Hotel Alpha Read online

  MARK WATSON

  HOTEL ALPHA

  PICADOR

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  1 GRAHAM

  2 CHAS

  3 GRAHAM

  4 CHAS

  PART TWO

  5 GRAHAM

  6 CHAS

  7 GRAHAM

  8 CHAS

  9 GRAHAM

  PART THREE

  10 GRAHAM

  11 CHAS

  12 GRAHAM

  13 CHAS

  14 GRAHAM

  AFTERWORD

  RESTAURANT AND ELSEWHERE, 1964

  FORECOURT, OUTSIDE HOTEL ALPHA, 1984

  CONFERENCE ROOM, 2001

  SMOKING ROOM, 1985

  EUSTON ROAD, HALF A MILE FROM THE HOTEL ALPHA, 1985

  ALL OVER THE HOTEL

  ROOM 68, 1966

  ROOM 76, 1970

  About the Author

  PART ONE

  1

  GRAHAM

  The Hotel Alpha was in flames. Fire had broken out in a top-floor room and was ripping through the place, threatening to gut the building I had devoted myself to for twenty years. Yet there I was, a quarter of a mile away, gliding along in the Mercedes, oblivious.

  It was a warm evening in the summer of 1984 and I had just ferried a guest to Heathrow Airport. As I swung off the Westway, heading back towards the hotel, people were everywhere: gathering outside the Globe pub, dawdling and laughing at zebra crossings until I honked jokingly at them to get a move on. I never spent much time outside myself, but I could see why this sort of weather was so popular. There was the delicious feeling in the air of a long, luxuriant evening still to unfold. It would have been impossible to believe that, not five minutes later, I would be facing the worst catastrophe of my career.

  As soon as I pulled up and saw that something was wrong – a melee of people in the forecourt, some fleeing, some trying to peer inside – a part of me felt as if I had known for twenty years that this moment would come.

  Not that I could have anticipated the fire, of course: just that, in some superstitious chamber of my brain whose existence I barely acknowledged, there had always been the fear that the paradise of the Alpha could not last forever. It was a similar impulse to the one which obliged me to imagine the loss of my wife Pattie or my children, a way of somehow safeguarding against the worst by picturing it. The Alpha was only a building, of course; yet it had, from the moment I had arrived here twenty years ago, come to feel like a blood relative. If I were away for any length of time, I would begin to have the most absurd fantasies that it might have disappeared; that it would prove to have been a vision, a dreamed world.

  Perhaps that is why, amid the panic which began to flood into my limbs as I leapt from the car, there was also a vein of cool determination.

  I dashed into the building through the mahogany doors I waxed and burnished each week, across the chequerboard floor I sometimes got onto my hands and knees to scrub – to the amusement of the cleaning ladies – as I could not bear to see it marked or muddied. I stood by my reception desk and looked up at the balconies running all round the hotel, stacked one on top of another like the layers of a cake. The top balcony was already obscured by a cloud of black smoke, and people were stampeding down the staircase. Our antiquated smoke alarms were rattling, and a competing swell of voices rose in horror or a sort of guilty fascination.

  At this time, many rooms would be unoccupied, the guests dispersed around London’s countless night haunts. But not everyone would have escaped from the top floor, I knew. I fought my way against the tide of people moving towards the doors and round those who were standing and gawping up at the thickening cloud. Across the atrium to the back stairs I went. The heat and the screaming and the panic were all on the other side of the wall, but I could feel it all like pinpricks on my skin as I leapt up the stairs two at a time. At the final bend, the gateway to the top floor, I ran into Howard York.

  This was a man who was credited with being able to make anything happen. For these twenty years he had been one of the crucial figures in my life and – as it sometimes felt – the life of London itself. He had bought the Alpha as a very young man and conjured up, from its neglected brickwork and empty space, the most notorious hotel in the city. People came to him, and to the hotel, for solutions to their problems; for things they could not get elsewhere. When he was in the room, there was a sense that anything was possible. Conversations stalled as he walked by; onlookers nudged each other; reality braced itself to bend into whatever shape took his fancy.

  But now there was no trace of the magician or the raconteur of a thousand nights in the bar, the supreme salesman and romantic, all the glittering versions of Howard we were so used to. Now he looked like a lost boy. There were tears in his eyes, and his face was as red as raw meat. He had no shirt on. He grabbed my wrist, his grip tight with a desperation which might tip into violence.

  ‘Room 77, Graham,’ he spluttered, breaking out into a cough, ‘77,77.’

  One of us had to fight through the smoke and try to stop what was already a calamity from becoming a tragedy. One of us or both of us. Or we could both stay where we were and trust that Howard’s luck would hold once more.

  It had held pretty well so far. But then, in Howard’s own opinion, luck was not a whimsical force which flitted in and out of lives. It was a commodity: something you could make or buy. This was one of the first things I learned about him.

  We were both in our mid-twenties when we met, but unlike him I did not know quite what I was doing with myself, and the question was becoming rather urgent.

  I had gone into the army under the influence – I should more accurately say the orders – of my father, himself a brigadier. I was well suited to military service, he thought, in that I respected authority and kept my shoes very clean. He had overlooked that I was ill suited to it in other ways: namely that I loathed the cold, could not run quickly, could not pitch a tent, hated mud, did not care to sleep in dormitories, and above all did not wish to kill other men.

  When I put all this to my father, he eventually allowed me to leave the forces, but he never spoke to me again. I would have to fend for myself, and for my wife Pattie. At first I greeted this prospect with a certain bravado, but this was beginning to flake away after a couple of years of poorly paid and unreliable work.

  I had been a tailor’s assistant, an ‘apprentice barber’, which meant sweeping hair off floors, and, when I was fortunate enough, a silver-service waiter at the Grosvenor House hotel and the Ritz. In these places I felt something like a sense of belonging, surrounded by the heavy wood and marble, chandeliers and vases and telephones, the mock-classical bas-reliefs. Grand hotels were fussy and old-fashioned in a way I recognized I was myself. But the work they offered was sporadic. We were, as they say, scraping by.

  Pattie never complained about our dingy flat or the fact we had ham and oven chips for dinner every night. In a way, her patience made matters worse. It was shaming to see her poring over the classifieds section of the Evening Standard on my behalf, or hear her talking about getting a loan and going to secretarial college. When she came across the ad which was to change my life, I was almost too grumpy to hear her out.

  ‘What about this one? Listen. Outstanding head concierge wanted … ’

  ‘I am hardly “outstanding”, am I? And I’ve never worked as a concierge. I don’t even really know what—’

  ‘Shush! Wanted for London’s best hotel,’ she went on. ‘No experience – there you go! No experience necessary. Efficiency and integrity important, as well as a sense of adventure.’

  ‘I’m efficient, I suppose. But I wouldn’t say I had a sense of adventure.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure you can get one,’ said Pattie. ‘Do yo
u want me to write you a letter or will you do it?’

  ‘Where is it? Which hotel?’

  Pattie laughed. ‘Well, this is the funniest bit. NB Hotel does not exist yet.’

  I had allowed my mind to play for a moment with the image of myself, smartly attired, at the front desk of the Dorchester; but at this final sentence I felt the picture dissolve. ‘It must be some sort of joke,’ I said, ‘and I’m damned if I’m going to mess about with the typewriter to apply for something which … ’

  ‘Well, this is even odder!’ she said, continuing to pay my moodiness the scant regard it deserved. ‘You don’t even have to apply. It says: Interested parties to report to Howard York, 11 a.m., May 1st.’

  ‘It’ll be an April Fool or something,’ I muttered.

  ‘April Fool’s day is in April, you silly man. And then there’s an address: Hotel Alpha, Curzon Mews, off Euston Road, N1.’

  I recognized the address and realized that the new hotel must be the establishment once known as the Royal. It had been a magnificent railway hotel in Victorian times, but endured a miserable retirement as an emergency sanatorium and a government records office, finally closing altogether in the fifties. I had heard about it from the one friend I made in the military, a retired colonel who had been sequestered there for several weeks after getting typhoid in India. He had described the magnificence of the interior: a huge central atrium designed for horse-drawn carriages, the balconies, the ornate and now neglected rooms. He had mentioned the eeriness of it, this place that had once teemed with extravagant life and was now full of illness and death. I had walked past the unloved building on a foggy day a few years ago and wondered briefly how long it would stand there before someone demolished it. But now, quite the opposite had happened. Now there was to be a new hotel, the Hotel Alpha.

  ‘Well, perhaps I’ll think about it,’ I mumbled.

  The day went on as normal after that: I went out to buy ham, we listened to the radio and cooperated on The Times’ crossword. The first of May approached and I pretended not to be thinking about it; but the more I did so, the more the words ‘Hotel Alpha’ seemed to swim around in my head.

  On the eve of the interview, Pattie ironed my suit and chose a tie for me, and we rehearsed possible interview questions.

  ‘What do you think are your best qualities?’

  ‘I … well, modesty forbids me to, er … ’

  ‘No it doesn’t,’ she scolded me. ‘Don’t you dare be modest tomorrow.’

  ‘Very well,’ I sighed. ‘I am punctual and reliable, have never missed a day of work, have an excellent memory … ’

  ‘And you’re the loveliest man I know,’ Pattie finished for me. ‘Don’t forget to mention that. Now, what are your hobbies and leisure interests?’

  ‘I enjoy crosswords and am a keen fan of rugby.’

  ‘That’s not good enough either,’ she said. ‘You need to stand out. Pretend you’re into morris dancing or something.’

  ‘Oh God, what’s the use? I may as well not turn up. There are bound to be … ’

  Pattie laid a finger on my lips. She had a flower in her hair, and there were ink marks on her fingers.

  ‘You will be marvellous,’ she said, ‘and if you don’t get the job, nobody’s going to die, are they?’

  I slept poorly, and – not knowing what else to do with myself – got the bus to the hotel first thing in the morning, arriving almost two hours before the advertised time. The hotel’s massive, weather-beaten brickwork was as I remembered it, but new windows had been fitted, and an imposing pair of mahogany doors bore a silver ‘A’ rendered in art deco style. I gazed up at the cedars which framed the forecourt. They had the advantage of me: they had been here many generations already, seemed to know how things would turn out. Behind those doors, the trees seemed to say, exciting things are about to happen. You might be a part of them, or they might just as easily go on without you.

  A queue began to form in the hour or so before midday, and the longer it became, the more my spirits flagged. The great majority of the forty or fifty men communicated youth and ease. Although I was only twenty-five myself, I felt like a relic with my case and my wartime hairstyle. I was not like these people who blew out cigarette smoke with an insouciance modelled on pop stars and chuckled slyly at each others remarks. They would know the bars to direct guests to, or the shops to be seen at on Carnaby Street. They, not I, were what this establishment would need.

  As I struggled to suppress these pessimistic impressions, my attention was drawn to a commotion. A man in a tatty old overcoat had wandered into the traffic, whisky bottle in hand. He hesitated for a moment, arm uplifted as if to conduct some invisible orchestra, and then slumped in the middle of the road, forcing cars to swerve round him with a fusillade of honks. A bus gave a low bellow like an animal whose lair had been invaded. I glanced about. A few of my fellow interviewees were watching curiously, even with amusement; others were fussing with their hair or checking wristwatches. Nobody seemed to be concerned for the fellow who now lay there motionless. Without stopping to consider it, I dropped my case and darted into the road.

  ‘Are you … would you like some help?’ I asked.

  ‘Very kind,’ he said in a voice quite as composed as my own. ‘Get me to the pavement, will you?’

  I reached out an arm and helped him to his feet, then escorted him to the kerb.

  ‘Brave of you, coming into the road like that,’ said the stranger.

  ‘I thought they would probably stop short of actually running me over.’

  ‘Quite right.’ He fixed me suddenly with a look of wily appraisal. ‘Cars don’t want to run you over. Snakes don’t want to bite you. Planes don’t want you to miss them. Do you know what I mean?’

  I said that I did, though in truth I thought he might well be as mad as a dog.

  Then the stranger did something which I would never forget. He shrugged off his overcoat to reveal a smoking jacket in purple crushed velvet, then reached up and removed his ratty, straggling hair in one grab. Beneath the wig was a raffishly parted mop and I was suddenly looking at a man of around my own age.

  ‘I’m Howard York,’ he said. ‘You were the only person to help, there. Out of all these.’ He gestured at the line of strangers, many of whom were now looking on in bemusement. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Graham Adam, Mr York.’

  ‘You’re hired, Graham Adam,’ he said.

  ‘I lost my speech for a second; but only a second. ‘Are you sure, sir?’

  ‘Not sir,’ he said, ‘Howard. And yes, I am. Go inside. Find a lady with very long brown hair. That’s my wife, Sarah-Jane. I’ll explain to these other chaps that their interview has already taken place.’

  I passed the queue of candidates in a daze and found the young lady he mentioned; she was waiting in the atrium with a raised-eyebrows sort of smile on her face.

  ‘Welcome,’ she said with a Yorkshire inflection, ‘and well done. He insisted on doing it this way, the silly fool.’

  She took my arm – I was too befuddled to consider it rather forward of her as I might otherwise have done – and began to show me round the hotel. I took in, as if dreaming them, the individually appointed suites, the vast cellars with a cache of half-century-old wines, the stately smoking room. We discussed wages, though I would have signed the forms placed in front of me even if they had proposed to pay me in biscuits.

  Released at last from these people, if not from the spell they had cast on me, I wandered westwards and called Pattie from a phone box opposite the green bulge of the Planetarium. I went into a pub, ordered a whisky, and on impulse bought a round for twenty strangers. In Regent’s Park I finally succumbed to my emotions and did a little dance behind a statue, perhaps observed – from the windows of white mansions – by rich people who thought I had gone out of my mind.

  My first duty was to send out invitations to the party for the grand opening of the Alpha. The guest list ran to hundreds of people, some
of the names so famous that even I had heard of them. We were also taking our first room bookings. Howard York approached this in a very odd manner. He instructed me that if anyone phoned for a room, I was to say that we were booked solid for the first three weeks, but they should call back later that evening in case something had become available. It was not so much that I minded telling a white lie – Howard was my boss, and I would do whatever he asked – but that it seemed extraordinarily rash. Why would a brand-new establishment decline business like this? Might I find myself out of a job in six weeks?

  Almost everyone did indeed call again, though, and when – this time – a room was miraculously found for them, they sounded so grateful and relieved that I almost believed in the lie. Word got around that it was already nearly impossible to book a room at the Alpha. Enquiries doubled and trebled, the Bakelite telephone on my desk was ringing every other minute, and the fiction of the hotel’s unstoppable popularity was quickly willed into fact.

  The party worked in much the same way. Though many luminaries had been asked to attend, plenty more went uninvited, the distinction between the two groups being quite arbitrary but inevitably coming to seem meaningful to those involved. Soon those in the latter group began making strenuous attempts to get themselves an invitation, and all the more so when a couple of fashionable magazines carried gossipy articles speculating upon who had, and had not, ‘made the list’. Howard, I was already realizing, had something of a gift for making things appear in print which he wished to be seen as accepted facts. At the same time there was this mischief, this relish for chaos, about him: he might spend half a day engineering a brief appearance by Mary Quant, but he also invited complete strangers, including a man whose dog ran up and tried to bite him on the Euston Road. On the day before the party, the hotel’s cellars were equipped to cater for the court of King Solomon himself, but it had ceased to be clear whether we were expecting fifty people or five thousand. Pattie was away from London visiting friends, and so I spent the whole day helping to get things ready.