by Mark Watson
‘Do you think lilac is all right for an autumn wedding? Or too springlike?’
‘Sorry?’
Her eye had been caught by an assembly of frilly, fussy dresses presided over by a woman with a cup of soup. ‘Lilac. For Caroline’s wedding.’
‘Oh.’
I had got so used to answering questions for hotel guests that, if a perfect stranger had come up to me at the reception desk with the same enquiry, I daresay I would have ventured an opinion. With my own wife, though, I was stuck for an answer. I muttered something to the effect that Pattie would look very nice regardless. She tutted and went on talking about the wedding. I went back to thinking about the hotel. We continued down these separate paths, watching as stallholders began to shout that it was the last chance to have a look.
In the days before the wedding, Pattie wore a permanent flush of excitement; she had her hair bobbed and highlighted and she addressed me in terms of endearment which I had thought retired some years before. On the day itself she fussed lovingly over my suit and shirt collar as she had before my Alpha interview. Finally I travelled to the church with Caroline, who was in a white dress that filled most of the back half of the vehicle: a Mercedes very like the Alpha’s. As we neared the church I thought of the portrait her six-year-old self had once painted: ‘My daddy is thin and important, he wears trousers and works in a hotel.’ I had four, then three, then two minutes to tell her how much I loved her and what a wonderful day it would be. Somehow, all I could find to say was nice car, good taste!’ as a feeble sort of joke, and I watched her eyes sink to the floor in disappointment.
At the reception, the talk turned to Howard and Sarah-Jane: they had been invited, but he was in Tokyo and so she was looking after the children. ‘Always lands on his feet, that one, doesn’t he!’ observed Brian, Caroline’s new husband.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘Well. Got the hotel up and running in double-quick time, I hear. After what happened. Triple-quick time.’
There was an implication in his voice which I was fairly sure I disliked. It was his wedding day, however: not the day for an argument; and besides I was not the person for one.
‘I’m not sure I understand you.’
‘Just … I don’t know,’ he said, squeezing Caroline’s arm. ‘I would have thought it’d take longer to rebuild a hotel than that. And I hear he’s actually expanded it.’
‘We have,’ I said, perhaps a touch stiffly. ‘But it hasn’t been a magic trick, I can tell you. Actually, Howard has a saying: a magician—’
‘I’ve always thought,’ Pattie cut in, and I had to steady her wine glass as it threatened to spill onto someone’s toes, ‘I’ve always thought there’s something about that man. Once when we were having dinner, there was talk about affairs or something, some scandal, and he looked down at the table in a very funny way. Do you remember, Graham?’
‘I don’t, I’m afraid, but perhaps it’s the sort of thing I wouldn’t notice. As far as I’m concerned,’ I went on, ‘people can look at tables as much as they like, within reason.’
‘Within reason!’ echoed Brian, slapping me on the back. ‘You’re so deadpan, Graham!’ There was general laughter and I thought it best to leave it there. It was not as if they were entirely wrong, after all. It was not as if Howard were beyond question. But he and I were bound together. He had found me when I was at a loss and built me into the man I was now. Where would I be without him? Languishing miserably in some office, having given mind and body to an army I despised and been put out to pasture. That was where. And so the loyalty I felt towards him took precedence over almost everything else: for better or for worse.
Besides, he had helped us in ways that Pattie was not aware of. That same autumn that Caroline got married, for example, our son Edward was in something of a funk. He had been out of university for some while, not quite settled into anything, was still living with us, and had been turned down for a dozen jobs – most of them after getting to the point of an interview. He was not much of a talker, Ed: he stumbled over words, or repeated them, and there was no mistaking that this was preventing him from being hired. Before an interview for a travel-agent job, he became particularly anxious.
‘If only I, if only I … I would love to work in travel,’ he said one night in the Alpha Bar. He had bony shoulders and a long spine; in his boyhood Pattie never tired of saying how like me he was. As I looked at him now, eyes turned dolefully down to his beer glass, I could remember with absolute clarity how it felt to be like him, uncertain of my direction.
‘It would be perfect,’ I confided later to Howard, ‘if only he could master interviews. It’s a pity you aren’t in charge of the travel agency, or he’d just have to walk into the road.’
Howard grinned. ‘Has he tried having interview training or anything like that?’
‘It’s a bit late for all that,’ I said. ‘It’s this week.’
‘Well.’ Howard put down his glass and drummed on his knees with that energy a project always gave him. ‘Let’s see if we can make it happen.’
He had me drive him the next day to the travel agency in Finchley I sat in the Mercedes for twenty minutes or so. He emerged with one of his schoolboy grins and told me not to ask any questions. Three days later Ed phoned me. He had got the job and was thrilled. I did not ask any questions.
That time at the beginning of the nineteen-nineties, when Ella had just been appointed, I recall now as the golden age of the Alpha. It is one thing to succeed in the first place, but quite another to emerge from the shadow cast by a tragedy as we did. Agatha and I worked together like lifelong conspirators. I reeled off the train times, I directed people to obscure restaurants, returned lost property, found out the results of overseas football matches. Agatha helped the man bring in the newspapers, carrying the pile on her head; she counselled a young man in the smoking room who was upset about some lady and threatening to throw himself off the top balcony. After a whisky with her, he reconsidered his plans and ended up going home with somebody else.
All this time we carried on guessing the gender of the next person to check in, and I kept the running score on a page at the back of the guest ledger – which, once more, was always full to capacity.
And then there was Ella. On the day she arrived for their first session, Chas paced the atrium for hours. He asked for the papers to be read to him, as usual, but hardly seemed to take anything in. Instead he was preoccupied with what he did not know. ‘What if she asks about the Ancient Romans? I only remember about three of the emperors. I can’t even remember their dates. I know they ate dormice and that’s about it.’
‘Funny idea to do that!’ said Agatha. ‘Rather have beef!’
This sort of thing went on all morning.
‘What if there’s some really easy sum like twelve sixteens,’ he lamented, running a hand through his hair which had grown rather thick and floppy like Howard’s, ‘and I panic and she thinks I’m stupid and makes me sing songs?’
It was only at lunchtime that Howard put a stop to this. ‘Now, look, mate,’ he said firmly. ‘You’re not going to get the Spanish Inquisition.’
‘I don’t even know what that is,’ Chas said.
‘Ella,’ said Howard, ‘is not here to test you. She knows already you’re the real deal. Right, Captain?’
‘Oh, she went on and on about you the other week,’ Sarah-Jane confirmed. ‘She loves you. I mean – not like we love you. But she thinks you’re marvellous.’
‘Which you are,’ Howard said.
By the time Ella arrived, Chas seemed more confident, though he was still practically hopping about as she reported to the desk.
‘Welcome back to Hotel Alpha!’ said Agatha.
‘Thank you for coming,’ said Chas, and added: ‘I see we’re in for a ’92 election.’
‘Sorry?’ Ella bit her lip.
‘They think the Tories will put it off till ’92,’ Chas informed her.
‘Gosh,’
said Ella, ‘you’re well ahead of me.’
She was a very pretty young woman, with dark hair which she had dyed blonde, not entirely convincingly. She gave us a friendly wink and followed Chas into the Yorks’ quarters.
‘Your perfume is very strong,’ he said.
‘Oh dear,’ Ella laughed, ‘I may have overdone it.’ Chas said something else, and the two of them went off laughing like old friends.
Almost from that moment it was as if Ella had pressed some button to transform Chas on the spot. She herself seemed just as happy, too: as well she might be, with what Howard was paying her. When they emerged from their lessons, they were always laughing. Chas no longer walked as if he were a soap-bubble and there were spikes all around.
That winter, a number of countries declared independence from the Soviet Union, which meant new capitals whose announcement Chas awaited with glee. A night came, a fortnight or so before Christmas, which was so cold we might have been in Russia ourselves. The bar and restaurant were down to a few late, low-volume lingerers: Mike Swan, the hotel critic, was spinning off travel anecdotes to a group of rapt hoteliers. In the smoking room was a depressed board-game inventor who was struggling to repeat the successes of his early career.
‘I’ve tried everything,’ he told me. ‘I’ve just designed a game where you’re a farmer and have to graduate from a smallholding to a full business supplying supermarkets. I mean, who wouldn’t want to play that?’
‘It sounds terrific fun,’ I succeeded in agreeing. ‘Best of luck with it.’
We did a lot of wishing people luck, I mused on my way out; sometimes it seemed to come true, and sometimes of course we never saw them again. At its first contact with my face, the grip of the night air quickly bullied all such thoughts away. It took a couple of crucial moments to retighten the scarf round my neck; as I reached the stop, I could see my bus pulling away. I scuttled down a side road towards an alternative stop. The shelter was crowded. A young man spat gum onto the pavement an inch from my shoes, and another held a Walkman which sent music hissing distractingly through his headphones. It took a few moments to notice, among this murky assembly, a buxom woman huddled in the corner.
‘Why I’m seeing you here, but never before!’ said Agatha with pleasure.
I explained the situation. ‘How long does it take to get back to Hornchurch from here?’
Agatha grinned. ‘Hour, maybe hour and a half. I got the Bible. There’s plenty of it to go. There’ a multitude of pages, man.’
It would be two or three separate buses, and there were people on some of these buses you would not want to spend an hour and a half with. I looked past her smile to the weary, rumpled figure I had seen before she noticed me.
‘Why don’t I get the Mercedes and drive you home?’
We headed back to the Alpha, where the overnight valet brought the Mercedes out of its sleep. As I eased it out onto the road, Agatha leaned forward and touched the gleaming dashboard as gingerly as if it were china. ‘Lovely car. Winston, my boy, he wanted to have a Mercedes. I look into buying him one.’ She laughed. ‘But we had to choose a bicycle instead.’
After the rare mention of her son, we drove in unaccustomed silence. A turn-off next to a clump of winter-wasted trees brought us out by a housing block, the sort put up in a hurry in the aftermath of war. In the entrance hall it was dead dark. ‘Light’s gone a little time ago,’ Agatha apologized. The smell of urine slunk in the stairwell as I followed her; I had to put out an arm against the wall, like Chas. We came to a door in a warped frame which opened into a single, nearly empty room. Adjacent was a kitchen barely bigger than the Alpha’s lifts.
‘Bathroom is upstair. People share.’
She made tea while I sat on a patched-up sofa. Music of a violent kind throbbed through the ceiling above. The radiator produced the occasional clanking noise but offered no heat. A silver-framed photograph showed Winston in his fatigues, offering a twinkling grin. There was a horror in knowing what the smiling boy in the picture did not. Perhaps it was this that spurred me on.
‘Look here, Agatha,’ I said, gesturing about me. ‘This is not good enough. I mean – and I hate to be so frank – but for what we pay you … ’
‘Me and Winston live here when he first went in the army,’ said Agatha. ‘I had a job, you see, not far from here. I don’ like to leave it just now.’
But it was more than a decade since Winston had been killed in Belfast. As I returned the Mercedes to its foxhole, and then climbed finally onto the bus to Muswell Hill, the image of the squalid little flat was still in front of my eyes. Pattie was long asleep as I visited the fridge for my ham. I undressed in the dark and lay wide awake next to her, thinking about the army, about having my clothes thrown in the creek as a prank, being called a piece of s--- for finishing last in a running race. I imagined with an almost physical pain how I would feel if Ed disappeared into such a place and never returned.
That beaten-up frame reminded me of Room 25 on our second floor. Though it was a perfectly ordinary room, it had always been the scene of odd happenings. A member of the Rolling Stones had hidden from the police in the wardrobe there; one of our chambermaids had fallen in love with a guest after mistakenly taking a room-service tray; and most recently a man had slammed the door with such force that it came off its hinges. The door was still not quite right, and so I tended not to put guests in 25 these days. I had once recently made it available to Ella when she’d asked, somewhat shiftily, if there was anywhere she could use to ‘entertain a friend’. I had told her afterwards that if the unnamed gentleman ever visited again, she only had to ask for the key. And now I saw an opportunity to put it to good use again.
‘Listen,’ I suggested one evening, half an hour before Agatha was due to leave. ‘Why don’t you clock off now and go for . . . well, have a sit-down, or a bath, perhaps?’
The way I proposed it, awkwardly and out of nowhere, she was certain to laugh. ‘What you’re talking about? Where the bath, man? It’s wrapped under the Christmas tree?’
‘This room is all yours,’ I said, handing over the chunky key. ‘Help yourself.’
‘Don’ be preposterous,’ she said. ‘You check Howard about this?’
‘Oh, he won’t mind,’ I said, waving her away with the sort of expansive arm movement you might have associated with the man himself. I watched her sashay through the atrium towards the back staircase with the particular momentum she had: ungainly yet possessed of a certain elegance, an inevitability, you might say. She looked back once, just before going out of my sight, and gave me a dazzling smile.
It is hard to say why it felt as if there were something covert about this, and why I gradually began to act that way. There is no doubt Howard would have approved if I had told him: the hotel’s history was full of gestures like this. But he was away somewhere, and so I did not. Agatha stayed in Room 25 the next night, and the next. By Christmas this had become a fairly regular occurrence. Agatha never assumed that it would continue forever, and even if she had, it really amounted to nothing. Nobody was losing out. A room not suitable for guests was being used by someone who needed it. That was all.
All the same, it meant that now there was a secret. I had harboured a few secrets for Howard in my time, but never in twenty-seven years kept one from him. This seemed an innocuous way to end that record. It was one person in one room. But of course every room in a hotel is connected to every other.
The Alpha had always had its own moods. It absorbed the various excitements and fears of the individuals under its roof and exhaled a mixture of them all. If there were a shocking or momentous news event, I could very often sense it without even leaving my desk. Something in the quality of the chatter from the bar and balconies, even the texture of the light as it streamed through the roof’s glass panel and drifted about the atrium, seemed to change.
On Christmas Eve the mood was always somewhat restless; everyone was anxious to be somewhere else. Howard and Sarah-Jane spent the d
ay putting up decorations at homeless shelters. Salvation Army singers appeared in the morning, and vanished again. In the afternoon we had the carols from King’s College playing in the bar. By four or five most guests had checked out and gone to King’s Cross or down to Waterloo, to be freighted across the country to their families. And on Christmas Day itself, all that remained in the hotel – apart from the Yorks themselves – would be a lonely sprinkling of strangers: visitors to London from foreign cultures, perhaps, or people with a reason to avoid the festivities. A couple of years ago a lady had stayed with us on Christmas Day to take revenge on her unfaithful husband. She lasted until five o’clock before Sarah-Jane found her sobbing in the bar and took her into their home for turkey sandwiches.
This year, Howard had planned an event for Boxing Day. The atrium would host two hundred people: fifty or so wealthy invited guests, and the remainder made up of homeless people. During the event, Howard would hold a whip-round in which the rich people would pay for the poor by means of an auction of worthless items which they were encouraged to bid excessive amounts for. As usual, I had my doubts about all this; as usual, I threw myself into preparations, telephoning the man at Fortnum & Mason to order food, and using my joke about the postcode. We went through our biannual review of the news.
‘Terrible business about that chap in New Zealand who went mad with a gun.’
‘Terrible.’
‘Not sure I trust that Yeltsin, do you?’
‘Well, time will tell.’
‘Hotel very much back in business?’
‘Bigger and better than ever.’
‘Well, I shall speak to you some time next year.’
When I put the receiver down, it was nine o’clock: I headed for the smoking room for a glass of whisky. But this year, somebody had beaten me to it: music was wafting from behind the frosted glass of the door, and inside, Agatha was jigging about the place. The song was about diamonds on somebody’s shoes. She put out an arm as if offering me a dance in some long-gone era of politesse. She was wearing a billowing black dress with a plunging necklace; her breasts swung boulder-like behind it.