Grand Affair

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘Taken together with some of this you will feel quite fried!’

  ‘Mmm.’ Ottilie took a good sip of her wine to take away the taste of the cigarettes, and in no time at all she knew what he meant.

  ‘Guess what I left here earlier?’

  ‘Simply can’t.’

  Philip stood up and went to the base of a small weeping willow.

  ‘Beau Geste? Remember our favourite game?’

  He held out a package. Inside was a small wooden boat.

  ‘Yes, but has it got a figure in it?’

  Ottilie had always been anxious that everything to do with their games should be correct, and for a second she found that it was eight years ago and it mattered just as much as it always did that they should be burning the boat with a figure in it.

  Philip held up a small figure. ‘Satisfied?’

  ‘OK.’

  She stood up.

  ‘Matches?’

  She took them from him as he placed the boat on the water and then striking the match she handed it to him.

  ‘You’ve cheated and put petrol in!’ she accused him as the boat caught fire all too readily, bobbing up and down on the lake as Philip pushed it away from them. Philip nodded but did not smile. Instead, as they stood closer and closer together watching the little scene they had recreated, he took hold of her cool hand with his warm one and held it close, so close that after only a few seconds just holding hands became more intimate than any kisses, which when the time came made kissing each other even easier.

  And how they kissed, but only after Philip had set out a small plastic portable gramophone, and an LP of Frank Sinatra songs to which they solemnly danced, cheek to cheek, round and round ‘their island’.

  ‘We’ve always loved each other, haven’t we, Ottilie?’

  Ottilie smiled. ‘I suppose we have,’ she agreed, letting go of him a little and smiling up at him, happy and relieved that she had liked being kissed. ‘Oh, Philip, isn’t it wonderful, just for a few hours to be able to forget about everything? The Army, guns, people, the hotel, everything, and just make love to music?’

  ‘It’s more wonderful than I could even imagine.’

  ‘Let’s always meet here and forget about everything and everyone, all our lives, do let’s, Philip?’ Ottilie asked, her voice suddenly urgent with the passion to escape, always.

  ‘Of course! All our lives we will meet here, always, and forget everything!’

  As they danced and started tentatively to touch each other between the kissing, in the excitement it was inevitable that Ottilie would forget that she had to be back in St Elcombe before the staff were up.

  Twelve

  It was dawn of an early, early summer morning which sometimes, if the air is cool enough, could almost be mistaken for late afternoon until warm toes touch cold grass, as Ottilie’s did, and the shock of the wet, dewy, early damp around feet that have been dancing and walking all the long evening seemed to spring up into her head and clear her mind, and she suddenly knew that something was up.

  There was not a great deal to go on, of course, just that strange feeling that she was being watched, but because it was late dawn there were no lights, and because there were no lights she couldn’t be completely sure. The feeling was there though, and so strongly that even just looking up it seemed to her that she could feel eyes watching her. As she put her feet on the first rungs of the fire escape she realized that she had started to pray that she was wrong, but even as she prayed she knew that it was too late.

  Silence she had been used to, silence as she walked into a room, silence as she picked up some required domestic item and then turned on her heel and walked out again. Silence as a couple of members of the staff saw her approaching, then the sound of conversation starting up once more, beginning always with a little conspiratorial laughter, but now as she retraced the route that she had taken earlier in the evening, she knew that something was wrong, that they were on to her, and it was simply a question of where they were, and where they were not.

  They were not on the back stairs that led up from the fire escape, they were not behind the pass doors that led into the main corridor of the hotel, and they were not in or around the reception areas that she trod through, evening shoes still for some reason in her hand, stockings tucked into her evening bag, her freshly made up lips tense with expectation, because she knew, she just knew that something was up.

  All right, there were no lights and no sound of voices, and everything was exactly as it had been when she passed it on the way out to the party at Tredegar. The flower arrangements that she had done the previous day were still in place, and the carpets whose vacuuming she had supervised were still immaculate, yet she knew, absolutely, that they were around somewhere, and they were waiting for her. It was now just simply a question of where.

  At last she saw the safety of her suite ahead. Its door closed, its lights still burning as she had left them to slip off to Tredegar, to laughter, to music, to dancing and to Philip. Seeing the door, and that thin seam of light under it, welcoming her, was reassuring. She had come this far without seeing anyone, perhaps after all she was wrong?

  She relaxed. Her hand reached out for the door handle and she let out a quiet little sigh of relief, but before she could turn the handle it had turned for her and standing illuminated in front of her were her parents, and their faces were bleak with whitened fury, and her father although standing and holding on to the side of her sofa was swaying, looking to Ottilie’s bewildered eyes puffed up with hatred at the sight of what was in front of him, a young woman with her evening shoes in one hand, beautiful silk dress shimmering, the Medici collar framing a freshly lipsticked face, eyes now over-large with fright.

  ‘So.’

  He could hardly speak, so great was his fury, and his fury was the more terrifying coming as it did from a man who prided himself on his sense of control. Anger was not something to which Ottilie had ever seen Alfred give in before.

  ‘So. You are home at last.’

  ‘No longer home, Alfred,’ Melanie promptly interrupted him. ‘No longer, not any more, not now. Remember what we said, Alfred.’

  All at once it was the look that came into Melanie’s eyes that told all, more than the triumph in her voice, more than the feeling that she could not wait to get rid of Ottilie now that she was grown up and wanted to go to parties and dance the night away with young men like Philip Granville.

  The long days when only Mrs Tomber the housekeeper would speak to Ottilie. The campaign of silence continuing day after wretched day, week after relentless week, was at last all confirmed as Melanie’s doing. Ottilie could see that now very clearly from the enjoyment reflected in her eyes. At last Ottilie knew for absolutely certain to whom she owed the torture of the last eighteen months. She owed it to the woman who had adopted her so enthusiastically, who had taken her in and given her a palace called the Grand Hotel in which to live, but who now loathed her for growing up and becoming an adult.

  ‘Yes,’ Alfred agreed, his own voice still trembling from emotion. ‘Your mother is right, this cannot still be your home, not any longer. You can no longer call us your parents, not now.’

  Ottilie could hear the sound of her heart beating, literally thumping in her ears, and in this raised state of extreme fright it seemed to her that she could see herself from above, as if she was her own ghost, watch herself in her evening gown standing at the door, and she could see her father and mother standing opposite her pale but magnificently virtuous in their fury, and yet she could not make any sense at all of what she saw. Not that is until her father threw a beautiful, hand-marbled cardboard folder towards her.

  ‘I can explain everything,’ Ottilie told them quietly as she realized that it was not the fact that she had deceived them to go dancing at Tredegar that had made them so furious, not fear for her safety that had brought them to this pitch of bitter anger, but what lay hidden in the folder. ‘Really, I can.’

  ‘There i
s nothing to explain, nothing at all. We can all see what you were up to in Paris now, we can all see how you spent your time, and since you made your choice there, you must allow us to make our choice here.’

  ‘This was done from Monsieur’s imagination, really it was.’

  ‘Hah!’

  Ottilie looked across at Melanie, momentarily amazed. She had never seriously imagined that anyone really did make sounds like ‘Hah!’ Sounds like that were so ridiculous.

  ‘You posed for this. It is perfectly obvious that you posed for this,’ Alfred stated, as a fact, and then, looking down at the folder, he sighed. After a few seconds the normally cool quality of his voice returned and he went on, ‘You see, we cannot possibly continue keeping you here if this is how you go on. You must see that. It is really not at all possible. You will have to go.’

  He was giving her the sack, dismissing her from her position as his daughter in much the same way that he would dismiss one of the maids.

  ‘I – I don’t understand.’

  ‘You will,’ said Melanie, and she appeared to be greatly relishing the grim nature of what she already knew her husband was about to say. ‘Just listen to your father.’

  ‘You will pack your bags, now.’ Alfred turned and looked round the room. ‘You may take only those things that belong to you, nothing else. And we never want to hear from you again, you understand? Never again.’

  ‘But you must listen. Please, Pappa. Mamma . . .’

  Ottilie heard herself begging and hated herself for it, because it was all so ridiculous.

  ‘I – I did not pose for this. What happened was that Monsieur saw me one evening when he arrived unexpectedly at the apartment, from Lyon, and – and – and I was in a towel, two towels actually, my hair wrapped in one and my body in the other.’

  Melanie turned her head away for a second in disgust at the word ‘body’. She never liked words like that. Nevertheless Ottilie continued, determined to be brave, or if she wasn’t particularly brave she must at least be honest.

  ‘It was a matter of a few seconds, really. I didn’t know that he was arriving in Paris that night. All that Mrs Le Martine had said was that I would have the apartment to myself because the family hardly ever used it – it was a business flat – and – and I could use it as I wished because the children were all grown up and in America, and the father lived in Lyon. So that’s what I did. Even after I met him that once I never saw him again, because he was always up so early for business and then out all day until very late. So we didn’t meet again until my last night, really, not at all, when he took me to dinner, and – he loaned and then gave me this dress, and these shoes, and that was it, really, until we parted when he gave me this drawing. He’s a Sunday painter, you see, you know how so many Frenchmen are? And he had been so amused by our meeting, because I looked so surprised at seeing him I think, that he went away and did this drawing from memory. Except that he removed the towel from my bo—he drew me without the towel I had on, but really, I promise you, it was entirely from his imagination.’

  ‘You see?’ Melanie turned to her husband. ‘You see? What did I tell you? She is incapable of telling the truth. And no good will come of her staying here in the hotel where she will be nothing but a bad influence on the staff. You have turned out to be no good at all, Ottilie. You must go. We cannot have you here any longer.’

  ‘But I did not pose for this, I tell you, I really didn’t.’

  ‘Are you so stupid that you think I am that stupid?’ Alfred asked Ottilie, his voice starting to tremble with fury once more.

  He picked up the marbled folder containing the drawing and with fingers that shook with the righteous indignation he was obviously feeling he undid the navy blue tapes that held it together. Carefully, his eyes narrowed with real dislike, he turned the beautiful drawing towards Ottilie and threw it on the table in front of her. ‘Do you honestly imagine that I can believe you when you say that you never posed like that? Who do you think we imagined this is, or who are we supposed to think it is? Mrs Tomber? Imagination indeed. I might have forgiven you for posing for it more easily than I can forgive you for thinking me such a fool as to believe you did not.’

  In the early morning light, the drawing suddenly looked, to Ottilie’s eyes anyway, really beautiful, more beautiful than when she had first seen it in the early morning Parisian light, when she had laughed out loud when she realized what naughty Monsieur had done, how he must have remembered exactly how Ottilie looked the moment they first bumped into each other that evening when Ottilie had emerged from the bathroom completely unaware of his sudden arrival at the flat.

  Now that Ottilie was faced with it so suddenly it occurred to her that he must have captured her expression of surprise most precisely, that this must have been exactly how she had looked to him when she had bounced out of the bathroom wrapped only in a towel. That was the genius of the drawing, really, the way he had contrasted the youthful firmness of her breasts and body with the surprise in her eyes. He had drawn the startled look from life and had added the confident nudity for contrast, and the effect was really very lovely because it gave the drawing an innocence, an enjoyment in the moment, the towel dropped behind, her body warm and rounded from its recent bath.

  Standing opposite the contemptuous gaze of her adopted parents Ottilie found that she could recall that delightful moment precisely, that it came back to her most vividly – Monsieur standing outside in the dark of the corridor, and Ottilie looking across at him, surprised but unafraid. And how they had both smiled, because it was one of those delightful and sensuous moments when a man and a young girl encounter each other, she without a stitch on under her bath towel, he fresh from the railway station still in his travelling clothes.

  Ottilie looked up from the drawing, her eyes going first to Alfred’s face with its five o’clock shadow and its tired middle-aged hue, and moving to Melanie’s. Her lipstick had worn off and her hair, Ottilie noticed for the first time, was turning yellow in front from the smoke of her cigarettes.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ she said slowly, ‘although I did not pose for this, if I had posed for it – to be honest, I should be very proud. Because as a matter of fact I think this is a very beautiful drawing, and there surely can’t be anything wrong in adding to the beauty of this world?’

  There, it was out! Her other self, the one that she had used to let out when as a child she went upstairs and was sick with laughter in the bathroom after she had imagined putting an old hat under the lid of the big silver salver that normally held the roast beef, the one that imagined springing out and frightening old ladies as they helped themselves from the dessert trolley.

  A short, stupefied silence followed Ottilie’s statement, and then Alfred shook his head and sighed heavily, a sigh that said, ‘You are beyond the pale, a lost soul, I cannot help you now.’

  ‘See? I told you! I told you, didn’t I?’

  As his wife’s words burst from her Alfred turned away, openly disgusted with Ottilie and obviously agreeing with his wife.

  ‘No, really, I can’t help you any more,’ he said, walking towards the door, closely followed by his wife. ‘I cannot help you any more, even if I wanted to. There is nothing more we can do for you. Pack up your things and go, please. And make sure you are gone as soon as possible so as not to upset the staff.’

  Melanie turned at the door. For some reason best known to herself she seemed to be enjoying the moment.

  ‘I shall send Mrs Tomber to you to make sure that you pack only what is yours,’ she told Ottilie, and for the first time Ottilie really felt the impact of her distrust. Now it seemed she did not even trust Ottilie not to steal.

  A quarter of an hour or so later poor Mrs Tomber came hurrying in, still in her dressing gown. Her large eyes filled with tears when she saw that Ottilie had packed all her clothes and was already tying up the remains of her things in brown paper and string, that the wall was bare of her few small pictures, and the hairbrush a
nd comb were gone from the top of the chest of drawers. Her teddy bear was no longer in the window and her summer straw was not hanging in its usual place on a hook above her bed but was tied to the side of her suitcase.

  ‘Oh, Miss Ottilie, I never thought it would come to this,’ she said, and she made a sound like a sob while pressing a fist to her mouth. ‘I feel it’s all my fault, really I do, for coming back early from my sister’s. She had the ’flu, you see, and I didn’t want to catch it because it always does go straight to my chest. So I was back in my room early and then I thought rather than just sit there watching telly I’d go downstairs and help. And Mrs Cartaret, and Mr Cartaret, they were downstairs all evening for once, laughing and smiling. They were in ever such a happy mood. But on the way up they met me, and they said, “Oh, Tomber, go along and fetch Miss Ottilie and tell her to come to our suite for a nightcap, would you?” Forgetting of course that you had a headache. But of course I didn’t dare say anything to them, because you know your mother, she doesn’t like people saying things to her that she doesn’t want to hear.

  ‘So anyway, I came along here, and – and I opened the door with my pass key, and in I came, and when I couldn’t find you I’m afraid I raised the alarm, thinking something must have perhaps happened to you. And everyone came here – least Mr and Mrs C came, and they went through all your things, in case you had run off again to Paris or something. They opened everything. They even read your diary, not that it had much in it they said, but then, well, they found that thing – you know, that drawing – and, well, after that they insisted on staying here until you returned. They were set on it for some reason. Frankly, I told them that – that thing was probably just a sudent joke. I know our son had things like that when he was studying.

  ‘They wanted to call the police, but I begged them not to. I said I thought you was probably just out dancing like any other girl your age – just a normal young girl – but once they found that drawing, well, that was it. They turned, they really turned, and they said things I never thought to hear respectable people saying, and it seemed to me that they were exaggerating for some sort of effect, you know the way people can once they’ve had too many drinks? But I never thought they’d go through with turning on you the way they have, never. This place won’t be the same without you, Miss Ottilie, really it won’t. Good heavens, you’ve worked your fingers to the bone here. I shall miss you so much!’