“Whoa,” says an excited voice from behind me. I turn to see Ruby Hedgers, the six-year-old, in the doorway of Sweet Pea. “Is it snowing?”
“No,” I tell her, “it is just structural damage. Hello, yes, fire brigade, please . . .”
* * *
? ? ? ? ?
The hotel is swarming with firefighters. Izzy is being unprofessionally flirtatious with one of the particularly handsome ones. I am in a very bad mood.
It has been a stressful morning. Understandably, the guests are a little disturbed by all this. Several of them did not take well to being posted out of windows and down ladders. One of the firefighters told us that the damage to the ceiling and staircase has “no quick fix” and said “this is going to be a big job,” and in case that wasn’t clear enough, he rubbed his forefinger and thumb together, a gesture that means the same in Brazil as it does here: money, money, money.
This is the root of all our problems at Forest Manor Hotel and Spa. As I understand it, the hotel was thriving before the pandemic, but business suffered badly during the Covid lockdowns, which coincided with the entire roof needing replacing. Now we are limping along, unable to give the hotel the renovation it needs. When I started here two years ago, Forest Manor was already looking tired; it has lost even more of its luxuriousness, and that, in turn, means prices have had to drop, even in our award-winning restaurant.
But the heart of this place remains the same. I truly believe there is no hotel in England quite as special as this one. I knew it the moment I first stepped into the lobby and saw the guests reading newspapers on the sofas in their hotel slippers, looking out at the children playing on the lawns. It was the picture of comfort. We treasure our guests here—the moment I hand them their key, they become part of our family.
“Lucas, right?” says a voice behind me, a hand clapping down on my shoulder.
I steel myself, placing my precious third coffee of the day on the lobby table. Of course, we don’t always like every member of our family.
Louis Keele is staying in Wood Aster, one of the downstairs suites, for the next two months while he’s in the area on business. It is our finest room, and Louis likes the finest things. People don’t appreciate quality anymore, he told a colleague the other day on their way through the lobby. I imagine it is much easier to “appreciate” quality when your father made several million pounds on the property market in the nineties, but I wouldn’t know.
“Yes, Mr. Keele. The hotel is being evacuated,” I say.
He knows this, obviously. There are firefighters everywhere, and there is a cordon across the doorway that Louis has just ducked under. Also, a lot of the ceiling is on the staircase.
“I’m very sorry, but you’ll need to vacate your room for a short time, just while we get all this sorted.”
He is looking at “all this” with interest. I clench my fists. Louis puts me on edge. There is something hungry underneath his easy smile—something calculating. He was here last Christmas, and even then he was asking Mrs. SB if she would consider selling to his father’s company—or, as he calls it, “the Keele family firm.” She laughed and told him no, but the situation is so different now. We were in serious financial trouble before the ceiling caved in.
Louis whistles slowly, tucking his hands in his trouser pockets. “This sort of damage, with the broader renovations needed here . . .” He grimaces in sympathy. “Excuse the crude language, but you guys are in real deep shit, aren’t you?”
“Louis!” Izzy trills, appearing from the dining room and shooting me a warning look that suggests my expression is not as obliging as it should be. “Let me take you outside. We’re having an impromptu winter picnic under the pergola, or the pergoda, or the pagoda, I have actually never known what the difference is between all of those, but you know what I mean.”
She has her hand on his arm. Izzy is very tactile for a Brit—with everyone except me.
“Mrs. SB called,” Izzy says to me over her shoulder as she leads Louis away. “Someone needs to phone the already hysterical bride whose wedding just got cancelled. I told her how passionate you were about the set-up for tomorrow’s wedding and said you’d be the perfect person to make the bride feel heard.”
I grit my teeth. Izzy knows I do not enjoy emotional conversations. The only consolation is that I have already signed Izzy up to help Barty fill in a forty-four-page insurance document, which he has definitely downloaded in the wrong format. It will be pure torture for her.
“And she wants to see us both in the office at five,” Izzy adds.
It is only as the front door creaks shut behind Izzy and Louis that I realise what this is likely to mean.
Even if it is safe to use the downstairs of the hotel, that leaves us with five bedrooms instead of twenty-five. They are five of the most expensive bedrooms, which is something, but still, it’s a fraction of what we’d usually earn over the winter months, and doesn’t exactly require a full front-of-house team. In the average week, Izzy and I would each share the desk with one of the agency receptionists Mrs. SB employs, and endure our one overlap day. (Monday. The gloomiest of days.) Mandy would take most of the evening shifts, when only one receptionist is required.
If I were Mrs. SB, I would be looking to cut a member of front-of-house staff. Given the short notice, she will probably have to pay the agency receptionists even if they don’t come in, and Mandy is an old family friend of Barty’s.
Which leaves . . . me and Izzy.
Izzy
It’s five o’clock. I’ve got my pitch ready. I’ve had some useful feedback from Arjun, who said I was focusing a bit too much on why I was better at my job than Lucas, which doesn’t make me sound like a team player. I disagree, obviously—if anyone isn’t a team player, it’s Lucas. He’s always annoying housekeeping, and he once made Ollie cry when the dishwasher broke. But maybe I don’t need the slide about how my booking book is better than his online booking system in literally every way.
Now that the two of us are standing side by side outside Opal Cottage—the old gate house where the Singh-Bartholomews live—I am finding myself feeling a teeny bit sorry for Lucas. He looks as anxious as I feel. It’s a freezing cold day, and the grass is still wet from this morning’s sleet, but he’s rolled his shirtsleeves up and keeps tugging at his collar as if he’s too hot. He catches my eye, and I am just considering smiling at him when he says, “By the way, I reorganised your box for you.”
All thoughts of smiling evaporate.
“My box o’ bits?”
Lucas’s expression shifts from “tense and implacable” to a subtle “I tire of your nonsense.”
“The box that you keep under our desk, filled with your belongings, yes.”
“You can’t go through my box o’ bits! That’s been there for eight years!”
“That was obvious from the contents,” Lucas says. “It was easy to condense it into a smaller, more sensible container when I removed all the out-of-date packets of sweets.”
“Sweets never go off! Tell me you did not throw anything away.”
He regards me flatly. “I kick that box at least twice per day. I have asked you repeatedly to move it. Rationalising the contents seemed like a compromise. Aren’t you always telling me to compromise?”
“Excuse me? You’ve been kicking my box? There are breakables in there, you know.” Well, my Teen Wolf mug. But that is very precious.