The Grand Hotel (14 page)

Dr Feast's hands fell immediately to his side, but unexpectedly applause could still be heard. It was coming from upstairs. And along with it came muffled cries of ‘Bravo! Bravo!' through the walls and the floorboards. It was The Blonde Maria, enraptured in her room. She clapped enthusiastically for a few moments longer, and with an ecstatic cry of ‘Magnificent!' she ceased. The quiet of the riverflat once again reigned over the morning.

A little later, as I stood in the backyard listening to Dr Feast's Peugeot purring away along the Dray Road, I looked up at the second-storey windows for signs of life. The Lazy Tenor's window was flung open, with Nan's floral curtains shifting in the subtle currents of the air. But there was no other movement. Finally, upon hearing a footfall and a shifting of furniture from The Blonde Maria's room, I decided that the poignant aftermath of the aria had disappeared. I made my way back inside for breakfast, reflecting on the pros and cons of our current lodgers. There were definitely marks on both sides of the ledger.

Holy Bohemian

During the course of that day Kooka's health stayed much the same. I'd check in on him from time to time to find him sound asleep, with a peaceful look on his face, and no sign of any discomfort. The Blonde Maria's situation, however, seemed to be worsening. She still wouldn't budge from her room, nor would she even change out of her dressing gown. She'd completed the jigsaw of the Bavarian Alps and was now chewing through the eclectic collection of my mother's books she'd found on the lacquered Oregon bookshelf in her room.

It was the life of St Thérèse of Lisieux that The Blonde Maria was reading when I knocked on her door just before lunch. Once again I found her sitting at the table in front of the window. This time she was more prepared to speak, although still with a trace of the little-girl voice of the day before.

She asked me straightaway if I'd heard The Lazy Tenor's singing again that morning. I told her I had and explained that it was Dr Feast who was applauding in the garden. ‘It was beautiful alright,' I said. ‘But I don't know whether clapping him might make him go back into his shell.'

The Blonde Maria raised her finger to her mouth in horror. ‘Oh my God, I hadn't thought of that,' she exclaimed.

Clearly she was still a little unhinged. But somewhere inside me a tall bird fluttered its wings and I finally realised that her retreat to the room had something to do with The Lazy Tenor's singing.

‘You know,' she said, with a sudden change of tone, and holding up the saint's life in her right hand, ‘this is an interesting book.'

‘Yeah. I think I read it, but years ago now.'

‘Mmm,' was all The Blonde Maria said.

‘From memory, though,' I added, trying to fill the gap in the conversation, ‘Thérèse had a lot of insight.'

‘The point is, Noel, it is impossible for a bird to sing a wrong note.'

Rather than explain this remark, The Blonde Maria promptly lit a cigarette. Then, as if she couldn't focus on any one thing for long, she changed the subject again. ‘Was that Kooka I heard calling in the night?'

‘It could have been,' I said. I told her about his falling off the stool and how he had to be carried up to bed.

She nodded happily. ‘Yes it was him then. I thought so.'

‘Did he sound okay? He wasn't distressed was he?'

‘Oh no, not particularly. It was more as if he was dreaming. Calling out to people he knew. But quite happily I think.'

‘I see.'

The Blonde Maria's expression changed yet again and she stared at me gravely. ‘I'll never sing again,' she blurted out.

Inside I frowned but externally I tried to look calm. ‘Why not?' I asked.

‘I'm not a singer,' she said. ‘There's something I am, but it's not that.'

‘I see. Well, what is it you are then?'

‘I don't know.'

I breathed through my nose, a bit impatiently now. ‘Well, I'm not a publican, Maria, but look at me.'

‘What do you mean by that?' she asked.

‘Well,
I'm not a publican
!' I said, finally exasperated. ‘We're all doing things we're not necessarily suited to.'

The Blonde Maria smiled at me patronisingly. She was once all good times and insouciance but now the vaudevillian had taken another role. ‘But that's my point, Noel,' she said. ‘Who wants to continue as a fraud? Not me. You can count me out on that score. At last I've encountered a human being who is on the one undivided path. I've woken to the living proof the last two mornings. I know now, for the first time, what music is. What it
really
is. That's good enough for me. We can't go on like this.'

‘Can't go on like what?' I said. ‘It's a beautiful voice, but hey, so is yours.'

As soon as the words had come out of my mouth, I winced. The Blonde Maria's voice was good – as an entertainer she was fabulous – but when all was said and done The Lazy Tenor worked on a different plane. We both knew I had proved her very point with the lie.

Slowly I straightened my face and stared at her. She had a different look again now, a zealot's look, a look of shining realisation. She sat before me like some reformed harlot of song, smoking in a dressing gown. I heard my brother Jim's words ringing in my ears. What would my mother and father make of this hotel their old house had become, with the author of ‘The Tradesman's Entrance' in one room, a sick old man taken to his bed in another, and a holy bohemian in between?

For a precipitous moment, sitting there at the table with The Blonde Maria, my humour grew slipshod, my inner vision went blank, and I retreated to the dank loneliness that had exiled me from town. With a psychiatric urgency I clasped my left wrist with my right hand to see if it felt wooden and numb. But no, there was warmth there, there was life. I could still feel the blood coursing through me. I hadn't reverted. I wasn't the Reverse Pinocchio. Instead I felt those globulous, tremulous, giant-sized tears welling up in my heart. ‘Oh dear,' I said aloud. And then, shaking my head in a way that immediately reminded me of my mum when she couldn't see the lighter side of one of my world-shattering childhood dilemmas, I said it again. ‘Oh dear.'

By the time I'd said it for the third time it was with a hint of irony and a smile. A little laugh of gladness spluttered out of me for the knowledge that despite the madness of the human world I would always remain sane as long as those globulous tears were welling up beside my laughter. As long as they were there, I knew that the garden of my life would have both the sun and rain it required.

Sensing my transition from uncertainty to humour, The Blonde Maria grew a little uncertain herself and retreated back into her shell. She picked up the book of the saint again and buried her nose in it haughtily.

‘Oh dear,' I said. Yes, I said it again, realising what a debilitating effect The Lazy Tenor's voice had had on The Grand Hotel's chanteuse.

Finally getting up to go, I put my hand on Maria's shoulder and asked her if she could check in on Kooka from time to time, seeing as though they were both confined to their rooms. She nodded into the book, still haughtily, and almost as if I didn't have to ask.

Kooka Stays Put

The next few days passed smoothly, in the new rhythm created by the upstairs inhabitants of the hotel. The Lazy Tenor would entertain some and upset others every Happy Hour. Jim and The Barrels would stoically ride their way through their sets, and up in The Sewing Room Kooka would lie with eyes shut in the big space, snoozing and farting and being attended to by myself, Jen and Joan, and in the wee hours of the night by his new saintly companion, The Blonde Maria.

It was early November and all through the valley the mushrooms were still sprouting. They remained on the menu right through the month. Dishes such as ‘Japanese Rising Tide Soup', ‘Endless Autumn Pasta', and ‘Perennial Mushroom Pie' were constantly being invented. It was disconcerting for people, even subtly terrifying, this surfeit of fungi, but nevertheless The Grand Hotel's purpose seemed stronger than ever – to cheer people up. In this respect we were remaining faithful to the much loved tradition of hospitality in Mangowak.

Each morning The Lazy Tenor would fling open his window and regale the riverflat with his gift. In essence it became a form of metaphysical rent he was paying to the likes of myself in the barn, The Blonde Maria in her increasingly monastic room, and anyone else who bothered to drop by to hear the arias. Even Kooka, whose eyes like a newborn pup's were gradually beginning to open more and more, remarked to The Blonde Maria that he hadn't heard anything as good for a long time. ‘It's like eavesdropping at the doors of nature,' he told her one evening, when she'd asked him what he thought.

About ten days after his turn on the stool in the bar I took a plate of Endless Autumn Pasta up to Kooka for his lunch. When I'd placed the tray in his lap and opened the ocean and inland windows to circulate the salty air, he asked me if it was possible if lunch could be accompanied by a drink. Well, he was sitting up quite chipper in his single bed, and despite Dr Feast's recommendations I couldn't see the harm in it. I went downstairs straightaway and returned with a carafe of red wine.

‘Well, Kooka,' I said, pouring the wine. ‘I reckon you'll be up and about again soon. You've got good colour. And anyway, it's time you got that whodunnit game going downstairs.'

Before he'd fallen off his perch, Kooka had been concocting a barroom game based on the hushed-up mystery of why the original Grand Hotel had burnt down. The game was to be his fun way of exposing everyone to his particular obsession for our long-ago predecessor, and also maybe to nut out once and for all what had brought it to an end. Why had Joan Sweeney shot through to Chicago and refused to answer the police's questions? And why were the authorities convinced it was arson yet they couldn't find a culprit? Basically the game would work like a TV whodunnit. From his research Kooka would provide us with the scenarios and the characters, and each player would try to patch together the most plausible story to explain the fire.

Kooka had been very excited about it. In fact, around lunchtime on the day of his fall I'd found him sitting alone at the communal dining-room table in the bar, surrounded by an assortment of the different coloured shards of time-smoothed glass from the tartan shortbread tin I'd seen in his shack. He fondled these cast-offs from the old Grand Hotel bottle dump with a reverence usually reserved for religious relics. With great enthusiasm he showed me the broken decorative lettering and the ingenious nineteenth-century graphics of the brands embossed on the softened pieces of hand-blown glass, and began to tell me how his whodunnit game would work, who he considered the main protagonists to be, and how each player would get his or her own different coloured piece of glass at the outset, which he would add to as their scenarios and scores progressed over the coming rounds. He also planned to make up special cards, complete with a map of the old Mangowak, for each player to concoct his or her scenario with. Next to the tin and the glass on the table in front of him there was a sheet of adhesive labels with the names of the current regular clientele of The Grand Hotel and other names that I presumed to be the protagonists in the hotel of the past. He had seemed quite possessed by the concept on that afternoon in the bar but now, when I brought it up, it didn't seem to register at all.

As he looked at me blankly, I didn't want to press the issue. He was getting on, after all, and maybe his falling off his perch was the first sign of a coming decline. Instead we clinked glasses and wished each other a ritual ‘good health'. Kooka took a sip and smacked his lips. ‘Terrific,' he said. ‘Bloody nice drop.'

‘Yep. Well you can blame the Balts for this one, Kooka. It's from Finland.'

‘You don't say!'

‘Yep. I do.'

Kooka licked his lips again and nodded in a surprised reaffirmation of the wine's quality. It was a light summer-berry wine recommended to me by our wine supplier. He'd thought the novelty might appeal to me, as Finnish wines had only recently been imported into the country.

‘Now, Noel,' Kooka said, adjusting his bedclothes, ‘there's something I've been meaning to talk to you about.'

The old fella's big birdlike head took on a serious cast so I leant in a bit closer out of respect. ‘Yeah, Kooka?'

‘Yes, well, I was wondering how you'd feel if I just propped here for a while. Instead of, well, you know, getting back up on the horse?'

I stayed poker-faced, careful not to betray any surprise. ‘You're comfortable here are you, Kooka?' I said.

‘Too right,' he replied enthusiastically. ‘I like this room, Noel. And the bed itself is nice and soft, just how I like it. To tell you the truth, I don't think I can be bothered with anything much anymore.'

Kooka looked at me sheepishly and took a sip of the wine. I took a sip too. It was a nice drop indeed. Then he said, ‘Well I'm gettin' on a bit you know, Noel, and–'

But I cut in. ‘You don't have to explain, Kooka.'

‘No?'

‘No.'

‘It's just that I've been on me Pat Malone for years now, since Mary died, and what with one thing and another, falling off that stool the other night made me realise it's time I gave it a spell.'

‘Kooka, it's alright. You don't have to explain.'

‘Well, Noel, I've been lyin' here snoozin' and thinkin', looking about at this old room where your mum, Audrey, used to fix up my shirts and trousers and run up dresses for Mary and the rest of the Mangowak lasses, and I dunno, I just have a notion I could be content here. That it'd be a good place to finally prop and maybe have a bit of a think about things.'

‘Fair enough, Kooka, if that's what you want.'

‘Yairs, well to tell you the truth I feel like I've been runnin' around like a blue-arsed fly almost since the day Mary died.'

I nodded, sympathetically. ‘But what about the Grundig? It's still downstairs on the bar you know.'

‘Is that so? Well, to be perfectly honest, Noel, I think the days of the Grundig are over for me.'

He let out a deep sigh, a tired sigh, as if the very thought of the portable recorder exhausted him. ‘You do what you think best with it,' he said. ‘And that tape that's in it, well, it's all monkey business anyway. That big fella's stories, down at the bar. That's about all I've recorded for the last little while.'

He took a last and demonstratively savoured sip of the Finnish wine and placed the glass gently on the bedside table. Through the inland sash window flickers of light were playing on Kooka's unshaven face as he turned on his side to go back to sleep.

‘Bit weary now, old fella?' I said, fondly.

‘Yairs,' he said, in a hoarse whisper, ‘nicely so. The food and the grog. From Finland, eh?'

‘Yep. Who would've thought?'

‘Like bloody nectar, Noel,' he said, almost inaudibly, his eyelids beginning to grow heavy and close.

‘Yep,' I said sadly, ‘like nectar, Kooka. Now you just rest. Don't worry about a thing. You can prop up here for as long as you want, old-timer. You can stay for keeps if you like.'

As Kooka's breathing deepened and he sank away into a deep sleep, I added quietly, ‘Yes, my old friend, you can stay till stumps, till the last drinks are called and even beyond. You can stay till all your local histories are finally said and done, old boy.'

And with that I got up, took the half empty carafe of wine and tiptoed out of the room.