Grand Affair

by Charlotte Bingham

  Ottilie heard herself sobbing and sobbing and then felt Joseph’s hand on her shoulder reminding her, as if she needed it, that this was possibly how she was going to feel when the police did come for her. She would feel the sudden weight, her shoulder would suddenly be pressed down by a roughened hand.

  ‘Ah come on now, Ottie, stop your crying and howling. There’s no need for it. Give me the earbobs or whatever they are, I’ll throw them away for you. For God’s sake, you’re carrying on as if you’ve stolen a car, not a pair of old earbobs.’ He put out his hand for them. ‘Give them to me, Ottie pet, and I’ll throw the wretched things out the window for you. Lord, you’ve got yourself in a right old state now, haven’t you?’

  Ottilie could not wait to give them to someone else. She delved into her wretched pocket and put the heavy drop diamond earrings into Joseph’s hand that was already so rough and coarse due to the building work at Hultons. Now they were out of her keeping, somewhere other than her coat pocket, it was as if she had been terribly hot with a fever and now was cool and calm, and the sobbing stopped quite suddenly with a big shudder that shook her body, and inwardly she sighed with relief as she saw Joseph’s large hand take the wretched things and zip them inside his mock leather jacket pocket.

  ‘There now. All gone. See? And never been here either. Stop your sobbing and go home now, I’ll throw them away for you. You always did get yourself in a fine old state, right since you were a bit of a thing at Number Four. If you were in one of your states, Ma always said, there was no dealing with you. There’s not much to throwing away a pair of old earbobs, you know? You just throw them away! Even so, never mind, eh? I’ll get rid of them for you in, as they say, a twinkling of an eye, all right?’

  He smiled down at her.

  ‘Just tell me one thing, though, Ottie. Why in heaven’s name did you take them if you were going to get so upset about them?’

  Ottilie stared up at her middle brother, who was actually laughing at her.

  ‘But I didn’t take them, really I didn’t, Joseph. I don’t like earrings. No, they were from Mamma to throw away because—’ She stopped as she remembered Melanie’s eyes boring into hers and her words ‘something terrible will happen to you’. If she told Joseph the real truth maybe something terrible would happen to him too, to both of them. ‘I didn’t take them, Joseph, really I didn’t,’ she finished.

  Joseph nodded, not believing her and not really listening either, turning away to light an untipped cigarette from the one he was already smoking, the way he would never have done if Ma were alive.

  ‘I don’t suppose they’re worth more than a shilling or two, are they? The earbobs, not worth more than a few shillings, I don’t suppose?’ he asked casually, still seeming not to be really interested in anything except his cigarettes, which he now turned round and round in his mouth as he sucked in the smoke and blew it up into the cold, stale, dusty air of the cottage.

  ‘Oh but they are, Joseph. Those earrings are worth pounds and pounds. That’s why the police are there looking for them, that’s why they might even search the pipes the way they did when old Mr Pepper lost his gold tooth and it had to be found whatever happened because it cost him over a hundred pounds.’

  ‘Oh yes, and how many pounds would it be that these are worth, then?’

  ‘A thousand pounds.’

  There, it was out.

  Joseph gave a short laugh after a second’s astonishment.

  ‘A thousand pounds, eh? Is that all? In that case we had better send them off to our favourite charity so?’ he said, half to himself. A pause, and then: ‘Right. OK. Now. Ottilie, this really is strictly between you and me. Look. Ottilie. You don’t want something bad to happen to you, now do you?’

  Ottilie was sure that she did not want anything bad to happen to her, of that at least she was quite, quite sure. ‘You mean, you want me to keep something under my hat?’ she volunteered for the second time that day.

  ‘Exactly, Ottie. You should keep this under your hat, if you were wearing one,’ he added, joking. ‘Now, first. You mustn’t tell anyone you’ve been here, and if you don’t, well then neither shall I, all right? Look. Remember that time I knew what it was they had written in the kitchen even though Ma and Lorcan had told me not to tell you? Well, this – it’s just like that time, really. This is strictly between you and me, Ottie, and no-one else. You know, like when you go to confession and the priest never tells out? Think of me like that priest, you know, you’ve told me something, but I will never tell out. It doesn’t matter that you took these earbobs, really it doesn’t—’

  ‘But I didn’t take them—’

  ‘Doesn’t matter, Ottie. Forget about it. It doesn’t matter. Really. Mrs Cartaret will get the insurance and I will get rid of them for you. Now all you have to do is to go home, clean up, and forget all about it. OK? It’s just a bad dream, and now it’s stopped. Just forget all about it. No-one knows you’ve been here now, do they? You’re quite sure?’

  ‘No-one, no, I swear it, Joseph.’

  ‘Good, well then off with you, and not another word.’

  He opened the cottage door suddenly, but not very wide, as if Ottilie was a cat or a dog he was putting out at dusk, and Ottilie shot through the narrow opening and started once more to bolt towards the little road, the high hedges, and another world.

  Oh the relief of running and running and knowing that she was free of those dreadful objects. She would always hate jewellery now, for ever and ever afterwards. She would never like jewellery, or diamonds, or anything to do with earrings, or anything at all like that. They would always make her feel sick.

  The sea breeze was now strolling not whipping round the corner of the hotel but it cooled her hot cheeks as she slipped back into the empty reading room and crept up the back stairs to the sanctuary of her own suite once more.

  Soon Edith would come to her, and everything would be all right. Ottilie would joke with her and everything would be like it was. But first she must wash her socks, and clean her shoes, and brush the mud from her coat. No-one must find out where she had been. Only Joseph knew, and he would never tell. He would throw away the earrings for her, probably in the bottom of the cement mixer that Mr Hulton and his men used, or in the stream that ran past the cottage where the old man had shouted at her that first day.

  Except they would show up in the clear water, just as they would be sure to be found by someone local in a hedge or a field, their brightness catching the sun, or someone’s boot overturning them, or their spade. No, Joseph would find somewhere else to throw them. Perhaps he would take a bus ride and then throw them away? But the worst of it was, as Ottilie knew only too well, all that time God would be looking at him, and at her, and He would know.

  Hardly minutes after Ottilie had cleaned up her clothes as best she could – the mud appearing to her frantic guilty eyes to be more like blood – Edith returned to her suite, quietly relieved that the police had searched the staff quarters and nothing had been found.

  ‘Leaves a nasty taste for all of us, though,’ she told Ottilie. ‘Really it does, Miss Ottilie. I just don’t understand who could have done such a thing to Mrs Cartaret. She was in tears, she was that upset by the end.’

  Ottilie’s eyes strayed to the cupboard. She had hung the now damp-edged coat to the back of the wardrobe. She had placed the still damp shoes at the back of the many rows of shoes that she owned. She had washed out her white knee socks and wrapped them round and round the towel rail underneath her bath towel to dry them. All traces of the real criminal had been washed off, or wiped off. No-one could find out that it was her now, no-one.

  ‘Would you like me to read you a story tonight? You look too washed out to read to yourself. You know your trouble, Miss Ottilie? You have a skin too few. I reckon you’ve suffered for us all today, just as if it was you that was the thief.’

  Ottilie nodded and closed her eyes. The words from the favourite chapter of her favourite book offered Ottilie noth
ing but consolation after the hell of the day that had been, and Edith’s voice was so warm and kind.

  ‘Home! That was what they meant, those caressing appeals, those soft touches wafted through the air, those invisible little hands pulling and tugging, all one way! Why, it must be quite close by him at that moment, his old home that he had hurriedly forsaken and never sought again, that day when he first found the river!’

  Against the sound of Edith’s voice reading, Ottilie thought – home! She had tried to go home not just to get rid of the earrings but to find Ma and her old happy ways, to find Number Four and the dear golden days that had always seemed so full of sunlight and laughter when Lorcan, Joseph and Sean had loved her, and played with her, and not wanted her to go away from them.

  ‘Poor Mole stood alone in the road, his heart torn asunder, and a big sob gathering, gathering, gathering, somewhere low down inside him, to leap up to the surface presently, he knew, in passionate escape.’

  Edith stopped as Ottilie turned away, her eyes straying to the old-fashioned thick chintz curtains hanging at her windows, rows of decorative bobbles adorning their swagged pelmets and running down the long edges until they ended at the carpet where they lay an inch or two beyond the floorline in extravagant spills. She had not been ‘home’ very long, but it had been long enough for her to notice that there were no such pelmets at the cottage, no extravagant spills of curtains thickly lined, no soft carpets, no kind eyes like Edith’s looking down at her with concern as they were now, only Joseph looking at Ottilie as if she was someone he now hardly knew.

  ‘Are you all right, Miss Ottilie?’

  ‘Oh yes, Edith, quite all right, thank you.’

  ‘Well, that’s all right then,’ said Edith. ‘It has been quite a day, I’m afraid, Miss Ottilie, but all’s well that ends well. And no more to be said.’

  Edith continued to read.

  ‘Meanwhile, the wafts from his old home pleaded, whispered, conjured, and finally claimed him imperiously. He dared not tarry longer within their magic circle. With a wrench that tore his very heartstrings he set his face down the road and followed submissively in the track of the Rat, while faint, thin little smells, still dogging his retreating nose, reproached him for his new friendships and his callous forgetfulness.’

  One last great shuddering sigh escaped from Ottilie, and then she was asleep.

  Seven

  Mrs Le Martine was almost as excited as Ottilie at the thought that Ottilie might be actually going to have tea with Blue Lady. But first, for her mother’s sake, Ottilie must try to hint to Mrs Le Martine that she had prior knowledge about Mamma’s designer clothes going to London to be sold. After the horrors of her experience with the diamond earrings, dropping hints to Mrs Le Martine seemed as easy as helping to give a tea party for lonely, bored children on a rainy day at the hotel.

  Ottilie began with flattery, though she knew that Mrs Le Martine would not believe a word. Even so she knew she would enjoy it, that they both would, just like playing a familiar card game, or going for a walk each step of which you knew but which you could pretend that you did not, stopping and exclaiming at each turn at a view, or a statue, or a perfectly planted garden as if you had never seen it before.

  ‘I love your lavender coat and skirt, but I think I like you best of all in pink.’

  Mrs Le Martine was quite used to Ottilie threading her way through all the clothes in her cupboards, and sighing and making appreciative remarks. As a matter of fact Ottilie always thought that she must rather like it, because as Ottilie did so she would stare at her own reflection in her silver hand mirror and turn her head to and fro, watching her reflection intently as Ottilie’s words came floating back to her across the deep-carpeted room.

  ‘Do you know, Mrs Le Martine, my mother has a pink Chanel suit, quite new, but she has been seen in it just one time too often in the hotel, so it must go back to the secondhand shop in Knightsbridge to be sold hardly worn. Such a pretty pink. I wrapped it for her this morning . . .’

  ‘Which shop in Knightsbridge?’

  All Mrs Le Martine’s clothes were wrapped in some form of tissue paper or box with one of many Knightsbridge names printed in silver or gold across it. Ottilie often felt that Mrs Le Martine might even own this place called ‘Knightsbridge’.

  ‘Oh, it’s just a little shop where all her clothes must go once she’s finished with them because of being seen too often at the hotel, and of course she can’t give them to staff or anyone in the town because they might turn up here wearing them, and then where would she be?’

  ‘Well, quite. Your mother could not have that, I do see.’

  There was a slight pause while Mrs Le Martine continued to stare at herself in her hand mirror, and then Ottilie offered, ‘Of course, I want her to keep them for me, but she won’t because they won’t be at all fashionable by the time I grow up.’

  ‘No, I don’t suppose they will, Miss Ottilie.’ At last Mrs Le Martine turned from the hand mirror and, head on one side, looked across at Ottilie who was now busy trying on some of her shoes. ‘I might be interested. Would you like to show me the Shah-nelle? I missed going to the Collections in Paris this year, and, as you know, I have always been interested in collecting Shah-nelle.’

  This was another pretence that they both kept up, that Mrs Le Martine always went to Paris to the Collections and never bought her clothes secondhand from the shop in London which was just about, according to Mrs Cartaret, so sadly to close. Ottilie had long ago realized the truth because of the cleaning tickets that still adhered to the so-called ‘new’ clothes that Mrs Le Martine arrived with every year.

  But that was another thing that she and Mrs Le Martine shared, their pretence. That’s why they laughed so much, because they both enjoyed pretending so much, and it didn’t matter that not very much was true. All that mattered was that they laughed and enjoyed themselves during the month that she sayed at the start of the summer season every year.

  Later Mrs Le Martine said, staring at the pristine Chanel suit in its beautiful white box that Ottilie had raced to find in her mother’s rooms and returned with at equal speed, ‘Of course it will be very expensive, I expect, perhaps too expensive, don’t you think?’

  ‘It will be less if you buy it now, here,’ Ottilie found herself saying with a certain urgency, remembering the look in her mother’s eyes what now seemed like a lifetime away, but was really only two days.

  ‘Would Mrs Cartaret accept forty pounds for the coat and skirt, do you think?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘In that case, ring for Edith, Miss Ottilie, and I shall try it on.’

  Edith must be rung for, and then Mrs Le Martine dressed in the suit, but not before she had negotiated a full change of lingerie and Edith had done up her silk stockings with the suspenders that she so favoured – silk-lined, and tiny as if, Ottilie always thought, made for the Little People in whom Ma had believed so fervently.

  ‘Did you know that in Ireland there is a shoe two inches long, made of mouse skin, and yet the heel of it is quite worn down, and the sole a little too, so it must have been worn by one of the busiest of the Little People?’

  Ma had told Ottilie that often, as the start of a story designed to soothe her to sleep. Often the shoe had been lost by a little girl running away from her wicked stepmother to find the Land that Always Will. Sometimes it would be worn by a mischievous leprechaun searching to steal the Big People’s shoes when they were bathing in the sea. Now Mrs Le Martine looked across at Ottilie.

  ‘My dear Miss Ottilie, how fascinating,’ she murmured, not actually very interested at all, as she turned and turned in front of the dressing mirror before the fascinated eyes of Edith and Ottilie. ‘Oh yes, I think this is quite a fit, although it is a little long. But how particularly lucky that Her Majesty and I are both size eight, how most particularly lucky.’

  ‘You look ever so elegant in that, Mrs Le Martine,’ Edith murmured. Despite this flattery Mrs Le Martine waite
d until Edith had gone, which meant that she had to wait for Edith to stop hanging about removing fluff from the carpet and pretending that there was something she had forgotten so that she could listen to their talk, and then quickly found some crisply clean money and gave it to Ottilie.

  ‘There, dear, give this to you-know-who and tell her I am most grateful for the opportunity to buy Shah-nelle, but be sure to reassure that I shall not wear it until I return to London, never in the hotel. We could not have that, of course.’

  If Ottilie thought that Melanie would be grateful when she passed on that first money for her secondhand clothes, she was very much mistaken. She simply took it from her as if she was a little late in arriving with it, and said, ‘Did I tell you, everything is fixed? Mrs Ballantyne is expecting you for tea tomorrow, at four o’clock. Do be on your very best, won’t you?’

  Ottilie nodded, not wanting to catch Melanie’s eye, and then with much relief she effected her escape from the suite, and bolted off back to Mrs Le Martine with the news that tomorrow, only twenty hours away from now, she would at last be meeting Blue Lady.

  This time Mrs Le Martine must come to Ottilie’s suite to help her choose her dress, and to watch Edith brush and comb her hair and tie the sides of it up in a beautiful bow at the top of her head while brushing the rest down her back in a thick and shining and satisfying fall of hair.

  ‘Most decorative, Edith,’ Mrs Le Martine purred as Edith turned Ottilie towards her. Tartan dress, broad white lace collar, wide sash, long white socks, black patent leather shoes, and a full petticoat beneath edged with lace just a little of which, as was currently the fashion, was allowed to show. ‘Oh yes, Edith, most satisfactory. Come here, pet.’