‘Interesting,’ she says, turning her attention back to the fountain, but he notices a flicker of her eye, checking if he’s still watching her. Seeing that he is, she studies the tree for a little longer. She turns away from the picture, pushing at the small of her back, avoiding his gaze. In less than ten minutes they will have to set off for the station and there are things he has to say to her before she goes. She swats away a fly that wasn’t close to her and follows its flight across the room, at the same time scanning the office for some other diversion. ‘What’s all that stuff?’ she asks, pointing behind him.
‘What stuff?’
‘This,’ she says, sidestepping to pick up the topmost sheet from the pile of papers on the edge of the desk. ‘“Braised Sweetbreads and Green Peas”,’ she reads from the tattered page. ‘“Quails and Lobster Salad”. Where’s this from?’
‘Here. It’s a menu devised by Walter Croombe, for the first anniversary of the Albert’s opening,’ he tells her, as she raises the page to her nose. ‘I thought I might get some ideas for the last night. Remember, I told you?’
‘I remember.’ She takes up another sheet. Like a policewoman uncovering a piece of incriminating evidence, she peruses the page and then reads it to him: ‘“Bed four shillings, double bed five shillings; servant’s bed two shillings; sitting room five shillings; bedroom fire one shilling.” Those were the days, eh? Put your servant in a half-price bed. Why was it half price? Half the width? No mattress?’
‘Two shillings was the price of the room. A smaller room, not a smaller bed.’
‘Yes,’ she replies, smiling at his literal-mindedness. ‘I’d worked that out.’
‘Stephanie –’ he begins, but she has taken a handful of paper now and is riffling the pages beneath her chin.
With her eyes closed she inhales the wafts of air, as if analysing the complex bouquet of a glass of fine wine. ‘I’m getting mildew,’ she pronounces, her voice genteel and pretentious. ‘I’m getting mildew and I’m getting cobwebs. There’s curtains too – dusty curtains. And mushrooms. Mushrooms a week past their sell-by date.’
In five minutes they will have to leave. He reaches to take the sheaf of papers from her, but she turns her shoulder on him.
‘So what is this?’ she asks, replacing the papers on top of the stack. ‘The hotel archive?’
‘Something like that.’
‘You’re keeping them as souvenirs?’
‘They’re not mine to take, but I’m negotiating with the bosses. If I don’t take them they’ll end up in a skip.’ She shakes her head at the possible loss, perhaps ironically. ‘Stephanie,’ he says, angling his head to look her in the eye, ‘I have really enjoyed having you here.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I mean it.’
‘Same here,’ she says, too glibly.
‘I mean it,’ he repeats.
‘And so do I,’ she says, with a flash of impatience, aimed directly at him.
‘You know,’ he tells her, ‘we haven’t really had a talk. A proper talk.’
Now looking over his shoulder, at the garden, she straight away responds, ‘Yes we have. We talked when I arrived. A full and frank exchange of views. And the next morning. We talked then. We’ve talked a lot.’
‘You know what I mean. We’ve made a start, but there are things that need to be cleared up between us. About what happened. About the future.’
‘What about the present?’
‘Please, Stephanie, I’m being serious.’
‘So was I,’ she smiles wryly, patting the pile of papers as if taking her leave of it. She looks at him again, and this time her look is sustained and unevasive. ‘Let’s just get on with it,’ she says. ‘The past is done. We can’t predict the future. Why waste time talking? I don’t want to talk any more. I’m sick to death of talking.’
‘Because it’s not done, is it?’ he goes on, but she won’t look at him now. ‘The past. It’s here, it’s part of the present and we can’t ignore it. Unless you –’
David is standing in the doorway, knocking with a bent knuckle at an imaginary door, holding Stephanie’s bag in his other hand. ‘Put this in the car for you, Mr Caldecott?’ he asks, raising the bag sideways with his arm locked straight, like a wing.
‘Thank –’
‘I can manage my own bag, thank you,’ Stephanie interrupts, approaching him with a hand outstretched. ‘I’m not an invalid.’
‘No trouble,’ says David, swinging the bag back from her hand.
Stephanie stands in the doorway to watch her bag being borne away. ‘Time to go, I guess,’ she says, her hands opened helplessly towards him, surrendering to circumstance.
She walks across the hall to the door without looking round at all, and she does not give the building as much as a glance as she gets into the car. They drive through the garden, down the hill, not speaking. In silence they drive along the High Street, down Station Road and into the car park. Under protest, she allows him to buy her ticket. When he hands it to her she reads the price and feigns horror, and makes a very slight movement towards him, as though at an impulse to kiss him. They walk over the footbridge to the London-bound platform; an announcement, distorted by the loudspeaker, informs them that the train is running five minutes late. ‘Will there be music? On the last night?’ she asks. ‘A band in the Randall Room, that’d be nice. A string quartet or something.’ Unfortunately he doesn’t have the budget for a band, but it would be nice, he agrees. She places the bag between her feet and looks to left and right along the empty rail lines. The sun is so bright that he can’t see which lights are lit on the signal gantry. Beyond the gantry, where the track starts to curve towards the tunnel, a purple seat, thrown from a train, lies in a sunlit patch of oil-blackened grass. He regards the square of radiant purple fabric, then looks at his daughter, who is reading a poster that warns of the consequences of being caught travelling without a ticket. Over the words ‘Revenue Protection Officer’ someone has scrawled ‘Cunts’. Stephanie looks from the poster to him. ‘Kids today,’ she says, and then, noticing the train that’s slowly approaching, she picks up the bag. ‘Well,’ she says, taking a step towards the edge of the platform, but the train passes right through without stopping. They both watch it disappear into the tunnel, and she gives him a dilute smile. The loudspeaker crackles, as if the microphone were being rubbed on wool.
‘I’ll give you a call,’ he says, when the noise has stopped. ‘To arrange where to meet on Monday.’
‘OK,’ she says.
‘I’ll ring in the evening, after the interview.’
‘Sure.’ Again she looks along the westward line, willing her train to arrive, and a minute later it appears, a distant mark in the depths of the cutting. She doesn’t take her eyes off it until it has crawled past the limit of the station’s fence. ‘What’s it going to cost?’ she suddenly asks, swinging the bag onto her back. ‘The closing-down banquet. I bet it’s expensive,’ she says, raising her voice above the squeal of the wheels.
‘Fifty pounds per person.’
She winces and reaches for a door handle. ‘Out of my price range,’ she tells him, stepping onto the train. She closes the door and slides the window down. Leaning on the frame, she watches the other passengers getting on, then smiles at him. ‘I was thinking I might come back, for the last night,’ she says. ‘But fifty quid’s a bit steep.’
‘You wouldn’t be paying.’
The train lurches and clanks, and begins to move off. ‘Let’s talk about it,’ she says, as though the issue were one of great seriousness.
‘Tomorrow,’ he tells her, striding alongside the train.
‘Good luck with the job,’ she replies, and turns away.
Before the train is clear of the station it judders and comes to a halt. From the edge of the platform he can see her walking through the carriage, in search of somewhere to sit. She speaks to a woman with severely styled grey hair and a round-collared blouse that’s buttoned to the throat, w
ho is glaring out of the window as if this delay were the latest of the day’s many insults. At Stephanie’s reiterated request the woman looks sourly at her and laboriously, begrudgingly, removes her jacket from the adjacent seat. Stephanie thanks her, but the woman is looking out of the window, bristling at this new irritation. Having taken her novel from her bag and stowed the bag on the rack, Stephanie slips cautiously into her seat. Primly, like a devout young lady with her Bible, she raises the book to eye level. The train jolts. She lowers the book, gives her neighbour a caustic grin and mouths ‘Goodbye’ at him. He mimes talking into a telephone, and receives a smile in response.
Encouraged by the contrast between Stephanie’s play-acting on the train and her truculence when she arrived, by the thought that she might soon be back, by the image of her sitting in the window of his office, he begins the session of interviews with his staff in buoyant mood, and the first of the interviews brings good news too: Mark will be taking over as chef in a restaurant in Bristol, where there’s a possibility of a position for Ian as well. And it turns out that several members of his staff have a job lined up, at the call centre or the supermarket, or one of various pubs and restaurants and hotels between here and Bristol. But Eloni, he knows, has nothing to go to, and when she walks into his office he can tell that she knows he has no news for her. She sits on the chair, her ankles pressed together beneath the seat and her hands pressed under her thighs, waiting to be told nothing.
‘I’ve talked to everyone,’ Mr Caldecott says, running his fingers through his hair, ‘and so I thought we should talk, though I’m afraid I have nothing concrete to propose. I’ve continued to ask around. Discreetly. But, as I said, this is a difficult predicament. I wish I could say that I could see some way out of it, but I’ve spoken to everyone I can think of in this area, and I can’t say I’ve come up with anything positive.’ He looks down at the oblong of blotting paper in the middle of his desk, his eyes roaming as if reading a map.
‘There is no work.’
‘The people I know, they would want things done officially. There is work, but there would be questions.’
‘This is what I think,’ she tells him.
This morning he cannot face her for more than a second at a time. Now he is looking askance at the window, scratching at the place where his hairline goes back. ‘This part of the world,’ he says, as if starting to talk of something that might offend her, and she knows what it is, ‘it’s no good for you. These small towns, conservative places, people do things by the book. Everything is done properly. All the papers signed. And if you are a stranger, an outsider, they take an interest. Here, in the hotel, this is OK. This is its own little world. But out there, sooner or later – you understand? In London –’
‘No.’
‘Hear me out, Eloni.’
‘In London there are thousands of police. Police everywhere and all looking for people like me. It is a big problem in London, a big problem.’
‘The police have too many things to do in London. Keep yourself to yourself and you’ll be fine. The point is, Eloni, that London is as big as a whole country. How many people are there in your country?’
‘I don’t know,’ she says, though she does know.
‘Three million? Four million?’
‘It is possible.’
‘In London there are six million. More than six million. Nobody will notice you there. You’d be one little fish in the ocean.’
‘There are six million people who can say: “There is one. She is one of those gypsies. She must go back.” Too many people to see you.’
‘No, they don’t see you. They are too busy and there are too many faces. If you don’t cause any trouble, you’re invisible. Just think about it a bit more.’
‘It is not safe.’
‘It’s safer than here.’
‘There is no reason to think. I do not like London. It is dirty and there are too many people and you need too much money to live there. I don’t have money.’
Mr Caldecott has no reply. He looks at her for a long time, as if she had asked him a very difficult question and he is now so tired of thinking about it that he is about to give up. His face seems to become heavy between his hands, making the skin crease below his eyes. ‘I can’t contradict you. It is expensive. Too expensive. But it’s all I can suggest,’ he says at last, touching his hair again. ‘There are other cities, of course,’ he says, and he turns slightly to look out at the garden, frowning with doubt, as if seeing those other cities.
‘So I will go to one of them.’
‘But nowhere that’s anything like London. With people from all over the world. And so many tourists. With hotels and restaurants where you could work. All sorts of places that wouldn’t be too fussy about the paperwork.’
‘There are hotels everywhere. There is a hotel here,’ she says, gesturing at where they are, as if to remind him.
‘Not for much longer, Eloni,’ he responds, surveying the walls of his office.
She watches his eyes as they explore the room and she sees an unhappiness in them, but his unhappiness does not seem to be about the hotel. A picture of the outside of the hotel as it used to be, a long time ago, is what is before his eyes, but he is not looking at it. He is thinking of something else and when she realises this it is as though a bitter taste had returned to her tongue. ‘I’m not going to London,’ she tells him quietly. ‘I am not going to sleep by the roads. I will not do it.’
He faces her again, stroking his jaw. Like a child struggling with a puzzle, he nips the skin of his lip between his teeth, then he turns back to the picture. ‘I wish I could think of something,’ he says. ‘But I’m stumped. Completely stumped.’ He is looking through the picture, into an imaginary distance. Fingertip to fingertip, his hands form a cage that breaks apart and closes and breaks apart. And then he says, with the expression of someone who has little belief in what he is going to say: ‘Is this really better than home?’ He looks at her enquiringly, but already he knows her answer.
‘There is nothing at home,’ she says.
‘But that’s not true. There’s your family. You have your family at home. But here –’ He holds his hands open, inviting her to acknowledge something that isn’t good.
‘There is my family, but life is poor. It is very poor.’
‘But life here is poor, Eloni. For you. The work you have to do. Where you live –’
‘One day it will be better. I believe so.’
‘For a very long time it will be very hard, though.’
‘At home it will always be very hard. For ever. We see life in Italy, on TV. We see the cars and the food and the clothes, but where we are we will never have these things. We know this. We can see them, but we cannot have them, not at home. If we want to have this life we must go there, to where it is,’ she explains, and the more she talks the sorrier she is for herself, because Mr Caldecott’s face tells her that he is sorry for her, but also that there is another reason for his unhappiness, and this reason is that Mr Caldecott loves his wife, and when he talks about home and her family he is thinking of his own family, of his wife and his daughter. He loves his wife still and his wife does not love him. She has suspected this since she saw him looking at his wife when she got out of the car, and has known it for certain from the moment he looked at her when they were all in the kitchen and his wife went out of the room without him. And that moment also proved to her that she still had not freed herself of the fantasy that Mr Caldecott might be the Englishman that she had imagined she might one day marry. It was nothing but a story she was making up, she told herself whenever the idea returned to her mind. It was nothing but a young girl’s imagining, she told herself, and soon she had accepted that it was only a fantasy and had begun to forget it, but in that moment, when Mr Caldecott watched his wife go through the door, she knew that she had not forgotten it. She still carried it with her, like a watch that is broken but you can’t bear to throw away. ‘I must stay in England,’ she
tells him, more sharply than she meant. ‘I want to work, here. In England. Best I would like not to leave here, this place.’
‘This building?’
‘Yes. I like it.’
‘So do I,’ he says, and he purses his lips at their shared misfortune. ‘I too would like not to leave it.’
‘I could ask Mr Laidlaw. I can tell him that I would like to stay here. At this building,’ she says, smiling, because it sounded as if she were accusing Mr Caldecott of failing her, which is not what she wanted to say.
‘Well, you could, yes. But as I said, the hotel will be closed for months and when it opens again it will be a different kind of place. And I think the way Mr Laidlaw will do things will not be like the way we have done them.’
‘But I could ask.’
‘Of course. He’s coming back soon, I believe. Tomorrow, possibly. You could ask him. But be careful about what you tell him, yes? Don’t tell him too much.’
‘You do not mind?’
‘Of course not. He might be able to help. He owns a lot of places, I gather. Bars and clubs, in London, mostly. But there’s one in Manchester, so I’ve heard.’
‘Where is Manchester?’ she asks, and in reply Mr Caldecott reaches for a book from the shelves beside the window. He pulls out the largest book, an atlas of the whole world, and as he turns the pages she feels, like the touch of a weak breeze, a little hope that the city for which he is searching will be the one that she is seeking, the place that will be a new home for her. With his finger pressing on the page, he swivels the book so she can see the location of Manchester. It is a long way from London, farther than where she is now. To the north and to the east there are mountains, not far away, and to the west lies the sea close enough to visit often. Roads run into the city like veins and arteries, from all directions. Looking at the blot of ink that means Manchester, she sees in her mind a city with thousands of shops and wide avenues and cars flowing through its streets all day, but with a view of mountains on the horizon. She keeps this vision in her mind for as long as she can. Walking back down the hill, she imagines a hotel in this new city: it is a tall building, and she takes a break from her work to look out through the huge windows for the gladdening sight of the hills in the distance. She imagines where she will live: a room, small but clean, where she will stay for a year or two, saving money every week, living quietly and as safe as a nun.
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