Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Cala Mare ·
The Guests of the Low Season
A winter desk clerk holds seven rooms booked before the season can be thought of, confirmed in writing and never once arrived to.
- reliability: uncorroborated
- witness: "Reg Poole, hotel desk clerk"
The Marine stands on the crescent at Cala Mare with its shoulder to the wind. Twelve letting rooms, and closed November to April, as it has been closed since before my time. I take the winter desk alone. Balancing the winter ledger on Friday nights is habit more than duty; nothing moves in the low season, and what does not move does not cost.
The bookings move. They arrive the second week of January, one for each of the front rooms, before a line of our brochure is printed — the printers take our copy in March — before the trestles go out on the pier, before anyone except me has thought of the summer. The letters are plain, and plain in their names. Mr. F. Wain, party of two. Miss O. Bastable, single, sea view, and the sea view rooms are the crescent-side numbers, and the letters ask for those numbers. I answer each with our confirmation slip and request the lower half back, signed, with the deposit.
The lower halves come back signed, dated, postal orders to the full amount, every one, every year. I enter them in the register: confirmed, deposit received, in the hand the summer desk is judged on. Seven rooms stand booked for the first week of May through the whole of a winter in which the hotel is shut by its own rules, and my Friday ledger carries seven deposits and not one arrival to account for.
The season opens the first Saturday in May. The seven do not come. There is no note at first, either. The rooms are held to the end of terms as the terms require, fresh keys cut each spring and hung in the board, and then in the third week of June the covering notes arrive: regret the change of plan, carry the deposit to next season. Carry, meaning the column never clears and never costs. The auditor looked at it once, in 1979, wrote deferred deposits, and closed the file inside the minute.
That part anybody could check. The part I could not check with anybody is this. The covering notes are postmarked CALA MARE, MURROW, which is honest — the sorting office is four streets inland — but franked between three and four in the morning, in fourteen seasons of it, on every slip, while the only pillar box on the parade is emptied at nine and at noon. And the notes are initialled, not signed, in initials that match the booking letters, in no hand I have met on the parade at all.
I have tried to have it corroborated, which is why it is filed the way it is. Miss Ada Chantry keeps the summer desk and winters at her sister's in Croydon; she laughed at the postmark and said a machine will frank what you feed it. Mrs. Dunstan, who comes in at eight to clean, has never seen the winter post, because there is no winter post for her to see. The sorting office will not put a man's word against a franking machine's. Nobody has corroborated it. The tin of slips sits at the back of my drawer, and I know the dates on them better than family birthdays.
The question that walks me out along the crescent some evenings, late enough that the sea stops being worth describing, is the order of it all. They book before the season can be imagined. They pay before the room can be offered. They are confirmed, held, missed, excused and carried, in that order, without one arrival in fourteen years, and the arithmetic has been neat through every year of it. What the register does not say, and it is the register I have run since 1971, is what the booking is kept for. The seven names hold the rooms and the rooms hold the keys and the keys come back dry. Who is it that books every winter to be here, and arrives by post, and never past the desk?