Beatrice sits on a plastic bench in Trafalgar Square, waiting for the night bus to take her back to Bermondsey. Her legs are aching from an eight-hour shift of cleaning and folding, wiping and sponging. But the most tiring part, she finds, is the endless tramping up and down the long, windowless corridors that wind through the hotel, each one identical to the last so that it would be easy to forget where you were unless you had the room numbers to remind you. At work she misses the daylight most of all. The building seems hermetically sealed, kept alive only by recycled air. At Catholic school back in Uganda, she’d read a book by Virginia Woolf that talked about a hotel being a place where even the flies that sat on your nose had been on someone else’s skin the day before. That is how the Rotunda felt: arid, stuffy, loveless.
Normally, she didn’t mind it too much. She had been a waitress for a short time at the Hotel Protea in Kampala when it opened, serving ladlefuls of posho to rich tourists and Kenyan businessmen, and she had got used to the peculiar rhythm of hotel etiquette, the small niceties that would ensure a bigger tip. Once, a white man had left her a $50 note simply because she had brought him a citronella candle when the mosquitoes started buzzing. She had noticed him when he walked into the restaurant, skinny and worried-looking, wearing a beige money belt and two mushroom-coloured bands round his wrists that were meant to protect tourists from insect bites except they never did. His face had been flush with relief when she brought the candle. It gave Beatrice pleasure to see it and, for a brief moment, she had felt valued.
The Mayfair Rotunda was different because she worked behind the scenes and hardly ever got tips. Every day, she cleaned up after people, emptying their bins of used condoms, scooping out their hair from the plugholes, wiping the mirrors free of toothpaste flecks. It was draining work with minimal satisfaction. Beatrice liked things to look clean but then she would come back the next day and the room would be in disarray, as if she had never been, as if she didn’t exist.
Today had been particularly bad. The man in Room 423 … she shudders to think of him, pressed up so close against her she could feel the bristle of his stubble against her neck, could smell the rottenness of his breath. A coil of anger tightens in the pit of her stomach. How she hated men like that, men who believed they could take what they wanted and treat her like meat. She feels humiliated – not for herself but for them, that they could be so pathetic.
It is part of the job, she has come to realise. Bitter experience has taught her it is better not to resist but to be pliant, to allow them to do their silly business and get it over with. All the maids have the same problem: oversexed businessmen and adulterous foreigners. They tend to clean in pairs now, each one doing an adjoining room, so that if anything ever gets nasty or goes further than you want it to, you can scream out and bang the walls. Otherwise, if you’re not being asked to do anything you don’t want to, it can be a handy way to make extra money. Some of the girls have regular clients. Ewelina, from Poland, has a guy called Franz who comes over from Austria every month and has given her a Rolex watch. Beatrice is pretty sure it is fake but hasn’t the heart to tell her.
But the man today – the fat one in the robe, with hairs growing out of his nose – had not paid Beatrice. Once it was over, he’d tightened his belt, patted her on the bottom and leered at her, as though she had been a willing participant, as though she had wanted him to rub against her until he came. Stupid idiot. Beatrice had stared at him sullenly until he’d been forced to look away. She left the room without replacing his bottle of Chablis or drawing his curtains. She hoped she wouldn’t get in trouble for that.
She glances up at the digital display board to find out how long the next bus will be but it is broken so she has to sit here, patiently, waiting for a bus that might or might not come in the next half-hour. Waiting always seems to take so much longer when you don’t know how long it will be for, she thinks.
Mrs Dalloway, that was what the book had been called. It had seemed so far removed from her own experience and yet here she is, living in the same city it described, all those years ago. London wasn’t recognisable to her when she first arrived, despite having read so much about it. It was so much bigger than it had appeared on the page, so much more foreign, and although Beatrice should have been intimidated by this, she found instead that she took a kind of comfort from the hugeness of the city. She craved London’s anonymity, the constant reinvention of the streets, the silence of strangers that would, in any other context, have been unfriendly but which gave Beatrice space to breathe for what felt like the first time in years. She grew to love the overlooked beauty of the urban sprawl, the mismatched things you wouldn’t expect: the evening sunlight glinting against a steel girder on the Westway, the flat sheets of cardboard in the Waterloo subway where people slept huddled against the wind, the angry graffiti scrawled across a tube carriage, the flaking paint on advertising billboards, the tin-foil glimmer of a flickering street-lamp bulb against white birch bark. All of it felt to Beatrice like freedom.
She wonders what happened to her copy of Mrs Dalloway. She’d had to leave it behind, like everything else. She had been good at school. She wishes she’d been able to stay at university. Hard to remember now but she was studying to be a lawyer.
Across the street from her, there is a bulky shadow, hunkered down in the doorstep of a gentlemen’s outfitter’s. Her eyes adjust gradually to the dark and she realises the shape conceals a person, coddled tightly in a sleeping bag like a caterpillar snug in its cocoon. She can just make out the tip of a head, covered in a beanie hat, and a flash of skin beneath.
A drunken group of men in matching rugby shirts are trailing their way through the Square, slapping each other’s backs, loudly reciting the course of the evening to anyone who happens to pass within earshot.
‘Gagging for it, mate,’ she hears one of them shout. ‘Fucking all over you.’
Men. All after the same thing.
Up on the fourth plinth, Beatrice’s attention is caught by a dull strip of gold, picked out by the soft moonlight. She read in the Evening Standard that some artists have put an oversized boy on a rocking horse there, where normally you would expect to see grave-faced generals on horseback. She likes the idea of this. It makes her smile. There is something in the rocking-horse boy’s carefree attitude – one arm raised aloft in pure, unencumbered happiness – that reminds her of John, her little brother. He would be ten now, she thinks, and a heaviness tugs at her heart.
After a quarter of an hour, a Number 47 swings into view. Beatrice stands, feeling the stiffness in her shoulders and her calf muscles. She slips her Oyster card out of the fake-leather handbag she bought in the Primark sale last year and swipes it across the reader as the driver looks at her with tired eyes. He has light, youthful skin and wears a turban.
He nods at her, just the once, just to let her know that he feels the kinship of the night-worker, that he understands what it is to be one of those silent, uncomplaining people who clean rooms and drive buses and stack shelves and sweep streets into the early hours, who fuel this vast and friendless city, who feed its pavements and drains with sweat and silent submission, who stay hidden from view, passed over by richer residents who believe it all happens without any effort. She sees the bus driver convey this in the smallest inflexion of his head, in the tiniest upturn of the corners of his mouth. She wants to lean over and hold his hand, through the gap in the screen, simply so they can reassure each other that their blood runs warm, that life still pulses in their veins, but she stops herself – just. She smiles at him, then moves to the mid-section of the bus, sliding into the window-seat. The grey upholstery smells faintly of curry.
She leans her head against the glass and dozes, lulled by the juddering of the engine and the tinging of the bell for request stops. A man behind her is burbling to himself, talking in a stream of swear words and furious rejoinders to an imagined opponent. When she turns round, she sees he is swigging from a clear bottle, the neck of it protruding from a brown paper bag.
