Keith shook his head. Not this group, he said, a different group; a group that was travelling on to another destination. Keith was not a tall man, and often suffered from what he considered to be arrogance in other people, from officials of one kind or another, and shop-assistants with a tendency to assume that his lack of stature reflected a diminutive personality. In a way Keith didn’t care for, the receptionist repeated:
‘This is the Edelweiss Hotel, sir.’
‘We were meant to be in Venice. In the Pensione Concordia.’
‘I do not know the name, sir. Here we have Switzerland.’
‘A coach is to take us on. An official said so on the plane. She was here last night, that woman.’
‘Tomorrow we have the fondue party,’ the receptionist went on, having listened politely to this information about an official. ‘On Tuesday there is the visit to a chocolate factory. On other days we may take the steamer to Interlaken, where we have teashops. In Interlaken mementoes may be bought at fair prices.’
Dawne had still not spoken. She, too, was a slight figure, her features pale beneath orange-ish powder. ‘Mingy’, the old man had a way of saying in his joky voice, and sometimes told her to lie down.
‘Eeh, idn’t it luvely?’ a voice behind Keith enthused. ‘Been out to feed them ducks, ’ave you?’
Keith did not turn round. Speaking slowly, giving each word space, he said to the receptionist: ‘We have been booked on to the wrong holiday.’
‘Your group is booked twelve nights in the Edelweiss Hotel. To make an alteration now, sir, if you have changed your minds –’
‘We haven’t changed our minds. There’s been a mistake.’
The receptionist shook his head. He did not know about a mistake. He had not been told that. He would help if he could, but he did not see how help might best be offered.
‘The man who made the booking,’ Dawne interrupted, ‘was bald, with glasses and a moustache.’ She gave the name of the travel agency in London.
In reply, the receptionist smiled with professional sympathy. He fingered the edge of his register. ‘Moustache?’ he said.
Three aged women who had been on the plane passed through the reception area. Had anyone noticed, one of them remarked, that there were rubber linings under the sheets? Well, you couldn’t be too careful, another agreeably responded, if you were running a hotel.
‘Some problem, have we?’ another woman said, beaming at Keith. She was the stout woman he had referred to as an official, flamboyantly attired this morning in a two-tone trouser-suit, green and blue. Her flesh-coloured spectacles were decorated with swirls of metal made to seem like gold; her grey hair was carefully waved. They’d seen her talking to the yellow-and-red girl at Gatwick. On the plane she’d walked up and down the aisle, smiling at people.
‘My name is Franks,’ she was saying now. ‘I’m married to the man with the bad leg.’
‘Are you in charge, Mrs Franks?’ Dawne inquired. ‘Only we’re in the wrong hotel.’ Again she gave the name of the travel agency and described the bald-headed counter clerk, mentioning his spectacles and his moustache. Keith interrupted her.
‘It seems we got into the wrong group. We reported to the Your-Kind-of-Holiday girl and left it all to her.’
‘We should have known when they weren’t from Windsor,’ Dawne contributed. ‘We heard them talking about Darlington.’
Keith made an impatient sound. He wished she’d leave the talking to him. It was no good whatsoever going on about Darlington and the counter clerk’s moustache, confusing everything even more.
‘We noticed you at Gatwick,’ he said to the stout woman. ‘We knew you were in charge of things.’
‘I noticed you. Well, of course I did, naturally I did. I counted you, although I dare say you didn’t see me doing that. Monica checked the tickets and I did the counting. That’s how I know everything’s OK. Now, let me explain to you. There are many places Your-Kind-of-Holiday sends its clients to, many tours, many different holidays at different prices. You follow me? Something to suit every pocket, something for every taste. There are, for instance, villa holidays for the adventurous under-thirty-fives. There are treks to Turkey, and treks for singles to the Himalayas. There is self-catering in Portugal, November reductions in Casablanca, February in Biarritz. There’s Culture-in-Tuscany and Sunshine-in-Sorrento. There’s the Nile. There’s Your-Kind-of-Safari in Kenya. Now, what I am endeavouring to say to you good people is that all tickets and labels are naturally similar, the yellow with the two red bands.’ Mrs Franks suddenly laughed. ‘So if you simply followed other people with the yellow-and-red label you might imagine you could end up in a wildlife park!’ Mrs Franks’ speech came hurriedly from her, the words tumbling over one another, gushing through her teeth. ‘But of course,’ she added soothingly, ‘that couldn’t happen in a million years.’
‘We’re not meant to be in Switzerland,’ Keith doggedly persisted.
‘Well, let’s just see, shall we?’
Unexpectedly, Mrs Franks turned and went away, leaving them standing. The receptionist was no longer behind the reception desk. The sound of typing could be heard.
‘She seems quite kind,’ Dawne whispered, ‘that woman.’
To Keith it seemed unnecessary to say that. Any consideration of Mrs Franks was, in the circumstances, as irrelevant as a description of the man in the travel agent’s. He tried to go over in his mind every single thing that had occurred: handing the girl the tickets, sitting down to wait, and then the girl leading the way to the plane, and then the pilot’s voice welcoming them aboard, and the air hostess with the smooth black hair going round to see that everyone’s seat-belt was fastened.
‘Snaith his name was,’ Dawne was saying. ‘It said Snaith on a plastic thing in front of him.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘The man in the travel place was called Snaith. G. Snaith it said.’
‘The man was just a clerk.’
‘He booked us wrong, though. That man’s responsible, Keith.’
‘Be that as it may.’
Sooner or later, Dawne had guessed, he’d say ‘Be that as it may’. He put her in her place with the phrase; he always had. You’d make an innocent remark, doing your best to be helpful, and out he’d come with ‘Be that as it may’. You expected him to go on, to finish the sentence, but he never did. The phrase just hung there, making him sound uneducated.
‘Are you going to phone up that man, Keith?’
‘Which man is this?’
She didn’t reply. He knew perfectly well which man she meant. All he had to do was to get through to Directory Inquiries and find out the number of the travel agency. It was no good complaining to a hotel receptionist who had nothing to do with it, nor to a woman in charge of a totally different package tour. No good putting the blame where it didn’t belong.
‘Nice to have some young people along,’ an elderly man said. ‘Nottage the name is.’
Dawne smiled, the way she did in the shop when someone was trying to be agreeable, but Keith didn’t acknowledge the greeting because he didn’t want to become involved.
‘Seen the ducks, ’ave you? Right champion them ducks are.’
The old man’s wife was with him, both of them looking as if they were in their eighties. She nodded when he said the ducks were right champion. They’d slept like logs, she said, best night’s sleep they’d had for years, which of course would be due to the lakeside air.
‘That’s nice,’ Dawne said.
Keith walked out of the reception area and Dawne followed him. On the gravel forecourt of the hotel they didn’t say to one another that there was an irony in the catastrophe that had occurred. On their first holiday since their honeymoon they’d landed themselves in a package tour of elderly people when the whole point of the holiday was to escape the needs and demands of the elderly. In his bossy way Uncle had said so himself when they’d tried to persuade him to accompany them.
�
�You’ll have to phone up Snaith,’ Dawne repeated, irritating Keith further. What she did not understand was that if the error had occurred with the man she spoke of it would since have become compounded to such a degree that the man would claim to be able to do nothing about their immediate predicament. Keith, who sold insurance over the counter for, the General Accident insurance company, knew something of the complications that followed when even the slightest uncertainty in a requirement was passed into the programme of a computer. Somewhere along the line that was what had happened, but to explain it to Dawne would take a very long time. Dawne could work a till as well as anyone; in the shop she knew by heart the price of Mars bars and the different kinds of cigarettes and tobacco, and the prices of all the newspapers and magazines, but otherwise Keith considered her slow on the uptake, often unable to follow simple argument.
‘Hi, there!’ Mrs Franks called out, and they turned and saw her picking her way across the gravel towards them. She had a piece of pink paper in her hand. ‘I’ve been doing my homework!’ she cried when she was a little closer. She waved the pink paper. ‘Take a look at this.’
It was a list of names, a computer print-out, each name a series of tiny dots. K. and H. Beale, they read, T. and G. Craven, P. and R. Feinman. There were many others, including B. and Y. Nottage. In the correct alphabetical position they were there themselves, between J. and A. Hines and C. and L. Mace.
‘The thing is,’ Dawne began, and Keith looked away. His wife’s voice quietly continued, telling Mrs Franks that their holiday had been very kindly paid for by the old man whom they lived with, who had been her employer before they ever moved in to live with him, who still was. They called him Uncle but he wasn’t a relation, a friend really – well, more than that. The thing was, he would be angry because they were not in Venice, he having said it should be Venice. He’d be angry because they were in a package for the elderly when he wanted them to have a rest from the elderly, not that she minded looking after Uncle herself, not that she ever would. The person in the travel agency had said the Windsor people were quite young. ‘I always remember things like that,’ Dawne finished up. ‘Snaith he was called. G. Snaith.’
‘Well, that’s most interesting,’ Mrs Franks commented, and added after a pause: ‘As a matter of fact, Dawne, Mr Franks and myself are still in our fifties.’
‘Be that as it may,’ Keith said. ‘At no time did we book a holiday in Switzerland.’
‘Well, there you are, you see. The ticket you handed to me at Gatwick is as clear as daylight, exactly the same as the Beales’ and the Maces’, the same as our own, come to that. Not a tither of difference, Keith.’
‘We need to be conveyed to our correct destination. An arrangement has to be made.’
‘The trouble is, Keith, I don’t know if you know it but you’re half a continent away from Venice. Another thing is, I’m not employed by Your– Kind, nothing like that. They just reduce our ticket a bit if I agree to keep an eye. On location we call it.’ Mrs Franks went on to say that her husband had also scrutinized the piece of pink paper and was in complete agreement with her. She asked Keith if he had met her husband, and said again that he was the man with the bad leg. He’d been an accountant and still did a lot of accountancy work one way or another, in a private capacity. The Edelweiss Hotel was excellent, she said. Your-Kind would never choose an indifferent hotel.
‘We are asking you to get in touch with your firm in London,’ Keith said. ‘We do not belong with your group.’
In silence, though smiling, Mrs Franks held out the pink list. Her expression insisted that it spoke for itself. No one could gainsay the dotted identification among the others.
‘Our name is there by mistake.’
A man limped across the gravel towards them. He was a large man of shambling appearance, his navy-blue pin-striped jacket and waistcoat at odds with his brown trousers, his spectacles repaired with Sellotape. The sound of his breath could be heard as he approached. He blew it through half-pursed lips in a vague rendition of a Gilbert and Sullivan melody.
‘These are the poor lost lambs,’ Mrs Franks said. ‘Keith and Dawne.’
‘How do?’ Mr Franks held a hand out. ‘Silly thing to happen, eh?’
It was Mr Franks who eventually suggested that Keith should telephone Your-Kind-of-Holiday himself, and to Keith’s surprise he got through to a number in Croydon without any difficulty. ‘Excuse me a minute,’ a girl said when he finished. He heard her talking to someone else and he heard the other person laughing. There was a trace of laughter in the girl’s voice when she spoke again. You couldn’t change your mind, she said, in the middle of a package. In no circumstances whatsoever could that be permitted. ‘We’re not changing our minds,’ Keith protested, but while he was explaining all over again he was cut off because he hadn’t any more coins. He cashed a traveller’s cheque with the receptionist and was supplied with a number of five-franc pieces, but when he re-dialled the number the girl he’d spoken to couldn’t be located so he explained everything to another girl. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ this girl said, ‘but if we allowed people to change their minds on account of they didn’t like the look of a place we’d be out of business in no time.’ Keith began to shout into the telephone, and Dawne rapped on the glass of the booth, holding up a piece of paper on which she’d written G. Snaith the name was. ‘Some sort of loony,’ Keith heard the girl say in Croydon, the mouthpiece being inadequately muffled. There was an outburst of giggling before he was cut off.
It was not the first time that Keith and Dawne had suffered in this way: they were familiar with defeat. There’d been the time, a couple of years after their marriage, when Keith had got into debt through purchasing materials for making ships in bottles; earlier – before they’d even met –there was the occasion when the Lamb and Flag had had to let Dawne go because she’d taken tips although the rules categorically forbade it. Once Keith had sawn through the wrong water pipe and the landlords had come along with a bill for nearly two hundred pounds when the ceiling of the flat below collapsed. It was Uncle who had given Dawne a job in his shop after the Lamb and Flag episode and who had put them on their feet by paying off the arrears of the handicraft debt. In the end he persuaded them to come and live with him, pointing out that the arrangement would suit all three of them. Since his sister’s death he had found it troublesome, managing on his own.
In Interlaken they selected a postcard to send him: of a mountain that had featured in a James Bond film. But they didn’t know what to write on it: if they told the truth they would receive the old man’s unspoken scorn when they returned – a look that came into his eyes while he silently regarded them. Years ago he had openly said – once only – that they were accident-prone. They were unfortunate in their dealings with the world, he had explained when Dawne asked him; lame ducks, he supposed you could say, if they’d forgive the expression, victims by nature, no fault of their own. Ever since, such judgements had been expressed only through his eyes.
‘You choose your piece of gâteau,’ Dawne said, ‘up at the counter. They put it on a plate for you. Then the waitress comes along and you order the tea. I’ve been watching how it’s done.’
Keith chose a slice of glazed greengage cake and Dawne a portion of strawberry flan. As soon as they sat down a waitress came and stood smiling in front of them. ‘Tea with milk in it,’ Dawne ordered, because when she’d said they were going abroad someone who’d come into the shop had warned her that you had to ask for milk, otherwise the tea came just as it was, sometimes no more than a tea-bag and a glass of hot water.
‘A strike?’ Dawne suggested. ‘You’re always hearing of strikes in airports.’
But Keith continued to gaze at the blank postcard, not persuaded that an attempt at falsehood was wise. It wasn’t easy to tell the old man a lie. He had a way of making such attempts feel clumsy, and in the end of winkling out the truth. Yet his scorn would continue for many months, especially since he had paid out what he would
call – a couple of hundred times at least – ‘good money’ for their tickets. ‘That’s typical of Keith, that is,’ he’d repeatedly inform his customers in Dawne’s hearing, and she’d pass it on that night in bed, the way she always passed his comments on.
Keith ate his greengage slice, Dawne her strawberry flan. They did not share their thoughts, although their thoughts were similar. ‘You’ve neither of you a head for business,’ he’d said after the ships-in-bottles calamity, and again when Dawne unsuccessfully attempted to make a go of dressmaking alterations. ‘You wouldn’t last a week in charge of things downstairs.’ He always referred to the shop as ‘downstairs’. Every day of his life he rose at five o’clock in order to be downstairs for the newspapers when they arrived. He’d done so for fifty-three years.
The plane couldn’t land at the Italian airport, Keith wrote, owing to a strike. So it had to come down here instead. It’s good in a way because we’re seeing another country as well! Hope your cold’s cleared up, Dawne added. It’s really lovely here! XXX
They imagined him showing the postcard to Mrs Withers. ‘That’s typical, that is,’ they imagined him saying and Mrs Withers jollying him along, telling him not to be sarky. Mrs Withers was pleased about earning the extra; she’d been as keen as anything when he’d asked her to come in fulltime for a fortnight.
‘Could happen to anyone, a strike,’ Dawne said, voicing Mrs Withers’ response.
Keith finished his greengage slice. ‘Call in to Smith’s for a will form,’ he imagined the cross, tetchy voice instructing Mrs Withers, the postcard already tucked away on the Embassy Tipped shelf. And when she arrived with the will form the next morning he’d let it lie around all day but have it in his hand when she left, before he locked the shop door behind her. ‘Silly really,’ Mrs Withers would say when eventually she told Dawne about it.
‘I’d just as soon be here,’ Dawne whispered, leaning forward a bit, daring at last to say that. ‘I’d just as soon be in Switzerland, Keithie.’
The Collected Stories Page 152