Goodmans Hotel - 8. Chapter 8

Having warned me of the trend towards buying in computer services from specialist companies, Peter expected me to resist any attempt to close down my unit should one of the younger more forward looking partners, or even one of the old codgers who had been tipped off about the trend by a friend at his club or on the golf course, suggest it.

He knew nothing of Goodmans Villa or Andrew’s ideas for a gay hotel. That I might want to relinquish the income and status of my position in the firm to set up a small business had probably not crossed his mind. The happiness brought me by Tom’s return helped my decision. Giving up Lindler & Haliburton for Andrew’s world of small independent gay businesses would surely show that there was not some other social group who were ‘more my sort of people’, prove the depth of my commitment and strengthen the bond between us.

A software supplier I regularly dealt with was also in the business of running computer facilities for other City institutions. I told my contact there that one of the younger Lindler & Haliburton partners was rumoured to be thinking about contracting out the work of my unit. This was untrue, but he passed the rumour on to his colleagues, and before long they began lobbying several of the partners to be allowed to bid for the work. Peter need never know that his warnings had helped contrive my exit from the firm.

In return for my co-operation in the process that would bring about my redundancy – and for anyone to take over the work without my help would have been extremely difficult – I was promised a substantial ‘severance’ payment and a huge bonus based on anticipated cost savings over the first five years of the change. The partners may have genuinely believed that the savings dangled before them by the company hoping to take over the work were realistic, or in the increasingly bitter internal politics at Lindler & Haliburton, Peter’s enemies may simply have thought it worth paying a substantial sum in order to be rid of me, one of his main supporters. Had he been present he might have prevented the change, but since he was in exile, other than harrying me by telephone and e-mail to put forward the arguments for keeping the IT Unit as it was, there was little he could do. I pretended more and more to be disillusioned because, after all my work over the years, the partners wanted to call in outsiders to replace me and my carefully selected team. Misleading Peter in this way might be disloyal, but he had had my past hard work and support by way of repayment for the help he had given my career. The time had come for the account to be closed.

My disillusion with Lindler & Haliburton and work in the City increased by the day. Things that had once impressed me, the huge sums of money appearing on balance sheets, the senior staff meetings and conferences in prestigious office buildings, the business lunches, all the outward show of City affluence, ceased to attract me. My hopes and ambitions lay elsewhere. My years of work there came to appear as a necessary period of labour undertaken in order to win my independence.

Having recently invested in the Buckinghamshire nursery, Andrew had no capital available to invest in Goodmans Villa, but he played a major role in obtaining the lease. The old lady who owned it depended on income from the flats to pay her nursing home fees. The flats were deteriorating and becoming more and more difficult to let, and she could not afford extensive renovations. He went to see her, and she welcomed the proposal to take the house over for use as a hotel. Her solicitor was in favour, and the hotel, or rather guest house, that had for so long been a vague possibility became the subject of contract negotiations. After several meetings we agreed on a lease for ten years with options for two five-year extensions.

The draft business plan for the first year, drawn up with Andrew’s help, was guesswork. We estimated the likely charge for a night’s stay using advertised prices at other hotels and guest houses nearby, calculated potential annual takings and set them against running costs. Profit or loss depended on our assumptions about the level of bookings, something we would not really know until the hotel had been open for a year or more. Lizetta’s boyfriend, Vincent, helped us with the figures and encouraged us with statistics about rising demand for hotel rooms in London.

Arrangements to take out the lease on Goodmans Villa, like the contracting out of my work at Lindler & Haliburton, went on for month after month. As the opening of the hotel came closer, going into the office every day became an agony. The snobbery, the competitiveness, the hand-stitched suits, ostentatious motor cars and business lunches were now loathsome to me. That world, in which general social good meant nothing, where men were ranked entirely according to money and position, now seemed horribly obsessed with the superfluous and pretentious.

Events seemed to progress under their own momentum. Andrew guided me through the stages of agreeing and signing the lease for the hotel, giving the existing tenants notice, arranging for the conversion work, clearing the hurdles of planning permission and having the business registered with the authorities. At Lindler & Haliburton I gave opinions on the papers and memos dealing with the hand-over of the IT Unit, and attended meeting after meeting at which long lists of queries about costs, timings and terms of contract were examined and weighed from every imaginable viewpoint. Seven months passed as item by item all the uncertainties were resolved. At last two crucial documents, the contract for the firm’s future computer services and my formal acceptance of redundancy terms, were ready for signature.

Except for my friendship with Lizetta, the break from my old working life was to be total. Because she was also friendly with Peter and Caroline I held back from revealing my plans for the hotel until the key documents were signed, and she knew only that Vincent had been giving me some advice about setting up in business. When I made critical remarks one day over lunch about the firm wasting money on extravagant perks she said, ‘You really have had enough of the place, haven’t you? I’m sure you could have put a stop to them contracting your work out if you’d wanted to. My opinion of the firm has gone down too, especially since I’ve met Vincent. He gets on by being considerate and constructive, whereas at Lindler & Haliburton there is so much personal antagonism; everyone is becoming more greedy and grasping.’

When eventually I did tell her of my plans for the hotel, asking her to promise not to tell Peter, she was surprised and delighted. A week before the party to celebrate my departure from the firm, I invited her, Vincent, Tom and Andrew for a meal at a recently opened French restaurant. She had met Tom briefly once before, but knew Andrew only from what she had heard me say about him.

We all arrived at the restaurant together. The waiter who showed us to our table was relaxed and friendly, but by mistake he gave us menus that were entirely in French. Tom, embarrassed and threatening one of his moods, tucked his elbows into his sides and his face took on a rock-like expression. Somehow Vincent did what I had never succeeded in doing: he laughed him out of it. ‘Oh blimey, might have known, hope one of you knows what all this means. Last time this happened to me we all ended up eating some sort of stomach-churning casserole, tripe and goose gizzards or something unmentionable.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Lizetta said, ‘Mark speaks fluent French.’

‘Might have known, bloody know-all.’ Vincent’s choice of words may have been confrontational, but his tone of voice was warm and gentle. ‘Come on then mega-brain, what’s it say?’

Tom started to laugh, very quietly at first, but he couldn’t stop himself. When I began to translate the menu he laughed even more, as though instead of saying Lamb Steak with Rosemary Jelly or Sliced Duck Breast I was reading out a series of extremely funny one-line jokes; Vincent started laughing with him, and Lizetta and Andrew were soon infected too. Keeping my face straight, I continued, looking up and glancing around the table occasionally, trying to look mildly put out. A concerned waiter came over to offer us copies of the menu in English. Lizetta coughed and swallowed to regain control of herself and asked him for a bottle of mineral water. Pouring this out and sipping the contents they recovered themselves sufficiently to decide what to order.

On the ?phone the next day I mentioned to her how fortunate we had been to have avoided one of Tom’s moods. She said, ‘That’s one of the great things about Vincent, he has the knack of putting everyone at their ease. Doesn’t matter who he meets, a car park attendant or a captain of industry, a few minutes later he’ll be chatting away with them as though they’re close friends.’

On my last day at the firm I had to return the Mercedes. My Chiswick flat had been sold by then and I had moved into the newly damp-proofed and renovated ‘garden flat’ of Goodmans Villa. Waking up on my first Monday morning, with no congested journey to work to endure, no need to observe a rigidly imposed pecking order, and no senior partners to answer to, I revelled in the fresh, new, as yet unblemished world of being my own boss in my own guest house. I had never felt happier.

The decorators would not finish their work on the upper floors for another fortnight, but otherwise the hotel was ready for its first guests. Tom had completely rewired the building, and a small company he recommended did the rest, ripping out the old partitions and installing new plumbing and fittings to create twelve double en suite rooms. The cost of the lease and all the work had absorbed my savings, the generous pay-off from Lindler & Haliburton, and the proceeds from the sale of my Chiswick flat. Andrew had to guarantee an overdraft at the bank to provide me with cash for running costs.

As well as being my living accommodation, the basement housed two big commercial washing machines and a dryer. The breakfast room, lounge, kitchen, and a little office were on the ground floor. Breakfast and Sunday dinner would be available, and for other meals guests could use local restaurants and take-aways or the Beckford Arms, all within a few minutes’ walk.

The landlord at the Beckford Arms introduced me to an old friend of his who managed a long established gay hotel, Housmans Hotel, near King’s Cross. During several evenings in the pub and a couple of meals together he talked to me about the business, advising that as an absolute minimum the hotel would need a part-time cook for breakfasts and at least one part-time cleaner. Over the years he had had lots of interesting people come to stay, actors, musicians and visitors from all over the world. He told me about a married man whose wife tracked him down to the hotel and screamed accusations of perversion and betrayal at him in the hall, about a masseur who booked a room for a week and had to be asked to leave when client after client came in asking for him, and about guests who seemed to think sex with the hotel’s staff was included in the price of the rooms. He gave me lots of tips, for instance always to confirm times of arrival and departure when taking bookings, and how to deal with allegations of theft from rooms and the various ruses used to evade payment. The thirty-four rooms of his hotel were, he claimed, occupied most of the time; he offered to refer clients to me when he was fully booked, and I promised to do the same for him if Goodmans Hotel was successful.

He came to see it when the decorators had finished, and as we stood outside looking at the restored and repainted stucco facade, the tidy garden, and new signs in gold lettering on a green background big enough to stand out, but not so big as to look like advertisement hoardings, the appearance of the premises filled me with joy. Everything was the way I wanted it.

Except, that is, for one thing: the tenant in the attic. Andrew had befriended the gawky boy he was so taken with when we inspected the house with the estate agent. According to him Darren was sensitive and intelligent, and his having been abandoned by his parents to fend for himself in London was disgraceful. He would, he said, happily have found somewhere for him himself, but Darren was not earning enough to pay for a self-contained flat, and at his age with his boyish appearance and trusting nature he was too vulnerable to be pushed out into the risky world of multi-occupied accommodation. There was no question that his circumstances were very hard, and although letting him stay meant having him occupy what could have been another hotel room, albeit up three flights of stairs, Andrew had helped me so much in setting up the hotel his arguments were difficult to reject.

At weekends he took Darren on trips to museums, gardens, art galleries, the theatre, classical music concerts and jazz clubs. When he proposed taking him to Paris for a few days Tom and I were seriously worried that he was becoming infatuated, but he dismissed the idea, saying that he was old enough to be Darren’s grandfather and that there was nothing sexual about their friendship. On a cold day seeing them leave the hotel together that was what they looked like, a grandfather and grandson going out for the day, Andrew white haired, well wrapped up in a thick overcoat, scarf and gloves, the boy in jeans and a T-shirt, or on wet or extremely cold days draping himself in one of the lightweight but ludicrously long raincoats that were a teenage fashion at the time.

At first, I suspected that Darren was simply flattered at being treated so generously by a rich older man, and that his claimed interest in the places Andrew showed him was largely a pretence. However, given the chance, he would detain Tom and me for half an hour with detailed reports on their expeditions to Kew Gardens, Greenwich Observatory or some other attraction, and after hearing several of these enthusiastic accounts I had to accept that he was genuine.

All the same, however much pleasure Andrew derived from his company, in the first days of the hotel he was an unwanted complication. He kept his room clean and tried not to be a nuisance, but would ask me for advice about all sorts of things, about opening a bank account or going to some club or other he had heard about. Returning from the burger bar sometimes he would interrupt me in the kitchen or the office with some mildly amusing story about the people he worked with, referring to his place of employment by derogatory names such as the grizzle-in-a-bun bar, the dieters’ disaster, the nutritionists’ nightmare and the odious offal outlet. He had taken this dead end job shortly after arriving in London because he was down to his last few pounds, and passing by on his way to the Underground saw a placard in the window advertising for staff.

Tom was much better than me at dealing with him, warning him to be on his guard against strangers in case they tried to take advantage of him, telling him that he was a bright kid and ought to be thinking about his future. One night when we were lying in bed holding hands after sex Tom told me a little of the boy’s background.

He had run away from his home in Twyford after making a pass at a friend one night when staying at his house. The supposed friend recoiled; Darren’s parents, who were the religious type, were told, his relationship with them deteriorated and he ran into trouble at school. On his way home one afternoon he was punched and kicked by a gang of three bullies. Believing his parents were against him and having no confidence in his teachers, he evaded awkward questions about his bruises by saying he had fallen off a wall. Feeling there was nobody he could trust, early one morning he packed a bag and left.

Tom’s and Andrew’s appeals made me more sympathetic towards him. Once the larger of the two attic rooms was redecorated I helped him move his things into it and kept his rent the same as before. His old room became a store-room for linen, cleaning materials and a couple of spare mattresses. In return he pressed me to let him help in the hotel, and I asked him to cut the grass and keep the gardens tidy.

The next day he created a neat border for shrubs inside the front garden fence. His spindly limbs worked the spade so skilfully that he had obviously learned how to dig somewhere, probably by helping out in the garden at home. Nearby a little collection of plants in plastic containers was lined up waiting to be planted. When I asked how much they were going to cost me he said they were a present from Andrew. He spoke so anxiously, an abandoned kid desperate for reassurance and support. What could I do but smile and say, ‘You’re making a good job of that,’? He smiled in return, a little embarrassed by the praise, and returned to his task.

Over the next few weeks he brought in window boxes and ornamental containers, planted them up and nurtured them conscientiously. To encourage him I told him to bring his laundry down to the basement once a week and to help himself to breakfast and whatever food he wanted during the day from the kitchen. He always looked for me to let me know whenever he was coming in or going out, and I came to quite like seeing his skinny figure appear at the kitchen or office door several times a day. Andrew’s foundling, with his pet terrapins, had successfully established himself in the attic of my hotel.