Of course, around half the people who used it forgot to close the inner door. If you left it open, the lift couldn’t be summoned from another floor and the mahogany door remained locked. Say, for example, you were in the reception area and wanted to go to a higher floor, pressing the button would be useless if someone on the third floor had forgotten to shut the inner door when leaving the lift and going to his room. The only way to make the bugger (Jonny’s word) work again was by going up to the third floor by the stairs and closing the inner door. That was just an example, it might as well be the fourth floor or the fifth.

Jonny soon found that his duties humping guests’ luggage were as nothing to the nuisance of that lift door. It was almost always he who had to go up those stairs and close it. He counted the stairs. To the top there were sixty-seven of them. A guest might arrive with two heavy suitcases and be allotted Room 52. Jonny’s task was to take him and his luggage up in the lift. But nothing happened when he pressed the button. The guest couldn’t be expected to use the stairs, so Jonny would run up them, checking on each landing to see if the lift was there with its door open, and finally perhaps find it on the fourth floor. He would go down in the lift himself, take the guest and his luggage up, come out of the room and find the lift had gone. So down the stairs he would go to find the receptionist taking an angry call from a guest on the second floor who hadn’t been able to summon the lift. Jonny would go up again and find it stuck on the third floor with its inner door open.

He began to understand why he had got the job so easily, not to mention why no porter they had ever had before had stayed more than a month. One day he climbed those stairs forty-seven times in the eight hours he was there and twenty-two of them to the top. But all that was more or less bearable. People forgot to close the door, it was in most cases a simple failure to remember. One guest left that door open deliberately.