The Little Hotel (21 page)

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 was 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:

‘I am shivering, Blaise; it’s terribly cold. I am utterly wretched here. I must go home.’

‘Yes, you had better go home. But now you had better go to bed. Everyone wants to sleep.’

He said goodnight to Lilia and Robert in an affable way with the same odd twinkle and a sharp stern sidelong glance which had been an expression of his ever since the night of the dinner.

‘I have a most disagreeable impression, most,’ said Mr Wilkins, in a low tone.

Mrs Trollope was in bed crying,

‘And all because we did not invite them to lunch. They are greedy. I could not show so much greed,’ said Lilia in a voice which she intended Madame Blaise to hear. Madame Blaise knocked on the wall, and called:

‘Let people sleep.’

Lilia wept.

The result of all this was that Madame Blaise went off with Dr Blaise in his car the next morning to live in the home which she had quit seven months before and which she had sworn never to set foot in again. When she left Madame Blaise kissed Lilia, took her by both hands, begged her pardon. ‘I was tired and nervous and cold and frightened, the doctor had been roaming round his room all night and I thought he meant me harm.’

She told Mrs Trollope that when she returned after a few months she was going to stay at a charming hotel up the street, The Old English, recommended to her by some Russian ladies, White Russian, of course. It was very warm, pretty, and not much dearer than the Hotel Swiss-Touring; and she wanted Lilia to go there too.

‘Perhaps, Liliali, I shall come back in a week and we shall all move there and sing Happy days are here again. We will show the Bonnards that we are not such fools as they take us for. Then, dear Liliali, for people in our position, it is not quite right to live in the most rundown hotel in town. Now promise me, if I do not come back in a week, you must come to live with me. We will be sisters. You will look after me and be a witness if the doctor tries to poison me.’

She said this with the doctor looking on and smiling his odd smile; she kissed Lilia affectionately. They went out to the car. Madame Blaise said:

‘Liliali, I shall write to you every day. Now mind you write to me. Forgive me, darling. You are my best friend. Remember, it is your duty. I impose it on you. You must live for me, when I am away, for I shall be so lonely without you. And remember, do not go to Paris or anywhere till I come back. Do not move till I come back, then we will all go to the Old English. If you are not there, there will be no charm for me there. Remember you are my only confidante; you know everything. You know all about him—’ she pointed to her husband; ‘I adore you, Liliali, you owe it to me to wait for me here. And if I do not write, remember, you must come over to Basel and find out why. It will mean I am in danger.’

So they parted. Mrs Trollope did not like this parting. She told Mr Wilkins that she thought it overbearing, not to say impertinent of ‘the old lady’ to imagine that she would wait for her there, ‘tied hand and foot’.

But Mr Wilkins said: ‘Oof! I am glad she is gone; that is something to be thankful for. If I had only known before. Now I know how to manage her—deprive her of a meal.’

‘Don’t speak that way of a poor woman who goes in fear of her husband.’

Mr Wilkins laughed.

‘If I only knew what you were thinking, Robert. At times you seem to me a complete stranger. I am living with a stranger.’

‘We all are,’ said Mr Wilkins and laughed.

He went up the hill to reserve two rooms in the Old English Hotel for his sister and her old friend Miss Price. When he came back, he said:

‘Well, you had better keep out of the way, Lilia. I shall do my level best to keep them from here. I decided I could not stay with them, after all, I shall eat with them, take them on trips, take them to the Casino and they will be satisfied. I shall not allow them to come prying round here. Of course, Lilia, if you should see me out with them, you had better make believe you do not know me.’

Lilia went up to see the Princess. She meant to tell her everything. But when she got there the Princess was packing; very flustered and irate. She had to go to Paris at once; there had been a mistake, she was to go into the clinic at once. She said to Lilia, as soon as she saw her, that she must take Angel; and she gave her the address of the lawyer she had been seeing on Lilia’s case.

‘And I have had such stupid letters from Ramon, my fiancé. He thinks he can do anything with me. He is so lazy. Why do I have to meet such a lazy man, when I am full of energy? He does not want to open a restaurant; he wants to have a good time. And what else do you think he wants? Where is it?
Mi salud y la de mi madre
—no, he thinks I am worrying about his health!
Seria un ladron.
Yes, I must send him some more money; he was with someone who must have been a thief. Yes, yes, here it is, such impudence! He wants me generously and nobly to pay for the fare of a cousin of his,
una señorita de veinte y dos años,
a young lady of twenty-two. I know those cousins!’

She stopped and said to Lilia: ‘I beg your pardon, Lilia. But I am in such a fit of temper, my head is on fire. And yet he is so sweet to me. “I miss you, you are only a child,” he says to me; “you are so much older, I respect you for all you are, and yet with me you are a child and I feel all the tenderness I would feel for a child. In life you are a child.” ’

The Princess hastily wiped her eyes.

‘And so, Lilia, you must take Angel, take him to the Blaises. I myself, to tell the truth, telephoned the clinic and they called me back; for it is urgent. You see he is becoming interested in women younger than himself. ’

‘And now I am going to be quite alone,’ said Lilia, sitting down.

‘Will you take Angel?’

‘Oh, yes, I promised, didn’t I? But what on earth will Robert say?’

‘You had better take him straight to Basel.’

‘I should take him to England, if they would let him in; but there is that quarantine.’

‘Oh, no, Angel must never be in quarantine; he would die of loneliness.’

Mrs Trollope took the lawyer’s address, though she knew she would never use it. She went back to the hotel leading Angel. Mr Wilkins was resting and asked her to go in and see what ‘that poltergeist’ wanted. Mrs Trollope tied Angel to the bedpost in her room and went in.

Miss Chillard’s flesh had sunk back onto her skeleton.

‘I am afraid you are not well, Miss Chillard. Shall I send for the doctor?’

‘They have taken my money for the hotel. I cannot pay the doctor.’

‘Shall I make you some tea?’

‘I cannot take anything. I have not eaten for three days, for these carrion-crows are only waiting for me to eat, to take the last of my money. They will put me out and you can see I cannot move. I do not know what is to become of me. I am dying. I don’t want to die on the train home, in a dusty third-class carriage. If only I could see Zermatt once more, where I was happy, I would not mind dying. I want to die there. I don’t want to die here, Mrs Collop, Mrs Collop! What am I to do?’