Always and Forever

Trish sighed. ‘Cleo, those houses look like that because they have a fleet of paint experts each with a Masters in fine art working round the clock to transform a dingy hallway into a Garden of Eden with just seventeen tins of paint. If normal people like us do it, it would look like those paintings done by chimpanzees.’

‘It can’t be that hard,’ Cleo muttered.

Trish narrowed her eyes. ‘Yeah, right, Leonardo. Get real. Your family think you’re a kid who knows nothing. That’s what being the youngest is all about. You should face facts and get out of there and get on with your life. Like I have,’ she added defiantly.

Trish had moved to Dublin at the age of eighteen when she went to college. And she claimed that the secret to getting on with your family was not actually having to live with them. She’d lived away ever since. Cleo used to envy Trish for her independence in those days, but now she wasn’t so sure. She’d been wildly keen to go to Bristol and experience a bit of the world, and yet, when she did, she found that she missed home.

‘It was different for you, Trish,’ Cleo pointed out. ‘You needed to get out.’ Trish’s family were known for their volcanic arguments and door slamming. ‘But I don’t want to leave,’ Cleo said sadly. ‘I know if only I can make them see we’re in trouble, that they’ll do something, won’t they?’

‘OK, you have the family conference and tell them they’re doing it all wrong and let’s see what happens,’ Trish said. ‘And don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

As she walked to the bus, Cleo mulled it all over in her mind. She knew that staying in Carrickwell to revitalise her family business was unlikely to work for all the reasons Trish had mentioned: her father wouldn’t listen to her, and her brothers probably hoped it would fail anyway. Neither Jason nor Barney had shown the slightest inclination to work as hoteliers. Jason worked in the travel business while Barney was a sales manager in a local car dealership. If the hotel and its land were sold, they could make a lot of money.

Cleo loved her brothers but the age difference between them meant she’d been excluded from their games as a child, and even now there was always a squabble between them when they met.

The bus was waiting, and Cleo got on board. As the bus doors shuddered to a close, she took her scarf off and wriggled lower into her seat to enjoy the ride.

‘Cleo Malin, as I live and breathe. How are you?’

Mrs Irene Hanley, a friend of her mother’s, deposited two huge bags of shopping onto the seat beside Cleo. ‘Can I sit with you? I hate the journey home – drive you mad, wouldn’t it, with boredom?’ Without waiting for an answer, Mrs Hanley had removed her coat, rearranged her shopping on the floor so it fell onto Cleo’s feet, and launched herself into the seat. Built along the same lines as the robust women of Tonga, Mrs Hanley took up all her own seat and a fair percentage of Cleo’s too. Cleo was pushed nearer the window but all chance of staring happily out of it, in a world of her own, was now gone. Mrs Hanley was set for chat. First, she produced a box of chocolates from her shopping.

Cleo could feel hunger rising in her like a tidal wave as Mrs Hanley opened the box and dithered happily over her selection before choosing a succulent white chocolate and passing the whole box to Cleo.

‘Have a chocolate – ah, go on,’ she added, as Cleo shook her head. ‘One won’t hurt.’

Cursing herself for being so weak, Cleo took one. Chocolate caramel with a nut in the middle. She could feel the chocolate sensors in her body going on full alert. We’re back in business, boys!

‘Maybe I’ll have another one,’ she said.

Mrs Hanley’s family, all girls and all with the same statuesque physiques, were apparently either married or nearly married to wildly eligible men.

‘Now Loretta, her fellow, Lord, he’s fabulous, calls me his second mummy, well, he’s taking her to Lanzarote for Valentine’s Day. Loretta, I said, Loretta, hold on to that man, I said.’

‘Loretta, she was twenty-two last year?’ asked Cleo suddenly, remembering Loretta from the vast Hanley clan. Loretta had worked briefly in the Willow as a chambermaid one summer and now ran the Carrickwell office of one of the bus tour companies.

‘My baby.’ Mrs Hanley got all misty and only a dark chocolate nougat could make her feel better.

Cleo sighed and took a cappuccino cream. Since the shortlived thing with Laurent, there was no sign of a man in her life – except Nat, who didn’t count – never mind one with either the wit or the overdraft to take her to Lanzarote. How did Loretta do it?

Perhaps being less bolshie was the trick. Cleo knew she was tough with men, but you couldn’t change that, could you? A firm hand was what was needed, whether it was throwing drunks out of the hotel at closing time or telling men that one date did not entitle them to stare glassily at her cleavage.

‘Nearly there already. Lord, doesn’t the time fly when you’ve got company?’ Mrs Hanley said as the bus shuddered into the depot at the bottom of Mill Street. ‘As I said, I’m counting on Loretta coming back from Lanzarote with an engagement ring, although keep that to yourself, but if she does, we’ll have a bit of a bash. Nothing too fancy. They’ll be saving for the wedding, I dare say. Loretta loves the Metro-pole in Dublin. Very classy. Or the Merlin Castle and Spa over in Kildare. Pity we’ve nothing like that here. There are builders working all hours of the day and night on the health farm in the old Delaney place. It’s nearly finished, I believe, but it won’t have a hotel with it, so Loretta will have to go out of town if she wants her posh wedding.’

The words were only out of Mrs Hanley’s mouth when she realised what she’d said and clasped a beringed hand to her lips. ‘Sorry, Cleo. Me and my big mouth. I didn’t think. Don’t tell your mother, please. You know I’m mad about her, it’s just that young people, like Loretta, you know, they want different things at weddings these days and they like to make a weekend out of it. Say with the wedding on a Friday, then all sorts of treatments in the health centre on the Saturday, and a party that night. And you’d need a big ballroom too and at least fifty rooms to cater for all the people flying in from abroad. A small place with a few rooms wouldn’t do…’ She clamped a hand over her mouth again. ‘I’m digging an even bigger hole for myself, Cleo, love. I didn’t mean to offend you or your family.’

‘Don’t be silly, Mrs Hanley,’ said Cleo briskly. She could hardly blame the woman for pointing out the truth as Cleo saw it herself. ‘Anyway, you’ll be hearing interesting things about the Willow soon. We have great plans for the future, you know,’ she added. ‘The work will be starting soon, in fact.’

‘Be positive about your hotel,’ had been part of the advice in college. ‘Don’t be afraid to tell people the positive points and any future improvements, as long as you can back it up.’

And they’d be able to do that soon, Cleo reasoned. If her family listened to her.

‘I’m so glad,’ Mrs Hanley said. ‘I’ve been worried because the place has been a bit run down and your poor mother is worn out with it all. Myself and the girls from the book club talk about it all the time.’

‘You do?’

Relief that Cleo hadn’t taken offence made Mrs Hanley loquacious. ‘She looks worn out, you know. Worn out. It can’t be easy, although she keeps a brave face on her. But we have been worried, Cleo. I’m so fond of your mother, and your father too. I thought they might retire, to be honest, and head off for the sun. The heat’s great for arthritis and your mother is a martyr to it. Stay off the tomatoes, Sheila, I tell her, they’re ruinous for the old arthritis, but does she listen?’

Mrs Hanley pressed another chocolate upon Cleo before they parted company. ‘You’re only a slip of a thing,’ Mrs Hanley said disapprovingly.

Cleo grinned and took the chocolate. Compared to the Hanley girls, she was a slip of a thing.

As she walked out of the bus depot, she chewed her chocolate slowly to make it last and thought of the truth in Mrs Hanley’s words. Everybody could see that the hotel was in trouble. Except her family.

On her way up through Carrickwell to the Willow, Cleo passed The Holy Land, which looked a bit bare now Christmas had gone, and past the brightly painted façade of Little Tigers Nursery with its big tiger motif on the front door. It was half-six and parents were still rushing in to collect children, who emerged all wrapped up in warm clothes, running and skipping to their parents’ cars, talking madly about what they’d been painting and what games they’d played. Cleo had never given much thought to it before, but it occurred to her that it must be hard to leave your child in a nursery all day, only picking him or her up when you were both worn out.

Cleo and her brothers had never been sent to a crèche or nursery. The hotel had been their nursery. There had always been someone around to keep an eye on them, and from when she was little Cleo had loved helping clean bedrooms as long as she had her own yellow duster and her own squirty bottle. She wondered if she’d have children some day and would they play in the hotel while she worked, learning how to make a bed properly and watching the chef rustling up twenty-four cooked breakfasts as easily as making a cup of tea.

It had been a fun way to grow up. Her children would play in the hotel, she decided. She’d want them to enjoy their birthright the way she had. Of course, that was years and years off, and she’d need a man first. That wasn’t the sort of thing that could happen quickly. No way was she settling for any guy. She wanted the one. The right one. Perfect. Tall, naturally, so she wouldn’t have to look down on him. Small men loved her for some reason, but she could never bear to go out with anyone shorter than herself.

Laurent had been tall and olive-skinned, with the most amazing grey eyes. And his accent…when he said, ‘You are so sexy, Clee-oh,’ in that luscious Provençal drawl, Cleo had felt herself melt.

By the time she got home, Cleo’s hair was woolly from the damp of the evening. Hat – she had to buy a new hat to replace the one she’d lost on a night out with Trish. A vibrant young businesswoman needed decent hair. And she was a vibrant young businesswoman, the sort of one who could have her pick of handsome tall men with fabulous accents. Who’d manage to drag their eyes from her bosom to actual eye-level.

With this cheering thought in mind, she walked in the front door and did what Mrs O’Flaherty, her favourite course lecturer, used to tell the students to do: imagine they were guests arriving at the hotel and see what it felt like. Cleo stood and tried to see the hotel with a dispassionate eye.

The flowers that had only one day left in them yesterday still stood on the big hall table and it was obvious that nobody had got round to changing the water. Murky and green like water from a gloomy pond, it gave the hall the aroma of bad eggs. The cushions on the two big armchairs in front of the fireplace still bore the imprints of whoever had last sat in them, and a newspaper was rolled up and squashed in a corner of one. Worse still, the door to the conservatory hallway was swinging open, admitting both a stiff breeze from the garden and the smell of eau-de-cabbage from the kitchens.

Cleo didn’t have to exert her imagination to figure out what any self-respecting guest’s reaction would be if they’d travelled in the cold evening to the Willow, hoping for warmth and welcome, to be greeted by all this. The place was only missing Bela Lugosi with extra sharp incisors to complete the atmosphere. Before she’d gone to college, before she’d spent work experience summers in other hotels, Cleo had thought that their hotel was the finest around. Creaking water pipes, quaint hot-water bottles for guests’ bedrooms in winter and beautiful rugs with papery thin edges were part of an old hotel’s attractions. Its charm had also come from the love and warmth her parents had put into it, charm that meant more than any new furnishings or thick carpets. Harry Malin’s warmth was as much a part of the Willow’s success as the sense of faded elegance in a world of monotone, identikit hotel chains. But the balance between her father’s warmth and the state of the house had shifted.

Now she saw the Willow with new eyes. The hotel was tired, a dump. It badly needed a total revamp.

‘Hello!’ yelled Cleo into the empty hall.

Tamara, the hotel’s part-time receptionist, poked her head out from behind a tiny gap in the office door, the door that was supposed never to be shut. Small and very blonde, like her elder sister, Sondra, Cleo’s sister-in-law, Tamara had the air of one who always had something better to do than talk to you.

She wasn’t too keen on Cleo, mainly because Cleo was one of those people who never wanted to sit still. Tamara liked sitting still when there was nothing she felt inclined to do. Even better, she liked working on her nails. The acrylics had been too expensive, so she’d got rid of them and it was hard work getting her nails back into condition again. You really needed to rub nail conditioner in every hour religiously.

‘Yeah, hi,’ Tamara muttered, from where she sat, and went back to reading her magazine carefully so as not to dampen the pages with fingers slick with nail oil.

Cleo counted to ten. Then she went to twenty to be on the safe side. Screaming at staff was generally not encouraged in hotel management. But Tamara was not Cleo’s idea of a proper hotel receptionist, even if she was ‘almost family’, as Barney put it.

In the grand tradition of keeping the business in the family, Barney’s wife, Sondra, used to work as receptionist on a part-time basis, but now that she was pregnant, albeit only just, with the first grandchild of the Malin dynasty, she had given up work and her sister had been drafted in as her replacement.

Cleo had been all for hiring someone new but, no, family had to come first.

‘Cleo, come on, charity begins at home and all that. Tamara’s a bit low since she lost that job in the beauty salon,’ Barney had said. ‘And it’s not as if you need much experience for reception.’

That, Cleo decided, was what was wrong with her brothers. They didn’t understand the finer points of running a hotel. In Barney’s view, any idiot who could do long multiplication and say ‘Reception, how can I help you?’ could operate a successful hotel.