Grand Affair

by Charlotte Bingham

  From the first she could sense that the owner of the apartment must be very rich indeed, not just because the furnishings were so understated, the materials at the windows and on the beds, the linen sheets, the coffee machine, the navy blue and white china – everything in the flat was so perfectly, acceptably rich, and out of the reach of most people except the very rich – but because it smelt rich.

  When she was growing up at the Grand Hotel Ottilie had always told Edith and Mrs Tomber, the housekeeper, that long before a guest arrived and she saw their suitcases, long before they rang down for room service or left out their shoes to be cleaned, or sent their chauffeur or their secretary ahead to check out their rooms – long before this happened she could smell riches.

  ‘I always know when someone rich is about to arrive long before they’re here!’ she would boast loudly and childishly, to Edith’s intense embarrassment and Mrs Tomber’s incredulity, but now, here in Paris, she was certain that had not the concierge led her up to Apartment E and let her in, Ottilie’s nose for wealth could have brought her to it quite on its own.

  She imagined to herself as she wandered down the corridors in a sort of haze of delight that it might even have been just the smell of a rich man that would have brought her to the apartment door, the smell of tobacco, expensive aftershave and clean laundry. And following this thought came another, that with his impeccable taste, and the indefinable aroma that swathed the rooms, should they ever meet she would be quite unsurprised by the sight of him, in fact she would know him immediately.

  She was sure that he would have a perfect haircut done by a barber who had known him since he was a little boy, and that his clothes would include an expensive cashmere or wool overcoat, under it a shirt or a cashmere sweater so little worn that the creases were still detectable down the sides. He would wear shoe leather that never creaked and carry hand luggage and a wallet that looked light but felt heavy, because they were old, and they would be discreetly initialled.

  This was the man who owned the apartment in which Ottilie now stood, she was sure of it, just as she was sure that he would be older, not very, very old, but older, with a slight grey at his temple, and although tall, not so tall that he would have to bend down too far to kiss a woman’s hand, or put his cheek against hers while he danced with her. He would be all these things, she thought, and more, because judging from the many paintings and drawings of what must be his beautiful wife, he loved her extravagantly.

  The kitchen of the apartment was pulsatingly up to date and austere, glistening with modernity, and had tall stools of which Ottilie, who was by now feeling more than a little hungry if not ravenous, took immediate advantage, sitting on one of them first to drink coffee and eat one of the croissants that she had managed to buy at the station, and then to dream, to pretend to herself that from now on her life would always be like this, that one day she would be able to be cool, and alone like this, whenever she wanted.

  Soon it would be time to go out and explore the tiny winding streets around the Left Bank quarter, time to attempt to order her first meal in real French rather than ‘Menu French’, time to be surprised by the structure of real French menus. (It would be very different, she was sure, from the kind of food that Chef back at the Grand at St Elcombe imagined what he always called les français were eating.) Soon she would do all those things. Now, however, she would do nothing at all but run water in the bathroom next to the only bedroom that remained unlocked and ready for her arrival into a large old-fashioned bath, water that ran with tremendous, gushing enthusiasm from a great broad central chrome tap, and climb with difficulty over the side into the great claw-footed iron tub which she had previously scented with some bath essence given to her by the always loving Edith.

  As the water closed over her limbs and the bubbles clustered around her nipples in decorative rings, Ottilie surveyed her form for the first time not as something to dress, but as a perfect young body, watching it relax in the water as someone might watch a flower that opened only at evening.

  She could not let go of this overwhelming, intense joy that being alone was giving her, the knowledge that for the next few weeks no-one would telephone her, or fling open her sitting room door unasked and call for her to run down and help in the kitchens, or run up and help with bed-making for a late arrival, or an unexpected booking. In fact she had left St Elcombe in such a determined hurry that really no-one, anywhere, except Mrs Le Martine, really knew where she was, nor she imagined would they care very much, not with two Spanish girls taking her place, and life being so quiet at the Grand at the end of the season. She sighed first of all with the whole incredible thought of it, the strangeness of it, and then it seemed to her that her heart, or her soul, whichever was most sensitive and alive to life, was leaving her body and floating above the water in which she lay, rising, rising and rising until it was looking down at her lying in the great iron bath, noting her smile, her dampened hair, her utter happiness.

  Dinner in the quartier was even more exciting than everything that had previously happened. The early October evening air was balmy, and she was able to stroll out across the courtyard, leave her keys with the concierge and walk the narrow streets in a dark green twin-set and plaid skirt with no jacket or coat.

  As she made her way down the narrow winding streets, on the concierge’s instructions, past the great church of Ste Geneviève and on to share a corner seat of a table next to a clutch of arguing students at the famous Deux Magots café-restaurant, Ottilie could sense the optimism and the enthusiasm of the young people she passed. Strolling by her, always in groups of two or three, after the mostly middle-aged inhabitants of St Elcombe they seemed to her to be ravishingly beautiful; and since they were students, naturally intelligent and clever.

  As Ottilie observed them she realized that she did not want to see them like this, she did not yearn for them to be like this, but quite simply saw them as they actually were at that moment. In a few years, of course, they would doubtless be dowdy, serious, resentful and dull, but at this moment, on this warm October evening, they knew they were, as she knew they were, as she knew she was, intelligent, beautiful and optimistic, but most of all full of the best reason for living which is, quite simply, living.

  They all knew, as she knew, that for this short time in their lives they could argue and accept, tolerate and disagree with everything that the world had ever written, sung or depicted, but to be young and in Paris, to be a student and living on the old Left Bank in 1964, was to know for the rest of your life what joy and just being was all about.

  Ottilie ate alone, omelette and salad, coffee and an ice cream, and then walked home as slowly as possible, stopping every few yards to gaze at the interiors of the tiny old shops with their artful window displays.

  Here were no crowded windows where no-one could possibly understand what they should be looking at, as in St Elcombe, no goods so diverse that someone would be hard put to discover what the shop was trying to sell. Here there was only ever one book, one piece of velvet, one hat, nothing too much, nothing too little. At last, she felt she was witnessing taste, and it was like an electric charge to her senses, it shot through her and made her dizzy with the sheer sensuality and wonder of it. If she had known how, she would have made love to it.

  Up early to go to the Parisian School of Cookery and Ottilie was all too conscious of her real ignorance of classical French cooking. All the way there, a tourist guide in one hand, her American traveller’s cheques in the other, she wondered at her courage in going to a French cooking school where she would surely be a subject of extreme mockery, having never made so much as a sauce béarnaise or even a mayonnaise in her life, although she had witnessed the making of hundreds from an early age, the kitchens of the Grand having always been one of her favourite places, where she had been tolerated from the moment she had arrived as the newly adopted daughter of the old hotel.

  But now, as she walked down the narrow streets towards the address in her hand,
Ottilie felt an unaccustomed nervous tension, for ahead of her, in her imagination, she saw a great team of bewilderingly expert fellow pupils all clothed in white aprons, their hair held back by chef’s caps, their nails short, their eyes full of the messianic gleam that was usually only associated with religion. What a revelation, therefore, to round the corner of yet another private little courtyard set about with the kind of chairs and tables that were normally associated with small pavement cafés, and see a number of blue-rinsed middle-aged ladies with pronounced American accents eagerly heading in the same direction as herself, all inevitably clutching the same familiar books of traveller’s cheques.

  ‘Looks as if you’re going to be the youngest by about thirty years, dear!’ one of them joked to Ottilie.

  Ottilie, who was now sixteen and three-quarters but, given the hard work that had been required of her the previous few years, felt at least twenty-five, smiled, and tried to think of something to say. Looking down the little queue of grey- and blue-haired women she could hardly deny that it did indeed look as if she was going to be the only student much below the age of fifty.

  ‘I’m much older than I look, I promise you. I’m actually a grandmother,’ she joked back. It was something she sometimes said to hotel guests, and said lightly it always passed the moment off, because at the Grand so many of the guests were always bemoaning their ages to her, or saying, ‘But you wouldn’t remember that, now, dear, would you, you’re far too young.’

  Finally, when they had all signed the old, buff, barely legible cooking forms and paid their traveller’s cheques to the Parisian School of Cookery, Ottilie reflected to herself with some humour that it was just her luck to be gifted a cooking course in a neighbourhood filled with beautiful young people and find that the average age of the students she would be seeing every day was probably going to be forty-nine and a half.

  The ground rules for the cooking course were explained in broken English by the proprietress of the school, and in broken French by an American woman. They were all to be given, each day, a little recipe to make, or part of a recipe. For instance if they were to have a tarte tatin for the dessert then one pupil would be required to make la pâte – the pastry – and some other pupil the actual ingredients for the tart. When they had all finished making their various recipes for the morning, the food would be taken downstairs and eaten for lunch, for déjeuner.

  The mood that Ottilie was in, just the word déjeuner was exciting, and saying la pâte instead of dull old pastry gave her a birthday feeling.

  The silence at the start of that morning was, despite the very mature appearance of the eager students of the little school, profound. It was as Ottilie had first imagined it would be when she had been walking along with her guide in her hand – church-like in atmosphere, and yet at one moment, when she found herself looking round the large, airy, light room, she became unexpectedly moved by the sight of these undoubtedly redoubtable ladies from the East Coast, or Middle West, or wherever, of America, with their wedding rings removed, and their pinafores tied tight, struggling with such sincerity to attain that most difficult of all arts, a cooking skill.

  Ottilie’s particular recipe that first day was unexpectedly easy to make, oeufs persillés. Eggs, hard boiled, cut in two, the centres removed and then mixed with mayonnaise and finely chopped parsley before being carefully replaced in the centre of the whites. Quite simple, but when they sat down to eat them as part of the hors d’oeuvres, like most classical mixtures they all agreed the result was light, or as Mrs Blandorf from Connecticut, of the especially blue rinse and the humorous eyes, said to Ottilie, ‘makes you want Easter to come round quick!’

  Not all the results were so good. Mrs Blandorf’s pastry was, as she herself admitted, to huge laughter, ‘about as light as Mr Blandorf’s humour’.

  The course stopped on the dot of half past two o’clock, and so, by some unseen agreement, Ottilie was taken off by Mrs Blandorf and her friends ‘to see the Art, dear’. As a matter of fact, as Ottilie readily admitted to herself, it was they who were dear, solicitous and charming, and full of the kindly acceptance of life that Ottilie had so often observed in the older women who lunched or dined at the Grand. As if life, having thrown itself at them, having allowed them to survive childbirth, husbands, the domestic grind, and their own natures, was now, in these short years left before the real burden of age was upon them, allowing them a little time at last to relax and enjoy themselves in a way that they perhaps had not done since they were teenagers, or perhaps had never done.

  Their gaiety was infectious, and their enthusiasm undeniable. It did not matter if they were all hopping on and off the Métro, or an autobus, or just walking, to them everything was enjoyable, despite their ages, or because of them perhaps. Ottilie sensed that they, like her, had stepped out of the normal day-to-day routine of their lives and were enjoying the lack of daily grind to the hilt, up to and possibly well above the actual experience, because there was no-one to reprove them or make fun of their sincerity, no member of their family ready to cut them down to size and sigh ‘oh Mother’. No-one to tell them to ‘be their age’. Most of all, for a few weeks anyway, there were no housewifely duties to weigh them down, or in Ottilie’s case no hotel visitors or staff to keep them on the hop with their demands.

  Ottilie called them ‘the girls’. They seemed to love that. ‘Come on, girls,’ she’d call, ‘time to go to the Louvre.’ Or ‘Come on, girls, time to head back.’

  ‘I can’t think when I last enjoyed myself this much,’ Mrs Blandorf sighed during the second week of their course. ‘I keep saying to myself “Jeannette Blandorf, just imagine if you had missed out on all this.”’

  There was a small silence as all of them, comfortably seated at their café tables and watching the world strolling by, imagined between sips of strong French coffee that they had not seen the advertisement in the magazine or newspaper, imagined that they had not in a moment of determined independence had the courage to write off for details, face their husbands or their old mothers or their bossy, demanding children and say gaily, ‘Just off for a cooking course to Paris, dear!’

  ‘I don’t know about you, but it’s going to be a bit different facing Ludgrove over dinner after this,’ Mrs Blandorf continued. ‘And as for bridge on a Wednesday, what will they say when I hand round my tartelettes au jambon en chemise?’

  ‘Perfection! Just so long as you get me to do the pastry,’ Ottilie murmured, at which of course they were all off again, laughing about absolutely nothing really, laughing not because Ottilie’s oblique reference to Mrs Blandorf’s terrible hand at pastry had been particularly funny, but because they felt happy, which after all, Ottilie thought, as she walked slowly back to the apartment, leaving them all to return to their hotel, was surely the best form of laughter?

  But back at the apartment there was a letter waiting for her, and as soon as Ottilie saw that it was addressed in her father’s writing she knew that she did not want to open it.

  Ottilie stared at Alfred’s handwriting. The writer was careful, intelligent, and literate, the handwriting told her. Out loud she said to the silent flat, ‘I don’t want to open this!’ and her heart started to beat really rather fast, as if she had been running. Just seeing her father’s handwriting brought her present happiness and freedom into terrible contrast with that other existence. It was as if she was once more set to watch her own life on television, only now in black and white, not in colour, and the sound would be turned down so low that she would miss every other word, so much was she in love with Paris, with the flat, with the narrow little streets, with the cooking course, the cafés, the art galleries, the sound of French.

  ‘I’m not going to read it,’ she went on, still aloud to the flat. ‘Not only am I not going to read it, but it has never arrived.’ She knew it would be full of I am afraid your mother is right, you should have told her of your plans to take a month off long before you left, or The Spanish girls, as I predicted, are less than
satisfactory and we really must consider the possibility of your returning early.

  As soon as she saw the letter Ottilie knew that if she read it she might as well just pack up and leave for St Elcombe that minute. Reading it would mean that the spell was broken. Paris would be over and with it all the laughter, and all the gaiety. Mrs Blandorf’s pastry would no longer be funny, and the ‘girls’ with their blue rinses and their good humour and their ability to laugh at themselves would never be the same again. And, as with a holiday photograph containing the smiling faces of long-forgotten people who had once seemed so glamorous, but now in a cheap snapshot could be seen to be all too ordinary, Ottilie would be hard put to it to remember why it had all seemed so magical.

  ‘You’re not going to do this to me!’ she called to Alfred back in St Elcombe as she saw him in her mind’s eye staring hopelessly at his ledger books, and taking the letter she tore it up and threw it in the wastepaper basket.

  Whatever happened she was going to have her month in Paris, quite alone. Whatever happened no-one, but no-one, was going to take these few weeks away from her. She would have them no matter what and no matter who.

  Tonight she and the ‘girls’ had planned to revisit a little club called L’Abbaye which was tucked behind the church of St Germain des Pres. There they would once more listen to the singing, once more become saddened or delighted by the songs. Nothing in that letter torn into tiny pieces and left in the chic wastepaper basket was going to stop that.

  Nine

  Ottilie, Mrs Blandorf and her friends were having their last luncheon together at the Parisian School of Cookery. They had all tried their best with the menu, and it had to be said, in celebration of their last meal together, that the result had been very satisfactory, if only to them. If the proprietress and her assistant assumed their usual polite if studied expressions as they ate their navarin de mouton, or discussed the amount of oil in the salad, there was no such problem for their pupils, who were now, in their own imaginations at least, experts on French food. And if husbands, so gaily referred to in the previous fortnight – Ludgrove Blandorf, or Pip Bartlett, or Tom Zeigler, in Connecticut, Ohio, or Los Angeles, did not and never would like French cuisine, it was evident that their wives had been and seen and conquered, and that as far as they were concerned this meant that they had fought through the cooking and eating equivalent of the Korean War. They were heroines in their own and each other’s eyes. They would write to each other, of course, they would never forget each other, naturally.