They left after lunch, and went to the hotel to check in. A cab was called, and it was the same driver who had brought them, the genial Muslim bloke who had asked them, on the way from the station, where they were from, and having discovered they were British, had picked up an enormous book from the front passenger seat and waved it: “You know Robert Fisk? The British journalist Fisk? He tells the truth, it’s all there in his book.” Alan had admired how smoothly Helen had handled him, and was looking forward to another display of her finesse. But he was on his phone, talking in Arabic, and ignored his passengers, who sat quietly and looked at the streets.
“Christ, it’s bleak here,” said Alan. It was getting dark quickly, and somehow the snow that had fallen the day before seemed already shabby. A massive orange truck, with a plow at the front, passed by and spat salt at them. You could taste the salt in the air, the snow was coming down as flakes of salt.
“It’s really not bleak.” Helen was shifting impatiently in the car, her face long and unappeased. “Saratoga is one of the nicest towns in America. If you want bleak, I can show you. Drive half an hour or so from here to Troy. Now that’s bleak. Or at least it looks pretty bad from the highway. Troy seems almost Soviet—rotting old warehouses, dirty factories, there’s a grim river, and horrible new blocks of buildings that look like hotels for the fat party apparatchiks…”
“All right, it’s not bleak. But it’s so bloody cold … Maybe, with the other place, its name laid a curse on it? What were they thinking? Troy, indeed…” The cab was moving slowly down an admittedly handsome main street, it was called Broadway, wider and more spacious than its English equivalent. The buildings were ornate, proud, redbrick or faced in stone. He was reminded of certain streets, still fine, in Newcastle or in Harrogate. The ones that got away, that escaped the bombers and the town planners … These eminent nineteenth-century American buildings stood like stone ghosts of lost prosperity, impotent but still accusing: we know what we did, what we achieved, but what have you built for the future, what have you achieved? Good lord, the Adirondack Trust Company, presumably a bank, looked like the Lincoln Memorial. It seemed to be made out of marble, with two huge Greek columns on either side of the main entrance. And almost next door, they were pulling up alongside it now, was an extraordinary building, their hotel, called the Alexandria, done up like a Venetian palazzo. There were three levels, with rows of tall, narrow arched windows. There was a piazza balcony on the first floor that ran the length of the building, with thin columns and filigree fretwork everywhere. He reckoned it was late nineteenth-century, though knowing this country it might easily have been authentic Renaissance, nicked from somewhere in Italy and brought over in bits on a boat.
“I think you’ll like this place, Dad. At the very least it’ll amuse you. It’s American sui generis. You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.”
The lobby was dark, full of polished mahogany and plum-hued velvet. It was also frantic with objets—the hysterical congestion of the bourgeois Victorian parlor: two tall fig trees in brass pots, peacock feathers in jars, oak standard lamps, two hideously religiose Tiffany lampshades (casting pools of sacred dusk), a closed grand piano, a prim chaise longue with scrolled arms, a huge staircase, and asylum-grade drapes, thick as prison walls, at the window frames. There was that cinnamon smell again. Dixieland jazz was playing through concealed speakers. The effect was archival, as if color were trying to turn itself into sepia and earn itself a caption: “Olde Saratoga.” If he’d been less tired he’d have enjoyed the joke—except that it wasn’t quite offered as comedy. He needed to call Candace, and sleep for a bit. Helen was back on her BlackBerry, ably prodding. The girl behind the registration desk did not inspire confidence; at her side was a plate with a vast, half-eaten piece of cake. She put her fork down and looked up. “Welcome to the Alexandria!”
But check-in was easy, and a few minutes later he was sitting on his hotel bed, the second in two days, and pulling his shoes off. The bedroom was less funereal than the lobby, but still ornate. He was sitting on a roofless four-poster bed (the four wooden columns made him think of the tie-rods that poke out of concrete foundations); there was another chaise longue, in striped pink-and-cream satin: at either end, the fat cylindrical cushions, buoyantly tight, were less like cushions than flotation devices. He looked directly onto the main street, with its fine shopfronts and ornate antique lamps.
Snow was now blowing in the air, illuminated in the arc of these lights, scurrying sideways and returning like large wet insect-clouds, white against the flat violet air. The window glass was appallingly cold on his forehead.
There was a knock at the door: “Room service.” He hadn’t ordered anything, and for an absurd James Bond second—him again!—Alan thought he could be in a film. It was a real hotel employee, and he was bringing the hotel’s complimentary glass of champagne. Fairly bad champagne, it turned out, with a single bloated raspberry struggling to stay afloat.
He phoned through to Helen’s room. “A bloke just came to give me a glass of champagne with a raspberry…”
“He just came by my room, too. They didn’t used to do that.” Helen had stayed twice at the Alexandria, both times in the summer, when the hotel’s old-fashioned outdoor swimming pool was a necessary treat. She’d come up to hear Dave Matthews at the Performing Arts Center, one of the best places in America, she said, to hear live bands.
“I know what you’re fishing for: okay, Vanessa seemed fine. To me. A bit limp. A bit damp. Do you know that ‘damp’ is an actual category in Chinese medicine? Too much ‘dampness’ is rectified with certain foul-smelling hot teas.”
“When I think how close you were as kids, how Vanessa admires you and admires what you do…”
“Admires what I do? Pop music? I don’t think so, Dad.”
“Yes, she does. You don’t know.”
“The Philosopher and the Music Executive. It’s an updated Aesop fable, with her as the wise old owl and me … as the foolish donkey or something.”
“I don’t think anyone would ever think of you as foolish,” he said—admiringly, in spite of himself.
“As the greedy fox, then?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Helen…”
“Well, I thought she seemed okay. And to tell you the truth I couldn’t see a sign of any particular new crisis. Maybe she seemed a bit nervous. And she looked quite good, different somehow, more done up. She’s got contact lenses now.”
“But the arm! So she really did fall. Josh wasn’t exaggerating. It was serious.”
“She slipped!”
“Why the hell didn’t she tell us about it? Isn’t that suspicious?”
“Maybe, maybe not. I think she likes the drama.”
“That’s unfair. You can’t accuse her of enjoying the drama if she kept it a bloody secret! Find out for me? I need to know if it was an accident. I can’t do it, Helen … I’d better call Candace now, then have a sleep before we regroup tonight.”