Hotel Alpha

by Mark Watson

I didn’t want her to ‘pull herself together’, of course; what I wanted was to understand what was going on. I handed over the strange coat and listened to her leaving in a state of miserable confusion. I waited for JD to come home from his friend’s house that night, expecting to stun him with the news. But the oddness was not even half over. He had an almost equally big bombshell waiting for me.

  ‘Agatha’s gone as well, you know.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She left this week. Graham says he doesn’t know why. She just went.’

  I thought of her big laugh and her cheery hello in the morning, all of it snuffed out as if someone had turned off the radio. It was dumbfounding.

  ‘She didn’t even say goodbye.’

  ‘There’s no law that people have to say goodbye,’ JD replied in a tone of scorn.

  It was true. Adults made the rules of this world and they behaved as they chose. Until I understood more, this sort of thing could happen; people could disappear from my life as easily as they could slip out of the room, leaving me unawares and chatting on to nothing.

  The door creaked in a manner which somehow suggested we had been overheard, and the room was filled with Howard. ‘Aye-aye,’ he said quietly, ‘what’s up here, then? Still awake?’

  There was no tap-tapping, none of his tongue-clicking My bed creaked as he perched on the edge of it.

  ‘Ella’s going,’ I said, ‘and Agatha has already gone, and no one even said.’

  Howard hesitated for a telltale second before launching into his speech. ‘Ella has been wonderful, I know, but America is an exciting place, and she obviously feels that this is a chance she can’t turn down.’

  ‘She knew so much about computers,’ I said, resenting the forlorn way my voice came out, ‘things like that—’

  ‘We’ll find someone who can take care of that stuff,’ said Howard. Perhaps he would, I thought, feeling the force of his confidence as he slid down the bed and disarranged my hair.

  ‘We’ll get the best computers for you that we can,’ he continued, ‘the – what’s it called? – the Internet, whatever you want.’ His voice was back in a smooth groove now: this was home territory, visions and promises. ‘I’ll put the word out that we need someone of exceptional quality, someone to match you.’

  ‘And what about Agatha?’ asked JD in a rising tone, a challenge. I was appalled and a little excited by the silence which followed.

  ‘Agatha,’ said Howard, ‘had personal reasons for going.’

  ‘Like what?’

  Howard snapped at him. ‘Personal reasons, Jonathan, means we don’t ask. Now, goodnight. Goodnight, both of you.’

  He shut the door hard behind him, though the use of JD’s full name had had almost as jarring an impact. I waited for JD to speak.

  ‘It’s not my fault this place is fucking weird,’ he eventually muttered, his voice horribly fragile.

  My last two lessons with Ella were conducted in a spirit of false brightness on both sides. Or perhaps it was only an act on my side; perhaps for Ella things really were bright enough, in spite of the performance she had made of not wanting to go. She had made a huge document to map out my ongoing studies, apparently a compilation of spider graphs and plans and photocopied government information sheets which she would entrust into Howard’s hands.

  ‘I don’t want you on modernism too early,’ she said. ‘Not because you can’t do it now; just because you’ll get more out of it later. History – you should choose whether you want to go into the American Revolution next, or … well, I’ve written it all down. You can take GCSEs with an oral invigilator these days, and that’s something else I wanted to talk to you about, or to Howard. Anyway. I’ve left it in the file. And we’ll write. We’ll talk on the phone. Please don’t see this as … as some sort of final end.’

  There was a fair bit more of this, but I couldn’t listen to it. The care with which she’d sketched out my future only seemed to underline that she wouldn’t be supervising it in person: I felt like an evacuee. When it was time, I went to fetch her coat. Howard and Sarah-Jane had bought her a bottle of champagne. She said that she would miss this place, her voice shaking; she said it had been like a home. I followed her out of the doors, where a car was humming in wait. She kissed me on the cheek; her face was wet. Sadness was like a gale trying to blow me off a cliff face.

  ‘You’re extraordinary, Chas. Look after yourself, all right? And come and see me. We’ll go up the Empire State Building.’

  She must have known how unlikely this was. Even to say such a thing, the kind of cheerless platitude a near-stranger might offer, she must already have disengaged from me. The final goodbye barely made it out of my mouth. I had a feeling close to certainty that I would never smell that perfume again.

  The door crunched shut and the car pulled away as if there were nothing out of the ordinary going on. I realized suddenly the scarf was still hanging in the hall, and went to snatch it down. By the time I blundered out again, of course, the car was long gone.

  In the sludge of time that separated me from sleep, I tried to put together everything that had happened. I thought back to Agatha’s behaviour, what I knew of it, in recent months, and to moments with Ella, her sometimes strained dealings with my family. As my talking watch gave its discouraging updates – 02:20, 03:12 – I tried to think of a link between them, a reason that would compel them both to leave. It was hopeless. After all, there could be any number of links between everybody and everything out there: looks, gestures, guilty expressions, all the patterns and rhythms of life. All plain to see, if you were one of the gigantic majority of people who could see. I couldn’t; I relied on being told. Howard and Graham and Sarah-Jane had written the encyclopaedia of my life. If there was anything they didn’t want me to know, I’d never know it.

  That was all as it had always been, but recent events had made it clear exactly how powerless it left me. I had come a long way by trusting the people around me. They’d looked after everything. Perhaps in future I would have to train myself not to trust them quite so much.

  The faint flame of subversion soon sputtered out in the long, long dark of the night. Thinking about Ella would only be a finger picking at the wound, and so I allowed myself to imagine something I never had before: that a doctor had somehow given me back my sight, and everything was laid out colourfully in front of me.

  PART TWO

  5

  GRAHAM

  "The more things change, the more they stay the same.’ A comforting phrase, but less so when expressed in reverse. At the beginning of a new century, the Hotel Alpha looked much as it always had. There were the couples in the Alpha Bar, heads low in complicity, the lady’s foot resting against the gentleman’s. There was Mrs Davey, shunting a stacked linen trolley like a steam engine hauling freight. Bellboys scampered up and down in the lifts with their room-service trays and newspapers. Guests stopped and stared at Howard, grey hair piled as high as ever on his head, as he paced through the atrium on his way to an international flight which left in an hour but which he would somehow catch. All this was still the same. But if you looked and listened carefully, you would notice the new and strange: the electronic susurrations in every pocket of the building, delivering invisible information in ever-faster, ever less know-able ways.

  Computers had entered the Alpha in earnest in 1996. Howard had been thinking for some time of converting the smoking room into a computer facility. It had always been a white elephant, he reasoned; you could smoke anywhere here. I would have argued that the room had very little to do with smoking, and was really all about the secret life of the Alpha. It was where you could get a drink after hours; where you could be counselled for a broken heart; where you could dance with a colleague in a manner which was never discussed outside the room.

  None of these arguments were strong enough to hold back Howard or the drum of progress whose beat he was always so anxious to march along to. One summer morning, two men in rolled-up shirtsleeves a
rrived at the hotel. The leader of the two called me guv’nor’ and immediately asked for a cup of tea. By the time I came back, they had begun to remove thirty years of history from the room; standing in the doorway with the mugs I felt as if I were the visitor. The leather armchairs had been put outside, and plastic swivelling chairs had taken their places. By the end of the day cheap wooden worktops supported big white humming machines, each one sprouting an Underground-map of wires which made me think of the tubes attached to my father in the days before he died. Chas and JD, who had anticipated these arrivals for weeks, immediately began to demonstrate the benefits of the computers. You could look up anything. Any fact could be yours.

  It was a couple of nights later, on my final rounds before going home, that I paused to look at the bronze plate on the wall. IT SUITE. Suite! I thought irritably to myself. The name ought to be reserved for our luxurious accommodation upstairs, not splashed across this newly soulless little place; but this was the fashion nowadays. The exercise room and massage tables now went by the name Wellness Suite; before long I supposed the bar would be rechristened the Alcoholic Suite. As I passed, there was a rustling from within. I recognized the sound of somebody labouring not to make a sound.

  I opened the door. JD was sitting in front of one of the computers with his trousers unzipped. At the sight of me he tried simultaneously to wriggle back into them and to use the controller to change the picture on the screen: but too late. I could see, as I walked round him, that it was a naked woman, her legs apart, her face to the camera in what was almost a sneer.

  ‘Don’t bother,’ I said.

  JD writhed in the swivelling chair like a big, dopey animal easily cornered. His cheeks darkened. ‘Don’t tell my dad,’ he said. ‘Don’t tell anyone, Graham. I won’t do it again.’

  ‘Best if you don’t,’ I said, ‘not in here, at any rate.’

  He sloped away, leaving me to add the episode to the tab of York family secrets I was already running. The photograph’s subject, whoever she was, stared at me from the screen. I had been twenty-two before I saw a woman without any clothes on, and that woman was already my wife by then. This generation could now see whatever it wanted, whenever it chose to.

  It took me a few minutes to work out how to get the arrow across the screen and make the image disappear. In its place appeared the message which now greeted all our guests when they began to use the computers, or ‘logged on’ as Howard had tiresomely taken to saying. The screen was white, with a little oblong box you could type words into. Enter keyword – search for anything! it urged. Slowly – on account of my long fingers’ reluctance to find the right letters, and a more general reluctance brewing in my stomach – I found myself tapping out: ‘Hotel Alpha’.

  The computer pondered, with a few clicking and grinding noises, and then offered me various fragments of text. With another effort to manipulate the pointer to the right part of the screen, I eventually selected one.

  The Hotel Alpha, the computer announced to the establishment’s longest-serving member of staff, is a five-star hotel in the Euston/King’s Cross area of London.

  On it went like this for some time, and I gathered that if I wished to, I could choose any of these phrases and learn more about it. I could open a whole new article, for example, on Euston; and from there I could ask the machine about something else again, and so on. But there was more than enough about the Alpha alone. Here, for anyone to see, was the history of our building. The feeling was a little like finding that somebody has been reading your diary.

  On the night the men came to install the new equipment, I had asked Chas a question. ‘I’m sorry to sound like an old fuddy-duddy,’ I said, ‘but this Internet. I’m dashed if I can quite … I mean – where is all this information? Who compiles it?’

  Chas beamed at me.

  ‘Everyone does,’ he said. ‘Anyone can put something on the net, and anyone else with a computer can read it. So it’ll change all the time, it’ll always be up to date.’

  As I sat now under the new strip lights and screwed up my eyes to continue reading, I was still not sure I quite grasped how all this information had got there. But I understood enough. It was not the case, as I had once insisted to Ella and Lara, that a man’s computer could only ever be as clever as he was himself. All the computers in the world were in league. Already they offered access to words and pictures and facts which had been out of reach for all history. Their interest reached even as far as our hotel. They knew about the fire, about the adoption of Chas.

  What else did they know about us?

  The new and strange: that is how I thought of computers, mobile telephones and the like. But perhaps I was alone in finding them strange. They had invaded with such stealth that most people acted as if the invasion had never taken place: as if a computer were as familiar a design feature as a desk. The way computers colonized the smoking room had been dramatic, but with much less ceremony they had insinuated themselves in a dozen other parts of what used to be my haven.

  There was a computer behind my reception desk these days: it competed for elbow space with the leaflets for Madame Tussauds and the zoo, and with the check-in ledger, like a bumptious dinner guest. It was operated by a lady called Suzie, the latest in a series of people to occupy what was once Agatha’s place. She had long painted fingernails and dyed blonde hair and the habit of saying ‘it’s for you-hoo!’ when passing me the telephone, or speaking in fragments of foreign languages: ciao! and voila! and so on. Armed with the computer, Suzie could accomplish a variety of tasks which were once exclusively mine. She could check guests in and allocate them a room without my having to write it in the ledger. She could encourage them to write on our ‘website’ what they thought of the Alpha, rather than going to the bother of telling us in person. Thanks to the website, they could even make a reservation without having to telephone us; and at the end of their stay, they could put a credit card into a new machine and pay for everything with barely a word exchanged between human beings.

  ‘Breakfast is at seven o’clock,’ I continued to say, ‘because Mr York thinks no one should be ready for the day before then; there is a games room, and a Wellness Suite, and we can make restaurant reservations …’ but half the time these days, the spiel was interrupted halfway through. ‘Yes, yes,’ the guest would say, barely meeting my eye: ‘I looked all this up. Speaking of which–’ and here they turned invariably to Suzie – ‘is there Internet in the rooms, and what is the password?’

  Once more, I had to admit that check-ins were more efficient without all the conversations Agatha and I used to have over them. But then, it was more efficient not to play the check-in game than to play it. It would probably be most efficient of all for people to stop speaking altogether, to spend their time at the Alpha carrying out tasks in a preprogrammed manner like robots. Did that mean that it would be better?

  I was unable to hold back Suzie’s new ways of doing things, but nor did I mean to succumb to them. And so she kept on putting people’s names on the computer, and I kept writing them in the book. She kept accepting reservations by ‘email’, and I kept acting as if there were no such system. We rubbed along like two people in a comedy of manners, each convinced the other is mad but happy enough to humour them.

  And so the machines’ infiltration of the Alpha had not ruined the place I loved; only filled me with a certain nostalgia for the simple past. It was a rather different matter, though, when Pattie decided to purchase a computer for the house. She had come to the Alpha for dinner one night, and JD had given her a demonstration of the so-called IT Suite’s marvels. By the time I got away from my desk and came to join her, she seemed to be hooked.

  ‘Look at this, Graham! See this?’ She gestured at the screen. ‘This is a page for the shop where we get your driving gloves.’

  ‘I see it,’ I mumbled. ‘Very nice.’

  ‘And if we click with this – this is called the mouse, look – if we click here, we can actually buy a pair of gl
oves and have them delivered straight to the house! Isn’t that clever!’

  ‘Ingenious,’ I said. ‘Probably the second-best method I can think of, after visiting the shop.’

  ‘Oh, you old fusspot.’ She patted me on the sleeve with what almost felt like a condescension to the elderly, as if we were not exactly the same age. ‘Imagine being able to chat to all our friends in America!’

  ‘Such a miracle already exists,’ I said, ‘in the form of the telephone … ’

  ‘And failing that, there’s always telegrams, eh, Graham?’ butted in Howard, who was never far away when some feature of the hotel was being shown off. ‘Or smoke signals?’ He elbowed Pattie. ‘You should get yourself one of these. Perfect for when the old man’s away from home banged up in here. You wouldn’t believe how easy it is to set up. JD could come round … ’

  And there it was. In February 2001, only a few weeks after Pattie had touched a computer’s keys for the first time in her life, we were the proud owners of a ‘PC’.

  I made its acquaintance for the first time after a rugby afternoon at Twickenham. Ed and I had been going to matches for years, since he was a boy: two or three chilly afternoons every spring, with tickets which were normally arranged by Howard’s string-pulling Today, though, the party was bigger: my grandson Christopher, escorted by his mother Caroline, was making his debut as a spectator, at the age of nine. From the way he galloped ahead like a goat as we went through the turnstiles, you might have thought he was in the team himself. Before the match began – and while Caroline fiddled with her mobile telephone – he squealed in glee at each sighting of a referee, a programme-seller, a policeman. ‘Good heavens!’ he shouted, when a try was scored; and ‘Bad form!’ when a penalty was conceded. It was not clear how he had acquired the antique vocabulary he had, but the finger was generally pointed at me. Christopher and I had a lot in common. At half-time I took him for refreshments, lifting him up with a creak of my old joints so that he could read the items chalked on the board.