I’d fallen in love with its every delight and failing. I’d accepted its flaws in a way I couldn’t do with a person. I also knew that papering over the cracks of something couldn’t disguise its deeper issues. I longed to transform the Routard International back into the H?tel Près de la C?te.
Local folklore had it that the hotel had seemed to appear from nowhere in the mid-1920s. It had been designed by a promising Bordeaux architect who’d only ever made two visits to his project – once as they broke ground, and again when the doors were declared open to paying guests. Nobody could remember his name.
He’d been commissioned to design it for a wealthy Jewish German family who, after the First World War, feared their country might implode again. So they fortuitously made their property investments abroad. But when Germany crumbled for a second time, their hotel remained while they disappeared from the face of the earth. Their legacy was intact, but the hotel was orphaned and, with no owners to trace, the manager at the time retained it as his own. Upon his death, its fate lay in the hands of a succession of distant relatives who cumulatively did little to prevent it from falling into rack and ruin.
I was dismayed at how something once so treasured could have been wilfully abandoned, before recognising the irony. But I related more to buildings than to people. If you gave structures time, detail and attention, they would protect you. You would be safe beneath their roofs. People never truly offered such guarantees. So I made it my mission to give it the help it had given me.
Bradley put me in contact with its entrepreneurial Dutch owner, who admitted he’d blindly purchased it through auction on description alone. I wrote him a detailed, twelve-page proposition, explaining who I was, my feelings towards his property, my qualifications and skills that would enable me to resuscitate it.
I listed the work it required and an approximate timescale and costing. Then I crossed my fingers and waited. A fortnight later, Bradley approached me over breakfast.
‘I don’t know what you said but the usually cheap bastard is on board.’ He smiled, and offered me a congratulatory handshake.
‘Really?’ I replied, genuinely surprised I’d been taken seriously.
‘Yep. He’s wiring the money into the hostel’s bank account on Monday, so you can get started when you like. He’ll probably sell it once you’re done, though.’
At that point, I did not care. The news delighted and excited me in equal measure, as for the first time in months, I had something to focus my attention on other than myself.
13 August
The work the hotel required gave me lots of time to spend alone. And with each acquaintance I made at the Routard International, I reflected more on the ones I’d cast aside.
I thought back to not long before Catherine and I became a couple, and the childhood friends who helped to shape me, specifically my best friend, Dougie Reynolds.
He’d moved some five hundred miles from Inverness, Scotland to Northamptonshire with his family, after his policeman father accepted a transfer to take charge of a new unit. They uprooted to the street next to mine.
Our friendship wasn’t instant. Roger, Steven and I glared at the lanky, sapling-armed boy ambling into the classroom with his auburn hair and coarse, unintelligible accent, like he’d just fallen from a spaceship. During his first few days in our territory, he was given a wide, discerning berth. But he paid frustratingly little heed to our feigned lack of interest.
I’d just reached a personal best of twenty-five keepy-uppies with a football on the village green when he wandered over to me.
‘Bet you I can do more,’ he said with a grin, and struck a defiant, comic-book superhero pose with his hands on his hips.
‘Go on then,’ I sniffed, and deliberately threw the ball too hard at his chest. By the time he’d reached fifty with ease, he’d claimed victory and headed it back to me. A little humiliated, I began to walk away.
‘Arch your back a little,’ he said suddenly. ‘Put your arms out for balance and focus on the centre of the ball.’
I reluctantly followed his advice, and it was only when my bare thigh smarted from the repetition of skin against cheap leather that I stopped at fifty-one. I concealed my smile, but that was all it took to cement the foundations of a friendship.
I was unsure whether it was his affable personality or his stable family life that captivated me the most. Dougie belonged to the perfect family, compared to mine, at least. A mother, a father, a brother and a sister – everything I’d have killed for.
Dougie Senior greeted his wife Elaine with a kiss to the cheek on his arrival home each evening. And she’d respond with an infinite supply of hotpot dishes and mouth-watering casseroles. Their family banter filled the dining room as Michael, Isla and Dougie each told their parents all they’d done that day. No detail was too insignificant to be included.
My friends all adored Elaine, and I think found her sexy before they knew what sexy meant. Her curls glowed like a Christmas tangerine, her skin was milky and freckled and she possessed a Monroe-like hourglass figure. She never asked me about Doreen, but I’m sure Dougie had explained to her my mother’s irregular presence in my life. I wouldn’t have been bothered if she’d pitied my circumstances at home. I was just grateful for the attention from a mother, even if it wasn’t my own. Later, Shirley would try her best to mother me, but by then, I no longer wanted a matriarch.
Dougie’s parents treated me like a part-time son. My place was set at the dining room table regardless of my presence. My sleeping bag remained on a camp bed in Dougie’s bedroom and they’d even bought me my own toothbrush and facecloth. All the Reynolds children were encouraged to invite their friends over, and their house resembled a youth club with the number of children passing through its doors. But I believe Elaine took a special shine to me.
As an only child, I was fascinated by the unfamiliar world of sibling relationships – how they played, learned and fought with each other. They taught me the definition of family. But watching them also bred resentment in me towards my father. The head of Dougie’s house was not a ghost of a man too overtly consumed with his louche wife to notice his own neglected son.
I questioned what was missing in my father’s make-up that rendered him unable to keep hold of Doreen. Why didn’t she love him like Elaine loved her husband? What did he lack that drove my mother into the arms of other men? He lacked nothing, of course. My negativity merely masked what I felt were my own failings as her son. I knew the man who offered me as much as he could also had his limitations. So what I couldn’t get from him, I stole from the Reynoldses.
But the most important lesson I learned from spending time with them came years later. And it was that, if you scratch the surface of something perfect, you’ll always find something rotten hidden beneath.
1 September