And my husband cut straight across her and said: we’d like to check in.
I have known that man forty-one years.
I have heard him speak to four thousand people in that time — to builders, to doctors, to his own mother, to a policeman once.
I have never once in my life heard him use the voice he used on that receptionist. It was not loud. It was flat and it was final and it stopped a professional woman mid-sentence.
And I said: how many times has he stayed here?
And Hollis got hold of my wrist.
In a hotel lobby. In front of about twenty people with suitcases.
And he said, loudly enough for most of that lobby: don’t. Not here.
Nobody moved. Somebody put a glass down on a table.
He did not let go. He leaned in about four inches and he said: I’ll tell you upstairs.
And he meant it. That is the thing I did not know at the time. He fully intended to, in a room, with the door shut — and then he got up there and could not do it.
We went up in the lift and neither of us said one word in it.
Upstairs I asked him directly, with the door shut and the cases still standing by the wall and neither of us sitting down.
I said: you’ve been here without me.
And he said: no.
Straight away. No pause, no four seconds of deciding. He has had eleven years to practise that one syllable and it came out perfectly.
I said: she recognised you.
He said: she’s mistaken.
And then he went into the bathroom and ran a tap, which that man does when he wants four minutes, and which I have known about him since roughly 1989.
And I wanted to believe him.
I nearly managed it. I got about four hours out of it, which at sixty-four, on a bad afternoon, in a strange room, is quite good going.
I unpacked. I hung four things in a wardrobe and put the empty case under the bed.
I put my book on the nightstand on the side I have always had, in forty years, in every room either of us has ever slept in.
Then at dinner I asked another member of staff, very casually, over the bread, how long that receptionist had been working there.
Almost fifteen years, he said. She’d started in the restaurant.
And something in my stomach went.
Because that woman was about four years old in 1985. There was no possible way on earth that she remembered my husband from our honeymoon, and she had not said she did, and I had been the one who assumed it and laughed.
