The Honeymoon Hotel (7 page)

I glanced at Joe, who didn’t really need to know this, and said quickly, ‘He did, yes. But she still wants to sing. So we’ll need to come up with another strategy for that.’

‘Professional performing rights,’ said Helen in a flash. ‘Or piano issues.’

‘
Why
would you want to stop her mother singing?’ Joe argued. ‘Or having a vow renewal? Isn’t it a nice celebration of a lasting marriage?’

‘Not when Mummy wants to wear her original wedding dress too,’ said Gemma. ‘That’s just showing off. Poor bride’s already on a liquid vegan diet.’

Joe’s eyes focused properly for the first time since he’d
arrived, but not in a good way. In an argumentative way. ‘I’m amazed anyone’s actually allowed to get married here.’

I felt tetchy. Why should I have to justify my highly regarded events planning to someone who’d never even
been
to a Bonneville wedding? ‘Joe, you’ve clearly got some strong ideas of your own about weddings,’ I said lightly. ‘Have you been to many?’

‘Enough. And is it a
strong
idea to think it should be all about the bride
and
groom, not just some big princess wish-fulfilment party?’ he countered. ‘That weddings should just be about two people and their spiritual commitment to each other in their own way, not what kind of canapés are in this week?’

‘And that’s what we provide,’ I said hotly. ‘An elegant celebration of the marriage of two people, without any tacky glitz or trendy nonsense. The perfect English hotel wedding ceremony.’

He raised an eyebrow, then sank back into his chair, crossed his arms, and looked tired again. As if he really,
really
didn’t want to be here now.

I thought I was pretty good at reading people, but I couldn’t work out what was going on under the messy blond hair. Was he pro-weddings? Anti-weddings? Whatever, I had no intention of letting him derail the Thornbury wedding meeting. Even if Laurence was lining Joe up to be manager, I wanted it to be clear from the start: there was no way he was going to interfere with my events.

‘Right, so when Flora comes in with her mother on Friday, I thought we’d start with tea,’ I said, ‘then show off the rooms. Helen, you could come in and have a chat about the menu options?’

Helen uncapped her silver pen. ‘Okay. What time?’

‘About half ten? Just for ten minutes.’

‘Fine.’ She made a note. ‘I’ll tell Delphine to do those special almondy pastry things in the shape of hearts. Oh, hang on. Do supermodels eat pastries?’

I thought of Flora’s last lingerie campaign, the one that had been projected on the side of the Tate Modern. Even magnified to that size, I hadn’t been able to spot any cellulite on her racehorse legs. ‘No. But her mum probably will.’

‘Would you like me to come and take notes?’ Gemma asked.

‘No,’ I said firmly, ‘I think we should keep it quite low-key.’

‘Aw, please? I can fill you in on all her exes. So you don’t put your foot in it?’

Gemma was an avid reader of
Heat
magazine – and any other magazine that featured Circles of Shame and charts that detailed who’d dated whom and when. She was constantly revising her own spreadsheet about which celebrity couples were about to get engaged, and how she would arrange their weddings in the hotel. I thanked God most days that we didn’t have a big enough turning circle in the courtyard for Gemma’s favourite glass coach and two white horses.

‘I’m the celebrity consultant,’ Gemma informed Joe. ‘I keep Rosie up to speed with all the breaking celebrity news.’

He leaned forward in his chair, fixed her with his pale blue eyes, and, just as Gemma flushed an excited deep pink, said, in the manner of a guru, ‘Gemma, all that celebrity stuff is utter bollocks.’ Then, to my surprise, he turned to me and said, ‘Can I sit in?’

I was thrown. I couldn’t say no. I didn’t really want to say yes. ‘Why, if it’s all bollocks?’

‘Because I’m supposed to be learning how weddings work?’

‘Er, yes. Of course.’

I tried to work out whether there was an ulterior motive in it. Joe probably wanted to see a supermodel in the flesh, I reckoned, regardless of all that high-minded business about celebs. Anthony had always claimed to be a card-carrying socialist, but he’d still made a special detour to collect me from work when Kate Middleton had popped in for tea in the Palm Court with her sister.

Joe was regarding me with an expression that reminded me of Laurence at his most inscrutable, so I smiled back in a blandly friendly way. What harm could it do? He’d probably be bored senseless within five minutes. I’d go through the catering quote in minute detail and he’d soon make his excuses.

‘Good, so that’s that,’ I said, turning to the rest of my agenda. ‘Now, the rest of this week. Stephanie Miller’s rehearsal dinner is tomorrow night, after the rehearsal in the afternoon. To recap, the wedding’s on Saturday – three o’clock start, afternoon tea in the garden, black tie dinner in the evening in the ballroom, then dancing until one …’

I watched out of the corner of my eye as Joe’s attention drifted into the garden, where pigeons were perching on the fountain.

‘Big princess wish-fulfilment thing’ indeed. Pretty rich coming from a man who hadn’t, as far as I could see, ever come back off his gap year.

Dominic and I had a lot of meals out, but they weren’t all what you’d call romantic. There were usually at least three of us round the table at any intimate dinner for two: me, him and his notebook.

This was actually an intimate lunch for nine, if you also counted the waiters, the manager, the chef, the sommelier and the ‘cocktail creative’ who were hovering nervously around us like shy moths at a lamp party. We were in a new seafood bar, Benny and the Nets, I was trying to whisk Dominic through the courses as quickly as possible, so we could pop into an open-house viewing in Lambeth before I had to get back to meet some florists at four, but we kept being interrupted by staff checking we were having a wonderful time.

The flat situation had moved on a few steps, in that I’d spoken to my bank, cajoled a vague promise of a deposit loan from my parents, and managed to steer Dominic’s attention away from his main priority, a flat with ‘a shower powerful enough to peel new potatoes’, and onto how we’d actually finance our joint purchase.

‘… and I know you’ll like this place because apparently the
showers are so violent that you can’t let children use them unsupervised – oh, for heaven’s sake,’ I muttered, after yet another
amuse-bouche
was delivered to our table under two choreographed silver domes. We hadn’t even finished looking at the menu. I’d only just worked out how to get it open. It came in a weird orange net that was meant to reflect the restaurant theme: organic seafood ‘with a twist’.

In the two years I’d been living my twilight life as Betty, I’d learned to dread the phrase ‘with a twist’. It usually just meant ‘served in a plant pot’.

‘Those sound like my kind of showers,’ said Dominic without taking his eyes off the bizarre list of starters. ‘Ooh. What do you think jellyfish in froth tastes like?’

‘Angry? Excited?’ I shoved the Old Vintners Development prospectus towards him. ‘Sounds more like a natural disaster than a seafood special. Look, the completion date for this conversion is November, so if we put a deposit down now we could—’

‘Ha! Very good. Natural disaster.’ Dom reached for his notebook, and I told myself to say something. I didn’t mind helping him with observations about the food but I did want proper credit for my jokes. Talking to Helen about Seamus had that effect; for a few days afterwards, it made me more determined not to let things get
that
bad.

But, to my surprise, Dominic murmured aloud as he wrote, ‘Betty said she was more concerned for the frothy jellyfish than tempted to eat it.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, mollified somewhat.

No, Dominic was nothing like Seamus. Seamus was a liability.
Dominic was … the right side of unpredictable. The interesting side.

The waiter reappeared, doing that invisible hand-washing thing that gave me unwelcome mental images of hand sanitizer. I kept that to myself.

‘Are you ready to order?’ he enquired. ‘Because chef wanted me to pass on the message that if there’s anything off our menu you’d like, you only have to say. Anything at all.’

‘We’ll be ordering from the menu, thanks,’ Dominic assured him, safe in the knowledge that
he
wouldn’t have to have the frothy jellyfish.

‘We can always rustle you up … a burger?’ The waiter raised his eyebrow. When Dominic got too impatient with a restaurant’s conceptual offerings, he sometimes asked for a burger. To see if the chef could really cook – or, alternatively, how fast one of the washing-up lads could sprint round to the nearest burger joint.

‘No, it all looks so delicious.’ I really hated the grovelling that often ensued on these meals out. I couldn’t help thinking of Helen, fuming in the kitchen trying to please the critic while keeping the chef from putting a pan through the wall because the critic had asked for salt.

I glanced down, and tried to remember what I was supposed to have. For once, I felt like having what I actually wanted. ‘I’ll have the potted mackerel to start, then the, um, prawns on the lawn? Whatever they are?’

‘A great choice. And for you, sir?’

Dominic reeled off (ha! I made a note to use that later) a selection of dishes he fancied, but, I noted, no chips. ‘And can
you serve the sauce on the side?’ he added, with a light pat to the stomach.

‘No chips?’ I said before I could stop myself. In addition to last week’s reference to Betty being on a diet – which I wasn’t – I’d noticed Dom had omitted to put Nutella on last week’s supermarket delivery, despite Nutella sandwiches being his favourite midnight snack. Four jars of Nutella were usually the only things on ‘his’ side of the kitchen cupboard.

He pretended to be surprised that I’d asked. ‘Not unless you want some?’

‘I’m on a diet. Apparently,’ I said, but he didn’t react, so I looked up at the waiter and handed back my menu. ‘That’s all, thanks.’

Was Dominic on a diet? I knew better than to bring up the sticky topic of weight – I spent my day with brides, after all – but maybe he was. I wondered why. He’d always been pleasantly solid, something I found rather attractive, actually, but maybe the constant eating was getting to him.

‘So how are things going with Little Lord Fauntleroy, King of the Wild Frontier?’ he asked as the bread arrived in a miniature lobster pot. No matter how crazily themed the restaurant, there was always bread. Only the receptacle changed. ‘Has he had the revolving door replaced with a zip wire yet?’

‘Not yet.’ Helen and Gemma were both rather taken by Joe, but Dominic wasn’t impressed so far with my reports. He was highly scornful of people who didn’t own hard-shell luggage and talked about ‘travelling’ instead of ‘going on holiday’. ‘I don’t know how long he’s going to stick it in events. He told me
yesterday that weddings should be individual celebrations of a couple’s relationship, ideally with just the bride and groom and a humanist minister. Everything else is merely social pressure to eat tiny cakes.’

‘He
said
that?’

I nodded. ‘In front of Delphine, too. It’s a good job she’s still not great with English accents. He’d have been wearing those éclairs otherwise.’

Dominic winced. ‘Well, those tiny cakes are doing pretty well for his dad’s hotel, aren’t they? Hasn’t he seen how his inheritance is being financially stabilised by a pile of teeny-weeny cupcakes while he surfs his way round the world? The ungrateful slacker.’

I reached for a roll. ‘I think it’s the celebrity thing he doesn’t have much time for. Or fashion. He’s one of those “be honest all the time” types.’

Dominic looked gleefully disapproving. ‘And that’s what happens when you move to California. They encourage people to be brutally honest just to keep the therapy industry going.’

‘Well, it bothers me. I don’t think it’s always
best
to be completely honest with brides. They’re in a different reality as it is.’ I stared at the tiny crystals of salt on the dish; it was perfect salty butter. ‘If he talks to them like he talks to the rest of us, I’m going to be mopping up hysterics for the next seven weeks. Laurence is insisting he’s in every meeting.’

‘What? Even that big meeting with the supermodel?’

‘Even that. In fact, Joe asked to be there. Specifically. God knows why.’

Dominic waved his butter knife dismissively. ‘Send him out to get whatever the wedding equivalent of tartan paint is. Invisible confetti, or bride hooks, or something. Get her in, do the meeting, let him wave her off. I can’t think that Pouty McLegs—’

‘Flora Thornbury.’

‘—is going to be impressed with some beach bum banging on about being
totally honest
about her wedding vows and how fat her bridesmaids look.’ He sat back in his chair and gazed across the table at me with delight. ‘Honesty at a wedding. I love it. Only a complete idiot could think that’s a good idea. Can you imagine? If Jamie Hobson had been
honest
about the fact that the stag do was in Prague and not at Silverstone, like Sophie thought? Or if I’d been
totally honest
about that weird cake they tried to serve at the McLintock reception?’

Dominic and I didn’t go to a lot of weddings, mainly thanks to my weekends being taken up with arranging other people’s, and him professing to be very tired of poached salmon. He’d been to a few recently on his own – he had a lot of university mates, as well as work colleagues – but I was happy to let him go by himself. To be honest, even though I was
very
much over Ant, if I wasn’t actively running proceedings, weddings made me a bit self-conscious. Dominic was surprisingly sensitive about it. He and I had never really talked about the Non-Wedding of the Year, apart from one night when we’d been drunk and he’d told me he’d have punched Ant, had he been his best man. I’d been quite touched by that.

I could see a waiter hovering in the background, and suddenly I wished we could be having this private conversation
at home, in our flat. On our sofa, with our feet up. Not in a restaurant with waiters hovering and Dominic’s notebook out. But then we were only ever at home together for about twenty minutes a day; most of those breakfast conversations were him giving me directions to some pop-up chimichanga-Korean-fusion launch.

A funny pang hit me from nowhere, and I blinked. Had I really just yearned for a boring night in with my boyfriend and a bottle of wine, rather than a glittery free dinner out in a new restaurant?

‘Rosie?’ Dom prompted. ‘Admit it. You’re thinking about that awful wonky wedding cake? The one you said looked like a badly stacked set of soup plates.’

‘I didn’t go to the McLintock wedding,’ I reminded him. ‘That must have been one of your own jokes.’

‘Ah yes.’ He pretended to look apologetic. ‘I thought it wasn’t up to your usual high standard.’

I felt his foot press against my inner calf under the table, and my funny pang changed to a more warming glow of happiness that this handsome, funny man was
my
man. I’d never met anyone whose eyes actually twinkled like Dom’s. Thank God they did. They were nature’s way of compensating for some of the things he came out with.

‘What were you thinking about?’ he asked. ‘You looked miles away. Was it this flat we’re going to see? The shower sounds great, by the way. I’m really looking forward to living somewhere with modern heating. I don’t think I could have stood another winter wrapped in blankets like a Victorian urchin.’

I hesitated – I didn’t want to say I’d been thinking about weddings, it’d come out wrong – but I was too late. Dominic pretended to look reproachful. ‘You were thinking about work. Sorry, for a moment there I thought we were talking about something not related to your job.’

‘No. I was thinking about the flat …’ I started, but Dominic could read me too well.

He squinched up his face, then said, ‘Look, don’t worry, he can’t give his son the job straight off the bat.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I know that’s what you’re bothered about. Laurence doing the old nepotism-promotion thing. But how many departments has the prodigal son got to work his way around?’ Dominic started counting on his fingers. ‘Events, bar, restaurant, housekeeping, reservations … that’s nearly a year. He’s bound to get bored by then. You’ll be fine. And if Laurence is daft enough to give a beach bum with no management experience the most important job in the hotel, then I will write your resignation letter myself and find you a decent position somewhere else, where your boss might actually appreciate the work you do, and maybe even let you have a life. Ah, the starters! Marvellous!’

The team of choreographed waiters arrived and started putting the usual slabs of slate down in front of us, but even though the food smelled very nice, suddenly I didn’t feel very hungry.

*

One of the growing number of American wedding traditions that was becoming very popular for us in the hotel was the rehearsal dinner.

I didn’t suggest it to clients as such – it was yet another potential seating-plan stress-out, at the exact moment that most brides didn’t need more stress
or
seating plans
or
additional time with their immediate family – but if I had a bride who either was American or read a lot of American wedding sites, then we could cater the most fabulous rehearsal dinner required in the private dining room. It did bump up my profit margin, I’ll be honest. And it flushed out any post-rehearsal familial simmering before the official photographer arrived on the scene.

Stephanie Miller was both of the above: a Bostonian bride who began every other sentence with the phrase, ‘I saw this amazing thing online …’ The sentences that didn’t start like that started with, ‘Rosie, I don’t want to make a fuss but …’ On the whole, I preferred the ‘online’ sentences; they usually featured something that actually existed, whereas most of Stephanie’s own detail-driven suggestions would only be possible in films. I did my best, obviously.

When Stephanie wasn’t detailing the exact dimensions of the petits fours she wanted placed on each coffee saucer or making paper models of her entire guest list with photo faces so she could ‘visualize their conversation’ at the reception tables, she was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer in an American law firm. I could see the crossover; she was very, very sure about what she wanted, which included her husband-to-be, English Richard, a handsome, bald, golf-playing businessman whose company Stephanie’s firm had put into receivership three years earlier.

‘As soon as I saw Richard on the other side of the table in the
liquidation meeting, I knew we were destined to be together,’ she’d told me in our first meeting, eighteen months ago. ‘And would you believe it, he said the same thing! It was like the most amicable merger ever!’

Richard didn’t say much. He was one of those strong, silent types, which was just as well, because Stephanie did the talking for both of them. But they never stopped holding hands, and on one occasion arrived to taste wedding cake in matching golf wear. Since then, I’d seen Stephanie on a regular basis, and I’d privately rated them at a solid eight-out-of-ten compatibility on my private How Long Do You Give It?-o-meter.