The Lazarus Hotel (5 page)

‘Oh yes, being happy's a real bummer.'

Sheelagh looked surprised. ‘Happy? Am I?'

Miriam gave a hefty shrug. ‘Can't help you with that. You are if you think you are. But as a rule, people who're not happy with their lot want something different, not more of the same.'

‘So it's all right to be a workaholic.'

‘I didn't say that. I said it made you happy. Whether it's good for you is something else.'

‘Perhaps I should broaden my horizons.'

‘Perhaps.'

‘Get out and meet people?'

‘Yes.'

Sheelagh nodded thoughtfully. ‘See if any of them want to buy advertising.' It was hard to know if she was joking.

Before resuming, Miriam sent the group off to find their rooms. ‘Mrs Venables has put your bags in them so if you recognize your own gear, that's where you're sleeping.'

‘Don't we get a jolly dorm and pillow-fights after lights out?' murmured Tariq.

‘You get,' said Miriam, ‘seven of the best rooms in what will be, when it's furnished, one of the best hotels in London. The facilities aren't luxury standard yet. You have a bed each, a chair and a chest, but we haven't got a television between us. On the other hand, the view will never be better.'

‘Oh, whoopee,' muttered Will.

Mrs Venables had a sense of propriety. Tessa and Sheelagh found their rooms on one side of the conference room, the men on the other. Two more rooms were in use on the women's side, presumably for the psychologist and the housekeeper. Beyond were some unfurnished rooms. Then the corridor turned a corner and ended in a blank wall.

‘We must be the first people to stay here,' said Sheelagh. Her door squeaked on its new hinges.

Tessa had practical concerns: whether there was hot water in her bathroom, whether her cistern worked. She gave her bed an experimental bounce. ‘Seems OK.'

Sheelagh was in her own room. ‘Do you have a phone?'

‘No. Nor a fridge, nor a radio, nor a trouser-press. I meant, what we have seems to be OK.'

‘I thought there'd be phones.' Sheelagh sounded troubled.

‘Miriam may have one.'

Sheelagh appeared in the doorway, shaking her head. ‘I looked.'

‘Does it matter?'

The younger woman gave a sudden smile that chased the thunderclouds out of her face. ‘If you must know, I arranged to be rescued. Someone was going to phone after lunch and say I was needed in the office. There was a number on the letterhead. I assumed it was this place.'

Tessa laughed. ‘You really weren't keen on this, were you?'

‘It's a bit beside the point now.' She gave a snort of self-deprecating laughter, half-annoyed, half-amused. ‘If I'm stuck here for the duration perhaps I'd better stop biting people's heads off and try and get something out of it.'

‘Nobody'll raise any objection to that.'

Sheelagh eyed her sideways. After a moment she said, ‘I do
know
, you know. I am aware that I have a foul temper. That even Jesus wouldn't want
me
for a sunbeam.'

‘Well,' Tessa said thoughtfully, ‘knowing's a start.'

It was the mildest reproof possible, but enough to push up Sheelagh's adrenalin level. A steely edge sounded on her voice. ‘Tessa, you don't know me well enough to criticize.'

The doctor was unruffled. ‘Sheelagh, none of us knows one another at all, and you've done nothing
but
criticize since we arrived. Now, it's no odds to me whether you join in or sulk, but don't expect people to be grateful because you think you might stop behaving like a spoilt child.'

One of the prices to be paid for success is that people don't tell you the unvarnished truth often enough. Sheelagh recoiled as if slapped and the cobalt eyes flared; but a split second before the Geiger counter raced off-scale the best part of her, her sense of justice, recognized the other woman's words as fair comment and she diverted the burgeoning anger into a cackle of fishwife laughter.

‘You have a point,' she admitted as it subsided into a rueful grin. ‘I'd try going out and coming in again if we weren't so bloody far from the front door. Would you settle for an apology instead?'

Tessa was happy to meet her halfway. ‘No apology called for. Like I say, I'm only an observer here. But if you're staying you might find the time passes quicker if you go with the flow a bit. If you can't take it seriously, think of it as a rather protracted party game.'

‘What, like charades?'

‘Just like charades,' agreed Tessa.

They obviously went to different parties. Sheelagh nodded. ‘Only you keep your clothes on.'

Not meaning to stay, she'd packed only enough to support the pretence. Fortunately, in the cause of authenticity she'd included a wash bag and nightdress. She put the latter under her pillow, the former in her bathroom. Then she ran the taps for a wash.

Blinded by soap, she heard the squeak of the door hinges and the mattress sigh. ‘Better or worse than yours?' she asked through the open bathroom door.

‘Sorry?' Tessa's voice came from further away than she expected, and when Sheelagh dried her face and went back into the bedroom it was empty.

She stepped into the corridor. In the next room Tessa was still putting things in her chest. ‘What did you say?'

‘Oh – nothing.' As Sheelagh looked round Mrs Venables emerged from one of the men's rooms with a stack of towels. ‘Nothing at all.' She returned to her room, her momentary unease forgotten, put her nightdress under her pillow and went back to the conference room.

It was someone else's turn. Miriam picked on the man from Derbyshire. ‘Joe, tell us why you're here.'

Joe was not merely a volunteer but a zealot, a man pursuing a quest. Personal Discovery may not have been the obvious answer to his problem but he'd already tried the things that were. ‘I've had a right bugger of a couple of years, the sort of time nobody'd blame you for sticking your head in a gas oven.' He gave a fractional jowly smile. ‘It's harder with an Aga. I'm not looking for sympathy, but to explain why I'm here I'll have to tell you some of it.

‘Two years ago I had a wife, a daughter and a good job, and I was about as content as a man's any right to be. Then Martha got cancer. It wasn't a total surprise. She'd had treatment six years earlier. We thought she was in the clear, but it came back and this time the treatment didn't work so well. After six months we knew there was no long-term solution.

‘She was home most of the time. I quit my job to be with her. It was funny – we weren't scared, either of us. I knew I was going to lose her. Somehow that seemed less important than making the most of the time we had left. We visited places we used to like, caught up on old friends. We had a lot of fun. I don't know if you get marks out of ten for these things, but I reckon we earned an eight and a half for sheer style.

‘Then one day the police were at the door. Our girl had been in an accident and she was dead.' He looked up with tears in the seams of his cheeks, gravel in his voice. ‘More than Martha's illness, that broke us. You expect to die, don't you? You hope it won't be soon and you hope it won't be hard but you know your time'll come. But you don't expect your children to go first. It's the consolation for your own mortality, that your children will be there after you're gone, and theirs after them.

‘Losing a child makes a mockery of the seasons of life. I think after that Martha saw no point in hanging on. She couldn't bear the pain of grieving when she knew she wouldn't live long enough to come out the other side. Four months after our girl went, Martha went too. So now I'm a widower, childless and unemployed, and I can't seem to deal with it. I was a family man for forty years and I don't have the instinct, the behavioural vocabulary, for being single.'

He heard himself saying that and gave a self-deprecating grin. ‘Oh yes, I've seen all the experts. My GP sent me to a psychiatrist who sent me to a grief counsellor who said I was grieving just fine and it would take time for things to fall back into place. That was all right for a few weeks, even a few months. But it's a year since Martha died and I'm still living one day at a time. I can't seem to move on. I could live another thirty years – I need to make some plans but I can't seem to get started.' He raised one bushy eyebrow. ‘Does that make any sense?'

Miriam nodded. ‘You were very happy. The happier we are, the more we have to lose. You don't want to let go of the time in which your family still exists.'

Joe nodded ponderously as he considered that. ‘What do I do?'

‘You're already doing it. You look for a way out. Looking creates the door. You want to move on so you will. All you need is the confidence to stop hugging your memories. They're like a dog on a lead – at some point you have to let them run free and trust them to come back. And they will. They'll always be there. You don't have to live in the past to hold on to your family. Joe, you couldn't forget them if you tried. They're part of you. Go on, enjoy your thirty years. Your wife and daughter will come with you.'

Joe stretched stocky legs into the circle, vented a deep sigh. There was the sense of a burden lifting, of his thick body unknotting and letting go.

Richard watched in fascination, half-embarrassed to be a witness at something so personal but more impressed than he could have said. This was what he'd come for: this process of exploration, understanding, catharsis. Maybe Fran was wrong, maybe he'd been right to hope. Maybe with a few perceptive sentences Miriam Graves could spear the worm that was eating the heart out of Richard Speke. Yearning sharpened his eyes as he searched Joe's face for confirmation. And though there was nothing to see he thought the grieving man had found what he'd sought.

In fact he hadn't. What he'd got might have been better than what he came for, but Joe's quest remained to be accomplished. Though he hadn't lied he had told only a fraction of the truth. He was not merely a man in mourning: he was a bitter, angry man seeking both answers and retribution. His mind spun with images – laughing faces and sombre faces and the stolid faces of people posing for photographs – that mocked him and gave him no peace, and he craved their erasure as an insomniac craves sleep.

At the other end of the conference room was a dining table. ‘I hope nobody's expecting cordon bleu,' said Mrs Venables coyly. ‘I haven't much of a kitchen here.' Then she produced a lunch any of them would have been proud to give their mothers.

Personal discovery was not suspended while they ate but Miriam took steps to lighten the mood. ‘Love and hate,' she announced briskly. ‘Everyone, quickly, no thinking – one thing you love and one thing you hate. Starting with … Tessa.'

‘I love my job, helping people, getting them well. I hate bureaucracy.'

Larry said, ‘Courage and laziness.'

Will said, ‘Generosity and injustice.'

Joe said, ‘Compassion and treachery.'

Sheelagh said, ‘Strength and cowardice.'

Tariq said, ‘Frivolity and dogma.'

Richard wanted to say, ‘I love my job too. I hate being too scared to do it any more.' Instead he said, ‘Diversity and intolerance.'

Miriam made notes on a paper napkin. ‘All right, comments. Tessa loves her job. Does that surprise anyone? What does it tell us about her?'

Will said tentatively, ‘Isn't it a bit obvious? Nobody's going to go “Ah-hah!” on the strength of that.'

Miriam smiled at Tessa's expression, an amalgam of amusement and indignation. ‘What conclusions can we draw from that?'

‘That she didn't want to answer the question?'

‘She's here in a professional capacity,' suggested Richard. ‘She doesn't see herself as part of the group – she's responding as an observer rather than a participant.'

‘Excellent
.' The psychologist's enthusiasm was infectious. Whatever doubts her clients might have, Miriam believed in what she was doing and something of that confidence was beginning to rub off. The tensions between them diminished as they opened themselves to the process. ‘I think I'll go home now and let you develop one another.'

‘Just a minute,' interjected Tessa amiably. ‘Do I get a right of reply?'

‘Of course. Do you dispute Richard's assessment?'

She thought for a moment, then laughed. She had a strong, musical laugh and humour skipped in the hazel eyes. If he hadn't already known, Richard would have guessed she was a doctor. That degree of poise, of composure, of almost masculine confidence came from certain knowledge of her own worth, measured in qualifications and independent of anyone's opinion. But though she came across as cool, self-possessed, slightly detached, she had the kind of presence that generates magnetism much as a wire coil and a pulse of electricity do. Not a woman to have men buzzing round her at social gatherings, perhaps, but one for whom a few men would gladly give up everything else.

‘Actually, no,' she said. ‘He's right. But Richard should understand better than anyone. I'm here to report, not to get involved in the story.'

‘You're not interested in a voyage of self-discovery then?' Miriam pitched the question just the safe side of impertinence, watching for Tessa's reaction.

The doctor responded professionally: smiled composedly, went straight for the jugular. ‘Miriam, that's what I'm being paid to assess – if you do help people discover themselves, or just separate them from their money.'

Miriam roared with laughter, vastly amused. She was frustratingly difficult to insult. ‘I'm glad you're not letting yourself be overawed by the responsibility. I'll be most interested to read your conclusions. All right, Will, how about yours? Generosity and injustice – isn't that a bit obvious too?'