The French Guesthouse

1

~~~~~~

The hotel was on fire.
When people tell you that flames lick, they’re lying. Flames don’t lick, or caress, or dance – they tear, and spit, and roar. Flames shatter glass, crack floor boards, and send great billows of thick, black smoke pouring out into the night. Rooted as if by wet tar to the pavement, I watched as the fire ate its way through my business, my livelihood, my home, and thought about those lies. More in a long line of many.
Surrounding me, noise. Men and women in beige suits and helmets, fluorescent bands around their sleeves. So much shouting, not one word of it decipherable: a code between firefighters. The torrent of water was an unnatural blue, caught as it was in the glow of the engine lights, and as the droplets fell from the sky, I was spirited back for a fleeting moment to my childhood, chin raised as fireworks exploded above, Dad’s warm hands resting on my shoulders.
‘Look, Fliss – shooting stars. Make a wish.’
The door of the hotel burst open with a tumble of bodies. The sight of one was enough to unfasten my feet from the concrete. I shouted his name, and he swung around, squinting through the mess of limbs, the crowd of onlookers, the paramedics who surged forwards.
‘I’m fine,’ he proclaimed, baritone lacerating the clamour.
A walkie-talkie crackled, static flared, numbers were spoken. I was jostled, and a large boot connected with my slipper-clad foot, causing a ricochet of pain so intense I saw spots.
‘Clear the way,’ the owner of the boot said brusquely. ‘Get back.’
The smoke mushroomed, its acrid scent abrasive. The evacuated guests stood off to one side, a cluster of monogrammed terry-clothed robes, hands raised to shield their airways, some barking commentary into mobile phones. Mine had been abandoned amid the chaos – the peal of the alarm, the disgruntlement that soon became panic, the list of names, ticked off one at a time, the scrape of fear as it clawed through my gut.
I reached the ambulance and put my hand on the open door. They were sitting side by side on a cot, she wrapped in a foil blanket, he with a plastic mask over his mouth and nose. His shirt was unbuttoned, blond hair askew, feet bare.
‘What happened to your shoes?’ is how I greeted him.
Charlie glanced down, then back towards me. When he spoke, he did so through a volley of coughs. ‘Took them off, in the bar.’
The paramedic, a tired-looking woman with a steely demeanour, glowered at me.
‘Keep breathing through the mask for me, sir. That’s right.’
‘Were you in the bar, too?’ I asked, turning my attention to Madeline. Charlie always referred to her as ‘our front-of-house girl’, though she was not a ‘girl’ at all, very much a woman, and her job title was Head Receptionist.
Madeline’s eyes grew a fraction wider. ‘I was . . . yes.’
‘Didn’t your shift end at four?’
‘Charlie said—’ She stopped, glanced at my fiancé. ‘It was just a nightcap.’
They must have bumped into each other in one of the bars in the area. Chelsea was full of them. Nondescript doorways leading through into darkened rooms, throbbing music and overpriced cocktails, places to be seen, to network, to indulge in a spot of ‘mutual ego-greasing’, to quote Charlie. He was a social bee, someone who needed to pollinate, while I was happier in the back office, strategising, filing and overseeing the minutiae of tasks that must be done in order to keep our modest hotel running. It was a partnership that I told myself was working well, each of us playing to our strengths, he free to roam and me understanding his need to do so. On most nights, he was out until the small hours, not back for a nightcap before midnight. Furthermore, I had checked the bar during my final sweep of the ground floor, and it had been empty.
Madeline was looking not at but past me. ‘They’ve switched the hoses off ,’ she said. ‘The fire must be out.’
Charlie lowered his mask. ‘Finally. Thank Christ for that. Fliss, why don’t you go and find out what’s going on?’
‘I don’t think that—’ I hesitated. ‘I’m sure they’ll keep us informed. Won’t they have to go room to room first, and make sure nobody else is in there?’
Madeline suppressed a shudder, the foil blanket slipping down to reveal a skimpy sliver of a dress. She, too, was barefoot, her toenails painted a bright, coral red.
Charlie coughed, earning himself a concerned look from the paramedic. ‘Do they have key cards?’ he managed.
I nodded. ‘I gave someone the master.’
His eyes narrowed as he moved the mask back up, though with satisfaction or annoyance, I couldn’t tell. I dropped my gaze, studied his toes instead, which were large, and far paler than one would expect, given his ruddy complexion. I loved this man, though acknowledging it had begun to feel more like a habit than an emotion. On my hand, the symbol of our mutual devotion: a large diamond so sharp that it sparkled even in the dark.
‘Felicity Fitzgerald?’
I turned.
‘Crew Commander Hinshelwood – call me Tom.’ He made no move to shake my proffered hand, and I withdrew it meekly as he removed his helmet and tucked it under one arm. ‘And you’re the owner, are you?’
I opened my mouth to reply, but Charlie beat me to it.
‘Officially, my folks own the biggest share of the place,’ he said, ‘but it’s our business, mine and Fliss’s here. We run it, live on the premises.’
I watched as the firefighter took this in.
‘And you’re Mr Fitzgerald, are you?’
Charlie coughed out a laugh that sounded painful, and from beside him, Madeline emitted a whimper of sympathy. I looked at my fiancé, knowing what he’d say next, what he always said when someone made the assumption that we were married.
‘I’m Charles Fitzsimons,’ he said. ‘I know, right? What are the chances of the two of us having such similar surnames?Pals tend to call us “The Fitzes” ’ – he made the inverted commas – ‘and it’s actually how we came up with the name for the hotel, you know, “The Fitz”.’
The fire officer frowned. ‘I assumed it was a play on The Ritz,’ he observed, to a guffaw from Charlie.
‘We have a smidgeon of the luxury of that place, but it’s a lot more fun here. That’s what the “F” in Fitz stands for, you see – fun.’
I closed my eyes briefly. The crew commander, to his credit, dredged up a smile from somewhere, though it was short-lived.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘We’re straying off topic here, aren’t we? How can we help you?’
‘Well, the fire is out; that’s the main thing.’ He folded thick arms across a broad chest and focused his attention on me. ‘We got here quickly, and structurally the building’s remained sound. I received the all-clear a few minutes ago.’
It sounded like encouraging news, but his expression remained sombre.
‘Do you know how it started yet?’ I asked. ‘There’s strictly no smoking in the hotel, so I’m guessing it was some sort of electrical fault. All our appliances have been checked, and our fire-risk assessment is up to date.’
‘Fliss is on top of all that sort of thing,’ chimed in Charlie. It sounded as if he’d swallowed a handful of sand. I turned and saw Madeline place a hand on his back, tapping it ineffectually. It was easier to look instead at the firefighter, though now I detected pity in his expression.
‘We do have an idea of what happened,’ he said, ‘but it’s a bit tricky to explain. Could you . . .?’ He moved backwards a few paces, beckoning for me to follow. I glanced at Charlie, and he shrugged. He couldn’t very well accompany me, not anchored as he was by the oxygen mask, the determined paramedic, the sympathetic touch of a woman who could not meet my eye.
I followed Crew Commander Hinshelwood across the street, pausing by the hotel entrance to put on the hard hat he passed to me.
‘The roof isn’t going to fall in on us, is it?’ I said, only to wither at the look on his face.
‘Precaution,’ he told me. ‘Come along.’
I’d only been alerted to the existence of the fire a little over an hour ago – it didn’t seem possible that so much had changed in such a short space of time. The Fitz looked familiar, but felt different, the dark walls frowning down at me resentfully.
‘I’m afraid the power will have to remain off on the upper floors until we finish assessing the extent of the electrical damage,’ he explained, clutching a gargantuan torch in one hand. I’d assumed we would be heading straight upstairs, but instead he led me past the bar, along the carpeted corridor, and into the office beyond. The overhead light cast an artificially white halo around the room. My laptop was on the desk, the safe beneath it untouched. I’d asked Charlie once if I should lock my engagement ring in there, and he’d laughed at me.
‘You’re supposed to wear it, Fliss – that’s the whole point of the thing.’
But it felt heavy on my finger, a great weight of responsibility, an object worth more than my parents had paid for their first house. I loved it, but it was obscene. Mum had worn a ring – a gold band with a blue glass flower adornment – one of the only possessions she truly seemed attached to or took care of. I would see her talking to it sometimes, her hand raised to her lips, a faint murmur I could never decipher, tender and considered, so unlike the manner in which she addressed me.
‘Mrs Fitzgerald?’
I had been gazing into the middle distance and rushed to apologise. ‘It’s Ms,’ I corrected automatically. ‘And please, call me Fliss.’
Fliss.’ The briefest uplift at the corners of his mouth. ‘I had a look at your CCTV.’
‘Oh?’
We had inherited the rather antiquated closed-circuit television cameras with the hotel, deciding not to splash out on a more high-tech system right away. It was not password-protected, and from the deft way Crew Commander Hinshelwood was now spooling through the footage, it was apparent that he’d used this particular software many times before.
‘We know the fi re originated on the top floor,’ he said. ‘Room twelve, correct?’
He didn’t need me to confirm it, but I did so anyway, nodding as the air began to constrict inside my chest.
‘That’s why I assumed it must be an electrical issue,’ I said, ‘because room twelve is – was – unoccupied. There was an issue with the plumbing in the en suite. We’ve got someone coming to look at it tomorrow, although I suppose I’ll have to cancel that now. God,’ I said, contemplating the to-do list that was beginning to unspool in my mind, ‘there’s so much to do, to sort out.’ I pressed a hand to my chest, felt the rapid machine-gun fire of my heart. The firefighter stared at me for a moment, then lifted his radio and instructed someone to bring a cup of sweet tea to the office quick-sharpish. ‘Take a seat,’ he added, motioning to a chair.
‘I’d rather stand,’ I said, fearing that if I sat, I would not get up again. I felt unsteady – even my voice was strange, a tremor running through it that made me sound off-kilter. Crew Commander Hinshelwood turned to the screen on the wall, his hand on the keyboard, and tapped a button to restart the video. It showed the narrow hallway leading to rooms ten, eleven and twelve, the stair banister intersecting the bottom corner of the frame, and a fire extinguisher tucked into an alcove below a painting of the Fitzsimons’ long-ago deceased Labrador, Champ. Charlie’s parents had been so devoted to the dog that they’d named their son after it, bestowing him with Charles but nicknaming him Champ from the moment he was born. It was a moniker that had endured, though one I never used. He’d always been Charlie to me.
Two figures came into view on the screen, a woman and a man, the latter of whom threw a furtive glance over his shoulder. My blood stilled, curdled, burned.
Not ‘in the bar’, then.
‘We can’t be sure, obviously, until we ask him, but it looks to me as if that’s a cigar tucked behind his ear.’ Crew
Commander Hinshelwood paused the footage and pointed at the blurry image of my fiancé’s head.
The night Charlie and I slept together for the first time, he’d made a show of bringing out a cigar to smoke afterwards. ‘The PCC,’ he’d proclaimed, as he ran the stick of fermented tobacco along his upper lip, explaining after I’d raised an enquiring brow that the acronym stood for ‘post-coital cigar’. Enthralled as I was then, I had deemed it a charmingly idiotic Chelsea-boy trait, and told him sweetly that he stank. ‘It’s my one remaining vice,’ he’d replied. ‘But I’ll give it up for you.’
But he hadn’t given it up – not the cigars, nor the smoking of them after sex, apparently. There were no cameras inside room twelve, but it was glaringly apparent what had gone on behind that closed door. Charlie had taken Madeline upstairs, the two of them had enjoyed themselves together, fallen asleep, and forgotten to put out the infernal ‘PCC’.
‘Do you know for sure that the cigar started the fire?’ I asked, marvelling at my own ability to remain calm.
The firefighter shook his head. ‘Not definitively, but we have traced the origin of the flames to the curtains, and, as you know . . .’
‘The bed is beside the window.’
He waited for me to continue, though I couldn’t locate any coherent words. It would affect the insurance claim – it had to. Charlie wasn’t an errant guest breaking the rules. He was the boss, the person who was supposed to set the boundaries, not defy them. My hands started to shake, and I curled them into fists.
‘Shame you had to find out this way,’ Crew Commander Hinshelwood said, his gruff tone softening a fraction. His stoicism, which had been coming across as impersonal, was, in fact, strength, and it took a great deal for me not to simply collapse against him and wail. But wailing would not solve the problem; crying gets nothing useful done at all. Instead, I drew in a long breath, used it like a sail to steady myself, and told him not to worry, that it was fine, that I would sort everything out.
Another firefighter arrived with a Styrofoam cup of tea, Charlie following in her wake.
‘There you are, Fliss,’ he said, pausing in the open doorway. ‘I thought that— Oh.’
His gaze slid from me to Crew Commander Hinshelwood, before settling on the small screen behind us.
‘I can explain,’ he said.