by Jonathan Lee
“Too tentative, man. If you’re going to say it tentatively, like, ‘Oh maybe please maybe can my friend take your bag?’ you might as well just do the usual ‘Can I get the bellman to help you, sir?’ No. No no no. You’ve got to tell them, Freya Finch. You’ve got to say ‘My good friend Derek here will take your—’ ”
“Bags, yeah, I know.”
“Got to help me get my kill rate up,” he said. “This girl is just wow, you know? Like insane expensive.” He paused. “You could hang with us sometime if you wanted.”
“Derek,” she said, “you’re not normal.”
He shrugged. “I thought he was going to be one of those guys that comes up with the balance line. You know, bag balanced on each shoulder. No need to help me! I’m balanced!”
“I’ll get the next guy,” Freya said, and Derek traipsed away.
She opened the corporate brochure and continued adding ink to the letters “b,” “g,” “e” and “o,” but the project had lost much of its lustre.
She was happy. Overall she was. But—she played with the yellow master key for Roy Walsh’s room—she’d also been thinking recently that she was maybe suffering from a lack of something, a smallness or thinness, a stuntedness even, like there was a higher plane of being she wasn’t reaching for. Her blatant failure to impress Roy Walsh seemed in some way to confirm this. Wimping out of a progressive haircut was similarly damning. She visualised the higher plane of being as a hard-to-reach shelf in the herbal shop on East Street, but the point about higher planes was that they were, presumably, unimaginable. Like God’s face. Like Tessa Sanderson’s training regime. Like a boy who wouldn’t try and shove your head down on a first date, and who didn’t try and twiddle your nipples like a radio dial. What tune did they expect her breasts to play?
She thought she might pay a visit to the top-floor storage cupboard, where someone usually hid some wine. Then she thought: what if I just let myself into Roy Walsh’s room, walked up to him, took control? She’d noticed lately that lust and boredom shared a bed.
When her final break of the day arrived she took a short walk along the King’s Road, turning back when her fifteen minutes was almost up. A man was collecting for charity. She gave him twenty pence. Didn’t look, actually, at what he was collecting for. Up ahead the hotel looked like a gesture, a huge white symbol for something, but it was surely rare for symbols to come so comprehensively covered in bird shit. Three gulls were perched above the entrance, not looking at each other. Freya watched them fly up as she approached. As the birds settled back down they altered their configuration, one from the edge now taking centre stage, their wings not touching and no squawks exchanged, but a definite team nonetheless.
At 5:15 p.m. a fresh weirdo approached the desk.
“I’d like to book the restaurant, if I could,” the woman said. “Intimate table with a view, please, for six this evening.” She leaned forward, elbows on desk, and touched her mouth with her fingers. “Intimate,” she said.
“Sure,” Freya said. “Actually, you can always do that just through there, in the restaurant, but I can definitely help you here too.”
The woman blinked.
“I can do it for you. It’s no problem.”
“That’s what I was hoping,” the woman said. “Good. Good.” There was a dead fox around her neck. It looked somewhat surprised to be there. She had a way of touching it as her body swayed from side to side during sentences. There was lipstick on her teeth. Her eyes searched various sections of Freya’s face with a grim and happy hopelessness.
“So you’d like to book a table for 6 p.m. this evening?”
“Six? No no. Six people!” The woman laughed like a drain or a minor sewage works. “An intimate dinner,” she said. She played with her purse, emergency yellow, a cyclist on a bike in the dark.
“That should be fine. What time would suit you, Ms.—?”
“Cooke,” the woman said. “You can call me Mrs. Cooke.”
“What time shall I book you in for, Mrs. Cooke? Your party of six?”
“Oh. Eight o’clock?”
“Great.”
“We may be a little late, though, I should warn you. No more than about an hour, though, I would say.”
“An hour later than eight o’clock?”
“Possibly.”
“So more like nine, you might say?”
Mrs. Cooke’s smile tightened. “Perhaps safer to bring our menus at nine, as it were, yes. Unless you work in increments. No one does, though, do they? Will you be the one serving?”
“Me? No.”
“So many people, aren’t there?” The tongue moved across the two front teeth and further blurred the lipstick stain. Freya tried to meet Derek’s eye, but he was doing his napping-while-standing thing. He only really woke to the rustle and clink of cash.
Mrs. Cooke said, “What’s the cuisine, would you say?” and made a rolling motion with her hand.
“Modern British, with a twist.”
“A twist?” At length Mrs. Cooke weathered this blow. “It isn’t French, then?”
“No, sorry. It’s not French.”
She clutched her fox and frowned. A man in a maroon bow tie and matching cummerbund crossed the lobby’s complex rug. The chandelier dripped light onto his wife. He waved at Mrs. Cooke and warmly she waved back.
“They have no politics at all,” Mrs. Cooke whispered when the couple had entered the bar area. “Can you believe it? Not even at the local level. Almost as bad as the windscreen wipers. Left right, left right, left right.”
Barbara meanwhile was having her third nap of the day, occurring within a whisker of her first and her second. She had picked, for her rest area, the middle of the lobby floor. When Mrs. Cooke’s husband arrived downstairs, wearing the shiny bewildered wince of a baby, he leaned down to tickle Barbara’s tummy, saying “Good kitty” as his spectacles slid down his nose, and she bit him hard on the hand.
4
Chef Harry was a ruddy, sarcastic, manic-depressive former professional player of darts who, after one of his strenuous lock-ins at a favourite pub, often arrived at work, Moose had noticed, wearing a shirt with the words HIGH-TON HARRY on the back, several sequins missing. He’d recently added to his repertoire of light lunches on the Grand’s summer menu a Strawberry Risotto with Fine Champagne Jus. It was a dish he generally topped off with what he referred to, in his squeaky children’s-entertainer voice, as Parmigiano Stardust. Tonight, at home, Freya had adapted this into a less fussy and flashy and far more delicious dish, replacing the strawberries with bacon bits, the champagne with extra chicken stock, and the Stardust with tiny planets of proper mozzarella. Moose was spooning additional portions onto a plate garlanded with small blue flowers.
Freya cleared her throat.
“What?” he said.
“I was just thinking.”
“About what, though?”
“Nothing.”
Unlikely, he thought, swallowing. One of the great understated tragedies of humankind was that people were always thinking about something.
He eventually cornered her into telling him this: he needed to be careful he didn’t become fat. In response he pointed out that his stomach was mostly muscle.
“Is there science behind that?”
“I’m eating,” he said.
A little speech ensued. She said you should get healthy again, you smoke way too much and you’ve been coughing a lot. He said I’m more than in shape but thanks for the concern. She said I don’t think you are in shape, at least not the shape you should be. He said you’re mistaken. She said I don’t think I am. He said yes, you are, and you’re mistaken about not being mistaken.
Alas, this was when an ill-timed coughing fit caused risotto to shoot out of his mouth. It made a grainy landing on what she went on to describe as her “all-time favourite sweatshirt, ever.” An argument ensued as to how that could really be so. He’d seen her, just the other week, cutting its sleeves off, and using a
ruler to mark a line along which the collar was also cut. That didn’t sound like a way to treat your favourite sweatshirt, did it? In fact, it no longer looked like a sweatshirt at all. She wore it slack, the shining ball of one shoulder exposed.
“OK,” he said. He lit up a cigarette and pushed his plate towards her. Every fibre of his humanity was focused at this time on the business of not coughing again. “Let’s go for a morning swim tomorrow.”
Her face relaxed. “Not too early, though.”
“It’ll have to be.”
She sighed and rubbed miserably at the little beige stain.
They sat in silence. Something Moose had learned over the years was that, in silence, the past could be relied on to resurface. His memory seemed to flourish in quiet conditions, like a monk or a bucket of popcorn, and he began remembering now how, on a crucial day four months ago, he’d ruined a nice white shirt with a similar stain to the one just inflicted on Freya. A slippery gherkin was to blame. It had exited a recklessly overpacked pastrami sandwich. He’d been sitting on a bench, looking at the sea.
He remembered reading a piece in The Times. An announcement that the conference would be held in Brighton this year, a thin article next to an advert for cricket-bat oil. The Conservatives were to continue their pattern of alternating between Brighton and Blackpool, the article had said, and when he phoned Group headquarters that afternoon they had additional intelligence: the booking was up for grabs. Apparently the Metropole had fluffed its chance at perfection in ’82 by failing to stock a sufficient amount of Denis’s “special water.” The Prime Minister’s husband was an easy-going man, but gin shortages greatly tested his patience.
Moose had punched the air three weeks later. A call from the Prime Minister’s office: in response to his “impressive letter,” they wanted to take a look around. He prepared fully, faultlessly, and on the day—the mustard stain notwithstanding—everything at first went to plan.
Four blokes in grey suits arrived. Also a woman wearing shiny heels. There were dark swipes of something interpretable as loneliness riding the lower curves of her eye sockets. Already he liked her a lot. His excitement began to toss and turn in his stomach. They walked around the hotel, nodding and making notes. He took them to room 122, the suite where the Key VIP (for they insisted on speaking in code) might wish to stay. He took them to the restaurant and the bar. He took them to the Empress Suite, a function room with five-star refinements and stunning sea views, top-spec audio-visual routing, and complimentary high-concept seafood for Christmas parties booked before 5 November. He took them to the car park and two of the men measured the precise inclines of the ramps. Then, instead of climbing back into their Jaguars, they said they would take a stroll along the seafront. He escorted them out of the front entrance and told them in brief the story of the West Pier. The grey-suited guys shook his hand one by one and the high-heeled lady gave him a two-second smile. Sandwich, he thought. They’ll be wanting a late lunch. He nearly warned them about the amount of mustard in the Pastrami Slammer from Tony’s Café. But then he thought no no no don’t do that don’t do that and sure enough as he looked on and lit up a cigarette they hooked right and entered the Metropole.
A small war ensued. He wrote a twenty-page proposal. He laminated it and velo-bound it at his own expense. The proposal set out in extensive detail the Grand’s facilities and security procedures and Head Office’s willingness to bolster staff headcount as required. CCTV no problem at all. Events management included in the price. £2.50 corkage if they preferred their own wine. He didn’t slag off the Metropole. He went for a stately tone shorn of all exclamation marks, jazzed with the occasional winking semicolon, as if there were no real contest at all. He read and edited. Took Marina’s comments on board. Vivienne’s ghost was also there, lurking somewhere behind the head of the anglepoise, suggesting small punctuation changes and tiny shifts in syntax.
He waited.
A letter came.
We would like to provisionally reserve 150 rooms.
He’d won!
(The Grand had won.)
There was sparkling wine in the bar that night. The pleasantly strange guy everyone called the Captain turned up, downed two glasses in ten minutes, and disappeared into a night full of excessively bright stars of the kind Moose had once painstakingly glued to a large piece of black card—an early art project of Freya’s for which he’d been awarded a Highly Commended. Jeremy Garner from Group headquarters draped an arm over Moose’s shoulder and said, “If this goes well, Moose, I think I can see you right at the top of this tree.”
“Tree?”
“Good work. Very good work. Overall GM, I’m saying. You know Nipster’s stepping down, yes?”
He didn’t know, but now he knew with his whole soul.
He began imagining a two- or three-year tenure as overall manager at the Grand, followed by a hotel in a red-brick university city, followed by an appointment to one of the great hotels of the world. He imagined the Grand obtaining a reputation as the Lady’s favourite hotel—her mentioning it in interviews—and people beginning to call it, colloquially, the Lady Hotel. Then he started to think this perhaps wasn’t a good idea, that the Lady Hotel sounded like a cheap King’s Cross brothel. You had to be extremely careful, in the hospitality industry, with both names and numbers. He’d once talked to the Front Office Manager at the Ritz at a conference in Sevenoaks. The guy told him they used to have a “George IV Suite,” but that one of their best customers, an overseas gas billionaire, had one day refused to stay there because he thought it was only the fourth-best suite in the overall category of “George.” If it hadn’t been good enough for him, you could bet it wasn’t good enough for the next big gas billionaire who arrived. Empty rooms cost you money. Gas gas gas. The Ritz renamed the “George IV Suite” the “King George Suite” and profits returned to normal levels.
The woman with the tired eyes and beautiful business cards had asked him to call her if, in the weeks leading up to the visit from the Key VIP, any guests at the hotel acted “in any way abnormally.” But was she half joking when she said this? Playing up to an over-glamorised idea of the riskiness inherent in having the Prime Minister stay? There were a few recent guests who fitted the profile she’d described—male, not regulars, young among the Grand’s demographic. Mr. O’Connor. Mr. Smith. Mr. Walsh. Mr. Danson. But each of them was polite, and each seemed relaxed, and each had only checked into a room for a few days. The risk was surely from people staying right up until the Prime Minister’s arrival. These people, the woman had said, would be vetted.
The only suspicious thing about Smith was his shifty-eyed wife, the only suspicious thing about Walsh was the amount of room service he was getting through (never one Coke, always two), and the only suspicious thing about Danson was his voluminous toupee. As for O’Connor, he was clearly here to take advantage of the nightlife. There was very little room, in the tight leather trousers he wore to dinner each evening, for sinister plans to be hidden.
Abnormal. The concept was relative. Was he supposed to tell the authorities about the man six weeks ago who’d offered to pay extra for yellow bed sheets? The American steel magnate’s wife who’d wondered if Moose could “reduce the ocean noise”? If you looked at people closely, you realised most of them were acting abnormally most of the time. It was what made life in the hotel interesting. That and the careful choreography of guest experiences, the perfect neatness of the rooms and the attractive symmetry of the meals, the world reduced to a manageable scale and the decor refusing to change.
—
Seven a.m. at the public pool, making good on his promise. Exercise, exercise! Well, he was exercising. Doing as his daughter advised. Around him were splashes, shouts. The clunky suck of wet feet walking. Shoulder-deep in water a thought came unrequested: Why not try a dive?
It had been a long time since his diving days. Confidence gets thin. He couldn’t picture himself doing the somersaults of old, but neither did he feel he
belonged in the shallow end over there with the loose-skinned oldies, discussing Terry Connor and cancer. These men were the work of a half-hearted taxidermist; age had emptied them out. Five breathless lengths he’d spent trying to keep up with his daughter. It dampened a guy’s esteem to be panting after just five lengths. He hauled himself out of the pool and joined the queue for the tower, a line of lean boys waiting for a dive.
Wearing swimming trunks rescued from his thirties he was a magnet for their smirks. Fair enough. It was nice to be a magnet for something. There was a time when his stomach was a thing of alien precision. Crunches, kettlebell windmills, prone plank. Would any of these kids believe it? Why were they even awake at this hour? He thought the lady over there might be a teacher of some sort. Overhead a body fell through the air.
The high-dive platform was a long grey tongue stretching out from the top of the tower. Ten metres. Three storeys high. A near-vertical metal ladder was the only way up. He stood in line and tried to look bored. Freya swam to the edge of the pool and watched him, head bobbing, a beautiful person he’d made. In response he extended his spine, puffed out his chest, becoming father-shaped. She continued swimming. Touching the wall, turning, breaking away. All of her freedom unthinking. Last night’s ale was thudding in his head, squashing fine memories of mozzarella.
When it was his turn to climb, each rung felt cold and hard under his feet. He took two rest stops to let out his smoker’s cough. Above him the grubby glass ceiling, September clouds breaking up beyond it, sunlight restless on tiles. There used to be a second pool next door where the women had to go. A few years ago they floored it over for badminton. Up high you could hear the dull pop-pop of the shuttlecock, the scribble-squeak of fast-moving shoes. Blinking, he clambered to stand.
That first look around: such a shot of eerie beauty. It took him straight into his past. Chlorine gave the air up here a hazy uncrackable quality, everything a chemical blue. The only higher creature was a seagull relaxing in the rafters. Trapped and relaxed: it made no sense to Moose.