Grand Affair

by Charlotte Bingham

  Mrs Le Martine leaned forward and pecked Ottilie on the cheek, giving Ottilie a wonderfully satisfactory inhalation of ‘Enchantée’.

  ‘Good luck, Miss Ottilie,’ she murmured in her husky voice, ‘and don’t forget the details, all the details. I want to know everything, please, right down to the last little jot or tittle.’

  No need for Edith to take her upstairs, for during the last three years Ottilie had spent much time playing in the Great Suite on rainy days. She knew the way very well. She actually loved the grandness of it, the loneliness of it, the strange sense of its always waiting to be occupied by the very rich. The moment the double doors opened to admit the visitor the sea did not just come into view, it rose up from outside the French windows ahead and slapped them in the face.

  Mrs Tomber always said, with great satisfaction, ‘We never have had any trouble in the Great Suite’, and if this was so it might be because the view of the sea and the rocks was so spectacular that the occupants of the rooms were constantly reminded that do what they might they were as important as sandhoppers compared to the sea outside.

  In the long lonely winters when the hotel was shut Ottilie loved to people the rooms with exotic characters, polo-playing princes and grand ladies, brilliant painters, Chinese empresses and American film stars, the kind of people that never seemed to come to the Grand at St Elcombe.

  But despite this particular suite’s being such an old friend, Ottilie had absolutely no idea of what to expect when she pushed open the double doors of the Great Suite. It was all very well for Mrs Le Martine and herself to imagine that they knew just what Blue Lady looked like, but they only knew her from afar, from their surreptitious daily glances up towards her balcony as they wondered over and over what she was doing there, so still, staring out to sea at the waves and the rocks on either side of the bay.

  And no good asking the staff, Edith or anyone, because they were all so vague, having no powers of description unless there was something really out of the ordinary about someone that they could seize on – such as a broken arm, or a great white beard. But if the person in question did not have some special peculiarity they would reply to Ottilie’s curious questions in a vaguely impatient voice as if the very idea of answering her was a colossal effort, ‘Well, I wouldn’t know, really, Miss Ottilie. Well, all right. I’ll tell you. Quite pretty, she is, I suppose, for her age that is, but a bit old-fashioned now, see? But always quite polite, I would say, but as I say, definitely old-fashioned. Now I really must get on.’

  They nearly always ended their poor efforts at description with ‘Now I really must get on’ as if Ottilie had embarrassed them with her questions. Perhaps because of this Ottilie had already formed the opinion that Blue Lady would be really quite old, not old as Mrs Le Martine was old but really, really old, because from afar, right above them on her private balcony, Mrs Ballantyne – which Ottilie kept having to remember was actually Blue Lady’s real name – always looked as if she was going to be old, tiny and frail, sitting in her dark glasses with a hat pulled down, and nearly always with a rug on her knees and sewing on her lap.

  The shock to Ottilie therefore of seeing her on the other side of the elegant sitting room, beside the French windows of the Great Suite, was astounding. It was as much of a shock as expecting someone quite young and then finding them to be very old. It was as much of a shock as seeing how Joseph had seemed so suddenly to have changed into someone Ottilie simply did not know, tall, and handsome, but sort of grim, and with a tattoo on his arm, just like any other man that might be working on a building site for Mr Hulton, not like the Joseph she remembered even from Christmas last. It was as much of a shock as finding out how difficult it was to throw earrings away when you knew that God was watching you and Edith would be sure to notice. It was a bucket of cold water of a shock to see that Mrs Ballantyne was anything but old.

  Not only that, but as Ottilie edged into the room with her tea tray, quietly shutting the door behind her with a push of her rear, she was instantly aware of the change in the atmosphere of the rooms. The Great Suite was no longer a furnished and carpeted, richly curtained blank canvas for an active imagination, the kind of imagination that Ottilie possessed, it was no longer a great toy box for her to open so that she could play with its contents, but a changed and most positive place filled with alien possessions.

  It was only on giving a quick surreptitious look round that Ottilie remembered that Mrs Ballantyne’s arrival was always preceded by the delivery of innumerable personal belongings, and that she herself always arrived last, late at night and alone, hurrying up the stairs as if she was terrified that someone might see her, as if for the Great Suite to retain its magical, ghostly hold on her no human eye must behold her for longer than a few seconds, for if it did she herself might melt and disappear.

  Outside the long windows it was an afternoon of dark grey clouds, and a dark grey sea rose and fell, pushing up the white tips of each new wave ever higher, so that at times it would seem they were vying to be taller and more imposing than the unmoving rocks on either side, or playing some game of touching the ceiling of the lowering sky that so exactly matched the sea. Even the palm trees that grew closer to the shielding comfort of the hotel seemed to be bending just slightly to the will of the wind, and certainly despite the late spring no-one was about outside, either below the balcony or beyond the window at which the lady now sat sewing steadily, her head bent over her needlework.

  ‘Put the tea tray on the round table,’ she called out in a pretty if strangely mechanical voice. ‘Leave it just there, and put two teaspoons of Lapsang Souchong from the silver caddy that you will notice in front of you into the strainer in the teapot, pour on the hot water from your jug and leave for one minute by the clock that you can see on the other side of the table, take it out, and then place a slice of lemon in each cup, pour on the tea and set one beside me and one beside the chair opposite, please.’

  Ottilie, despite considerable previous experience of helping out with teas, felt more nervous at the sound of these instructions than she could possibly have imagined. To calm herself she thought of the kitchens from which she had just come. Down there, way below them, the staff would be laughing and joking as they set cream teas for one, or toasted muffins for two and put them in the old-fashioned muffin dishes. Down there the chefs would just be coming back on duty, stubbing out their untipped cigarettes by the back doors, waiting to swing into action as the evening star started to climb the weather-dark skies outside the windows and their wives and girlfriends settled back to watch the evening news on small black and white televisions, or listen to the shipping forecasts on their radios.

  Mrs Ballantyne had never once raised her head from her sewing frame as she issued her instructions, and so, as Ottilie obediently poured hot water onto the closed straining spoon filled with Lapsang Souchong and waited an exact minute by the small, round mahogany clock in its special case by the caddy, it was still impossible for the inexperienced young waitress to see very precisely the face of the lady for whom she was making this delicately flavoured tea.

  And besides, she was too intent on getting the tea right to permit herself to stare across the darkening room, unlit as yet by any of the large Chinese porcelain lamps, and illuminated only by that little amount of light that the weather and the time of year permitted.

  Obedient to Mrs Ballantyne’s so-precise instructions she set a cup of tea first beside her, and then beside the empty chair.

  Mrs Ballantyne must have finished the stitch upon which she was concentrating so hard, because at last she did look up just as Ottilie was looking down and for a second she stared into Ottilie’s eyes.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked, but only after it seemed to Ottilie that she had given a little start and her eyes had, for a fleeting moment, lit up, as if she had found herself staring into the eyes of an old friend whom she really loved and had not seen for years. But it was only a second and then the brown eyes, rimmed with a faint gr
een eye-shadow, seemed to once more glaze over, to become indifferent.

  ‘I am Ottilie, Mrs Ballantyne. Ottilie Cartaret.’

  There was a slight pause as Mrs Ballantyne placed her sewing frame to the side of her chair and picked up the fine china teacup that had been put beside her, sipping at it delicately and almost without a sound.

  ‘People have such peculiar names nowadays,’ she remarked. ‘Such peculiar names.’

  ‘’parently it’s actually short for Odelia, Mamma says, but I’m never called Odelia, only Ottilie.’

  ‘Good heavens, imagine, did you ever hear the like of that?’

  Mrs Ballantyne raised her head slightly as if she was talking to someone in the room, someone whom Ottilie certainly could not see but she now saw she had set a cup of tea for beside their chair.

  Ottilie nodded at the empty chair which Mrs Ballantyne had addressed, because she felt so awkward and could think of nothing else that she could do. It would seem quite silly to say anything more, because of course had Ottilie thought the origin of her name uninteresting she would not have told Mrs Ballantyne about it.

  ‘Myself I like a name to have an old-fashioned ring to it, rather than a peculiar or quaint ring,’ Blue Lady went on, picking up her sewing frame once more but glancing, with a fleeting, loving smile, at the empty chair opposite her.

  At this Ottilie could not help having a quite searching look round the room for this unseen person who had not yet attempted to drink the cup of tea set out so precisely for them. But there was definitely no-one else in the room, and so Ottilie stood on in an agony of embarrassment, not knowing what to say to these remarks that were not being made to her, pulling awkwardly at her broderie anglaise apron and wishing for perhaps a fiftieth time that Melanie had not been so terribly extravagant with her clothes money, and wondering how soon she could make good her escape. Above all she hoped that Mrs Ballantyne would tell her to go, because now she was here, in the Great Suite, only a few feet from her, Ottilie could see just how wrong she and Mrs Le Martine had got Blue Lady. For someone who, like Ottilie, had been looking to see an old lady with a lace collar and a cameo brooch, and if possible a great chignon of white hair, being so close to Mrs Ballantyne was certainly a great disappointment.

  For a start she could hardly be more than thirty years of age, or something around that (Ottilie was not very good at ages), yet at the same time there was something very unmodern and not at all up to date about her. It was not just that she did not wear modern clothes, or that nowhere about her was there any evidence of the shirtwaisters and stiff petticoats that were currently so fashionable. It was not just that her suit had a nipped-in jacket, and a skirt that fell in an unfashionably long length to her ankles in a style that Mrs Le Martine had told Ottilie when they were talking ‘fashion’, which was practically every day, was ‘New Look 1948’, nor that her shoes were what Ottilie knew used to be called ‘peep-toed’ or that her make-up was unfashionable in that it emphasized her lips, so that they looked red and full. It was something about her whole being, as if she, despite not being old at all, was set as much in the jelly with which Chef always surrounded his oeufs en gelée as one of the softly poached eggs themselves.

  And although Ottilie could see that she was very pretty, and that like Mrs Le Martine she was just the size to fit into one of her mother’s coat-and-skirts or one of the evening dresses that Mrs Cartaret was so intent on selling, she could also see that Mrs Ballantyne would never buy anything modern and up to date from either Mrs Cartaret or anyone else, for the very good reason that Mrs Ballantyne was quite obviously a person from the past. She was a person from another era, haunting the Great Suite in clothes which could now only be found in some magazine that not even the Grand would still have lying about on some dusty shelf. She looked as strange and old-fashioned as any of the old ladies who stayed at the Grand at Christmas, with their long crêpe evening dresses, their shingled hair and their delicate little reticules hanging from silver and gold chains from which they would from time to time remove their gold or silver powder compacts and pat their noses between dinner courses, discreetly turning to one side so that no-one would have cause to notice them.

  ‘It is a very dark day today,’ the voice from the chair went on, addressing that same empty chair opposite her, while at the same time holding out the fragile fine china teacup, part of the special tea service that was reserved especially for the Great Suite. ‘It is a very dark day indeed. And I will have another cup of tea, please, young lady.’

  Just at that moment Ottilie had been hoping to bolt out of the door and down the stairs back to the fun of the kitchens, back to friendly faces and steam and bustle, but instead she silently stepped forward to do as bidden, leaving the other cup undrunk beside its chair.

  She stared at the little mahogany clock as she minutely observed the tea ritual for a second time. This must be the reason why none of the staff liked even talking to her about Mrs Ballantyne. This must be the reason why none of them really liked taking trays up to her in answer to her calls for room service, the ghostly undrunk cup of tea.

  This must be the reason, because of how she was, because of the frightening atmosphere that she brought into the room and which lingered about her, making Ottilie feel shivery at the sound of her mechanical tones, her strange way of speaking. The staff did not want to talk about Mrs Ballantyne, because Mrs Ballantyne was a ghost.

  Yet unlike most ghosts she spoke, and her voice was the most upsetting aspect of Mrs Ballantyne, because it was a voice from which all expectation had quite gone. A voice which reflected some deep inner misery which was frightening, and at the same time unreachable. Having watched Ottilie place the teacup on the table beside her, she once more turned back to sewing in front of the fast-darkening backdrop outside the window where the storm clouds appeared to be dominating everything. But as she turned the large solitaire diamond on her finger appeared to catch what remained of the disappearing light, so that Ottilie, whose head was always full of romantic notions, imagined for a fraction of a second that its light might be acting as a secret signal to some boat being thrown about in the wrangling seas beyond the windows.

  ‘I love the sea when the sky is darkening.’

  At this Ottilie could not help nodding, even though by now she knew that the remark was most certainly not meant for her, and that she was in reality nodding in place of someone she could not see, because Mrs Ballantyne looked up and stared across at the empty chair opposite hers.

  ‘The sea is at its best when in dark and lowering mood.’

  Ottilie, silent as always, nodded yet again to the back of the chair, at the back of Mrs Ballantyne’s elaborate but severe chignon, at the sea in front of both of them, at the boats on the horizon, but actually to someone whom she could not see but who was none the less, it seemed to her, as real to Mrs Ballantyne as to Ottilie herself.

  Downstairs the soups would be gently simmering, the bread rolls warming up, the butter curls glistening, and people would have begun dashing in and out of the service doors. There would be lights and the dessert trolley would be about to be wheeled into position, jellies and trifles shimmering, miniature eclairs glowing in their dark chocolate sauce. Everything would be such a contrast to this dark and gloomy room and its strange occupant with her long painted fingernails, her sculpted Dior clothes, and her heavy rings that seemed to be pushing her small, slender hands down towards her needlework, at the same time making it difficult for her to hold her needle except with almost straightened fingers, in a sewing style that old ladies in the lounges downstairs always used.

  ‘Yes, and perhaps there will be thunder. That would be exciting, wouldn’t it, darling?’

  Mrs Ballantyne smiled at the empty chair and then gazed out at the sea ahead as if she was following someone else’s gaze rather than her own, as if she had heard someone say, ‘Oh, do look at that.’

  Gradually, step by step, like a sort of reverse Grandmother’s Footsteps, Ottilie found herself
backing towards the double doors, and then slowly, so slowly, she managed to turn one of the old-fashioned pointed handles. Then, quickly, she bolted out of the door, shut it and fled down the stairs again, without the tea tray, without having even mentioned her mother’s clothes, without anything, but above all without Mrs Ballantyne and her invisible guest.

  ‘What on earth can you mean, Ottilie?’

  Melanie turned with evident reluctance from her hand mirror and placed it face down on the glass top of her much beribboned dressing table with its underskirts of shell-pink satin, and its overskirts of muslin draped in decorative swags and caught up at the sides by bunches of beautifully made artificial roses.

  ‘Please explain what you mean.’

  Long before she opened her mouth to announce to Melanie that, unlike Mrs Le Martine, Mrs Ballantyne could have no possible interest in Mrs Cartaret’s model clothes, Ottilie had determined that she would tell Mamma that she no longer wanted to have anything to do with passing off her old clothes onto hotel guests.

  ‘Mrs Ballantyne only likes very old clothes, she told me so herself.’

  ‘That, Ottilie Cartaret, is a barefaced lie. I happen to know it is a barefaced lie, because Mrs Ballantyne is quite mad and has been for years. You could not possibly know that she is only interested in old clothes, because once she gets up into the Great Suite she never makes the slightest shred of sense.’ Mrs Cartaret paused to throw a pill down her throat and at the same time took a sip of her gin and tonic. ‘That is a lie!’

  Ottilie turned scarlet at this and at the same time found herself wondering why her mother had sent her up to take tea to the woman if she knew all along that she would not be in the slightest bit interested in her cast-off clothes? Nevertheless, as always when she made something up, she could not give in, and anyway she knew what would happen if she was caught in a lie. It was the rule. Everyone at the Grand knew what happened when Ottilie was caught in one of the lies in which she believed so heartily. However well meant, they were always punished. ‘What I mean, Mamma,’ Ottilie went on, trying not to let her growing sense of desperation creep into her voice, ‘what I meant was, well, that Mrs Ballantyne only wears old clothes, so there didn’t seem much point in asking her, see? I mean did there? See?’