They came down a couple of hours later and looked in at the little office to pay their bill, completely unaware of my intrusion. We shook hands and with genuine warmth I wished them a good journey home and hoped they would come back to the hotel the next time they visited London. If Goodmans Hotel provided a comfortable and welcoming place for men like them, surely it was an enterprise I could feel pleased about.
Relentless sexual frustration was a daily reminder of my return to single status. After the long period of regular love-making with Tom my appetite was strong. Irrepressible urges began twisting my thoughts, imbuing everyday social and business contacts with lewd sexual connotations. My mind constantly saw in others the persistent lust that was swamping me, and almost any vaguely attractive man in almost any circumstances became, to my imagination, a potential debauchee.
For a time I thought that an outlet for my desires might be found among the hotel guests, but any kind of sexual involvement with them threatened to cause awkward complications. How could the commercial part of the arrangement be kept separate from the sex? Might a man refuse to pay for his room after having slept with me, hoping that embarrassment and fear of being accused of selling sex would prevent me pursuing the debt or calling the police?
Even if nobody tried to get out of paying for his stay, word would surely spread. In gay bars when Goodmans Hotel was mentioned people might say, 'Oh yeah, stayed there, had the manager.' What if Darren realised what was going on and followed my example? My intention was to run a clean comfortable hotel, not a brothel.
One Friday night, when Darren was at the club with Cheung, I ventured out to a bar in the West End to look for a pick-up, leaving a note with the number of my mobile 'phone pinned to the office door in case of emergency. There were three or four men drinking on their own among the crowd, and after conversation developed with one of them I brought him back to the hotel. Reluctant to let him know anything about myself, rather than going down to the basement flat I pretended to be one of the guests and took him up to a vacant second floor room.
As we were unaccustomed to each other physically the sex was rather clumsy, but becoming intimate with a stranger again after so long was exciting, and the pretence of being a hotel guest added an element of adventure to what might otherwise have been a fairly uninspiring one night stand.