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.
My staff, some of whom had seemed ready to leave as well, rallied round me now that they saw I was about to act. It was the morning of the couple’s fifth day at my hotel. I would have to speak to the man, as the—responsible party. My chambermaid had told me that every morning before they came down to breakfast—never earlier than nine-thirty—the girl took a bath in the bathroom on the landing (alas, not all my rooms had private baths) while the man remained in the room. This would be the best time to confront him.
At about nine the chambermaid informed me that the bathroom was occupied and the bath running. I wasn’t sure what I was going to say. I’d half prepared openings like “You must leave at once—I think you know why” or “You must leave at once—can’t you see what you’re doing to my business?”—but after that, what I felt I should say only got blurred and angry. I went up the stairs to number eleven. I was about to knock, loudly, on the door, but in the circumstances I dispensed with propriety, and opened it directly.
I’d expected, of course, to find the man. But they must have changed their routine with the bathroom that morning because I found the girl. The daughter. She was sitting at the dressing-table in a white nightdress with small pink flowers on it. She didn’t have her heavy make-up on; perhaps she was about to apply it. She looked incongruous in this position, like a child sitting before a grand piano. You see, she couldn’t have been more than fifteen. For the briefest instant she must have thought that I was her father, because when she looked up I got the impression of a cloud suddenly crossing a perfectly clear and peaceful face—as if I might have seen her for a fraction of a second without that habitual look of strain she wore in the public rooms of the hotel. I didn’t say anything because I couldn’t. I looked into that face. I have never seen a face which looked so guilty and so terrified. But it seemed to me that deep in that face, deep beneath its desperate surface, I saw happiness. It was like the glint of still water at the bottom of a dark well, like a beautiful, long-submerged memory. Just for one moment I thought I could put my hands on that girl’s
neck and throttle her. A window was open and I could hear the weir.
Then I went down to my hotel office, shut the door and wept.
Seraglio
IN ISTANBUL THERE ARE TOMBS, faced with calligraphic designs, where the dead Sultan rests among the tiny catafalques of younger brothers whom he was obliged, by custom, to murder on his accession. Beauty becomes callous when it is set beside savagery. In the grounds of the Topkapi palace the tourists admire the turquoise tiles of the Harem, the Kiosks of the Sultans, and think of girls with sherbet, turbans, cushions, fountains. “So were they just kept here?” my wife asks. I read from the guide-book: “Though the Sultans kept theoretical power over the Harem, by the end of the sixteenth century these women effectively dominated the Sultans.”
It is cold. A chill wind blows from the Bosphorus. We had come on our trip in late March, expecting sunshine and mild heat, and found bright days rent by squalls and hail-storms. When it rains in Istanbul the narrow streets below the Bazaar become torrents, impossible to walk through, on which one expects to see, floating with the debris of the market, dead rats, bloated dogs, the washed up corpses of centuries. The Bazaar itself is a labyrinth with a history of fires. People have entered, they say, and not emerged.
From the grounds of the Topkapi the skyline of the city, like an array of upturned shields and spears, is unreal. The tourists murmur, pass on. Turbans, fountains; the quarters of the Eunuchs; the Pavilion of the Holy Mantle. Images out of the Arabian Nights. Then one discovers, as if stumbling oneself on the scene of the crime, in a glass case in a museum of robes, the spattered kaftan in which Sultan Oman II was assassinated. Rent by dagger thrusts from shoulder to hip. The thin linen fabric could be the corpse itself. The simple white garment, like a bathrobe, the blood-stains, like the brown stains on the gauze of a removed elastoplast, give you the momentary illusion that it is your gown lying there, lent to another, who is murdered in mistake for yourself.
We leave, towards the Blue Mosque, through the Imperial Gate, past the fountain of the Executioner. City of monuments and murder, in which cruelty seems ignored. There are cripples in the streets near the Bazaar, shuffling on leather pads, whom the tourists notice but the inhabitants do not. City of siege and massacre and magnificence. When Mehmet the Conqueror captured it in 1453 he gave it over to his men, as was the custom, for three days of pillage and slaughter; then set about building new monuments. These things are in the travel books. The English-speaking guides, not using their own language, tell them as if they had never happened. There are miniatures of Mehmet in the Topkapi Museum. A pale, smooth-skinned man, a patron of the arts, with a sensitive gaze and delicate eyebrows, holding a rose to his nostrils …
It was after I had been explaining to my wife from the guide-book, over lunch in a restaurant, about Mehmet’s rebuilding of the city, that we walked round a corner and saw a taxi—one of those metallic green taxis with black and yellow chequers down the side which cruise round Istanbul like turquoise sharks—drive with almost deliberate casualness into the legs of a man pushing a cart by the kerb. A slight crunch; the man fell, his legs at odd angles, clothes torn, and did not get up. Such things should not happen on holiday. They happen at home—people cluster round and stare—and you accommodate it because you know ordinary life includes such things. On holiday you want to be spared ordinary life.
But then it was not the fact of the accident for which we were unprepared but the reactions of the involved parties. The injured man looked as if he were to blame for having been injured. The taxi driver remained in his car as if his path had been deliberately blocked. People stopped on the pavement and gabbled, but seemed to be talking about something else. A policeman crossed from a traffic island. He had dark glasses and a peaked cap. The taxi driver got out of his car. They spoke languidly to each other and seemed both to have decided to ignore the man on the road. Beneath his dark glasses the policeman’s lips moved delicately and almost with a smile, as if he were smelling a flower. We walked on round the corner. I said to my wife, even though I knew she would disapprove of the joke: “That’s why there are so many cripples.”
Our hotel is in the new part of Istanbul, near the Hilton, overlooking the Bosphorus, across which there is a newly built bridge. Standing on the balcony you can look from Europe to Asia. Uskudar, on the other side, is associated with Florence Nightingale. There are few places in the world where, poised on one continent, you can gaze over a strip of water at another.
We had wanted something more exotic. No more Alpine chalets and villas in Spain. We needed yet another holiday, but a different holiday. We had had this need for eight years and it was a need we could afford. We felt we had suffered in the past and so required a perpetual convalescence. But this meant, in time, even our holidays lacked novelty; so we looked for somewhere more exotic. We thought of the East. We imagined a landscape of minarets and domes out of the Arabian Nights. However, I pointed out the political uncertainties of the Middle East to my wife. She is sensitive to such things, to even remote hints of calamity. In London bombs go off in the Hilton and restaurants in Mayfair. Because she has borne one disaster she feels she should be spared all others, and she looks upon me to be her guide in this.
“Well Turkey then—Istanbul,” she said—we had the brochures open on the table, with their photographs of the Blue Mosque—“that’s not the Middle East.” I remarked (facetiously perhaps: I make these digs at my wife and she appreciates them for they reassure her that she is not being treated like something fragile) that the Turks made trouble too; they had invaded Cyprus.
“Don’t you remember the Hamiltons’ villa? They’re still waiting to know what’s become of it.”
“But we’re not going to Cyprus,” she said. And then, looking at the brochure—as if her adventurousness were being tested and she recognised its limits: “Besides, Istanbul is in Europe.”
My wife is beautiful. She has a smooth, flawless complexion, subtle, curiously expressive eyebrows, and a slender figure. I think these were the things which made me want to marry her, but though they have preserved themselves well in eight years they no longer have the force of a motive. She looks best in very dark or very pale colours. She is fastidious about perfumes, and tends devotedly our garden in Surrey.
She is lying now on the bed in our hotel bedroom in Istanbul from which you can see Asia, and she is crying. She is crying because while I have been out taking photos, in the morning light, of the Bosphorus, something has happened—she has been interfered with in some way—between her and one of the hotel porters.
I sit down beside her. I do not know exactly what has happened. It is difficult to elicit details while she is crying. However, I am thinking: She only started to cry when I asked, “What’s wrong?” When I came into the room she was not crying, only sitting stiller and paler than usual. This seems to me like a kind of obstructiveness.
“We must get the manager,” I say, getting up, “the police even.” I say this bluffly, even a little heartlessly; partly because I believe my wife may be dramatising, exaggerating (she has been moody, touchy ever since that accident we witnessed: perhaps she is blowing up some small thing, a mistake, nothing at all); partly because I know that if my wife had come out with me to take photos and not remained alone none of this would have occurred; but partly too because as I stare down at her and mention the police, I want her to think of the policeman with his dark glasses and his half-smiling lips and the man with his legs crooked on the road. I see that she does so by the wounded look she gives me. This wounds me in return for having caused it. But I had wanted this too.
“No,” she says, shaking her head, still sobbing. I see that she is not sobered by my remark. Perhaps there is something there. She wants to accuse me, with her look, of being cold and sensible and wanting to pass the matter on, of not caring for her distress itself.
“But you won’t tell me exactly what happened,” I say, as if I am being unfairly treated.
She reaches for he
r handkerchief and blows her nose deliberately. When my wife cries or laughs her eyebrows form little waves. While her face is buried in the handkerchief I look up out of the window. A mosque on the Asian side, its minarets like thin blades, is visible on the skyline. With the morning light behind it, it seems illusory, like a cut-out. I try to recall its name from the guide-book but cannot. I look back at my wife. She has removed the handkerchief from her eyes. I realise she is right in reproaching me for my callousness. But this process of being harsh towards my wife’s suffering, as if I blamed her for it, so that I in turn will feel to blame and she will then feel justified in pleading her suffering, is familiar. It is the only way in which we begin to speak freely.
She is about to tell me what happened now. She crushes the handkerchief in her hand. I realise I really have been behaving as if nothing had happened.
When I married my wife I had just landed a highly sought-after job. I am a consultant designer. I had everything and, I told myself, I was in love. In order to prove this to myself I had an affair, six months after my marriage, with a girl I did not love. We made love in hotels. In the West there are no harems. Perhaps my wife found out or guessed what had happened, but she gave no sign and I betrayed nothing. I wonder whether if a person does not know something has happened it is the same as if nothing had happened. My affair did not affect in any way the happiness I felt in my marriage. My wife became pregnant. I was glad of this. I stopped seeing the girl. Then some months later my wife had a miscarriage. She not only lost the baby, but could not have children again.