Fortune Is a Woman - Elizabeth Adler [3]
Her antennae were so tuned after all these years that she would have noticed a rug an inch out of place, an ashtray unemptied or a guest waiting too long for his order. She loved her hotel; she had practically built it with her own hands from ten rooms to two hundred. She knew every inch of the place and exactly how it worked, from the miles of electrical wiring to the intricacies of the steam-heating system. She could have told you exactly how many Irish linen sheets were in the linen rooms on each floor and how many pounds of prime Chicago beef the chef had ordered that week, how many room-service waiters were on duty that night and the names of the guests checking in or out tomorrow.
She had told the laundry workers in the basement exactly how much starch should be used on the pink damask tablecloths and she had been known to show the chambermaids how to properly clean a bathtub. She personally had decided the color schemes, fabrics, and furnishings for each of the twenty suites, and supervised the decoration of the entire hotel, choosing the English country-house look for the public rooms and the modern art deco green-and-silver mirrored decor for the cocktail bar. She always supervised the menus and the buying of the wines, and the coffee was specially blended to her taste. Nothing at the Aysgarth Arms was ever left to chance or in charge of a mere manager. Annie was a stickler for cleanliness and quality and she ran her smart hotel the same way she had run her father’s house in Yorkshire, all those wasted years.
Satisfied that everything was as it should be, she strolled back to the marble hallway and with a little gold key opened the door to the private golden bird-cage elevator that took her directly up to the penthouse. She sighed pleasurably as it whooshed silently upward, and wondered why people preached that it was wrong to enjoy luxury. The lift stopped, the door slid open, and she was in her own world. Dropping her velvet coat onto a chair she walked straight to the windows, as she always did.
The penthouse was twenty stories high, the floor-to-ceiling windows ran the full forty feet of her drawing room and the view over the nighttime city was magical. Traffic roared through the streets below, but up here all was silent and the city unrolled before her in a million sparkling points of light. She sighed with satisfaction, pleased that it still gave her the same thrill it had when she had first seen it, then turned and looked around her, smiling. She had wanted her home to be completely different from everything she had ever known, and therefore she had consulted a famous interior decorator.
The decorator was shrewd, talented, successful, thin, and ugly, and Annie was shrewd, talented, successful, and plumply pretty, and they had taken to each other immediately. “Look at me,” Annie had demanded, taking up a dramatic pose in the center of the huge, empty room. “You may be looking at a short, plump, brown-haired Yorkshirewoman of a certain age, but inside I’m tall and blond and glamorous. And ten years younger. That’s the woman I want you to design this apartment for.”
The decorator had laughed and said she knew exactly what Annie meant and then she had gone ahead and created a white and silver, silk and satin, lacquer and crystal apartment just like a Hollywood film set. The floors were laid with costly white marble and covered with velvety cream rugs, the enormous windows were hung with hundreds of yards of billowing cream silk taffeta, the walls were mirrored and lit with filigree silver sconces, the opulent sofas were white brocade, and there were little glass tables and alabaster, chrome, and crystal lamps