The Honeymoon Hotel by Hester Browne
‘To cut down on my drinking?’
‘No, to loosen up.’ Joe’s voice echoed in the cavernous room. He didn’t sound as drunk as I felt, but then he’d probably been stuffing himself with canapés all night. ‘Let your hair down. See what the universe brings.’ He paused. ‘Stop making lists, and start living in the moment.’
Target, promotion, flat. That was what I needed to focus on.
Not living in the moment. And definitely not love.
I frowned. Love? Where had that come from?
‘Rosie?’
I found my shoes, shoved them on, and began walking towards the door. They were pinching me but I wasn’t going to let it show.
‘I’m going to start this year as I mean to go on,’ I said. ‘With three hours’ sleep. I’ve got work in the morning.’
CHAPTER TWENTY
You get to know people quickly when you’re sharing a fridge. Even if you barely see them, thanks to your ridiculous working hours, one shelf can tell its own story. In Laurence’s case, it was an entire shelf devoted to four different probiotics. In Joe’s, it was a secret stash of Cadbury’s Creme Eggs.
Joe wasn’t, it turned out, the complete health nut I’d assumed he was when I first met him. That, or he’d fallen off the wagon spectacularly on rediscovering British chocolate. I also discovered, through the bedroom wall adjoining mine, that we shared the same taste in sixties singer-songwriters; that he did seventy-five press-ups before getting in the shower (I honestly wasn’t listening, he counted aloud and the walls were thin); and that like me he was weirdly specific about loading the dishwasher.
‘It’s in the rinsing,’ he insisted. ‘You’re the first girl I’ve met who really gets the pre-rinsing.’
(I should add that he left the bathroom looking like a bomb had hit it, and never replaced a loo roll. The dishwasher was an isolated non-slobby instance.)
It wasn’t what I’d imagined for my new year, new start, but somehow it did feel like a fresh start. I’d dreamed about settling into a flat with Dominic, planning out our new life. Instead, I was back to sharing fridge space and arguing about how to squeeze out a tea bag properly. But, oddly enough, even though I was flat-sharing with my boss and a colleague, I didn’t feel half as awkward as I’d assumed I would.
I think Laurence and Joe felt the same. At least, they were too polite to say anything.
*
The good news was, as I inspected it on the first proper Monday morning of the new year, that the Bridelizer was already ahead of schedule, mainly thanks to Flora Thornbury. I had deposits banked for weddings right up until October, and my appointments book was so full I was having to turn away prospective brides. Just after Christmas, one of Flora’s potential blonde bridesmaids turned up in a background role in a live (well, live-ish) reality show called The Queens of Knightsbridge, and spent most of her January airtime banging on about her supermodel mate’s amazing bridal suite, and how she was down to ‘the last three’ for the role of hen night planner.
Joe claimed never to have heard of The Queens of Knightsbridge, of course. He also claimed to be disgusted at the torrent of freebies that began to arrive in my office after New Year, although that didn’t stop him working his way through the chocolates.
‘Do they think we don’t have pink champagne?’ he said, inspecting a box with silk rose petals glued all over it. It had been hand-delivered by a runner from the PR agency, along with a gushing invitation for me to meet them and ‘chat with us about the brand, which Flora is a big fan of.’ ‘I mean, we are a hotel. With an entry in Secret Hotel Bars of the World.’
Laurence (or rather, Dino) had moved Joe from catering to the lovely old oak-panelled bar, and Joe had been spending some time learning the arcane ways of the cocktail. He could now mix a very passable Bonneville Martini, following some after-hours tuition. One advantage of living above the shop was that I was now invited to these ‘tasting sessions’. Detoxing wasn’t on my list of resolutions, fortunately.
‘Oh, so Dino’s been telling you about that, has he? Did he give you the Dean Martin story?’
‘Yup. And the Duke of Edinburgh story, and the secret tunnel to Fortnum and Mason story, and the gold hidden in the icemaker during the Blitz story. He still won’t give me the full recipe to the Honeymoon Night cocktail, though.’
‘I don’t know that, and I’ve been here years.’
‘I think it’s bubble bath,’ he said. ‘Or possibly Night Nurse. So are we supposed to give this champagne to Flora?’
‘No! You can have it,’ I said, without turning round. ‘You’re the one who has to deal with her twice a week.’
I was trying to find room to pin Cressida Connor’s details into the second weekend in October on the Bridelizer. She wanted a hundred and fifty guests, a fairground theme, and ‘whatever wedding cake Flora Thornbury’s having!’
‘You must be way past your total now,’ Joe observed. ‘Are you aiming for a wedding every weekend?’
‘No, three a month, max. I don’t want us to look too available.’ I stood back, running my eyes over the variety of brides and colour swatches. Grey was a big theme this year. Grey attendants, bone-white macaroons and picture frames made of flowers were in; tans, crafts and pastel cupcakes were out. It was already looking a bit Miss Havisham around May/June, with four brides in vintage lace. I made a mental note to steer Jessie Callum back towards rose pink.
‘You should double your stakes.’ Joe leaned back in his chair and put his feet on my desk. He was wearing green Converse, which were not my idea of office-appropriate footwear for planners handling wedding budgets equivalent to the cost of a Zone 4 flat.
I frowned, but he ignored me. ‘Meaning? And get your feet off my desk. And get some more appropriate shoes.’
‘Oh, so it’d be fine to have my feet up here if they were brogues?’
‘Yes. I mean it. This hotel merits proper shoes and a decent suit.’
Joe left his feet where they were. ‘I think you should ask for an additional bonus, plus a guaranteed job offer, if you hit the target early. It looks confident.’ He put his hands behind his head: the image of confidence. ‘If you want him to take you seriously for the role of manager, you need to look confident.’
I pressed my lips together, thinking. It would look confident. And I needed a bonus to boost my deposit on a studio flat, maybe even to upgrade to a nasty one-bedder. Much as living upstairs was convenient (and cheap), I knew I couldn’t stay forever. ‘What if it doesn’t come off? What if someone cancels?’
Joe shrugged. ‘Give yourself the challenge, then you’ll make sure it does. Works for me. I went to LA with nothing, and I had a business within six months.’
‘That’s you, though.’ I stared at him over the desk. I found myself confiding in Joe more lately, sometimes without meaning to. ‘I’m more of a planner than a gambler.’
He rolled his eyes. ‘I told you what your resolution should be for this year. Go with the flow more. Let the universe do its thing. It’ll help you do yours.’
I did need something. There’d been a couple of moments lately when things hadn’t quite gone to plan: I’d double-booked a rehearsal dinner, and accidentally misquoted for a wedding reception, which annoyingly we were now legally bound to honour. The whole Dominic thing had dented my confidence; I hadn’t realized how much I’d come to rely on his ‘they’re all idiots!’ support.
‘You can do it, Rosie,’ said Joe earnestly. ‘You’ve got to believe.’
‘Thanks for that, Oprah,’ I said. I’d developed a tolerance for Joe’s mess in the bathroom but not for his irritating platitudes. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, the universe doesn’t seem to have done its thing about the chairs for Laura Southwell’s reception. And get your feet off my desk,’ I added in a ‘confident’ voice.
Joe put his feet back down.
It was a start. And it obviously worked, because when I put the proposal to Laurence, he said yes, pretty much straight away. Which made me w
*
In the great division of Flora Thornbury labour, Joe had the madness but I had the maths. And believe me, there’s more maths in a wedding than you’d think. Guests divided by tables, multiplied by canapés, all over one and a half bottles of wine … it’s endless. Especially when you have a bride who keeps remembering friends she owes invites to, or – in the case of my worst wedding last year – a bride who sends out two hundred save-the-dates, but only a hundred and fifty invitations, leading to a embarrassed knot of extra guests arriving on our doorstep, clutching presents like the additional Wise Men Mary wasn’t that keen on and only gave an evening invite to.
Luckily, I enjoyed spreadsheets; I found their lack of hysterics about ribbon width soothing. And the Thornbury spreadsheet was already a thing of epic complexity. Julia Thornbury hadn’t ended up with diamond earrings the size of ice cubes without keeping her eye on the maths, and she’d asked me to supply her with running totals of where her substantial budget was going. With the wedding now five months away, deposits had been taken for the flowers, catering, the two floors of rooms booked in the hotel for guests, the unbelievably elaborate stationery, the band … My spreadsheet totals were already way over what most brides spent on their entire event, and we hadn’t even got to the rehearsal dinner.
It was now the beginning of the second week in January, and I was deep in boring data entry about Flora’s table linens when the door to my office burst open and Helen waltzed in.
‘Good afternoon!’ she sang. ‘And a very Happy New Year to you!’
I hadn’t seen Helen since before Christmas. She’d taken her remaining days off and allowed Wynn to sweep her off on a romantic holiday to a mystery destination, which he’d refused to let her pay for or plan.
‘Happy New Year to you too!’ I said, putting my pen down. ‘And where did your romantic mystery tour take you? We were trying to work it out when you texted on New Year’s Eve. I thought New York?’
Helen had always wanted to see the ball drop in Times Square. She’d tried to persuade Seamus to go for years, but he’d always ducked out, probably because he’d never have got past the sniffer dogs at Heathrow.
‘No!’ she said, as if I’d suggested something insane. ‘Why spend all the time on a plane? No, we had a lovely time in Wales.’
‘In Wales?’ I blinked. It had rained for most of the holiday. All over the UK, but especially in Wales. I’d seen news footage of sheep being rescued in kayaks.
‘Mmm. Cosy hotel, log fires, amazing food.’ Helen looked very dreamy for someone who’d probably contracted trench foot by New Year’s Eve. But that was love, I reasoned. It kept you very warm. And dry.
‘Brilliant. So did Wynn give you something nice for Christmas?’ I asked.
‘You could say that.’ She perched on the edge of my desk with a serene smile, and then it broke down into a broad schoolgirl grin. ‘I’ve got gossip. Guess what?’
‘You found Delphine hanging upside down in the cold walk-in again?’
‘No.’
‘Laurence has discovered he’s got the plague? No, wait – I think he’s had that. What hasn’t he had? Foot-and-mouth?’
‘No! Rosie, it’s much better than that.’
‘I give up.’
Helen was wafting her hands around her face like someone trying to mime a very complicated film, jiggling her eyebrows meaningfully.
‘You’ve had eyelash extensions?’ I hazarded.
‘No! Are you doing this on purpose?’ she demanded, and slammed both her hands down on either side of my keyboard. ‘Oh, hang on, it’s slipped round. It does that.’
She fiddled with something, and the resulting sparkle from the diamonds on her left hand almost blinded me. It looked like three sugar lumps stuck together. It was even bigger than Flora’s, and hers was half a carat short of needing its own bodyguard.
‘Whoa!’ I blinked. ‘Is Wynn a secret millionaire dentist?’
‘What? Oh, it’s not real. It’s just a fake one he got to propose with. The real one’s a family heirloom. He was waiting to make sure I said yes.’ She smiled down at the ring, then looked up at me. Her face was shining brighter than the fake sparklers.
I felt a tug of envy in the middle of my happiness for her, but pushed it away. ‘Congratulations!’ I said, getting up to hug her. ‘So come on, how did he do it?’
‘Oh, Rosie, it was so romantic. We were staying in this beautiful hotel in Abergavenny, and it stopped raining one day for, like, half an hour, so we went for a walk. Seriously, who knew walking was fun? Anyway,’ Helen went on, seeing my don’t push it expression, ‘we’d got to the top of the hill, and the sun was setting over the mountains, and I said, “Oh, Wynn, I’m so happy right now,” meaning, “Thank God I’m not running a dinner service with a bunch of psychos,” and Wynn turned to me and said, “I’m so happy right now too. Would you consider making me this happy forever?”’
She blushed. ‘And he went down on one knee, and he had the ring in his pocket all ready! He said he’d had it for weeks, but he wanted to pick a perfect moment, so we’d always remember it. Just us. Privately.’
It took a lot to impress me where proposals were concerned – I’d heard everything from flashmobs to rings in trifles to flower beds planted six months in advance to spell out Will You Marry Me in tulips – but this one sent a proper lump to my throat. I put my hands to my face. It was sweet, and genuine, and I could hear Wynn saying the simple words in his gentle Welsh accent, gazing up at Helen with that unexpectedly passionate look he gave her when he thought no one else could see, the one that said, You. Just you. Nothing else.
‘And you said?’
Helen’s voice was an emotional squeak. ‘I said yes.’
‘That’s wonderful!’ I really meant it. ‘I’m so happy for you.’
Helen grabbed my hands. ‘I wanted to tell you first. I mean, because you’re my best friend, but also … I know it’s not a great time for you.’
‘It’s a brilliant time for me,’ I insisted. ‘Because you’ve found a good honest man who makes you happy. And that makes me happy too.’
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she said. ‘That it’s very quick. And it is quick. But Wynn’s the man I’ve been waiting for all my life. I don’t have to try to make things right with him, I just feel like the best possible version of me, all the time. We fit together, not in some big dramatic way, but in little, practical ways. And I’d never have found him if I’d carried on looking in all the places I thought I should be looking – it’s like love found us.’ She paused, and squeezed my hands. ‘I just – I want you to be as happy as we are. I’m sorry I encouraged you to waste time on Dominic, like I wasted time with Seamus, because it doesn’t have to be like that. Something amazing is out there for you, I just know it.’
I tried to say something, but my eyes had filled up with tears.
‘Come here!’ Helen’s eyes were full of tears too. We had a big hug, during which her ring slipped round again and the enormous cubic zirconias dug into my back, but I didn’t care.
I was so happy for her. I was. I just wasn’t sure there was enough luck like that for both of us.
*
Helen and Wynn’s engagement drinks weren’t taking place in the hotel, as I’d assumed they would, but in the newly refurbished pub at the end of Wynn’s street in Clapham.
Joe and I headed over there after work on Friday night after promising Laurence we wouldn’t be back late, and it was at the door that I got the first nasty surprise of the evening.
‘You didn’t tell me it was a karaoke bar,’ I said accusingly to Helen.
Over in the corner by an old-fashioned piano, a woman in a suit and trendy black-framed glasses was already working her way through ‘Crazy in Love’. Or stamping out a small fire. One or the other.
‘It is,’ said Helen. ‘It’s a lovely local pub that does karaoke on a Friday night.
‘Is that meant to be a sales pitch? That’s like saying it’s a tea shop and a waterboarding facility.’
Helen rolled her eyes, and blocked my line of sight. ‘Come on, Rosie, it’s fun. The burgers here are the best I’ve ever had in London, and you know how many burgers I’ve had.’
‘But how can we relax when there are people singing as if they’ve got something trapped in their throats and doing that awful X Factor jerky hand thing? I know it’s your local pub, and I really want to eat here, but can’t we just go somewhere else until—’
‘No,’ said Helen firmly. ‘We can’t. Wynn and I have booked the snug. Have a drink, and in five minutes I promise you will not care.’
‘Problem?’ Joe strolled up behind us and knuckled my head playfully. ‘Is Rosie micromanaging you?’
I rearranged my face into a forced smile. Get a grip, Rosie. I didn’t want to look like a killjoy, but karaoke brought me out in hives of anxiety.
‘There’s no problem,’ I said. ‘And I don’t micromanage—’
‘Hi, Joe!’ said Helen, right over me. ‘Thanks for rearranging your shift – it’s great you could come.’
‘Wouldn’t miss it for anything. Oh, wow.’ His face lit up in a broad grin, and I did a brief double take, thinking he was smiling at me, but no – he was staring right over my shoulder.
I turned to see what he was smiling at, but incredibly, he was smiling at the office Beyoncé, now hunched over the microphone and clumping about as if her left leg had gone to sleep and she was trying to get the blood flowing again.
‘Karaoke, amazing!’ he said. ‘I love it! There was this incredible karaoke bar back in Santa Cruz that we used to go to all the time. I do a brilliant Lenny Kravitz …’
‘Excellent!’ said Helen. ‘You can go first.’
‘We’re not—’ I started.
‘Look, go through and meet everyone – Wynn’s already in there with some of his friends. He’ll introduce you, they’re all lovely.’