‘I thought you might prefer the spare room rather than Ripley and Otto’s,’ said Joe, swinging open the door to a cosy bedroom with a terracotta carpet, pale orange walls and curtains that looked as if they’d been made from the ties of Carnaby Street hipsters. ‘You think this is bad, but Ripley’s going through a pink phase. The other room’s like sleeping inside Peppa Pig.’
‘It’s great.’ I eyed the décor. Thankfully I’d be asleep most of the time. If I could sleep, with those curtains.
‘Bathroom’s down here, shower’s a bit temperamental, been on at Dad to replace it for ages, but you know what he’s like – you might be better breaking into Room 219 which is the nearest …’
It only took a few minutes for Joe to show me round the flat; then we were back in the kitchen, where we stood about awkwardly, as it dawned on the pair of us that we were now flatmates and privy to each other’s off-duty routines, such as they were.
‘So,’ said Joe. He glanced at his ‘off-duty’ sweatpants, and I realized his feet were bare. Tanned, still, with a small star tattooed on the bone by his big toe. It reminded me that I knew where his other tattoos were. The less accessible ones.
I swallowed, and scrabbled for a neutral subject.
‘So, er,’ I said, gesturing towards the table, ‘what’s the gossip with Flora’s bridesmaids? Anyone famous?’
My involvement with Flora’s wedding was now largely catering-based. Joe was the one dealing with the favours, the favoured personnel, Flora’s expectation that Photoshop could be performed in real time on actual people, and so on.
‘Oh, she’s running auditions, essentially,’ he said. ‘Let me show you the long list …’
An hour flew past discussing Flora’s wedding madness, and I was surprised by how confident Joe sounded about the plans. Maybe I’d been a bit harsh on his organizational skills. Anyone who could talk Flora out of releasing ten thousand butterflies at the moment of her marriage had to have hidden steel.
At eight, he asked me if I fancied anything to eat, and when I said yes, he called down to the kitchens and persuaded them to stick a pizza in the oven for us. Then he said, conversationally, ‘Listen, I meant it about helping out over the holidays. I’ll be here anyway.’
‘Aren’t you going skiing? Or snowboarding?’ I couldn’t stop glancing around the kitchen; one big window looked out over the hidden rooftops of Piccadilly, and underneath it along one wall there were appliances I hadn’t seen since 1970s episodes of Fawlty Towers. Was that a Teasmade?
‘No, I’ve either got to work here, or work at Wragley Hall with Mum. She says I have to work Christmas week, so I can hold my head up with the staff. If I stay in London, at least I can go out into town, whereas if I go to Wragley, there’s no escape from Alec. He’s a complete nightmare over Christmas. He still booby-traps the chimney in case Santa drops in. I’m not even joking.’
‘I know you’re not,’ I said. ‘I heard about the reindeer.’
‘Anyway, London’s pretty cool at Christmas,’ he went on, stretching out his long legs under the table with a yawn. ‘I’ve never been to that skating rink at Somerset House.’
‘It gets pretty busy,’ I said. ‘But yeah, it’s nice.’
I had a sudden flashback to last year: Dominic had reviewed the café next door. We hadn’t actually skated – I didn’t want to make a fool of myself; he didn’t want to risk his writing hand – but it had been Christmassy. A London moment we’d shared.
I didn’t want to think about Dominic and the life I’d just lost, but my caffeine levels were dropping along with my energy levels, and miserable thoughts were breaking through like splinters.
‘Do you want to go?’ Joe suggested with an encouraging smile. ‘We do get an afternoon off between now and New Year’s, don’t we? I’ll take you – my treat.’
Would Dominic be going this year, with New Betty? I’d bought a special skating hat, a furry Russian one from Topshop. I’d wanted it to feel like New York. It had felt a bit like New York. (Disclaimer: I’ve never been to New York.) Dominic had grumbled about the lukewarm hot chocolate, but in a funny way …
‘Rosie?’ I felt Joe touch my arm, and when I looked up, he was gazing at me as if he was worried. His unexpectedly kind expression made me feel warm inside, then sad.
‘Sorry?’ I blinked my tears away, and smiled manically. Work. That solved most of my problems. Lots of work. ‘So!’ I pulled the list towards me. ‘What has Flora got in mind for her hen night?’
‘Uh-uh. I called down for supper. Work’s finished for today.’ Joe’s blue eyes were still fixed on mine, concerned. ‘Look, if you—’
‘If we want her wedding to be a headline feature, I don’t mind putting the hours in,’ I carried on. Something had changed in the atmosphere between us. It was work, but it wasn’t work. I felt as if he was seeing a different me now. If he asked me how I felt about Dominic now, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to stop talking.
Joe gave me a funny look. ‘Okay. But only till the pizza comes.’
*
And so the days leading up to Christmas slipped past in a blur of tinsel, carols, mistletoe, tipsy guests, champagne and 2 a.m. finishes, until I found myself – surreally – in the Bonneville’s restaurant on Christmas Day, volunteering to help dish out sprouts to a roomful of people rather than sit in my boss’s empty flat watching repeats of Christmas Top of the Pops from 1978. In a room that was, still, to all intents and purposes, in 1978, too.
Downstairs, the restaurant was, for one day, a riot of tasteless gold and red jollity. At the beginning of December, Helen’s team had added a few festive touches to the restaurant’s usual eau-de-nil and seashell colour scheme, but for Christmas Day, they’d abandoned good taste and thrown all the remaining tinsel at it.
Gold garlands mingled with real pine along the banquettes and red Chinese lanterns hung from the ceiling as I shimmied round the tables dishing up sprouts and sherry trifle with the other waiting staff. I had to admit, it was fun. A sort of communal madness had got us through the early prep, and now we were openly speculating at the serving pass about the families who’d decided to have dinner in a hotel instead of at home.
The oddest family group of all was the one in the corner banquette: the Bentley Douglases.
Joe, Laurence and solemn little Otto had crammed paper hats from the crackers over their luxuriant blond hair (clearly a family trait, now I could see them all lined up), but Ripley was stubbornly wearing a pink riding helmet, while Ellie was refusing to wear anything that might spoil her immaculate Kate Middleton blow-dry. What with the fur-trimmed beige sweater, Chanel miniskirt and lace-up boots, Ellie looked as if she’d dropped in on her way to a matinee performance of The Nutcracker on Ice.
Three silver-service staff members were lined up behind the table, and Ripley was pointing at things with a magic wand, again pink. Otto was glaring at the four boiled eggs on the plate in front of him. Ellie had been grilling the waiter about every dish since she’d arrived, and Laurence’s glassy smile told me he’d taken a lot of St John’s Wort.
Only Joe seemed to be having a good time, reading out jokes from the crackers, persuading Otto to eat his eggs, acting the fool a bit, the way I’d noticed him doing with some of the youngest bridesmaids, something the photographers loved him for. Grumpy attendants were a real pain to photograph, and Joe’s lack of self-consciousness – which was a bit annoying with adults – worked brilliantly on tantrumming tots.
I tried to picture the Joe I’d first met: sulky, hungover, unshaven, sprawled over the bridal suite bed like a used towel. It was hard to match the man in front of me now with that version. Something had definitely changed, but I still didn’t have the first idea what had happened to put him in that state to begin with. That hadn’t just been jet lag. I felt like I knew Joe much better now, yet I felt less able to ask him what exactly it was that had put his sunny nature under such a cloud.
Someone nudged me in my ribs. ‘I wouldn’t be serving on that
table if you paid me triple,’ muttered one of the waitresses as she squeezed past with an empty platter. ‘Mrs BD’s watching everyone – have you noticed?’
I’d noticed Ellie eyeing me a couple of times, but then I’d known her when she was a receptionist, not an ex-wife.
‘You’d think her and Joe were the parents, wouldn’t you?’ the waitress went on. ‘Poor Laurence. Looks like he’s getting an earful.’
Joe was drawing faces on Otto’s eggs and making hats for them out of napkins, while Laurence seemed to be listening to Ellie’s list of complaints. It was funny: in all my years of working for the family, for the hotel, I’d never really pictured what their Christmas Day must look like. The human side of the magnificent machine for entertaining.
I had a sudden sense that they’d all be having a better time upstairs in the time-warp kitchen, with Christmas crackers and familiar old crockery. Well, Laurence and the kids would. If Caroline was there, dishing up her big Sunday roast.
Joe looked up and grinned in faux-despair. I half-smiled back.
‘I’ll be glad to get off shift and get home,’ sighed the waitress. ‘You havin’ your dinner later?’
‘Yup,’ I said, and thought of the double portion of Christmas pudding waiting for me in the restaurant fridge, which I intended to eat in bed. Relaxing in my pyjamas.
*
Laurence left that night for his stay at the Mayo Clinic detox program.
‘Now, the Farewell to the Year – please follow the instructions I left on the—’
‘I know,’ I said, giving his bag to the taxi driver taking him to the airport. ‘I’ve run the New Year’s Eve party for three years now. It’ll be fine.’
He looked at me. ‘And have a few evenings off,’ he added. ‘You need a rest.’
‘I will.’
Laurence looked as if he was about to say something else, but I nodded at the driver to go go go! and he did.
Upstairs, Joe was settling into the comfy leather sofa in the sitting room with a giant salad bowl of crisps and a bottle of Diet Coke.
‘I thought you’d be going out?’ I said, surprised.
He shook his head. ‘Where would I be going?’
I didn’t know the answer to that. ‘To friends?’
‘Nope. Anyway, I couldn’t leave you on your own on Christmas night, could I? Wouldn’t be very chivalrous. I’ve got chef’s ice cream and some of Ripley’s DVDs. I’m afraid they’re mostly tap-dancing. You might recall she’s into that.’
‘Only in front of a captive audience.’ We shared a sardonic grin, remembering.
‘I know. Look, it’s sweet of you but …’ I’d planned to have a long bath with a new book, and an earlyish night. On the other hand, ice cream did sound good.
‘Don’t make me sit alone watching Singin’ in the Rain and eating ice cream on Christmas Day,’ he added. ‘I’m not Bridget Jones.’
‘Neither am I,’ I said defensively.
‘Well, I’m glad we’ve established that,’ said Joe. ‘Now, there’s a trough of cocktail sausages in the fridge. You and I are in charge of eating up the leftovers, apparently. And if that doesn’t make you feel Christmassy, I don’t know what will.’
‘Done,’ I said, and gave in.
The year before, I’d spent Christmas forcing down a seven-course gourmet meal with Dominic’s parents and playing one fiercely competitive game of charades, before dashing back to the hotel (nursing chronic indigestion) to work an overtime shift. Dominic had promised to give me a spa day that had never materialized, and I’d maxed out my credit card on his expensive toaster.
This year, I watched Singin’ in the Rain. Then 42nd Street. Joe gave me some miracle repair cream for tired feet, and I gave him a Green Guide to London. We ate our combined bodyweight in sausages, ice cream and Quality Street, and didn’t make a single comment about why the other wasn’t somewhere more fun. Then, at some point on Christmas night, we both nodded off in front of the antiquated four-bar electric fire.
It was one of the best Christmases I’d ever spent.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
My very favourite night of the year at the hotel was, by a long, long way, New Year’s Eve. And I say that as someone who generally hates the whole New Year thing.
The Bonneville Farewell to the Year was different. It was a tradition that Laurence’s grandmother, Maude, had started in 1923, officially ‘to give people something to look forward to after being trapped with their families over Christmas.’ Laurence had told me that she’d cooked the whole thing up after the war for the benefit of her single girlfriends who weren’t sufficiently top-drawer to get onto the snobby debutante circuit where all the few remaining eligible men were to be found. I liked the game old dame even more for that.
The Farewell to the Year had been a hit from the start, thanks to its glamorous guests. In 1927 the Prince of Wales was rumoured to have been spotted dancing on the conductor’s podium with two divorced women. Before long, it was the place to go at New Year if you weren’t skiing, shooting, or making appointments with the family solicitor. Even when the hotel languished in the doldrums during the seventies and eighties, the Farewell had still drawn colourful revellers from all walks of life. Aristos, actors, singers, chefs, the odd bishop – anyone who had to be in town for work over Christmas wound up under the majestic crystal chandelier as midnight struck and hundreds of balloons filled with glitter floated down from the nets above.
I never minded working at the Farewell because, for me, the hotel cast a special spell on those nights and all the ghosts of parties past walked, or rather danced, at midnight. A different kind of sparkle seemed to fall over the Bonneville on New Year’s Eve – a pearlier, more moonlit sort of glamour than the cheerful glitter of Christmas. When Laurence handed the organization of it over to me after Caroline left, I’d spent hours poring over old photographs from the thirties for inspiration: the sweeping staircase decked in silver stars, wide-eyed socialites draped in long beads gazing up into the hooded eyes of their black-tied dates, champagne in ice buckets everywhere. Then, as now, the big jazz band in immaculate dinner jackets started in the ballroom at nine and played on until the last person couldn’t dance another step, which was usually late, on account of the copious booze and the bacon sandwiches that appeared on heaped silver platters at two in the morning to sustain the revellers.
*
This year, from the moment the first cork popped, the party swung like its most riotous 1920s predecessor, and I threw myself into keeping everything running seamlessly towards midnight. I couldn’t wait to say farewell to this year – I hadn’t exactly covered myself in glory at another Christmas party, that one for a medium-size City law firm. My eye had been off the ball at the end, which had led to a scuffle and some unfortunate breakages and a bit of a black mark from Laurence – and I wanted to restart my promotion campaign properly.
Midnight came, the silvery balloons tumbled down, everyone cheered and hugged and kissed as Big Ben’s chimes boomed out. I stood by the drinks table, alone, and felt a brief, sad pang that there was no one reaching for me to kiss. Which was ridiculous, I told myself; I’d worked this event for years, and no one had ever been there. This year, though, I suddenly felt the lack.
I busied myself with the glasses until the chimes finished, and when I turned round, I was hit by a full-on hug from Gemma.
‘Happy New Year!’ she yelled over the sound of poppers popping. Euphoria, like a good crisis, went straight to her head.
Across the room, I caught Joe’s eye over her smooth dark hair. He smiled but didn’t say anything, and I thought he mouthed Happy New Year at me. I smiled back, and the sourness inside me retreated. I’d never be completely alone, not in a hotel.
At half past four in the morning, Tam steered the final pair of revellers out of the ballroom and towards the taxi rank, where a lone black cab sat waiting. He could be surprisingly gentle for an eighteen-stone ex-international rugby player. Once he’d clocked off for the
night, Gemma, Joe and I were left to start clearing the main debris of the party before the crack squad of housekeeping staff arrived at six. They were amazing to watch, like a furious army of ants, clearing mess and leaving only clean space behind, but I couldn’t leave the ballroom in this state overnight.
It seemed too quiet, without the music and laughter that had filled it an hour ago, and with the lights up, the mess was a bit depressing.
I steeled myself; Caroline had drilled it into me that, when it came to parties, it was better to get the worst done before bed, plus I needed to count the bottles back in, so I could work out how much champagne had mysteriously vanished with the temp staff.
‘Just get the bottles in the crates, and put the glasses on that table,’ I said, making a start on the nearest table with its sticky tangle of streamers, napkins and flutes.
‘Where you do want lost property?’ Gemma held up a silver shoe in one hand and a pair of black lace knickers in another. ‘Shall I make a pile?’
‘Tweet photos,’ said Joe. ‘“Do you recognize these knickers? Lost at the Bonneville Farewell to the Year.” Hashtag FunTimes. Brilliant publicity!’
‘Again, exactly the classic image we’re trying to promote,’ I said, but my heart wasn’t in sarcasm tonight.
‘Seriously, shall I get a box?’ Gemma had found more underwear and an umbrella. ‘And labels? And the lost-property book?’
Maybe it was the evidence of everyone else’s fun, but suddenly the past months caught up with me. I didn’t want to dictate a list of lost knickers and mobile phones to Gemma. There was the rest of the year for that.
‘Just put everything you can find in that crate, then go home,’ I said. ‘I’ll deal with it in the morning.’
Gemma looked as though there was some sort of catch. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes, I’m sure. Go home. Get a taxi,’ I said, then added, out of habit, ‘Don’t forget to give me the receipt in the morning.’
‘A receipt? Jeez.’ Joe reached into his back pocket and got out his wallet. ‘Have you any cash, Gem? No? Look, here’s thirty quid. How far away from here do you live?’