Grand Affair

It had never been open to Ottilie to change anything at all at the Grand. The Grand had been like a great old ocean liner. There was only one way it operated and that was the way it had always done, and even when the staff shrank and it became an almost insuperable problem to keep the huge floral arrangements on every floor fresh, with the water in the vast vases changed daily and each flower stem checked for peak perfection, even when just the polishing of the twelve pieces of silver set at every place for every meal took until midnight, that was how it had always been done, and that was how it seemed it would always be done at the Grand, St Elcombe.

Even in her own suite Ottilie was never allowed to change anything. Once she had decided to privately adopt the seven-year-old Ottilie O’Flaherty, Melanie had sent for a designer from Truro to come and draw up a design for the ideal little girl’s bedroom and sitting room, and he had done so with an eye to detail which was quite perfect and his design was one which Mr Hulton and his team were more than happy to implement.

Hence the curtains were of a pale salmon printed with small girls wearing Kate Greenaway dresses and hats, the dressing table was draped with organza underlined with a pale salmon silk, and the carpet was of palest French blue with a flowered design arranged in Madame de Pompadour fashion – small knotted bunches of pale pink roses set at discreet intervals.

The books too were all arranged in alphabetical order on mahogany shelving of the most delicate kind – Queen Anne copies – and the books themselves were all old, beautifully printed children’s books of the kind that still have tissue paper over the illustrations and dates never later than 1939. Dresses were hung in wardrobes with mahogany shelving, drawers lined with scented flowered paper and lavender bags placed everywhere ‘against the flies, Miss Ottilie’ Edith would always say.

Ottilie’s private bathroom was a designer’s dream of what a little girl’s bathroom should be. The bath itself was built into an edifice that was shaped and painted to resemble a swan. The ‘la-la’ as Edith called it was a little throne with salmon-pink carpeted steps up and a salmon-pink satin embroidered cover over the lid with ‘O.C.’ sewn on it in raised blue silk.

Wherever possible everything else in the bathroom and bedroom had also been salmon-pink satin and embroidered. Ottilie’s sponge bag, her nightdress case, her dressing gowns – always ordered from the same shop, year in year out – her slippers, her ribbons for night-time, her counterpane, even her lawn nightdresses were trimmed with the same salmon-pink satin ribbons.

Of course, after living at the cottage and sharing her bed with Ma, her suite at the Grand had seemed to be a sort of paradise of space and luxury to the young Ottilie, with toys and books that Lorcan and the boys, and up until then Ottilie herself, would not have even glimpsed in a shop window, so exclusive were they to the rich.

But then, inevitably, she had matured and her feeling for colour developed, and long before she went to Paris Ottilie had started to feel absurd bathing in the painted swan, however pretty. But there was no question of change. She had been adopted into salmon-pink satin and in salmon-pink satin she would remain.

All this was why being granted the money she wanted to redesign the Angel was such a heady moment for Ottilie. More and more it seemed to her that the Courtyard Suites, as they were destined to be known, were going to be the best suites in the place, principally because when starting afresh it was easy to design rooms more spacious and bathrooms more luxurious than the bedrooms and bathrooms in the inn itself. Using a local architect, she commissioned a series of ground-floor double bedrooms with windows overlooking the courtyard and picture windows overlooking the gardens, but first she and Veronica went in search of that most elusive event, the genuine country house sale.

Ottilie and Veronica arrived early at the old house clutching their catalogues and convinced that they were about to find Old Masters for a few pounds and Knole sofas for only a little more than that. Instead, faced with someone else’s treasured possessions all marked and catalogued, not only unwanted but so unloved by anyone in her family that they sought only to sell them, they both became quite low with the sadness of it all, and Ottilie could not help thinking of Philip and how he loved not just Tredegar, but everything in it. Supposing everything there had to be put up for sale as it was in this house?

She remembered how tall and handsome he had looked in his uniform, and how courageous he had been, perhaps knowing all the time that he might not come back, and trying to pretend not to care. She delayed going into the main rooms and from there to the marquee where the sale was being held, fascinated and appalled by a brass plaque with the roll call of the dead from two world wars upon which was inscribed not just the names of the sons of the house but the names of the gardeners and grooms who had once worked on the estate. There was even a Granville.

‘I usually only feel sort of sad like this when autumn comes and I hear my mother or my aunt singing “The Last Rose of Summer”,’ Veronica tried to joke to Ottilie when they found the impromptu refreshment area set out in the stables. ‘It’s all those little things – the boot jacks and the old hunting boots, the silver christening mugs. You’d think someone in her family would have wanted to treasure them, wouldn’t you? Or even just some of the framed photographs of their relatives who died in the war. You’d think they’d be of interest.’

Ottilie nodded, but Veronica could see that she could hardly concentrate on what she was saying and was polite enough to fall silent and study her catalogue, for all Ottilie could see was Philip dead like those young boys whose pictures lay marked up and priced for sale in the very reception rooms in which they would have once played as children, or danced with their girlfriends to the wind-up gramophone, or as one of their aunts or sisters played the old Steinway.

To begin with it was a little boring waiting for the items they had marked to come up, but when they did Ottilie became quite tense with the excitement of waving her catalogue at the right moment. Perhaps because the weather was bad there were not as many people as anticipated, and in what finally seemed like seconds two lovely old Persian rugs became the property of the Angel Inn. After that it was Veronica’s turn and she bid for and won a Chippendale-style chest of drawers, a very well made Victorian copy, and what guest would complain that it wasn’t genuine Chippendale?

Sets of three dozen plates, old cake dishes, fish knives and forks – old linen tablecloths, a mahogany barometer. Ottilie and Veronica, while keeping a keen eye on their budget, started to grow in confidence as the day wore on, nodding and flapping their catalogues until they gradually acquired the kind of furnishings that would grace the old inn and make it look as if they had always been there.

Staying right until the last pitchfork and garden bench had been bid for, they finally walked out into the dark of the early spring evening with the largest fountain sold privately in Cornwall in recent years, or so the auctioneer had said. It was vast, far too large for most people’s gardens, but perfect for the courtyard of the Angel Inn. Three stone horses prancing, the water destined to come from a fountain at their centre.

Driving home in Oscar and practically whooping with joy at their success, Ottilie confided to Veronica that there was only one thing that had puzzled her. ‘I don’t understand why there were not more people there?’

There was a sudden silence from the secretary in the passenger seat beside her. Veronica stared ahead into the darkness, seemingly concentrating on the narrow road ahead lit dimly by Oscar’s lights, on the high hedges either side, on the rain that was falling to be lightly swished away somewhat haphazardly by the Citroën’s windscreen wipers.

‘Well,’ Veronica began, stopped, and then glanced at Ottilie’s profile as she drove. ‘You must promise not to tell, but the auction was a bit of a sort of a fix, I’m afraid, according to Mr Pennington.’

Ottilie frowned. She took her eyes from the narrow country road with its high hedges momentarily and stared at Veronica, who she had only just begun to realize really had hidden depths. ‘You’ve got your still-waters-run-deep look. What is it? You know something I don’t. Mr Pennington knows something I don’t. You both know something I don’t. I want to know something I don’t, so please, please, tell me.’

‘I’ll tell you, Miss O’Flaherty, but you must understand that neither Mr Pennington nor myself had anything to do with it. We just knew about it, if you understand me, we didn’t organize it?’

‘The reason there were only just locals at the sale, if you noticed, and a few people from Truro and Plymouth after the books, no real London dealers, is very simple. You see, local people really liked the owner of the house, old Miss Princeton Blount, and when she died her relatives had no interest in taking on anything of hers – just interested in the money and that was it – so they determined to buy as many of her lovely possessions as possible not just because they were rather old and rather nice but because they knew the old lady would have wanted her things to go to people she knew and liked – that way they would stay in Cornwall, which old Miss Princeton Blount loved. But of course at London prices the locals knew they wouldn’t possibly be able to afford them, would they?’

‘Well – you mustn’t tell anyone, but they turned many of the country signposts to the auction round so that the dealers from London arrived either too late or not at all.’ Ottilie started to laugh as Veronica finished, ‘Not for nothing do they say never cross a Cornishman!’

And so back to dinner at the Angel and that odd feeling of real achievement that the purchase of bargains brings. As the work on the conversion of the stables progressed that too brought new excitement. Ottilie found that for the first time since her month in Paris she was springing out of bed earlier and earlier, sometimes arriving in the office or on the site before even the builders arrived, and as each rotten timber was thrown out and new wood arrived, as she decided on keeping the rough stonework in the small halls and entrances, as she searched out shops that would give her discounts on new beds and designed four-posters that looked like four-posters but were really just curtains, as she chose Spanish lamps decorated in the old manner but gave them large white silk shades sewn by Veronica’s mum, and white bathroom suites with pale carpets and small oil seascapes that she was able to buy from local galleries, without realizing it she started to bloom with health.

Ottilie looked up from her account books, surprised by Veronica’s sudden statement. The state of her looks, never one of her own preoccupations, was not something she thought anyone else noticed.

‘You – well, you won’t mind me saying this, will you?’ Veronica went on, hesitant at first, but obviously encouraged by the glass of whisky Ottilie had fetched her from the bar. ‘But when you first arrived here, frankly I thought Mrs Blaize had made a grave mistake. You seemed far too young for the position, only then I could see from your very first day that you knew what it was all about, that although you were young you were quite tough, which you certainly have to be in this business. But you were always so pale and tense. And, as a matter of fact, I started to feel sorry for you having to shoulder so much in a greasy spoon place such as this was. It didn’t seem right, so instead of leaving, which frankly I was about to do, I stayed on, and I’m very glad I did.’

‘Thank you, but no.’ Veronica smiled, shook her head and went back to typing out the rewritten brochure. ‘Frankly the last manager before Mrs Blaize had everyone calling him Geoff and it didn’t stop the place going to rack and ruin.’

Veronica, like Ottilie, took making a success of the Angel very seriously, and yet Ottilie could not prevent herself feeling lighthearted when she walked round the Courtyard Suites once the carpets had been laid, and saw just how smart and welcoming everything looked. And then it was somehow magical to wander out again into the courtyard and stand and admire the horse fountain that had been such a bargain, and from there to step back into the inn and see the fires, warm and welcoming, and watch more and more new customers arriving.

As she had promised Sir Harold the bar menu was a welcoming choice of soup and salads all for one price and dinner a simple classically based menu. In fact everything had turned out how she had hoped. The reception rooms painted in old-fashioned pale colours, the flagstone floors laid with faded rugs, candlesticks commissioned from a local potter arranged on the dining tables with the new cypher Ottilie had designed set in the middle of their bases; and what with the old cream holland blinds that she had found in the attics cleaned up, and parchment lampshades over pink light bulbs softening the look of everything, it was probably not surprising, so speedy is ‘word of mouth’, that the Angel rarely had a table free.

Thanks to Lorcan, in a matter of months Ottilie had gone from a sort of hopeless boredom to that state of being happily busy from early dawn to late at night without a moment to think of anything beyond the welfare of her staff and guests. All the more shocking therefore when one night she heard a scream coming from the dining room.

A childhood spent in a hotel meant that even as Ottilie started to hurry towards the dining room she already knew that it would only be a matter of a moment before she was confronted by a white-faced waitress. At the Grand it had always been known as ‘the spider in the salad scream’ and whenever it had happened Alfred or Mrs Tomber had always sighed and shrugged their shoulders.

As she waited in the service area for Jean to emerge from the dining room clutching a plate of roast pork and potatoes, half eaten, the knife and fork still on the plate, Ottilie reminded herself that this was always the first symbol of success in the hotel trade.

Quickly calling Veronica to deal with the customer who had screamed, Ottilie herself rushed off to examine the piece. Having satisfied herself as to its exact shape and design she beckoned to Jean to follow her into the main part of the kitchen.

‘Mrs East,’ Ottilie turned to Cook, ‘please remove the piece with one of your serving spoons, and Martin – come here, please, bringing with you each of our glasses. Now you are all witnesses to this, and thank heavens we opted for the same design for all the glasses so there are definitely no variations in the rims. Now, see, the rim of the plant – because believe me this is what this is – if you look you can see it is quite different from our own, having a rolled edge to the top, whereas you can see our own glasses have no cheap rolled edge, they are quite plain.’

There was a ripple of relief and then admiration from everyone around Ottilie. Barely able to contain her indignation, she said, ‘If you will please all follow me, bringing with you the plate, and the piece of glass on a napkin, we will see this one down and very publicly too.’

Yet another murmur and the staff, looking amazed, followed Ottilie back through the service doors into the restaurant. Ottilie clapped her hands for attention as she remembered seeing her father do many times.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, I want your attention please.’ She looked sharply round the room as she began to make her speech and saw at once to her immense disappointment that the woman who had screamed, and her companion, were no longer present. ‘As you no doubt just heard the lady who was only recently sitting at that table found a piece of glass in her food. A piece of glass that had no business in her food. A piece of glass, ladies and gentlemen, that had no business not just in her food but anywhere in this hotel since, ladies and gentlemen, and I have seven witnesses here to this effect, not one of our glasses have this design to their top. Hold it up please, Jean. Here is one of our glasses and here is the piece of glass just found. Take them round to each of the tables, please.’

The strange little ceremony that followed started uncertainly but as each set of guests could see the point of what the management was trying to prove it gained in popularity. Ottilie once more clapped her hands for attention.

‘I’ve read about this sort of thing happening in restaurants, but never actually seen it for myself, d’you know? Fascinating, absolutely fascinating,’ one guest announced to everyone. ‘People like that should be shot.’

‘I knew from my previous life at the Grand just what to look for. My father warned me, years ago, that they often make a fundamental mistake – with glass especially. They plant just any old piece, not one that matches the kind used at the hotel.’

She had suddenly realized just what the real reason for Mrs Blaize’s sudden departure must have been, nothing to do with a sick husband and everything to do with sabotage. That must also be the reason for the Angel going downhill under previous managements, the usual dirty tricks. They’d already had false bookings but she had paid little attention to them.