by Mark Watson
‘An awful lot,’ I pushed on, ‘has been sacrificed to make sure that your secret has been safe, Howard. Agatha left. Kathleen left. I have been biting my tongue for years. And Chas has been lied to. His life has been founded upon a lie.’ I remembered sitting in this same room and reacting angrily when Kathleen used almost this same phrase. But she had been right. ‘Sarah-Jane and JD have also been lied to. They have all been lied to for more than twenty years.’
Howard had been swallowing hard and clasping his hands together for the latter part of this speech.
‘But you knew all this,’ he said. ‘You’ve always known this. And you went along with it. You protected me. When did you change your tune?’
His eyes were frightened, just as they were on the night it all happened: the night it all began to go wrong. Looking into those eyes, I saw him as I had seen him over the years – as the man on the Euston Road who changed my life, as the figure regaling audiences in the atrium whom I felt proud to know; and as the person in whose company Chas had for years been most alive, most himself. I saw him as a person who had made one terrible mistake and spent the past decades fleeing it.
‘I didn’t say I had changed my position,’ I said, retreating. ‘I am just wondering whether perhaps it is time, finally, to tell the truth. Even if you only told Chas. Not Sarah-Jane, even. Not the rest of them.’
‘It wouldn’t work.’ Howard’s eyes glimmered. It was so difficult to maintain anger against him, especially when you were not sure you wanted to. ‘Chas would be knocked over by it. He wouldn’t be able to keep it from the others. It’s all or nothing, Madman. It’s always been all or nothing.’
He had swivelled the chair round so that our knees were touching as we sat there, and both of his hands were on my arms.
‘If there was a way I could have told Chas without my whole life collapsing, the whole bloody … house of cards collapsing.’ He shook his head. ‘There has never been a way. I would be done for.’
Then he stood up, so suddenly that I scooted back a little way in my chair, and gestured at the computers. ‘But, you know what,’ he said. ‘These things will have me, in the end.’ We both looked at the machines, so bland in appearance. ‘I was all in favour, mate. I knew computers were the next big thing. I wanted a piece of that – you know me. But now … now it’s out of hand. Anyone can write anything they want.’ I thought about the first time I had made the computer search for ‘Hotel Alpha’. ‘It only takes someone out there. Everyone gets caught in the end. No one’s luck holds forever.’
Even after everything that had passed, I could not be sure whether he really thought this rule applied to him, or whether – as always – he felt that he could be the exception. There was a silence. I had a strong desire to be out of the room, to be somewhere I could think. Howard seemed to be driven by the same impulse; he went as if to open the door, but then stopped and put his hand out and touched my shoulder.
‘No one could have been a better mate. Whatever happens now.’
I listened to him walking away. For several minutes I did not move a muscle. Eventually I went to reception, leaned against my walnut desk and looked up at the skylight.
Kathleen had wanted the job in China very much, for sure, but I believed she had really left Chas because it was intolerable to keep a secret from him any longer, and yet impossible to reveal it and watch everything disintegrate. She had chosen, as it were, a third way. I would have to do the same. I could not stay here and continue lying, but I did not want to rip the place apart with the truth. And so I was going to have to leave the Hotel Alpha.
As I clocked off that night and watched the cedars’ branches frisking in the gentle night breeze, I repeated it to myself. I must leave this place. More than that: I must go and find Agatha. She was out there, or she might be. I had done this job as well as I could for forty years. I had approached it like a life’s work. But it was not; not quite. I had lived most of my life, but not all of it. There was a little left.
When the bus appeared, I imagined getting off at Muswell Hill, putting my key in the lock, going to the oven and finding a plate ready for me, getting into bed with the warmth of my wife there beside me, coming back tomorrow to this place where I belonged. I thought of these things, and it was hard to believe that the same mind had been thinking with such hunger of their opposite. The closer I got to home, the more it felt as if the idea of walking away from it all had simply been an old man’s ridiculous fantasy. With each minute that went by I had more work cut out to hang on to it, not to let reality whip it from my hands.
13
CHAS
It was only in the week leading up to the Olympic announcement that I realized I really wanted us to win. It was strange, given that for six months I’d directed most of my time to writing propaganda with that aim in mind. But it was only time, not emotional energy. I had done it like a machine.
The world in one city! That was where we lived. An ancient city with a very modern sensibility: that was us. A nation of sports fanatics. Glittering phrases written by someone who had never seen Big Ben, never watched a sporting contest. People could run or jump or throw things as far as they wanted without it having much meaning to me. Since Kathleen had gone, it was even more the case that I lived in words, not solid things. With Kathleen I had tasted the real world beyond the hotel walls and even come to think it could be mine. Without her, that was gone. She was like Ella in my mind – someone who had once existed because I could reach out and touch her, and now did not. All the places we used to go had vanished with her. I didn’t want to go running or go to the cinema with anyone else. What was left was the virtual world, and I had thrown myself head first back into it.
Of course, it wasn’t quite the same as when Ella had left. Technology had come a very long way. There was a program called Skype which allowed me to keep in touch with Kathleen for free: she could even look at me.
‘And what do I get out of this?’ I grumbled.
‘You get the satisfaction of me being able to see you and check that you … ’ she said, the voice distant, random phrases snapping off on their way down the tunnel. ‘And you look very nice.’
‘Thank you. How’s work?’
‘It’s OK. It’s hot here. Hot and sweaty.’
‘I’ve been reading your articles. Getting someone to read them to me. You know.’
‘Sorry? I lost you there.’
‘Oh, I just said I was reading your stuff.’
‘You’re lovely. Did you see the one about … ?’
‘Sorry?’
After a short period of disjointed interactions like this, we had concluded that they were not a good idea. It was hard to discuss her work, because it was what had taken her from me, and hard to discuss mine, since it had been part of the cause of our separation too. I didn’t really want to know where she was living, who she was drinking with, who might be kissing her. And so we reverted to emails, functionally cheery, full of gossip and irreverence, keeping alive a friendship which could only be the ghost of something a hundred times better. Then the emails themselves dropped away, and now we were down to the odd text. If we weren’t going to be together, we had to be meaningfully apart.
Still, dozens of other things might trick me into imagine-seeing her: hurried footsteps in the atrium, or profanities, mentions of China or of running, particular people’s smells, songs she had played me. She was still out there. That was probably why I felt the first stirring of my wish for London to win. I wanted something to happen that was mine alone, something she had been opposed to, to show that this was a new time.
Ten days before the announcement there had been a strange conversation with Lara. We were in the Alpha Bar at lunchtime. When I sat down, Lara was blowing her nose, and when she began to speak her voice was hoarse and dry.
‘So listen, Chas. After Singapore I’m going to take a little break.’
‘A holiday?’
‘More of a sabbatical.’
‘F
or how long?’
‘Six months, nine months.’
‘Christ. Really?’
‘Yah.’ She went on in her bland tone as if the astonishing notion of her disappearing from work – she who slept with her phone next to her pillow – were something anyone would have expected.
‘So I’m more or less saying you will be in charge.’
‘In charge?’
‘Yah,’ she said, and I had a giddying mental rush, something like a flashback combined with a premonition. On one side was the day I had met Lara, the feebleness of being floored by her trivia question. On the other, up ahead, was the reality of being her equal – being in her confidence, if anyone could ever be in her confidence. As the two extremes appeared at once, it felt like being an explorer looking back with sudden wonder over the mountain that has been conquered.
‘That would be … ’
‘I mean, of course someone would need to be across all the stuff as it came in, someone would need to help you with the admin. But you’d be the brains of this thing.’
Howard reacted as if it was the least I could expect. ‘Makes sense, mate. She’s grooming you. She rates you second to none. I wonder what she’s playing at, though. Tell you what I think it probably is.’
I wasn’t really listening; I was imagining myself as Chas York, Chief Executive of Lara Krohl PR. Krohl York PR. Krohl &York?
‘Midlife crisis,’ Howard went on. ‘She’s at the age where people can’t help wondering why there’s no man. It comes to everyone. Even someone like her.’
Without knowing why, other than that we were on the subject, I asked him suddenly: ‘Was there ever anything between you and her?’
‘Anything between us?’ Howard scraped his chair back along the floor.
‘I don’t care either way,’ I added hastily. ‘It wouldn’t change my opinion of … I’m just asking.’
Howard’s voice was a little different; it was hard to say how. It was a fraction thinner, higher, perhaps. It might be, I thought, the first time I had ever heard him speak without total conviction.
‘There never was, no,’ he said at last. ‘What made you ask?’
What made me ask, I thought, is the nagging idea that there’s something I’m not being told.
‘Nothing. Just wondered.’
‘A lot of people thought it,’ Howard mused, ‘because we worked so closely together. And because – well, I guess people thought I might have my own midlife crisis.’
‘Which you never did?’
‘I’m only sixty-six, mate,’ said Howard. ‘I haven’t reached midlife yet.’
It was a typical Howard joke because it was only eighty per cent joke: you could believe, sitting here in his castle, that he really did mean to live a couple of centuries and that everything he had built would still be standing around him. Soon the question about him and Lara, and its curious aftermath of ambiguity, had gone out of my mind. It had been replaced by the idea, swelling with every moment, of the place my life might go from here.
That was why, as we stood in an atrium thickening with bodies by the minute, I found myself jangling with nerves. Victory would give us dozens of new contracts; it would mean huge amounts of new work, all of which I would be first in line for. If I needed a top-up of excitement, Howard was so full of it that it would have infected someone a mile away. He patrolled the atrium, gathering up anyone in his path. A projector screen had been hung from the top balcony. It was a new screen – not the one which had shown the Moon landing and the World Cup matches of old – but the Alpha tradition was the same as ever.
Sarah-Jane was wandering around with trays of champagne and snacks; I could hear her offering them as more and more people appeared, in the way they always did on these big occasions. Howard was discussing a Plan B for the eventuality that Paris won instead. ‘What we’ll do,’ he said, ‘if they’re insane enough to give it to the French, is we’ll get on the Eurostar. We’ll go straight down there this afternoon and we’ll ruin the celebrations. Get some eggs. Or pour buckets of cold water over people from the fucking Arc de Triomphe or whatever. Or – right, this is a good one, mate … ’
‘Christ,’ someone muttered behind me, presumably pointing up at the screen, ‘look at the French guys. Look how happy they are.’
‘They’ve been told already,’ said someone else. ‘I bet you. They already know.’
Within half a minute this idea had begun to whisper through the audience around me. How flat the party was going to fall if we didn’t win. In Howard’s cocky speech I could detect a note of melancholy. This was bigger than him, after all, this decision. He could not really make everything happen – it only seemed so within this building. I had a sudden wrenching feeling that I was about to see the power of Howard – and Lara, of course, but especially Howard – cut down to size.
‘Shall I investigate train times and the availability of buckets?’ asked Graham. Howard was revived by the joke. ‘I can see Lara! There she is. This close to Beckham. They’re all at a big table, black tie, very swish. There’s still a lot of people shaking hands, and … ’
‘Shush!’ Sarah-Jane commanded. ‘This is it!’
The volume was turned up and an accented voice filled the Alpha. It was Jacques Rogge, the president of the committee, who had once stood in the bar.
‘Before opening the envelope,’ he said, ‘I would like to thank our wonderful hosts and the people of Singapore, who have worked so hard to make our meeting possible.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ shouted Howard.
There were more preliminaries. I was pacing back and forth, I realized. Howard’s hands were on my shoulders. Finally the moment came. For ten seconds there was absolute silence in the atrium. There was the prolonged noise of an envelope being opened: an absurdly small noise to captivate so many people.
‘How can he still be opening the fucking thing?’ I blurted out, causing a small ripple of nervous laughter.
‘The International Olympic Committee has the honour of announcing,’ read Rogge, ‘that the Games of the 30th Olympiad in 2012 are awarded to the city of London.’
I only heard the first half of the word, the first quarter of a second; then Howard hollered so loudly into my ear that I thought I was going to be thrown off my feet. There were the squeals of the people in Singapore coming through the screen; there was the uproar around me, and Howard’s hands were under my armpits. He was lifting me off my feet, and it turned out he could do anything after all.
It was going to be a long Alpha night. Friends were all around. Howard kept me by his side, topping up my glass as we rolled from room to room. Sarah-Jane got onto the balcony and sang her old favourite, ‘That Ain’t No Way to Treat a Lady’, while the audience in the atrium below whooped up at her. JD had showed up with a girl he described as a ‘seriously talented erotic dancer’ and addressed as ‘baby doll’. As I shook her hand, which was cold and slim, he began excitedly to describe me. ‘This guy, my brother,’ said JD, ‘is a fucking miracle-worker.’ It was a while since JD and I had spent any time together, but in the glow of this moment I could trace a straight line back to when we were boys. ‘This guy produced ad campaigns for the whole Olympics thing, and for the army, and – seriously, all sorts of things.’
I remembered, with this talk of work, that Howard and I were meant to be attending a reception at the Park Lane Hilton in the morning to celebrate the win. In the morning. But it was already the morning.
‘You are completely blind?’ asked the girl. Her accent was Eastern European, I thought. An age ago I would have asked her country of origin and informed her of the capital.
‘Completely blind,’ JD said. ‘Howard rescued him from the fire, you know? He—’
‘Yes,’ said the dancer. ‘I know about fire, yes.’
‘I didn’t actually do that much with the Olympic thing,’ I began to say, ‘I—’
‘Oh, shut up.’ Howard had been attending to another conversation, but now he muscled back
into this one. I got a waft of that ages-old leather aroma. ‘Imagine this place in 2012, when those Olympics are on. I’ll be an old man.’
‘Shut up, you idiot,’ Sarah-Jane heckled from somewhere behind us.
‘I will,’ Howard insisted. ‘That’s just the way it goes, that’s … ’
‘I’m not arguing,’ said Sarah-Jane, ‘I’m pointing out you are already an old man.’
He let her have her laugh before continuing. ‘I won’t be running this place by then,’ Howard said. I heard Graham’s cough and breathed that old-fashioned hair-cream smell floating into the gaps where Howard was not. ‘JD will be in charge,’ said Howard, ‘and you, Chas, you will be in charge of Krohl’s company, and between you two, you will run this city.’
‘We’ll run this country,’ JD corrected him, slapping me on the back with enough force to dislodge a breath of surprise. ‘There’s going to be no stopping us. We’ll have an empire.’
‘That’s enough empires, Hitler,’ Sarah-Jane said. There was more banter in this vein. Feeling a sudden dizzy rush, I asked JD to show me to a chair. There I sat, with all the noise swimming round me like clouds of smoke in the air. I thought about the years ahead. It was impossible not to feel, at least for now, that this was my victory after all. I’d tried the virtual world and the real one, and finally I had settled on my own version of life which seemed to have everything, and it was stretching in front of me like a walkway.
Eventually the smell of coffee wafted up from the Alpha Bar, followed by frying meat. Howard had barely stopped talking all night: stories even I had never heard about the Alpha, tales of the famous and the forgotten, more brash pronouncements about the future. He threw himself in the way of people who were thinking about leaving; he made drinks appear. The hours between three and seven were torn away like layers of tissue paper. Not long after the coffee came the everyday footfall the sound of ordinary business at the desk. It was only then, shortly after eight, that I turned on my phone’s automatic reading function to find a message from Kathleen. Jesus in the long jump! Well done.
