Hotel de Dream (11 page)

The Salute went as usual, but Mr Poynter could see that all was not well with the men. He braced himself after the twenty-one cannon shots had temporarily erased the maddening
whine, and went over to his second-in-command. Today he forgot to take pleasure in the wheat-yellow hair of the men, and the blue eyes that lay like a stripe on a medal before him. He spoke tersely, the ostrich feather in his helmet moving up and down with slow deliberation as he made his announcement.

“I am getting married today, Struthers. Please see that the ceremonial marquee is erected in the Central Park and inform the caterers. Also, conduct me instantly with a guard to the dungeons. The problem of these women must be solved forthwith.”

Struthers, an indispensable part of Mr Poynter's machine, bowed low.

“And by the way, have you seen my fiancée?” The Commandant-in-chief went on. He concealed his nervousness at a possible negative reply by clicking his heels together and putting his hand to his sword. Immediately the army in the courtyard in front of him clicked their heels in unison and bright blades flashed in the air. The deafening roar subsided, and Struthers was saying:

“She is waiting in your Residence, sir. May I be the first to congratulate you, sir. We felt something was afoot, as her ladyship ordered a magnificent gown from the couturier only this morning.”

Poynter suppressed a smile of triumph. If Mrs Houghton was hard to get in the Westringham, here she was malleable, to say the least. He was glad, too, that she had assumed a title fitting to her new station in life. He nodded to his bodyguard—Swiss men, not one of them under six and a half feet—who had appeared at his side, and made for the door leading to the dungeons. Once this unpleasant task was over, he was sure nothing but happiness lay ahead. There had evidently been unrest—the state of the ghetto and the expressions of the men testified to that—but he would put an end to the whine (he was not yet quite sure how he would do this), and serenity and order would be restored. The low
door swung open and he went down the damp, evil-smelling steps. Struthers walked beside him, a body of giants bringing up the rear.

“What measures have you taken so far, Struthers?” The whine grew unbearably loud, and Mr Poynter noticed that he was beginning to experience the sensations of guilt normally associated with a long night in the moving streets. He glanced covertly at his companion, and saw that Struthers too wore an expression of deep embarrassment and shame.

“So this is what the men have been suffering,” Poynter said quietly before Struthers could reply. “Subversive warfare. They're well nigh exhausted by their guilt by now, I suppose?” Struthers assented mutely. They came to the iron door of the largest dungeon and he produced a key, sliding it into the rusty keyhole with one hand and covering his right ear against the noise with the other. Poynter looked behind him and saw that even his bodyguard had grown pale, several of the men actually shaking and the tallest and strongest leaning against the oozing wall as if he wouldn't be able to stand the sound a minute longer. As leader, Poynter refrained from blocking his ears, but his heart was pounding and his throat dry. Memories of the late Mrs Poynter's frequent attacks of helpless sobbing returned to him. Her inexplicable grief and his own feelings of anger and impotence in the face of it. He realised then that he had constructed his City precisely in order to be removed from this sound for ever; and the rage which swept over him at finding it multiplied under his very headquarters gave him the strength to look in at the dungeon with an appearance of steely resolution. Struthers, shouting over the intolerable keening, was punctiliously giving his chief details of the measures taken against the women in his absence.

“We didn't want to act without instructions,” he shouted. “But the men were coming down here at first to try and comfort them and stop the noise and we administered oral contraceptives. I hope that meets with your approval, sir?”

Poynter shuddered at the thought of the contamination of his perfect race which would result from the men coupling with these Amazons. He nodded gratefully. “You've stopped the soldiers, I trust?” he asked Struthers, at the same time scanning the awful contents of the dungeon with a wary eye. The women looked as filthy, desperate and matted as he had expected; some were chained to the black walls, others lay on straw and thrashed their legs slowly as they keened. When they saw the men at the door the hubbub rose in volume, and Poynter heard the terrified steps of half his bodyguard as they ran back to the stairs and open air.

“No, it didn't do any good,” Struthers bellowed. “They wouldn't stop it for anything. What are your instructions, sir?”

Poynter was silent while his mind raced. He thought of gas, starvation and solitary confinement; and at each solution he imagined the horrified response of his bride-to-be. There were too many of them to contemplate release: the idea of an attack on the City walls at night from this tribe was hardly enjoyable. He stalled, while the almost comprehensible moaning rose and fell about him like waves in some human Sargasso sea.

“Gas?” said Struthers hopefully. Poynter shook his head. Then a figure detached itself from the thick crowd of women in the gloom at the far end of the dungeon and darted towards him, a bruised, sand-encrusted arm came down on his before the bodyguard could intervene.

“Mr Poynter!”

Of course: Miss Scranton. Poynter's stomach heaved at the sight of the schoolmistress, naked again and looking up at him with the adoration he had suddenly noticed at the end of lunch earlier that day. Her eyes shone through a bushy fringe of hair, she was babbling something; Poynter pulled off the guard and stooped to listen. He thought he could make out the words. He would conquer his nausea. He put on a benevolent expression, and a murmur of surprise
came from Struthers and his men behind him.

“I can stop them!”

This was what Miss Scranton was saying! Mr Poynter could hardly believe it. He swore to himself that he would be kinder to her in future, cut out the snubs which had hitherto greeted every one of her remarks at mealtimes in the Westringham. He took her hand and squeezed it.

“How, my dear? How?”

“I don't want to be here!” Miss Scranton's eyes filled with tears and Mr Poynter recoiled. But she kept a tight grip on his arm.

“I don't belong with these women! It was all the most awful mistake! Let me go, Mr Poynter, and I'll make sure they're quiet. They think I'm their emissary, you see.”

Poynter thought quickly. Miss Scranton's suggestion sounded a reasonable one.

“Let me see you quieten them,” he said. Struthers muttered approval at his cunning and he smiled to himself. Not for nothing was Poynter Commandant-in-chief of the beautiful City.

Miss Scranton turned to face the Amazons and held up a hand. A low, inarticulate stream of sound came out of her mouth. The whine faltered; and stopped. There was silence. A woman's leg could be heard moving in the straw.

“You see, Mr Poynter? I told them they would be released in twenty-four hours if they were quiet all that time. It's up to you of course, what you do then.”

“My dear Miss Scranton, I really can't thank you enough. Struthers, find a blanket for Miss Scranton and take her to HQ. She may have a bath and order any delicacy she wishes to eat. Then she is to be set free.”

“Free?” Miss Scranton sounded distressed at the thought.

But by now Mr Poynter was halfway down the passage and going fast in case the tone of complaint should come into her voice again. He reached the stairs, anxious for a glimpse of Mrs Houghton in her magnificent gown, for a
leisurely discussion in his residence of the wedding later in the afternoon.

“Freedom of the City I mean,” he called back over his shoulder.

“Struthers, please make sure Miss Scranton is awarded the freedom of the City.”

“Yes sir,” Struthers said.

Poynter climbed into his white Rolls and cruised through the streets to his residence. He thought he could detect symptoms of instantaneous relief on the features of his subjects: the workers, out for their factory break, were strolling and laughing; the exiled dictators saluted him with pleasure and gratitude rather than envy from their lawns. As he went up the grand boulevard that culminated in his fine white house, he saw a familiar figure—small and scurrying modestly across the road to avoid the slowing of his car, but unmistakable, and he let out a low grunt of astonishment.

“Isn't that the Queen?” he demanded of his chauffeur.

The man inclined his head.

“Her Majesty arrived a short time ago and is living in the turreted house opposite yours, sir. If I may say so, sir, I would like to congratulate you on solving the woman problem here in the City. How long will they be quiet for sir?”

“There's a new rule,” Poynter snapped. “The future tense is now banned in the City. It will be used only on ceremonial occasions, and by myself.”

“Yes sir.”

The Rolls drew up outside Mr Poynter's residence. At the end of the archway of sprinklers, on the gleaming steps, Mrs Houghton stood in a white and gold gown that took Mr Poynter's breath away. He almost fell out of the car in his eagerness to greet her. And he reflected, as he went through the glittering drops of water, that it would be nice for the future Mrs Poynter to have the Queen living so very close.

While the dreams of the residents of the Westringham Hotel tangled and unfolded, binding their victims together in terrible juxtapositions and snapping them apart just at the moment when they seemed most inextricably interwoven, there began to creep out of the doors and into the streets and over the countryside the faint, invisible strands of these dreams, which came down in ghostly loops over the innocent and the unsuspecting and the corrupt alike. Stockbrokers and barristers wandered half the day in Mr Poynter's City, eyes glazed and expressions abstracted as they passed under Grecian porticoes and into buildings of glass as fine and shimmering as the droplets of water from Mr Poynter's sprinkler. Housewives and women at desks in offices saw suddenly long beaches, and a flat warm sea, and felt sand encrusted on their wrists and their legs heavy. Royalty breathed out from newspapers and magazines, enveloping and protecting and carrying their prey to an unchanging and benevolent world. Already Mr Rathbone, pulled in as it were from the right of the Westringham—which was spinning now at increasing speed, like a bobbin out of control, the material beneath the needle torn and rumpled—stumbled through his impossible mixture of dream and reality. To the left, the filaments spread in many directions—and the first to be caught, to suffer the illusions and fight for the dreams which were awakened in him, was a young man, no longer so young perhaps, by the name of Marcus Tapp.

Marcus Tapp was a waiter at the White Horses Hotel, Frinton-on-Sea. At lunchtime on this momentous day he
walked into the dining room holding an oblong plate on which lay fried plaice, chips, a slice of lemon and a large lettuce leaf which looked as if something was hiding under it although in fact its function was to conceal the foodless portion of the plate. He set this collection down before the solitary, out-of-season guest and went over to the window to look out at the sea. The White Horses had a curved window in the dining room, and cornered more of the sea than the other hotels on the front: whichever way you looked the grey pencilled waves seemed to run parallel with you; and this was generally considered the triumph of the architect, an ambitious Lutyens' school man at the turn of the century, that he had marshalled the sea to run according to his plan. Today, because low tide coincided with lunchtime (and even this architect had found himself unable to control the tides) the view from the window was a desolate one. Plastic and cardboard debris littered the beach. An old man and a boy, in the far distance where the sea would have been visible if the clouds had not come down in the intervening stretch and obscured it, were digging for lug-worms. The rows of bathing huts, awkward on their slender wooden legs, looked like an abandoned shanty town, left suddenly by the worker inhabitants once the splendid buildings on the Front were completed—or a necropolis, unvisited and unkempt. There was the promise of rain in the sky. While the guest ate slowly and suspiciously at the table behind him, Marcus Tapp folded his arms over his tails and permitted himself a heavy sigh.

Marcus Tapp had fallen far. In the heady days of '68 he had been a professional revolutionary, and this role had sustained him for several years afterwards. He was young, but had a shock of white hair, which lent weight to his pronouncements—most of these were cryptic, consisting as they did of the barking out of strings of initials representing the various political groups with which he was involved or at war. He had fought, marched and gone underground.
Rich, guilty girls had made their parents' houses and their own incomes available to him: he had “occupied” stately homes up and down the country, “liberated” five-course dinners in famous restaurants, and “ripped off” books he needed from leading bookshops in London. As the revolutionary fervour sagged, and publishers, rather than offer him handsome advances for his explanation of his times and the times to come, were mysteriously “tied up” when he called, Marcus toyed briefly with mysticism and acid rock. But he was too late to make anything of these phenomena. And not really suited to them either: he liked to impose order, to make a conscious collective instead of plunging into the collective unconscious; there weren't enough initials in the Universe; as far as music was concerned he was unfortunately tone deaf. A kind and impoverished aunt in Gloucester replaced his guilty, noble supporters, and he was reduced to expounding his views on the smashing of capitalism to her in a small front room where the cat snuffled and the gas fire gave him a headache. Occasionally friends sent drugs through the post—cut into the spines of books usually, Marcus's aunt had valiantly tried to read a mutilated copy of
The Mayor of Casterbridge
which had arrived in this way—but after a while, with rising prices and no feedback from Marcus, even this stopped. The aunt died, showing the feeble malice for which her nephew had so often berated her (she was petit bourgeois, he told her, Poujadist, she was the enemy of the revolution) by leaving her remaining five hundred pounds to a cats' home. Marcus took a job as a waiter, for all that was left to him was to feel his identity in peril, he had read Sartre on waiters and hoped to re-emerge when the time was ripe with a host of ideological anecdotes; Frinton offered the best wages and an attic room overlooking the sea. In the evenings he read Engels and Lacan and Gramsci and Adorno and Deutscher's
Trotsky
and thought of his family, one of the oldest banking families in England and by no means unsympathetic to his views. They would
not give him any money, however, for the turning of these views into reality, and as a result he had been cut off from them for some time. He thought of the delicious nursery food of his childhood while the chef at the White Horses smeared coloured breadcrumbs on to the deep-frozen fish, and for each bout of bourgeois individualism he punished himself late at night in his tiny room. Guests on the floor below, comfortable with their Neville Shute and H. E. Bates, became anxious at the sound of Guevara and Mao read loudly at the starless sky and Marcus was reprimanded by the proprietor for his strange habits. He had taken to pacing the Front now in his time off and reciting his favourite passages. The few all-the-year-round inhabitants of Frinton found him a familiar, reassuring figure as he strode, always in his tails and always at high tide, along the ramp. Sometimes children ran behind him with shrimping nets like small disciples. Once or twice, in the season, he was photographed as he went by a curious tourist.