The next morning I waited until he went out for his walk, which he does at about eight and which takes him forty minutes.
And I went back down.
I had rehearsed it in the lift, which tells you something about the state I was in at eight o’clock in the morning at sixty-four years old.
She was behind that desk on her own, doing something with a stack of cards.
I said: I need you to tell me when my husband stayed here.
And her whole face shut. She said: I’m sorry, ma’am. I can’t discuss a guest’s stays.
I said: he’s my husband. Forty years.
She said: I understand.
And she did. That is the thing. She understood considerably better than I did and had done for about eleven years.
I said: was he here with somebody?
And she would not answer me.
She looked down at the ledger. She looked at the door. She did the thing people do with their hands when they want you to leave and are not allowed to say so.
She did not lie to me once in that entire four minutes.
Not one word. She refused and refused and refused, and every refusal was true, and I have thought about that a great deal since and it matters more than I expected it to.
So I said: you told me yesterday that he usually asks for the same room. How many times has he been here?
And she lowered her voice and glanced towards the lifts, and she said:
Your husband already asked me not to discuss his previous visits with you.
Not we don’t discuss. Not policy. Your husband asked me.
Four words of that sentence were about him and the rest of it was about me, and she had been carrying it since long before I walked in.
I said: asked?
She looked away.
I said: did he pay you?
And she said nothing at all for about four seconds, which is its own answer and which I have decided to be fair about.
So I said: I’ll pay you more.
I said that. Out loud. To a working woman at eight in the morning, in a lobby, having already asked her whether she had taken money.
And she said: no.
And she meant it. There was no negotiation available anywhere in that woman’s face.
And then she looked at me with something that was almost sorry, which is the single worst thing that happened to me in that building — worse than the lobby, worse than the bins, worse than any of it.
A woman of thirty-nine behind a desk felt sorry for me and I could not work out why, and now I know exactly why.
