Chapter 42
Present
When that annoying little bell rang for the umpteenth time that morning, Blythe didn’t move. She was past breaking point. Morwenna Whythe had been here three days at this stage. Three long and horrible days and Blythe was at breaking point.
A second tinkling sound propelled Blythe from her chair.
What could that awful woman want now?
She had turned Blythe’s whole house upside down since she arrived.
She had complained about absolutely everything.
From the cats in the garden, to the unscented candles in the empty fireplace grates.
There wasn’t one kind word from her in the time she’d been here.
And she never left. Not once. She didn’t so much as stroll past the front door.
Instead, she moved from her bedroom to the dining room and from there to the sitting room.
She ran every other guest out of the house with her rudeness.
And this morning, as Blythe had been preparing breakfasts for the sixteen other guests who were due to leave on the early ferry, she had rung that infernal bell constantly.
Blythe was run ragged, fetching and carrying.
The final straw was when she asked for a change of sheets, because she had managed to spill the whole cafetiere of expensive French coffee across Blythe’s lovely Belfast Linens.
It was too much.
Blythe felt her feet begin to pick up pace.
She didn’t care at this point if the woman was the queen of Sheba. She didn’t give two flying bananas if she was a reviewer sent down from St Paul’s pearly-gated mansion in the sky. Blythe couldn’t take one more ring of that irritating bell.
‘That’s it.’ She screamed as she flung open the door.
‘That’s it.’ She hardly even registered the shocked expression of the woman stretched out on the chaise longue.
‘Let’s be having you. I’m not taking another moment of this, I don’t care if you’re Satan’s sister, which I suspect, you probably are, but I’m not putting up with another moment of this.
’ She was beside herself with fury at this point.
Blythe dived at the bed. Pulled the woman’s belongings that were strewn there, off it.
Blitzed the entire room like a demon, gathering up various clothes and shoes and anything that didn’t look as if it belonged to the room.
She was stuffing them into a bag, shoving them in, no care as to whether they creased, curled or rotted.
In her fury, she noticed that there was a dollop of the soy yogurt on a cream cardigan, and she found herself stuffing that even more solidly, hoping it would make an even bigger mess.
‘You can’t do that,’ Morwenna had taken herself off the narrow couch now and she was lumbering around the room, flapping her arms as if she was some sort of annoying fly who might put Blythe off if she kept moving and wittering in her ear.
‘I can do this, and I am doing it. I’m throwing you out.’
‘I’ll…’ Morwenna had suddenly lost some of her imperiousness. ‘I’ll report you to…’ She stopped. ‘I’ll put up a stinker of a review on all the websites.’
‘Morwenna,’ Blythe turned on her quickly and the woman, who’d been supposedly unsure on her feet, stepped swiftly back from her.
The movement gave Blythe a measure of malicious joy.
‘We both know you’re the sort of mean-spirited woman who would give a stinking review anyway.
I’ve bent over backwards for you. I’ve welcomed you into my home and you’ve been insufferable from the moment you arrived.
’ She folded over the lid of the wheelie case she had stuffed almost beyond capacity and began to zip it closed with all her strength.
‘So, you can put up whatever reviews you want, but if you don’t want to walk the two mile journey from here to the ferry, I suggest you come now, because my offer to get you there runs out in the next thirty seconds and you were right by the way – it’s a very, very long walk.
’ Blythe turned on her heels and dragged the suitcase out the door.
‘I’ll be leaving your case on the pier for the next ferry, if you want to come with it, you’d better come now. ’
Blythe never made a journey like that journey. Not one word was spoken between the two women. At the pier, Blythe walked to the back of the car, took out Morwenna’s case and threw it on the ground. By the time she sat back into the jeep, her passenger had already fled.
There would be no White Book entry now, it seemed.
But at that moment, Blythe felt as if she was so stupid to have ever believed it mattered anyway.
She hardly remembered driving back to Still Water House that day.
The front door had been left wide open; such was the haste with which she had left it earlier.
As she passed by the room that had been Morwenna’s, she pulled shut the door.
She would clean it when she was ready. Not now. Not today.
Today, she was too depressed to do anything more than curl up at the end of the garden in one of the old blankets that she kept outside for visitors to use in the summer.
She watched as the tides changed in the distance, thinking about everything her life had become and what frightened her most was that she could see nothing ahead.
For the first time in her life, her plans were dashed aside, she had no idea what she wanted from the rest of her life.
She had no idea where this life was leading and most terrifying of all, she wasn’t sure she wanted to go forward anyway.
It was late when she realised there was only one thing she could do now. Suddenly filled with pangs of loneliness for the hotel, she unfurled herself from the blanket she’d been wrapped up in and headed towards her jeep.
Later, as she drove into Muffeen Mòr, she knew it was irrational to feel this way about bricks and mortar, but she needed to run her hand along the gable, look up in the immense size of the place, remember the happy times there with Pappy.
She had no other agenda, just to sit close to the hotel while it remained everything it had always been to her.
On the floor of the jeep, in the passenger footwell, a can of kerosene sloshed its contents noisily on the uneven roads.
She hadn’t noticed it earlier, perhaps Kip had left it there.
Funny how she could hear the kerosene this evening; normally, you couldn’t hear yourself think over the noisy old engine.
On the passenger seat, a box of fireside matches glared up at her. She had not put them there, had she?
Was she finally losing her mind?
Not until she met Rae on the road did the thought occur to her that somehow, she was moving to the beat of someone else’s drum this evening. Had she slowed down? Blythe wasn’t sure, but once she knew the hotel was empty, it was like a sign.
Not that Blythe was a believer in signs. She left all that crazy mumbo jumbo to people like Rae, but still, if she’d ever been driven to do something crazy, there had always been the failsafe – she simply couldn’t if Rae was in the hotel.
Now, driving into the village, she knew for sure. The hotel was empty. Siggy had mentioned earlier in the week that their first guests of the season were arriving tomorrow.
It was, as Rae might say, another Sign.
The square was eerily silent when she pulled up in the Land Rover.
She sat there for a while, staring up at the hotel.
How much of her life was given over in the service of it?
She’d spent her youth working here and far too much of her life thinking about the place.
If it was possible to love a building with the very bones of you, Blythe loved the hotel.
She loved it too much, probably, she realised now. She took a deep breath. Grabbed the can of kerosene and stalked over towards the end of the building.
She walked along the side in the dusky light. It was only this end she needed to set alight. Just enough to put a spanner in the works of the proposed sale. The insurance would cover any damage.
No one would want to buy a torched building.
Out of sight of any passers-by, she broke the glass window in the small anteroom that had been cut out of the lobby years earlier. This had been a side door once and fed directly from a servants’ staircase, which was only open now as an emergency exit.
Blythe knew nothing of setting fires, but she needed enough to alert a passer-by that something was up, but not so much to do a huge amount of damage.
She doused the stairway with the fuel, ran a trail of it towards the doorway leading into the lobby and then pulled the door out firmly.
Just as she struck the match, in the distance she heard the wails of the fire brigade.
It jolted her and she let the match drop before she was ready.
Instantly she was surrounded by the flames racing along the trail of kerosene. She dived out of the way of the hungry blaze, and by some miracle managed to land on her feet on the path next to the hotel.
The sirens now, she could hear, were fading into the distance.
The flames swished higher. Shit.
There was only one fire brigade unit on the island. What now?
She would have to alert them. But how?
She stumbled away from the hotel.
What had she done? What on earth had she done?
Blythe ran towards the jeep now, tears beginning to fall down her cheeks. She had to get help. She couldn’t let the place burn down.
‘Mrs Carney, is everything alright?’ It was that boy, Danial.
‘I’m fine,’ she snapped. Except she wasn’t. Suddenly, she didn’t know if she was coming or going. She had no idea where her mobile phone was, had she even brought it with her?
‘You look as if you’re not fine at all. Shall I call my grandmother? Were you looking for Siggy?’
‘Siggy?’ She felt completely bewildered. What on earth was he talking about?
‘She’s in the hotel. I saw her go in earlier,’ he said and he pointed to a seat beneath one of the huge chestnut trees on the square.
‘Siggy is in the hotel? Now?’ Oh God. What had she done?
‘She went in about an hour ago. I’m sure she’s still there, I would have seen her come out, so… you could knock on the door…’ He was still talking but she couldn’t hear him.
‘Have they given you a key?’ she shrieked.
‘No. Why would I have a key?’ And then, suddenly, his expression changed.
‘The hotel,’ he pointed across, his extended arm shaking.
‘Fire. There’s a fire in the hotel,’ he said, but his voice was hardly more than a whisper.
‘Siggy…’ And then he was running towards the front door without a backward glance at Blythe.