The Lazarus Hotel by Jo Bannister Page A

games.’
    â€˜Tracy Louise Walters,’ drawled Tariq, his eyes misty with nostalgia. ‘We played games as well.’
    â€˜My best friend at school was called Smelly.’ With a grin Richard explained. ‘The caretaker’s Jack Russell – we used to go ratting in the air-raid shelters during break. And quite often during maths.’
    â€˜Tessa?’
    â€˜I was a dreadful swot at school; she confessed with a peridot twinkle in her eye. ‘I decided early on what I wanted to be. After that I was always working towards it. My best friend was another embryo doctor, Lynn – something. We studied Latin together, God forgive us.’
    â€˜Larry?’
    The tennis pro looked at Miriam as if she’d called him out when he couldn’t see the Vinesman for chalk-dust. ‘I’m forty-one years old,’ he said distinctly. ‘I don’t remember the name of anyone I was at school with.’
    â€˜I’m fifty-six,’ said Joe, ‘and I can remember the name of everybody in my class. And where they sat.’
    â€˜Well, bully for you.’
    â€˜And whose mum did them a proper lunch, and who just got bread and dripping.’ Joe smirked. ‘My best friend was Duncan Wilder. His mum baked Eccles cakes.’
    â€˜All right,’ said Larry in mounting impatience. ‘My best friend was the captain of the girls’hockey team. Charity Matchett. She scored the winning goal for England in the 1973 world championships. She went on to become a concert violinist and Labour MP for Bootle.’
    There was a longish pause while people wondered if it was safe to laugh. Then Miriam said levelly. ‘That isn’t actually true, though, is it?’
    â€˜Not actually, no.’
    â€˜You don’t see the point of this, do you?’
    â€˜Not even slightly.’
    â€˜Does anyone?’ Looking round them expectantly she met only averted gazes and the odd embarrassed cough. She sighed. ‘People are partly born and partly made. Some of our strengths and weaknesses are inherent, there from the moment of conception. Others are acquired in the course of our development. It’s useful to know which of our problems are programmed into our genes and which we’ve created for ourselves. By looking back to childhood we can see ourselves in something close to our native state, without the emotional baggage we’ve picked up since.’
    There was a bemused pause. Then Will murmured, ‘She means, Were we born weird, did we achieve weirdness, or was weirdness thrust upon us?’
    Miriam chuckled deep in her throat. ‘I like that. I may use it in my advertising. All right, we know about Smelly. Sheelagh, tell us about Cathy.’
    Momentarily Sheelagh hesitated; then she began. ‘We were eleven. We met on the junior athletics squad. She beat me over a hundred metres, I beat her over five hundred. She was stronger, I had more stamina. For three years we carved up sports day between us.
    â€˜What she was really good at, though, was tennis. By the time she was thirteen it was obvious she was wasted on school matches. There was a place in Richmond that gave tennis tuition as part of the syllabus. When her family were sure it was what she wanted they sent her there.
    â€˜We kept in touch but we had less and less to talk about. Selina’s mum was right: the price Cathy paid for her first professional points was everything else. All she knew about, all she was interested in, was tennis. But it paid off – she got to Wimbledon. Twice she was the last Brit in the women’s singles.’
    â€˜Do you still see her?’
    â€˜I didn’t see her for years. Then about eighteen months ago she turned up out of the blue, dropped into my office for a gossip. It was lousy timing. I’d have loved to catch up on her news but I was expecting a client. We swapped phone numbers, promised to get together, but somehow it didn’t