The Little Hotel

by Christina Stead

  Mr Wilkins said: ‘I wrote to that man in Alassio I mentioned, to ask if the lira was still a buy; and meantime I heard from a man in Kuala Lumpur about our business there. He is sending a man to see me about the rubber business, but I very much fear he is going to tell me what I know already. I don’t mind doing a stroke of business now and then; in fact, I must be continually in business to get the rest of my money out of the East; but it really is strange the things business people expect you to do.’

  The Princess said: ‘I really don’t understand why you don’t go and live in my house in Venice. It’s on a canal and I simply have no use for it. Part of Lilia’s objection to living here, Robert, is that you have no friends and have nowhere to receive any.’

  ‘But, Bili, I don’t feel like taking a whole house. I have never lived with anyone. You know, in the East I lived at first in a chummery, but after my friend left I moved away to bachelor quarters and found out I was a natural bachelor. Odd, eh? I suppose it is in one.’

  ‘Well, why don’t you take a brace of apartments in that Alassio place in that case? You could be separate and together. You would live a private life and be together without the publicity of a hotel. Lilia is such a dear girl; I am so fond of Lilia. And she is a shrinking sort of woman, Robert.’

  ‘Oh, everyone is fond of Lilia: she has the art of making friends.’

  Lilia said: ‘You are talking about me as if I were not here. I am going to church to pray to my saint and I hope this time he will tell me what to do. I will see you for drinks, Robert.’

  ‘Oh, don’t—’ said Robert, rising; then he sank back. ‘I know I cannot stop Lilia going to church.’

  ‘And now, Robert, let us have a little chat. Let’s have some more coffee and some brandy. You see, Robert, though you call yourself her cousin, everyone knows the situation and it is an absurd one. Don’t say anything. I am going to have my say.’

  ‘Did Lilia know you were going to have your say?’

  ‘She knew and she forbade me. But for me, I am fond of arranging things for people that they can’t do for themselves, and I feel sorry for dear Lilia, such a dear natural woman. You know how she feels about her children’s estrangement?’

  Mr Wilkins laughed easily. ‘Oh, I shouldn’t bother too much about that. It’s Madeleine, I’m sure. She’s a spoiled brat but a nice girl, she’ll come round. Her mother must simply stand firm. If I had had the arranging of her affairs, I should have had Madeleine married long ago. I am afraid Madeleine is a little like me. I was fond of the children as children, I suppose there is a lot of me in them. Children are imitative. I know those children, Princess; I held them on my knee.’

  ‘Yes, Lilia said you were like a father or an uncle to them.’

  ‘Oh, I am afraid I was not like a father to them. I have led a selfish life, Princess; entirely for myself. Whether it was good or bad for me I can’t say. I lived for myself. Lilia’s children were the only bright spots in my life. I think I can say I was not selfish about them. I liked to visit them and bring them toys. I could wield safety-pins and that sort of thing. I gave them treats. I won’t say I never spent my money on others. I’ve made a loan or two, not always to the most reliable sort of chap, and I’ve wagered a bit and even played cards a bit; and I’ve spent a bit of money on short ones and small gins and little dinners at the club, and naturally when my turn came round I always gave a party; and I was always chummy with people and paid my scot; but I’m selfish in the sense that I never did marry and I’m not sure I ever wanted to. My money came and went. Naturally I kept some; but I was responsible to no one. That is what I don’t like—being conscious of a responsibility to someone. Then I should feel my selfishness very acutely. You see I was very selfish. Oh, don’t mistake me, Bili, you can do nothing with me. I am a selfish man.’

  ‘Still, I am going to take Lilia’s part; there is no need to put her case. Every servant in the hotel, even old Charlie, could tell you that you are doing wrong.’

  ‘Old Charlie!’ He laughed.

  ‘Oh, don’t snap me up; everyone knows that Charlie has a mistress in the south of France who kept him for years under the occupation and that he won’t go near her to marry her; and that he takes little girls up to a room in that horrible flea-bag; but he’s a respectable man just the same. And you are not respectable, Robert. You can easily get married here, secretly, never telling your mother and sisters; it can last for years. You will not suffer; I am sure Lilia will be no burden to you; and she will stay here and bring out her money.’

  ‘Oh, she will bring out her money, my dear Bili. I am seeing to that.’

  ‘You are crowing too soon. But Robert, I must go up to Lausanne; will you walk Angel part of the way with me?’

  ‘Oh, no; I must take my nap. It’s a new habit I’ve developed and I don’t seem able to do without it. I’ll see you this evening at the Café Grand Palace.’

  Mrs Trollope came home from church looking very tired. She was troubled that she had had no answer from her saint; and she worried about Madame Blaise, who would be angry that they were spending so much time with the Princess.

  She came home at five o’clock, at which time Madame Blaise was usually in the Old English Tea Room, having tea and cakes. But no sooner did she enter her room than Madame Blaise knocked on the wall; and in a moment they both appeared at her door, Dr Blaise with a remarkable twinkle in his eye. He said:

  ‘You see, I decided to stay the week and take a little holiday for once; and then I am taking my wife home with me.’

  They were dressed to go out. The doctor invited Mrs Trollope and Mr Wilkins for cocktails at about six-thirty, then to dinner and to a cabaret or dancing-place. Leave it all to him, he said; he would fix it up. Madame Blaise also seemed to be in the best of humours. Mrs Trollope was very much embarrassed and went in to consult Robert. Robert said:

  ‘Tell them we shall be delighted. We’ll meet them here. And I shall fix it up with Bili—I shall tell her—yes, I shall tell her my sister is coming.’ He laughed in delight.

  ‘Your sister!’

  He laughed. ‘Since it is so unlikely, she must believe it. And I should like to miss Bili and the Angel this evening.’

  They accepted, and the Blaises then went off arm in arm and began laughing heartily, the doctor shouting with laughter as they reached the lobby. Mrs Trollope was disturbed, then shocked. What could it mean? However, she told Mr Wilkins that she had been wrong, the Blaises were in a good mood and wanted to pay them back in the grand manner for the entertainment of the other evening. She said: ‘I think better of them; I had the queer idea they would do us some hurt.’

  Mr Wilkins laughed, scolded Lilia for her imagination, ‘always worrying about insults and offences,’ and said he supposed that Dr Blaise, one of the best-known doctors in Switzerland, would have some mental balance and social nous; he was not to be judged by his wife. Lilia must have noticed that what she said often didn’t make sense.

  ‘We must be charitable, Robert: she is a drug-addict, though in a small way. She merely takes it to steady her nerves and she is in the doctor’s care.’

  She sat down to drink with Robert, ruminating.

  ‘But, Robert, what do you make of it? He was so coarse in the café that night, saying, “I am a slave and so are you”; and saying they had decided to live separately and she would never see the Basel house again. We decided, you know, that he had caught her in some situation—she talks so much about gigolos. Though it seems unlikely. Though she said to me once, “My son is my only gigolo.” But there they were arm in arm like thief and—h’m—and thief and laughing loudly at the whole world. She told me only yesterday that she was never going back there; yet the day before she invited me to stay there. And now he says she is going back.’

  ‘Oh, they have made it up. And I believe, Lilia, that people tell you fairy tales to see your eyes pop open. They see you are gullible. They had a quarrel and now it is made up. You are always so imaginative, Lilia; it is one of
your feminine traits. It is the kind of thing that men like, but it would never do in business. By the by, the Princess has taken to lecturing me about you, I am not sure it is not without your consent. I can do without another curtain lecture this evening.’

  Mrs Trollope said nothing. Mr Wilkins telephoned the Princess. They had to be careful. The Princess lived near enough to mark their comings and goings. Mr Wilkins said that one of his sisters, the very old one, was coming from Yorkshire that night to stay in Montreux; and that they both had to go to the station to see her to her hotel and see that she had some dinner. She was an old-style Englishwoman who had never been abroad and would rather be with her own family; and in fact was only coming to make sure she had a place in Robert’s will.

  He laughed to Lilia: ‘The Princess will understand that; and she will think we are all being reconciled and so I shall hear no more about marrying you. Do you know that Bili has actually consulted a lawyer about it?’

  Lilia said she would go to church tomorrow and beg to be forgiven for this lie.

  They changed their clothes and were ready by six-thirty. Mr Wilkins was called to the telephone in the office and came back looking rather pale and stiff; he also looked as if he had had a revelation. He said:

  ‘Really, Lilia, really, you will not have to go to church tomorrow to talk about the lie. Let us have a short one before the Blaises get here. I have seen the long arm of coincidence operate, but by Jove I turned cold at this one. I shall believe in table-turning. That was a longdistance telephone call from my sister Flo. She is using up her travel allowance to come to Switzerland with her old school-friend, Miss Price. I think they met at a young ladies’ establishment on the south coast about fifty years ago; and they are coming here, not to Montreux, but here, tomorrow, by the midnight train. Oh, my aunt!’

  ‘What for, in heaven’s name?’

  Mr Wilkins said in anxious tones: ‘If I knew, Lilia, I should tell you. Still, I am glad we did not tell a lie. Or only half of one. I can call spirits from the vasty deep; yes, and when I call them, they do come.’

  He slapped his knee. ‘Oh, by James, that’s ripe. I had a Scots grandmother, but as for second sight—’

  They had their short ones and he became serious, thinking his own thoughts and leaving Lilia to think hers, which could not be pleasant. He poured two more short ones. Lilia felt her headache coming back; she felt wretched indeed.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know if I can spend a whole evening with the Blaises; they are such bores, and ugly people. He has no small talk and she is always talking about her son. I wish I could see the Princess. It is going to be very difficult here for me, Robert, unless Flo has become reconciled and is coming here to make friends.’

  ‘Oh, that is not it. Flo does not know you are here. She thinks I am here alone. She does not know we are travelling together.’

  He finished his drink and remarked: ‘Do you know, that woman is a good card-player if I remember aright. We could have some games.’

  ‘Is she going to stay here?’

  ‘Oh, of course not. I shall make arrangements tomorrow. She will never come here. I shall see to that. I shall find out how long she is staying and I may move to her hotel just for the few days; it would be more prudent.’

  ‘And I am to stay here alone?’

  ‘Surely you don’t want to meet Flo?’

  It was seven. The Blaises had not returned. Where were they supposed to meet them? There was no message downstairs; and the Blaises had mentioned in the office that they were driving to Clarens to a friend’s house for dinner; the friend was a colleague of the doctor.

  Robert and Lilia changed their clothes and went down quietly to the dining-room, examining their memories; they had made a mistake somehow. Mrs Trollope’s headache was very bad; and after dinner she said:

  ‘Oh, I believe I shall go and see the Princess. I can tell her about your sister; and we can meet Bili after all at the café, as Flo is coming tomorrow.’

  ‘One thing I don’t care for in you, Lilia, is that you are so clinging. If you are dropped by Madame Blaise you must run straight to the Princess for consolation.’

  ‘I am not dropped by Madame Blaise; it is a misunderstanding,’ said Lilia, frightened.

  ‘My opinion is, you may take it with a grain of salt, that that was a deliberate sell.’

  ‘Oh, you are too suspicious. Gliesli loves me, she calls me her Liliali; she would never hurt me. And why should Dr Blaise lend himself to such a thing?’

  ‘I think he is a very peculiar man.’

  ‘You look so conceited when you smirk like that.’

  Robert said: ‘It is because I think I am clever. I have ideas about Dr Blaise that could not be put into print and I am not going to breathe to you.’

  After dinner they sat for a while upstairs and then decided to go for a walk. They had scarcely reached the footpath when they met Dr and Madame Blaise strolling along arm in arm, just as if waiting for them. The Blaises said goodnight coolly, politely, but, it seemed to Mrs Trollope, with malicious smiles, though it was hard to tell in the starlight. When they left once more, the Blaises broke into immoderate laughter.

  They went to the Lake Club for a drink. Lilia’s heart beat hard.

  ‘Oh, Robert, I cannot understand it.’

  ‘I can. They took it out of us for being what we are. They took it out of us for putting up with their boorish-ness.’

  ‘Where’s the sense?’

  ‘If you want my plain idea about the doctor, Lilia, the man has all the making of a criminal. I should not be at all surprised to see his name in the papers one day.’

  ‘And you say I am imaginative! All on account of a mistaken invitation.’

  ‘I am never wrong in this kind of intuition, if that is what you call it,’ said Robert.

  ‘You are right about wrong things, I know. Oh, the world must not be this way.’

  They had a long conversation with a waitress they knew about Bogota and about Newfoundland, when ‘Oh, Robert!’ said Mrs Trollope. The swing-doors opened, the circular door rotated and in came the Blaises. The Blaises saw them but pretended not to, and went to another part of the room, where they were hidden—in fact, to a favourite corner usually occupied by Lilia and Robert.

  ‘Are they expecting us?’ said Lilia, but at this moment into the café from the hotel came a tall dark woman with a young man at her side. Both were showily dressed. Everyone knew about this woman. She was the widow of the richest man in that part of Switzerland, owned factories, all kinds of establishments, had a share in the luxurious hotel in which the café was situated. The woman and her lover joined the Blaises.

  ‘Oh, this is going too far!’ said Mrs Trollope. After a reasonable time, Lilia and Robert went back to the hotel.

  At one-thirty in the morning someone knocked on Robert’s door and asked him to call Madame Blaise to go down to the office and answer a long-distance call from New York, from her son. Charlie was off duty, and Herman the German as they called him, the man from Lucerne, refused to understand where the guests’ rooms were. Robert’s was at the head of the stairs, and him he called. ‘Madame Blaise is there,’ said Robert. The man shrugged in his ox-like manner, said ‘Weiss nicht’ and turned to the stairs. Then Robert thought that the lady might be with her husband, so he said to Herman the German, ‘Der Doktor—the doctor is in the end room.’ ‘Weiss garnichts davon,’ said Herman and went downstairs. Well, thought Robert to himself, I am not calling on that bundle of charms; and he knocked on Lilia’s door with the message. After noises like a horse struggling in dreams in his stall, Mrs Trollope came out onto the landing, and then Madame Blaise herself. She had bundled herself into several extra pieces of underclothing, a wrapper and her fur coat, and tied a scarf round her head, with her hat on top of it; and while dressing she shouted at Mrs Trollope that Lilia had no thought for her at all, she knew that Gliesli’s grandmother had died of tuberculosis and thought of nothing but her own selfish whims, that she wa
s a tiresome little woman, a hotel pest, and that Madame Blaise did not know why she had left her beautiful home, not cold like this death-trap, but heated, like a hothouse, not packed with hotel rats from the mountains but full of efficient servants, where everything was done for her hand and foot, to come and live with ridiculous English exiles in the cheapest hotel in a tedious French-Swiss resort. She said to her husband who had come in from his room:

  ‘You are French-Swiss too and absolutely intolerable, dirty and inefficient; and the French and the English anyhow are the laughing-stock of Europe. Everyone knows the English are a fallen nation; and you know it, too, Trollope and Wilkins, cousins who sleep together, or you would not be hiding here like cowards, misers, insects that you are, lower than the hotel rats of whom you make friends, rich people and grudging every penny, going shabby. I am tired of your company.’

  ‘Come to the phone, Liesl,’ said the doctor.

  ‘And you want to expose me to the cold and you grudge me every penny; you push me out of sight here in a rubbishy little pension, so that you can eat and drink all you please on my money and sleep with the servants.’

  ‘Come on, Liesl!’

  ‘I will go. I think it will be better if I go home. I am rudely treated, treated like dirt, a woman like me—’

  She picked up her crocodile handbag to take it with her, put her hand into it and suddenly pushed her open palm at Lilia.

  ‘I present you with the five francs my dinner cost you. We are used to good living. Do you think we didn’t see how you grudged us every mouthful?’

  She went downstairs. They heard her coming up a few minutes later saying: