Jonathan Lee - High Dive

‘About what, though?’

‘Nothing.’

Unlikely, he thought, swallowing. One of the great understated tragedies of humankind was that people were always thinking about something.

He eventually cornered her into telling him this: he needed to be careful he didn’t become fat. In response he pointed out that his stomach was mostly muscle.

‘Is there science behind that?’

‘I’m eating,’ he said.

A little speech ensued. She said you should get healthy again, you smoke way too much and you’ve been coughing a lot. He said I’m more than in shape but thanks for the concern. She said I don’t think you are in shape, at least not the shape you should be. He said you’re mistaken. She said I don’t think I am. He said yes, you are, and you’re mistaken about not being mistaken. She said what?

Alas, this was when an ill-timed coughing fit caused risotto to shoot out of his mouth. It made a grainy landing on what she went on to describe as her ‘all-time favourite sweatshirt, ever’. An argument ensued as to how that could really be so. He’d seen her, just the other week, cutting its sleeves off, and using a ruler to mark a line along which the collar was also cut. That didn’t sound like a way to treat your favourite sweatshirt, did it? In fact, it no longer looked like a sweatshirt at all. She wore it slack, the shining ball of one shoulder exposed.

‘OK,’ he said. He lit up a cigarette and pushed his plate towards her. Every fibre of his humanity was focused at this time on the business of not coughing again. ‘Let’s go for a morning swim tomorrow.’

Her face relaxed. ‘Not too early, though.’

‘It’ll have to be.’

She sighed and rubbed miserably at the little beige stain.

They sat in silence. Something Moose had learned over the years was that, in silence, the past could be relied on to resurface. His memory seemed to flourish in quiet conditions, like a monk or a bucket of popcorn, and he began remembering now how, on a crucial day four months ago, he’d ruined a nice white shirt with a similar stain to the one just inflicted on Freya. A slippery gherkin was to blame. It had exited a recklessly overpacked pastrami sandwich. He’d been sitting on a bench, looking at the sea.

He remembered reading a piece in The Times. An announcement that the conference would be held in Brighton this year, a thin article next to an advert for cricket-bat oil. The Conservatives were to continue their pattern of alternating between Brighton and Blackpool, the article had said, and when he phoned Group headquarters that afternoon they had additional intelligence: the booking was up for grabs. Apparently the Metropole had fluffed its chance at perfection in ’82 by failing to stock a sufficient amount of Denis’s ‘special water’. The Prime Minister’s husband was an easy-going man, but gin shortages greatly tested his patience.

Moose had punched the air three weeks later. A call from the Prime Minister’s office: in response to his ‘impressive letter’, they wanted to take a look around. He prepared fully, faultlessly, and on the day — the mustard stain notwithstanding — everything at first went to plan.

Four blokes in grey suits arrived. Also a woman wearing shiny heels. There were dark swipes of something interpretable as loneliness riding the lower curves of her eye sockets. Already he liked her a lot. His excitement began to toss and turn in his stomach. They walked around the hotel, nodding and making notes. He took them to room 122, the suite where the Key VIP (for they insisted on speaking in code) might wish to stay. He took them to the restaurant and the bar. He took them to the Empress Suite, a function room with five-star refinements and stunning sea views, top-spec audio-visual routing and complimentary high-concept seafood for Christmas parties booked before 5 November. He took them to the car park and two of the men measured the precise inclines of the ramps. Then, instead of climbing back into their large Jaguars, they said they would take a stroll along the seafront. He escorted them out of the front entrance and told them in brief the story of the West Pier. The grey-suited guys shook his hand one by one and the high-heeled lady gave him a two-second smile. Sandwich, he thought. They’ll be wanting a late lunch. He nearly warned them about the amount of mustard in the Pastrami Slammer from Tony’s Cafe. But then he thought no no no don’t do that don’t do that and sure enough as he looked on and lit up a cigarette they hooked right and entered the Metropole.

A small war ensued. He wrote a twenty-page proposal. He laminated it and velo-bound it at his own expense. The proposal set out in extensive detail the Grand’s facilities and security procedures and Head Office’s willingness to bolster staff headcount as required. CCTV no problem at all. Events management included in the price. £2.50 corkage if they preferred their own wine. He didn’t slag off the Metropole. He went for a stately tone shorn of all exclamation marks, jazzed with the occasional winking semicolon, as if there were no real contest at all. He read and edited. Took Marina’s comments on board. Vivienne’s ghost was also there, lurking somewhere behind the head of the anglepoise, suggesting small punctuation changes and tiny shifts in syntax.

He waited.

A letter came.

We would like to provisionally reserve 150 rooms.

He’d won!

(The Grand had won.)

There was sparkling wine in the bar that night. The pleasantly strange guy everyone called the Captain turned up, downed two glasses in ten minutes, and disappeared into a night full of excessively bright stars of the kind Moose had once painstakingly glued to a large piece of black card — an early art project of Freya’s for which he’d been awarded a Highly Commended. Jeremy Garner from Group headquarters draped an arm over Moose’s shoulder and said, ‘If this goes well, Moose, I think I can see you right at the top of this tree.’

‘Tree?’

‘Good work. Very good work. Overall GM, I’m saying. You know Nipster’s stepping down, yes?’

He didn’t know, but now he knew with his whole soul.

He began imagining a two-or three-year tenure as overall manager at the Grand, followed by a hotel in a red-brick university city, followed by an appointment to one of the great hotels of the world. He imagined the Grand obtaining a reputation as the Lady’s favourite hotel — her mentioning it in interviews — and people beginning to call it, colloquially, the Lady Hotel. Then he started to think this perhaps wasn’t a good idea, that the Lady Hotel sounded like a cheap King’s Cross brothel. You had to be extremely careful, in the hospitality industry, with both names and numbers. He’d once talked to the Front Office Manager at the Ritz at a conference in Sevenoaks. The guy told him they used to have a ‘George IV Suite’, but that one of their best customers, an overseas gas billionaire, had one day refused to stay there because he thought it was only the fourth-best suite in the overall category of ‘George’. If it hadn’t been good enough for him, you could bet it wasn’t good enough for the next big gas billionaire who arrived. Empty rooms cost you money. Gas gas gas. The Ritz renamed the ‘George IV Suite’ the ‘King George Suite’ and profits returned to normal levels.

The woman with the tired eyes and beautiful business cards had asked him to call her if, in the weeks leading up to the visit from the Key VIP, any guests at the hotel acted ‘in any way abnormally’. But was she half joking when she said this? Playing up to an over-glamorised idea of the riskiness inherent in having the Prime Minister stay? There were a few recent guests who fitted the profile she’d described — male, not regulars, young among the Grand’s demographic. Mr O’Connor. Mr Smith. Mr Walsh. Mr Danson. But each of them was polite, and each seemed relaxed, and each had only checked into a room for a few days. The risk was surely from people staying right up until the Prime Minister’s arrival. These people, the woman had said, would be vetted.