David Szalay - Spring

‘Okay, see you,’ he says.

She smiles at him.

Well, she ‘smiles’ at him. It is a smile she sometimes does—a momentary flexing of her mouth—which does not even pretend to be sincere. To that extent it is, in its way, a sincere expression. It expresses something. She knows this, and wonders as she leaves and wanders up to the lobby, what it does express. She tends to do it when she is nervous, when she does not know what else to do. It is a sort of surrender to the pressure of social niceties, to the pressure of pretending—a sort of helpless shrug.

She starts to walk up the service stairs, with their strip-lit landings. She finds it impossible to pretend. She is not sure why. Other people seem to be able to do it so easily. Once—and they have been together just long enough for there to be ‘once’—James said it was impossible for him to imagine her acting, acting in a play for instance. Impossible to imagine her playing someone else. If she had to, he said, she just wouldn’t take it seriously, she’d turn it into a joke. It was not something she had thought about. He was very pleased with himself for having had what he thought was an insight into her personality—and one which she had not had herself. She is still sometimes astonished that anything much has happened with him at all, after that first—or was it the second? — night at his flat. The fiasco. That was the word she used for that episode of pure sexual misery, which a sort of politeness had led her into. It was a problem, the way she let men polite her into things. And that night, when he was suddenly all over her in the hall of his flat, it was a sort of politeness which pressured her into letting him do what he wanted with her—a feeling that perhaps it would not be polite to stop him, that he might be offended, that there might be a scene, with her somehow in the wrong. When she thought she was pregnant the following week and he seemed unable to understand what she was suffering, she hated him as much as she had ever hated anyone. He was in his own world and seemed to have no understanding of hers—and no interest in having such an understanding. That was what she found so strange. His two-dimensionality. He was, however, the first man she had felt a strong attraction to since Fraser, and she had started to fear that she would never feel very attracted to anyone else again. That was probably what had made the fiasco so painful—it had been surprisingly painful. And that was probably what had made it so hard just to end it, as for a week afterwards she had fully intended to, even when it turned out that she was not pregnant.

She visits the Ladies, and while she is in there she tries to tidy up her hair. She splashes water on her pasty face, and nurses her shot eyes. Then she takes up her post at the front desk and stands there facing the hours of the afternoon. From the heart of the lobby, the huge London outside and the weather, which is increasingly wild, seem like another world. It is difficult not to think of Fraser here. It was here, in this lobby, that she met him. It was this time of day. An afternoon like this one—a dark sky through the distant, attended doors. He had been hanging around for some time, since the morning. First outside. Then, when the downpour arrived, in the lobby. He was not the only photographer; there were a few others, all waiting for someone upstairs—she did not know who. The sort of person they were waiting for never used their own name, so to look at the long list of people staying in the hotel was pointless. She had not been given any special instructions; there were no special security people in evidence.

The photographers were matey with each other, but it was obvious from their eyes—she had plenty of time to watch them in the quiet hours of the early afternoon—that they were plotting against each other too. (As he later explained to her, any edge over the others, however marginal, might make the difference between a massive payday and a total waste of time. The point was—if they all got the same shots, they would all be worthless.) He was the most talkative. He seemed the happiest—he was always smiling, and made the others laugh. He was also the tallest. And also, she noticed, the most determined. It was he who quietly detached himself from the others and tried to slip into the lifts, until he was spotted and held up his hands like a football player. When he tried it a second time the security guards evicted him from the lobby. She found, standing at the desk, that—while she had watched its noisy slapstick progress with a sort of smile—she did not welcome his eviction. The lobby seemed more tedious with him not there. And something had happened as he was being ejected—their eyes had momentarily met and, from the middle of his melee with the security men, he had smiled at her. She was not sure whether she had smiled back. There might not have been time. The other paps did not entertain her. They stood in a little sour-faced huddle, pacing up and down the strip of marble to which they were now limited—the security guards had seemed to want to throw them all out, there had been a long negotiation—and not speaking much.

It was several hours later that she suddenly found herself facing him. She had more or less forgotten about him, though the other paps were still there, on their strip of marble. They had been there for such a long time that she no longer noticed them. And she did not have time to notice them. It was early evening and the lobby hummed with purposefully moving people. She turned to the next person waiting there. ‘Hello,’ she said, and only then saw who it was. To her irritation, she immediately felt nervous. He too seemed nervous, however. When he smiled—and he was smiling nervously at her—his eyes shrank to laughing slits. He was in his mid-forties probably and his face was pleasantly weathered. It was the face of someone who smiled a lot, and who spent a lot of time outside. ‘Look, I’m sorry about this,’ he said. Was he American? ‘And I quite understand if you call security on me straight away.’ She did not move. ‘But I really need this shot and there’s no way I’m going to get it out there.’ No, not American—he had just said what sounded like ‘ oot there’. He tilted his head quickly in the direction of the doors, and through them the sodden London evening, still just streaked with light, where a mush of fallen plane seeds and soppy leaves was choking the drains of Park Lane. It was October. ‘So I was wondering,’ he was saying, ‘if I could wait in there for a bit.’ He had noticed the staff cloakroom, a door to the side of the front desk, the wood of which discreetly matched the wood of the section of wall in which it was set, with a sign saying, ‘STAFF ONLY’. Or maybe he knew about it already. He was probably very familiar with the layout of the hotel. This was probably not the first time he had done this. ‘I quite understand if you say no,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to get you in trouble.’

And of course she would get in trouble if he was found in there.

‘Okay,’ she said quietly.

She let him into the cloakroom—‘Thank you so much,’ he said—and went back to her post at the desk.

An hour or two later, she went into the cloakroom herself. It was windowless, and except for a hanging-rail with some wire hangers—one of which held her coat—and a few stained chairs withdrawn from public service, it was empty.

He was on the phone. As soon as he saw her, he said, ‘Listen, can I call ya back? I’ll call ya back. Okay.’ He smiled at her. ‘I don’t know how to thank you for this,’ he said. ‘My name’s Fraser, by the way.’ He stood up and held out his hand.

She shook it and told him her name.

‘Who are you waiting for?’ she asked.