Room 17

All Rooms Except One The linen supplier had reduced Thursday’s delivery to six double sets and no bath sheets. Yvette brought the email into Malcolm’s office and put it beside the rota Clara had been trying to understand for most of the morning. ‘They’ll honour the bookings we’ve already got,’ Yvette said. ‘That’s the wording. I asked whether they meant the standing order or the guests, and the girl said she wasn’t allowed to tell me.’ Clara took the sheet. It was printed in a shade of grey faint enough to suggest the office printer was about to give up. Three invoices were listed beneath a politely phrased request to contact the accounts department. ‘Did they say anything about Tuesday’s collection?’ ‘They’re still collecting. They’re just not bringing much back.’ ‘That’s very generous of them.’ ‘I thought so.’ Yvette pushed a loose strand of hair behind her ear. ‘We can get through tomorrow. Thursday will be awkward if the coach booking goes ahead.’ ‘It’s twelve people.’ ‘Twelve people who’ll want a towel each, I imagine.’ Clara had counted sixteen arrivals for the end of the week, including the six rooms reserved through a small walking-holidays organiser. She counted them again because the bookings screen gave her something definite to do. The total remained sixteen. The office still smelled of Malcolm’s hand cream and the dusty heat of his computer. He had bought the desk from a closing solicitor’s practice when Clara was eleven, and its drawers had never run smoothly. Three weeks after his death, she was still finding small arrangements made for his convenience: a rubber band around the drawer handle, a folded beer mat beneath the leg of the filing cabinet, a list of extension numbers stuck to the telephone with clear tape gone yellow at the edges. ‘Can you take the desk for half an hour?’ Yvette asked. ‘I want to show the new evening cover where the clean pillow protectors live. Someone keeps putting them in with the mattress toppers.’ ‘Go. I’ll ring the laundry.’ Yvette hesitated at the door. ‘Ask for accounts, not dispatch. Dispatch know us. Accounts have the money.’ She glanced at the email again. ‘And don’t tell them you’ll clear everything by Friday. We can’t.’ ‘I wasn’t going to.’ Clara turned the invoice over to find the account number she would need. ‘Good.’ Yvette went out, leaving the door partly open. Clara heard her greet somebody in the corridor, then explain in her ordinary, unhurried voice that the cupboard beside the stairs was for guest coats, not bags of used sheets. Whoever she was addressing apologised twice. Yvette told them once was enough. Clara looked through the accounts again before calling. The Royale had eighteen bedrooms, including one that had sat empty for so long it was easy to forget to count it. Most midweek nights they sold between seven and eleven. A few regular commercial guests kept returning because the beds were comfortable and the hotel sat a short walk from the station. Weekend trade varied more than Malcolm’s pencilled forecasts suggested. There was an uneasy amount of money due in the next fourteen days, and very little of the balance in the current account was free to spend twice. The heating engineer was booked for Friday. There had been complaints about hot water taking too long to reach the second floor, and the annual service had been postponed once already. The estimate was just over five hundred pounds before parts. Clara had considered putting it back another month until she saw a note from Yvette about a guest standing under a cold shower for four minutes in Room 12. Malcolm had paid a refund without recording the reason in the maintenance book. She made the call. The first person transferred her. The second wanted an account number, which was somewhere under Malcolm’s handwriting on the side of an invoice. The third, a man whose voice sounded worn out by people who promised things, listened to her explanation without interrupting. ‘The account was put on review last Thursday, Ms Webb.’ ‘Yes. I have the notice.’ ‘You’ve had two reminders as well.’ ‘I’ve found one. I’m not arguing about the amount.’ He read it out anyway. The unpaid invoices came to eleven hundred and forty pounds, with the oldest balance more than six weeks overdue. Malcolm had agreed to a payment date at the end of August and missed it. Clara asked whether the laundry could supply a smaller order while she arranged the arrears. ‘I’ve got to apply the same terms to everyone.’ ‘Of course. What terms can you apply?’ He paused. She heard a keyboard. ‘We can do the six doubles that dispatch offered.’ ‘I need towels as well. There’s a group on Friday and we haven’t got enough clean stock to cover them.’ ‘Your collections are still coming in.’ ‘Yes, but you’re keeping the washed items.’ ‘We’re holding them pending settlement.’ Clara rested the receiver against her shoulder and wrote holding beside the amounts. For one ridiculous moment she had a picture of shelves full of The Royale’s sheets, neatly folded and taken hostage, with nobody quite knowing what to do with them. She asked him what partial payment would allow the hotel to receive twenty-four bath towels and enough bedding for the group. He gave her a figure she could meet if she used the money set aside for two smaller supplier bills. ‘Can I send two hundred today,’ she said, ‘and give you a written schedule for the balance on Wednesday? If dispatch brings those towels Thursday, you’ll have the schedule before they leave the depot.’ ‘Two hundred won’t release the whole account.’ ‘I know.’ ‘And if you miss the next arrangement, it goes to pro forma. Payment before every order.’ ‘I understand that.’ ‘People say that.’ Clara considered telling him about Malcolm. There was a sentence she had become practised at over the past three weeks, something about her father having died unexpectedly and her still putting the business affairs in order. She had used it at the bank and once with a man who wanted a deposit for work Malcolm had ordered. The man on the telephone had probably heard worse stories before lunch. She kept the explanation to herself. They spent another ten minutes on quantities, collection bags and the point at which an arrangement counted as broken. In the end, he agreed to ask dispatch to release the towels alongside the six double sets, provided the payment reached them that afternoon. She would send a written plan on Wednesday. The regular delivery remained suspended. He would call on Thursday if her plan was not acceptable. When she rang off, Clara wrote the details on the printed email, then made the transfer while she could still remember what she had agreed to. The payment confirmation appeared on the screen. The figure in the current account dropped at once. The room was quiet enough that she could hear the receptionist at the front desk asking a caller to repeat a surname. Clara opened the boiler estimate again and checked that the appointment was confirmed, although she had checked it twice already. Paying for the service would leave an uncomfortable margin for wages at the end of the week. Cancelling it would be worse if the hot-water problem became a proper failure. There was a knock on the open door. A young member of the housekeeping team stood there holding a pillow protector, rolled into a sausage. ‘Sorry. Yvette said you’d be on the phone.’ ‘I was. It’s all right.’ ‘Are we still doing fourteen tonight? The booking sheet says vacant, but the bed’s got somebody’s cardigan on it.’ ‘Fourteen’s a stayover. They added a night yesterday.’ Clara swivelled towards the bookings screen. ‘Has it been marked as an arrival on your list?’ ‘No. I’ll leave the cardigan.’ ‘Please do.’ The girl went off. Clara had an impulse to call her back and apologise for not knowing the answer without checking a screen, but the girl had asked a perfectly sensible question and been given an answer. Perhaps that was sufficient. For years Clara had thought of The Royale as a place that somehow continued to exist between her visits. Now she could see how much of that continuing had involved people asking whether a cardigan belonged to a guest, whether the towels would be there on Thursday, and who had authority to approve another paid hour at the end of a shift. Malcolm had carried most of the decisions in his head. Some of those decisions had been unwise, or simply delayed until they became someone else’s nuisance. Others had kept eighteen rooms open for decades. She went downstairs shortly after one and found Yvette beside the trolley cupboard, showing the evening receptionist how to work the small brass latch that prevented the door swinging across the corridor. ‘You have to lift it,’ Yvette said. ‘Pulling harder doesn’t help. I’ve been telling people that since before you were born, Clara.’ ‘I believe you.’ ‘You don’t look convinced.’ ‘I’ve spoken to the laundry.’ Yvette let the receptionist try the latch twice, then came with Clara into the breakfast room. There were three tables still set for late departures. The smell of toast had gone from the air, leaving furniture polish and a trace of coffee from the urn. Clara explained the arrangement, including the reduced stock and the Wednesday deadline. Yvette listened, then asked to see the quantities. She calculated something on the back of the paper and pointed out that two rooms would need to receive fresh towels on Friday rather than Thursday if both children in the family booking requested extras. ‘They probably won’t,’ Clara said. ‘Then we’ll be ahead of ourselves. Shall I take the old reserve from the top linen cupboard down to the laundry room? It’s not pretty, but there’s nothing wrong with it.’ ‘Yes. Thank you.’ ‘You’ve kept the heating appointment?’ ‘I have.’ ‘Good.’ Clara felt relieved enough by the single word to be irritated with herself. ‘That was my decision, you know.’ ‘I know whose signature’s on the cheque.’ Yvette folded the paper into quarters. ‘I’m pleased you made it.’ They checked the rest of the week's arrivals together. A guest arriving after ten had requested a ground-floor room, which the reservation system had failed to note, and the evening receptionist had assigned him one on the second floor. Yvette said she would rearrange the rooms, provided Clara authorised the small rate difference. Clara authorised it. Yvette had already made the rearrangement on paper. ‘You could have told me before you did that,’ Clara said. ‘He’s travelling after a hospital appointment. I didn't want him standing here at eleven while we debated whether he ought to climb the stairs.’ ‘I would have agreed.’ ‘Then we’re both happy.’ Late that afternoon Clara made her way through the room inventory with a pen and the printed booking list. The names had survived three changes of computer system, yet Malcolm had continued to keep his own occupancy ledger in a thick, ruled book, each month laid out across two facing pages. Yvette used the software. Malcolm had trusted it only when its figures agreed with what he could see written down. The row for Room 17 was empty apart from a block-capital instruction: ROOM 17 — NOT TO BE LET. Malcolm had ruled a line through the space where a nightly rate should have been. Similar instructions appeared on the booking lists for the past several years. There was no note explaining why. No leak report attached, no maintenance estimate, no insurance warning. Room 17 was absent from the website and from the booking system’s saleable inventory, though a key still hung in its numbered place downstairs. Clara counted the rooms, then counted them again. She had put seventeen into the cash forecast and told the accountant the hotel had eighteen. The error would not transform the books. At the rates they could realistically charge, another bedroom might add a few hundred pounds a week in good periods, much less in quiet ones, before laundry, cleaning and wear. That was enough to matter. It was certainly enough to justify asking why it had been taken out of service for so long. She found Yvette bringing fresh milk to reception and showed her the ledger. ‘Seventeen,’ Yvette said, as though Clara had pointed out an old stain on the wall. ‘Your dad never used it.’ ‘Never?’ ‘Not for guests.’ ‘Was there a problem with the room?’ ‘Ask me when I haven’t got four people due in from a delayed train.’ Yvette glanced at the clock. ‘I’ll tell you what I know. It won’t be very exciting.’ The answer had a familiar shape. Malcolm had been capable of ending a question by giving Clara another small task, or by promising to explain after supper and then staying busy until she forgot. Yvette’s reasons were probably less mysterious: four people really were due in from a delayed train, and the evening receptionist had gone to look for a travel cot. Clara left the ledger on the office desk and went back to reception. At half past ten, the late guest appeared with a carrier bag containing medication, a walking stick and an apologetic account of an appointment that had run on for hours. His reservation still showed a room upstairs on the printout. Yvette brought out the amended key card before anyone could mention the discrepancy. ‘You’re on the ground floor,’ she told him. ‘There’s a kettle, and I’ve put an extra blanket in the wardrobe. If you want a sandwich, I can get you one. We’ve got cheese or ham.’ The man chose cheese. He asked whether there was mustard. Yvette said there was, and the receptionist went to find some while Clara helped with the bags. At eleven she returned to the office. Wednesday's promised payment schedule was written at the top of tomorrow's work pad. Beneath it she added a note to check the booking figures with the accountant and another to ask Yvette about Room 17. She crossed out tomorrow on the pad, wrote Wednesday’s date and copied the supplier’s accounts number underneath. Then she put the email at the front of the folder for the morning.