Читать книгу: «Invisible»

one

It was an afternoon in late summer, Edward remembers, and they walked through a wood until they came to a circle of sunlit grass in the midst of tall ferns. The picnic was laid out on the scratchy plaid rug, and when their parents had fallen asleep Charlotte took his hand and they wandered off, along a path through the bracken. At the top of a hill they came upon a track of packed earth that had a ridge of matted grass and dandelions running down the middle. One side of the track was bordered by a high wall, which they followed. Walking two or three steps behind his sister, he dragged his fingertips on the blocks of stone. When a motorbike came along she stood beside him as it passed, and put a hand over his face to protect his eyes from the dust. At an angle of the wall there was a wide iron gate, and beyond the gate lay vast beds of scarlet flowers, on both sides of a wide white path that rose towards a pale yellow building. She left him by the gate and walked a short distance up the path, between child-sized shapes that might have been urns or animals. Her footsteps made a loud crunching noise, he remembers, and the building reared up like a castle in fog.

He lets go of the iron gate and begins to walk up the gravel driveway, staying close to its edge. After half a dozen paces he strikes a heavy object. He reaches forward, and touches, at the height of his waist, a curved surface of pitted stone or concrete. His hand reads the grooves of a mane, protruberant eyes, a jaw of granular teeth. He walks on, up the shallow gradient, to a flight of three low steps which conducts him between columns of finely grained stone to a glass door, open. Standing in the doorway, he waits for someone to speak, but his querying cough receives no answer. He advances, treading on polished tiles. The sound of his shoes is absorbed by a space that sounds broad and tall, like the foyer of a town hall or law court. Twenty paces straight ahead, or more, bring him to the foot of a wide carpeted staircase. Plates are being stacked in a distant room, to his left. A sweep of his cane to one side finds empty floor, then an obstruction: a high desk, with a glass-cowled lamp and a bell. He folds his cane, slots it into a jacket pocket, and smacks the bell lightly. As the chime vanishes into the high ceiling he hears a hiss, the hiss of a door’s draught excluder, followed by footsteps, approaching rapidly on a wooden floor. High above him, at his back, a woman’s voice says: ‘Hello? Hello? Wait, please.’ Startled, he turns to face the source of the call, and the footsteps are coming into the hall. A man speaks his name.

‘Mr Morton?’ the man says, ‘I’m so sorry. I thought someone was at the desk.’

‘Not to worry.’

‘I do apologise.’

‘Only this instant arrived.’

‘It’s remiss of us. I didn’t hear the taxi.’

‘He left me at the gate.’

‘Really? That’s –’

‘At my request.’

‘Ah,’ says the man, and from the dragging of the vowel it is clear that he has scrutinised him and understood. A large sheet of paper is turned, and another. ‘Good journey?’

‘Not bad. On time, more or less.’

‘Good, good,’ he says, writing with a harsh nib. ‘And no problem getting a taxi?’

‘None at all.’ High up behind him, near where the woman’s voice came from, an aerosol gushes.

‘Now, we have a single room reserved for you, on the second floor. But if you’d prefer there’s a double on the first floor. A very nice room, large. I can offer it to you at no extra charge.’

‘That’s kind of you, but I don’t need a lot of space. Just a bed and a bath and a table for my laptop,’ he says, hoisting the bag in which he carries it.

‘Well, there’s a small table in the single, a bureau in the double. I would recommend the double, Mr Morton. It’s an extremely comfortable room and very quiet. I’m afraid we don’t have air-conditioning. You knew that? With this weather we could do with it, but we just have the breeze.’

‘I prefer the breeze.’

‘Good, good. So the double it is?’

‘Thank you, Mr –?’

‘Forgive me. Caldecott, Malcolm Caldecott. The manager. Pleased to meet you.’

‘Likewise.’ He holds out his hand and Mr Caldecott takes it, giving a grip that is firm and brisk. Someone wearing steel-tipped shoes approaches and halts at the desk, brushing his sleeves with gloved hands. ‘One other thing, Mr Caldecott. Is it possible to send e-mail from my room?’

‘It is, yes. David here will show you.’ A key clinks, being detached from its hook. ‘David will take your bags up. The lift is very close.’

‘I’d rather take the stairs. You know where you are with a staircase, if you see what I mean.’

Ascending the staircase behind the porter, he slides a palm on the curving handrail, which has the coolness and smoothness of naked metal and is interrupted by a stout column of glossy stone, marble probably, and resumes with a tight angle that steers him round to a landing, where they pass through a fume of furniture polish. ‘This way,’ says David, turning left into a corridor where the air is considerably warmer than in the hall and has a dusty tang. ‘Here we are,’ he announces.

A lock grinds and snaps, and a freshening waft of rose scent arrives. He rests his hand on wallpaper that is embossed with a florid pattern and slightly greasy. A hand gently hooks his other cuff to draw him forward.

‘OK,’ says David, uncertainly. ‘Well, what you have here, sir, basically, is the bed over here, in the middle of the room, against the wall.’ David pats a quilt three times and moves further away. ‘Over here is the bathroom.’ Another door opens, making a soft boom, and now there is cooler air, which has a weak glassy smell in which there is an element of bleach. ‘Right. OK. Well, basically what you’ve got, sir,’ he continues, his voice amplified by the bare room, ‘is the basin on your left. It comes out quite a way, and the bath on your right, yes, a bit more, that’s it. And then there’s quite a gap, a bin there, careful sir, yes, and right down the end here, towel rail there, and down the end here there’s the toilet,’ and as if to prove its existence he flushes it, with a clank like an ancient water pump.

When the presentation of the room has been completed and the computer plugged in, he unpacks his clothes and eats half of one of the sandwiches he made this morning. He switches the laptop on and immediately switches it off again. Still wearing his jacket, he lies on the bed. His outstretched hands do not reach the edge of the mattress, nor do his feet. The smooth fat pillow subsides slowly under his head, exhaling a fragrance of pristine linen. He flips the face of his watch: it is not yet six o’clock. He is unaccountably tired, but he should at least attempt to work. ‘Garzoncello scherzoso’, the phrase that pestered him intermittently all morning, appears in his mind again, pursued by the English words: playful boy; playful lad; larking lad; lively lad. He drowses in the humid air, while the words circle ceaselessly, like flies: lively boy; scamp; lively lad; boy.

Cleaning the mirrors on the balcony, Eloni wonders if the man who has just arrived is somebody important, because there was something important about the way he held his head, in the manner of someone who is used to being treated respectfully. The dark glasses made him look frightening, and it seemed from his expression that he was still annoyed that there was nobody at the desk to greet him, or perhaps David had annoyed him in some way. His slow, stiff-backed walk was like a soldier’s walk, but his hair was longer than a soldier’s would be, and the soft bulge of his belly above his belt wasn’t like a soldier, and his clothes were too messy for a soldier. His shoes were covered in dust, and his denim shirt was black with sweat around the collar. And would a soldier wear a crumpled jacket or have a big brown stain on his sleeve? He is interesting but perhaps not nice, she concludes, whisking the duster once more over the head of Prince Albert, then she hears the double peep of the butcher’s van.

The driver’s surly face, when he sees her hurrying towards him, does not change at all. Reluctantly he climbs down to open the back doors. The hinges crack when he pulls at the handles, making him scowl more sourly. Without a word he hands her the parcels of meat, piling them into her arms without once looking her in the eye. In all the time she has been here, he has spoken not a single complete sentence to her; he has never asked her name, and she does not know his. He pokes a crumpled invoice under the string of the top parcel and turns his back, which has a stripe of sweat right down it.

‘Thank you,’ she says to the stripe.

The driver pushes the doors shut with a slap of both hands. He gives one of them a shove with a shoulder to be sure, and a sound is knocked out of him by the effort: ‘Yup.’

‘Goodbye,’ she says, as the driver gives the door another bang with his shoulder. Clamping her chin on the invoice, she turns round slowly and almost walks into Mr Caldecott, who takes half the packets from her and comes with her to the kitchen.

When she has finished putting the meat into the refrigerator he looks at her directly and tells her again that he is asking about work. ‘But you understand, I can’t promise anything. It’s –’

‘I understand,’ she tells him.

‘I’ll do what I can, Eloni,’ he says. He gives her today’s thin envelope of money.

‘Yes,’ she replies, looking at her watch. She will be late if she doesn’t leave now. Over Mr Caldecott’s shoulder a long string of cobweb hangs from the underside of a rack of pans, with a blue-grey clot of web dangling at its end. ‘Thank you,’ she says.

From a chair by the window Malcolm contemplates the Randall Room, where William Randall was stabbed by his wife one afternoon. And it was in this room that Miss Lavinia Sergeant, the celebrated actress, caused a scandal by attending a song recital without a male escort, a scandal she compounded by smoking a cigarette when the concert was over. He gets up to look at the poppies at the ploughman’s feet and at the shepherdess in the oak grove behind him, whose face is the face of Lily Corbin. She never fails to cheer him up, this girl, with her look of guileless invitation, but will anyone pay any attention to her in years to come, he asks himself, if nobody knows her story?

He wanders back to his office, where the prospectus for the Beltram Highlands Development lies on his desk. An aerial photograph on the cover shows a slender valley strewn with computer-generated bunkers and greens that resemble a string of cartoon amoebas, swimming around the hotel and its lake. Inside, in the computer-generated bar of Scotland’s premier golf resort, a superb selection of single-malt whiskies is provided for the Beltram Highlands’ clientele – the decision makers, the high-flyers, the people who expect the best. Famous international designers have been consulted at every stage in the creation of Beltram Highlands. Only the finest materials and fittings have been used. ‘A perfectionist’s eye for detail characterises every aspect of the Beltram Highlands,’ he reads, and yet the bedrooms could be from any of a hundred business hotels in Frankfurt or Birmingham or Brussels, were it not for the fact that they have no numbers, bearing instead the names of the immortals: Jones, Nicklaus, Hogan, Woods. Throughout the hotel will hang paintings by internationally recognised masters of sporting art, depicting the timeless triumphs of these sporting heroes, whose exploits can be enjoyed once again in the magnificent video library that will be available to guests, either to rent or to purchase from the hotel shop, which will also stock a superb range of top-quality equipment from every leading manufacturer.

‘Give it some thought,’ Giles had urged him, handing him the envelope as if it were a confidential document that could make him millions. ‘Give it some serious thought,’ he said, but it requires no thought at all. ‘Purgatory,’ Malcolm mutters to himself, dropping the prospectus into the bin in his office. He reads – the current economic climate…the ongoing malaise of the domestic tourism sector…a restructuring of the Beltram portfolio – then pushes the letter aside to continue writing to the suppliers who have not yet been notified of the closure. Taking care to phrase each letter differently, in a couple of hours he thanks another twenty people for their services over the years. Intending to write to Mr Ryan of Powerpoint Electrics, he picks up another blank sheet of paper, but as he gazes at the letterhead’s silhouetted oak he begins to think again of his daughter. He tries to envisage her, as she was the last time he saw her. Entering the house where her mother lived, she looked back at him. As the door closed she waved, perhaps because she was told to, and she did not smile. On her purple T-shirt her name was spelled out in silver sequins. That afternoon, he now remembers, she snatched her hand away when he was leading her across Oxford Street.

‘Dear Stephanie,’ he begins, for the sixth or seventh time. ‘Your letter arrived a couple of days ago. I’m sorry I didn’t answer right away, but I had to get my thoughts in order before replying,’ he writes, then crosses the words out. ‘I was saddened to read that you think you can’t talk to your mother. I don’t know what has happened between you, but you have to discuss this with her. Of course I won’t say anything until you tell me to, but she has to know that we’re in contact now,’ he continues, and crosses this out too. Below the cancelled lines he starts another draft. ‘First things first: for years I have hoped to see you again. I do want to see you now – more than you can possibly imagine. You should have seen my face when your letter arrived. I could hardly believe it was from you. If I –’ he writes, but a knock interrupts him and Mr Ainsworth is standing in the doorway.

‘No rest for the wicked, eh?’ Mr Ainsworth observes.

‘Nearly done,’ he smiles.

‘Care to join me? A small postprandial?’

‘My pleasure,’ he says. ‘Five minutes?’

‘Excellent man. Excellent,’ says Mr Ainsworth, winking. ‘I’ll be back,’ he adds, and over his shoulder Malcolm sees Mr Morton striding across the lobby, sweeping his cane forcefully in a wide arc, as though whisking litter from his path.

Sitting at the bureau in room 8, Edward writes:

I am, after all, visiting the family. There was a party at Mike’s place two nights ago. At 2am we had words, and I decided shortly after, while stewing in my bed, that now was as good a time as any to make the trip. Niall Gillespie came round yesterday, to install the new software, and he helped me find a hotel within striking distance of the parents. An Internet search came up with a place called the Oak, around ten miles from the parents. It sounded rather special from its website, with a billiards room and an indoor pool and something called the Randall Room, which has a wall made of glass and murals from floor to ceiling – like a mad millionaire’s conservatory, Niall said. Normally it would be out of my price range, but it has an Amazing Special Offer for August: ‘Experience the style of a bygone time, at the prices of a bygone time.’ And they are not kidding – it’s ridiculously cheap. So Niall booked a room for me, and I thought the least I could do, after all his help, was to buy him a pint or two, which is why I wasn’t at home when you rang.

And now I have arrived at the Oak, which is indeed quite a place, but empty, or almost empty. When I stop typing the only sound I can hear is a rustle of ivy outside the window. And the corridors smell empty – there’s no hint of perfume or cigarette smoke or any other trace of a passing body. I feel as if I’ve turned up at some country mansion on the wrong day, after everyone has fled back to the city. And it really is a mansion, with a vast garden – a hundred metres from the road to the front door, I reckon. Pass through the door and you’re still a long way from the reception desk, which lurks in the corner of an echoing hall that has a double-decker gallery running around it, reached by a huge staircase. The galleries are as wide as a road, with columns at every angle of the gallery – marble, it feels like, or very high-class fakes if not. I’m on the first floor, in a room you could swing a tiger in. Quite sparsely furnished, but with a sumptuous bed in the middle. And as for the bathroom – glazed tiles cover the floor and walls, and the bath is an ancient freestanding tub that would take both of us quite comfortably. It has a wide curvaceous rim, and taps with enormous four-sparred handles, and a shower nozzle that’s as big as a sunflower. The toilet is an antique as well: the chain has a fat sausage of porcelain dangling from it, and the cistern seems to be about ten feet in the air. Judging by the noise, it holds a hundred gallons.

The new software didn’t go quite to plan. Niall promised me a seductively female voice. Like Lauren Bacall, he said. I’d be happy with Ethel Merman, I told him – anything’s better than the drone who’s currently in residence. The name of the new voice was ‘Sandra, high quality’, which suggests a Las Vegas call-girl, don’t you think? (What I had before was ‘Fred’, it turns out.) The sex change was a very swift operation, but the result was not at all Lauren Bacall: more like an over-keen intern on some Midwest radio station. Still, definitely a big improvement: unfailingly clear and her intonation was appreciably more ingratiating than Fred’s. I write ‘was’ because Sandra has left me, after less than a day. When I switched on the computer this morning it was Fred the depressive automaton who spoke to me. I don’t know what has happened, and it’s beyond my capabilities to get Sandra back.

It’s even hotter today than when you left. My scalp feels as though it’s got ants crawling over it and I’m dripping on the keyboard. Thunderstorms are forecast, the manager tells me. His name is Caldecott – an obliging and tactful chap whose timbre suggests someone on the lower slopes of middle age, but with an older man’s undertone of world-weariness. That’s what running a hotel does for you, I suppose.

In the morning Charlotte is whisking me away, so I may not have time to write. Shall we speak the day after? Write me a report from Recanati, if you have the time.

He presses a key, and the computer recites his message to him. Having corrected his mistakes, he sends the e-mail. The air in the garden is absolutely still; upstairs a door closes, then silence returns.

Malcolm locks the door of room 48, reassured that the stain from the water tank has not spread any further across the ceiling. Tucking the key into a pocket of his waistcoat, he covers his mouth to yawn, then walks slowly towards the staircase, past the dormant rooms, none of which has had an occupant since last summer. At the head of the stairs he pauses to press a toe against the uneven seam where a length of new carpet adjoins the old and the field of plain colour behind the loops of vine changes from crimson to maroon. He descends to the landing of the first floor and turns to walk past room 20, which is vacant, as is number 18, and number 16 as well. At the door of room 14, the suite in which the great soprano Adelina Patti once stayed, he hesitates, hearing gunshots and screeching tyres. He listens, and then there’s Simon Laidlaw’s voice, approaching the door, talking on the phone.

He moves away, past Giles Harbison’s room, then the one in which Mr and Mrs Sampson are staying, and room 9, where a Do Not Disturb sign hangs from the handle, above Mr Gillies’s brogues. He goes down the stairs and crosses the hall to turn off the lights in the lounge. On one of the tables, underneath the panel depicting a croquet game, two empty wine bottles stand by an ashtray, in which lies the stub of a cigar, with its scarlet and gold paper band still in place. He turns off the lights, and in the moonlit dusk of the lounge he regards the portrait of Walter Davenport Croombe. Late one night, in the autumn of 1861, Croombe stood on the corner of the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris, watching the bricklayers and stonemasons at work under arc lamps. He closes his eyes and tries to imagine how it must have been, to see the gangs of labourers, in the small hours of the morning, in a blaze of artificial light, unloading the carts that had hauled the stone from the quarry of St Maximin. He tries to picture the building site, illuminated by banks of gas mantles, and Croombe marvelling at this nocturnal scene, as he would marvel at the completed Grand Hôtel one year later, when he would sit in the Salle des Fêtes, with Sandrine, amid an infinity of reflected gaslights.

Back in the hall, still under the influence of his reverie, he looks up at the galleries that Croombe built around the hall in the year he bought the hotel. Up there, in front of the bust of Prince Albert, Adelina Patti one afternoon sang an aria by Rossini, impromptu, to an Italian family that was gathering downstairs, making ready to depart for the church, for a wedding. He follows the cascade of the staircase from the upper floor to the hall, tracing the spirals of wrought-iron ivy under the sinuous black handrail, admiring the way the spirals unwind into looser strands as they tumble down the stairs. In something like a gesture of consolation, he places a hand on the rail.

Seated at the reception desk, he once again reads the letter he has written to Stephanie:

You ask how I’ve been. I’ve been all right. I have a good job. I like where I work and the people I work with, and that’s more than most people can say, I suspect. But I have to admit it’s been difficult, never seeing you or speaking to you. It’s tempting, very tempting, to pick up the phone right now. To hear your voice – I’ve wanted that so often. How do you sound, I wonder? You were a child last time you spoke to me and now you’re a young woman. It will be wonderful to hear you. A minute from now I could be listening to your voice, but I can’t do this – I mustn’t do it – until you’ve spoken to your mother. Nothing could please me more than to see you straight away, but we must take everyone’s feelings into account. Why don’t you talk to her and then give me a call? The number’s on the top of this letter. I’m here most of the time, Monday to Sunday.

Actually, the Oak will be closing down very soon – less than three weeks from now, in fact. It would be nice if you could come down here for a day or two, to see where I’ve been working all these years, while you’ve been going through school. There’s a pool in the basement, a huge bath of mineral water. You won’t ever have come across anything quite like it. I’ll put a leaflet in with this letter so you can see what I mean.

I would love to see you, Stephanie. Every day I’ve thought about you. I’ll stop now, otherwise I’ll get embarrassing, and you won’t want to come down here after all.

Jack Naylor comes in from the garden, carrying a bottle of beer by its neck. ‘Evening, Mr Caldecott,’ he says, swinging the bottle behind his back. ‘Working late?’

‘Odds and ends, Jack,’ he replies. ‘Odds and ends.’

‘Need me for anything?’

‘No, Jack. Thank you. I’ll be off home in a minute.’

‘I’ll say goodnight then, Mr Caldecott.’

‘Yes. Goodnight.’

‘Goodnight,’ says Jack, crossing to the room that was once the office of the telegraph clerk.

For the last time he reviews what he has written. It is inadequate, but this is only the beginning, he tells himself, putting it into an envelope with a leaflet for the Oak.

From an inner pocket of his jacket he removes the note he has written for the morning: a copy of the Daily Mail should be put on Mr Gillies’s tray, who would like a breakfast of two fried eggs and thickly sliced ham, with well-toasted bread and strong coffee; a copy of The Times should be left at Mr and Mrs Sampson’s table in the breakfast room – it is their wedding anniversary, so congratulations might be offered; Mrs Ainsworth dislikes cut flowers, so there should be no vase on the Ainsworths’ table. He takes a paper clip from the wooden tub on the desk and attaches the memo to the cover of the register. From the glass door, under the elegant gold lettering, his weary face regards him. He turns off every light in the hall except the lamp above the desk.

Looking at the stairs, he recalls the sight of the workmen as they chipped away the concrete in which the staircase had been encased, exposing inch by inch the wrought-iron ivy. Giles Harbison had come down from London that afternoon. Stooped under scaffolding, they admired the panels that nobody had expected to find: the tennis game, the croquet match, the archery contest. They went to the terrace, where Giles produced a pack of H.Upmann cigars and lobbed one to him. Sitting on a sack of sand, wearing white paper overalls that were too small for them, they smoked their cigars and looked at the rainwater pooling on the tarpaulins that covered the flower beds.

From Jack’s room the sound of snoring emerges, a forthright noise, like the snoring of a bad actor. Looking through the crack between the door and the jamb, he observes Jack asleep on the camp bed. He has wound his jacket tightly and lodged it under his neck as a pillow roll, which has tilted his head back so that his nose and chin and Adam’s apple form three sharp little peaks in a row. His mouth gapes as if an oxygen mask has just been taken off him. Soundlessly he pulls the door shut.