by Mark Watson
‘It’s fine,’ I said, grateful to be put on the front foot. ‘“Blind” is just an adjective.’
‘ … well, anyway,’ she went on. ‘I’m Ella, by the way.’
It was only now that I registered the smell I was to associate with Ella from then on. It was a little like one of Agatha’s Christmas candles after it had been snuffed out: a low, wispy, somehow suggestive perfume which matched her voice.
‘All I was saying,’ Ella resumed, ‘was that I think you’ve got a fantastic future ahead.’
Howard’s palms were slapping rhythmically against his jacket pockets.
‘Tell me, if you don’t mind,’ he addressed Ella, ‘what do you do? You’re a teacher?’
‘In training. I’m here for the conference. But I’ve missed the first session, like an idiot.’
‘And you qualify when?’ asked Howard.
‘Another year,’ she said, ‘and then of course I have to actually find a position.’
‘Hard work, I should think?’ Howard remarked. ‘Not a lot of money at first?’
Ella laughed. ‘Well, I didn’t exactly get into this profession for—’
‘How much would you want,’ said Howard, ‘to come and teach Chas full time? One to one?’
There was a silence. I held my breath. Behind us, Graham and Agatha chortled as somebody was dispatched to the lifts and one of them racked up a point in the checking-in game.
‘I …’ Ella began, sounding rather stunned.
‘Chas, would you want Ella to tutor you?’
‘I’d love it,’ I said, ‘but … ’
‘And Ella – I feel like a vicar here! Do you take this man …?’ Howard rewarded his own gag with a hearty laugh. ‘Ella, if I made you an offer, would you think about that?’
‘I … well, of course I’d think about it,’ said Ella.
Much later, Ella tried to explain to me how startling a moment this had been. She’d arrived that morning for the third of four days listening to talks about the theory of education; she was some way away from being qualified, let alone from having what you would call job prospects. Now here was Howard York, a famous man, his hand on her shoulder, looking into her eyes in a manner which tended to extract a yes. And the question was: did she want to chuck in all of her plans here and now and come with him?
‘Why don’t you think about it for the rest of the day?’ Howard suggested, but I was beginning to recognize this tone of voice. I hadn’t asked to be tutored, though I was dizzy with wanting it now, and Ella hadn’t applied for a job, but she too was being tugged into the stream. Howard was going to make it happen.
3
GRAHAM
I have heard it said that adversity is the truest test of character, and that the greatest people turn disaster into opportunity. Perhaps Howard had heard it too, or perhaps someone like him does not need to be told. In any case it was no great surprise that he converted a moment of terrible panic – Chas’s brief escape from under my nose – into one of the soundest decisions he ever made: the appointment of Ella Flanders, after an interview of around thirty seconds. Even shorter, in other words, than mine.
The way he saw it was – as usual – perfectly simple. Chas needed a regular tutor who could keep up with him. Instinct told him that Ella was the right person, and his instincts were generally right. ‘She’s just the ticket, Madman,’ he said – the nickname being a play on my surname and less-than-excitable nature. And sure enough, she was.
Soon after I first came to work for him – after a hastily organized party bloomed into another miraculous success – I had commented that Howard’s knack for conjuring tricks was not limited to card-shuffling and balancing acts, but extended to life itself. ‘No such thing as magic, Graham,’ he said. ‘A magician is just an actor impersonating a magician.’ It was an unusually cryptic remark for him, but as he had been drinking gin, I let it pass.
Now, after the fire, I thought I had an idea of what he meant. Howard’s successes might look like magic, but they were not. In fact, there was no one word that explained why things always seemed to come true for him. It was not precisely luck, charm, or faith, or any nameable combination of them all. He was just Howard: that was all you could say. And when being Howard was not enough, he had found certain ways round it.
The biggest disaster of all – the fire – somehow became, in his hands, an opportunity. The top floor was to be rebuilt, and the hotel would be ‘bigger and better than ever’ as he put it in an advert which ran in several daily newspapers. This was rhetoric, of course. The Alpha was no bigger after the repairs: it was, naturally, exactly the same size. And it was questionable whether it had actually got better. All the same, it was back. It was back, all right, and I was grateful.
The months following the fire were very trying. We remained open to guests, but they were not always open to coming. The death of Roz Tanner had left a series of wounding memories: the unearthly cries of Chas for his mother as he was carried away from the scene, the bundle of her body being taken away, the bouquets of flowers left in the atrium by strangers; Chas’s frequent requests, over the months that followed, to see his mother, and the catch in Sarah-Jane’s voice as she explained that this could not be. And behind all this there was the endless drilling and hammering and scraping on the top balcony, the effort to eradicate what had gone on there: an effort which guests often acknowledged with a wary glance skywards, as if ghosts might fly out any moment.
At night – I had taken, in these pressing times, to staying later than ever – Chas’s wails would float along the corridor from the Yorks’, and I would hear Howard and Sarah-Jane arguing. Since Chas’s father had not surfaced, they had (in Howard’s view, at least) no choice but to be responsible for him: all the same, given the damage he had suffered, I wondered how wise this was. There was no merriment in the Alpha Bar; the pages of the ledger stood white and bare, great swathes of rooms lay empty. After handing over the desk to the night staff I would sometimes sit in the smoking room with a glass of whisky, listening to the emptiness and feeling that, no matter how bullish Howard might be, something had been lost that we could never find again.
But he was right, and I was wrong. Chas seemed to be crying less often. Howard would bring him into the atrium on his shoulders and encourage him to walk a few steps here and there, a strong grip on his little arm. Sarah-Jane had reconfigured their house, with a strict place for everything Chas would need; JD took Chas to the bathroom and slept in the bunk above him. Psychologists told us that he might well be young enough that he would have no memory, in the end, of what had happened; that his life, in essence, could start again from this moment.
And that was also somehow true of the Alpha. It was not enough to restore it; we had to show that the fire had been – as Howard put it – ‘a blessing in disguise’. It sounded preposterous, but he meant it. Money was spent on reupholstering and scrubbing, new artwork was acquired, new celebrities were strong-armed into appearing in the bar. And I was to have a full-time assistant.
‘Are you sure we ought to be recruiting,’ I asked Howard, ‘at a time when we have just had to spend all this money on—?’
‘That’s what insurance is for,’ he said with one of his grins, brushing his hair out of his eyes. The hair was greying a little now – we were all middle-aged – but it suited him, introducing a certain gravity which played well alongside his boyish features.
‘But the insurance, surely, only covered—’
‘Let me worry about that, mate. You just get that post advertised.’
I wrote out the classified ad under Pattie’s proud supervision, photocopied it and sent it to all the quality papers. We received more than a hundred CVs in the post; and each carefully written submission seemed to confirm what Howard had said, that the Alpha was still in business. Eventually I chose a shortlist of ten and arranged to interview them all in the smoking room. This is not a normal hotel, I tried to explain to each. We do not leave squares of chocolate on guest
s’ pillows; no crooner sings Billy Joel songs at squirming couples in the restaurant. Some of the younger male candidates, the ones who came in with business cards and cufflinks and a university-minted confidence, were taken aback. Didn’t we understand that every hotel had music in the lobby, and air conditioning? I did indeed. We were not like every hotel. That was the point.
One candidate seemed to understand. Her name was Valerie Davey. She was lean, stub-nailed and hard-handed, economical of speech; somebody you would put your life on to get a duvet clean. ‘I ain’t precious,’ she said. ‘You tell me what to do, I’ll do it.’ That seemed good enough for me, but there was one final person to interview. I had done quite enough talking by now, and I was almost hoping she would not show up, but there was a forceful knock at the door at precisely the minute arranged, and when Agatha Richards entered the room I soon forgot my fatigue. When she was in a room, you knew all about it.
I thought at first glance that she was the fattest person I had ever set eyes on. But as she unbuttoned a shapeless black overcoat to reveal another just the same, and then another, it emerged that she was simply one of the most swaddled. It was very chilly outside – I had been out, briefly, to pick up some food for Chas – but this nonetheless seemed excessive. At the third coat I laughed out loud.
‘I don’ like the cold, man,’ she said.
‘Evidently!’
Off came a further wardrobe’s-worth of cardigans, shawls, scarves and woollen items I could not put a name to. There were splashes of wild colour, oranges and purples.
‘Sorry, took eternities!’ said Agatha, finally settling her ample self into the armchair opposite mine. She was in her mid-thirties, with large dark eyes and a flat nose, great bosoms that pushed gently against the navy fabric of her dress. I could see that the dress was old and had been altered more than once at the sleeves. ‘I’ from Barbados,’ she said. ‘So cold here.’
‘I was mesmerized watching your clothes come off!’ I said. Then: ‘Oh, Lord … ’
Agatha let fly with a laugh that could have been heard on the other side of the Thames, and what an infectious laugh it was: almost to my shame I found myself joining in. We giggled for a good half-minute like schoolchildren at the back of class. Eventually she wiped her eyes, sighing. Trying to remain professional, I glanced down at her CV. It was easily the worst of the ten that had made it to the shortlist: big loopy writing like a child’s, strewn with misspellings and grammatical irregularities. Yet there were a couple of sentences I had not been able to forget.
As God is my Judge, which He is, one had said, I will always work my Best and I will not let any gest ever be unhappy while I am in the same Building.
‘I was interested that you wrote that,’ I told her. ‘Happiness is certainly what we try to provide here, all right.’
‘I’ a happy person, you know,’ said Agatha. ‘Not always happy at everything that’ll go on. Or I’ be a crazy person, right!’ Our eyes met. ‘You know, my life, there’s good thing, God be praised, and not so good. My husband brings me to England, not a very good man, I have to run away with nothing but my son. My son, he join the army, you know?’
I did indeed know the army, I said. ‘And his rank now?’
‘He went to Ireland. What the hell they’re even fighting about? He din’ know. He was eighteen. He send me a postcard. Belle-fast. Food is awful, he says. Weather awful. Having a great time!’ She laughed; her teeth were very white. ‘Third day, someone ask him to play snooker. He follows them to the pub. They shoot my boy in the head. Found him on the table all in blood.’
It was a few moments before I could speak.
‘He din’ even know how to play snooker,’ she said.
‘My dear lady … ’ I began, clumsy as an elephant.
‘It was a despicable thing,’ she said, ‘that’s what the paper said, a despicable thing. Anyhow. What is it if you’re unhappy, man? It’s wasting your life!’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I … yes. Quite so. Quite so.’
Although in theory I was still interviewing her, I had begun to feel as if it were the other way round. I returned to the subject of the Alpha. ‘Howard always says that luxury is having what you want,’ I trotted out for the tenth time. ‘Rather than what the hotel thinks you should want. So we pay very close attention to our guests.’
‘Oh, I’ pretty good at that, man,’ Agatha said.
‘That’s where we … where we like to focus our energies,’ I said, feeling more and more like some colonial nitwit trying to give a lecture in the heat, ‘rather than, you know, some of the nonsense hotels go in for. We don’t have someone standing in the lifts to press buttons. We don’t ask our chambermaids to fold the lavatory roll into a point.’
‘No, that’s right!’ Agatha cackled again, her face ignited, and it was as if the conversation of a moment ago had never occurred. ‘Why you’re putting the effort in, when they only wipe their behind with it!’
This was not my kind of joke, and yet I found myself harrumphing with laughter once more, and by the time Agatha left ten minutes later I dearly wanted to hire her. Yet there was still Mrs Davey. My conscience told me that she would be a safer appointment. I put the two CVs on the table and poured a tot of whisky from the smoking room’s secret stash. I kept imagining Mrs Davey and Agatha Richards at home waiting for news. I could see Mrs Davey’s weary face; Agatha’s, stoical and good-natured. Really, I was not cut out at all for decisions like this.
But one man was, and I heard him – as ever – some seconds before he came into the smoking room. The door slammed behind him so emphatically that I thought the frosted-glass panel would jump out. ‘Got a winner, mate?’
I explained my dilemma. Howard squinted as if the problem were too small to make out.
‘Why not both?’
‘We haven’t the budget for that, surely. I—’
‘They’re both good, right? Good people are hard to find, Graham. There’s you, me, the Captain, and that’s about it. And that’s if you count me as a good person.’ He chortled loudly. I tried to join in, but the joke struck me as an ill-advised one. ‘Take them both.’
I telephoned both women; both sounded delighted. It was a warming sensation to have been the source of that delight. They both reported for duty the following Monday; within moments, Mrs Davey was taking luggage from guests and genially bossing the chambermaids. Agatha joined me at the desk. Before a fortnight had passed it was as if she had always been there, guffawing and reading her Bible and advising guests on how to combat the cold.
‘I told you to take them both, Madman,’ said Howard. ‘Simple.’
And perhaps it was, after all. When you were with him, you could believe that cars did not want to hit you, that planes did not want to be missed. And that the universe, which had seemed to conspire against the hotel so dramatically, meant only good for the Alpha after all.
Long after our bookings had returned to normal, and Agatha and I were playing our check-in game ten rounds at a time, Howard pressed on with what he considered improvements. As the years slipped by, we acquired a gymnasium with a running machine and a ‘relaxation area’ where guests could receive massages.
Much of this seemed like rot to me. Why could people not run outside, if they must run at all? Who in his right mind wanted oil rubbed into his back by someone he had never met? It all seemed harmless enough, though. Of slightly more concern were the gadgets Howard occasionally foisted upon me. An electric typewriter would speed up letter-writing, he said. A fax machine would allow us to send menu changes to the printers’, or invoices to event organizers, in a matter of moments. A credit-card machine would reduce the need to handle cheques.
‘But what is wrong with cheques?’
‘It’s not that anything’s wrong with them. It’s just important to modernize.’
He was fond of these American words and the assumptions that went with them. ‘Not everything modern is good,’ I pointed out.
‘You like to live
in the past, don’t you, Madman?’
‘Not in the past – the present. I have done most of my living in the present so far.’ (I was pleased with this response, and repeated it to myself a couple of times on the bus home, until people started to look at me.)
‘If you’re not standing still, Graham, you’re going backwards.’
I demonstrated, by coming round the desk and standing there, that this was not true.
This was all spoken in good humour. We had never argued, Howard and I, and we could certainly not afford to start now. I might not share his eternal enthusiasm for the next new thing, but I had heard it said that the more things changed, the more they stayed the same. That was the case with the Hotel Alpha. Howard changed things, and I kept them the same. As far as I could imagine, this was how it would always be.
Caroline, now in her early twenties, was getting married to a doctor who owned a large detached house in Chiswick. As far as Pattie was concerned, this meant she had made it in life, and my attempts to talk about the Alpha tended to sputter out as she anticipated the wedding more and more keenly.
‘Which do you think sounds better: we are honoured that you chose the Alpha, or we are delighted that you chose the Alpha? It’s going to the printers tomorrow.’ We were trooping round the stalls at Greenwich. Antique dealers, themselves on the way to being antique, prowled around their jumbles of mirrors and fireguards and commemorative pin-badges as if any of the gently browsing couples might be about to make off with it all. There was the smell of hamburgers sizzling on the griddle of a grubby van. This place had barely changed in the thirty or so years of Sundays we had been coming. When I took Patties arm in mine, or we wrestled some silly purchase – a coal scuttle, a harp – back to the car, I always felt that we ourselves were unchanged also.