The Honeymoon Hotel (27 page)

Okay, maybe
enjoying
is a bit strong. But the nervous adrenaline mixed with that giddy sense of team spirit (not something I normally went for, to be honest) made it far more fun than I’d imagined it could be, and when Joe insisted that he and I do a duet, I was too revved up to say no.

I recognized the oom-pah-pah introduction to ‘I Got You Babe’ immediately, and groaned, but Joe was already swinging along, a blissed-out expression on his face. I felt a bit sick. I didn’t know how high this song went. My armpits tingled with sweat.

Then Joe turned to me and sang the opening lines in a solemn hippie voice, and I had to stop myself laughing out loud. He raised his eyebrows, prompting my line, and somehow the words came out, half-spoken, half-sung, but enough for him to carry on.

My singing was a bit uptight, but after a verse suddenly I got what Joe was doing. We weren’t supposed to be amazing like Wynn and Helen, or even in tune like Wynn’s mates. He was being clownish so no one would laugh at me. So
I
wouldn’t be the one everyone was staring at.

Then he opened his eyes, faded blue like old jeans, with those long sandy lashes, and gave me a conspiratorial wink, and for a moment I forgot how irritating he was in real life.

We’d sung nearly the whole song, and Helen and Wynn were smiling up at me, their arms round each other, and I was beginning
to think that actually Joe might have been right, when the whole evening stopped being fun, like a needle jerking across a record, when the second nasty surprise of the evening exploded on me.

Dominic walked into the restaurant, with a New Betty on his arm.

I saw his familiar bearded shape appear through the crowd while my mouth was still forming the climactic ‘I got yooooooooo,’ and my brain froze. My knuckles went white on the microphone.

It took Joe a second to work out that something was wrong, because he was striking a pose, but when he realized my ‘yooooooooooo’ was going all wobbly, he looked where I was looking, swore under his breath, and without saying anything put his arm around me and started making me sway from side to side with him.

‘I got you, babe!’ Joe sang for both of us, and made the audience sing along, too. I heard Helen’s voice, Wynn’s voice, Geraint’s. Not mine. My throat had gone dry. And then my voice came back.

I don’t know how I managed to get the lyrics on the screen to come out of my mouth, because my brain was sending the words
He’s here to review it with her, who is she, is that the Swedish one, is it a new one, what is he thinking?
across my brain like frantic subtitles. My stomach lurched, but somehow, with Joe’s rigid arm moving me like a puppet, I got through to the final ‘I got you’.

And then, without warning, Joe bundled me up in a huge bear hug and lifted me up off the floor and turned my whole
body so there was absolutely no way I could see Dominic even if I’d wanted to.

Everyone clapped, Helen did her special wolf whistle, I could hear the Welsh boys bellowing; but most of all, I could hear my own heart thudding in my ears, pressed against Joe’s warm neck.

Dominic’s going to think we’re a couple
, I thought, and a funny sensation rippled through me.

When Joe put me down, again with my back to the crowd, he whispered, ‘Did you surprise yourself?’

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t say anything.

I had.

Everyone at the Bonneville loved Valentine’s Day, and the week or so that led up to it. Everyone apart from me. And possibly Delphine, who claimed that making heart-shaped pastel macaroons was a sacrilegious waste of her Parisian pâtisserie training.

Dino loved it, because the hotel bar was packed full of flirty couples ordering recklessly from his selection of classic cocktails and then leaving for dinner, so the next round of flirty post-dinner couples could sweep in and take their places for the nightcap menu.

Helen loved it, because the restaurant was fully booked by the same flirty couples willing to splash out on a meal, and also married couples who wanted to go somewhere treaty and not talk to each other.

Laurence loved it, because sometimes the flirty couples or married couples who could afford babysitters booked rooms after the meal and stayed for our Valentine’s breakfast.

I suppose I half-loved it, because there was always someone who wanted to get married on Valentine’s Day; but I also half-hated it, because, on a personal level, it was always a crushing anticlimax. The adult equivalent of praying Santa will bring
you a Sindy horse and carriage set, only to unwrap a
Blue Peter
annual and a tangerine. And then discovering all your friends not only got the Sindy horse, but the stables too.

This year, I’d managed my expectations. Right at the start of February, I told Gemma and Joe I was doing the petty cash to keep them well away from my office, then poured myself a coffee and made a list of reasons my singleton Valentine’s Day would actually be better than those I’d spent with Dom.

First, I had a wedding booked in for noon (second time round, small guest list, afternoon tea, then everyone leaving by five, on account of childcare logistics). In the days before Valentine’s Day, I’d be very busy finalizing arrangements, and then, on the day, ensuring that the bride’s sister didn’t try to steal her limelight by going into labour, as the bride feared might happen.

Second, I wouldn’t have to waste time finding a witty but not overly romantic card to send to Dominic. It was impossible to find something that summed up our relationship in a non-passive-aggressive, non-overdoing-it way.

I chewed my pen morosely. I should have seen the writing on the wall when all my Valentine’s Day cards to him featured
New Yorker
cartoons.

Third, I wouldn’t have to drive myself to an ulcer watching the post and chasing every floral delivery in the hotel in case it was for me when it never was. Also, I wouldn’t run the risk of last year’s embarrassing moment when I snatched a bunch of flowers from Jean, head of housekeeping, thinking I saw Rosie on the card when it fact it just said
Roses
.

Fourth …

I got stuck at four. But three was enough. The main one was that I was already pretty miserable, and at least Dominic couldn’t make me more so, by giving me a meat tenderizer and a bar of Dairy Milk. I hadn’t seen him, or heard from him since the night in the pub, but I still hadn’t quite broken the habit of checking my phone for texts of wee-small-hours-regret first thing in the morning. None, of course, had ever come.

*

One less welcome side effect of Helen’s sudden conversion to easy relationships was that she’d developed an evangelical attitude to pairing the rest of us up. In the space of what felt like a few weeks, our secret coffee breaks on the fire escape had gone from mutual support sessions to remote speed-dating, especially now I’d met most of the contenders.

‘You and Geraint were getting on like a house on fire the other night!’ she told me, stopping just short of getting her phone out to show me his Facebook page. ‘He’s really funny. And he loves the theatre.’

I gave her a scornful look. ‘Loving the theatre’ was something people only ever claimed to do on internet dating profiles, and even then only in London, I’d noticed. You never met anyone in, say, Ross-on-Wye who claimed to love the theatre, and yet they probably went as often as the average Londoner.

‘What’s that got to do with the price of fish? I
don’t
love the theatre,’ I reminded her. ‘I saw
The Lion King
once, and that was only because Sam got too many tickets from that agency and Laurence made us all go, so as not to waste them.’

‘The theatre’s a brilliant place to go for a date,’ she said. ‘It’s somewhere new, you don’t have to talk, you can discuss it after – it’s good to get out of your comfort zone.’

‘What is so wrong with having a comfort zone? The clue’s in the name. Anyway, I’d rather take up hill-walking. And you know how I feel about that.’

‘But Geraint’s a great—’

‘Helen, it’s really sweet that you’re trying to pair me up, but can you stop doing it, please?’ I broke some heart-shaped shortbread in half and grimaced at the symbolism. ‘I’m fine as I am. I don’t need a boyfriend. I’m focusing on work.’

‘No, but there are men out there who need the joy of your company.’

‘At least keep your cheesy compliments credible.’

‘What are you doing on Valentine’s Day?’ she asked.

‘Why?’ I could see the awkward shape of a double date looming into view.

‘I was thinking Wynn and I could arrange another get-together at the pub and invite a load of single people, so it would be a nice low-pressure way of mingling. Not just romantically,’ she added, ‘it’s always good to broaden your horizons. You know how hard it is to meet new people in our line of work – anyone you meet’s already spoken for, by definition. And it’s a numbers game. Mr Right could be a friend of a friend of a friend.’

‘How do you know I don’t already have a date?’

Obviously, I didn’t. I just didn’t like the assumption that I was at such a loose end that I’d be grateful for dinner with a man who liked the theatre, or a singles night in a pub.

‘Do you?’ Helen seemed surprised. Then she peered more curiously at me. ‘Do you?’

‘I might,’ I said airily. ‘I might be at that delicate stage of a relationship where I want to keep things very much under my hat.’

She looked at me a second longer, then reached for a second biscuit. ‘You’re not, though. You’re going to be working.’

‘How do you know that? Have you seen the rota?’

‘I don’t need to. You always are. Even more so now you’re living over the shop and Laurence is paying you overtime to camp downstairs at the reception desk.’

I could hardly deny that, but Helen wouldn’t give up, even when I collected the mugs and climbed off the fire escape back into the plusher environs of the fourth floor. She was still extolling the joys of ‘singing with friends and letting yourself go!’ when the lift pinged and let us out into the hotel foyer. We could have gone down into the
bowels of the earth
and she’d still have been going on about it.

‘… need to recalibrate your expectations about men,’ she finished. Finally.

‘You’re done?’

She nodded, and before she could start again, I said, ‘Helen. Please don’t make me spend Valentine’s Day singing Tom Jones classics with the Clapham Leek-Fancying Association.’

‘Sounds fun,’ said Joe, wandering past with an armful of tablecloths. ‘Open to anyone?’

‘Joe!’ Helen seized on him with a bold look at me. ‘Have you got plans for Saturday night?’

‘Er, Saturday night?’

‘It’s Valentine’s Day,’ I reminded him. ‘Isn’t it marked in your calendar?’

‘Oh,
Valentine’s Day
,’ he said with an unusual amount of wariness.

Joe, like me, had had a lot of enforced dating attention from Helen over the past few weeks. In an unguarded moment over the kettle one evening, he’d confided that he was starting to understand how the pandas in London Zoo felt, but without the privacy of a cave to hide in.

‘Because if you’re not doing anything,’ Helen went on, with the determination of a zookeeper armed with a bag of aphrodisiac-laced bamboo, ‘my sister’s flatmate Kate has got a spare ticket to
Hamlet
at the Barbican that she’s trying to get rid of—’

‘So Kate’s very keen on the theatre, too?’ I asked. ‘I had no idea you moved in such thespian circles.’

Helen ignored me. ‘—and maybe you’d like to go? She’s very nice.’

‘I’m sure she’s very nice,’ said Joe. ‘But even if I wasn’t doing anything, which I am,
Hamlet
’s not my thing.’

‘I know. It’s not exactly a date-night play,’ I pointed out. ‘Family feuding, ill-advised second marriages, two of the unfunniest funny men in the whole of English literature. And the bride goes mad and drowns herself.’

Joe gave me a funny look. ‘I am familiar with the play, thank you. Anyway, why would I want to go to the theatre when I can watch all that happen in the comfort of my own home?’

‘Oh, you two,’ said Helen with a playful swipe; then she
turned serious again. ‘But have you got a date for Saturday, Joe? Because I was thinking of having a party …’

He gave me a quick sideways look, and I said, ‘Don’t look at me, I’m going out.’ I don’t know why I said that. I ignored the slight intake of breath from Helen. ‘I booked the night off ages ago.’

Joe paused for a second, then said, ‘Good for you. Me too.’

Helen looked intrigued. ‘Who’s the lucky girl?’

‘Yes, who?’ I realized I was staring, and coughed.

‘Sorry, I thought I just had to book the night off with Dad, not with the romance committee,’ said Joe. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to talk Flora out of releasing a hundred London pigeons as she and Milo say their vows.’

‘And how are you going to do that?’ I asked.

‘I’m going to agree with her that it’s a brilliant visual spectacle, then ask how many umbrellas she thinks she’ll need to protect her fashionable guests from stray pigeon poo. It’s very lucky,’ he added. ‘Pigeon poo.’

I nodded. ‘You should probably feed them beforehand to ensure it’s a very lucky wedding. Maybe you could suggest that? Then, as a back-up plan, obviously, suggest white rose petals scattered from the windows above the courtyard. Easier to clean away and they smell less of old chips.’

Joe pointed at me – an annoying habit months of effort hadn’t yet broken (though he was now wearing a more normal, if brightly coloured, shirt instead of his surfer ones) – and grinned. ‘What a team. I’ll let you know what she says.’

Helen and I stared after him as he loped down the corridor
towards the lounge bar where most of his meetings with Flora took place. She was finding it particularly hard to decide on her signature cocktail for the exclusive after-party, and kept making appointments to try new ones.

‘I wonder who Joe’s got a date with?’ Helen mused. ‘Not … Flora?’

‘I doubt it,’ I said. If Joe was seeing someone, he’d been doing it very quietly. We didn’t exactly live in each other’s pockets upstairs, but I certainly hadn’t noticed him making any calls or texting anyone. He hadn’t mentioned seeing anyone. Should he have? We talked about quite a lot of other things.

I realized I did feel a bit … funny about it, actually.

Helen grabbed my arm as if she’d just thought of something. ‘Oh! Rosie! Do you think it’s someone from America? A girl?’

‘Caroline says there wasn’t a girl in America,’ I said at once.

Although there had been that moment at New Year’s when clearly something was going unsaid at the mention of that one perfect person …

The burning sensation in my chest increased. What if he had met someone? And he brought her back? The bedroom walls were, as I may have mentioned, very thin.

If even Joe found someone …

‘Then it must be someone new.’ Helen’s eyes widened. ‘Maybe someone he’s met at a wedding? Or one of Flora’s bridesmaids? There’s a whole string of them turning up with Flora to try cocktails with him in the bar …’

‘I really don’t think so!’ I said, and my voice was so high Helen gave me a strange look.

I didn’t have time to think about stuff like this. I had weddings to sort out. Registrars with flu to check up on. Extra chairs to order. ‘Sorry, I mean I don’t know. And, no, before you ask, I’m not going to hang around the flat waiting to see who turns up.’

‘Of course not,’ said Helen. ‘You’ll be on your date, won’t you?’

I didn’t know what I could politely say to that, so I smiled tightly and marched off to deal with the reported broken headboard in the honeymoon suite.

*

Obviously, I didn’t have a date for Valentine’s night but there was no way I was going to let Joe know that, or Helen.

Instead, once my bride and groom had been safely waved off in their taxi to Heathrow, and their few remaining guests discreetly handed over to the clutches of Dino and his cocktail cart of delights, I’d planned a date night
with myself
. I’d be able to relax properly in the flat for the first time: Joe was going to be out on his mystery date, and Laurence was due for his regular monthly night out ‘with his bridge friends’ at their club in Mayfair.

Part of my New Year, New Me resolution included a full overhaul of my beauty regime. I’d splurged on various treatments brides had told me about over the years, including a hair treatment that the girls in the spa downstairs insisted would turn my hair into a gigantic mane to rival Flora’s, and a facemask made with Swiss mud. While it was all working, I’d got a box set of a Danish crime drama I hadn’t had time to see when everyone else in the country was watching it.

And then I planned to have an early night. I hadn’t had one of those in
months
.

Joe was already in the bathroom when I let myself into the flat after handing over to the night manager. I could hear him splashing around, making his usual mess. I could also smell him applying liberal amounts of aftershave and deodorant, which only made me feel grumpier and weirder.

I didn’t want to see him come out of the bathroom in his towel, all fresh and hopeful, while I was the Last Singleton in London, so I went straight to my room, got changed, and waited until the flat door slammed shut. Once the whistling had died away, I dashed into the bathroom, slapped on the face mask, combed the conditioner through my hair, got my DVD and a bottle of wine, and settled into the old leather sofa.