The Willow Hotel had been a part of Carrickwell as long as anyone could remember. Other, grander establishments had come and gone, bringing variously nouvelle cuisine, Zen-like simplicity and chic modern style to the area, but only three hotels remained in the town: the Carrick Park, a motel on the main road to the city; the Townhouse, a small business establishment near the cathedral that did a roaring trade in office lunches, and the Willow, a big, rambling Georgian country house hotel that was crammed with shabby antiques, was hell to heat and had managed only to stay more or less solvent in the thirty years since Cleo’s parents had taken it over.
Harry and Sheila Malin had been newly married then and thought the Willow would be a great place to rear a family, what with its enormous overgrown back garden and the big house for children to tear around in, and they’d thrown themselves into running the place with great gusto, even though they hadn’t a smidgen of experience between the pair of them. Somehow they’d managed it, and thirty years and three children later, the Willow was still there: a landmark building on five valuable acres of land on the outskirts of the town.
It featured in guidebooks in the country house category, the sort of place where guests could feel they were visiting a friend’s large, old-fashioned, comfortably down-at-heel home rather than a hotel. There were sixteen bedrooms, each one different, two suites, and a tiny ballroom where small, intimate wedding receptions could be held.
The Willow Hotel was the same as it had always been. It was Carrickwell that had changed over the years. No longer a sleepy town, it had become a busy part of the commuter belt where property prices rocketed and where other hotel-owners were always trying to set up shop.
The most recent bit of competition had come from the large Victorian rectory on the Glenside Road, where all the bedrooms were done up like a Parisian brothel, complete with mirrors and an abundance of plum-coloured velvet and leopardskin. Cleo’s father had surreptitiously checked it out and was able to report back that the breakfasts were bad – continental instead of the good solid fry-up that most people wanted, high cholesterol notwithstanding – and that the owner seemed more keen on having the place photographed in style magazines than attending to the daily routine of a hotel.
The leopardskin palace was a source of great amusement in the family quarters of the Willow, where the carpets were threadbare and the wallpaper hadn’t been changed in aeons.
Harry Malin thought that its closure after only a year was reassurance that people liked solid home cooking and a cosy atmosphere instead of great style and expensive new furnishings.
Given that nothing at the Willow had been updated since she was a child, Cleo thought this was all just as well, but she didn’t say so.
Sheila said it was proof that the Willow was part and parcel of Carrickwell, and didn’t people drive out from the city just for Sunday lunch in the big dining room? People booked the Willow’s Christmas Day lunch months in advance, and wasn’t the waiting list for Christmas cancellations a mile long? Barney and Jason, Cleo’s older brothers, said the Willow could be a little goldmine now they had cut a deal with the tour company taking people to see the Cistercian monastery and the round tower. And as it was all going so well, what was the point of shelling out lots of money to upgrade the heating system just because the plumber mentioned that the pipes were beyond their use-by date? That was plumbers for you – of course any plumber worth his salt was going to say the pipes were in need of work.
Sondra, Barney’s wife, said that the family could always sell a bit of the land at the back of the hotel to developers, who’d whip up a couple of apartment blocks before you could whistle, and then, wouldn’t everyone be in clover?
Cleo was the only one to sound a note of warning. Fresh from graduating in the top five per cent of her class in hotel management, she said they really ought to think about refurbishing because times were tough and it would be very easy for a hotel like the Willow to slide into the doldrums because of a lack of vision on the family’s behalf. The big modern hotels were generally owned by corporations who could afford to invest with an eye to the long term, she said, while smaller establishments had to offer something special as boutique hotels, a concept that required high standards and lots of money spent.
Mrs O’Flaherty, who’d worked in the exquisite Victoria Jungfrau in Switzerland, had lectured Cleo’s class on the future of the hotel industry, and she’d been passionate about the need of smaller hotels to do their best to keep up.
‘If standards slip and the money isn’t spent, then your thriving small hotel can go from having every bed occupied to being empty every night very quickly,’ Mrs O’Flaherty had pointed out with great seriousness. ‘That is the tragedy of the family-owned end of the business. There often isn’t enough money for renovations but not investing is a recipe for disaster.’
The class, many of whom were from hotel-owning families, listened earnestly, making notes and wondering how they’d impart this information at home.
Cleo’s friend and admirer, Nat, who came from a quaint twenty-bedroomed hotel in Galway that had been in his family for generations, used to say he had no hope of getting through to his widowed mother about the need for investment.
‘She says there’s a limit to how much money you can spend on a place and that if we doll it up too much, we’ll have to charge miles more per room and all the old regulars won’t come near us,’ said Nat gloomily. ‘I keep telling her we need to put thousands into the place or we’ll go under, but she won’t listen. So what can I do?’
Cleo shrugged her shoulders, which meant: don’t ask me – you know my lot don’t listen to what I say either.
Cleo was the youngest in the family and, at the age of twenty-three, she was still treated like a child at home.
Barney and Jason had no interest in the hotel except to discuss its finances. When they’d reached twenty-five, each brother had been given a ten per cent share in the business. Cleo was sure that her father had waited until her brothers had reached twenty-five because they were both reckless when it came to money. Her mother insisted it was because Harry wanted to make sure they were sensible enough to think of the hotel’s future when they were finally part of the deal.
‘Twenty-five is ridiculous. It’s so far off it’s almost Victorian,’ Cleo insisted at her twenty-first birthday, when she heard of this scheme for the first time and realised she wasn’t old enough to be in it.
‘It’s the age of maturity,’ her father said.
‘In Jane Austen’s time, perhaps,’ Cleo said. She hated the fact that her father didn’t realise she was already far more mature than her brothers would ever be – honestly, they were like children sometimes – and she was determined to change this. Dad would listen to her. It was crazy not to give her her share now so she could have a say in the running of the business. She had all the training, she knew what would work and she was so eager…
‘Are you buying those magazines or are you practising to be in the wax museum?’ demanded the man behind the counter in the newsagent’s. Wrenching herself out of a daydream in which her family listened to her every utterance as if it was written on tablets of stone, Cleo realised she’d been staring blindly at the magazine rack for ages with two glossy magazines clutched to her chest.
‘Sorry,’ she said, going over to the counter and beaming at him. Cleo had a fabulous smile, everyone said, because it brought out her dimples and reached her eyes too. If Cleo had been the sort of girl who’d ever got into trouble – and she wasn’t, as she moaned to her best friend, Trish – she’d have been able to wriggle out of it instantly, thanks to her hundred-watt beam.
The newsagent’s face mellowed as he took the magazines to scan them. She was a grand girl and polite too, not like those hoydens who came in, flicked through every magazine in the place, read out the sex hints loudly, and went off without buying so much as a packet of crisps.
‘Thank you.’