The Elf Service, Episode 7

In which Maddie Sharp visits the Metropolitan hotel and gets a talking to

All over the city children post letters to Santa Claus and they go undelivered and unanswered. Until Irving Jefferson founds the Elf Service, that is. The Elf Service is the story of charity, journalism and mayhem, the extraordinary story of an extraordinary young man, his extraordinary plan to make Christmas happen for the children of his city and all the extraordinary ways in which that plan goes extraordinarily wrong.

Miss Saltadora was not actually yet officially engaged but she did have an understanding with a young man called Roger who did something very mysterious but very clever in one of those obscure businesses in the New Town.

She did a lot of charity work and attended a lot of charity functions because she felt it was important for people like her - she was not specific about who those people were - to ‘do good’. She thought Irving Jefferson was just spectacular. There was a slight hint that she could be persuaded to have a misunderstanding with Roger in Jefferson’s favour. She thought it very important that people like Jefferson use their creativity and entrepreneurism to ‘do good’.

She was generally in favour of ‘doing good’, apparently.

Maddie Sharp had only been in the elevator in the Metropolitan Hotel with Miss Saltadora for five minutes but already knew more about her than people she had done in depth investigations on. 

Maddie was in the habit of staying quiet, professionally, and letting other people do the talking. Generally people will feel the need to fill a conversational silence and consequently tell you all kinds of things they weren’t intending to. Maddie liked to say that the two more useful journalistic skills were knowing which questions to ask and when not to ask them.

In the case of Miss Saltadora, however, she didn’t need to ask any questions. She couldn’t have got a word in edgewise to ask them if she’d wanted to. Miss Saltadora talked as she breathed, as an autonomic activity, an incessant, wandering stream of consciousness. 

Maddie got the sense that it was somehow necessary to her functioning, as if she might not perceive the world if she did not remark on it, or might not believe in it - or herself - if she did not note them constantly.

It was not entirely annoying. She had a perfectly pleasant voice and some of what she said was interesting or perceptive.

Perhaps that was the problem, come to think of it. She seemed to live a constrained repetitive life consisting of the same few streets, the same few families, the same few ideas. It would drive Maddie mad.

Perhaps she had to occupy herself so  because she might perceive the world, her life, herself too clearly if she ever stopped to look. Perhaps she was frightened of what she might see, hear, think in the silence and thus had to busy her mind with this stream of narration, turning her experience into an ongoing entertainment removed behind a convenient proscenium arch.

Maddie was also beginning to suspect that Miss Saltadora had been dispatched to take her on this errand to give everyone else in the Elf Service a rest from the chatter.

Like Tin Lizzie, Miss Saltadora had her own idiosyncratic paths through the city, but these paths led through the New Town, past florists and hairdressers she waved to through their shop windows, down arcades of jewellers, by houses at which she had had tea, or at which she had left a card or received an insult.

She was a thin young woman and ever in motion, like a strip of willow in a breeze, a constant flutter of talk and hands.

Maddie and she were on their way to the other end of Jefferson’s process from the letter writers, out in the New Town, up from the gutters of the Market to the penthouse of The Metropolitan. Miss Saltadora was there to deliver a letter to a potential Santa and Maddie was there to observe.

From the main street that ran alongside The Gardens the main thing you noticed about the Metropolitan Hotel was the awning over the main doors and the tall plate glass windows of the restaurant on the corner of the building. Above these was just floor after floor of anonymous room windows.

The irony was that if you were to cross the Gardens, climb up the hill into the Old Town and then trudge up the rickety stairs of on the lowering tenement buildings that Maddie had visited up there, then you would be able to look down on the penthouse floors on the roof of the hotel on the other side of town.

Up there, there was, at one end, a rooftop garden and cocktail bar, a hopeful idea at best in this city and its weather and at this time of year in very infrequent use indeed. When it had been inaugurated it had had macaws in the shrubbery to bring a dash of exotic colour, but they had grown, in the incessant rain and freezing winters, increasingly recalcitrant and grey and had long ago been retired to the zoological gardens, where there was heating.

At the other end of the roof rose further,  ever smaller floors, in step-wise fashion. Two rooms with balcony, one suite with balcony and finally one small floor all its own, barely the size of a standard room.

This was the office and private hiding place of the hotel’s owner, Felix Savoir. There was, of course, an ‘official’ office down below, on the first floor, that Savoir had had furnished by a theatrical set designer so that it looked precisely like the opulent office visitors might expect. And there was an ‘official’ suite on the fifth, carefully appointed with all the most exquisite art, the most shiny contraptions, the most luxurious furnishings, where Savoir entertained guests. But he rarely slept in the enormous four poster from a country house, nor did he often read papers behind the desk made from the timbers of a man o’war.

He worked up here, in this tiny room so filled with desk that he had to climb over it to get to his chair as there was no way round, a room lined entirely by cubbyholes, into which were stuffed a lifetime’s accrued plans and schemes and the bills and receipts for those schemes being realised. 

And he slept next door, in a severe little bed with an iron-work bedstead which had once belonged to his grandmother. And while he slept, below him the hotel murmured and turned and he murmured and turned, and the rhythms of it crept into his sleep, so that he dreamt of laundries and lift shafts, of carousing guests and gossiping nightporters, or deliveries and removals, of comings and goings, of the thousand little transactions and ongoing lives that make up a hotel.

Up here he could smell the hotel, feel it rising up through his feet. During the day he was everywhere about the place. In the kitchens and bars, the cellars and the rooftops, observing every part of it in detail, but up here he got the whole place as a gestalt, a huge, throbbing creature of the back of which he perched, like a mahout with a goad ever at the ready. Up here he could feel every twitch, every upset, every unease, always prepared to plunge back down into the depths of the building to find its source.

This was also where he liked to conduct personal business, because he felt it conveyed the right kind of intimate, private interest. Personal business like playing Santa Claus. He was already acquainted with Miss Saltadora in her role at the Elf Service and, he being the kind of man he was and her being the kind of reporter she was, he knew Maddie Sharp of old.

“Miss Sharp, what an unexpected delight,” he somehow managed to stand up behind his cramped desk and make a little bow.

“No it's not,” said Maddie, “I’m neither unexpected nor a delight. Both Jefferson, and more recently, reception, told you I was coming, and no one as important as you is pleased to see anyone from the Argus that isn’t the society correspondent.”

“Au contraire,” said Savoir, sitting down and gesturing the ladies to chairs, “A great newspaper, like a great hotel, is vital to the life of a great city.”

“You might not think this city so great if you’d seen some of the things I’ve seen today,” said Maddie.

“I imagine it is an unfortunate side effect of your work that you see the worst of the world,” said Savoir.

“Your kitchens are mostly supplied from the market in the Old Town, I imagine,” said Maddie, “Don’t tell me: a great market is as important to a great city as a great boob. This morning I met a child who works there picking up discarded vegetables from the gutter and selling them to pay rent on the bottom of a wardrobe.”

“She’s the little girl who has written this letter,” said Miss Saltadora, no longer able to stand being quiet, “This is the letter and this is a transcription that Miss Reynarde prepared although the child’s writing is really rather excellent, don’t you agree, for someone so young and so, one assume, ill-educated, although the paper is a bit torn, I am sorry about that.”

“Her name is Midge,” said Maddie as Savoir took the letter from Miss Saltadora. He put the card with the transcription on the desk but kept hold of the letter, reading it.

“Her letter C’s show great energy,” he said, tracing one, “She shows promise.”

He peered at Maddie over the top of the letter.

“I know what you mean, Miss Sharp,” he said, “This city has highs but it also has lows. It has those who have and those who have not. Those who are lucky - and I know it is luck - to have their hard work repaid and those who know only failure and penury. I know this. You cannot sit here, above this hotel, above the city and not know this. 

“But what can even I do? I give to charity, I give to the city. The food that is uneaten in my restaurants is given to the hungry, the clothes my guests discard is given to the poor. Is this enough? I know it is not. But what this Irving Jefferson is doing, this interests me.

“What is a hotel, Miss Sharp, what is this hotel?” Savoir steepled his fingers and leaned back, he was lecturing and not expecting an answer, “It is wholly unnecessary. No one needs a suite, no one needs a restaurant, a cocktail bar, a swimming pool, a library. We are a luxury. But one needs luxuries, wait!” he held up a finger, “One needs the promise of luxury. The prospect of it, the possibility. That is what we are.

“Yes, there are some who live here, but for them the luxurious is the humdrum. They complain about the softness of feathers and the size of their bath bubbles. For most, they come maybe once a year, maybe once a lifetime. They perhaps only wander through the lobby, dance at New Year in the ballroom. To them we are a luxury, to them we are a delight, the thing that adds flavour to life, adds joy, makes it worth living.

“This is the great luxury of my life, to be able to offer these people such joy, to make one day special, to help them believe in the possibility of delight, that it might happen to them.

“And this is Christmas, is it not? This is what Christmas is, a luxury, a delight? The thing that gives life savour, that gives it lightness and pleasure? What a splendid gift to give then. What a splendid gift for Jefferson to give me, the gift of giving a splendid gift to someone else. The gift of delight, even if just for one day. This, I think, is a splendid thing.

“And so, Miss Saltadora, I am delighted to take this letter from you and I shall see to it that Midge gets her doll. It may even be a one that talks.”

“I hope it doesn’t talk as much as you,” said Maddie, not mentioning Miss Saltadora, “Here, have an apple.”