I am lodging in downtown St Elcombe where the nightly entertainment is taking bets on how many steps the local drunks can make when they come out of the Pirate’s Cabin, and how soon they fall into the road.
Sometimes she could hardly bring herself to get out of bed she felt so hungry in the mornings, and so dismal at the idea of setting out on yet another search for a job. She had signed on at the Labour Exchange but it would be some weeks yet before she could draw any money, and anyway it would not be enough to cover the rent and her food. Desperate, Ottilie took to praying again, and even to going to church. It didn’t seem at all right after all these years of not praying, of not going to church after Ma had died so suddenly, to start beseeching the Almighty, but at least it was warm in church, and the brightly painted statues seemed to exude a Mediterranean cheerfulness with their bright blue or red garments and their silver orbs and bare feet.
‘Catholic churches are so ugly,’ Melanie used to say as if that excused her ever attending one, and she certainly never bothered to take Ottilie.
But as she grew up Ottilie had realized that Melanie was right. The Catholic church in St Elcombe was little more than a tin hut, but the people she met there were not unfriendly and suspicious like so many downtown. Ottilie found that when she went to church people who did not know her smiled at her, and it wasn’t like the Grand – they never stopped you going in because you had poor clothes or were not wearing a tie.
It was after early morning church one day (Ottilie had gone less because she wanted to pray than because St Antony’s was a great deal warmer than her basement room) that she clearly heard a voice behind her calling her old childhood name.
‘Ottie! Ottie Cartaret!’
She was so caught up in her thoughts, so full of the usual mixture of elation and despair that going to church seemed to bring on, that when she turned she fully expected to see some sort of statue come to life, calling her back to prayer once more, calling her back to kneel among the other sinners and ask God’s forgiveness for offending her parents. Instead, she saw a face she only barely recognized, the face of a priest.
It was also the face of her eldest brother Lorcan.
‘Lorcan!’
‘Well now, let me look at you.’ He held her away from him, and shook his head in a kind of avuncular wonder. ‘Ottie. You’re a young lady. Will you let me look at you, will you look at that?’
When Lorcan had last communicated with her – and it must have been two years ago – it was from Ireland, from the priests’ college where he was still studying. He had wanted her to come to his Ordination Mass but Ottilie had been needed at the hotel, so she had sent him a present of a silver crucifix and although he had written hastily to thank her she had not heard from him since, for – as Edith had often gently reminded her – ‘Brothers are not like that, I don’t think, Miss Ottilie, they just think of you as being there, and not really needing them, not really. They don’t think like girls.’
‘Lorcan.’
As she said his name, and to her horror, Ottilie felt a devastating embarrassment sweeping over her. She might be a young lady but Lorcan was a priest. He was a person set apart, someone to whom she could confess her sins, someone who would come to her if she was dying and say the Last Rites over her, someone who was empowered to hold up the Host at daily Mass. Lorcan, who had always seemed to be either building something or painting something. Lorcan, who had appeared at her birthday party when she was ten, was now a person whom she could ask for a blessing like the nuns and the priest at her first school.
Could she treat him like Lorcan and tease him, or would it be more fitting if she respected the barrier that she sensed was already between them?
‘You have changed so much,’ Lorcan told her, as if he had not, and he stood back to openly admire her still smart coat and shoes, a residue of her former life, her long hair brushed back, her treasured leather gloves and shoulder bag. ‘You are really beautiful now, Ottilie.’ Ottilie must have looked embarrassed for him, because he went on quickly, ‘Oh, no, don’t look shocked, Ottie. It is perfectly all right for me to say so. In fact Father Peter encourages us to admire women and their beauty. They are all part of God’s Creation.’
‘I should think so too!’ Ottilie said, laughing suddenly, and her embarrassment started to dissipate as she realized that although he was mostly not the same at all, a part of Lorcan was still very much the same.
Of course they were not like brother or sister any more, that feeling could never come back, they had grown too far apart. Yet when he smiled so endearingly down at her, Ottilie could see that he was still the same tall, handsome eldest brother who used to swing her onto his shoulders and jogtrot her up to the cottage door.
‘Are you at the eight o’clock every morning? Being the youngest I take the six o’clock, for my sins!’
‘Practically every morning,’ Ottilie replied.
She did not dare to tell Lorcan that she was attending Mass regularly not just to pray but to warm up after a long damp night in her lonely basement.
‘It’s good your faith still means so much to you, Ottie.’
Seeing the sincerity in his eyes and hearing the warmth in his voice, Ottilie did not make a joke of her recent regular churchgoing as she might have done to Philip, for the sweetness and solemnity of Lorcan’s look prevented her.
‘Look, Ottie. Wait until I change, will you? Father Peter will allow me half an hour with you, I’m sure, great man that he is.’
Ottilie put out her hand to delay Lorcan, but he was already walking quickly off towards the priest’s house, his gown billowing behind him. Time enough perhaps to tell him of her newly reduced circumstances.
But as she waited for him to change to a dark suit Ottilie herself changed her mind, deciding not to take Lorcan back to her lodgings which were a good twenty minutes’ walk from the church anyway. Instead she would take him to a local café for a cappuccino coffee, using the excuse that she did not want to upset Melanie by bringing Lorcan back to the hotel as her guest in the middle of the season.
They had hardly sat down when Lorcan, with his suddenly familiar slow, kind smile which reached up to his eyes and took Ottilie back to the dear days of Number Four, said, ‘So tell me, Ottie, what did you do that was wrong enough for Mrs Cartaret to throw you out of the Grand?’
Ottilie looked up from sprinkling sugar on the top of her coffee. To gain time she helped herself to another spoonful which she scattered thickly all over the white froth before finally saying to Lorcan, ‘How did you know?’
‘St Elcombe’s a small place, and I had hardly arrived back in the parish last week when I rang the hotel and was told, “Miss Cartaret no longer lives or works here.” And then of course I asked Mr Hulton and he told me of the scandal at the Grand and how you had been thrown out in disgrace, or so they said.’
Lorcan succeeded in looking both sage and grave at the same time while Ottilie only managed to look rueful.
‘You know me, Lorcan. I could always get into trouble when I really wanted to, couldn’t I, no matter what? Always out in the corridor in some kind of disgrace, always in trouble. Ma used to laugh and think it funny, but the nuns didn’t think I was very good at all, I’m afraid.’
‘Ma. She thought the sun shone every time your eyes opened.’
Lorcan shook his head, remembering, and smiled, but his eyes never left Ottilie’s face and from his quiet but determined manner Ottilie quickly realized that she was talking to a trained priest, not just to an elder brother whom she now hardly knew. ‘Priests,’ Ma used to say with a laugh, ‘have minds like athletes, pet.’
‘It will shock you, what happened will shock you.’
‘Very little, you’ll find, shocks even a young priest. The Bible is shocking.’
‘Well, if you really want to know. . .’ Ottilie took a deep breath and began, only to stop a moment later as she remembered how Philip had laughed and teased her on the day she had been kicked out. ‘If you really wa
nt to know, I was given a drawing of a nude when I was in Paris,’ she went on, finally unable to stand the silence. ‘It’s really rather beautiful, actually, even though I say it myself, and it is of me, though it was drawn from the artist’s imagination, how he remembered me.’
Lorcan nodded, and Ottilie noticed that not even his eyes blinked, so reassuringly unshocked was he. ‘Go on.’
‘I never posed for it, Lorcan. I mean I don’t actually think it matters a damn if I did, for heaven’s sakes, God made our bodies, didn’t He? But as it happens I didn’t.’
‘You once fainted clean out in a shop when Ma removed your pullover, even though, as Ma said, you were wearing a blouse, a skirt, a petticoat, a vest, long tights and little lace-up boots,’ was all Lorcan thought to say with a fond smile.
This encouraged Ottilie to go on, which it was obviously meant to do.
‘What happened was that this much older man, “Monsieur” I called him, I can’t even remember his name now, but he was a friend of a friend and he owned the apartment where I was staying. Anyway, he saw me coming out of the bathroom wearing only a towel. I mean it was quite by mistake, and he went away and drew me from memory, but without the towel, if you can imagine?’
Lorcan obviously did not seem to find this as difficult to believe as Alfred and Melanie, because he merely nodded for her to go on.
‘And to be honest, when he gave it to me I was thrilled. I love it. It reminds me of Paris. But even so I didn’t frame it or hang it, in case the staff saw it and jumped to the wrong conclusion, you know how staff can? Not because I was ashamed of it or anything. What I did instead was, I bought a special sort of folder to put it in, and I really didn’t think anything much more about it, except that it was beautiful. Then Philip Granville came home on leave. You remember Philip, Lorcan? He used to come to the hotel and play tennis sometimes when you were still working there? Anyway, he was home on leave for forty-eight hours and he came to the hotel and he asked me to this party and I went, but without telling the parents because I knew they would try and stop me. That was wrong, I do admit, and, well, when I got back – you can imagine, the heavens and the earth split open.’
‘They would have done. . .’
‘Yes. They had spent most of the night going through all my things to see if I had a diary and had written about where I was going or something. Anyway, of course they ended up finding the drawing, and of course—’
‘They didn’t believe you hadn’t posed for it.’
‘No. They didn’t believe me, and perhaps worse – they didn’t want to believe me, which was strange, because even if I don’t believe someone I find I always want to believe them, because it helps when it comes to forgiving them, don’t you think?’
‘Certainly.’
Lorcan had watched Ottilie slowly drinking her cappuccino with small appreciative sips, having made a meal of the froth and the sugar off a teaspoon first, which was why he now said in his usual down-to-earth way, ‘And now, you’re starving.’
‘No, I’m fine, really, Lorcan.’
‘You’re starving,’ Lorcan corrected her. ‘I know.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because I fast, Ottie. I know the signs. Look at you, you’re as thin as a pencil, there’s nothing of you. I would hardly have recognized you at Mass but for those large eyes of yours staring out from under your black veil. You must eat to live, you know.’
‘I just can’t get a job, Lorcan,’ Ottilie confessed, knowing the game was up. ‘You see I haven’t a reference, despite all my experience at the hotel.’
‘So, what are you going up for, Miss Cartaret?’
‘Waitressing, cleaning, anything—’
‘Dressed like you and speaking as you do, you haven’t a hope,’ Lorcan told her, at his most practical. ‘Folks don’t want cleaners who speak like ladies, Ottie, you should know that. You’ve employed enough people at the Grand. People want cleaners who speak like cleaners; and they don’t want beautiful girls waiting on their tables either. It distracts the customers from the main business of the day, spending their money on food, eating it and clearing off as quick as time will allow. Waitresses who are too pretty make the customers linger over their food or their drinks, but they do not necessarily spend any more. A full table is not necessarily a paying table. However, no matter. I think I can get you a job, as it happens, a very good job, as a matter of fact, and one which will not only suit you perfectly, but for which you are perfectly suitable. When I heard of your disgrace I thought you might need me!’
He grinned, suddenly very much the elder brother.
‘Come back with me to the presbytery and we’ll ring up Mrs Blaize.’
Although Lorcan looked smart and handsome in his dark suit and clerical collar, Ottilie started to feel distinctly uneasy as she was walking down the street with him towards the Angel.
Ottilie paused on the threshold of the ancient coaching inn.
‘It’s no good, Lorcan, I can’t go in there. They’re sure to know who I am. Staff from here used to come dressed up as customers and spy on our menus.’
‘It’s all changed now, Ottie, I promise you.’
‘Yes, for the worse, I heard.’
‘Exactly, that’s why they’re looking for a new manageress. Someone young with a light touch but experienced in the old ways, someone who will attract back their old customers and bring them new ones.’
‘I know, the usual camel that a committee has in mind.’
Lorcan laughed. ‘You’ve become some kind of a right hard young businesswoman then, now haven’t you, Ottie?’
Ottilie smiled at his constant use of her childhood nickname. Just hearing ‘Ottie’ said with an Irish accent was like pressing a button which brought back golden memories of warmth, and in a second she could once more feel herself a small child, her hand clutching at Ma’s index finger as they ambled away from Number Four and towards the shops, and hear Ma’s voice saying, ‘Come on, pet, and maybe we will even be able to have ourselves a sweet when we get to see Mr North at MacDonagh’s?’
So along they’d go, and first there would be the railings across which Ottie would be allowed to run a stick as she passed, making a satisfying clatter as they walked round the corner into the High Street, and all the time Ottilie’s grip on Ma’s index finger would become tighter and she would glance up anxiously every few seconds just to make sure that not only was Ma’s finger there, but Ma was too.
And sure enough Ma would be there, her great thick plait of hair tossed back, her lips parted in a smile as at every turn they seemed to pass someone they knew, or who knew them. But once they had trailed on past them, Ma, still preceding Ottilie with her stately amble, would glance down at her and mutter, ‘Heaven only knows who that was, pet, and who cares for heaven’s sakes? Just so long as they don’t come round wanting supper we should be all right.’
But all that was over, and now it was Lorcan saying, ‘Here we are, Ottie.’
The new priestly Lorcan had a quietly confident air about him, so unlike the young man Ottilie remembered walking towards her birthday table, painfully shy, seemingly all too aware of his thick clothing and heavy boots, his Irish accent most particularly because he must have felt himself to be such an awkward contrast to the Cartarets in their fine tailoring and with their refined accents and gentrified ways.
Ottilie glanced at the clock. It was after half past nine and yet there was no staff about, giving the Angel Inn a neglected air. Mentally Ottilie compared it to the Grand at the same time of the morning, when all the flowers would have been changed, and the carpets cleaned, when the receptionist would be ready and smiling, and even Blackie striding about as if the Grand was a station and he the station master.
‘Ah now, good morning to you, Father O’Flaherty, we were expecting you.’ A dumpy little grey-haired woman in a much worn tweed skirt appeared to have arrived from what looked like a broom cupboard under the stairs. She spoke with an Irish accent and looked wor
n and harassed. Not a welcoming sight, least of all if you happened to be an arriving guest.
‘This is my sister, Ottilie O’Flaherty.’ Lorcan turned and his eyes warned Ottilie, ‘You’re O’Flaherty here, OK?’
As she picked up the warning look Ottilie warmed at the familial closeness which Lorcan and she were able to resume so quickly, as if no time at all had elapsed since they were both living under the same roof, and she suddenly remembered the old days when Lorcan would give her just such a look if Ma had one of her ‘bad’ days, and they needed to help her upstairs and he didn’t want Ottie opening her trap and saying something that might set Ma off.
‘This is Mrs Blaize. She is leaving very suddenly and having to look for someone to replace herself, Ottilie. A bit of a novel situation, isn’t it, Mrs Blaize?’
Mrs Blaize nodded, all the time trying to smooth down her skirt while indicating for them to follow her and sit down in the small, overcrowded office to which she had conducted them.
‘There’s been no time to tidy up since I arrived, I’m afraid, Father O’Flaherty,’ she told Lorcan apologetically as she removed telephone directories and full ashtrays from various worn seating arrangements around the room. ‘It’s terrible to have to ask you in here, but there’s been no time to turn my hand to anything, and because I have to return immediately to Liverpool to nurse my poor husband there’s no time to advertise either. And then too, as you may imagine, since the Clover Group have taken over we’re all at sixes and sevens. Now tell me, Miss O’Flaherty—’
She stared at Ottilie for the first time. ‘Oh dear, you look really rather young for this position, if you don’t mind my saying, Miss O’Flaherty. What might your previous experience in the hotel trade be, may I ask?’
‘She has been helping to run the Grand for the couple who adopted her, a Mr and Mrs Cartaret, but there has been a misunderstanding and so she is looking for a new position,’ Lorcan put in quickly, speaking for Ottilie.
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