THE HEIR OF HARTWELL

Chapter 4

His phone rang as they reached the car.

The number was Vivienne's. He looked at it. He declined the call.

It rang again.

He declined it again.

The third time, he answered, because she was the sort of person who would ring forty times if she had to and he was too tired for that.

"Where are you?" she said.

"That stopped being any of your business about two hours ago."

A pause. Then, with the smooth gear-change of someone who has lost one argument and is already positioning for the next: "Father is furious. He is asking questions I cannot answer without making myself look terrible. If you come back and explain to him that this was mutual—"

"It was not mutual."

"Alexander." Her voice shifted into the register he had once found compelling, lower, more deliberate, the tone she used when she wanted something. "You have nowhere to sleep. It is November. I am offering you a way back in, just for tonight—"

"Vivienne," he said. "I am standing outside the Royal Free Hospital with the entirety of the Hartwell estate documentation under my arm. Do not call this number again."

He hung up.

Bernard, who had heard every word from two feet away, studied the pavement with great interest.

"The Royal Free is not a detail she will be able to ignore for long," he said carefully.

"Good," Alexander said. He looked at the folder in his hands. In the yellow light of the hospital entrance, he opened it and read the total asset value listed in the third paragraph. He read it again. Then he closed the folder and looked at Bernard. "Where am I sleeping tonight?"

"The Hartwell townhouse in Belgravia," Bernard said, with the faintest trace of a smile. "It has seven bedrooms. I took the liberty of having one prepared."

* * *

The townhouse was four storeys of pale stone on a street so quiet it felt like a film set. Inside, it was the kind of place that had been beautiful for so long it had stopped trying. The rooms were high-ceilinged and warm and smelled of old wood and beeswax. Someone had left a single lamp on in the entrance hall. The effect was welcoming in a way that felt, to Alexander, almost accusatory, as though the house had been waiting for him and was gently making its feelings known.

He stood in the hallway for a moment.

"Yours," Bernard said, from behind him. "All of it. Or it will be, once the papers are reviewed and signed."

Alexander set the folder on the hall table. He looked up the staircase. He looked at the oil portraits on the wall, Hartwells going back three centuries, various degrees of sternness, all with the same jaw. He looked at them for a long time.

"I will need a solicitor in the morning," he said.

"Mr. Fletcher at Hartwell and Cole. He has been retained for forty years. He is expecting your call."

"And I will need to see the hotel."

"Hartwell Mayfair. You can go in tomorrow. I will arrange it."

Alexander nodded. He picked up the folder. He started up the stairs, then stopped.

"Bernard." He did not turn round. "Thank you. For not giving up."

A pause. Then, very quietly: "Thank you for getting in the car."

* * *

He slept for nine hours, which was four more than usual, in a bed that felt like a considered argument for lying down. When he woke at six the house was perfectly still. Grey light came through curtains so thick they seemed to absorb it. He lay on his back and looked at the plasterwork ceiling and thought: this is real. This is actually real.

He got up and found his way to the kitchen. Bernard was already there, in a suit that managed to be both formal and entirely comfortable, making tea with the focus of a man for whom tea is a craft.

"You cook?" Bernard asked, glancing at Alexander, who had opened the fridge with professional instincts.

"Extensively," Alexander said. "Three years of making dinner for a family of four will do that."

"Nevertheless—"

"I am aware," Alexander said. "I will not cook in my own house. I am just looking."

Bernard appeared to accept this. He poured two cups of tea. They sat at the kitchen table, old pine and enormous, the kind of table that suggested generations of people eating together, and Alexander thought about his mother, about Catherine who had waited two years and then died waiting, and filed the thought somewhere careful for later.

"Tell me about the hotel," he said.

Bernard wrapped both hands around his mug. "Hartwell Mayfair. Forty-two rooms, a restaurant, a bar, a rooftop terrace. It was one of the finest small hotels in London for thirty years. For the last five it has been losing ground: occupancy declining, reviews slipping, the restaurant running at a loss. Your father has not had the energy to address it, and Julian—" He paused.

"Julian has not helped," Alexander finished.

"Julian has, with the best intentions, made things considerably worse."

Alexander drank his tea. "Tell me about Julian."

Bernard told him. The riding accident. The head injury. The months in rehabilitation. The brilliant intervals and the dangerous ones. The jealousy that the accident had somehow stripped of its subtlety. Julian had always wanted to be the heir, and now that wanting was no longer mediated by restraint.

"He will come for me," Alexander said. It was not a question.

"Yes," Bernard said. "He will."

Alexander set his cup down. "Then I had better be ready." He stood up. "Show me to the wardrobe. If I am going to run a hotel, I should look like someone who runs a hotel."

* * *

They went, before the hotel, to Savile Row. Bernard had an appointment with a tailor he had used for thirty years, a compact Italian man named Ferretti who measured Alexander in under four minutes and produced three suits from a back room as though he had been expecting them.

Alexander tried on a charcoal wool with a faint chalk stripe. He looked in the three-way mirror and did not entirely recognise the person looking back at him. Not because the suit was transformative, he had always been suspicious of anyone who claimed clothes made the man, but because the person in the mirror looked, for the first time in years, like someone who was not apologising for being in the room.

"That one," Bernard said, from the chair in the corner, in the tone of a man confirming something he already knew.

"All three," Alexander said. "And shoes."

* * *

The hotel's general manager was a nervous man named Thomas Webb who met them in the lobby with the visible tension of someone who has been told the owner is coming and has spent the intervening time cataloguing every possible failing. He shook Alexander's hand too hard.

"Mr. Calloway. We are very pleased—"

"Show me the books first," Alexander said. "Then the rooms. Then the restaurant."

Thomas Webb showed him the books.

The books were not good. Occupancy at sixty-one percent. The restaurant running at a loss for the third consecutive year. Staff turnover up sharply. Alexander read through the figures with the file open on the lobby desk, standing up, because he thought better standing up.

"What happened three years ago?" he said, pointing at the line where the numbers began their downward turn.

Thomas Webb's expression did something complicated. "That was when Mr. Julian took a more active role," he said carefully.

Alexander looked up. "Right. I want a board meeting this afternoon, everyone who has a decision-making role in this building. Two o'clock."

"Yes, sir."

"And I want to see the restaurant."

Thomas Webb took him to the restaurant. It was a beautiful room, high windows, pale walls, tables dressed in white linen, and it had the particular sadness of a beautiful room that was being underused. At the far end, a woman in chef's whites was talking to a waiter, pointing at something on a menu with the focused irritation of someone who has had to say the same thing more than once. She had dark hair pulled back tightly, a pen tucked behind her ear, and she had not looked up.

"Who is that?" Alexander asked.

"Ms. Renaud," Thomas said. "Isabelle Renaud. She owns Maison Renaud in Soho. She received a Michelin star last month. Mr. Ashford engaged her six weeks ago to consult on the restaurant."

As though she had heard her name, she looked up. She assessed Thomas Webb as a known quantity, assessed Alexander as unknown, and returned to the waiter without visible change of expression.

Alexander found, to his mild surprise, that he wanted to know what she had concluded.

"Two o'clock," he told Thomas, and turned toward the lobby.