Grand Affair

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘The amethysts tonight,’ she would say. Or, ‘No, Edith, how many times must I tell you? En parure, you silly creature. Pearls with black, always. Pearls with black, most especially black velvet.’

  Mrs Le Martine liked white flowers in her suite, but never chrysanthemums which she said were ‘funeral flowers’. She also liked a box of rich tea biscuits by her bed, but only the finger-sized ones, not the ordinary round ones. And she liked pot pourri but never, ever a mix with any lavender in it because, she said, ‘It reminds me of my hated governess who used to hit my hands night and morning so that I would never grow up and marry, because I would be too crippled to play the piano or hold hands with a man. But there you are, I grew up to do both, so there really was not much point to all that cruelty, was there? Except it did put iron in my soul.’

  Treading across the deep blue carpet to the wardrobes Ottilie stared into their depths to make sure that the hangers Mrs Le Martine liked so particularly were waiting there in readiness. It was exciting to think that the strong, polished mahogany ones would soon be supporting Mrs Le Martine’s size eight suits with their silk-lined skirts, and the soft padded ones, with their small lavender bags removed in deference to her hatred of lavender, her blouses and evening tops. And the white and gold Louis-Quattro chests of drawers would soon have cashmere twinjets and silk crêpe nightdresses arranged in their flowered paper-lined drawers in such a way that Ottilie would find herself secretly stroking them when Mrs Le Martine was too busy bossing the maids to notice.

  From her first season at the Grand onwards Mrs Le Martine had warmed to Ottilie, and said so to her face.

  ‘I took to you the moment you came in with that bunch of exquisite flowers that you had picked from the hotel hothouse and smuggled up to me, you naughty girl,’ she would remind Ottilie, laughing, because unlike the rest of the world Mrs Le Martine was not fooled by Ottilie. She knew that Ottilie was naughty and mischievous, and she liked her for it, which was why it was always such a relief to be with Mrs Le Martine, and why Ottilie looked forward with such intense excitement to her arrival, to hearing her lovely rippling laughter in the downstairs foyer, to her satisfied sigh when she saw her suite and turned to tell Ottilie that she had ‘got everything just right’.

  Because as far as Ottilie and Mr Cartaret were concerned it was Ottilie’s duty, her prized duty as it happened, to get everything completely right for Mrs Le Martine’s arrival each year.

  ‘She is a great star,’ Alfred would say of Mrs Le Martine, sighing with appreciative approval, although never within his wife’s hearing. ‘Really a great star. She could have been a great actress, you know, but of course she is too refined for such a life, too sensitive. Plucked from the firmament they are, wonderful women like Mrs Le Martine, Ottilie, plucked from the Milky Way and sent down to enchant us mortals. We are indeed privileged.’

  After these words Alfred would give a deep sigh which had within it more than a vein of melancholy, and Ottilie could sense that he too was looking forward to Mrs Le Martine’s arriving, eager to meet her demands, loving to please her as much as Ottilie did, as they all did, longing to hear her say in her slightly husky voice, ‘But this is charming!’ so that each person felt, as never before, that they and they alone had filled Mrs Le Martine’s eyes with delight and set her small, elegant hands aflutter with appreciation simply and solely because of what they had done for her.

  First, and long before they saw her, they would hear her low gurgling laugh with its entrancing mixture of merriment and complicity. Next they would smell her scent – ‘Never perfume, Ottilie dearest’ – and this again it always seemed to Ottilie would be long before they saw her. ‘Enchant’ was the name of Mrs Le Martine’s scent. (Edith always said, ‘I never did see such large bottles of perfume, Miss Ottilie, not nowhere. I think she must have had them made up special in La France before the war, really I do.’) And then at last Mrs Le Martine herself. Not tall like Melanie, but small and petite like Ottilie, but so exquisitely made that it seemed to Ottilie who was already nearly her height that Mrs Le Martine was really just as tall as Mum, so finely made were her legs and arms, so small and white her hands.

  This day, as always on her arrival, Ottilie met her by the reception desk.

  First, as always, came the embrace. Ottilie had rapidly become used to the fact that one of her many duties as the ‘hotel child’ was to submit not only to letting herself be talked about – ‘My, you have grown this last winter’ – but also to being kissed by the ladies and patted on the head by old gentlemen who smelt strongly of either camphor or moth balls.

  But being kissed by Mrs Le Martine was not a duty at all. In fact Ottilie found she longed for it, because not to be kissed by Mrs Le Martine would be to miss out not just on the smell of her famous scent but on the feel of her cool hands either side of your face, on being close to the softness of her lace or chiffon blouse and her lingering look of appreciation as she held you away from her and murmured to Dad, ‘But this is a young lady, Mr Cartaret. Your daughter has grown into a young lady this winter past.’

  After this little ceremony they were off, the whole of her team, willing and eager, all smiles, all keenness.

  First Blackie, sweating and puffing, the buttons on his old uniform looking fit to burst due to a long winter of indulgence in steamed puddings. Then the Grand’s team of page boys, long past their thirtieth birthdays but small like jockeys so they could still pose as young, trooping after Blackie. After them came Ottilie, usually in a brand new dress with a starched broderie angles pinafore over the top and tied in a big sash at the back, and finally Mrs Le Martine herself, walking gracefully and elegantly, smiling at members of the old staff who would have made some excuse to leave their duties and greet her on her arrival and carefully nodding at new members who had yet to be put under her spell.

  Once outside her suite Blackie and the ‘boys’ would stand aside as Ottilie put the key into the lock and flung open the double doors and Mrs Le Martine and she floated in together, each appreciating the immaculate scene before them in quite different ways. The furniture set just as Mrs Le Martine liked it, the flowers in tall vases – if possible white lilac somewhere in the arrangements. The champagne in a bucket, even though she never touched it, just liked it to be there on show, and finally the picture of her late husband which she always sent on ahead to be put beside her bed, just in front of the biscuits and the water carafe.

  Unpacking was always left to the maids. So first, before the solemn business of setting out her clothes was begun, there was welcoming sherry, a small glass for Mrs Le Martine, and a glass of barley water for Ottilie, after a sip or two of which, having safely seen to the departure of Blackie and the boys, Mrs Le Martine would turn to Ottilie and in a conspiratorial voice say, ‘Well, has she arrived yet?’

  It was hardly necessary for Mrs Le Martine to ask, for they both knew that for the person in question not to have arrived would be like the sun refusing to rise in the morning, or the tides outside the windows stopping for ever.

  Neither Ottilie nor Mrs Le Martine ever had to say any more than ‘she’, because being conspirators they both knew whom they meant by she.

  She was the lady who always took the top suite and never left her room. She was the lady who after her arrival never dined downstairs and was seen only by the maids who took up her trays in response to orders for room service. She was the lady who came, the older staff loved to tell Ottilie when she herself had first arrived at the Grand, year after year at the same time, ever since spending her honeymoon in that same top suite. The suite which, once arrived, she never left. She was the mysterious lady who always stayed at the same time as Mrs Le Martine but never appeared in lounge or foyer, in dining room or garden, but could be seen in all weathers sitting on her balcony gazing out to sea as if she was waiting for someone to arrive at any minute, and longing only for that.

  ‘Her name is Mrs Ballantine,’ Ottilie had told Mrs Le Martine when she first became intrigued by he
r mysterious fellow guest, ‘but downstairs they call her Blue Lady. They say that she honeymooned here in the top suite but that her husband, who was much older, died while they were making a little trip to the Italian Lodge near Wichita Bay in Devon. And do you know what? Chef says she nearly went mad from the grief of it all. And that is why she comes back here every year, and always will perhaps, for ever more.’

  ‘Oh the fascination of it.’ Mrs Le Martine had clasped her hands together in delight as Ottilie finished speaking. ‘And the way you tell it, Miss Ottilie. Too delightful. Mad with grief indeed! Where do you get your expressions from, I would dearly like to know? But. What a business. We must find out more, or we will faint from the excitement of not knowing, surely?’

  Mrs Le Martine always called Ottilie ‘Miss’, it was one of her peculiarities. Ottilie loved this almost most of anything about her, that Mrs Le Martine never let anything pass her by without changing its name – very effectively sometimes – to something else or adopting some new or different style of address.

  So Ottilie was always ‘Miss Ottilie’ and Edith was ‘Droopy Dolly’, and Blackie the hall porter was ‘Tiresome Ted’ and even Mum and Dad were ‘Her Majesty’ and ‘His Majesty’ behind their backs.

  But sometimes Mrs Le Martine said ‘Oh Miss Ottilie’ in a voice that was suddenly just a little too like Edith’s, which would make Ottilie feel uncomfortable and cause her to look round to make quite sure that poor Edith was not there. But having found that she was not, she would feel safe to laugh, and once more a delicious feeling of. relief would flow through her that when she was with Mrs Le Martine, as with no-one else, she could allow her naughty self to be seen, and that despite this, Mrs Le Martine still seemed to like her.

  So not only did the start of the season bring with it its own excitements, new staff joining the few old regulars, occasionally to go very soon afterwards and be rapidly replaced, but more important to Ottilie, after the long winters of storms and rain and high seas, it brought with it Mrs Le Martine and Blue Lady.

  ‘You see far too much of that woman,’ Melanie would say to Ottilie at regular and monotonous intervals during the whole month of Mrs Le Martine’s annual stay, at which Ottilie would open her eyes wide, assume her most innocent expression, and instead of protesting, which would be useless – because everyone knew that Ottilie danced attendance on Mrs Le Martine from the moment she arrived until the moment she left – she would be sure to murmur, ‘Can I help you with anything, Mum? The flowers, the telephone – I’ve finished helping Mrs Tomber.’

  Ottilie was always sure that even though her mother was all too well aware that she was distracting her from the main issue, nevertheless Melanie was so terribly lazy that she could not help availing herself of any offer of assistance, and this despite the fact that, as far as Ottilie knew, she never actually did anything in the hotel anyway except appear in the dining room and be charming to everyone once she had walked down the stairs, observing her dramatic ritual of looking straight ahead and not down at her feet.

  One particular day Ottilie had only just finished saying ‘Can I help you with anything?’ when she noticed that Melanie was looking more than a little apprehensive, not at all her usual superior self, not at all the person that Ottilie was always so careful to be good and well behaved around.

  ‘You see far too much of that woman, Ottilie. She will tire of you and turn on you, really she will. You must be careful not to foist yourself upon guests,’ she repeated mechanically, several times, but without her usual command.

  ‘Yes, Mum,’ Ottilie agreed.

  ‘Also, I think you should stop calling me Mum and call me Ma, now that you are older. I think it would be more fitting if you were to call me Ma, and Dad should be Pa. Better in front of the guests, too. I thought I saw someone looking at you the other day as you said Mum, as if they did not think it either suitable or fitting for me, and I do not think it is.’

  Ottilie frowned. This was going to be difficult. And it was no good making one of her jokes as she would if she was with Edith or Philip Granville, or being cheeky as she would if she was with Mrs Le Martine. She had noticed that Alfred Cartaret would always say to Mrs Tomber or his secretary, when he was faced with a problem, ‘You deal with this’, but Ottilie was not a man, she could not turn to someone else and tell them to ‘deal with this’. Instead she opened her mouth, and then closed it again, quickly realizing that for once she truly did not know in the very least how to answer this new edict from Her Majesty.

  It would be so difficult to try to explain to Mum that Ma had been Ma. Ma was Number Four and the fun and the warmth and wearing sandals without socks and knowing people like Charlie on the corner, people that Mum and Edith would now never dream of letting Ottilie know. And Mum was Melanie, the Queen of the Grand, all perfume and silk, and if she tried to swap them round it might be a bit confusing.

  ‘I think of you especially as Mum, now,’ was how she finally put it, carefully leaving out all the feelings of pain and confusion that just hearing the name of Ma brought into her heart, all the agony of that day in the police station when Ottilie had stared at the picture on her stolen tin bucket rather than look up at the policemen in their uniforms or listen to the sound of Ma protesting her innocence to Lorcan.

  How could she call Mrs Cartaret Ma? Ma had been a thief, and really – as Joseph had said afterwards so bitterly – ‘should by all that is right have been in gaol’, whereas Mum was a beautiful woman who had come into Ottilie’s life and adopted her, lifted her out of her poor existence at the cottage and made her grand and rich.

  Mum had taken away Ottilie O’Flaherty and replaced her with Miss Ottilie Cartaret, given her a beautiful room and books and toys and expensive clothes and as much food as she wanted whenever she wanted it. She had made her into Miss Ottilie whom all the staff at the hotel spoilt. She had made her into a princess who was asked to places like Tredegar by boys like Philip Granville whom other boys like her brothers Joseph and Sean called snobs.

  ‘Yes, I really think from now on, Ottilie, since you are older, you should call me Ma and your father Pa.’

  Please don’t make me, please, please, please, please God help her not make me call her Ma.

  ‘I tell you what,’ Ottilie said, her eyes over-wide, ‘why don’t you let me call you Mamma and Pappa? The older guests would like that ever so much, wouldn’t they?’

  ‘Don’t say “ever so much”, Ottilie, it’s common. Have you been watching the television in the staff room? I hate you to pick up expressions from the television, you know that.’

  ‘No, Mum – I mean Mamma – I never watch television. Sorry, Mamma.’

  There was a small pause, and Ottilie, who had long ago learned never to let Melanie know just what she was thinking, opened her eyes even wider and smiled although she actually felt like crying, for some reason that she could not understand, crying the way she had cried when she had been left on the steps of the hotel the evening of Ma’s funeral.

  ‘Oh very well, Mamma it must be, if you think you like that better, if that makes you happy.’ Melanie put down her silver-backed hairbrush and looked suddenly bored by the whole idea and at the same time peculiarly restless and unhappy too. ‘But please don’t argue all the time with me about everything, Ottilie. Terribly tiring, you know. Now to other things. I do hope and think you are old enough to be someone I can entrust with a secret?’

  She paused and looked at her adopted daughter.

  ‘You mean you want to tell me something that I should keep under my hat?’

  Melanie continued to look across at Ottilie, and for one second Ottilie could see that she was really rather surprised by what Ottilie had just said, as if she had suddenly guessed that Ottilie had secrets with other people, secrets that she knew nothing about, and perhaps never would.

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed slowly, as if suddenly seeing Ottilie for the first time, ‘I certainly do want you to keep this under your hat.’

  Ottilie nodde
d. She knew all about keeping things under her hat from Mrs Le Martine. It was an expression that she always used, particularly when they were trying to find things out about Blue Lady and why she came back to the hotel every year – well, they knew why, but not quite why – not really, really why.

  Certainly it was to do with Blue Lady’s husband’s dying so tragically when they were still on honeymoon, and his being such a loss to her, and his being so terribly rich. But they both wanted to know much more than that, and yet in the three whole years that Ottilie had been living at the Grand, in the seven years that Mrs Le Martine had been arriving for the opening month of the season, they had not found out anything more, except that she always wore the same clothes, which Mrs Tomber the housekeeper said to Ottilie were now beginning to look ‘old hat’.

  Fleetingly Ottilie observed to herself that hats seemed to feature a great deal in grown-ups’ conversations.

  Melanie stood up and walked with her usual graceful sloping walk, hips forward, hair brushed back from her face, to the central table of her large, ornate bedroom with its elaborate fittings and what always seemed to Ottilie to be miles of fitted wardrobes. ‘Madame’s closets’, as Mrs Tomber always reverently referred to them, were each lit from within by special lighting so that when Madame opened a cupboard she could see all her clothes illuminated. One glance at each wooden drawer or shelf showed her all the rainbow colours of her cashmere twinsets, all the beauty of her hand-embroidered Italian blouses, all the Chinese silk shawls, all the delicacy of her nightwear and her underwear made specially for her by Roses in Knightsbridge, all her shoes – pink, blue, red, two-tone, suede, shoes of every description – and that was all before the cupboard for her hats was opened, because Melanie’s hats were so many and various they took up not one closet but two.

  And they were nothing compared to the closets for her evening clothes, the long sequin-studded evening gowns, the short slipper satin evening dresses with matching coats. If Alfred ever dared to comment upon the arrival of some new parcel from London containing yet another garment, his wife always said in ringing tones, ‘I must have these things, Alfred. You cannot possibly expect me to be of any use to either you or this place if I am to be clothed in rags.’