Honeymoon Suite

by Wendy Holden

  Rachel had got out and was picking her way, in her red silk shoes, determinedly through the stagnant puddles and broken tarmac of what might once have been a car park.

  Nell lingered in the Land Rover. She was not walking about here in her wedding dress! Up here you’d need thermals in July. And Arran jumpers on top of those. She hadn’t even got wellies.

  ‘Come on,’ yelled Rachel, waving frantically as she disappeared round a corner. Of Juno there was no sign; presumably she had gone before.

  With no option but to get out, Nell lowered herself gingerly in her white plastic boots and hurried after Rachel. A cold wind whipped around her bare legs.

  Rachel stood before a dank aperture which might have been the inn entrance. Recessed into a green-streaked stone porch, a great, ill-fitting front door slumped sideways on its hinges. Rachel lifted the rusty handle – a circle of heavy iron – and twisted it, producing a creak as loud as a shout in the still air.

  ‘Don’t open it,’ begged Nell.

  This just couldn’t be the Edenville Arms. Even allowing for the fact that this was where Google had sent her, and that hotel websites always made places look better than they were, there seemed no possibility this was the sunny, well-kept establishment she had seen online. Nell stared despairingly round at the black stumps of stone, the broken windows. It was a ruin, and not a romantic ruin at that.

  She folded her arms decisively. ‘Let’s just go back to London.’

  Rachel folded her arms as well. ‘I’ve just driven for four hours up here. There’s no bloody way I’m driving for four hours back. We’re staying here tonight, at any rate.’ She opened the door of the Evil Arms and called into the dark cave within. ‘Hello?’

  Nell looked back longingly towards the Red Baron. If they kept driving they might come across a B&B somewhere.

  ‘It’s raining,’ said Juno, and it was. Hard. With incredible speed, a group of fat black clouds had gathered in the sky above. A fat drop of cold water hit Nell hard on the nose. Then another. And another. The drops bounced off the broken ground, the size of a cherry tomato.

  ‘It’s hail!’ Juno shouted, amazed.

  Incredibly, it was. Everyone’s ears filled with the roar of ice balls hitting tarmac and exploding into puddles. The whole sky was white and moving downwards. Then the hail abruptly changed direction and became horizontal. Cold, hard pellets lashed their faces. It was like being shot.

  ‘My dress!’ shouted Rachel and Nell in unison.

  ‘Ow! Ow!’ shrieked Juno.

  Rachel yanked open the door and they hurried inside. The empty entrance hall, its rotting ceiling bristling with exposed cables, opened into a big, gloomy, stone-floored room. It was utterly empty, freezing cold and perceptibly damp; a situation that the tiny stove, set in a vast fireplace at the room’s far end, would clearly never be able to address.

  Hail rattled like bullets against the windows, setting Nell’s nerves jangling. She felt like a refugee from a war, or an extra in the last scenes of a Bond film.

  What light had managed to struggle through the small, dirty panes gleamed dully on rows of pewter pots hanging from great black ceiling beams. A pair of colossal bull horns was fixed to the nearest one.

  Juno was the first to speak. ‘It’s like something from a Hammer Horror,’ she said, delighted. ‘Look at that suit of armour!’

  Nell looked. The huge, helmeted figure was holding a pike whose axe-edge looked horribly sharp.

  ‘And . . . next to it?’ gasped Rachel, her fingers gripping Nell’s bare arm. In a tall glass case beside the armour hung a jumble of something yellowish-white. It was a skeleton.

  ‘It’s not real,’ Juno reported, skipping back from examining it. ‘It’s a facsimile of the bones of a highwayman who was hung on the gibbet near here. Apparently,’ she continued cheerfully, ‘he was a regular. Still is, in a way, because he haunts the place. Isn’t that nice?’

  ‘Lovely,’ muttered Nell as Juno darted off to investigate the armour.

  The freezing cold of the flagstones seeped through the thin soles of the women’s footwear as they walked to what might, long ago, have been the bar. A counter made of thick black wood stood atop a great carved black panel. Behind stretched a grubby mirror, before which a couple of upside-down spirits bottles glimmered through the all-covering dust.

  ‘Please let’s go,’ Nell begged. She could see, as if from a great distance, her dim reflection in the bar mirror, but she didn’t want to look at it in case something creepy in a hood and carrying a scythe turned out to be standing behind her. Or a long-dead, gibbeted highwayman.

  Rachel, however, had spotted the Gordon’s bottle. ‘Not without a gin,’ she stated, in a tone which brooked no argument. She strode to the bar and banged her fist on it; some flakes of ceiling plaster floated gently down. ‘Landlord!’ Rachel called. The noise, in the lonely, eerie silence, sent panic shooting through Nell.

  ‘There’s no one here!’ she gasped. ‘Well, no one actually alive.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. There’s no such thing as ghosts,’ Rachel replied briskly. ‘Landlord!’ she yelled again.

  Nell wondered afterwards if, without Rachel’s need for a stiff drink at just that point, any of what subsequently happened would have happened. It seemed amazing that so much could be contingent on a mere few distilled drops.

  Nonetheless, when she looked back, of all the twists of Fate that could so easily have twisted the other way, or never have twisted at all, that drink seemed the most decisive.

  Had Rachel not demanded refreshment in that peremptory manner, the owner of the establishment may well have chosen not to appear. The fact that he did gave them all a fright; the hunched, scowling figure appearing suddenly in the shadows behind the bar. Only the pungent smell that came with him indicated he was terrestrial rather than some awful apparition; he was accompanied by a powerful stench which quite bore out his claim to have been ‘owt wi’t pigs’ and unaware that customers required his presence.

  Once he had hunted about the dusty bar shelves for a small and rusting tin of tonic and jerked a smeared glass upwards into the Gordon’s optic, mine host revealed that no booking in Nell’s name for the honeymoon suite had been made online. There was no internet here. That, admittedly, was less of a surprise than the information, subsequently vouchsafed, that while this was indeed the Edenville Arms, it was not the only one. There was another pub of the same name in a village ten miles away.

  CHAPTER 21

  Dylan stood in the cramped lobby of the Edenville Arms waiting for the manager to finish his argument with the woman in the bright pink dress. The dispute was being conducted in whispers, so he could not hear what was being said, but it was clear it was both urgent and acrimonious. The woman’s bottom, turned towards him, seemed to be getting more dangerously close all the time. Every time she made a point she stuck her rear out still further and there was a danger it was going to end up shoved into Dylan’s midriff.

  He had shrunk back against the wall as best he could, but, thin as he was, it was clearly only a matter of time. In any other circumstances he would have left; given it up as a bad job. But he needed a room here so he could start working with Dan on Monday. He allowed himself an audible sigh, hoping it might move matters on.

  Jason, behind the flap, heard the sigh and the screw of anxiety within him tightened further. He and Angela had reached stalemate over the room business. They were quite unable to come to an accommodation over accommodation.

  She wanted him to hand over the honeymoon suite but Jason was sticking to his guns. The lesbians – if indeed they were – had paid in full, up front. He couldn’t give their room away. What if they turned up?

  Angela’s response to this was to declare, in an aggressive, hissing slur, that she couldn’t care less if they did. As a manifesto for innkeeping it lacked something,
Jason felt.

  Necessity, of course, is famously the mother of invention and now, just as Jason gave way to despair, an idea bounded into his mind. An idea about a Japanese toilet and a locally sauced headboard made of ginkgo biloba branches. An idea about a holiday cottage that no one wanted to rent. An idea that, if it worked, would not only satisfy Angela but earn him brownie points in the eyes of the Estate.

  He scrabbled hurriedly under his counter for Ros Downer’s brochure, found the page with Bess’s Tower on it and shoved it over Angela’s shoulder at his customer who, incredibly, hadn’t fled yet.

  ‘May I suggest, sir?’ he yelped, proffering the little book.

  ‘What the . . . ?’ exclaimed Angela, following the publication’s trajectory and twisting awkwardly back round. As she did so, her wrap dress caught on a hook in the flap and yanked itself partially unwrapped. ‘Wassgoinon?’ she demanded unsteadily, as Dylan politely avoided looking at her largely exposed chest.

  He could not, Jason recognised, any longer afford to tolerate a drunken, partly undressed Angela in the main visitor welcome area of the inn. He leaned forward and whispered in her ear and Angela’s suspicious, flushed, confused features settled. ‘Ah,’ she said, nodding. ‘BeshesTower. SaverygoodideaJase. Yestis.’

  As his customer was now reading the brochure, Jason took the opportunity to gently lead Angela into Pumps and settle her at a booth in the corner. Her head flopped against the padded seat and she regarded him through half-closed eyes. She was quite helpless, Jason saw. In this state, there was something almost vulnerable about her.

  ‘Oozethatguyoutthere?’ she slurred. ‘Versexy, dontchathink?’

  Jason sighed. There was a far sexier guy in the pub so far as he was concerned. But whether he would ever pluck up the courage to do anything about it was anyone’s guess. Poor Angela, he thought. And poor me. We’re just two lonely people, really, simply wanting to be loved.

  ‘Bloodygorjusifyouaskme,’ Angela was groaning. ‘I would, I tell ya.’

  Jason hoped she wasn’t about to turn lewd. The bar dining tables were full of the gin-and-Jag couples that represented the Arms’ customer base. Expensively understated clothes, ostentatious good manners and a tendency to converse in murmurs were their distinguishing characteristics. Angela’s breasts were now almost fully dislodged from their moorings and her general deportment more suitable to some of Chestlock’s less reputable establishments, such as Harlots or Knockers.

  Jason was suddenly, electrically, aware of Ryan standing next to him. He swallowed a few times and breathed in deeply to control the racing of his heart. Then he looked up, straight into the melting eyes of his most junior barman.

  ‘Can you get her some water?’ he asked, hearing his voice come out rushed and panicked.

  ‘Water?’ Ryan repeated, his uncomprehending tone striking Jason’s ear like the trumpets of angels.

  ‘Clear stuff, non-alcoholic, comes in bottles,’ the manager persisted. ‘Or out of a tap.’

  Ryan nodded, flashed another of his dazzling smiles, and with one final look into Jason’s eyes, walked away. Jason stared after him, feeling as if all the breath had left his body.

  A tower in the forest that you could rent, Dylan gathered, having ploughed through Ros Downer’s description. But what was that thing in the bathroom? There was something strange going on above the bed as well, a sort of bald hedge. Weariness was making it hard to focus.

  ‘I’ll take it,’ he said, when Jason returned, raised his flap and entered the alcove behind it.

  ‘Perfect, sir,’ Jason nodded. ‘If sir would give me a few moments, I’ll phone through to the appropriate office. In the meantime, may I give sir a booking form?’

  Dylan stared down at the many and varied demands for personal information on the paper Jason slid in front of him. He raised his head, looked steadily at the manager and let fly the sentence he had originally composed for Dan Parker.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m ideologically opposed to giving away information about myself. I’m happy to pay in cash up front, though.’

  Jason’s mouth dropped open. He’d never heard anything like this before. Most people he came across would tell you anything about themselves; were eager to. ‘But sir, I’m afraid we have to have certain information. Credit card, date of birth, home address.’

  Dylan shook his head. ‘I don’t see why, not if I’m paying cash in advance. My personal details are my own. I’d reveal them to the police, a court of law, a doctor, but no one else.’

  One of those libertarian types, obviously. But he had a point, it was ridiculous the way you were expected to hand over everything from your blood group to your mother’s maiden name on the flimsiest possible pretext. No, Jason didn’t disagree with him. And he had good reasons for wanting this arrangement to work.

  ‘I’d be prepared to pay a month’s rent up front,’ Dylan said, getting out his wallet. Luckily, he’d brought a great deal of cash. It had seemed a sensible precaution as he was heading to unknown regions. Money always helped.

  Jason needed no further convincing. ‘Very well, sir.’ He slid the prurient form away. ‘I’ll just give you a map and the code to get the key out of the safe at the cottage.’

  ‘Great.’ Dylan felt energised by his moral victory. His eyes sparkled.

  ‘But may I at least have your name, sir?’

  ‘Adam Greenleaf.’

  Jason nodded. He was counting Dylan’s notes. ‘This all looks in order, Mr Greenleaf.’

  He’d got away with it. Dylan was almost enjoying this now. He felt the urge to giggle tug at his lips. It was not a sensation he had ever imagined feeling again.

  Jason looked up and bestowed on Dylan his best professional smile. ‘Will sir be joining us for dinner tonight? Kegs is fully booked, I’m afraid, but if sir wishes to eat around eight, I can offer the best table in Pumps.’

  ‘Er . . . OK.’

  ‘Right next to the fireplace,’ a smiling Jason went on. ‘And as it’s only early summer as yet, we light it in the evenings.’

  He was puzzled at the expression of horror sweeping over his customer’s face. Dylan reeled backwards. A lit fire! Flames roared in his imagination. He saw the devil surfing boots, shrinking and evaporating in the screaming heat.

  ‘No thanks,’ he stammered. He took the sheet of paper Jason now handed him and hurried towards the door.

  Outside, the sunny afternoon was mellowing into golden evening and Edenville’s fanciful buildings glowed in radiant light. Wall-ivy sparkled and shimmered and in the cottage gardens, the flowers glowed.

  ‘This is more like it!’ exclaimed Rachel as they hurried across the car park towards the Edenville Arms. The real Edenville Arms. Which, Nell was relieved to see, didn’t merely look just like its website, but even better. The fields swelling gently behind it really were rolling and mellow. It was hard to believe that the stark moors with their twisted trees and blasted sheep were in the same country, let alone the same county a mere few miles away.

  She felt fragile and very tired. The long journey, especially with the shock of the Evil Arms, had taken its toll. But Rachel, as ever, seemed to be firing on all cylinders. ‘It’s like a model village,’ she exclaimed loudly, looking round. ‘Except that all the houses are life-size.’

  ‘Woo hoo!’ Juno shouted from across the road. She was standing next to a pond on the village green. ‘Ducks!’

  ‘Come on!’ Rachel yelled at her daughter. She was not, unlike Nell, even aware of the couple of drinkers sitting at the wooden tables on the sunny terrace who were staring in surprise at the women in party dresses and the little girl in a sober suit who had just emerged from the rusty red Land Rover.

  While Rachel passed easily under the pub’s low doorway, the much taller Nell had to stoop almost in half.

  ‘It’s lovely!’ gasped Rachel,
looking admiringly about her.

  On one side of the entrance passage was a bar with small scrubbed-pine tables and a fake-antique figurehead with a chef’s hat on it. On the other side was a restaurant with very brightly striped tub chairs. Rows of glasses and cutlery shone in the sun streaming through the polished windows. Everything was sparkling clean, and drifting through the warm air was a spicy, expensive smell of scented candles.

  Nell was about to agree with Rachel when the words dried in her mouth. Someone was approaching rapidly in the entrance passage. A tall young man with dark hair and a preoccupied expression. He wore jeans and a white T-shirt and was studying a piece of paper in his hand.

  Nell felt a shock like an explosion, followed by a strange, falling sensation, as if the atoms of her being had all been blown up into the air, floated back down and rearranged themselves.

  He was thinner and looked scruffier, but there was no doubt that it was him. She would have been able to pick him out of a million. It was the man who had pretended to be OutdoorsGuy. Who had humiliated and embarrassed her at Paddington. Who, after Joey, was the source of all her troubles. Had it not been for him, she would never have fallen for Joey in the first place.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 22

  The honeymoon suite’s vast bed was draped in lilac and black. It was scattered with hot-pink, heart-shaped cushions decorated with black flounces, fringes and lace. Above it loomed a black-draped half-tester and dangling in front of that was a black glass chandelier.

  ‘We’ve got to go,’ Nell said grimly. ‘We absolutely can’t stay here.’

  ‘Oh come on,’ said Rachel. ‘It’s a bit over the top, but it’s pretty comfortable. Juno likes it, don’t you?’

  Juno, seated at a side table tucking into room service bangers, mash and onion gravy, nodded enthusiastically.