Perhaps any help was better than none. Finding steady waiting staff was a continuing problem for Suzy. ‘Don’t suppose you know anyone looking for some part-time work?’ Jude was asked, not for the first time.
She shook her head, not for the first time, and once again had the mischievous idea of mentioning the job to her neighbour. It wouldn’t be a serious suggestion. Carole Seddon, with her civil-service pension and her hide-bound ideas of dignity, would be appalled at the notion of acting as a waitress. But Jude was playfully tempted to unleash the inevitable knee-jerk reaction.
‘Max is cooking for them, presumably?’
‘Yes.’ Suzy looked at the exquisite Piaget watch Rick Hendry had lavished on her for one of their happier anniversaries. ‘He should be in by now. I’m afraid the Pillars of Sussex aren’t his favourite kind of clientele. Still, how else are we going to get dinner for twenty and most of the rooms full on a Tuesday evening?’ She spoke with weary resignation.
Max Townley, Jude knew, saw himself as a ‘personality chef’. He was good at his job and, so long as Hopwicke House attracted high-profile guests, he had enjoyed mingling, and identifying himself, with celebrity. Since the downturn of the previous year, Max had been less at ease, and Suzy knew that each ‘ordinary’ restaurant booking she took made him more unsettled. The fact that fear of drink–driving convictions would guarantee most of the hotel’s rooms were booked for the night carried little weight with the chef. From Max’s point of view, as clientele for a restaurant where he was cooking, the Pillars of Sussex were about as bad as it could get.
‘Are you worried about him not turning up?’ asked Jude.
‘No, he’ll be here. Max is enough of a professional to do that. But he’ll make his point by being late . . . and resentful.’ Her voice took on the chef’s petulant timbre. ‘A load of bloody stuffed shirts who wouldn’t recognize good food if it came up and bit them on the leg, and who will have blunted any taste buds they have left with too much beer before dinner, and then be allowed to smoke all the way through the meal.’
‘Really?’ asked Jude, amazed. One of the strictest rules of the Hopwicke House restaurant had always been its non-smoking policy. Mega-celebrities of the music and film business had succumbed meekly to the stricture, and retired to the bar for their cigarettes and cigars. The fact that the prohibition was being relaxed for a group as undistinguished as the Pillars of Sussex showed, more forcibly than any other indicator, the levels to which Suzy Longthorne’s aspirations had descended.
But it didn’t need saying. Jude leant across the kitchen table and took her friend’s hand, still soft from its years of expensive lotioning.
‘Things really bad, are they, Suzy?’
There was a nod, and for a moment tears threatened the famous hazel eyes.
‘Everything rather a mess, I’m afraid,’ the ‘Face of the Sixties’ admitted.
‘Anything you can talk about? Want to talk about?’
‘Some things, maybe. Certainly this.’
From a pocket in her apron, Suzy extracted an envelope. It bore the Hopwicke House crest, but no name, address or stamp. The back had not been sealed, just tucked in, and the envelope was slightly bent from its sojourn in the apron.
‘Kerry found it in one of the rooms she was checking. She said she opened it because she thought there might be a tip inside . . . though I think she was just being nosy.’
Jude picked up the envelope. ‘May I?’
Her friend gave a defeated nod.
There was only one sheet of paper inside. Of the same quality as the envelope, again it bore the Hopwicke House crest. Centred on the page were three lines of printed text.
ENJOY THIS EVENING.
IF YOU’RE NOT SENSIBLE,
IT’LL BE YOUR LAST.
Chapter Two
The phone call had disturbed Carole Seddon. Her life was rigidly compartmentalized, and many of its compartments had, she hoped, been sealed up for permanent storage. To have one of those old boxes opened threatened her hard-won equilibrium.
Having retired from the Home Office early (and the earliness still rankled), moving with her Labrador Gulliver to a house called High Tor in the seaside village of Fethering had seemed an eminently sensible solution to the problem posed by the rest of her life. And, though the arrival of her next-door neighbour had added extra dimensions to that life, in her more po-faced moods Carole could still feel nostalgic for the acceptable dullness of Fethering pre-Jude.
There was a sharp division in Carole Seddon’s mind between the life she had lived in London and now lived in West Sussex. Although she was happy to discuss her career as a civil servant, she had kept few London friends, and never talked about her personal life. Jude was one of the very few people in Fethering who knew her neighbour had once been married and was a mother.
Had the phone call come from David, Carole would have been less flustered. Her relationship with her ex-husband had now settled down to something totally inert, its only remarkable feature being the fact that two people with so little in common had ever spent time together. Mutual financial interests, or news of long-lost relatives’ deaths, necessitated occasional phone calls, which were politely conducted without warmth, but without animosity.
It was Stephen, however, who had rung Carole that evening, and she wasn’t so sure what her relationship with her son had settled down to. On the rare occasions when she could no longer keep the lid on that particular compartment battened down, its contents prompted a mix of unwelcome emotions. She felt guilty for her lack of maternal instinct. Stephen’s birth had been a profound shock to her, shattering the control which up until then she had exercised over all aspects of her life. A woman who indulged in any kind of self-analysis might have deduced she had experienced post-natal depression, but for Carole Seddon that was territory into which she did not allow her mind to stray. She had been brought up to believe that giving in to mental illness was self-indulgent. Life was for getting on with.
All she knew was that, from the start, Stephen had represented a challenge rather than a blessing. She could not fault herself on the meticulous attention she had given to his upbringing, but she knew she had never felt for him that instinctive love about which so many parents wax lyrical.
So when, as an adult, Stephen drifted further away from her, Carole felt no extra guilt, no regret, possibly even an inadmissible degree of relief.
They never lost touch. Present-givings at Christmas and birthdays were meticulously observed. They rarely met in London, but at least twice a year Stephen would come down to the Fethering area and take his mother out for lunch. The meals were eaten in anonymous seaside restaurants or pubs, and passed off amiably enough.
On these occasions Carole would say the minimum about her local doings, but Stephen seemed quite happy to monopolize the conversation. He talked almost exclusively about his work, which involved computers and money in a combination his mother never quite managed to grasp. She should have taken more interest when he first started his economics course at Nottingham University; then maybe she would have been able to follow the subsequent progress of his career. As it was, when they met she felt increasingly like someone at a party who hadn’t caught the name of the person to whom they were talking initially, and had left it too late to ask.
So, if a question about their relationship had been put to them, both Carole and Stephen would have said they ‘got on’. In spite of the divorce, theirs could by no means be classified as a ‘dysfunctional’ family; it was just one that lacked spontaneous affection.