The Little Hotel (7 page)

I stopped her by telling her about the new document the Mayor had given me. He was going to buy the Hotel Lake Leman, which is right on the lake and charges much higher prices. He was going to put the hotel in Olivier’s name.

‘I don’t see why the Mayor should not want to make such a sweet little boy a gift to remember him by, especially if he is alone in the world,’ said Mrs Trollope.

‘As the Mayor is ill, he may suddenly have realized what it is to have no one to cry for you when you’re gone. You come back and look at a tombstone and think, there is my dear father. Perhaps he might want Olivier to take his name as a second name. You ought to suggest that. After all, it is a really magnificent present.’

I looked out. There was no one about but Clara, who was singing, croaking rather, a song to herself. Mrs Trollope said, forgiving her:

‘Clara is always so happy.’

I got my hat on and when I went out Clara was sitting in her chair at the office door watching the stairs, the lift, knitting the same old sweater and chatting with Mrs Trollope who was admiring her clumsy work.

‘It is for my boy-friend,’ said Clara coyly.

I wondered in passing what she was so good-natured about. Mrs Trollope, like most people, was taken in by Clara’s red and yellow cheerful face and the blonde mat like a wig piled on her head which, at fifty, had not a single grey hair in it. The sweater had been done for Christmas, but had such small armholes and neck that it was more fit for Olivier than for a man, and so it had to be undone. Clara, with nods, pokes, glances and stabs with her needle was indicating to Mrs Trollope that she would be in charge of the house, while the proprietors were out enjoying themselves; that she was a motherly sort, who after working all day, found pleasure in staying at night to look after my child. I came and whisked Mrs Trollope away. Robert Wilkins was downstairs talking with Charlie and drinking whisky with him; my husband had gone to another cellaring; this was becoming quite a habit of his. He pretended that it was good for business: in these cellarings he met all the influential men in town.

How good Clara was, said Mrs Trollope, what a nice woman, one felt comfortable with her.

I said: ‘Clara is all right as long as she feels herself admired: she will play up to you. But she is treacherous, underhand, turbulent and a plotter.’

‘I thought she looked so happy and romantic knitting for her sweetheart and looking after your baby. I feel quite fond of her.’

‘You don’t know her,’ I said, laughing gaily.

Now we were hurrying along the street in the damp mild air and I forgot all my troubles. ‘She’s only happy when there’s trouble and misery; and when there isn’t she stirs people up until there is. She’s full of smiles: something is cooking.’

‘But she has an honest straightforward jolly way and she’s a hard worker.’

‘She thinks she’s indispensable because she was here before us. On the other hand she conspires because she’s afraid of her old age. You must beware of old servants, old horses and old dogs.’

Mrs Trollope sighed and said life was very cruel.

I was just telling Mrs Trollope about the happy days when my girl friend Edith and I went out every afternoon arm-in-arm, and how Roger and I had taken Edith in in her trouble at the sad time her parents put her into the street, when we passed the Hotel Lake Leman. There were three men on the corner, one of them middle-sized, bareheaded and excited. It was the Mayor. He saw me and ran up saying: ‘It is done, it is done this very minute, Madame: the business is concluded.’

He talked eagerly for a bit and we went on. I explained that he meant he had bought the Hotel Lake Leman. We gave it a quick glance as we hurried past, at the tiled entrance full of glass doors, palms and carpets. I had noticed that one of the two other men was the manager of the hotel. He did not acknowledge me. People were jealous of us when we first came here into the hotel business. They had driven others away.

Mrs Trollope kept asking me about the Mayor and halfway through the film, when the break came, she made me quite a long speech in an undertone. She said, in the East, she and Mr Wilkins had known someone rather like the Mayor. She said I must watch the servants and guests. He might wait for them in the dark and jump on them. I was surprised and interested. I had never seen a madman and I thought they made faces, howled and had fits. I could not help saying that only that morning the Mayor had had a long talk with me about Olivier and how we ought to train him if he was going to be an actor—for Olivier is always dressing up and loves to recite. The Mayor knew a lot. He had mixed in the very best society. He told things that made me laugh. A woman he had known in the very best society in Brussels had a lover who objected to her horsy teeth; so she had them all pulled out and her mouth remade. Just then her husband died and her lover married a high-school girl. ‘I loved her for her wonderful teeth and she pulled them out,’ was his excuse. The Mayor said, ‘Belgian society is very amusing and very cruel; you would like it very much.’

We liked the movie. Mrs Trollope said she was glad to see a story of natural sweet little boys. After we had a quiet beer I told Mrs Trollope about my troubles with Roger. There is a married woman after him, my best friend Julie, the one who keeps calling me German because I like beer. She makes him smoke and drink too much; and she leaves me alone with her husband while she goes off with Roger. She is French and she flatters Roger that he is truly French. Her husband, although he is Roger’s best friend, tried to kiss me. Mrs Trollope said to me, ‘This woman wants to make up a foursome.’ Until that evening I had never heard of such a thing. I said:

‘But why does she insult me and Olivier so much? She said, “Olivier used to be a beautiful child; now he is cross-eyed and fat and getting more like you every day.” ’

Mrs Trollope told me that the mother of a beautiful child must put up with a good deal of jealousy.

The next morning was Friday. There were only two or three people in the dining-room for breakfast, people who had stayed overnight; and I let young Emma, Gennaro’s wife, make the coffee. The cook Francis had left, I had a new cook coming; but in the interval I had the old German chef who had been here before, in Clara’s young days in the hotel. He was an aged man, obliging, glad of the work. He got occasional work in the workmen’s pensions and did odd jobs. His cooking was in the German country style, which our guests did not care for; but for a day or two it did no harm. He made good plain flour soups, boiled meat with potatoes and cabbage and desserts of flour and jam. And, unlike Francis, he got on with everyone.

Emma was an Italian mountain peasant, serious, goodlooking and very intelligent. I think she was the most intelligent of all our servants; and yet she knew nothing when she came to us. The Christmas before, I had allowed Gennaro to go to her home, to ask permission to marry her. He asked our advice several times: ‘Is it right? Am I fair to her? Is it the right thing to do? She is a young girl, only nineteen years old and I am compared with her an old man, thirty-four. Fifteen years is a great difference. I am not sure it is right.’

But then he would add: ‘She is a very serious woman and I am serious. Her opinion is that it will work out. I asked my mother’s advice and she thinks Emma is a good wife for me. My married brother and his wife, also, are in favour of it. They think I should marry and they overlook Emma’s poverty. They say she herself is such a fine woman that they consider I am lucky.’

At such moments he would change expression and say: ‘I’ll tell you the truth: I think myself very lucky to have found such a fine woman. Her poverty is nothing to me.’

Gennaro met his mother every morning when he was cleaning the lowest part of the building, which is on lake level. Since the hill is so steep, one side of the hotel is almost on lake level and the chief entrance is up the hill just below the station. The lower entrance is a wide calm place, very sunny in the mornings; Gennaro liked to work there and spend a few moments in the sun. His mother came past every morning on her way to another little hotel where she worked as chambermaid; and there they would meet.

Emma was short and thickset but I could see her attractiveness. Roger came from the mountains himself and preferred town types. Gennaro, you see, was born on the lake shore here, at Nyon, and he had lived here all his life, except for the war and a few years as a child under Mussolini. His family came from the Borromean Islands. If you have ever seen them you know that those low-lying islands are heavenly. The grandfather’s home was in these islands and Gennaro was saving money to buy it, so that his mother could go there in her old age. Therefore he thought a long time about marrying. What confused him more was that now his mother, a widow, wished to remarry. He was ashamed: ‘People will say I cannot provide for my mother.’

Emma came to us with only a cotton dress. She had not even a shirt or drawers, nothing but her dress and a coat belonging to someone. Someone in the train had lent her a pair of bedroom slippers, high-sided plush shoes with a fur edging, to pass the frontier; and Gennaro found her barefooted at the station, when he went with his little handcart to pick up any tourists and to collect her luggage.

Gennaro left her in the waiting-room at the station while he ran all the way downhill to the hotel, got his money, hurried back and bought her a pair of shoes in a shop up Great Oak Street; and so after several hours he brought her to us in a new pair of shoes; and I was very angry with Gennaro for dawdling. She had brought absolutely nothing with her, not the smallest bundle. She was only allowed over the frontier because she had a letter from me, saying that we would employ her as a maid in the hotel. The next day, Gennaro went out, bought some underwear and gave it to her to wear in the hotel.

Everyone who has lived in our hotel knows how severe and proud the Italians are: there was never any hint of impropriety. Gennaro’s age made Emma respect him. He treated her like a young ignorant sister and taught her everything. And last Christmas, the first Christmas, they agreed to become sweethearts and he had already decided he would not ask for a dowry.

The family had a cabin on a few square yards of mountain earth and not even a spade, not a rope, nor a basket to carry things in; not even a pail. There he spent his holidays. He went down to the nearest village, bought a washtub, a pail, a spade, a fork, a hoe, a basket and some seed; and in spite of the winter weather he showed them how to use the stones he had loosened in the soil to pave part of the floor of their cabin. The stones bruised their bare feet and they had no rags to wrap them in, so he bought one pair of sabots. They agreed to let him marry Emma. He told Emma what had taken place and said to her with our consent:

‘I love you and in due time, when we have some savings, I should like to marry you. You are my idea of a good wife and I am quite sure you never looked at another man. Do not answer me at once but think it over for a week. I know I am old and only a man-of-all-work in a small hotel, but if we work hard together we will become something better. It is my duty to see you do not do anything against your wishes, for I am an experienced older man, a city man, and you only a peasant from the mountains.’

Emma agreed to this and a year later they were married. Emma had developed and had begun to laugh; she had grown rosier and stouter.

Gennaro was a small man and more talkative than his wife. He took his position as married man and as elder son very seriously. He thought about it too much. Then Gennaro grew jealous. He said Emma should be kept in the laundry and kitchens until she had learned everything; she was so ignorant that she would be embarrassed in public; she ought not to serve in the dining-room, the bedrooms were no place for her.

He should have been satisfied. His mother came past every morning. She had much more sense than her son and he listened to her respectfully. She said:

‘She’s a woman in a thousand, there’s not a better woman in the world. Be good to Emma and do what she says.’

Then she told me that Gennaro was unfortunate.

‘My poor boy’s head is not quite right. He was obliged to join the Mussolini youth, he was a Ballilla as a child. I could say nothing. Gennaro is honest and he thinks others are too; he is credulous.’

Gennaro would come in happy and refreshed from these morning conversations with his mother; and perhaps from the fresh breeze, the air of the lake, the view of the steep peaks on the French side and the Bernese Oberland and the water rippling.

Emma would be working inside somewhere and he would say a cheerful word to her, go upstairs to his work, be by her side when she was preparing the vegetables and salads for lunch. After the day’s work, Gennaro’s spirits fell and sometimes at the servants’ meals, which took place in the kitchen one hour before the guests’ mealtimes, he would sit pinched, depressed, unable to say a word and eating little. Emma understood him and kept up a cheerful manner, sitting next to him and answering people in a quietly friendly way but always reserved. She took it for granted that her husband would be jealous and tired from his work. It happened that the Mayor one Friday morning was in a gay mood. He sent in Document 191 to say that the coffee was very good, remarkably German, and asked who made it. The answer came back that no one knew. Friday was a quiet day. You would not think perhaps from what I say, how very peaceful the hotel is in that off season just before spring. You could hear a ski-boot drop on the attic floor. It was too quiet. The servants began to think of their homes and whether they would lose their jobs if the season continued quiet. Gennaro had time to be jealous. Luisa and Emma went on making things for their linen-chests. Mrs Trollope began to feel her sciatica more. Meanwhile Rosa, the schoolteacher’s daughter from Lucerne, had got the star part in a play run by the German-Swiss Catholic Daughters’ Association. She stuck her thumb showily in Madame Blaise’s soup, she swaggered about the dining-room. She was to be found in the street, garden and house shadowed by a tall young German-Swiss, a businessman, who said she was his cousin. Mrs Trollope met them on the stairs going up to the servants’ rooms.