Grand Affair Page 7

  Sometimes Ottilie wished that Mum and Dad were not so very proud of her. On the other hand she knew it was very little to pay in return for living at the Grand and having so many friends in the new staff that came every year, and very often in some of the older guests who came to stay too. She was lucky in every way. She was lucky in being able to use the swimming pool any day of the summer, and in having pretty clothes and food and all those things that everyone everywhere must want. So being polite and nice was really a very small thing. It was just that sometimes she wished that she could be more herself with Mum and Dad, and not the person that they thought she was, or ought to be. On the other hand she also dreaded that they might discover just what a bad person she could be, because if they did they might get rid of her as quickly as they had adopted her. That person, the person they had not adopted, could only be let out once the door of her bedroom was shut in the evening and everyone was downstairs in the large, old-fashioned dining room. Then Ottilie could lie in bed and in her imagination be as wicked as she liked.

  She would fantasize about going down into the dining room of the hotel wearing only her bathing suit and jumping out from under the pudding table and frightening all the old ladies in their evening dresses and diamond brooches. Or she would imagine putting an old hat under the silver meat dishes so that when Gianni, the head waiter, removed the silver dome with his usual flourish, instead of a magnificent fillet of beef there would be Mum’s best hat with the veiling, or the hotel cat. Sometimes she would laugh so much at these ideas that she would have to go to her bathroom and splash her face to stop herself from laughing until she was sick.

  ‘There now.’ Melanie looked proudly from her husband’s face hovering just behind them both to the scene below, down the steps into the great dining room of the Grand. ‘There now, isn’t that lovely, Alfred darling, isn’t that just something?’

  Melanie nodded towards the central table round which were sitting ten carefully selected children, all of them dressed in one or another version of a theme on black and white. The staff had set the table with black and white napkins and flowers dyed specially, and black and white candles, and right in the middle the famous chocolate cake with an outer icing of black and white and a lucky black cat on the top. And of course the staff themselves, Edith and everyone, were in black and white as well, because they always were in black and white.

  ‘Isn’t that just charming, darling?’ Melanie asked her husband. He darted forward to photograph his wife and Ottilie on the grand semi-circular staircase coming down to the dining room, and after that their arrival at the birthday table, before taking another of the cake and the table with the staff standing behind the chairs of the small guests who were now applauding the birthday girl.

  But while Ottilie was going from guest to guest and shaking hands, all she could think of was that Lorcan would be arriving soon. She hoped that he would not feel shy and embarrassed from not being in black and white too. In between opening presents and talking to the guests Ottilie found herself fantasizing that Lorcan might arrive wearing his white overalls, the ones he was wearing all morning to paint the railings. She wished he would, because it would look so funny in the grand dining room, and it would mean that they could laugh together the way they had always used to do in the old days before she came to live at the hotel.

  She had not seen Lorcan close to for a long time, not since before Christmas when he and Joseph and Sean came to lunch with her in her apartment on the top floor of the hotel, and then they had all been so hungry that they could not wait to tuck their napkins into the collars of their best white shirts and eat as if they were sure they were never going to eat again. It had seemed to Ottilie that there had been hardly any time to hear how they were or what had been happening to them, before the two eldest had to go back to work, and Sean back to school.

  Ottilie had been longing to see them all and to give them their presents, things that she had spent practically all year making them, a felt pig for Sean, a long scarf knitted on big needles for Joseph, and a book of funny drawings for Lorcan who said how funny they were without even looking at them, so great a hurry was he in to get through all five courses and back to work before Mr Hulton discovered that he was gone.

  ‘It’s all right, everyone knows you’re here,’ Ottilie had kept saying once the waiters had served them, because the boys didn’t seem to understand that it didn’t matter the three of them being there with her, that no-one would mind, that the Cartarets had truly laid on the lunch for them all especially, so that Ottilie could see them before Christmas was upon them and she was needed at the hotel to be charming to all the elderly guests who booked in every year at the Grand for the festivities. But the boys, besides eating as fast as they could swallow every course that was put in front of them, seemed to have spent their precious time with her looking uneasily around at everything, the paintings, the cut glass on the table, the silver forks engraved with the hotel crest, as if a policeman was going to arrive at any moment and accuse them of breaking and entering. Joseph had said when he was leaving, ‘I envy you all this, Ottie,’ and although Ottilie had smiled up at him to cover her embarrassment she had been grateful to him too because, all in all, she realized that perhaps it was better said than not.

  Seated at her birthday table Ottilie looked round at the faces of all the invited children as she herself sat down and pulled at her starched napkin to put it on her knee. She knew everyone who had come to her party because they were all children who had come to the hotel at some time or another with their parents, or their grandparents, or were connected to the Grand in some other way. All except for Philip and Constantia Granville who had never come to the hotel before, whom Melanie had invited because she had just met their mother at a cocktail party. The Granvilles were one of the fifty oldest families in Cornwall. Ottilie knew this because Edith had told her. Ottilie was not terribly interested in people’s families, unless they were guests at the hotel, but looking at them she thought the Granvilles looked quite gentle and polite, unlike some of the children. They were both tall and blond, as tall and blond as Ottilie was petite and dark.

  ‘Do you like parties?’ she asked Philip Granville.

  ‘Not really, no. I prefer staying at home with my tame hare as a matter of fact.’

  The seriousness of young Philip’s manner impressed Ottilie, and she couldn’t help agreeing with him that staying at home with a tame hare would be much more interesting than going to a tea party because someone happened to be ten that day.

  ‘Do you like going to the cinema?’

  ‘Not really, no,’ Philip answered, and he looked at Ottilie, his blue eyes very serious. ‘I only really like animals and being outside.’

  ‘Where does your hare live?’

  ‘In my room. With me. I rescued him.’

  Ottilie gave a small sigh of admiration but before she could ask Philip Granville more about his hare she saw Lorcan arriving in his best tweed suit, his hair smoothed down, his white collar as stiff as anything, his tie just so. She wanted to get up and run across to him and fling her arms around his neck but Melanie, who was standing behind her chair, leaned forward and gently but firmly pushed Ottilie back into her seat again as soon as she started to rise to greet her eldest brother.

  ‘It’s all right, darling, I’ll deal with this.’

  Before Lorcan had finished walking slowly and self-consciously, his best shoes squeaking, down the great semicircular staircase that led into the dining room, Mrs Cartaret had hurried up to him.

  Ottilie tried not to look, but finally all she could do was look – as Lorcan, the dearest of all her three brothers, smiled shyly and awkwardly at Mrs Cartaret coming towards him wearing her best cocktail party smile. Although she could only see the back of her head Ottilie knew that Melanie would be smiling at Lorcan the way she smiled at the hotel guests, and trying to take the small present Lorcan was holding from him before he had even finished speaking, thereby making it plain that she
did not expect him to do more than leave the present with her and then take himself off.

  Watching anxiously from the other side of the dining room Ottilie swallowed hard, wondering how much it had cost Lorcan to take time off work to come to the party to which she had invited him so many weeks before. It must have cost him money that he dearly needed to save for all the books he was studying at night so that he could go to some religious college that he had tried to tell her about at Christmas. Ottilie had not really wanted to hear about it, because she had hated going to the convent and enjoyed going to church even less.

  She could see Melanie talking to Lorcan as if he was a hotel guest, laughing and smiling but blocking his progress to the birthday table all the same. She would not be able to imagine, as Ottilie could imagine, how much trouble it would have been for Lorcan to come here today. Her mum could not see in her mind what Ottilie could see – Lorcan returning home in the middle of the day and carefully bathing and changing his clothes, ironing his own shirt, brushing his hair, putting the bicycle clips on the bottom of his clean trousers, bicycling back to the hotel, chaining his bicycle to those railings that he had not yet finished painting, walking into the foyer of the hotel, talking his way past the staff who knew him only as one of the builders, and then summoning up the courage to come into the dining room in his best suit. Worst of all, Mum could not imagine, as Ottilie could imagine, just how much he would have looked forward to the party, only to be turned away by Mrs Cartaret as he was now being, politely but firmly, charmingly and sweetly turned away, and not allowed to join Ottilie and her friends.

  Back he would have to go, not just up the staircase, this time feeling even more awkward, but across the foyer, back to his bicycle where he would put on his clips again, and all the way back to the cottage where he would have to take everything off once more, the specially starched shirt, the neatly pressed suit, the black polished shoes, the tie that was normally only taken out for church.

  And tomorrow morning, at work, what would he say to Mr Hulton about all the time he had taken off work – the best part of an afternoon, just to come into the hotel by the front doors and leave a present and go away again? What would he say? Ottilie’s legs under the birthday table wrapped themselves tightly round each other at the thought of how embarrassed he would feel, and knowing the other men working on the hotel she could imagine just how they would tease him and call him a snob for wanting to take Ottilie a present himself, because Ottilie suddenly knew that was how it would look to his mates at work, just as though Lorcan had wanted to join in with the snobs at her tea party, to push himself forward where he was not wanted, whereas the truth was that Lorcan would not have dreamed of coming to the party had not Ottilie asked him so particularly.

  ‘Lorcan!’

  Ottilie pushed her chair back and ran as fast as she could after him. Lorcan was halfway up the stairs. He turned and looked down at her.

  ‘Come back, please, Lorcan! Please, please, please! Come back and sit beside me and watch me cut the cake, please?’

  Lorcan looked first at Ottilie’s pleading face and then across the room at Melanie and the formal group over at the table.

  ‘There’s no place laid for me, Ottie,’ he said, his face half smiling and half rueful.

  ‘Oh but there is, Lorcan, I laid one specially, and wrote your name.’ She nodded towards the table. ‘Please come!’

  Melanie’s smile had now become more fixed than ever, but Ottilie pulled on Lorcan’s hand, and now his own smile had lost its hesitancy and he murmured, taking her hand, ‘Very well, Ottie, if you have laid for me.’

  Ottilie pulled out Lorcan’s chair and smiled round at her young guests.

  ‘This is my brother, Lorcan,’ she told them all proudly.

  Mrs Cartaret leaned over Ottilie’s chair and for a second the smell of Chanel No 5 overwhelmed her adopted daughter as she said, ‘Really, Ottilie, I don’t think Lorcan wants to sit with all you children.’

  ‘On the contrary, Mrs Cartaret,’ Lorcan replied, ‘I am greatly honoured.’

  ‘This is Philip Granville, Lorcan,’ Ottilie said, introducing the young fair-haired boy who shook hands with the dark-haired young Irishman. ‘Lorcan’s a painter,’ Ottilie went on proudly.

  ‘A painter?’ Philip Granville looked impressed.

  ‘Yes, he paints railings.’

  Lorcan smiled suddenly at Ottilie’s obvious pride in him and then placed the small packet he’d brought with him beside Ottilie’s plate.

  This belonged to your mother. Ottilie stared at the words written in Lorcan’s careful hand as Philip Granville leaned over to look at the contents of the small old-fashioned cardboard box, a beautifully wrought bracelet.

  ‘Rather pretty, isn’t it? One of my aunts has jewellery just like this.’

  Philip took the bracelet from Ottilie and held it up, staring at the insets of tiny sapphires and diamonds.

  ‘I know Ma wanted you to have it, Ottie,’ Lorcan murmured to her alone, and his eyes softened as Ottilie put it on her wrist, slipping it over her hand without unfastening the catch because it was still much too big for a child.

  Philip Granville looked across at Melanie in her Balmain dress and pearls.

  ‘Your mother is a very pretty woman.’

  At which Ottilie turned and smiled mischievously at Lorcan. Her smile said, there really was no point in explaining, was there? Lorcan’s answering smile confirmed that there truly was not. But then Ottilie looked down once more at the bracelet and an awful thought passed through her mind. If this beautiful bracelet had belonged to Ma, was it perhaps stolen?

  Following her birthday party Philip Granville asked Ottilie over to Tredegar, his family home. Edith was most impressed. Just to take Ottilie and pick her up in one of the hotel cars Edith wore her best brooch, the one with the yellow stone in the centre, and her best grey macintosh, dark grey with a belt that still buckled, albeit the buckle was becoming a little worn, Ottilie noticed, although that was almost all she did notice that afternoon. She was certainly far too excited about the prospect of meeting Philip’s tame hare to notice much about Tredegar.

  Later, in the kitchens of the hotel, she heard Edith extolling Tredegar’s exotic flower arrangements set in immense silver and crystal vases and the vast kitchen with its centuries-old flagstoned floors and its kitchen range that dated from a hundred years ago, but Ottilie herself was not interested in these things. She only noticed the Great Danes the colour of gunmetal with their strange yellow eyes, who sat silent and still in front of the warmth of the immense fire that burned in the dark panelled hall, as if hoping that by remaining so still they would be mistaken for stone. Yet fascinated by the dogs as she was, she was more than happy to run up the stairs after Philip to his suite of rooms and meet his tame hare.

  ‘This is Ludlow.’

  ‘He’s beautiful.’

  This was a rare moment. Ottilie, who was hardly ever silenced, was overcome by the sight of a tame hare seated on an old sofa. For once, she could think of nothing whatsoever to say as the animal sat quite still and allowed her to stroke his head, watched by his proud owner.

  ‘Do your mum and dad mind him being here, inside with you? I can’t have animals because of being in a hotel.’

  ‘No, mine don’t mind, they’re divorced. Divorced people don’t mind what you do, at least not if you’re their children, I find. They don’t come here very often. Most of the time there’s just Constantia and me. And the staff, of course. They look after us. Mamma and Pappa, they just argue about everything if they come here, so it’s better just to have staff. Besides, they’re much nicer to you than parents, actually. Come on, I’ll show you my soldiers if you like.’

  Ottilie suspected that soldiers were not going to be very interesting, but because of always being on show at the hotel she knew very well that she had exquisite manners even though she was only ten, and so she said nothing but followed the slender figure of Philip Granville through the connecting doo
rs into another of his large rooms. If he wanted to play with his soldiers then she was perfectly prepared to watch him. But when she saw what he meant by ‘soldiers’ Ottilie was amazed.

  What Philip had laid out was a whole great battle, and what he called ‘soldiers’ were truly elegant lead figures of men in uniform, on foot or on horse, or riding gun beside carriages, endless lines of them, each piece of their uniform picked out in still brilliant colours. The plumes, the gold, the scarlet, the regimental colours, everything that had been the mighty spectacle of war before the reality of death, was laid out in meticulous lines, and it was beautiful, as beautiful as the sea, even though what was to come was so terrible. Ottilie thought of the sound of the gunfire, of the terror of the horses, of the beautiful uniforms stained with blood, of the poor boys dead in the mud.

  ‘I’m in the middle of the Crimea, actually,’ Philip told her. ‘It’s pretty good fun. Do you know anything about the Crimea?’

  ‘I certainly do.’ As Philip looked pleased but quite definitely surprised, Ottilie said by way of explanation, ‘There’s an old gentleman who comes to the hotel every year and he tells me all about battles, but although he’s a general he hasn’t any soldiers any more. He only has books and maps which he shows me, and medals that he wears in the evening. This is much more interesting, though,’ she continued at her usual conversational gallop. ‘Because you see this old general, well, he really only knows about the Second World War, North Africa, Italy and so on, and by then there were no horses. Do you want me to help you with your battle? I can if you like.’

  Philip frowned. The idea of a girl helping him stage a battle was obviously pretty startling to him.

  ‘I tell you what,’ Ottilie went on, seeing the doubt in his eyes. ‘I’ll stand by in case – because you look a bit wobbly about that.’