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.
On a big white chair, opposite the man and woman who are presenting the show, sits an actress whose face is on the cover of a magazine this week. Behind the man, on a big screen, the actress is dressed in a nurse’s uniform. They all look round at the screen, and the picture begins to move. An old man is lying in a hospital bed, with a white plastic curtain around him. Tightly he grips the nurse’s arm, then lets it go. On the screen the actress is crying; watching her cry, the woman presenter puts down her sheet of paper and
