Grand Affair

By the time Ottilie was sixteen most of the Grand’s regular visitors had died. All the old ladies with their fur stoles and their reticules, their long dining dresses and their vague aroma of camphor, had gone, quietly and elegantly departing for another life, making way for a new and very different age where no-one stood for the National Anthem, revered the Church, or cared to know what it was to use papiers poudres to lessen the shine on their noses, and the Beatles were widely thought to be more famous than Jesus Christ.

Of course it was inevitable, it was bound to happen and everyone said so. It was only to be expected that with change came change, but knowing this did not make it any easier. Particularly for the Cartarets, and most especially Alfred Cartaret, for Alfred did not like change, to put it mildly. In fact he abhorred it. He still wore black tie and embroidered slippers for dining in the evenings even if he and Melanie were dining alone in their rooms, and he would raise his hat in greeting to everyone along the sea front outside the hotel, although it sometimes meant that by doing so in a force ten he risked seeing his precious hat from the specialist hatter in Savile Row blow off into the sea.

Observing the steady decline in the Grand’s bookings as the Sixties approached and then overtook them, Alfred had taken on less and less staff as each new season began. Those few workers that he had taken on had been foreign, but when they found it too hard to bear the low wages and the cold English winters, while the countries they had come from could offer holidaymakers air flights and a week’s break for what it cost for just a few nights at the Grand, he had been reduced to using only his hard core of local staff from the town. ‘That’s what a good hotel depends on, after all, its old timers, both behind the reception desk and in front of it. Regulars will always finally come back to regulars, you know,’ he would say, as if he had planned this all along, as if he really wanted to manage with only a quarter of his original staff.

But despite the regular staff at the Grand, despite the same Swiss chef, Blackie the porter and Thierry the head waiter, now a grandfather – despite everything’s staying reassuringly the same, with the old regular visitors dying off one by one it seemed that all Alfred’s optimism was purely and simply talk.

Nowadays no young people wanted to stay in a great old-fashioned seaside hotel with thick white linen cloths in the dining room, and thick white linen sheets in the best suites, and a staff who would not dream of presenting a newspaper on a breakfast tray without its having first been ironed. Outside the slow life at the Grand no real fires were being burned in hotel grates any more, and no-one cared to be offered three different vegetables in their own sauces with seven tablespoons of butter added to the creamed potatoes, and pancakes were no longer flambées at table in front of admiring guests who watched through lorgnettes and sighed with delighted appreciation.

Of course the reluctant knowledge of the Cartarets’ new difficulties did not dawn upon Ottilie suddenly. It came to her little by very little as she was maturing, and it was actually the very personal things which she started to notice first, beginning with her mother’s entrances down the great gold staircase.

Melanie’s long-awaited entrance into the dining room, of which Ottilie had used to be so proud, and everyone had used to like to talk about, was among the first of the changes she noticed, because it was no longer watched by all her mother’s old gentlemen admirers with their military moustaches and short-back-and-sides haircuts, but by embarrassed young waiters waiting, all too often, to serve only the proprietor and his family of two.

At first Melanie no longer bothered to dress up and come down at the beginning of the week, because even she must have realized that she had started to look just a little foolish sweeping down the stairs to an empty restaurant. Then, gradually, bit by bit, she stopped appearing at all on weekdays, until finally her grand entrance was limited to Saturday nights only, and even then only if Edith could reassure her that at least half the tables were full, otherwise she would stay in her room and talk back to the newscasters on her small Bush television, loudly denouncing the Labour government for encouraging cheap foreign holidays at the expense of the British tourist trade, her glass of gin beside her chair, her bottles of pills comfortingly near in the bathroom.

Ottilie knew that he must be alone and talking to himself because his voice sounded so low and worried and he never sounded like that in front of anyone else. She could hear him opening his desk drawer and pouring something into a glass, and she knew that he would be staring at the accounts books in his office trying hard, hoping against hope, to make them add up to more than they could possibly ever do in these dark times when not even Americans would come to England.

As she heard him saying ‘I just don’t know what to do’ yet again, and as she imagined him, his grizzled head bent over the accounts books, trying to convince himself that he would be able to make ends meet very soon, that soon the telephone would be ringing and all the old timers would be flooding back to stay with them and there would be an orchestra playing on Saturday nights, Ottilie flattened herself against the corridor wall outside his office. For some reason which she really could not understand, despite its being autumn and the hotel’s being eighty-five per cent empty she had hoped to find him in a more buoyant mood than he had been in of late.

‘What do you know about anything, anyway?’ That was all Melanie ever said to Ottilie nowadays if she made any suggestions for improvements at the hotel, and then as Ottilie turned away, knowing that it was useless to argue with a woman who took pills and drank gin at the same time, she would add, ‘I’m just sorry we took you on, really I am, just so sorry we adopted you. I know your father isn’t sorry, but I am. You’ve been nothing but a drain on us from the very beginning, a constant drain, and there’s no two ways about that. All those clothes I bought you, all those toys – I could do with that money now, you know.’

Ottilie never bothered to anwer her when she was in that sort of mood, which was practically every day now – none of the staff did. The long-suffering hotel housekeeper, Mrs Tomber, would merely raise her eyes to heaven, and even the saintly Edith would purse her lips, and then they would all carry on as they had been, trying to make up to Mr Cartaret for his wife being as she was, all well aware that they took on twice as much work nowadays because they wanted so much to get the Grand through the present very difficult times until eventually, somehow or another, the old days would come romping back and people would appreciate the ‘old-style’ grand hotel once more.

Mr Cartaret stared at Ottilie over the top of his half-moon glasses, his eyes round and melancholy. His gaze did not upset Ottilie in the least. If it had been his wife staring at her it would have been different, because what with the pills and the gin and the onset of late middle age Mrs Cartaret’s expression had become more and more sour, and the look in her eyes more coldly indifferent, more filled with dislike for herself, for everyone, most of all, it sometimes seemed to her adopted daughter, for Ottilie.

Ottilie knew that this was Mr Cartaret’s way of saying that he could not afford to send her. She also knew that he was worrying as to who would take Ottilie’s place helping out at the hotel, if only for a few weeks, that, although he never said so, he was all too aware that she dusted and cleaned and stood in for just about everyone on every floor, and that Mrs Tomber might well crumple into a heap of exhaustion at the very idea of managing without her.

Ottilie always spoke in an over-cheerful manner to her father as if she was talking to someone who was not very well. She wanted to cheer him up, make everything all right for him, bring back the old days with lots of visitors coming to the hotel instead of just poor Blue Lady for her one month every year, but otherwise none of the old guard, none of the old courteous couples with their hired chauffeurs and their pathetic pretences that their personal maids were ‘unfortunately unwell’ rather than long dead.

‘No, listen, Pappa. This Spanish girl is coming with her cousin, and they don’t mind in the least working hard, they’re really very used to it because they’ve been working at the Angel Inn these last weeks, and since the Clover House group took them over—’

‘Exactly. And as for the rest . . .’ Ottilie knew the bit about the money was going to be awkward, but she pressed on with her usual over-hurried way of talking, the words falling over themselves. ‘Well, you see, Mrs Le Martine sent me a cheque and I’ve saved and saved. Actually, it was her idea. She thinks I should. She thinks I would be of more use to you if I went to cooking school and learned a bit of French so that I could be more of a help instead of running around after everyone all day.’

Nowadays Ottilie made a joke of her adoption by the Cartarets, she found it best. Alfred looked up at her and started to say something, but then seeing the logic in her reply he stopped, hesitated, began to say something else instead, thought better of that too, and finally said, ‘Well, as a matter of fact, she might. Could well be a relative of the O’Flahertys, couldn’t she? By the way – how are all those brothers of yours?’

Because she was asking something of Alfred, because her father knew he was going to have to answer her directly rather than go in for his usual evasions, Ottilie had steeled herself for this question, or one like it. She had already anticipated that he would be sure to ask her something calculated to delay the moment when he would have to respond. Alfred always did find some remark to make her feel suddenly vulnerable, stupid or lacking in some way (sometimes if she had just washed her hair he would murmur ‘Our cat has got a long tail’ as he passed her in the corridor, or on another day if she was trying to justify something he would say ‘Oh, clever clicks, they are a plague’). Ottilie knew that fond as he might be of her (and she thought he was quite) nevertheless now that she was grown up his overriding wish seemed to be to make her feel uncomfortable for some reason. In this instance he knew, all too well, that ‘all those brothers’ of hers had long ago left St Elcombe, and with the exception of Lorcan she never heard from them, not even a card at Christmas, nothing.

As soon after he had left school as was possible, Sean had gone to Australia on an assisted passage, and Joseph – well, they all tried never to give a thought to Joseph now, it was too painful. As for Lorcan, he was training for the priesthood, which although surprising was not that extraordinary considering what a wonderful father he had been to them all when they were growing up.

‘Oh, please, Pappa,’ Ottilie continued, ignoring as she always did Alfred’s ability to refer to her roots at the most inopportune times, his funny little waspish streak that always seemed so anxious to remind her of her brothers’ defection. ‘Please let me go. It’s only for a few weeks, and I’m to stay in the business apartment of the family of one of Mrs Le Martine’s old friends on the Left Bank, and there’s a cooking school there called the Parisian School of Cookery—’

‘And I will come back with new ideas and be much more of a help in the kitchens and everywhere, I promise. Mrs Le Martine has even arranged for someone to take me round the kitchens in the Paris Ritz. Another old friend of hers works there, it seems. I will come back much better, really I will.’ Even as she pleaded with Alfred, the words bumper to bumper, trying to make him see just how much a few weeks in Paris would mean to her, Ottilie was utterly certain that it could only happen if her mother did not hear about it until it was a fait accompli, as Mrs Le Martine would call it, and Ottilie was gone.

It was the first time she had ever heard her father suggest that she should deceive, or admit publicly that he was capable of even suggesting deceit. ‘Nowadays your mother gets very upset about all sorts of things, and Mrs Le Martine is one of them. You know Mrs Le Martine never came back here after that dreadful night six years ago? She stays at the Angel Inn of all places?’ Of course Ottilie knew, she looked forward to her old friend’s visit all year. ‘Your mother has never forgiven her for her dreadful outburst that night in front of all the staff and so many of the guests, Ottilie. It was most uncalled for, I must say.’

Ottilie did not like to say so, nor would she, but she knew all about this, because from the moment that Mrs Le Martine had left that night in such a blind fury at what had happened to Ottilie they had kept in touch. Ottilie had written to her at fortnightly intervals, via Edith’s home address.

First she had, naturally, written to thank her for the money she had left in the envelope that day, and then she had written to her about what had happened at the hotel, and about saving for Lorcan’s fishing rod, and how the money Mrs Le Martine had left meant that she did not have to save for it at all, and how there was still some left and that she was saving that to buy Mrs Le Martine a Christmas present. And how Melanie had gone back to being nice to her. And not to worry because Edith had said that her mother was taking pills and going through a ‘trying time’. After that the writing of the letters, the sometimes rather one-sided correspondence (Mrs Le Martine was not a natural letter writer) had become a habit for Ottilie, something to which she looked forward, as if the act of writing the letter was a form of meeting Mrs Le Martine for tea in her suite, the way they had always done in previous years.

Thank heavens Mrs Le Martine was not like a mother to her (Ottilie realized that she had already had too many mother figures in her life) yet Ottilie had become a little like a niece, or perhaps a goddaughter to her, and she thought that this was perhaps because Mrs Le Martine had no other young people in her life, in spite of knowing so many people.

Ottilie knew that Mrs Le Martine hated her having to be what she called ‘an unpaid servant’ at the Grand, that she wanted something better for her and that was why she was always trying to think of ways to help her, and why she sent her clothes and money via Edith. She knew, as well, that Edith liked her role of ‘safe house’ for all this postal love and attention, and that Edith too, like Mrs Le Martine, wanted Ottilie to be a lady and grow up to have a better life than she had ever had.

‘You don’t want to be like me, Miss Ottilie, really you don’t. Just dancing attendance on your mother all your life, and when she goes, which she will very soon believe me, left with nothing but your memories and too old for marriage.’

As with a woman who wants to hide her age, it was her hands that had given Ottilie away. For when, on the first day of her annual visit to St Elcombe – but now in summer, and to the Angel Inn – Mrs Le Martine had taken them in her own, she had recoiled as if they had given her an electric shock.

‘Miss Ottilie! What have you been doing? Scrubbing floors and baths without gloves! Your palms are becoming like pumice stone, not at all attractive, really not at all. Oh my dear, you will never marry a gentleman, really you won’t, not if this goes on.’

Although their relationship had changed so profoundly over the years, and although Ottilie was no longer able to make her heroine laugh quite so readily as she once had because Mrs Le Martine knew now about everything, and her wonderful old brown eyes now looked at Ottilie with compassion and pity where once they had sparkled with amusement at Ottilie’s cheek, there was one aspect in which Ottilie was quite certain Mrs Le Martine would never change, namely in her determination that when she grew up Ottilie should become a lady.

‘You have nice hair, very nice hair, thick and brown. You have beautiful eyes, large and expressive, you are very well made, your hands and feet are excellent, and provided you stay slim all should be well. However, your profile is not all that we would wish because your nose is too heavy, but your chin is small and your voice undoubtedly an asset. All this means that, if you take care to work hard on yourself, you will sweep men off their feet and break great numbers of hearts. Personally I will be most disappointed if you do not make a very great marriage indeed.’

Ottilie did not dare to tell her guiding light – the person to whom she could always turn for advice, the only person to whom she could really talk or write about her feelings – she could not tell her the perfectly dreadful truth about herself, something not even Edith knew about her and to which Ottilie could never admit.

Paris had changed. Ottilie knew this because Mrs Le Martine had told her so, often and often. Although this did not stop her wanting Ottilie to go there for a ‘little polish’, she nevertheless spent a great deal of time moaning to Ottilie about the way Paris had changed so dreadfully, and, naturally, for the worse, not at all like when she had known it in the early Fifties.

Ottilie did not mind hearing that Paris had changed so much. It did not prevent her from longing to get to know this much worse Paris for herself, if only for a few weeks. As a matter of fact Ottilie was so used to being warned that life was about to be a disappointment, something to which she should undoubtedly inure herself, that she really hardly noticed how frequently Mrs Le Martine reminded her of the destruction of the old Paris, its loss of elegance, the decline of its restaurants, the lack of money to run the great private houses, or ‘hôtels’ as they were called there.

Everyone Ottilie had ever known at the hotel, every older guest who had ever stayed had always said to her about everything – even sometimes about the Grand itself – ‘Oh, but it’s not at all like it used to be’.

This phrase had been said so often to her that Ottilie found she had developed a form of double vision, so that she could never pause to admire anything, not a sparkling sea, not a beautiful bowl of fruit, not a tree in blossom outside the window, without also reminding herself some few seconds later that it could not of course be quite as beautiful as she thought it. No apple was really as crisp, no dress really as pretty, no-one as beautiful or as kind as ‘before the war’, because she had been told this so often by so many of the older guests at the hotel that she had actually come to believe it.

And as she stepped off the train at the Gare St Lazare, as the crowds hurried around her, as she picked up both her suitcases and determined on taking the Métro or the autobus, and the smell of abroad swam towards her, and the excitement of being alone and unknown in a great city washed over her, together with the knowledge that she was free for the first time in her life to do as she wished when she wished and that not even Edith knew where she was, Ottilie realized that she simply did not care if Paris was not like it used to be. She did not care how it had been, nor what she was missing from that time of ‘used to be’. For the first time in her life all she cared about was now, and here, and already within a minute of her arrival she knew deep down in her deepest heart that now was wonderful, and magical, and to hell with how it used to be. First she needed somewhere to stay.

As she had told Alfred quite truthfully Mrs Le Martine had arranged for her to lodge, free of charge, in the business apartment of an old family friend. Having taken a taxi cab and proudly worked out the correct fare and a generous tip, Ottilie now faced the great broad steps running up to the door, but she could only see them, not reach them, for there were two great locked wrought-iron gates in front of her, while beside her the large red face of someone whom she at once took to be the concierge peered at her with more than a little interest.

From now on Ottilie would have to get used to the extreme enthusiasm of the Gallic race, their inability to wash out a cardigan, buy a potato, or walk their dogs to a lamppost without reacting in the kind of way that not even the rescue of a drowning man off St Elcombe Point would have evoked in someone English.

Ottilie did not understand a word of the concierge’s welcome, but she very well understood the gates opening to allow her into the prettiest courtyard garden set about with statuary, and the beaming smile of the fat concierge, whose offer to carry one of her suitcases certainly did not go amiss.

The apartment door eased itself open, and Ottilie edged her way into a front hall set about with large, dark oak chests, a marble bust and a vast vase of dried flowers. She looked with some admiration at everything, knowing all at once that she was standing in a hall that had been decorated by a man. The choice of dark red Pompeiian walls, and navy checked rugs, and the smell of expensive cigarettes long extinguished but greatly enjoyed, had nothing to do with the feminine sex.

As it happened she had not bothered to ask Mrs Le Martine anything about the friend to whom the apartment belonged. She had merely accepted her offer with embarrassing eagerness, persuaded her father to let her off from being the unpaid under-housekeeper at the hotel, and bolted onto a boat heading for France so fast that by the time Alfred Cartaret had turned round, Ottilie was gone. And what was even better about her timing was that her mother, back from staying with a friend in Switzerland, had missed her opportunity to cancel Ottilie’s plans and tell her father that the hotel could not go on for a minute without her. She had missed having to make it her painful duty to tell Ottilie that she did not deserve any sort of rest from her life at the Grand, because nowadays she should be paying them back for everything they had done for her, and would do for her, not least giving Ottilie their name.

And now it was too late. Ottilie was gone and not even Melanie could bring her back. Edith had packed her suitcases for her so beautifully that Ottilie feared she might feel homesick when she saw just how starched and fresh Edith had made all her old clothes look, because there was no question of Ottilie being able to go abroad dressed in the latest fashions, no Jackie Kennedy-style coats and dresses for her, just old shirtwaisters and flat little ballet-style pumps, and her dark brown hair worn daily either in a pony tail or loose about her shoulders in a page-boy hairstyle held back by an Alice band of black velvet.

Not that madame la concierge in her flowered dress and with her steely little hair curlers still nestling under an old cotton scarf seemed to mind, because she carried on beaming at Ottilie despite the steep flight of stairs up to the apartment door and despite the suitcase with which she was intent on helping Ottilie.

‘Vous avez les clefs, ENFIN! Voilà, Mademoiselle, voilà! Vous allez apprendre la cuisine française? Mais c’est merveilLEUSE, ça! C’est MAGNIFIQUE! A plus tard, Mademoiselle!’ she cried, having unlocked the apartment door with a series of keys and handed Ottilie her own set.

The concierge was gone, and for a second Ottilie stood alone and quite still in the chicly decorated hall listening to the sound of her footsteps retreating down the stone staircase to the lower floors until eventually she reached the courtyard outside. Ottilie watched her from above, waddling across the cobbled stones of the central part of the courtyard garden until she reached the little door in the wall from where she doubtless observed the rest of the world coming and going and probably not realizing that pretty soon their business would be her business.

Once she had seen the concierge retreat to her little house in the wall Ottilie felt it was all right to explore the apartment. If she had not been so used to the strangeness of rooms just left, or rooms about to be occupied, she might have felt intrusive, but as it was she felt perfectly at liberty to open and shut those doors that had been left unlocked for her use, and peer into cupboards or look for a coffee maker in the kitchen without feeling that she was in some way trespassing.

From the first she could sense that the owner of the apartment must be very rich indeed, not just because the furnishings were so understated, the materials at the windows and on the beds, the linen sheets, the coffee machine, the navy blue and white china – everything in the flat was so perfectly, acceptably rich, and out of the reach of most people except the very rich – but because it smelt rich.

When she was growing up at the Grand Hotel Ottilie had always told Edith and Mrs Tomber, the housekeeper, that long before a guest arrived and she saw their suitcases, long before they rang down for room service or left out their shoes to be cleaned, or sent their chauffeur or their secretary ahead to check out their rooms – long before this happened she could smell riches.

‘I always know when someone rich is about to arrive long before they’re here!’ she would boast loudly and childishly, to Edith’s intense embarrassment and Mrs Tomber’s incredulity, but now, here in Paris, she was certain that had not the concierge led her up to Apartment E and let her in, Ottilie’s nose for wealth could have brought her to it quite on its own.

She imagined to herself as she wandered down the corridors in a sort of haze of delight that it might even have been just the smell of a rich man that would have brought her to the apartment door, the smell of tobacco, expensive aftershave and clean laundry. And following this thought came another, that with his impeccable taste, and the indefinable aroma that swathed the rooms, should they ever meet she would be quite unsurprised by the sight of him, in fact she would know him immediately.

She was sure that he would have a perfect haircut done by a barber who had known him since he was a little boy, and that his clothes would include an expensive cashmere or wool overcoat, under it a shirt or a cashmere sweater so little worn that the creases were still detectable down the sides. He would wear shoe leather that never creaked and carry hand luggage and a wallet that looked light but felt heavy, because they were old, and they would be discreetly initialled.

This was the man who owned the apartment in which Ottilie now stood, she was sure of it, just as she was sure that he would be older, not very, very old, but older, with a slight grey at his temple, and although tall, not so tall that he would have to bend down too far to kiss a woman’s hand, or put his cheek against hers while he danced with her. He would be all these things, she thought, and more, because judging from the many paintings and drawings of what must be his beautiful wife, he loved her extravagantly.

The kitchen of the apartment was pulsatingly up to date and austere, glistening with modernity, and had tall stools of which Ottilie, who was by now feeling more than a little hungry if not ravenous, took immediate advantage, sitting on one of them first to drink coffee and eat one of the croissants that she had managed to buy at the station, and then to dream, to pretend to herself that from now on her life would always be like this, that one day she would be able to be cool, and alone like this, whenever she wanted.

Soon it would be time to go out and explore the tiny winding streets around the Left Bank quarter, time to attempt to order her first meal in real French rather than ‘Menu French’, time to be surprised by the structure of real French menus. (It would be very different, she was sure, from the kind of food that Chef back at the Grand at St Elcombe imagined what he always called les français were eating.) Soon she would do all those things. Now, however, she would do nothing at all but run water in the bathroom next to the only bedroom that remained unlocked and ready for her arrival into a large old-fashioned bath, water that ran with tremendous, gushing enthusiasm from a great broad central chrome tap, and climb with difficulty over the side into the great claw-footed iron tub which she had previously scented with some bath essence given to her by the always loving Edith.

As the water closed over her limbs and the bubbles clustered around her nipples in decorative rings, Ottilie surveyed her form for the first time not as something to dress, but as a perfect young body, watching it relax in the water as someone might watch a flower that opened only at evening.

She could not let go of this overwhelming, intense joy that being alone was giving her, the knowledge that for the next few weeks no-one would telephone her, or fling open her sitting room door unasked and call for her to run down and help in the kitchens, or run up and help with bed-making for a late arrival, or an unexpected booking. In fact she had left St Elcombe in such a determined hurry that really no-one, anywhere, except Mrs Le Martine, really knew where she was, nor she imagined would they care very much, not with two Spanish girls taking her place, and life being so quiet at the Grand at the end of the season. She sighed first of all with the whole incredible thought of it, the strangeness of it, and then it seemed to her that her heart, or her soul, whichever was most sensitive and alive to life, was leaving her body and floating above the water in which she lay, rising, rising and rising until it was looking down at her lying in the great iron bath, noting her smile, her dampened hair, her utter happiness.

Dinner in the quartier was even more exciting than everything that had previously happened. The early October evening air was balmy, and she was able to stroll out across the courtyard, leave her keys with the concierge and walk the narrow streets in a dark green twin-set and plaid skirt with no jacket or coat.

As she made her way down the narrow winding streets, on the concierge’s instructions, past the great church of Ste Geneviève and on to share a corner seat of a table next to a clutch of arguing students at the famous Deux Magots café-restaurant, Ottilie could sense the optimism and the enthusiasm of the young people she passed. Strolling by her, always in groups of two or three, after the mostly middle-aged inhabitants of St Elcombe they seemed to her to be ravishingly beautiful; and since they were students, naturally intelligent and clever.

As Ottilie observed them she realized that she did not want to see them like this, she did not yearn for them to be like this, but quite simply saw them as they actually were at that moment. In a few years, of course, they would doubtless be dowdy, serious, resentful and dull, but at this moment, on this warm October evening, they knew they were, as she knew they were, as she knew she was, intelligent, beautiful and optimistic, but most of all full of the best reason for living which is, quite simply, living.

They all knew, as she knew, that for this short time in their lives they could argue and accept, tolerate and disagree with everything that the world had ever written, sung or depicted, but to be young and in Paris, to be a student and living on the old Left Bank in 1964, was to know for the rest of your life what joy and just being was all about.

Here were no crowded windows where no-one could possibly understand what they should be looking at, as in St Elcombe, no goods so diverse that someone would be hard put to discover what the shop was trying to sell. Here there was only ever one book, one piece of velvet, one hat, nothing too much, nothing too little. At last, she felt she was witnessing taste, and it was like an electric charge to her senses, it shot through her and made her dizzy with the sheer sensuality and wonder of it. If she had known how, she would have made love to it.

Up early to go to the Parisian School of Cookery and Ottilie was all too conscious of her real ignorance of classical French cooking. All the way there, a tourist guide in one hand, her American traveller’s cheques in the other, she wondered at her courage in going to a French cooking school where she would surely be a subject of extreme mockery, having never made so much as a sauce béarnaise or even a mayonnaise in her life, although she had witnessed the making of hundreds from an early age, the kitchens of the Grand having always been one of her favourite places, where she had been tolerated from the moment she had arrived as the newly adopted daughter of the old hotel.

But now, as she walked down the narrow streets towards the address in her hand, Ottilie felt an unaccustomed nervous tension, for ahead of her, in her imagination, she saw a great team of bewilderingly expert fellow pupils all clothed in white aprons, their hair held back by chef’s caps, their nails short, their eyes full of the messianic gleam that was usually only associated with religion. What a revelation, therefore, to round the corner of yet another private little courtyard set about with the kind of chairs and tables that were normally associated with small pavement cafés, and see a number of blue-rinsed middle-aged ladies with pronounced American accents eagerly heading in the same direction as herself, all inevitably clutching the same familiar books of traveller’s cheques.

Ottilie, who was now sixteen and three-quarters but, given the hard work that had been required of her the previous few years, felt at least twenty-five, smiled, and tried to think of something to say. Looking down the little queue of grey- and blue-haired women she could hardly deny that it did indeed look as if she was going to be the only student much below the age of fifty.

‘I’m much older than I look, I promise you. I’m actually a grandmother,’ she joked back. It was something she sometimes said to hotel guests, and said lightly it always passed the moment off, because at the Grand so many of the guests were always bemoaning their ages to her, or saying, ‘But you wouldn’t remember that, now, dear, would you, you’re far too young.’

Finally, when they had all signed the old, buff, barely legible cooking forms and paid their traveller’s cheques to the Parisian School of Cookery, Ottilie reflected to herself with some humour that it was just her luck to be gifted a cooking course in a neighbourhood filled with beautiful young people and find that the average age of the students she would be seeing every day was probably going to be forty-nine and a half.

The ground rules for the cooking course were explained in broken English by the proprietress of the school, and in broken French by an American woman. They were all to be given, each day, a little recipe to make, or part of a recipe. For instance if they were to have a tarte tatin for the dessert then one pupil would be required to make la pâte – the pastry – and some other pupil the actual ingredients for the tart. When they had all finished making their various recipes for the morning, the food would be taken downstairs and eaten for lunch, for déjeuner.

The silence at the start of that morning was, despite the very mature appearance of the eager students of the little school, profound. It was as Ottilie had first imagined it would be when she had been walking along with her guide in her hand – church-like in atmosphere, and yet at one moment, when she found herself looking round the large, airy, light room, she became unexpectedly moved by the sight of these undoubtedly redoubtable ladies from the East Coast, or Middle West, or wherever, of America, with their wedding rings removed, and their pinafores tied tight, struggling with such sincerity to attain that most difficult of all arts, a cooking skill.

Ottilie’s particular recipe that first day was unexpectedly easy to make, oeufs persillés. Eggs, hard boiled, cut in two, the centres removed and then mixed with mayonnaise and finely chopped parsley before being carefully replaced in the centre of the whites. Quite simple, but when they sat down to eat them as part of the hors d’oeuvres, like most classical mixtures they all agreed the result was light, or as Mrs Blandorf from Connecticut, of the especially blue rinse and the humorous eyes, said to Ottilie, ‘makes you want Easter to come round quick!’

The course stopped on the dot of half past two o’clock, and so, by some unseen agreement, Ottilie was taken off by Mrs Blandorf and her friends ‘to see the Art, dear’. As a matter of fact, as Ottilie readily admitted to herself, it was they who were dear, solicitous and charming, and full of the kindly acceptance of life that Ottilie had so often observed in the older women who lunched or dined at the Grand. As if life, having thrown itself at them, having allowed them to survive childbirth, husbands, the domestic grind, and their own natures, was now, in these short years left before the real burden of age was upon them, allowing them a little time at last to relax and enjoy themselves in a way that they perhaps had not done since they were teenagers, or perhaps had never done.

Their gaiety was infectious, and their enthusiasm undeniable. It did not matter if they were all hopping on and off the Métro, or an autobus, or just walking, to them everything was enjoyable, despite their ages, or because of them perhaps. Ottilie sensed that they, like her, had stepped out of the normal day-to-day routine of their lives and were enjoying the lack of daily grind to the hilt, up to and possibly well above the actual experience, because there was no-one to reprove them or make fun of their sincerity, no member of their family ready to cut them down to size and sigh ‘oh Mother’. No-one to tell them to ‘be their age’. Most of all, for a few weeks anyway, there were no housewifely duties to weigh them down, or in Ottilie’s case no hotel visitors or staff to keep them on the hop with their demands.

‘I can’t think when I last enjoyed myself this much,’ Mrs Blandorf sighed during the second week of their course. ‘I keep saying to myself “Jeannette Blandorf, just imagine if you had missed out on all this.”’

There was a small silence as all of them, comfortably seated at their café tables and watching the world strolling by, imagined between sips of strong French coffee that they had not seen the advertisement in the magazine or newspaper, imagined that they had not in a moment of determined independence had the courage to write off for details, face their husbands or their old mothers or their bossy, demanding children and say gaily, ‘Just off for a cooking course to Paris, dear!’

‘I don’t know about you, but it’s going to be a bit different facing Ludgrove over dinner after this,’ Mrs Blandorf continued. ‘And as for bridge on a Wednesday, what will they say when I hand round my tartelettes au jambon en chemise?’

‘Perfection! Just so long as you get me to do the pastry,’ Ottilie murmured, at which of course they were all off again, laughing about absolutely nothing really, laughing not because Ottilie’s oblique reference to Mrs Blandorf’s terrible hand at pastry had been particularly funny, but because they felt happy, which after all, Ottilie thought, as she walked slowly back to the apartment, leaving them all to return to their hotel, was surely the best form of laughter?

Ottilie stared at Alfred’s handwriting. The writer was careful, intelligent, and literate, the handwriting told her. Out loud she said to the silent flat, ‘I don’t want to open this!’ and her heart started to beat really rather fast, as if she had been running. Just seeing her father’s handwriting brought her present happiness and freedom into terrible contrast with that other existence. It was as if she was once more set to watch her own life on television, only now in black and white, not in colour, and the sound would be turned down so low that she would miss every other word, so much was she in love with Paris, with the flat, with the narrow little streets, with the cooking course, the cafés, the art galleries, the sound of French.

‘I’m not going to read it,’ she went on, still aloud to the flat. ‘Not only am I not going to read it, but it has never arrived.’ She knew it would be full of I am afraid your mother is right, you should have told her of your plans to take a month off long before you left, or The Spanish girls, as I predicted, are less than satisfactory and we really must consider the possibility of your returning early.

As soon as she saw the letter Ottilie knew that if she read it she might as well just pack up and leave for St Elcombe that minute. Reading it would mean that the spell was broken. Paris would be over and with it all the laughter, and all the gaiety. Mrs Blandorf’s pastry would no longer be funny, and the ‘girls’ with their blue rinses and their good humour and their ability to laugh at themselves would never be the same again. And, as with a holiday photograph containing the smiling faces of long-forgotten people who had once seemed so glamorous, but now in a cheap snapshot could be seen to be all too ordinary, Ottilie would be hard put to it to remember why it had all seemed so magical.

‘You’re not going to do this to me!’ she called to Alfred back in St Elcombe as she saw him in her mind’s eye staring hopelessly at his ledger books, and taking the letter she tore it up and threw it in the wastepaper basket.

Tonight she and the ‘girls’ had planned to revisit a little club called L’Abbaye which was tucked behind the church of St Germain des Pres. There they would once more listen to the singing, once more become saddened or delighted by the songs. Nothing in that letter torn into tiny pieces and left in the chic wastepaper basket was going to stop that.