‘Gentlemen. What can I get you?’
‘Drunk, fast.’
My first day, my first customers. Two London journalists with an hour to put in before the taxi took them to the airport. They had been in Belfast three days and had seen, they said, all they could bear to see sober. Eager to please, I served them doubles, neat, refilling their glasses the instant they were empty. If I say so myself, I got them drunk very fast indeed. I got them close to paralytic. As I was helping one of them to the door, he turned his lolling head towards my face.
‘Where the fuck are we?’
‘The International.’
‘What the fuck is that?’
‘It’s a hotel. In Belfast.’
The journalist missed his footing; his eyes struggled to focus. ‘How the fucking hell did we end up here?’
Would you like the short answer, I wanted to say, or the long answer? All the same, I could see his point.
* * *
I search my memory, but I have no firm recollection of ever having set eyes on the International Hotel before the June day I first resisted the temptation to click my heels at the top of the front steps and asked the small woman with the red-rimmed eyes behind reception to direct me to the manager’s office.
‘Marian,’ she said and blew her nose. ‘Don’t mind me. I’m not always like this.’
The interview was nothing like as terrifying as I had expected; it was scarcely an interview in the proper sense of the word at all. Mr Rogan, the Master, as I would soon learn to call him, was sombre and distracted. Several times while I was in the room the phone rang. The Master listened in silence.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I appreciate your phoning.’
And after each call he sat for a moment staring at his desk, before rousing himself and shifting papers.
‘Where had we got to?’
Nowhere in particular, and we might have remained there the rest of the day had not Len Gray arrived, late and apologetic, and asked to see my reference. He ran his eyes down the page, gnawing on a rag nail.
‘I’d like him to start tomorrow,’ he said.
The Master nodded. The phone rang. Len and I slipped away.
‘You know we’re desperate,’ Len said when we were outside the door. ‘Clive or no Clive, that’s the only reason I’m taking you on.’
I say I had never seen the hotel before (come to think of it, I had never till then seen the back of the City Hall), but I had heard of it. In the previous few days, in fact, the whole country had heard of the International so often that my parents had serious doubts when Clive White got in touch through a neighbour telling them what he had found for me. Tragedy has a way of tainting a place.
And necessity has a way of overcoming most reservations in the end.
‘What else am I going to do?’ I asked my parents.
Andy and Edna, I think, were shocked, not by my insistence so much as by the simple unaccustomed fact of my voice. I was shocked. I said more to them that evening after the interview than I did in the course of an average year. Well, I didn’t say much beyond that one sentence, but I said it over and over.
‘OK, OK,’ my father said finally.
He switched on the television as if to signal that from now on we would leave talking to people who were paid to do it, thank you.
‘We are happy,’ my mother whispered to me. ‘As long as it’s what you really want.’
Oh, it was what I wanted all right. My initial impressions of the International may have been brief – the atmosphere more than a little subdued – but they were enough to seduce me entirely. The rich pile of the carpets, the drapes dripping reds and golds, the vast ceilings, the chandeliers, the sheer unnecessariness of it all … how could a young man fail to be impressed?
Exactly.
I am told that the Savoy Hotel in London takes its name from the count who built his palace on that very site in the Middle Ages, and that in Paris and Rome many old palaces themselves were converted to hotels when their owners hit hard times. It was this lingering opulent quality I had fallen in love with. Forget the cinema – or picture palace, as my parents still sometimes referred to it – in a hotel you could act out the fantasy yourself.
The Union Hotel was the first hotel in Ireland to offer hot and cold running water in every room.
So Nancy O’Connor said. Nancy O’Connor worked in the Union as a chambermaid in the years before the Great War, though long before that she remembered Annie Owens, the hotel’s proprietor, coming with Mary, her cook, into St George’s Market, where Nancy’s mother had a stall, and personally overseeing the buying of vegetables.
‘I saw her many’s the time give back a solitary potato out of a couple of stone because she didn’t like the look of it.’
This would have been 1903 or 1904, for Nancy was not yet ten. The Union then was a small affair, little more than a private house with extra beds for guests. Priests, a lot of them, and the odd commercial traveller from across the water. When Nancy went to work there six years later there were eight rooms and four staff living in the hotel along with Annie and her two younger brothers, who had come north with her from the family home in County Kilkenny. The ground-floor lounge was already there, much as it was when I knew it, and there was a small bar on the first landing in which Annie would sit for a strict hour every evening and talk to her gentlemen guests about affairs of Church, State or marketplace as required.
‘An hour was all she dared allow herself,’ Nancy said. ‘Annie Owens could have run rings round the lot of them if she’d been bothered.’
In time, Nancy married the night boots, a Scot named Ross, and took a house in Little May Street, a minute’s walk from the hotel. Within weeks she was pregnant. She left Annie Owens’s employ and, though it was not her intention, never went out to work again. The war was on. Ross joined up and was killed in the Crimea with peace already declared (Nancy never did understand exactly where the Crimea was, still less what her husband had been doing there), leaving Nancy with two small boys to bring up on her own. The first died in infancy, the second survived only as long as the start of the next war, lost when the liner on which he was a waiter was sunk in the north Atlantic. In between times Nancy had a third child, a girl, Violet, whose father’s name she never divulged. The girl was born blind and palsied, a punishment, some said, behind Nancy’s back. Nancy got to hear what they were saying anyway. TCs, she would whisper in Violet’s ear when they passed such people on the street: Twisted Christians; and mother and daughter would laugh like sisters.
Others, more open, advised her to give the child over to an institution, but Nancy would not be parted from her. For nearly thirty years she devoted her waking hours to Violet’s care. They kept little other company, but one afternoon a week walked together the short distance to the Union Hotel where they took tea in the private rooms of Nancy’s former employer.
Throughout this time, the Union had continued to grow in size and reputation. Another floor was added, an adjacent property annexed: every couple of years, Nancy said – more renovations. Annie Owens’s brothers were long gone from the hotel, successful businessmen now in their own right; a nephew was climbing the ladder in Washington DC on his way to becoming an aide to President Eisenhower. Annie Owens herself had become a woman of wealth and standing and counted among her friends several bishops and a cardinal who presented her with his own ring in recognition of her steadfast loyalty to the Church. Yet in spite of her devoutness she never once passed judgement on Nancy. Judgement was for God alone and Annie Owens’s God, Nancy liked to think, had more serious matters to concern himself with than a young mother, deprived of a husband, looking for solace.
Violet and Annie Owens died within a week of each other in the summer of 1950. The Union Hotel passed to Annie’s eldest brother. Nancy was fifty-six years old, but felt as though she had lived three lives. For want of anything better to do, she took to drink. She said she thought it would either fill her days or end them. Hugh, who was working then in the Kitchen Bar on Victoria Square, remembered her at that time as a very loud drunk with a fondness for young men to whom she would attach herself, often physically, and offer her services in return for a large gin. Services which, Hugh was happy to report, in defence of mankind, or that portion of it which frequented the Kitchen Bar, were never availed of, though endless drinks were stood her.
If you threw her out one door, she would come straight back in the other. This could go on for hours. The Kitchen Bar regulars dubbed her Yo-YO’Connor. The staff, eventually, left her alone.
In time, Hugh went as senior barman to a house on the Stewartstown Road, several miles distant from Nancy’s haunts, and gradually ceased to hear reports of her. He had long since written her off as dead when he walked in for his first shift in the International to find her dozing over a bottle of stout in the corner of the Blue Bar. She had come back, she told him, to where she had been happiest. In fact, she was sitting in what, in her day, had been a neighbouring warehouse.
The intervening years had calmed her somewhat, though she was still an old soak. She was three years older again and virtually pickled when I started work there and she adopted me.
‘You don’t have to pretend with me,’ were the first words she addressed to me: ‘Nancy knows.’
I pretended, anyway, that I didn’t know what she could possibly know. Late at night, however, leaving the Blue Bar, she would pause, unsteadily, at the door and sing to me. Always the same song, always ‘Danny Boy’. It had been sung to me before, of course, but never with such subversive delight. Coming from Nancy’s mouth, the calling of the pipes was unambiguous, at least to my reddening ears. To everyone else her cracked performance was just another big bar-laugh, my discomfort no more nor less than anyone else’s being serenaded by a seventy-two-year-old lush. Which was why, though Nancy died, inevitably, if mercifully suddenly, something under two months after I met her, the Danny Boy tag stuck fast.
Nancy, I think, sometimes mixed things up; made them up, even. Certainly she never told me the same story, the same way, twice. But she told me this story and swore to me it was true. During the war, the English traitor Lord Haw Haw named the Union in one of his broadcasts from Germany. British morale was crumbling, he claimed, disaffection was rife, and, as if to prove it, in Belfast the IRA were meeting in the Union Hotel to plot against the detested Churchill government. Actually, the only people Nancy could remember meeting in the hotel in those days were a group of writers, reds a lot of them, she didn’t doubt, but it was the Nazis themselves, not the British, they wanted brought down.
One night the writers had as a guest speaker a minister of the Czech government in exile, and at the end of his talk Annie Owens presented him with a Czechoslovakian flag – in Belfast, in the middle of a world war – so that Nancy wondered if there wasn’t a cupboard somewhere in Annie’s rooms stocked with the flags of every country on God’s earth against just such an eventuality. Tears welled in the man’s eyes as he took his seat. Tears welled in Nancy’s as she told me.
When the war ended and the communists came to power in his country, the minister killed himself by jumping from a balcony of the government palace. Annie Owens lit candles in St Malachy’s church. The Soviets spread stories about the dead man of course, called him a bourgeois reactionary, an enemy of the people; all the usual names. A week before she died, Annie Owens told Nancy she had never ceased imagining the poor man leaping to his death, clutching the flag she had given him, like a useless parachute.
Nancy couldn’t be sure that this episode had anything to do with it, but, if you asked her, Annie Owens was never quite the same woman after the war. The Union itself seemed altered, certainly its reputation plummeted. Perhaps it was just age, perhaps for all the renovations it had simply not been able to keep up with changing times.
Long afterwards, though, Nancy couldn’t help wondering whether Lord Haw Haw wasn’t in some way connected with the funny name the hotel had begun to acquire in certain parts of the city.
The danger with propaganda after all is that some people will hear in it what they believe in any case to be true.
*
If only I’d known some of this on my first day, I might have earned myself a half-decent tip from those drunken London journalists before they fell into their taxi and out of my life for ever.
Next!