Ring Road (19 page)

The hotel accommodated itself accordingly. A large neon sign was erected over the carved entrance, stating, simply, 'QUALITY' and then, soon,'QUALIT' then 'QUA IT', and then finally just 'QU IT.' There was the concrete back-bar and disco extension. During the 1980s there was even a short-lived attempt to turn the hotel into a conference facility, the chapel becoming a room with a slide projector and stackable chairs, but apart from the local council, who used the facilities for some town-planning enquiries, our town did not support a business community which could utilise such state-of-the-art facilities.

After the conference failure came the weekend antiques and collectables fairs, and the record fairs, and the psychics and healers, and briefly, Frank Gilbey's jazz festival, which attracted no more than a couple of dozen punters to turn out and listen to some pot-bellied men play Dixieland in the remains of the lounge, which now resembled the day room of an old people's home.

For all its recent history of inevitable decline, though, there is not a resident in town above the age of consent and below the high tide of senility who doesn't have some fond memory of the Quality Hotel. One of our oldest residents, Mrs Malone, who lives in the Gables – by far the most prestigious of our many old people's homes, which boasts residents' parking, landscaped gardens and views over the People's Park, all of which are, strictly speaking, surplus to requirements, since most of the residents are half blind and none of them any longer owns a car – claims that she can remember being at the Quality Hotel when she heard news of the outbreak of World War One in 1939.

‘No, Mother,' Gerry her son would always say. ‘The First World War began in 1914.' As a history teacher Gerry was accustomed to correcting.

‘I know what I know,' she'd say.

‘The
Second 
World War began in 1939,' he'd insist.

‘Well, we shall have to agree to disagree, Gerard,' she would say and fall into another gentle sleep.

Mrs Malone is shrivelled now, has emphysema, looks like an oven-ready bird and is about the weight of a sparrow, but back in the old days she'd been glamorous in a way that no one these days is glamorous, and no one has been for about fifty years. Photographs of her with the late Mr Malone outside the Quality Hotel, arriving for a Masonic Ladies' Night, show him with hair that looks as though it has been glued into place and a three-piece suit, and her in a borrowed stole and long gloves, staring proudly at the camera – and they were just average people, they were nothing special – and if he was honest Gerry would have to admit that one of the reasons he'd taken up the study of history was to try to understand that look, and to try to recover some of that glamour, and that confidence. Gerry wore a leather jacket and listened to music by the Grateful Dead, but he intended, as he got older, to switch to suits and a fob watch, and maybe a panama hat in the summer. Gerry is now nearly sixty years old, so he's taking his time. The leather jacket, in the meantime, was meant to evoke T. E. Lawrence rather than James Dean, but this was a fine distinction that was lost on the people of our town. Gerry's area of specialisation was the 1930s – that period when his parents were young adults and the Quality Hotel was still, just, a place of wonders.

Gerry's own memories of the Quality Hotel were typical of his generation. What he remembered were the 1960s, the time when the hotel first passed out of family hands, when it was acquired by the famous Mr Brittle, who'd bought it from the McCreas, the descendants of Nora and John, who had tired of the hotel's fading glamour, and the spiralling costs of repairs and maintenance. This was the era of the ice cream parlour and the coffee bar in the lobby, where live bands – skiffle, mostly, and nascent rock‘n'roll performed by the likes
of Barry Devlin and the Tigers
*
– could be heard between 6 and 9 only on Wednesday and Friday nights, while residents attempted to eat their warm roast dinners and their pies in the dining room, which had once been the library, surrounded by shelves long since denuded of books, and replaced with swaths of treen and silver-plated silverware.

It was when Mr Brittle sold up and bought some land on the coast of southern Spain – clearly foreseeing the future – that the hotel's final phase of decline began, the era that most of us still remember.

The new owners, the people who bought the hotel from Mr Brittle, were a consortium headed by the shadowy Mr Miller, a man, people said, ‘with city money behind him'. They were responsible for the addition of the concrete back-bar and disco extension. The Italianate gardens were used as a dumping ground and the vast windows leading out were removed and bricked up. Another bar appeared in the entrance hall, in order to attract passing trade. In these final refurbishments every penny had been spared and every last improvement carried out in Formica, plywood, and unplaned 2″ x 4″. The Quality Hotel had finally achieved its apogee.

In these last years only the disco, which at first was ‘Jumping Jack's', then ‘Scruples', then ‘Club 2000', could boast a profit: there were restrictions on numbers, but some nights during the summer, when people would travel in from the city and the country, there were as many as 2000 dancing like John Travolta, and then like Jennifer Warnes and Madonna, and then body-popping, and then round their handbags, and throwing shapes. The disco manager, Cliff – known as ‘The Libyan' on account of his dark good looks and the fact that his father came from somewhere far away – doled out a grand in the hand, cash, no questions asked, to big-name DJs from local radio and television who travelled out to play a set, and
then travelled back up the new motorway as fast as they could, after a rousing finale of ‘Heigh Ho Silver Lining' or ‘Lady in Red'.

The hotel, at this point, was to all intents and purposes finished. The consortium of owners took no interest and one day the whole place was simply closed, no fanfare and no announcement. One Friday night there was a disco and the next night, when people arrived wearing their casual trainers and with condoms in their pockets, the doors were closed, locked and bolted, and everyone had to make do with early chips and home.

The place has since been completely stripped, at first by Mr Miller and his backers, who managed to auction off the larger parts of kitchen equipment, and the beds and the sofas. Elderly Mrs Malone, although she didn't know it, sat on a part of the Quality Hotel when she was in the day room in the Gables, developing sores, vacantly watching morning television, and every Thursday she ate a chunky vegetable soup which had been served with a ladle from a kitchen that had once been the boast of the county and had seen the back of
velouté aux fleurs de courgette.
A small revolving leather chair which now sat in the Gables's duty manager's office had once, it was rumoured, seen the behind of More O'Ferral himself.

After the first stripping came the scavengers. In one memorable night someone managed to pick off about 2000 Bangor Blue roof slates, plus several hundred yards of copper piping, some lead flashing, the remaining art deco-style door handles and about a mile and a half of architraves and skirting. After that the real looting began and before long there wasn't much left for the rest of us. Parquet floors were burned for bonfires. Banisters were snapped. Terrazzo floors hacked up and used for missiles. The stud walls were punched and kicked through, and set light to, opening up the hotel's original and vast womblike spaces, and for a while More O'Ferral's monument to his wife was revealed once again in all its original glory. People
said even the guard dogs were spooked by the place and would howl at the ghosts who inhabited the halls and corridors, but pretty soon the contract to patrol the building expired, the dogs departed and the hotel was left to rot in peace.

But still it has its residents, of course, rats mostly – the great-grandsons and great-granddaughters of the original rats who inhabited the ash pile which stood hidden behind the summer house in the Italianate garden – and pigeons, and the occasional alcoholic like Jerry, who sleeps in his clothes on the bandstand in the old Turkish Baths, a position which gives him a commanding view should anyone attempt to come at him unawares. Drug takers had at one time colonised the old library, but a steel door now kept them out.

To be honest, it's hard to feel much nostalgia for the building these days and the Quality Hotel's current owner, Frank Gilbey, was not a man who could feel nostalgia at the best of times. Like Stalin, Frank believed – as he often told Mrs Gilbey and anyone else who would listen – that you couldn't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. (Although as far as Mrs Gilbey was aware, Frank had never actually made an omelette. He had boiled her an egg once, for breakfast, when she'd been ill after the Scotsman had left Lorraine, and she thought she couldn't find the will or the energy to get up and do things, but the egg had been boiled hard enough to bounce and by lunchtime she was back on her feet. Men, Mrs Gilbey was forced to recognise once again, are useless in a crisis, and not that much good the rest of the time either.)

Frank believed that progress was inevitable and that quality had to be reinvented, time and again. Frank believed that plastic was a natural improvement upon wood and to be preferred in most instances; he believed that uPVC windows were better than sash; that Frank Sinatra on CD was better than Frank on vinyl; and that aerosol cream in a can with a half-life of a hundred years was preferable to the perishable stuff from cows. Frank believed in progress.

Nonetheless, even though he never liked to look back and he always preferred the future, Frank couldn't deny that he'd had his good times at the Quality Hotel in the old days. He'd saved up and taken his parents there once for their wedding anniversary, years ago, the first time they'd ever eaten out. Back then, the Quality Hotel was the only place you could eat out in our town – this was way before Wong's and Scarpetti's. Frank had insisted that his father order the beef Wellington, the most expensive item on the menu. His mother had the scampi. It was the first time that Frank had really realised what money could buy you: attention, power, respect, people taking orders from you at the click of a finger. It was a revelation. Because he could still remember as a child, when his family didn't have two pennies to rub together and he'd been sent to the hotel with his brothers to beg for scraps round by the kitchen door, queuing with their pillowcases like the other children from the tight end of town, waiting to receive any crusts and knobs of bread that the cooks saw fit to throw away, or even the occasional pig's cheek for a Sunday dinner. People would hardly believe it today, but this was within living memory, his own memory. His lifetime. And frankly, after that, no one had the right to deny him anything; after that sort of a start in life Frank Gilbey was entitled. Jerry, who is one of our most notable town tramps, who has a magnificent yellowy beard, actually worked in the kitchens in the Quality Hotel years ago and he had always had a kind word for children like Frank when they came round looking for scraps, and if Jerry was ever out begging Frank always made sure he gave him at least a pound.

Times have changed, for all of us.

Frank could remember taking his little girl Lorraine to eat out at the Quality Hotel, and Lorraine, of course, is no longer his little girl. She's over thirty now and divorced. Frank preferred not to think about that.

And then there were the dances. It was the dances that
everyone remembered, even Frank. He'd been pretty fast in those days, quite a racy kind of a fella, and he'd often take girls out into the Italianate gardens, to see what might develop, and things frequently did develop, and as a thank-you he sometimes gave them a photograph of himself at Blackpool, wearing a Kiss Me Quick hat, as kind of a memento.

But that was all a very long time ago, and the past, as Frank always liked to remind Mrs Gilbey, is history.