by Mark Watson
‘I didn’t think we’d ever get him to go out,’ Howard said, watching fondly as our boy strode off on another expedition to the Tate gallery, Kathleen swinging his arm energetically. ‘Turned out he just needed to be going out with someone.’
A strange business, love. I ought to have known that. Hadn’t I seen enough, in this very building, of the bother it caused? Yet right in the middle of this blooming romance, midway through a patch of gloomy July days which had disappointed tourists scuttling like mice through the atrium, its workings caught me quite unawares.
A grey day had turned into a wet night. As I walked up the hill towards home, my mind was on this new war we had got ourselves involved in. It was terrible to think that more mothers, now, would have to pick up the telephone and hear what Agatha had once had to. I was certain that Kathleen was right – we were better off out of it. Howard felt differently, but all that meant, I sensed, was that Lara had persuaded him differently.
At the turn of the key in the lock I heard a youthful voice raised, and thoughts of politics went clean out of my head. Christopher was here! In surprise I almost galloped into the living room, wanting to lift him and spin him round. It was only after arriving in the room and calling out his name delightedly that I troubled to assess the scene.
Christopher had been crying. Caroline was dishevelled in a cardigan and jeans, her hair unwashed and scraped roughly back, looking close to tears herself and almost as old as her mother. Patricia was wearing her blue M&S dressing gown and a frumpy expression, arms folded.
‘Can we play a game, Gramps?’ asked Christopher, his little pink nose twitching hopefully.
‘It’s past midnight, young Topher,’ I said.
‘Actually, Dad, if you could … ’ Caroline appealed to me. ‘We’ve got … we’re in the middle of talking about some stuff here.’
‘Well, I don’t see the harm in dominoes,’ I said obligingly, not at all sure what was afoot. ‘Let’s go up to your room, Topher.’
‘Or what about Hungry Hippos?’ he haggled.
‘Very well,’ I said with a comical sigh, ‘or Hungry Hippos.’
I quickly threw together some jam sandwiches and took him up to our spare room – once Ed’s room, and still boasting his old map of the world, some of whose national borders and names were now obsolete. Christopher climbed into bed and the two of us played without talking: there was just the rumble as the balls rolled onto the board, and the fast clack-clack of the hippopotamuses’ heads as Christopher bashed zealously away. Before long he seemed to droop, his eyelids sliding half down. He looked near sleep when suddenly the original problem, the problem under discussion downstairs, stole back onto his face.
‘Oh, Gramps,’ he said, everything is jolly awful.’
‘What exactly is happening, Christopher?’ I put my hand on his shoulder, marvelling as usual at how big he had grown, and how little he still was.
‘Mum’s taking me away,’ said Christopher. ‘She doesn’t want to live with Dad any more. She wants to live with someone else instead, in Inverness.’
‘Inverness? In Scotland?’
His lip curled and his large, long-lashed eyes surged with fresh tears. ‘Yes. It’s very far indeed. I won’t be able to see Dad.’
‘Now, then,’ I said, switching off his bedside light. ‘I’m sure you’ve got it confused somewhere. I’m sure that’s all it is.’
But my gut was full of misgivings as I went down the stairs. Patricia and Caroline were sitting in a washed-out silence.
‘Is it true?’ I asked.
Caroline looked out of the window.
‘I can’t live with him,’ she said. ‘I can’t do it. He’s never there. He only cares about work. He doesn’t … our relationship isn’t a real relationship. I can’t do it,’ she said, again.
‘But another man?’
‘He’s a good man.’ Caroline’s tone was flat and functional; she had had this conversation too many times already. ‘He’ll look after us. He will.’
‘You are seriously proposing,’ I asked, ‘to move to … to Inverness, and take Christopher with you?’
‘Tell her, Graham,’ Pattie appealed, ‘tell her it’s madness.’
‘How on earth did you meet a man in Inverness?’
‘Over the web,’ she said. ‘I got chatting to him. He’s been in a failed relationship too. And one thing led to another, we texted. We met up one time when Brian was away. One of the times he was away.’ She snorted. ‘Anyway, I realized Neil is who I should have been with all along.’
‘Tell her, Graham,’ Pattie begged again, as if there were some password I needed only to utter and all this would be solved: we would be back in an Indian summer for their wedding day, back at the joyous announcement of a grandchild.
‘Please, Dad,’ Caroline countered, ‘please understand I wouldn’t do this unless I knew it was right. He can see Brian every couple of weeks, every … we’ll sort something out.’
And me? I wanted to ask. What chance did I have of seeing Christopher if even his father was to be an occasional player now, if truly she was going to take him to the other end of the British Isles? I pictured his baffled, sleepy eyes and imagined him in a new bedroom, in the house of a man he did not know. It was cold in Inverness, too. I could not quite think about it all.
‘You have to support me,’ said Caroline. ‘I mean – I’m asking you, please, to support me.’
I cleared my throat, which felt sandpaper-dry, but managed to say nothing. Pattie got up and went to the kitchen. I heard her fill the kettle. I reached out and held Caroline’s arm. After a short while she got up and went up the creaky old stairs to check on Christopher.
I stared at the curtains, the ones that had hung there when we played charades that Christmas; it was impossible to believe it was the same room. My wife and daughter came back into the room simultaneously, moving round one another in the doorway like complete strangers.
That was a hard night. First there was Pattie’s bedtime address to get through, as long as the Queen’s Speech and with as few surprises. I did not blame her: these were exceptional circumstances. Did it seem reasonable? Pattie enquired again and again. To meet someone on a computer and go off with them? It seemed like madness, didn’t it? She was not really looking for an answer. I let her talk until she ran out of steam and drifted off, leaving me and the gloomy grey-orange night outside. I went quietly down to the kitchen and mustered up some ham; the effort of putting chips in the oven seemed somehow to be beyond me, so I ate it on its own and thought about what had happened tonight.
It was not as if I thought love affairs were all as neat and predictable as the marriage we ourselves were in. I had not stood behind the reception desk all this time with my ears closed to arguments, coded conversations and anguished phone calls, no matter how much the people involved might have thought their situation unique and undetectable. And I had seen first-hand the consequences of this sort of thing a long time ago.
It was a couple of years before JD was born, and a long time before Chas came into our lives. Sarah-Jane stormed into the atrium one night, a slammed door echoing behind her. She was wearing what they call a kimono jacket, as they were meant to be going to a Japanese-themed ball. But there would be no ball – you could see that, all right. She was in tears. I took her by the arm to the privacy of the smoking room. Howard had cheated on her, said Sarah-Jane. There was a guest who came often. They went to a room. He went to meet her in Bloomsbury She had left a message on the answerphone and Sarah-Jane had found it.
Worse, this apparently was not even the first time. I had thought the nickname Howard-you-like referred solely to his inexhaustible appetite for high jinks; not that it was also meant to reflect his persuasive abilities in a very specific arena. I was rather dumbfounded.
‘So,’ I asked, ‘what are you going to … do about it?’
‘Do?’ echoed Sarah-Jane. ‘I’ll do what I always do. I’ll forgive him. Because I haven’t got anywhere el
se to go. And because I love him. That’s the stupid thing, Graham. I still love him.’
Where my own reaction was concerned, I had two options: to regard my hero in a new and rather unpleasant light, or to go on exactly as I always had. You are familiar by now with the sort of decisions I generally make.
People’s love for one another could outlast the misery caused by betrayal or disloyalty: that was one thing that episode taught me. Another, obverse, lesson was that loving somebody – even for a lifetime – did not exclude you from having strong feelings for somebody else. Howard had learned this fairly early in life. As ever, he was ahead of me.
There was the dancing with Agatha: well, that was nothing to worry about. There were all the jokes and the games and the fact that looking forward to tomorrow’s workday, and looking forward to seeing her, had become difficult emotions to separate. I began to take her into my confidence; I told her about Howard’s past misdemeanours, and about certain other matters of the hotel’s history which had weighed on my mind longer than I admitted to myself. And finally there came the afternoon in February when I visited Room 25 with a tray of fish and chips, her favourite. Come in! she shouted, and I walked in to find her trailing water across the light-coloured carpet, wearing only a towel, and barely wearing that. I set the tray down with a crash.
‘Hey, you trying to demolish Mr York’s nice hotel?’ she said, cackling, turning away from me. I could not take my eyes away from her body. She seemed to catch sight of herself in the mirror and understand the situation. She turned to face me again. Drops of shower-water fled her wetted hair, raced down her shoulders towards her great cleavage. She let the towel fall gently away. I looked at her, all of her, and did not know what to do. Then there was noise in the corridor; Mrs Davey, perhaps, or a bellboy delivering an order. Agatha seemed not to panic but to consider coolly that we had made a mistake.
‘Go, go,’ she said, moving with sudden, alarming swiftness towards clothes, throwing something on. ‘You need to go, Graham.’
I went. I went down in the lift and walked to reception and gave someone directions to Covent Garden, called Ed about rugby tickets, tidied my pile of leaflets, went on a rapid circuit of the hotel to see what else could be done. Agatha was back at the desk late that night, after the final housekeeping rounds, and we did not discuss what had happened. Nor did we the next day, nor the next. We played the check-in guessing game. We swatted flies. After a week or so of this, it became another of those things that you left undiscussed so long they disappeared. I went back to Pattie every night; Agatha back to her one-room apartment with the picture of her son. But one day, barely two months after the incident, she looked up from her Bible.
‘Graham, I’m going to leave next week.’
‘Leave … ?’
‘Going to depart from the hotel.’
As I caught up with her meaning, my first feeling was a violent twist in the stomach as if I were about to be sick.
‘Why?’
‘Another job,’ she said, ‘found a different job.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. Good job. Got to go, Graham.’
But she would not meet my eye and she would not talk about it much more than that. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I was: it must be my fault. Either Howard suspected us of wrongdoing, or he had found out I’d told her something about him and was getting rid of her; or she had simply decided to leave because of what happened in Room 25. Anyhow, it was my fault, all right. That was why she could not tell me any more about it; why she continued to hold her tongue over the hollow days that followed.
Her last day is not one I look back on with affection. We made our usual amusing conversation. The clock raced round and round, perfectly indifferent. At eight, we had drinks in the bar. Howard was away, but Sarah-Jane toasted her with champagne. As I walked Agatha to the doors, everything felt flat and thin, as if the Alpha were a film set used years ago and left to moulder.
‘What are we going to do without you!’ I said, trying to make it sound like a joke.
‘Now, it will be all right, Graham,’ she told me, ‘because these thing, they always are.’
I drove her to Hornchurch that last night. She would write when she could. She was thinking about travelling; she had a sister in America. She said a few things like this. She might, though, have been whistling ‘Auld Lang Syne’ for all I could take in. I had the strong impression, as I embraced her, that the goodbye was likely to be a permanent one.
‘Good luck,’ I said.
She was wrapped in the same enormous coat as the day I first met her. It made me feel as if the whole thing were beginning all over again, instead of ending. She put down her heavy bag and struggled with the front door for what seemed a long time; somehow I wanted her to disappear properly before I went anywhere. At last, as the door yielded, I tore my eyes away and started the engine.
When, not long after, it emerged that Ella was also leaving, I did wonder if something more complicated might be going on. But Howard and Sarah-Jane were disinclined to talk about it; and after a certain point, as the months went by, it no longer really mattered why Agatha had left. Only that she had, and that it was quiet without her, and that every time I heard a raucous female laugh, or the tread of big boots on the marble floor, I looked up in case she had decided to come back, knowing already that it would be someone else.
It was years now since I had thought properly about all this. It served no purpose to think about it, but tonight everything was peculiar. I could hear Christopher cry out in his sleep; Caroline creaking over the floorboards to his room. Once I went out to see her, making her jump, and asked if she were all right. ‘No,’ she said, with a sorry smile, ‘but thank you, Dad.’ The wind whined outside; a cat, or something wilder, gave a wail from time to time.
As I finally took myself back upstairs, I passed the computer, off-duty on its big ugly table in the living room. I thought about Caroline sitting at another computer, tapping messages to this man in Inverness, planning to whisk Christopher far away from me. I thought of Lara Krohl and the look that had come over her face at the mention of Agatha and Ella; it was impossible to picture Krohl without also seeing the laptop computer that always sat six inches in front of her. I pictured the PCs humming their way through the night in the smoking room where Agatha and I used to dance. It was clearer and clearer that I had dismissed these machines too easily. They were living among us like a new species, and the world was theirs as much as mine.
8
CHAS
Kathleen had a journalist’s ruthlessness. She could skim for five minutes through the whole daily stack of papers and absorb what mattered, like the body breaking down food into nutrients. She knew all the columnists’ names, their particular agendas. She could speed-read to me from a webpage faster than Howard, faster than anyone I could have hoped to meet. She knew about food, famous people, musicians, architecture, all kinds of things which had never found their way into what now seemed the arbitrary spectrum of my knowledge. Sometimes she was astounded by the things I hadn’t come across.
‘I refuse to accept you don’t know the Rolling Stones.’
‘I know “Satisfaction”. Howard sings it.’
‘Bowie? Dylan?’
‘Is Dylan the one with the funny voice?’
‘Christ in Hong Kong!’ she marvelled.
‘Well, what was I meant to do? Search the net for “what music is good”?’
‘I’ll do you some playlists. I am your Internet now.’
It was as if I’d only ever seen the universe through the Alpha’s skylight, and now I was up on the roof with a sky full of stars above me. ‘That’s a nice way of looking at it,’ said Kathleen when I shared this with her. ‘But it’d be even nicer if we actually got you going outside.’
‘It’s not really my thing.’
‘I had noticed. But you’d be surprised. Some of it is actually quite nice.’
We went to lunchtime recitals at S
t Martin’s. We saw films in the early afternoon in a perennially empty one-screen place where the foyer’s air tasted of cigarette smoke. Kathleen provided audio commentary. ‘Guy comes into the room. He’s got a big nose like mine. He watches the two of them kissing. Is pretty pissed off.’ Once, there was a man slumped in a seat several rows in front of us: it was only when we got up to leave that Kathleen noticed him. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, ‘I was wittering on all the way through.’
‘Actually, it was very helpful,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t really follow it.’
He told me I was a lucky man to have Kathleen. ‘Not so lucky to be blind,’ I pointed out.
‘Ah, fair point. That must make it difficult, eh?’
‘His dick isn’t blind,’ Kathleen assured him.
We went on our way through a London whose frantic noise and action no longer frightened me. The more I moved through it, in fact, the harder it was to get back in touch with that fear: it was like someone whose name I couldn’t quite remember. People lived their lives, nothing more or less. The non-blind life was the same as mine. Some days I never even had the thought that I couldn’t see. I tried to explain this, not very successfully, to JD.
‘What you’re saying is, things are a lot better when you’re banging someone.’
Moving through the atrium, these days, I felt as if a suit of armour had been lifted off me. Even so, when Kathleen first suggested a run, I thought she was out of her mind.
‘What am I going to run in, exactly? You think I have a sponsorship deal with Nike?’
‘I took the liberty of picking up some kit for you.’ She put it into my hands, a plastic-feeling top, a pair of shorts. ‘I hope you’re joking about Nike, by the way. Their record is appalling. What are you waiting for? Do I have to help you get undressed again?’