Learning to Swim: And Other Stories

Hotel

THE DAY THEY LET ME out of the hospital I went for a long walk round the streets. People looked very remote and sorry for themselves. I noticed there was scarcely anyone who didn’t show some sign of strain, of fear, of worry. And I seemed somehow superior to them, as if they were dwarf people and I was bigger and taller and had a better view than they. And, very occasionally, just here and there, there seemed to be other taller, clearer-sighted people who seemed capable, if they wished, of taking charge of all the others, of directing them and consoling them.

Then I went back the next day, as I’d promised, to say goodbye to Dr. Azim, who’d been called away on the day they discharged me. I said to him, “I want to tell you how much I’m grateful for what you’ve done. And I want to say how much I admire the work of you and your staff.” He smiled and looked flattered. I continued my farewell speech. “I see now,” I said, “where I went wrong. It’s all very clear. You have to be one of those who cares for others rather than one of those whom others care for. It’s simple.” Then I said, “I’ve been happy here.” And Dr. Azim beamed, and shook hands with me when I left. And I knew then that one day I must occupy some hospitable and protective role like his.

I spent over three months in the hospital, from a time shortly after my mother died. The police picked me up on the street because I was shouting things out loud and alarming passers-by. They thought I was drunk or on some sort of drug. But when they found out neither was the case they took me to see Dr. Azim and his colleagues.

It’s strange that I should have been delivered at the hospital doors by the police, because at first so much of what was called my “therapy” seemed to resemble criminal investigation. It was as though I were a suspect and the important thing, to save everyone time and trouble, was for me to make a clean breast of it. The doctors would conduct little question-games, like interrogations, and when I failed to come up with the right answer, they would sigh disappointedly, pump me full of tranquilizers and wait for the next session. I seriously wondered if at a certain stage they would resort to tougher, harsher methods.

So it was a relief to myself as well as them when I said: “The fact is, I wanted to kill my mother.”

In one sense I don’t think this changed anything. Merely saying it. But my doctors seemed pleased and started to busy themselves on my behalf; and from that day my relations with them changed. They became more friendly, they started to take me, as it were, into their confidence. And from that day too I began to admire them.

Only one thing seemed to disappoint them, and that was the way I failed to give a satisfactory answer to their further question: “Why did you want to kill her? Didn’t you love her?”

It was the second part of it that upset me. My first instinct was to be angry with them. I loved her very much. But I saw how this would trap me. So I started to tell them how when my father left us, three years ago, Mother and I had to look after each other. How, considering everything, we were happy, and I was even rather glad (though I didn’t tell them this) that Father had gone. And when I got a bit older, I started to get these feelings, hard to explain, that mother wanted to do me harm. I got scared of her and angry with her, and then as the feelings got worse I started to wish she was dead. And then she really did die. She was knocked down in the High Street, by a car which, so they told me, was hardly going at any speed. But she died. I had to go to the hospital to identify her.

Then my doctors said, “But if you were frightened of your mother, if you thought she would do you harm, why didn’t you leave her?” I didn’t answer that. When things got to this point it would be time for one of my injections.

So I never told them exactly why I wanted to kill Mother, but perhaps what I did tell them gave them plenty to be getting on with, because, as I say, our relations improved. We would often talk about my “problem” as if we were talking about some third person who was not present. I stopped having my gabbling and shouting fits, or my sessions of weeping inconsolably because of my dead mother. I was told by Dr. Azim, who had taken charge of my case, that I was making progress. And I agreed.

Once I said to Dr. Azim: “So is that what it amounts to? I’ve been put in here — people think I’m mad — because I wished to kill my mother?”

Dr. Azim smiled and gave an expression which suggested that this was taking a naive view.

“No, it’s not your wish to kill your mother that’s brought you here. It’s your guilt about that wish.”

So I said to him: “Does that mean then that the answer would be to have your wish.”

He smiled again. He had a reassuring smile.

“It’s not as simple as that. There are wishes, and there are wishes …”

Then there followed a period of five or six weeks — which I still look upon as one of the sweetest in my life — when, with my main course of therapy over, I was required only to recover slowly, like any convalescent after an illness. It was summer and I spent a lot of time sitting on the hospital lawns, observing the other patients, talking to Dr. Azim, and thinking about this business of guilt and secret wishes.

It seems to me that there can scarcely be anyone walking the earth who doesn’t carry with him some measure of guilt; and that guilt is always the sign of some forbidden happiness. Somewhere inside everybody’s guilt is joy, and somewhere within everybody’s unhappy, guilt-ridden face is happiness. Perhaps there’s no way out of this. And yet there must be someone who will try to understand our guilt and not blame it; there must be places where we can go where our secret wishes can be uttered and our forbidden dreams catered for. There must, in a word, be care.

And then I felt privileged to be where I was, and very proud to have met Dr. Azim and his colleagues; and I had the feeling that perhaps every recovering inmate experiences, of being an honoured and fortunate guest. So perhaps it was then, and before that first walk out of the hospital gates, that the ambition was sown in me that would one day make me a hotel-keeper.

But don’t think I walked out of that hospital with a worked-out plan for something which, of course, was then quite beyond my reach. My efforts matured slowly. For many years I ran a small café, bought with the money mother left me — no different from countless other cafés. I made a point of getting to know my customers, of making them feel that they could talk to me and I would listen; and some of them appreciated this, though some of them took exception and never came back.

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.”

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.