The Grand Hotel (18 page)

The Beautiful Story-Voice

It's easy for a generally quiet man a little starved of sex such as myself to take the high moral ground about other people's infidelities. On the other hand I had no idea what Maria had been experiencing at night with Kooka in The Sewing Room, how genuinely profound it was, nor that it would turn out to be the guiding force and overwhelming key to the fate of our increasingly unstable establishment.

What I found out later, and what I now understand The Blonde Maria couldn't tell me until she was absolutely compelled to do so, was that most evenings at around 9pm, with the sounds of The Barrels pretty much muffled through the floorboards, she would gently knock on the Sewing Room door and enter to find Kooka sitting up in bed, gladly waiting for her. The air in the big room would smell not only of the increasingly musty boxed-up archive and the ocean spray ballooning down the riverflat but also of that timeless combination from the days of yore: old man and mushrooms. Kooka's empty dinner plate would be sitting on the bedside table with oily smears of whatever version of a mushroom sauce he'd been treated to that evening. Beside the dinner plate would be a small claret glass, a crinkled foil sheet of mild painkillers, and his transistor radio, waiting patiently, butler-like, to be put into service.

Maria would cheerfully sit down on the chair next to the bed and together they'd chitchat about the day just passed. Invariably this would involve a few light recriminations about the sameyness of the weather or the calibre of the clientele downstairs, and then Maria would take up whichever of my mother's old novels she was enjoying and begin to read aloud to Kooka. The old fella would lower himself down into the bedclothes a bit, and with a contented grunt turn his big bird head in profile towards the seaward window. And there the two of them would remain, in the little pool of light cast by the tassled standard lamps beside the bed, Kooka lying and listening among the blankets, and Maria sitting upright on the chair reading to him, just like in an old Rembrandt.

And so it was one evening, with The Blonde Maria reading
The World of Carrick's Cove
to Kooka, that their empathetic conversations about nature, and about romantic love, were set in train.
The World of Carrick's Cove
was well thumbed – it had been read countless times – and both Maria and Kooka had already commented to each other how much they were enjoying the tale of a fastidious eldest son's frustrations with the sloppy boatbuilding of his father on the Maine coast of New England. But, as Maria was reading a lovely passage to Kooka about some wowsery folks further up the coast near Rockford – who the author joked liked money so much they used to salt it – a remarkable transition seemed to take place in the old Sewing Room.

As Maria said, the joke about the Rockford wowsers was an innocuous enough little passage from the book; there was nothing in it to account for what happened next. As she was approaching the end of the chapter, Kooka slowly raised his hand for her to stop reading. Telling Maria her ‘beautiful story-voice' was making him a bit sleepy, he asked her if she'd mind just sitting beside the bed while he had a little kip. She said she didn't mind at all, but as she explained it to me it seemed odd because Kooka's voice didn't betray any sleepiness at all. If anything, it was strong, awake, as clear as ever.

The old man reached over and clicked on his transistor radio. A country tune began to twang out from the station. Kooka pulled the sheets and blankets up to his chin and closed his eyes. Maria just sat there looking at him. Then, in the pool of light cast by the two standard lamps, with all activity abated, and stillness ruling the room, the transistor started to speak.

The country song had abruptly stopped, the tranny had glitched and static filled the room. Then a man and woman were in conversation, but it wasn't just normal radio chat, and not intended for public consumption. The woman's voice was light and happy, and she spoke the most; when the man replied, his voice was quiet, a little muffled, and with a broken-down sort of grief attached to it. Then, as quickly as they had begun, the voices changed again, and this time the sound of splashing and sucking water among rocks was in the background. Now a woman was swimming in the ocean, and sighing with pleasure as she did so. She was also reciting lists to herself, as if she was trying to remember what she had to buy at the store. But the contents of the list were from another time: rushlights, chicory, strawberries by the quart, pickled onions, bottles of digestives from W.G. Hearne, a gross of buttons, calico, rum and mattress ticking. The list went on and on, the recital of it broken only when the swimmer dived under the waves, at which point all Maria could hear from the transistor was bubbling and then hiss, and a low subaquatic hum. And then, just as she was trying to figure all this out, the sounds changed once more, this time back to the conversation of before, except with the man speaking rather than the woman.

Sitting by Kooka's bed, The Blonde Maria was confounded. Quite understandably, given the various other antics of The Grand Hotel, she wondered if she was listening to some prearranged piece of avant-garde radio drama. But no – it had a different quality; there was something entirely unique and unpremeditated about it. As the scenes kept switching between the man and woman's conversation – which took place over cups of tea at a kitchen table – and the woman swimming with her sighs and old-timey lists in the ocean, Maria found herself trying to make connections between the two scenarios. But try as she might, the man and woman, and the swimmer in the ocean, seemed to bear no relation to each other whatsoever.

Yet each of their scenarios held Maria's attention regardless. She gathered that the couple at the kitchen table were man and wife, and that their names were John and Mary. This was normal enough, of course, but their talk was strange – fluid and natural one minute and then disjointed and abstract the next. And then, every so often, the woman at the table, Mary, would reel off long speeches of consolation to the man, her husband, John, but it was unclear as to what she was consoling him about. And always, just as Maria felt she was about to find out what was upsetting him, the sound would crackle and switch on the tranny, there would be silence for a brief moment, and then the sucking sound of water and the swimmer's breath and sighs would re-emerge. The swimmer would dive under again and her pleasure in the swimming could be felt, intimately, almost as if Maria herself was duck diving amidst the pool of light in The Sewing Room. And then the swimmer's list would continue again: castor oil, candles, a hundred pounds of flour, Turkish Delight, feather-down for the pillows, a new cask for sundries, kerosene, brown rum, malt, whiskey,
crème de cacao
, ink for the portmanteau and heavy thread for the bellows. The swimmer would dive and then stroke through the slack of the water between waves, composing her list. And then a wave would crash, the sound of breaking water would fill the room, and John and Mary's voices would continue, and Maria would sink deeper into their thrall.

‘It is not a blind alley. The apricots were worthwhile, John. You just needed proof, so I took them away. But, dear, only for one summer, for you to credit me with it, to see me in the fruitless vacant tree, but all you saw were the empty branches and the knobbly bits on them, and the visit I paid became your hollow. Dear John, it needn't be, and your mother agrees with me. She's weeping. Her tears put out the fire. Oh yes, she's still weeping alright, but the fire is out and she agrees with me about the apricots, and now ... wait, who's that coming now?'

Maria's eyes would close tight, then open as she tried to make head or tail of what was being shared between John and Mary. And who
was
this coming now?

A new sound cut across the waves, and high drama began to issue from Kooka's transistor. There was a fire in a building, and a woman's voice was screaming FIRE FIRE and OH MY JOHNNY BOY and then FIRE FIRE again and OH MY GOD MY JOHNNY. Taken aback by the intensity of the cries, Maria looked across at Kooka for the first time since he'd fallen asleep. His big head was still on the pillow but his jawline was twitching, and in the pool of light she could see movement behind his eyelids. Apart from that his face was quite calm.

Maria could hear timbers falling and walls of the building collapsing, paint crackling and distant yells for help, but that was nothing compared with the distressing cries of the screaming woman. Obviously the heat was getting closer to her now, her breathing was becoming laboured, and she was coughing and gasping for air. Eventually her cries subsided into moans, and then, as if the flames took her over, her voice was gone altogether. For a brief time the only sound from the transistor was crackling flames and the shifting structure of the building, but eventually the sound of horses' hooves and the voices of what were obviously firemen could be heard, and then the sound of a hose and the fizzing noise of flames going out.

All at once Kooka made a sudden realignment of his head in the bed. He rolled over towards the seaward wall, and after a harsh rapid glitch from the transistor, to Maria's astonishment the country song that had previously been on recommenced, as if it had never stopped playing.

Maria sat stunned beside Kooka's bed in the pool of light. She couldn't see the whole of the old fella's face, only his shoulder and the profile of his beak-like nose and bulbous forehead. She couldn't fathom what had happened. She considered right there and then, and despite her new found passion for Louis Daley, leaving The Grand Hotel for good. She feared she'd become unhinged by holing herself up in her room all day and night. Was she finally, and properly, going mad?

Later she told me she'd tried to rationalise it for a while but couldn't get around it. Kooka's sudden movement in the bed had definitely seemed to terminate the dousing of the fire. It was as if he was affecting what came out of his tranny.

Eventually the drowsy country song had reached its final verse, ended with a melancholy twang and then was back-announced. But there was no mention of apricots or a house fire, just a song called ‘Sally Mae'. Nothing was said about a woman swimming with a list of things from long ago. This was a normal weekly country-music show, with no doubt a regular audience of insomniacs listening through the night.

The Blonde Maria got up off the chair beside Kooka's bed and immediately switched off the standard lamps. The pool of light vanished. Quietly she made her way across the floor to the seaward window and looked out. She waited in the darkness. Behind her she could still hear the tranny, but through the window now she could also hear the Plinth bells ringing down at the rivermouth. Oscar must have forgotten to tie them down again. She was thankful. The sound of them calmed her. She took a few deep breaths. She waited at the window for a long time, through four songs and the beginning of an interview with Troy Cassar-Daley. Then she quietly tiptoed out of the room.

The Blonde Maria didn't sleep that night and found herself just after the dawn roaming around Kooka's old place, looking for an apricot tree. She missed it at first but after searching the back and side yards thoroughly and almost giving up, she spotted it on her way back towards the front gate. The tree was laden with fruit.

She stood beside it, considering the possibilities. Then she spied a blue ice-cream container catching drips under an outside tap on the house wall. She walked over, tipped out the water into the long grass that had sprouted from the overflow and, walking back to the tree, began to fill the container with apricots.

That night when she re-entered The Sewing Room with
The World of Carrick's Cove
in her hand, she also carried the apricots. Kooka was glad to see them. He not only recognised them as fruit from his tree but he recognised the blue ice-cream container as well.

So they sat again in the pool of light, this time munching on the apricots. They both agreed they were delicious. Without being prompted, Kooka told The Blonde Maria how he'd had regular fruit from the tree over the years. The only exception, he said, was the summer after his wife, Mary, had died, when the tree didn't even flower, let alone produce any apricots.

‘As if it was in mourning,' The Blonde Maria remarked, wiping juice from her chin.

Kooka just raised his eyebrows. ‘She made a famous apricot jam, my Mary,' he said.

Having confirmed her suspicion and that she herself hadn't lost her marbles, The Blonde Maria was all of a sudden keen to get cracking. ‘How about I read a little more of the book, Kooka?' she asked.

The old man smiled. ‘Sounds like a fine idea, lassie, a fine idea.'

Once again Kooka settled himself into the blankets, as The Blonde Maria set the blue ice-cream container of apricots down on the wooden boards of the floor between them. She opened
The World of Carrick's Cove
on her lap.

Unlike on the previous night The Blonde Maria herself was now less absorbed by the novel and more interested in arriving at that moment when Kooka would raise his hand and announce that the reading should stop, that he might sleep for a little while. To lull him towards this mood, she tried to read the text as musically as she could.