Don’t think, either, that a lot of time didn’t pass and a lot of living didn’t get done between the day I left the hospital and the day I opened my hotel. I got married. My wife helped me with the café and even put her money towards it. It’s true, our marriage didn’t work out. It wasn’t happy. But I’d learnt to take a balanced view of unhappiness. My wife — Carol — often told me that I treated her like a child; I patronised her, talking down to her. The strange thing was it seemed to me to be the other way round.
When we got divorced, I decided not to marry again. I bought a new café in a nicer suburb with rooms above it so it could be used as a guest-house. For a long time — until it began to pay — I ran this virtually single-handedly, which was hard work. But I was good at it. I had a natural flair, I’d discovered, for catering — cooking, making beds, attending to laundry — I’d learnt it in those years with Mother. I don’t think I was ever lonely, not having a wife. You’re never lonely in the café and guest-house business, with people to look after. After a while I could afford a couple of permanent staff, and this enabled me to take the odd half-day off — to visit Mother’s grave, to go to look up Dr. Azim, though I was saddened to learn that he had retired through ill-health, and his whereabouts were unknown.
So many years went by, dull, if busy, years on the face of it. But I always felt I was only waiting, marking time. My ambition of a hotel was crystallizing. And I knew there would come a time when that long period — over thirty years in all — between my leaving the hospital and owning my hotel would seem unimportant, a preparation, a mere journey between two points.
Because you see, if I haven’t made it clear already, my idea of a hotel wasn’t just the crowning of a career in catering, the next step up from high street café and small-time guest-house. It was a genuine idea. I had no interest in providing mere board and lodging, though, God knows, I could provide that. I wanted a hotel that would be like my old hospital without its department of health notices. A hotel — of happiness.
And at last, after waiting, saving and searching, I found it: a twelve-bedroomed establishment in a west country town, beside a river. The former proprietors, local people, seemed to have lacked imagination and failed to see its potential. Within five years I had transformed it into a haven where people came, summer and winter, for what I used to call — and many of my guests were taken by the phrase—“therapeutic visits.” I think it owed some of its success — which is not to be modest — to the presence of water. The restaurant looked out across a lawn with white painted chairs and tables to the river, and there was not a room in the building in which could not be heard the soft rushing of a nearby weir. People like to be near water. It gives them a feeling of being cleansed, of being purified.
But there are plenty of small hotels beside rivers in pleasant country towns, and these things alone don’t explain the special charm my hotel had. I still like to believe it had a special charm. I like to believe that when people stepped through the entrance of my hotel they felt at once they were in the hands of someone who cared. Somehow I knew that “out there,” in the lives they came from, there were all kinds of things — guilty things — that they would be reluctant to admit to and came to escape from. And somehow they knew that I knew this and that I understood and didn’t blame or condemn. And in the meantime I offered them a week, a fortnight, of release. When I talked to them — because I always tried to get my guests to speak — they would sometimes laugh over matters that before, I am sure, they might have cried about or not dared to broach, and this atmosphere of candour, of amnesty, was all part of the cure.
Of course, there are always those who don’t want to talk and give away nothing. But faces show things. People always smiled in my hotel, even if they checked in with tired and reticent expressions. And if all this isn’t proof enough, I only have to quote the list of guests who returned to my hotel over and over again, sometimes several times in the same year, or the affidavits of those who wrote to me personally to say how much they enjoyed their stays. A lot of these people, I don’t mind admitting, had money and influence. But that isn’t the important thing. The important thing is that they were grateful to me, they were loyal to me, they appreciated what I was doing.
And I mustn’t omit to mention that special category of guests for whom I always catered with particular delicacy and for whom my hotel was the very scene of their guiltiness — and their happiness. I mean the couples — the lovers — who turned up without booking or at short notice and signed themselves in, if not as Mr. and Mrs. Smith, then as Mr. and Mrs. Jones or Mr. and Mrs. Kilroy. Never for one moment did I allow them to feel unwelcome. Instead I let them understand in all sorts of subtle ways, that I saw through them yet permitted — blessed — their subterfuge. So that as I directed them to their rooms it was as though I were saying, “Go on — have your wish, have your forbidden joy.” And I like to think that in my hotel rooms, to the sound of the purring weir, they did indeed find their secret bliss.
My other guests — I mean my respectably married or unattached guests — were not upset by the presence — if they detected it — of these illicit lovers in their midst. Far from it. They either pretended not to notice or they winked at it — literally sometimes — with a kind of vicarious pleasure. It was as though they were relieved, exonerated in some way by what was going on, perhaps in the very next room to theirs. And the reason for this is that we are all guilty.
You see, there was nothing stuffy and stuck-up about my hotel, as there is about so many country hotels. In my hotel all was forgiven.
And all this went on for many years. My guests sat in the restaurant or at the white tables under the sun-umbrellas. They watched the river rippling by; they wined and dined; they went for their walks and their fishing; they bought antiques in the town; they smiled and knew they were well looked after; and they wrote letters, to thank me and said they would come again.
Until one day a couple checked in who were different from the others. Not obviously and immediately different: the man in his forties, the girl heavily made up and a lot younger, perhaps still in her teens — which made their purpose in wanting a room transparent. But this didn’t set them apart from all the other couples whose purpose was the same. What struck me was that their faces were more than usually guarded, more than usually strained and marked by frowns, compared with most guests when they first step into my entrance hall. I said to myself, those faces will smile tomorrow. And I ushered them to room eleven.
But they never did smile, their expressions never lightened. That was the first thing that worried me. And their melancholy was only made more noticeable by the way they deliberately avoided other guests, kept to their room for long periods and ate their meals at the least busy times at out-of-the-way tables.
I thought: What can I do for them? How can I help?
And then, on their third morning, when they were eating breakfast in an almost deserted dining-room, one of my chambermaids, who was having her morning coffee, drew me aside at the bar and said, “Look carefully at that girl.”
This had to be done circumspectly and partly with the aid of the mirrors behind the bar; but I thought I knew, from my own observations already, what the chambermaid was driving at, and so I said to her quietly, with a shrug and a touch of rebuke for her curiosity, “She’s a lot younger than she’s trying to make out.”
“She can hardly be sixteen. Now keep looking — and look at him as well.”
So I kept looking. And when I made no comment my chambermaid said, “I’ll lay you ten to one that man is that girl’s father.”