I don’t know why I didn’t see it — or believe it — when I spend so much time watching the faces of my guests. I don’t know why I replied to my chambermaid, “Nonsense.” And I don’t know why from that moment on I began to feel threatened and ill at ease in my own hotel. Chambermaids are tolerant, broad-minded people — they have to be in their job — but that chambermaid began to look at me with reproach, as if I were somehow failing in a duty, and if I didn’t do something she would take the law into her own hands.
And it wasn’t just the chambermaids and other people on my staff. It was the guests. Gossip must have been going around. They began to give me searching, doubting looks, as if they too expected me to do something. But I still didn’t see it. All I saw was this couple whose faces seemed so desolate and inconsolable in my hotel of happiness. I wanted to talk to them, to draw them out, but somehow I lacked my usual knack for this, and I was aware that if I did talk to them, in a friendly fashion, I would antagonize everyone else. I watched their unsmiling faces, and in watching their faces I was slow to notice that the smiles on the faces of my other guests were disappearing.
For so they were. It was as if some infection was spreading. The smiles had changed to looks of accusation. But I still didn’t see it. One morning, the Russells, a couple who stayed with me many times and were booked for another four days, came down the stairs with their suitcases and requested their bill. When I asked what was wrong they looked at me in disbelief. And the Russells’ departure seemed to be a signal for others. A family with young children left; Major Curtis, who came for the fishing, left. They muttered words like “unwholesome” and “fetch the police.” Another couple announced: “Either they go or we go.”
And then it was clear to me. These people whom I went to such lengths to care for, they weren’t in need of care at all. These people who arrived with guilty faces, to have their guilt absolved and their frowns turned to smiles — they weren’t guilty at all. They didn’t need happiness. They were only people enjoying country air, good food and being away from it all. That was what made them smile. And thrown in amongst them were a few weekend adulterers — bosses with their secretaries, husbands having fun away from their wives. And I had done so much for them — and now they were deserting me.
At that point I stopped feeling concerned for the couple in room eleven. I was furious with that couple. I saw it all right — I’d seen it all along. That couple in room eleven were father and daughter, it was plain as plain, and they had come to my hotel to share the same bed and they were driving all my guests — my precious guests — away. I had to send them packing.
My staff, some of whom had seemed ready to leave as well, rallied round me now that they saw I was about to act. It was the morning of the couple’s fifth day at my hotel. I would have to speak to the man, as the — responsible party. My chambermaid had told me that every morning before they came down to breakfast — never earlier than nine-thirty — the girl took a bath in the bathroom on the landing (alas, not all my rooms had private baths) while the man remained in the room. This would be the best time to confront him.
At about nine the chambermaid informed me that the bathroom was occupied and the bath running. I wasn’t sure what I was going to say. I’d half prepared openings like “You must leave at once — I think you know why” or “You must leave at once — can’t you see what you’re doing to my business?”—but after that, what I felt I should say only got blurred and angry. I went up the stairs to number eleven. I was about to knock, loudly, on the door, but in the circumstances I dispensed with propriety, and opened it directly.
I’d expected, of course, to find the man. But they must have changed their routine with the bathroom that morning because I found the girl. The daughter. She was sitting at the dressing-table in a white nightdress with small pink flowers on it. She didn’t have her heavy make-up on; perhaps she was about to apply it. She looked incongruous in this position, like a child sitting before a grand piano. You see, she couldn’t have been more than fifteen. For the briefest instant she must have thought that I was her father, because when she looked up I got the impression of a cloud suddenly crossing a perfectly clear and peaceful face — as if I might have seen her for a fraction of a second without that habitual look of strain she wore in the public rooms of the hotel. I didn’t say anything because I couldn’t. I looked into that face. I have never seen a face which looked so guilty and so terrified. But it seemed to me that deep in that face, deep beneath its desperate surface, I saw happiness. It was like the glint of still water at the bottom of a dark well, like a beautiful, long-submerged memory. Just for one moment I thought I could put my hands on that girl’s neck and throttle her. A window was open and I could hear the weir.
Then I went down to my hotel office, shut the door and wept.
Seraglio
IN ISTANBUL THERE ARE TOMBS, faced with calligraphic designs, where the dead Sultan rests among the tiny catafalques of younger brothers whom he was obliged, by custom, to murder on his accession. Beauty becomes callous when it is set beside savagery. In the grounds of the Topkapi palace the tourists admire the turquoise tiles of the Harem, the Kiosks of the Sultans, and think of girls with sherbet, turbans, cushions, fountains. “So were they just kept here?” my wife asks. I read from the guide-book: “Though the Sultans kept theoretical power over the Harem, by the end of the sixteenth century these women effectively dominated the Sultans.”
It is cold. A chill wind blows from the Bosphorus. We had come on our trip in late March, expecting sunshine and mild heat, and found bright days rent by squalls and hail-storms. When it rains in Istanbul the narrow streets below the Bazaar become torrents, impossible to walk through, on which one expects to see, floating with the debris of the market, dead rats, bloated dogs, the washed up corpses of centuries. The Bazaar itself is a labyrinth with a history of fires. People have entered, they say, and not emerged.
From the grounds of the Topkapi the skyline of the city, like an array of upturned shields and spears, is unreal. The tourists murmur, pass on. Turbans, fountains; the quarters of the Eunuchs; the Pavilion of the Holy Mantle. Images out of the Arabian Nights. Then one discovers, as if stumbling oneself on the scene of the crime, in a glass case in a museum of robes, the spattered kaftan in which Sultan Oman II was assassinated. Rent by dagger thrusts from shoulder to hip. The thin linen fabric could be the corpse itself. The simple white garment, like a bathrobe, the blood-stains, like the brown stains on the gauze of a removed elastoplast, give you the momentary illusion that it is your gown lying there, lent to another, who is murdered in mistake for yourself.
We leave, towards the Blue Mosque, through the Imperial Gate, past the fountain of the Executioner. City of monuments and murder, in which cruelty seems ignored. There are cripples in the streets near the Bazaar, shuffling on leather pads, whom the tourists notice but the inhabitants do not. City of siege and massacre and magnificence. When Mehmet the Conqueror captured it in 1453 he gave it over to his men, as was the custom, for three days of pillage and slaughter; then set about building new monuments. These things are in the travel books. The English-speaking guides, not using their own language, tell them as if they had never happened. There are miniatures of Mehmet in the Topkapi Museum. A pale, smooth-skinned man, a patron of the arts, with a sensitive gaze and delicate eyebrows, holding a rose to his nostrils …