A rattling noise woke me in the dead of night and I fumbled my way into the dark corridor. It was coming from the room at the end of the hallway, which was occupied by a couple from West Virginia on a romantic road trip.
The door rattled again as I stood there. I realised the big old key was turning and returning in the lock and the handle was rattling but the door was not opening. I ran back into our bedroom and shook the builder boyfriend awake. ‘The people in room 4 are stuck in their room!’ He stirred and when I wouldn’t stop shaking him he got out of bed and put on his dressing gown.
That old door with its ancient lock and big old-fashioned key… we should never have left it. We should have taken it off and fitted a modern door with a modern lock. But we kept it because it was the original Georgian door, for heaven’s sake.
I climbed back into bed and pulled the covers over my head. Whatever was about to happen, I didn’t want to know. Would the BB have to put up a ladder and go through the window?
I could hear him creeping downstairs, and supposed he was getting tools to try to prise open the door. When he came back up, he walked into the bedroom and declared there was no one down there. ‘Of course there’s no one down there! The couple in room 4 are locked in and can’t get out!’ But he was in one of his half-asleep states. He climbed back into bed, telling me he couldn’t hear anything.
I was dreading the next morning, but, in fact, all our guests came down for breakfast, including the couple in room 4.
One was in a rainbow bomber jacket and the other wore tight cowboy dude jeans and a snazzy belt. They didn’t say anything about the door jamming. They were too polite. They had breakfast and went out for the day.
The Australian couple in the other room were wandering around the gardens and she approached the BB while he was working outside to say they liked it so much they might stay another night. ‘The, er, two gentlemen who were staying last night,’ she said. ‘Will they be staying again tonight?’
The builder b wasn’t sure what she was driving at. He said: ‘Yes, I think they’re booked in for two nights. Why?’
‘Oh, nothing, nothing,’ she said. Shortly afterwards, she and her husband came down with their bags packed and said they’d be checking out to head for Dingle, or maybe it was the Cliffs of Moher. Almost everyone who stays with us is in a tearing hurry to get to one or the other, and heaven knows what it is they think they’ll find when they get there. ‘We’ll be on our way after all,’ she said.
This worked out well, because we had a lovely time with the couple from Virginia, inviting them to dine with us.
The young, slim guy in tight jeans was softly spoken and polite – ‘I sure would appreciate it…’ he said to everything we offered – while the other guy, of South American extraction, sat on the sofa in the kitchen playing games on his phone and making deadpan comments to everything we were saying as I made dinner.
‘It must be amazing where you come from,’ said the BB to the dude cowboy. ‘I’d love to go to the Blue Ridge Mountains.’ Without looking up from his phone, the guy said: ‘Them rednecks living up there ain’t doing nothin’ but huntin’ and shootin’ things…’
‘That sounds fantastic,’ said the BB.
‘No it ain’t. Them rednecks…’ and the big fella shook his head.
The dude in tight jeans then very quietly said he liked hunting too. But the big fella was having none of it: ‘Them rednecks…’ he said, still playing with his phone. They left us a five-star review, the big guy writing the comments. He said that it was the nicest place they had stayed during their entire road trip. This lifted my spirits no end after a string of difficult customers, including one woman who marked us down because we weren’t in the town centre. Being up a remote hillside on a farm will tend to have that effect, I pointed out in my reply to her review.
I told the BB that I thought we had found our niche. ‘We’re a hit with the gays,’ I said. ‘The trans love us too, remember?’
How could he forget? We recently had two chaps from Holland who might have been chapesses, or else they might have been ladies who were now men – the BB, who was running the show alone that week while I was in London, didn’t know which way round they were coming or going.
They appeared for breakfast each morning dressed one way, then the other, and some days, when one of them was one way, the other went the other, then they sometimes swapped the next day, or else went the same way at the same time.
The BB thought he had worked out the formula and informed me by text how he thought it went, but I said he should not presume to understand it. ‘Only ever address them by their names. Never use a pronoun,’ I told him, for what he supposed they might be was way too complex to run the risk.
They were absolutely lovely. Just about the politest people you could meet. The BB started to feel very protective of them when they said they tried to go for a pony trek and the people had not been all that nice to them. He was very cross as he told me. How dare someone not be nice to our guests. To be fair, he explained, they had been wearing baby-doll dresses, so you could see how it might have been difficult to get them on a horse safely. But that doesn’t excuse rudeness.
When they left to go on another outing, dressed like lumberjacks, I asked the BB: ‘Will they be all right today do you think?’ ‘Don’t know,’ the BB replied. ‘I’ve sent them to Skibbereen, to be on the safe side. They should be OK there with all them vegan cafés.’
And so they were. Five stars from the Dutch couple and five from the rainbow cowboys. We just seem to have a feel for it.
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