by Jonathan Lee
11. Security threats. (PF)
12. Any other business.
In the “any other business” section of the meeting—so seldom used for anything except birthday announcements—there was a discussion about the fact that the hotel hadn’t suffered an overflowing bath for the best part of nine months, which was thought to be a record. There was also a complaint from a maid about further strings of semen found on floral-pattern curtains. Who were these curtain fuckers? What was their plan?
Once item 12 was dealt with, the ever-sleazy Peter Samuels asked Fran a mischievous question. She was the p.m. Housekeeping Manager, a black lady with striking eyes. Turndown, purchasing, scheduling. Thirty-two staff under her command.
Fran said to Peter, “Nah, no no, not what happened. Here’s the story. OK. So. The wife came out of the bathroom, yeah? Wet and naked.” Fran paused for effect. Silence fell around her. Only Marina smiled. Perhaps she’d heard the story already. “And this guest, she’s wearing nothing except a skimpy little white towel tied up around her hair. This is when I’m covering for one of those useless summer girls, Veronica the Vomiter, you got it.” A nervous laugh from the assembled staff, two of whom had personally recommended Veronica for the job. “And she says to me, this guest, her tits out, her arse out—everything out—she smiles and says all casual, ‘Carry on, darling, but shut the curtains, will you? I don’t want the neighbours seeing me naked.’ ”
Hush around the table. Men full of longing leaned in. “What did you do, Fran?”
“Well,” Fran said, “I carried on making the bed, didn’t I? And then I explained to her, real polite, that if the neighbours saw her naked they’d shut their own fucking curtains.”
The room exploded. Fran had worked in hospitality for the best part of three decades. Her principal complaint about the Grand was that tights weren’t supplied with the uniform.
As the sky over the Channel became a deep purple, only a few fragile coral swirls surviving up high, Moose took a seat in the bar area for his pre-dinner beer and cigarette combo. His Zippo was engraved with the words “To Viv, Love Phil.” His ex-wife hadn’t shown much commitment with her smoking. Marina came over, clutching a pack of menthols. Moose provided a flame. The best thing about smoking was that people like Marina sometimes asked you for a light.
He dropped a twenty-pence piece into the till, opened a packet of crisps, pulled up a chair for her. Pictures of famous guests adorned one wall: Napoleon the Third, John F. Kennedy, Harold Wilson.
“Take a holiday, Moose,” Marina said. “A couple of days you could spare, no?” She lifted her arms. A little pink yawn as she stretched. He noted once again the miraculous mundanity of her elbows, tiny angry creatures that seemed too awkward to belong to her body.
Technically he was, via a dotted line, Marina’s boss. But the clash of continents in her voice gave the Grand’s Guest Relations Manager a worldliness he couldn’t ignore. Also: he was still suffering a little from The Infatuation. He took to heart everything she said and respected also the fact she didn’t explain too much about her past. Viv used to say there were two types of person in life, past tense and present tense. Viv had seen herself as a present-tense person, which gave her an excuse never to discuss what she felt about a thing that had already happened. She’d dwell on that thing silently instead. Marina, though, was genuinely present tense. She inhabited it. Owned it. Male staff members at the Grand waded through the myths that surrounded her, enjoying the feeling of being stuck. The story that she’d once been married to an adulterous game-show host in Argentina. That she’d previously been a model and a children’s entertainer. That recently, on her thirty-eighth birthday, a woman with short blonde hair had proposed to her in a café in the Lanes. No one quite knew what was true.
“Want one?” he said.
Marina shook her head.
The first three crisps he ate individually, seeing how long he could keep them on his tongue before succumbing to the crunch. The rest he crammed in quickly.
3
Taking a fresh pen from a drawer, hunching over a 42-page hospitality brochure, Freya began to fill in, with black ink, every pocket of negative space in the letters “b,” “g,” “e” and “o.” At the western end of the reception desk lay ten paper clips, placed there in readiness for a task not yet determined. At the eastern end, in a pool of shadow, the Guest Registration Book: a thick volume containing information on room rates and check-in dates, but also several ambitious doodles of penguins caught in rainstorms and a regularly updated note entitled “TOP FIVE LIES TODAY.”
Actually, sir, the singles are all exactly the same size.
Madam, I’m so sorry. If there was any way to upgrade you, I would.
Really, it’s been my pleasure.
The GM enjoyed meeting you too!
Of course I remember you, Mr. Norton. It’s really great to see you again.
A guest asked for his key. He had a thin officious moustache on his clammy top lip. It looked like it had crawled there in the search for a warm place to die. She closed her eyes sometimes and saw the whole hotel going up in flames, re-forming as a structure made of pink reservation paper, all the neatly pencilled words settling as ash on the floor, but pulsing a little as they lay there.
Her shift today would run until 7:30 p.m. Her principal role, during this time, was to sit behind the reception desk without falling asleep or killing anyone, in particular herself or a customer. She played with her hair, curling it around a forefinger as she had on multiple previous summers. There were a few guests talking in the lobby. One guest on the stairs doing some kind of back-stretching exercise. In the bar area opposite men played chess and sipped gin and tonics, surrounded by antiquated swank. Jorge the Barman was reading the splayed pages of a newspaper, a skyline of whisky bottles behind him. He was handsome in a damp kind of way.
One of the chess players in the bar area she recognised from yesterday. While her father was in a meeting this guest had called her “extraordinarily useless” for not knowing the name of a shop on East Street. The guest next in line, overhearing this, had been extra nice to her to compensate. A queue for the reception desk often broke itself down this way: nasty—nice—nasty—nice. When a customer had been audibly rude to you, your options opened up. It was possible to give the next guy in line the coffin room and hear no murmur of complaint.
The lobby’s clocks ticked, hands angling for different hours. The air filled with the delicious smell of cakes and scones, the scent mingling with the sweetness of fresh-cut flowers. People padded softly across oriental rugs, pausing to look at art in ancient frames. Still lifes and landscapes. Oil paintings of sea scenes. Glossy ladies with lapdogs. Horses drawn out of proportion. There were an awful lot of kings in capes.
“Split ends”: the phrase didn’t even begin to cover it. The ends of her hair had been put through a mini blender this week. £8 that trim had cost her. Considering she was paid £1.60 an hour to sit behind this desk, watching people come and go, life actually genuinely passing her by, the price tag was nothing short of criminal. Usually if someone assaulted you it was free.
Lost in the curves and slopes of her penguin pictures, rubbing her dry eyes, she heard the familiar whirr of the revolving door and began to sit up straight. The man entering the hotel now was unusually young: mid-twenties, she guessed. For a September guest he was also unusually good-looking and tall. You wouldn’t hesitate to call him a “guy,” and in the wake of peak season most of the men who stayed at the Grand could be better described as “chaps,” or “fellows,” or some other form of upper-middle-class address you might, if you were a silver-haired person from a similarly creamy kind of background, be tempted to preface with “Jolly good” or “Hello, old.” He didn’t have the drowsy smile. He didn’t have the soft, outdated face. He didn’t have a thin tense wife on his arm and he wasn’t even swinging an umbrella.
He made his way from the door to the desk. He was carrying two sports bags, one on each shou
lder. He was wearing a good leather jacket. It seemed a little heavy for the weather. Barbara—her foot in the air, her tongue on her bumhole—reluctantly raised her head. She’d been adopted by Chef Harry in the winter of ’79 and had subsequently developed a generous figure, plus certain unresolvable issues with authority. She was not in the habit of making needless moves. Freya had time to wonder if Barbara sensed what she sensed: the guy’s air of competence; the fact he’d probably be a dab hand with a can-opener. She had time to think that he must be here to ask for directions. Time to convince herself that he didn’t plan to stay here at the Grand, with its massive oak reception desk, a shelter for hillocks of fuzzy dust, swamps of chewing gum, several miraculous cobwebs, Snogger Dave’s bogey collection, battered stickers saying “Rad!” and “Pow!” and, until Freya purchased a deadly spray from Woolworths last week, a complacent oversized spider whose death she’d immediately mourned. No one cared about the areas the guests couldn’t see.
He was right in front of her now. She arranged a curl of hair over her collarbone, pointing it towards a space that she might, on a more confident day, have called cleavage. She watched him touch his own hair. It was dark and sharply parted. He was wearing a smart white shirt under his jacket, tucked in at the waist. His stubble was thickest in the cleft of his chin.
“Welcome to the Grand!” she said.
And he said, “It’s nice to be here.”
His face was one of those that looked even better when it was moving. His eyes were greenish-brown.
“You’ll be checking in?”
“Yes please.”
“And do you have a reservation?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Roy Walsh.”
She flicked through the Guest Registration Book and got the pink notepad ready. “And did you already put a deposit down, or—”
“No, no deposit. But I’m happy to pay cash up front.” He opened a leather wallet and a new-car smell escaped.
There was talk of the weather. His tone was neutral, empty, like the drained voice of a teacher. But unlike Mr. Pickford or Mr. Easemoth, his expression wasn’t weary, his bearing wasn’t broken. He didn’t come from a world of corduroy and borrowed novels. His back was straight. He looked bracingly awake.
“Just the one night, right? That’s what it says here.”
A smile began to break on his face. “Actually, if it’s not too late, I was hoping to extend to three.”
“Three nights?”
“That’s what I was hoping.”
“Let me see. I think you’re probably in luck.”
Luck, though. He didn’t seem like a person who needed it. Probably he made his own. That was what everyone was supposed to do in life, she’d been told. This despite the fact that the people who told you so never went on to explain how you might make your own luck and were often wearing, at the time when the advice on luck was dispensed, very unfashionable shoes.
She seemed to be on her feet. Sitting down again straight away would make her look like some ditzy freak in an exercise video. “Half-board?”
“Why not.”
“OK. That’s sixty pounds a night. So, a hundred and eighty overall.”
“Great.”
“Would you like to pay for the first night now?”
“I’ll pay it all.”
“Up front? You don’t have to.”
“Might as well. Do you know which number you’ll put me in?”
“Sorry?”
“Which number room.”
She took a quick glance at the registration book. “629 is vacant. A nice room facing the sea.”
“629. That’s great, thank you.”
“Maybe you’d like to see the room first? I can do that for you.”
“No no, that’ll be grand. That’ll be fine.”
Did he mean it, though? Was he being overly polite? Sixty a night was a lot of money. She had a good feeling about this man Roy Walsh. You could tell straight away whether someone was kind, and he was kind. Kind customers were sometimes too nice to ask for what they really wanted. With this in mind she waved at her father.
“Have you come far?” she asked. “Was your journey OK?”
“Oh,” Roy said. “The train was like it always is.”
“It’s a work trip?”
“With a bit of pleasure, I hope. Colleague of mine might stop by a couple of times. I assume the room has a desk?”
Before she could say “yes” her father arrived. He shook Roy Walsh’s hand. “Welcome, welcome,” he said.
“Dad, maybe someone could show Mr. Walsh room 629?”
She said this and a little pantomime of deferrals ensued. He didn’t want to see the room. He said he was in a bit of a rush. Everyone apologised and their words overlapped and she could feel herself beginning to blush.
Her father walked away. She marked Roy Walsh’s name down on the grid. Acronyms were printed next to room numbers. NB (no bath). WF (wooden floors). SB (small bathroom). NL (near lift). The only letters next to 629 were SVB, for sea-view balcony. She’d done what she could for him.
“This your summer job?” he said.
“This? Sort of, yeah.”
“And sort of no?”
“Well, this is the never-ending summer.”
“Ah. I know the feeling.”
“You do?”
He blinked. “My dad used to get me doing DIY every summer, then in the evening playing snooker with him. Those weeks could drag, not being outdoors, though it’s better looking back.”
She opened a fresh pack of registration cards. “My dad’s got me helping out here. I haven’t applied to university yet, basically, and Moose—that was my dad and he’s called Moose, unfortunately—it’s a busy time for him. Some important guests are coming in a few weeks. Not that every guest isn’t important, obviously.”
He smiled. “Obviously.”
“Some of the summer staff are staying on.”
“Do many of them stay the night?”
“Sorry?”
“You know, live in. The staff.”
“A few do, yeah.”
“You should travel.”
“Pardon?”
“See the world,” he said, smiling again.
She’d been thinking about that. She told him so. Marbella or somewhere, if she got some money saved.
“Marbella.” He seemed about to laugh. “Good plan. I hear it’s nice there.”
“Have you been anywhere in Spain?”
“Me? Never. Every now and then, though. Every now and then it occurs to me to go.”
“Better weather,” she said.
“I suppose that’s a part of it, yeah.”
She thought of telling him about her better-than-expected A-level results. She thought of telling him about not being sure university was for her. She thought about admitting that up until last month she’d thought Oxbridge was an actual place, rather than two places made to mate as if by way of a posh schoolboy prank—the kind of prank she wasn’t sure she had much time for at all. She thought about saying she had friends who would be enjoying Freshers’ Week soon and that university was actually an extended drinking game—probably he’d been, could confirm it—but wasn’t real-world experience actually more important? She blinked twice before explaining all of this and then decided not to explain at all.
Was his accent shifting from sentence to sentence? She couldn’t quite pin it down. In Scotland she’d only been to Edinburgh, and in Wales only to Cardiff. She’d never been to Ireland and had never explored the North. It was grim up there, her mother used to say, but then again Vivienne Finch considered a lot of things to be grim. Life. England. America. Love. People who ate meat or called the wrong things “ironic.”
He said, “So the VIPs are coming soon, you said? Other than me, I think we established.”
“Yeah. We’ve had JFK here, in the past. And Napoleon number three also stayed. But nowadays, basically, although I shouldn’t say it, we actually don’t get so man
y VIPs. It’s a big deal when one comes. I guess more people are going to exotic islands and stuff.”
“Or Marbella.”
She laughed. “Exactly.”
“No film stars, then?”
“No. Just Mrs. Thatcher. The whole thingy. It’s the Conservative Party Conference thing. Last time she was in Brighton she stayed at the Metropole, so, you know…Then last year they did it in Blackpool.” It was all public knowledge, but she lowered her voice nonetheless. She wanted him to feel like he was receiving a secret. “So, Mr. Walsh, if you wouldn’t mind just signing this…”
He looked down at the Guest Registration Card, the pen in his left hand. He signed it slowly. “What room will you stick her in, do you think? I hope it’s no better than mine.” He smiled again.
“Ha, well. I’m not really meant to say.”
He nodded. His eyes politely died. She tried for an apologetic smile. He picked up his two sports bags from the floor.
As he put the key in his pocket he said, “OK. Thank you.” It was a cold thank-you. An empty OK.
She said, “My friend Derek here can—”
No no, he said. No need to bother the bellboy with my luggage. See you later on.
He walked towards the lift but didn’t press the button. Turned left through the double doors, maybe looking for the downstairs loo. Unusual, actually, because people almost always waited to use the en suite in their room. People put privacy first.
What exactly had she done wrong? She’d begun to think they had a rapport going, and in no time at all that rapport had collapsed. She wrote it down on a page of the Guest Registration Book—rapport—and it didn’t look quite right.
Derek came over, shaking his head. He was amazing at making guests feel warm and fuzzy, at playing with their kids and complimenting their grandmothers, and at then turning that warmth right down to zero and fixing them with an icy stare. The stare said: “Yeah, motherfuckers, time to tip me, you thought this was free?” It was a strategy that had resulted in him owning two types of car.
“Wow,” Derek said. “Just, wow.”
“Lay off,” she said. “I tried.”