by Mark Watson
I was getting old, all right; I had got into a rut from which I could see the past with ebbing clarity and the present only with trepidation. Nothing was going to change. But the Hotel Alpha – like its owner – never stopped playing tricks, good and bad. Within an hour it had dealt me a card that took my breath away.
It was late, and I had almost decided to let the desk stand empty for what ought to have been my final hour until the arrival of the pair of alarmingly young coffee-drinking chaps who wisecracked their way through the night. Then footsteps sounded in the quiet. I somehow knew straight away that it was Kathleen; there was that urgency in the tread, the silent intensity she communicated. She was wearing a shapeless sweater over blue pyjamas, as if she had already been to bed and failed to sleep. I was about to attempt a witticism on this subject, but the look on her face stopped me.
‘I need to talk to you,’ she said.
Her eyes were moist, and I thought at first there must have been some fight with Chas. On closer inspection, it was a sort of fierce excitement which had got into them. I felt a shamed, but inescapable, pleasure to be called upon like this.
‘Of course.’
‘It can’t be here,’ she said. ‘Somewhere private.’
The light in the former smoking room was as sickly as ever, the screens’ glares in uneasy harmony with the wan bulbs overhead. What had happened to the lamps we used to have here? I wondered. Kathleen brought a plain brown envelope from the pocket of the sweater and handed it over without a word.
It had been opened before; the flap came away easily. I brought out a single sheet of paper. A shiver ripped through me as I recognized Agatha’s erratic handwriting.
To Whoever Reads this!
I did not Want to Leave.
Howard York is a Bad Man.
Howard York has lied to Everyone.
Howard York Will go To Hell.
Agatha Richards.
I read each of the five lines five times.
‘Where is she?’ I asked. ‘Where—?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Kathleen, and my heart thudded back to ground. ‘I found this in the room.’
‘That’s impossible.’ I thought about the number of times I had been in Room 25 since Agatha left and the servicing it had received from housekeeping staff. ‘It can’t have been there all this time or … ’
‘It was in the Bible. In the drawer. I was looking something up for a piece. You know what it’s about, don’t you?’
I was shaking a little.
‘You have to tell me.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I do not have to tell you; I have never had to tell anyone.’
After a silence, she cleared her throat and then touched my hand so softly that I had to glance down to make sure I had not imagined it.
‘Please tell me,’ she said. ‘Please.’
‘I need to think about this.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ she said, ‘I’m in my f---ing pyjamas here and I’m wondering what the hell Chas should know about Howard which has presumably been kept from him, and in the morning I’m going to have to see him and—’
‘Half an hour.’ I was almost pleading, I realized with embarrassment. I sounded like what I was, a man who had kept a secret for an unconscionably long time. ‘Just let me collect my thoughts, Kathy.’
I had not meant to abbreviate her name, and it sounded very peculiar. She crossed one leg over another, swallowed, and looked into my eyes. There was a silent understanding; I thought – I hoped – that we were on the same side.
‘I’ll wait,’ she said.
I took the note and left her sitting there. It was clumsy of me to handle it like this, but the stakes were higher than Kathleen could possibly know. I walked unsteadily across the atrium like one of the drunken guests I would nod to on an ordinary night. I made for the lift, and then – without really knowing why – went up to the top floor and stood outside Room 77. Since the rebuild, it had functioned as a normal guest room; there was no trace of what had happened there. Still, it had its memories for me, and it felt like the right place to take stock. There was a stockroom a little way along the corridor; I would duck in there if anybody came. The note in my hand felt like a bomb which would be detonated if anyone so much as saw it, and which would destroy everything around us.
But nobody came. I looked at the handwriting. I pictured, as clearly as if it were happening in front of me now, Agatha writing the note, sealing it in the envelope, placing it in the Bible and walking heavily out of the Alpha. It was harder – but vital – to imagine what had been in her head as she did it. Did she hope that somebody would find it and that the situation could be reversed? That I could save her from going, or bring her back?
I did not want to leave.
Each of the words was like an electric shock, even now. I could hear her voice rupturing the silence of the hotel, and the crestfallen way she put down her bag and struggled with the door the last time I ever saw her. Not everything about the note was clear to me; but it was clear enough what Agatha would want me to do, what she was willing me to do from wherever she was now.
I walked slowly down the back stairs, passing the spot where I met Howard on the night everything changed. I crossed the atrium, relieved now rather than dispirited by the absolute quiet which filled all the space from the marble floor to the skylight. Kathleen was sitting at one of the computers but did not seem to have turned it on. As I pushed open the door, she lifted her head and the hair fell around her shoulders. I sat down next to her and spoke so quietly that she had to lean in to hear me.
When Howard had croaked the number 77 and gestured desperately at me, I came to realize that he was begging me to go up there alone: to save the day, without him. There was no time to wonder why. There was little enough time to do what I had to do.
The door of Room 77 was ajar. Roz Tanner lay naked, passed out upon the bed. Next to her on the bedside table was a mess of empty bottles and smoking paraphernalia. The boy was lying on the floor, pleading for his mother to wake. In the time it took me to perceive all these things, flames had licked further into the room and were shooting along the carpet with appalling speed, and a wall of smoke meant it was already impossible to make out the way I had come in. The boy was keening in pain as tongues of fire began to lick at his face. His cries turned to chokes and I realized I, too, was choking. When I opened my mouth to shout at Roz Tanner, smoke charged into my throat and I coughed and retched.
My God, I thought: we shall die here, all three of us. I saw the faces of Caroline and Ed. This vision can only have taken a quarter of a second, but it stirred me into the fastest motion of my life. I gathered up the howling boy and ran, head down, through the smoke. Outside the room was only more heat, the ashy murk of the air, and I could not see. But I had been in this hotel so long that I did not need to. I ran towards the staircase. I was not thinking about the screaming boy in my arms, or the violent red scarring I could see upon his face, let alone the woman I had left behind to die. I simply wanted to live.
‘Graham!’ a voice was yelling, and Howard took the little bundle from me and steered me towards the staircase. That is the last thing I remember.
When I came to, I was in one of the ground-floor guest rooms: Room 7, as it turned out. I had been taken out of my clothes and was lying in a bed. A doctor had hold of my wrist and was examining my pulse. I tried to say something and coughed up soot and ash and bile.
‘Good man,’ said the doctor. ‘You’re going to be right as rain.’
I had only been out for a few minutes, as it seemed. People floated indistinctly around the room. I was given information. The fire had been overcome. The boy’s face had been badly burned, and he might lose his sight; but he would live. His mother had not been saved, but I should not blame myself.
I stayed a long time as I was, my head on the cool pillow. But after an hour or so I felt better; I sat up and began to have conversations. In the course of these, a rather different story unfolded from
the one I thought I remembered.
Howard had been first on the scene. He had gone up and rescued the boy just in time. I had arrived afterwards and tried to get the mother out, but the flames and smoke had driven me back. By the time Pattie arrived, this version of events was so well established that she had heard it already. She stroked my forehead as I lay with my eyes closed.
Everyone was saying how brave I had been, Pattie told me. And indeed I had. But something, I thought, was not right here.
It was some time in the early hours of the morning that Howard came and sat in the chair next to the bed. I had been left alone to sleep, and when I opened my eyes I cried out in surprise to see him. In his face I saw such utter abjection that I had to turn my eyes down to the blankets in front of me.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said in a voice nothing like his own. ‘They jumped to conclusions and I let them do it. I couldn’t tell them the truth. I couldn’t tell them I was with her when it started. But you can tell them, Graham.’
I wanted to get it straight, all this, though to someone a little less addled it would have been straight enough already.
‘Why were you with her?’
‘You know why, Graham.’ Howard began to sob. ‘Oh God. I just wanted her. If someone comes along … I’m a weak man. I can’t seem to resist when someone wants me. When someone falls for it. I can’t seem to do the right thing. I don’t know what you must think, Graham. You’re such a good person.’
I let Howard weep and bleat through a few variations on the theme, quite at a loss. He was as unstoppable in his new mode of defeat as he had always been in triumph.
‘This is it now,’ he said. ‘I did know this would happen. It had to fall apart.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, imagine when it gets out what really happened,’ Howard said. His voice began to lose that pitiful, wallowing note, taking on a quality which – oddly, in the circumstances – was almost noble. It was like a man reading the announcement of his own death. ‘That I got off my face with her and as soon as I woke and smelled smoke, I bolted. And then had to pretend I’d only gone up there to save the kid. That I was the hero. The hero, not a total, total …’
And the word he now used to describe himself I hesitate even to write with spaces.
Even accounting for a bit of Howard-exaggeration, it was true that his situation was a terrible one. If the story he described were to get out, he would be, as they say, finished. His reputation as a playboy conjuror, naughty on occasion but impossible not to love, would disappear. Instead people would see a criminal and a liar. Sarah-Jane would leave him, this time. And Howard himself would go, he would have to. He would either close the hotel outright or sell it to somebody new who would waste little time in starting from scratch. In either outcome, it was clear enough what would happen to me.
‘Who, other than you and me,’ I asked Howard, ‘knows about this?’
‘No one,’ he said.
‘The police will ask questions, I suppose.’
‘It’s not them I’m worried about, Graham. I’d rather go to prison than what is going to happen when this gets out. When it gets out I was responsible.’
‘What is going to happen if I tell anybody, you mean,’ I corrected him.
‘Yes.’
‘Well then,’ I said, and shrugged.
A silence followed, the duration of which I would put somewhere between three and five minutes. I was thinking about what it would mean to promise what I was about to. I would be weighed down by a secret until the end of my life, and a terrible one: I would be obscuring the real reasons for the death of a guest. Moreover, I would miss out on the credit I deserved for saving the boy. But if I did not? Well, the Yorks’ lives would probably begin the very same day to fall apart, and with them the hotel that had given me my main reason to get up each day for the last twenty years.
Howard must also have been running through these calculations, but he still hardly dared believe I had decided to protect him. He looked up at me, and then slightly over my head, as if this last hope were a beam of light on the wall behind me. He opened his mouth halfway.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Quite sure,’ I said, ‘and I propose we do not discuss it ever again.’
He began trying to say that I was the greatest friend he could have – or that anyone could have – and that he would always have to live with it, what he had done, and this was the start of a new him, and a great many more things until I put a stop to it.
‘I meant,’ I said, ‘we do not discuss it ever again, with immediate effect.’
Howard grabbed my arm and looked very hard at me for a moment, and then his eyes began to overflow. I felt immobilized by fatigue, as if a concrete block had been lowered onto me. I was abandoning myself happily to unconsciousness when a final thought snapped my eyes open.
‘What will happen to the boy?’
‘The boy?’
‘To her child.’
‘They said he’ll probably be blind,’ said Howard, the final word seeming to disappear back into his throat. ‘But he will live.’
‘Yes, but where will he go?’
‘Leave that with me,’ said Howard.
I offered to make tea. Kathleen nodded, seeming barely to have heard. A few drops spilled as I carried the mugs back from reception. Never mind, I thought. Somebody else, for once, could worry about it.
‘So you told Agatha all this?’ Kathleen said.
‘I did, eventually. We had become close, and I needed… I felt I could not last forever without telling a soul. But she left soon afterwards.’
‘Because Howard found out you’d told her?’
‘I assumed either it was that, or there were other reasons, possibly. I never knew.’
Kathleen was holding her tea in front of her without any apparent intention of taking a sip. ‘And Chas … ’
‘Has never known. No.’
‘You don’t think he deserves to know that his life has been founded on a lie?’
‘I have had this to live with for more than twenty years,’ I hissed, ‘and you for twenty minutes. So I hardly think that you ought to be telling me how to proceed.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said; immediately I apologized myself for speaking so harshly.
‘Why did you tell me?’
‘Because it was what Agatha intended by leaving that note. Because I owe it to her memory, as it were. And perhaps because I feel that you deserve better, too, than to be in the dark. And,’ I added pointedly, ‘I decided I could trust you never to let it go further.’
She nodded, her eyes cast down into her lap. ‘Thank you. But . . .’
I saw the weight of the secret, a weight very familiar to me, settle upon her shoulders. She leaned forward and took a long breath, and then shivered and took hold of her own forearms as if embracing herself for warmth.
‘S----y f---,’ she muttered to herself.
‘Indeed,’ I said, with feeling. ‘Would you like a taxi home?’
‘Would you mind?’
I squeezed her shoulder in response, noting how hard and unyielding it was. She went up to get dressed, and we walked in silence out to the front of the Alpha. A couple of cars hummed past on the Euston Road. The night air was cold, like a building where nobody lived. I hailed a taxi and gave the driver Kathleen’s address. As she got into the back seat, she reached her hand out and I held it for a moment.
The note was still lying in the computer room. I picked it up and looked at the writing. For a moment I thought about keeping it, hiding it, so that I would have something of her. It was a ridiculous thought. Before it could take root, I had folded the paper carefully, torn it eight ways, and walked to the Gents, where I disposed of it. Its work was done.
My hands, when I looked down at them, had barely regained their steadiness. I pressed the button on the hand dryer and allowed it to blast them for a little while as I attempted to collect myself.
It was difficult to
ascertain exactly what my emotions were. I was frightened in part, certainly. The bomb was part-exploded, and the rest of the explosion was a prospect which would hang over us. Kathleen might easily tell Chas, in spite of my entreaties. Her loyalty to him might trump her respect for my wishes. And so, for all I knew, might her journalistic instincts. She might not be able to resist writing about it: what a story it was, after all! Yes, there were a dozen ways in which she might in some way let everything slip. If she did, it would be very dangerous for her, for me, for all of us.
But other things kept bobbing up in the froth of these thoughts. There was a longing for Agatha, which I did my best to force back under the water. And something else which was close – strange as it might be – to the thrill which my hardier army comrades had felt as they went into battle.
Things, I felt, were going to change now that this secret was out, unearthed by a note left in a book all that time ago. Change was not something I had ever embraced, yet I could not mistake a certain faint excitement, or at least intrigue, at the prospect. In any case, it did not matter what I thought of it; it was as if the events had simply set their course in this direction, and I was caught up in them. Change happened, in the end, whatever you did: this much I had learned. It was coming to the Hotel Alpha now, whether we liked it or not.
PART THREE
10
GRAHAM
‘Drive on, Madman,’ commanded Howard in a giddy slur, ‘drive us back to the Hotel Alpha, and don’t spare the horses.’
‘Don’t spare the what?’ Sarah-Jane giggled; behind me, the seats squeaked as the two of them grappled with one another, erupting into further laughter. I opened the glove compartment and got out my driving gloves, the sixth pair, purchased in a fit of stubbornness from the shop on Savile Row rather than ‘online’, even though it had meant going there on a very wet day and getting into a foul mood. I turned the key in the ignition and the machine started up, as smooth and even-tempered as ever. Howard was unscrewing the lid from a little bottle he had smuggled out of the theatre. They had been to see Les Misérables, not for the first time; and they seemed to have got so drunk that they barely knew whether they were in France themselves. It had been Sarah-Jane’s sixty-fourth birthday last week. Howard hid sixty-four roses around the Alpha and had Paul McCartney call with a birthday message.
