Ottilie raised her eyes to heaven and handed Miss Little a new black ribbon for the typewriter.
‘You won’t want to stay here much longer, will you?’ she asked her secretary suddenly. ‘I don’t blame you, it’s terrible.’
‘I like a challenge, really I do,’ Veronica Little told her just a little too quickly.
‘I’ll go for the post before I start to get any more tiresome than I am already,’ Ottilie said, sighing and leaving poor Veronica to blackened fingers and a still unworkable ‘h’ on the typewriter.
It was a relief to walk out of the office and into the courtyard where the post was still left in an old box in the archway, enabling the horsemen of yesterday to throw it in without dismounting. Ottilie turned her head away from the post, grabbing it and not looking at it, which had become a sort of superstition with her, not to look at the letters until she was back in the office – rather like getting down the last bit of stairs before the loo finished flushing – and stared at the courtyard. She longed so much to pull it all down and rebuild it sometimes it was all she could do not to start, at once, with her own hands.
‘Please, God!’ she prayed to the leaden sky above, but she knew that God had something rather more important on His mind so she quickly went inside and put the post on Veronica’s desk, saying as she did every morning, ‘You look, I can’t.’
Veronica paused in her typewriter-servicing duties, shook her head, and went to wash her hands before returning and saying, ‘Very well, fingers crossed, Miss O’Flaherty, fingers crossed!’
She sat down at her desk, very much the secretary now, and started to leaf through the letters in complete silence. She stopped one before the last and looked up at Ottilie.
‘Oh Lord, it’s come,’ she breathed, at which they both stared first at each other and then at the square, thick white envelope with its small, shiny red crest engraved on the back and the neatly written ‘Miss Ottilie O’Flaherty’ on the front and then at each other again.
‘A letter from Sir Harold himself, handwritten.’
Veronica who had stood up at once, as if he had come into the room, reverently handed the small white envelope over her desk to Ottilie, who took it and stared at it.
‘No, it’s no use, I can’t read it.’ Ottilie handed it back.
‘It’s in his own handwriting.’
‘I know. That’s why I can’t read it. You read it to me.’
Veronica put on her glasses, very modern and up-to-date with black frames.
‘“Dear Miss O’Flaherty.”’ She stopped for a second.
‘What’s the matter?’ Ottilie stared at her. ‘There must be more, surely?’
‘Yes, of course there’s more, it’s just that I can hardly bear to read it. In case you’re disappointed.’
‘I see. Well, never mind.’
‘“Dear Miss O’Flaherty, I have given much thought to your idea, and regret to say—” Dear, his handwriting is really rather appalling, Miss O’Flaherty, really it is. It seems to be pulling in both directions, a sign of a rather weak personality I’m afraid. But to continue. Where was I? Yes. “I have given much thought to your idea and regret to say—”’
‘Oh damn, damn, damn.’
Ottilie fell into the old office sofa and buried her head in a cushion. Damn, damn, double, double damn, she screamed silently into the worn old brocade cover.
‘There is more,’ she dimly heard Veronica telling her. ‘Yes. Now where was I? Ah yes. I “regret to say that your – idea” yes “your idea is remarkably” what’s this word? Oh yes, I see “apt.” I think that’s it. “I say I regret it, Miss O, because it means considerable company expenditure, but as you said at our luncheon there is a definite need for this kind of hostelry and there is nothing in England at the moment between the very grand and the spit and sawdust. I will therefore have no hesitation in granting you the monies that will be needed for your improvements at the Angel Inn, and provided you keep to the budget and make the mayonnaise yourself I would think you will soon be sitting in my chair at Head Office.
‘“Thank you again for a most enjoyable luncheon. Yours sincerely, Harold Ropner.”’
Ottilie took her head out of the cushion and straightened up as Veronica removed her glasses. They stared at each other.
‘Oh, Miss Little – Veronica.’
‘Yes, Miss O’Flaherty?’
‘Would you mind terribly reading that letter again to me? Word by little word?’
‘Of course not.’ This time Veronica read it far faster.
‘And again, Veronica. And again. And again. Once more with feeling! You’re getting better at it every time!’
Obediently Veronica put back her spectacles and word by little word repeated her by now really rather polished performance, after which Ottilie jumped all over the sofa and Veronica looked as if she was about to burst into tears.
‘Do you know I really think this is the happiest day of my life, Miss O’Flaherty?’
‘Do you know, Veronica, I think this might be mine?’
Fifteen
It had never been open to Ottilie to change anything at all at the Grand. The Grand had been like a great old ocean liner. There was only one way it operated and that was the way it had always done, and even when the staff shrank and it became an almost insuperable problem to keep the huge floral arrangements on every floor fresh, with the water in the vast vases changed daily and each flower stem checked for peak perfection, even when just the polishing of the twelve pieces of silver set at every place for every meal took until midnight, that was how it had always been done, and that was how it seemed it would always be done at the Grand, St Elcombe.
Even in her own suite Ottilie was never allowed to change anything. Once she had decided to privately adopt the seven-year-old Ottilie O’Flaherty, Melanie had sent for a designer from Truro to come and draw up a design for the ideal little girl’s bedroom and sitting room, and he had done so with an eye to detail which was quite perfect and his design was one which Mr Hulton and his team were more than happy to implement.
Hence the curtains were of a pale salmon printed with small girls wearing Kate Greenaway dresses and hats, the dressing table was draped with organza underlined with a pale salmon silk, and the carpet was of palest French blue with a flowered design arranged in Madame de Pompadour fashion – small knotted bunches of pale pink roses set at discreet intervals.
The books too were all arranged in alphabetical order on mahogany shelving of the most delicate kind – Queen Anne copies – and the books themselves were all old, beautifully printed children’s books of the kind that still have tissue paper over the illustrations and dates never later than 1939. Dresses were hung in wardrobes with mahogany shelving, drawers lined with scented flowered paper and lavender bags placed everywhere ‘against the flies, Miss Ottilie’ Edith would always say.
Ottilie’s private bathroom was a designer’s dream of what a little girl’s bathroom should be. The bath itself was built into an edifice that was shaped and painted to resemble a swan. The ‘la-la’ as Edith called it was a little throne with salmon-pink carpeted steps up and a salmon-pink satin embroidered cover over the lid with ‘O.C.’ sewn on it in raised blue silk.
Wherever possible everything else in the bathroom and bedroom had also been salmon-pink satin and embroidered. Ottilie’s sponge bag, her nightdress case, her dressing gowns – always ordered from the same shop, year in year out – her slippers, her ribbons for night-time, her counterpane, even her lawn nightdresses were trimmed with the same salmon-pink satin ribbons.
Of course, after living at the cottage and sharing her bed with Ma, her suite at the Grand had seemed to be a sort of paradise of space and luxury to the young Ottilie, with toys and books that Lorcan and the boys, and up until then Ottilie herself, would not have even glimpsed in a shop window, so exclusive were they to the rich.
But then, inevitably, she had matured and her feeling for colour developed, and long before she went to
Paris Ottilie had started to feel absurd bathing in the painted swan, however pretty. But there was no question of change. She had been adopted into salmon-pink satin and in salmon-pink satin she would remain.
All this was why being granted the money she wanted to redesign the Angel was such a heady moment for Ottilie. More and more it seemed to her that the Courtyard Suites, as they were destined to be known, were going to be the best suites in the place, principally because when starting afresh it was easy to design rooms more spacious and bathrooms more luxurious than the bedrooms and bathrooms in the inn itself. Using a local architect, she commissioned a series of ground-floor double bedrooms with windows overlooking the courtyard and picture windows overlooking the gardens, but first she and Veronica went in search of that most elusive event, the genuine country house sale.
Ottilie and Veronica arrived early at the old house clutching their catalogues and convinced that they were about to find Old Masters for a few pounds and Knole sofas for only a little more than that. Instead, faced with someone else’s treasured possessions all marked and catalogued, not only unwanted but so unloved by anyone in her family that they sought only to sell them, they both became quite low with the sadness of it all, and Ottilie could not help thinking of Philip and how he loved not just Tredegar, but everything in it. Supposing everything there had to be put up for sale as it was in this house?
Suddenly the last time she had seen him seemed even more likely to be the last time she would ever see him.
She remembered how tall and handsome he had looked in his uniform, and how courageous he had been, perhaps knowing all the time that he might not come back, and trying to pretend not to care. She delayed going into the main rooms and from there to the marquee where the sale was being held, fascinated and appalled by a brass plaque with the roll call of the dead from two world wars upon which was inscribed not just the names of the sons of the house but the names of the gardeners and grooms who had once worked on the estate. There was even a Granville.
‘Let’s go for a coffee.’
‘I usually only feel sort of sad like this when autumn comes and I hear my mother or my aunt singing “The Last Rose of Summer”,’ Veronica tried to joke to Ottilie when they found the impromptu refreshment area set out in the stables. ‘It’s all those little things – the boot jacks and the old hunting boots, the silver christening mugs. You’d think someone in her family would have wanted to treasure them, wouldn’t you? Or even just some of the framed photographs of their relatives who died in the war. You’d think they’d be of interest.’
Ottilie nodded, but Veronica could see that she could hardly concentrate on what she was saying and was polite enough to fall silent and study her catalogue, for all Ottilie could see was Philip dead like those young boys whose pictures lay marked up and priced for sale in the very reception rooms in which they would have once played as children, or danced with their girlfriends to the wind-up gramophone, or as one of their aunts or sisters played the old Steinway.
It was a relief when, minutes later, the auction started.
To begin with it was a little boring waiting for the items they had marked to come up, but when they did Ottilie became quite tense with the excitement of waving her catalogue at the right moment. Perhaps because the weather was bad there were not as many people as anticipated, and in what finally seemed like seconds two lovely old Persian rugs became the property of the Angel Inn. After that it was Veronica’s turn and she bid for and won a Chippendale-style chest of drawers, a very well made Victorian copy, and what guest would complain that it wasn’t genuine Chippendale?
Sets of three dozen plates, old cake dishes, fish knives and forks – old linen tablecloths, a mahogany barometer. Ottilie and Veronica, while keeping a keen eye on their budget, started to grow in confidence as the day wore on, nodding and flapping their catalogues until they gradually acquired the kind of furnishings that would grace the old inn and make it look as if they had always been there.
Staying right until the last pitchfork and garden bench had been bid for, they finally walked out into the dark of the early spring evening with the largest fountain sold privately in Cornwall in recent years, or so the auctioneer had said. It was vast, far too large for most people’s gardens, but perfect for the courtyard of the Angel Inn. Three stone horses prancing, the water destined to come from a fountain at their centre.
Driving home in Oscar and practically whooping with joy at their success, Ottilie confided to Veronica that there was only one thing that had puzzled her. ‘I don’t understand why there were not more people there?’
There was a sudden silence from the secretary in the passenger seat beside her. Veronica stared ahead into the darkness, seemingly concentrating on the narrow road ahead lit dimly by Oscar’s lights, on the high hedges either side, on the rain that was falling to be lightly swished away somewhat haphazardly by the Citroën’s windscreen wipers.
But Ottilie would not let it go. ‘Veronica. You know something I don’t know. Please tell me?’
‘Well,’ Veronica began, stopped, and then glanced at Ottilie’s profile as she drove. ‘You must promise not to tell, but the auction was a bit of a sort of a fix, I’m afraid, according to Mr Pennington.’
Ottilie frowned. She took her eyes from the narrow country road with its high hedges momentarily and stared at Veronica, who she had only just begun to realize really had hidden depths. ‘You’ve got your still-waters-run-deep look. What is it? You know something I don’t. Mr Pennington knows something I don’t. You both know something I don’t. I want to know something I don’t, so please, please, tell me.’
Veronica bit her lip and paused, but then she spoke.
‘I’ll tell you, Miss O’Flaherty, but you must understand that neither Mr Pennington nor myself had anything to do with it. We just knew about it, if you understand me, we didn’t organize it?’
Ottilie nodded briefly, still frowning to see through the evening rain and unable to risk turning to look at her secretary again. ‘Very well. Go on.’
‘The reason there were only just locals at the sale, if you noticed, and a few people from Truro and Plymouth after the books, no real London dealers, is very simple. You see, local people really liked the owner of the house, old Miss Princeton Blount, and when she died her relatives had no interest in taking on anything of hers – just interested in the money and that was it – so they determined to buy as many of her lovely possessions as possible not just because they were rather old and rather nice but because they knew the old lady would have wanted her things to go to people she knew and liked – that way they would stay in Cornwall, which old Miss Princeton Blount loved. But of course at London prices the locals knew they wouldn’t possibly be able to afford them, would they?’
‘Well, no. So what did they do?’
Without turning her head Ottilie knew that Veronica was smiling despite her serious tone.
‘Well – you mustn’t tell anyone, but they turned many of the country signposts to the auction round so that the dealers from London arrived either too late or not at all.’ Ottilie started to laugh as Veronica finished, ‘Not for nothing do they say never cross a Cornishman!’
And so back to dinner at the Angel and that odd feeling of real achievement that the purchase of bargains brings. As the work on the conversion of the stables progressed that too brought new excitement. Ottilie found that for the first time since her month in Paris she was springing out of bed earlier and earlier, sometimes arriving in the office or on the site before even the builders arrived, and as each rotten timber was thrown out and new wood arrived, as she decided on keeping the rough stonework in the small halls and entrances, as she searched out shops that would give her discounts on new beds and designed four-posters that looked like four-posters but were really just curtains, as she chose Spanish lamps decorated in the old manner but gave them large white silk shades sewn by Veronica’s mum, and white bathroom suites with pale carpets and small oil seascapes that she wa
s able to buy from local galleries, without realizing it she started to bloom with health.
‘You’re looking much better, Miss O’Flaherty.’
Ottilie looked up from her account books, surprised by Veronica’s sudden statement. The state of her looks, never one of her own preoccupations, was not something she thought anyone else noticed.
‘You – well, you won’t mind me saying this, will you?’ Veronica went on, hesitant at first, but obviously encouraged by the glass of whisky Ottilie had fetched her from the bar. ‘But when you first arrived here, frankly I thought Mrs Blaize had made a grave mistake. You seemed far too young for the position, only then I could see from your very first day that you knew what it was all about, that although you were young you were quite tough, which you certainly have to be in this business. But you were always so pale and tense. And, as a matter of fact, I started to feel sorry for you having to shoulder so much in a greasy spoon place such as this was. It didn’t seem right, so instead of leaving, which frankly I was about to do, I stayed on, and I’m very glad I did.’
‘I’m glad you did too.’
They smiled at each other, which prompted Ottilie to say, ‘I was wondering if you’d like to call me by my first name?’
‘Thank you, but no.’ Veronica smiled, shook her head and went back to typing out the rewritten brochure. ‘Frankly the last manager before Mrs Blaize had everyone calling him Geoff and it didn’t stop the place going to rack and ruin.’
‘I don’t suppose it was because of what they called him. More to do with what he drank, from what I hear.’
But Veronica would not be moved, frowning and shaking her head and saying again, ‘Thank you, but no.’
Veronica, like Ottilie, took making a success of the Angel very seriously, and yet Ottilie could not prevent herself feeling lighthearted when she walked round the Courtyard Suites once the carpets had been laid, and saw just how smart and welcoming everything looked. And then it was somehow magical to wander out again into the courtyard and stand and admire the horse fountain that had been such a bargain, and from there to step back into the inn and see the fires, warm and welcoming, and watch more and more new customers arriving.
Grand Affair Page 28
