‘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,