‘I know you didn’t know,’ he said gruffly.
‘I’m sorry. Do you want me to cancel her?’ I asked. Even as I said it, I knew we couldn’t, not at this stage, but it was all I had.
‘Of course not, that would be totally unreasonable.’
‘I could get another planner in?’ I said, scrabbling for gestures I could actually make. ‘I could tell Emily I was handing over to Gemma because of a prior commitment? Leave all my notes and let someone else handle it.’
He stopped packing and looked at me. His clear-eyed gaze raked my face and I wobbled inside, yet I still couldn’t say the things going through my mind.
‘You can’t do that,’ he said. ‘It’s a big break for you. You’re going to give Emily the perfect wedding, she’ll tell all her friends, you’ll meet your target and Dad’ll promote you. Happy ever after.’
A small voice in the back of my head pointed out that Joe would be the first person to call someone else on melodrama but I let it go. One more comment like that, though …
‘I’d do it, if it’d convince you that I didn’t take it on knowingly.’
Joe seemed to struggle with himself, then shoved a handful of boxer shorts into the bag. ‘Look, I know you didn’t know. I just can’t …’ He frowned. ‘I just can’t.’
Neither of us needed to spell it out: what Joe was really tormented by was Emily and her strange lack of acknowledgement. I didn’t come into the picture at all, I thought unhappily.
I don’t know what made me say it, but I heard my voice in the room.
‘This maybe isn’t the best moment to say it,’ said the voice that sounded like mine, ‘but all those things you said to me about growing up and moving on from Anthony were so true. I can see that now. I know it probably doesn’t feel like it now, but you and Emily met at the right time for who you were then. You had that wonderful experience, but perhaps it was only ever supposed to be intense and of that moment—’
‘It’s nothing like you and Anthony,’ he said, outraged.
‘How is it not like me and Anthony?’ I demanded. He’d had a holiday romance; I’d been jilted. ‘My experience is worse! I was left in the actual church. But I’ve let all that go, because it’s not who I am now. You’re not that same Joe now. This year, you’ve changed a lot.’
‘Yes, but you … Rosie, you and me, we’re very different people. I believe in love, and you believe in … lists.’
This time, it was as if he’d slapped me across the face. My mouth fell open, and I took a step back. Joe seemed to regret it almost before the words were out of his mouth, but it was too late. It hung there between us, echoing in our heads.
He rubbed his face with his hand. ‘Oh, bollocks. I didn’t mean it like … I … Rosie?’ His eyes were apologetic, but I didn’t want to see that. My own vision was blurring with hot tears.
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Suit yourself. Give my love to Caroline. Come back when you’ve stopped sulking.’
And I went off to someone else’s old bedroom, shut the door, and cried.
*
Of course, the irony was that while Joe got to nurse his wounded pride in a five-star luxury country-house hotel, I had to get on with organizing the big-budget wedding that was causing all the trouble.
I was still under strict instructions not to leak details, so Helen and Laurence were the only people who knew who was really getting married in our courtyard. Helen was off-radar for the first time in years, enjoying her honeymoon in Paris, and Laurence only had to be shown Missy the agent’s ever-growing list of clauses and conditions for him to turn white and sit down with a wheatgrass shake.
Security details piled up on top of the florists, on top of the dietary requirements for the star guests, on top of the complicated room bookings. I had to field calls from Emily’s dress designer about flying the dress over for fittings, sneaky calls from journalists fishing for scoops, and, for light relief, a few more personal appearances from Tweedledum and Tweedle-Don’t-Even-Look-at-Me-You-Pig, who were even less cordial following ‘incidents’ on the hen/stag weekend in Las Vegas that neither of them could bring themselves to talk about.
Caroline, obviously, was the only other person who knew, because, as co-owner of the hotel, she was a co-signatory on the various confidentiality agreements Missy had made the hotel sign.
‘It sounds like a nightmare,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Are you utterly at your wits’ end? I bet the bookings are through the roof for next year.’
‘No one knows,’ I said. ‘I’ve been keeping a very tight lid on things.’
‘But it’ll be worth it,’ she reassured me. ‘Puts those B-list Thornburys in the shade, doesn’t it? Still no word of apology from the bolting clotheshorse?’
‘Not from Flora,’ I said. ‘Julia’s been out for a few lunches with Laurence.’ I paused. ‘The first few were apology lunches, apparently, but I don’t know what the excuses for the others were. She’s very keen on herbal medicines, apparently. And they go to the same osteopath in Highgate, so that’s good.’
I waited for Caroline’s cackle of approval, but instead, just heard a thoughtful hmm.
Should I ask if I’m still fixing up your ex-husband? I wondered crossly. No one at the Bonneville seemed to give me actual instructions for anything any more, while at the same time expecting me to have done things by telepathy.
Fortunately Caroline then changed the subject to the only thing I really wanted to talk about but couldn’t ask about, for obvious reasons.
‘You must be delighted to have got Joe out of your hair at last,’ she said. ‘I must say, it’s nice having him home. Even if he is a bit … glum.’
‘Glum?’
‘Mmm. Keeps wandering about with this glum thinking face on. Going for long walks. I’ve been making him take the guests’ dogs with him, but that’s not what I brought him back to Wragley Hall for. What do you think it is, Rosie? Was there some girl trouble in London?’
‘I don’t know what’s going on with Joe,’ I said, which was the truth.
‘Well, he won’t talk to me about it, that’s for sure,’ she sighed. ‘I suppose he’ll just have to walk it out, whoever she is.’
And that wasn’t what I wanted to hear at all, so I didn’t ask any further.
*
At least planning the wedding with Emily was fun. I did wonder whether Emily Sharpe was such an amazing actress that she was hiding a reptilian dark side beneath the sunny transatlantic exterior, but eventually I came to the reluctant conclusion that she would have been just as nice if she’d stayed in London and I were organizing her wedding to an architect, rather than to the undead, half-wolverine seducer of Renaissance Venice.
She came back the week before the wedding to help sort out final details, but there wasn’t much left to do. I had to invent an entirely unnecessary cake testing, so she wouldn’t feel she’d missed out.
Emily and I were sitting in my office on Wednesday morning, sampling tiny squares of pastel genoise sponge (yes, she was so nice she was even actually eating the cake before her wedding) when she hesitated a couple of times, then said, ‘Rosie. I’ve been meaning to ask you for ages. Who was that blond guy I met at Helen’s wedding? The one who blanked me?’
‘Joe?’ My heart bumped in my chest, but I tried to make it sound casual. ‘That was Joe Bentley Douglas. The owner’s son.’
‘Joe.’ Emily groaned, and she covered her mouth. ‘Oh, my God, it was him. I thought it was, then I thought, no that’s just too weird, and then he left before I could ask …’ She lifted her eyes to me, and I could see she was genuinely mortified. ‘I thought my films had some freaky coincidences in them, but this is just too much.’
‘You know him then?’ I asked, twisting the knife in myself, more than in Emily.
She nodded, then winced. ‘I do. What did he say?’
‘It’s not really any of my …’
Emily put her hand on mine. She was very good at theatrical gestures, I noticed.
&
nbsp; Oh, stop it, I told myself. She’s just a friendly, tactile person. Like Joe.
‘He said you two dated in America,’ I confessed. ‘And you dumped him and never returned his calls.’
‘Is that what he said?’ Her beautiful eyes drooped.
‘More or less.’
Emily chewed her lip, and then covered her face and made a muffled ‘aarrrggghhh’ noise.
‘Rosie, this might be TMI,’ she said through her fingers. ‘But do you ever do shitty things you’re not proud of, and hope they’ll never come back to bite you – and they do?’
‘They always do,’ I said. ‘Yet the noble stuff vanishes without a trace.’
She pummelled her own head, groaning, then looked up at me. ‘I’m going to tell you this because I feel like maybe you can get Joe to forgive me? It’s just so weird and coincidental. It has to be the universe pushing me to do it.’
‘Joe’s very big on the universe,’ I said drily. ‘He’d back you up on that.’
She sighed, and looked at me. I tried to keep my face neutral, even though my heart rate had just doubled.
‘Okay, so, I met Joe while Ben and I were on a break.’ Emily did guilty air hooks to show she knew it was a cliché. ‘Ben had gone off to do a film in Canada; I’d just got down to the last two for a few projects and lost them. It’s not always easy being an actor, dating an actor. Anyway, my American friend Amber was desperate to go to this beach party in Santa Cruz. I didn’t want to go, but I did, to be her wingman, and I met Joe. And he was … well, you know him, right? He’s lovely.’
I nodded. He was so much more than just lovely.
Emily gazed at the Bridelizer but she wasn’t seeing it. ‘It was one of those perfect holiday romances. Right place, right time. He taught me to surf, I taught him to make pancakes, we spent all day together, and all night, if you know what I mean. But it was intense, it wasn’t going to last. It couldn’t have. Even if Ben hadn’t come back from Canada and proposed, which he did …’ She looked genuinely guilty.
‘Is that why you didn’t return Joe’s calls?’
‘Yeah. I know. I’m not proud of that. Ben had to fly back to Europe to do some location filming, and I’d got a part this time, so I went with him. I didn’t know how to handle it. I just thought it would be easier to put Joe and what we had in a box and leave it in California.’
‘He didn’t find it particularly easy.’
She pulled the layer of marzipan off her cake. ‘No. I realize that. I don’t think I’ll ever forgive myself for that look on his face when he saw me here.’
‘And you really had no idea this was his family’s hotel?’
‘Of course not! You think I’d have come here if I did?’ Emily looked horrified. ‘He never told me his parents had a hotel. He didn’t even tell me he had a fancy surname – he was just Joe Bentley. I got the impression there was some sort of family business he wasn’t interested in taking over, which was why he’d come out to the States, to do his own thing.’
And instead he’d ended up coming back, I thought. Back to the hotel he didn’t really want to work in, to be bossed around by me, and then to find Emily there. No wonder he’d flipped out.
‘Poor Joe,’ I said aloud.
‘Well, he’s kind of an idealist.’ Emily looked honestly at me. ‘I guess you know him better than I do, but I never expected to find he was a wedding coordinator. He was so down on marriage. He used to say it was meaningless, but at the same time he’d be insanely idealistic about the perfect woman.’
‘That’s you.’
She shook her head. ‘No. It’s not me. His perfect woman’s a lot more down-to-earth. He needs someone to balance him out. And, come on, I work in films. We all know there’s no such thing as perfect. Even I don’t look like Emily Sharpe half the time.’
We picked at our cakes in silence; then Emily said, ‘Can you tell him all that? Can you explain?’
I felt my face go red. ‘I don’t think I’m the right person, to be honest. I think he needs to hear it from you.’
‘Okay.’ She wrinkled her nose, more at herself than anything else, I guessed. ‘It’s just … I feel so bad about this. I feel like I can’t marry Ben knowing I’ve … knowing I’ve maybe broken Joe’s heart. But he was so lovely …’ She pulled herself together. ‘What if I wrote a letter? Would that be enough?’
‘I think that might help,’ I said. ‘But …’ I hesitated. ‘Be kind. I know it’s hard, but your relationship meant a lot to him. If you could explain what he meant to you, not underselling it or giving him false hope. Just … recognizing it was the right thing at the right time. A part of who you both are now.’
‘I like that,’ said Emily. ‘I’m going to do that. Thanks, Rosie.’
‘Pleasure,’ I said. It wasn’t.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
With Joe gone, and my desk full, I focused my energy on all the positive, happy, wonderful things going on in my life. Because for once, I had a lot of blessings to count. June was pleasantly warm; Emily wasn’t a diva; I got an amazing discount on champagne flutes because I didn’t care about negotiating like a hard-arse; but the truth was that without Joe around, for the first time my fourteen-hour days at the Bonneville were beginning to feel too long.
To my annoyance, Laurence didn’t seem to appreciate the effort I was putting into being his deputy manager as well as everything else. He’d gone very vague again, and was spending quite a bit of time away from the hotel, not answering his phone. I knew I should be worried in case he’d had some new health scare, but frankly, I didn’t have the energy. What little I had left after running round the hotel covering for Joe, Laurence and Helen was going into feeling unspecifically cross whenever I didn’t have to deal with the public.
Worse – and this had never really happened before – I found myself feeling jealous of the brides who floated in, starry-eyed and drunk with love, to talk about their big days. Where was I going to find that, wiring emergency buttonholes at two in the morning, or putting out two hundred gold chairs because everyone else had gone home?
Even the hotel seemed to be closing itself off to me. It had never felt so much like someone else’s business as when I was letting myself into its empty heart, at the top of the building, behind the fire door.
*
The final straw came when the second Mrs Bentley Douglas arrived three days before the Benily wedding, just as my stress was reaching maximum velocity, and dropped Otto and Ripley off in my office, which was stacked with handmade name cards, crystal table settings and other fragile and expensive things.
‘Only for a day. Or two. I’d have left them with Laurence, but he’s nowhere to be found, as per usual,’ she said, as Ripley tapped her way over to the window and started lisping ‘All That Jazz’ out of it as if it were a television screen.
‘He’s here,’ I said. ‘Did you check under his desk?’
‘Of course I did,’ she said over the tapping. ‘And in that little room next to his office. I know all the tricks, Rosie, I used to help him hide from Caroline.’
‘Then can I give you the number for our emergency nanny?’ I was probably a bit spikier than I should be. ‘Because much as I love spending time with Otto and Ripley,’ I gave Otto a quick smile; he was sitting on my spare chair like a constipated owl, ‘I’m about to go and deal with a lot of glass, and it would be awful if something happened.’
The door opened and Gemma bounced in. ‘Rosie, I’ve got the – oh.’ She tried to reverse her way out, but it was too late.
‘Mummy, why is that lady so fat?’ asked Otto, pointing at Gemma.
Gemma made a choking noise, but I was past caring.
‘My assistant will take you two down to the restaurant and get you both an ice cream!’ I announced. ‘Won’t you, Gemma? You will! Wonderful. Off you tap.’
When I’d shoved the three of them out of the office and closed the door, Ellie wrinkled her eyebrows sympathetically. Well, as much as they still could wrinkle
. ‘Rosie, can I give you some advice?’
I bit back the retort that since she’d worked in the hotel industry for about three years and I’d been here, on and off, since I was sixteen, I wasn’t sure what that would be. But I was tired.
‘Go on,’ I said. ‘Everyone else does.’
‘You’re working too hard.’
‘No, no, it’s fine, I—’
‘You’re not getting any younger,’ she said brutally. ‘And you’ve got to think about yourself. Laurence wants to hand this place on to his kids – it’s all he’s ever wanted. If he had his way, Otto and Ripley would be sent off to catering college now. Joe’s being lined up as the manager, and even if you stay you’ll never be in charge. Laurence will take advantage of you, just like he took me for granted, and Caroline. It’s what he does.’
I thought this was pretty rich, coming from someone who was about to leave both her children with a woman who couldn’t even keep a ‘Thank you for arranging our wedding!’ orchid alive beyond the honeymoon, but I said nothing.
She fixed me with a piercing look. ‘You must have been headhunted by now, yes?’
‘Um …’
Ellie was sharp; she caught the brief flicker on my face. ‘Well, don’t be stupid, if someone’s offered you a better job, for crying out loud, take it. Leave and come back if you have to. But don’t end up like Caroline. Pouring your heart and soul into your new hotel because you let your old hotel screw up your family. There’s more to life than folding other people’s bloody towels into swans, Rosie.’
And suddenly, I saw the truth of what she was saying. Something clicked inside me. I couldn’t stay here, regretting what hadn’t happened with Joe. I had to do my own thing. Open myself up to new chances. Let the universe—
Oh, for God’s sake.
‘You can always come back,’ said Ellie, then added over her shoulder, ‘though I have no idea why you’d want to, seriously. The spa here is woeful these days.’
*
Caroline and Laurence were very surprised when I asked if I could have a meeting with them both in Laurence’s office, the day before the biggest wedding of the year.