Mountain Magic (4 page)

Marianne said nothing about approving of this, and
when she had conducted Toni up in the lift to a faraway room on the top floor—which at least she hadn’t to share with anyone else, she realised thankfully— Marianne said smoothly that, as they really were very short of bedroom staff, perhaps she could find herself a uniform and start work that afternoon.

Toni had lunch with a few members of the staff, every one of whom appeared to be almost completely exhausted after a hectic few weeks following the opening of the hotel, and had neither the curiosity nor the interest to ask her any questions about herself, or comment on the fact that she was English. The girls had only one idea in their heads when they entered the staff room, and that was to kick off their shoes and take the weight off their feet, and the men found nothing intriguing about the acquisition of a new chambermaid.

P
articularly a shy-eyed girl who was so embarrassed by being thrust amongst them that she forgot she could speak another language apart from English.

Her uniform was a light sky-blue that made her look very young, and as there was no apron or cap that went with it she had to admit that it hardly branded her with the badge of a servitor. It had a wide white belt, and she wore flat-heeled white sandals, and when her soft brown hair was brushed into a shining cap she was perhaps more attractive at first glance than she had ever been in her shrunken cardigans and much-washed cotton frocks.

That first afternoon she made beds almost without ceasing. With the assistance of another girl called Heidi she learned how to deal with huge fat eiderdowns that had to be either rolled, or folded like an envelope, and in order to achieve the most satisfactory results a certain dextrous flick of the wrist was necessary. Torsi acquired this dexterity after half an hour, but before that she so exhausted herself struggling with mountains of feathers that the exhaustion lasted until the evening, when she was required to sit in the corridor and answer bells.

Fortunately there was no one who required anything that it was beyond her to procure—extra towels, soap, a hot milk drink for a child—and at ten o’clock she was allowed to go to bed, and anyone who rang their bell after that either had it ignored (which explained why Mrs. Van Ecker, an ardent ringer of bells, had hers ignored when she tugged at them at the wrong end of the day) or had to ring very hard indeed.

In the morning, having slept as if she were half dead after her unusual physical exertions, she was aroused by her alarm dock at six, and put in an hour’s Hoovering before being allowed breakfast at seven
o
’cl
ock. The half-hour interlude permitted for breakfast seemed to pass in a flash, and then she was once more on duty in the corridor.

Unused to entering people’s bedrooms and seeing them before they were ready to face the day, she felt embarrassed when told to “Come in,” and then
was
casually ignored as if she was a piece of furniture while carrying out requests that were made to her. One young woman wanted her to smear sun-tan lotion all over her back before going out to sit on the terrace, and another got her to hunt through her luggage for sleeping tablets because she had had a bad night.

On that first morning the most embarrassing incident was caused by her obedient entry into a room that was occupied by a good-looking fair young man, who was shaving in front of the mirror above the wash-basin. Clad only in his pyjama trousers, and looking splendidly fit and sun-tanned, he didn’t even bother to turn round as he said casually:

“Bring me some coffee here to my room, will you...
?
” Then he must have caught sight of her in the mirror, for he turned and one of his fair eyebrows went up comically, and he whistled.

“Well, well! I haven’t seen you before, have I?” He spoke in English, and that was the only thing about the interview that caused her heart to lighten. “And what’s your name, little one? Trudi, Hanni, Dor
li
...?”

“My name is Toinette,” Toni answered, biting her
li
p.

His eyebrow went up still more.

“That sounds French, but your English is excellent. You wouldn’t happen to be English, by any chance? They don’t employ English girls in places like this.”

“I am English,” Toni said, very quie
tl
y.

“We
ll
, we
ll
!” he exclaimed again. “How often in life can we be surprised?” He wiped his razor blade on a square of tissue, and then walked across to her and surveyed her with open interest. “Of course, you look
English,
and you’re also very pretty. Has anyone ever told you that before?” He watched the colour stream into her face, and laughed softly. “Of course they have! Quite a number of times, I should say!” He reached for a towel and dabbed at his face, and then made the discovery that he had cut himself very slightly.

“Would you like to stick a piece of sticking-plaster on for me, Toinette
?
” he asked, his blue eyes dancing gaily. “There’s a tin of the stuff somewhere about, and if we can only find it—”

But she backed hastily towards the door.

“I’ll go and get your coffee,” she said, turning to grasp at the door handle.

But he caught her by the arm and refused to let her go.

“Not yet, my sweet! I want to hear a lot more about you, and why you’re here at all! You seem very timid for a young woman accustomed to barging in on impressionable bachelors at this hour of the morning—”

“I’m not accustomed to it,” she told him, and succeeded in wrenching her arm free. “And I’ve a lot of other things to do apart from fetching your coffee, so I must go!” Luckily they could both hear a couple of bells shrilling discordantly in the corridor, and he shrugged resignedly.

“I’ll be as quick as I can,” Toni said, making for the door.

“And when you come back I want to know your surname, and what part of England you come from,” he called after her. “I’m English myself, so we ought to get together...”

Toni fled along the corridor as if she were being pursued, and at a junction with another corridor she all but collided with Pierre, one of the white-coated waiters she had first seen coping with a sudden rush of custom the day before. He looked at her in a certain amount of amazement when she grabbed at his sleeve, and as he was bearing a tray supporting a syphon and a large whisky only narrowly averted a nasty accident in the corridor.

“Oh, Pierre,” Toni appealed to him, breathlessly, “will you do something for me?”

As Pierre had thought her unusually dumb the night before, and had had no opportunity yet to revise his opinion, he merely stared.

“Will you take some coffee to number twenty-six?
Th
e room at the end of the corridor.” She glanced over her shoulder as if it held for her an almost certain menace. “There’s a man in there who..
.”

Pierre understood at once, and grinned appreciatively. He also thought Toni, with her face full of colour and her dark blue eyes lifted slightly imploringly to his, was unusually attractive; and he agreed without any further appeals.

“Okay,” he said, making use of the only expression in the
English
language with which he was familiar. “If it’s like that I will
.
But you’d better not let Mademoiselle Raveaux know.”

“Why? Wouldn’t she approve?”

“In this business the customer is always right,” he told her, patting her shoulder. “Now, disappear, before number twenty-six starts ringing again
!”

For the rest of that day Toni saw, and heard, nothing of the occupants of room twenty-six, and she was so grateful to Pierre that she agreed to teach him English when they were both off duty. He sat next to her in the staff dining-room at lunch, and he decided, quite definitely,
that
she was attractive—a nice little thing who was rather like a fish out of water, but with a soft, feminine appeal about her that he liked. He told her if she was in any difficulties to come to him.

With the feeling that she had now one friend at court, Toni returned to her bed-making and her floor-polishing. The floor-polishing was an extra job that was handed out to her when the girl who normally did the bathrooms and corridor on that floor fell down the short flight of stairs from the linen room, and sustained a fractured ankle. She was whisked off to hospital in Innsbruck, and the assistant housekeeper made it clear that until she was replaced everyone would have to undertake extra duties.

Toni was taken off answering bells, and divided her time between sorting dirty linen, cleaning wash-basins and baths, keeping the corridor immaculate, and being at the beck and call of anyone who wanted her at the moment. For instance, just as she was about to go off duty the linen-keeper wanted her to hem-stitch some sheets, and as she was quite unfamiliar with the machine that performed this useful function it took her some little while to get used to its eccentricities; and then when she thought she was finally finished, some new arrivals required a couple of children’s cots erected in their room, and this meant a large-scale rearrangement of furniture, and Toni was called in to provide the extra pair of hands.

That night she was so tired that she could hardly keep awake and consume her supper, and the longing she had for a walk in the open air had to be suppressed before the urgent desire to go to bed. She fell asleep the instant her head touched the pillow, and the sound of her alarm bell
shrilling
at six o’clock was more like an early Spanish torture.

Nevertheless, she dragged herself out of bed, found that she had no time for more than a quick wash in her hand-basin—which, incidentally, had to be filled with a ewer from the nearest bedroom—and then began the same routine as the day before. The only exception being that she was no longer called upon to penetrate the privacy of guests’ bedrooms, and witness them shaving in their pyjamas; and for this exception she was so grateful that she would willingly have scrubbed floors all day rather than have the unpleasant duty thrust on her again.

That second day was even more hectic than the first, and when it ended she wondered whether this sort of
thing
went on interminably, and whether the hard-pressed staff ever complained. The waiting staff were worked, perhaps, harder than anyone else, for they had little opportunity to sit down, even if it was only for a few, minutes, and they were constantly in the public eye, and had to appear trim and alert and absolutely fresh, even if the heat was intolerable and their feet were killing them.

This last fortnight in September the weather was fiercely warm, and not even at night was there very much air. In Toni’s attic room the atmosphere was
stifling,
and although her window was open to its fullest extent, no cooling breeze ever reached her. She had a magnificent view of the stars at night, and when the moon rose the surrounding peaks were wonderful. But when that happened, and the hotel orchestra got into its stride and couples started dancing far below her, she was usually completely insensible on her bed, and nothing could possibly have aroused her save her alarm clock at six o’clock in the morning.

The one person who was always completely unruffled, cool and fantastically beautiful was
Marianne
Raveaux. And whenever Toni caught sight of her she appeared to be smiling slightly.

She was, officially, the manageress, but Toni sensed that she had far more power than an ordinary employee. Her almost affectionate greeting to Antoine had proved that she knew him well, and the way his eyes had lighted up at sight of her had proved another thing to Toni
... that he was a great admirer of hers. Possibly a very great admirer
.
Toni saw nothing of him in the first week of her servitude at the Hotel
Rosenhorn
. But she was frequently running into Mademoiselle Raveaux in the corridors. The elegant Frenchwoman passed her with a bare nod of recognition, and never once stopped to ask her how she was getting on, or offer a word of encouragement.

This didn’t surprise Toni particularly, for she felt fairly certain that Mademoiselle Raveaux would not have engaged her but for the insistence of Kurt Antoine.

At the end of her first week of duty Toni found that she was granted an evening off. This was at the close of a day that had been marked by one of the younger chambermaids, a girl called Anneliese, bursting into tears when she dropped a breakfast tray right outside the door of a private suite, and was ordered to pick up every fragment of smashed crockery while the tears poured down her cheeks. She was a girl from a remote village, and her clumsiness was apparently incurable, and some of the housekeeper’s acute annoyance was no doubt perfectly justified; but Toni thought it was too much to expect her, having removed the debris and cut her hand on a jagged piece of china, to clean and vacuum the carpet, and then fetch another breakfast-tray for the occupant of the suite.

She would willingly have taken over the duty herself, and given Anneliese a chance to clean up and recover her poise, but the housekeeper would not allow that.

Then, in the middle of the morning, the linen-keeper indulged in a fit of frenzy because, instead of clean sheets and pillow-cases being returned to her, she had received baskets of dirty linen
... an extraordinary happening which no one seemed able to account for.