Grand Affair

by Charlotte Bingham

  Certainly the dress did not cling with quite the same confidence as it had clung to her that wonderful night in Paris, but it was still the same exquisite cut, and although it might now be a little less tight-fitted it was still made up of the same iridescent silk, the Medici collar still framed her face, setting off her dark hair as precisely as a frame to a picture, and the train still whispered and swayed behind her as she rehearsed walking in the tall, high-heeled delicate evening sandals that Monsieur had chosen for her that memorable evening when it had seemed to both of them the whole restaurant was about to applaud as Ottilie swayed confidently towards their table watched admiringly by what seemed to be the whole of fashionable Paris.

  Confident that she could still manage both the train and the high-heeled shoes, Ottilie slipped them into a shoe bag and herself back into her flat work shoes and started for the door of her suite. Just in time she heard voices and knew that one of them belonged to Mrs Tomber. With second sight, and before the housekeeper had even started to put her pass key in the door, Ottilie fled back to her bathroom, and flung herself inside.

  ‘Are you all right, Miss Ottilie?’

  Ottilie acted out a groaning sound.

  ‘Just a migraine, making me feel a bit sick, Mrs Tomber.’

  ‘Madame wanted to know if you were all right. She wanted you downstairs with them, but I’ll tell her you’re still poorly.’

  Seconds later she was gone, and happily it was Saturday night and she would soon be driving off in the opposite direction to that which Ottilie would be taking to Tredegar, off to stay with her sister for the weekend as she always did. To be safe Ottilie waited and listened, and then finally, heart in mouth, shoes in hand, she slipped out into the empty hotel corridor, and down the back stairs as planned until finally she climbed carefully down the outside fire escape and ran towards her second-hand, brown Deux Chevaux.

  Of course it would not start, would it?

  ‘Come on, Oscar,’ she prayed as with each turn of the key the engine spluttered into life only to shudder back into silence. ‘Come on, Oscar, come on!’ Finally she closed her eyes and for the first time for years, and to her immense shame because it would seem so trivial to someone else, she prayed, to Edith, to God, to Ma, far above her. ‘Please!’

  They must have heard her for seconds later, with what seemed to Ottilie to be a Gallic shrug, Oscar her beloved but temperamental little convertible shuddered into life and lurched forward towards Tredegar, towards dinner, towards what seemed suddenly to be life and love.

  Unaccountably, just for a second, when she at last arrived at Tredegar Ottilie’s confidence ran out and she became a prey to nerves. She had never before been to a grand occasion, and she suddenly felt not excited but nervous, cold and shivery and wondering if she could possibly go through with an evening spent with the fashionable and the beautiful.

  She felt too nervous to join the other women and their black-tie evening-dressed partners who were even now following each other down the wide path leading to the great front door. For Ottilie, unlike all the confident figures walking ahead of her, was without a partner, and for a moment it seemed to her that she always would be, and that the women walking ahead of their men with that slow solemn walk that derives from coping with the length of one’s evening dress would all ignore her. Doubtless the men would too. Having at last arrived, against all the odds, at Tredegar all Ottilie could now visualize was passing the dinner party that lay ahead of the dance ignored and in silence. She saw that she was likely to be some sort of pathetic wallflower decorating the sides of the ballroom while everyone else danced the night away in the company of people who, while they might be all too well known to them, would be completely unknown to Miss Ottilie Cartaret.

  That she should experience such feelings was not really very surprising, particularly since she had not visited Tredegar for such an age. In fact, now that she was here at last it seemed to her that she had hardly known it, she had forgotten so much. Forgotten that there were two large eagles with spread wings at the gates, and that the drive was over a mile long but not dark and overcrowded with rhododendrons as were so many Cornish drives. The loveliness of Tredegar’s Elizabethan façade was easily seen long before the visitor started to tread the long path that led up to the old oak door, which meant that Ottilie, along with the evening’s other visitors, could see just how beautiful Tredegar was long before they arrived. Set in perfectly rolled green lawns and surrounded by walled gardens with terraces that reached down to the same sea that ran up below her window at the Grand, Tredegar was the very image of the perfect English country house to which an Englishman dreams of returning when abroad.

  As she parked her car, straightened her dress, and wrapped herself around in an old Twenties evening cloak that she had discovered in the attic of the Grand, Ottilie had not been able to stop herself from thinking how strange it was that despite the fact that she was now grown up, the house should succeed in actually looking larger than when she was last there, when she herself had been considerably younger. It should seem smaller, as childhood places do when a person grows up.

  Or it might be that having only visited Tredegar in order to play soldiers or feed Ludlow dinner carrots smuggled from the kitchens at the Grand she had quite simply not truly noticed its contained beauty, its quiet grandeur. Perhaps also she had always been too busy looking forward to seeing Philip, or fretting that Edith was driving too slowly so that the all too precious minutes of playtime would soon be gone and Edith would be returning with her to the hotel long before Ottilie had time to tell Philip everything that she knew he would like to hear. About the old general in Room Six who on hearing from Ottilie of Philip’s military interests was planning to send him a whole other set of Victorian lead soldiers. About Blue Lady in her strange New Look 1948 clothes back on her annual visit and still talking to the empty chair. About Blackie’s new friend who had taught Ottilie to whistle through her fingers. Philip had always loved to hear about all their eccentric guests. He had particularly loved to encourage Ottilie to mimic them, saying over and over again, ‘Oh, but that’s brilliant’ and sometimes, she remembered him sitting doubled over with laughter at Ottilie’s efforts to entertain him with her imitations of people at the Grand.

  Now Ottilie paused on the threshold of the old house. Ahead lay the great reception hall filling up with guests, behind her lay the past when she had used to love to fling herself through the doors to find the Great Danes with their strange yellow eyes. For a second it seemed to her that she was looking backward, and then she turned and looked forward and there was Philip, and the moment he saw Ottilie his face lit up just as it had used to do when she would arrive in her dresses with the lace collars and the smocking that Edith spent all summer sewing. But this evening they were separated from each other by the crowd of other arrivals and anyway Constantia was walking towards Ottilie, her hand held out in greeting.

  ‘See you back down here,’ Philip called up to Ottilie as she followed his sister up the old polished wooden stairs from above which his elegant ancestors looked calmly from their portraits. Ottilie just had time to smile down at him before turning the corner of the staircase.

  As Ottilie followed Constantia up to her bedroom to leave her cloak she could see Philip chatting animatedly below her to some new and stylish arrival, and suddenly it seemed to her that every girl in the room was looking more beautiful than she herself could possibly look and that Philip would want to sit next to them rather than her, and she could not blame him in the least.

  ‘Ottilie Cartaret.’

  Constantia, who was now a tall, slender blonde with the face of an angel but blue eyes that looked out at the world with the hard stare of an eagle, smiled at Ottilie in her dressing mirror, and then lit a cigarette.

  ‘How dare you?’ she murmured. ‘How dare you look better than the rest of us, Ottilie Cartaret, and whom may I ask did you persuade to buy you that dress? St Laurent, is it?’

  Ottilie, who had s
pent the previous forty-eight hours rubbing cream into her hands and practising putting up her hair so that it did not look what Mrs Cartaret always called ‘provincial’, turned and without thinking said, ‘Oh no, not St Laurent – Balenciaga. It was given to me by a Frenchman in Paris. He supplied the silk to make it.’

  ‘My, my,’ Constantia said, drawing on her cigarette, ‘and what on earth did you do to get him to give you that, may I ask? No, don’t tell me, just follow me downstairs, and in my turn I will not say a word to Philip, I promise.’

  Two seconds later and Ottilie realized that it was already too late, much too late to see that as soon as she could possibly do so, Constantia would go straight to Philip and tell him that Ottilie was wearing a couture dress bought for her by ‘some strange Frenchman’.

  But since what was done was done, Ottilie tried to put this thought from her and concentrate instead on walking down the slippery polished wooden stairs with her head held high and her hips pushed forward a little in the way that Monsieur had approved that evening in Paris. (‘All the modelswalk this way, Ottilie, a little exaggerating, you know? It makes the dress move better, huh?’)

  But as she followed Constantia into the great hall below the thought persisted, and she just knew from the haughty look that Constantia’s eagle eyes had given her that she had made a really terrible mistake in telling Philip’s sister that she had been given the dress by a Frenchman in Paris. Unwittingly she had made herself sound as if she was what Edith would sometimes murmur when reading about someone in a newspaper, that they were ‘used goods’, and nothing she could now say could make up for it.

  Once downstairs, perhaps because he came straight to her side, Ottilie suddenly understood that the party was. really being given by Philip for her, so that they would meet again, and had nothing whatsoever to do with Constantia’s being bored at the weekend. The moment she walked towards Philip, the high Medici collar of her shimmering tight silk dress framing her face, was a moment that she would always remember, and she knew that somehow she could not put a foot wrong, and that every man in the room was looking at her and mentally making a note to dance with her later, and that Edith would be proud of how she looked.

  Dinner was laid in the cellars of the house, so that, freeing the main reception hall and drawing rooms for the band and the dancing later, the guests descended to cellars lit only by candles and set about with three large dark purple clothed tables and pink flowers. While waiters in knee breeches served the food and the wines, a trio of violins and a cello played while the guests ate and talked.

  Ottilie knew all too well about the complications that could arise from the placing of guests at dinner, the sometimes insuperable difficulties of pleasing everyone at once. Tonight the mixture of guests were a few from well-known local families and many others from the kind of London circle that would not take kindly to being placed down the table, so when Philip passed her murmuring, ‘You’re beside me, Miss Cartaret,’ Ottilie was hard put to it not to turn and say, ‘That’s not quite right.’

  Nevertheless she gave him a questioning look which was countered by the laughing expression in his eyes as he personally pulled out her chair, looking across at Constantia with one of his raised-eyebrowed looks which said, ‘You’re surely not thinking of going to do something about this, are you?’

  All at once from their exchange of looks as she sat down on his right Ottilie realized that Philip had changed the names on the dinner cards in front of them, and that Constantia would be furious. Suddenly they were not children in any way at all any more, and Tredegar was not a game of Monopoly where Philip and Constantia would inevitably end up throwing the board at each other. Philip was a man, and a man at ease in his ancestral home. It was his house, and not Constantia’s, and by putting Ottilie on his right, he had asserted his ownership.

  As he sat down beside her Ottilie smiled mischievously, and in a second she recognized that they were still both running away from Constantia, as they had always used to do, because she only ever seemed to want to play whist or canasta even on the hottest days, while Philip and Ottilie wanted to play imaginary games where they dressed up. Games like ‘King Arthur’ who was said to come from Cornwall and about whom they were both obsessed, or best of all a game they just called ‘Beau Geste’ which was joyous because it took so long and involved playing with things of which Edith would never approve like matches and swords taken from Tredegar’s walls and smuggled out to the garden.

  From that moment on, although she could see that all the other girls at their table were pretty – some of them to her mind a great deal prettier than she was herself – nevertheless Ottilie knew that Philip was only thinking about her, and that he might be talking to someone else but in reality he was looking at Ottilie’s dark hair and the way the line of the dress showed off her figure, and the silk of the dress that shimmered and moved in the light of the candles. What she had not anticipated, would never have thought to expect of Philip, was that at the end of dinner, as the ladies left the table to follow Constantia out of the room in the traditional British way, he would slip her a note.

  Before the ever marshalling Constantia could see it, Ottilie had slipped the note up the sleeve of her dress. Upstairs, while all the other girls powdered their noses and talked about things she knew nothing about – like going to a Beatles concert, and London, and hunting with the Beaufort – Ottilie turned and looked at the scrap of paper.

  Meet me by the boat when the lights go down and the candles are lit.

  Ottilie smiled. She knew just where the boat was, by the little lake where they had loved to play, Ottilie pushing Philip laid out in Arthurian clothes, while carefully holding on to a rope, herself dressed as Guinevere, a sword set in the middle of the lake, tied to an old stick.

  ‘I don’t know what you did to get that dress, Ottilie, but it is certainly the hit of the evening,’ Constantia murmured, as once more brushed and repowdered, the girls made their way down the old polished oak staircase.

  She said this just as Ottilie saw Philip coming towards her across the reception hall, but as the music started and they began to dance, it was some long while before Ottilie could let go of the feeling that Constantia had reached out and scratched a nail down the side of her cheek.

  ‘Is something the matter?’

  Ottilie smiled and shook her head. How could there be anything the matter? She was dancing with Philip at Tredegar on a beautiful evening and soon they would be meeting, just like in the old days, by the boat, but this time under cover of darkness, as the moon crept up, and the clear Cornish skies sparkled with far-flung stars.

  As they danced she knew for certain that they were suddenly and obviously no longer pals, but passionately and urgently in love, and in the kind of way that makes just waiting for the music to start so that you can touch each other seem to take a century, and walking towards the dining room together for a glass of wine the most intimate act of your life. It was impossible to ignore. Ottilie knew now what she had probably known from the moment she saw Philip standing in the foyer of the hotel, that she was in love with him and that it was quite possible that he was in love with her.

  She knew it from the way that Philip was not looking at her, and from the way that she was not looking at him. And suddenly and frighteningly it seemed that nothing else in her life had mattered at all up until then.

  ‘I must do my duty as host,’ he murmured as they parted after one brief dance, knowing, excitedly, that they were soon to meet again by the boat, at the lakeside.

  It might have seemed an age before they would meet again, under the dark skies in a garden as brilliantly lit by the moon as any stage, but because Ottilie sensed joy to come she found that the time flew, and when eventually the lights dimmed and the music slowed to a blues number, and the farm workers from Tredegar solemnly dressed in their knee breeches bore the candelabra into the Great Hall, Ottilie knew that the time had come to slip away.

  Finding her way across the gard
en to the sound of the sea in the distance was romantic in itself, and yet part of her wondered mischievously if any other couples might have made the same arrangement and she would find herself hurrying towards the wrong man, someone to whom she would call ‘Is that you?’ only to be answered by the wrong voice.

  In the event it was he who arrived late, calling, ‘Ottilie? Ottilie?’

  To which she answered as she had always done, ‘Have you remembered the matches?’

  ‘You bet!’

  Ottilie smiled as he half ran down to where she was standing. He was carrying a large packed basket.

  ‘Let’s go out in the boat.’

  He stepped in first, tucking the basket under the seat, and she followed him carefully holding up the skirts of her precious dress. He rowed out to the island, and having dragged the boat a little way up the beach, he held out his hand to her.

  ‘Cigarette?’

  Ottilie looked at the packet and then up at Philip.

  He had always smoked from when they were quite young and she never had, and nothing he had said could ever persuade her to try one, but now was different, now she was grown up.

  ‘What a revolting taste! Ugh!’

  She wrinkled her nose as he spread his evening jacket on the ground and they sat down on it for a few minutes, Ottilie trying not to cough as she gallantly applied herself to the art of puffing on a tipped cigarette.

  ‘If you persist, in the open air, after a while you’ll find it makes you delightfully giddy,’ Philip instructed her as he took the bottle of wine and two glasses that he had brought in the large basket together with a strange-looking plastic box and some records.