Chapter 6
AN HOUR LATER , ENERGIZED by another coffee, a shower, clean clothes and part of a defrosted baguette she’d found in the freezer and blasted in the oven, Maggie had made a plan: the Bancrofts could stay. It was only four nights, and they didn’t look like the sort who’d be demanding cocktails by the pool. She’d practically run this place before; she could do it again. She just needed to tidy up.
It was while she was hoovering their bedroom (Citronella, on the basis it had the best view of the hills but also because it had the fewest dead flies in the bathroom), that Maggie smelled cigarette smoke.
She returned downstairs, lumping the hoover behind her, and followed the smell to the kitchen, and from there outside to a bench that overlooked the vegetable garden.
‘Audrey, hello!’ she said, seeing the familiar figure.
Sort of familiar. In the eight years since Maggie had last seen the hotel manager, Audrey had started dying her hair an alarming shade of orange, but she remained very squat and vaguely pigeon-shaped, with an impressive chest which, Maggie suddenly remembered as Audrey turned to face her, was often covered with a band t-shirt. Today, under her blue cleaning coat, Bon Jovi was stretched so tightly across Audrey’s breasts that his face looked contorted.
‘’Allo, Maggie.’ She smiled and revealed a row of yellowing teeth.
‘Long time. How are you?’
Audrey’s smile vanished and she sighed heavily. ‘I am OK. My back, it is not so good, but I carry on. We ’ave to carry on, n’est-ce pas ?’
‘We do,’ Maggie agreed solemnly.
But then Audrey let out a strange yelp, like a cat whose tail had been stamped on, and started weeping. ‘Your aunt, she missed you so much. She was so sad about that.’ She fumbled in her coat pocket for a tissue.
‘I’m sorry.’ Maggie lowered herself to the other side of the bench. ‘I didn’t know anything. I didn’t even know she was sick. Georges said she wanted to keep it a secret.’
Audrey blew her nose into the tissue. ‘Pfffffffffft! That man.’
‘You don’t get on?’
‘Always telling me what to do, as if I haven’t been working at this place for so many years. I was the one who was ’ere until the end with Madame Phil, I was the one who looked after ’er.’
Madame Phil. Maggie had forgotten that’s what everybody here used to call her. ‘Thank you.’
‘Of course,’ Audrey replied scornfully. ‘Who else was going to do it?’
‘This is what I don’t understand, Audrey. Where were all her friends? What happened to this place?’
Audrey grunted, dropped her butt into a flower pot full of cigarette butts, and pulled another from the packet. ‘It was difficult, the last few years. Your aunt, she gave up.’ She gestured at the vegetable patch in front of them, as overgrown as the gardens, with clumps of long grass where courgettes and strawberries once grew. ‘Sometimes her friends came but this place was not the same and some of them were made sad, and they never stayed for much time. And the guests stopped coming when there was the pandemic and she was alone for so long.’ Audrey inhaled, straining Bon Jovi’s face even further.
‘But why did she let it get like this ?’
‘She was not well for a long time before she died. She was drinking too much, and smoking too much, and you could not tell her to stop doing those things.’
‘No,’ Maggie replied, recalling her last conversation with Phil, ‘you couldn’t do that.’ As the church bell rang in the distance, she added, ‘Did you go to her funeral?’
‘ Oui ,’ Audrey replied, dabbing her nose with the tissue. ‘Just me and some people from the village. No one else. No family.’
‘We didn’t know, Audrey. That’s the thing, we hadn’t been told anything. If I’d known she was sick, or even if I’d known about the funeral, of course I would have been here, I would have come out so much earlier if I’d known any of it.’ Maggie leant forward and rested her elbows on her knees as sadness rolled through her. ‘I wish I had known but …’ She trailed off as Audrey exhaled smoke into the air.
‘It has not been the same ’ere for some time.’
‘How much time?’
‘Maybe three years. We ’ad guests but not like before. She seemed to lose her energy.’
‘But she kept the hotel open?’
‘ Oui . She was worrying about the money.’
‘Georges mentioned that.’ Maggie sat back up. ‘Look, Audrey, I’m sorry I wasn’t here, but I’m incredibly grateful that you were and I’m not sure exactly what’s going to happen to this place bu—’
‘You are going to sell it?’
The defiance in Audrey’s voice made Maggie look down at her lap. ‘I don’t know. I’m going to see Georges in a few days.’
Audrey exhaled. ‘It is not for me to say, Maggie, but I don’t believe Madame Phil would ’ave wanted that.’
‘I know,’ she mumbled, before lifting her head and squinting at the view again. ‘But without money, and without guests … although a British couple arrived earlier, thinking they were staying. Do you know anything about them?’
A flash of panic crossed Audrey’s face.
‘Lord and Lady Bancroft? Here for three nights? It’s fine, I’ve made up a room. And I can cook, but Georges said you’d cancelled the guests so I just wanted to make sure nobody else is about to arrive because it’s not like, well … it’s not like this place is up to having guests.’
‘It is not my fault! ’Ow can I remember everything that man told me? All “do this” and “do that” when I am the only person who comes ‘ere, and I look after the donkeys and I …’ Audrey paused while she tried to remember what else she was supposed to do at the hotel now.
‘So you don’t know if there are more guests?’
Audrey flung her hands in the air. ‘Why is everything my job, Maggie? I ’ave done everything and now you are blaming me for this pl—’
‘I’m not blaming you for anything, I just need to sort this place out. Where’s the book?’
‘It’s not in the book any more, it is in a computer. But I cannot find it,’ she replied sulkily, flicking another butt into the pot.
‘A computer? Things have got high tech.’
Audrey grunted.
‘Well, we’ll just have to find it then, won’t we?’ Maggie smiled brightly at Audrey and walked back through the kitchen to the old reception desk in the hall, which was covered with unopened envelopes, old cookery books, pens and a pile of paper with a Post-it note on the top on which someone had written ‘URGENT’. She didn’t want to be short with Audrey. She was grateful that she’d been here, looking after Phil. But if Audrey had been running things for the past three years as Phil slowly gave up, then no wonder the hotel looked like this. Phil might as well have put one of the donkeys in charge.
She pulled open the desk drawers, one by one, then looked up to see Audrey standing over her.
‘I looked there. I looked everywhere. But I could—’
‘Could it be this one?’ Maggie pulled a black laptop from the bottom drawer.
‘I did not see it!’
Maggie ignored her and opened it. No battery left, so she knelt on the floor and scrabbled in the dust for a cable.
‘I do not know the password!’
Maggie sat back in the chair and plugged the charger in, then held up a Post-it note peeled from the laptop which read PASSWORD: RINGO1940.
Audrey didn’t reply.
The laptop purred into life and Maggie opened her aunt’s inbox, then typed ‘bancroft’ into the search bar. Up popped multiple emails.
My wife and I are celebrating our ruby wedding anniversary and would very much like to return to your hotel, where we spent a very happy holiday many years ago!! read Lord Bancroft’s first email.
Phil had replied later that day. It would be my pleasure to welcome you both back. I’ll make up our loveliest room. Please let me know your arrival time so I can have a bottle of Champagne on ice and cook something very special for you that evening.
Maggie closed the email and scrolled up Phil’s inbox, noting several other reservations until Phil’s replies abruptly stopped two months earlier. ‘Audrey, there are multiple bookings here! We can’t manage these!’
‘It has not been easy, Maggie! So much to remember and that man, Georges, saying I ’ave to do everything.’
Maggie reached behind the desk and fished a piece of paper from the printer. ‘OK, here’s what’s going to happen,’ she said, as she started writing a shopping list. ‘I’m going to have a go at the pool … you’re going to go to the village and buy everything listed here. No! Hang on, Gruyère. That, too.’ She added the cheese to the list and thrust the piece of paper across the desk. ‘Let’s look after these two guests and I’ll go through Phil’s emails and cancel everyone else. But in the meantime, business as usual. Take that, buy everything on it and come back here. Here, I’ll give you some cash.’
‘I cannot go shopping. My back, it is too bad.’
‘Alternatively, I’ll go to the village and you can clean the pool?’ Maggie had heard Audrey make excuses like this for years and Phil had always let her get away with it. But not any more. She looked perfectly capable of filling a shopping bag.
Scowling, Audrey took the list and slid it into her pocket. ‘ Non . I will do it.’
‘Terrific, Audrey. Thank you so much.’ Maggie gave her a genuine smile and felt a prickle of anticipation; she hadn’t cooked for anyone apart from Mungo for months. She hadn’t cooked professionally since she closed her restaurant. She knew chefs who’d been out of the game for long spells and lost their confidence, but how fussy could a couple in their seventies be?
She listened to Audrey make her way down the entrance steps and thought: we can’t let Phil down.