A Winter's Child

by Brenda Jagger

  The following morning, after a breakfast of scrambled eggs and smoked salmon, Arnold Crozier returned to his large empty house in Bradford, having reserved the Tangerine Suite for the following weekend, leaving an impression that he regarded the Crown rather as a convenient pied-a-terre of his own. He had left the hot water tap running in his bathroom and had not tipped any member of staff.

  ‘Old goat,’ said Mr Clarence, the receptionist, his voice charming now only from habit.

  ‘Skinflint,’ said the housekeeper, no longer motherly.

  ‘Dirty old man,’ declared the fresh-faced young chambermaids in chorus.

  ‘Miser,’ shuddered Miss Adela Adair, the pianist, who felt entitled to something more substantial than a pat on the behind for sitting up half the night playing Viennese waltzes.

  ‘Barbarian,’ muttered Chef Keller, not at all pacified.

  ‘Agreed,’ said Kit Hardie pleasantly, firmly, ‘and we’ll be just as kind to him next week, and the week after that. Agreed?’

  The same courtesy, the same lavish attention was to be extended to every guest without exception.

  ‘There is only one kind of tray,’ decreed Kit Hardie. ‘It is made of silver. A napkin is starched white linen. Ashtrays exist to be filled and then immediately to be emptied. Mirrors and windows are there to be polished. A guest is made of gold – cherish him.’

  But, in the early days, there were very few to cherish, the bedrooms remaining in such pristine condition that the occasional occupant seemed almost an intruder, the restaurant serving no more than a nightly dozen; businessmen mainly, ‘trying the place out’, their sombre attire and heavy conversation creating an atmosphere which, although perfectly respectable, and producing nothing of which even the most careful of mothers or the most pernickety of town councillors or magistrates could possibly complain, was undoubtedly dull.

  For ten days, fifteen days, a month, and then rather more, the beautiful rose-pink lounge with its baroque ceiling remained empty, feathers Teashop full. Yet, nevertheless, tea was there to be had should anyone require it, magazines and periodicals continued to be laid out on the map table, the flowers to be changed twice weekly, the lounge waiters to hover if not in attendance then certainly in anticipation.

  ‘Is it looking very bad, Kit?’ Claire asked him, wondering if she should offer to forego her salary, uncomfortably aware of the money which had been spent on decorating and furnishing, for which the Croziers would want a speedy return. But, whatever his private opinion, he remained outwardly of good cheer.

  ‘No more than I calculated. But you could invite your mother to tea. And should there be the remotest possibility of Miriam Swanfield –?’

  Miriam, albeit most charmingly, declined – yet, since the Swanfields in a spirit of noblesse oblige felt bound to offer some measure of support to their former butler, Eunice appeared one afternoon and, sitting down somewhat gingerly at first in a pink armchair, was so impressed by the strawberry mille-feuilles, so delighted with the array of fashion magazines – having given up such luxuries herself in favour of Toby’s motoring and racing journals – that she returned the week after, her approval obliging Edward to lift his ban on Dorothy, ‘ever setting foot in such a place’, although of course, with his delicate digestion, he could not come himself.

  ‘Who else can I invite?’ asked Claire, looking extremely anxious.

  ‘Who do you know? Look up the girls you were at school with – and their mothers. The kind who meet friends for tea. And we need women in the restaurant. I can manage the occasional celebrity from the Princes Theatre or the Grand, but a few smart young ladies – not too young mind – wouldn’t go amiss. Women who wear big hats for luncheon and low-cut dresses at dinnertime.’

  And so Claire, who had not wished to play the game of old acquaintances, wrote notes to addresses of which she was no longer quite certain, made telephone calls which varied from the amusing to the embarrassing, catching in her net an assortment of women who had been girls when they had last met and who reacted variously to her approach. Yet there were some among them, comfortably married and slightly bored, or war-widowed and lonely who, once the lounge in the Crown Hotel had been pointed out to them, found it a more comfortable gossiping place than Feathers; others who, having admitted that the slaughter of their generation had made marriage a matter of chance rather than the certainty it had once been, were beginning to make lives and careers for themselves without men, and for whom dinner in town with friends was no longer improper.

  ‘Well done,’ said Kit Hardie.

  ‘What next?’

  ‘Let’s give some attention to lunches.’

  Claire telephoned Swanfield Mills and asked for Mr Hartwell.

  ‘Claire?’ Toby’s voice sounded nervous. ‘What am I guilty of now?’

  ‘You haven’t been to see us at the Crown, that’s all.’

  ‘Can I afford you? I rather promised Eunice I’d economize, what with the new Merc, and well – one or two other things… A little flutter on a horse last week for instance that’s still running …’

  ‘Oh Toby, don’t let me down,’ she said, sounding a little like Polly. ‘I suppose there must be an important customer somewhere that you’d like to impress. Come and see what we can do.’

  He came that same morning for coffee, glanced at the wine list, sampled a pate, disappeared into Kit Hardie’s office to emerge, an hour later, openly savouring the after-taste of old brandy and looking well satisfied. He returned to lunch with a party of four others, a celebration, or possibly a consolation, lasting until four o’clock in the afternoon and, before long, had become so much a part of the hotel that his constant presence, always vague and sweet and half apologetic, popular with the staff, generous with tips he could not afford, ready at all times to drop everything and lend a sympathetic ear – or a five pound note – to anybody’s problems, gave Claire a sharp pang of conscience. Did Eunice know how he spent his time and the Swanfield money? Did Benedict know? She supposed they did. And there was no doubt that his value to the Crown, if not to the Swanfields, not only on his own account but for the customers he introduced, was immense.

  ‘What next, Kit?’ she asked.

  ‘We keep on giving good food and wine, good service, good value. The news will get around.’

  She sincerely hoped – for his sake at least and partly, already, for her own – that it would.

  But from the night of its opening, a week after, the cocktail bar was filled to capacity, every table around the minute dance floor booked in advance, every seat, every bar stool, eagerly taken by young people not only from Faxby but from miles around who asked nothing more from life, it seemed, than to dance, all night if possible, to these sensual, staccato American tunes and drink these American concoctions of gin and vermouth, pernod and grenadine, green and yellow chartreuse.

  The war was over. And half of the young men who came roaring up to the back door of the Crown in their dashing little roadsters had too many medals for gallantry under fire to be cautioned by parents on the evils of late hours and strong drink. The future, which had once seemed limitless, had turned out to be very short. And what mattered now was to cram its little duration, its insignificant span of time, with brief passions, temporary joys, to make a noise loud enough to echo when the voice faded, to paint colours vibrant enough to last at least the night; to be – in accordance with the latest fashion – both ‘crazy’and ‘smart’.

  ‘Sandwiches only in the cocktail bar,’ decreed Kit Hardie. ‘Dainty ones. Curls of smoked salmon, rare roast beef cut like paper, a dash of caviar, silver trays and lace doylies and plenty of garnish – tomato roses, cress, lemon wedges, black pepper, horseradish, all the trimmings. Very pretty. Looks a lot and pleases the eye but just whets the appetite.’

  ‘Darling – I’m hungry,’ moaned one liberated young lady after another. The restaurant, for those who could afford it, was close at hand, and since orders for dinner were not taken after half past nine, it soon b
ecame the fashion among that ‘smart and crazy’set, to dine first while palates were still sharp and heads relatively steady before drifting downstairs, replete, pleasantly tipsy, faintly amorous, to flirt and make promises, to drink fruit-flavoured spirits, smoke Turkish cigarettes, and, above all, to dance.

  There was the bunny hug, the shimmy. There was the foxtrot, the most perfect excuse yet invented for a man and a woman to embrace publicly. There was the tango. Girls danced without gloves, without programmes and with complete strangers. The need to be introduced had become obsolete alongside the need to be chaperoned. Young ladies – and they made no bones about it – did not come to the Crown in search of husbands. They came, unashamedly and as young men had always been allowed to do, for the adventure, the amusement, the fun. The great thing was not to be bored. In some cases not to remember. And where better to blur one’s sense of resentment of the past and futility at the future in a haze of tobacco, jazz music and alcohol, than the Crown?

  ‘Nowhere,’ said Kit Hardie, ‘but if we could fill the bedrooms we’d be making money all through the night as well, while everybody’s asleep.’

  ‘Major Hardie, do you think you could help me out?’ enquired a bright but suddenly earnest young thing. ‘We’re having a party for my twenty-first – marquee in the garden and all that, and what with our cutting down on maids and moving to a smaller house after the boys were killed, Mummy wonders if you could possibly put up about a dozen of our guests – just overnight for the 24th and maybe the 25th?’

  ‘I only wish you had given me more notice,’ replied the Major, looking grave.

  ‘Oh I say, Major Hardie, please don’t let me down. If my friends can’t come here then I’ll end up with nothing but cousins and brothers-in-law and old grannies at my birthday party. Please, Major.’

  He hesitated, glanced upwards speculatively, as if he just might have been deciding which of his numerous bookings could best be cancelled. ‘Mr Clarence,’ he said, ‘Mrs Swanfield. Let’s put our heads together and do a little juggling for this young lady.’

  ‘Oh, Major. Mother will be so thankful.’

  Would she convey her thanks in person? She came, a sensible, handsome woman dressed with unobtrusive elegance, the ‘first lady’, despite her removal to smaller premises, of the village a dozen miles from Faxby where her family had been settled for several generations. Kit Hardie, at his most impressive, escorted her around the hotel, a grand tour culminating with the Earl Grey tea in floral Coalport china, freshly baked scones and raspberry jam, hot muffins, a traditional English plum cake, nothing too elaborate or suspiciously continental, Claire noticed, nothing, in fact, which the lady might not have expected in the country homes of her friends.

  ‘This is really very pleasant,’ she said, relaxing into a chintz armchair, glancing with approval around the quiet room, perfectly at ease with its unostentatious, reassuring solid comfort. ‘Very pleasant. I had expected something rather more flamboyant, I confess. I am so glad. Do you have facilities for private parties, I wonder? I chair a number of committees and when it comes to annual dinners and the like it seems sensible, these days – when one is afflicted with a servant problem, as I am – to take the catering out of one’s home.’

  She left with menus, brochures, prices.

  ‘The word is spreading,’ said Kit.

  Would it spread fast enough? But by the autumn, Claire no longer felt the slightest qualm about accepting her salary, being well aware that she often earned it twice over.

  ‘You can’t possibly enjoy it,’ said Dorothy, no question this but a statement she desperately wanted to be true, in order to assure Edward that her daughter’s latest madness was over.

  ‘It gives me a reason to get up in the morning.’

  ‘Claire?’ Dorothy was plainly scandalized. ‘And you must know, I suppose, that – inevitably – there have been rumours. About your relations with that man.’

  ‘Inevitably?’

  ‘Well, of course, since you are always with him, shut up together for hours in his office by all accounts. Claire is that necessary? And you were seen, you know, in his company at two o’clock one morning, walking in the direction of Mannheim Crescent. I really didn’t know how to explain it.’

  ‘It must have been a fine night.’

  And then, seeing that Dorothy was sincerely upset, she said tartly, ‘Mother, whoever it was who saw me, must have been out in the streets at two o’clock in the morning themselves, you know.’

  ‘Yes. Yes. We all know about that.’ Dorothy’s temper, under pressure from her nerves and from Edward, was fraying. ‘Just the same – since you are so clever – you should also know that it is downright foolish to allow yourself to be seen in compromising circumstances with a man to whom you cannot possibly be attached.’

  ‘Can’t I, mother?’

  ‘No. No you can’t. Certainly not. Claire – for Heaven’s sake – he was in service.’

  And had she said ‘in prison’, ‘infected with a social disease’, ‘insane’, her expression could not have been more shocked and bitter.

  ‘Yes, mother. But he was a war hero too, you know. You should see his uniform – absolutely covered with ribbons and medals.’

  ‘The war,’ snapped Dorothy in direct quotation from Edward, ‘is over. And now that things are back to normal again – well …’

  ‘Yes mother. A lady is a lady. And a butler is a butler.’

  And what, she knew Edward had demanded, would the Swanfields say should she misbehave herself with theirs?

  Did she care? No. Only insofar as it would hurt Dorothy. And both she and her mother – and Edward – would just have to live with that. If she decided, that is, to ‘misbehave’.

  Throughout Claire’s life every one of her close relationships had been, to some degree, painful and she knew of no reason why her future ones should not follow suit. Intimacy, therefore, implied a certain amount of hurt and, still bearing more or less bravely the scars inflicted by Dorothy and Jeremy and Paul, what concerned her now was not to avoid wounds altogether but to make sure they were light, superficial, quick to heal. And in her present frame of mind, Kit – as he seemed to know – was too much for her. Not that he would hurt her. On the contrary, should she go to him now, this minute, she rather imagined that he would take her straight upstairs to the elegant little flat he had made for himself from the attics of the Crown and make love to her so thoroughly that she would have no breath left to worry about what anyone might say. And afterwards she would be able to lean against him, firm hands upon her, a firm will to guide her, allowing him to blend her and merge her with himself until they became a couple. She was almost sure he wanted that. Not, of course – and she found herself smiling tolerantly, with affection – that he was prevented by anything he might feel for her from succumbing promptly and with a goodwill to any temptations strewn along his path by certain ladies from the Princes Theatre and elsewhere. He was a man of appetite who had never had any reason for restraint. She understood that. And until he had a reason it would not occur to him to be celibate.

  Was it only a question of breaking the barrier between the warm camaraderie they now shared and the more exclusive passion of lovers? It could be done, she sometimes felt quite certain. And to be cherished by a man like Kit, who did nothing by halves, could be no mean experience. Yet what – at present – had she to give him? He would want a great deal. If he ever made a commitment he would expect, quite rightly, as much in return. And even on the days when it seemed to her that she would be glad of that, she did not feel fit for it. In her present state of mind it would be an act of weakness, not of giving so much as of surrender. So much less than he – or any decent man – deserved, that she could not really think of it. Not yet.

  And in the meantime, since he was evidently in no hurry, she admired him, liked him, was very happy to learn from him. There were times, of course, usually early mornings following too little sleep, when she found him exacting, exhausting, over-meti
culous, extravagant. Yet when, at his insistence, the silver which had seemed quite bright enough, had been polished once again, the flowers which, in everybody else’s opinion, could easily last a few more days, had been replaced, when everyone had grumbled that it could hardly be necessary to rearrange those newspapers, empty those ashtrays, plump up those cushions so constantly over and over, there was – when one surveyed the final picture – no denying that the Major had raised the Crown a decided cut above the station hotels. And when tempers flared, crisis or panic or chaos broke out as it inevitably, and fairly regularly did, the mere appearance of Kit Hardie upon the scene provided instant reassurance, a speedy return to calm. Here was the man who would take the decision, provide the solution, shoulder – if necessary – the blame. Here was the man who would put things to rights, would save the day and everybody’s bacon, reducing disaster to a little extra work and ingenuity and sending it tamely away.

  ‘What name can one give for what you do?’ enquired Dorothy. ‘We rather think you should be called an assistant manageress. At any rate, that is what we tell our friends. I don’t see how you can object.’

  She did not object, thinking it as good a title as any for her range of tasks, for the miles she ran every day from Kit Hardie’s office to every part of the hotel; to the lobby where Mr Clarence, his charm being interspersed with brief fits of melancholy, could not always copy; to the little flower room to make sure the girls had remembered ‘blue for the Blue Room, pink for the Rose’; to the housekeeper’s room to investigate an unaccustomed moodiness in a chambermaid, or a discrepancy in the linen stock. She calculated and paid out the wages, checked the bar accounts, arbitrated in Chef Keller’s many disputes with tradesmen, kept within sight of the lounge at teatime and made herself pleasant to any solitary ladies. Three nights a week, often four, wearing a long tunic of black net covered with jet beads, she moved through the restaurant and the cocktail bar, available for conversation, compliments, complaints; ready to preserve order and keep an eye on the barman, MacAllister, an agreeable fellow but quite likely – said Kit – to give short measure at full price and pocket the difference if he could. She spent hours listening, with half her mind, to men who boasted of their virility and their bank balances and men who charmingly confessed that they had little of either; to the beginning and end of love affairs; to Arnold Crozier’s discourses on the art of making and drinking wine; Toby Hartwell’s abandoned ambitions to be a test pilot, a racing motorist, to ride the winner of the Derby; the claims of the restaurant pianist, Miss. Adela Adair, that only the envy of her music teachers and her own generosity to a series of feckless lovers had kept her from the international concert stage. In obedience to Kit Hardie’s instructions that the Kellers, upon whose culinary expertise so much depended, must be kept happy at any cost, she made frequent visits to the kitchen, where more often than not, she was able to convince Aristide Keller of his own genius, the high value the Major and the entire gourmet population of Faxby – never large – put upon him, and that no one was in the act of stealing his recipes which he kept scribbled down on scraps of paper and impaled on a spike behind the door, except for their one most vital ingredient which remained locked inside his shrewd, suspicious mind.