She could see it all now: the house, carefully and sympathetically renovated, the new block perfectly in keeping with the original building, a large sunny conservatory added which could be used as an extra alfresco-type dining-room, the lawn perfectly manicured, sweeping down to the copse and its pretty hidden pool, the formal walkways and borders filled with the colour and scent of traditional summer flowers… What a setting it would make for summer weddings; the lawns were more than large enough for even the largest of marquees. Her imagination took fire; the weddings became charity balls, prestige events, the busy but very elegant reception area filled with eager visitors whom the smiling, very well-trained receptionist was having diplomatically to turn away. Tatler and Harpers mentioned them in their ‘dining out’ columns and they were inundated with floods of bookings…
Ben was in such popular demand that he was contemplating his own small cookery school in a new purpose-built block tucked away discreetly in the grounds…
She heaved a deep ecstatic sigh of pleasure and excitement.
She could see it all… everything they had ever talked about, dreamed about. Perhaps they might even expand, open a second restaurant… perhaps a château in France… But this place, their first hotel, would always remain special to them.
And one day, when they were old and about to retire, they would look back and she would remind Ben of how pessimistic he had been, of how needlessly he had agonised and worried.
‘Mmm…’ she heard Ben murmuring sexily in her ear. ‘Bet I know what you’re thinking about.’
She laughed as she shook her head, and told him with a grin, ‘Bet you don’t.’
* * *
‘Is this it?’
Ben gave a small grimace as he stopped the car next to the hotel entrance.
To either side of the drive where once there must have been the kind of ‘natural’ rolling parkland beloved of Capability Brown there now stretched a golf course, all raw patches of earth and vistas which contained only unrealistically posed clumps of golfers instead of majestic stands of specimen trees.
‘This course was probably designed in the days before they had to design them around existing landscape features,’ Zoe pointed out.
‘It does look pretty off-putting, though, doesn’t it?’ he said.
‘Mmm… Unless of course you happen to be a golfer; but why on earth couldn’t they put the course out of sight of the hotel’s main entrance?’
‘Are you sure this is the only place in the area that we’re going to have to compete with?’ he asked her thoughtfully.
‘As far as I can tell.’
‘Mind you, there’s still that good food rating,’ Ben pointed out as they parked the car in front of the hotel.
Inside, the reception area was cramped into what was obviously a sectioned-off portion of what had originally been a much larger room. The conversion had altered the room’s proportions in a way that gave the reception area a boxed-in, unwelcoming feel to it, a mistake they were most definitely not going to make, Zoe assured herself as she contrasted its layout to the one she was mentally planning for Broughton House.
The reception desk was unattended, even though they could hear the sound of voices from the office area behind it—and so presumably could the people within it hear them.
In the end, Zoe had to ring the bell provided a couple of times, before a very young and rather flustered girl appeared.
She had to go through the registrations twice before she found their names, her manner changing slightly as she found them and commented with some surprise, ‘Oh, you’re booked into our special suite.’
‘Are we?’ Ben whispered to Zoe as she turned away from them.
‘Clive’s idea,’ she whispered back. ‘He said I was to book the most expensive suite they had so that we’d know exactly what we were competing with.’
‘Well, I don’t care how it advertises itself,’ Ben told her. ‘This place is no country retreat. It’s more of a business complex-cum-conference centre.’
‘It does have a large leisure complex attached to it,’ Zoe pointed out fairly. ‘Something we haven’t even considered.’
‘Nor do we intend to,’ Ben countered firmly.
The girl behind the reception desk had found their key, but she seemed to be having trouble locating someone to take them and their luggage up to their rooms.
‘I’m sorry,’ she apologised, ‘but we’ve got a conference on and we’re rather short-staffed.’
‘Permanently short-staffed would probably have been a better description,’ Zoe murmured to Ben when she had eventually found someone to take them to their room.
It wasn’t the girl’s fault, she acknowledged; she was very young, probably only a part-timer. The hotel was several miles from the nearest village, and presumably had to bus its staff in and out.