THE HOTEL EDEN
THAT YEAR THE place we would go after hours was the Hotel Eden. It had a cozy little bar in the parlor with three tiny tables and four stools at the counter. You had to walk sideways to get around, and it had a low ceiling and thick old carpets, but it had a roomy feeling and it became absolutely grand when Porter was there. Over the course of the spring he told us a hundred stories in the Eden and changed things for us.
The barman was a young Scot named Norris who seemed neither glad nor annoyed when we’d come in around midnight after closing down one of the pubs, the Black Swan or the Lamb and Flag or the forty others we saw that cold spring. Pub hours then were eleven o’clock last call, and drink up by eleven-fifteen. Porter would set his empty pint glass on the whatever bar and say to Allison and me, “The Eden then?” He’d bike over, regardless of where we were, out on the Isle of Dogs or up in Hampstead, and Allison would get us a cab.
Norris would have the little curtain pulled down above the bar, a translucent yellow sheet that said, “Residents Only.” He drew it down every night at eleven; hotels could serve late to their guests. Porter had done some favor for the manager of the Hotel Eden when he’d come to London years before, and he had privileges. They became in a sense our privileges too, though—as you shall see—I was only in the Eden alone on one occasion. The curtain just touched your forehead if you sat at the bar.
We often arrived ahead of Porter, and Norris would set us up with pints of lager, saying always, “Hello, miss,” when he placed Allison’s glass. The Eden didn’t have bitter. I remember the room as always being empty when we’d arrive, and it was a bit of a mystery at first as to why Norris was still even open. But there were times when there was a guest or two, a man or a man and a woman, having a brandy at one of the tables. We were quiet too, talking about Allison’s research at the museum—she had a year in London to work on her doctorate in Art History. But it was all airy, because we were really just waiting for Porter. It was as if we weren’t substantial enough to hold down our stools, and then Porter would come in, packing his riding gloves into his helmet, running a hand through his thick black hair, saying, “Right enough, Norris, let’s commence then, you gloomy Northlander,” and gravity would be restored. His magnetism was tangible, and we’d wait for him to speak. When he had the pint of lager in his hand, he’d turn to Allison and say something that would start the rest of the night.
One night, he lifted his glass and said, “Found a body today.” Then he drank.
Allison leaned in: “A dead man?”
“Dead as Keats and naked as Byron.” We waited for him to go on. His was the voice of experience, the world, the things that year that I wanted so much.
“Where?” I asked.
“Under the terrace at the Pilot.”
“The place on the river?” Allison asked. He’d taken us walking through the Isle of Dogs after we’d first met and we’d stopped at half a dozen pubs which backed onto the Thames.
“Right, lady. Spoiled my lunch, he did, floating under there like that.”
Allison was lit by this news. We both were. And there it was: the night kicked in at any hour, no matter how late. When Porter arrived, things commenced. We both leaned closer. Porter, though he’d just sucked the top off his pint, called Norris for another, and the evening was launched.
We always stayed until Porter leaned back and said, “It’s a night then.” He didn’t have an accent to us, being American, but he had the idiom and he had the way of putting his whole hand around a glass and of speaking over the top of a pint with the smallest line of froth of his upper lip, something manly really, something you’d never correct or try to touch off him, that was something to us I can only describe as being real. He’d been at Hilman College years before Allison and me, and he knew Professor Mills and all the old staff and he’d even been there the night of the Lake Dorm Fire, the most famous thing about Hilman really, next to Professor Mills, I suppose. I spent a hundred hours with him in the Eden that spring, like Allison, twelve inches across that little round table or huddled as we were at the bar, and I memorized Porter really, his face, the smooth tan of red veins running up under his eyes, as if he’d stood too close to some special fire, and his white teeth, which he showed you it seemed for a purpose. His nose had been broken years ago. We played did you know so-and-so until Allison, who was still a member of Lake Sorority, brought up the fire.
“Oh yes,” he said. “I was there. What’s the legend grown to now? A hundred ghosts?”