After lunch on Friday afternoon, Charlotte joined Mr Parker in his office behind the reception desk. "The other Beaufort girl", Phillida, was on duty now. She was as young and inexperienced as her sister and equally fascinated by the contents of her phone.
Charlotte wondered why Mr Parker tolerated such behaviour. As far as she knew, the girls were paid for looking after the hotel guests, not for checking their Instagram accounts. And there were plenty of guests, asking for the Wifi-password, for breakfast times, for the way to the wellness area, for bathrobes and slippers, for restaurant recommendations, train times to Brighton, rental bikes and the opening hours of basically all sights between Hastings and Chichester.
"Mr Parker, is it true that your brother is coming down from London for the ball?" Phillida asked between a guest and a glance at her phone screen.
"Of course he is, my dear," Mr Parker said. "He's always coming down to Sanditon for our events."
"It's only … there isn't a room booked for him just yet."
"Oh, he'll stay in our spare room… or one of the empty staff rooms upstairs. Would you mind a neighbour, Charlotte?"
"Of course not," she lied, reddening deeply. Without having met the man, she was absolutely sure she did want to sleep wall to wall with him. Phillida giggled, and Mr Parker said: "Splendid". Then his phone started ringing.
He discussed the appropriate colour of bathroom tiles with someone called Stringer for a few minutes, but just when he called off, his phone started ringing again. This time it was Lady Denham herself, and all Charlotte gathered from the conversation was that it was about contracts, bank and a signature.
She took the time to have a look around the office. Mr Parker's desk, as well as parts of the carpet, were covered by piles of papers that looked too delicate to touch or move. The folders labelled "Accounting" were stacked in a shelf behind the desk, yet the labelling ended about eighteen months ago, which must have been about the time when Mary got pregnant with little Jamie.
Charlotte decided to go through this as methodically as possible. She spent most of the afternoon running through the piles and sorting their contents in new piles: incoming invoices to her right, outgoing invoices to her left, delivery notes next to the incoming invoices, and reminders (yes, there were several) next to them, general correspondence in front of her.
While she was at work, Mr Parker continued to talk on the phone on the other side of the table, and when he was not talking, he typed by stomping his index fingers on the keyboard of his laptop, taking a painfully long time to complete whatever he was writing. From time to time, a member of staff knocked on the open door – Manoel, the F&B Manager, updating him on the state of the preparations for the ball, and Clara, going through the VIP list for the weekend, followed by Esther, also wishing to go through the VIP list.
More than once, Mr Parker jumped up, cried "Ha!" as if he had discovered Archimedes' Principle, and in unintelligible handwriting scribbled something on the whiteboard behind his desk. "You're stimulating my creativity, Charlotte," he said on one such occasion. The whiteboard, he explained to her, was his notepad. Bursting of ideas as he was, he would classify and follow them up later. Then his phone started ringing again, and he was back to talking to Lady Denham about a contract and a missing signature.
There was no end to a hotel manager's working day, Mr Parker said after ringing off, but there was for Charlotte, as she was only a trainee. She was free to spend the evening as she liked, and what she liked best was to walk along the cliff and all the way down to the beach and enjoy the last rays of sunshine.
The next day was the day of the famous ball. Even though she was not to attend as a guest, but as part of the service crew, Charlotte felt a certain note of anticipation. And she was not the only one. When she came to the office that morning, Mr Parker, very red in the face, was running wild.
The wine merchant had failed to deliver on time, the temp agency had cancelled two waiters for the evening, there was no word from his brother Sidney – or his famous friends – on when they would be arriving (if they were arriving at all). And, worst of all, someone (no names, please) had messed up thoroughly and forgotten to take a signature from Lady Denham for a super-important document that had to be presented to the bank on Monday morning. "Can't you ask Lady Denham to sign it at the ball tonight?" Mary asked, having followed her husband to his office and carrying Jamie with her.
"No, my dear, that is out of the question. A ball is a ball and not a place for bank business. It would be highly unprofessional to bother Lady D with these matters during such an event." It was also highly unprofessional to forget a vital signature – but if that thought was on anybody's mind, they did not say it.
"You look after Jamie, and I'll go to Lady D," Mary said. "I'll take Charlotte with me – she has yet to meet her ladyship anyway. We'll take a golf cart, dash down to Sanditon House, get that signature and return immediately. We'll be back in an hour and we'll have enough time to get everything done for tonight."
"My dear." Mr Parker shook his head in admiration. "Where would I be without you?"
"I wonder," Mary said with an indulgent smile. Charlotte watched them kiss good-bye over Jamie's head and asked herself what it would be like to be loved so unconditionally – and whether she would ever meet someone who loved her like that.
x
Sidney Parker's week had not been good so far.
He had spent a considerable amount of time doing what he did for a living – trading stocks for his clients, thereby making as much profit as possible for them. He was good at it - brilliant, actually -, and he knew it was terribly clichéd, but sometimes he wished he was earning his living by doing something really useful, like saving puppies from animal testing, or building wells in remote desert villages, or teaching children in developing countries how to read and to write.
So far, his most successful bid at being a better person was to regularly donate some of his precious blood to the NHS – but even for that, he got paid. And whenever he saw a new commission fee from one of his clients credited to his account he understood that as long as saving puppies, building wells and teaching children the alphabet was not as well paid as making rich people even richer, he was going to stick with the stock market.
Between trading this week, he had spent a considerable amount of time on the phone, cajoling Babington and Crowe into meeting him at the Sanditon Grand Hotel for the weekend. A favour for his brother Tom (who was excellent at demanding favours and far worse at returning them). It was the weekend of the Spring Ball, and it did say much about the splendour of the occasion that Tom believed a minor lordship and a self-styled influencer would add some shine. As a bonus, Sidney thought, rolling his eyes, he would have to endure his friends' puns about the non-existing joys of Sanditon until the end of all days.
And as if all that was not bad enough, he now had the added burden of what he called "the Lambe-situation". Just another small favour, this time for his mentor, George Lambe, and it had backfired terribly. What did one do with a troubled seventeen-year-old girl? Sidney had no idea. He knew a lot about little girls, thanks to his nieces (and thinking of them made him actually smile), but he did doubt that Gigi Lambe could be pacified with the promise of building a sandcastle and playing shuttlecock on Sanditon's beach.
So the two hours he spent driving down from London to Sanditon on Saturday morning promised to be the best two hours of the week, and he enjoyed them, turning the radio to full volume and opening the roof of the Aston Martin as soon as he had left the motorway. It was a fine fresh day, but there was a light breeze from the sea, ruffling his hair. There was also a whiff of saltwater and wet seaweed in the air: the smells of home.
When he passed the town sign ("Welcome to Sanditon, home to sea-bathing", with an ancient bathing machine painted next to it), he felt the familiar frustration creep up inside of him, a frustration that always left him ill-tempered.
Sanditon was a beautiful little town, his forefathers had done well on that, and its location between the river estuary and the clifftop plus the wide beach was truly unequalled. Yet, it always felt as if the last time anything substantial had happened here was two hundred years ago. Admirable as his brother's efforts at reviving the place were, in the end, it was just another sleepy seaside town with little entertainment and so much less sunshine than the Costa Brava.
He drove past Tom's worn out banners for the anniversary in 2016, turned the Aston Martin into the high street, parked in front of the Sanditon Museum, and walked over to the flower shop. His sister-in-law deserved a little something after spending days if not weeks with Tom's nerves before the ball.
As usual, the Aston Martin drew onlookers, though not the kind of onlookers that asked how vintage it was (very, being the 1952 model), if it was really his (yes!) and how much it was worth (no comment). Constable Hankins was busy writing out a ticket, scarcely able to hide his glee when he saw Sidney coming out of the flower shop. "As I told your brother the other day, traffic rules also apply to members of the Parker family," he said. "This is a strictly no-parking-zone."
Sidney pocketed the ticket without a word, dropped the bunch of flowers for Mary on the passenger seat, put his sunglasses on and jumped back into the car. A bad day gone worse. He could not wait to go to the hotel's gym and hit the punching ball as long and as hard as possible.
Just before the last bend of the driveway up to the hotel, a golf cart came chugging across the impeccable green towards the road. The woman behind the wheel waved at Sidney: the patient angel that was his sister-in-law. He stopped the Aston Martin and got out.
"Mary! Good to see you," he said, lifting his sunglasses and walking up to meet her. A brown-haired, slightly chubby looking girl of fourteen or perhaps fifteen years was with her. "New babysitter?" he asked.
He knew immediately that it was a misstep. Seen from up close, the girl was not fourteen, but in her early twenties, and she was not chubby, but… well. As in well-formed. He would have to have his eyesight tested when he returned to London.
"Sidney!" Mary said with the slightest note of reproach. "This is Charlotte Heywood, Tom's management trainee for this summer."
Oh Lord, not another one of Tom's trainees. His hopes, which had risen for a second, were deflated immediately. He had no idea where his brother acquired them every year again: graduates from hotel management school voluntarily agreeing to a summer of long working hours for a joke of a salary while having to sleep in one of the sticky former staff rooms in the attic. He gave this one a half-hearted smile. "Miss…?"
"Heywood," she said primly.
"Miss Heywood," he repeated, squinting into the sun. Tom's trainees came in two categories: the nerds and the flirts. This one was a nerd.
„We are off to Lady D.'s," Mary said. "Some last-minute business papers that have to be signed."
"Then I won't keep you." With a smile at his sister-in-law and a cursory nod to Miss Heywood, Sidney jumped back into his car and drove off. That punching ball in the gym could not be hit soon enough.
x
New babysitter! Charlotte watched the Aston Martin disappear beyond the bend of the road.
"He is so good," Mary said, starting the golf cart again. "He has so many concerns, but we can always count on him. He can be abrupt and inattentive, as he was just now with you, but he has a good heart."
"I'm glad to hear it." Charlotte could barely hide her doubt. Idiot, she added to her ever-growing list of Sidney Parker's characteristics: self-confident, unreliable, unsteady, ambitious, superficial, probably in need of strong glasses but too vain to wear them.
"I do worry about his own happiness though," Mary continued.
Well, I don't, Charlotte thought.
"I should like to see him settled, but I fear it is not in his nature. He's never brought a girl to Sanditon since… anyway. Not our concern."
Maybe he is gay, Charlotte mused. But this was 2017, not 1817: nothing to hide, nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to be punished for. And the Parker family seemed to be unprejudiced and open-minded enough. So what was wrong with that man? It was a conundrum, and she had not solved it by the time they had reached Sanditon House, Lady Denham's anything but humble abode.
Lady Denham turned out to be precisely the dragon she had been described as, a short and sturdy lady in her seventies with an alarming tuff of grey hair and a clothing style that seemed to be stuck somewhere in the seventies as well. She grudgingly signed the papers Mary Parker presented, not missing the opportunity to criticise Mr Parker's business style, and openly asked Charlotte about her career plans. "A girl must have a career these days," she said. "I keep preaching Clara and Esther. It's not like back in the old times when you could find yourself a fine rich husband, and be sure you were provided for until the end of your life once you had given birth to an heir and his spare."
"I doubt it was ever that simple," Charlotte said. "I believe that even in the old times people would have preferred to marry out of love and affection and that they would have had cares and worries and struggles and disappointments to overcome."
"You're very opinionated," Lady Denham said, eyeing her with fresh interest. "So what were your plans again?"
"I hope to gain as much experience as possible in the hotel industry. One day, I might go back to Willingden and help my eldest brother when he takes over the farm from our father. He has ideas about sustainable farming and converting some of the outbuildings into tourist accommodation."
"I see," Lady Denham said with a yawn.
They left soon afterwards, Mary directing the golf cart through Lady Denham's park and then across the golf course. Charlotte was in no particular hurry to return home, and she immediately relented when Mary suggested to drop her off on the driveway so that she could walk along the cliff back to the hotel, enjoy the view and relax a little before taking on her duties as part of the service crew for the evening event.
This was an exceptionally beautiful spot of the Sussex coast, with the cliff rising high above a coastline full of secret coves and wild rocks ragged by the sea. Further to the right, where the hillside flattened out towards the estuary, Sanditon's wide beach stretched along the promenade and the buildings of the town.
I'll never get tired of this view, Charlotte thought. She was on the public footpath now, populated by a weekend crowd of Nordic walkers, mountain bikers, joggers and tourists, all of them passing the Sanditon Grand Hotel. This place must be a gold mine, she speculated. Imagine sitting on that terrace above the sea and enjoying the view while savouring a good cup of tea and one (or two) of Arthur Parker's Strawberry Secrets. The only thing missing was a sign to the terrace and a hint that such a wonderful treasure as Arthur Parker's Strawberry Secrets could be found there. I'll ask Mr Parker about it, Charlotte decided when she entered the hotel through the staff entrance in the basement.
She took the elevator up to her apartment in the attic, meeting and greeting some guests on the way and mentally designing some posters for the elevator's walls to advertise Arthur Parker's artistry. It was only when she got out her keys that she remembered what Mr Parker had said about putting his brother up in one of the other spare attic rooms. It certainly seemed as if she had a neighbour, for there was a noise on the otherwise empty corridor. Maybe Sidney Parker was exercising, doing push-ups or sit-ups or whatever he did to keep his, well, glorious shape. But would he do anything that sounded like a sledgehammer hitting the wall? And the noise was closer to the elevator than to the rooms. Charlotte looked around. Next to the elevator shaft and the staircase was a door marked "Utility Room – authorised personnel only". That was where the thumping came from, the ancient control room of the even more ancient elevator. Something must have gone wrong in there, with the hydraulics, the cables or whatever was needed to stop an elevator from plummeting downwards. Charlotte tried the door.
To her surprise, it did open.
That's not ok, she thought. This door has to be locked… and then she wished it had been locked, or she had not tried it, or she had returned later – or the housekeeper and the golf instructor had just thought of locking up from inside. She did not see much of Edward, who had turned his back to her, but she did see enough of Clara to understand what was going on. And that look on Clara's face, surprised and triumphant at the same time!
Charlotte blushed, slammed the door shut behind her, ran over to her own room and leaned against the window until she was sure her face had returned to its normal colour. Why was she so shocked? It was none of her business. Clara and Edward were grown-up people and free to do whatever they wanted. Though why they had to do it in a scruffy, dusty utility room was beyond her understanding.
Notes:
In the next chapter, Charlotte is going to make "One Assumption Too Many".
