The Honeymoon Hotel (16 page)

‘Go on.’ I folded my arms. ‘Say it. You’re going to anyway.’

‘Again, I don’t mean to be rude, but is
your
boyfriend always like that?’

‘Like what?’

‘Like … he has to explain everything to everyone else because they don’t understand things quite as well as he does?’

Joe had only spent about fifteen minutes in Dominic’s company, yet he’d unerringly zeroed in on one of Dominic’s worst habits, one that always set my teeth on edge. I felt the part of me that had softened towards Joe ice up again defensively.

‘Not always.’ I moved a spare flower arrangement off the table and marched away to replace it in the florist’s box. ‘Only when he’s with people who need to have things explained. Can
we stick to the task at hand? Guests are going to be arriving soon. Oh, God, what
now
?’

I’d put my phone on the table, and it was making the text-alert noise and sidling its way dangerously towards a clingfilmed platter of blinis, like a fish out of water.

‘I’ll get it,’ said Joe, and he’d grabbed it before I could stop him. I hoped it was Dominic texting something nice, ideally that he’d called in at the estate agents and picked up the details I’d asked him to find, but of course it wasn’t.

‘Oh, God,’ said Joe, looking at the message.

‘Don’t tell me. It’s Flora, and this time she wants a thunderstorm, but only in the Palm Court.’

‘No, it’s from Mum.’ Joe thrust the phone at me. ‘For you.’

The text was from Caroline:

I bit my lip and blushed. ‘Um, yes, pretend you didn’t see that.’

‘Rosie! Is it
ethical
to supply guest lists to outside parties?’ Joe enquired. ‘Especially when that party has a record of enforced blind dating on her male family members?’

‘You know about that?’ It slipped out before I could stop myself.

‘Not officially. But yes. Mum’s another one who can’t stop micro-managing other people’s lives.’ He wagged a finger at me. ‘Don’t you start dancing to her tune.’

My cheeks went pink. ‘It’s called taking an interest. And I’m not – oh, why am I even discussing this with you?’

Joe raised his palms in a gesture of despair. ‘Because that’s what living in a hotel does for your boundaries. It completely messes with them. Watch out for that.’

‘Rosie!’ Gemma dashed in, waving the special pink phone reserved for really, really demanding brides. The ring tone was set to ‘Crazy’ by Gnarls Barkley; Gemma tried to change it to ‘I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do’ by Abba every so often, but Helen always changed it back.

‘It’s her!’ she whispered, looking simultaneously thrilled and terrified. ‘Ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod!’

‘Calm down, Gemma,’ I said automatically. ‘Who is it?’

‘Flora Thornbury,’ she squeaked. ‘
Actual
Flora Thornbury!’

‘Is there a pretend Flora Thornbury?’ asked Joe.

I made a
don’t wind her up
face, but he held out his hand. ‘Give it here,’ he said. ‘I bet I know what she’s calling about.’

‘No, I should take it.’ I reached out my hand towards Gemma. ‘I’m her wedding co-ordinator.’

Gemma looked uncertainly between us. The phone went into another burst of ‘craa-aaa-aazy’. I made a mental note to change it. It probably wasn’t very professional.

Joe gave me a quizzical look. ‘Do
you
want to hear about how Flora can’t decide between Borneo or Kenya or Necker Island for her honeymoon? Because that’s what the last hour-long conversation was about.’

‘Wow,’ breathed Gemma.

‘Just don’t get her back on the stag weekend,’ I warned him.
‘No poles.’

‘No poles,’ agreed Joe, and took the phone from Gemma’s hot
hand. ‘I had a better idea, anyway – a bush survival weekend in Dartmoor, where Alec tracks them with his laser-sighted … Joking. I’m joking! Hi, Flora! How are you?’

‘Is that really Flora Thornbury?’ Gemma whispered as Joe strolled off towards the grand piano, dappled in the sunlight falling through the blinds.

Yes,’ I said. I watched him, chatting away with a charming smile on his handsome face, helping himself to unguarded cakes during the long gaps where Flora was talking.

Part of me was very irritated by the easy way he’d commandeered the biggest-budget and potentially most useful contact I’d ever landed; part of me was relieved that I didn’t have to listen to Flora agonizing over her luxury honeymoon when I hadn’t had a holiday in years; and the tiniest part of me was secretly envious of the ease with which he did it all. Now that his initial grumpiness had worn off, Joe’s real personality was starting to emerge. I’d grudgingly come to realize that he said what he thought, not because he was an arrogant sod, but because he didn’t see any point in being anything other than himself.

That’s what you got when you inherited charm from both sides of your family, as well as a hotel and two sets of blond genes.

I snapped back to the task at hand. I didn’t have the luxury of charm, hotels, or genes. I’d have to work for all my breaks, and in a way, that was better, wasn’t it?

‘Right, Gemma,’ I said briskly. ‘I need to find the place card for Mrs Sally Markham …’

Summer always passed in a whirl of confetti and honeymoon-suite white linens for me, and this year was no different. A warm July and a sultry August saw the hotel full of sighing wedding guests nearly every weekend: the old cool room downstairs was constantly filled with white lilies and roses for the tables and arrangements, clanking crates of champagne were wheeled in and empty bottles wheeled out, and Fiona, the harpist, was here so often she was dating one of the barmen by the end of August.

My Bridelizer was making steady progress towards the target, and I was dropping regular hints to Laurence about how much of the general manager’s job I was now doing in the hope that he might get bored and just offer me the job early. Meanwhile, in the events office, Joe was fielding most of Flora’s more whimsical calls about butterflies and whether it was okay to cull guests on grounds of weight gain, while I dealt with Julia Thornbury and the nitty-gritty details, like how many people she would be inviting. Life was good. But I couldn’t enjoy it as much as usual, because in the space of one painful evening, my beautiful friend Helen had gone from a poised and confident restaurant manager to a lovelorn zombie.

True to her word, the day after the awards dinner, Helen gave Seamus his marching orders, and he was happy enough to march, the rat. One of the kitchen porters let slip to me that he’d moved straight in with one of the wine buyers for a big West End restaurant chain – not that I told Helen.

Instead, I took her out for dinner – usually to McDonald’s, since most London restaurants had bad associations now – and tried to keep her busy in as much social life as Laurence let us have, but the fact remained that the pair of us were condemned to celebrate other people’s happy relationships at least once a week, and smile constantly while we did it. I tried to relieve the grisly irony by reintroducing our old favourite, Wedding Bingo – three guests in identical Coast dresses; Hungover Ushers; Fake Tan Lines; Spot the Exes – but Helen didn’t want to play any more.

‘Why is the moral high ground so boring?’ she moaned to me through gritted teeth and waterproof mascara. ‘Why is it so lonely? Why is doing the right thing so – so unbelievably painful?’

‘You’ll find someone else,’ I assured her, as I did about four times a day, more on wedding weekends. ‘You’ll never meet Mr Right if you’re shacked up with Mr Wrong.’

‘But how am I going to meet Mr Right?’ She rolled her eyes towards the Paris-themed wedding reception of childhood sweethearts Callum and Eithne Riley. ‘Even if I found a single bloke under the age of fifty here, I’d have to fight off the three single friends of the bride who were invited specifically to scrap it out over him. I never realized how like
The Hunger Games
weddings are.’

I took the croquembouche discreetly out of her hands. She’d started to pick viciously at the spun sugar. ‘The right man will come along,’ I said, ‘when you least expect it. What’s meant for you won’t go by you.’

Seriously, I should have been painting these thoughts onto pebbles and selling them to brides as wedding favours.

Over by the champagne table, two women in strapless prom dresses started having a very obvious standoff, next to a sheepish-looking bloke.

‘Leave them to it,’ I said. ‘He’s the best man’s boyfriend.’

‘Ha!’ said Helen, and stalked back to the kitchen.

*

The Indian summer of Post-Seamus Gloom rolled on in London until the last week in September, and then suddenly one morning I woke up and autumn had arrived. The air changed – there was a crispness about everything, and people started to walk a little faster down Piccadilly in the mornings.

Something had changed in the hotel, too.

We’d had a weekly wedding meeting, in which Joe had brought us up to date with Flora’s latest ideas for a wedding dress made entirely from rose petals and Love Hearts sweeties (she’d actually found someone mad enough to make it, too), and he and Gemma had gone off, under protest, to remove all the red Smarties from Catriona Hale’s fifteen pounds of sweets for her ice cream bar. That left me and Helen to run through Delphine’s cake schedule for the rest of the year.

Down in her pâtisserie cave, Delphine created beautiful bespoke wedding cakes, but lately she’d started modelling very
‘realistic’ toppers of the bride and groom, some of which had actually upset the brides, who’d been under the impression that their efforts on the 5:2 diet had been more successful than Delphine apparently thought.

‘Helen.’ I nudged her. ‘You were going to talk to Delphine about being a bit less Parisian and a bit more generous in her sugar paste.’

‘What?’ She jumped and frowned, then smiled in a spacey way. ‘Sorry, I was miles away.’

I eyed her. This was a different kind of distracted from the usual heartbroken zombie face. ‘Are you all right?’

She nodded, but only stayed focused for about two nanoseconds before drifting back into her private daydream. Her eyes weren’t smiling at me. They were smiling at a non-specific point about two yards to the right of my head.

I clicked my fingers in front of Helen’s face to try to get her to concentrate. ‘Helen? You haven’t been eating anything out of the commis chef’s biscuit tin again?’

She shook her head and smiled. Again, not at me.

‘Don’t make me throw this glass of water over you,’ I warned her.

Helen pulled herself together. ‘Guess what?’

‘What?’ I narrowed my eyes. ‘Please don’t tell me Seamus has come back? Whatever he’s done, Helen, think about those bunny rabbits that you thought were for pets but were really—’

‘No, it’s not Seamus.’ Helen looked scornful. ‘That loser? Forget
him
. No, I’ve met someone else.’ She glanced down, as if having a private thought of her own, and her usual poise
was suddenly, and rather beautifully, disrupted by a very goofy grin.

‘Really?’ An odd sensation rippled through me. ‘That’s … that’s brilliant! When?’

‘Last week.’

Last week?
I felt a bit hurt. ‘When were you going to tell me?’

For the first time, she looked a little shifty. ‘Um, soon. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t having one of those weird rebound-goggles episodes.’

‘So, who is he?’ I nudged her. ‘How did you meet? Come on, I want to know
everything
!’

Helen blushed. ‘It’s really corny, but it was in the restaurant. He came in at ten to, reservation for two people at one o’clock, so I seated him, did all the usual stuff, didn’t take much notice because we were busy. He was on his iPhone, so I thought, fine … then I realized at ten past one that he was still on his own. And no one had come by quarter past, so I sent Rita to ask if there was a problem, he said no, but he’d finished the bread—’

‘Yadda yadda,’ I prompted, rolling my hands, because much as I wanted to know all the details, my schedule wasn’t going to allow for a real-time re-enactment.

‘Anyway, a little after half past Rita took a call from someone called Lou, to let Wynn Davies at table three know she wasn’t going to make it. Could we pass on the message?’ The pink flush on Helen’s cheek deepened. ‘I always pass on phone messages like that myself, in case it’s something personal, so I went over to tell him, and he looked crushed, poor guy, and it turned out …’

Finally
.

‘… that he’d been set up on a blind date, and he’d been stood up. I didn’t ask, he just blurted it out. I don’t think he meant to tell me, but he’d been sitting there for over half an hour, eating bread.’

‘Awkward,’ I agreed. ‘So, what did you do? Offer him the specials menu, and tell him to hurry up?’

Helen tutted. ‘Of
course
not. I gave him a glass of champagne on the house. He’d made an effort too, I could tell. Nice suit, new haircut. And we’re not a cheap first-date restaurant, either. I thought that said a lot about him.’

‘And …?’

‘And then we sort of got chatting, and he, um …’ Helen shyly curled a strand of hair round her finger. ‘He asked if he could take me out for dinner, or if that was the worst thing you could ask a restaurant manager? And I said, no, it wasn’t, actually, and that I’d been dying to try that place Dom reviewed last week.’

‘The Fulham Rigger?’

‘No, the other one.’ She frowned. ‘The Coach and Horsemen.’

‘I don’t think I’ve been there.’

‘You have. In Canonbury? Betty was there – she had some tart comments to make about the butter.’

I hadn’t been to Canonbury in over a year. ‘Nope, haven’t been. You’ll have to tell me what it’s like.’

‘It’s very nice, actually. We’ve actually, um, had the date.’ Helen hugged her knees.

‘What? Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I thought you might think I was moving on a bit fast. From Seamus.’

Privately, I didn’t think Helen
could
move on too fast from Seamus, not even if she was speeding away from him with a jetpack, but I just made a
wow!
face. ‘Of course not! So tell me all about him! What does he do? Where’s he from?’

‘He’s called Wynn, he’s thirty, he’s from Swansea, he’s …’ Helen’s sunny expression wavered a little. ‘He’s …’

‘He’s what? A sous-chef?’ Helen rarely dated anyone beneath chef status, but she’d sometimes settle for a talented sommelier. ‘Another restaurant manager?’

‘Don’t laugh,’ she warned me. ‘It’s not the most exciting job.’

I racked my brains. ‘He’s not a … baker?’

‘No, he’s a dentist.’

I did a double take. ‘A dentist?’

‘I know it’s not a very sexy profession, but I thought it could be a good idea to get away from the food industry for a bit.’

‘Well, I suppose dentists deal with the … aftermath of the food industry.’

‘You’re pleased?’ She looked at me anxiously. ‘It’s not just rebound insanity?’

Helen looked like a new woman. Well, not a new woman. Her old self. Her old, glowy, confident, Scandinavian goddess self.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Truthfully, it’s the best news I’ve had all year.’

‘I think so too.’ She beamed sunnily, and opened her diary. ‘So, when are you and Dominic free for a double date?’

*

As usual, Dominic insisted on taking Helen and Wynn out on a reviewing mission for our double date.

‘It kills two birds with one stone,’ he protested when I found he’d booked us into Jocques, ‘Fulham’s exciting new ground-breaking Scottish-French fusion concept’. ‘And this new bloke of Helen’s is bound to have some good insider gossip.’

He’d rung me up to tell me, but I could hear the eagerness in his voice; there was nothing Dominic loved more than access to foodie gossip. One of his main complaints about Seamus was that he was too high-minded – or high – to pass on kitchen scandal.

‘I hate to disappoint you, but I doubt it. Not unless their salted caramel is causing root-canal traumas all round Chelsea.’

‘What?’

‘Wynn’s a dentist.’ I tucked the phone under my ear and stuck the Post-it note with Bride’s Babysitter onto the new seating plan in the one remaining place it could go, between Groom Uni Friend and Mrs Bride’s Boss. There. Done. Issy Livingstone’s feud-riven, multi-married, half-mad family, all seated.

I stood back and surveyed the plan with some pride.

‘So that’s settled,’ said Dom, clearly not listening to me. ‘I’ll see you both there at half past seven.’

‘But, hang on, what sort of place is this? I don’t know if he eats meat or—’

‘What kind of weirdo doesn’t eat meat?’

‘Plenty. I don’t eat a lot myself.’ Lately I’d been picking Dominic up on some of his casual rudeness. Ever since the awards fiasco, it had stopped being charming and started to, well, sound plain rude.

‘You know something, Rosie, you’re beginning to sound like someone’s mother,’ said Dominic tetchily. ‘Not mine. She didn’t nag me quite so much.’

‘This isn’t nagging,’ I pointed out. ‘This is just manners. You could at least—’

But the line had gone dead. He’d hung up on me. I stared in mute fury at the phone. That was the third time he’d hung up on me this month. Our theoretical mortgage had finally come through from the bank, but the prospect of taking another step towards our own flat wasn’t filling me with the unbridled joy I’d expected it to.

‘I hate it when you hang up on me, you charmless nerk!’ I yelled into the receiver, just as Joe walked in.

‘Was that Issy?’ he asked. ‘Bit brisk?’

‘No, it was bloody Dominic,’ I said, then frowned at myself. I hadn’t meant to tell Joe that. ‘Could you knock, by the way? Before you come in?’

Joe leaned against the doorframe. ‘Why? Would I have overheard something that might have shocked me? More covert matchmaking for my mother? Date reports about my dad?’

‘No, I …’ Urgh. My mind went blank. ‘But I often have brides on the phone. And they don’t appreciate doors opening and shutting, and interruptions.’

As I spoke, the Chief Bridesmaid Post-It peeled slowly off the plan and fluttered to the ground, closely followed by Groom’s Stepmother.

‘Oh, you’re kidding me,’ I groaned. The groom’s stepmother had been stuck to the back of the chief bridesmaid all along.

‘What?’

I showed him the offending Post-its. ‘Seating plan. My least favourite part of a wedding.’

‘Oh,’ said Joe, as if it had jogged his memory. ‘Issy was trying to get hold of you. She left a message to say that her stepmother thinks she will come after all, so can we fit her in? Top table, ideally, otherwise she’ll have one of her dos, whatever that means.’

I stared at the top table, already overloaded with the bride’s father’s three previous wives, all at very carefully spaced distances from one another. I’d worked it out with a ruler and sightlines so none of them had to look at each other directly. In the end, I’d had a brainwave and asked the florist to make an extra, very thick, freestanding arrangement to block one out.

‘There’s no room for another Mrs Livingstone,’ I said. ‘Not unless we put a hammock over the top table and stick her in that.’

Joe wrinkled up his nose as if I were just making a big fuss about nothing. ‘Oh, it can’t be that bad.’

‘Hello?’ I waved in defeat at the plan.