Graham Swift - Learning to Swim - And Other Stories

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.