The Secret of Annexe 3 Read Online Free Page A

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