Love Lives

by Emlyn Rees

  Stopping by the church with its witch’s hat spire, she realised she was at the top of the cobbled street and had been on a pointless detour through the town. Still, at least she now had her bearings and she recognised the High Street where they’d stopped in the car earlier by W. H. Smith. As she looked down the front, she could see the sign for the Grand Hotel swinging in the wind.

  The only thing for it, she resolved, as she hurried towards it past a Chinese takeaway and a shop crammed shut with semi-deflated beach toys, was to be professional. She would get the filming done and get out as quickly as possible. As soon as she had a fax number, she was going straight up there to check out Lost Soul’s Point and finalise her filming schedule.

  She was brought out of her thoughts by the sight of the boy she’d met earlier. He was next to a bench a little way down from a wrought-iron shelter, hunched down in his leather jacket, furtively smoking a cigarette as he leant up against his bike. Ellen could see him clearly from her side of the road, but either he was so engrossed in what he was thinking as he scuffed the toe of his trainer against the pebbled concrete, or he was deliberately ignoring her. Ellen almost called out, but then she changed her mind, lowered her eyes and headed on.

  It seemed so long since Ellen had been a teenager that she had no idea what it must be like living in a town this size. For all she knew, the boy probably regarded her as some nosy city type.

  Well, that was exactly what Ellen wasn’t and she would prove it. She was here to be sympathetic about the suicides that had happened and to make the legend of Lost Soul’s Point interesting again for everyone, including the locals. That was what she was going to do: capture the romance of the place and bring history to life.

  Ellen had been thinking, when she’d seen the impressive Georgian façade of the Grand Hotel, that she’d throw caution to the wind and book herself in on her own credit card. But now, as she walked through the door, she immediately had second thoughts and started to wonder whether she could make the cottage cosy after all, despite Scott’s reservations.

  Inside, there was certainly nothing grand about the hotel as its name suggested. A tall mahogany plant stand was by the door, but instead of a leafy aspidistra adorning it, an ice cream tub filled with stagnant brown water caught drips from the leaking porch roof.

  As she walked further inside, Ellen could see a visitors’ book resting on a carved wooden lectern opened at an ominously blank double-page spread. She could smell the faint odour of cigarettes mixed with a sickly tang of pine air freshener as her footsteps echoed on the tiles. She stopped by the reception desk and looked up at the panelled staircase and around to where the space opened out into the lounge. There, the only sign of life was a grand piano in the huge bay window which was stacked with open music books, the stand light illuminating the shiny white keys like a cartoon grin.

  Timidly, Ellen pressed her palm on the brass dome bell on the desk and heard the loud chime echo out in the hall. When nothing happened, she looked behind her at the pictures on the wall by the staircase. Several reproduced sepia photographs showed scenes of rotund women in bathing chairs on the beach. Another showed horse-drawn carriages crowding the market square and well-to-do gents in top hats walking ladies in fine dresses. Ellen peered more closely at the images of Shoresby in its Victorian heyday. Maybe she should do some shots of these, she thought, to show how the town must have looked when Appleforth House was still thriving.

  She was so engrossed that she jumped when she heard the door behind the reception area burst open and she looked round to see a girl stepping through.

  The girl was holding a piece of toast in her hand and, when she saw Ellen, she covered her mouth and tried to chew faster. As she came forward to the desk, Ellen noticed that the girl was strikingly tall, with pretty, wide-set green eyes. Everything about her, from her make-up-free complexion to the rope-like plait of thick chestnut hair hanging down her back, was exceptionally neat. It was only when she put her hands on the edge of the desk that Ellen saw that her fingernails were bitten right down.

  ‘Can I help you?’ she asked, in a well-spoken, clear voice, fixing Ellen with a disarmingly aloof stare.

  ‘I’m here with a television company. I’m going to be making a documentary up at Lost Soul’s Point –’ began Ellen, slightly thrown by the girl’s manner.

  ‘Would you like a room?’

  ‘Actually, I was wondering whether I could use your fax machine. If you have one?’

  ‘Of course.’ The girl nodded and stepped back a few paces, pushing the door ajar. ‘Mum!’ she called through the gap. ‘Is it all right if –’

  She was cut off by a small, busty woman who marched in a businesslike way through the door, straightening the starched white collar beneath her bulky checked blazer. The woman had the same green eyes as the girl, but none of her feline grace. Her freckly cheeks were flushed and three parallel stress lines burrowed across her forehead. ‘Don’t shout, Verity,’ she scolded in a hissed whisper, shooing the girl out of the way, before turning to Ellen. ‘Welcome to the Grand Hotel, Shoresby,’ she said, licking her fingers and vigorously flipping over pages of an oversized notebook on her side of the desk. ‘How can I help?’

  ‘She wants to use the fax machine,’ mumbled Verity, her haughtiness now completely evaporating in front of her mother. ‘She’s already explained. She’s from a TV company.’

  Verity’s mother looked up, forgetting the notebook, her eyebrows rising with instant curiosity. Then she smiled and proffered her hand over the desk, as if Ellen were a long-lost relation, or a famous guest.

  Ellen smiled back and avoided eye contact, her attention diverted by an old couple who were walking arm in arm down the stairs. They nodded good morning, but the woman ignored them, still gripping Ellen’s hand.

  Ellen was used to people mistakenly being impressed by her job title. When they found out she was a television director, they assumed that she could get them on to the small screen in an instant. She always found this slightly embarrassing and was ready with a spiel to dispel any ideas that her job was in any way glamorous. She certainly didn’t feel glamorous right now.

  ‘I’m the hotel manageress, Cheryl Driver,’ said Verity’s mother, introducing herself with a satisfied tut, as she finally let go of Ellen’s hand. ‘Cheryl with a sh, although I’m not very quiet,’ she added with a self-deprecating laugh.

  ‘Ellen Morris.’

  ‘Mum,’ Verity said, with forced patience and Ellen could hear the frustrated embarrassment in her tone.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be getting to school?’ asked Cheryl, not turning round.

  Ellen watched Verity push off the wall back towards the door. But for a split second her eyes met Ellen’s and she smiled shyly.

  ‘That’s my daughter, Verity,’ said Cheryl conspiratorially, darting her hawk eyes between Ellen and the door through which Verity had disappeared. ‘She may seem surly, but that’s just her temperament. Oh yes,’ she continued smugly, ‘my Verity’s quite something.’

  Ellen nodded, as Cheryl lifted up the flap of the reception desk and walked through it towards her. ‘Can I offer you some breakfast?’ she asked.

  At that moment Ellen realised that not only was she starving, but Cheryl’s friendly offer was the first nice thing that had happened to her all morning. ‘Thank you,’ she said gratefully. ‘That would be wonderful. You see, I’ve only just arrived.’

  ‘Then you’ve come to the right place,’ assured Cheryl. ‘Let me tell you a little bit about the Grand.’

  Chapter III

  ON THE OTHER side of the door, Verity tipped her head back against the wooden door and closed her eyes. She’d had her fixed metal braces removed the week before and she couldn’t get used to the sensation of her unencumbered teeth as she bit down on her lips.

  Why did her mother always have to do this? she thought, as she listened to Cheryl through the door. It was bad enough that she’d totally butted in when Verity had been just about to sort out th
e TV woman – Ellen – herself, but worse, her mother’s whole manner was just so embarrassing.

  Verity could hear through the door that Cheryl was trying to sell Ellen the benefits of staying at the Grand, reciting verbatim the bullet points on her latest amateurish home-produced pamphlet.

  ‘And obviously here’s the drawing room,’ she heard her mother saying.

  ‘Who plays the piano?’ Verity could hear Ellen Morris ask.

  ‘Oh … Verity. She’s always been an exceptionally talented child.’

  Child? Verity cringed. She wasn’t a child. She’d just had her seventeenth birthday.

  ‘She sings too. There’s not one person in the whole town who won’t tell you that she’s got the voice of an angel.’

  Stop quoting other people’s CD sleeve notes, begged Verity silently, but her mother was on a roll.

  ‘I mean there’s so many talent programmes on the television nowadays – people signing up left, right and centre to become pop stars and there’s no doubt in my mind that Verity would beat them hands down, but she won’t enter. Well, you see, opera is more her forte, as well as the piano, obviously. I’ve told her that a talent like hers mustn’t go to waste. It’s so frustrating, but I try to encourage her rather than push her …’

  Verity felt her stomach clenching up as she stared ahead at the dormant fax machine on the office shelves and thought about how her mother must look to someone as worldly and sophisticated as Ellen. Ellen was just the type of person Verity hoped that she’d turn out to be one day. She had that kind of confident ageless style that nobody had in Shoresby. Even her make-up looked classy and, despite the fact that Ellen was obviously so much older than her, Verity felt dejected at how far away she was from ever achieving anything like that kind of look.

  Now, by the mere fact that she was related, Verity was bound to be tarred with the same small-town snobbery that her mother had perfected to an art form. Well, one thing was certain, she thought, darting through the small office door into the dining room, there was no way she was going to have any more embarrassing encounters this morning.

  Slipping silently between the tables, which she’d laid up with fresh paper cloths only half an hour earlier, Verity could see that the breakfast on the long table remained more or less untouched, except for the cornflakes which the mad professor and his wife picked at like sparrows. Verity glanced in their direction. They were in the far corner at their usual table by the window near the fat sisters who were studying guidebooks and waiting to devour their daily fry-up. Even though there were several other diners, a couple of old men reading newspapers and a sad lady with an Agatha Christie novel, the only sound was the odd chink of cutlery on cheap china.

  Ever since her parents had taken over the hotel six years ago and Verity had watched The Shining, she hadn’t been able to shake the creepy feeling the guests gave her, especially off-season when all the oddballs and pensioners came to stay.

  Why anyone would want to come to a dump like Shoresby in the first place was a mystery to Verity. Once the schools had gone back and the tourists had left, it was the dullest backwater she could imagine and she couldn’t wait to get out. Anywhere would do, just so long as she didn’t have to live with strangers any more.

  Verity sped onwards, trying to keep her scorn for the guests from showing on her face. Some days she could ignore them, treating them as moving wallpaper in her home. On other days the polite institutional hush of the dining room made her want to scream. Talk to each other, she wanted to shout. Make some noise. Live a little!

  But Verity kept quiet. She’d learnt long ago that it was better to keep her opinions to herself. It annoyed her mother more that way.

  In a few seconds she’d reached the kitchen service door, which swished against its felt lining and she flattened her palms behind her on the door to still it.

  In front of her – a world away from the pink-carpeted cleanliness of the restaurant – was the vast, cluttered kitchen. Above her, rows of giant pans hung down from the maze of clanking water pipes on the ceiling. A few dusty, dimpled, stainless-steel units lay unused in one half of the room. In the other half, vast wooden cupboards with wonky doors stretched along the walls to the cavernous sinks. On the back wall, beneath the windows dripping with condensation, rows of tomato plants flourished unseasonably and a feather danced in the thermal above the gas heater.

  Yanos, the kitchen porter-cum-waiter, was wiping the grease from the edge of two giant plates, where the sausages, eggs and fried potatoes destined for the fat sisters were piled high on a sea of baked beans.

  Behind him, at a huge stove, Verity’s father, Russell, was whistling in a loud builder’s tremolo in time with Tom Jones’s song ‘Delilah’ on the radio, as he flipped over rashers of sizzling bacon in a pan. Off-season, he liked to cook breakfast for the guests himself, instead of paying Rudi, the chef, who was never at his best in the morning and Russell regularly referred to himself as Shoresby’s fry-up king. As much as his wife’s face betrayed the stress of their chosen profession, Russell’s wrinkleless complexion failed to mask the inner boy inside him. He never took anything too seriously and was ready to play a practical joke at any second.

  ‘Hang on, princess,’ he said, stopping Verity on her path to the stairs in the corner. ‘Breakfast coming right up.’

  ‘I’ve already had toast, Dad.’

  Russell Driver was in his late forties and had lost most of his hair on top, but what did remain was fixed in a rebellious curly ponytail at the nape of his neck. He’d once been the town’s karate instructor, but despite having the tall, slight frame he’d passed on to his daughter, his metabolism had caught up with him lately and a large rotund belly stuck out over the top of his low-slung jeans. ‘I heard you playing,’ he said, as Verity stopped at the bottom of the stairs. ‘Up early, weren’t you?’

  ‘I’ve got the exam coming up. Remember?’

  Verity wanted to remind him that she didn’t get up at the crack of dawn by choice. It was just that it was the only time she could practise in peace when the guests were still asleep and she could be guaranteed some privacy.

  ‘What do they want to test you on this time?’ her father asked, reaching into the bread bin and plucking two pieces of economy white from the bag inside. ‘Sounded perfect to me.’

  Verity smiled wanly at her father. He wouldn’t know the difference between Brahms and Beethoven if his life depended on it. His idea of music appreciation was rocking out with an air guitar to Dire Straits, or, more embarrassingly, dropping Pink Floyd lyrics into the conversation when he was trying to sound profound. She’d often got the feeling that even if she were to sit down and assault the piano keyboard with a mallet, her dad would still lead blindly enthusiastic applause.

  ‘It’s not perfect,’ she said. ‘At this rate, I’m not going to pass.’

  Russell snorted and laughed loudly, as if she were joking.

  ‘I’ve got to go, Dad,’ Verity said. ‘Treza will be here any minute.’

  At that moment one of the old service bells rang in the kitchen. Verity and her father looked up at the ancient Victorian contraption above the service door and then back at each other. Even Yanos looked up in alarm.

  The bells were hardly ever used, but Verity knew it could only mean that Cheryl was showing off to Ellen instead of walking through to the kitchen herself. She must be in her absolute worst Cheryl Driver, Grand Hotelier mode.

  The service bell rang again, more impatiently, as Verity bounded up the first flight of corner stairs, which led up to the top of the hotel.

  ‘But what about your butty?’ called her father, holding up the bacon sandwich on a plate.

  ‘You have it,’ Verity replied. ‘You know you want it,’ she teased, bobbing her head down from the top of the stairs to see her father roll his eyes in mock frustration. He was just about to take a bite out of the sandwich when Verity saw her mother swooping into the kitchen from the other end.

  ‘Ah, ah,’ she chided,
marching across and swiping the plate from her husband’s hand. ‘That’ll do nicely for our new visitor, Ms Morris. Poor woman is famished. I rang for Verity. I think it would be very useful if they had a chat. She’s a television director, Russell. She seems so professional and nice with it. That’s the true mark of success …’

  Verity didn’t stay to hear any more, slipping away, up the carpeted stairs two at a time, past Eva and Katia, the chambermaids, and on to her bedroom.

  Everyone in the town admired the front of the hotel and its uninterrupted view over North Beach, but Verity’s room faced the opposite way. From her seventh-floor window in one of the old suites she’d been allowed to move into on her sixteenth birthday, she looked over the shiny corrugated air-conditioning pipes that snaked over the different levels of the hotel roof. Below her, across the asphalt polka-dotted with seagull droppings, she could see the abandoned chairs on the cast-iron fire escape that lay broken and tangled together as if they’d been in a fight. Then down into the hotel car park, where a family of stray cats lived among the cylindrical bins.

  Beyond, over the old town walls where the drunks held court outside the amusement arcade, she could see the humped tops of the green buses in the bus station and, further on, the wide triangle of wasteland between the train tracks, where a group of travellers camped each summer.

  Verity knew that people in school thought she was spoilt living in a hotel suite, but none of them, apart from Treza, had seen the reality; that the room, with its shabby early Eighties floral decoration, was so vast and cold that in the winter months she could see her breath and the condensation froze in sheets on the inside of the windows at night.

  But Verity didn’t mind. She was as far away as possible from her parents and their claustrophobic flat next to the boiler room in the basement. Her mother regularly threatened Verity with her imminent incarceration back below stairs once Russell had magically transformed Verity’s room into a honeymoon suite, but Verity knew she was safe. Firstly, the hotel was a financial sieve and there was no way her parents could afford to renovate the room properly and repair all the damage caused by the burst pipes a few winters ago. And secondly, no honeymooners came to Shoresby – only the odd hen and stag parties and her mother refused to have them in the hotel.