Goodmans Hotel

They asked me about eating locally, and ruled out the nearby curry house, recalling a previous time when the effects of Vindaloo and pints of lager had ruined their hopes of picking up continentals that night. I mentioned that the Thai restaurant had a couple of very attractive waiters, warning that some of the food was extremely hot, and they decided to try there.

My plans for the evening were to eat a take-away meal that Tom would bring in and, if the hotel was quiet enough, to escape the premises by going to the Beckford Arms for an hour or so. We were seeing much more of each other than when I was living in Chiswick, but the established pattern of spending Friday, Saturday, and Wednesday nights together continued. Sunday lunch with Andrew was now always at the hotel. We had briefly discussed the possibility of Tom moving in with me, but both of us were used to our independence and were afraid that being constantly together from necessity might be bad for us.

With the hotel full, leaving it unattended for over an hour to go to the Beckford Arms was a little risky, but most of the guests had gone out for the evening and were likely to return late. All had keys to the front door, the No Vacancies signs on either side of the ground floor bay window would put off anyone who might pass by looking for a room, and a notice on the office door gave my mobile 'phone number in case of an emergency.

To my annoyance when we returned from the pub we found a note on the hall table asking for two full breakfasts to be taken up to a first floor room in the morning. The two men who had taken it had public school accents, were very well dressed, and were probably accustomed to larger hotels staffed to provide room service. They had not asked about having breakfast in their room when I told them that breakfast on Saturdays was between eight and ten-thirty in the breakfast room. Leaving me a note like that was presumptuous. Tom suggested taking them up a couple of bowls of lukewarm porridge with skin forming around the edge, but I wrote a polite refusal on the foot of their message explaining that there were insufficient staff to serve breakfast in the rooms and pushed it under their door.

The next morning Tom woke me as he climbed out of bed, his stronger build as usual causing the mattress to quake underneath me. The time was twenty past seven, and unable to lie in bed at weekends as I used to in Chiswick, my best hope was to steal another fifteen minutes' sleep as he dressed and went up to make coffee for us in the hotel kitchen.