by Alan Keslian
Events seemed to progress under their own momentum. Andrew guided me through the stages of agreeing and signing the lease for the hotel, giving the existing tenants notice, arranging for the conversion work, clearing the hurdles of planning permission and having the business registered with the authorities. At Lindler & Haliburton I gave opinions on the papers and memos dealing with the hand-over of the IT Unit, and attended meeting after meeting at which long lists of queries about costs, timings and terms of contract were examined and weighed from every imaginable viewpoint. Seven months passed as item by item all the uncertainties were resolved. At last two crucial documents, the contract for the firm’s future computer services and my formal acceptance of redundancy terms, were ready for signature.
Except for my friendship with Lizetta, the break from my old working life was to be total. Because she was also friendly with Peter and Caroline I held back from revealing my plans for the hotel until the key documents were signed, and she knew only that Vincent had been giving me some advice about setting up in business. When I made critical remarks one day over lunch about the firm wasting money on extravagant perks she said, ‘You really have had enough of the place, haven’t you? I’m sure you could have put a stop to them contracting your work out if you’d wanted to. My opinion of the firm has gone down too, especially since I’ve met Vincent. He gets on by being considerate and constructive, whereas at Lindler & Haliburton there is so much personal antagonism; everyone is becoming more greedy and grasping.’
When eventually I did tell her of my plans for the hotel, asking her to promise not to tell Peter, she was surprised and delighted. A week before the party to celebrate my departure from the firm, I invited her, Vincent, Tom and Andrew for a meal at a recently opened French restaurant. She had met Tom briefly once before, but knew Andrew only from what she had heard me say about him.
We all arrived at the restaurant together. The waiter who showed us to our table was relaxed and friendly, but by mistake he gave us menus that were entirely in French. Tom, embarrassed and threatening one of his moods, tucked his elbows into his sides and his face took on a rock-like expression. Somehow Vincent did what I had never succeeded in doing: he laughed him out of it. ‘Oh blimey, might have known, hope one of you knows what all this means. Last time this happened to me we all ended up eating some sort of stomach-churning casserole, tripe and goose gizzards or something unmentionable.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Lizetta said, ‘Mark speaks fluent French.’
‘Might have known, bloody know-all.’ Vincent’s choice of words may have been confrontational, but his tone of voice was warm and gentle. ‘Come on then mega-brain, what’s it say?’
Tom started to laugh, very quietly at first, but he couldn’t stop himself. When I began to translate the menu he laughed even more, as though instead of saying Lamb Steak with Rosemary Jelly or Sliced Duck Breast I was reading out a series of extremely funny one-line jokes; Vincent started laughing with him, and Lizetta and Andrew were soon infected too. Keeping my face straight, I continued, looking up and glancing around the table occasionally, trying to look mildly put out. A concerned waiter came over to offer us copies of the menu in English. Lizetta coughed and swallowed to regain control of herself and asked him for a bottle of mineral water. Pouring this out and sipping the contents they recovered themselves sufficiently to decide what to order.
On the ̓phone the next day I mentioned to her how fortunate we had been to have avoided one of Tom’s moods. She said, ‘That’s one of the great things about Vincent, he has the knack of putting everyone at their ease. Doesn’t matter who he meets, a car park attendant or a captain of industry, a few minutes later he’ll be chatting away with them as though they’re close friends.’
On my last day at the firm I had to return the Mercedes. My Chiswick flat had been sold by then and I had moved into the newly damp-proofed and renovated ‘garden flat’ of Goodmans Villa. Waking up on my first Monday morning, with no congested journey to work to endure, no need to observe a rigidly imposed pecking order, and no senior partners to answer to, I revelled in the fresh, new, as yet unblemished world of being my own boss in my own guest house. I had never felt happier.
The decorators would not finish their work on the upper floors for another fortnight, but otherwise the hotel was ready for its first guests. Tom had completely rewired the building, and a small company he recommended did the rest, ripping out the old partitions and installing new plumbing and fittings to create twelve double en suite rooms. The cost of the lease and all the work had absorbed my savings, the generous pay-off from Lindler & Haliburton, and the proceeds from the sale of my Chiswick flat. Andrew had to guarantee an overdraft at the bank to provide me with cash for running costs.
As well as being my living accommodation, the basement housed two big commercial washing machines and a dryer. The breakfast room, lounge, kitchen, and a little office were on the ground floor. Breakfast and Sunday dinner would be available, and for other meals guests could use local restaurants and take-aways or the Beckford Arms, all within a few minutes’ walk.
The landlord at the Beckford Arms introduced me to an old friend of his who managed a long established gay hotel, Housmans Hotel, near King’s Cross. During several evenings in the pub and a couple of meals together he talked to me about the business, advising that as an absolute minimum the hotel would need a part-time cook for breakfasts and at least one part-time cleaner. Over the years he had had lots of interesting people come to stay, actors, musicians and visitors from all over the world. He told me about a married man whose wife tracked him down to the hotel and screamed accusations of perversion and betrayal at him in the hall, about a masseur who booked a room for a week and had to be asked to leave when client after client came in asking for him, and about guests who seemed to think sex with the hotel’s staff was included in the price of the rooms. He gave me lots of tips, for instance always to confirm times of arrival and departure when taking bookings, and how to deal with allegations of theft from rooms and the various ruses used to evade payment. The thirty-four rooms of his hotel were, he claimed, occupied most of the time; he offered to refer clients to me when he was fully booked, and I promised to do the same for him if Goodmans Hotel was successful.
He came to see it when the decorators had finished, and as we stood outside looking at the restored and repainted stucco facade, the tidy garden, and new signs in gold lettering on a green background big enough to stand out, but not so big as to look like advertisement hoardings, the appearance of the premises filled me with joy. Everything was the way I wanted it.
Except, that is, for one thing: the tenant in the attic. Andrew had befriended the gawky boy he was so taken with when we inspected the house with the estate agent. According to him Darren was sensitive and intelligent, and his having been abandoned by his parents to fend for himself in London was disgraceful. He would, he said, happily have found somewhere for him himself, but Darren was not earning enough to pay for a self-contained flat, and at his age with his boyish appearance and trusting nature he was too vulnerable to be pushed out into the risky world of multi-occupied accommodation. There was no question that his circumstances were very hard, and although letting him stay meant having him occupy what could have been another hotel room, albeit up three flights of stairs, Andrew had helped me so much in setting up the hotel his arguments were difficult to reject.
At weekends he took Darren on trips to museums, gardens, art galleries, the theatre, classical music concerts and jazz clubs. When he proposed taking him to Paris for a few days Tom and I were seriously worried that he was becoming infatuated, but he dismissed the idea, saying that he was old enough to be Darren’s grandfather and that there was nothing sexual about their friendship. On a cold day seeing them leave the hotel together that was what they looked like, a grandfather and grandson going out for the day, Andrew white haired, well wrapped up in a thick overcoat, scarf and gloves, the boy in jeans and a T-shirt, or on wet or extremely
cold days draping himself in one of the lightweight but ludicrously long raincoats that were a teenage fashion at the time.
At first, I suspected that Darren was simply flattered at being treated so generously by a rich older man, and that his claimed interest in the places Andrew showed him was largely a pretence. However, given the chance, he would detain Tom and me for half an hour with detailed reports on their expeditions to Kew Gardens, Greenwich Observatory or some other attraction, and after hearing several of these enthusiastic accounts I had to accept that he was genuine.
All the same, however much pleasure Andrew derived from his company, in the first days of the hotel he was an unwanted complication. He kept his room clean and tried not to be a nuisance, but would ask me for advice about all sorts of things, about opening a bank account or going to some club or other he had heard about. Returning from the burger bar sometimes he would interrupt me in the kitchen or the office with some mildly amusing story about the people he worked with, referring to his place of employment by derogatory names such as the grizzle-in-a-bun bar, the dieters’ disaster, the nutritionists’ nightmare and the odious offal outlet. He had taken this dead end job shortly after arriving in London because he was down to his last few pounds, and passing by on his way to the Underground saw a placard in the window advertising for staff.
Tom was much better than me at dealing with him, warning him to be on his guard against strangers in case they tried to take advantage of him, telling him that he was a bright kid and ought to be thinking about his future. One night when we were lying in bed holding hands after sex Tom told me a little of the boy’s background.
He had run away from his home in Twyford after making a pass at a friend one night when staying at his house. The supposed friend recoiled; Darren’s parents, who were the religious type, were told, his relationship with them deteriorated and he ran into trouble at school. On his way home one afternoon he was punched and kicked by a gang of three bullies. Believing his parents were against him and having no confidence in his teachers, he evaded awkward questions about his bruises by saying he had fallen off a wall. Feeling there was nobody he could trust, early one morning he packed a bag and left.
Tom’s and Andrew’s appeals made me more sympathetic towards him. Once the larger of the two attic rooms was redecorated I helped him move his things into it and kept his rent the same as before. His old room became a store-room for linen, cleaning materials and a couple of spare mattresses. In return he pressed me to let him help in the hotel, and I asked him to cut the grass and keep the gardens tidy.
The next day he created a neat border for shrubs inside the front garden fence. His spindly limbs worked the spade so skilfully that he had obviously learned how to dig somewhere, probably by helping out in the garden at home. Nearby a little collection of plants in plastic containers was lined up waiting to be planted. When I asked how much they were going to cost me he said they were a present from Andrew. He spoke so anxiously, an abandoned kid desperate for reassurance and support. What could I do but smile and say, ‘You’re making a good job of that,’? He smiled in return, a little embarrassed by the praise, and returned to his task.
Over the next few weeks he brought in window boxes and ornamental containers, planted them up and nurtured them conscientiously. To encourage him I told him to bring his laundry down to the basement once a week and to help himself to breakfast and whatever food he wanted during the day from the kitchen. He always looked for me to let me know whenever he was coming in or going out, and I came to quite like seeing his skinny figure appear at the kitchen or office door several times a day. Andrew’s foundling, with his pet terrapins, had successfully established himself in the attic of my hotel.
Chapter 9
To bring in customers I placed adverts in the gay press for ‘London’s newest gay hotel’, set up a site on the Internet, and sent nearly two hundred e-mails to gay organisations. When the momentous occasion came that the first ever guest stepped over the threshold, suppressing my excitement I pretended to check the hotel diary for the booking, took him up to his room, wished him a comfortable stay and told him that breakfast was available from seven in the morning. Alone in the kitchen afterwards I leapt up and waved my fists in the air. The hotel was in business at last.
About a month later my friendly welcome to those arriving was well rehearsed, and as people were leaving I would wish them a pleasant journey and say I hoped they would stay with me again the next time they came to London. A few guests hinted that the rooms were expensive, but others who visited London regularly on business were positive about booking again, and after a few months in business I would know if prices needed to be adjusted up or down.
Adapting to a situation in which everything not done by my part-time staff had to be done by me was not easy. If the cook was off, making the breakfasts, serving them, and preparing the morning’s bills was almost unmanageable even with the hotel only half full, and I had to take on a student as a part-time waiter. When the cleaner was off, there were potentially twelve bedrooms to ‘do’, including twelve en suite lavatories, a taste of drudgery which may have been morally good for me but was something I loathed.
Encouragingly, bookings grew; one morning my contact in Housmans Hotel rang to warn me he had given my number to a group of six men from Newcastle. ‘They’re a bit rowdy,’ he said. ‘If you accept the booking put them close together, they’re forever going in and out of each other’s rooms. Make sure they know what time you want them out on the last day. Getting them to leave on time has not always been easy.’
Minutes later a man with a deep voice and a strong Geordie accent telephoned asking a series of quick fire questions: did I have three double rooms available, how far was the nearest Underground station, would they be able to get in easily late at night, and how much were the rooms? He reproachfully drew in his breath when he heard the cost.
‘That’s quite a bit more than we were paying at King’s Cross.’
‘The rooms are a good size, they’re comfortable, they all have en suite facilities, and this area does cost a bit more. What time would you be leaving on Sunday?’
‘We should be gone by dinner time, lunch time as you call it down south; our train back home is a bit after five. What makes you ask that?’
‘I usually let the rooms midday to midday, but you could have until four o’clock say, I’ll still have time to put the rooms to rights before the next people arrive.’
‘Just one more question. I take it you have no objections to, I don’t know how to put it exactly, what you might call continentals.’
Puzzled I said, ‘Doesn’t matter to me where you come from.’
‘It’s not that, we’re all from Newcastle. There’s a particular club we go to, if you get my meaning.’
‘Sorry, I’m not with you.’
‘It’s a bit difficult to say over the phone,’ he said, evidently expecting me to read his mind.
‘All denominations, races and nationalities are welcome, if that answers your question.’
‘Well it does sort of.’
His booking meant displaying the No Vacancies signs in the windows for the first time, and their arrival marked the end of the quiet manageable first months of business, and the beginning of a much busier and hectic phase. For the first time I experienced how exhausting and unpredictable running a hotel can be.
When they appeared in the hall, nothing about their appearance or speech explained the mention of continentals. Voluble lusty lads in their twenties and thirties, they might have been mistaken for a party of football supporters. As I reached out to take their room keys from the rack one of them asked where the hotel register was. They had already supplied a full list of names and addresses by post with their deposit, but before I could tell them there was no need to sign the register two of them spotted it on the hall table.
‘There it is!’ The whole group rushed towards it, pushing and shoving each other in a playful scrum, shouting ‘I’m ne
xt,’, ‘Come on now, I’ve got my pen ready here,’ and ‘The last one to sign has to carry everyone else’s bags up to the rooms.’
They had come down to London determined to have fun, which to them meant drinking heavily, having casual sex, and maintaining their incessant loud and excited banter. When talking they often spat out their words like bursts of fire from a machine gun. They seemed to know every gay venue in London and what sort of crowd it attracted. They joked and teased each other tirelessly, involving anyone else in the vicinity in their foolery. They were always lively, often amusing, occasionally very funny, and in their regional dialect sometimes completely incomprehensible to anyone but each other.
I took them up to the second floor to show them their rooms. They followed me into the first, all of them crowding in after me. ‘This one is at the front of the house,’ I said.
‘We’re at the front of the house now, lads,’ a Geordie voice imitated.
‘Toilet and shower are through here.’
‘Toilet and shower through there.’
‘First time I’ve noticed an echo in the room. Will this do for two of you?’
‘Will this do for two of us? Was that an echo, or might it have been a parrot? Very high class – we’ll have to take our shoes off before we get into bed here.’ The impudence came from a tall redhead, who stood in front of me with his shoulders back, his stance revealing a slight paunch. When I turned to move on to the next room they crowded around the door, blocking my exit. ‘Excuse me, if two of you would like to see the next room… ’