Room Service

I meet many nice people through my job at the hotel, and I will do what I can to help them . . .

THE lady in room seven is here alone. I know this because there is only one toothbrush in the glass beside the sink and no whiskers left behind on its white enamel surface when I go in to clean.

I also know she has not always been so. The pillow on the bed’s left side only bears the impression of her head; never the other half, as if she has been used to always keeping to the same place.

The right side stays perfect so that I hardly need straighten the sheets.

This much I would have been able to tell even if she had not spoken to me. But she did.

She’s nice, Room Seven Lady.

Yesterday was my day off. This morning, as I trundle my trolley along the hotel’s cream-painted corridor, my heart pounds a little faster as I approach room seven. I know I am being foolish, but I am curious to see.

“Good morning, Maria,” she said, making a point of looking at my name badge that first morning.

Karen, who works these corridors with me, hates it when customers do that.

“Like it’s any of their business what my name is,” she says.

Then she frowns in the way she often does. I think perhaps that is why her forehead has so many lines.

I don’t understand this. I have lived in this country for over 20 years but still British people baffle me. I think it is kind of guests to take notice of my name and use it.

I like this much better than those who ignore me and do not speak, as if I were some kind of flesh-coated machine that comes in to clean up their mess.

So I smiled back at Room Seven Lady.

“Good morning. It is a lovely day,” I said, nodding at the blue sky behind her.

She was standing on the little stone balcony. Room seven is one of our best rooms, with French doors and a view out over the beach.

“Yes, isn’t it?”

Her smile made her face soft, but there was sadness around her eyes.

“You will walk on the beach today?”

I nodded at her fleece and jeans as I collected bottles and a book from her bedside table, marking them to put in my basket while I dusted.

“Yes.” She nodded. I looked again at the book.

“You are a fossil collector?”

We get lots of them down here. Especially in autumn when the surfers and families have departed.

They tap away down on the beach all day and huddle happily around our log fire in the bar afterwards, comparing finds. The lady from room seven didn’t really look like one of them.

“No.” She laughed. “My husband wrote that book.”

I looked at it again with admiration.

“This was his favourite beach.” She glanced back over her shoulder at the shore through her window. “He said it was where he got some of his best finds. This is the first time I’ve been back since . . .”

Her voice tailed away and then, of course, I knew. “I’m sorry,” I said. What else could I say? “Oh, no.” She looked embarrassed. “It’s been two years. I’m fine, really.

“It’s just that this is the first time I’ve felt strong enough to come back. It’s such a lovely place: I didn’t want to avoid it any more.”

“Do you collect fossils yourself?”

I shook pillows to make them plump.

“No, not really. But it’s a dramatic and beautiful beach, with the cliffs and everything. I love to walk.”

“Well, I hope you have a happy day.”

My heart felt full of affection for her.

“You bother too much about the guests,” Karen said when I told her the story of Room Seven Lady. “I don’t know why. I’m certain they don’t give two hoots about you.”

I just shrugged and filled up the trolley with fresh soap, because I know this conversation with Karen will go nowhere.

To her it is just a job, this hotel. But to me it is like a family, and the guests are family for however long they stay.

I think perhaps that people like Karen do not understand about loyalty.

When I first came to this country, many people looked at me with unfriendly faces and frowned with suspicious eyes when I applied for jobs.

They saw only my foreign name and my weak English, ignoring my willingness to learn.

“Let’s give it a try over the summer, shall we?” Mrs Phillips said across the beautiful mahogany desk I have now polished with love so many times. “See how we get on.”

For all the years since then I have made beds, polished and scrubbed to make Mrs Phillips’s hotel a beautiful place to stay.

I do it from winter, when I also light fires for walkers and fossil

hunters, to the summer season, when the little hotel is filled with families and the people who come to try to tame our waves with their funny black rubber suits.

It is important to me that our guests have a happy holiday so that they will want to return to Mrs Phillips’s hotel.

“You do too much for her,” my husband Pieter says.

But smiles when he says it because he understands.

On those Saturdays when the boss of the haulage firm where he works rings him because another young driver has failed to come in to work, my Pieter always goes.

“Is that the cliff where they found the skeleton of the Welsh Dragon?”

Autumn sunshine continued to be kind and Room Seven Lady was on her balcony again.

“The cliff that looks like a mouth with a tooth pulled out? Yes, that is the one.”

“Dracoraptor hanigani,” she said, sounding like she was saying a religious word. “Two hundred and one million years old. My husband was so excited when he heard.

“He would have loved to have come back and visited the site.

“That’s one of the reasons I’m here, really. For him. Goodness, does that sound silly?”

“Not at all.”

I placed her husband’s book in my basket with respect.

“They found it when the cliff collapsed, didn’t they?”

“All the time it happens. I can remember when the coast path was a whole field back from the edge. Soon it will be washed away.”

“Oh, dear.”

She looked solemn for a moment, but then her lovely kind face smiled.

“I’ll bet the dragon find was good for business, wasn’t it?”

She laughed and I thought that very few guests took time to talk to a cleaner as she did. And I realised, of course, why it was.

“We were full.” I flapped fingers at the memory of that frantic time. “First with journalists and scientists, and then with fossil hunters, all wanting to see where the dragon was found. Mrs Phillips was very pleased.” “And isn’t that Butlin’s?” She pointed across the Bristol Channel to the startling white roof. I pursed lips in distaste and nodded.

“I thought so.” She gave a delighted little laugh. “I stayed there once with the children while my husband was fossil hunting. I thought they’d like it.”

“But they didn’t?” I thought then that surely I should have remembered this nice lady and her husband and children if they had been to our beach so often before.

I have a good memory for the faces of our guests, and people like it when you remember them.

But then Room Seven Lady laughed again and solved this puzzle for me.

“No. They preferred the caravan.”

Downstairs on the terrace, the new man from room fifteen was admiring the view also.

“I’ve always wanted to come here.”

He had lovely kind blue eyes; they were shining in excitement.

With the hard hat, hammer, chisel and specimen bag, I knew exactly what he was. “For the fossils?” “Yes, partly. I never had time till I retired. And my wife – well, she always preferred to go abroad. I’m a bit new to all this, actually.”

I looked again and saw how shiny the hammer was and how smooth the chisel.

He asked about the dragon and how far you could walk along the coast path.

“As far as you wish.” I smiled and dropped bed linen into the container that the laundry comes to empty each day.

“How wonderful.” He looked as though he really thought it was, and when he smiled the skin around the kind eyes crinkled into creases which made me think he did that a lot.

“Sorry,” he said then, shuffling his feet. “Sorry to keep you from your work. It’s just good to talk to someone from the area, you know?”

“No problem.”

I smiled and turned my trolley and it stuck on paving stones. Room Fifteen Man sprang forward to help.

“Any luck?” I asked him the next day, nodding at his fossil-collecting bag.

“Not really.” He laughed. “I’m not sure I’m much good at looking for fossils. But the walks are lovely.”

I just smiled and decided in that very moment I would check.

“I will do room seven.” I push on the trolley brake and spread the fingers of my left hand in a signal to stop Karen walking towards it.

There is a silly fizzing in my stomach.

“Suit yourself.” Karen shrugs and makes a mocking smile. “I wouldn’t want to interfere with you and one of your special guests.”

As soon as I approach the white-painted panel of the door to knock on it, I know that I have succeeded.

The fizzing in my stomach turns into delighted little butterflies flapping their wings for joy.

They are both on the balcony, dressed to go out. I hear her gentle laughter before I even see them.

And his, too: a deeper sound that makes me think of log fires in winter and glasses of fruity red wine. “Good morning, Maria.” There is a light in her eyes this morning, or maybe I imagine it. But I don’t think I do. It warms my heart to see.

“Good morning.”

The man from room fifteen flashes me a smile and pats his fleece pockets in a confused way.

I nod and turn my back to continue with my work because I don’t want him to think I am listening to their conversation, or noticing that he feels awkward that I have found him here talking to Room Seven Lady.

“So . . .” he says to her, making a clapping movement with his hands but no sound. “It’s a ten-mile walk today, then, if you’re OK with that?”

“Fine.” Room Seven Lady laughs. “As long as there is a pub at the halfway point.” “Definitely.”

He laughs, too, and I think again what a comfortable sound it is. “It’s called the Dragon.” “How appropriate.” Her lovely smile is so warm I can see it makes him go red in the face with pleasure.

“The guide book recommends the homemade shepherd’s pie,” he adds. “My favourite.” “Mine, too.”

“I’ll meet you downstairs in reception, then?”

This time the smile he gives me is a happy one. It makes me very glad.

You see, when I checked his room I saw that just as Room Seven Lady sleeps only on the left, Room Fifteen Man sleeps only on the right.

So when I put her fossil book in my basket with its room marker the day before yesterday, I returned it instead to room fifteen.

I knew he would hand it back, and I hoped it wouldn’t be to a member of staff.

I don’t know if these two nice people – people who I think are both a little lonely – will make a match. Perhaps they will just make each other happy for this holiday.

Perhaps that is enough. n

The fizzing in my stomach turns into delighted little butterflies