For Better for Worse

Whenever he could, he played in a small team made up in the main of fellow chefs, and when she could Zoe went along with him to cheer him on. This Sunday, though, she would be working. Which was probably just as well, she reflected, smiling to herself as she visualised the results of her ardent handiwork.

‘Have you any days’ holiday left?’

Sleepily Zoe opened her eyes, lifting her head off the pillow to stare through the darkness at Ben. She had thought he was already asleep.

‘Yes, I think so. Why?’

‘I was just thinking. When we go down to see the house, it might be a good idea to take a few days off, have a good look round and weigh up the competition.’

‘A holiday?’ Zoe was sitting bolt upright now, her eyes bright with enthusiasm. ‘Oh, Ben, could we?’

She knew how careful he was with his budget. Careful but not mean—never that. She earned more than he did, and she also had her parents to turn to should she need to do so. Because of that she was careful not to offend his pride by offering to pay for too many extra ‘treats’. She also knew how much he would be worrying about Sharon’s coming baby—the extra mouth he would insist on helping to feed, no matter how much he might rail now against the child’s conception.

‘I don’t see why not. We could always put it down to business expenses,’ he added drily. ‘Isn’t that the way it’s done? Mind you, why should I knock it? It will be all those executives with their hefty expense accounts that we’ll need to attract if we’re going to make this thing pay. Running a hotel isn’t like running a restaurant.’

Zoe caught the underlying note of tension in his voice and frowned. She was fully awake now and so obviously was he.

This was something they had talked about when Clive had first offered to back them.

Ben had always wanted to open his own restaurant; he was after all virtually running the restaurant where he now worked, although Aldo, the Italian who owned it, would never have admitted it. He was a sour-tempered, mean-natured man, whose chefs didn’t normally last very long, even though the restaurant itself was a popular one.

He was over fifty, married to an Englishwoman, and it was the marriage which was the root cause of his bad temper and general antagonism towards his employees, Ben believed.

He made no secret of the fact that had he not been stupid enough to believe himself in love with an English girl he would now be running the family’s prestigious restaurants in Rome and not living here in London.

His parents had never approved of his marriage; elderly now, they were still alive, his mother very much the matriarch of the family. Aldo’s half-British children were still treated with disdain and suspicion by Aldo’s family.

Zoe felt sorry for the man’s wife, but Ben was not as sympathetic.

‘She could always leave him,’ he had told her. ‘In fact she should do, but she stays with him because she enjoys making him suffer… and he takes it out on us.’

‘You could always change your job,’ Zoe had suggested.

‘It’s not that easy at the moment,’ Ben had told her. ‘You might not have noticed it yet, not with the hotel being so close to the airport and still busy, but we have. We’re not getting as many midweek bookings as we used to.’

She knew he was worrying about how the recession might affect their hotel—about his own ability to take on so much increased responsibility.

She had done her best to coax him out of it, reminding him that he was the only one who seemed to lack faith in himself and that he should perhaps follow the example of others like Clive and herself who felt very differently.

‘I know you can do it,’ she had assured him. ‘And so does Clive.’

It had been Clive who had been convinced that they should look beyond the mere owning of their own restaurant to a small top-flight country hotel.

Initially Ben had been uncertain, unsure if they were ready for that kind of responsibility, and it had been Zoe who had convinced him, pointing out that the hotel gave them a chance to pool their abilities in a way that a restaurant would not.

With a restaurant there would be no real role for her, she had told him, other than that of part-time bookkeeper and accountant. She would still need to keep on her own job, otherwise she would lose the momentum of her own career, and if she did continue to work, given the shiftwork involved and the long hours, they would scarcely have any time together at all.

As she had known he would, Ben had soon seen the validity of her arguments, and now he was every bit as keen and excited about their future as she was herself, even if he did sometimes lapse into the cautious wariness which was so much a part of his personality.

Not that she would want him to be any other way, Zoe told herself sunnily now. She quite cheerfully admitted that she was sometimes inclined to be so over-optimistic, that she neglected to see genuine potential pitfalls.

She had no need to fear them, though, not with Ben standing patiently and protectively by, ready to keep her safe from them.

‘I can’t wait to see the house, can you?’ she asked him eagerly. ‘When can we go? When?’

‘Don’t get too excited,’ Ben interrupted her warningly. ‘There’s a long way to go yet, Zoe.’

‘Cautious, careful Ben… Always looking for problems,’ she teased him light-heartedly.