by Mark Watson
Stuck behind a succession of minicabs whose drivers honked at one another and drove in unpredictable bursts of speed, we crawled eventually onto the Euston Road. There had been no point really in my coming in the car to drive such a short way when they could have got the Tube. There was no real need for the driving gloves, either – the steering wheel, whose ivory they were meant to protect, had been reupholstered a few years ago. But it was a performance, and for Howard everything was about performance, after all. I was certainly not complaining. The Mercedes was the place for me, now. It had become the part of the Alpha where I felt most at home.
The hotel itself was slipping from my grasp a day at a time. The old guest ledgers, forty books in total, had been moved from the cabinet behind the reception desk into storage in the cellar, which was to say that they would never be seen again. Suzie talked brightly about ‘archiving’ the information on a computer, but it was not as if the names of long-gone guests were any use: I had simply liked having them there. All the same, when the move came, I put up very little resistance. I considered salvaging the three books on whose back pages I had kept score in the check-in game with Agatha, but the sight of my past self’s handwriting, the naivety in the joyfully scribbled characters, deflated me. Behind the desk there was now a second computer, which I occasionally used – when nobody was about – to search for Agatha, as I had done before. Pattie had bought me a book called The Internet for Dummies.
Soon, perhaps, I would need Hotels for Dummies. Howard’s taste for modernization was as sharp as it always had been; but the improvements were more and more alien to me. There was talk of replacing all the lovely keys on their wooden fobs with plastic cards which would unlock doors by means of an electronic chip. There was talk of improving our Internet service to ‘broadband’, so that it could do its work more quickly.
In the forecourt Howard flung open the car door, in the way he had which always made me wince, as if it were an old banger ready for the junkyard. He and Sarah-Jane made a tipsy fuss of getting out, her dress becoming stuck in the door as he slammed it again. I stayed in my seat, watching through the driver’s window as the two of them returned to their castle, his arm round her back. His hair was thinning very slightly now, and hers was cut short and coloured. Each of them was a little thicker-set than forty years ago. But they still moved with the urgency, the thirst for what was ahead, that they always had; Howard still held open the mahogany door, and Sarah-Jane still stepped inside with a nimble excitement as if they were twenty-four and had taken ownership of the place that afternoon. They were a perfect couple, as if from some romantic story. And a story, you might say, is exactly what it was: a story that, all this time, Howard had managed to tell the world.
Until recently, it had been easier than I had imagined to keep the pact: to listen to Howard’s chatter, raise an eyebrow at his petting of the Captain, pick a card – any card – and not tell him what it was. It had not really been a matter of sacrifice. I had gone along with the rewriting of history to protect him, it was true: he was my friend and my mentor. But I was also protecting the hotel, and that meant protecting myself and the future I wanted, which was a future in which the Alpha’s reputation continued to sparkle and I was able to stand behind this desk until I could not stand at all.
The hardest part had been getting through the first days and weeks while Howard tried to avoid all the publicity caused by the fire and his supposed heroics and Sarah-Jane nursed Chas in the evenings. During that time the secret felt gigantic, like a pimple pulsing on the forehead which one feels must be visible to all. But each day after that, it had shrunk a little. In the course of this, my brain – and Howard’s, I supposed – had changed shape, the secret being incorporated so fully that it was no longer even recognized as such. And so we carried on, outwardly the same as ever.
This process, however, had required energy. It was not for nothing that Howard kept himself on the move, would travel a thousand miles just to get someone’s signature on a donation cheque, would erect Christmas decorations at ten soup kitchens in one morning. It was not an accident that he thrust so relentlessly into the future. If you were Howard, you too would be getting as far away from the past as you could.
Not that his past twenty years of good deeds had been mere penance. It was in Howard’s nature to help people and to make the grand gesture; he would have given thousands of pounds away whatever had happened, and would unquestionably have raised any orphan fate cast into his path. He was always minded to gallop around the world collecting his thrills, just as I was always happy staying in Muswell Hill and dining on ham and chips. But in the twenty-year aftermath of the fire, those energies had been more specifically directed. It was no longer only about maintaining the legend of the Hotel Alpha, the great fiction he had willed into life. It was now about maintaining a myth of a different kind: a tall story even by Howard’s standards.
To do that, he had to keep moving further and faster from the real events. I had never felt the same compulsion. The daily hum of Alpha business had been enough to drown out everything else. Each time I took my place at reception in the morning, or settled into the driving seat, I had been able to wipe the slate clean: to pretend that Agatha had never been next to me, and Howard had never lied to his wife, to Chas, to the whole of London.
But now that daily hum had dropped somewhat. It had been replaced with the tapping of computer keys, with the silence of the once-vocal telephones. Less time spent helping guests meant more time to think, and thinking was dangerous. And that was probably why I had taken to getting into the car at the slightest excuse, ferrying guests to this end of London or that. Each time I turned the key in the Mercedes and heard the old thoroughbred report for duty, I was running away, as Howard had been doing for years. By telling Kathleen the secret, I wondered if I had condemned her to run the same race.
Almost a year had passed since the night of the note, and Kathleen had been back and forth more times than I could count: to the front in Afghanistan, and to talk to widows in Iraq, and several times to China. There were still the tearful goodbyes in the atrium, the fierce farewell kissing at Heathrow. All the same, there was no mistaking her appetite not just for the trips but for the experience of getting away.
Her latest trip was a particularly ambitious one: first to Athens where the Olympics were being staged in the summer, and then on to Beijing to meet some of the people protesting against the games to come. Already, some of the evidence of corruption she had uncovered was being used in a Panorama programme to be broadcast while she was away. This would make her exceedingly unpopular with Lara, and I supposed with Howard, but Kathleen was not the sort to be put off by that idea. This morning she had been in the atrium well before the time we arranged, whistling, the battered and dust-chalked travel suitcase by her side as ever.
‘I don’t suppose a couple of packages have come for me, Graham? Amazon?’
‘Packages from the Amazon?’
‘From Amazon the website.’ Kathleen shook her head in exasperated fondness.
Suzie went into the backroom and emerged with a couple of cardboard parcels. ‘Voilà,’ she said. I took Kathleen’s suitcase out to the car and waited until she emerged, Chas following.
Now we were on the Westway, stationary in a queue, the still heat of the road coming through the windows and coating us like dirt; yet I felt happier than I would at reception.
‘Jesus on the toilet,’ Kathleen said, ‘stop pawing me, will you; it’s hot as hell in here.’
I met her eyes in my mirror. ‘Perhaps it will be cooler in Athens?’
She laughed. ‘F--- off, Graham.’
‘I tell you where it will be cooler,’ Chas was now saying, his hand moving obligingly away from her; ‘the Business lounge. It’s meant to be lovely.’
‘Yes,’ said Kathleen, looking out of the window, ‘that’s good.’
‘And Business Class itself,’ Chas persisted. ‘I bet you’re glad you’re in there, not rammed in w
ith everyone else.’
‘It’ll be nice, yes.’
‘What’s up?’ he asked.
‘I just … I’d be perfectly fine in Economy.’
‘But Howard wants you to have a good time,’ said Chas. ‘He loves doing stuff like this. You know, he once—’
‘I would rather not feel beholden to Howard.’ Kathleen had taken the bait. Chas pursed his lips.
‘You don’t think we’re both slightly in his debt?’ he asked.
My eyes and hers came together in the mirror again as she swallowed what must have been a mouthful of impossible replies; we met eyes once more at Departures as I hauled the suitcase out of the boot. I patted her on the shoulder and wished her a good trip. When Chas returned, guided out by an airport official, he was carrying a Starbucks coffee cup and his face was slick with tears. I clapped him on the shoulder.
‘She’ll be back before you know it.’
‘Don’t suppose she’s still in the car after all,’ he said, ‘and you two are winding me up?’
I always felt a curious mixture of things when Chas cracked a joke relating to his blindness: relief, affection, but also a kind of indignation that he had had to suffer this and always would have to. It made me realize with a shock, as if for the first time, that he was blind: and that every single moment since I last had the same thought, he had simply been getting on with it. He was quiet a while, sipping his coffee: I dearly hoped he would not spill any of it on the seats, but I never liked to tell him to be careful as he’d had more than enough of that in his time.
Near the gates of Fuller’s Brewery – like so many before him – he began to speak.
‘She loves going there so much.’ It was precisely what I had been thinking earlier, but I was not sure it would be helpful to say so. ‘And she’s incredible at her job. There aren’t many journos who can speak the language and everything. It’s just … you know. I’ve never even been on a plane.’
‘Well, not so long ago you had never been to the park.’
‘I worry I’m holding her back. She gets much more frustrated with me than she used to.’
This might be true: but there was more to it, so much more, than he dreamed. Kathleen’s biggest reason for being uncomfortable in Chas’s presence – the secret that she carried – was quite impossible for him to guess, yet it was now known to three of us. I watched him in the mirror as the Mercedes sliced through the city, easing instinctively past the Trellick Tower, a dense, vertical block of hemmed-in humans; past a gigantic billboard asking Londoners to ‘Back the Bid’ and another half-dozen all designed by Lara and Chas’s team. From the Westway there was a view of trains in sidings, a cemetery, a park where young people sloped about on skateboards, and then the traffic was fed in quarrelling lines onto Baker Street, where the Planetarium’s domed green head pointed the way to the Alpha. I had seen it all so many times, Chas not once: he could not even see the great big poster with his own work on it. I experienced a powerful twist of guilt in my guts.
‘ … made so much progress,’ he said, ‘but at some point, obviously, someone like me is going to hit a glass ceiling. And Kathleen – she isn’t exactly a fan of glass ceilings.’
I had drifted out of his speech as I sometimes did with Pattie’s rambles, and it took me a few moments to realize he was not talking about a real ceiling. I mumbled some comforting gibberish about the course of true love and led Chas from the forecourt into the Alpha, where Howard was waiting to take him like a baton. He began talking twenty to the dozen about some idea to do with the Olympics. ‘I need to pick your brains, mate,’ he said, and Chas’s face lit up – as it always did, as everyone’s always did – with the glow of Howard’s attention. They went into the bar, howling with laughter at some joke. Still feeling uneasy, I stepped back through the doors, joining the huddled band of smokers who had tended to gather out here since the hotel went non-smoking. If only we had such a thing as a smoking room, I had quipped to Suzie once; but she was too young to know what I was on about.
I watched as the smokers carried out their solemn business in the shadow of the hotel, lighting one cigarette from another, faces close as if hatching some conspiracy. As one of them went back into the Alpha, the big doors swung open and I was sure, even from this range, I heard Howard’s irresistible laugh ring out.
It was so perfect – it made so much sense – the story of his having rescued Chas: just as it felt absolutely right when he told the story about opening the door naked and winning the day with the Marilyn Monroe line, though it had not been him who did that either. Chas had lived a long time in a theatre set designed by Howard, and I had never thought of tearing the scenery down.
What Chas did not know, I had believed, could not hurt him: at least, not as much as the truth. But now I suspected it was hurting Kathleen. Perhaps the weight of secrecy had been hurting the lot of us all along, in fact, in ways we had never been aware of.
In Howard’s words, the Panorama programme ‘went down like a rat sandwich’. Lara Krohl had got hold of a copy and there was a private screening on the morning before it went on the air; she emerged from the function room with her eyes low over her telephone and marched up and down the atrium conducting a string of her jargon-ridden conversations. Amid the lunchtime clatter, the low, ill-intentioned tone of her voice rumbled like thunder in the distance. She remained in the Alpha Bar till after midnight, sitting and typing and taking her tiny sips of water. At one point I ambled in to speak to Ray about a room-service request for bourbon; before I had got within ten paces of her, Krohl reached for the screen and snapped it down over the computer keyboard, glancing up at me as if I were a spy narrowly thwarted.
Whether or not because of the fandango caused by the programme, Kathleen stayed in China a week longer than expected. Chas, as always when she was away, made strenuous attempts to fill the time. One afternoon he turned up at reception in his gym kit.
‘This is my white top and blue shorts, right? Kathleen left them out for me.’
‘You can’t be planning to go for a jog?’ I glanced over at the doors. Outside, the breeze was a knife slashing at the few green scraps still clinging to trees; the cedars stood as proud as ever.
‘Not outside. On the machines. I need someone to regulate the pace for me and someone just to check I’m not going to fall off. Just while I get started.’
Howard and I escorted him down to the subterranean Wellness Suite, where I scarcely ever set foot; it was run and looked after by its own staff, manicured and white-toothed ladies who thought me as old as their great-grandfathers.
Chas jumped up onto one of the treadmills, recently vacated by a powerfully built fellow I had seen about the atrium before. He mopped perspiration from the machine’s armrests as he left. Chas asked us to position ourselves at opposite sides of the machine. My job was to watch that his feet were safely positioned on the conveyor belt; Howard’s was to increase the speed. ‘OK, bit faster,’ Chas commanded, graduating from a stroll up to a trot. ‘Faster,’ he said again. The machine’s previous occupant came past, nodded approvingly at Chas’s exertions and sat astride the almost floor-low saddle of another toy. After a moment he began to zip back and forth in what seemed to me a ridiculous parody of a man rowing a boat. ‘Faster!’ shouted Chas. Howard raised an eyebrow.
‘Sure, mate? You’re going along pretty nicely there.’
‘How fast?’
Howard glanced at the electronic display. ‘9.2. Whatever that means.’
‘Bit faster,’ Chas insisted. Howard, with a wry look at me, pressed the button again. The machine gave an incredulous whine.
‘You’re really bombing along,’ said Howard, admiration and concern mingled in his voice.
‘Need to get up to this pace regularly.’ Chas’s breaths were shortening. ‘Kathleen is getting quicker and it’s annoying for her.’
‘You don’t have to do everything Kathleen wants, old mate,’ Howard said in a tone that was almost perfectly neutral.
‘I know she can be a bit … ’ Chas began. There was another short interval of hammering feet and moaning machinery. ‘She’s just doing a job,’ he said, ‘doing what she believes in, and—’
‘There’s a time and a place,’ said Howard.
‘I don’t think she feels it’s ever wrong,’ Chas said, inserting chunks of sentence into the gaps between his jagged inhalations and exhalations, ‘to say … to say what’s true.’
‘No, well.’ Howard’s mouth was a firm line. ‘I’m suggesting that it isn’t always right, either.’
I looked at Howard’s big, solid profile, so powerful and yet in its way so vulnerable. Then Chas half cried out as his momentum took him to the edge of the running belt and his shoe caught for a moment. I put out my arm and steadied him, and Howard plunged down the button to slow the thing. After striding a few paces to recover, Chas asked for it to be speeded up again, and on he went as we stood vigil: running to keep pace with someone who was thousands of miles away.
The telephone rang late at night. ‘It’s for you-hoo,’ said Suzie. How was I to stop her, I wondered, from doing that? I thought it must be a telephone booking from some old-fashioned soul like myself, but the voice was far away and criss-crossed by background noise as if our line were tangled up with some strangers’.
