by Simon Brett
Suzy was by no means a remote figurehead in the enterprise; she was a very hands-on manager. Her money was backing the project, and she had always kept an eye on what her money was up to. She was punctilious about the quality of staff – particularly the chefs – who worked for her. The media may have started the ball rolling, but word-of-mouth recommendations ensured its continuing motion.
As the reputation of Hopwicke House grew, the hotel appeared more frequently in brochures targeted at the international super-rich – particularly Americans. Soon the breakfast tables in the conservatory resounded to Californian enquiries as to what a kipper might be, or tentative Texan queries about the provenance of black pudding. The hotel was included in an increasing number of upmarket tours, and played its part in nurturing the delusion of wealthy Americans that England had been created by P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie.
So Suzy Longthorne had cleverly carved her niche, done the appropriate niche-marketing, and looked set fair to reap great riches from that niche.
Until 11 September 2001. Among the many other effects of that momentous day, as Americans ceased to fly abroad and the bottom fell out of the tourism market, bookings at Hopwicke Country House Hotel immediately declined. Unfortunately, the transatlantic market was not alone in drying up. A collective guilt about over-indulgence had struck the Western world, and no amount of inducements in the form of weekend breaks with suicidally low profit margins seemed able to reverse the downturn for Suzy’s business. She had been forced to abandon the exclusivity that had been her cachet and selling-point, and accept bookings from anyone who wished to stay.
It was with this knowledge, on that April afternoon, that her friend Jude asked, a little tentatively, ‘Who have you got in tonight?’
Suzy’s perfect nose wrinkled with distaste. ‘The Pillars of Sussex.’
‘Oh.’ Jude grimaced in sympathy. Though she had never met any members, she recognized the name. Like most British clubs and institutions, it had been founded in the second half of the nineteenth century. Originally, under the grand name of ‘The Pillars of Society’, the group had been initiated for philanthropic purposes, and was still involved in local charity work and Christmas fund-raising. As with many such associations, however, the initial worthy intention soon took a back seat to procedures, rituals, ceremonies, elections, all of which had the same general aim: that those who had achieved membership of the Pillars should feel eternally superior to those who had not. Nothing had changed since an 1836 publication, Hints on Etiquette, had observed that, ‘the English are the most aristocratic democrats in the world; always endeavouring to squeeze through the portals of rank and fashion, and then slamming the door in the face of any unfortunate devil who may happen to be behind them.’
Needless to say, meetings of the Pillars of Sussex involved a great deal of drinking.
What made all this worse, from Jude’s perspective, was that the Pillars of Sussex was an exclusively male organization. She had grown up suspecting that in the absence of female company men get increasingly childish, and experience had turned the suspicion into a conviction. She did not relish the evening of raucous misogyny ahead.
But her views didn’t matter; she was there to help out her friend. ‘What do you want me to do, Suzy? Bar?’
‘No, I’ll handle most of that. Part of being the hostess. Might need some help with the drinks orders before dinner.’
‘Trays of glasses of wine?’
‘I think this lot’ll probably be drinking beer. No, basically, I want you to help with the waitressing.’
‘OK.’ That was what Jude had been expecting. ‘Is it just me?’
‘No, I’ll help, of course. And I’ve got Kerry . . .’
Suzy spoke as if this possession was a not unmixed blessing. Jude had met the girl on a previous visit – a sulky, rather beautiful fifteen-year-old supposedly destined for a career in hotel management. Since Kerry was in her last year at private school and without much prospect of making any impact academically, her parents had arranged for her to spend her Easter holiday doing ‘work experience’ at Hopwicke House ‘in order to get some hands-on training’. The girl’s commitment to her career choice was not marked – her only interest seemed to be pop music – but Suzy endured Kerry’s flouncing and inefficiency with surprising forbearance.
Perhaps any help was better than none. Finding steady waiting staff was a continuing problem for Suzy. ‘Don’t suppose you know anyone looking for some part-time work?’ Jude was asked, not for the first time.
She shook her head, not for the first time, and once again had the mischievous idea of mentioning the job to her neighbour. It wouldn’t be a serious suggestion. Carole Seddon, with her civil-service pension and her hide-bound ideas of dignity, would be appalled at the notion of acting as a waitress. But Jude was playfully tempted to unleash the inevitable knee-jerk reaction.
‘Max is cooking for them, presumably?’
‘Yes.’ Suzy looked at the exquisite Piaget watch Rick Hendry had lavished on her for one of their happier anniversaries. ‘He should be in by now. I’m afraid the Pillars of Sussex aren’t his favourite kind of clientele. Still, how else are we going to get dinner for twenty and most of the rooms full on a Tuesday evening?’ She spoke with weary resignation.
Max Townley, Jude knew, saw himself as a ‘personality chef’. He was good at his job and, so long as Hopwicke House attracted high-profile guests, he had enjoyed mingling, and identifying himself, with celebrity. Since the downturn of the previous year, Max had been less at ease, and Suzy knew that each ‘ordinary’ restaurant booking she took made him more unsettled. The fact that fear of drink–driving convictions would guarantee most of the hotel’s rooms were booked for the night carried little weight with the chef. From Max’s point of view, as clientele for a restaurant where he was cooking, the Pillars of Sussex were about as bad as it could get.
‘Are you worried about him not turning up?’ asked Jude.
‘No, he’ll be here. Max is enough of a professional to do that. But he’ll make his point by being late . . . and resentful.’ Her voice took on the chef’s petulant timbre. ‘A load of bloody stuffed shirts who wouldn’t recognize good food if it came up and bit them on the leg, and who will have blunted any taste buds they have left with too much beer before dinner, and then be allowed to smoke all the way through the meal.’
‘Really?’ asked Jude, amazed. One of the strictest rules of the Hopwicke House restaurant had always been its non-smoking policy. Mega-celebrities of the music and film business had succumbed meekly to the stricture, and retired to the bar for their cigarettes and cigars. The fact that the prohibition was being relaxed for a group as undistinguished as the Pillars of Sussex showed, more forcibly than any other indicator, the levels to which Suzy Longthorne’s aspirations had descended.
But it didn’t need saying. Jude leant across the kitchen table and took her friend’s hand, still soft from its years of expensive lotioning.
‘Things really bad, are they, Suzy?’
There was a nod, and for a moment tears threatened the famous hazel eyes.
‘Everything rather a mess, I’m afraid,’ the ‘Face of the Sixties’ admitted.
‘Anything you can talk about? Want to talk about?’
‘Some things, maybe. Certainly this.’
From a pocket in her apron, Suzy extracted an envelope. It bore the Hopwicke House crest, but no name, address or stamp. The back had not been sealed, just tucked in, and the envelope was slightly bent from its sojourn in the apron.
‘Kerry found it in one of the rooms she was checking. She said she opened it because she thought there might be a tip inside . . . though I think she was just being nosy.’
Jude picked up the envelope. ‘May I?’
Her friend gave a defeated nod.
There was only one sheet of paper inside. Of the same quality as the envelope, again it bore the Hopwicke House crest. Centred on the page were three lines of printed text.
>
ENJOY THIS EVENING.
IF YOU’RE NOT SENSIBLE,
IT’LL BE YOUR LAST.
Chapter Two
The phone call had disturbed Carole Seddon. Her life was rigidly compartmentalized, and many of its compartments had, she hoped, been sealed up for permanent storage. To have one of those old boxes opened threatened her hard-won equilibrium.
Having retired from the Home Office early (and the earliness still rankled), moving with her Labrador Gulliver to a house called High Tor in the seaside village of Fethering had seemed an eminently sensible solution to the problem posed by the rest of her life. And, though the arrival of her next-door neighbour had added extra dimensions to that life, in her more po-faced moods Carole could still feel nostalgic for the acceptable dullness of Fethering pre-Jude.
There was a sharp division in Carole Seddon’s mind between the life she had lived in London and now lived in West Sussex. Although she was happy to discuss her career as a civil servant, she had kept few London friends, and never talked about her personal life. Jude was one of the very few people in Fethering who knew her neighbour had once been married and was a mother.
Had the phone call come from David, Carole would have been less flustered. Her relationship with her ex-husband had now settled down to something totally inert, its only remarkable feature being the fact that two people with so little in common had ever spent time together. Mutual financial interests, or news of long-lost relatives’ deaths, necessitated occasional phone calls, which were politely conducted without warmth, but without animosity.
It was Stephen, however, who had rung Carole that evening, and she wasn’t so sure what her relationship with her son had settled down to. On the rare occasions when she could no longer keep the lid on that particular compartment battened down, its contents prompted a mix of unwelcome emotions. She felt guilty for her lack of maternal instinct. Stephen’s birth had been a profound shock to her, shattering the control which up until then she had exercised over all aspects of her life. A woman who indulged in any kind of self-analysis might have deduced she had experienced post-natal depression, but for Carole Seddon that was territory into which she did not allow her mind to stray. She had been brought up to believe that giving in to mental illness was self-indulgent. Life was for getting on with.
All she knew was that, from the start, Stephen had represented a challenge rather than a blessing. She could not fault herself on the meticulous attention she had given to his upbringing, but she knew she had never felt for him that instinctive love about which so many parents wax lyrical.
So when, as an adult, Stephen drifted further away from her, Carole felt no extra guilt, no regret, possibly even an inadmissible degree of relief.
They never lost touch. Present-givings at Christmas and birthdays were meticulously observed. They rarely met in London, but at least twice a year Stephen would come down to the Fethering area and take his mother out for lunch. The meals were eaten in anonymous seaside restaurants or pubs, and passed off amiably enough.
On these occasions Carole would say the minimum about her local doings, but Stephen seemed quite happy to monopolize the conversation. He talked almost exclusively about his work, which involved computers and money in a combination his mother never quite managed to grasp. She should have taken more interest when he first started his economics course at Nottingham University; then maybe she would have been able to follow the subsequent progress of his career. As it was, when they met she felt increasingly like someone at a party who hadn’t caught the name of the person to whom they were talking initially, and had left it too late to ask.
So, if a question about their relationship had been put to them, both Carole and Stephen would have said they ‘got on’. In spite of the divorce, theirs could by no means be classified as a ‘dysfunctional’ family; it was just one that lacked spontaneous affection.
Inside Carole grew the suspicion, which she was unable to voice – even to herself – that the entire contents of her son’s gene-pool derived from his father, and that Stephen Seddon was, in fact, a deeply boring man.
But exciting things happen even to boring men, and that evening Carole’s son had had exciting news to impart.
‘Mother . . .’ he’d said. As a child, he’d always called her ‘Mummy’. When he left for university, the word seemed to embarrass him. ‘Mother’ was safer, less intimate. He’d stuck with it.
‘Mother, I’m engaged to be married.’ The wording, too, seemed formal, distancing.
It was the last thing Carole had been expecting. For Stephen to ring was unusual enough; for him to ring with anything to say beyond vague pleasantries was unheard of. ‘Ah,’ she had responded, caught on the hop. ‘Wonderful.’
Funny, she’d never really thought of her son as having a sexual identity. He’d certainly never brought any girls home. Though maybe, given the state of his parents’ marriage, he might have considered that an unnecessarily risky procedure.
‘Her name’s Gaby. I met her through work.’
‘And what work is that? Remind me again.’ Of course she didn’t say the words, but Carole was surprised how readily they came into her mind. The unspoken response struck her as funny, and she knew it would have struck Jude as funny too.
She managed to come up with a more socially acceptable, ‘So how long have you known each other?’
‘Three years. But we’ve only been going out together for the last seven months.’ Stephen spoke of his fiancée with exactly the same seriousness as he did about the work that Carole didn’t understand.
‘Does she do the same sort of thing as you do? Is she in the same company?’ Whatever that’s called.
‘Oh no, no, she was a client. We set up a financing package for the agency she works for,’ he continued, confusing his mother even more. She understood the individual words; they just didn’t seem to link together into anything that made sense.
‘Ah.’ Carole tried desperately to think what potential mothers-in-law were supposed to say in these circumstances. ‘So have you thought yet about when you’re going to get married?’
‘September the fourteenth,’ her son replied, surprisingly specific.
‘Well, that sounds fine.’
‘It fits in with Gaby’s parents. They always spend August in the South of France.’
Oh yes, of course. The fiancée would have parents. Presumably at some point Carole would have to meet them. She shrank instinctively from the thought of contact with these unknown people. If their daughter was called Gaby, and they spent their summers in the South of France, then perhaps they weren’t even British?
‘Also,’ Stephen went on, ‘that date suits Dad fine.’
Carole was shocked by how much that hurt. Not just Stephen continuing to call David ‘Dad’ while she had been relegated to ‘Mother’, but the implication of her ex-husband’s complicity in her son’s life. David had been told about the wedding before she had. He’d probably met Gaby. They all lived in London, after all. (At least, presumably Gaby lived in London.) Perhaps David was regularly included in social excursions with the young couple.
Her marriage, the event Carole thought she had locked away for ever, was evidently still capable of breaking out and reviving her pain.
‘I’d like you to meet Gaby,’ Stephen pressed on doggedly.
Carole felt new guilt. She should have said that before he did. ‘I’d love to meet Gaby soon’ – that’s what she should have said. And yet, in the shock and smarting from the hurt, she was forgetting even her most basic good manners.
‘Oh yes, I’d love that!’ Trying to make up the lost ground, she only managed to sound over-effusive.
‘We want to come down the weekend after next.’ As her son spoke, Carole realized he was following an agenda. His and Gaby’s lives between now and the wedding were rigorously planned. Telling his mother the news and introducing her to his bride-to-be were duties that had to be performed and fitted into their schedule. ‘We’ve got to be
in the area.’
‘Oh, why?’
No answer could have surprised her more than the one Stephen came up with. ‘We’re looking at some houses down your way.’
‘Really?’
‘Gaby’s very keen to get out of London. We’re looking for a big family house in the country for the next stage of our lives.’
So formally did her son speak these words that Carole knew, had Jude been there to hear them, they would both have giggled. But, on her own, Carole was too winded by the implication of Stephen’s words to offer any response.
‘So I was wondering, Mother, whether you’d be free for Sunday lunch that weekend.’
‘Lunch? Sunday week. Yes, that sounds fine.’ Uncharacteristically gushing, she added, ‘I’m simply thrilled at the idea of meeting Gaby!’
‘She’s longing to meet you,’ Stephen asserted, with all the enthusiasm of a weatherman announcing a cold snap. But he hadn’t finished. ‘There is one thing, Mother.’
‘Yes?’
‘I am very keen that you and Dad should both be at the wedding. Will that be all right?’
‘Yes,’ said Carole Seddon. ‘Yes, of course it will be.’
That was only one of her worries after she had put the phone down. A lot of moribund emotions had been stirred up, reminding her they were still far from dead. And she knew they wouldn’t go away. September the fourteenth would be a climax, a day of maximum stress, but that would not end the process. She was reliving the myth of Pandora’s box. Now it had been opened, Carole was made aware of its fragility, and felt foolish for the misguided reliance she had placed on its security.
Another troubling thought occurred to her. It was rare for Stephen to come down to Fethering, and even rarer for him to stay overnight. On the few occasions when he wasn’t just down for a quick pub or restaurant lunch and away, she had put him up in her spare bedroom. But if he was coming with a fiancée . . . The spare room only had a single bed. Oh dear, would she have to arrange for a double to be brought in? Worse than that . . . would she actually have to ask Stephen what sleeping arrangements he and Gaby favoured? The potential embarrassment loomed large enough to cloud Carole’s entire horizon.
