by R J Gould
‘You all right there, Thomas,’ asked Carol and Margaret in unison. All the people sitting on the back seat laughed. The person on the front seat didn’t join in.
Reginald, Suzie, Fiona, and Henry
It had stopped snowing. A weak January sun appeared through a blue chink in the heavy grey sky, illuminating the white slopes of Surrey countryside.
‘Beautiful,’ Suzie declared, squinting in the dazzling brightness. She took out her sunglasses.
They passed another sign to Worplesdon. Just two miles. But was it Worplesdon or would they be spending the afternoon on a tour of Surrey Ws?
On a hill on the outskirts of the village the locals were enjoying themselves; building snowmen, sleighing, and throwing snowballs. An over-excited dog was churning up the snow as it ran. A couple were walking hand in hand, twin-like in their matching navy ski jackets, orange beanies, and green Wellington boots. Suzie felt a pang of envy towards the young parents playing with their children.
They reached High Street, a muddled history lesson of buildings through the ages. A Tudor timber-framed house sloping substantially to its left stood next to a Barclays Bank sited in a grand four-storey Georgian building with powder blue walls. Next in line was a Co-op residing in an over-fussy Victorian structure with decorative brickwork, turrets and gargoyles. Further along was a low-rise block of flats, a sixties monstrosity of dull grey concrete and unimaginative rectangles of windows.
Ahead of them on the otherwise deserted pavement were a middle-aged couple, smartly but highly inappropriately dressed given the weather. The woman was wearing patent shoes with a significant heel. As they neared she stumbled and fell on one knee. The man pulled her back up.
‘My God!’ exclaimed Reginald.
‘What?’ asked Suzie.
‘It’s Fiona, my ex.’
‘Good, that means we’re in the right village.’
Reginald drove past them.
‘What are you doing, Reginald, aren’t you going to give them a lift?’
‘No.’
‘You can’t say no.’
‘I can. No.’
‘Don’t be silly.’
He accelerated.
‘Stop!’ Suzie screamed.
Reginald braked with some force and the car did a one hundred and eighty degree skid, settling with a loud thud against a lamppost.
‘Look what you’ve made me do,’ yelled Reginald.
‘Me? If you’d done the decent thing, what anyone else would have done, if you’d stopped and offered them a lift instead of speeding up then this wouldn’t … my bloody neck hurts.’
‘And if you hadn’t of screamed so loudly I wouldn’t have …’
A gentle tapping on the drivers’ side window interrupted their argument. It was Henry. Reginald pressed the window control. ‘Yes?’ he snapped as it opened.
‘Are you all right? Is there anything we can do to help?’ Fiona arrived by his side and peered inside the car.
‘Reginald!’
‘Hello, Fiona.’
‘Your eye! What’s happened?’
‘It’s a long story.’
Fiona looked across to Suzie and there was a short, frosty silence, broken by Reginald. ‘Fiona, this is Suzie.’
‘Your neck, your arm.’
‘Another long story,’ Suzie replied. ‘Get in, we’ll give you a lift.’
‘Is it still driveable?’ Henry asked.
Reginald got out to inspect the damage and Henry joined him. There was a considerable dent along the back passenger door. Reginald pushed the warped metal outwards to discontinue its contact against the tyre.
He looked across at Henry. ‘I think that should do it,’ he said with as much enthusiasm as he could muster in the circumstances. ‘Don’t I know you?’
‘We met once,’ Henry replied icily. ‘At a parents’ evening. I taught Clarissa English.’
‘Did you? Anyway, we’d better get going.’
Reginald got back in the car and started the engine while Henry stooped to join Fiona in the back.
‘Excuse me, there’s a wing mirror on the seat.’
‘Oh, just put it on the floor.’
‘But it’s your wing mirror.’
‘Well of course it’s mine. Who else’s would it be?’
‘I can see it’s yours, but it’s illegal to drive without wing mirrors.’
‘I’m not driving without them. It just so happens that one is on the back seat.’
‘They need to be in use.’
‘Have you got a better idea? Shall I leave the car here then we can all walk? Or perhaps I can find a BMW garage open on a snowy Sunday in this Godforsaken dump that happens to stock the appropriate wing mirror for this car. And while we’re at it, maybe they’ll have a spare door and rear panel for the repair.’
‘Careful, Reginald, you might get hit in the other eye, then we won’t be able to drive at all,’ muttered Suzie for the second time that day, loud enough for Fiona to hear.
‘Someone hit you, Reginald?’ she asked.
Reginald ignored her question. ‘Does anyone know where we’re going?’
Henry pulled out an A4 sheet. Fiona looked across at his meticulously hand drawn map of the route between the railway station and Manor Lodge Hotel. Arrows had been used to link intricate annotated notes to various points on the map. Turn left onto High Street and travel past small area of shops. Cross the road at the pedestrian crossing. Leave the village and proceed along the road for about two and a half miles until the sign for the hotel on the left hand side.
‘Henry, why on earth have you got that map if the intention was to get a taxi from the station?’
‘In case the driver was unsure of the route.’
‘Worplesdon is hardly going to be crammed full of sites of interest. I would have thought that Manor Lodge Hotel and the station are pretty well the only destinations taxi drivers ever have to go to. Not that there are any taxis.’
‘Poor you if you had had to walk the whole way.’ It was Suzie.
‘And poor you with your neck and your arm.’ As Fiona spoke she was aware that this could be misinterpreted as bitchiness which was not the intention. She quickly moved the conversation forward. ‘It must be so uncomfortable wearing a neck brace, a sling, too for that matter. How did it happen?’
‘Reginald hasn’t had a good week for driving.’
There followed a period of reflection, broken only by Henry’s ‘keep going, straight on’ and similarly unnecessary instructions every minute or so.
‘It will be a problem not having a wing mirror driving in the dark on the way back,’ Henry said as they turned a sharp bend.
‘Shut up, Henry,’ Reginald and Fiona said in unison.
Wayne and Clarissa
Wayne slid his hand across the bedside cabinet in search of his mobile phone. Wearily, he forced his hungover, sleep-deprived eyelids apart and was dazzled by the harsh glare of the bright digits. 10.09. Clarissa remained asleep by his side, her arms splayed out across her face.
‘Riss,’ he called out softly. She didn’t stir so he repeated her name and gave her a gentle prod when she still hadn’t responded.
‘What?’ she groaned.
‘It’s gone ten. We’d better get up if we want breakfast.’
‘Don’t want breakfast,’ she slurred.
‘Well, we need to get up anyway, lots to do before everyone arrives.’ Wayne stood up and walked around the bed. Clarissa always chose the window side. When he pulled open the curtains uninviting light filled the room.
‘God, Wayne, do you have to do that?’
He paused before replying, weighing up how best to express his concern having looked outside. After all, Clarissa did have a history of getting rather panicky when a potential problem loomed.
‘Bit of snow out there,’ he settled on. ‘So much for the weather forecast.’
Actually, “bit” was a considerable understatement. There was already a thick ground covering and t
he heavy sheet of dark grey sky was chucking down more snow at a rapid rate.
Clarissa got out of bed and Wayne savoured her naked beauty. As she approached the window he blocked her path, put his arms around her slender waist, and kissed her. ‘I love you.’
‘Not now,’ Clarissa said, pushing him aside with her usual sense of overwhelming urgency once there was something on her mind. ‘Out the way, let me see. Shit!’
At the same instant Clarissa and Wayne began to consider the odds. Clarissa was certain her father would reach the hotel –he could overcome any obstacle. In fact, he would enjoy the challenge. But she had doubts about the chance of success for her mother and The Weed, as she called Henry – though not to his face except once by accident when she was a bit drunk. Wayne was confident that his mum, Lil, and Jack would make it, but what about poor old Dad and Margaret having to get across from the Isle of Wight?
‘Well, if the worst comes to the worst, we’ll just have to party ourselves,’ Clarissa joked.
Over the last day or so they’d agreed to totally lighten up about what after all was no more than a small family gathering. Wayne had promised not to regularly declare his portfolio of things that could go wrong and Clarissa had pledged not to bottle up her fears to the point of boiling over. They could do a lot worse than be at this hotel, whatever the weather and whoever turned up, Wayne reckoned as he looked around and took in the old-fashioned charm of the room. High-beamed ceiling, gold filigree wallpaper, deep burgundy curtains, dark wood furniture. There was a large oil painting of distant gently rolling hills, sheep, and haystacks in the middle distance, and a horse-drawn coach winding its way along an uneven track in the foreground. He’d hate it in his own house but here it seemed perfect.
By the time he’d reached the bedroom the previous evening Wayne had been too drunk to appreciate how stylish it all was. Anyway, Clarissa had other things on her mind. She’d begun to shed clothes as they walked along the corridor and was already down to the skimpy black and purple underwear that Si had bought by the time they’d got into the room.
‘Bloody nice of your dad booking us in here last night. Very generous.’
‘Yeah, he’s always doing stuff like this,’ Clarissa answered somewhat dismissively as she remained standing by the window watching the snowfall.
Her dad. Her “don’t worry, I know best” dad, always telling everyone what they should be doing. Poor Mum in his shadow since Clarissa could remember, following his orders like a lapdog. Maybe a bit of her dad’s attitude had rubbed off on her the way she treated her mother sometimes. There was no way she was going to end up like that, letting a man boss her around. To his credit, Wayne didn’t even try.
‘Riss, you’re miles away. Let’s dash down for breakfast, it finishes in fifteen minutes. Then we can come back up and get ready properly.’
She turned and regarded her near naked fiancée with a wave of affection. He was just wearing a pair of skimpy boxers. A lovely face, a tall muscular frame, as gentle as a lamb. He was so malleable – or was it pliable? Or did they mean the same? She’d have to ask The Weed. After all, he was the English teacher, he could no doubt discuss it for hours. Looking across at Wayne she felt extremely lustful despite the previous night’s activities. Or was it because of them? Another question for The Weed. Ha-ha.
‘No time for underwear then,’ she said teasingly as she pulled on jeans and a T-shirt.
‘Blimey, you are the limit.’
It was Clarissa’s second visit to the hotel. She’d spent a night in bed with Si last time round, which was about a year and a half ago. A client based in Guildford had invited the magazine’s marketing team to lunch there following great returns on a promotion they had run. That was during early summer; the place looked quite different now. Then they’d been able to drink champagne in the manicured gardens amidst an explosion of red, pink, and white blossom. After that they went into the private dining room that they were going to use for today’s meal. The lunch had been delicious. When the others headed off she and Si spent the afternoon drinking and then they stayed in the most expensive room, the Manor Suite, with its four-poster bed and a Jacuzzi in the bathroom.
When she and Wayne announced their engagement her mother suggested the idea of a lunch so that the two families could meet. They came to the conclusion that it was as good a way of meeting as any. This was the hotel that came to mind. It was somewhere special and had the added advantage of being at least part of the way towards the Isle of Wight for the sake of Thomas and Margaret. She did have just a little bit of misgiving based on her previous tenancy, but no one had to know that she’d spent a night there with another man. So the day after her mother had made the suggestion Clarissa called her father and he agreed to fund the event. She left it to him to do the arranging.
And now here they were, eating breakfast in this luxury hotel, Wayne with his full English breakfast, a plate piled high with sausages, bacon, egg, tomatoes, mushrooms, and quite possibly other stuff hidden in the heap. Clarissa stuck to her usual hotel diet of muesli, fruit salad, yoghurt, and double espresso.
Back in their bedroom they showered, dressed, and packed. Wayne wore his new Ted Baker suit, selected by Clarissa. For herself she’d chosen a flowing patterned linen dress from Jigsaw – not her usual style for clothes. An out of the ordinary outfit for a special day, she had said when they bought it.
Wayne waited patiently until Clarissa had finished applying make-up then he picked up their weekend bag. They left the bedroom and went down to reception.
‘A very nice stay. Thank you very much,’ Wayne said as he handed in the key.
‘Which room are we in?’ Clarissa asked.
‘Room, madam? It says it here,’ said the young lady behind the counter with a strong Germanic accent but perfect grammar. She smiled as she looked at the tab on the key she had just been handed. ‘Room one hundred and twenty four.’
‘Not our bedroom, the dining room,’ Clarissa countered.
‘Yes, you are most welcome to dine here. Would you like me to reserve you a table?’
‘Where is our own dining room? It’s been reserved under the name of Montague,’ Clarissa persisted with a noble attempt to hide a rising impatience.
The receptionist looked at her computer screen, clicked the mouse a few times, then shuffled through the papers in front of her. She frowned with considerable intensity. ‘Excuse me, I will call the manager.’
‘Her English isn’t good enough to understand what I’m asking,’ Clarissa explained.
A couple of minutes later the manager joined them in reception and Clarissa repeated that her father had booked the private dining room for their engagement party and that the guests would be arriving within half an hour or so. Montague is the name, she reiterated.
‘We had an enquiry and tentative reservation, I took the call myself,’ explained the manager. ‘Then I sent an email to Mr Montague asking for a deposit to confirm the booking but he didn’t reply. As usual we sent a reminder and asked for a response within a week or else we would have to cancel the reservation. We didn’t get an answer so our assumption was that the room was no longer needed. I’m afraid it’s taken by another customer.’
‘What! Are you saying that we haven’t got a place to eat?’
‘I could probably fit your group in the main dining room though you might have to wait for an hour or so. How many are you?’
‘That’s not the same, we want our own room.’
‘I do apologise, but there is little I can do.’
The manager had one of those false looks of deep concern that people working in the service sector are able to put on in an instant. At the same time, despite this look, they manage to convey that it is the end of the conversation so the customer might as well piss off. Wayne and Clarissa picked up on the message. They put their bag in the boot of the car and sat in the lounge in silence, waiting for the imminent arrival of their guests.
Thomas, Margaret, Carol, Jack, and Li
l
‘It’s nice to meet you,’ Carol said, looking across Thomas and Lil towards Margaret.
‘And it’s good to meet you, Carol.’
‘On such a happy occasion, too.’
‘How are things goin’ with you, Lil?’ Thomas asked.
‘She’s got some big news, ain’t you, Lil. She’s got an exciting trip coming up.’
‘Mum, I can speak for myself, thank you very much.’ So she chatted away about what had been happening. She told Thomas and Margaret about her progress at college, the plans for higher education and then, having practiced several times over the last couple of days and now reached a high level of drama, she announced the New York trip. Just like her mum, her dad wanted to know all the details about the cost and how come someone else was paying. This took the excitement out of the chat so she ceased speaking.
Then Carol took over, talking about her lecture and the plans for a university course. They were yapping away like close mates in the back when Jack interrupted them with a grunted, ‘We’re ’ere.’
The taxi had stopped in front of what the passengers would later justifiably describe as a palace; a broad building as white as the snow on the ground with a grand arched portal built of rich honey-coloured stone. The same stone was used for the lintels on the long rows of imposing sash windows across three storeys.
‘Sorry to keep you waiting,’ Thomas addressed the taxi driver. ‘We was so busy catching up we didn’t know we’d arrived.’
‘It’s your money. You can sit in here as long as you like,’ the taxi driver replied. Thomas paid up as the women and Jack got out. The fare seemed rather high, twenty-four pounds, and Thomas was all set to challenge the driver. But reflecting on what a special day it was he decided not to spoil it with an argument. Everything was going well; the journey despite the weather, seeing Carol in good form. Carol and Margaret getting on fine was an added bonus. Lil was standing next to them playing with her mobile phone. How she’d changed in the few months since he last saw her. Admittedly, Jack was detached from the group and it must be noted, seemed rather morose for such a celebratory occasion.