The Lazarus Hotel (3 page)

‘Then why are you here?' It was the sort of obvious question only a reporter would have been brazen enough to ask. Richard's freckled face was amiable but he waited for a reply.

Sheelagh had arrived in a bad mood and nothing that had happened since had improved it. She resented his curiosity. Whether she refused to answer, answered honestly or offered some polite dissimulation instead, he'd win on points. As a businesswoman she hated being outmanoeuvred.

‘Well now,' she said, pursing carmine lips. She wore a lot of make-up for a young woman, used it combatively like warpaint. ‘In the advertising world there are clients, Clients and CLIENTS.' She made the distinction with vocal and facial modulations that had Miriam making ticks on a mental check-list. ‘When a CLIENT tells you about the wonderful weekend he's had learning how all his problems stem from being pushed off his rocking-horse by his sister at the age of three, you don't say what you're thinking, which is that anyone who'd believe that should get the word PRAT tattooed on his forehead. You smile and nod, and steer the conversation back to how you're going to shift a million pounds'worth of his useless bloody product.

‘And when a week later he gives you an idiot grin and an envelope, and explains that since you were so interested he's treating you to a Personal Discovery weekend of your very own, you don't say that the only thing you need less is herpes and can you have the money instead? You thank him, and say it'll be most revealing, and add the cost of your time to his bill. And you come. But you don't feel obliged to pretend it's anything more than an excuse for a bunch of losers to blame someone else for their own inadequacies. That's why I'm here, Richard. You want to tell us why you are?'

‘Sure,' he said, without missing a beat. ‘I'm a loser looking for someone to blame for my inadequacies.'

Others had gathered round. A powerfully built Asian sidled up to Sheelagh with a consciously handsome smile. ‘You're in advertising? We should compare notes. I'm in promotions. Tariq.' He stuck out a large hand.

Sheelagh eyed the big man, his pony-tail and his out-thrust hand with blanket disfavour. ‘Aren't Indians usually rather small?'

Seeing it wasn't about to be taken, Tariq Straker took his hand back. It wasn't the first time he'd had to. ‘My mother's from Pakistan. My dad's from a long line of Canning Town dockers.' His accent was ambivalent; he'd erased all the clues to his origins that weren't indelibly branded on his skin.

Richard ambled to the window. ‘You could give them a wave from up here.'

All London and half the Home Counties stretched below. The Thames was a grey ribbon dropped in loops across a pointillist cityscape. There were other high buildings but none was close: Richard was looking down mostly on roofs. Though he knew the city well it took him time to get his bearings, to recognize the threads that were main thoroughfares and the matchboxes that were important buildings. The boats on the river looked like cracker novelties. A movement caught his eye: a helicopter following the line of the river. He was looking down on the helicopter too.

Tariq grinned, the slight – if that's what it was already forgotten. Insults had the same lasting effect on him as allegations of misconduct on a politician or water on a duck. He ran his life as he ran his business: adding up the profits, writing off the losses. ‘Hardly. I bought them a retirement cottage in the Peaks.'

‘Excellent choice,' said the last man heartily, sticking out a hand. He'd been waiting patiently to be introduced, finally decided to do the job himself. He was older than the rest of them, a big bluff man with a Midlands accent. ‘Joe Lockhead. I‘m from Derbyshire. Lovely county. Nothing to beat it in all England, I always say.'

‘I bet you do,' said Sheelagh waspishly.

‘For pity's sake,' groaned Richard. ‘You're not going to start on him now, are you? What happened – miss your breakfast?'

Short of calling her sweetheart he could hardly have put himself at greater risk of physical assault. Sheelagh Cody had carved a place for herself in a competitive field by hacking through the tangle of custom and practice with a determination as sharp-edged as a machete. She was used to fighting – for acceptance, for respect, for success. She always reacted to a slight; quite often she reacted first to pre-empt any slight which might have been coming. She didn't mind her reputation for aggressiveness. She did sometimes worry, in the privacy of her own head, that aggression had become a way of life, that she was addicted to the stench of battle, that fighting was no longer a means to an end but an end in itself. She would not have admitted this even to close friends and colleagues, but it remained a gall on her psyche that quite casual comments could irritate.

If she'd sketched a brief apology, explained that the situation had got her a bit twitchy, it would have been readily accepted by people who were themselves on edge and glad she'd made a spectacle of herself before they could. Half of her wanted to do just that. But the other half had the casting vote and she squared up to the long-limbed man like a bantam threatening a heron. ‘So what are you – his minder?'

‘If you two will stop squabbling for a moment I've a little announcement to make.' Completing the group was a tall rangy woman in her early forties with fox-red shoulder-length hair and a dusting of freckles across her nose. Light hazel eyes travelled between the protagonists with good-humoured self-confidence, amused at their antics. She was dressed simply but expensively in fawn slacks, a linen jacket and lace-up shoes that could have been handmade.

When she had their attention she went on. ‘Miriam knows already but I'd better warn the rest of you: I'll be writing about this. Don't panic: no real names and it's not for general release. I'm a doctor – Tessa McNaught. A medical journal I do some work for wants an assessment of this kind of course. It won't make you famous but don't be concerned if you see some reference to what went on here. You may recognize yourselves but no one else will.'

Sheelagh turned her back on Richard with a sniff. Her saving grace was that her mercurial temper passed as quickly as it blossomed: she could shed a quarrel as quickly as get into it. Unless Richard chose to prolong it this one would be forgotten within minutes. ‘As long as you don't use these bloody photographs. Have you seen mine?' She showed it round. ‘I must be about fifteen. I look like something out of the Wizard of Oz – a cross between the Wicked Witch and a Munchkin.'

‘If you're using aliases,' said Tariq with a sly smile, ‘can we pick our own? If Sheelagh's going to be the Wicked Witch I'll be the Tin Man – a poor lost soul searching for a heart.'

Possibly he was searching for something; conceivably it was the organ mentioned; but on mature reflection Richard decided that he'd never met anyone less like a poor lost soul. Whatever neuroses the others entertained, whatever anxieties lurked behind their eyes, Tariq's outlook was cheerfully uncomplicated. He'd come here as last weekend he might have attended a conference and the weekend before a party at some country house: for whatever he could get out of it in terms of contacts, gossip and entertainment. He would talk a lot, listen attentively, show off shamelessly and flirt with any woman under sixty; and on Sunday evening he would bore whoever he went home to with an enthusiastic appraisal of the encounter even though he had brought to it no problems and left with no insight. Ruefully, even a little jealously, Richard thought the big man needed three days with a psychologist like Abraham Lincoln needed a season ticket to the theatre. He murmured, ‘In that case, I‘ll be the Cowardly Lion.'

‘What's left?' asked the man from Derbyshire. ‘The Wizard, I suppose. I can't sing soprano so that rules out Dorothy.'

It was a good reason but not the only one. If Judy Garland had sprained her ankle during her first dance routine, Joe Lockhead was the last person in the world the director would have called. He'd have tried Mother Teresa of Calcutta first; he'd have made discreet enquiries as to what Winston Churchill and Noel Coward were doing, but Joe's career as a printer would have been safe.

He was in his mid-fifties but he hadn't changed that much since entering Cartwright's of Derby as a fifteen-year-old apprentice. The curly hair was dark then instead of silvered, the jowls less heavy, the movements less ponderous. But that solid framework was the result of genetics more than time. He'd been a solid child and a substantial young man, and the idea of him tap-dancing his way up the Yellow Brick Road would have been hardly less ludicrous forty years ago.

‘Printers served a six-year apprenticeship then,' he said. ‘By the time a lad was twenty-one he was a journeyman. We hadn't the education they have today – the degrees, the diplomas. At least, I don't think we had them in Derby. I never heard of anyone taking a year off to ride a bicycle to Nepal. We were too busy making families and the means to support them. I met my wife when we were fourteen. We were engaged at sixteen, married at eighteen and still best friends when she died last year. How many of today's youngsters will be able to say the same when they're my age?' He raised a bushy, interrogatory eyebrow.

No one answered; but no one mocked either.

Miriam was doing mental arithmetic. ‘Is that everyone now?' Her eyes travelled round the room, coming to rest on Joe.

Another thing they apparently didn't have in Derby was rhetoric. He looked concerned. ‘I don't know.'

She smiled. ‘Of course you don't. I'll check the list again, but I thought—'

She was interrupted by the sound of the gondola in its tube. It delivered Mrs Venables and a man in a navy-and-white tracksuit.

‘You must be Larry.'

Everything about him said athlete: the muscular body stripped of fat, the lithe purposeful movements, the determined jaw, the piercing light blue eyes. Fair hair flecked with grey was clipped ruthlessly short, as if he'd no use for anything that didn't lend him speed. He might have been forty. He was not a handsome man but he was impressive. ‘Yes.'

Richard didn't have to invent a background for him. He remembered when Larry Ford was the home crowd's best hope of a Wimbledon men's singles title. He never fulfilled that promise: there were bad draws, bad luck, injuries. Three years running he was among that small handful of Brits to survive the opening round. A week later he was the only survivor and the debate switched to how much further he could get: if this could be the year the host nation had a semi-finalist – a finalist – a champion? Then he bowed out at the quarter-final stage and told the Press the best man had won but did anyone know a good treatment for hamstring?

Larry Ford's tragedy was that he was never quite good enough to be a national hero nor bad enough to be an institution. For one week each year people were rooting for him, but when he suffered the inevitable defeat attention shifted elsewhere. There was never the affection that sustained other players, including poorer ones. For a few years after he dropped out of the singles line-up he was in the doubles; then that too came to an end. Richard hadn't heard his name in ten years.

‘I think that's everyone,' said Miriam. ‘Time's getting on and we've a lot of ground to cover. I suggest we make a start.'

There were eight chairs in a circle at one end of the room. Miriam Graves watched who sat where as if their choices were significant.

All Will cared about was that he didn't find himself eyeballing the pilot of an inbound flight to Heathrow. He set his back to the window. Tessa took a chair beside him, marking her territory with an old-fashioned snap-jawed medical bag she pushed underneath it.

Richard liked the view and took a chair facing Will's. But it was low and, ill at ease, he couldn't think what to do with his legs. When he crossed them he couldn't see past his knees; stuck out in front they became a hazard to navigation.

Sheelagh tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Swap?' Her chair was higher and when she sat back only her toes touched the floor. Changing places solved both problems.

Larry took the seat next to her simply because it was nearest. Tariq sat beside Tessa, the orientation of his large, supple body suggesting that the ten-year difference in their ages need be no obstacle if the chance arose for some other sort of personal exploration. Joe Lockhead held one of the remaining chairs for the psychologist before settling heavily on the other, palms flat on his knees, feet square on the floor, as if modelling for a toby jug.

Now they were assembled in all their idiosyncratic glory Richard began to think his wife had been right. Seeking equilibrium in this company was like a glue-sniffer going cold turkey at a model-plane convention. Of course they weren't actually crazy, but they were people who'd elevated individuality to an art form. A phobic, a paranoid, a gigolo, an android and a man who'd retired too soon. The only one who struck him as normal was Tessa and she was being paid to be here. Even the psychologist would have attracted uneasy glances anywhere else.

He knew he was being unfair. They had as much right to be here as he had; his motivation only seemed less frivolous to him. Perhaps they too had worries for which they wanted professional advice. Will's fear of heights, for instance, and Sheelagh‘s temper. Though she claimed to have been shanghaied it could have been an excuse; perhaps she too was seeking enlightenment. Presumably they each had an agenda, were probably as unimpressed with Richard as he was with them.

That coaxed a little inward grin from him – at least, he hoped it was purely internal; he didn't want to have to explain it. There was one positive aspect to all this. At work, at home, he felt to be riding an emotional roller coaster. Among these people he felt like a paragon of self-control.

‘Everyone comfortable?' Miriam smiled. ‘Make the most of it. It'll be the last time for a while.