Grand Affair

by Charlotte Bingham

  Ottilie saw suspicion flash into Mrs Blaize’s eyes at Lorcan’s words, but perhaps it was the dog collar or Lorcan’s confident manner because she seemed to pause only for a fraction of a second, long enough to allow suspicion to enter her mind and be rejected, and then she said, ‘I see. In that case perhaps you would like to tell me what you were in the habit of doing – your normal day and hours, as it were, at the Grand?’

  Ottilie told her, exactly. There was a short silence during which Lorcan smiled his slow, warm smile, and Mrs Blaize also smiled, only with relief, but then she made an impatient little sound and said, ‘Such a nuisance about your references, though as I understand it from Father O’Flaherty there will be some difficulty in obtaining any at all. With such experience you are obviously perfect! And what’s more, which is more important, willing. As we both know, even in a small hotel, that is almost more important than anything. Still,’ she sighed, ‘I have to be able to recommend you with utter confidence.’ She turned to Lorcan. ‘Father O’Flaherty, much as I appreciate your recommending your sister, and clearly as I can see she would be perfect for the position, the Clover House Group will not accept my recommendation, however warm, unless backed by a reference of some sort. It is just not possible.’

  There was a long disappointed silence which both Lorcan and Ottilie were wise enough not to try to fill with explanation. After all, if there was no way out, there was no way out.

  ‘Mrs Tomber, the housekeeper, might give me a reference, but she knew me as Miss Cartaret – my adopted name,’ Ottilie volunteered, suddenly desperate at the idea of returning jobless to her wretched basement once more. ‘I’m sure she would give me a telephone reference if you rang her, in fact I know she would. But you would have to ring her at her sister’s house. I think she would be frightened to say anything nice about me otherwise.’

  ‘Well now, this is more hopeful.’ Mrs Blaize paused and nodded at Lorcan as Ottilie wrote down Mrs Tomber’s sister’s number from her own small address book, and handed it to her.

  ‘Mrs Tomber always goes there on Saturday night.’

  ‘I will ring her on Saturday night then.’ Mrs Blaize nodded, quickly interrupting. ‘It will be a great relief to me if I can get this matter settled as soon as possible, as you will appreciate. Thank you for coming, Father, and what a miracle it was that you heard about our plight. Something for your favourite cause, Father.’

  Lorcan looked embarrassed as Mrs Blaize slipped him an envelope, but he took it none the less, saying, ‘I take this in a spirit of humility and I thank you, Mrs Blaize.’

  Outside, as they walked along, Ottilie could hardly believe what she knew might be about to happen. She might actually be about to be able to leave the basement with its constant dreary sight of feet walking or shuffling or stopping by her windows, the lavatory that took seventeen pulls to work, the basin that only ran hot water for five minutes and the gas ring that was forever consuming shillings and running out just as she tried to boil a kettle.

  ‘But how did you hear about this?’ she said, stopping and frowning, although she knew that Lorcan most probably would not tell her anyway because he always did have a way of working things without letting on to anyone. ‘How did you hear they were looking for someone, Lorcan?’

  Lorcan carried on walking as he answered, ‘Put it this way, Ottie. The good Lord brought the position to my attention, and when I heard from you of your plight it seemed to me that restoring the Angel Inn could be just the job for you.’

  ‘I hope so,’ Ottilie said fervently and she closed her eyes for a second and prayed, for if there was anything that might drive her to the edge of despair it would be the idea that she would have to spend another month in that basement in downtown St Elcombe.

  ‘There’s a call for you, dear, at least I think it’s for you. Ottilie something, that’s you, în’tit?’ Ottilie’s landlady always called down the stairs, never came down herself, as if she was afraid of entering the appalling reality of her own basement flat. ‘A Mrs Blaize on the telephone for you, dear.’

  Why she called Ottilie ‘dear’ Ottilie could not imagine, but it didn’t matter what she called her just so long as Mrs Tomber had given her a good reference. Ottilie jumped up the stairs to the narrow hallway of the main part of the house with its shiny linoed floor and its public telephone box (‘for incoming calls only, dear’) that made walking down the corridor anything but sideways so difficult.

  ‘Don’t be long, dear.’

  Ottilie could hardly hear Mrs Blaize, her soft Irish voice being almost drowned by the landlady’s harsher English accent.

  ‘Yes, this is Mrs Blaize from the Angel Inn.’

  ‘Hello, Mrs Blaize.’ Ottilie could suddenly hear just how much she wanted the job from the tension in her own voice.

  Mrs Blaize sounded equally tense, but, as it turned out, for other reasons. ‘It’s very embarrassing, Miss O’Flaherty, particularly in view of your brother’s position, but I’m afraid – well, I’m afraid that Mrs Tomber does not recommend you for the situation.’

  ‘What?’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘Mrs Tomber says she does not think you are at all suitable for the position for which you applied,’ Mrs Blaize repeated. ‘She says, moreover, that she herself would never employ you.’

  Ottilie could hear her heart pounding in her ears as she tried to take in what Mrs Blaize had just said, and make sense of it.

  ‘Are you sure it was Mrs Tomber you spoke to?’

  ‘Positive. I spoke first to her sister and then to her.’ A pause and then, ‘I think you should come back and see me, Miss O’Flaherty. I think there is definitely a great deal more to this than meets the eye. I am suspicious, let us say. That’s why I think we should talk it over at once.’

  ‘I will be with you as soon as I can.’

  Ottilie ran down the familiar winding streets of St Elcombe that seemed, on bad days such as this, to be mean and more than ever full of ugly people with narrow minds and hard feelings. She pounded up the short hill towards the Angel, where she stopped suddenly to regain her breath. She was angry with Mrs Tomber, but whatever her feelings it made no sense to arrive in a state of breathless indignation. It would only look as if she was over-reacting like a guilty person. She should arrive calm, collected, and above all not defensive.

  At least Mrs Blaize had given her a second chance to speak for herself, she had that for which to be grateful.

  ‘Good girl, you came back as soon as may be.’ Mrs Blaize gave Ottilie an approving glance as she walked her from the hotel foyer back to her small, overcrowded office. ‘Sit down now while I order us both some tea and we talk this thing through. I need to know more from you about this Mrs Tomber and why she might be so intent on preventing you taking up this position?’

  ‘I really don’t know. I actually thought she was my best friend, my only friend I mean after Edith – the other housekeeper at the hotel – died. Edith looked after me, you see, when I was little, and she and Mrs Tomber were the best of friends. I thought I was too, but obviously not.’ Ottilie’s voice dropped as she realized the full implications of Mrs Tomber’s betrayal. ‘It was an odd situation, you see,’ she continued after a few seconds’ thought. ‘Mrs Tomber was the official housekeeper, but Edith and I were too, in a way. Mr Cartaret was a bit disorganized like that. I mean no-one quite knew where the dividing lines lay. We all had to step in for each other, so finally, in the shake-up, we were all doing a bit of everything, if you know how that can be?’

  ‘Certainly. I used to be a nurse when I was young, Miss O’Flaherty,’ Mrs Blaize said briskly. ‘We had sisters on the wards like that. Chaos usually resulted, but if it did not it was no thanks to the sister. Now.’ Mrs Blaize paused, having spent the previous minute staring at the top of her fountain pen. She looked directly at Ottilie. ‘I don’t know how much I can tell you, or how much I should tell you, but since I made that call on Saturday night to Mrs Tomber . . . oh, I really don’t k
now – Father O’Flaherty would say I am causing scandal – but I suppose I must tell you if we are to come to any satisfactory conclusion. The thing is, Miss O’Flaherty, I made a few enquiries for myself before calling you this morning. St Elcombe is a small town – I myself come from a small town in Ireland, and in my experience everything comes to light sooner rather than later in small towns. It is very difficult – impossible – for people to keep things to themselves, or indeed for people not to talk about each other. Gossip let us say is a recreation, for there is very little else to do in small towns, is there?’

  Ottilie stared at Mrs Blaize, realizing that she obviously knew a great deal more than Ottilie herself. She wanted to say, ‘Come on, come on’ but she couldn’t, so she sat very still instead, her large eyes never leaving Mrs Blaize’s face until Mrs Blaize’s own eyes seemed to be wandering round the room looking at everything except Ottilie.

  ‘So. After I telephoned Mrs Tomber, I telephoned Father O’Flaherty and we set to putting our thinking caps on. It occurred to us that there would have to be some other reason why this woman should let you down in this way. I mean I could see that you gave her name with complete confidence. Frankly, I have a wide experience of people in this work, Miss O’Flaherty, and why in the name of all that is holy should you have given me this woman’s name if you had any reason to believe she would not recommend you? No, there had to be a reason for her “spinning” you, as they say in Ireland, and I felt I had to uncover her motive, if only to satisfy my own curiosity, and of course for my own selfish sake too, because as you know I want to leave here and be with my poor husband as soon as I possibly can. It is so terrible to be here when I should be with him, caring for him.’

  More and more Ottilie wanted to urge Mrs Blaize to come on, and the front of her knees hurt in her effort to keep still and not show the impatience she felt.

  ‘This is how it is, then.’ Mrs Blaize paused, considering her words. ‘First of all Father O’Flaherty and I, we thought it must be that she did not want to lose her situation. She has only a year or two to go before she is due to retire, and she would not want to do anything to risk her pension, which is understandable all right. But then I said to Father O’Flaherty, that’s not quite right either. The woman was most vehement. She was most insistent on, let us say, running you down, and that does not make much sense. If she just did not want to be discovered recommending you, even verbally, she would merely have said so and replaced the telephone receiver and that would have been that. She would not have gone to the lengths she did to run you down to me. She was, to put it mildly, most unkind. Poisonous, actually.’

  ‘I really can’t believe it,’ Ottilie said, unable to keep quiet any longer. ‘She has always been such a friend to me. These last months, she was the only person I felt I could really trust. She cried when I left, for heaven’s sake.’

  ‘Things change very quickly in any establishment, Miss O’Flaherty. Most of all in a hotel, as you might have observed.’

  Ottilie stared at Mrs Blaize.

  ‘To put it delicately, I believe that Mrs Tomber is more than influential in your parents’ establishment nowadays.’

  Ottilie heard herself asking, ‘Mrs Tomber?’

  Mrs Blaize nodded. ‘Housekeepers have a habit of taking over hotel proprietors. It’s often seen as a natural progression, especially if a wife dies. One person goes, and another takes their place. In this case, though, it was not the wife dying, but the daughter going. You, after all, as I understand it from Father O’Flaherty, more or less ran the Grand in place of your mother, didn’t you?’

  ‘Of course. It makes such sense,’ Ottilie said to herself, but out loud. ‘The last thing she wants is me setting up in opposition to them, so she gave me a bad reference.’

  ‘Indeed it does make sense, Miss O’Flaherty. When you left, Mr Cartaret would have suddenly found himself having to rely upon someone new and strange. Proximity is the first step towards temptation.’

  Mrs Blaize looked at Ottilie, and Ottilie knew at once from the solemn nature of the words she was using that she was probably quoting Lorcan. ‘So you see, it seems to me, given that this is so, and we have it on good authority that it is, we know now that this woman’s testimony as to your character not only cannot be relied upon, it must not be relied upon. I shall recommend you for the post of manageress. Head Office will be told you are the subject of a calumny. It happens a great deal, I assure you!’

  Mrs Blaize put out her hand in a strange little gesture of formality, but her eyes were full of warmth. As for Ottilie, she could hardly believe it.

  Indeed, so great was Ottilie’s happiness that as she walked out into the winter sunshine she was quite sure that she could hear Edith’s voice reading to her from their favourite book – ‘The sunshine struck hot on his fur, soft breezes caressed his heated brow, and after the seclusion of the cellarage he had lived in so long the carol of happy birds fell on his dulled hearing like a shout.’

  That was just how Ottilie felt now, as if the song of the birds was more like a shout, as if the cold wind blowing so strongly from the sea was just a soft breeze. She started to run back to her lodgings, but she was hard put to it not to stop each person she passed and tell them, ‘I’ve got a job! I’ve got a job!’ It didn’t seem possible that after all this time someone wanted to employ her at last.

  Mrs Blaize was explaining to Ottilie that the Angel had not always been a hotel. It had once been an old coaching inn, so now, Ottilie found, standing in the centre of its cobblestone courtyard, it was not at all difficult to imagine the scenes at the end of the eighteenth century when the inn was at the height of its popularity and sometimes horses would be changed at such speed it was breathtaking, and at other times coach and horses rested overnight while men and boy passengers climbing stiffly from the outside of the coaches and the ladies and older folk from the inside would all retire thankfully to stand by glowing fires and eat warm food, to be served by cheerful staff and sleep in comfortable feather beds.

  ‘You know of course that it was actually the fine quality of its coaching inns that made England famous, now, don’t you?’ Mrs Blaize told Ottilie as they walked round the old place on Ottilie’s first day, for Mrs Blaize appeared briskly expectant that Ottilie would take over from her within hours of her arrival. ‘The fact is, and it was a fact, I’m afraid, that until the improvement in the services at the old coaching inns foreigners dreaded to come to England, and worse than that even English people could not travel about freely without taking their lives in their hands, such was the low quality at the inns at which the staging coaches halted. People were regularly robbed of their possessions. There were nothing but brigands and ex-convicts to change the horses, and nothing but slatterns and prostitutes staffing the inns. But then someone or other realized that things had to get better because it was affecting the coaching trade and only the aristocracy could travel safely, and so they took out the convicts and put in proper grooms, which led to faster changes for the horses and better stabling, and from the end of the eighteenth century until the coming of the railways the English coaching inn was the most admired hostelry in Europe. And still could be if someone new could see sense!’

  As Ottilie was listening to Mrs Blaize’s potted history lecture she was pushing open the doors of the old stables, her eyes narrowing in the darkness of each interior, trying to find old-fashioned light switches, and staring at the great tangling muddles inside the old unkept storage spaces, some full of nothing better than old lawnmowers and petrol cans and garden shears and other ageing or rusting implements. There was even a set of heavy old harness from a team of horses, now long gone, their names carefully engraved on a copper plate down the side.

  ‘What’s the Chairman of the Clover House Group like, exactly, Mrs Blaize?’

  Mrs Blaize abandoned her history lecture and thought for a minute before answering, ‘Sir Harold Ropner? All right, possibly.’

  ‘So if say someone wrote to him with an id
ea, he might listen?’

  ‘Oh no, Miss O’Flaherty, Sir Harold might be nice, but he’s not that nice. Someone like you couldn’t write to him and expect a reply, really you couldn’t. Chairmen of groups do not have anything to do with area managers or manageresses of individual establishments, nothing at all.’

  ‘In that case, Mrs Blaize, perhaps it is high time they did?’

  Seeing the determined look on Ottilie’s face, Mrs Blaize smiled. As they turned to retrace their steps back to the main part of the hotel, she gave a satisfied nod. ‘I knew you’d be the right person.’

  Two days later she was gone.

  Fourteen

  Ottilie flung open her grey curtains to see the winter sky which exactly matched them. The curtains were most definitely going to be dyed a vibrant shocking blue in the hotel washing machine, and the walls of her dingy housekeeper’s room painted a pure snow white. There was a secondhand shop in St Elcombe, selling antiques and old clothes for charity, and nowadays Ottilie never passed it without going in. She had seen an old white Victorian cotton cover in the window. They were actually using it to display ornaments, but if Ottilie had her way in exchange for a couple of pounds and the added purchase of a packet of soap powder by this evening it would be on her bed.

  But before this evening something rather more important was about to happen. Sir Harold Ropner was visiting Cornwall, and more particularly the Angel Inn. Ottilie paused on the stairs leading down to the main hall. Since getting up that morning she had tried not to think about what the outcome of Sir Harold’s visit might be, or indeed how she had managed to persuade him to come to this small out of the way hotel in St Elcombe. Luck of course had played its part. He had been due to visit his old friends the Staffords at Christopher House, near St Elcombe, but that was not all, it seemed, because the secretary had added on Sir Harold’s behalf, ‘Sir Harold is very interested in much of what you had to say in your letter to him.’