The Pentangle Court, Where Sleep Is Offered As A Concept Rather Than A Service
Two weddings, a function room with no ceiling insulation, and a boiler that keeps its own counsel until roughly a quarter past three.
Two Bins out of Five
Two Bins, one of them awarded to the earplugs, which were free and utterly outgunned.
A note on this one. The Pentangle Court Hotel does not exist. Neither does Halversham Sands. This entry belongs to our series of completely fictional hotels we regret to imagine, and any resemblance to a real establishment is a coincidence and, frankly, a tragedy for that establishment.
By the third night we could identify the song from the vibration alone
The Pentangle Court is a large and handsome hotel which has discovered that it earns considerably more from functions than from guests, and has arranged itself accordingly. Rooms 20 through 34 sit directly above the Wentworth Suite. The Wentworth Suite is available for hire until one in the morning. This information appears on the hotel's events page, and on no page a guest is ever likely to read.
On Friday there was a wedding. We do not begrudge anybody a wedding. We begrudge the flooring, which is a single layer of board laid across a joist and possesses the acoustic properties of a drum skin. Music does not travel up to Room 26 so much as arrive there whole, having lost only the words on the way.
On Saturday there was a second wedding, a delivery of glassware at six, and at ten past three the boiler. The boiler occupies a cupboard on the landing and announces itself with two knocks and a long shudder, at intervals of roughly forty minutes, all night, every night. It is not broken. It is simply of an age at which everything has become an effort.
By Sunday we had begun keeping records. We could identify the song from the vibration alone, without melody, working purely from the pattern of the bass through the headboard. This is a genuine skill. We did not want it. It has no application whatsoever outside the Pentangle Court and we expect to be carrying it for years.
We raised the matter at the desk each morning and were met every time with immediate, practical sympathy and a small paper packet of earplugs. The woman on duty said she keeps a drawer of them and that the drawer is restocked weekly. She added that the rooms above the suite are sold at the same rate as the rooms at the front, and said it quietly, in the tone of somebody reporting a fact she is not supposed to have noticed.
We asked whether the hotel might simply stop selling those rooms on function nights. We were told that the function nights are most nights. That is the whole of the Pentangle Court in a single sentence. It is not a hotel with a noise problem. It is a venue with a small and shrinking guest problem, and for three nights we were it.
This is an original work of satire about a fictional establishment. Bin Ratings are opinions. Report this story.
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