Hotel Alpha

by Mark Watson

  ‘How long do you think it will last?’ I asked Sarah-Jane, watching in concern as she reached on tiptoe from a stool to drape an arch of fairy lights above the reception desk. ‘And would you like a hand with that?’

  She turned, her face a little flushed, and hung the string of lights round her neck to amuse me. ‘Perhaps I’ll just wear them like this instead. As for how long it will last – I would expect the unexpected.’

  ‘I suppose I’m a bit of a stick-in-the-mud,’ I said, ‘but I prefer to expect the expected.’

  Sarah-Jane’s face lit up with a laugh. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it might be all over by midnight, but it might go on till one o’clock, or – good God – even two, Graham. We’ll pay you overtime, of course.’

  ‘It isn’t a matter of wages at all. I just like to be prepared.’

  But within an hour of the mahogany doors being flung open and the first inward surge of arrivals, it was clear that this was not an event one could be prepared for. The atrium throbbed with the energy of bodies; around the balconies went the echo of laughter, sometimes shrill and demonstrative as if designed to show the laugher’s cleverness, at other times almost wild. Champagne corks came out like shots from a popgun. I went down to the cellars many times for fresh supplies of liquor; I set down plates of salmon and cream cheese and prawn cocktails and whisked away the remains only moments later. The Hotel Alpha was full of noisy joy: the building was like a person returning to company after a long period of sickness.

  The slice of the heavens visible through the skylight went from heavy purple to an ambiguous lilac and finally a pale blue-white, and still no end to this party was in sight. People were in any number of the bedrooms; as I stood on the top balcony I could hear raucous song from the end of the corridor, and in a room closer at hand a young couple was collaborating on something rather different. Everyone in the building but me was under the influence of alcohol or some other drug, I realized. Further singing and shouting floated up from the atrium, like noise from a wireless far away. Some people, in their lurid party clothes, lay across the chessboard floor as if they had crash-landed there; others wandered like wobbling insects from one area to another. In the middle of it all I could see Howard unveiling one of his party pieces: balancing a chair on his forehead. His arms shot out to his sides for balance, but from where I stood it seemed as if he was gesturing to his audience Look at me! I glanced up at the skylight again and it was suddenly difficult to believe that anything of substance existed beyond these brick walls.

  At nine in the morning I went home. The air outside was cold and thin and there was a dreamlike quality to the people I saw going to their places of work; even to the heaviness of my own body in its unchanged clothes. I let myself in, slept for a couple of hours, bathed and headed straight back to the Alpha, having telephoned Pattie at her friends’.

  ‘How was the party?’

  ‘It was … well, it is still going on, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Golly,’ said Pattie. ‘I hope they know what they’re doing, these people.’

  I could not reassure her on that score. As I got off the bus and strode along Euston Road, past people who glanced indifferently at the grin which had stolen across my face, I had no way of knowing whether the Alpha would be continuing its rise to instant notoriety. For all I knew, police might have thrown everyone out; the place might have reverted to its former ghostly state, even vanished altogether. I need not have worried, though. The doors with that angular ‘A’ were as marvellously solid as ever, and behind them, bedlam was at an advanced stage. Howard and Sarah-Jane, loosely flanked by other couples, were dancing the Lindy Hop to the beat of a jazz quartet in ragged tuxedos who had appeared from somewhere. There was still a drink in everyone’s hand; the balconies, the bar, the smoking room still thrummed with activity. The police had come earlier in the night and been sent away again. Sarah-Jane had opened the door, naked other than her socks, to a nervous young constable.

  ‘Shouldn’t you put something on, madam?’ he had suggested.

  ‘We’ve got music on,’ said Sarah-Jane, putting out an arm to usher in the policeman, who stayed for a couple of drinks before going meekly on his way.

  There were no clocks on display, and the only sight of sky was from that glass panel: not just the time but the very idea of time seemed to disappear. The hourly boundaries collapsed like the timbers of a roof we were all falling through. It was not until the second midnight that the party began to break up, addled guests making their way out onto the Euston Road, blinking and staring as if they had been trapped in a cave for weeks. Each one was seen off with a slap on the back and a merry word of farewell by the still buoyant Howard, including the man with the dog, invited on a whim, who had ended up staying for seventeen hours.

  By this time I had begun the job of cleaning up, going round the balconies and entering room after room with a certain trepidation. I gathered up cans and bottles and somewhat less recognizable items which I held by the edges, putting everything in a black bag which got heavier and heavier on my shoulder, as if I were Father Christmas in reverse. Despite the mess, no damage had been done, I was relieved to see: already I felt for the place as if I owned it myself. As I made my way down to the atrium, I passed Howard and Sarah-Jane. They were lying in the very middle of the marble floor, gazing all the way up to the skylight and sharing a cigarette. Thinking me out of earshot – or perhaps not caring – Sarah-Jane propped herself up on an elbow and said: ‘We’ve fallen on our feet with that one!’

  They were talking about me, I realized, feeling my ears turn red.

  ‘He’s the business,’ Howard agreed, ‘but you make your own luck, Captain. Captain is your nickname from now on.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Because I have decided it,’ he said with mock grandeur. I glanced back, and then away again as he leaned in to kiss her on the nose. She rested her head on his shoulder and the two of them lay there, the great amphitheatre of the Alpha around and above them. The silence which had fallen felt temporary. The feeling I had experienced these past couple of days – of being the lucky invitee at a party which should have been beyond my aspirations – was one I never really lost in the years that followed. At least, not for a very long time.

  There was no longer any doubt in my mind that Howard would find guests to fill the hotel. What we would do with them was a different matter. He knew how to build up a business and throw a party, all right, but he had very little idea about running a hotel. That was to be my job.

  At least, it seemed to be. My job title – ‘concierge’ – was rather vague: Howard had adopted it, like ‘bellboy’, from the American thrillers which had tempted him to put his family fortune into hotels in the first place. The position would be what I made it. And so I made it a considerable one.

  I ran the front desk, and what a desk it was: a great slab of Dutch walnut which felt almost as big as the original tree must have been. On the desk was the Bakelite telephone, an oversized ledger with creamy white pages and a fountain pen, and a till. In the desk’s many drawers I kept useful things: foreign phrase books, train timetables, leaflets for local attractions and so on. When the phone piped up, I took the reservation and wrote the name in the ledger, which was actually an artist’s pad designed for sketching. Pattie and I had divided each double page carefully into 77 squares, so I would always have a plan of who was where. At nine o’clock on the fifteenth of May, 1963, I checked in the first guest with a set of rules I had plucked from thin air, but which became our gospel.

  ‘Breakfast is from six until ten. There is a games room and a smoking room, though of course you may smoke in your room as well. For a restaurant reservation … ’

  The room keys, hung on a rack, were all attached to A-shaped wooden fobs which Howard had commissioned and shipped at breathtaking expense from Switzerland. I loved to reach one down and put it in a guest’s hand; to take their cash and ring it up in the till, or file the cheque carefully in a drawer,
ready to be taken to Lloyds Bank on the Friday. I had command of the hotel’s dozen staff; I wore a smart grey suit and people called me ‘Mr Adam’. Pattie noted that I had taken to whistling as I left the house.

  ‘I’ve never known you so happy, Graham!’

  It was truer than she knew. What I had found was something I had sought all my life without being aware of it: a thing I was really good at, a place where I was in command. Howard and Sarah-Jane were in charge, of course, but I spoke to them on what seemed like an equal footing. When Howard suggested that breakfast be moved forward to seven – ‘it’s easier on the chefs, and I don’t trust people who are dressed at six in the morning’ – I said as a compromise that we ought to serve guests in their rooms at the earlier time, but begin restaurant service at seven.

  ‘I suppose,’ said Howard. ‘At least in their rooms they don’t need to have their clothes on.’ And he laughed, as usual, at my face, which rarely knew what to do with remarks of that kind.

  It was as if I were in charge of a giant train set, like the one I had as a boy before my father – in one of his rages – threw it all on the bonfire. The more loops and twists I built for myself, the more ingenious I became at navigating them. I began remarking to guests that, if there were anything they wanted, they only had to call down; and I looked forward to those calls, to the challenges they presented. What time does the train leave from Euston for Liverpool Lime Street? Are any restaurants open nearby at this late hour? Sometimes there were more taxing questions: could I clarify one of the rules of chess? Might I summarize the news headlines that morning, to save the caller from getting out of bed? I soon found it was not enough to look up the information – not enough for me, that is. I wanted to be able to answer instantly.

  And so I memorized train schedules; I built up a mental telephone directory of Howard’s many useful friends – maître d’s and nightclub owners and theatre impresarios. I learned the streets of London as well as any taxi driver; I could bring to mind the different time zones of the world, or the address of the place where you could get crumpets at one in the morning, or the names of people who had stayed weeks before. When someone forgot to take their room key out and came shamefacedly to the desk for a replacement, I would recall their name and room without their having to say it.

  I had always had a precise memory; as a child I used to challenge myself to learn lists of monarchs or Underground stops in order, to take my mind off other things. But I had never thought of it as being particularly valuable. In the army, the only function of my memory was to remind me how much better life was before I signed up. In the Hotel Alpha, memory was an asset: it helped to get guests what they wanted. And that was one of the only instructions Howard gave me. ‘Find out what people want. Make it happen. That’s what the Alpha is for.’

  His idea of what that meant, however, was rather more elaborate than mine, as I was to discover as the months and years went by.

  One day in 1965 I was given the keys to the hotel’s Mercedes and asked to drive a man to Heathrow ‘just a little bit faster than the speed limit’, as Howard put it.

  ‘That is, of course, illegal,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Oh, not very illegal,’ said Howard impatiently. ‘Now the thing is, my friend is in danger of missing his flight.’ He indicated a nervous-looking Spanish fellow who was pacing up and down, uttering the odd word I did not care for.

  ‘When does it leave?’

  ‘In twenty minutes.’ Howard made it sound as if this were no more than a minor concern. ‘But I’ve told you, Graham: planes don’t want you to miss them. You get him there, fast as you can. I’ll do the necessary to ensure that the plane doesn’t take off on time. When you get there, go to British Airways’ desk and say my name, and it should be fine.’

  I put on the driving gloves which Pattie and I had bought in Savile Row in order to protect the beautiful ivory of the steering wheel, and started the car. When we were close to the edge of the city – not far from Fuller’s Brewery, its white brickwork glistening in the wet night and lent a molten appearance by the floodlights – the man began to talk to me about Esperanto, a project for which he was trying to raise money in order to popularize it. It was very often near the brewery that passengers first struck up a conversation. If they were new to London, this was the moment at which the city began to assume its distinctive shapes and dance around them; if they had been to Heathrow to drop someone off, it was around now that they began to realize the person was really gone.

  Esperanto was a language gaining in popularity, said my passenger, and in fifty years it would be spoken by half of the world’s population.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘best of luck with that. What is the … Esperanto for “good luck”?’

  ‘Bonan sancon. The “sh” sound, it is just one “s”, with a little curly line which sits on the top.’

  ‘Bonan sancon, then!’ I repeated. ‘But then, we might be better off saving up your luck to ensure you make this flight…’

  ‘Ah, the flight will be cool,’ said the Spanish gentleman, ‘thanks to old Howard-you-like.’

  I had no idea how he knew this nickname of Howard’s – a popular play on his insatiable energy and his ability to get what he asked for – but it sometimes seemed that everyone knew everything about him. Everything, at least, that he wanted them to know. And when we got there, things did indeed go just as my boss had said. At the check-in desk, his name provoked a knowing wink and nod from the lady in a blue blouse, and I was informed that the flight was taking off an hour later than anticipated. I did not ask, on my return to the Alpha, how Howard had – as he always put it – ‘made this happen’. It was none of my business.

  Occasionally I had legitimate reason to question him. There was once a man whose name stayed in the ledger for five pages running: SAUNDERS, in Room 34. He was late to check out, presenting himself at one in the afternoon, and when I wrote out the bill and gave it to him, he looked at it as if I were being rather unreasonable.

  ‘Look, the thing is,’ Saunders said, fiddling with the cuff of his leather jacket, ‘it’s going to be difficult for me to pay that.’

  ‘May I ask why?’

  ‘Well, to be completely honest, I haven’t got it.’

  ‘You don’t have enough money?’

  ‘I haven’t got a penny on me.’

  ‘A cheque, then, or … ?’

  ‘I haven’t got a penny,’ repeated the man, flashing me a yellow-toothed grin of apology.

  I wanted to box his ears. It felt as if he had taken a great liberty, not just with me, but with the hotel: if people were going to stay here and eat and drink with no notion of how they might pay at the end, we might as well open a soup kitchen. Howard, however, felt differently.

  ‘What about if you write out an IOU,’ he suggested, ‘and you come back whenever you can and pay it?’

  ‘Really, Howard,’ I began, ‘this seems very … ’

  But the matter was done. They had shaken hands on it. Saunders, his travelling case swinging by his side, was off to play the same trick on another hotel. I looked at Howard in disappointment. He swept a hand through his thick hair and grinned.

  ‘He’ll be back.’

  I did not believe he was right, but three years before I would not have believed that a hotel of this order could spring out of the dust, and that I could have a part in it. I muttered something to the effect that I was sure it would all be fine in the end.

  Howard slapped me on the shoulder. ‘It will be. It always is.’

  His habit of seeing things in the simplest, most crudely optimistic terms sometimes exasperated me, but it is hard to argue with optimism when it so often proves itself right.

  As time went by I stayed later and later at the reception desk. Sometimes I was home at midnight, sometimes even after that. Pattie would leave me a plate of ham and chips, which was still all I ever wanted: I had tried an egg once or twice, but found it unbalanced the meal. I ate quietly, went up to bed, wh
ere she would already be asleep, and in the morning there would be time for a few words over breakfast before I went to the bus stop and began to breathe in – even before arriving there – the warmth of the atrium, the busy hum of people heading out to mysterious appointments or bedding down in the bar.

  Sunday was my day off: on those days Pattie and I went down to Greenwich to look for antiques in the market, or spent quiet hours pasting her photographs into albums. In our late twenties we had children: first a daughter, Caroline, and then our son Edward. Pattie took to motherhood with such alacrity, it was as if she had been a parent all along. She rose at five in the morning when one or other of the children cried out; she chose clothes for them, washed their nappies with sleeves rolled up to her armpits, sat at their bedsides to read them stories. The children provided her with what the Hotel Alpha had given me: a shape for life to assume.

  Sometimes, as a deserved break from the household routines, Pattie would come for dinner at the hotel, and once – it must have been in my fifth or sixth year – Howard made a big performance of inviting us out to the Ritz with him and Sarah-Jane. He was on vintage form that evening, dressed in heavy platform shoes and a floral-patterned shirt; he juggled the cutlery and asked for a wine which was not on the list but nonetheless appeared shortly afterwards. Pattie, however, remained uncharmed.

  ‘There’s something not quite right about that man,’ she declared after we had got into bed.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know. Too good to be true. Something like that.’

  I might have said so too, not so long before. But in my time at the hotel, my understanding of what could be true, and of how good things might be, had changed. The more you asked from life – I had heard Howard remark – the more it could provide you. I said something of the sort to Pattie, and she shrugged and said she was sure the Alpha was lovely, and Howard was perfectly all right when you got to know him. After a while she fell asleep, and the conversation was not renewed in the morning.