Always and Forever

‘Barney, you do need experience for reception,’ Cleo said in exasperation.

‘Ah, Cleo, she’ll be great,’ wheedled Barney.

He had such an engaging smile, like Cleo’s but with an added hint of rogue thrown in for good measure. It was hard to resist.

‘Where is everyone, Tamara?’ asked Cleo brightly now so that Tamara would hear her through the half-closed office door.

‘Your mother’s in the kitchen and your father’s out.’

And there’s nobody on reception in case a guest comes in, Cleo thought. The hotel didn’t have a receptionist on all day; they couldn’t afford to. Tamara was employed for times of the day when Harry or Sheila were busy elsewhere.

Cleo was heading for the door that separated the reception from the kitchen when the office phone rang sharply.

After five interminable rings, Tamara picked it up.

‘Helloo, the Willow Hotel, how can I help yoou?’ she intoned in the special voice she used only for the phone or talking to rich guests.

Tamara would have to go, Cleo decided. Family or no family. Because if she didn’t go, Cleo would end up being arrested for hitting Tamara over the head with Tamara’s cosmetic-filled Burberry handbag. Also not generally encouraged in hotel management.

Cleo’s mother, Sheila, sat in the tiny alcove in the kitchen where an old church pew had been wedged in and covered with cushions so that people rushing around cooking and serving could take a rest and a cup of tea out of everyone’s way. The pew was of worn oak and the cushions looked like a multi-coloured bric-a-brac display with two scruffy rose velvets lined up with a scratchy oatmeal barrel cushion, a few threadbare tapestry cushions and a toile de Jouy confection that was faded to nothing. All had once been somewhere else in the hotel and had ended up in the kitchen when they were too old and shabby to be in the public domain. A small card table covered with a floral oilcloth sat in front of the pew and it was there that Cleo had done much of her homework, working patiently away with sums and French verbs while her parents spun past as they cooked and cleaned.

‘A good hotel-owner needs to be able to cook if the chef doesn’t turn up,’ Cleo’s father always said. And Harry Malin could certainly cook. In the early days, it was from him that Cleo had learned her love of the business – and her skill with people. Dad just had that way with people that made them comfortable in his company. It was the perfect gift for an hotelier.

The kitchen was warming up for dinner time with Jacqui, the chef, surveying her empire with pride before she sloped off for a quick break before the rush. Jacqui had been with the hotel for a year now. The same age as Cleo and just as eager, she was always having arguments with Harry about innovative new menus. Harry liked substantial French cuisine with an Irish twist. Jacqui liked Pacific Rim food, worshipped lemongrass and longed to be allowed to create exotic recipes with coconut milk.

Cleo waved a greeting at Jacqui, filled a mug with coffee from the pot on the counter, then kissed her mother on the cheek. ‘Where’s Dad?’

‘He and Bill are looking at the hot-water pump.’ Bill was the hotel’s part-time handyman and a genius with machines. He needed to be, given the age and decrepitude of most of the hotel’s equipment. ‘It’s gone again and Bill has some new yoke to fix it.’

‘Cardiac paddles are the only things that’ll work on that pump,’ Cleo joked. ‘Or else a novena to St Jude.’ It would take the patron saint of hopeless cases to perform a miracle.

Her mother nodded absently over her sewing. ‘For sure.’

‘Mum, look at these.’ Cleo spread the interiors magazines in front of her mother.

Sheila moved her mug to make room. ‘Those magazines are very expensive, love,’ she muttered, peering through her glasses at the price stickers. Since she’d started wearing the spindly gilt bifocals, she looked so much older, Cleo thought sadly. For years, Mum had looked so young and lively, with her hair, same uncontrollable nut-brown curls as Cleo’s, tied up in a bouncy bun with tendrils trailing around her neck. But suddenly her hair was almost all grey and the lines around her silvery blue eyes were so deep they looked as if they’d been carved with a compass. Her hands were misshapen with arthritis, the knuckles on both hands swollen, and where she’d once made an effort with pearly nail varnishes, now her nails were bare. Even her clothes looked aged. There was never any money in the Malin family for clothes. Every penny was ploughed back into the business. Cleo’s school uniform had been patched so often it looked like a quilt, to her shame.

Mrs Hanley had been right: her mother was worn down by everything. Cleo felt a surge of remorse at not having noticed this herself before now.

‘Bit of a waste of money, Cleo. If you’re going to have enough money to buy a car for when you’re working in Donegal, then you’ll have to stop spending it on magazines.’

Cleo bit her lip. She still had to tell them she’d turned the job down. Everyone had been so pleased when she’d blurted out that she’d been offered it, particularly Mum and Dad. It had been almost upsetting. You’d think they were glad to get rid of her.

‘Mum, I had this great idea. Well, I’ve been thinking about it for ages. We do need to upgrade the place a bit and then I saw this magazine and, what do you think of us doing some new paint effects? It wouldn’t cost much,’ she added hurriedly. She opened the magazine on the correct page for her mother. ‘The dining room could do with a bit of work and just think if we had something like this paint effect on the far wall…’ She got no further.

The back door opened, and Sondra and Barney arrived in a whirl of cold wind and Body Shop White Musk, a perfume Cleo had once liked and now hated because Sondra seemed to wear a pint of it every day.

‘Hello, just thought we’d drop in to say hi,’ Sondra said, newly pregnant and radiant in full make-up and a chic black dress.

‘We’ve nothing in for dinner so we came up here to cadge a couple of free meals,’ said Barney, who was nothing if not frank.

‘Sit down, Sondra, love. Chef’s got lovely sea bass and I can get her to rustle up some chips for you.’

Out of the corner of her eye, Cleo could see Jacqui smile as she came back from her break. She loved being called Chef.

‘Great.’ Sondra sighed as she sat down in the comfiest corner of the pew and flicked through Cleo’s magazines while Barney scavenged in the main part of the hotel kitchen for a snack.

Jacqui knocked his hand away as it slid towards the chill drawer where the smoked salmon was ready. ‘Don’t touch.’

Barney got a fistful of almond cookies that had been made to accompany Sheila’s homemade vanilla ice cream instead and squashed in beside his wife. She’d come to the trompe-l’œil page. The house really did have a look of the Willow about it – the same big windows, high ceilings and similar coving.

‘That’s nice,’ said Barney, munching.

‘Isn’t it?’ Sheila said. ‘Cleo wonders if we could do something similar here.’

Sondra raised carefully painted eyes to Cleo. ‘But impossible to copy,’ she said. ‘It’d cost a fortune.’

‘You think?’ Cleo said, wondering why Sondra complained about how she’d hated exams at school, since she was so scarily sharp about everything post-school.

‘Lord, Cleo, don’t they teach you anything in college? Paint effects cost a fortune. You weren’t thinking of doing it yourself, were you?’

The first stirrings of anger roared through Cleo’s veins. ‘I was, actually,’ she said. ‘The whole place needs work and this is one option that wouldn’t cost too much. We weren’t full over Christmas and it’s about time we all faced facts and did something about it. We don’t want to lose the place, do we?’

She could sense rather than see her mother stiffen at these words.

‘Cleo, the Willow will be going strong when we’re all dead and buried,’ came her father’s voice.

Harry Malin stood in the kitchen unwrapping a scarf from his neck. ‘The pump’s fine. Bill has it working like a dream. How’s my favourite daughter-in-law, then?’ He smiled down at Sondra.

Cleo’s inner fire roared a bit more. He was doing what they all did: deliberately avoiding any mention of the hotel’s shortcomings. Like ostriches with their heads in the sand.

Cleo steeled herself. ‘I wish I could agree with you about the hotel, Dad,’ she said, ‘but I can’t. I love this place but we’re on the slippery slope. We need to do something.’

‘I think your father knows what he’s doing,’ Sondra shot in. ‘He’s been running this hotel for thirty years.’

Cleo’s plans to be diplomatic took a dive. ‘So a hotel management degree is a waste of time and money, is it, Sondra, and I know nothing about hotels?’

‘You said it, not me,’ smirked Sondra.

‘Please don’t argue,’ said Sheila.

‘All I’m saying is that the hotel is in trouble and nobody’s even talking about it,’ Cleo argued hotly. ‘We might have managed in the past because people love the Willow but it’s getting older; the whole hotel needs refurbishing. If you could see the money they spend in some of the hotels I’ve worked in…Customers expect that now…’

‘The Willow doesn’t stand up to the other places you’ve been then?’ her father said evenly.

‘No, Dad, that’s not what I mean at all.’ Cleo’s eyes pleaded with him not to take offence. ‘They were different sorts of hotels. We run a small, intimate house hotel where people feel welcomed into our world and that’s what I love. That’s what you created, Dad.’ Her eyes were still pleading. ‘But we need to improve the place somehow. Carrickwell’s changing all the time and we’ve got to change with it, be ready for the future or else…’

‘Or else what?’ asked Harry.