Goodmans Hotel

My disillusion with Lindler & Haliburton and work in the City increased by the day. Things that had once impressed me, the huge sums of money appearing on balance sheets, the senior staff meetings and conferences in prestigious office buildings, the business lunches, all the outward show of City affluence, ceased to attract me. My hopes and ambitions lay elsewhere. My years of work there came to appear as a necessary period of labour undertaken in order to win my independence.

Having recently invested in the Buckinghamshire nursery, Andrew had no capital available to invest in Goodmans Villa, but he played a major role in obtaining the lease. The old lady who owned it depended on income from the flats to pay her nursing home fees. The flats were deteriorating and becoming more and more difficult to let, and she could not afford extensive renovations. He went to see her, and she welcomed the proposal to take the house over for use as a hotel. Her solicitor was in favour, and the hotel, or rather guest house, that had for so long been a vague possibility became the subject of contract negotiations. After several meetings we agreed on a lease for ten years with options for two five-year extensions.

The draft business plan for the first year, drawn up with Andrew's help, was guesswork. We estimated the likely charge for a night's stay using advertised prices at other hotels and guest houses nearby, calculated potential annual takings and set them against running costs. Profit or loss depended on our assumptions about the level of bookings, something we would not really know until the hotel had been open for a year or more. Lizetta's boyfriend, Vincent, helped us with the figures and encouraged us with statistics about rising demand for hotel rooms in London.

Arrangements to take out the lease on Goodmans Villa, like the contracting out of my work at Lindler & Haliburton, went on for month after month. As the opening of the hotel came closer, going into the office every day became an agony. The snobbery, the competitiveness, the hand-stitched suits, ostentatious motor cars and business lunches were now loathsome to me. That world, in which general social good meant nothing, where men were ranked entirely according to money and position, now seemed horribly obsessed with the superfluous and pretentious.

Events seemed to progress under their own momentum. Andrew guided me through the stages of agreeing and signing the lease for the hotel, giving the existing tenants notice, arranging for the conversion work, clearing the hurdles of planning permission and having the business registered with the authorities. At Lindler & Haliburton I gave opinions on the papers and memos dealing with the hand-over of the IT Unit, and attended meeting after meeting at which long lists of queries about costs, timings and terms of contract were examined and weighed from every imaginable viewpoint. Seven months passed as item by item all the uncertainties were resolved. At last two crucial documents, the contract for the firm's future computer services and my formal acceptance of redundancy terms, were ready for signature.