Guestbook

by Leanne Shapton

  VII. Titanic iceberg.

  VIII. Mrs. Mabel Fenwick, a Carpathia passenger on her honeymoon, photographed the iceberg from the Carpathia’s deck on the morning of 15 April.

  I.

  Communication between restaurant and bar still needs improvement. The restaurant was proposing tables for the bar. I would suggest be more strict about it. Kelis Baum was informed she wouldn’t be able to come to the bar by Catroina and Jeff. Ms. Baum then approached a new waitress in the restaurant, who walked her straight in.

  TBL 6: Four people + high chair increased from four to five + high chair. Phone call confirmed by PT came in for brunch on 2.2. Baby got stuck in a high chair and waited a very long time for food. Overall they were not impressed, but Kevin dealt with it.

  Please look after on next visit.

  II.

  Restaurant needs to brief all staff about restaurant/bar relationship and operations. It is completely understood, accepted, and supported by the bar staff that saying “No” to restaurant guests regarding entry to the bar should be down to bar staff and NOT restaurant staff so they may maintain good relations with restaurant guests BUT . . . it has been observed that there is often an unsupportive attitude from the restaurant once the “No” has been delivered.

  III.

  “I’m sorry, there is nothing I can do, it’s nothing to do with me [hands raised in the air whilst shaking head], if it was down to me of course you would be let in” vs. “I’m sorry, the bar is a separate operation to the restaurant. Now that the hotel is open, the bar is primarily for hotel guests and their guests. I know the bar team accommodates our very important clients when they can, but it seems they are unable to do so this evening, I’m terribly sorry.”

  IV.

  Security 1. Lucas had an encounter with paparazzi at the front gate when Jessie Macksamie arrived. Ms. Macksamie’s driver parked on the pavement, three feet from the gate. Her security tried to shield her from the paps. In trying to get between gate and car, one pap got pushed inside the gate by the security. When asked to leave, he refused and pushed Mark aggressively (Mark received a small cut to his neck), and Mark pushed him back to get him off. The pap held on to Mark’s scarf and wouldn’t return it. All witnesses agree that Mark only acted in self-defense and even then acted with restraint.

  V.

  Bobby Gordon (had dinner with eight guests) entered the bar through the lift after being told it wouldn’t be possible for them to enter this evening. They were very unhappy and aggressively rude to both Catroina and Jeff. Quote: “Well, I know for a fact that the fat bitch I met in the elevator is not a hotel guest, so you are lying to me!” PG Director, Higham Gallery New York Ltd. Lives on Euclid Street. Came in for brunch on 2.5. Waited a long time for food.

  VI.

  Jake Neil (owner Hebrides) pushed his way through the bar door, refused to even engage in civil conversation, and stormed around the bar looking for hotel guests who could say they were friends of his so he could stay. He was very impolite and aggressive with Catroina and the maître d’ team.

  VII.

  Ian Keith showed up wanting to come back later with guests. Jules and myself informed him of the situation and that he could come back with only two guests. He came back with six, including Hector Lethese, Alex Peter, and Miloz Czeh. I let them in without knowing that Jules had already texted him to say it wouldn’t be possible. We have discussed communication breakdown. Won’t happen again. Alison Poole showed up with eight guests. We told her that tonight it wouldn’t be possible with so many. She accepted this (at first) and left grumpy.

  VIII.

  Caroline Leith and Taylor Tune showed up at one a.m. with five guests. Very drunk and a little difficult at the gate. One of the standing lights by the entrance flickered when dimmed and one of the rope lights had fallen through behind the bench by the fire; both of these matters were dealt with by engineering. Clive Benenson and Lily from Hoppers came down for a couple of hours to experience and see if they would be happy recommending us to the “right” guests and vice versa. We spoke at length and they have invited me down on Saturday night to experience Hoppers.

  OVER THE WALL

  Deep in the woods.

  Along a dirt trail.

  Past the stone gates.

  Over the wall.

  Where the path ends.

  A falling-down barn.

  An abandoned house.

  An old schoolhouse.

  Nobody knew they were there.

  The ruins.

  They would meet.

  Nobody saw them.

  GEORGEHYTHE PLACE

  Georgehythe Place in 1965.

  GEORGEHYTHE PLACE, owned by the Percy family since 1804, stands at the end of a mile-long drive from the main road. The house is an ivy-covered stone mansion on the outskirts of Goldbourne, backing onto what is claimed to be the largest water meadow in England. The oddest feature of the interior is the double asymmetrical hall.

  The old manor house, Chautmarle, once occupied the site of the present house. It was destroyed by fire in 1799, save the east wing, which sits at an angle to the hall and boasts original oak paneling. One east-wing bedroom features a Venetian window.

  Georgehythe was rebuilt by William Tyrol Jr. in 1812. Tyrol was a master of Jacobean Revival, as was his father. In 1926, the shipping tycoon William Kingsley tried to demolish Georgehythe Place to build row housing. After a public outcry, he sold it instead to the Peal County council, which merely neglected it. Scores of dogs and cats lived in the building for years. Restoration was planned in the late 1930s but was delayed due to the occupation of the house by American troops, lasting until 1945. Since then the house has fallen into disuse, but the gardens have been used as community sports fields, and the lakes and ponds for annual county-wide regattas.

  A number of curious tragedies befell the Percy family, all preceded by the sudden presence, absence, or death of animals. This prompted local paranormal authorities to consider the family as possessing an unusual example of what is known as a “family ghost.”

  Left to right: Etta Kingsley, Beth Kingsley, Anna Drebbin, Sir William Letts (father of Sir Anthony), Lady Melgund, Lady Helen Percy, Gwen Letts, Lord Charles Percy, and Lady Evelyn Percy.

  Lady Helen with Lady Evelyn, who was recuperating from one of her many bouts of illness. She is seated at the base of Ashes, the Georgehythe landmark. In her hands she holds a bird.

  Lord Charles Percy, age four, around the time he noticed the appearance of animal bones in the back of his wardrobe. He kept them wrapped in a scrap of linen in his desk.

  Helen, Reginald, and Evelyn Percy on Beausoleil Lake, south of Georgehythe, a month before Reginald’s death by drowning in Beausoleil Pond. Each year on the anniversary of his death, unexplained water stains appear on the oak paneling in the east wing.

  Beausoleil Pond.

  Lady Helen Percy with her terrier Derby and an unknown child. Derby was killed in a motoring accident the day before Reginald’s drowning and was buried with Reginald in the family plot.

  The east hall, showing some of the mysteriously water-damaged paneling.

  Beausoleil Pond at Georgehythe was filled in and made a garden in the year after Reginald’s death.

  Lady Helen Percy with her spaniel Mucky at Georgehythe the year she fell ill with tuberculosis. Mucky disappeared the day before she died.

  The hall at Georgehythe, where the German governess Fräulein Siebeck groomed Mucky the day of his disappearance.

  The music room at Georgehythe, where the remains of Mucky were recovered during minor renovations in 1942. The room is located directly above the original east hall.

  The main stair
case at Georgehythe, where Theresa Percy twice saw three large black dogs soundlessly descend the stairs.

  Anna Drebbin holding her cat Cucko. The cat lived to fourteen years but disappeared while Evelyn Percy was in labor with her son Duncan. She died in childbirth.

  Duncan Percy, age three, with Georgehythe neighbors and a dog. Duncan began raising spaniels on the grounds of Georgehythe as a boy.

  Duncan Percy, standing, with friends and Hilda, his prize spaniel. Percy and Hilda were involved in a motoring accident in 1933. Hilda perished at the scene of the crash, her master the following day.

  Georgehythe’s east wing, during its incarnation as an infirmary during the war.

  Kelly Finch, a nurse who worked at Georgehythe during its occupation by American soldiers, holding a cat. Finch recorded in her diary that the day before the death of Private Jonathan Lynch she discovered two dead jackrabbits under his bed.

  ALCATRAZ

  She looked me in the eye and said, “This is a true story.” We were at a dinner party, a casual one in someone’s enormous, expensively fitted kitchen. She had come alone, was recently divorced. I’d met her before, but we’d never really spoken or found common ground. I’d always thought she was chilly. When we were sat next to each other at dinner and got to talking about books and people we both knew, I realized her shyness was the blurry, foggy kind—reserved, but not cold.

  She told me she had been visiting San Francisco with her boyfriend, who would become her husband, and then her ex-husband. His name was Troy. It was early days. Troy was there for work, and they stayed in a suite on the fortieth floor of the Four Seasons. She sipped her wine and said she had not been used to hotels that nice. The square footage. The sitting room. The enormous white towels. They’d had a driver. She’d been to San Francisco before, when she was ten, during a stopover on a family trip to the Philippines. They’d stayed with her mother’s Filipino cousins in a small house, and she’d slept in a bottom bunk with her brother. She told me she’d drunk a whole can of Coca-Cola for the first time in her life that night, and she laughed.

  The day after they arrived, Troy had meetings, so, she said, she decided to visit Alcatraz. She laughed again and said that as a teenager, she’d worn a pink-and-white sweatshirt that had been sent to her by those same Filipino relatives. She described the puffy white stencil-style letters that read Alcatraz Swim Team above a flocked blob of the famous island.

  We were offered coffee at this point, and some of the guests had moved to the living room, but we stayed in the kitchen and poured ourselves more wine. She boarded the ferry and took the thirty-minute guided tour with a handful of other visitors, listening closely as the guide explained the routine of an Alcatraz inmate, its history as a military prison that held Confederate sympathizers during the Civil War, the designation of bunks, the block called “Park Ave” where the prisoners, on certain nights like New Year’s Eve, could hear the sounds of the city across the bay and were served spaghetti and better-than-usual food in the mess hall. The guide boasted that “the crème de la crème of criminal minds came to Alcatraz.”

  When the tour was over, the guide invited the visitors to wander the site for as long as they wished. She returned to what had been the library. She described the room as fenced-in, large, and bare, with peach-painted walls, empty wooden bookshelves, and tall barred windows. She stayed in that room a long time and thought of the prisoners reading books. She remembered the safety and escape she felt as a child, in libraries. She retraced the tour backward, pausing to take pictures of the cells where two prisoners had successfully escaped by leaving dummies in their bunks. She stayed for hours, watching as a new tour was led through, looking at the glossy green- and cream-painted walls, the bars, and the corridors. Finally she left, late afternoon. They had reservations for dinner in Berkeley that night, and she said that as the car had crossed the bridge she’d looked at the dark rock of Alcatraz in the middle of the water, and violent thoughts, bloody, ferocious thoughts, had filled her mind. She shook her head.

  That night she woke, unable to move. The space in the bed beside her was empty, and there was a man sitting in an armchair in the corner of the room. Both of his hands were placed along the rests, and his legs were stretched out on the ottoman. He was still. She tried to call out for Troy and to move her fingers, but she was frozen and unable to speak. She remained in that state for a few minutes, and then she was finally able to make a small noise and push her arm an inch across the sheet. She sat up. The toilet flushed, and Troy returned from the bathroom. She whispered to him that someone was in the room. He turned on the bedside lamp. The chair was empty. He looked around the room and went into the sitting area. Nobody was there.

  The next day she and Troy visited the San Francisco Zoo. She said that she wore a skirt and, in the car, put a hand up her skirt and scratched herself hard. She described walking around the zoo as agony. She had wanted to touch herself in the aquarium, looking out over the manatee swimming slowly in its round pool, at the pacing lions, at the gorillas. Out by the llamas she straddled a children’s ride, a toy duck, and moved atop it for some relief. Back in the car she reached up her skirt again and told Troy she needed to go to a drugstore. They flew home that afternoon.

  For the next week, back at her apartment in New York, she was distracted every few days by the sensation of a cat brushing past her legs. She did not own a cat, but she would turn and look down at her feet. There’d be nothing there, and she’d go back to whatever she was doing. The feeling of a gentle brush against her legs persisted for another week, then another, always with the same, invisible result. She began to wonder about it and told Troy over dinner one night. He asked her if she felt anything when it happened. She told him, “Sadness.” The word had only then occurred to her, but it was true. Troy asked when it had started. She told him it had started in San Francisco after visiting Alcatraz. Then he told her that he thought something had attached itself to her at Alcatraz. He told her that when he first visited the prison he’d become obsessed with the story of Robert Stroud, the “Birdman of Alcatraz.” When he got home he walked into his apartment to find that a bird had flown in while he was away and had shat all over his furniture.

  The next morning, as she was pouring milk into a bowl of granola, the cat-brushing-past feeling happened again. Troy told an acupuncturist friend about what was happening. After thinking hard on the details, the acupuncturist told her that the spirit of a prisoner had attached itself to her at Alcatraz, that it sought the sympathy she felt for the men who had been there, sympathy they’d desperately wanted. The acupuncturist suggested that she take off all her clothes, have Troy burn sage in circles all around her, open the windows in the apartment, firmly ask the spirit to go, and then leave the windows open for the rest of the night.

  LAGO

  Interior.

  View of the lake.

  Dining room table in sitting room.

  Toilet.

  Doors to sitting room.

  Guest room.

  Desk.

  Sitting room.

  Sitting room.

  Bedroom window.

  Bedroom.

  Bedroom.

  Bedroom.

  Bedroom.

  Bedroom.

  View of the lake.

  Guest room.

  View of the lake.

  NEW JERSEY TRANSIT

  I was walking down the street because my plans were delayed because my ride was canceled because I don’t like to improvise. I was walking down the street and the night was falling and the streetlamps were lit and there I saw you leaning against the mailbox reading your phone.

  I saw you and I slowed, then stopped. I thought you were with our son. I thought if I left town you would be wit
h our son since that was the plan, I mean generally, I mean so to speak, so we had spoken, not that we speak, I mean.