London Transports (23 page)

She stopped. He looked like a hunted animal.

“Wouldn’t you like to come?” she said in a much calmer voice.

“My dear Rose.
Sometime
, I’d love to go to Paris, my dear, there’s nothing in the world I’d like to do more than to come to Paris. But I can’t go just like that. I can’t drop everything and rush off to Paris, my dear. You know that.”

“Why not, Daddy?” she begged. She knew she was doing something dangerous, she was spelling out her own flightiness, her own whim of doubling back from the station, she was defining herself as less than level-headed.

She was challenging him too. She was asking him to say why he couldn’t come for a few days of shared foreign things. If he had no explanation, then he was telling her that he was just someone who said he wanted something but didn’t reach for it. She could be changing the nature of his little dreams. How would he ever take out his pathetically detailed maps and scrapbooks to pore once more with her over routes and happenings if he had thrown away a chance to see them in three dimensions?

“You have nothing planned, Daddy. It’s ideal. We can pack for you. I’ll ask them next door to keep an eye on the house. We’ll stop the milk and the newspaper and, Daddy, that’s it. Tomorrow evening in Paris, tomorrow afternoon we’ll be taking that route in together, the one we talked about for me this morning.”

“But, Rose, all the things here, my dear, I can’t just drop everything. You do see that.”

Twice now he had talked about all the things here that he had to drop. There was
nothing
to drop. What he would drop was pottering about scratching his head about leaf curl. Oh Daddy, don’t you see that’s all you’ll drop? But if you don’t see and I tell you, it means I’m telling you that your life is meaningless and futile and pottering. I will not tell
you
, who walked around the house cradling me when I was a crying baby, you who paid for elocution lessons so that I could speak well, you, Daddy, who paid for that wedding lunch that Gus thought was shabby, you, Daddy, who smiled and raised your champagne glass to me and said, “Your mother would have loved this day. A daughter’s wedding is a milestone.” I won’t tell you that your life is nothing.

The good-natured woman and her father were probably at Folkestone or Dover or Newhaven when Rose said to her father that of course he was right, and it had just been a mad idea, but naturally they would plan it for later. Yes, they really must, and when she came back this time they would talk about it seriously, and possibly next summer.

“Or even when I retire,” said Rose’s father, the colour coming back into his cheeks. “When I retire I’ll have lots of time to think about these things and plan them.”

“That’s a good idea, Daddy,” said Rose. “I think that’s a very good idea. We should think of it for when you retire.”

He began to smile. Reprieve. Rescue. Hope.

“We won’t make any definite plans, but we’ll always have it there, as something we must talk about doing. Yes, much more sensible,” she said.

“Do you really mean that, Rose? I certainly think it’s a good idea,” he said, anxiously raking her face for approval.

“Oh, honestly, Daddy. I think it makes
much
more sense,” she said, wondering why so many loving things had to be lies.

Pimlico

O
live sat in her little office making her weekly lists. First she balanced her books. It didn’t take long. Her guests paid weekly and usually by banker’s order. Her staff bills were the same every week. The laundry was always precisely the same—thirty-two sheets, thirty-two pillowcases, thirty-two towels, seven large tablecloths, seven smaller teacloths. Olive had costed the business of getting a washing machine and a dryer and in the end decided that the effort, the space, and the uncertainty in case of breakdowns were simply not worth it. Her food bills were fairly unchanging too; she hadn’t been twenty years in the hotel business for nothing. And other bills were simple as well; she transferred a regular amount weekly to meet the electricity, telephone, gas, rates, and insurance demands when they arrived. Olive could never understand why other people got into such muddles about money.

Then she made her list of activities for the notice board. This involved going through the local papers, the brochures from musical societies and theatres, appeals from charitable organizations for support for jumble sales. When she had a good selection she would pin them up on her cork board and remove those which had become out of date. She took care to include some items that none of her guests would dream of choosing, like Wagner’s Ring or a debate about philosophy. But she knew that they liked to be thought the kind of people who might want to patronize such things and it flattered them.

Then she would take out her loose-leaf file, the one she had divided into twelve sections, one for each guest, and in her neat small handwriting Olive would make some small entries under each name. It was here that she felt she could find the heart of her hotel, the memory, the nerve centre. Because Olive knew that the reason her twelve guests stayed with her was not the great comfort, the food, the value, the style; it was simply because she knew all about them, she remembered their birthdays, their favourite films, their collar sizes, the names of their old homes or native villages. Olive could tell you quite easily the day that Hugh O’Connor had come to live there, all she had to do was open Hugh’s section in the file. But it warmed him so much to hear her say “Oh, Hugh, don’t I remember well the day you arrived, it was a Wednesday in November and you looked very tired.” Hugh would beam to think that he was so important that his arrival had seared itself into Olive’s mind.

She never saw anything dishonest or devious about this. She thought it was in fact a common courtesy and a piece of good sense in what people nowadays called “communications and relating.” In a way it was almost a form of social service. After all, if she was going to go and spend a half hour with Annie Lynch on a Saturday afternoon, with Annie retired to her bedroom with what looked like the beginnings of a depression, then Olive thought how much more considerate to look up Annie’s file and remember the little farm in Mayo and how it had to be sold when Daddy took to the drink, and how Annie’s mother, who was a walking saint, had died and the boys were all married and the only sensible thing for Annie to do was to come and work in London. Olive had filed the kind of things that seemed to cheer Annie up, and would trot them out one by one. Yes, perhaps she should remember everything without writing it down, but really she lived such a busy life. It would be impossible to manage without her little Lists.

Nobody knew of Olive’s filing system; they weren’t even aware that she seemed to have a better than average memory. Each one of her guests simply marvelled at his or her own good fortune at having found a woman who ran such a comfortable place and who obviously understood them so well. Even the three Spaniards who had been with Olive for five years thought this too. They didn’t question their money or their small living quarters, they just appreciated that she could remember their names and their friends’ names and the village in the south of Spain where they went back once a year when Olive closed for her two-week break. She was determined that nobody would ever know and had even made preparations that after her death her executor should arrange to have her private records of her years in the hotel business destroyed unread. A solicitor had told her that such a request was perfectly in order.

She was only thirty years of age when she bought the small and then rather seedy hotel in Pimlico. Everyone had assured her that she was quite mad, and that if clever boys who knew about making money hadn’t made a go of it, how could an innocent Irish girl with ten years’ experience working in a seaside Irish boardinghouse hope to do any better? But Olive was determined; she had saved since her teens for the dream of a hotel of her own, and when her uncle’s legacy made it actually within her reach she acted at once. Her family in Ireland were outraged.

“There’s more to it than meets the eye,” said her mother, who foresaw gloomy summers without Olive’s considerable help in the boardinghouse.

“Maybe she’ll find a fellow in London, she hasn’t found one here,” said her sister cattily.

Olive’s father was enthusiastic that she should try working in London for a little bit before actually committing herself to the buying of a hotel. He had worked there himself for ten years and found it a lonely place.

“When you’ve seen Piccadilly Circus and Buckingham Palace and you’ve said to yourself, this is me here sitting listening to Big Ben strike, well that’s it. You’ve seen it then. It’s time to come home. It’s a scaldingly lonely place.”

As determined as any young woman about to enter religious life and take vows as a nun, Olive went ahead with her plans.

Ten years in a third-rate boardinghouse had given Olive more of an insight into the psychology of hotel work than any amount of professional courses. She saw the old and the lonely who could barely endure the sea winds and the bracing air and who hardly left the sun lounge during their two-week visit. She knew they came for company, and that the anticipation was much better than the holiday. She saw the couples with their children hoping that the two-weeks vacation would be a rest, a bit of peace, a time to get to know each other again, and she saw her mother disappointing them year after year by frowning at the children, complaining about noise, and in general making the parents much more anxious than they would have been had they remained at home in the normal daily round. Oh, the number of times Olive would have loved to be in charge, she knew what she would have done. She would have had a special room for the children with lino on the floor, a room where it didn’t matter if they kicked the furniture or made a noise. She would have offered the guests a welcoming drink when they arrived instead of making an announcement about what time she expected them to be in.

But in the years of watching the visitors come and go, Olive gained what she thought was an insight into the returned emigrants, those who lived the greater part of their life in big English cities. What they seemed to appreciate so much when they came back was the smallness of the place, the fact that people saluted other people and knew all about them. These might have been the very things that they fled to London and Birmingham and Liverpool to avoid, but it certainly seemed to be something their souls cried out for now. Olive knew that when she had enough money she would run a place for Irish people in London, and she would make a small fortune. Not a big fortune, she didn’t want that, just a little fortune. So that she could live in comfort, and could surround herself with nice furniture, nice pictures, so that she needn’t worry about having two bars of the electric fire on. The kind of comfort which would mean she could have a bath twice a day, and take a taxi if it was raining.

And in her terraced house in Pimlico she built up the hotel of her dreams.

It had taken time. And a great deal of effort. For a year she lost money—heavy, frightening sums, even though she regarded it as an experiment. She advertised in local papers in boroughs where there were large Irish populations, she attracted lonely people, certainly, but not the ones she could help. Too many of her guests turned out to be working-on-the-Lump men who had forgotten their real names because they used so many in so many different jobs, men who appeared on no social welfare list, men who knew that if they got a bad dose of pneumonia or broke a leg the other lads would pass a hat round for them, but there would be no pension, no insurance, no security.

They didn’t stay long in Olive’s little hotel, and she made them uneasy, asking where they were from and what they did.

“Sure the police wouldn’t ask me that, ma’am,” a man had replied to her once when she had asked some simple and, she thought, courteous question about his origins.

Then she had the con men. The charmers, the people who were expecting money shortly, who cashed checks, who told tales. It was an apprenticeship, she was learning. Soon she thought she was ready and she advertised again. By this time she had the hotel the way she wanted it. Not splendid, nothing over-awing, but comfortable. There wasn’t a hint of boardinghouse about it, no sauce bottles appeared with regularity on stained cloths. She arranged a weekly rate which included an evening meal, with no refund if the meal was not taken. She knew enough about her future clients to know that they were the kind of people who would like to be expected home at a quarter to seven. They could always go off out again afterwards.

She implied that those she was accepting were people of good manners and high standards. This was done very cunningly and without any hint of appearing restrictive. Whereas her mother would have said, “I want no drink brought into the bedrooms,” Olive said, “I want you to consider this house very much as your home. I know you don’t want to be in the kind of place where people have bottles in bedrooms.”

She chose the guests carefully. Sometimes after several interviews where she always gave them tea and managed to explain that it was simply a matter of having promised the place to somebody else who was to let her know by Thursday. It took her a year to build up to twelve and she sat back satisfied. They were right. They were the correct mix. They depended on her utterly, they needed her, and for the first time in her life she felt fulfilled. She felt she had got what other people got from teaching or nursing or maybe the priesthood. People who needed them, a little flock. She never included marriage and children in her list of fulfilling life-styles. She had seen too many less than satisfactory marriages to be impressed by the state. And anyway she was too busy. You didn’t run the perfect hotel without a lot of work.

There had been a question of marriage two years ago. A very nice man indeed. A Scot, quiet and industrious. She had met him at a hoteliers’ trade fair, when she was examining a new system of keeping coffee hot. He had told her that it didn’t really work, he had tried one in his own hotel and it had been wasteful. Their friendship got to a stage where her twelve guests were rustling and ruffled like birds in a coop fearing the intrusion of an outsider. Alec came to tea so often on Sundays that there were definite fears he might either join the establishment or else spirit Olive away. The ruffled feelings were balm to Olive, the ill-disguised anxiety among those men and women who paid her hefty sums of money to live with her was almost exhilarating. Olive kept them and Alec in suspense for some weeks and finally sent Alec away confused, wallowing in the luxuriating relief and happiness of the civil servants, bank clerks, bookkeepers, shop assistants, and bus driver who were now her family.

She finished her list of entries in the ring file with the information that Judy O’Connor, the nice girl who worked in the chemist shop, had a brother who was a missionary and that he was coming back from Africa and through London on his way home to Ireland for Christmas. Olive thought it might be a nice occasion to have a Mass in the hotel.

Well, why not? They were all Irish, they were all Catholic. Even the three little Spaniards, José, his wife, Carmen, and her sister Maria, they were Catholics, they would love a Mass in the dining room. It would make it all much more like home. She must start putting it in Judy’s mind soon. Olive was careful for people not to think that all the good ideas came from her. She let the guests think that it was their idea to strip their own beds on Monday mornings and leave all the dirty linen neatly ready for the laundrymen. The guests thought that they had suggested pooling fifty pence a week each to have wine with Sunday lunch.

Hugh O’Connor was absolutely certain that
he
had broken off his engagement to that rather forward hussy who had no morals and wanted to come in and share his room saying that it was perfectly all right since they were engaged. Annie never realized that it was Olive who suggested that she should break her ties with Mayo, she thought she had done it herself. The guests thought that it had just come about that they all stayed in the hotel for Christmas, they saw nothing odd about it. Olive had carefully managed to distance herself from those who had been rash enough to go to relations or friends. They had felt lacking in some kind of spirit and had felt deeply jealous when they returned afterwards to hear about the wonderful turkey and the presents and the carols by the Christmas tree and the Pope’s blessing in the morning and the Queen’s speech in the afternoon—a combination of what was best about both cultures.

The last thing that Olive did on her List day was to write home. Her father was in hospital now, her mother almost crippled with arthritis. She sent them regular small contributions with pleasant cheering letters. She had no intention of returning home. They were nothing to her now. She had a real family, a family that needed her.