Field of Thirteen - Dick Francis [40]
Perhaps he’d better see the management, one of them eventually and weakly suggested.
‘At once,’ Bill Williams said.
The management, located in a small room down a passage behind the bar, turned out to be an imposing woman in a flowing red and gold kaftan counting money. She was sitting behind a desk. She did not invite Bill Williams to sit in the chair across from her, but he did, anyway. She looked down her long thin nose.
She said, sounding as if such a thing were impossible, ‘I’m told you have a complaint.’
Bill Williams forcefully described his ruined evening.
The management showed no surprise. ‘When you booked a table,’ she said, not disputing that the table had been booked, ‘you should have said you would be arriving on a boat.’
‘Why?’
‘We do not accept boats.’
‘Why not?’
‘People on holiday on boats behave badly. They break things. They’re noisy. They dirty our lavatories. They have wild children. They complain of our prices.’
‘I booked a table in the ordinary way,’ Bill Williams said with slow, distinct and heavy emphasis, ‘and I am angry.’
The truth of that statement reached the management heavily enough to send a tremble through the kaftan, but she licked her lips and obstinately repeated, ‘You should have said you were coming on a boat. When you booked the table you should have said it. Then we would have been prepared.’
‘When I booked the table, you didn’t say, “How will you be arriving?” You didn’t say, “Will you be arriving in a Rolls-Royce?” “Will you be arriving on a tractor?” “On a bicycle?” “On foot?” My three guests came in a Daimler and you treated them as if they were here to steal your forks.’
The management tossed her head, compressed her lips and stared blindly at her wronged and steaming customer. She wanted him to go away. She had no appetite for a fight.
Bill Williams, who did have such an appetite, felt the militancy drain away in the management and, as always when he had won, his own hostility weakened. Lowering one’s guard is lethal, he’d been often warned, but he’d never got the knack of kicking the fallen foe. He rose abruptly from the management’s chair and sought the fresh night air and the path through the rose garden and the blue upholstered mattress in the punt.
He changed his clothes, folded back the punt’s anti-rain canopies and lay in his sleeping bag looking up at the dry clear sky. He knew he’d lost any chance of editing the Daily Troubadour. He spent the night not sleeping but ceaselessly revolving in memory the humiliations heaped on him undeservedly and his own failure to make a public fuss. And would the public fuss have won him the Troubadour? Would it not more likely have passed into snigger-raising mythology, whereas now, if he read Mrs Robin Dawkins right, the evening would merely give her an ‘I told you so’ weapon in her internecine wars?
He fantasised about an appropriate revenge, doubting his ability to carry it out. As ex-editor he couldn’t get the food columnist to do a demolition job: the same columnist that had given the recently opened restaurant a ten-star rave. As Mr Ordinary Citizen, he might fume without costing Mainstream Mile a fraction of his sleepless night.
Dawn brought him no sweet dreams. Full daylight found him putting the punt ship-shape, though there was no joy left in his journey. In the next town downstream he would summon the Lechlade people to collect their boat.
Down the path through the rose garden came the same dark-suited waiter as before, though this time without the bouncing smirk.
‘The management,’ he said, ‘invite you to take coffee ashore.’
‘Coffee?’
‘Served in the bar.’
He turned away and departed without waiting for a response.
Bill Williams didn’t know, in fact, what response to make. Was coffee an olive branch? An apology? He felt far from accepting either. Could coffee, though, be a preliminary to the cancelling of his credit card slip? Had the management decided he shouldn’t have to pay for their appalling treatment?
The management had not.