Grand Affair

Matters might have been a little easier for her if Melanie, who after all still drank far too much gin, and had been prescribed tranquillizers for ‘her nerves’, had been so out of control that she was not aware of what was going on. Unfortunately, with her looks slipping away from her, it was as if Melanie was quite determined to make all around her appear as ugly as she now felt herself becoming.

‘I cannot understand why you were so selfish, so selfish as to think that it was all right to simply stay on in Paris not getting in touch, not telephoning. It did not seem to me to be possible. With all that you meant to Edith, all that you owed poor Edith, how could you just stay on in Paris ignoring the whole thing? I could not believe that anyone could be that selfish. What an appallingly selfish view of the world you must have, Ottilie, appallingly. Thank God, if the rest of the world is to be like you, thank God that your father and I will not live to see it. A world peopled by such selfishness does not seem possible. Not possible. It will be an appalling place. Edith asked for you, you know, she asked for you many times, and I just had to tell her, “Edith, Miss Ottilie is in France and I am afraid she just does not want to come back. We have told her you are gravely ill, Edith, but she will not come back to see you.” We had to say that. There was nothing more we could say. We had to tell her the truth.’

Happily for her, over the nearly ten years of her adoption, Ottilie had been able to develop a way of mentally sidestepping what happened to her, a way of pushing the hurt aside, so that it stayed pulled back like a curtain, while she strained every effort to concentrate only on the light ahead through the windows to the side of that curtain which was so often patterned with misery and guilt.

And so now to stand back from Melanie’s constant torrent of sadistic words, her enjoyment, her revelling in the misery of Ottilie’s supposed guilt, Ottilie imagined what Edith would say if she heard Melanie at her. (Edith would always use that expression, ‘Been at you again, has she, Miss Ottilie?’)

With that kind of remembrance Ottilie found would come reason, and light, and even a little colour, imagining Edith with her calm eyes, her close-permed crisp hair, her cameo brooch at the neck of her uniform dress, standing composedly in Ottilie’s suite and saying something ordinary and calming so that neither the words nor the beatings would hurt quite so much, knowing that only ordinariness could restore the kind of calm that was necessary for a child to be able to face another day.

‘Take no notice of her, Miss Ottilie, she’s in one of her bad moods, just take no notice. Mrs Tomber and I, we just ignore her, and she soon comes round, really she does.’

Ottilie and Edith had been very close. Edith and Mrs Cartaret had not been really close even though Edith had worked at the Grand for so many years, which was probably why Melanie had not gone to the funeral or even sent a daisy. Ottilie knew this from Mrs Tomber, who whispered it, her eyes narrowed with shock and dislike, while they were making up beds together.

‘You would have thought, Miss Ottilie,’ the housekeeper muttered, ‘you would have thought that after all this time she would have had the common decency to go to poor Edith’s funeral, but no. She sent Blackie and myself and Mr Cartaret, while she just sat at home with her gin and her television. What a thing!’

But her mother’s apparent dislike of Ottilie was nothing compared to the open distaste now displayed by the staff at the Grand. It seemed that they were determined as one to stand behind Mrs Cartaret, ‘Madame’ as they still called her, in their open hostility to Ottilie when she returned from Paris.

This open disapproval was made all too evident at every hour of the working day, as they turned silently away from Ottilie when she spoke to them, or kept their eyes averted as she passed them, or moved pointedly away when they saw her approaching. It was difficult for them not to speak to her sometimes, since nowadays she was in charge of most of their activities, but they kept what they had to say to a minimum, and every sudden silence that fell as she approached signalled to Ottilie the one word – Coventry.

She had seen this form of punishment before, seen it happening to other people, new maids if they flirted too much with Chef or upset Mrs Tomber, or failed to give Blackie the attention he so craved, and she had been unable to prevent it. She had seen the misery it caused the victim but she had never imagined that it could happen to her, to ‘Miss Ottilie’ the spoilt daughter of the Grand Hotel, St Elcombe.

Of course it only gradually dawned on her what was happening, as day after day her sudden entry into the kitchens or the lobby or the reception rooms of the hotel would be greeted with an equally sudden silence, and then, eerily, laughter and talk would resume the moment she left, the sound following her through the swing doors and up the service stairs until with relief she reached the ground floors and the prospect of the sea beyond the old glass doors.

At one particularly low point Ottilie found herself digging her fingers into her hand and realized that her knuckles must be turning white in the effort not to beg the maids not to turn away when she addressed them so that she ended up speaking to the backs of their heads. On other days it was all she could do to stop herself imploring Blackie to stop whistling in her face when he was spoken to about the filthy state of his shoes. Or Chef just to look at her when she discussed the next day’s menus with him – menus which Ottilie, after her month in Paris, had seen needed to be considerably revised. But somehow hearing the flat, uninterested tone he used with her, and watching how he, like the rest of the staff, appeared to have mastered the technique of looking anywhere except at her, Ottilie always stopped just in time. Life with Melanie had taught her the hard lessons early. You did not beg, you did not cry, you smiled and got on with it.

Or as Edith would say, quietly and prosaically in her calm voice, ‘As long as you’ve got your health and strength, Miss Ottilie, that’s all that matters in this life.’

Late at night, alone in her room, Ottilie could not avoid realizing how miserable her life was, but back out there, in the hotel, moving up and down the stairs, back and front, she carried on, determined to find an answer to the deadlock while wondering, night after night as she lay gazing at the darkness, what she actually could do? She knew that she had to win against the staff somehow or her position would become untenable, but how?

And then it came to her, and it was the words of that dear old major general who used to come to the hotel for August which came back to her, for in between describing those battles that made the very name of England and the English so invincible, he would stop and murmur some phrase of sweet old-fashioned advice.

‘People are like that,’ she thought, looking round, knowing that the way she walked, the look in her eyes, everything about her must have altered so substantially that a silence fell at the moment of her entry, but not the old sullen silence, not the ‘here she comes, let’s bait her, boys’ silence, a quite different sort of silence.

‘Right. Now, Chef,’ Ottilie said, smiling, ‘I should like your attention, please. To begin with the escargots last night. They were far too salty. I heard Lady Saltrim complain of it, and when I tasted one down here I must say I agreed with her. Make a note, please.’ She handed him a small notebook and pencil, which because he had been wrong-footed Chef took, in spite of himself. Ottilie then turned to the young pastry chef, a new cheeky so-and-so with a Beatle haircut and an identity bracelet. ‘No jewellery in the kitchen, Dean, please. And the petits fours that you made yesterday, much, much too big. Trop grands, if you understand French, which you should if you want to cook better. Guests only want something to pop into their mouths, they do not want to have to plough through sweetmeats, really they don’t.’ She turned back to Chef who was now reddening in fury. ‘No more pastry around the fillet, please, Chef. I know it is fashionable but I find it heavy. In future the fillet is to be presented individually, if you would, in the classic manner – lightly fried in butter and olive oil and served on a piece of rounded bread fried in the same juices. Here at the Grand we must try to avoid fashion fads and stick to the classical. It can never fail us.’

Some of what Ottilie had just said was parroted straight from her cooking classes in Paris, but none of the staff would know that. She turned her attention to the kitchen now. It was way below what it should be in terms of cleanliness. She had known this for some time, but had not had the courage or given herself the authority to say what had to be said, but since neither Alfred nor Melanie ever came down to the kitchens a decline in standards was inevitable. She started to pull out saucepans and cooking pots from cupboards and turn them over, all the time talking, talking, saying over and over, ‘Oh no, no, this will not do, no and not this either.’

When she had finished, most of the contents of the kitchen were on the stone-tiled floor. Ottilie stood back to survey her handiwork.

‘Good. Well, that is something to be getting on with, anyway.’

She smiled round at them, very sweetly.

‘I’ll be back to inspect your work in a couple of hours.’

She turned to go, still smiling. How right the old general had been. Since they had sent her to Coventry, there was now not a thing they could say, because to do so would be to break their own code of silence. Effectively she had used their own strength against them.

‘I’m very sorry I didn’t come back from Paris, Edith, really I am. I didn’t know that you had suffered a heart attack. I’m afraid I threw away the letter telling me because I wanted to stay and I didn’t want to come back. I hope God punishes me for not coming back to see you when you had had a heart attack, but I want you to know that I truly would have done if I had known.’

After she had finished her speech, said aloud as if Edith was standing in front of her, Ottilie put her flowers on the grave. They looked rather odd because there was as yet no tombstone, but nevertheless she knew from Mrs Tomber that Edith was lying in the ground underneath the earth all right, because Edith always had said that she would prefer a nice old-fashioned burial and no new-fangled crematorium, nothing like that, that was not her style at all. As she walked back towards the road she raised her eyes up to the frowning sky and knew for certain, and she could not have said why, that Edith was watching her. No matter what Melanie said or did in the next years or months, or weeks or days, nothing would take away from Ottilie’s feeling that Edith was quite definitely watching her, and smiling.

‘Madame put it about that you knew Edith was ill from the first, that you knew all about her heart attack, and didn’t bother to come back, because you were having too nice a time of it in Paris,’ Mrs Tomber kept saying, as if reminding Ottilie of why she was being ostracized made any difference at all.

But if Ottilie was effectively now placed in Coventry by all those people who she had once thought were her friends, she still had to work as hard as ever in the hotel, stepping in and substituting at the last minute for anyone who happened to have a cold, or a cough, or some disaster at home that prevented them from coming to work. And it did not stop Melanie treating her as her personal maid and calling for her at any time of the day or night, sometimes as late as midnight, and sometimes as early as five in the morning if she could not sleep and wanted someone to bring her tea.

‘Your mother will never get over your betrayal of Edith, not coming back to see her in the last hours, you know that,’ Alfred told Ottilie factually, at least once or twice a week, usually when he was about to hand her one of his neatly written lists of things to do.

Great Suite needs preparing for Mrs Ballantyne.

China in the drawing room cabinets needs washing, full complement of Victorian matching dinner plates, very valuable, be extra careful please and do not enlist any of the other maids to help you as they are liable to be careless.

So although Ottilie had been effectively frozen out by the staff she was still expected to deal with all the diplomatic problems concerning the running of them, those delicate, embarrassing problems with which Alfred did not care to deal, and Melanie could not be left to deal.

As Mrs Tomber, who couldn’t care less who talked to whom just so long as the hotel was running along smooth lines, often remarked ruefully, ‘For someone who was once a great beauty Mrs Cartaret has a tongue like a viper, and that’s for sure, Miss Ottilie.’

After a while the silence started to become oppressive, so oppressive and finally so miserable that sometimes Ottilie would stop on the stairs leading up to the Great Suite – which during these dark days was hardly ever occupied except once a year by poor, mad Mrs Ballantyne in her strange-looking New Look 1948 clothes – and having paused for a minute, she would stare ahead to the sea, suddenly and crazily attracted to the idea of running down to the beach and throwing herself into the waves. With all the power of her imagination she would feel the waves closing over her, the dreadful cold reality of it, the weight of the water in her clothes, and then feel herself sinking into the dark water, feel the seaweed entangling her and finally see herself dragged out to sea, and oblivion, her body to be eaten by fishes, her soul committed for ever to dark despair.

But then she would remember her debt to the Cartarets for adopting her and bringing her to the Grand, her nursery specially done, her childhood filled with old people who spoilt her, Edith always helping her get over things, the staff in nicer days before Paris, when they did not disapprove of her, when they all laughed and joked with her, when they still liked her, and it would seem unfair to leave the Grand so suddenly, leave them all in the lurch. Most of all Edith would not approve, and Ottilie could imagine her shaking her head and saying, ‘You don’t want to cause misery, Miss Ottilie, do you?’

She still wrote to Mrs Le Martine, of course, but nowadays for some reason she heard even more rarely from her old friend. It was almost as if, Ottilie having written to tell her she had met Monsieur in Paris, Mrs Le Martine knew she could no longer pretend to be someone else in front of Ottilie, that now they both knew too much about each other to be able to have the jokes and the fun any more, that not even talking about ‘Shah-nelle’ suits and the newest fashions would be very amusing to either of them.

Yet Ottilie kept on writing to her mentor, keeping the tone as cheerful as Ottilie herself nowadays never seemed to feel, and holding all the while to the idea that the Grand was still its old self. That pretence too Ottilie kept up, even though she realized that Mrs Le Martine could not really believe in such a romantic notion any more.

As time crept by Paris seemed a century ago, and Ottilie could never hear a French accent or hear a street accordion or watch a French film without a depth of nostalgia which was not really in keeping with having spent only four weeks there. Again, to cure herself of her homesickness for those few weeks she took to writing letters to her acquaintances from that time. But, unlike Mrs Le Martine, Ottilie’s American friends from the Parisian School of Cookery actually wrote back.

Their replies were so prompt, and so enthusiastic, Ottilie knew at once that they too felt the same nostalgia for those few carefree weeks they had spent together trying to master the secret of the omelette, trying to find out why a teaspoon of sugar in a vinaigrette dressing made all the difference to the taste of that same dressing.

Mrs Blandorf always ended her letters, ‘Now you take care of yourself, dear, do you hear?’

‘Sounds kind of oldish for a young girl at that hotel of yours, Ottilie!’ Mrs Zeiger kept insisting in her letters, in between graphic descriptions in large black writing of how her navarin de mouton had gone down ‘about as well as fried buffalo’ with her guests at a recent winter dinner party.

Over the next eighteen months Ottilie began to realize that Mrs Zeigler was all too right. It was oldish at the Grand, and sometimes it seemed to Ottilie even a little macabre, what with Blackie going by in his uniform, now far too small, with his middle-aged face and his old-fashioned way of saluting, and his pillbox hat more suited to the page boy of nineteen he had been than to the venerable hall porter he had become.

Ottilie had never been to school and made friends of her own age. She had stayed in Paris in a middle-aged man’s flat, she had been adopted by a couple who were already well into middle age, and now she was working alongside a staff most of whom were nearing retirement. As the months went by she sometimes felt so desperate to talk to someone nearer her own age it was difficult to stop herself rushing out into the street and collaring the nearest boy or girl and dragging them into the Grand for coffee or a drink. Lorcan she never saw except at Christmas. Sean she never heard from. Joseph she had seen in the magazine, but would never, she supposed, hear from again either. It was as if the early part of her life had never existed, as if she had never had brothers.

She went to bed with hands and feet throbbing from the work she had undertaken during the day. Sometimes she would wake up in the night, her heart beating too rapidly, and know that she was putting herself under too much strain, but be quite unable to work out how she could alter anything. If she did not do the work, who would? If she was not there to answer Melanie’s calls for tea or coffee or a gin and tonic at all times the task would fall to Alfred, and he did not have his old energy any more. Sometimes just hearing him sigh so deeply was enough to send Ottilie scurrying away to try to work harder and longer than ever, just to try to make up to him for the sadness of the times, for the life that had departed from the hotel, for the twentieth century speeding by too quickly for him, for everything that he had known and loved going, for the old days disappearing never to come back.

And then suddenly it happened, or at least not ‘it’ but Philip.

If Blackie or Mrs Tomber had suggested to Ottilie that as she watched Philip walking into the foyer that morning she was watching a knight strolling into her life she would have believed them. For with his tall, blond, patrician looks, his just right faded sports jacket worn with a newly fashionable denim shirt and faded corduroys, his slip-on shoes, and his greatcoat with the military buttons that had once belonged to a great-uncle, he seemed no less.

‘Philip.’

Ottilie said his name as factually as possible in case he had not come to look for her. He was actually leaning on the reception desk, his blond, thick, curly hair brushed back, laughing and teasing the receptionist who wore butterfly glasses with silver pieces set into them and was obviously becoming pink and flustered under the pressure of his attentions, but although Ottilie could see at once that he was a man as her eyes took him in all she could really see was the young boy after whom she had used to run through the woods as he attempted to call down owls, or who sat on her legs as she tried to tickle trout.

‘Philip.’

As Philip heard her voice, he turned.

‘Miss Ottilie Cartaret, I do declare.’ Despite spending so much of their growing up times together, walking and fishing in the warm Cornish springs and summers, or, on rainy days, what Philip called ‘mucking about in the house,’ she had not seen Philip for several years. And now he was in the Army.

‘You’re home on leave.’

Philip looked behind him jokingly, pretending that he thought she was addressing someone else, and then turned back to Ottilie, saying, ‘So I am.’

‘It’s really nice to see you again.’

She could not help sounding formal, but she felt so happy to see him it was difficult not to get what he in the old days of their childhood would have called ‘soppy’, and it did not seem to matter either if it was only for a few minutes before he went off to meet someone else in the restaurant, or the cocktail bar, because just seeing him was a burst of sunshine in her otherwise dreary day-in-day-out existence.

‘I would hardly have known you,’ Philip told her, drawing her over to the other side of the foyer, well away from the receptionist. ‘Are you well?’

As Ottilie looked at Philip she remembered that they had always enjoyed an unspoken closeness when they were growing up, as if in each other’s company they could find solace against the pain they had both experienced. Whether it was playing with Ludlow, his tame hare, or sadly burying him, or arranging military battles with his old lead soldiers together, they had always been at ease, not needing to say very much, just understanding each other and being happy. So now it was not very surprising for Ottilie to see that Philip’s eyes were full of concern. But he did not say ‘My God you’re so thin’ or ‘You look twenty-five not eighteen’, he just looked down at her, and once he put his hand on her arm as if to steady her.

The words that he was thinking went, as always with Philip, unsaid, but what he actually did say was, ‘Care to come to a party, Miss O? Constantia’s back at Tredegar for all of two minutes, and after four seconds finds herself as bored as an unpicked raspberry. Needs must we give a party, needs must we ask the whole neighbourhood. She has a list as long as the kitchen table, which is very long indeed. I have a list as short as what Nurse used to call my pinkie and on it is only one name. Yours.’

If she had not known it would be such a dreadful thing to do, Ottilie would have burst into tears there and then. A party. People of her own age. Music. Dresses. Laughter.

‘I should love to come to a party, Philip. If I can, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to.’

‘Of course you can come to a party, Cinders. You’re not telling me you’re previously engaged, or married with seven children already, are you?’

‘Oh no, nothing like that,’ Ottilie agreed hastily. ‘Good heavens, no. What it is . . . What it is – it’s here. It’s sometimes very difficult to get time off from here.’

‘Time off from here?’ Philip looked round the empty foyer with feigned amazement and a patrician mockery. ‘Time off from here,’ he repeated. ‘You’re not a night nurse, or a surgeon needed for a brain operation. Of course you can have time off from catering to pampered guests. All the old trouts can do without you for one night, surely?’

‘It’s a bit difficult at the moment, particularly if it’s a Saturday. Is it a Saturday, your party?’

‘Yes, Ottilie, it is a Saturday, Ottilie, because that is the night when everyone from London is usually down, I think you’ll find, Ottilie. Mondays are not good for parties, nor are Sundays. Saturdays we find fit the bill and then we can snore through the sermon in Sunday church, wop our roast beef, and fall into yet another recovery sleep.’

Philip’s conversation mirrored a warm normality, reflecting as it did the basic acceptance that life could be fun, that behaving just slightly badly was good for you, that youth was for being young. Yet although his words were light and flippant they filled Ottilie with sadness, contrasting as they did so starkly with the kind of dialogue that was her everyday fare.

‘You are such a deep disappointment to me. When I think about it, really it was after you arrived that everything started to go so wrong. You were a mistake, I’m afraid. We should have left you where you were at that dingy little cottage with those brothers of yours.’

‘If it is a Saturday then you will never be allowed off, is that what you’re saying?’

She had not actually said anything.

‘It’s very difficult,’ Ottilie finally volunteered, dropping her voice, and quietly indicating for him to follow her out to the green sward in front of the hotel. ‘You see, my mother, Mrs Cartaret, she is really very ill at times nowadays, with her nervous depressions, and my father is getting quite old, looking after her, the strain of this place. You know the sort of thing? And so it’s very difficult for me to get away.’

Philip took Ottilie’s hands in a very grown-up sort of way, in a way that made her realize at once that he must have already made love to girls. But having taken her hands he now looked down at them.

‘Tut, tut, Miss Ottilie, what would Edith say to these? Not the hands of a lady, are they? Have we been leaving off our hand cream at night?’

The very idea of having enough time to put on hand cream at night made Ottilie smile suddenly, but looking up into Philip’s eyes and remembering the happiness of running all over Tredegar with the Great Danes and pretending to be characters from some old book they were both reading, she heard herself say in a calm, accepting way, ‘Edith’s dead, you know, Philip. She died of a heart attack while I was in Paris. She had one, and then she had another, and then she died.’

‘Well she would do, probably, after two,’ Philip said, using his reasonable, unemotional and considered voice, the one he had always used when something not very nice, or very sad, had happened, but also when he wanted to make people laugh, or cheer them up.

Ottilie suddenly started to laugh, at the same time putting her hand over her mouth, feeling the sudden roughness of it, knowing that her eyes were underlined with tiredness, black patches which must make her laughing seem a little hysterical to an onlooker.

‘Oh, Philip, you always were like that,’ she gasped, half bent double. ‘Edith loved you for it. She used to say “Mr Philip’s so naughty with his gallows humour, really he is.”’

‘Listen, let’s cut the cackle and face this thing head on, Carruthers. It’s your mother who’s going to be a pill about this, isn’t it? She’s the one who’s going to be putting up the objections. So why don’t I go to her and say “Mrs Cartaret, I know you want to do your best by us boys who are about to be posted abroad, and I happen to be one of them, so stop being such an old bag and let your daughter go to a party on a Saturday night for once.” How about that? Should do the trick I should have thought.’

For one glorious moment Ottilie imagined the scene. She imagined Mrs Cartaret, gin glass in one hand, cigarette in the other. She imagined the tall, patrician figure of Philip Granville standing so tall and handsome in her sitting room, bringing a much needed breath of fresh air into it, making it seem as stuffy and as claustrophobic as it absolutely was, and it was wonderful. Then she remembered something else.

‘It would be lovely, Philip, really it would, but it’s impossible. You see if you go and ask her, she’ll say yes, of course she will, but then she will throw a fit when the night comes, and I won’t be able to leave anyway, so it’s better to be realistic about it, really. And then there’s my father. She takes it out of him so dreadfully if I do something I want to – when I went to Paris it was hell on wheels here, I believe. She even accused him of trying to get off with one of the Spanish girls. You know, she’ll go that far, she really will.’

‘In that case,’ Philip said, after a short pause during which he frowned and gazed out to sea, ‘in that case there is nothing for it but go AWOL.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Come to the party and to hell with the consequences. Spike your mother’s drink, put too much gin in her martini, stick a sleeping pill in her Horlicks, do something, but come to the party. Or else.’

He started to walk off towards his car.

‘Or else?’ Ottilie called after his tall, fair-haired figure, his dark old-fashioned guards officer’s coat with the wonderful swagger to the back. ‘Or else?’

‘Or else I will never speak to you again.’

‘Really?’

‘Really. You’re dining with us first, by the way. We haven’t farmed you out, don’t worry. And Constantia says if you haven’t a dress, she’ll lend you one.’

‘Oh, I have a dress, all right,’ Ottilie called after him.

She planned her Saturday night deception most carefully, and like a good criminal she based her plans most securely on the character of her victim. Her mother was currently what Philip would call ‘screwy’ in that she could not be relied upon for anything except to drive Ottilie and the staff as mad as herself. But if Ottilie could manage to persuade Melanie to dress up in one of her old dinner gowns and accompany Alfred to the dining room for dinner it would mean that for once she could be counted upon not to be at the other end of her extension line summoning Ottilie every few minutes until late into the evening.

‘I’m too tired. Really, I don’t feel like it, Ottilie,’ Melanie moaned. Ottilie knew that she was by no means too tired, and it was far more likely that she would prefer to stay upstairs so that she could drink more than was possible if she was in the public rooms. She had put on a great deal of weight lately, but still looked very handsome, as handsome as a woman half her age. Ottilie had persuaded her father to buy her a new evening dress and present it as a surprise, a dress in her new, rounder size, but nevertheless a very expensive dress.

‘Not too tired to open the parcel that has just arrived for you, surely?’

Ottilie knew that it was always best to use a soft coaxing voice with her when she was on her second or third gin of the morning. Anything more would bring on tantrums or one of those quick switches of mood that came from nowhere and so terrified even the oldest members of the staff.

The dress in the parcel was obviously expensive, but Melanie’s expression as she took it out of its fresh tissue paper was that of a child torn between two moods. Part of her wanted to love it, because it was expensive and because Alfred had obviously chosen it with great care – new sizing, perfect cut, beautiful deep maroon which set off her blonde looks so well. The other part of her wanted to find fault with it, wanted to say ‘It won’t fit, it’s the wrong colour, and besides Capucci is not really my designer’ so that she could stay behind upstairs with her gin and not accompany her husband down for dinner, which would mean making an effort, thinking of someone else beside herself.

‘Oh, yes, your diamond earrings – they would be fine.’

Ottilie could hardly bring herself to say the words, or look at the costume jewellery to which Melanie was referring, hardly keep her eyes from straying towards anything else rather than watch her mother clipping on a pair of paste earrings, which nevertheless looked very fine on her.

‘Are you ready, dear?’

Alfred was calling, and Melanie smiled at the sound of his voice, and her own lifted for the first time for years, and she called back, ‘Yes, Alfred, I am coming, as soon as may be, darling.’

‘They’re playing our song, Melanie.’

This was an old joke of theirs and one that Ottilie remembered from the time when she had first arrived at the Grand, when she had first climbed what had then seemed to be so many very steep stairs to Melanie’s suite, holding Edith’s hand, and preparing to say ‘goodnight and God bless’ to her new mother and father.

But now it seemed to Ottilie, looking at them, that she would always remember them tonight, how handsome they both looked, and how devoted they seemed, with Alfred holding out his arm in the old way, and Melanie taking it with practised elegance, and the two of them making their way, slowly, oh so slowly, down the stairs as if they were stepping out to some music that only they could hear.

‘And you, Ottilie, would you please follow?’

‘I am afraid I have a terrible migraine. I must go and lie down.’

Alfred nodded. He didn’t seem to care in the least.

‘Oh, very well. How sad. It would have been nice. But still.’

They continued down the stairs, and Ottilie plunged off in the direction of her own suite, thinking only of how many minutes it would take her to dress, lock up, climb down the back stairs and thence onto the fire escape, and into her old Deux Chevaux to drive out to Tredegar in time for dinner.

She had already put on her nail varnish, toes and fingernails both, donned her undies and her sheer stockings and made up her face (but not put on her lipstick in case Melanie, who did not approve of her wearing it, noticed it) so that her transformation was practically instantaneous when she returned to her suite.

Just before she turned to see herself in the mirror, kicking the short train of the dress behind her, it occurred to Ottilie that she might no longer look as she remembered herself looking the night she went out with Monsieur to the Tour d’Argent, that although her hair was freshly washed and knotted in the classical manner in the nape of her neck, that although she had been careful to go to bed early the night before and to take a long bath, after all the long hours of labour she had been putting in, the dress might look ridiculous. She knew she had lost weight and that her appearance in the drab dress of her uniform, in flat shoes and black stockings, had actually shocked Philip, who only remembered her from the days when she was little Ottilie Cartaret, the pampered young girl who belonged to a successful hotel.

Certainly the dress did not cling with quite the same confidence as it had clung to her that wonderful night in Paris, but it was still the same exquisite cut, and although it might now be a little less tight-fitted it was still made up of the same iridescent silk, the Medici collar still framed her face, setting off her dark hair as precisely as a frame to a picture, and the train still whispered and swayed behind her as she rehearsed walking in the tall, high-heeled delicate evening sandals that Monsieur had chosen for her that memorable evening when it had seemed to both of them the whole restaurant was about to applaud as Ottilie swayed confidently towards their table watched admiringly by what seemed to be the whole of fashionable Paris.

Confident that she could still manage both the train and the high-heeled shoes, Ottilie slipped them into a shoe bag and herself back into her flat work shoes and started for the door of her suite. Just in time she heard voices and knew that one of them belonged to Mrs Tomber. With second sight, and before the housekeeper had even started to put her pass key in the door, Ottilie fled back to her bathroom, and flung herself inside.

‘Are you all right, Miss Ottilie?’

Ottilie acted out a groaning sound.

‘Just a migraine, making me feel a bit sick, Mrs Tomber.’

‘Madame wanted to know if you were all right. She wanted you downstairs with them, but I’ll tell her you’re still poorly.’

Seconds later she was gone, and happily it was Saturday night and she would soon be driving off in the opposite direction to that which Ottilie would be taking to Tredegar, off to stay with her sister for the weekend as she always did. To be safe Ottilie waited and listened, and then finally, heart in mouth, shoes in hand, she slipped out into the empty hotel corridor, and down the back stairs as planned until finally she climbed carefully down the outside fire escape and ran towards her second-hand, brown Deux Chevaux.

Of course it would not start, would it?

‘Come on, Oscar,’ she prayed as with each turn of the key the engine spluttered into life only to shudder back into silence. ‘Come on, Oscar, come on!’ Finally she closed her eyes and for the first time for years, and to her immense shame because it would seem so trivial to someone else, she prayed, to Edith, to God, to Ma, far above her. ‘Please!’

She felt too nervous to join the other women and their black-tie evening-dressed partners who were even now following each other down the wide path leading to the great front door. For Ottilie, unlike all the confident figures walking ahead of her, was without a partner, and for a moment it seemed to her that she always would be, and that the women walking ahead of their men with that slow solemn walk that derives from coping with the length of one’s evening dress would all ignore her. Doubtless the men would too. Having at last arrived, against all the odds, at Tredegar all Ottilie could now visualize was passing the dinner party that lay ahead of the dance ignored and in silence. She saw that she was likely to be some sort of pathetic wallflower decorating the sides of the ballroom while everyone else danced the night away in the company of people who, while they might be all too well known to them, would be completely unknown to Miss Ottilie Cartaret.

That she should experience such feelings was not really very surprising, particularly since she had not visited Tredegar for such an age. In fact, now that she was here at last it seemed to her that she had hardly known it, she had forgotten so much. Forgotten that there were two large eagles with spread wings at the gates, and that the drive was over a mile long but not dark and overcrowded with rhododendrons as were so many Cornish drives. The loveliness of Tredegar’s Elizabethan façade was easily seen long before the visitor started to tread the long path that led up to the old oak door, which meant that Ottilie, along with the evening’s other visitors, could see just how beautiful Tredegar was long before they arrived. Set in perfectly rolled green lawns and surrounded by walled gardens with terraces that reached down to the same sea that ran up below her window at the Grand, Tredegar was the very image of the perfect English country house to which an Englishman dreams of returning when abroad.

As she parked her car, straightened her dress, and wrapped herself around in an old Twenties evening cloak that she had discovered in the attic of the Grand, Ottilie had not been able to stop herself from thinking how strange it was that despite the fact that she was now grown up, the house should succeed in actually looking larger than when she was last there, when she herself had been considerably younger. It should seem smaller, as childhood places do when a person grows up.

Or it might be that having only visited Tredegar in order to play soldiers or feed Ludlow dinner carrots smuggled from the kitchens at the Grand she had quite simply not truly noticed its contained beauty, its quiet grandeur. Perhaps also she had always been too busy looking forward to seeing Philip, or fretting that Edith was driving too slowly so that the all too precious minutes of playtime would soon be gone and Edith would be returning with her to the hotel long before Ottilie had time to tell Philip everything that she knew he would like to hear. About the old general in Room Six who on hearing from Ottilie of Philip’s military interests was planning to send him a whole other set of Victorian lead soldiers. About Blue Lady in her strange New Look 1948 clothes back on her annual visit and still talking to the empty chair. About Blackie’s new friend who had taught Ottilie to whistle through her fingers. Philip had always loved to hear about all their eccentric guests. He had particularly loved to encourage Ottilie to mimic them, saying over and over again, ‘Oh, but that’s brilliant’ and sometimes, she remembered him sitting doubled over with laughter at Ottilie’s efforts to entertain him with her imitations of people at the Grand.

Now Ottilie paused on the threshold of the old house. Ahead lay the great reception hall filling up with guests, behind her lay the past when she had used to love to fling herself through the doors to find the Great Danes with their strange yellow eyes. For a second it seemed to her that she was looking backward, and then she turned and looked forward and there was Philip, and the moment he saw Ottilie his face lit up just as it had used to do when she would arrive in her dresses with the lace collars and the smocking that Edith spent all summer sewing. But this evening they were separated from each other by the crowd of other arrivals and anyway Constantia was walking towards Ottilie, her hand held out in greeting.

‘See you back down here,’ Philip called up to Ottilie as she followed his sister up the old polished wooden stairs from above which his elegant ancestors looked calmly from their portraits. Ottilie just had time to smile down at him before turning the corner of the staircase.

As Ottilie followed Constantia up to her bedroom to leave her cloak she could see Philip chatting animatedly below her to some new and stylish arrival, and suddenly it seemed to her that every girl in the room was looking more beautiful than she herself could possibly look and that Philip would want to sit next to them rather than her, and she could not blame him in the least.

‘Ottilie Cartaret.’

Constantia, who was now a tall, slender blonde with the face of an angel but blue eyes that looked out at the world with the hard stare of an eagle, smiled at Ottilie in her dressing mirror, and then lit a cigarette.

‘How dare you?’ she murmured. ‘How dare you look better than the rest of us, Ottilie Cartaret, and whom may I ask did you persuade to buy you that dress? St Laurent, is it?’

Ottilie, who had spent the previous forty-eight hours rubbing cream into her hands and practising putting up her hair so that it did not look what Mrs Cartaret always called ‘provincial’, turned and without thinking said, ‘Oh no, not St Laurent – Balenciaga. It was given to me by a Frenchman in Paris. He supplied the silk to make it.’

‘My, my,’ Constantia said, drawing on her cigarette, ‘and what on earth did you do to get him to give you that, may I ask? No, don’t tell me, just follow me downstairs, and in my turn I will not say a word to Philip, I promise.’

Two seconds later and Ottilie realized that it was already too late, much too late to see that as soon as she could possibly do so, Constantia would go straight to Philip and tell him that Ottilie was wearing a couture dress bought for her by ‘some strange Frenchman’.

But since what was done was done, Ottilie tried to put this thought from her and concentrate instead on walking down the slippery polished wooden stairs with her head held high and her hips pushed forward a little in the way that Monsieur had approved that evening in Paris. (‘All the modelswalk this way, Ottilie, a little exaggerating, you know? It makes the dress move better, huh?’)

But as she followed Constantia into the great hall below the thought persisted, and she just knew from the haughty look that Constantia’s eagle eyes had given her that she had made a really terrible mistake in telling Philip’s sister that she had been given the dress by a Frenchman in Paris. Unwittingly she had made herself sound as if she was what Edith would sometimes murmur when reading about someone in a newspaper, that they were ‘used goods’, and nothing she could now say could make up for it.

Once downstairs, perhaps because he came straight to her side, Ottilie suddenly understood that the party was. really being given by Philip for her, so that they would meet again, and had nothing whatsoever to do with Constantia’s being bored at the weekend. The moment she walked towards Philip, the high Medici collar of her shimmering tight silk dress framing her face, was a moment that she would always remember, and she knew that somehow she could not put a foot wrong, and that every man in the room was looking at her and mentally making a note to dance with her later, and that Edith would be proud of how she looked.

Dinner was laid in the cellars of the house, so that, freeing the main reception hall and drawing rooms for the band and the dancing later, the guests descended to cellars lit only by candles and set about with three large dark purple clothed tables and pink flowers. While waiters in knee breeches served the food and the wines, a trio of violins and a cello played while the guests ate and talked.

Ottilie knew all too well about the complications that could arise from the placing of guests at dinner, the sometimes insuperable difficulties of pleasing everyone at once. Tonight the mixture of guests were a few from well-known local families and many others from the kind of London circle that would not take kindly to being placed down the table, so when Philip passed her murmuring, ‘You’re beside me, Miss Cartaret,’ Ottilie was hard put to it not to turn and say, ‘That’s not quite right.’

Nevertheless she gave him a questioning look which was countered by the laughing expression in his eyes as he personally pulled out her chair, looking across at Constantia with one of his raised-eyebrowed looks which said, ‘You’re surely not thinking of going to do something about this, are you?’

All at once from their exchange of looks as she sat down on his right Ottilie realized that Philip had changed the names on the dinner cards in front of them, and that Constantia would be furious. Suddenly they were not children in any way at all any more, and Tredegar was not a game of Monopoly where Philip and Constantia would inevitably end up throwing the board at each other. Philip was a man, and a man at ease in his ancestral home. It was his house, and not Constantia’s, and by putting Ottilie on his right, he had asserted his ownership.

As he sat down beside her Ottilie smiled mischievously, and in a second she recognized that they were still both running away from Constantia, as they had always used to do, because she only ever seemed to want to play whist or canasta even on the hottest days, while Philip and Ottilie wanted to play imaginary games where they dressed up. Games like ‘King Arthur’ who was said to come from Cornwall and about whom they were both obsessed, or best of all a game they just called ‘Beau Geste’ which was joyous because it took so long and involved playing with things of which Edith would never approve like matches and swords taken from Tredegar’s walls and smuggled out to the garden.

From that moment on, although she could see that all the other girls at their table were pretty – some of them to her mind a great deal prettier than she was herself – nevertheless Ottilie knew that Philip was only thinking about her, and that he might be talking to someone else but in reality he was looking at Ottilie’s dark hair and the way the line of the dress showed off her figure, and the silk of the dress that shimmered and moved in the light of the candles. What she had not anticipated, would never have thought to expect of Philip, was that at the end of dinner, as the ladies left the table to follow Constantia out of the room in the traditional British way, he would slip her a note.

Before the ever marshalling Constantia could see it, Ottilie had slipped the note up the sleeve of her dress. Upstairs, while all the other girls powdered their noses and talked about things she knew nothing about – like going to a Beatles concert, and London, and hunting with the Beaufort – Ottilie turned and looked at the scrap of paper.

Meet me by the boat when the lights go down and the candles are lit.

Ottilie smiled. She knew just where the boat was, by the little lake where they had loved to play, Ottilie pushing Philip laid out in Arthurian clothes, while carefully holding on to a rope, herself dressed as Guinevere, a sword set in the middle of the lake, tied to an old stick.

‘I don’t know what you did to get that dress, Ottilie, but it is certainly the hit of the evening,’ Constantia murmured, as once more brushed and repowdered, the girls made their way down the old polished oak staircase.

She said this just as Ottilie saw Philip coming towards her across the reception hall, but as the music started and they began to dance, it was some long while before Ottilie could let go of the feeling that Constantia had reached out and scratched a nail down the side of her cheek.

‘Is something the matter?’

Ottilie smiled and shook her head. How could there be anything the matter? She was dancing with Philip at Tredegar on a beautiful evening and soon they would be meeting, just like in the old days, by the boat, but this time under cover of darkness, as the moon crept up, and the clear Cornish skies sparkled with far-flung stars.

As they danced she knew for certain that they were suddenly and obviously no longer pals, but passionately and urgently in love, and in the kind of way that makes just waiting for the music to start so that you can touch each other seem to take a century, and walking towards the dining room together for a glass of wine the most intimate act of your life. It was impossible to ignore. Ottilie knew now what she had probably known from the moment she saw Philip standing in the foyer of the hotel, that she was in love with him and that it was quite possible that he was in love with her.

She knew it from the way that Philip was not looking at her, and from the way that she was not looking at him. And suddenly and frighteningly it seemed that nothing else in her life had mattered at all up until then.

‘I must do my duty as host,’ he murmured as they parted after one brief dance, knowing, excitedly, that they were soon to meet again by the boat, at the lakeside.

It might have seemed an age before they would meet again, under the dark skies in a garden as brilliantly lit by the moon as any stage, but because Ottilie sensed joy to come she found that the time flew, and when eventually the lights dimmed and the music slowed to a blues number, and the farm workers from Tredegar solemnly dressed in their knee breeches bore the candelabra into the Great Hall, Ottilie knew that the time had come to slip away.

Finding her way across the garden to the sound of the sea in the distance was romantic in itself, and yet part of her wondered mischievously if any other couples might have made the same arrangement and she would find herself hurrying towards the wrong man, someone to whom she would call ‘Is that you?’ only to be answered by the wrong voice.

In the event it was he who arrived late, calling, ‘Ottilie? Ottilie?’

To which she answered as she had always done, ‘Have you remembered the matches?’

‘You bet!’

Ottilie smiled as he half ran down to where she was standing. He was carrying a large packed basket.

‘Let’s go out in the boat.’

He stepped in first, tucking the basket under the seat, and she followed him carefully holding up the skirts of her precious dress. He rowed out to the island, and having dragged the boat a little way up the beach, he held out his hand to her.

‘Cigarette?’

Ottilie looked at the packet and then up at Philip.

He had always smoked from when they were quite young and she never had, and nothing he had said could ever persuade her to try one, but now was different, now she was grown up.

‘What a revolting taste! Ugh!’

She wrinkled her nose as he spread his evening jacket on the ground and they sat down on it for a few minutes, Ottilie trying not to cough as she gallantly applied herself to the art of puffing on a tipped cigarette.

‘If you persist, in the open air, after a while you’ll find it makes you delightfully giddy,’ Philip instructed her as he took the bottle of wine and two glasses that he had brought in the large basket together with a strange-looking plastic box and some records.

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

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

‘Guess what I left here earlier?’

‘Simply can’t.’

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

‘Beau Geste? Remember our favourite game?’

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

‘Yes, but has it got a figure in it?’

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

Philip held up a small figure. ‘Satisfied?’

‘OK.’

She stood up.

‘Matches?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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