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. It wasn’t in any case the money that had infuriated Bill Williams, since his abrupt removal from the Voice had cost the new owners several noughts. He entered the restaurant intending to accept a refund grudgingly, but was offered not a cent.
He went into the bar, which was shuttered and dark at breakfast time. A waiter slowly came in and put on one of the small tables a tray bearing a cup and saucer, a cream jug, sugar, and a china pot of coffee.
And that was all. In cold disbelief Bill Williams drank two solitary cups of admittedly good strong coffee. No one came into the bar. No one said anything at all.
If the coffee were an olive branch, it was also an insult.
When he’d finished the second cupful Bill Williams rose from his small table and, going across the room, opened the exit door which led through a small vestibule to the car park outside. Over the entry door of every place in Britain licensed to sell alcoholic drink there has to be displayed by law the name of the licensee. Bill Williams, without a clear plan of retaliation, went to see at least the name behind the affront.
The name over the entrance door of Mainstream Mile was Pauline Kinser.
Kinser. A coincidence, but odd. Bill Williams turned back into the bar and found it, this time, not empty. The management lady from the previous evening stood there, flanked by four of her staff. They stood stiffly, bodyguards, but also vigilant that she shouldn’t blame them for their behaviour.
‘Are you,’ Bill Williams asked the woman slowly, ‘Pauline Kinser?’
She reluctantly nodded.
‘Do I get an apology for last night?’
She said nothing at all.
He asked, ‘Do you know anyone called Dennis?’
Bill Williams was aware only of deepening silence. Pauline Kinser’s eyes stared at him darkly, wholly devoid of any admission of fault. He shook with a primitive impulse to slam her against the wall and frighten her into speech but was constrained not by clemency but by the thought of handcuffs.
Pauline Kinser felt relieved to see her difficult customer return to his punt and move off down river, and she believed she’d heard the last of him. She didn’t even mention what she thought of as ‘the unpleasantness’ when her nephew Dennis Kinser drove in for one of their frequent business meetings. Dennis Kinser, always golden tongued, had first persuaded his unmarried aunt to sell her house to start the restaurant and then had raised a mortgage on it to set himself up as a racehorse trainer. His Aunt Pauline balked at putting the proceeds of her house directly into a racing stable as she didn’t like horses. Apart from that, in her eyes Dennis could do no wrong. Dennis it was who had chosen the comfortable chairs in the restaurant dining-room and the handsome tableware, Dennis who had engaged a chef of renown, Dennis who had dressed her in kaftans, Dennis who had enticed newspaper columnists to visit and dazzled them with excellence, and Dennis, too, who had made the rule of no boats.
‘Restaurants in London turn away people they don’t want,’ he’d told his aunt. ‘And I don’t want vulgar hire boats clogging up our pier and attracting the hoi polloi.’
‘No, Dennis,’ his aunt said staunchly, seeing the sense of it.
Her nephew heard about the customer in the punt from the waiters in the kitchen and, vaguely troubled by their evasive self-justifications, he asked his aunt what had happened.
Dennis Kinser was only moderately dismayed. However badly he’d been wronged, one disgruntled diner couldn’t ruin a brilliantly successful enterprise.
‘This punt guy,’ he said, looking through ledgers, ‘he really had booked a table?’
‘Yes, he had.’
‘Then you should have served him decently, same as everyone else.’
‘But you said no—’
‘Yeah, yeah, but use some sense.’
Pauline Kinser’s reservations book lay open on the desk. Dennis Kinser, glancing at it, asked, ‘Which booking came from the man in the punt?’
‘That one.’ His aunt pointed. ‘The first one for yesterday. Williams, four people, eight o’clock. We took his phone number too, of course.’
Dennis Kinser glanced at the phone number and his whole body lurched. He knew that number. He couldn’t believe it. Wouldn’t believe it. He tugged his aunt’s phone roughly towards him, pushed the buttons and listened to the woman answering saying ‘Cotswold Voice, good morning.’
Half speechless, Dennis Kinser asked to be connected to the racing writer who, as usual, was leaning back in his chair cleaning his nails.
‘Williams?’ the racing writer said. ‘Sure, of course I know him. He used to be our editor. Bloody good at it too, though I wouldn’t tell him. It was thanks to him you got all that publicity for your racing syndicates and such. He sent me to interview you, that day we had the photographer for the pics. What do you want him for?’