Timothy Lea's Complete Confessions

‘Oh, you’re fantastic,’ I murmur into Audrey’s lughole. ‘Absolutely fantastic.’ This is Lea’s standard Mark I gambit and seldom needs to be followed up with anything more imaginative before the bedsprings start playing ‘Love’s Old Sweet Melody’. All birds lap up a diet of non-stop flattery if delivered with sufficient enthusiasm because it backs up their own judgement. They feel both reassured and impressed by your good taste. I know I have said this before but you can’t repeat the golden rule too often.

‘Go on with you,’ whispers Audrey. ‘I bet you say that to all the girls.’

‘I wish I could,’ I murmur passionately. ‘But the words would stick in my throat.’

Diabolical, isn’t it? But Audrey grabs my hand and practically drags me up the stairs. We get up to the third landing just as Sid is gently shutting the door of our room with June inside it. He gives a little wave and a thumbs-up sign and I hear the bedsprings creaking before I get to the turn in the stairs.

‘Are you going to make me a cup of Ovaltine?’ I murmur to my sultry companion.

‘Something better than that,’ she says, squeezing my thigh. At least, I think she means to squeeze my thigh but the light on the stairs is practically non-existent.

‘Don’t scream like that!’ she hisses. ‘You’ll wake everyone up.’

‘Watch what you’re doing with your hands then,’ I howl in my anguish. ‘Otherwise we’ll be making this journey for nothing.’

By the cringe, but it is big, this hotel. Another couple of flights and I am looking for Sherpa Tensing to hand me an oxygen mask. The only thing that keeps me going is the outline of Audrey’s delicious little body before me. Funny how a few days before, I was thinking that I never wanted to see another woman. Now I can hardly wait to get inside that bedroom. I stretch out my hand and run it lightly over her tulip bulb backside. This is the life. Free bed and never bored. She pauses outside a door and presses a finger to her lips. I remove it and we dissolve into a deep kiss. She puts a hand behind my thigh and pulls me towards her savagely. She does not say much, this girl, but her heart is in the right place. The rest of her is not badly situated, either. Just to make sure, I slip my hand up underneath the back of her skirt and am browsing happily as she reaches behind her and turns the knob–the doorknob, I hasten to add, though you could be excused for asking!

I press forward and imagine us doing a slow motion shuffle towards the bed as the door swings open. This is a very beautiful thought and it is therefore doubly choking when I glance inside and see that one of the two beds in the large dog’s kennel is already occupied. Occupied is perhaps the wrong word. It has a large naked man lying in it with his tonk flopped on one side, like a boiled leek. He seems to be asleep. Audrey is apparently unaware that she has a guest because she hooks her hand into the waist band of my trousers and starts to pull me into the room.

‘Hem, hem,’ I murmur with the discretion that has made the name Lea synonymous with upper crust gentility (you wouldn’t believe I only got ‘O’ level woodwork, would you?). ‘Did you know you had company?’

That bird spins round and says a few words I have not heard since Nat and Nan were last on the rampage. ‘Filthy bastard’ is the most repeatable phrase she utters.

‘A friend of yours?’

‘We finished a long time ago. He’s taking a terrible liberty.’

‘Do you want me to throw him out?’

‘No. You’d better not. I know! We’ll go round to his room. It will serve him right. He can have a nice sleep here.’

Phew! Thank goodness for that. For a moment I could see that lovely piece of nookey slipping through my fingers.

‘Wait a minute.’ There is a piece of pink ribbon lying on the dresser and I carefully slip it under the uninvited guest’s tonk and tie a floppy bow in it. Call me a romantic if you like, but it is little gestures like that that make the world a happier place to live in.

Audrey grabs my hand and leads me along the corridor and down a small flight of stairs. I bet she could find her way there blindfold if she had to.

‘Who was that?’ I whisper to her.

‘The night porter,’ she says. ‘Petheridge.’

No wonder there was no sign of anybody when we blundered into the broom cupboard. Petheridge obviously confines his activities to the upper floors.

‘He doesn’t share, does he?’ I ask nervously.

As I have said before, I am not a great one for unveiling my nasty in the presence of others than those who have been invited to witness the experience.

‘Not on Thursdays,’ she says comfortingly and pushes the door open on a small room smelling of Boots After Shave lotion. There, to my relief, is a tiny cot, empty as the day it left the great bed maker. I do not wait to look under it for burglars but pull Audrey to me and slip my hands under her skirt as if picking a mushroom. Her tongue nearly beats mine to the draw and we fondle each other like a couple of kids with their first wad of plasticine. Normally, on such occasions, I expect to play some part in removing my partner’s clothes, but this chick is such an enthusiast that she is pulling down her tights before I have unzipped a boot. In less time than it takes to sign for a registered envelope from ERNIE she is lying back on the bed with only a small heart-shaped necklet in danger of being crushed out of shape between her boobs.

‘You look lovely,’ I tell her.

‘Shut up with all that flannel,’ she says. ‘I’m not putting up a fight.’

She is right, of course. It is just that I am so used to saying it that it has become a habit with me.

I strip down to my pink candy-striped underpants–everybody is wearing them in Clapham this year–and climb on to the bed. It is not that I am modest. Just that I don’t see why the bird should not do a little work for it. Her greedy little hand slides down over my belly and I close in on her mouth. She has the most fantastic skin. Like a slightly bruised peach. I slide one hand beneath her shoulders and send the other down to do a recce for J.T. Everything seems more than ready so with a quick nibble around the bits that give baby his elevenses, I climb aboard and we motor round the bay a couple of times. She is quite a girl, this Audrey. Very strong in the pelvis and capable of opening Tizer bottles with her belly button, I should reckon. I can see why Petheridge hangs around her bedroom. It must be better than sorting out the early calls. I am trying to control myself but with this girl thudding away underneath you it is like trying to put out a forest fire with a can of petrol. She suddenly starts groaning hoarsely and then squealing so loud that everyone in the hotel must be able to hear her. Nothing turns me on faster than a woman’s moans and in no time at all I am ebbing away between her thighs, beautifully taken out of myself.

‘I can hear your heart beating,’ she murmurs.

‘Thank God,’ I say. ‘I was worried there, for a minute.’

Maybe I am getting old or perhaps it is just that I have had a busy day. Anyway, I immediately begin to feel sleepy and climb gratefully between the sheets as Audrey looks about her wistfully.

‘I think I’ll go and see if that man is still sleeping in our room,’ she says. ‘I won’t be a minute.’

I Mumble something and close my eyes as I listen to the sea hissing against the shingle–we don’t have much sand on our part of the beach. There is a shaded lamp on the table beside the bed and this bathes the room in a soft, warm glow. Lucky Timmy. The door opens and I hear Audrey come in. I do not change my position but nuzzle deeper into the pillow and make ‘I am almost asleep, please do not disturb’ noises. I will catch up with her again in the morning, Petheridge willing.

Strange that I can hear the delicious sound of nylon being peeled away from flesh. Why should Audrey have put on her tights to go up one flight of stairs? I turn my head to take a quick butcher’s and–blimey oh Riley! There, bending forward to shed her bra is the receptionist bird Sandra. The one I took an instant fancy to. She must have an understanding with Petheridge as well. No wonder the bloke sleeps so much!

Without looking towards the bed she slips out of her panties, gives a delicious little shiver that makes her tits wobble invitingly and pulls back the sheets. It is in this far-from-unattractive pose that our eyes meet for the first time that evening.

‘Oh.’ she says. ‘I wasn’t expecting to see you.’

‘Me neither.’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Come inside and we’ll talk about it’

She gives a little shrug and begins to climb into the bed.

‘Oh well,’ she says. ‘Life’s so short, isn’t it?’

CHAPTER THREE

‘Quite like old times, it was,’ says Sid wolfing down half a kipper in one mouthful. ‘Good to know that the old unquenchable magnetism is still coming on like the Chinese cavalry.’

‘Very reassuring, Sid,’ I say, trying to keep my eyes open. By the cringe, but that Sandra is a goer. Maybe it is something to do with the sea air. I reckon someone like her must have had a go at Nelson. He lost his eye and his arm and then he said ‘Right! That’s it!’ and hopped up on his column. Female spiders are supposed to nosh up their mates after having it away, aren’t they?

‘I didn’t tell you what happened, did I?’ continues Sid, who is clearly going to. ‘It was amazing, really. I’ve been in some funny situations in my time, but–hey, wake up! Your rice krispies are going all soggy. What’s the matter with you?–anyway, where was I? Oh yes, I’d just finished driving her into a fit of uncontrollable ecstasy for about the seventeenth time when suddenly the door opens and in pops your one. Before I can say “half-time, change ends”, she’s hopped into bed with us! How about that then? I have to admire her taste but, blimey! It’s brazen, isn’t it? Doesn’t say much for your performance either–stop yawning!’

‘Sorry, Sid. I did have a few problems myself last night.’

‘Sounds like it.’ Sid is obviously dead chuffed with himself and in such moods is considerably less than lovable.

‘Yeah, that receptionist bird Sandra nobbled me–nibbled me a bit as well.’

‘What!’ Sid’s toast quivers outside his mush.

‘Some kind of strange magnetism I exude must have drawn her to me. It was funny, really, just like you say. I had just finished driving my bird into a fit of uncontrollable ecstasy for–oh, I suppose it must have been about the twenty-fifth time–when Sandra springs through the door like a female tigress–’

‘As opposed to a male tigress,’ says Sid.

‘Precisely. “Leave him,” she cries, “that man is mine,” and she picks up Audrey and chucks her through the door like she is a sack of feathers. After that, well I don’t really know how to describe it. She just tears the bedclothes off and has her ruthless way with me until cockcrow–or in my case, cockcroak.’

‘Go on! You’re kidding.’

‘Straight up, Sid–or at least it was to start with.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Please yourself.’

At that moment Sandra comes into the dining room, throwing out more curves than a Scalextric track.

‘Hello tiger,’ she says, raping me with a warm smile as she goes past our table.

‘More toast, Sidney?’ I say politely.

Half an hour later we are outside leaning against the sea wall and admiring the patterns the oil slicks make on the water.

‘One thing I don’t understand, Sid,’ I say. ‘Who is supposed to be running this place at the moment?’

‘A woman called Miss Ruperts. She used to own it once and then sold out to Funfrall. She’s an alcoholic apparently. Goes off to be dried out occasionally.’

‘I can imagine this place driving you to drink. Blimey, what with her and Mrs Caitley, it’s going to be a nice little set-up, isn’t it? Does Miss Ruperts know you’re taking over?’

‘She should have heard this morning. Sir Giles wrote to her at the sanatorium.’

‘So she’s away on a cure at the moment?’

‘Yeah. She should be in peak form at the moment.’

As he says the words, an ancient Armstrong Siddeley can be seen belting down the promenade towards us. Its course is, to put it mildly, erratic, and it forces a milk float off the road before squealing to a halt outside the Cromby. Hardly have the wheels stopped turning than the driver’s door flies open and a big woman of about fifty gets out. She is carrying a bulging suitcase and has only taken two steps before the case bursts open and about half a dozen spirit bottles shatter on the paving stones.

‘What did you say her name was?’ I ask Sid.

‘Miss Ruperts,’ he says grimly.

‘ “In peak form”, that’s what you said, isn’t it, Sid? Looks as if she’s heard the news all right.’

‘Shut up,’ says Sid.

‘I expect you want to go and introduce yourself. I think I’ll take a turn round the pier.’

I watch Miss R. lurch through the front entrance of the hotel.

‘You come with me,’ hisses Sid. ‘You’re my Personal Assistant. This is what you get paid for.’

‘When, Sid?’ I ask, but he does not seem to hear me. I follow him across the road and we bump into Miss Primstone just outside the hotel.

‘Was–er–that Miss Ruperts?’ says Sidney casually.

‘Yes,’ says Miss Primstone hurriedly. ‘But she seems rather overtired. I think she wants to be alone.’

‘Very understandable,’ says Sid. ‘But could you tell her that Mr Noggett would like a word with her? It is important.’

‘Have you ever thought about changing your name?’ I say as Miss P. hurries away shaking her head.

‘Shut up.’

‘But Sidney Noggett. I mean, it’s not like Gaylord Mandeville, is it?’

‘No, thank God. Now belt up! Unless you want to start sketching the insides of Labour Exchanges for a living.’

‘That’s very funny, Sid,’ I say as we are shown into a small dark office behind the reception. ‘Have you ever thought about doing it professionally?’

‘I’ve thought about doing you, hundreds of times. Ah, Miss Ruperts? How nice to have the pleasure of making your acquaintance. I am Sidney Noggett and this is my Personal Assistant Mr Lea.’

‘A bauble,’ says Miss R. as she pours a jumbo shot of Scotch into a shaking tumbler.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘To be a bauble passed from hand to hand is not the future I would have envisaged for myself in those halcyon days of yore.’ I don’t really understand what she is on about because I have edited out the slurs so it reads understandably. But ‘passed from hand to hand’? With her frame you would need a fork lift truck. She has a mug like a professional wrestler–only most of them shave these days–and hair like Wild Bill Hitchcock–feminine but masculine, if you know what I mean. Her shoulders would not be out of place on a second row forward. And, how often does Raquel Welch wear a Norfolk jacket and jodhpurs with a bootlace tie? You can count the times on the notches of your riding crop. All in all, a very distinctive lady, not much prone to flower arrangement, or anything else, I would wager.

‘Have no fear, madam,’ says Sidney who picked up most of his manners from old movies starring the likes of Ronald Colman. ‘You have no cause for alarm.’

‘Casting an eye over the register used to be like glancing through Debrett. Half the crowned heads of Europe stayed here. Their servants used to put up at the Grand. And now, now–’ Miss Ruperts chokes with emotion, or maybe it is the booze. ‘I am on my way to the gutter.’ She knocks back the contents of her glass and belches loudly. Now you would not think that DDT. ‘No flies on me’ Noggett would be taken in by that load of cobblers, would you? No? Well, you would be wrong. Very wrong. Sidney–and I am not so different myself, really–has a respect for anything uppercrust that is positively terrifying. If some bloke had rolled up flashing his greasy braces and with half a Woodbine glued to his lower lip, Sidney would have taken him apart soon as look at him, but this drunken old slagbag is getting the Queen Mother treatment because she talks very refained and does not remind Sid of anything he has seen in Scraggs Lane–ancestral home of the Leas.

‘Miss Ruperts, allow me to assure you–’

But Miss R. has not finished yet.

‘It is not me that I am thinking of,’ she says, reaching out for the Scotch bottle, ‘but those faithful retainers who have rendered yeoman service all these years. Treat me as you will, I have my memories to live on, but I beseech you, do not cast them into the wilderness. This place has been a home to them. To you it may only be a realisable asset but–please! I beseech you. Temper expediency with mercy.’

You don’t read speeches like that in Shakespeare, do you? Certainly not, if it’s a choice between that and Coronation Street.

‘Miss Ruperts,’ says Sid, while I wonder if I am hearing right. ‘I am certain that your experience will be invaluable. I hope that we will be able to work together to restore the hotel to its former position of immenseness. Do not fear that I have any plans to destroy your life work.’

Miss Ruperts is visibly moved by these stirring words and has to take more liquid comfort to calm herself.

‘Call me a stupid old woman if you will,’ she begins.

‘You’re a–’

‘Shut up, Timmy! Forgive me, Miss Ruperts. You were saying.’

‘Nothing. Nothing at all. I was only attempting an expression of gratitude for your noble gesture and generous sentiments. Now, if you will forgive me, I would like to be left alone. The events of the last few hours have taken toll of my strength–my heart, you know.’ She taps the region of her enormous chest which looks like a kitbag worn on the wrong side of the body.

‘Of course, of course,’ Sid is backing out of the office. ‘We can discuss details later. I hope you will soon be perfectly recovered.’

‘I hope you know what you’re doing,’ I say as we return to the cocktail bar. ‘You weren’t really swallowing all that rubbish were you?’

‘One of the old school,’ says Sid. ‘You don’t often meet them like that these days.’

‘If you’re lucky you don’t. Come off it, Sid. She’s a piss artist. If you don’t get rid of her, she’ll drink the place dry within a couple of weeks.’

‘She does have a drink problem, I’ll grant you that, but she must be worth a lot of goodwill in a place like this. Think of the contacts she’s got.’

‘I’d rather not, though I suppose she might be able to fix us up with an Alcoholics Anonymous Convention. I thought you were going to weed out all the layabouts? She’d be top of my list.’

‘I’ll be the judge of that, and make sure you don’t start creeping up the charts. If we can keep her under control, I’m certain she can do us some good. I don’t want to start off with any unpleasantness.’

‘It’s because she’s got a posh voice, that’s what it is. You’re just like Dad when there’s a whiff of the nobility about’

I can see that Sid is getting the needle and this impression is confirmed by his next remarks.

‘Let’s forget about Miss Ruperts for a minute,’ he says, ‘and let’s talk about what you’re going to do.’

‘Your Personal Assistant,’ I say brightly.

‘That kind of thing,’ Sid nods his head slowly. ‘But first of all you’ve got to learn the ropes. I’ve already mentioned that this place needs a commissionaire.’

‘You don’t expect me to hang about outside all day in some poncy uniform, do you?’

‘Not all day, Timmy, no. You are going to have so many other things to do, there won’t be time–waiting, working in the kitchens, portering–’

‘Hey, wait a minute!’

‘No “heys”, Timothy. I want you to undertake a thorough apprenticeship in the hotel business. I only wish I could join you myself.’

‘Why can’t you?’

‘Lazy majesty. It’s a French expression meaning that if you are the boss you are expected to ponce about all day doing nothing, otherwise it upsets people.’

‘It wouldn’t upset me, Sid.’

‘You are not people, Timmo.’

‘But they’re going to think I’m some kind of nark, Sid.’

‘Of course they won’t. They won’t realise you are reporting back everything you hear to me, unless you choose to tell them. This experience is going to be vital, Timmy, because you’ll be able to learn about every fiddle the staff are pulling, from the inside.’

‘I don’t like it, Sid.’

‘Well, you know what you can do then. What did you think you would be doing? Sitting in a little office in a pinstripe suit?’

‘It would make a change from some of the things I’ve been doing lately.’

But, of course, Sid has me firmly under his thumb and when I appear at the meeting at which he addresses the staff, I don’t even get a place on the platform. Miss Ruperts introduces him and it would make you sick to hear the way she goes on. She must have sworn off the stuff for a couple of hours beforehand because her hands are not shaking and every word comes over crystal clear. ‘Better days ahead’, ‘Exciting new prospects’, ‘Marching forward into the seventies’, are some of the golden oldies that come tripping off her tongue and these are only bettered by Sid who bounds to his feet and gives his all in true Funfrall manner. I am quite pleased to find that nobody registers any enthusiasm at all except Mrs Caitley who says ‘Hear! hear!’ periodically through Miss Ruperts’ address. I later learn that they were land girls together during the war and have been in tandem ever since. What a diabolical thought! Milk production must have dropped off something awful when the cows saw those two flexing their pinkies.

Sid eventually draws to a close, one of the hall porters farts and there is a ripple of applause. I personally think it is for the fart, which is quite an effective one. What is interesting is to observe the reaction of Sandra, June and Audrey now that they know who we are. The last two seem to think that they have been conned while Sandra is clearly impressed. All through Sid’s speech she gazes at him like he has just discovered how to make gold bars from fag ends and her contribution is a sizeable slice of the ripple of applause that greets the end of his ramble through cliché land.

On the other hand, she looks through me like an empty goldfish bowl and I feel it is going to be some time before I get another piece of nooky from that quarter. The fact that I am posted to the kitchens on the first part of my training course does not help matters. In my greasy clobber I hardly look likely to give Smoothiechops a run for his money.

Make no mistake about it. The people who work in the kitchens of large hotels are not likely to crop up in the Vogue social column very often. Some of them are rough. Very rough. If it was not for the frying pans I would have thought I was in the engine room of an Albanian minesweeper lent to the Irish navy. One bloke is tattooed from head to toe and keeps gulping down swigs of meths whilst there are two Spaniards who cannot understand a word of English and spend most of the time holding hands behind the chip slicer.

The female presence, apart from Mrs Caitley, is virtually non-existent and I, for one, am grateful. When you look around you it is easy to see why chefs are usually men–big, strong men. It is a tribute to Mrs Caitley’s muscle power that she can wield any authority at all and still have enough strength left for her marathon hassle with Mr ‘Superpoof’ Bentley–that is the name of the maitre d’hotel, or head waiter to you and me. Normally, the chef de cuisine has total authority over the choice and preparation of meals and Mr B. is pushing his luck in trying to get in on the act.

That is another thing you soon learn when you work in a hotel. Everybody is ‘Mr This’ and ‘Mr That’. There is none of the informality that used to prevail at the holiday camp. This is presumably because everybody in the business seems to have worked their way up from the bottom and is very jealous of preserving their status.

And talking of working your way up from the bottom, I have never seen so many concrete parachutes in my life. I have nothing against queers, except the toe of my boot if they become too persistent, but really! After peeling millions of potatoes and scraping blackened cooking pots in a temperature of over a hundred degrees, and in an atmosphere so steamy that you can hardly see the dripping walls, the last thing you fancy is being touched up by some joker as you bend over to sluice your greens.