Your friend,
Lilia Trollope
However, Mrs Trollope must have written to Mr Wilkins that day; for the next morning Mr Wilkins was very disturbed. He asked me if I had had a letter from his cousin about her room and I said yes, she was not keeping it on.
‘Well, I am staying on,’ he said; and then I told him that he would be charged double for the summer season; it always was so. He said that I should wait till the other rooms were taken before ‘this holdup’; and he said the town was not even half full, the great hotels along the lake were empty. I said: ‘But that is all changed now, Mr Wilkins. These days are gone. It was the British who used to stay here in villeggiatura; now they have not the money. The Americans and French all run through in their cars; they do not even stay one night. Now those hotels are being taken over by the trades unions for their members and taken up in block bookings by the travel agencies. They are being converted as holiday centres. This means that we who remain will be doing a splendid business forever for those few people who want to stay.’
He said he was most certainly not going to stay here alone; and he wrote at once to Mrs Trollope to come back to us. She did not answer. She had already left for London. He wrote to Madame Blaise about her plans; but in reply all he had was a newspaper cutting which said that Madame Blaise had died of heart disease and that her entire estate, except for two settlements, had been left to the housekeeper Ermyntrud, if she married Dr Blaise. No doubt a wedding took place.
‘I do not know what I am going to do without Mrs Trollope,’ said Mr Wilkins, when he came down to pay for his room. He continued:
‘She should never have left me. I arranged my affairs to include her and she knew it quite well. This has upset all my calculations. I shall have to reorientate my whole plans. It is most inconsiderate; but she never had any ballast. At the same time, I shall not go to England. I should have to return all the capital they allowed me to bring out; I shall certainly not do that; and for her sake I shall keep hers here too. She does not know what trouble she is in for, having to explain why she exported capital and then came home without it. She is going to write to me to help her out of the pickle. But I shall say simply, Lilia, you must come abroad again.’
He went on talking, but at this moment there was some trouble going on in the foyer. The Admiral was going upstairs to her room. She had brought the lift down, she went in and tried to slam the door. She could not get used to the electric eye and wanted it taken out. She thought she might be trapped in there. She shouted:
‘The lift is out of order, I can’t slam the door.’
‘She can’t see that it is closing,’ said Mr Wilkins.
One of my lodgers, a young man, Mr Forel, who was sitting in his shirt-sleeves writing a letter in the writing-room, rushed out and shouted in French:
‘Let it close and don’t slam it! It’s a mechanism; it can’t be managed by brute force, brute force!’
The Admiral started to come out. ‘It’s out of order; eh, l’homme!’
Mr Forel exclaimed: ‘Animal, faut pas le forcer.’
A young man coming down the stairs from the little rooms upstairs shouted suddenly, turning red, to Mr Forel:
‘Back into your hole, dog!’
‘What were those words? Repeat them!’ said the shirt-sleeved man, creeping closer.
‘Back into your hole, like a dog,’ remarked the other young man, calmly.
‘Don’t speak to a man like that,’ I said.
The man in shirt-sleeves turned to me and raised his fists:
‘Dirty spies! Dirty spies! Switzerland is full of nothing but foreign spies !’
‘You dare!’ said the other young man.
‘She is a spy, no one else here,’ said Mr Forel, looking furiously at the Admiral.
I said to the Admiral: ‘Take no notice; he’s mad.’
The young man cried: ‘Mad, am I? Mad—ah—I’ll report it to the police.’
He ran back for his jacket, while the other young man, running down to the door, said over his shoulder: ‘You do that and we’ll all say you’re mad. Enough!’
‘Mad!’ cried Mr Forel. He ran to the door.
The other young man went racing out. ‘Goodbye!’ he shouted laughing, as he ran up the little asphalt path to the gate.
‘You’ll hear from me,’ said Mr Forel running after him.
‘Mad, mad!’ shouted the young man, running his hands through his flying hair, as he made off.
‘Tas de coquins!’ said Mr Forel, running to the gate.
‘Goodbye,’ shouted the other.
‘Mr Hops!’ shouted Mr Forel.
‘Goodbye, madman!’
‘Smuggler, smuggler!’ said Mr Forel.
Mr Hops reached the turn in the road and disappeared, still running. Mr Forel stood at the gate shaking his arm in the air. He came slowly back, his shirt-tails flying out from his trousers. He had his slippers on and a hole in one of his socks so large it could be seen for hundreds of yards, I am sure. He stood for a while in the cold breeze, thin and bent. After calling something unintelligible to Mr Hops, he turned and came towards the front door splaying his large flat feet, putting them down as if they were broken at the ankles. He was a postman who had had a nervous breakdown and was staying in one of the little rooms at the top for a holiday.
Ah, yes, Mrs Trollope did not return to the Hotel Swiss-Touring. She wrote several times from England telling me about the prices of things and how strange she found the people’s manners; and I had a postcard from Mr Wilkins in Rome, where he was looking for a business opportunity; and later another from Cape Town, where he had gone on business, asking me if I had had a word from his cousin. I do not know if they ever saw each other again.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1983 by The Estate of Christina Stead
cover design by Mimi Bark
978-1-4532-6522-2
This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media
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