Chapter 36 #2
‘No, thank you. Actually, I forgot to mention, I’m lactose intolerant,’ she pinned Blythe with her eyes, ‘violently so. In fact, if there’s as much as a drop of milk in the vicinity of any of my food, I’ll know about it.
’ She snatched the keys from Blythe’s hands before going to the French doors and pulling them closed with a bang loud enough to rattle the panes.
‘The pollen sets off my allergies,’ she said then and Blythe felt her heart sink. This was not going to be an easy sell.
‘No problem, the other room is…’ She was going to say sea-facing, not taking in quite so much of the garden, but Morwenna shook her head with the look of someone who couldn’t suffer another word.
‘That’ll be all,’ she said then, dismissing Blythe as if she was a servant of the lowest standing in her personal employ.
Just as Blythe was about to leave, she heard the woman’s finger click behind her back.
She turned to see Morwenna Whythe standing a little away from the fresh flower arrangement she’d spent almost half an hour putting together especially earlier.
‘Take these away, will you? I can’t stand flowers in a room. That unpleasant scent of them makes me feel like vomiting if I’m near them.’
‘Oh, right, sorry about that. I didn’t realise, most of our guests love them, not to worry,’ Blythe said and somehow, she managed to keep smiling through gritted teeth as she carried them out of the room and into the kitchen instead.
After that, Blythe felt more like having a good double whiskey, rather than the strongest coffee she could make, but she wasn’t sure her nerves would survive alcohol on top of all the stress.
She’d barely sat down, having scraped the burned crust from one of Siggy’s scones, when she thought she heard a bell tinkling somewhere in the distance.
She walked out into the hall. Yes, she absolutely heard a distinct ringing sound, and it was coming from Morwenna Whythe’s room.
She stood for a moment, not quite sure what she should do, but then, in case the woman was in some sort of peril, she knocked on the door.
‘Come,’ was the imperious response from inside.
Blythe poked her head into the room, to see Morwenna, stretched out on the chaise longue, the covers had been thrown from the bed onto the floor and Morwenna was reclining with a long cigarette in the air, smoking and tipping the ash into one of the pricy pottery dishes that had come from an auction at Ashford castle a few years earlier.
That bloody dish had cost her twenty-five euros and now, it was balanced precariously on the back of the chaise longue.
‘I’m sorry, but this is a non-smoking home,’ she said calmly, because this could just as easily be another test and Blythe knew that she needed to stick to her rules for the sake of other guests. ‘Of course, you can smoke on the terrace, I’m happy to put a proper ash tray outside if you need it.’
‘Oh, pooey, it’s a world gone mad on political correctness, if you ask me. What harm has an occasional puff of smoke ever done anyone in a public place?’
‘This is not a public place; it’s a family home.’ Blythe stopped; she could not afford to argue with this woman.
‘Pah, well really.’ Morwenna stubbed out her cigarette with an exasperated sigh.
‘Can I get you anything?’ She looked at the small brass bell which rested against the woman’s leg. ‘You rang?’
‘I did. I find travelling with your own bell makes everything so much easier for everyone.’ She reached out and gave the thing a second shake.
‘I think I’d like to have some tea now. Obviously, Assam, two sugars.
And something on the side, light, restorative.
’ She flicked her hand again to dismiss Blythe.
Breathe. Just breathe, Blythe told herself.
Within two hours of the woman arriving, Blythe was run ragged.
After the tea, there was a bath, which had to be run by Blythe, because the old bat couldn’t possibly do it for herself.
Then, there were cards to be sent. The bed had to be remade.
She objected to the down pillows and quilt.
She objected to the Corrigan Mills woollen blanket.
She didn’t like the selection of books in the bookcase.
She couldn’t read with that lamp way over there.
It was too noisy. It was too cold. It was too stuffy.
Could Blythe possibly do something about the sound of the sea birds in the distance, apparently, Morwenna couldn’t hear herself think from all that squawking.
Blythe wanted to wring the old witch’s bloody neck before she even thought about how she’d prepare a beef stroganoff without any cream.
This was an island, for heaven’s sake. She was dependent on the local supermarket which had a tiny four-shelf section for all intolerances.
As far as anyone knew in Muffeen Mòr, the only one who ever looked for dairy alternatives was a kid who’d moved into that commune arrangement on the far side of the island.
Blythe felt as if her head was fit to explode by the time Kip came back to pick up something or other from his shed and disappear again, leaving her there to mull over the news from Rae and the unrelenting demands of the woman she was certain held in her hands the power to count her in or out of the prestigious guide book she’d set her heart on having Still Water House in.
It would all be worth it, she told herself as she heard that infernal bell tinkling for what felt like the thousandth time that afternoon.
When she opened that first edition, with a photograph of Still Water House inside it, it would all be worth it then.
It was a terrible thing to admit, but when her brother-in-law died, she had found herself wishing that he’d lived, just long enough to see her final triumph.
What was wrong with her? The man was dead. Let him rest in peace.
Her life, if she was completely honest, felt empty for his loss – she hadn’t liked him, she was not enough of a hypocrite to pretend otherwise, but knowing he was in the hotel had driven her on in a way that she lacked since he’d died.
If she achieved White Book status for Still Water House – what then?
She had no idea. It was so much easier when they’d been trying to make the place up.
She’d been busy every hour of the day, with a young daughter and making ends meet, that she didn’t have time to think about what next.
Now, it felt as if there was no more what next.
Still Water House was as good as she could make it.
Welcoming guests and hearing them compliment her and her home had lost its sheen.
She was bored of her committee work. Over the years she’d been on the parish council, the school board, a serving Brown Owl with the girl guides and numerous other committees that she’d whipped into shape.
But now, most recently, with the pedestrian crossing granted, there seemed to be nothing more she had the interest to do or to join.
Siggy was almost grown up. Grown up and despite her best efforts to keep her near – growing away from her.
Blythe was holding on for dear life, but Siggy would outgrow her.
It was the same for her marriage. Was it too, pulling away from her?
The dinner table that had once been a place of lively discussion was now, Blythe felt, the loneliest place in the world.
Kip hardly spoke to her and she knew that beneath that silence there was a simmering resentment because he felt emasculated – he couldn’t even have the last say on his daughter’s camping trip.
The sale of the hotel was the tin hat on it all. Blythe just didn’t want it sold.
There was nothing she could do about it. She couldn’t afford to buy it, certainly not at the price currently being offered.
Did she want that badly enough to let go of Still Water House?
That night, she lay awake for hours, chasing sleep seemed futile when she saw that it was four-thirty and she still hadn’t slept a wink.
She padded downstairs, as silently as she could past Morwenna’s door.
If she heard that bell one more time, there was a good chance she’d take one of those bloody pillows and…
She shook her head, firmly pushing from her mind visions of what she’d do to that awful woman.
Instead, she turned towards the kitchen, headed for the back door, and slipped her feet into Kip’s too-large work boots in the porch.
The night air was cool, but not unpleasantly so.
She was approaching that age where she valued a crisp night far more than a boiling heat.
In Kip’s van, she noticed he’d left the keys in the ignition.
One of those habits she’d given up trying to break years ago, it was as futile as trying to force down the cow’s lick over his right eyebrow.
She sat into the van, turned over the engine.
Before she knew it, she was driving out the gate, towards Muffeen Mòr.
It was a quiet road at this hour, a four-mile journey that she could do with her eyes closed, but somehow, there was an unfamiliar bleakness to everything tonight.
Cassidy’s abandoned cottage, the overgrown hedgerows all along the road, waiting for the council to come out and tidy things up a little later in the year, the silence of the van.
Kip never listened to the radio, unless it was a live match. Tonight, it all felt otherworldly.
The village was the same; deserted, dark, somehow hostile, as if even the old houses and roads knew her intentions were not good. She drove up towards the village square, pulled in across the road from the hotel. Sat there, with the van idling for a few moments before turning off the engine.
She had no idea why she’d come here. To take a mental snapshot of the place before it was changed forever, perhaps?
Or maybe she was attempting to drill the reality of what was to come into her brain once and for all.
Who knew how the mind works when you’re up to ninety and you haven’t slept a wink?
And then it hit her, a bolt that had been buried deep inside her for as long as she’d been able to say her own name. If she couldn’t have the hotel – she couldn’t bear to see anyone else have it.