Grand Affair

by Charlotte Bingham

  Ottilie thought hard as she followed him into a small, dark shop. What she did like wasn’t something she had ever really summed up for anyone else.

  ‘I suppose, just recently, I’ve only thought about what I dislike.’

  She began slowly but then gathered confidence when she realized that she had rather more definite ideas than she had at first thought.

  ‘Since you ask, I like wooden floors with old rugs, I like soft colours which look old and old colours which look soft. I don’t like change for the sake of it, but if it means more comfort I want change immediately. I don’t like anything ornate, nor do I like collections of things – you know, china in glass cabinets and collections of vases on shelves. Too museum-like for me. I loathe mock Chinese or Japanese, in fact anything mock Oriental, however old or beautiful. As a matter of fact I don’t like anything Oriental except in the Orient, or in a restaurant. I hate orange, including marigolds. I prefer a garden to have old trees and look really rather unkempt rather than stiff and – well, stiff. I like white roses in gardens but not inside where I always think they look too white. I like black cherries in or on practically everything; and velvet. I like straw hats but only if they are made of panama straw. I like tea to be at teatime, but at no other. I like fourposter beds, but not if they have lamps sticking through the drapes. I like plain carpet if it makes a room cosier, but not if it’s covering a beautiful wood floor. I like large lamps with large shades but not if they look angular and stiff. I like a mixture of everything. I mean . . .’ she hesitated, thinking. ‘I mean I really hate to walk into a place and see it all done correctly with everything in the same style – like some sort of a room set in a museum—’

  Ottilie stopped suddenly pulling a little face at Pierre because she realized she had been really talking out loud to herself rather than to Pierre whom she had been following round the little dark crowded antique shop as she spelt out her likes and dislikes. He turned as she finally finished, and looked down at her. ‘I do believe we are going to get on infamously, Miss Cartaret, do you know that?’ he said delightedly. ‘As a matter of fact, after that, there is only one more thing I need to ask and that is – will you marry me?’

  Ottilie laughed, realizing that he was joking as he turned back to his task of sorting through a medley of old books, picking up vases, bending down and examining small dark uncleaned paintings close to, and pulling an old dress out of a trunk. It was long, velvet, gold-embroidered, with slightly large sleeves, tight at the wrists, low across the bust.

  ‘Very Tudoresque, probably made for some grand lady performing at some Edwardian house party,’ Pierre said, holding it up against Ottilie. ‘Suits you. That dark green is great with your hair. As a matter of fact I am determined that I will buy it for you, Miss Cartaret, as my gift, on this sunny day.’

  Ottilie stared at it for a brief moment, and then turned abruptly on her heel.

  ‘Thank you but no,’ she said curtly and after clambering back over and through the many objects in the old place she found her way thankfully back to the sunshine outside.

  Pierre did not follow her out of the shop for some quarter of an hour and so she was left to hang around outside wondering what he was doing, only to see from his expression of triumph as he finally emerged that it was all too obvious what he was doing. He was what he called ‘truffling’ and seeing his delighted expression Ottilie forgot her disquiet and found that all she could do was to smile at his delight.

  ‘I think you are going to love me when you see what your very own truffle hound has bought you,’ he said, as he walked briskly towards his car, and carefully placed a large cardboard box covered in old newspaper in the boot. ‘I think what we may have here are two very fine small eighteenth-century paintings which when cleaned up will grace the walls of your hotel with an ease hitherto unknown to them. No frames, which is a pity, but we can fake those. Oh and you must not be too angry, but I couldn’t resist one other thing—’

  Ottilie looked at him. It was Pierre’s turn to pull a face.

  ‘And now these you are going to hate me for, but they will be great in the dining room. A pair of Ming vases, would you believe?’

  ‘Oh no.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘You have them.’

  Pierre looked suddenly so hurt at her reaction Ottilie started to laugh.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry, but didn’t I just tell you I don’t like anything Chinoise—’

  ‘Not even Ming?’

  ‘Not even double or triple Ming.’

  ‘What about our picnic then?’

  ‘Oh I like picnics all right.’

  They found a beautiful white beach, a tiny cove embraced by rocks. Ottilie put down a rug, and Pierre assiduously found stones to hold down each corner of its tartan wool as Ottilie began the joyous task of unpacking Mrs East’s picnic. Thank heavens the old cook’s idea of a picnic was not some miserable pile of sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper and a hard boiled egg with no salt. Mrs East’s picnics were made up of pies with meltingly soft pastry whose inner mixes were a surprise of tender chicken in lightly flavoured sauces made from their own stock, or tiny vegetables parboiled and chopped before being wrapped in pastry made with cream cheese. Homemade sausages, home-made sausage rolls, home-cooked ham baked in honey and cloves and served with peaches and potato salad made with just the right amount of home-made mayonnaise. Everything that could be home-cooked was home-cooked by Mrs East, but it seemed to Ottilie that never had Mrs East’s cooking tasted quite so delicious, so light, so meltingly perfect as it did that lunchtime on the beach as she sat staring out to sea with Pierre.

  Later, as the wind became sharper and they walked along the sand barefoot, Ottilie slipped on a piece of seaweed. Catching her hand quickly Pierre steadied her and she clung to him laughing, but he held on only for a second, letting her go immediately so that she could go on paddling, allowing the cold frills of water to lap her feet, relishing the change in temperature.

  ‘You have very elegant feet for a man, most unusual,’ she told him as they went on paddling and staring at the water as if they were looking for something, momentarily calmed, as people so often are at the edge of the sea.

  ‘You sound as if you’ve made some sort of study of feet.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, I was brought up at the Grand! I was always seeing men’s feet, when I took them breakfast, when they passed me on their way out for their inevitable “dip before breakfast”, when I had to take them fresh towels if they were sunbathing on the beach. They almost became an obsession with me. And do you know why? Because I hardly ever met a member of either sex who had pretty or elegant feet, except perhaps Blue Lady, and now you.’

  ‘Who was Blue Lady?’

  ‘Not was – is. Blue Lady is still a regular guest. She is in the top suite. Doesn’t mind the alterations, doesn’t mind who comes or goes, she must always be in her suite at this time. She commemorates her honeymoon every year, and as far as we know she always will. Her husband, who was much older, died you see, just at the end of their glorious six-week honeymoon, and it seems that she never got over it. She loved him that much.’

  ‘What a strange story . . .’

  ‘Mmm, she talks to him, out loud. It’s quite spooky if you go in there because you have to lay tea for two and she makes you put the teacup just so where he would have had it, and she goes through the kind of day they have had – you know, “Wasn’t it bright out today, darling?” that sort of conversation, and for years I couldn’t understand it because there she was stitching away and going on about how beautiful the day had been when anyone could see it had been raining stair rods and then I clued in suddenly when I saw her consulting her diary one morning, and I realized that she must re-enact each day up there in that suite just the way it was twenty or more years before, each day just the same, all over again.’

  ‘Is she beautiful?’

  ‘Very beautiful, but she even dresses from that era you know, the New Look from
Dior kind of clothes that you see in old movies? I was scared stiff of her when I was younger but now – well, particularly now – she seems almost like a touchstone from the past, something precious that I want to preserve just as she is preserving her few weeks of happiness – you know, how it is before life happens and everything goes wrong?’

  Ottilie could see Pierre wanted to ask, ‘But what has gone wrong?’ Yet he didn’t because he could see from the way she turned her eyes away and looked ahead down the beach that she wasn’t prepared to say any more.

  ‘Perhaps we should call the top suite after her?’ Ottilie wondered as they continued to walk to the end of the beach, where they turned. The wind had got up and the waves were pounding and growing white tops that curled over and rushed up the tiny cove, so they quickly packed up and went back to the car.

  ‘Bit difficult for men to book a suite with “Lady” in the title. But the Blue Suite might be quite chic. I’d love to meet her,’ Pierre said, as they drove on in search of more treasure. ‘What a story. I keep trying to imagine her and yet I know I’m nowhere near what she’s really like.’

  But if Pierre wanted to meet Blue Lady he had no interest in hearing any more about Alfred or Melanie.

  ‘From what I have heard of them, they sound a bit – er, Victorian for my taste,’ he explained to Ottilie as they drove back, but Ottilie, realizing that he must know about the incident when Mrs Le Martine left the hotel, felt the need to justify her upbringing.

  ‘I didn’t mind that they were strict, really I didn’t, because I never was any good at being young. I mean even now I don’t like doing the twist, I prefer waltzing, and I hate the Beatles I’m afraid. If you want to make a nightclub in the hotel basement, fine, but don’t ask me down there. I can’t stand nightclubs unless they’re in Paris and really a jazz club like the Blue Note. I’m afraid I’m a flop as a young person and I always have been. Too much time spent with old ladies at the hotel.’

  Pierre laughed and she knew at once that he completely understood.

  ‘You sound just my sort of person. When I was a little boy I always hated other little boys because they were always coming round and ripping up your train sets and smashing your Lego and then telling you they were bored and going outside and blaming you if they fell off your slide. Couldn’t wait for them to leave.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about you,’ Ottilie teased Pierre as they had dinner in the hotel restaurant that night. ‘Except, of course, that you like to make the lives of antique dealers miserable.’

  ‘I do love to be the bane of their lives, that’s true. I hate what they do to beautiful things – tearing apart wonderful books to frame the prints, cannabalizing furniture, pretending age, overcharging, it’s anathema to me,’ Pierre agreed, and lifting his glass he toasted, ‘To the destruction of cheats, everywhere.’

  Ottilie raised her glass to his toast, and a little later she said, ‘You must tell me a little about yourself, please? You know, like where you were born and how your middle finger came to be that shape, shockingly intimate things.’

  Pierre shook his head and for a second Ottilie remembered the sudden sharp sense of disappointment she had experienced when he had released her so quickly on the beach.

  ‘I never talk about myself to clients.’ He looked at her. ‘In what is after all a professional relationship, nothing matters except how I do the job for you, wouldn’t you say?’

  As he finished speaking Ottilie remembered Veronica’s feeling that Pierre ‘must be one of those’ because so many interior decorators were, and although she had not cared in the least then, now, suddenly, for some reason she found she did mind, which was pathetic, because as Pierre had just said after all their relationship was professional.

  ‘No, of course not, no, I mean, yes, just professional.’ Ottilie dropped her eyes. ‘No. It was just that I really enjoyed today, and now, of course, it’s over.’ She fell silent thinking of Philip on the station at St Elcombe and of how he had said he would be back in a matter of a moment and how she had pleaded with him to reassure her that nothing would change, and yet everything had changed between them. In the end it could not have become more changed, and he had come back with no trace of the boy he had once been in his eyes or his voice, anywhere. She had thought that he would be like one of Peter Pan’s Lost Boys and would come back the same, but he had come back just a conventional Army sort of person.

  Thinking of this in the silence that had fallen Ottilie realized that she was just about to make the same mistake with Pierre. She was just about to try to pretend that each second of each minute did not change everything.

  She stood up suddenly, pushing her chair back and replacing her napkin.

  ‘This has been a coloured glass of a day, and I shall always remember it, thank you very much.’

  ‘But you haven’t finished your coffee.’ Pierre looked up at her in utter dismay, still seated. ‘Mrs East has made very good coffee!’

  ‘No, I know.’ Ottilie turned to look at Pierre. ‘I suddenly don’t feel like coffee, so if you’ll excuse me?’

  She had always taken such comfort from walking down to the beach, particularly at night when it was empty, and when she was younger she had imagined that she had a dog, or even two dogs, and that they would be running ahead of her and then running back, and that she could throw them sticks and they would run into the waves barking and back again as she collected shells and stones that looked so wonderful on the beach but always faded indoors, as if pining for the sea and the rain outside where they really belonged.

  Tonight, outside, the wind had got up and was making the trees sway so she did not hear someone following her out and down the green sward in front of the hotel, and when she did and saw it was Pierre she no longer wanted to walk but to run off towards the sea, to be quite alone.

  ‘Why did you get up and leave like that?’ he asked as, catching up with her, he finally managed to force her to a halt. ‘I didn’t say anything to hurt you, did I?’

  Ottilie shook her head and lied, ‘Of course not. I just wanted some air, that’s all, I get claustrophobic sometimes, you know—’

  ‘No, I don’t. I mean one minute we were fine, really enjoying ourselves, and the next minute you just – disappeared.’

  ‘I told you I wanted some air,’ Ottilie insisted, not looking at him.

  ‘That’s not it at all, is it? That is not it at all!’

  ‘It is, really.’

  ‘No, it’s not. It’s because I said our relationship was “professional”, that’s why you became upset, and you know it. The “you” bit of you suddenly disappeared, by that I mean the Ottilie I’ve been with all day suddenly disappeared. Please bring her back again.’

  Ottilie tried to turn from him, shaking her head, determined to keep her pride intact but Pierre pulled her back and put his hand under her chin, murmuring, ‘I’ve been longing to kiss that pretty mouth of yours ever since I first arrived and tried to set fire to your rug,’ and bending his head he kissed her so beautifully that Ottilie realized that the kissing she had done with Philip had been just kissing and that this kissing was nothing less than the wondrous confirmation of what she had been feeling all day, utter happiness. He stepped back a little, but still held on to her.

  ‘I’m sorry. That wasn’t very – er, professional, Miss Cartaret.’

  Ottilie was silent for a moment, and then, looking up at him, ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said and started to laugh. ‘I should think most girls would give you ten out of ten!’ And after that they kissed again, and again, until Ottilie, feeling a little faint, murmured, ‘or perhaps even eleven out of ten.’

  She touched Pierre’s cheek and without saying anything they walked back up to the hotel hand in hand. They passed Jean who tried not to stare, and Nantwick who did not bother to pretend not to see them, but only smiled in almost paternal approval. Ottilie did not care a jot. If life had taught her only one thing it was that when, that beautiful-coloured piece of pink
glass known as happiness was put into your hand you held it up to the light and looked through it, and never mind if next day someone stole it from you, or you dropped it, it was yours for that moment.

  As it turned out the delightful oasis of a day that she had spent with Pierre was the high point of Ottilie’s week. There was so much office work to be done she had to leave Pierre to get on with the plans upon which they had agreed while she and Veronica sorted through files of old papers, staring at the small print of previous agreements which governed the day-to-day running of the hotel, and updating valuations which were so long out of date they were laughable. All important, but endlessly dull after the laughter and the fun that she had enjoyed with Pierre searching for antiques and bric-a-brac to bring the old hotel back to life.

  She found herself shifting in her seat and yawning when she should be attending to something, or staring out of the window and dreaming of more days spent hunting antiques and more picnics on white sandy beaches with only the sound of the waves and the wailing cries of the seagulls to break or add to the happy harmony that being with Pierre seemed to bring.

  And so it was, faced with so many dull papers through which she had to sift, that on hearing the telephone on her private line ringing, instead of feeling irritated at having her concentration broken on such a rainy, cloudy afternoon, Ottilie felt only a glorious sense of relief. Hoping, indeed thinking, that it would be Pierre telephoning from his London office to which he had returned for a few days, she quickly picked up the receiver after only two rings, despite knowing that Veronica was watching her, she knowing only too well that Ottilie was praying it would be Pierre, no matter how much she pretended.

  ‘Hello.’

  Disappointingly it was not Pierre. Worse it was Nicholas Phelps, the lawyer.

  ‘Oh, good morning.’

  Ottilie could feel herself tensing up. It was not just the embarrassment, knowing that he must remember just how drunk she had been that night, it was everything. The fact that Joseph had accused her of being a thief in front of him, the fact that she had so demeaned herself, swaying about the room, arguing with Joseph and then finally passing out. Phelps was so proper, always so meticulous about everything, almost an old woman in his ways, not someone who would ever be so stupid as to drink on top of antibiotics and make a display of himself.