trace the lines of the painting beyond the frame, to imagine where they might go next, extrapolating from what I could see. Spheres. Conjoined spheres. Nothing more. Spatial relationships – what did that even mean?
Spit, rinse. Bag, credentials, keycard. The shadows returned and I closed the door on them.
Music while waiting for the lift: easy-listening ‘Brown Sugar’. The lift doors were flanked by narrow full-length mirrors. Vanity mirrors, installed so people spend absent minutes checking their hair and don’t become impatient before the lift arrives. Mirrors designed to eat up time – there was some dark artistry, it’s true, but a decorators’ trick, not a cabalistic conspiracy. A small sofa sat in the corridor near the lift, one of those baffling gestures towards domesticity made by hotels. It was not there to be sat in – it was there to make the corridor appear furnished, an insurance policy against bleakness and emptiness.
In fact, given that this was a new hotel, it was possible, even likely, that no one had ever sat in it. An urge to be the first gripped me, but the lift arrived. Several people were already in it, blocking my view of infinity.
The first time I saw a hotel lobby, it was empty. Not completely empty, in retrospect: there were three or four other people there, a few suited gentlemen reading newspapers and an elderly couple drinking tea. And the hotel staff, and my father and mother. But my overriding impression was plush emptiness. Tall leather wing-back armchairs, deep leather sofas riveted with buttons that turned their surfaces into bulging grids. Lamps like golden columns, ashtrays like geologic formations, a carpet so thick that we moved silently, like ghosts.
Who was this fine place for? Surely not for me, a boy of six or seven – it had been built and furnished for more important and older beings. But where were they? When did they all appear?
‘Who stays in hotels?’ I asked my father.
‘Businessmen,’ my father said. ‘And travellers. Holidaymakers. People on honeymoon.’ He smiled at my mother, a complex smile broadcasting on grown-up frequencies I could detect but not yet decode. My mother did not smile back.
A waiter had appeared, without a sound. My father turned back to me, his smile once more plain and genial, eager to please his boy. ‘What would you like to drink?’
‘What is there?’
‘Anything you like.’
‘Coca Cola?’ I said, unable to fully believe that such a cornucopia could exist, that I could order any drink at all and it would be delivered to me.
Mother straightened like a gate clanging shut. ‘We mustn’t go off our heads with treats. How much will this cost?’ The question went to the waiter but her eyes were on me and my father, warning.
‘Darling, the company will pay.’
‘Will they? Do they know it’s for him? Is that allowed?’
‘They won’t know, and if they did, they wouldn’t mind. It’s just expenses.’
Expenses – another word freighted with adult mystery. Expenses, I knew, meant something for nothing, treats without consequences, the realm of my father; a sharp contrast to the world of home, which was all consequences. And expenses meant conflict, but not this time.
My father sold car parts, but he never called them car parts – they were always auto parts. Later, I learned specifics: he worked for a wholesaler and oversaw the supply of parts to distributors. This meant continual travel, touring retailers around the country. He was away from home three out of four nights, and at times for whole weeks. I yearned for the days he was home. We would go to the park, or go swimming – nothing I did not do with my mother, but the experience was transformed. He brought an anarchic air of possibility to the slightest excursion. A gleam in his eye was enough to fill me with mad joy. It was life as it could be lived, not as it was lived.
This was, in my father’s words, ‘a proper hotel’ – plush and slightly stuffy; English, not American; not part of a chain. It was in a seaside resort town, far enough from home for the company to pay for a room, but close enough for me and my mother to join him for a brief holiday, a desperate experiment in combining his peripatetic career with home and child-rearing. A fun and, much more important, normal time would be enjoyed by all – such was my mother’s anxiety on these points that she successfully robbed herself of any enjoyment. The hotel was quiet because it was off season. Winter coats were needed for walks along the grey beach; the paint was bright on the signs above the metal shutters, though the neon stayed unlit. The town was asleep, and we were intruders. In the hotel, we dined quietly among empty tables, an armoury of cutlery glinting unused, table linen like snow undisturbed by footsteps. I roamed the corridors. The ballroom was deserted and smelled of floor-polish. The banqueting hall was a forest of upturned chairs on tables. Everything was waiting for others to arrive, but who, and when? What happened here was of great importance and considerable splendour, but it happened at other times, and to unknown persons. Not to me.
Maybe my father moved in that world, where things were actually happening. There was a provisional air to him, as if he was conserving himself for other purposes. Even when he was physically present, he conducted himself in absences. He smoked in the garden and made and received telephone calls, speaking low. I would listen, taking care that he did not see me, trying to learn about the other world from what he said when he thought no one was listening. But he spoke in code: Magneto, camshaft, exhaust manifold, powertrain, clutch. And, rarer, another code: Yes, special, away, not until, weekend, she, her, she, she.
I was missing something.
The other lift passengers and I debarked into a lobby that had filled with people: sitting on the couches, standing in groups, talking on or poking at phones. Normally these communal places – the lobbies, the foyers, the atria – are barely used, inhabited only fleetingly by people on their way elsewhere, checking in or out, perhaps alone on a sofa waiting for someone or something. To see the space at capacity, teeming with people, was curiously thrilling, like observing by chance a great natural migration. This was it: I was present for the main event, when the hotels were at capacity and the business centres hosted back-to-back video conferences with head offices all over the planet. I could see it all for what it was and what it wasn’t. Because even when thronged with people, the lobby is still uninhabited – it cannot really be occupied, this space, or made home; it is a channel people sluice through. Those people sitting on the sofas don’t make the furniture any more authentic than the maybe-virgin seat I had seen by the lift. The space isn’t for anyone. My younger self might have been troubled by this thought, that even the main event could not give the space purpose – but now I had come to realise that the sensation was simple existential paranoia. I recognised the limits of authenticity.
Where there are buses, there is hanging around; Maurice’s dictum was quite correct. The driveway outside the hotel was protected by a porte-cochère. Under this showy glass and steel canopy, three coaches idled while conference staff in high-visibility tabards pointed and bickered, and desultory clusters of dark-suited guests smoked and hunched against blasts of cold, wet wind. The buses were huge and shiny, gaudy in banana-skin livery; their doors were closed. Evidently a disagreement or communications breakdown was under way – the attendants listened with fraught attention to burbling walkie-talkies, staring at nothing, or shouted at and directed each other, or jogged about, or consulted clipboards, but nothing happened as a result of this pseudo-activity.
I was about to retreat behind the glass doors, back to the warmth and comfort of the lobby, when I spotted Rosa (or Rhoda) standing alone among the huddle waiting for the buses, cigarette in one hand, phone apparently fused to the other. She had put on a brightly coloured quilted jacket and seemed unbothered
