Todd was starting to feel as he’d felt as a child—that everyone around him knew a secret he wouldn’t learn until he was older. “Why not?” he demanded.
“We’re just providing the buffet option on this occasion. Chef had to leave us.”
“Then I haven’t much choice, have I?”
“We always have while we’re alive.”
The waiter sounded more priestly than ever, and his pace was deliberate enough for a ritual as he approached the lengthy table that stood along the left side of the room. He uncovered every salver and tureen before extending a hand towards them. “Enough for a large party, sir.”
When waiters used to say things like that, Todd had expected his uncle to respond with a witticism. The hotel seemed to be turning into a joke Todd didn’t understand. As he crossed the shiny blackened carpet to the buffet, the waiter raised a cloth from an elongated heap at the end of the table and handed him a plate. The buffet offered chicken legs and slices of cold meat, potatoes above which a fog hovered or at least a stagnant cloud of steam, a mound of chips that reminded him of extracting sticks from a haphazard pile in a game for which his aunt had never had the patience. Last came salads, and as he loaded his plate a lettuce leaf attempted a feeble crawl before subsiding on the salver. The movement might have betrayed the presence of an insect, but it was the work of a wind that had moved the floor-length curtain away from a window behind the table as though somebody was lurking there. As a child Todd had somehow been led to believe that God lived behind the curtains above the altar in the church. The curtains on the far side of the table veiled only a vast darkness tossing restlessly as a sleeper in a nightmare. He did his best to ignore the impression while remarking “At least I’m the first one down.”
“The only one,” the waiter said and found utensils under the cloth for him. “It’s all been put on for you, Mr Todd.”
Was this meant to shame him into taking more? Todd might have wondered if his fellow guests knew better than to eat at the hotel, but he was more inclined to ask how the waiter knew his name. The man spoke before Todd could. “Will you be having the house?”
“I’ll try a bottle. Make it red.” In a further attempt to recapture some sense of maintaining control Todd said “And a jug out of the tap.”
The waiter gave a priestly bow before gliding through a doorway to the left of the buffet, and Todd heard him droning to himself under his breath. Any response was in the same voice, and monotonous enough to suggest that the man was murmuring a ritual. After some sounds of pouring the waiter reappeared with a tray that bore an unstoppered carafe and a jug. He served Todd water and wine and stepped back. “Can you taste it, sir?” he murmured.
Todd took a mouthful of the wine, which seemed oddly lifeless, like some kind of token drink. “It’ll do,” he said, if only to make the waiter step back.
The man continued loitering within rather less than arm’s length. He’d clasped his hands together on his chest, which put Todd in mind of someone praying beside a bed. When he tried to concentrate on his meal the hands glimmered so much at the edge of his vision that he might have imagined the gloves were plastic. “I’ll be fine now,” he said as persuasively as he could.
The waiter seemed reluctant to part his hands or otherwise move. At last he retreated, so slowly that he might have felt he didn’t exist apart from his job. “Call me if there’s anything you need,” he said as he replaced the covers on the buffet before withdrawing into the inner room. He began murmuring again at once, which made it hard for Todd to breathe. It reminded him too much of the voice he used to hear beyond the doctor’s waiting-room.
“Go to the doctor’s with your uncle,” his aunt would say, and Todd had never known whether she disliked having him in the house by herself or was providing her husband with company if not distraction, unless it had been her way of making certain that Todd’s uncle saw the doctor yet again. Every time he’d filled the wait with jokes at which Todd had felt bound to laugh, although neither the quips nor his mirth had seemed to please the other patients. He’d felt not just embarrassed but increasingly aware that the joking was designed to distract someone—himself or his uncle or both—from the reason they were waiting in the room. He had never ventured to ask, and his uncle hadn’t volunteered the information. It had been the secret waiting beyond the door through which his uncle would disappear with a last wry grin at Todd, after which Todd would gaze at the scuffed carpet while he tried to hear the discussion muffled by the wall. Eventually his uncle would return, looking as if he’d never given up his grin. While Todd had seldom managed to distinguish even a word, he’d once overheard his uncle protest “This isn’t much of a joke.”
Todd knew the secret now, but he preferred not to remember. He was even glad to be distracted by the waiter, who had stolen at some point back into the dining-room. Todd seemed to have been so preoccupied that he might have imagined somebody else had eaten his dinner, which he couldn’t recall tasting. The jug and carafe were empty too. He’d barely glanced at his plate when the waiter came swiftly but noiselessly to him. “Do go back, Mr Todd.”
The subdued light and the oppressive silence, not to mention the buffet, were making Todd feel as if he were already at a wake. “I’ve finished, thank you,” he said. “The doctor says I have to watch my food.”
When his uncle used to say that, Todd could never tell if it was a joke. Certainly his uncle had gazed at his food until his wife protested “Don’t put ideas in the boy’s head, Jack.” Since the waiter seemed ready to persist, Todd said “I’ll be down in the morning. I have to be ready for a funeral.”
The waiter looked lugubriously sympathetic, but Todd was thrown by the notion that the man already had. “Whose is that, sir?”
“I’d rather not talk about it if you don’t mind.” Todd regretted having brought the subject up. “I’m on my own now,” he said as he made his way between the empty tables, which had begun to remind him of furniture covered with dustsheets in an unoccupied house. When he glanced back from the lobby the waiter was nowhere to be seen, and Todd’s place was so thoroughly cleared that he might never have been there. A curtain stirred beside the long uneven mound draped from head to foot on the buffet table, and Todd discovered he would rather not see the mound stir too. He made some haste to leave before he realised that he didn’t know when breakfast was served. Calling “Hello?” brought him no response, neither from the dining-room nor from the impenetrably dark office beyond the reception counter. He’d arrange to be wakened once he was in his room.
Why did he expect to be met in the lift? He was close to fancying there was no room for anyone but him as soon as he returned to the panelled box. He fumbled the gates shut and watched the wall ooze past them like a mudslide. He was anxious for light to appear above it well before that happened, and as soon as the lift wobbled to a halt he clambered up into the corridor.
It was as silent as ever. The sombre doors between the dim glazed flames could easily have reminded him of a mausoleum. The rain on the window at the end was borrowing colours from the lights of the town. The storm was slackening, and Todd was able to read some of the illuminated signs. Beneath the race of headlamps on the motorway he made out several letters perched on a high roof—ELLE and also U. An unwelcome thought took him to the window, on which he couldn’t distinguish his breath from the unravelling skeins of rain. The sign swam into focus as if he were regaining his vision, and he saw it belonged to the Bellevue Hotel.
If anybody heard his gasp of disbelief, they gave no response. For a moment he had no idea where he was going, and then he found his numbered baton and jammed the key into the lock. A few bulbs flared in the dwarfish chandelier—not as many as last time, but they showed him the shabby leather folder on the dressing-table. He threw the folder open on the bed, revealing a few dog-eared sheets of notepaper and a solitary envelope. While he couldn’t tell how much of their brownishness the items owed to age, there was no mistaking the name they bore. He wa
s in the Belgrave Hotel.
It might have been yet another element of a joke that somebody was playing on him, unless he was playing it on himself. He was too late to change hotels, whatever time it was—“too late, Kate,” as his uncle liked to say even when Todd’s aunt wasn’t there. Just now Todd wanted nothing more than to lie down, but first he needed to arrange his morning call.
He retrieved the phone from the upper cupboard of the wardrobe, only to find no instructions on the yellowed paper disc in the middle of the dial. When he picked up the bony receiver he heard a sound not unlike a protracted breathless gust of wind, presumably the Belgrave’s version of a dialling tone. 9 seemed the likeliest number, but when he tried it Todd heard a phone begin to ring along the corridor. He was tempted to speak to his fellow guest, if only to establish there was one, but the hollow muffled note tolled until he cut it off. Dialling 1 brought him only the empty tone, and so he tried the zero. A bell went off in the depths of the building and was silenced, and a slow hoarse blurred voice in his ear said “Mr Todd.”
“Can you get me up for eight?”
“For how many would that be, sir?”
“I’m saying can you see I’m down for breakfast. What time’s that?”
“Eight will do it, Mr Todd.”
Had the receptionist heard his first question after all? Todd was too weary to say any more—almost too exhausted to stand up. He stumbled to the token bathroom, where he lingered as briefly as seemed polite. The shower cubicle put him in mind of a cramped lift that had somehow acquired plumbing, while the space outside it was so confined it almost forced the toilet under the sink. Another reason for him to leave the windowless room was the mirror, but the wardrobe door showed him more of the same, displaying how age had shrunken and sharpened his face. He switched off the light and clambered into bed.
The indentation in the mattress made it easiest for him to lie on his back, hands crossed on his breastbone. He heard a hollow plop of rain on wood and then an increasingly sluggish repetition of the sound, which put him in mind of heartbeats. The wind was more constant, keeping up an empty drone not unlike the voiceless noise of the receiver. Though he’d remembered one of his uncle’s favourite turns of phrase—the comment about lateness—it didn’t revive as many jokes as Todd hoped. It only brought back his uncle’s response to hearing the doctor’s receptionist call his name. “That’s me,” he would say, “on my tod.”
It wasn’t even true. His nephew had been with him, sharing the apprehension the man had been anxious if not desperate to conceal. None of these were memories Todd wanted to keep close to him in the dark. With an effort he recalled names his uncle had dug up from history: Addled Hitler, Guiser Wilhelm, Josef Starling, Linoleum Bonypart, Winsome Churchill… For years Todd had believed they had all been alive at the same time. Now the names seemed more like evidence of senility than jokes—blurred versions of the past that put him in mind of the way the rain on the window had twisted the world into a different shape. They left him unsure of himself, so that he was grateful to hear a voice.
It was next door. No, it was beyond the other room, though not far, and apparently calling a name. Presumably the caller wanted to be let in, since Todd heard a door open and shut. For a while there was silence, and then someone came out of the adjoining bathroom—a door opened, at any rate. As Todd tried to use the hint of companionship to help him fall asleep, he grew aware of more sounds in the next room.
His neighbour must be drunk. They seemed to be doing their utmost to speak—to judge by their tone, striving to voice some form of protest—but so unsuccessfully that Todd might have imagined they had no means of pronouncing words. He was struggling to make sense of it, since it was impossible to ignore, when someone else spoke. Was it the voice he’d first heard? Or perhaps the guest in the next room but one was calling for quiet. In a moment a door opened and closed. Todd willed the silence to let him sleep, but he was still awake when he heard the door again, followed by activity in the other room. His neighbour seemed to be in a worse state than ever, and had given up any attempt to speak while bumping into all the furniture. After some time the ungainly antics subsided, letting Todd hope his neighbour had found the bed or at least fallen asleep. But a voice was calling a name, and the door was audible again. By now Todd knew the silence wouldn’t last, and he reared up from the trough of the mattress. “What are you doing in there?” he shouted.
The darkness engulfed his protest as somebody came back into the next room. They no longer sounded able to walk. They were crawling about on the floor, so effortfully that Todd fancied he heard them thumping it with their hands if not clawing at it. He’d had enough, and he lurched off the bed, groping at the dark until he found the light-switch. As soon as a couple of bulbs flickered in the chandelier he stumbled along the corridor to knock on the door of his neighbour’s room.
The huge indifferent voice of the dark answered him—the wind. He pounded on the door until the number shivered on its loose screw, but nobody responded. The nearest glazed flame lent the digit a vague shadow that came close to transforming it into an 8, although Todd was reminded of a different symbol. It would have needed to be lying down, as he did. He thumped on the door again as a preamble to tramping back to his room. He parted his thin dry lips as he snatched the receiver off the hook and heard its empty sound. It was the wind, and the instrument was dead as a bone.
As he let the receiver drop into its cradle he heard the door in the next room. He couldn’t take a breath while he listened to the noises that ensued. His neighbour was crawling about as blindly as before but less accurately than ever. It took them a considerable time to progress across the room. Todd would have preferred them not to find the connecting door, especially once he heard a fumbling at the bottom of it, a rudimentary attempt that sounded too undefined to involve fingers. As the door began to shake, a rage indistinguishable from panic swept away Todd’s thoughts. Grabbing the suitcase, he flung it on the bed and dragged the luggage stand aside. He heard a series of confused noises in the other room, as if somebody were floundering across it, retreating in an agony of embarrassment at their own state. The connecting door wasn’t locked, and he threw it wide open.
The next room was deserted, and it wasn’t a bedroom. By the light from his own room Todd made out two low tables strewn with open books and magazines. Against the walls stood various chairs so decrepit that they seemed to need the dimness to lend them more substance. If the room hadn’t been deserted he might not have ventured in, but he felt compelled to examine the items on the tables, like a child determined to learn a secret. He was halfway across the stained damp carpet when he wished he hadn’t left his room.
The books were textbooks, in so many pieces that they might have been dismantled by someone’s fumbling attempts to read them. There were no magazines, just scattered pages of the oversized books. Despite the dimness, Todd was able to discern more about the illustrations than he even slightly liked. All of them depicted surgical procedures he wanted to believe could never have been put into practice, certainly not on anyone alive or still living afterwards. Mixed up with the pages were sheets of blank paper on which someone had drawn with a ballpoint pen, perhaps the taped-up pen that lay among them. Its unsteadiness might explain the grotesque nature of the drawings, which looked like a child’s work or that of someone unusually crippled. In a way Todd was grateful that he couldn’t judge whether the drawings were attempts to reproduce the illustrations from the textbooks or to portray something even worse. He was struggling to breathe and to retreat from the sight of all the images, not to mention everything they conjured up, when he heard the door shut behind him.
He whirled around to find he could still see it—could see it had no handle on this side. He only had to push it open, or would have except that it was locked. He was throwing all his weight against it, the very little weight he seemed to have left, when a voice at his back said “Mr Todd.”
It was the voice he’d been hea
ring, as hoarse and practically as blurred as it had sounded through the wall. “You don’t want me,” he pleaded, “you want someone else,” but the silence was so eloquent that he had to turn. He still had one hope—that he could flee into the corridor—but the door to it had no handle either. The only open door was on the far side of the room.
The doorway was admitting the light, such as it was. When he trudged across the waiting-room he saw that the source of the dim glow was a solitary bare bulb on a tattered flex. It illuminated a room as cramped as a trench. The bare rough walls were the colour of earth, which might be the material of the floor. The room was empty apart from a long unlidded box. Surely the box might already contain someone, and Todd ventured forward to see. He had barely crossed the threshold when a voice behind him murmured “He’s gone at last.” They switched off the power and shut him in, and the light left him so immediately that he had no time to be sure that the room was another antechamber.
Holes For Faces
As Charlie turned away from the breakfast buffet his mother gave a frown like the first line of a sketch of disapproval. “Don’t take more than you can eat, please.”
He didn’t know how much this was meant to be. He put back one of the boiled eggs that chilled his fingers and used the tongs to replace a bread roll in its linen nest, but had to give up several round slices of meat before her look relented. “Come and sit down now, Charles,” she said as though it had been his idea to loiter.
His father met him with a grin that might have been the promise of a joke or an apology for not venturing to make one. “Who wants to go to church today, Charlie?”
It wasn’t even Sunday. Perhaps in Italy it didn’t have to be. “At least we won’t be robbed in there,” his father said.
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