A hurried turning-off of taps. A torrent of apologies. Offers to pay. Offers to leave. Offers to read all notices next time – it was all just ghastly. But the Connaught being the hotel it is, our friends and their luggage were whisked off to another suite, and all were made to feel as though it was the hotel’s fault, even though our guests knew full well it was all down to their own carelessness. They crept through the halls of the mansion like furtive spies for the next few days, shamed by the error of their ways.
And never more so than that very evening, when they dared briefly to enter the bar – the ground-floor bar which, in all its oak-panelled magnificence, turned out to be situated in the hotel’s right-hand corner, exactly, exactly, below the room they had until lately occupied. The bartender was there, cheerful and newly and drily uniformed, looking for all the world as though nothing untoward had happened.
But happened it most decidedly had. And there was evidence. For in the very corner of the room, directly beneath a slightly sagging ceiling, was a red and tasselled velvet rope suspended from a pair of brass stanchions. An aspidistra in a Chinese pot stood where a banquette once had been, and there was a small handwritten sign regretting that owing to a leak of water, this area of the bar would be closed for a day or two. The humiliation! The pair slunk immediately from the bar and headed to the Grill next door, saying almost as little to each other and to the waiters that evening as those elderly diners who were sleeping so contentedly over their Dover soles.
However, time heals. The following night, perhaps emboldened both by drink and by time, the pair confessed their mistake – and they did so to the towering literary figure who first told me the story. He chortled merrily at their discomfort, and said that he would write something about it.
As indeed he did. Five days later he came to see off our heroes at London’s aerodrome, and after the usual obeisances and valedictories had been made, he pressed into his agent’s hand an envelope. Read it on the aircraft, he said. You might be amused.
And this is what our agent and über flood-maker read.
A young American man, a Boston Brahmin of impeccable family and taste, had lately married a young and beautiful girl from the American Midwest, a somewhat innocent treasure of a colleen whose father had made a fortune in dry goods, but whose family had travelled little in their lives, and whose daughter had travelled not at all. No matter, said our Lowell or our Cabot or whatever he might have been: I shall take you on our honeymoon to the great and wonderful city of London, England; and there we shall put up at the world’s finest hotel, by name the Connaught, and we shall sit in my favourite corner seat in my favourite oak-panelled bar in all the world, and there shall we toast one another with a pair – maybe more – of the finest gin martinis that were ever made by human endeavour. I have been there a hundred times; I know all the attendants and they know me; we shall have a time that will in all senses be memorable, a perfect first excursion into the known mysteries of the outer world.
And so they flew across the ocean, our Mr and newly Mrs Lowell or Cabot or Lodge. They were collected at the aerodrome by the Connaught’s magnificent black Daimler, they were shown to an impeccable suite on the fourth floor, they bathed – carefully and obediently adhering to the Rules, for this was a couple fastidious in their habits. They changed into proper evening clothing and in due course came into the oak-panelled bar and they sat in the corner, on a banquette, together in peace and style, the flickering of the fire before them, the rosy glow of London glimpsed behind the velvet curtains.
A bartender approached, smiling with easy familiarity. Two martinis, George, said our Brahmin. Certainly, sir – gin, of course? Of course. Certainly, sir.
And within moments, after nuts and napkins and knives had been arranged by silent men in white linen jackets, and after the sounds of tinkling and shaking and stirring from a very scientific-looking person who stood before an immense array of bottles and behind a brass and cherry-wood bar, so two glasses were brought to the table, and on a silver salver. And what glasses! – perfectly shaped crystal, elegant stems and necks, gleaming and sparkling, and filled almost to the brim with a clear and sparkling liquid, two small olive-green spheres within, an oval film of lemon zest floating on the meniscus above. The glasses were placed, carefully, reverently, before the happy pair. The waiter silently withdrew.
Our man then picked up his glass and motioned to his lady to do the same. He held it up, almost at eye level, gazed into it with awe, the firelight flickering and refracting about its inner mysteries. He spoke. Darling, he began. I have so wanted to bring you here, the world’s most perfect girl, to the world’s best hotel, to begin our married life with a toast taken with the world’s perfect martini. So may I say simply this: I love you, I adore you, and I toast you for a lifetime of happiness and contentment.
He leaned forward, clinked crystal to crystal, brought his glass to his lip and tasted.
And for what was only a second or two, but which his wife later said seemed a lifetime, he hesitated.
Eventually he spoke again. Almost perfect, he said. Almost. But just – how shall I say it? – just the tiniest bit too cold.
And he held his glass before him, at arm’s length, gazing with gimlet eye into its glassy depths.
As he did so, suddenly, without warning, a drop of warm and fragrant water fell from the ceiling above him, directly into his glass. He looked up, grinned, put the glass to his lips once more. And smiled.
There, he declared. Now that’s just right. He looked up at the ceiling again, then over to the waiter – to whom he flashed a conspiratorial look – and finally to his wife.
See that? he said, delighted. Now didn’t I tell you – this surely is the world’s most perfect hotel.
THE PRINCE AND I
KATHIE KERTESZ
At the age of nine, Kathie Kertesz started dreaming about international travel – and saving her money. By the time she was fourteen she was able to pay for her first trip to Europe. Now a happy grandmother of six, in the past year she has had essays published dealing with her major passions: travel and dancing. In her professional life she coaches people in high performance and joie de vivre. Visit her website at http://home.earthlink.net/~kkertesz.
It never occurred to me that I would meet a prince looking like this: dressed in blue jeans, slightly damp from spilled sparkling water, and carrying a long Hungarian sausage under my arm. I am half-Hungarian – which means that I was brought up with a strong romantic streak. I learned the Viennese waltz when I was five. When I was a girl my favourite fantasy was of attending a ball and meeting Prince Charming. I would, of course, be dressed in a beautiful long gown. He would be wearing a formal tuxedo and tails, or possibly the dress uniform of his country. It would all be very proper and formal, and I would fall madly in love.
But when I met this particular prince, I was seated in a first-class compartment on a train between Vienna and Geneva, using up the final section of a Eurail pass. I was in my mid-thirties, and was returning from a visit with my father’s relatives. As a special parting gift I had been handed a very long Hungarian hard sausage, a delicacy – one of my father’s favourites. They had also loaded me down with cheeses, bread and bottled water. As it was nearing lunch time, I had decided to have a snack.
You have to understand that I was feeling a bit shy. I was travelling in first class on a Swiss train, surrounded by a number of slightly forbidding men and women, all of whom were dressed in formal, expensive business attire. I, on the other hand, was wearing jeans and a faded T-shirt, and was loaded down with strange-looking, slightly smelly parcels. As if that weren’t bad enough, when I uncorked the sparkling water, it gushed up in an arc, narrowly missing the people beside me and wetting our compartment. I decided to make a quick exit, so loaded up my packages and started down the hall, looking for a less-crowded, less-critical space.
Within minutes I had found one. As I peered into an open door, I was waved in by an affable-looking man who appear
ed to be in his early thirties. Though dressed formally in a pin-striped suit, he had taken off his shoes and had his feet propped up on the seat across from him.
‘Come in’, he said. ‘There’s plenty of room.’
When the two other people occupying the compartment left at the next station, we introduced ourselves.
‘Call me Hans’, my seat companion said.
I noticed that he was reading a book about science and, telling him that I had grown up surrounded by scientists, I asked if he was a scientist. He gave me a rueful look and told me that he was going through a career crisis. The book was being used to clear his brain.
Soon we were deep in conversation. Still a bit self-conscious about my large Hungarian sausage and slightly dishevelled appearance, I explained that I was travelling back from my father’s fiftieth-anniversary high-school reunion in Ordeal, Romania, two miles from the Hungarian border. I also told Hans that I lived in a small town near San Francisco, California. He asked me all sorts of questions about my interests and activities, saying that he had visited the Bay Area and had enjoyed it a great deal. Earlier I had noticed a wedding ring on his finger, but thought, philosophically, At least I am getting the chance to talk in depth with someone who lives in this part of the world.
Our conversation grew more and more animated, and before I knew it, I was showing him aikido moves, teaching him eye exercises and discussing my knowledge of the field of accelerated learning. He said that he was interested in educational reform and asked me a series of intelligent, very specific questions. I found myself enjoying our conversation even more than I could have imagined.
‘Tell me about your daily life? What was it like to grow up near here?’ I asked Hans.
‘My parents brought me up in a very strict and formal manner, so my wife and I vowed that we would raise our children in a more relaxed, informal and loving atmosphere. Our children attend the local public schools. We often do our shopping in the local marketplace, and our cars are Volkswagens, not Mercedes. I am wearing this suit because I had a special business meeting, but I usually like to dress more casually. And I am only travelling first class because of this meeting’, he answered.
Hans was so friendly that I pulled out my business card and gave it to him.
‘If you and your family ever come to the San Francisco area, do call me up. I would be happy to tell you about special places known only by the locals, and to show you some of them.’
Hans hesitated for a moment, then pulled out his business card and gave it to me. I noticed that it only had his first name with ‘von Liechtenstein’ on it and then the name of that country below it. I did think the card a bit strange, but thought that maybe they were more formal around here, and didn’t have cards with addresses on them.
Looking at it, I said slowly, ‘Oh, you are from Liechtenstein?’
‘Yes,’ he said dryly, ‘my family is in agriculture there.’
I smiled at him.
‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I am the Crown Prince of Liechtenstein.’
For a second I thought that I had fallen asleep and this was some sort of dream. Or perhaps he was just joking with me. I considered answering, ‘Yes, and my mother is Queen Elizabeth II!’
Hans must have noticed the expression on my face. ‘It’s really true’, he said, ‘and we are as informal as I told you.’
‘I’m sorry to have seemed so stupid’, I replied, feeling like an idiot that I hadn’t recognised his name on the card.
‘Forget it’, he answered. ‘I just wish that we could always be like this – like ten-year-old friends, Hans and Kathie, being enthusiastic about our lives.’
‘Well, we are right now’, I replied. ‘I want to hear what it was like when you were growing up.’
Relaxing back into our seats, we munched companionably on my Hungarian sausage and drank the beers he had bought us. I looked outside – we were passing snowcapped Alps with tiny chalets perched upon them.
‘Once upon a time… there was a country called Liechtenstein’, Hans began. Stillness settled upon me. If this was a dream, I would never forget it.
A few years passed and once again, I was on my way to Europe. ‘Why don’t you write to the Prince’, a girlfriend of mine teased. ‘I bet you don’t have the guts to do it.’
The gauntlet had been thrown down. I couldn’t pass on the challenge, but I wanted to hedge my bets. I would write to the Prince, but not too far in advance of the trip I was about to make. That way I could tell my friend that I had met the conditions, but wasn’t able to make a connection. I wrote a fairly formal note, on letterhead stationery, mentioning the time and place where I had met him, and saying that I was going to be passing near his country and would like the opportunity to talk to him again.
I arrived in Paris, and just as I walked into the apartment I was staying in, the phone rang. ‘Ms Kertesz,’ a woman’s voice said, ‘the Prince of Liechtenstein [his father had died] would be happy to see you in his office in ten days.’ I felt faint.
It was winter in Liechtenstein. When I asked directions to Hans’s office, everyone pointed up to a fairy-tale castle perched high above the town. The taxi driver told me that it had been built in the fourteenth century and was where the Prince’s family lived. He deposited me at the end of the drawbridge and I walked slowly inside the castle walls and down a cobbled road that led to a spacious courtyard. As I rounded the corner, I couldn’t believe my eyes. There were two Volkswagens parked there, just as Hans had told me. I couldn’t keep the silly smile off my face. It was all true.
I had been told to go to a specific door in the courtyard, and I knocked and was directed to enter. My eyes were still dazzled from the snow and the blindingly blue sky, so at first I didn’t see Hans. He jumped up and bounded across the room, holding out his hand to greet me. I had vowed to appear more professional this time, so was wearing a dress and had groomed myself carefully. Hans, on the other hand, wore corduroy pants, a shirt with rolled-up sleeves and sandals.
He looked at me and grinned.
‘Do you remember those eye exercises you taught me?’ he asked. ‘Well, I have used them and they work. And all of your information about accelerated learning inspired me so much that I have now put an accelerated learning programme in all of the schools in my country.’
I can still feel the wave of excitement and pleasure that went through me at those words. I have always believed in fairy tales – but I never expected to play a role in one!
WANGARA’S CROSS
JOSHUA CLARK
Joshua Clark, founder of Light of New Orleans Publishing, contributes fiction, travel and photography to various US publications, from the Los Angeles Times to the Miami Herald. He is also the associate editor for Scat magazine. An oyster-eating champion, certified personal trainer and retired bartender, Joshua was raised in Washington, DC, got a somewhat irrelevant economics degree from Yale University, lived in Spain, Australia and Argentina, and now resides in New Orleans.
There is a part of the Simpson Desert in Central Australia where day is split clean into red and blue, earth and sky, with only bone-white trees between the two. And dusk is the same as dawn. The small leafless trees reach like hands, the branches fingers grasping for sky, silhouetted against the red above the horizon. Above the red is a strip of orange and above that canary yellow and pastel blue which gets deeper, then darker overhead, until it’s black against clouds of stars you can’t see in the Northern Hemisphere. It was below those stars and between those trees that my overturned ’74 panel van lay hulking against the red horizon.
I hadn’t been near it since noon, when the world was still split clean between red and blue, when the van had stopped being an extension of my body, as cars usually are, and started being a three-tonne hunk of metal that you’re trapped inside while it’s succumbing to the forces of gravity after you’ve helicoptered off the road and walloped your third tree.
I hadn’t even been going fast. Over the last eight days I’d lo
st traction and spun out four times on the dirt roads here. But there was nothing to hit, just dirt and sky to slide through until I stopped. And trees. It was the trees that got me. That third one anyway.
When the van started rolling, I thought that was it. But I also thought about how, if I lived, this would make a good story I could tell my girlfriend sometime. Like most people, I’d often wondered what I’d think about right before I died. And that was it. A story.
When the van finished rolling I realised there was blood all over my shoulder and I was probably in shock. I did a limb check. Then a broken bone check. Then I tried to open the door but it wouldn’t budge. There was ground where the window used to be. I turned the other way to see sky where the passenger-side window used to be. Both doors, along with the sides of the van, were caved in. After making my way through my belongings heaped on top of me – bottles of water, a gas can, canned beans, CD cases, books, clothes, pillows, a cooler – I kicked open the passenger door, climbed up, leaped from the van and started running like hell because as everyone knows from the movies your car always blows up after you have a bad accident.
It didn’t blow up. It just lay there on its side exhaling Cyndi Lauper. It was part of a CD mix my girlfriend had given me for the trip. My finger had been on the way to hitting the ‘skip’ button when the van lost traction. I’d always wondered if the stereo would keep going after you got into an accident.
Finally, the song ended. For five seconds there was silence in the thin, still July winter sun. I inspected my shoulder, and saw it was only a scrape. Then the synthesizer and drum machine started up again and Cyndi kicked into gear. Something somehow in the tumult must have hit the ‘repeat’ button.
By the Seat of My Pants Page 22