Jonathan Lee - High Dive

During his first day at the hotel — an hour, no more — there had been champagne and cake, hugs from two dozen colleagues and friends, a kiss on the cheek from Marina. A rush of affection that moistened his eyes.

On the second day he’d worked for three whole hours. He spoke to a guest in a herringbone jacket. The guest told Moose that without cynicism and sarcasm the modern man was finished. The cross stitch in the weave. Brought to mind the bones of a fish. Moose, so often prepared to put diplomacy first, told the guest that he didn’t agree. Cynicism and sarcasm were all very well, but only if underwritten by a proper depth of feeling. Irony might be the modern mode, but shouldn’t someone sing the virtues of earnestness? This didn’t mean turning away from the darker aspects of a life. It did not mean conspiring to make your days something falsely warm and neat. But it did involve looking closely at the dark stuff, paying attention to its variety of shades, its aliveness, the ridiculous and the terrible, the fart jokes and the tragedies. For to be alive, to be capable of laughter and surprise — this itself was a beautiful thing. All this he said to the guest and in response the guest said, ‘Churchgoer?’

Yesterday he’d done a five-hour shift. He’d seen a guest tipping George a ten at the door and intervened when the man reached the desk. ‘Let’s get you an upgrade, sir.’ Head Office wouldn’t approve, but Head Office hadn’t just survived a heart attack. Also: it made good business sense. The softly spoken guy had the label of a luxury airline on his luggage. Probably came to Brighton a couple of times a year, a break before or after business meetings in London, or else he rarely came but had well-off friends who might. Upgrade him and send some wine to his suite. He’ll tell people. They’ll tell people. Men looking for a reliable home for their expense accounts: these were bread-and-butter customers. Certain limits on the kind of room his secretary can book for him without the company’s finance guy expressing some alarm, but a generous allowance for meals, for drinks. And the cost to the hotel? Nothing. The suite was vacant until Thursday anyway. The late checkout associated with a suite jams up housekeeping a little, but only if he actually checks out late, and a businessman rarely does. Creaky cogs in Moose’s brain were turning again. God, it was good to be back.

The first batch of conference-goers had been more or less well behaved. The occasional incident of major drunkenness had been tactfully dealt with by Marina. Most were there to applaud the minor speeches, the ones no one seemed to care about. Moose had watched some of the TV coverage. He saw how the cameras cut quickly from whatever weak joke had been delivered on the podium to the faces of the speaker’s wife or sworn enemy, an attempt he supposed to add some human drama. Even the keenest among the Tories milling in the lobby at breakfast time, little plastic badges swinging round their necks, admitted it was the Big One that mattered. Mrs Thatcher had briefly been in Brighton yesterday but, despite a last-minute flurry of phone calls from her Private Secretary’s Assistant’s Assistant, she had decided to stick with the initial plan: sleep in London, return Thursday night. The wait would only add to the eventual satisfaction. What was that line Viv liked to use about his diving? Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length. Robert Frost or another of her favourites. Early on she used to read him poems late at night and he understood so little except the rhythm, and that was lovely.

Thatcher snoring and dreaming in a bed he had checked. And he’d be there. Not in the bed. Not in the room. No no no. But in the building, heart beating. They’d talk at the big drinks function and then again maybe over breakfast. For the sake of his health he tried to rein in his excitement. Tried also not to guess at the number of weeks it would take him to get promoted post-visit.

When he told Chef Harry his daughter had been making him delicious soups, Harry told him she’d been going through the hotel’s library of cookbooks, teaching herself new tricks, asking his advice when she couldn’t work something out, test-running different dinners for two. Was all this for him, for his return? Her mother, when she could be bothered, had been a good cook too. He longed for a chocolate fudge sundae but it was completely out of the question.

He tried now to remind himself of that first year back in Brighton, him and a motherless teenage daughter returning to the secondary school she’d left behind. But all he could really remember was the incredible amount of little jobs to do, the lifts to and from school and swimming practice and netball and friends’ houses at the weekend and the washing and cleaning, cleaning and washing. How, even when he started paying Sandra to help out occasionally, other tasks filled his few spare hours and at work he was always exhausted. For the first time in years sleep ushered in no dreams and there was a comfort in that, wasn’t there, in dreamlessness?

He’d decided he was going to buy his daughter a ticket to Spain. One of Marina’s sisters had a spare room in an apparently safe bit of Madrid.

Cutting down on salt. The careful moderation of sugar. Never would another cheese croissant pass his lips. Not outside Bastille Day, anyway. Cigarettes only on very special occasions. When the promotion came. When Freya graduated. His fiftieth birthday. He had a timeline in his mind. It was full of light exercise and lots of salad. After a while he’d come off the beta blockers and his lower body would be back in business. He’d find the love of a good woman, or at the very least an average one, and settle down. He was no Patrick Swayze; he’d been aiming way too high. Marina. The idea of it! He hoped the lady in question would have feet no bigger than size seven. He hoped she’d make him laugh. In every other respect he was open to ideas.

His last few hours in the hospital were vague now. The decor of the ward had already shrunk from view. As soon as you were told you were to be discharged, the place could hold you no more. You drifted free of the whole world of scrubbed-clean suffering. Amazing how quickly you could take on the mindset of a visitor: this place isn’t so bad; it holds a certain intrigue. When you know it only confines others, confinement doesn’t seem so troubling. Add that to the lessons. Suffering is in your face or two hundred miles away, nothing in between.

His mother arrived at the Grand at the worst possible moment, thirty-six hours before Mrs Thatcher. She had a gift for perfectly atrocious timing. He was in the midst of dealing with the Close Protection Unit, and also the plain-clothes Sussex police officers. Politicians were cluttering the reception area, politicians were swapping rooms, politicians were complaining about overbookings. They didn’t understand that you had to overbook; had to assume one in ten wouldn’t turn up. The hospitality industry was founded on this fraction but some people went crazy, didn’t care that you were going to cover their whole stay in the Metropole, didn’t care for the implication that they perhaps could have called to confirm. Staff frowning. Staff flirting. The twitch of temporary security cameras, the yapping of small ineffectual dogs. Men with thinning hair and full smooth faces and that combustible mix of fatigue and wealth that made people step out of the way.

‘It’s me,’ she said, standing under the chandelier on her outstandingly abbreviated legs. That hunched posture. That forward tilt. Countering, he supposed, the constant impulse to sink back.

‘Mum!’ He kissed her. ‘So great to see you.’

‘Pipe down,’ she said. ‘I’m not one of your guests to impress.’