by Della Galton
‘I hope she says yes,’ Zoe said. ‘I’ve been trying to imagine how I’d feel if a guy proposed to me after climbing up to my window with a box of chocolates. It’s all a bit Rapunzel, isn’t it!’
‘I suppose it would depend on who he was.’ Clara thought of her ex, Will Lightfoot, who’d been a techie on a help desk for Apple. Which was still recent enough to twinge a bit.
‘It might also depend on how good the chocolates were,’ Zoe added thoughtfully.
A couple of feet away, Foxy, who’d been sniffing at a patch of grass – pricked up her ears at the sound of the word chocolate – she was a total foodie, Clara had discovered – and looked hopefully in their direction. Not seeing any evidence of any of her favourite doggie chocolate on offer, she didn’t bother coming over but resumed her sniffing.
Arnold Fairweather, the man currently climbing up the lighthouse, had an enormous purple box strapped to his back, which was hampering his progress slightly as it had just slipped round a little and one corner was now wedged under his armpit.
‘The Milk Tray advert has a lot to answer for,’ Clara mused. ‘The guy in the 2003 one was quite hot. You weren’t even born then, were you?’
‘I was five,’ Zoe said.
‘Blimey, that makes me feel old. I was eighteen.’
‘But I’ve seen them all on YouTube. I checked them out when you said this was happening.’ Zoe blushed, her English rose skin going pink. ‘Is that overkeen? It probably is, isn’t it? Anyway, I wasn’t so struck on the shark-infested sea one. I guess we should be relieved he didn’t want to set that up!’
‘It would have made a great video,’ Clara said, glancing at the cameraman a few feet away. He and Matt Davies, the professional climber, who was currently looking bored but on standby in case he was needed, were the only other spectators – or at least the only other invited ones. A couple of dog walkers on the coast path were pointing at the unfolding drama – or perhaps spectacle would have been a more accurate description.
‘Although we may have had trouble finding any co-operative sharks on the Dorset coast.’
‘I think the insurance company might have quibbled a bit more too,’ Clara said.
‘What was that stroppy message from the Manor House about?’ Zoe asked.
Clara sighed. ‘Just a misunderstanding about a booking.’ This wasn’t quite true – Adam Greenwood, the manager of the Manor House Hotel, had been very rude. He’d had some bee in his bonnet about them stealing a booking, which was ridiculous, not to mention petty. It had taken all of her self-restraint not to hang up on him and all of her tact to calm him down, which she’d done, eventually.
But she didn’t want to get involved in hotel politics with Zoe right now. It was too lovely an evening.
Arnold Fairweather had just reached the halfway point – fortunately their lighthouse was on the squat side and only twelve metres high – and he had paused for breath. Like the original hero, he was dressed all in black. Wasn’t black supposed to be a slimming colour! But this was where the similarity to heroes ended. He was bigger than the average climber and carrying an extra couple of stone around your middle could only hamper you, Clara thought, feeling a twinge of trepidation. His age was against him too. He was fifty-one – not that she hadn’t met plenty of fit fifty-one- year-olds in her time, but Arnold Fairweather wasn’t one of them.
‘He looks like he’s doing OK, doesn’t he,’ Zoe said. ‘And he’s right, it’ll make a great video for posterity. They can show it to their grandkids…’ She broke off, because it was at that very moment that things started to go wrong.
One moment Arnold had been making slow, if a little laborious, progress up the lighthouse and the next he was dangling. No longer a spider but a frantically struggling fly on a thin rope strand of web.
‘Oh my God, what’s happening?’ Zoe clutched Clara’s arm.
‘It’s OK. He’s just lost his footing that’s all. He has the safety rope on. He’s perfectly fine.’
Arnold didn’t look fine. His arms and legs were thrashing about and he was clawing at his chest.
Clara was struck by a dreadful realisation. ‘Good grief, I think he might be having a heart attack.’
Both women were suddenly galvanised into action. Matt had woken up too. He darted in to steady the ropes, calling up to Arnold as he did so. The cameraman was still filming. Couldn’t he see something was wrong?
Then, to make matters worse, the window, which was only a few feet above Arnold’s head, was flung open and a tousled blonde head popped out. ‘Arnold Fairweather, what the bloody hell do you think you’re playing at?’
At least everything had turned out OK in the end, Clara thought as she finally put the key into the front door of Kate’s bungalow at midnight on that same Friday evening. Although it had been touch-and-go for a while.
She had spent the entire evening in Poole Accident and Emergency department, where she had followed the ambulance, along with Arnold’s prospective fiancée, Maureen Grey. Maureen had not been impressed with what she called ‘Arnold’s shenanigans’. She had not been impressed that the last evening of their holiday had been wasted in A&E. She had not been impressed when it turned out that Arnold wasn’t having a heart attack at all, nor even an angina attack, but a common-or-garden panic attack, brought on by his fear of heights.
‘What on earth did you think you were doing?’ she had yelled at Arnold, once it was clear there was nothing at all wrong with him. ‘You know you hate heights.’
‘I was trying to do something romantic.’ He had visibly shrunk under her gaze.
‘Well, you failed, you great wassock.’ Her voice had got shriller and shriller. ‘I don’t even like Milk Tray.’
Poor Arnold. Clara had begun to feel sorry for him under this rather unfair, in her opinion, onslaught. The contrast of his white face against his black clothes wasn’t as marked as it had been earlier, but he was still quaking in his Nike trainers.
She had just been wondering whether she should perhaps intervene before he really did have a heart attack, when, to her horror, she had noticed that a scraggy-looking teenager, also in A&E, had started to film the exchange on his mobile. That was all they needed.
She had marched across and demanded he stop, and the teenager, who’d towered over her, even with her heels, had scowled but reluctantly obeyed. Maureen Grey had stopped shouting after that, but the whole thing had been a complete nightmare.
Finally, in her boss’s gorgeous, stainless-steel kitchen, Clara kicked off her three-inch heels, made herself a hot chocolate and tried to calm down. Foxy was overjoyed to see her – she wasn’t used to being left alone for long, but fortunately Zoe had offered to feed her and let her out while Clara had been at A&E. Now the dog pushed her cold wet nose into Clara’s hand and wagged her skinny red tail. Clara fondled her ears.
‘I don’t know what Kate is going to say about all this,’ Clara told her. ‘We don’t need any unnecessary publicity.’
Foxy wagged her tail some more and Clara gave her a treat. Was she really discussing her evening with a dog? She must be more exhausted than she thought. Thank heavens no real harm had been done.
She would tell Kate in her Monday report. Fingers crossed, she would understand that none of today’s events could have been foreseen. Just as Arnold Fairweather hadn’t foreseen that his big romantic gesture was going to backfire on him.
Did men ever think things through? Clara wondered later, when the adrenaline spike of the evening finally subsided enough to make sleep an option and she climbed into the king-size bed.
She might not have approved of Maureen Grey’s outburst in A&E, but she did have a smidgeon of sympathy for the woman, having only recently been on the other end of a big, but misguided, romantic gesture herself.
That too had been an unfortunate series of events. Will, her partner of almost a year, had decided to surprise her a couple of weeks before their first anniversary with an equally unexpected proposition.
&
nbsp; It hadn’t been of the ‘let’s get married’ variety, thank heavens. Will must have spotted the element of coolness in their relationship lately. Clara had been thinking of telling him they should call it a day. They’d been drifting apart for a few weeks. Will, however, had put it all down to the fact that they didn’t see enough of each other, due to their conflicting work patterns. They didn’t live together – although their houses were only a few miles apart – but he worked nine till five and she worked shifts.
His answer to this had been to take her out for a spontaneous slap-up meal at her favourite Italian. Clara wasn’t a fan of surprises, although she’d been touched by the gesture and had insisted on contributing her half. But then, just after they’d paid the bill, he had presented her with a small white envelope.
‘It’s an investment in our future,’ he’d said, his eyes gleaming in the candlelight. ‘It’s got a long date on it, so I think it could work.’
Feeling only a slight sense of foreboding, Clara had opened the envelope and discovered it had contained a round-the-world plane ticket.
For a whole ten seconds, she’d been speechless. Had she ever in their entire relationship given Will the idea that she might like to go travelling? She didn’t think so. She was a home bird, through and through. Dorset was the county where she’d grown up. She loved living and working by the sea. She was also terrified of flying.
‘What do you think?’ Will had said. ‘I’m coming too. They were doing a “buy one get one free”.’
She’d put up a hand before he got too carried away. ‘Will, you really should have asked me.’
‘I am asking you.’
‘I mean, before you bought it.’ Although technically she supposed he hadn’t bought it if it was a ‘buy one get one free’.
‘Don’t you want to go?’ He was clearly puzzled by her reaction.
She should have just said no there and then, but she hadn’t wanted to throw his grand gesture completely back in his face. His heart had clearly been in the right place.
‘Have you forgotten I’ve just taken on a new job?’
‘Well, no, but they can get someone else and you’ll easily get another fab job when you get back. You’re brilliant at what you do.’
‘Thanks, but I want this job.’
‘More than you want to go round the world with me?’
That was a toughie too, but she had bitten the bullet. ‘Er – right at the moment – yes.’
He’d looked so crestfallen, but this would have been bad timing even if she had wanted to go round the world with Will, which she had known in that moment with a terrible clarity that she didn’t.
In fact, his out-of-the-blue proposition had clarified everything for her, just as it must have done for Maureen when she’d seen Arnold’s upturned red, panting face, inching up towards the window of her boudoir in the lighthouse.
Not only did Clara not want to go round the world with Will, she had also known for sure then that she didn’t want to carry on seeing him.
Will had taken it badly. Since their split at the end of April, just over two months ago, she hadn’t heard a murmur from him, despite the fact that, at the time, once he’d calmed down sufficiently, he had elicited from her a promise that they could still be friends.
She had agreed that she would like that. Will was a nice enough guy. But ‘nice enough’ just wasn’t what she’d had in mind for a life partner. Both her mum and her older sister, Rosanna, had told her she was being too picky.
‘There is no knight in shining armour,’ Rosanna had said, prodding her husband, Ed, in his ample middle – he drove artic trucks for a living – and smiling so he knew she was teasing.
‘Compromise is the key,’ her mother had said. ‘I compromised when I met your father and I still do!’
As her parents had been married for thirty-nine years, Rosanna had just sneaked in under the radar, Clara didn’t take this too seriously either.
Anyway, she didn’t want to compromise on love. She had decided she would far rather be on the shelf than in the wrong cupboard.
Even so, splitting up with Will had been the only dark spot this year. Everything else had been rosy. She had a fabulous new job, a gorgeous free bungalow on the cliffs, which meant she could put her own house in Wareham up on Airbnb – Rosanna had agreed to help out with the changeovers – she needed the cash. And she had an overfriendly three-legged dog to take care of – what could be better?
As Clara yawned and stretched across to switch off the rather twee Cath Kidston bedside light, she found herself praying that Arnold Fairweather and his shenanigans hadn’t wrecked the whole thing before she’d really had the chance to get started.
3
Clara was at her desk in the manager’s office on Monday morning, she had just written up her manager’s report, when Kate Rawlinson’s name flashed up on her mobile.
Oh heck. She shouldn’t have waited. She should have phoned her about Arnold first. But it was too late now.
Stiff with tension, she answered it. To her immense relief, Kate sounded relaxed.
‘Just a routine call, Clara. How are things?’
Clara felt as though she’d been given a second chance. Keeping her voice as matter-of-fact as possible, she told her what had happened on Friday.
Kate took the news a lot better than she’d expected.
‘I really don’t see how you could have foreseen what would happen. Why did he want to climb up our lighthouse anyway?’
‘He said something about Maureen being a fan of Mission Impossible.’
Kate snorted. ‘And did they say anything else when they checked out?’
‘Not much,’ Clara replied. ‘Although they didn’t look like they were very happy. I don’t think Maureen had forgiven him for being what she called “a proper show-up”. She turned him down apparently.’
‘Oh dear. Mmmm. We’ll just put that one down to experience, but maybe no more lighthouse climbs.’
‘Definitely not,’ Clara said, feeling as though a great weight had been lifted from her shoulders.
‘So, how’s it going otherwise? Do we have any other guests coming who have crazy OTT dreams I should know about?’
‘Not many are as crazy as that one,’ Clara said, scrolling through the online bookings’ diary on her laptop. ‘We’ve got a troupe of actors here this week. They’re rehearsing for an open-air production of Romeo and Juliet in Regent’s Park and they’ve booked every room for a fortnight, plus the amphitheatre and a full catering staff.’
‘Ah yes. I remember.’
‘Then, on the eighteenth of July, we’ve got a dog display team who are hoping to perform at Crufts next year. I’m really looking forward to meeting them.’
‘Maybe they’ll be able to teach Foxy a thing or two. How is my gorgeous girl?’
‘She’s asleep in her basket, under my desk.’ Clara nudged Foxy with her toe and she opened one sleepy brown eye and wagged her skinny tail. ‘She’s been chasing seagulls on the coast path. She’s tired out.’
‘Bless her.’
‘How’s Australia?’
‘Hot – even though technically it’s winter over here.’
‘Sounds lovely. It’s still hot here too. By the way, the dog handlers are sharing the place with some young musicians who plan to record their debut single.’
‘Ooh, how exciting. We might be responsible for a Number One. Wouldn’t that be something?’
‘You never know.’ Clara could hear raised voices in reception. She hoped Kate couldn’t. ‘I’d better get on,’ she told her boss. ‘Don’t worry. Everything’s under control.’ She hoped that were true too. The voices were getting louder, or at least one of them was. Clara put her hand over the phone. ‘I’ll be in touch again very soon.’
‘No rush,’ Kate said and Clara hung up hurriedly and shot out into reception.
To her immense relief, there wasn’t a row going on. Zoe was just mid discussion with a woman who had an incredibly loud v
oice.
‘They won’t be able to hear a thing – we’ll be as quiet as little mice,’ she screeched, seemingly unaware that the entire hotel, including the postman, who’d just got out of his van outside, were listening to her now.
‘I’m sure that’s true,’ Zoe said, looking slightly strained as she glanced up at Clara.
‘Is everything OK?’
The woman turned and beamed at Clara. She didn’t look cross. She was just ultra-loud.
‘This is Mrs Jones, Chair of the WI,’ Zoe introduced them. ‘As you know, we’re hosting an event for them in December.’
‘Very pleased to meet you, Mrs Jones.’
‘Call me, Dora,’ she yelled at the top of her voice.
Clara resisted the temptation to wince. It was painful at close quarters.
‘The WI would like to come in and set up the room the day before if that’s possible?’ Zoe was pointing at the bookings screen with a frantic ‘help me please’ expression in her eyes.
Clara leaned over her shoulder and saw that they had a convention of Quakers doing a silent retreat booked in for the day before. She turned back to the Chair of the WI. ‘Dora,’ she began, ‘I couldn’t possibly put you to the trouble of sending an advance party. We will organise everything for you. Maybe, as you’re here now, you could show me what you would like?’
At around eleven thirty, Zoe appeared in the doorway with two lattes and a packet of ginger nuts, Clara’s favourite.
Oh to be effortlessly slim like the twenty-two-year-old and not have to worry about how many biscuits you ate, Clara thought, unconsciously holding her stomach in. Unlike most of the hotel staff, Clara didn’t wear the Bluebell Cliff uniform, which was a smart navy suit with a distinctive curving bluebell logo on the pocket of the jacket. She did wear a suit to work, but she had her own personal collection, all of which were especially cut to flatter her petite – OK, make that short – figure and she had them in an array of gorgeous colours. Today’s was lemon and she had a co-ordinating designer bag to go with it.
