Grand Affair

by Charlotte Bingham

  Ottilie could have hugged all of them to her, so endearing did she find their conversation, and so much did she want them to be returning home to men who would listen to their anecdotes and at least try to share their enthusiasm for Paris, French food, and holidays in Europe. That they would very probably not be doing so she already knew from the determined gaiety with which they enjoyed their last self-cooked luncheon together. Although they were flying off home with new ideas that could, if they were allowed, add so much colour to their lives and interest to their existence, Ottilie knew that their accounts of their fortnight in Paris would be met with stony stares and ‘What’s this?’ expressions, and that soon all they would have would be their letters to each other, and their photographs of themselves in front of well-known Parisian buildings or monuments.

  Ottilie knew all this because of having grown up at the Grand. She knew all about the fleeting nature of holiday friendships and the formality of the exchanging of addresses. She knew all about wives asking for recipes, and husbands trying to get away from their conversations to play what they always called in martyred voices ‘some quiet golf’, as if being on holiday was a penance from which a man could, once in a while, be allowed to have some time off, time off from his wife who, it always seemed to Ottilie, had spent most of her life waiting for a holiday with her husband, so that she might talk to him.

  ‘Trouble with you living here at the Grand, you’ve seen too much and know too little,’ Edith would admonish Ottilie, now that she was older.

  And although Edith only ever said it in a laughing kind of way Ottilie knew that it was true. By the time she became a teenager Ottilie had seen too much, though not of the kind of harsh backstreet behaviour that Edith sometimes hinted at – gangs with knives, near-escapes from rape, nothing like that.

  What Ottilie had seen were the terrible silences of married people, the hatred underneath the polite conversation, the narrowed eyes as one or other of a couple left a room, the mocking laughter of the staff as they retold their experiences with guests at the end-of-season staff dinner.

  By the time she was a teenager Ottilie knew all about couples who tried to make love in front of the waiters or waitresses when they took up their breakfast on a tray, and other couples who were not married but pretending to be, and yet others who had, the waiters always hinted, ‘strange tastes’. She knew to hang about in the corridor if she heard Mrs Tomber’s disapproving command, ‘Don’t go in there until I’ve done the bed, Miss Ottilie!’ She knew too how to tell a married woman from a mistress, or a husband from a lover (different size suitcases, different expression, different way of signing the register – lovers always smiled too much and looked far too ‘natural’, the receptionists had told her, and it was not long before Ottilie was able to realize the truth of this).

  But most of all Ottilie knew that the golden rule was never, whatever happened, to start a conversation. Rather, by being of service she had learnt to encourage guests to talk to her, not the other way round. Never to tell one guest of the previous visit of another (in case they were meant to be somewhere else at the time), never to refer in any way to anyone who had stayed at the hotel before. Discretion was the key to everything, because as Mrs Tomber often said, her eyes dramatically narrowed, ‘You would be surprised, really you would, Miss Ottilie, the complications that can occur in even the nicest establishments.’

  ‘I will come to the airport to see you all off,’ Ottilie said to Mrs Blandorf as with sighs of delight and sighs of contentment, and still more sighs of ‘If only we were at the start of this instead of the finish’, she and her friends the ‘girls’ finally walked away from the Parisian School of Cookery for the last time, under the archway of vines, and off down the narrow little street that led once more to the busy boulevards and life as it is normally lived from day to day, filled with ordinary little tasks and not enough laughter.

  ‘You don’t want to come to the airport, honey!’

  Ottilie did not, but she smiled and said she did because it somehow seemed the right thing to do, and anyway she suddenly felt lonely at the thought of staying on in Paris without the girls, of going to the cooking school for the second part of her course with new versions of them, or an entirely different set of them.

  They flew off with much waving of handkerchiefs, leaving Ottilie with a number of addresses in America where she could contact them, either written in largish handwriting on small notepads in black ink, or printed in smallish letters that looked like handwriting on large cards with frilly edges, and put in envelopes that had coloured tissue paper on the inside.

  ‘Here, have these, honey.’ Mrs Zeigler had handed Ottilie a smart carrier bag which said ‘Rue Rivoli’ printed very small in gold on one side and was filled with international magazines. ‘No point in taking them back to Los Angeles with me when I’ve read them.’

  Back at the flat and trying to pretend that she was not feeling momentarily rather flat because the second part of her cooking course did not begin until the following Monday and she faced spending the weekend entirely in her own company, Ottilie ran a bath as she had often done when she was small back at the hotel, just for want of anything else to do.

  As the great tub filled with pleasantly warm water she flicked open one of the magazines donated to her by Mrs Zeigler, only to find herself staring at a face she had once known but was now only just able to recognize.

  A young man – the article stated that he was ‘under twenty-five’ and ‘compellingly handsome’ with ‘dark hair and dark grey eyes and a slight Southern accent’. The confident but wary look in the eyes, the determined set to the looks, they were unmistakable. She was looking at a photograph of her brother Joseph.

  But if Ottilie was not any longer ‘O’Flaherty’, nor it seemed was Joseph.

  Open-mouthed, Ottilie read that her middle brother was now named Joseph Maximus, and he was not the second son of three boys and a girl, but the eldest son of a Mr Maximus and born into the hotel trade. Originally from England, he had emigrated to America and was now one of the managers, at what must be the youngest age ever, of the flagship of an international hotel group.

  Before she read on, Ottilie sat down on the stool in the bathroom, her hair curling in the steam. No-one in the family had heard from Joseph since that terrible night when Ottilie had given him the wretched earrings to throw away for her. Ottilie only knew many days later that he had left home the following day, to Lorcan’s hurt and Sean’s desolation, leaving only a letter to say that he was going because there was nothing more for him in St Elcombe.

  Ottilie stared at the picture, holding it too close to her eyes as if by doing so she could make quite sure that it really was Joseph whom she was seeing, as the water continued to rush and gush into the great iron bath. It was as if by staring at his photograph she could understand Joseph and his going better. But most of all it was as if by staring at the photograph, at his expression of confidence in himself and his future, she could fully grasp what it meant to her that he was, after all, at least alive.

  In her innocence that night, Ottilie had honestly thought that Joseph would simply throw away the earrings for her. It had been stupid of her really, because knowing Joseph and his often voiced determination to free himself of what he saw as the confines of his family she ought to have guessed that he would be incapable of ridding himself of something that could provide the means of his escape from St Elcombe.

  Yet, being only ten years old at the time, she had sincerely believed that he would throw the earrings away, and that would be that. She had really imagined that, as Joseph had said that night, he would be like the priest in confession, and that Ottilie, having confessed to taking the earrings and promising to throw them away for Melanie, would then be able to run away and forget about the whole wretched business, that she would have been absolved for her part in Melanie’s deception of the insurance company.

  But such had not been the case, and could never have been really, not if she though
t about it. Indeed, as she stared grimly through the bathroom steam at Joseph’s photograph, Ottilie agonized yet again over how she could ever have been so foolish. Joseph had been the middle boy. Not the oldest one like poor Lorcan, not the one forced to replace Da in Ma’s life, compelled by circumstances to be a ‘pretend husband’ to his own mother.

  Nor had he been the youngest like Sean – easily forgiven for a great deal, spoilt by the attention of two older brothers – no, Joseph had been the middle one. The one who was at neither extreme of his mother’s love, the one who had been conveniently there to be a companion for both the elder and the younger boy and because of this was in effect cut in half. Someone so divided could only become whole on his own. In other words, out of all of them, Joseph had been the loner.

  He had lied to Ottilie about being able to trust in him, but bad as that could be, hurtful as that could be, it had not been as hurtful as his disappearance. Whatever anyone said or did, beating you or cutting you in two with their words as Alfred sometimes liked to do, nothing could be as bad as simply disappearing. And no amount of prayers (and how Ottilie had prayed) and no amount of poor Lorcan’s saying endless novenas, no amount of making sacrifices to Our Lady to speed Joseph’s return, had brought him back. Indeed, if prayers could have returned Joseph to his family he would have been back within the month, but as it was it seemed that heaven was deaf to his family’s entreaties, until Sean, who had always been a religious boy, finally stopped going to Mass altogether, as a bribe to God.

  ‘I shaan’t go back till God has sent Joseph back to us, all right?’ was how he put it to Lorcan in his Cornish accent.

  For weeks after his disappearance, from afar, and in an agony of guilt, Ottilie had watched Lorcan turning up daily for work at the Grand, looking older and older as the time went by and they heard nothing. He grew so thin that finally Mr Hulton noticed and sent him to see a doctor at his own expense, but the doctor had said it was just shock. Just shock. Edith said just shock could kill you. Edith said that calling what Lorcan was suffering from just shock was just what a man would do, and that the trouble with most doctors was that they certainly did not understand that the person inside was as important as the person on the outside, and that until they did they would never be able to help people suffering from just shock.

  It was from this time onwards that Ottilie had started to work so hard for her parents in the hotel. Every time she ran upstairs when she did not need to, every time she ran downstairs when she did not have to, every time she stood in for the telephonist or the receptionist (she could say ‘Grand Hotel reception speaking’ as well as anyone) it seemed to her that God might just be watching her hundredth willing errand and forgive her the trespass of giving Joseph those wretched earrings that evening. That being so, He would, out of the kindness of His heart, send Joseph back, not to her but to Lorcan and young Sean who were missing him so much, who imagined even now that, like Ma, he might have been swept over the cliffs into the sea.

  But it seemed that God was not watching, and nor it seemed did He appear to care in the least, and eventually Ottilie found that she was simply running errand after errand for the sake of it. At first she did it to take her mind off imagining Joseph dead and it being all her fault, but after that, as she grew older, she did it to help her parents out, and after that because the hotel was doing so badly.

  God, Joseph, how could you? I mean really how could you? How could you have left us all in such agony all this time? Not knowing if you were alive or dead? Changing your name so that we could not find you. Getting rich on the money you must have made from my mother’s diamond earrings. Becoming rich and now, it seems from this magazine, even a little famous, and still not letting us know? It doesn’t seem possible. Could you not once have sent Lorcan just a little card to say you were alive? For heaven’s sake, did you not know that after your disappearance everything would change for ever?

  Because of your disappearance the family just broke up – Sean went to Australia, and Lorcan to train for the priesthood. After that day you disappeared Lorcan became obsessed by the idea that it was all his fault. He thought if he had kept a better eye on you, been a better brother to you, you would never have gone. He thought you felt unloved, without parents. He kept saying to me, ‘If only I’d been a better brother to him, not let him just drift on.’

  But Lorcan was a wonderful brother to you, Joseph. No-one could have had a better brother. He even learned to cook for you and Sean, Joseph. Don’t you remember how after Ma died he learned to cook beautiful omelettes and home-made pies for you, and puddings the way Ma always used to make them, and how you told me he would even wash up on his own so that you and Sean could get on with your homework?

  That’s how much he loved you both and tried to make up to you for what had happened, with Ma dying and us all being left, and yet all you could do was disappear and never send a word! I can hardly believe that all the time we were crying ourselves to sleep at night there you were, all safe and sound in America, all the time knowing – you must have known – that we were all in St Elcombe praying for your safety?

  Ottilie would never know how long she sat on the bathroom stool staring at the picture in Mrs Zeigler’s magazine and making that pathetically indignant speech over and over again in her head to her middle brother, but eventually she rose to her feet, and having bathed and tied a towel around herself, and another around her still damp hair, twisting it into a turban on top of her head, she stepped out of the bathroom door and down the long corridor, straight into the arms of a tall Frenchman with dark hair, immaculately cut, greying at the sides, and wearing one of those soft sports coats that Englishmen never care to wear – which is to say a jacket that fitted beautifully, in a soft cashmere.

  Ottilie knew it was soft cashmere because she actually walked right into it, and for one fleeting moment she could feel that softness that only cashmere gives against her own soft skin. It was surprisingly sensual, and she sensed immediately, although her thoughts had been anywhere except where she was, that the man was French because he smelt so appealingly of Gauloise cigarettes and a recent cup of coffee, and rarely scented aftershave. Also he had on a soft-collared shirt with a thin tie, which again was not something which Englishmen, anyway in St Elcombe, ever wore.

  Before she even looked up Ottilie knew that she had walked straight into the arms of the rich man who owned the apartment, he of the impeccable taste and the beautiful wife.

  ‘Ah, but I know who you are – Ottilie Cartaret, no?’

  Ottilie jumped backwards as soon as she heard his voice, but as she did so she made sure to put her hand around the top of her towel to reassure herself that it was knotted quite tight. And yet she smiled at him, because just for a moment it seemed a pity not to allow herself a few seconds to enjoy the situation. He, an older, handsome, distinguished man, she a much younger woman, just out of girlhood. He very much clothed, and she without a shred on despite the thickness of the towel – his towel, the towel belonging to the flat.

  ‘Yes, I am Ottilie Cartaret.’

  He was tall, quite a lot more than fifty possibly, urbane of course, suntanned, with eyes of a startling hazel green. Ottilie knew at once as she stared across the space between them that whatever his age – perhaps because of it, she would not know since she herself was not yet seventeen – she knew immediately that he was far too attractive for his age, and hers.

  ‘I knew I would know you,’ Ottilie heard herself saying, which she realized just too late sounded really rather provocative.

  ‘You knew that, did you?’ he asked in a French-accented English which was really more American than British, while his eyes took in her standing there in a towel, her hair in a turban on the top of her head, her feet and legs dry, but also suntanned and bare.

  ‘Yes,’ Ottilie nodded, determined to carry on the conversation as if she was fully clothed. ‘I’m afraid it is from being in this flat. And I knew just what you would look like, even though there were n
o pictures of you. It’s just that feeling that one gets living in someone else’s apartment. What I mean is— What I should say, rather, is it was very kind of you to say to Mrs Le Martine that I could stay here,’ she added a little hastily, remembering her manners rather too late. ‘And . . . Are you sure it’s still all right? I mean if you want to be here too? If you would rather be on your own, I will quite understand. I prefer to be on my own myself, I find, quite a lot of the time.’ Too many words said too quickly as usual, but there – they were out, and that was that.

  A look came into Monsieur’s eyes at just the mention of Mrs Le Martine’s name that was difficult to understand. It was as if just hearing Mrs Le Martine’s name brought back something that Monsieur (as the concierge always called him) would rather not remember. But he said in a firm, loyal tone, ‘I would do anything for Madame Le Martine. And of course you can here stay, my Gahd, but of course! I am old enough to be your grandfazzer, and you are une jeune fille très bien elevée, n’est-ce pas? This appartement is very big, even fer two, and my son he may be ’ere soon, so I will stay in case, because with him about you may need a chaperon, you know. Sons!’