Chapter 39
NOW
‘What’s happening?’ she asked breathlessly, standing next to Claudine on the small, tarmacked area just behind the hotel.
Before Claudine could answer, Mélodie ran up, phone clamped to her ear.
‘It’s Yves. Everyone is out,’ she confirmed.
The guests were grouped together in the corner of the car park; there were about thirty in all.
Among them, Madame Roux, somehow still immaculately dressed, with Coco on a lead sniffing at her boots.
She caught Bella’s eye and shook her head impatiently.
A small collection of staff – cleaners, the kitchen workers, and one or two Bella didn’t recognise – were grouped nearby.
‘Is it a false alarm?’ Bella enquired.
‘No.’
For the first time, Bella looked properly at her boss. The woman’s face was pale, her eyes, glassy.
‘Don’t worry,’ Mélodie said. ‘Yves has said it was contained in only two rooms. Very small fires. He was able to use the fire extinguisher. And of course there were the sprinklers.’ She smiled, clearly delighted the crisis was averted.
But the juxtaposition of Claudine’s pale face next to Mélodie’s untroubled one meant that Bella couldn’t relax. Something had happened. Had Claudine been burnt in some way? Was it shock?
Yves appeared at the corner of the building and Mélodie began to walk quickly in his direction. Bella turned to Claudine.
‘Do you need to sit down?’ she asked.
‘Non. I do not need to sit down!’ Claudine snapped.
‘Oh. I’m sorry… I just—’
‘I can’t believe that this has happened. A week before the presentation! It is the worst luck. Or perhaps the worst judgement.’ She gave Bella a look. Gone was the friendliness that she’d had in her eyes when she’d confided in her just an hour or so ago. Instead, her expression was fixed, cold.
‘But everything’s OK, the fire’s out. Mélodie said—’
‘Ah, Mélodie. She is a fool. She doesn’t know!’
‘Know…?’
‘How important it is! How important the rooms were.’
‘The rooms?’
Claudine looked at her. ‘Yes, the rooms. You did not think to ask which rooms have been burnt and sprayed with foam and watered from above? You did not think that they might be important rooms, perhaps?’
An icy hand gripped Bella’s heart. ‘Oh. Oh no.’
Claudine nodded. ‘And have you considered perhaps how the fire started?’
Her look was so fixed, so accusatory that Bella was taken aback.
She had been nowhere near the rooms when the alarm had been raised.
In fact, the last time she’d entered the rooms had been earlier when she’d been with Claudine.
She’d only stayed afterwards to fluff a couple of pillows, check everything was in place for the photographer.
Then something inside her sank as rapidly as if she’d plunged downward on a fairground ride.
The candles. She’d lit the scented candles to impress Claudine, to showcase the overall effect of the room.
But she hadn’t thought, as she’d closed the door feeling so pleased with herself, to blow the candles out, relight them later.
Then again, they were in glass jars; they should have been OK.
‘The candles?’ she said.
‘Yes. They were placed on the bedside tables, non? Very near the curtains? Of course, the damage from burning is minimal. The smoke alarm and Yves’s quick thinking saw to this. But the water damage, the foam…’ Claudine’s voice was devoid of emotion. ‘The rooms are quite ruined.’
Bella felt the blood drain from her face. She’d put the candles there for ambiance, to throw light on the curtains and highlight the embroidery, the slight sheen on the material. It had been a momentary decision; she hadn’t thought.
‘We can delay Hotel Club, we can—’
Claudine shook her head. ‘Everything has been paid for up front, the air tickets. Everything. Yes, we can cancel but…’ she shrugged. ‘I am not sure we will be able to afford to start again. Besides, Hotel Club have a one year waiting list…’
* * *
It was an hour before they were allowed back in the building, the guests grumbling and Claudine reassuring them, in a voice that betrayed none of her former misery, that they would receive a free meal in the restaurant this evening to make up for the inconvenience.
Other guests, who’d been out for the afternoon, began returning, confused to see the pompiers driving away, the muddy footprints in reception where they’d rushed through in haste – unnecessarily as it turned out.
Upstairs, Bella stood by the entrance of one of the Superior rooms, hardly moving. Her face was fixed on the decor inside, her heart sinking anew every time she glanced at something she hadn’t noticed before.
The paintwork was streaked, the bedding saturated and covered in foam.
The rugs that she’d painstakingly sourced were sodden.
The antique-looking chest of drawers had a black, burnt area, and the beautiful, expensive art that she’d carefully chosen had been soaked by the sprinkler, the canvas sodden, foamy, its paint bleeding onto the wall.
The curtains, so carefully made to measure, were half eaten by fire, the shreds remaining blackened.
If someone had planned to destroy every item in the room, render each thing unusable, they could hardly have done a better job. Yves had clearly panicked and foamed nearly everything in the room. The sprinklers had finished the job. The fire itself had hardly damaged anything.
Any thoughts she’d had, any hopes that things might have been rescuable were scuppered. Nobody could turn this around in time, not even Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen himself. Not even the House Doctor, or Kim and Aggie, or the entire team on Changing Rooms.
It was over.
* * *
She knocked, tentatively, on Claudine’s closed office door.
‘Oui?’ said a weary voice.
She opened it. ‘Claudine, I’m so sorry.’
Claudine regarded her, her mouth a miserable fixed line. ‘Yes, I am sure.’
‘I can— we can—’ her voice trailed off.
‘You should go,’ Claudine said. ‘I will cancel the visit. We don’t have the budget to re-do those rooms – you know that. The decor you chose was not cheap. And there is really no need for you to be here now. I am sorry, I will not be able to extend your contract further. I am sure you understand.’
Was this financial or was she being punished for her negligence? Either way, Bella didn’t blame her.
She opened her mouth to argue, but then realised that there wasn’t really any point.
What else could Claudine do? Even if it hadn’t been her who’d caused the fire, she’d have had to let Bella go anyway.
If the hotel was in trouble and this might have been its final chance at solvency, then pretty soon – barring a miracle – there wouldn’t be a hotel to work at.
And there certainly wasn’t space for a project manager who’d managed to spend thousands of euros making things better before tearing the whole thing down.
‘I’m so, so sorry…’ she began. ‘I—’ But she found she had run out of words. She looked at the woman who’d been her boss, who’d started to become her friend.
Claudine leapt to her feet so suddenly that Bella stepped back in shock.
‘Ah, yes,’ she hissed, leaning forward over her desk.
‘You are often sorry! But this is not something that a “sorry” can fix! You are incompetent, careless. Foolish! I should never have taken you on – and now you have ruined everything!’ Claudine’s eyes flashed and Bella took another step back.
‘I want you out of my hotel. And if I have anything to do with it, you will never work in the French hospitality business again.’
‘But Claudine… I—’
Claudine’s expression was so thunderous, Bella’s words fell away. ‘Just go,’ she said. ‘Go back to your beautiful home. Or, better, back to England. I never want to see you again.’
Filled with sudden, nervous energy, Bella rushed to her office, gathered her things and made her way to the lift. The doors opened to reveal Madame Roux with her dog and some sort of wheeled basket at her feet. She regarded Bella’s tear-stained face as she entered the lift.
‘Ground floor?’ she said, raising a well made-up eyebrow.
Bella nodded, miserably.
‘So you are leaving?’
She nodded again, not trusting herself to speak.
‘Claudine asked you to go?’
‘Yes,’ she managed. ‘The fire. It was my fault, you see. I— And now everything is ruined and… well, you know the rest.’
Madame Roux shook her head. ‘I have already told you. When you are old, nobody tells you anything. Certainly not Claudine. What’s the rest?’
Bella looked at the old lady. It couldn’t hurt to tell her; after all, everything was already as bad as it could get. ‘Claudine’s in financial trouble,’ she said. ‘She’s struggling with the hotel, and hoped she’d be able improve things if the presentation went well. But now—’
Madame Roux frowned. ‘Silly girl.’
‘We all get ourselves in difficulties sometimes.’
‘Perhaps.’ The old lady looked thoughtful. ‘But now you are going too, just when Claudine needs you most.’
‘Claudine made it quite clear I’m not welcome.’ Bella fought to keep her voice under control. ‘She never wants to see me again.’
‘Pah!’ The word was loud and made Bella jump. ‘Of course she says things, but she doesn’t mean them. Claudine is proud; she won’t be able to ask you for what she really needs.’
‘Which is…?’
‘Comfort. A friend.’
Bella sighed. ‘If you’d seen her…’
‘Oh, I can imagine. But that is just her exterior. Surely you are old enough to understand now that nobody is the person they present to the world. It’s just a version of themselves they think is palatable enough for others to like.
We are all secretive. We all have our worries, our pain. Claudine needs you.’
The lift reached the ground floor, giving its habitual lurch. The doors slid open, revealing a reception covered in footprints, one of the large plants turned on its side. Bella held her finger on the ‘door open’ button to prevent them closing and turned to Madame Roux.
‘I just can’t. I— I should never have taken this job in the first place. And I’m definitely not the right person to help Claudine now. She’s much better off without me. I can’t go back there. I just can’t.’
Madame Roux regarded her steadily. ‘We do not know what is possible until we test it.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, more hotly. ‘But I do. And I just know that I’m not up to the job. I never should have come here.’
And with that, she turned and walked past Mélodie, face fixed forward to avoid eye contact. She made her way through the glass doors and, without glancing back, began to run.