Laidlaw

34

What time it was didn’t bother Harkness, only what time it wasn’t. It wasn’t quarter-to-eleven, and it wouldn’t be again tonight. The waste of a night weighed on him. He had passed up something in order to arrive at nothing. The aimless scuffling that composed the whole day made him feel like a bit-player in his own life.

The Burleigh didn’t help, locked and dark, a storehouse for sleep. He had to get the night-porter to let him in. The old man obviously knew the plot of Harkness’s day. He wasn’t about to change the ending.

When Harkness rang, the small figure appeared out of the dimness beyond the glass door with infinite patience, like a genie materialising atom by atom out of a bottle. You knew he was getting nearer because he wasn’t getting any further away. Once there, he cupped both hands against the glass, giving himself a letterbox of shadow he could keek through. It took him a day or two to focus. He was a slow mover, Harkness decided, the kind who could miss a world war by glancing away.

While the old man was plotting his position, Harkness had a strong desire to put on his Frankenstein face, shoot out his arms and stiff-leg it up and down the porch. He contented himself with trying not to look like a letter-bomb.

Then it was the ritual of the keys. He brailled his way through them, made his selection and dropped the lot. The whole process began again, taking him so long that Harkness was hoping he wouldn’t take a tea-break in the middle. Inside, Harkness tapped him on the sleeve of his brown dustcoat.

‘Thanks,’ he said with relief.

But the receptionist was waiting to continue the art of walking backwards to meet you. She wasn’t the one from earlier. She was younger and harder and looked as if she wanted the world to go away and bother somebody else. In the time it took Harkness to safari to her desk, she didn’t look up once. When he got there, she still didn’t look up.

She was making entries in a ledger, presumably working out when the world would end. She didn’t glance at him. While the point of the pen in her right hand bounced like a bagatelle-ball among complicated figures, her left hand spun the register round for him.

‘Will you be a single-room?’ she said.

She was the perfect end to a crappy day, brusque, supercilious and precisely as pleasant as a boil on the sphincter. Harkness stared at the crown of her head, deciding where the axe should go.

‘Only if you’ll be a bungalow,’ he said.

The pen-point jabbed purposefully a couple of times more and then staggered to a halt in mid air. She looked at him as if she didn’t want her pince-nez to fall off.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Of course you do. I’m going upstairs to see a Mr Laidlaw. I’m just letting you know. He’s in, I take it.’

She had checked the register and the key-board and said, ‘Yes’, before she caught up with herself. Harkness waited patiently for discomfiture to give way to annoyance and for annoyance to exercise itself into indignation before he showed her his card.

‘He’s a policeman, too,’ he said.

She wasn’t pleased.

‘I suppose it’s all right. But keep it quiet, please. The residents are sleeping.’

‘And here was me hoping to have a dorm feast,’ Harkness said.

The old man offered him the lift but Harkness said, ‘No. Thanks all the same.’ He was in a hurry. He went upstairs and walked the tilting decks again. At Laidlaw’s door he knocked gently several times and nothing happened. He tried the handle and it opened. He switched on the light. The room was empty.

Leaving the door open, he went to the Residents’ Lounge and put on the light. There was nobody there, just a beer-glass ringed with white and a newspaper lying open at the television programmes. He put off the light and went back to Laidlaw’s room. The note he left said ‘Alan McInnes seems to be in the clear’.

Even Laidlaw was avoiding him. He went back downstairs and was heading for the door, where the old man was waiting, when he turned and crossed towards the desk. He needed one last squeeze at the boil to get the frustration out.

‘That’s me leaving now,’ he said.

She nodded curtly. He must have cost her another calculation.

‘You don’t have a lounge-bar open just now, do you?’

She looked a reprimand at him.

‘No, it’s closed. And even if it was open, it would only be for residents.’

He let her misunderstanding go.

‘Where’s the other woman? Who was on the desk earlier?’

‘She’s upstairs in bed,’ she said, and then wondered how he knew her. ‘You mean Jan?’

‘I don’t know her name. But you can’t miss her. She’s the one who treats people as if they were human.’

‘How can she tell?’

‘It takes one to know one,’ Harkness said.

The old man opened the door with all the ease of the Venus de Milo cracking a safe. The street cooled Harkness down. He thought maybe he had over-reacted. Laidlaw must be catching. He remembered he was supposed to have phoned Mary and wished it was quarter-to-eleven. He wondered about Laidlaw.