Grand Affair

There was a special feeling to the start of each season at the Grand. Even before Ottilie had become so much part of the place that regular guests would look for her within minutes of their arrival, she could sense it. She could sense it before Blackie, the Grand’s ageing porter, had puffed and panted and staggered with the first luggage to the lift. Before the sea had stopped raging and the winds whipping around the newly painted exterior of the Grand, Ottilie would know without even looking in the hotel diary that the first day of the season was upon them.

It was a sixth sense that came from living all the time in the hotel, knowing its rhythms, its heartbeat, its sense of its own fitness. As if on the exact day given in the guide books, the hotel was like an actor viewing itself in the mirror to the side of the stage, checking its appearance and adjusting its costume most precisely, before saying ‘Now!’ and sweeping on into the full glare of the summer season.

Mrs Le Martine always asked for Ottilie within minutes of her arrival. Mum said it was because she had no children and was a widow and that it was ‘rather pathetic really’, but Ottilie found Mrs Le Martine fascinating and not at all pathetic. Just seeing her expensive luggage, heavy leather with deep gold initialling and a trunk that opened outwards like a wardrobe so that all her clothes could be taken straight out of it on their own hangers, was thrilling. And then to put her heavy glass scent bottles on her dressing table and place her silver brushes beside them, and help the maid hang the clothes or put away the satin handkerchief sachet and the matching nightdress case, was a magical ritual which made Ottilie feel as if she was helping to serve at a religious ceremony.

All Mrs Le Martine’s clothes had discreet labels in them and, unlike Mum who boasted that she could dress in five minutes, Mrs Le Martine never dressed without the help of one of the hotel maids. She rang down when she was ready, and they came up and helped her. Ottilie was sometimes allowed to watch the last stages of her dressing in the evening. She especially liked the moment when Mrs Le Martine opened the small safe in her suite and took out one or two of the many leather boxes with her initials on them. She would view their contents and plump for one or another of the necklaces and matching earrings that she so liked to wear.

‘The amethysts tonight,’ she would say. Or, ‘No, Edith, how many times must I tell you? En parure, you silly creature. Pearls with black, always. Pearls with black, most especially black velvet.’

Mrs Le Martine liked white flowers in her suite, but never chrysanthemums which she said were ‘funeral flowers’. She also liked a box of rich tea biscuits by her bed, but only the finger-sized ones, not the ordinary round ones. And she liked pot pourri but never, ever a mix with any lavender in it because, she said, ‘It reminds me of my hated governess who used to hit my hands night and morning so that I would never grow up and marry, because I would be too crippled to play the piano or hold hands with a man. But there you are, I grew up to do both, so there really was not much point to all that cruelty, was there? Except it did put iron in my soul.’

Treading across the deep blue carpet to the wardrobes Ottilie stared into their depths to make sure that the hangers Mrs Le Martine liked so particularly were waiting there in readiness. It was exciting to think that the strong, polished mahogany ones would soon be supporting Mrs Le Martine’s size eight suits with their silk-lined skirts, and the soft padded ones, with their small lavender bags removed in deference to her hatred of lavender, her blouses and evening tops. And the white and gold Louis-Quattro chests of drawers would soon have cashmere twinjets and silk crêpe nightdresses arranged in their flowered paper-lined drawers in such a way that Ottilie would find herself secretly stroking them when Mrs Le Martine was too busy bossing the maids to notice.

‘I took to you the moment you came in with that bunch of exquisite flowers that you had picked from the hotel hothouse and smuggled up to me, you naughty girl,’ she would remind Ottilie, laughing, because unlike the rest of the world Mrs Le Martine was not fooled by Ottilie. She knew that Ottilie was naughty and mischievous, and she liked her for it, which was why it was always such a relief to be with Mrs Le Martine, and why Ottilie looked forward with such intense excitement to her arrival, to hearing her lovely rippling laughter in the downstairs foyer, to her satisfied sigh when she saw her suite and turned to tell Ottilie that she had ‘got everything just right’.

‘She is a great star,’ Alfred would say of Mrs Le Martine, sighing with appreciative approval, although never within his wife’s hearing. ‘Really a great star. She could have been a great actress, you know, but of course she is too refined for such a life, too sensitive. Plucked from the firmament they are, wonderful women like Mrs Le Martine, Ottilie, plucked from the Milky Way and sent down to enchant us mortals. We are indeed privileged.’

After these words Alfred would give a deep sigh which had within it more than a vein of melancholy, and Ottilie could sense that he too was looking forward to Mrs Le Martine’s arriving, eager to meet her demands, loving to please her as much as Ottilie did, as they all did, longing to hear her say in her slightly husky voice, ‘But this is charming!’ so that each person felt, as never before, that they and they alone had filled Mrs Le Martine’s eyes with delight and set her small, elegant hands aflutter with appreciation simply and solely because of what they had done for her.

First, and long before they saw her, they would hear her low gurgling laugh with its entrancing mixture of merriment and complicity. Next they would smell her scent – ‘Never perfume, Ottilie dearest’ – and this again it always seemed to Ottilie would be long before they saw her. ‘Enchant’ was the name of Mrs Le Martine’s scent. (Edith always said, ‘I never did see such large bottles of perfume, Miss Ottilie, not nowhere. I think she must have had them made up special in La France before the war, really I do.’) And then at last Mrs Le Martine herself. Not tall like Melanie, but small and petite like Ottilie, but so exquisitely made that it seemed to Ottilie who was already nearly her height that Mrs Le Martine was really just as tall as Mum, so finely made were her legs and arms, so small and white her hands.

First, as always, came the embrace. Ottilie had rapidly become used to the fact that one of her many duties as the ‘hotel child’ was to submit not only to letting herself be talked about – ‘My, you have grown this last winter’ – but also to being kissed by the ladies and patted on the head by old gentlemen who smelt strongly of either camphor or moth balls.

But being kissed by Mrs Le Martine was not a duty at all. In fact Ottilie found she longed for it, because not to be kissed by Mrs Le Martine would be to miss out not just on the smell of her famous scent but on the feel of her cool hands either side of your face, on being close to the softness of her lace or chiffon blouse and her lingering look of appreciation as she held you away from her and murmured to Dad, ‘But this is a young lady, Mr Cartaret. Your daughter has grown into a young lady this winter past.’

First Blackie, sweating and puffing, the buttons on his old uniform looking fit to burst due to a long winter of indulgence in steamed puddings. Then the Grand’s team of page boys, long past their thirtieth birthdays but small like jockeys so they could still pose as young, trooping after Blackie. After them came Ottilie, usually in a brand new dress with a starched broderie angles pinafore over the top and tied in a big sash at the back, and finally Mrs Le Martine herself, walking gracefully and elegantly, smiling at members of the old staff who would have made some excuse to leave their duties and greet her on her arrival and carefully nodding at new members who had yet to be put under her spell.

Once outside her suite Blackie and the ‘boys’ would stand aside as Ottilie put the key into the lock and flung open the double doors and Mrs Le Martine and she floated in together, each appreciating the immaculate scene before them in quite different ways. The furniture set just as Mrs Le Martine liked it, the flowers in tall vases – if possible white lilac somewhere in the arrangements. The champagne in a bucket, even though she never touched it, just liked it to be there on show, and finally the picture of her late husband which she always sent on ahead to be put beside her bed, just in front of the biscuits and the water carafe.

Unpacking was always left to the maids. So first, before the solemn business of setting out her clothes was begun, there was welcoming sherry, a small glass for Mrs Le Martine, and a glass of barley water for Ottilie, after a sip or two of which, having safely seen to the departure of Blackie and the boys, Mrs Le Martine would turn to Ottilie and in a conspiratorial voice say, ‘Well, has she arrived yet?’

It was hardly necessary for Mrs Le Martine to ask, for they both knew that for the person in question not to have arrived would be like the sun refusing to rise in the morning, or the tides outside the windows stopping for ever.

She was the lady who always took the top suite and never left her room. She was the lady who after her arrival never dined downstairs and was seen only by the maids who took up her trays in response to orders for room service. She was the lady who came, the older staff loved to tell Ottilie when she herself had first arrived at the Grand, year after year at the same time, ever since spending her honeymoon in that same top suite. The suite which, once arrived, she never left. She was the mysterious lady who always stayed at the same time as Mrs Le Martine but never appeared in lounge or foyer, in dining room or garden, but could be seen in all weathers sitting on her balcony gazing out to sea as if she was waiting for someone to arrive at any minute, and longing only for that.

‘Her name is Mrs Ballantine,’ Ottilie had told Mrs Le Martine when she first became intrigued by her mysterious fellow guest, ‘but downstairs they call her Blue Lady. They say that she honeymooned here in the top suite but that her husband, who was much older, died while they were making a little trip to the Italian Lodge near Wichita Bay in Devon. And do you know what? Chef says she nearly went mad from the grief of it all. And that is why she comes back here every year, and always will perhaps, for ever more.’

‘Oh the fascination of it.’ Mrs Le Martine had clasped her hands together in delight as Ottilie finished speaking. ‘And the way you tell it, Miss Ottilie. Too delightful. Mad with grief indeed! Where do you get your expressions from, I would dearly like to know? But. What a business. We must find out more, or we will faint from the excitement of not knowing, surely?’

Mrs Le Martine always called Ottilie ‘Miss’, it was one of her peculiarities. Ottilie loved this almost most of anything about her, that Mrs Le Martine never let anything pass her by without changing its name – very effectively sometimes – to something else or adopting some new or different style of address.

So Ottilie was always ‘Miss Ottilie’ and Edith was ‘Droopy Dolly’, and Blackie the hall porter was ‘Tiresome Ted’ and even Mum and Dad were ‘Her Majesty’ and ‘His Majesty’ behind their backs.

But sometimes Mrs Le Martine said ‘Oh Miss Ottilie’ in a voice that was suddenly just a little too like Edith’s, which would make Ottilie feel uncomfortable and cause her to look round to make quite sure that poor Edith was not there. But having found that she was not, she would feel safe to laugh, and once more a delicious feeling of. relief would flow through her that when she was with Mrs Le Martine, as with no-one else, she could allow her naughty self to be seen, and that despite this, Mrs Le Martine still seemed to like her.

So not only did the start of the season bring with it its own excitements, new staff joining the few old regulars, occasionally to go very soon afterwards and be rapidly replaced, but more important to Ottilie, after the long winters of storms and rain and high seas, it brought with it Mrs Le Martine and Blue Lady.

‘You see far too much of that woman,’ Melanie would say to Ottilie at regular and monotonous intervals during the whole month of Mrs Le Martine’s annual stay, at which Ottilie would open her eyes wide, assume her most innocent expression, and instead of protesting, which would be useless – because everyone knew that Ottilie danced attendance on Mrs Le Martine from the moment she arrived until the moment she left – she would be sure to murmur, ‘Can I help you with anything, Mum? The flowers, the telephone – I’ve finished helping Mrs Tomber.’

Ottilie was always sure that even though her mother was all too well aware that she was distracting her from the main issue, nevertheless Melanie was so terribly lazy that she could not help availing herself of any offer of assistance, and this despite the fact that, as far as Ottilie knew, she never actually did anything in the hotel anyway except appear in the dining room and be charming to everyone once she had walked down the stairs, observing her dramatic ritual of looking straight ahead and not down at her feet.

One particular day Ottilie had only just finished saying ‘Can I help you with anything?’ when she noticed that Melanie was looking more than a little apprehensive, not at all her usual superior self, not at all the person that Ottilie was always so careful to be good and well behaved around.

‘You see far too much of that woman, Ottilie. She will tire of you and turn on you, really she will. You must be careful not to foist yourself upon guests,’ she repeated mechanically, several times, but without her usual command.

‘Also, I think you should stop calling me Mum and call me Ma, now that you are older. I think it would be more fitting if you were to call me Ma, and Dad should be Pa. Better in front of the guests, too. I thought I saw someone looking at you the other day as you said Mum, as if they did not think it either suitable or fitting for me, and I do not think it is.’

Ottilie frowned. This was going to be difficult. And it was no good making one of her jokes as she would if she was with Edith or Philip Granville, or being cheeky as she would if she was with Mrs Le Martine. She had noticed that Alfred Cartaret would always say to Mrs Tomber or his secretary, when he was faced with a problem, ‘You deal with this’, but Ottilie was not a man, she could not turn to someone else and tell them to ‘deal with this’. Instead she opened her mouth, and then closed it again, quickly realizing that for once she truly did not know in the very least how to answer this new edict from Her Majesty.

It would be so difficult to try to explain to Mum that Ma had been Ma. Ma was Number Four and the fun and the warmth and wearing sandals without socks and knowing people like Charlie on the corner, people that Mum and Edith would now never dream of letting Ottilie know. And Mum was Melanie, the Queen of the Grand, all perfume and silk, and if she tried to swap them round it might be a bit confusing.

‘I think of you especially as Mum, now,’ was how she finally put it, carefully leaving out all the feelings of pain and confusion that just hearing the name of Ma brought into her heart, all the agony of that day in the police station when Ottilie had stared at the picture on her stolen tin bucket rather than look up at the policemen in their uniforms or listen to the sound of Ma protesting her innocence to Lorcan.

How could she call Mrs Cartaret Ma? Ma had been a thief, and really – as Joseph had said afterwards so bitterly – ‘should by all that is right have been in gaol’, whereas Mum was a beautiful woman who had come into Ottilie’s life and adopted her, lifted her out of her poor existence at the cottage and made her grand and rich.

Mum had taken away Ottilie O’Flaherty and replaced her with Miss Ottilie Cartaret, given her a beautiful room and books and toys and expensive clothes and as much food as she wanted whenever she wanted it. She had made her into Miss Ottilie whom all the staff at the hotel spoilt. She had made her into a princess who was asked to places like Tredegar by boys like Philip Granville whom other boys like her brothers Joseph and Sean called snobs.

There was a small pause, and Ottilie, who had long ago learned never to let Melanie know just what she was thinking, opened her eyes even wider and smiled although she actually felt like crying, for some reason that she could not understand, crying the way she had cried when she had been left on the steps of the hotel the evening of Ma’s funeral.

‘Oh very well, Mamma it must be, if you think you like that better, if that makes you happy.’ Melanie put down her silver-backed hairbrush and looked suddenly bored by the whole idea and at the same time peculiarly restless and unhappy too. ‘But please don’t argue all the time with me about everything, Ottilie. Terribly tiring, you know. Now to other things. I do hope and think you are old enough to be someone I can entrust with a secret?’

Melanie continued to look across at Ottilie, and for one second Ottilie could see that she was really rather surprised by what Ottilie had just said, as if she had suddenly guessed that Ottilie had secrets with other people, secrets that she knew nothing about, and perhaps never would.

Ottilie nodded. She knew all about keeping things under her hat from Mrs Le Martine. It was an expression that she always used, particularly when they were trying to find things out about Blue Lady and why she came back to the hotel every year – well, they knew why, but not quite why – not really, really why.

Certainly it was to do with Blue Lady’s husband’s dying so tragically when they were still on honeymoon, and his being such a loss to her, and his being so terribly rich. But they both wanted to know much more than that, and yet in the three whole years that Ottilie had been living at the Grand, in the seven years that Mrs Le Martine had been arriving for the opening month of the season, they had not found out anything more, except that she always wore the same clothes, which Mrs Tomber the housekeeper said to Ottilie were now beginning to look ‘old hat’.

Melanie stood up and walked with her usual graceful sloping walk, hips forward, hair brushed back from her face, to the central table of her large, ornate bedroom with its elaborate fittings and what always seemed to Ottilie to be miles of fitted wardrobes. ‘Madame’s closets’, as Mrs Tomber always reverently referred to them, were each lit from within by special lighting so that when Madame opened a cupboard she could see all her clothes illuminated. One glance at each wooden drawer or shelf showed her all the rainbow colours of her cashmere twinsets, all the beauty of her hand-embroidered Italian blouses, all the Chinese silk shawls, all the delicacy of her nightwear and her underwear made specially for her by Roses in Knightsbridge, all her shoes – pink, blue, red, two-tone, suede, shoes of every description – and that was all before the cupboard for her hats was opened, because Melanie’s hats were so many and various they took up not one closet but two.

And they were nothing compared to the closets for her evening clothes, the long sequin-studded evening gowns, the short slipper satin evening dresses with matching coats. If Alfred ever dared to comment upon the arrival of some new parcel from London containing yet another garment, his wife always said in ringing tones, ‘I must have these things, Alfred. You cannot possibly expect me to be of any use to either you or this place if I am to be clothed in rags.’

The very idea of Melanie appearing in rags was quite impossible to imagine, and certainly Madame’s clothes, Madame’s nightly descent of the semicircular staircase, Madame’s grand sweep into the dining room past openly admiring diners did give the hotel a certain class and glamour, no-one could deny that, and no-one did deny it. Melanie was not only a feature of the hotel, she was its centre, a personality in a way that her husband could never be, but as Ottilie was about to discover, it was at a price.

‘Ottilie,’ Melanie said, sighing a little as if she was about to tell her about someone else other than herself, ‘Ottilie, darling. I have to tell you the most annoying thing I have ever heard.’

Ottilie waited. She had a feeling that she was going to be told something she did not want to hear because of the way Melanie was fiddling about with her cigarette lighter, turning the smart gold object over and over, over and over, over and over, again and again. There was something about her doing that and her way of smoking in rapid inhalations that was making Ottilie uneasy, as if she was seeing a side of Mamma that she had never seen before.

‘Yes,’ Melanie continued. ‘The most annoying thing I ever heard,’ she repeated. ‘I don’t know how it is, but it surely is, and that is that I am more than certainly in trouble with my bank manager. I cannot tell Dad – I cannot tell Pappa, as you want to call him, because he already gives me what he thinks is such a large allowance for my clothes and things, and he just doesn’t realize that I can hardly manage, if I am to look presentable at all, on what he does give me, the little that he does give me – even though it might seem quite large to him. If you understand me?’

Ottilie did not quite understand in the first instance, but then it took only a glance round Melanie’s bedroom with its miles of cupboards for Ottilie to understand that it might be perfectly possible, however rich you were, not to have enough money to pay for all the clothes presently illuminated in Madame’s cupboards.

‘Now,’ Melanie continued, having stubbed out one cigarette and begun another immediately which she lit once more with the gold lighter. ‘You’re such friends with Mrs Le Martine, are you not? I wonder if you could just find out for me, that’s all you have to do, just find out, in a roundabout sort of way, if she would like to buy any of my clothes? You can tell her that I am having a grand clear-out. Make it seem as if you haven’t talked to me about it though, and then we can see if we cannot sell her some things, mmm? She loves clothes – all those trunks just for a month, and we are the same size, if not the same height.’

Ottilie blushed scarlet. In fact her cheeks became so red that she thought if she held her hands in front of them they would become as warm as hot crumpets. What an agony of embarrassment for her to be asked to deceive her greatest friend in order to take money from her. What on earth would Mrs Le Martine say?

‘And Mrs Ballantyne, the woman you call Blue Lady? You could do the same thing with her, could you not? I could easily arrange for you to take up her tea one afternoon instead of Mary. I mean it’s only fun. Women love buying things that they think are a bargain, and after all, Ottilie, most of my clothes are scarcely worn. And they’re all beautifully cut, you know. I mean they’ll probably end up baying for bargains from you, but just don’t tell them I know you’re trying to hook them. Just drop a hint, a light mention, that’s all, and wait for them to take you up on it, make a bite. That’s always the best way.’

‘You could even say that I don’t want to sell anyone in the hotel anything because I don’t like people being seen in the same things as me, which is quite true. You can tell them that my clothes normally go away to be sold secondhand in Knightsbridge, which they all do, normally – except the place for some reason closed down at the end of last year. I mean, usually they are falling over themselves to buy my hardly worn clothes at secondhand prices, which leaves me with quite enough left over to settle with the wretched bank, but not now.’

Ottilie’s colour had subsided and she had just started to think that what Melanie was asking of her was not so very terrible after all, that it would not be so difficult to drop a hint here, a hint there to Mrs Le Martine or Blue Lady – and what was more, she thought, with a sudden growing sense of excitement, she would now have every excuse to make friends with Blue Lady – when Mrs Cartaret raised a new issue.

Melanie stopped her pacing suddenly and dropped a pair of something small and heavy into Ottilie’s hand. She did it so casually and with such a lack of any sort of ceremony that the small items could have been something that she had just picked up off the carpet and wanted Ottilie to throw away. As it happened they were something that she wanted Ottilie to throw away, as she explained, but when Ottilie opened her hand and saw what the small but surprisingly heavy objects were, she knew that Melanie certainly could not have picked a pair of diamond earrings up from the carpet.

‘When we have finished talking, as soon as you can, I want you to go for a long walk with Edith and throw them away. Down a drain is a good place, any old drain in the town. Just let Edith go on ahead and then drop them down the drain, Ottilie. This will help me. This will really help your mamma a great deal, and after all I have done for you, Ottilie, you do want to help me, don’t you?’

What else could Ottilie say? The woman standing in front of her had adopted her, changed her life, given her a hotel that was just like a palace to live in, everything. Ottilie put the earrings in her pocket. She did so swiftly, and without saying a word, as if she had done just such a thing before, and she saw that for once Melanie was surprised by her silence, and by the grave look on her face.

‘They are worth over a thousand pounds on the last valuation,’ Melanie went on, talking quickly. ‘I can settle my debts with that. But to keep the wretched bank manager happy until the insurance company pays out, I must have some small sum to float at him, anything, just anything, or your father will be furious. That’s why you have to sell some of my clothes to the guests if you can, Ottilie. It is vital, you do realize? In my position I simply cannot do such a thing.’

There was a short silence during which Ottilie stared up at Melanie wondering, as always at these moments, what sort of person she was, and why she would not just go and ask her husband for the money and that would be that.

‘If you don’t,’ Melanie said, staring down at Ottilie so that her beautiful dark eyes seemed to her adopted daughter to be intent on burning into her own grey ones as she spoke, ‘if you don’t do everything I ask I will not just punish you the way you most hate, but something terrible will happen to you, Ottilie, something really terrible. Don’t forget that.’

She never knew whether it was the earrings themselves or the knowledge that they were worth so much money that weighed more heavily as she walked beside Edith to the shops that afternoon. Certainly the implications of the worth of the earrings were quite terrifying, but the act of throwing away such valuable objects was awful, more awful even than what had happened to Ma that afternoon when she was found to have the tea and the biscuits in her carrier bag.

With her gloved right hand around the diamond earrings in the bottom of her pocket Ottilie could not help suddenly thinking that was particularly funny. If Edith knew just what Ottilie had come out with she would die from the shock of it. But such moments were only a few seconds of relief in the overall tension that was overshadowing their normally boring and uneventful walk.

Telling someone to throw away your earrings was one thing, but doing it was quite another. It was not in the least bit easy to throw away the earrings without anyone seeing. Everywhere, even so early in the summer season, there were people, people, people. People walking and looking, drifting and hesitating, crossing roads, stopping by traffic lights. To throw away even two such small objects as earrings would take the greatest ingenuity and suddenly it seemed to Ottilie that she might not be in possession of such powers.

Apart from anything else, Edith would keep looking down at her every few seconds, checking on her, remarking every now and then that she was ‘definitely looking a bit peaky’ while all the time, as always, holding Ottilie’s hand as if she was afraid that someone might suddenly come along and kidnap her charge, or her charge might herself suddenly run off never to be seen again.

As they walked determinedly on, a wind sprang up from nowhere and whipped round the corner of the cliffs, tearing round the sides and bursting into the safety of the bay into which St Elcombe fitted so neatly. Edith bent her head against its force, holding on to her hat with her gloved hand. Ottilie did the same, knowing with a sinking heart that any minute now Edith would turn for home, and they would be returning along the front and up into the hotel once more, with the earrings still lying a ghastly secret in the bottom of Ottilie’s coat pocket.

‘Oh, look. How awful, Edith, look . . .’ In a desperate attempt to gain some time Ottilie allowed one of her gloves to be carried off on the wind, and then watched in a sort of detached fascination Edith running after it, down the steps of the hotel out towards the pink road that led to the iron gates and so once more to the sea front and the palm trees of St Elcombe. As the poor woman dashed after her white glove Ottilie looked round in desperation for a drain, anything into which she could drop the two earrings, but there was nothing, and then Edith was back, laughing and smiling, carrying the glove, holding her own hat in place, and generally continuing to be the worst kind of companion for the criminal Ottilie now knew that she was. More even than Ma when she was her whole life, the centre of everything that was wonderful at Number Four, Edith appeared at that second to Ottilie to be a shining saint compared to her own awfulness.

‘Skippety skippety up to tea we go,’ Edith chanted, as she always did, and she took Ottilie’s left hand once more as they walked together up the broad steps towards the welcoming bustle of the Grand, only to find Mamma waiting for them in reception.

‘The most ghastly thing has happened, Edith,’ she murmured, ignoring Ottilie completely. ‘My diamond earrings have been stolen. The police are here. They are insured, of course, but let’s face it, they’ve been in the family for so long, no-one can make up for that. No money can compensate for the sentimental value.’

Police. Edith’s face became chalk white – after all, if something went missing all the staff felt implicated, under a cloud. ‘Diamond earrings. How terrible, Madame, how perfectly terrible for you.’

‘It is terrible, Edith, it is too terrible for words. More terrible than I can tell you, and I am afraid that I have to ask you to go to the staff sitting room where the police will interview you.’

Ottilie watched as Edith, now more green with fright than white or grey, removed her poor macintosh and hat in a hurried sort of way. She patted and reassured Ottilie and then went off towards the staff sitting room to confront her worst of all nightmares, a policeman in a uniform.

‘Ottilie, you can go to your room. This is all most unpleasant, and I want you kept out of it.’ Again Melanie’s blue-shadowed eyes seemed to be burning into Ottilie’s own, saying, ‘Behave yourself, do as you’re told, or you will be punished, remember?’

Nevertheless, remembering only too well how Ma had cried at the police station that day, for once Ottilie defied Melanie’s burning glance and ran after Edith. Reaching up to her, she kissed her cheek and hugged her.

Edith nodded, but her blue eyes were full of fear. With the earrings still in the bottom of her pocket, Ottilie knew just how she felt, just how her knees must have gone to complete water, her heart be throbbing in her throat, her hands running with sweat.

Ottilie stared out at the early evening. The earrings were still in her Hayward’s coat, still lying heavy in the pocket of that coat that was now hanging in the pretty hand-painted cupboard next door to her own private sitting toom. Supposing the police came into her room and searched her cupboard? Supposing she threw them out of the window? They might search the garden and find her finger prints on them.

Supposing she put them down the plughole in the bathroom? That would be easy, except once when an old guest dropped his gold tooth down the plumber came right back up with it. Apparently they were searching all the staff rooms, looking through all their clothes, supposing they searched the drains? That day at the police station Ottilie had seen a young boy, just her age now, and he was being what Lorcan had called ‘had up’ and he was later found, ‘poor gossoon, hanging from his belt in the police cell’.

Lorcan. Of course. He would know what to do. To run back home to the cottage would be the answer to everything. No-one at the hotel would miss her at this hour, and she could tell Lorcan everything, and maybe he would think of something, or maybe he would throw the earrings away for her somewhere where no-one would ever think of throwing them, somewhere where they could never be found, not ever. Whatever happened, Lorcan would surely tell her what to do, or Joseph, or Sean. Someone at the cottage would tell her what to do.

Ottilie would never forget jumping out of that window and the feel of the soft earth as it seemed to rise and meet the bottom of her sandals. It didn’t matter now that she had dirtied her always immaculate white socks, that she had fallen once or twice as she escaped from the back of the hotel and out towards the straggle of cottages that lay behind it, and onto the hard, high-hedged but winding road that led up, up and away into the countryside, where lay, not the enclosed fascinations of hotel life, but fields and cows and wild birds and flowers, and a breeze that sprang up from over the top of the tall hedges, a breeze which seemed to be less salty, more mellow.

All the time Ottilie was running and running towards the cottage she had forgotten that Ma would not be there when she arrived. She knew she was dead, of course, but even so she did not expect her not to be there when she eventually arrived. Her rich laugh, her long thick red plait of hair, her lively voice overlaid with the soft Irish tone, everything that was Ma was what Ottilie was really running towards. The smell of her lavender scent, the early morning tea rituals, that was what she was racing towards, the pure love of Ma who had made Ottilie the centre of her life, her own little star, whom Ottilie loved more than anyone else in the world.

There at last was the door, but behind it was not the smell of lavender, nor the sound of the rich, gurgling laugh, nor the glimpse of the flowery frocks that she wore, but the sound of a tinny transistor radio playing, and as Ottilie burst into the cottage there was not the smell of polish, and tea on the stove, the brown pot ready to be filled with bubbling water beside the blue patterned mugs, but the strong smell of old boots flung across the door and tobacco, strong cigarette tobacco, not the kind that Mum smoked in her sitting room at the hotel, but another kind, acrid and unpleasantly real, and Lorcan was not sitting studying at the kitchen table, as she had somehow thought that he might be going to be, and Sean was not there doing his homework. Only Joseph was there, smoking a tipless cigarette, a dull look to his already mature gaze, his hair longer than it had used to be, and a tattoo on his arm.

‘Ottie!’ Joseph seemed unpleasantly surprised to see her, as if he had been expecting someone else, as if she was the very last person he wanted to see. ‘Aren’t you meant to be at the hotel?’ he went on, frowning, and already walking her back towards the cottage front door.

‘What have you been doing, Ottie? What have you been up to? Coming bursting into the place like this, whatever are you doing back here? You don’t belong here now, you know, you belong to the hotel now, you know that. Do they know you’re here, Ottie? Have you done something wrong?’ he added at last, noticing the tension in her young face.

‘Yes,’ she heard herself say. ‘I’ve done something terribly wrong, and now the police are there, and I don’t know what will happen if I don’t get rid of these like I said I would, but there’s always someone, so I can’t. I have to get rid of these earrings the way Mamma wanted but I can’t because Edith’s always there and now the police are there I can’t because someone will see me, and they might search the whole countryside and find them, but I must throw them away or something terrible will happen to me. Oh, and I so hate it when she punishes me.’

Ottilie heard herself sobbing and sobbing and then felt Joseph’s hand on her shoulder reminding her, as if she needed it, that this was possibly how she was going to feel when the police did come for her. She would feel the sudden weight, her shoulder would suddenly be pressed down by a roughened hand.

‘Ah come on now, Ottie, stop your crying and howling. There’s no need for it. Give me the earbobs or whatever they are, I’ll throw them away for you. For God’s sake, you’re carrying on as if you’ve stolen a car, not a pair of old earbobs.’ He put out his hand for them. ‘Give them to me, Ottie pet, and I’ll throw the wretched things out the window for you. Lord, you’ve got yourself in a right old state now, haven’t you?’

Ottilie could not wait to give them to someone else. She delved into her wretched pocket and put the heavy drop diamond earrings into Joseph’s hand that was already so rough and coarse due to the building work at Hultons. Now they were out of her keeping, somewhere other than her coat pocket, it was as if she had been terribly hot with a fever and now was cool and calm, and the sobbing stopped quite suddenly with a big shudder that shook her body, and inwardly she sighed with relief as she saw Joseph’s large hand take the wretched things and zip them inside his mock leather jacket pocket.

‘There now. All gone. See? And never been here either. Stop your sobbing and go home now, I’ll throw them away for you. You always did get yourself in a fine old state, right since you were a bit of a thing at Number Four. If you were in one of your states, Ma always said, there was no dealing with you. There’s not much to throwing away a pair of old earbobs, you know? You just throw them away! Even so, never mind, eh? I’ll get rid of them for you in, as they say, a twinkling of an eye, all right?’

‘But I didn’t take them, really I didn’t, Joseph. I don’t like earrings. No, they were from Mamma to throw away because—’ She stopped as she remembered Melanie’s eyes boring into hers and her words ‘something terrible will happen to you’. If she told Joseph the real truth maybe something terrible would happen to him too, to both of them. ‘I didn’t take them, Joseph, really I didn’t,’ she finished.

Joseph nodded, not believing her and not really listening either, turning away to light an untipped cigarette from the one he was already smoking, the way he would never have done if Ma were alive.

‘I don’t suppose they’re worth more than a shilling or two, are they? The earbobs, not worth more than a few shillings, I don’t suppose?’ he asked casually, still seeming not to be really interested in anything except his cigarettes, which he now turned round and round in his mouth as he sucked in the smoke and blew it up into the cold, stale, dusty air of the cottage.

‘Oh but they are, Joseph. Those earrings are worth pounds and pounds. That’s why the police are there looking for them, that’s why they might even search the pipes the way they did when old Mr Pepper lost his gold tooth and it had to be found whatever happened because it cost him over a hundred pounds.’

‘A thousand pounds, eh? Is that all? In that case we had better send them off to our favourite charity so?’ he said, half to himself. A pause, and then: ‘Right. OK. Now. Ottilie, this really is strictly between you and me. Look. Ottilie. You don’t want something bad to happen to you, now do you?’

Ottilie was sure that she did not want anything bad to happen to her, of that at least she was quite, quite sure. ‘You mean, you want me to keep something under my hat?’ she volunteered for the second time that day.

‘Exactly, Ottie. You should keep this under your hat, if you were wearing one,’ he added, joking. ‘Now, first. You mustn’t tell anyone you’ve been here, and if you don’t, well then neither shall I, all right? Look. Remember that time I knew what it was they had written in the kitchen even though Ma and Lorcan had told me not to tell you? Well, this – it’s just like that time, really. This is strictly between you and me, Ottie, and no-one else. You know, like when you go to confession and the priest never tells out? Think of me like that priest, you know, you’ve told me something, but I will never tell out. It doesn’t matter that you took these earbobs, really it doesn’t—’

‘Doesn’t matter, Ottie. Forget about it. It doesn’t matter. Really. Mrs Cartaret will get the insurance and I will get rid of them for you. Now all you have to do is to go home, clean up, and forget all about it. OK? It’s just a bad dream, and now it’s stopped. Just forget all about it. No-one knows you’ve been here now, do they? You’re quite sure?’

He opened the cottage door suddenly, but not very wide, as if Ottilie was a cat or a dog he was putting out at dusk, and Ottilie shot through the narrow opening and started once more to bolt towards the little road, the high hedges, and another world.

Oh the relief of running and running and knowing that she was free of those dreadful objects. She would always hate jewellery now, for ever and ever afterwards. She would never like jewellery, or diamonds, or anything to do with earrings, or anything at all like that. They would always make her feel sick.

The sea breeze was now strolling not whipping round the corner of the hotel but it cooled her hot cheeks as she slipped back into the empty reading room and crept up the back stairs to the sanctuary of her own suite once more.

Soon Edith would come to her, and everything would be all right. Ottilie would joke with her and everything would be like it was. But first she must wash her socks, and clean her shoes, and brush the mud from her coat. No-one must find out where she had been. Only Joseph knew, and he would never tell. He would throw away the earrings for her, probably in the bottom of the cement mixer that Mr Hulton and his men used, or in the stream that ran past the cottage where the old man had shouted at her that first day.

Except they would show up in the clear water, just as they would be sure to be found by someone local in a hedge or a field, their brightness catching the sun, or someone’s boot overturning them, or their spade. No, Joseph would find somewhere else to throw them. Perhaps he would take a bus ride and then throw them away? But the worst of it was, as Ottilie knew only too well, all that time God would be looking at him, and at her, and He would know.

Hardly minutes after Ottilie had cleaned up her clothes as best she could – the mud appearing to her frantic guilty eyes to be more like blood – Edith returned to her suite, quietly relieved that the police had searched the staff quarters and nothing had been found.

‘Leaves a nasty taste for all of us, though,’ she told Ottilie. ‘Really it does, Miss Ottilie. I just don’t understand who could have done such a thing to Mrs Cartaret. She was in tears, she was that upset by the end.’

Ottilie’s eyes strayed to the cupboard. She had hung the now damp-edged coat to the back of the wardrobe. She had placed the still damp shoes at the back of the many rows of shoes that she owned. She had washed out her white knee socks and wrapped them round and round the towel rail underneath her bath towel to dry them. All traces of the real criminal had been washed off, or wiped off. No-one could find out that it was her now, no-one.

‘Would you like me to read you a story tonight? You look too washed out to read to yourself. You know your trouble, Miss Ottilie? You have a skin too few. I reckon you’ve suffered for us all today, just as if it was you that was the thief.’

Ottilie nodded and closed her eyes. The words from the favourite chapter of her favourite book offered Ottilie nothing but consolation after the hell of the day that had been, and Edith’s voice was so warm and kind.

‘Home! That was what they meant, those caressing appeals, those soft touches wafted through the air, those invisible little hands pulling and tugging, all one way! Why, it must be quite close by him at that moment, his old home that he had hurriedly forsaken and never sought again, that day when he first found the river!’

Against the sound of Edith’s voice reading, Ottilie thought – home! She had tried to go home not just to get rid of the earrings but to find Ma and her old happy ways, to find Number Four and the dear golden days that had always seemed so full of sunlight and laughter when Lorcan, Joseph and Sean had loved her, and played with her, and not wanted her to go away from them.

‘Poor Mole stood alone in the road, his heart torn asunder, and a big sob gathering, gathering, gathering, somewhere low down inside him, to leap up to the surface presently, he knew, in passionate escape.’

Edith stopped as Ottilie turned away, her eyes straying to the old-fashioned thick chintz curtains hanging at her windows, rows of decorative bobbles adorning their swagged pelmets and running down the long edges until they ended at the carpet where they lay an inch or two beyond the floorline in extravagant spills. She had not been ‘home’ very long, but it had been long enough for her to notice that there were no such pelmets at the cottage, no extravagant spills of curtains thickly lined, no soft carpets, no kind eyes like Edith’s looking down at her with concern as they were now, only Joseph looking at Ottilie as if she was someone he now hardly knew.

‘Meanwhile, the wafts from his old home pleaded, whispered, conjured, and finally claimed him imperiously. He dared not tarry longer within their magic circle. With a wrench that tore his very heartstrings he set his face down the road and followed submissively in the track of the Rat, while faint, thin little smells, still dogging his retreating nose, reproached him for his new friendships and his callous forgetfulness.’