Of course, when she thought ‘they’ she was really thinking of Mrs Cartaret. She could be unkind and say bad things, she could make Ottilie work in the hotel all the hours that God had given, but she could no longer beat or humiliate her the way she used to.
What she could do, however, was tell her that Edith was dead.
Eleven
Of course Ottilie had known death before, when she was a small child. She had seen Ma’s coffin before the boys gave her away to the Cartarets, and she had known what it was like for someone she loved not to be there when she wanted her so much, when she had run back to the cottage that time, with the earrings in her pocket, expecting Ma somehow to be around, with her rich laugh and her thick red plait of hair, but then she had been young, six years old, now she was older, and death, she found, had changed for her, particularly Edith’s death. Nowadays death came hand in hand not with just sorrow, but with the feeling that she should have done something, that she could easily have done something, to prevent Edith dying, that somehow if she had not been so selfish, if she had read that letter, she could have come back from Paris and Edith would not have had her heart attack.
Matters might have been a little easier for her if Melanie, who after all still drank far too much gin, and had been prescribed tranquillizers for ‘her nerves’, had been so out of control that she was not aware of what was going on. Unfortunately, with her looks slipping away from her, it was as if Melanie was quite determined to make all around her appear as ugly as she now felt herself becoming.
‘I cannot understand why you were so selfish, so selfish as to think that it was all right to simply stay on in Paris not getting in touch, not telephoning. It did not seem to me to be possible. With all that you meant to Edith, all that you owed poor Edith, how could you just stay on in Paris ignoring the whole thing? I could not believe that anyone could be that selfish. What an appallingly selfish view of the world you must have, Ottilie, appallingly. Thank God, if the rest of the world is to be like you, thank God that your father and I will not live to see it. A world peopled by such selfishness does not seem possible. Not possible. It will be an appalling place. Edith asked for you, you know, she asked for you many times, and I just had to tell her, “Edith, Miss Ottilie is in France and I am afraid she just does not want to come back. We have told her you are gravely ill, Edith, but she will not come back to see you.” We had to say that. There was nothing more we could say. We had to tell her the truth.’
Happily for her, over the nearly ten years of her adoption, Ottilie had been able to develop a way of mentally sidestepping what happened to her, a way of pushing the hurt aside, so that it stayed pulled back like a curtain, while she strained every effort to concentrate only on the light ahead through the windows to the side of that curtain which was so often patterned with misery and guilt.
And so now to stand back from Melanie’s constant torrent of sadistic words, her enjoyment, her revelling in the misery of Ottilie’s supposed guilt, Ottilie imagined what Edith would say if she heard Melanie at her. (Edith would always use that expression, ‘Been at you again, has she, Miss Ottilie?’)
With that kind of remembrance Ottilie found would come reason, and light, and even a little colour, imagining Edith with her calm eyes, her close-permed crisp hair, her cameo brooch at the neck of her uniform dress, standing composedly in Ottilie’s suite and saying something ordinary and calming so that neither the words nor the beatings would hurt quite so much, knowing that only ordinariness could restore the kind of calm that was necessary for a child to be able to face another day.
‘Take no notice of her, Miss Ottilie, she’s in one of her bad moods, just take no notice. Mrs Tomber and I, we just ignore her, and she soon comes round, really she does.’
Ottilie and Edith had been very close. Edith and Mrs Cartaret had not been really close even though Edith had worked at the Grand for so many years, which was probably why Melanie had not gone to the funeral or even sent a daisy. Ottilie knew this from Mrs Tomber, who whispered it, her eyes narrowed with shock and dislike, while they were making up beds together.
‘You would have thought, Miss Ottilie,’ the housekeeper muttered, ‘you would have thought that after all this time she would have had the common decency to go to poor Edith’s funeral, but no. She sent Blackie and myself and Mr Cartaret, while she just sat at home with her gin and her television. What a thing!’
But her mother’s apparent dislike of Ottilie was nothing compared to the open distaste now displayed by the staff at the Grand. It seemed that they were determined as one to stand behind Mrs Cartaret, ‘Madame’ as they still called her, in their open hostility to Ottilie when she returned from Paris.
This open disapproval was made all too evident at every hour of the working day, as they turned silently away from Ottilie when she spoke to them, or kept their eyes averted as she passed them, or moved pointedly away when they saw her approaching. It was difficult for them not to speak to her sometimes, since nowadays she was in charge of most of their activities, but they kept what they had to say to a minimum, and every sudden silence that fell as she approached signalled to Ottilie the one word – Coventry.
She had seen this form of punishment before, seen it happening to other people, new maids if they flirted too much with Chef or upset Mrs Tomber, or failed to give Blackie the attention he so craved, and she had been unable to prevent it. She had seen the misery it caused the victim but she had never imagined that it could happen to her, to ‘Miss Ottilie’ the spoilt daughter of the Grand Hotel, St Elcombe.
Of course it only gradually dawned on her what was happening, as day after day her sudden entry into the kitchens or the lobby or the reception rooms of the hotel would be greeted with an equally sudden silence, and then, eerily, laughter and talk would resume the moment she left, the sound following her through the swing doors and up the service stairs until with relief she reached the ground floors and the prospect of the sea beyond the old glass doors.
At one particularly low point Ottilie found herself digging her fingers into her hand and realized that her knuckles must be turning white in the effort not to beg the maids not to turn away when she addressed them so that she ended up speaking to the backs of their heads. On other days it was all she could do to stop herself imploring Blackie to stop whistling in her face when he was spoken to about the filthy state of his shoes. Or Chef just to look at her when she discussed the next day’s menus with him – menus which Ottilie, after her month in Paris, had seen needed to be considerably revised. But somehow hearing the flat, uninterested tone he used with her, and watching how he, like the rest of the staff, appeared to have mastered the technique of looking anywhere except at her, Ottilie always stopped just in time. Life with Melanie had taught her the hard lessons early. You did not beg, you did not cry, you smiled and got on with it.
Or as Edith would say, quietly and prosaically in her calm voice, ‘As long as you’ve got your health and strength, Miss Ottilie, that’s all that matters in this life.’
Late at night, alone in her room, Ottilie could not avoid realizing how miserable her life was, but back out there, in the hotel, moving up and down the stairs, back and front, she carried on, determined to find an answer to the deadlock while wondering, night after night as she lay gazing at the darkness, what she actually could do? She knew that she had to win against the staff somehow or her position would become untenable, but how?
And then it came to her, and it was the words of that dear old major general who used to come to the hotel for August which came back to her, for in between describing those battles that made the very name of England and the English so invincible, he would stop and murmur some phrase of sweet old-fashioned advice.
‘My dear, never forget, if you want to stop a bolting horse, put your thumb in its neck and then pull, use its own strength against it.’
The moment Ottilie walked into the kitchens that morning she sensed that they all knew something had changed.
‘People are like that,’ she thought, looking round, knowing that the way she walked, the look in her eyes, everything about her must have altered so substantially that a silence fell at the moment of her entry, but not the old sullen silence, not the ‘here she comes, let’s bait her, boys’ silence, a quite different sort of silence.
‘Right. Now, Chef,’ Ottilie said, smiling, ‘I should like your attention, please. To begin with the escargots last night. They were far too salty. I heard Lady Saltrim complain of it, and when I tasted one down here I must say I agreed with her. Make a note, please.’ She handed him a small notebook and pencil, which because he had been wrong-footed Chef took, in spite of himself. Ottilie then turned to the young pastry chef, a new cheeky so-and-so with a Beatle haircut and an identity bracelet. ‘No jewellery in the kitchen, Dean, please. And the petits fours that you made yesterday, much, much too big. Trop grands, if you understand French, which you should if you want to cook better. Guests only want something to pop into their mouths, they do not want to have to plough through sweetmeats, really they don’t.’ She turned back to Chef who was now reddening in fury. ‘No more pastry around the fillet, please, Chef. I know it is fashionable but I find it heavy. In future the fillet is to be presented individually, if you would, in the classic manner – lightly fried in butter and olive oil and served on a piece of rounded bread fried in the same juices. Here at the Grand we must try to avoid fashion fads and stick to the classical. It can never fail us.’
Some of what Ottilie had just said was parroted straight from her cooking classes in Paris, but none of the staff would know that. She turned her attention to the kitchen now. It was way below what it should be in terms of cleanliness. She had known this for some time, but had not had the courage or given herself the authority to say what had to be said, but since neither Alfred nor Melanie ever came down to the kitchens a decline in standards was inevitable. She started to pull out saucepans and cooking pots from cupboards and turn them over, all the time talking, talking, saying over and over, ‘Oh no, no, this will not do, no and not this either.’
When she had finished, most of the contents of the kitchen were on the stone-tiled floor. Ottilie stood back to survey her handiwork.
‘Good. Well, that is something to be getting on with, anyway.’
She smiled round at them, very sweetly.
‘I’ll be back to inspect your work in a couple of hours.’
She turned to go, still smiling. How right the old general had been. Since they had sent her to Coventry, there was now not a thing they could say, because to do so would be to break their own code of silence. Effectively she had used their own strength against them.
Having mentally dusted herself down, she fetched her winter coat from the cloakroom and went to visit Edith.
Ottilie walked out to the graveyard alone, determined to talk to Edith by herself. The church was some way out of St Elcombe, a tiny Saxon place of worship some two miles away. Normally its atmosphere of Anglo-Saxon sanctity brought about a feeling of peace, but today was different and Ottilie shivered as she stood on the edge of the old churchyard, looking for a freshly dug grave. Perhaps it was the fact that it was such a dark grey day, the sort that makes the sound of trees moving in the wind, waiting for the rain, seem like people, waving and sighing and waiting for death, but she wished herself once more back on the road and heading for the cluster of white cottages which led eventually down to the town.
‘I’m very sorry I didn’t come back from Paris, Edith, really I am. I didn’t know that you had suffered a heart attack. I’m afraid I threw away the letter telling me because I wanted to stay and I didn’t want to come back. I hope God punishes me for not coming back to see you when you had had a heart attack, but I want you to know that I truly would have done if I had known.’
After she had finished her speech, said aloud as if Edith was standing in front of her, Ottilie put her flowers on the grave. They looked rather odd because there was as yet no tombstone, but nevertheless she knew from Mrs Tomber that Edith was lying in the ground underneath the earth all right, because Edith always had said that she would prefer a nice old-fashioned burial and no new-fangled crematorium, nothing like that, that was not her style at all. As she walked back towards the road she raised her eyes up to the frowning sky and knew for certain, and she could not have said why, that Edith was watching her. No matter what Melanie said or did in the next years or months, or weeks or days, nothing would take away from Ottilie’s feeling that Edith was quite definitely watching her, and smiling.
‘I’ll live my life for you, Edith,’ Ottilie said, looking up to the sky. ‘Just you see if I won’t.’
Visiting Edith’s grave and making the speech to her was one of the brave moments, for once back in the hotel Ottilie remained as unpopular as ever.
‘Madame put it about that you knew Edith was ill from the first, that you knew all about her heart attack, and didn’t bother to come back, because you were having too nice a time of it in Paris,’ Mrs Tomber kept saying, as if reminding Ottilie of why she was being ostracized made any difference at all.
But if Ottilie was effectively now placed in Coventry by all those people who she had once thought were her friends, she still had to work as hard as ever in the hotel, stepping in and substituting at the last minute for anyone who happened to have a cold, or a cough, or some disaster at home that prevented them from coming to work. And it did not stop Melanie treating her as her personal maid and calling for her at any time of the day or night, sometimes as late as midnight, and sometimes as early as five in the morning if she could not sleep and wanted someone to bring her tea.
‘Your mother will never get over your betrayal of Edith, not coming back to see her in the last hours, you know that,’ Alfred told Ottilie factually, at least once or twice a week, usually when he was about to hand her one of his neatly written lists of things to do.
Great Suite needs preparing for Mrs Ballantyne.
China in the drawing room cabinets needs washing, full complement of Victorian matching dinner plates, very valuable, be extra careful please and do not enlist any of the other maids to help you as they are liable to be careless.
So although Ottilie had been effectively frozen out by the staff she was still expected to deal with all the diplomatic problems concerning the running of them, those delicate, embarrassing problems with which Alfred did not care to deal, and Melanie could not be left to deal.
As Mrs Tomber, who couldn’t care less who talked to whom just so long as the hotel was running along smooth lines, often remarked ruefully, ‘For someone who was once a great beauty Mrs Cartaret has a tongue like a viper, and that’s for sure, Miss Ottilie.’
After a while the silence started to become oppressive, so oppressive and finally so miserable that sometimes Ottilie would stop on the stairs leading up to the Great Suite – which during these dark days was hardly ever occupied except once a year by poor, mad Mrs Ballantyne in her strange-looking New Look 1948 clothes – and having paused for a minute, she would stare ahead to the sea, suddenly and crazily attracted to the idea of running down to the beach and throwing herself into the waves. With all the power of her imagination she would feel the waves closing over her, the dreadful cold reality of it, the weight of the water in her clothes, and then feel herself sinking into the dark water, feel the seaweed entangling her and finally see herself dragged out to sea, and oblivion, her body to be eaten by fishes, her soul committed for ever to dark despair.
But then she would remember her debt to the Cartarets for adopting her and bringing her to the Grand, her nursery specially done, her childhood filled with old people who spoilt her, Edith always helping her get over things, the staff in nicer days before Paris, when they did not disapprove of her, when they all laughed and joked with her, when they still liked her, and it would seem unfair to leave the Grand so suddenly, leave them all in the lurch. Most of all Edith would not approve, and Ottilie could imagine her shaking her head and saying, ‘
You don’t want to cause misery, Miss Ottilie, do you?’
She still wrote to Mrs Le Martine, of course, but nowadays for some reason she heard even more rarely from her old friend. It was almost as if, Ottilie having written to tell her she had met Monsieur in Paris, Mrs Le Martine knew she could no longer pretend to be someone else in front of Ottilie, that now they both knew too much about each other to be able to have the jokes and the fun any more, that not even talking about ‘Shah-nelle’ suits and the newest fashions would be very amusing to either of them.
Yet Ottilie kept on writing to her mentor, keeping the tone as cheerful as Ottilie herself nowadays never seemed to feel, and holding all the while to the idea that the Grand was still its old self. That pretence too Ottilie kept up, even though she realized that Mrs Le Martine could not really believe in such a romantic notion any more.
As time crept by Paris seemed a century ago, and Ottilie could never hear a French accent or hear a street accordion or watch a French film without a depth of nostalgia which was not really in keeping with having spent only four weeks there. Again, to cure herself of her homesickness for those few weeks she took to writing letters to her acquaintances from that time. But, unlike Mrs Le Martine, Ottilie’s American friends from the Parisian School of Cookery actually wrote back.
Their replies were so prompt, and so enthusiastic, Ottilie knew at once that they too felt the same nostalgia for those few carefree weeks they had spent together trying to master the secret of the omelette, trying to find out why a teaspoon of sugar in a vinaigrette dressing made all the difference to the taste of that same dressing.
Grand Affair Page 19
