He went back into his room. Caragh was still lying on the bed.
‘Haven’t you gone yet?’ he snarled, then realized with a shock that she had her hands down her knickers.
‘I decided if you weren’t going to do anything about it, I’d do it myself,’ she breathed. ‘And to be honest, I think I’m doing quite a good job. Maybe I don’t need you after all.’
Frank hated himself for it, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away.
At tea time, Lisa found George and Victoria standing in the hallway with a paint chart, brows furrowed.
‘I think you’re making a huge mistake,’ said Victoria. ‘It’s far, far, far too cold. You need something with warmth.’
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Lisa.
‘We’re trying to pin down a colour.’ George held the chart up, scrutinizing it with eyes narrowed.
‘I thought we’d agreed white?’
‘Yes, but
which
white?’
‘White’s white, isn’t it?’
George and Victoria stared at her.
‘
God
, no.’
‘Oh.’
Victoria started stalking around the reception area, waving her hands.
‘You’ve got to remember that the light here is going to be changing constantly. So you need something that works in bright sunshine and gloomy, horrible winter. And you want soft, not stark. This isn’t the Med. You simply can’t get away with Brilliant White.’
Lisa’s eyes turned to the stack of paint pots that the decorators had lined up ready to start the next day. Each one was marked Brilliant White.
‘Me, I’d go for Farrow and Ball’s Slipper Satin,’ Victoria pronounced. ‘It’s a darling colour. Terribly forgiving. And it goes with everything.’
Lisa suddenly found she was trying desperately hard not to laugh. How could a paint colour be darling? Or forgiving? And surely the whole point of white was that it went with everything?
‘Estate emulsion on the walls,’ Victoria continued. ‘And dead flat oil on the woodwork. The key to it all is matt. Matt matt matt.’
‘I see,’ said Lisa, who didn’t have a clue what she was on about.
George was walking round with the chart, holding up a tiny square against the walls, the windows, the woodwork, squinting anxiously.
‘Victoria’s right, you know.’
‘It’s going to cost us a fortune,’ objected Lisa.
‘Better to make the investment now than to make an expensive mistake.’
‘Oh well,’ said Lisa. ‘You know best. What do I know?’
George looked pained.
‘Don’t be upset. Victoria happens to be good at this sort of thing, and she is right. It’s my fault, I should have thought about it more carefully.’
Lisa cleared her throat and spoke quietly.
‘Is she going to interfere with everything we’ve already decided?’ she asked. ‘Or is she going to crack on with sorting her own life out?’
George blinked.
‘Point taken,’ he replied. ‘I’ll have a quiet word.’
By the middle of the week the decorators had begun their task, arriving with masks and spray-guns, and soon the air was filled with the smell of fresh paint. The transformation was remarkable. As the walls and woodwork turned white, the house suddenly became suffused with light and the rooms seemed twice the size. And despite herself, Lisa suspected that Victoria had been right – the colour she’d picked did have a softness and subtlety when you looked closely. Not that she was going to admit it.
Thankfully, however, whatever George had said to Victoria seemed to have hit home, and she was keeping a low profile. She and Mimi had one of the rooms on the top floor and they came and went with the minimum of interruption, apart from a minor kerfuffle when someone came to take Victoria’s beloved car away, though she soon perked up when she looked at the cheque. Meanwhile, she was hard at work designing everything from the logo to the brochures and had any number of contacts she was happy to exploit on their behalf. She made a huge effort to be deferential towards Lisa, asking for her opinion and her approval. Lisa began to worry about Victoria’s bill.
‘It’s OK,’ George assured her. ‘She feels so guilty about landing on us that she’s insisted we don’t pay.’
‘But she’s broke,’ Lisa protested, wondering for a moment why she was suddenly on Victoria’s side.
‘Let her get on with it,’ George advised. ‘You don’t normally get something for nothing out of her.’
‘Too right,’ said Justin darkly, who was still twitchy about Victoria’s presence. Lisa was growing very fond of Justin, who was helpful in his own inimitable way, very supportive of her and very protective. While he was around she felt she had an ally. And he had some crazy ideas that would give The Rocks the edge it needed. Like turning one of the downstairs utility rooms into a wet room, with an adjoining area for storing surfboards and wetsuits.
‘Element of self-interest there, don’t you think?’ asked George, for Justin had thrown himself into the surfer’s lifestyle, taking any opportunity to sneak off to ride the waves.
‘No point in owning a hotel if you can’t take advantage of the facilities,’ retorted Justin, pushing back his hair that was already bleached white from the salt and the sun.
Meanwhile, six free-standing, copper-coated baths arrived and sat in the hallway, waiting for the carpenters to build platforms for them to be mounted on to in order to take advantage of the views. George was adamant that luxury bathrooms were the key to a successful hotel, and so they were sacrificing two of the smaller bedrooms so each room could have its own en suite.
The decision-making was endless. The office was a mound of brochures – from doorknobs to glassware to bedlinen to lighting. George was in seventh heaven. This was what he loved best. The finishing touches. Lisa laughed at him agonizing over the detail.
‘Do we go for a pewter or a polished nickel finish? And do we go for knobs or levers?’ he wondered.
‘You choose!’ she insisted. ‘I haven’t a clue. You know me. I really can’t get excited about what doorknobs to have.’
George looked at the brochure and sighed.
‘Starfish handles on the bathroom doors,’ he finally pronounced. ‘And the rope-effect levers on the bedrooms.’
Lisa privately thought that plain round knobs would be perfectly adequate, but she suspected that wasn’t the right thing to say. And she knew that it was her inability to understand the importance of the right doorknob that made her so different from Victoria. She had to admit that George’s obsession with the minutiae of the hotel was starting to get to her. He insisted that it was all in the planning; that of course the finish on the knives and forks should be considered, as closely as the table linen and the lighting and the glasses.
‘Trust me, people notice these things,’ he told her. ‘It’s what will make us stand out from an ordinary hotel.’
‘But I thought we were keeping things simple.’
George sighed.
‘Which is why everything has to be exactly right.’
‘Oh,’ said Lisa, as if that made everything clear, though it didn’t.
It was at the beginning of the following week that things started to go wrong. Lisa felt like tearing her hair out.
‘Where’s the man from the council?’ she demanded. ‘He was supposed to come and inspect our fire doors this morning and give us our certificate.’
Although they weren’t doing any major structural work, there were still plenty of rules and regulations to follow, and Lisa was finding it frustrating that they couldn’t begin one job until they’d finished another. When she phoned the man from the council he insisted that they’d called and postponed his visit themselves.
‘Rubbish!’ Lisa snapped at him. ‘It’s typical of you bureaucratic types to pass the buck. I want you here by midday.’
George cringed. You didn’t talk to people from the council like that, not if you wanted the right pieces of paper at the right time. But miraculously it worked.
‘You don’t take any crap, do you?’ he said admiringly.
‘No, I don’t.’ Lisa put a defiant tick on the enormous whiteboard George had put up in the office. It was a meticulous timetable of all the jobs that needed doing in consecutive order, detailing contacts, reference numbers, telephone numbers, delivery dates. That way everyone knew what was going on and no one could claim ignorance. George had learned the hard way that communication was the key.
By Thursday, Lisa sat at the desk in the office for a moment and put her head in her hands. The wrong tiles had turned up for the bathrooms. It was like a television makeover show gone horribly wrong. This was the fifth disaster in as many days, and somehow she suspected there was a gremlin at work. She knew that in this day and age people often made mistakes, that orders got cocked up, that tradespeople were over-committed and played clients off against each other, as did bureaucrats. But there had been a suspicious number of glitches.
George was irritatingly phlegmatic about it.
‘Listen, this is all perfectly normal,’ he said calmly. ‘In fact, I’d be worried if something didn’t go wrong.’
‘Someone doesn’t want us to succeed,’ Lisa insisted.
‘You’re being paranoid. In my experience, things are going swimmingly. There’ve been no real nightmares.’
At that moment, Victoria came in with the final artwork for the logo.
As she and George bent their heads over the desk, Lisa surveyed her thoughtfully. Could Victoria be at the bottom of all this? Deliberately putting Lisa under stress, in order to put her relationship with George under pressure? There were still times when George deferred to Victoria over some detail, and Lisa tried not to feel threatened. After all, if she couldn’t express an interest it wasn’t surprising he went elsewhere for a second opinion, and he obviously respected Victoria’s.
Was she, as George had implied, being paranoid?
‘Lisa? What do you think?’
George was giving her a rather reprimanding look over the top of Victoria’s head, as if to chide her for not paying attention.
‘Sorry, I was miles away.’ Lisa came over to the table to admire the handiwork, and had to admit it was stunning. ‘It’s gorgeous, Victoria.’
George held the paper up to the light to examine it more closely. ‘Maybe we could have it etched on to the wine glasses? What do you think?’
Bloody waste of money, thought Lisa, but she was pretty sure that was the wrong thing to say.
‘Lisa, you look exhausted.’ Victoria was peering at her, concerned. You look really stressed. I think you’ve been overdoing it. George, you’ve been working her too hard.’
Lisa felt uncomfortable under their scrutiny. What did Victoria mean, she looked exhausted? Was that Victoria-speak for rough-as-a-badger’s-arse? She knew she was hot and sweaty and she hadn’t washed her hair that morning as it took so long to dry. And she had a stained sweatshirt and filthy jeans on. Victoria, conversely, was in a pale blue linen dress and sneakers, looking cool and
soignée.
‘There’s a fab beauty salon in Bamford,’ pronounced Victoria decisively. ‘George, book her in for a massage. She can’t go on burning the candle at both ends. She’ll drop dead with exhaustion.’
Lisa wiped her forehead with the back of her hand, feeling rather like a little girl being scrutinized by her anxious parents.
‘I’m fine,’ she insisted.
‘No,’ said Victoria. ‘I know what George is like. He doesn’t realize us girls need pampering. I’ll book you in myself.’
She flipped open her mobile and scrolled through her address book. Lisa watched her suspiciously. Was that the very phone she’d used to create havoc, cancelling appointments and changing orders? And was this now a double bluff, feigning concern, chastising George for his negligence in order to put Lisa off the scent?
She decided not to protest. Perhaps she was being neurotic. She didn’t even have Justin to reassure her, as he’d disappeared for a few days on business. For a moment she felt very alone. George had as good as told her to stop fussing.
‘It’ll all happen,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ Lisa replied. ‘It’ll all happen because I’m making it happen.’
Not, she wanted to add, dithering about doorknobs.
The next day, Charlie the plasterer didn’t turn up to make good the bathroom walls where the old suites had been ripped out. Which meant the plumber couldn’t go in and fit the baths, which meant the tiler couldn’t do the walls and the floors. Lisa thought she might scream. When she’d called Charlie to give him an earful, he’d protested that someone had told him that the tiling and the plumbing were being done first and he was to wait till next week.
‘Rubbish! Who told you that?’
‘I can’t remember.’
‘How convenient,’ Lisa retorted drily. ‘I want you back here now.’
‘I’m on another job,’ he protested. ‘Down at the Mariscombe Hotel. I can’t just walk off.’
‘Why not?’ asked Lisa. ‘You’ve walked off my job.’
She slammed the phone down, knowing there was no point in arguing. She was so incensed, she decided to walk over to the Mariscombe Arms for a drink to calm herself down. Leonard, as ever, provided her with a sympathetic ear as she ranted.
‘Don’t listen to Charlie’s excuses,’ he advised. ‘He’s gone down to the Mariscombe Hotel because when Bruno says jump, everyone jumps.’
‘That’s totally unfair. He can’t operate like that.’
‘Try telling him that.’
‘I will.’ Lisa tilted her chin up defiantly.
Leonard laughed.
‘Good for you, girl. You’ll be the first person in Mariscombe to stand up to him. Bruno Thorne’s got everyone on a string.’
‘Not me, he hasn’t.’ Lisa almost snatched the spritzer Leonard had made her out of his hand and gulped thirstily.
‘I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s him who’s been putting a spanner in the works all along.’
Lisa’s eyes grew large over the top of her glass.
‘Do you think so?’
‘Typical Thorne behaviour. Big fish, small pond. Stamp out the opposition.’
‘But The Rocks is tiny compared to his place. We’re no competition, surely?’
‘Ah, yes, but he wanted to buy it, remember? And he’s not a good loser.’ Leonard crossed his arms self-importantly. ‘I should know. He wanted to buy this place but I beat him to it. He made me suffer for it, I can tell you. I couldn’t get a builder to give me a quote. I couldn’t get any staff. I had to bring in people from outside in the end.’