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This morning Nik had gathered his heads of department together for what was to be the first of many briefing meetings. In common with management and administrative staff in hotels the world over, Nik wore a gray suit in imitation of a style of smart business dress that was rarely adopted these days by the hotel’s guests. Like his colleagues, he wore a discreet name badge. At home, in front of the mirror, in suit and name badge, he had gone over his briefing speech several times, so as to be sure of making a good impression on his colleagues. In setting the tone for his tenure as general manager, he would be friendly yet firm. He would reassure colleagues that, as someone who was familiar with the Coram Hotel and the historical area in which it was located, he was a better choice than someone who might have been parachuted in by senior management to take charge. He was going to use the phrase “parachuted in” to make the point. In fact, his speech was to be peppered with jargon, which he hoped would impress everyone who heard it.

Once ensconced in the role, Nik was looking forward to worrying about personal performance targets and appraisals. He would mither over budgets. He would be properly anxious about illegal workers and Home Office raids. But, for now, the subject that most keenly absorbed him was the question of how to attract and retain foreign tourists—especially Americans—and how to persuade them to leave glowing reviews on travel booking sites.

“We are fortunate to operate in an area rich with history,” Nik told his staff, as proudly as if he had created the history himself. The expressions on the faces of his staff ranged from a sullen
I know!
to a vacant
What are you talking about?
to a more gratifying
How fascinating
, from senior receptionist Miss Wendy Chen, who was new to the hotel.

Nik said, “What’s our core business?”

There was a silence. There was no hostility in it, but neither was there any energy in the room. Nik smiled. He bounced on his feet to bring the energy up. He said, “That was a trick question! Conferences are very important to us. But so are American tourists. We have more than one core: what are we, an apple? No, indeed. This hotel is a honeycomb, full of worker bees!”

There was another silence. The speech had worked better at home in his bedroom, where Nik had even built in pauses for appreciative laughter and earnest questions, which he had acknowledged in the mirror with a gracious nod and a smile. He continued: “I want to see each and every one of you giving one hundred and ten percent when it comes to our conference delegates. And another hundred and ten percent for our American guests.” Mathematics wasn’t his strongest subject. But then he wasn’t giving a lesson in percentages, he was trying to motivate his staff.

“What about Americans attending conferences?” asked someone, trying to catch him out.

“Well, it’s quite simple. When you are dealing with American guests,” said Nik, “whether their purpose in coming here is business or pleasure, you go the extra mile.” He put his clenched fist just above shoulder height, as if he was about to walk that extra mile now. He was Dick Whittington on the road to London, off to make his fortune with his belongings in a handkerchief slung from a pole over his shoulder: a decent, honest man from humble beginnings who had risen to great power. Someone—Albin, one of the chefs—saw another amusing reference and sang, “Heigh-ho!”

Someone else joined in: “Heigh-ho!”

Nik knew what was going on. They resented his promotion. They weren’t sure if they were going to take him seriously. They weren’t sure if they were going to follow his orders. They were being impertinent, but in a way that would allow them to claim they were “only joking” or, “I thought we were friends, Nik” if he got cross about it or threatened to report them to Human Resources.

The chefs were a nightmare anyway. Now the TV was full of programs about celebrity chefs (when did chefs become the new rock stars, and more to the point, why?). The fryers and bakers in his kitchen thought of themselves as artistes: Picasso with a pickle. They were weasels, the lot of them.

His staff were staring: bored, amused or bewildered. Dry mouthed, Nik looked around for inspiration, trying to remember the thread of his speech. Weasels…Dick Whittington…Disney…Oh yes! That was it: Americans. A sense of desperation now urged him into fanciful rhetoric. Departing from his carefully rehearsed speech, he said, “Let’s say our American guests are cold: let them know you’d do anything to warm them. You’d fetch them a blanket, you’d hand over your jacket, you’d…you’d peel off a layer of
skin
and drape it over them.” He had the attention of the room now. Wendy Chen shuddered.

Nik bit his fingers anxiously. He hated this job. No! He loved it. It would settle down. They’d come to respect him. He’d do well here. The big bosses—the management of the hotel chain—would see it and promote him to another hotel, where he’d never have to see any of these idiots again. A settling-in period was inevitable. It would be worth it, if he could just deal with the stress of the next few weeks, and keep it together, and make sure nothing went wrong.

He decided to explain about his proposed austerity measures, which he hoped would earn him the attention of senior management.

“There’s too much waste. Let’s squash the waste! I’m going to make it my personal responsibility to check all the waste.”

Nik suspected that staff took the odd steak home, leftover fruit, maybe. That was fine. It was the stuff that wasn’t really leftover, the stuff that got pinched, that Nik was worried about. If they knew he was watching them and measuring what got thrown away, they wouldn’t be so quick to smuggle food out of the hotel that was unaccounted for.

“We’re going to do this across every department of the hotel. I’ll be checking the wastage of everything from cabbages to toilet paper to printer paper. It doesn’t just save money. It helps the environment. The Coram’s going green! Look, I know this isn’t going to be easy at first. At the end of each month we’ll name a Rubbish Champion. That Rubbish Champion’s photograph will appear on the staff noticeboard in my office, and they will get a Marks & Spencer voucher worth twenty-five pounds.”

Everyone looked unimpressed. Never mind. As Nik prepared to close the meeting, he had a brilliant idea. He would turn the insubordination of the chef to his advantage. When you are a senior manager, it doesn’t matter if something goes wrong—things always go wrong. What’s important is how you deal with that situation. Nik would show that he was the master of it. He clenched his fist again, now pretending to shoulder a work tool, and he sang, “Heigh-ho!” This would be a rallying call; a fun way to end all their briefing meetings, with everyone joining in and…But, sensing it was over and the meeting was breaking up, everyone rushed for the door, anxious to get to work and meet their targets, and stop being told how to do a job they knew how to do. No one joined in singing.

When the last person had left, Nik closed the door and got out the work sheets for the next week, to familiarize himself with them and anticipate any potential “situations.” It looked as though it would be rather a sedate week: the usual tourists, restaurant bookings and midweek business guests, and—of course—there was the conference of romance novelists. Very refined. Nothing to worry about there.

TO: [email protected]

FROM: [email protected]

SUBJECT: Next weekend

Muriel,

Can you let me know the title of the ethics in literature session you’re doing for us at the conference next weekend? I think you said it would be something along the lines of “Why Does It Matter if I’m Making It Up?” I need to get it right for the program.

I’m so glad you’re joining us. Your ideas are always so stimulating and clever, and amusing too, which is very important because we’ll be cloistered in a series of windowless rooms all day. Do come for the gala dinner on Saturday night, won’t you? I’ve got Lex coming, and you two always amuse each other. Publishing people have a terrible habit of talking shop, and Lex has been doing that for nearly forty years, and it bores him. So if you’ll come to dinner, I’ll put you next to him if you don’t mind.

I’m going to need some support on the admin side. Do you know anyone who might be free to help out? We can pay reasonably well, and we’ll put them up in the hotel and feed them (you too, of course, unless you’d rather go home after the dinner). It’s going to be one of those weeks. I need someone at my side who will make things better, not worse. There are so few of those kinds of people around these days. Let me know if you get any bright ideas.

See you then,

M x

P.S. How is your hip? Any better? I do hope so! I’m looking forward to a proper catch-up and a lot of fun—if I can get through the committee meeting without throttling anyone.

“Emily? Emily Castles?” The voice on the phone sounded like menthol cigarettes and feathers. “I don’t know if you’d remember me…”

But Emily knew instantly who was calling. No one else had a voice quite like Morgana Blakely, the famous romance novelist, whom Emily had met while helping out at a local stage school.

“I’m presiding over a gathering of romance authors at a conference in London this weekend.”

Surely there was a more appropriate word than gathering: a pash, a kiss, a
smooch
of romance authors?

Morgana interrupted Emily’s mental thesaurusing. “I rather think I’ve overfaced myself, and I need a hand with it. Muriel put your name forward. Would you be free to help, by any chance?”

Emily was free, as it happened. Until last Friday she had been working on a temporary contract in a tower in the financial district of Canary Wharf, East London. The tower was shiny, imposing and soulless. It was the sort of place where the occupants of a crowded elevator never asked incomers which floor they wanted, so that someone near the relevant buttons could press the one that would take everyone to their respective destinations: they expected you to push and stretch to get to the button yourself. Emily had tried calling out, “Forty-five, please!” She had tried shouting, “Which floor?” if she herself had managed to get nearer the operating panel than the other people piling into the elevator. Her words were met with resistance or incomprehension. After a few days she had realized that if you wanted to change the world, an elevator in a tower in Canary Wharf might not be the best place to start. It had depressed her, but at least she’d had the money to pay her phone bill at the end of the month.

The people in the department where she had been “embedded” (according to the bizarre new terminology from her handler at the employment agency, who persisted in talking as though Emily were a reporter dispatched to a faraway war) had been friendly enough, but the work had not been satisfying. Still, Emily had been sorry that the contract had come to an end. She would be glad of any kind of employment, even a weekend at a gathering of romance authors. Well,
especially
a weekend at a gathering of romance authors—depending on her duties, of course.

“All you have to do,” Morgana explained, “is turn up tomorrow morning at the Coram Hotel in Bloomsbury so we can get the delegates’ gift bags organized, and then be on hand for the gala dinner and the conference itself. I’m so glad you can help out. I was so impressed with your resourcefulness when we met. And, of course, Muriel speaks very highly of you.” Muriel was “Dr. Muriel” to Emily; a neighbor who lived on the same street as Emily in South London, as did Morgana’s nephew, Piers Blakely, and his wife, Victoria.

Emily wasn’t the sort of person to wonder whether Piers spoke very highly of her as well. He always offered her a glass or two of chilled white wine when the family was about to go on holiday, and Emily went round to be briefed about how best to look after their cat. If Piers kept his opinion of Emily to himself when talking to Morgana—even if it was a good opinion—so much the better. As for Victoria, she was indebted to Emily for Emily’s intervention during the end-of-term show at the stage school she owned and ran, which was where Emily had first met Morgana. Emily had saved lives at that show. She didn’t doubt that Victoria spoke very highly of her indeed.

“When the conference gets underway,” Morgana said, “I’d be grateful if you’d take notes during the speeches and debates—I’m chairing ‘Whither the Novel?’ again this year—and liaise with the hotel staff. Do you know how to spell ‘liaise’?”

“I do,” said Emily. “Two
i
’s.”

“Darling, I’m so glad you’re on board. You’re so clever and literate. One word of warning: if anyone talent-spots you and asks you to ghost one of their novels, do say no. They don’t pay very well. And if anyone asks you to do
anything
when they’re drunk, just say yes, but don’t do it. They ask for such silly things. And if anyone asks you to do anything when
you’re
drunk, well…How old are you?”

“Twenty-six,” said Emily.

“That’s old enough. But we’ve got some of the chaps coming in from the various publishing houses tomorrow. One or two of them find female company overstimulating. They look around the room and they see pretty hair and ready smiles and they think they’re in a Lynx advert and behave accordingly. Do you know what Lynx is?”

“Isn’t it a deodorant marketed to teenage boys?”

“I give it to Piers and Victoria’s eldest every Christmas to keep the girls away. I hope you never have to smell it, Emily. You can find the address of the hotel on the Internet, can’t you? See you at midday tomorrow.”

In the gray, historic city of Edinburgh, in Scotland, Archie Mears opened his notebook and took the lid off his pen. He was a slim man in his midthirties, with very pale skin and thick, blood-orange hair that flopped forward as he looked down at the page in front of him, accentuating the sharpness of his high cheekbones.

It was early morning, and hardly anyone or anything except the drunks and the pigeons were up and about. Archie’s former life—the one he didn’t discuss with anyone, even close family—had got him into the habit of rising early. He would start today, as he started every day, with twenty minutes of automatic writing, following a set of rules he had learned at the creative writing workshop where he had met Morgana Blakely. When he wrote like this, he didn’t think. He put pen to paper and he just wrote, so that the process seemed unconnected to him, almost magical. Gradually, in the writing, there emerged fragments of the previous night’s dreams, remembered as best he could, segueing into an acknowledgment of some of his hopes and fears. His fears were of being trapped by fire or water—of being hurt, physically. Were these snippets dreams or daydreams? They were sometimes violent: He was a little boy, lashing out at his parents. He was an angry man, challenging authority. And then came the soothing idea of a happy-ever-after: the favorite part of a story he had read or written, or one he was working on, would present itself on the page. As he wrote the happy-ever-after, he would begin to feel calm. It was a kind of meditation for him—going over and over the same things, finding something slightly different in them each time, being soothed by them each time.