The Cross Hotel
From THE LOWER REACH ADVERTISER, Friday, Letters
Sir, I am a bronze graduate of the College in the fourth year of my service, posted to the fever hospital at the Lower Reach, and I write to say that the wards are full, the wards are cold, and the ward mages sleep in them. I signed for five years at fifteen and did not know what five years was. I do not ask for sympathy. I ask whether the young gentlemen sitting the entrance on Monday have been told. I sign myself, A Bronze. [The Editor prints this letter as received and does not share the views expressed in it.]
Croft would not let anybody call a cab. “It is no distance,” he said.
It was a distance, as Leon discovered over the next half hour. They went down from Queen’s District on foot, past the low walls, the lamps and the houses whose windows were still glowing through the fog, and the fog came with them the whole way.
Leon carried the small canvas bag and the bundle. He had carried both further than this before breakfast, so that part did not trouble him, but Croft had gone strangely quiet. Leon had known him for five hours, and this was the longest he had gone without talking.
So Leon did the only sum he knew how to do. He had four marks and eleven coppers. That had to last until the entrance on Monday, and a good while after it if Monday went badly.
He had meant to sleep in the station; he had even found the bench and worked out which end of it was warmest before Mr. Croft had come out of the crowd and started being kind to him. He could not pay for a hotel, and he was fairly sure he could not pay for its front door.
“Sir,” he said.
“Mm,” said Croft.
“I have got money.”
Croft seemed to come back from wherever his thoughts had taken him. “Of course you have.”
“I mean to say I have got some. Not all of it.”
Ahead of them, Mr. Grey walked at the same measured pace he had kept since Ostley, never looking back to see whether the other two were still there. Leon had the impression that he would know if they stopped anyway.
“Nobody is asking you for any,” said Croft.
That was the trouble.
Nobody had asked him for anything all day, and Leon was three favours deep by his own count, with no idea at all how a person got out from under that sort of debt. The road bent, and slowly a large building came into view through the fog.
Every window in the front of the Cross Hotel was lit. There were four black carriages in the yard. Leon knew them; two hours ago, he had put his head out of a cab window to watch them go by with a standard fixed to a short pole, and one of the men in grey had looked directly at him while he did it.
“Ah,” said Croft.
The doors were glass with brass fittings, and a man outside in a coat better than the curate’s Sunday one opened them before they reached the steps. He did not say anything about Leon’s bundle, which Leon noticed because people usually did.
Inside, there was more light than Leon had ever stood in at once, and a great deal more movement. Luggage went past in both directions, half of it bearing labels written in scripts he could not read, while near the staircase a young man in black worked down a list with a pencil and three porters waited beside him.
Croft went to the desk. Leon followed and put his boots down carefully, because they were leaving marks.
“Rooms, if you have them,” said Croft. “Croft, Grey and Grey.”
The clerk wrote nothing. He looked at Croft’s satchel, then down over the edge of the desk at Leon’s boots. It took him about a second and a half, which Leon thought was a long time to spend looking at a pair of boots.
“We are very full tonight, sir.”
“Ah.”
“I have the third floor back. Two beds.”
Nobody in the lobby had said anything rude, but Leon still felt the heat rise into his face, and he could not have explained why. Then Mr. Grey arrived at the desk, and he did not seem to be in any hurry.
“Three, if you can manage it,” he said. “Nothing at the front.”
“As I say, sir. We are very full.”
Across the lobby, the manager stopped talking. He was a wide, tidy man in a good coat, and he had been halfway through a sentence to the young man with the list. He finished it, then crossed the floor without hurrying, and the crowd seemed to open for him as he came.
“Mr. Carrow.”
He stopped in front of Mr. Grey. A look moved behind his face and was put away again so quickly that Leon was not sure he had seen it.
“Mr. Grey. Forgive me, sir.”
“Not at all.”
“We have you in Nine.”
The clerk looked up at once. “Nine is not let, sir. That room is…”
“Nine is not let,” the manager agreed. “Nine, and the two either side of it. Take the gentlemen’s things.”
The young man with the pencil had come three steps closer. He had a narrow face, very good shoes, and spoke Ashfox with almost no accent.
“Nine is ours,” he said. “It was asked for this afternoon.”
“Nine was never let, sir.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes, it is held,” said the manager.
That was all. The young man looked at Mr. Grey for a moment and got nothing back. Then he wrote a note on his list, returned to his porters, and did not raise his voice at anybody.
After that, everything went very quickly. Somebody took Croft’s satchel out of his hands; he had carried that satchel on and off a train four times since noon, and once it was gone he seemed uncertain what his arms were supposed to do.
A porter came past Leon and lifted the canvas bag from his shoulder before he had finished deciding whether to give it up. Another porter crouched down.
“Your boots, sir.”
“They are all right,” said Leon.
“Yes, sir,” said the porter, and took them anyway, saying nothing about their condition.
Croft got his voice back at the stairs. “The register,” he said. “Do we not sign?”
“We shall not trouble you, sir.”
Leon looked back once from the third step. The young man with the list was watching the three of them go upstairs.
Room Ten already had a fire in it. There was a bed with four pillows, a washstand with hot water standing ready in a brass can, and a carpet that made Leon feel as though he ought to apologise for standing on it. He remained in the doorway for a while with his stockinged feet on somebody else’s floor before remembering that nobody had told him what to do next.
He could not work the gas. He turned the little tap the other way twice, and the light went up instead of down, so he left it and got into bed with the lamp burning.
Food arrived on a tray he had not ordered. He ate all of it, then put the tray outside the door because that seemed to be what you did, and because he could not think of anything else.
He put the bundle under the bed. Then he got up, took it out again, and put it on the floor where he could reach it.
He lay back and did his sum once more. Six sovereigns a night. It said so on the board in the hall, and that was for the smallest room they had. Twenty marks to the sovereign; Leon knew the number, although he had never had a sovereign in his hand.
He tried the rest anyway. Three rooms, three nights, and he would not let himself think past Monday. He got a figure, then did the calculation again and got the same one. There was nothing at the end of that sum he could pay.
Nobody had asked him for anything. That was the worst of it.
He would ask Mr. Grey in the morning what it came to, and then he would find out what work was worth in Meridian and do it. There had to be work somewhere in a city this large.
At midnight, Leon went down for water because he had drunk the whole can and had been too shy to ring. The lobby was empty now. The luggage was gone, the lamps had been turned down, and the night porter sat behind the desk with a ledger without asking Leon what he was doing there.
Mr. Grey was in a chair at the cold end of the room with a newspaper. There was a glass on the table beside him, full to the top. Leon looked at it twice as he passed, because it seemed strange to have a drink sitting untouched beside you at that hour.
“Cannot sleep?”
“No, sir.” Leon stopped. “It is too quiet.”
“It will be loud enough on Monday.”
Mr. Grey returned to his paper. He was at the back of it, on the advertisements, which Leon thought was a strange place for a man to spend his night, though rich men were entitled to be strange.
Leon got his water from the porter and went upstairs. Halfway to the landing, it struck him that Mr. Grey could not sleep either, and that made him feel a good deal better about everything.
He woke late. He knew it before he opened his eyes because the light through the curtain was a different colour, and there was already a great deal of traffic passing in the road.
There were clothes on the chair, and they were not his. A shirt, a collar, a dark suit with the jacket cut short in the fashion the young men on the platform wore, a coat and stockings. His boots stood underneath them, black again, with the worn heel built up level.
He looked at the door. Nobody had knocked, and he had not heard a sound.
He picked up the shirt and put it on. It fitted him across the shoulders, which no shirt had ever done because he was a big lad and shirts in his part of the country seemed to come in one size up or one size down. The sleeves ended where sleeves were supposed to end, and the collar sat properly around his neck. Nobody had measured him; he had been asleep.
On the end of the bed, folded neatly, were his own clothes, and they had been washed. The coat that had been a good coat twenty years ago on somebody wider had been taken in at the shoulder, and the lining had been put back where it had come away. His shirt had a new button on it, and it matched the others, which meant somebody had gone out and found one.
Leon sat down on the bed and looked at that for a while. They had not thrown any of it out. He had been certain, in the night, that they would.
The bundle was on the floor where he had left it. The oilcloth was tied the way he tied it, with the knot underneath. Nobody had touched it, and nobody had asked.
The last item on the chair was a pair of gloves: grey kid, thin, with two little buttons at the wrist. They were not for the cold.
Leon picked them up, turned his right hand over and looked at the back of it, at the mark Ma Fenn had put there when he was twelve. Then he put the gloves on.
Croft was in the dining room having his third breakfast. Leon did not recognise him for a moment. His hair had been taken off his collar and squared at the back, he had been shaved by somebody who did it for a living, and there was a new collar around his neck. Even his spectacles seemed to sit where they were meant to.
“Leon!” Croft half stood. “Sit down. Have the kidneys. I have had them twice.”
“Sir.”
“They led me to a salon and did something to my hair. Though I fell asleep after the first minute.”
“Was it bad, sir?”
Croft looked at his plate. “No,” he said. “That is the difficulty.”
He pushed his spectacles up out of habit, then noticed that they had not been sliding and stopped with his finger on the bridge. “Hm.”
Mr. Grey was two tables over with a cup of coffee he was not drinking. He had a newspaper again, and looked exactly as he had looked at Ostley, at Harrow Cross and on his uncle’s step. By the look of him, he had slept eight hours in his own bed.
The manager came through the room, checking things as he went. “Mr. Grey.”
“The service is improved,” said Mr. Grey, without looking up.
“Thank you, sir.”
That was all. The manager continued down the room and stopped a waiter about a fish knife.
Croft had gone very still with a piece of toast in his hand. He put it down and looked at Mr. Grey, then at Leon, who had nothing useful to tell him. So Croft did what Croft did when he was uncomfortable: he talked.
“About the bill,” he said.
“There is no bill, sir,” said a waiter from somewhere behind him.
“There is always a bill.”
“It is settled, sir.”
“Settled by whom?”
The waiter filled his cup. “Shall I bring more toast, sir?”
Croft opened his mouth, thought better of it, and reached for his satchel instead. He swung it onto his shoulder.
The strap held.
He stopped and looked at it because the strap had not held in four years.
The car was waiting at the door. Leon had seen three motor cars in his life, and two of them had been yesterday. This one was long, quiet and the colour of good boots, with a chauffeur standing beside it in a grey coat and his cap tucked beneath one arm.
“Whenever you are ready, sir.”
“It is the College,” said Croft. “The Royal College. Do you know it? You go up along the park and then…”
“Yes, sir.”
“The west gate is the one you want. The other one goes round to…”
“Yes, sir,” said the chauffeur, opening the door for him.
Croft stopped. “Nobody told you?”
The chauffeur looked at him politely. “No, sir.”
Leon looked at Mr. Grey. Mr. Grey said nothing.
On the step, as they were leaving, the young man with the list was putting his gloves on. He looked at Mr. Grey, and Mr. Grey looked at him. It lasted no longer than passing a stranger in a doorway, but neither man looked surprised to see the other.
Inside, the car smelled of leather and somebody else’s cigarettes. They went up along the park. Croft watched the city go past with his hands on his knees, and Leon noticed that he had not said the word uncle once all morning.
After a while, Croft looked at Mr. Grey. “Mr. Grey.”
“Mr. Croft.”
“Forgive me. What does your family do?”
Leon looked down at the floor of the car.
“I have no family,” said Mr. Grey.
Croft heard the answer about half a second after he had asked the question. He went a colour, began to speak, and then had the sense to stop.
“They give us the name at the registry,” said Mr. Grey pleasantly. “It is a useful name. Nobody asks you a second question about it.”
Which was not true, Leon thought, because Mr. Croft had just asked one. Nobody said anything after that.
The park came to an end. Away up the road, the wall began, and towers rose above it with the fog still sitting among them while the traffic streamed toward the same place. Leon put his hands in his lap, one glove over the other, the way Mr. Grey had held his in the lobby.
He watched Meridian go by and thought about Monday.