Chapter 27
The hotel looks very little like the picture on the website, which failed to feature the giant crane behind the main building, in situ for the major refurbishment that is taking place, wing by wing, of the country-house estate.
Still, as Nick drags her suitcase along the gravelly entrance, Olivia thinks she is hardly in any position to complain about something not being what it said it is.
Being catfished by a hotel is the least of her worries.
‘It’s going to be amazing once it’s done,’ says the receptionist, a girl who can’t be much older than Saskia.
‘There’s going to be a spa pool and a sauna,’ she says, tapping their car registration into the computer, ‘and all of the rooms will have Nespresso machines instead of Corby trouser presses.’
‘Sounds wonderful,’ beams Olivia, who has packed the leopard-print mini for the dinner, which looks to be taking place in a dining room with all the charm of an office canteen.
‘Now, you’ll be pleased to hear that you’ve been upgraded to a suite.’ The girl looks up brightly, smiles with perfect white teeth. ‘Compliments of the manager, of course, to make up for the construction outside.’
‘How lovely!’ nods Nick, who has spent most of the hour-long journey wondering if the hotel will have a gym (it will not, he is beginning to realize, as he notes the peeling orange paint on the walls, and the aroma of the deep red carpet, which smells of several decades’ worth of company away-day events and mid-range business conferences).
‘Right,’ says Olivia, as the girl hands her a key attached to a giant wooden panel bearing the cryptic words ‘The C r l Th t her Su te’ in faded black writing.
‘The Carol Thatcher Suite,’ grins the girl.
‘She came and did a keynote speech at an awards ceremony we hosted here back in 1997, apparently. I think it was for the local car salesmen. Anyway, she made quite the impression and ended up having to stay over in the very room that you will be sleeping in tonight. We hope that you’ll have as wonderful an evening as she did! ’
‘Gosh,’ says Nick, raising his eyebrows in what appears to be genuine excitement. ‘Aren’t we lucky?’
‘Unfortunately the lift is out of order right now,’ continues the girl, who has stood up and is motioning to the hall behind them. ‘If you take the stairs through there, go up to the first floor, take the second right, and it’s just down the corridor. You can’t miss it.’
‘Second right, just down the corridor,’ repeats Nick.
‘And if you have any problems, don’t hesitate to dial zero on your phone and I’ll be right up with whatever you need!’
Olivia thanks the girl, and watches as Nick begins to drag her wheelie suitcase in the direction of the stairs, his own overnight bag slung casually over one shoulder.
She has to admit his arms are really beginning to benefit from the regular trips to CrossFit.
She watches him scamper up the stairs excitedly, feels the terrible shame of all she has kept from him over the years, of how she is potentially about to upend all the building blocks of their marriage, in the Carol Thatcher Suite, of all places.
She thinks of how resentful she was of her husband up until a couple of weeks ago, how amazing their relationship has been since, and how terrible it is that she might be about to ruin it just as everything has begun to go so well.
Then she shakes the thoughts away. Shame hasn’t been much use to her in the past, and it certainly won’t help things now.
‘Sometimes life isn’t all rainbows and fluffy kittens,’ she says to herself under her breath, as they pass a pile of bricks in the corridor. ‘And that’s OK.’
‘Well, here we are,’ Nick says, putting the key in the lock of the room, unaware of the truth bomb she’s about to drop in it.
‘The big reveal.’ The latch turns and the door opens on to the Carol Thatcher Suite, which is as shockingly orange as its namesake (if Olivia remembers rightly from the woman’s turn on I’m a Celebrity).
There are orange carpets, orange walls, an orange quilt thrown over the tiny double bed.
There is a single dark-pine wardrobe, shoved up against a wall that hosts the aforementioned Corby trouser press, probably last used when Carol’s mother was still prime minister.
The bathroom is a peachy shade of pink, and not in an ironic way.
In the room’s favour, the windows are large, and probably once commanded wonderful views of the hotel grounds …
back when they were actually hotel grounds, as opposed to a building site.
‘Well, I think we’ll be very happy here,’ announces Nick, flopping down on the bed. Springs creak ominously below him, while the headboard makes a thudding noise against the wall.
Olivia goes and perches on the end of the bed, looks for the half-bottle of champagne and the box of chocolates, realizes that they must have been lost in the ‘upgrade’.
‘Nick, I need to talk to you,’ she says suddenly, because if she doesn’t get round to it now, she wonders if she ever will.
‘I need to tell you something that you’re probably not going to like. ’
‘Is it that we’re spending two nights here, as opposed to just the one?’ She turns around and looks at him miserably as he sits up straight, concern spreading over his lovely, kind features. ‘Is it something to do with the kids?’ he asks, looking worried. ‘Are you ill?’
‘God, no,’ she replies. ‘It’s nothing like that. It’s just, I like how we’ve been with each other in the last few weeks, and I think I owe you the truth about something.’
‘I don’t know if I can deal with much more truth, Olivia,’ he grimaces. ‘I’m still getting to grips with the idea of your dad in a cupboard with the magician’s assistant.’
‘I’m being serious, Nick.’ She looks away from him, notices a signed picture of Carol Thatcher in a cheap plastic frame on the MDF desk. ‘I need to explain why I’ve not been myself recently. Or why I’ve been a bit too much of myself, I should probably say.’
‘OK.’ He relaxes against the headboard, nods his head to let her know he is ready for whatever it is she needs to tell him.
‘So it turns out that the girl I went on that night out with and took drugs with …’
‘I’m sorry, who? When you … what?’
‘That’s not really the point of the story, Nick.’ Olivia grits her teeth. ‘It turns out she doesn’t work for The Morning. She works for something called Stop the Press.’
‘The pink-paint people!’ He looks like a child who has got a maths question right. ‘I’ve read about them. They could do with chucking some of that over that fucker of a boss of yours.’
‘Well, that’s the thing. I need to talk to you about him too.
’ Olivia takes off her jacket, puts it on the back of a plastic chair that sits in front of the desk.
Then she removes her shoes, returns to the bed, and scooches up so that she’s next to Nick, feeling the mattress springs sag beneath her increasing weight.
As the bed creaks, she realizes she’s never cared about the number on the scales less, hasn’t even bothered to look at it for the last few weeks, and that’s a small win in itself.
‘So a very long time ago, like, when we had only just first started going out, something happened with Stephen.’
Nick shifts ever-so-slightly away, a centimetre that feels like a mile. ‘OK,’ he says, clearly not OK at all. ‘Go on.’
‘Do you remember when he was the news editor?’ Nick nods.
‘He was my boss for a bit when I was a trainee, and he used to take everyone on those big boozy nights out and I’d never go because I’d heard how raucous they got, and I knew that as a woman, it wasn’t a good look to get raucous.
Not if you wanted to be taken seriously.
’ She shakes her head at the stupidity of it all, the realization that she was fighting for an impossibility from the very beginning.
‘They were every Thursday, and I actually made up a netball team so that I could get out of going to these boys’ evenings that he invited everyone to.
Can you believe that? I fabricated an entire sports team, a completely imaginary social life, just to avoid saying the word “no”.
But I’d heard about these evenings. Everyone had.
The next day there was enough winking and nudging for everyone to work out that they weren’t discussing the state of the nation.
As a rule, we women never, ever went on them, and there were so few of us there at the time it was barely noticeable, to be honest. God knows what variety of hobbies we all claimed to be committed to so we could get out of them.
I even had a kitbag I kept by my desk as a sort of prop.
A fucking kitbag! I mean, talk about delusional.
But one week it was absolutely pouring with rain outside, blowing a fucking gale, and Stephen cornered me before I could leave.
He was all like You can’t play netball in this, come out with us all instead!
And … I had this moment of weakness – I think I felt special, which is ridiculous I know, and I said yes.
I thought that maybe it might be a bit of fun, that perhaps I could show them all that I wasn’t some dry, dull graduate with a rod stuck up her arse.
To think it mattered to me that Stephen saw me as fun. ’
She exhales for the first time since she’s begun speaking.
‘And I don’t know what happened, Nick. I mean I do know what happened, but I don’t know how it happened, just that it happened really quickly, and I wasn’t entirely on my A-game because I’d made the mistake of having one-too-many white wine spritzers, and I’d agreed to go on to this sort of nightclub that was more of a dive bar, round the corner from the office.
It’s been demolished now, replaced with some swish restaurant, thank god.
Anyway, my memory is kind of hazy leading up to it, which they count on, don’t they? ’