3

GRAHAM

I have heard it said that adversity is the truest test of character, and that the greatest people turn disaster into opportunity. Perhaps Howard had heard it too, or perhaps someone like him does not need to be told. In any case it was no great surprise that he converted a moment of terrible panic – Chas’s brief escape from under my nose – into one of the soundest decisions he ever made: the appointment of Ella Flanders, after an interview of around thirty seconds. Even shorter, in other words, than mine.

The way he saw it was – as usual – perfectly simple. Chas needed a regular tutor who could keep up with him. Instinct told him that Ella was the right person, and his instincts were generally right. ‘She’s just the ticket, Madman,’ he said – the nickname being a play on my surname and less-than-excitable nature. And sure enough, she was.

Soon after I first came to work for him – after a hastily organized party bloomed into another miraculous success – I had commented that Howard’s knack for conjuring tricks was not limited to card-shuffling and balancing acts, but extended to life itself. ‘No such thing as magic, Graham,’ he said. ‘A magician is just an actor impersonating a magician.’ It was an unusually cryptic remark for him, but as he had been drinking gin, I let it pass.

Now, after the fire, I thought I had an idea of what he meant. Howard’s successes might look like magic, but they were not. In fact, there was no one word that explained why things always seemed to come true for him. It was not precisely luck, charm, or faith, or any nameable combination of them all. He was just Howard: that was all you could say. And when being Howard was not enough, he had found certain ways round it.

The biggest disaster of all – the fire – somehow became, in his hands, an opportunity. The top floor was to be rebuilt, and the hotel would be ‘bigger and better than ever’ as he put it in an advert which ran in several daily newspapers. This was rhetoric, of course. The Alpha was no bigger after the repairs: it was, naturally, exactly the same size. And it was questionable whether it had actually got better. All the same, it was back. It was back, all right, and I was grateful.

The months following the fire were very trying. We remained open to guests, but they were not always open to coming. The death of Roz Tanner had left a series of wounding memories: the unearthly cries of Chas for his mother as he was carried away from the scene, the bundle of her body being taken away, the bouquets of flowers left in the atrium by strangers; Chas’s frequent requests, over the months that followed, to see his mother, and the catch in Sarah-Jane’s voice as she explained that this could not be. And behind all this there was the endless drilling and hammering and scraping on the top balcony, the effort to eradicate what had gone on there: an effort which guests often acknowledged with a wary glance skywards, as if ghosts might fly out any moment.

At night – I had taken, in these pressing times, to staying later than ever – Chas’s wails would float along the corridor from the Yorks’, and I would hear Howard and Sarah-Jane arguing. Since Chas’s father had not surfaced, they had (in Howard’s view, at least) no choice but to be responsible for him: all the same, given the damage he had suffered, I wondered how wise this was. There was no merriment in the Alpha Bar; the pages of the ledger stood white and bare, great swathes of rooms lay empty. After handing over the desk to the night staff I would sometimes sit in the smoking room with a glass of whisky, listening to the emptiness and feeling that, no matter how bullish Howard might be, something had been lost that we could never find again.

But he was right, and I was wrong. Chas seemed to be crying less often. Howard would bring him into the atrium on his shoulders and encourage him to walk a few steps here and there, a strong grip on his little arm. Sarah-Jane had reconfigured their house, with a strict place for everything Chas would need; JD took Chas to the bathroom and slept in the bunk above him. Psychologists told us that he might well be young enough that he would have no memory, in the end, of what had happened; that his life, in essence, could start again from this moment.

And that was also somehow true of the Alpha. It was not enough to restore it; we had to show that the fire had been – as Howard put it – ‘a blessing in disguise’. It sounded preposterous, but he meant it. Money was spent on reupholstering and scrubbing, new artwork was acquired, new celebrities were strong-armed into appearing in the bar. And I was to have a full-time assistant.

‘Are you sure we ought to be recruiting,’ I asked Howard, ‘at a time when we have just had to spend all this money on—?’

‘That’s what insurance is for,’ he said with one of his grins, brushing his hair out of his eyes. The hair was greying a little now – we were all middle-aged – but it suited him, introducing a certain gravity which played well alongside his boyish features.

‘But the insurance, surely, only covered—’

‘Let me worry about that, mate. You just get that post advertised.’

I wrote out the classified ad under Pattie’s proud supervision, photocopied it and sent it to all the quality papers. We received more than a hundred CVs in the post; and each carefully written submission seemed to confirm what Howard had said, that the Alpha was still in business. Eventually I chose a shortlist of ten and arranged to interview them all in the smoking room. This is not a normal hotel, I tried to explain to each. We do not leave squares of chocolate on guests’ pillows; no crooner sings Billy Joel songs at squirming couples in the restaurant. Some of the younger male candidates, the ones who came in with business cards and cufflinks and a university-minted confidence, were taken aback. Didn’t we understand that every hotel had music in the lobby, and air conditioning? I did indeed. We were not like every hotel. That was the point.

One candidate seemed to understand. Her name was Valerie Davey. She was lean, stub-nailed and hard-handed, economical of speech; somebody you would put your life on to get a duvet clean. ‘I ain’t precious,’ she said. ‘You tell me what to do, I’ll do it.’ That seemed good enough for me, but there was one final person to interview. I had done quite enough talking by now, and I was almost hoping she would not show up, but there was a forceful knock at the door at precisely the minute arranged, and when Agatha Richards entered the room I soon forgot my fatigue. When she was in a room, you knew all about it.

I thought at first glance that she was the fattest person I had ever set eyes on. But as she unbuttoned a shapeless black overcoat to reveal another just the same, and then another, it emerged that she was simply one of the most swaddled. It was very chilly outside – I had been out, briefly, to pick up some food for Chas – but this nonetheless seemed excessive. At the third coat I laughed out loud.

‘I don’ like the cold, man,’ she said.

‘Evidently!’

Off came a further wardrobe’s-worth of cardigans, shawls, scarves and woollen items I could not put a name to. There were splashes of wild colour, oranges and purples.

‘Sorry, took eternities!’ said Agatha, finally settling her ample self into the armchair opposite mine. She was in her mid-thirties, with large dark eyes and a flat nose, great bosoms that pushed gently against the navy fabric of her dress. I could see that the dress was old and had been altered more than once at the sleeves. ‘I’ from Barbados,’ she said. ‘So cold here.’

‘I was mesmerized watching your clothes come off!’ I said. Then: ‘Oh, Lord … ’

Agatha let fly with a laugh that could have been heard on the other side of the Thames, and what an infectious laugh it was: almost to my shame I found myself joining in. We giggled for a good half-minute like schoolchildren at the back of class. Eventually she wiped her eyes, sighing. Trying to remain professional, I glanced down at her CV. It was easily the worst of the ten that had made it to the shortlist: big loopy writing like a child’s, strewn with misspellings and grammatical irregularities. Yet there were a couple of sentences I had not been able to forget.

As God is my Judge, which He is, one had said, I will always work my Best and I will not let any gest ever be unhappy while I am in the same Building.

‘I was interested that you wrote that,’ I told her. ‘Happiness is certainly what we try to provide here, all right.’

‘I’ a happy person, you know,’ said Agatha. ‘Not always happy at everything that’ll go on. Or I’ be a crazy person, right!’ Our eyes met. ‘You know, my life, there’s good thing, God be praised, and not so good. My husband brings me to England, not a very good man, I have to run away with nothing but my son. My son, he join the army, you know?’

I did indeed know the army, I said. ‘And his rank now?’

‘He went to Ireland. What the hell they’re even fighting about? He din’ know. He was eighteen. He send me a postcard. Belle-fast. Food is awful, he says. Weather awful. Having a great time!’ She laughed; her teeth were very white. ‘Third day, someone ask him to play snooker. He follows them to the pub. They shoot my boy in the head. Found him on the table all in blood.’

It was a few moments before I could speak.

‘He din’ even know how to play snooker,’ she said.

‘My dear lady … ’ I began, clumsy as an elephant.

‘It was a despicable thing,’ she said, ‘that’s what the paper said, a despicable thing. Anyhow. What is it if you’re unhappy, man? It’s wasting your life!’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I … yes. Quite so. Quite so.’

Although in theory I was still interviewing her, I had begun to feel as if it were the other way round. I returned to the subject of the Alpha. ‘Howard always says that luxury is having what you want,’ I trotted out for the tenth time. ‘Rather than what the hotel thinks you should want. So we pay very close attention to our guests.’

‘Oh, I’ pretty good at that, man,’ Agatha said.

‘That’s where we … where we like to focus our energies,’ I said, feeling more and more like some colonial nitwit trying to give a lecture in the heat, ‘rather than, you know, some of the nonsense hotels go in for. We don’t have someone standing in the lifts to press buttons. We don’t ask our chambermaids to fold the lavatory roll into a point.’

‘No, that’s right!’ Agatha cackled again, her face ignited, and it was as if the conversation of a moment ago had never occurred. ‘Why you’re putting the effort in, when they only wipe their behind with it!’

This was not my kind of joke, and yet I found myself harrumphing with laughter once more, and by the time Agatha left ten minutes later I dearly wanted to hire her. Yet there was still Mrs Davey. My conscience told me that she would be a safer appointment. I put the two CVs on the table and poured a tot of whisky from the smoking room’s secret stash. I kept imagining Mrs Davey and Agatha Richards at home waiting for news. I could see Mrs Davey’s weary face; Agatha’s, stoical and good-natured. Really, I was not cut out at all for decisions like this.

But one man was, and I heard him – as ever – some seconds before he came into the smoking room. The door slammed behind him so emphatically that I thought the frosted-glass panel would jump out. ‘Got a winner, mate?’

I explained my dilemma. Howard squinted as if the problem were too small to make out.

‘Why not both?’

‘We haven’t the budget for that, surely. I—’

‘They’re both good, right? Good people are hard to find, Graham. There’s you, me, the Captain, and that’s about it. And that’s if you count me as a good person.’ He chortled loudly. I tried to join in, but the joke struck me as an ill-advised one. ‘Take them both.’

I telephoned both women; both sounded delighted. It was a warming sensation to have been the source of that delight. They both reported for duty the following Monday; within moments, Mrs Davey was taking luggage from guests and genially bossing the chambermaids. Agatha joined me at the desk. Before a fortnight had passed it was as if she had always been there, guffawing and reading her Bible and advising guests on how to combat the cold.

‘I told you to take them both, Madman,’ said Howard. ‘Simple.’

And perhaps it was, after all. When you were with him, you could believe that cars did not want to hit you, that planes did not want to be missed. And that the universe, which had seemed to conspire against the hotel so dramatically, meant only good for the Alpha after all.

Long after our bookings had returned to normal, and Agatha and I were playing our check-in game ten rounds at a time, Howard pressed on with what he considered improvements. As the years slipped by, we acquired a gymnasium with a running machine and a ‘relaxation area’ where guests could receive massages.

Much of this seemed like rot to me. Why could people not run outside, if they must run at all? Who in his right mind wanted oil rubbed into his back by someone he had never met? It all seemed harmless enough, though. Of slightly more concern were the gadgets Howard occasionally foisted upon me. An electric typewriter would speed up letter-writing, he said. A fax machine would allow us to send menu changes to the printers’, or invoices to event organizers, in a matter of moments. A credit-card machine would reduce the need to handle cheques.

‘But what is wrong with cheques?’

‘It’s not that anything’s wrong with them. It’s just important to modernize.’

He was fond of these American words and the assumptions that went with them. ‘Not everything modern is good,’ I pointed out.

‘You like to live in the past, don’t you, Madman?’

‘Not in the past – the present. I have done most of my living in the present so far.’ (I was pleased with this response, and repeated it to myself a couple of times on the bus home, until people started to look at me.)

‘If you’re not standing still, Graham, you’re going backwards.’

I demonstrated, by coming round the desk and standing there, that this was not true.

This was all spoken in good humour. We had never argued, Howard and I, and we could certainly not afford to start now. I might not share his eternal enthusiasm for the next new thing, but I had heard it said that the more things changed, the more they stayed the same. That was the case with the Hotel Alpha. Howard changed things, and I kept them the same. As far as I could imagine, this was how it would always be.

Caroline, now in her early twenties, was getting married to a doctor who owned a large detached house in Chiswick. As far as Pattie was concerned, this meant she had made it in life, and my attempts to talk about the Alpha tended to sputter out as she anticipated the wedding more and more keenly.

‘Which do you think sounds better: we are honoured that you chose the Alpha, or we are delighted that you chose the Alpha? It’s going to the printers tomorrow.’ We were trooping round the stalls at Greenwich. Antique dealers, themselves on the way to being antique, prowled around their jumbles of mirrors and fireguards and commemorative pin-badges as if any of the gently browsing couples might be about to make off with it all. There was the smell of hamburgers sizzling on the griddle of a grubby van. This place had barely changed in the thirty or so years of Sundays we had been coming. When I took Pattie’s arm in mine, or we wrestled some silly purchase – a coal scuttle, a harp – back to the car, I always felt that we ourselves were unchanged also.

‘Do you think lilac is all right for an autumn wedding? Or too springlike?’

‘Sorry?’

Her eye had been caught by an assembly of frilly, fussy dresses presided over by a woman with a cup of soup. ‘Lilac. For Caroline’s wedding.’

‘Oh.’

I had got so used to answering questions for hotel guests that, if a perfect stranger had come up to me at the reception desk with the same enquiry, I daresay I would have ventured an opinion. With my own wife, though, I was stuck for an answer. I muttered something to the effect that Pattie would look very nice regardless. She tutted and went on talking about the wedding. I went back to thinking about the hotel. We continued down these separate paths, watching as stallholders began to shout that it was the last chance to have a look.

In the days before the wedding, Pattie wore a permanent flush of excitement; she had her hair bobbed and highlighted and she addressed me in terms of endearment which I had thought retired some years before. On the day itself she fussed lovingly over my suit and shirt collar as she had before my Alpha interview. Finally I travelled to the church with Caroline, who was in a white dress that filled most of the back half of the vehicle: a Mercedes very like the Alpha’s. As we neared the church I thought of the portrait her six-year-old self had once painted: ‘My daddy is thin and important, he wears trousers and works in a hotel.’ I had four, then three, then two minutes to tell her how much I loved her and what a wonderful day it would be. Somehow, all I could find to say was ‘nice car, good taste!’ as a feeble sort of joke, and I watched her eyes sink to the floor in disappointment.

At the reception, the talk turned to Howard and Sarah-Jane: they had been invited, but he was in Tokyo and so she was looking after the children. ‘Always lands on his feet, that one, doesn’t he!’ observed Brian, Caroline’s new husband.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘Well. Got the hotel up and running in double-quick time, I hear. After what happened. Triple-quick time.’

There was an implication in his voice which I was fairly sure I disliked. It was his wedding day, however: not the day for an argument; and besides I was not the person for one.

‘I’m not sure I understand you.’

‘Just … I don’t know,’ he said, squeezing Caroline’s arm. ‘I would have thought it’d take longer to rebuild a hotel than that. And I hear he’s actually expanded it.’

‘We have,’ I said, perhaps a touch stiffly. ‘But it hasn’t been a magic trick, I can tell you. Actually, Howard has a saying: a magician—’

‘I’ve always thought,’ Pattie cut in, and I had to steady her wine glass as it threatened to spill onto someone’s toes, ‘I’ve always thought there’s something about that man. Once when we were having dinner, there was talk about affairs or something, some scandal, and he looked down at the table in a very funny way. Do you remember, Graham?’

‘I don’t, I’m afraid, but perhaps it’s the sort of thing I wouldn’t notice. As far as I’m concerned,’ I went on, ‘people can look at tables as much as they like, within reason.’

‘Within reason!’ echoed Brian, slapping me on the back. ‘You’re so deadpan, Graham!’ There was general laughter and I thought it best to leave it there. It was not as if they were entirely wrong, after all. It was not as if Howard were beyond question. But he and I were bound together. He had found me when I was at a loss and built me into the man I was now. Where would I be without him? Languishing miserably in some office, having given mind and body to an army I despised and been put out to pasture. That was where. And so the loyalty I felt towards him took precedence over almost everything else: for better or for worse.

Besides, he had helped us in ways that Pattie was not aware of. That same autumn that Caroline got married, for example, our son Edward was in something of a funk. He had been out of university for some while, not quite settled into anything, was still living with us, and had been turned down for a dozen jobs – most of them after getting to the point of an interview. He was not much of a talker, Ed: he stumbled over words, or repeated them, and there was no mistaking that this was preventing him from being hired. Before an interview for a travel-agent job, he became particularly anxious.

‘If only I, if only I … I would love to work in travel,’ he said one night in the Alpha Bar. He had bony shoulders and a long spine; in his boyhood Pattie never tired of saying how like me he was. As I looked at him now, eyes turned dolefully down to his beer glass, I could remember with absolute clarity how it felt to be like him, uncertain of my direction.

‘It would be perfect,’ I confided later to Howard, ‘if only he could master interviews. It’s a pity you aren’t in charge of the travel agency, or he’d just have to walk into the road.’

Howard grinned.‘Has he tried having interview training or anything like that?’

‘It’s a bit late for all that,’ I said. ‘It’s this week.’

‘Well.’ Howard put down his glass and drummed on his knees with that energy a project always gave him. ‘Let’s see if we can make it happen.’

He had me drive him the next day to the travel agency in Finchley. I sat in the Mercedes for twenty minutes or so. He emerged with one of his schoolboy grins and told me not to ask any questions. Three days later Ed phoned me. He had got the job and was thrilled. I did not ask any questions.

That time at the beginning of the nineteen-nineties, when Ella had just been appointed, I recall now as the golden age of the Alpha. It is one thing to succeed in the first place, but quite another to emerge from the shadow cast by a tragedy as we did. Agatha and I worked together like lifelong conspirators. I reeled off the train times, I directed people to obscure restaurants, returned lost property, found out the results of overseas football matches. Agatha helped the man bring in the newspapers, carrying the pile on her head; she counselled a young man in the smoking room who was upset about some lady and threatening to throw himself off the top balcony. After a whisky with her, he reconsidered his plans and ended up going home with somebody else.

All this time we carried on guessing the gender of the next person to check in, and I kept the running score on a page at the back of the guest ledger – which, once more, was always full to capacity.

And then there was Ella. On the day she arrived for their first session, Chas paced the atrium for hours. He asked for the papers to be read to him, as usual, but hardly seemed to take anything in. Instead he was preoccupied with what he did not know. ‘What if she asks about the Ancient Romans? I only remember about three of the emperors. I can’t even remember their dates. I know they ate dormice and that’s about it.’

‘Funny idea to do that!’ said Agatha. ‘Rather have beef!’

This sort of thing went on all morning.

‘What if there’s some really easy sum like twelve sixteens,’ he lamented, running a hand through his hair which had grown rather thick and floppy like Howard’s, ‘and I panic and she thinks I’m stupid and makes me sing songs?’

It was only at lunchtime that Howard put a stop to this. ‘Now, look, mate,’ he said firmly. ‘You’re not going to get the Spanish Inquisition.’

‘I don’t even know what that is,’ Chas said.

‘Ella,’ said Howard, ‘is not here to test you. She knows already you’re the real deal. Right, Captain?’

‘Oh, she went on and on about you the other week,’ Sarah-Jane confirmed. ‘She loves you. I mean – not like we love you. But she thinks you’re marvellous.’

‘Which you are,’ Howard said.

By the time Ella arrived, Chas seemed more confident, though he was still practically hopping about as she reported to the desk.

‘Welcome back to Hotel Alpha!’ said Agatha.

‘Thank you for coming,’said Chas, and added: ‘I see we’re in for a ’92 election.’

‘Sorry?’ Ella bit her lip.

‘They think the Tories will put it off till ’92,’ Chas informed her.

‘Gosh,’ said Ella, ‘you’re well ahead of me.’

She was a very pretty young woman, with dark hair which she had dyed blonde, not entirely convincingly. She gave us a friendly wink and followed Chas into the Yorks’ quarters.

‘Your perfume is very strong,’ he said.

‘Oh dear,’ Ella laughed, ‘I may have overdone it.’ Chas said something else, and the two of them went off laughing like old friends.

Almost from that moment it was as if Ella had pressed some button to transform Chas on the spot. She herself seemed just as happy, too: as well she might be, with what Howard was paying her. When they emerged from their lessons, they were always laughing. Chas no longer walked as if he were a soap-bubble and there were spikes all around.

That winter, a number of countries declared independence from the Soviet Union, which meant new capitals whose announcement Chas awaited with glee. A night came, a fortnight or so before Christmas, which was so cold we might have been in Russia ourselves. The bar and restaurant were down to a few late, low-volume lingerers: Mike Swan, the hotel critic, was spinning off travel anecdotes to a group of rapt hoteliers. In the smoking room was a depressed board-game inventor who was struggling to repeat the successes of his early career.

‘I’ve tried everything,’ he told me. ‘I’ve just designed a game where you’re a farmer and have to graduate from a smallholding to a full business supplying supermarkets. I mean, who wouldn’t want to play that?’

‘It sounds terrific fun,’ I succeeded in agreeing. ‘Best of luck with it.’

We did a lot of wishing people luck, I mused on my way out; sometimes it seemed to come true, and sometimes of course we never saw them again. At its first contact with my face, the grip of the night air quickly bullied all such thoughts away. It took a couple of crucial moments to retighten the scarf round my neck; as I reached the stop, I could see my bus pulling away. I scuttled down a side road towards an alternative stop. The shelter was crowded. A young man spat gum onto the pavement an inch from my shoes, and another held a Walkman which sent music hissing distractingly through his headphones. It took a few moments to notice, among this murky assembly, a buxom woman huddled in the corner.

‘Why I’m seeing you here, but never before!’ said Agatha with pleasure.

I explained the situation. ‘How long does it take to get back to Hornchurch from here?’

Agatha grinned. ‘Hour, maybe hour and a half. I got the Bible. There’s plenty of it to go. There’ a multitude of pages, man.’

It would be two or three separate buses, and there were people on some of these buses you would not want to spend an hour and a half with. I looked past her smile to the weary, rumpled figure I had seen before she noticed me.

‘Why don’t I get the Mercedes and drive you home?’

We headed back to the Alpha, where the overnight valet brought the Mercedes out of its sleep. As I eased it out onto the road, Agatha leaned forward and touched the gleaming dashboard as gingerly as if it were china. ‘Lovely car. Winston, my boy, he wanted to have a Mercedes. I look into buying him one.’ She laughed. ‘But we had to choose a bicycle instead.’

After the rare mention of her son, we drove in unaccustomed silence. A turn-off next to a clump of winter-wasted trees brought us out by a housing block, the sort put up in a hurry in the aftermath of war. In the entrance hall it was dead dark. ‘Light’s gone a little time ago,’ Agatha apologized. The smell of urine slunk in the stair well as I followed her; I had to put out an arm against the wall, like Chas. We came to a door in a warped frame which opened into a single, nearly empty room. Adjacent was a kitchen barely bigger than the Alpha’s lifts.

‘Bathroom is upstair. People share.’

She made tea while I sat on a patched-up sofa. Music of a violent kind throbbed through the ceiling above. The radiator produced the occasional clanking noise but offered no heat. A silver-framed photograph showed Winston in his fatigues, offering a twinkling grin. There was a horror in knowing what the smiling boy in the picture did not. Perhaps it was this that spurred me on.

‘Look here, Agatha,’ I said, gesturing about me. ‘This is not good enough. I mean – and I hate to be so frank – but for what we pay you … ’

‘Me and Winston live here when he first went in the army,’ said Agatha. ‘I had a job, you see, not far from here. I don’ like to leave it just now.’

But it was more than a decade since Winston had been killed in Belfast. As I returned the Mercedes to its foxhole, and then climbed finally onto the bus to Muswell Hill, the image of the squalid little flat was still in front of my eyes. Pattie was long asleep as I visited the fridge for my ham. I undressed in the dark and lay wide awake next to her, thinking about the army, about having my clothes thrown in the creek as a prank, being called a piece of s--- for finishing last in a running race. I imagined with an almost physical pain how I would feel if Ed disappeared into such a place and never returned.

That beaten-up frame reminded me of Room 25 on our second floor. Though it was a perfectly ordinary room, it had always been the scene of odd happenings. A member of the Rolling Stones had hidden from the police in the wardrobe there; one of our chambermaids had fallen in love with a guest after mistakenly taking a room-service tray; and most recently a man had slammed the door with such force that it came off its hinges. The door was still not quite right, and so I tended not to put guests in 25 these days. I had once recently made it available to Ella when she’d asked, somewhat shiftily, if there was anywhere she could use to ‘entertain a friend’. I had told her afterwards that if the unnamed gentleman ever visited again, she only had to ask for the key. And now I saw an opportunity to put it to good use again.

‘Listen,’ I suggested one evening, half an hour before Agatha was due to leave. ‘Why don’t you clock off now and go for … well, have a sit-down, or a bath, perhaps?’

The way I proposed it, awkwardly and out of nowhere, she was certain to laugh. ‘What you’re talking about? Where the bath, man? It’s wrapped under the Christmas tree?’

‘This room is all yours,’ I said, handing over the chunky key. ‘Help yourself.’

‘Don’ be preposterous,’ she said. ‘You check Howard about this?’

‘Oh, he won’t mind,’ I said, waving her away with the sort of expansive arm movement you might have associated with the man himself. I watched her sashay through the atrium towards the back staircase with the particular momentum she had: ungainly yet possessed of a certain elegance, an inevitability, you might say. She looked back once, just before going out of my sight, and gave me a dazzling smile.

It is hard to say why it felt as if there were something covert about this, and why I gradually began to act that way. There is no doubt Howard would have approved if I had told him: the hotel’s history was full of gestures like this. But he was away somewhere, and so I did not. Agatha stayed in Room 25 the next night, and the next. By Christmas this had become a fairly regular occurrence. Agatha never assumed that it would continue forever, and even if she had, it really amounted to nothing. Nobody was losing out. A room not suitable for guests was being used by someone who needed it. That was all.

All the same, it meant that now there was a secret. I had harboured a few secrets for Howard in my time, but never in twenty-seven years kept one from him. This seemed an innocuous way to end that record. It was one person in one room. But of course every room in a hotel is connected to every other.

The Alpha had always had its own moods. It absorbed the various excitements and fears of the individuals under its roof and exhaled a mixture of them all. If there were a shocking or momentous news event, I could very often sense it without even leaving my desk. Something in the quality of the chatter from the bar and balconies, even the texture of the light as it streamed through the roof’s glass panel and drifted about the atrium, seemed to change.

On Christmas Eve the mood was always somewhat restless; everyone was anxious to be somewhere else. Howard and Sarah-Jane spent the day putting up decorations at homeless shelters. Salvation Army singers appeared in the morning, and vanished again. In the afternoon we had the carols from King’s College playing in the bar. By four or five most guests had checked out and gone to King’s Cross or down to Waterloo, to be freighted across the country to their families. And on Christmas Day itself, all that remained in the hotel – apart from the Yorks themselves – would be a lonely sprinkling of strangers: visitors to London from foreign cultures, perhaps, or people with a reason to avoid the festivities. A couple of years ago a lady had stayed with us on Christmas Day to take revenge on her unfaithful husband. She lasted until five o’clock before Sarah-Jane found her sobbing in the bar and took her into their home for turkey sandwiches.

This year, Howard had planned an event for Boxing Day. The atrium would host two hundred people: fifty or so wealthy invited guests, and the remainder made up of homeless people. During the event, Howard would hold a whip-round in which the rich people would pay for the poor by means of an auction of worthless items which they were encouraged to bid excessive amounts for. As usual, I had my doubts about all this; as usual, I threw myself into preparations, telephoning the man at Fortnum & Mason to order food, and using my joke about the postcode. We went through our biannual review of the news.

‘Terrible business about that chap in New Zealand who went mad with a gun.’

‘Terrible.’

‘Not sure I trust that Yeltsin, do you?’

‘Well, time will tell.’

‘Hotel very much back in business?’

‘Bigger and better than ever.’

‘Well, I shall speak to you some time next year.’

When I put the receiver down, it was nine o’clock: I headed for the smoking room for a glass of whisky. But this year, somebody had beaten me to it: music was wafting from behind the frosted glass of the door, and inside, Agatha was jigging about the place. The song was about diamonds on somebody’s shoes. She put out an arm as if offering me a dance in some long-gone era of politesse. She was wearing a billowing black dress with a plunging necklace; her breasts swung boulder-like behind it.

‘I don’t know the song, I’m afraid … ’

Agatha put a finger to my lips for a moment, as Pattie used to do, and began to steer me, diagonally like a chess bishop, in a waltz. My cheeks were warm. When the dance was over, we looked at each other. My face reddened with her scrutiny.

‘Thank you so much for the room,’ she said. ‘So nice.’

She leaned to grasp my arm again as a new song began, one about Africa. I broke free with a little more force than I had intended. Agatha looked put out for a second; then she resumed her dancing, thrusting out her hips and belly, the aliveness of her seeming to fill the room entirely. I poured out a drink and sat in the corner armchair, glancing up every now and again to see her moving as if there were a hundred other dancers in the room.

By the following afternoon I had ensured this was as far from my mind as all the rest of the year’s business with Agatha. I certainly did not care to think about how she was spending the day, alone in that single room in the east of the city.

In our house all was very much as usual. Pattie began chopping vegetables almost before dawn; the smell of roasting meat filled the hall. Caroline and Brian arrived at noon. There was a game of charades, something Ed normally enjoyed because of its generally non-verbal nature; but this time he got into a terrible tangle trying to mime a film. He threw his hands around, seemed to be pedalling a bicycle, to be climbing something. The living room descended into greater and greater hysteria.

‘What the hell is it!’ Caroline managed to say, her face streaming.

‘Oh, good heavens,’ said Ed in mock chagrin, ‘it’s Around the World in 80 Days. I was miming the Pyramids, the Colosseum, the Sydney Opera House … ’ – and that was as much as he could explain before everyone disintegrated into mirth again. ‘I suppose, I suppose – I suppose it was a little ambitious,’ said Ed, laughing as much as anyone else.

Later, in the soporific lull between dinner and dessert, Caroline announced that she had ‘something to share’. I felt Pattie stiffen; her hand crept under the white tablecloth to perch on my knee. The news was what she had desperately hoped to hear.

‘You are going to be grandparents!’ said Caroline.

This was a festive announcement, all right! I got to my feet and applauded as if we were at the Proms and slapped Brian on the back and finally took Caroline by the arm.

‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘even if I haven’t always been the most exciting father, I shall be a decent gramps.’

‘Oh, Dad,’ said Caroline, a little tearful. ‘You’ve been wonderful, and you’ll be wonderful again.’

That night, of course, Pattie talked of nothing else. Did I think they would have a boy or a girl? (It was difficult to say at this point, I told her.) Ought we to make Ed’s room into a nursery, or wait until we knew what colour it should be? What sort of names might they go for? (Again, I felt this depended upon the gender.) Did I fancy they would have more children after this one?

If I could have seen the future, I would have told her: he will be called Christopher, he will be a boy of placid temperament, straight hair, studious bearing, a little like a young Chas; he will love coming to visit us, playing a board game featuring hippos which requires us all to pound away at levers, his favourite food will be jam sandwiches, and he will make us both as proud as Punch. The present was my business, though, not the future. I lay looking at the ceiling, registering with something like guilt my impatience to be back at the Alpha, ready for the big event.

I caught a bus very early in the morning. Agatha was already there; I shuddered to think what time she had left home. While the rest of London woke to a grey sluggishness, to hangover and anticlimax, the Alpha was bracing itself for action. We jam-packed the atrium with long tables fetched up from the cellar; ran strings of fairy lights around the balconies. Well before the notional start time of twelve o’clock, the needy had begun to arrive. Their faces were ruddy with burst veins, or else sallow almost to the point of transparency; they had missing teeth, yellowed fingers; they smelled of cigarettes and drink and of lives lived against the grain. They sang lustily and swore and belched. The wealthy guests arrived later and we ushered them to the bar, where they were glad-handed by Howard and peeped out nervously at the uproar.

Chas’s favourite Christmas present had come from Ella: it was a program which allowed the computer to speak in a human voice. It meant that he could type words and have them read back to him, and so judge how accurate he had been.

‘I spent the whole of Christmas Day experimenting with it,’ he told me.

‘Yes, the rest of your presents might as well not have existed, eh?’ said Sarah-Jane, patting Chas’s head. Something in the quality of her smile – a certain restraint, a bottled frustration – made me fear suddenly for Ella. Sarah-Jane might not have been Chas’s mother to begin with, but she certainly felt that way now, and she would not look kindly on a rival. Ella had done a marvellous job of getting Chas to trust her. Now she had to ensure it was not too good a job. There were things she still did not understand about the Hotel Alpha.

At about one, everyone sat down for a meal. The noise of all the diners, full-throated and anarchic, wafted up towards the skylight. Cutlery was dropped; toasts were proposed, songs sung, and when Howard rose to give an after-dinner speech there was a loud, ragged cheer which made Chas beam and Sarah-Jane roll her eyes.

After this came the auction. The first lot was a porcelain toilet-roll holder which looked like a dog, and bore the inscription Dogs leave pawprints on your heart .

‘Let’s start with five hundred,’ Howard hectored. ‘Am I bid five hundred? I am, because I’m going to bid it myself! Five hundred f---ing quid! For this piece of c--p! Which I already own, people!’

There was a lot more of this bravado, and everybody got caught up in it, myself included: I hardly even noticed the colourful language. Howard’s audacity teased seven hundred pounds out of Mike Swan, who went up in his green jacket to collect the ‘prize’, while the audience whistled and whooped. Swan came back to join me at the top table, grinning at his own rashness.

‘Seven hundred pounds!’ I marvelled.

‘Luckily,’ he said, ‘the old Guide is paying me pretty well at the moment. As long as people keep wanting to stay in hotels, I shouldn’t come to regret this. Mind you,’ he added, ‘not sure why I bought something for the home. Hotels are my home.’

‘I don’t see much wrong with that,’ I remarked.

The shows of extravagance escalated; there was a pair of lederhosen which fetched nearly a thousand despite the manifest falseness of Howard’s claim that they had been worn by Mozart. Howard was in his element here: he bathed in the audience’s laughter, looking bigger and taller and more youthful every minute. Then, as he embarked on a particularly outrageous auction – a ghastly full-length portrait of a nude by a talentless artist which brought ribald hollers from the onlookers – there was a strange electronic noise. Agatha and I looked at each other, puzzled. The noise had the insistent rhythm of an alarm.

‘Hello?’ said someone loudly into the falling quiet.

We scanned the atrium until we could see the speaker. It was Lara Krohl, the South African now charged with various mysterious operations to do with publicizing the hotel. She had produced from her handbag an item about the length of a brick, though somewhat thinner. It appeared to be a walkie-talkie.

‘I’m at the Alpha. Yah, at Howard’s thing,’ she said, seemingly quite indifferent to the curious looks of the crowd. ‘I’ll call you back.’

She lowered the gadget from her ear and put it back in her bag, meeting the room’s stare without embarrassment.

‘I think after that,’ said Howard, ‘a pretty big bid would be appropriate … ’

Lara Krohl raised her hands in a show of good nature and made a huge offer, which was instantly matched by Howard. The two of them traded friendly insults across the room and the carnival went on. Agatha shook her head and, partly in jest, grasped the little crucifix brooch pinned to her blouse.

‘I’ never seen a telephone quite o’ that kind! You, Graham?’

I confirmed I had not. ‘And if it means that people can hold their private conversations wherever they like – well, I’m not sure I want to see it again, either, thank you.’

Agatha nodded and rolled her eyes. But most people there, I felt, had not seen the incident for what it was: an intrusion. They had looked at the portable telephone and wondered, not why anyone would wish to interrupt the whole room in such a manner, but: how can I get one of those?