The Honeymoon Hotel (31 page)

I sat back in my chair. ‘It’s a lot for me to take in,’ I admitted. I couldn’t be cool. This was too amazing. Headhunted!

‘I don’t expect a decision right now.’ Mary smiled at me, as if even an old hand would struggle to assimilate the scale of the opportunity on offer. ‘I just wanted to float it past you off the record. Have a think and get back to me. The opportunities are all here for you. As you know, openings like this don’t come along very often, and it’s vital for us that we get the right person. And I believe you, Rosie, are that person.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. I didn’t know what else to say.

*

As I strolled down the sunny side of Piccadilly on my way back to the hotel, I allowed myself to imagine a life as executive
events director. I pictured myself in an upgraded suit, more like Helen’s stylish designer-wear than my normal high-street ones, constructing fabulous, big-budget weddings, delegating the tedious jobs like chair-counting and favour-positioning to assistants …

I frowned. Although, would I? In a funny way, those were the parts I enjoyed. Ticking off the details. And the budgets were never a factor; I liked to make every single penny work for my couples, no matter how much they had to spend – in fact, that was part of the challenge.

Mary Waters’ offer was flattering, and I
was
tempted, but as I turned the corner and saw the Bonneville’s elegant windows shining in the midday sun, the curving brass details glinting on the revolving door, Frank, our dignified doorman helping an elderly couple into a shiny black London taxi, I felt a tug of something more than just job satisfaction towards the old ‘second-division’ hotel.

I’d learned so much here. Everything, in fact. And now, finally, I was getting to a position where I might actually get the promotion I wanted, and I couldn’t throw that in Laurence’s face. If Mary Waters considered me management material, then surely Laurence could speed up his decision.

More than that, I didn’t want to leave the Bonneville. Not now. Not even for the fanciest hotel job in London.

*

I’d only been back in the hotel for about ten minutes when the next surprising but nice thing happened.

Joe had interrupted my Stage 3: Red Alert check of Daisy
Wallace’s RSVPs to bring me some new sponge cake Delphine was testing; for some reason, he was one of the few people she would allow to take samples out of the pâtisserie room.

‘Come on,’ he cajoled, when I tried to tell him I was busy. ‘Take a break. You don’t want to know what I had to do to get this. She said most of your
brides
don’t even deserve her cakes, let alone the staff.’

Would I miss chilly Delphine and her hands of pastry genius?
I thought, as Joe put his feet up on my desk and helped himself to pale-green genoise sponge, topped with ivory Italian buttercream, dropping crumbs on my interactive model of the courtyard.

Yes, I probably would, I thought.

‘I tried to find you this morning,’ Joe said through a mouthful of cake, ‘but you weren’t around. Where’d you get to? Were you refereeing that squabbling couple?’

‘Most of our couples squabble. They’re getting married. Narrow it down a bit for me.’

‘The big guy with the yellow socks and the uptight dark-haired girl. I only saw them from a distance. The couple you won’t let anyone talk to.’ He squinted at me. ‘I’ve been meaning to mention it, but I know I obviously messed things up with Flora, but—’

‘What? No, you didn’t! That wasn’t your fault.’

He shrugged and looked cross with himself. ‘Feels like I let you down somehow. I should have spotted it coming. But I feel like I was learning something, and I should get back on the horse.’ He looked hopeful. ‘Maybe I could help with this one?
I’m good with squabbling couples. We make a good tag-team with squabblers.’

I stopped chewing the cake. He meant Chloë and Magnus. Or, rather, Benedict and Emily. The one couple I couldn’t let Joe – or anyone else – near, even though, to be honest, I could have used his help.

‘Um … they’re nearly done,’ I floundered. I was touched Joe wanted to make up for Flora. I
did
want to work on a wedding with him … just not this one. ‘Maybe, er, you could sit in on a meeting I’ve got this week, for December? They want a fifties Christmas theme.’

Joe gave me his X-ray specs look. The one that went right through me to whatever I was trying not to show.

‘Don’t you trust me?’ he asked simply. ‘I’m really trying.’

‘I know.’ I meant it. ‘And you’re great. And—’

My desk phone rang. I ignored it. ‘And I want to … I really want you – oh, for God’s sake.’

Joe lifted an eyebrow. ‘Pick it up. It’ll kill you not to.’

I did. It was Gemma, doing a shift in reception. ‘I’ve got a couple of familiar faces here for you,’ she said. ‘Shall I send them through?’

*

Stephanie Miller and Richard Henderson had called in at the hotel to see me and, surprisingly, to see the reason for their unexpected and socially awkward wedding cancellation, Joe ‘Don’t you want to swim naked in the sea? If not, why not?’ Bentley Douglas.

‘I’m so glad we’ve caught you both,’ Stephanie said, smiling at Joe, who had the grace to look a bit nervous.

‘Me? Are you sure?’ he said.

‘Absolutely. If it hadn’t been for that … lightbulb moment last year, I don’t think Rich and I would ever have had the conversations we ended up having. It completely changed our relationship. For the better.’ Stephanie touched Richard’s arm as she spoke, and he smiled in quiet agreement.

I noted they weren’t wearing matching golf sweaters any more, but there was a different sort of coordination about them. They seemed more relaxed. More in tune with each other.

She turned back to us, and her face glowed with contentment. ‘We want to fix another date for the wedding. What do you have free in November?’

‘You’re actually going to get married? That’s wonderful news!’ Did that sound too effusive? I wondered. Too surprised? ‘I mean, it’s exactly what I hoped you’d – no, that I knew you’d—’

‘Don’t apologize!’ Stephanie laughed. ‘It’s fine. We needed to step back. Things had gotten too intense; we were hung up on the little things and not talking about the big things. It mounted up, and we got overwhelmed.’

‘When you’ve called off a wedding, there’s nothing you can’t talk about,’ said Richard. ‘So we got talking. Had some time off. Had a bit of a think. I realized Steph was the best thing in my life. Made some changes. Got back together. Here we are.’

That was literally the most I’d ever heard him say in one go.

Stephanie squeezed his hand, but looked at me and Joe. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You guys derailing our wedding was the best thing that ever happened to us.’

‘In that case,’ I said, feeling oddly pleased, ‘the least we can do is make sure you have the best-ever day this time around.’

‘And would you like to try some cake?’ suggested Joe.

*

Laurence sent champagne, and we toasted their re-engagement, but as Stephanie and Richard left the hotel hand in hand, an unexpected melancholy descended on me. I wasn’t proud of it, because it was selfish, but I couldn’t help thinking,
They fixed things
. Things had gone as wrong for Stephanie and Richard as they could possibly go, but somehow they’d turned it around and talked, been honest, and now they could face anything.

A little voice inside me whispered,
What if …

I pushed it away, but the thought clung to my brain.
What if …?

Not me and Dominic – that was done. I knew why we’d finished; it was because we’d never really started. Me and Anthony. My own wedding that never happened. Could that have been saved?

‘What’s that frown for?’ Joe asked. ‘Are you worried you’ve double-booked them?’

I shook my head and set off down the corridor towards my office, where I could make some lists and not think about this.

But Joe followed me, still bouncy from the meeting. ‘You are going to let me work on this wedding, aren’t you? I feel like I owe it to them. Or maybe it’s a service we could offer? A rigorous road-testing before the wedding!’

‘No!’ I stopped in front of an alcove filled with a tumbling
arrangement of spring flowers. There were no fake flowers in the hotel, one of Caroline’s rules.

‘Tell me what you’re thinking,’ said Joe quietly, after a moment’s pause, and I knew he knew exactly what was going through my mind. He was one of the very few people in the world who did.

I didn’t turn around because I didn’t want him or anyone else to see my miserable expression. I pretended to be checking the flowers, and as I moved, Joe turned slightly so he was shielding me from anyone passing. It made me feel safe, just for a second.

‘Don’t bottle it up,’ he said. ‘Get it out.’

I swallowed hard. I didn’t want to cry but now I’d started thinking about all this stuff, after bottling it up for so long, it was making me weirdly tearful.

‘I was thinking, what if someone like you had made me and Anthony talk, before he decided to jilt me,’ I said in a rush. ‘Could we have worked things out like Stephanie and Richard did, if someone had had the guts to make him admit something was wrong?’ I stared at the waxy orange blossoms in the arrangement. I couldn’t imagine any of Anthony’s friends having the bollocks – or the imagination – to do what Joe had done. And we’d broken up so abruptly and completely that I couldn’t imagine even speaking to them now, let alone asking if they’d spoken to him before. But … ‘Maybe I could have made things right.’

‘Maybe,’ said Joe. ‘Or you might both have wasted another two years trying and trying to be something you weren’t, until he met someone else and left. And you wouldn’t have had your
great story, and your drunken disco. And knowing how great your mum and dad would be in a crisis.’

‘But I’ll never know what I did wrong.’ Tears stung my eyes, hot tears that felt more angry than sad. I didn’t expect to feel them at all, not now, but suddenly I felt close to the younger me, stuck in that limbo of not knowing. I’d blocked all this out with Dominic, and work, but now …

‘Why do you need to know?’ he asked gently.

I looked at him. Joe made me question all this stuff. No one else ever really had. ‘Because my life could have been different.’

He rolled his eyes. ‘Right. You could be stuck in a marriage with a man who doesn’t really talk to you, feeling dissatisfied but not quite knowing why, talking even less now you’ve somehow got a baby … instead of which you’re the best events manager in London, you’ve got the world in front of you, and you’re not even thirty.’

‘I’m thirty-one.’

‘Well, you don’t look a day over twenty-nine.’

‘Thanks.’

Joe sighed and ran a hand through his hair, then looked at me. ‘Bit of honesty coming up,’ he said. ‘Are you braced?’

I nodded. At least he warned people these days.

‘Maybe Anthony just realized he didn’t love you enough, and because he’s English and he’s a guy, he didn’t know how to put it in a way that wouldn’t destroy your confidence forever. It happens. He just chose to humiliate you in public instead.
He
looked like the knob. Not you. But people change,’ he said. ‘Thank God, we change, we grow, and we leave things behind.
It’s one of the redeeming features of being human. Otherwise we’d be stuck trying to find the first person we ever fell in love with, for the rest of our lives. Can you imagine? Being forty, and desperately searching for that teenager you had a crush on at school?’

I managed a watery smile.

‘If Anthony came back now, you probably wouldn’t even give him a second glance, because thanks to the way you pulled yourself out of that crappy situation, you’re a better, braver, wiser person than the one he left,’ said Joe. ‘Don’t deny it. You’re strong, you’re independent, you’re
so
smart. Way too good for someone who can’t be honest with you. Or see what sort of woman you are.’

I was about to mumble ‘Thanks,’ or something equally eloquent, when he held my upper arms and looked straight at me. The intensity of Joe’s gaze took me by surprise; it felt as if he wanted to burn what he was thinking directly into my mind. I wobbled on my heels.

‘All I can tell you,’ he said slowly, ‘is that if Anthony didn’t appreciate what he was losing, then he can’t possibly have been good enough for you. You should thank every lucky star in the sky that you’re free, so someone else can feel like the luckiest man alive when he gets the chance to start a life with you.’

My lips parted to speak, but no words came out. Instead I just kept looking into Joe’s blue eyes, at his handsome, honest face. At the unselfconscious warmth and positivity that seemed to surround him. At his simultaneous familiarity and his tingly otherness.

He didn’t speak either. He just gazed at me.

And then the third amazing thing happened.

I realized with the sudden clarity of a curtain lifting in my head that I’d fallen in love with Joe Bentley Douglas.

The trouble was, I’d now spent enough time experiencing Joe’s peace-and-love beliefs to know without a shadow of a doubt that he would have said exactly the same thing to Gemma, to Helen, to any of the brides who walked into our hotel, as he’d just said to me, and have meant it just as much.

‘Thanks,’ I said. My voice cracked. ‘I’ve never … I’ve never talked about this with anyone before. I’m sorry if it’s a bit …’

‘Don’t. No need to say it.’ He looked at me for another few, long seconds, then said, ‘I mean what I said.’

And then, just as my heart was looping a slow somersault around my chest, Gemma arrived with the pink phone of pre-wedding panic, and I was right back to sacking another bridesmaid.

Chloë and Magnus (or Tweedledee and Tweedle-Shut-Up-I’m-Talking, as Helen called them), came in twice more during early May to check over the arrangements for Benily’s June celebrity wedding.

They really didn’t need to; I had the spreadsheet to end all spreadsheets covering every possible circumstance. And I really didn’t
want
them to, because every time they started squabbling I had to fight the urge to send them to Joe to be lovingly psychoanalyzed into a dinner date, but I couldn’t risk
any
details of the Benily wedding getting out till the last minute.

But Chloë and Magnus came anyway, probably because, like me, they were copied in on the constant emails arriving from Missy the agent, whose latest request was for Nevin to outline all potential photo angles to her, in order to ensure there’d be no potential eating/drinking shots. Plus I think Chloë felt she had a responsibility to make sure there wasn’t going to be a beer fountain at the reception.

Maybe she was as sick of them as I was, but in the middle of May, Emily asked if she could call me while she was in her
trailer between takes, so I could ‘show’ her the preparations via the video-calling function on my phone.

‘
I so wish I was there!!!
’ she emailed. ‘
It feels so weird getting other people to organize my wedding!!! It’s kind of like being in a film! If you know what I mean!!!
’

Even without all Emily’s exclamation marks, I was nervous before our scheduled call. Flora Thornbury – I can’t even tell you what Helen called
her
since her elopement and subsequent
total silence
 – was famous-ish in London, but she wasn’t that different from the other posh brides I dealt with, being skinny, welded to her phone and blissfully ignorant of the price of a pint of milk. Emily, on the other hand, was a proper star. In the last few weeks I’d started to notice her heart-shaped face popping up in the celeb pages of magazines, as the publicity for her even-more-famous fiancé’s new
Dark Moon
film began to build, and on the morning of her call I got up an hour early so I could blow-dry my hair.

The plan was to ‘walk her around’ the courtyard by walking about with my phone, then chat about the details I’d arranged for the cake and flowers and the fun things that all brides liked to discuss, even Hollywood ones.

I’d been lurking around the hall between the hotel and the gardens, waiting for her to ring, and ducking into the alcove whenever Gemma or Laurence wandered past, when Joe appeared. He had his ‘looking for something’ expression on, and when he saw me, his eyes lit up as if he’d just found it.

‘Hey!’ he said, and waved.

My stomach flipped. Since my moment of realization, my
stomach flipped every time I saw Joe, but since I honestly didn’t know what to do about my crush – work colleague, flatmate, boss’s son, how many bad ideas did you need? – I was learning to live with it, the same way you get used to having a sprained knee or a wheat allergy.

When he got nearer, he said, ‘I’ve been looking for you,’ (my stomach did a double flip), and pointed at me.

I realized he was pointing at the folder I was clutching, and it unflipped.

‘Is that Helen’s reception folder?’ he went on. ‘She asked me to have a look at the drinks menu. I’ve had some ideas for a personalized cocktail. Does Wales have a national spirit?’

‘Leek brandy?’

‘Very good!’ He peered at me more closely. ‘You look different this morning. More … coloured in?’

‘I’m wearing lipstick.’

‘You look nice.’ Joe smiled approvingly, then raised an eyebrow. ‘Are you going somewhere?’

‘No! I mean, no? I just like to look nice for work.’

Before he could reply, my phone rang and I fumbled it out of my pocket, trying not to let the caller show. ‘Um, I should get this.’

‘I’ll wait,’ said Joe. ‘I need to ask you about something else.’

‘I might be a while,’ I said with an unconvincing casualness. ‘I’ll come and find you later?’

Immediately he was intrigued (although not as intrigued as Helen or Gemma would have been), and hovered by a painting of his great-great-grandmother, pretending to check his own phone.

Awkward.

I walked out into the garden, but Joe followed, and I had to shoo him away.

He looked at me strangely and mouthed something with a questioning expression.

Was it
Dominic?
I couldn’t tell. Maybe
Who is it?
I shook my head, and walked to the far side of the gardens, and when I looked back, he’d gone.

I took a deep breath and picked up the video call, and the shock I got when the face appeared at the other end nearly made me drop the phone.

This wasn’t the Emily I’d seen on Google. This face had red eyes, a long black wig that reached down to her waist, and a small pair of horns at the outer edges of her forehead.

‘Hi!’ it said, and waved. ‘LA calling!’

I must have looked a bit startled, because she squinted and said, ‘Oh, God, sorry, I’ve still got the lenses in! Sorry! I’m supposed to be in a shapeshifting state! It’s how they tell! Just ignore them! As much as you can!’

Emily’s exclamation marks weren’t limited to her emails.

‘It’s lovely to talk to you,’ I said. ‘Thanks so much for making time.’

‘I know!’ She broke out a dazzling but friendly smile. ‘Although I feel like I already know you through your emails! They’re so funny! And thoughtful! I love that you’re really thinking of everything, and giving me the easy stuff to decide!’ The exclamation marks dropped for a second. ‘I have to tell you straight off, Rosie, I am so grateful for all the effort you’re
making for us, when we landed this on you at such short notice. It could have been a train wreck, but it’s sort of fun. I mean, the emails I get from Chloë … I should let you read them one day.’

I couldn’t place Emily’s accent. It was a smooth mid-Atlantic blend, although the longer she talked to me, the more English she sounded.

We – well, I – walked around the garden where the wedding would happen (under our special canopy if wet); then I took her through the Palm Court, into the pretty orangery, and – after sending Dino down to the cellar for a hastily invented wine request – a whistle-stop tour of the hotel lounge, which I’d booked for their post-wedding celebrations.

Emily didn’t speak for a moment or two, and when I checked the phone, a smear of red make-up gave away the sneaky tear she was wiping away.

‘Sorry, sorry, Ben always says I get over-emotional,’ she gasped. ‘It’s so perfect! It’s like I was meant to get married here all along? Like we were meant to go through all that stress with the other place! It’s weird how things turn out. Thank you so, so much.’

‘You’re welcome,’ I said. I honestly hadn’t expected Emily to be so nice. She was a whole lot easier to deal with than most of the everyday brides I had to handle.

I heard a knock at her end; she turned and spoke to someone offscreen, then leaned forwards to me.

‘I have to go. That’s my call. Listen, I’m stuck here with a crazy reshoot schedule that seems to change every day, but if
there’s any way I can fly back early and maybe call in to see things for real, can I do that?’

‘Of course,’ I said, mentally flicking through the weddings I had booked in between now and then. ‘If you give me some notice so I can arrange security …’

‘Oh, there’s no need for that.’ She looked sheepish. ‘Missy’s done one of her lists? I guessed she would. She’s got a job to do but … You can smuggle me in as a waitress or something. I’ve done enough waitressing to pass myself off as one.’

‘No problem,’ I said. ‘Just let me know.’

‘Sure! Thanks again! I’m going to be recommending the FaceTime wedding planner to anyone who asks me out here!’ Emily smiled, popped her fangs back in, and she was gone.

I stared at the phone, still buzzing with adrenaline, and grinned to myself.

If I’d needed a sign that I was right to turn down Mary Waters’ Big Job Offer, that was it.

*

Emily’s crazy schedule meant she didn’t manage to fly over in time to see Sadie Hunter and Jamie Thomas’s vintage wedding the following week, or Jessie Callum and the Honorable Walter Fitzgerald’s
My-Fair-Lady
wedding the week after.

I was sorry she missed those, because they had gorgeous sunshine, a harpist and an Irish piper respectively, and some of the best flowers I’d ever seen. Having said that, I wasn’t sorry she missed the sight of me accidentally catching Jessie Callum’s bouquet, then immediately throwing it back in the air as if it were on fire, only for
Joe
to catch it. Joe then lobbed it in the
air in a panic, and Gemma half-dived underneath it as if she were playing beach volleyball and ended up spiking it to the intended recipient, Jessie’s best friend and chief bridesmaid.

I was mortified, but it made for some funny photos, according to Nevin. I checked his memory card afterwards and sneakily deleted the picture he’d got of me. The expression on my face – and the way my eyes had slid sideways to fix on Joe – was a bit of a giveaway.

Needless to say, I hadn’t done or said anything about my messy feelings for Joe, which were not wearing off as I’d hoped, but which were instead intensifying with every tag-team wedding meeting or cosy pizza night in with catch-up box sets at the flat.

I still hadn’t moved out. I couldn’t afford to, not having reached my bonus-triggering target yet, but more than that, I didn’t want to. And neither Laurence nor Joe seemed to be in any hurry to evict me.

Helen, of course, had noticed immediately. She claimed she’d noticed months ago.

‘You’ve
got
to say something,’ she told me for the millionth time. ‘Or else I will. And you realize that today I can do almost anything I like and no one will stop me?’ she added, with more glee than was really befitting someone being laced into a wedding dress.

We were perched on stools in her tiny flat, while the make-up artist and hairdresser finished turning Helen into the perfect bride. They’d managed to smooth my hair into a mini up-do and given me immaculate fifties cat-eyes flicks; I wasn’t unaware
that this was the prettiest I’d ever looked, and I’d be spending most of the day standing next to Joe, doing the ‘bridesmate’ duties of handing out orders of service and explaining which loo was the gents to the non-Welsh speakers.

‘I don’t understand why you can’t just
say something
,’ she said, also for the millionth time. ‘It’s not the nineteenth century. And he likes you. It’s so obvious.’

‘But Joe likes everyone, it’s his Sagittarian thing, man,’ I groaned. ‘And there are so many things that could go wrong. Work. My living situation. What people might think if I got promoted afterwards—’

‘Shut up, Rosie,’ said Helen. ‘Listen to me. If I’ve learned one thing this year, it’s that if you’re constantly looking ahead to what’s about to go wrong, you really stand to miss what’s already going right.’

‘I bet that sounded better on the original fortune cookie.’

She ignored me. ‘Joe’s not going to be working here forever. Laurence can hardly give him the job you’re already doing, can he? And what happened to his six-month stay? He’s only still
here
because he likes ‘doing weddings’ … with you. Plus, even if things didn’t work out, you said so yourself – he’s a world traveller, man. He’ll insist on you staying friends and move on.’

‘Well …’

Helen tilted her head so the hairdresser could pin the chic birdcage veil onto her signature French pleat, and gazed at me through it. ‘Can’t you just let yourself be happy for once? Take a chance. I am going to throw the bouquet at you this afternoon,
and by the time Wynn and I leave for Paris tonight, I want
you
to tell
me
you’ve seized the moment with Joe.’

‘But how?’ I tingled at the thought of seizing the moment. I’d seen couples ‘seizing the moment’ most weekends for the past five years – weddings were like a cocktail shaker for hormones.

‘You’ll think of something,’ said Helen, and stood up, smoothing her satin gown, ready for her Rolls-Royce downstairs. ‘You usually do. And if you don’t, there’s always champagne.’

*

Wynn and Helen’s wedding was beautiful, even though I didn’t understand half of it. In fact, it was the bits I didn’t understand that made me cry most. That and the singing. We all cried at the singing. The Welsh could have guarded the border with England just by singing at them and then stealing their weapons while they blubbed uncontrollably.

Afterwards, the new Mr and Mrs Davies emerged blinking into the sunlight outside the chapel in a shower of confetti and rose petals, started by me and Joe. Our fingers touched as we both reached into the basket of petals at the same time, and an electric shock tingled up my bare arm.

Say something
, I told myself, but I couldn’t think of anything. I just smiled dopily, and he smiled back, and everything about the world suddenly felt absolutely right. I really didn’t want to ruin that moment, so I didn’t.

Nevin ran through the photographs in double-quick time, and then Geraint and the ushers loaded us onto the red London bus hired to take us back to the hotel for the reception. It had a white ribbon on the front, and disposable cameras and mini
bottles of champagne on the original checked seats. Once Joe and I had clattered up to the top deck like excitable schoolkids, we discovered that Helen had reserved the front seat for us. The ride back through the oldest streets of the City in the Routemaster, sipping champagne like ghost tourists, was magical. Another moment I didn’t want to spoil.

I’ll definitely say something after the reception
, I told myself as Joe took a selfie of us both, our heads squeezed together with St Paul’s Cathedral in the background. Then the Strand. Then Piccadilly Circus. Lots of selfies, in fact. A whole camera full. My eyes were shut in most of them: I’d closed my eyes to imprint the smell of him, and the feel of the side of his face against mine.

*

The speeches were very sweet, and quite short, and thankfully in English; then Helen and Wynn cut the cake, which Delphine had covered in tiny fondant daffodils, and we all went out into the courtyard gardens to chat and enjoy the late afternoon sunshine.