the rain on the glass. The feeble lamps on the corridor walls resembled glazed flames, all the more by flickering. The number on Todd’s door was dangling head down from its one remaining screw. He twisted the key in the aged shaky lock and pushed the leaden door open, to be met by a smell of old fabric. It made Todd feel enclosed, invisibly and impalpably but oppressively, even after he switched on the miniature chandelier.
The small room was darkened by the furniture—a black wardrobe with a full-length mirror in its narrow door, an ebony dressing-table, a squat chest of drawers that looked stunted by age, a bed that wasn’t quite single or double, with a hint of an indentation underneath a shaggy blanket as brown as turned earth. A door led to a shower and toilet, while another would have communicated with the next bedroom but was blocked by a luggage stand. Behind the heavy curtains at the foot of the bed Todd found a window that showed him darkness raging above the moor. He was unpacking his case when he heard what could have been the fall of several pans in the kitchen. As he changed into his dark suit—the only one he’d brought—a phone rang.
At first he thought it was in the next room. It shrilled at least a dozen times before he traced the dusty wire from the skirting board to the upper compartment of the wardrobe. When he swung the door open, the receiver toppled off the hook, starting to speak as he fumbled it towards his face. “The gong’s gone, Mr Todd.”
The receptionist’s tone seemed capable of stripping Todd of all the years since his last visit. “Oh, is that what it was?” he retorted. “I’ll be with you as soon as I can.”
He would have liked to shower and shave, but the hotel could take the blame, even if the man in the black frame of the mirror would never have passed his aunt’s inspection. Todd had always felt on probation, never quite knowing if his visits were treats or punishments. “If you won’t behave you can go to your aunt’s,” his mother used to say, and he’d suspected she was a little afraid of her older sister. His uncle hadn’t seemed to be, and made a joke wherever he could find one, but then he’d done so at the surgery as well. Todd didn’t need to be alone with those memories, and hurried out of the room.
If he’d been able to locate the stairs he would have used them, but the corridor offered him just the silent doors, bearing numbers like steps in a child’s first arithmetic lesson. He was close to hearing them chanted in his skull. He stepped gingerly down into the lift and pushed the marble button, only to leave a blotchy print on it. He hadn’t even washed his hands. “Not my fault,” he muttered, feeling threatened by a second childhood.
The lobby was deserted except for a sign on a stand outside a room Todd hadn’t previously noticed. The plastic numbers separated by a hyphen weren’t years, they were hours with just six
ty minutes between them. The words above them would have said DINING ROOM if they hadn’t lost a letter. Todd found the N on the carpet in the doorway—carpet trampled as flat and black as soil. As he attempted to replace the letter between the I and its twin he felt as if he were playing an infantile game. He hadn’t succeeded when he grew aware of being watched from the room beyond the sign. “Just putting you together,” he said.
The waiter was dressed even more sombrely than Todd. He stepped back a silent pace and indicated the room with a sweep of one white-gloved hand. The room was nowhere near as daunting as Todd recalled. While the tables were still draped like altars, and the place was certainly as hushed as a church, it was scarcely big enough for a chapel. Even if it had always sported chandeliers, he didn’t remember them as being so ineffectual. He had to squint to be sure of the burly waiter’s small sharp face, the eyes narrowed as though in need of spectacles, the brow that he could have imagined had been tugged unnaturally smooth by the removal of a wig from the clipped grey hair. He was disconcerted enough to blurt “Has your sister gone off?”
The waiter paced to the farthest table and drew back its solitary chair. “Who was that, sir?”
His voice was as unctuously slow as a priest’s at a pulpit, and might have been striving for hoarseness and depth. “Aren’t you related to the lady at reception?” Todd said.
“They say we’re all related, don’t they?” Before Todd could give this whatever response it deserved, the waiter said “Will you be taking the buffet?”
Todd sat down as the waiter slipped the chilly leather seat beneath him. “Can I see the menu?” he said.
He never had while he was visiting—he’d only watched his aunt and uncle leafing through leather-bound volumes and then ordering for him. “I wouldn’t recommend it, sir,” the waiter said.
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