Grand Affair

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘Ah, there you are!’

  Philip seemed to fill the dark brown café, with its slimy, grim, once cream walls, with the vibrancy of his presence, with his authority and his gaiety.

  ‘Thank God! I thought you might have gone.’

  He pulled her to her feet, kissing her spontaneously first on her cheek and then briefly on her lips.

  ‘I thought you would have gone and I would have to send out a May Day for you. But what the hell has happened? Why are you here?’

  Ottilie glanced round at the interested occupants of the other tables, and although she could not help smiling at the way Philip had pulled her to her feet, she felt too shy to answer. Besides, there might be someone seated at one of those tables who knew her. She was known in the town by relatives and friends of the staff, by gardeners’ wives, by people who had worked at the hotel and now retired.

  ‘I’m so sorry about all this,’ she began, and then indicated with her eyes ‘let’s go outside’, which Philip picked up straight away. They quickly left the café and started to walk up the hill towards his old Austin Healey.

  ‘What’s happened? Have your parents gone mad or something?’ Spontaneously Philip took Ottilie’s hands and kissed them and stroked her hair just the way he had done earlier in the morning when they had been on the island lying in each other’s arms, quite alone, away from the dancing and the band. ‘Come on, tell me.’

  It was difficult for Ottilie to explain to Philip, who seemed at that moment to embody everything that was most especially life-enhancing, that because of a misunderstanding over a drawing she had been given by an elegant old Frenchman, she had been thrown out of her parents’ hotel.

  ‘Do you really want to know, Philip?’ she asked him. ‘I mean, do you honestly want to know the whole story? Or shall we drive off first and find somewhere for lunch, and then I’ll tell you?’

  ‘Lunch first,’ Philip agreed quickly. ‘Too uncertain for a picnic, I thought, so I booked at the Feathers. Constantia’s furious because she laid on lunch for me and everyone else, but I told her too bad, this is the last day of my last leave and I need to be with the girl I love.’

  Ottilie looked away. ‘Oh, Philip, you should have stayed with Constantia.’

  But when he had kissed her Ottilie quite changed her mind.

  ‘I’m starving,’ she told him, seconds after he had let go of her, which immediately made Philip laugh because he obviously was too, so they ran hand in hand to the car and drove off towards their table for two at the Feathers.

  Ottilie stared out of the window at the green Cornish fields and the ripened yellow of the farm fields which were already being slowly harvested far beyond where they were sitting. Something most unusual had just happened. Philip had actually questioned her about her family – she had never mentioned her adoption to him and did not feel like doing so now – but even so, it was not at all like Philip to suddenly ask why everything had gone so dreadfully wrong between her and her parents, and Ottilie had told him.

  For one second there was a long, disbelieving silence and then Philip started to laugh.

  ‘Only you, Ottilie,’ he said, eventually, as Ottilie, feeling mildly indignant, stared at the sight of him trying to stop laughing and failing in spectacular fashion, ‘only you could be thrown out of your parents’ house because of a drawing by a painter to whom you didn’t sit!’

  ‘I know, I know. It’s like being tortured for information you don’t possess,’ Ottilie agreed, pretending to look glum, but now, at last, beginning to see the funny side of it. ‘Oh, but Philip, it is just like me, isn’t it? I always was being caught and punished, even for things that the staff had done, wasn’t I?’

  ‘Always.’

  ‘Actually, now I come to think of it, you’re right. I suppose chucking me out was nothing to do with the drawing really, was it? Although I should not have cared a fig if I had sat for it, but I didn’t.’

  Ottilie frowned, still trying to make sense of everything despite Philip’s having lightened her mood.

  ‘Looking back I suppose it all started to go wrong when they saw that I was growing up. You know how it is, couples who have lost a child only think of adopting a daughter or son to replace the one who has died. They can’t think beyond that, I suppose. They probably just didn’t allow for me becoming an adult, because their own dead child never grew up, don’t you think? To them she will always be a little girl in hair ribbons and a smocked dress, and that’s really what I should have stayed if they were to go on loving me even a little, a young girl in a smocked dress.’

  Ottilie stopped, remembering the photograph of the little girl with her teddy bear that Melanie always kept on her dressing table. No-one could ever mention the dead child, not even Edith. There was no real point in going on, not when she could see that Philip knew perfectly well what she was talking about, so she picked up her glass of bitter lemon and sipped at it.

  Philip obviously understood because he said, ‘So – they’ve chucked you out, and you have nowhere to go and no money either, presumably?’

  ‘Oh, no, I have money. I shall be fine,’ Ottilie lied, and she looked away, out of the window at the happy crowded tables outside the pub dining room, at the sunshine, at the blue sky. ‘Aren’t we lucky in England?’ she went on, in an effort to distract Philip’s attention away from her problems. ‘Our fields never turn brown in summer like France or Italy, we always see green.’

  ‘At this moment I am afraid I can only see red. I do not understand how your parents can do this to you. How can anyone do this to you? As a matter of fact how can anyone do it to anyone?’

  ‘You’re in the Army, you ought to know about people fighting each other,’ Ottilie joked, but at that moment Philip put his hand up to her face to stroke it in a gesture which was so kind it made her warn him, ‘Please, don’t. Really, Philip, please don’t be nice to me, I’ll only get lachrymose.’

  ‘God, that is so like you when you were young, Ottilie. Do you remember how you adored big words? I always got the feeling when you used one that you had no idea what it meant.’

  ‘Too lazy to look them up in a dictionary—’

  ‘The only girl I ever knew whom I could trust not to ruin a decent game of soldiers.’

  ‘Blame all the old soldiers that came to stay in the hotel. They gave me an interest in battles.’

  ‘I used to look forward so much to you coming, days before, planning everything, waiting for you by the front door.’ Philip put his hand in hers despite the arrival of the lemon meringue pudding. ‘Do you know, for the first time in my life I am actually dreading leave ending? I suppose it’s because I have the feeling that I am actually going away from someone I would rather be with than not be with, rather than Tredegar which I know is always there and probably always will be. I don’t know that with you, do I?’

  ‘How long have we got?’

  ‘Until five o’clock.’

  Ottilie glanced up once more, this time at the old-fashioned pub clock. Five o’clock, and it was already half past one. The waitress put down a jug of cream for the pudding, and Philip poured some over both their plates and started to eat heartily. But Ottilie, who had been eating well until that moment, suddenly found that she had no appetite whatsoever. She had to find out all about Philip before he left.

  ‘Why did you go into the Army, Philip?’

  ‘Why do you think? To kill people,’ he joked.

  ‘No really, why did you? You hate killing things, at least you always used to.’

  ‘It’s a family occupation, going into the Army and then coming out again and returning to Cornwall to marry a nice girl and have children so that Tredegar echoes to the sound of happy laughter.’

  Philip pulled a droll face while Ottilie thought she could imagine all too well the kind of nice girl that Philip might marry when he left the Army, someone most possibly just like his sister Constantia, a tall girl with blond hair and an eagle stare to her blue eyes.

  ‘D
o you hate the idea of coming home to Tredegar, of knowing exactly what is going to happen to you?’

  ‘No, I love it. Tredegar means everything to me. Not my parents, but my grandfather, and all the animals, and the people who work there. It was the servants who used to look after us when we were growing up, and the luck of having my grandfather living to a ripe old age, that saved us from minding too much that the parents got divorced and had new babies. They stopped being interested in us at all, really. We might as well have been hunters swapped out at the end of the season. I tell you, when I have children I shan’t let them out of my sight.’

  Ottilie pretended to eat some more, and quickly changed the subject.

  ‘Remember Ludlow?’

  ‘How can I forget him?’

  ‘I found a picture of him in my things just now.’ She reached down into her handbag and brought out a small photograph of Philip as a boy holding the hare in his arms, taken by Edith with her box Brownie camera.

  Philip stared at it, and then he cleared his throat and said, ‘Let’s get out of here and go for a long walk, shall we?’ and this time it was he who pushed his food away and called for the bill.

  They drove up to a favourite walk, well away from St Elcombe, somewhere where they could feel that the whole world not only could get lost, but had been lost, somewhere behind them, in the interior, away from the cliff paths and the sea.

  ‘What are you going to do while I’m away? You must go to Tredegar and stay with Constantia until you find out what to do next. I insist that you do.’

  Philip was holding Ottilie’s hand very tight again, even though she was following him along the path. He stopped when they came to a place where they could sit down and again, as he had the previous evening, he took off his jacket and carefully laid it down for her to sit upon, a gesture which seemed to Ottilie to be infinitely touching and at the same time heartbreaking as she tried not to think about Philip going away and perhaps never coming back, ending up in some foreign field which might then be for ever England, but would eventually come to mean precious little to those who loved and missed him.

  Ottilie stared out to sea. She knew that Philip was thinking of her the way young men always did think of ‘their girls’ before they went back to their regiments. He was thinking that she was the girl he would be coming back to, that as soon as he was out of the Army he would marry her and they would go to live at Tredegar.

  ‘I am all right, Philip, really.’ She turned to him. ‘There’s nothing to worry about. I can work, really I can.’

  ‘I shall worry about you more than I shall worry about getting it right in Cyprus.’

  ‘You mustn’t worry about me, really. I shall find a job quite easily. With my experience of running the Grand, can you imagine? People will fall over themselves to employ me,’ she joked.

  ‘Let me give you some money—’

  ‘No, absolutely not. It’s not about money, all of this, it’s about doing it on your own. Making your own way. Besides, I know you don’t have any more than I do, not after your mess bills!’

  ‘I only really drink soft drinks except on leave. “Orange juice Jim” they call me in the mess, but it’s more expensive than champagne, would you believe? You can go and stay with Constantia at Tredegar, she would love it.’

  ‘Sweet of you, but it would be quite unfair to Constantia to go to live at Tredegar. Can you imagine? I would be under her feet all weekend when she would be wanting her friends there, and then because she would be away in London during the week I would be sure to try and reorganize everything my way – which comes I’m afraid from growing up in a hotel – and then Constantia would come back and find everything not to her liking, and it would be awful.’

  Philip smiled, recognizing, at once, thank God, the truth of what Ottilie was saying.

  ‘No, I shall be fine, really. I will write to you, wherever l am.’

  ‘And I will come back to you from wherever I am.’

  ‘Will it be long?’

  ‘A matter of a moment.’

  ‘Maybe, but it will seem like a lifetime to me, and perhaps when we meet again we shall both be old and changed, and nothing will be the same again. I always have that feeling when I’m happy, that nothing will ever be the same again, and of course it won’t.’

  Just at that moment it seemed to Ottilie that Philip had never looked more handsome, his fair hair brushed back, somehow every inch the hero. But now the hero must return to his house and change into his uniform, and Ottilie must wait in the car for him, knowing without being told that it would be more tactful not to go in with him, to allow him to say his goodbyes to Constantia and his friends without her, and instead of accompanying him she lay back in the car and listened to the sound of the trees outside, barely moving and yet utterly alive.

  Because she had been standing on the platform for too long Ottilie realized that she hated not only the Station Café at St Elcombe, but also the station. Not that it was not pretty in an idyllic English way, with flowers set about in tubs and a station master with a cap and a collection of smart flags, no, it was all the other people standing around, as they were – waiting with too much of an air of pretending that they were not waiting – who were so hateful. All those other people staring at her, other people seeing Philip holding her hand. Other people knowing who he was, or who she was, nothing any longer private, and Philip going off and pretending to be so brave but both of them knowing all the time that everything they were trying to say was just pretend and everything they were not saying was actually real.

  What they were not saying was that they might never see each other again, and that if they never did see each other again in this world, this was it. Nothing more nor less.

  This would be the last time they held hands, walked side by side, tried to find something to talk about to take their minds off the time on the station clock whose hands now seemed to be bending over double to hurry forward to summon the train and spell out the final moment of goodbye.

  Ottilie knew from the old general who had given Philip his soldiers all those years ago that young men were not brave before battle. He had described to her young Guards officers in tears on the eve of battles, crying their eyes out like little boys on Victoria Station before they went back to their boarding schools, not at all like in war films where everyone was bright-eyed and ready to do battle.

  As they waited for the train it was the general’s sad descriptions that kept coming into Ottilie’s mind, and though she turned away from them as much as she could they would keep coming back as Philip kept talking about anything and everything – his posting, the party the night before, the amount of champagne they had all drunk, how Ottilie had missed the best scrambled eggs ever by leaving before breakfast had been served.

  At last the train arrived and it was almost a relief to put an end to the waiting and the pretending.

  ‘I shan’t say goodbye.’

  ‘No, don’t,’ Philip agreed in a low voice, removing his Army cap and kissing her long and hard, neither of them caring at all who saw or who told.

  ‘I want you to keep this in your uniform.’ Ottilie handed him the small black and white photograph of himself as a boy with Ludlow. ‘They say hares are lucky, you know.’

  ‘You will be good until I get back, won’t you, Ottilie?’ Philip asked, holding her tightly to him.

  ‘You know I will.’

  It was such a very Philip way of saying something intimate to her that Ottilie could not help smiling, although it was actually the last thing she felt like doing at that moment.

  After that of course it was very difficult, just a question of clinging to each other briefly because the station master was looking pointedly at them as he slammed door after door behind them, and then as the train pulled out of the station Ottilie found herself running as fast as she could down the platform until it came to an end, when she stopped to wave and wave until the train was so far away that, quiet as it was at St Elcombe on a Sunday
evening, Ottilie found that she couldn’t even hear it any longer.

  Thirteen

  It had been easy enough at first for Ottilie to be brave, to walk out of the Grand and find herself lodgings in St Elcombe. Just as at first it was very easy not to miss the daily grind of bed-making, and seeing to everyone and everything, and usually all at the same time. Not to miss standing in for a waitress or a maid, not to miss Chef’s grumbling, the chaos and the heat in the kitchen, and most of all not to miss the endless hostility she had known over the last eighteen months at the hotel. But now, after five weeks without a job and with her money running out, her early courage started to desert her.

  She dared not risk driving to another town in search of work because every penny had to be counted, and if she wanted to be sure that she would be able to eat and pay her rent for the next few weeks she simply could not risk throwing away pounds on petrol. She knew that she could always sell her car, but a question mark lay over that too, because although the Cartarets had given it to her, Ottilie had no actual proof that they had done so. They had bought her the second-hand Citroën, but a suspicion lay in Ottilie’s mind that should she put poor Oscar up for sale, St Elcombe being such a small place, her parents might find out and claim back the money on the grounds that they had only bought her the car for her use while she worked at their hotel. The memory of the police station and Ma’s howls of despair as she protested her innocence still haunted Ottilie, and kept her from wanting to invite any kind of disgrace upon herself.

  On her own now, night after night, watching endless feet walking past her on the pavement by the railings which reached down to her basement window, she knew for the first time what it felt like to be really desperate and not to know which way to turn. She was far too proud to write for help to Lorcan or Mrs Le Martine, and besides, having not heard back from either of them for many months, she felt that if she described her new circumstances too fully to them it might appear as if she was asking them for money anyway, so she did not write at all.

  But if Ottilie was too proud to beg, she was also too poor not to realize how it came about that girls of her age took to the streets. They did so because they were desperate. But in her letter to Philip, waiting to be posted, she naturally made a joke of it all.