NEW YEAR'S DAY
8.30–10.30 a.m. Continental Breakfast (quietly please, for the 10.30 a.m. benefit of any of us — all of us! — with a mild hangover).
10.45 a.m. CAR TREASURE-HUNT, with clues scattered round a care-free, car-free (as we hope) Oxford. There are plenty of simple instructions, so you'll never get lost. Be adventurous! And get out for a breath of fresh air! (Approximately one and a half hours to complete.) Prizes!!
1.00 p.m. English Roast Beef Luncheon.
2.00 p.m. TOURNAMENTS once more for those who have the stamina; and the chance of an afternoon nap for those who haven't.
4.30 p.m. Devonshire Cream Tea.
6.30 p.m. Your pantomime coach awaits to take you to Aladdin at the Apollo Theatre.
There will be a full buffet awaiting you on your return, and you can dance away the rest of the evening at the DISCO (live music from Paper Lemon) until the energy (though not the bar!) runs out.
THURSDAY
9.00 a.m. Full English Breakfast — available until 10.30 a.m. The last chance to say your farewells to your old friends and your new ones, and to promise to repeat the whole enjoyable process again next year!
Of course (it is agreed) such a prospectus would not automatically appeal to every sort and condition of humankind. Indeed, the idea of spending New Year's Eve being semi-forcibly cajoled into participating in a darts match, or dressing up as one of the Samurai, or even of being expected de rigueur to wallow in the company of their fellow men, would drive some solid citizens into a state of semi-panic. And yet, for the past two years, many a couple had been pleasingly surprised to discover how much, after the gentlest nudge of persuasion, they had enjoyed the group activities that the Binyons so brashly presented. Several couples were now repeating the visit for a second time; and one couple for a third — although it is only fair to add that neither member of this unattractive duo would ever have dreamed of donning a single item of fancy dress, delighting themselves only, as they had done, in witnessing what they saw as the rather juvenile imbecilities of their fellow guests. For the simple truth was that almost all the guests required surprisingly little, if any, persuasion to dress up for the New Year's Eve party — not a few of them with brilliant, if bizarre effect. And such (as we shall see) was to be the case this year, with several of the guests so subtly disguised, so cleverly bedecked in alien clothing, that even long-standing acquaintances would have recognized them only with the greatest difficulty.
Especially the man who was to win the first prize that evening.
Yes, especially him.
CHAPTER FOUR
December 30th/31st
The feeling of sleepiness when you are not in bed, and can't get there, is the meanest feeling in the world.
(E.W. HOWE, Country Town Sayings)
WHENEVER SHE FELT tired — and that was usually in the early hours of the evening — the almost comically large spherical spectacles which framed the roundly luminous eyes of Miss Sarah Jonstone would slowly slip further and further down her small and neatly geometrical nose. At such times her voice would (in truth) sound only perfunctorily polite as she spoke into whichever of the two ultramodern phones happened to be purring for her expert attention; at such times, too, some of the belated travellers who stood waiting to sign the register at the Haworth Hotel would perhaps find her expression of welcome a thing of somewhat mechanical formality. But in the eyes of John Binyon, this same slightly fading woman of some forty summers could do little, if anything, wrong. He had appointed her five years previously: first purely as a glorified receptionist; subsequently (knowing a real treasure when he spotted one) as his unofficial 'manageress'—although his wife Catherine (an awkward, graceless woman) had still insisted upon her own name appearing in that senior-sounding capacity on the hotel's general literature, as well as in the brochures announcing bargain breaks for special occasions.
Like Easter, for example.
Or Whitsun.
Or Christmas.
Or, as we have seen, like New Year.
With Christmas now over, Sarah Jonstone was looking forward to her official week's holiday — a whole week off from everything, and especially from the New Year festivities — the latter, for some reason, never having enthused her with rapture unconfined.
The Christmas venture was again likely to be oversubscribed, and this fact had been the main reason — though not quite the only reason — why John Binyon had strained every nerve to bring part of the recently purchased, if only partially developed, annexe into premature use. He had originally applied for planning permission for a single-storey linking corridor between the Haworth Hotel and this adjoining freehold property. But although the physical distance in question was only some twenty yards, so bewilderingly complex had proved the concomitant problems of potential subsidence, ground levels, drains, fire exits, goods access and gas mains, that he had abandoned his earlier notions of a formal merger and had settled for a self-standing addendum physically separated from the parent hotel. Yet even such a limited ambition was proving (as Binyon saw it) grotesquely expensive; and a long-term token of such expenditure was the towering yellow crane which stood like some enormous capital Greek Gamma in what had earlier been the chrysanthemumed and foxgloved garden at the rear of the newly acquired property. From late August, the dust ever filtering down from the planked scaffolding had vied, in degrees of irritation, with the daytime continuum of a revolving cement mixer and the clanks and hammerings which punctuated all the waking and working hours. But as winter had drawn on — and especially during the record rainfall of November — such inconveniences had begun to appear, in retrospect, as little more than the mildest irritancies. For now the area in which the builders worked day by day was becoming a morass of thick-clinging, darkish-orange mud, reminiscent of pictures of Passchendaele. The mud was getting everywhere: it caked the tyres of the workmen's wheelbarrows; it plastered the surfaces of the planks and the duckboards which lined the site and linked its drier spots; and (perhaps most annoying of all) it left the main entrance to the hotel, as well as the subsidiary entrance to the embryo annexe, resembling the approaches to a milking parlour in the Vale of the Great Dairies. A compromise was clearly called for over the hotel tariffs, and Binyon promptly amended the Christmas and New Year brochures to advertise the never-to-be-repeated bargain of 15 per cent off rates for the rooms in the main hotel, and 25 per cent (no less!) off the rates for the three double rooms and the one single room now available on the ground floor of the semi-completed annexe. And indeed it was a bargain: no workmen; no noise; no real inconvenience whatsoever over these holiday periods — except for that omnipresent mud. .
The net result of these difficulties, and of further foul weather in early December, had been that, in spite of daily Hooverings and daily scrapings, many rugs and carpets and stretches of linoleum were so sadly in need of a more general shampoo after the departure of the Christmas guests that it was decided to put into operation a full-scale clean-up on the 30th in readiness for the arrival of the New Year contingent — or the majority of it — at lunchtime on the 31st. But there were problems. It was difficult enough at the best of times to hire waitresses and bedders and charladies. But when, as now, extra help was most urgently required; and when, as now, two of the regular cleaning women were stricken with influenza, there was only one thing for it: Binyon himself, his reluctant spouse Catherine, Sarah Jonstone, and Sarah's young assistant-receptionist, Caroline, had been called to the colours early on the 30th; and (armed with their dusters, brushes, squeegees, and Hoovers) had mounted their attack upon the blighted premises to such good effect that by the mid-evening of the same day all the rooms and the corridors in both the main body of the hotel and in the annexe were completely cleansed of the quaggy, mire-caked traces left behind by the Christmas revellers, and indeed by their predecessors. When all was done, Sarah herself had seldom felt so tired, although such unwonted physical labour had not — far from it! — been wholly unpleasant for her. True, she ached in a great many areas of her body which she had forgotten were still potentially operative, especially the spaces below her ribs and the muscles just behind her knees. But such physical activity served to enhance the delightful prospect of her imminent holiday; and to show the world that she could live it up with the rest and the best of them, she had wallowed in a long 'Fab-Foam' bath before ringing her only genuine friend, Jenny, to say that she had changed her mind, was feeling fine and raring to go, and would after all be delighted to come to the party that same evening at Jenny's North Oxford flat (only a stone's throw, as it happened, from Morse's own small bachelor property). Jenny's acquaintances, dubiously moral though they were, were also (almost invariably) quite undoubtedly interesting; and it was at 1.20 A.M. precisely the following morning that a paunchy, middle-aged German with a tediously repeated passion for the works of Thomas Mann had suddenly asked a semi-intoxicated Sarah (yes, just like that!) if she would like to go to bed with him. And in spite of her very brief acquaintance with the man, it had been only semi-unwillingly that she had been dragged off to Jenny's spare room where she had made equally brief love with the hirsute lawyer from Bergisch Gladbach. She could not remember too clearly how she had finally reached her own flat in Middle Way — a road (as the careful reader will remember) which stretches down into South Parade, and at the bottom of which stands a post office.