Grand Affair

by Charlotte Bingham

  Mrs Blandorf always ended her letters, ‘Now you take care of yourself, dear, do you hear?’

  ‘Sounds kind of oldish for a young girl at that hotel of yours, Ottilie!’ Mrs Zeiger kept insisting in her letters, in between graphic descriptions in large black writing of how her navarin de mouton had gone down ‘about as well as fried buffalo’ with her guests at a recent winter dinner party.

  Over the next eighteen months Ottilie began to realize that Mrs Zeigler was all too right. It was oldish at the Grand, and sometimes it seemed to Ottilie even a little macabre, what with Blackie going by in his uniform, now far too small, with his middle-aged face and his old-fashioned way of saluting, and his pillbox hat more suited to the page boy of nineteen he had been than to the venerable hall porter he had become.

  Ottilie had never been to school and made friends of her own age. She had stayed in Paris in a middle-aged man’s flat, she had been adopted by a couple who were already well into middle age, and now she was working alongside a staff most of whom were nearing retirement. As the months went by she sometimes felt so desperate to talk to someone nearer her own age it was difficult to stop herself rushing out into the street and collaring the nearest boy or girl and dragging them into the Grand for coffee or a drink. Lorcan she never saw except at Christmas. Sean she never heard from. Joseph she had seen in the magazine, but would never, she supposed, hear from again either. It was as if the early part of her life had never existed, as if she had never had brothers.

  She went to bed with hands and feet throbbing from the work she had undertaken during the day. Sometimes she would wake up in the night, her heart beating too rapidly, and know that she was putting herself under too much strain, but be quite unable to work out how she could alter anything. If she did not do the work, who would? If she was not there to answer Melanie’s calls for tea or coffee or a gin and tonic at all times the task would fall to Alfred, and he did not have his old energy any more. Sometimes just hearing him sigh so deeply was enough to send Ottilie scurrying away to try to work harder and longer than ever, just to try to make up to him for the sadness of the times, for the life that had departed from the hotel, for the twentieth century speeding by too quickly for him, for everything that he had known and loved going, for the old days disappearing never to come back.

  And then suddenly it happened, or at least not ‘it’ but Philip.

  If Blackie or Mrs Tomber had suggested to Ottilie that as she watched Philip walking into the foyer that morning she was watching a knight strolling into her life she would have believed them. For with his tall, blond, patrician looks, his just right faded sports jacket worn with a newly fashionable denim shirt and faded corduroys, his slip-on shoes, and his greatcoat with the military buttons that had once belonged to a great-uncle, he seemed no less.

  ‘Philip.’

  Ottilie said his name as factually as possible in case he had not come to look for her. He was actually leaning on the reception desk, his blond, thick, curly hair brushed back, laughing and teasing the receptionist who wore butterfly glasses with silver pieces set into them and was obviously becoming pink and flustered under the pressure of his attentions, but although Ottilie could see at once that he was a man as her eyes took him in all she could really see was the young boy after whom she had used to run through the woods as he attempted to call down owls, or who sat on her legs as she tried to tickle trout.

  ‘Philip.’

  As Philip heard her voice, he turned.

  ‘Miss Ottilie Cartaret, I do declare.’ Despite spending so much of their growing up times together, walking and fishing in the warm Cornish springs and summers, or, on rainy days, what Philip called ‘mucking about in the house,’ she had not seen Philip for several years. And now he was in the Army.

  ‘You’re home on leave.’

  Philip looked behind him jokingly, pretending that he thought she was addressing someone else, and then turned back to Ottilie, saying, ‘So I am.’

  ‘It’s really nice to see you again.’

  She could not help sounding formal, but she felt so happy to see him it was difficult not to get what he in the old days of their childhood would have called ‘soppy’, and it did not seem to matter either if it was only for a few minutes before he went off to meet someone else in the restaurant, or the cocktail bar, because just seeing him was a burst of sunshine in her otherwise dreary day-in-day-out existence.

  ‘I would hardly have known you,’ Philip told her, drawing her over to the other side of the foyer, well away from the receptionist. ‘Are you well?’

  As Ottilie looked at Philip she remembered that they had always enjoyed an unspoken closeness when they were growing up, as if in each other’s company they could find solace against the pain they had both experienced. Whether it was playing with Ludlow, his tame hare, or sadly burying him, or arranging military battles with his old lead soldiers together, they had always been at ease, not needing to say very much, just understanding each other and being happy. So now it was not very surprising for Ottilie to see that Philip’s eyes were full of concern. But he did not say ‘My God you’re so thin’ or ‘You look twenty-five not eighteen’, he just looked down at her, and once he put his hand on her arm as if to steady her.

  The words that he was thinking went, as always with Philip, unsaid, but what he actually did say was, ‘Care to come to a party, Miss O? Constantia’s back at Tredegar for all of two minutes, and after four seconds finds herself as bored as an unpicked raspberry. Needs must we give a party, needs must we ask the whole neighbourhood. She has a list as long as the kitchen table, which is very long indeed. I have a list as short as what Nurse used to call my pinkie and on it is only one name. Yours.’

  If she had not known it would be such a dreadful thing to do, Ottilie would have burst into tears there and then. A party. People of her own age. Music. Dresses. Laughter.

  ‘I should love to come to a party, Philip. If I can, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to.’

  ‘Of course you can come to a party, Cinders. You’re not telling me you’re previously engaged, or married with seven children already, are you?’

  ‘Oh no, nothing like that,’ Ottilie agreed hastily. ‘Good heavens, no. What it is . . . What it is – it’s here. It’s sometimes very difficult to get time off from here.’

  ‘Time off from here?’ Philip looked round the empty foyer with feigned amazement and a patrician mockery. ‘Time off from here,’ he repeated. ‘You’re not a night nurse, or a surgeon needed for a brain operation. Of course you can have time off from catering to pampered guests. All the old trouts can do without you for one night, surely?’

  ‘It’s a bit difficult at the moment, particularly if it’s a Saturday. Is it a Saturday, your party?’

  ‘Yes, Ottilie, it is a Saturday, Ottilie, because that is the night when everyone from London is usually down, I think you’ll find, Ottilie. Mondays are not good for parties, nor are Sundays. Saturdays we find fit the bill and then we can snore through the sermon in Sunday church, wop our roast beef, and fall into yet another recovery sleep.’

  Philip’s conversation mirrored a warm normality, reflecting as it did the basic acceptance that life could be fun, that behaving just slightly badly was good for you, that youth was for being young. Yet although his words were light and flippant they filled Ottilie with sadness, contrasting as they did so starkly with the kind of dialogue that was her everyday fare.

  ‘You are such a deep disappointment to me. When I think about it, really it was after you arrived that everything started to go so wrong. You were a mistake, I’m afraid. We should have left you where you were at that dingy little cottage with those brothers of yours.’

  ‘If it is a Saturday then you will never be allowed off, is that what you’re saying?’

  She had not actually said anything.

  ‘It’s very difficult,’ Ottilie finally volunteered, dropping her voice, and quietly indicating for him to follow her out to the green sward in front
of the hotel. ‘You see, my mother, Mrs Cartaret, she is really very ill at times nowadays, with her nervous depressions, and my father is getting quite old, looking after her, the strain of this place. You know the sort of thing? And so it’s very difficult for me to get away.’

  Philip took Ottilie’s hands in a very grown-up sort of way, in a way that made her realize at once that he must have already made love to girls. But having taken her hands he now looked down at them.

  ‘Tut, tut, Miss Ottilie, what would Edith say to these? Not the hands of a lady, are they? Have we been leaving off our hand cream at night?’

  The very idea of having enough time to put on hand cream at night made Ottilie smile suddenly, but looking up into Philip’s eyes and remembering the happiness of running all over Tredegar with the Great Danes and pretending to be characters from some old book they were both reading, she heard herself say in a calm, accepting way, ‘Edith’s dead, you know, Philip. She died of a heart attack while I was in Paris. She had one, and then she had another, and then she died.’

  ‘Well she would do, probably, after two,’ Philip said, using his reasonable, unemotional and considered voice, the one he had always used when something not very nice, or very sad, had happened, but also when he wanted to make people laugh, or cheer them up.

  Ottilie suddenly started to laugh, at the same time putting her hand over her mouth, feeling the sudden roughness of it, knowing that her eyes were underlined with tiredness, black patches which must make her laughing seem a little hysterical to an onlooker.

  ‘Oh, Philip, you always were like that,’ she gasped, half bent double. ‘Edith loved you for it. She used to say “Mr Philip’s so naughty with his gallows humour, really he is.”’

  ‘Listen, let’s cut the cackle and face this thing head on, Carruthers. It’s your mother who’s going to be a pill about this, isn’t it? She’s the one who’s going to be putting up the objections. So why don’t I go to her and say “Mrs Cartaret, I know you want to do your best by us boys who are about to be posted abroad, and I happen to be one of them, so stop being such an old bag and let your daughter go to a party on a Saturday night for once.” How about that? Should do the trick I should have thought.’

  For one glorious moment Ottilie imagined the scene. She imagined Mrs Cartaret, gin glass in one hand, cigarette in the other. She imagined the tall, patrician figure of Philip Granville standing so tall and handsome in her sitting room, bringing a much needed breath of fresh air into it, making it seem as stuffy and as claustrophobic as it absolutely was, and it was wonderful. Then she remembered something else.

  ‘It would be lovely, Philip, really it would, but it’s impossible. You see if you go and ask her, she’ll say yes, of course she will, but then she will throw a fit when the night comes, and I won’t be able to leave anyway, so it’s better to be realistic about it, really. And then there’s my father. She takes it out of him so dreadfully if I do something I want to – when I went to Paris it was hell on wheels here, I believe. She even accused him of trying to get off with one of the Spanish girls. You know, she’ll go that far, she really will.’

  ‘In that case,’ Philip said, after a short pause during which he frowned and gazed out to sea, ‘in that case there is nothing for it but go AWOL.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Come to the party and to hell with the consequences. Spike your mother’s drink, put too much gin in her martini, stick a sleeping pill in her Horlicks, do something, but come to the party. Or else.’

  He started to walk off towards his car.

  ‘Or else?’ Ottilie called after his tall, fair-haired figure, his dark old-fashioned guards officer’s coat with the wonderful swagger to the back. ‘Or else?’

  ‘Or else I will never speak to you again.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really. You’re dining with us first, by the way. We haven’t farmed you out, don’t worry. And Constantia says if you haven’t a dress, she’ll lend you one.’

  ‘Oh, I have a dress, all right,’ Ottilie called after him.

  That was the one thing she did have, a dress, and what a dress.

  Before she could resurrect the dress from where it was hidden at the back of her cupboard, carefully preserved like an Egyptian mummy in yards and yards of white cotton, Ottilie had to plan her escape. It was not easy, not on a Saturday night when even the Grand at St Elcombe attracted at least a dozen diners, and when her mother was quite likely to suddenly decide to make one of her rare appearances in the dining room, and when her father would pick himself up from his invoices and his receipts, from his carefully annotated accounts books, and put on winged collar and bow tie and descend to the dining room with measured tread, as in the old days when, it now seemed to Ottilie, an orchestra had always seemed to be playing and life had been one long party for the Cartarets and their staff.

  She planned her Saturday night deception most carefully, and like a good criminal she based her plans most securely on the character of her victim. Her mother was currently what Philip would call ‘screwy’ in that she could not be relied upon for anything except to drive Ottilie and the staff as mad as herself. But if Ottilie could manage to persuade Melanie to dress up in one of her old dinner gowns and accompany Alfred to the dining room for dinner it would mean that for once she could be counted upon not to be at the other end of her extension line summoning Ottilie every few minutes until late into the evening.

  ‘I’m too tired. Really, I don’t feel like it, Ottilie,’ Melanie moaned. Ottilie knew that she was by no means too tired, and it was far more likely that she would prefer to stay upstairs so that she could drink more than was possible if she was in the public rooms. She had put on a great deal of weight lately, but still looked very handsome, as handsome as a woman half her age. Ottilie had persuaded her father to buy her a new evening dress and present it as a surprise, a dress in her new, rounder size, but nevertheless a very expensive dress.

  ‘Not too tired to open the parcel that has just arrived for you, surely?’

  Ottilie knew that it was always best to use a soft coaxing voice with her when she was on her second or third gin of the morning. Anything more would bring on tantrums or one of those quick switches of mood that came from nowhere and so terrified even the oldest members of the staff.

  The dress in the parcel was obviously expensive, but Melanie’s expression as she took it out of its fresh tissue paper was that of a child torn between two moods. Part of her wanted to love it, because it was expensive and because Alfred had obviously chosen it with great care – new sizing, perfect cut, beautiful deep maroon which set off her blonde looks so well. The other part of her wanted to find fault with it, wanted to say ‘It won’t fit, it’s the wrong colour, and besides Capucci is not really my designer’ so that she could stay behind upstairs with her gin and not accompany her husband down for dinner, which would mean making an effort, thinking of someone else beside herself.

  Somehow, by not asking her to try it on, by merely pointing out its beautiful cut, the loveliness of the colour, Ottilie was able to persuade her to try it on, so that when her mother finally emerged wearing it, it did seem for a few seconds to both of them that the old days had come back. She looked magnificent, and standing in front of the long mirror in her bedroom even Melanie was forced to recognize this.

  ‘Shall I wear my diamond earrings with it?’ she asked Ottilie that evening while Alfred, in white tie and tails, moved in and out of their suite.

  ‘Oh, yes, your diamond earrings – they would be fine.’

  Ottilie could hardly bring herself to say the words, or look at the costume jewellery to which Melanie was referring, hardly keep her eyes from straying towards anything else rather than watch her mother clipping on a pair of paste earrings, which nevertheless looked very fine on her.

  ‘Are you ready, dear?’

  Alfred was calling, and Melanie smiled at the sound of his voice, and her own lifted for the first time for years, and she called back, ‘Ye
s, Alfred, I am coming, as soon as may be, darling.’

  ‘They’re playing our song, Melanie.’

  This was an old joke of theirs and one that Ottilie remembered from the time when she had first arrived at the Grand, when she had first climbed what had then seemed to be so many very steep stairs to Melanie’s suite, holding Edith’s hand, and preparing to say ‘goodnight and God bless’ to her new mother and father.

  But now it seemed to Ottilie, looking at them, that she would always remember them tonight, how handsome they both looked, and how devoted they seemed, with Alfred holding out his arm in the old way, and Melanie taking it with practised elegance, and the two of them making their way, slowly, oh so slowly, down the stairs as if they were stepping out to some music that only they could hear.

  ‘And you, Ottilie, would you please follow?’

  ‘I am afraid I have a terrible migraine. I must go and lie down.’

  Alfred nodded. He didn’t seem to care in the least.

  ‘Oh, very well. How sad. It would have been nice. But still.’

  They continued down the stairs, and Ottilie plunged off in the direction of her own suite, thinking only of how many minutes it would take her to dress, lock up, climb down the back stairs and thence onto the fire escape, and into her old Deux Chevaux to drive out to Tredegar in time for dinner.

  She had already put on her nail varnish, toes and fingernails both, donned her undies and her sheer stockings and made up her face (but not put on her lipstick in case Melanie, who did not approve of her wearing it, noticed it) so that her transformation was practically instantaneous when she returned to her suite.

  Just before she turned to see herself in the mirror, kicking the short train of the dress behind her, it occurred to Ottilie that she might no longer look as she remembered herself looking the night she went out with Monsieur to the Tour d’Argent, that although her hair was freshly washed and knotted in the classical manner in the nape of her neck, that although she had been careful to go to bed early the night before and to take a long bath, after all the long hours of labour she had been putting in, the dress might look ridiculous. She knew she had lost weight and that her appearance in the drab dress of her uniform, in flat shoes and black stockings, had actually shocked Philip, who only remembered her from the days when she was little Ottilie Cartaret, the pampered young girl who belonged to a successful hotel.