Room Nine

For six years the most careful man in Marlcaster had slept at the Bell every Tuesday, across the square from his own office, and on her second day as manager Clare Tennant put up his rate.

The back office of the Bell had one window, and on a Tuesday the window was full of market. Clare had her back to it by three o'clock. She had stopped hearing the man on the veg stall who called out prices as if they were bad news, and the smell of the hog roast by the cross had become something the room simply had in it, like damp. What she could not stop hearing was the printer, which took a breath before every page.

Harrowgate Inns had bought a coaching inn with twenty-two bedrooms, a Long Room, an Assembly Room, a kitchen that passed its inspections by one point, and thirty years of Ted Mallory. The first four were on the sale particulars. The last was not, and it was the one she had been hired to deal with.

Mallory had not been a crook. She had been clear with herself about that since Monday morning, because it was the easy thing to think and she did not trust easy things. He had been a landlord. He had run the Bell on his word and on other people's, and his word had been good, and it had cost the building about a third of what it ought to have taken. The bowls club had its Christmas lunch at the price of the year it was first agreed. The brewery's rep slept in room four for nothing on the understanding that he would be generous with the discount, and he had not been noticeably generous since the day it was agreed. A funeral director on Netherby Row had the Long Room for wakes at a rate that would not have covered the sandwiches. Each arrangement had a note on the booking system, and every note said the same thing in the same three words: per T.M., agreed.

She had a list. It was on a yellow pad because she thought better on paper, and by three it ran to two sides. Occupancy was fifty-eight per cent. Harrowgate wanted seventy-two by the end of the year, and Gillian Struthers had said so on the telephone in a voice that made it sound like weather rather than a threat. Clare did not need the reminder. She knew what fourteen points of occupancy looked like in an old building on a dead street. It looked like this list, and every line of it was somebody's friend.

At a quarter to four she found room nine.

It came up because she had sorted the forward bookings by rate rather than by date, which nobody at the Bell had ever done, because nobody at the Bell had ever wanted to know. Room nine was a double at the back of the first floor, over the coach yard. Its rate was a hundred and fifteen pounds, room only. Its standing booking was fifty-five, and the standing booking was for every Tuesday, and it went back further than the screen would show.

She went back to the start. It took a while. The system had been put in six years ago this month, and the first Tuesday on it was the first Tuesday in September, and the name on it was L. Faircloth. One guest. No second name, no second key, no extra breakfast. The note said per T.M., agreed. She scrolled. Every Tuesday was the same. The gaps were few enough to count on one hand, and she did count them, and then she took the number of stays off the report because she did not trust herself to add up six years in her head at four in the afternoon on a Tuesday.

Three hundred and nine.

She wrote it on the yellow pad. Underneath it she wrote sixty, which was the difference, and then she did the sum on the pad the long way, the way her father had never done anything, and got eighteen thousand five hundred and forty pounds. She checked it on the calculator. It was still eighteen thousand five hundred and forty pounds.

Then she sat back and looked at the name.

She had been in Marlcaster eight days, counting the week she had spent carrying boxes up to the flat on Corve Street, and she already knew Faircloth. It was not possible to cross the square without knowing it. FAIRCLOTH & SONS, LAND AGENTS & CHARTERED SURVEYORS ran across the front of the brick building opposite the Bell's own door in gilt letters that someone had been paying to keep gilt for a very long time. There were boards with the name on them at the edges of fields all the way in from the bypass. On her first morning the woman at the bakery on Netherby Row had told her, unprompted, that if she wanted to know who owned anything in this district she should ask Mr Faircloth, and that he would not tell her, and that this was why people asked him.

L. Faircloth. She did not need the system to tell her which one.

She got up and went to the old ledgers, which lived on the shelf above the safe in the order Mallory had left them, which was no order. They went back further than the system. She found the September six years ago and ran her finger down it. Room nine, Tuesday, L.F., and in the column where a rate should have been, in Mallory's hand, a small tick. The Tuesday before that, room nine had been let to a couple from Leicester at full rate. The Tuesday before that, it had been empty.

So it had started then, and it had started all at once, and it had been agreed over something that did not need writing down.

She put the ledger back. She did not know what she felt, and she was aware that it was not the feeling she had about the bowls club. The bowls club was a line. This was a man who came to a hotel on the square he could see from his own office window, every week for six years, to sleep in a room at the back that faced away from the square. She did not have to be clever to see that. She did not want to be clever about it. It was not her business what he did in there.

The rate was her business. She wrote Rm 9 — £115 from tonight at the top of the second page and underlined it once.

Kenny Aske came on at eight. She heard him before she saw him, because he came in the back way through the coach yard and said hello to the kitchen at a volume meant to carry to the front. He was twenty-four, thin, and shaved his head, and under the Bell's maroon jumper he was wearing a black shirt with FALCON DARTS across the shoulders in white. She had noticed the shirt on Monday and had decided to let it go for a week. She had a list of things she was letting go for a week. It was shorter than the other list.

"You're still here," he said, as if it were a sign of something.

"I'm going through the Tuesdays."

"Nothing on a Tuesday." He leaned in the office doorway. "Market's all day and then it's dead. Always has been, since they moved the cattle out to the ring road. Ted used to say you could fire a gun through the bar on a Tuesday night and hit nobody who was paying." He looked pleased with this, and then he looked at her screen, and he looked more pleased. "Oh," he said. "You've found Mr Faircloth."

"I've found a standing rate."

"That's him. Every Tuesday. Comes in at nine, not five past. Has his dinner sent up. Gone by half seven." Kenny folded his arms. "You don't want to go changing that."

"Why not?"

He grinned, and she saw that he had been waiting some time for somebody new to tell. "Because the whole town knows. Everybody knows about Faircloth's Tuesdays. My mum knows. They talk about it in the Falcon like it's the cricket."

"Knows what?"

"Well." He lowered his voice, which in Kenny's case meant he stopped projecting it to the kitchen. "That there's a woman. Has to be. Man like that, big house out on the Fettleworth road, nobody in it but him, and he takes a room in a pub fifty yards from his own office door? Once a week, regular as the bins?" He shrugged. "She comes up the back stair from the yard. That's what they say. Nobody's ever seen her. Half the Falcon reckons it's somebody's wife. The other half's got a list."

"Have you seen her?"

"No." He said it with real regret. "I've been on nights three years. I've never seen anybody go up there but him. Ted said that proved it. Said a woman who could get past his night porter three years running was a woman worth taking a room for."

Clare looked at him until he understood that she was not going to laugh, and then a little longer.

"The guests on the first floor," she said, "are guests. What the Falcon says about them is the Falcon's business. What you say about them is mine. Is that clear?"

"I was only telling you."

"I know. Thank you for telling me. Don't tell anyone else."

He went off to do the fire doors with his dignity visibly hurt, and she sat and looked at the name on the screen and found that she did not like what he had told her any better for having ordered him not to repeat it. She did not believe it, particularly. She did not disbelieve it. She thought that six years was a long time for a woman nobody had seen, and that it was also a long time for anything else.

At ten to nine she went out to the desk. She did not want to ambush a guest from the back office, and she did not want Kenny to be the one who told him. She took the yellow pad with her and then put it face down under the counter, because she did not need it. She knew the numbers.

The front hall of the Bell was the part of the building Harrowgate had paid for. It was flagged and panelled and the stairs went up out of it in a wide dark turn with the old coaching bell on a bracket at the bottom, and on a Tuesday night at nine it was absolutely empty. The market was gone. Somebody was hosing down the square under the lamps. Through the glass of the door she could see the gilt on the building opposite catch the light.

He came in at nine. Not five past.

He was taller than she had expected, which she disliked in herself, because she had not been aware of expecting anything. Six foot two or near it, long-boned, broad across the shoulders, in a tweed jacket that had been good twenty years ago and was still good, over a pale shirt with no tie. His hair was thick and grey, silver at the sides, combed back off his forehead. He was clean-shaven and his fair skin was weathered from being outdoors, lined at the eyes and nowhere else. He had a hardback book under one arm and a small leather bag in the other hand, and he came to the desk as if it had always been there waiting for him and always would be.

Kenny had the key off the board already. Clare put her hand flat over it on the counter.

"Mr Faircloth," she said. "Good evening. I'm Clare Tennant. I'm the new general manager."

"Miss Tennant." He had a quiet, even voice, local underneath, the vowels flattened by school and then by thirty years of talking to people who were selling something. He did not look at her hand. He looked at her. His eyes were a very pale blue. "Harrowgate's appointment. I heard. Welcome to Marlcaster."

"Thank you. I've been going through the standing arrangements. You've had room nine every Tuesday for six years at fifty-five pounds a night." She kept her voice exactly level. "The rate for room nine is a hundred and fifteen. From tonight, that's what it is."

Behind her, Kenny had become very still.

Mr Faircloth did not do anything for a moment. She had the impression of a man taking a figure she had given him and checking it, not against his feelings but against what he knew, and finding that it came out the same.

"Mr Mallory and I had an agreement," he said.

"Mr Mallory doesn't own the building. The agreement wasn't written down and it isn't honoured by the new owners. I'm sorry to do it at the desk. I'd rather have written, but you were booked in tonight and I didn't think it was right to let you go up on a rate that isn't going to stand."

"No," he said. "You wouldn't." He set the book down on the counter. It was something about field enclosure; she could read the spine upside down. "May I ask why you've gone back six years? The standing rate would have been enough."

"Because it's a discount of sixty pounds a night on three hundred and nine nights. That's eighteen thousand five hundred and forty pounds the Bell didn't take." She met his look. "It's my job to know that number."

"It is," he agreed. "Well done. What I do in that room, on the other hand, is none of your business."

It was said without heat. That was what made it rude. He had not raised his voice and he did not need to, and he said it the way she imagined he told a client the valuation was lower than they had hoped, as a thing already settled which it would be unkind to discuss.

"I didn't ask what you do in it," Clare said. "I told you what it costs."

For the first time something in his face moved. She could not have said what. Then he put his hand inside his jacket and took out a wallet, and from the wallet a card, and laid it on the counter beside the book. There was a gold signet ring on his little finger. He did not seem to know it was there.

"Put it on the card, please, not the firm's account," he said. "The account goes past my partners, and this isn't their business either."

She ran it. A hundred and fifteen pounds. The machine thought about it and then approved it and printed a slip, and he signed it in a quick upright hand without reading it. She tore off his copy and put it with the key and slid both across to him. He picked them up together.

"Thank you, Miss Tennant," he said. "Kenny. Would you ask the kitchen to send up at half past."

"Yes, Mr Faircloth."

He took his book and his bag and went up the wide stair and round the dark turn of it, unhurried, and she listened to his step go along the first-floor corridor to the back of the house, to the room over the yard, and heard the door close, quietly, as a door is closed by someone who has done it many times.

Kenny let his breath out.

"Blimey," he said. "Ted would've had a stroke."

"Go and tell the kitchen half past," Clare said. "And Kenny. Not a word."

He went. She stood at the desk in the empty hall with the pad face down under the counter and her hand still flat on the wood where the key had been. He had paid. He had not argued. He had told her it was none of her business and he had been right, and she had been right, and she could not see why that left her feeling as if she had lost something.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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