The Hotel Riviera (19 page)

Lola

The skies were gray with a misty rain falling when the train from Paddington pulled into Oxford.

“Typical,” was Miss Nightingale's sighing comment as we stepped out onto the platform, along with about a hundred other people, all obviously in a rush to get somewhere. I hauled out Miss Nightingale's boxy brown suitcase that was almost an antique, and my own little Samsonite on wheels, then we walked along the windy platform and out into the street.

“There you are, Miss Nightingale,” somebody said, and we swung round to see a burly, bearded man in a blue anorak, wiping the rain off his glasses and smiling at us. “Good to see you back again, though I'm sorry about the weather,” he added.

“Par for the course, Fred,” Miss Nightingale said, shaking his hand. “It always rains when I return from holiday. This is Lola March Laforêt, my friend from France, via California. Lola, this is Fred Wormesly, keeper of my Little Nell and the Blakelys Arms, as well as many of the village secrets.”

Fred's laughter boomed over us as he grabbed our suitcases and led the way to the dark blue Volvo wagon parked in the lot. “Not too many secrets in Blakelys anymore, Miss Nightingale,” he said. “All's peace and quiet here lately.”

“Well, thank heavens for that,” she said, climbing into the passenger seat. “Lola and I have had quite enough excitement to last us a while.”

Fred Wormesly drove us through Oxford, the city of “dreaming spires,” though it was hard to make out the lovely ancient stone colleges through what had now turned into a downpour. However, Miss N promised to bring me back and show me around “when the weather picks up,” she said, and Fred said the forecast wasn't looking too good and maybe I'd have been better off staying in the south of France.

We circled a roundabout and suddenly we were out in the countryside, driving past thick hedgerows and fields filled with woolly black-faced sheep, past gas stations whose high prices startled me, with shops selling crisps and “cigs” and cold drinks. Little side roads led off to villages with names like Witney, Eynsham, and Widford.

We turned into the lovely village of Burford, bowling down the high street lined with quaint bow-windowed shops and tearooms and pubs, across a little stone bridge over the Windrush River, then we turned off once more and we were in Blakelys.

“Home at last,” Miss Nightingale murmured, as we curved along the village street, sheltered with big old plane trees, past a store that sold bread and eggs and milk and small everyday supplies. We drove through a little stream, fording it like the stagecoaches of old must have done, swung a right, and ended up in front of the Blakelys Arms, all honey-colored stone, low roofed, and with a jolly crested sign swinging in the wind. A blackboard outside said:

“We'll have a bit of that for our supper,” Miss Nightingale said, climbing stiffly out of the car. “It's good to be home.” She lifted her face happily to the soft, cold rain. “And my Little Nell will be waiting for me.”

“That she is, Miss Nightingale,” Fred said, holding open the car door for me. “And welcome to Blakelys, Ms. March.”

The “saloon” bar was low ceilinged with ancient black beams and lath-and-plaster walls, crisscrossed with more beams. A fire burned in the huge stone grate and a couple of old codgers in cords and tweed jackets and flat tweed caps sat in front of it, quaffing pint mugs of dark brown ale. They glanced our way, lifting their caps as they recognized Miss N, saying, good to see you home again, ma'am.

Little Nell, the Yorkie of the lusty yelps, had already bounced up into Miss N's arms and was busy licking her face. A stately blond woman emerged from behind the bar, a smile of welcome on her face. “Well, there you are at last, Miss Nightingale,” she said. “It's lovely to see you again.”

“And you too, Mary,” Miss N replied, returning Mrs. Wormesly's embrace. “And thank you for taking such good care of my Little Nell. Though you've spoiled her rotten of course, as you always do. Just look at her, she's quite the little porker.”

Mary Wormesly laughed and tickled Little Nell under the chin. “She's a right one for the beer, Miss Nightingale, better get her home and sobered up. But how about something to eat first? You must be starving after that journey.”

Miss N introduced me and said we would love two steak-and-kidneys, please, and two lager and limes, nice and cold if she had it.

We made ourselves comfortable in a high-backed pine settle with red velvet cushions that looked as though it might once have been in a church. Little Nell was tucked between us. Miss N made the formal introductions and told the terrier she had better behave and make me welcome or she was for it. Little Nell gave my hand an exploratory sniff, then a lick, then sat back smiling at me. And yes, dogs do smile, you know that.

“This is so nice,” I said, sipping my cold lager and lime, relaxing as the logs crackled in the hearth and the old boys settled into a game of dominoes.

“It's early yet though,” Miss N said. “It'll fill up later, especially on a night like this.”

A night like this, I thought, with a little shiver of apprehension. A gray, cold, rainy night, so far away from “home” and from the sunshine. And from Patrick. But I pushed away those thoughts and tackled my steak-and-kidney pie, hot and aromatic with a thick gravy and a buttery crust. It was very good, even to my critical chef's taste buds.

“Exactly what we needed,” Miss Nightingale said, feeding a bit of gravy-soaked crust to Little Nell, who for a miniature Yorkshire terrier was certainly looking a bit “porky.” “I know it's wrong,” she admitted, “but Nell's been ruined here, and I don't want to look like the ogre all at once. I'll have to wean her off all this and back onto dog food—and no beer. It all takes time, it does every year,” she added with a mischievous grin. “I believe Little Nell looks forward to her vacation at Blakelys Arms as much as I look forward to mine at the Hotel Riviera.”

Our stomachs full, warm and tired, it was time to go. Miss N collected Little Nell, we said our good-nights, then Fred drove us back through the village, to Miss N's cottage. Across the river and through the woods to Grandmother's house we go, I thought, smiling.

Gardener's Cottage was typically Cotswolds, built of the local golden stone with sloping roof lines, set in a riotous cottage garden surrounded by a low dry-stone wall. Dormer windows peeked from under the eaves, and on the ground floor were diamond-paned arched windows. The door was planked wood with massive iron hinges, and the last of the yellow roses draped the lean-to garage. With the sweep of treed hillside in back of it, and the little brook we had forded earlier bubbling in front of it, it was the perfect calendar cottage.

“It's just a hodgepodge, really,” Miss Nightingale explained as she unlocked the front door and ushered me inside. “Part Elizabethan, part Gothic Victorian, and anything in between.”

I found myself in a small, beamed sitting room, crammed with tables of knickknacks: silver polo trophies and sepia photos of rather grand-looking people in tweeds holding shotguns, standing on the steps of the manor house, with an array of slaughtered pheasant displayed at their feet. Dozens more photos in lovely old silver frames; a Chinese tea service of exquisite design and fragility arranged in a beautiful antique glass-fronted cabinet; a square of scarlet silk embroidered with dragons framed in ebony, and oil paintings of horses and dogs on the walls. There were two deep sofas in rose-patterned chintz arranged in front of the stone fireplace. Some kind person, probably Mary Wormesly, had lit the kindling, so there was a bright fire crackling in the grate to greet us. An Oriental rug in reds and blues warmed the wide-planked dark wood floor, which Miss N told me was chestnut.

Books were everywhere, books, books, and more books, crammed into the built-in shelves, in piles on the floor, tumbling from chairs, propping up lamps.

“My little library,” Miss N said, taking modest credit for the accumulation of a lifetime of reading. “I do like a good book on a long winter's night.”

There were baskets too, filled with bright wools and knitting needles, and doggie toys and chew bones scattered around. This was a true home, with all the love and chaos that went into creating it.

In the kitchen a bright-red Aga stove murmured softly, sending out wafts of heat, and next to it was Little Nell's bed, a soft blue cushion that she instantly climbed on. She circled three times, then curled up in a tight little ball, head on her paws, watching us with bright dark eyes.

The kitchen was softly lit and cozy with a long pine table that could seat eight comfortably, a couple of old leather armchairs that Miss N said had come from the manor, and red and white checked curtains at the Gothic-arched windows.

A small hallway divided the living room from the kitchen and a central staircase, carpeted in red, obviously Miss N's favorite color, ran up from it. The staircase walls were lined with school photos, and Miss Nightingale told me they were her Queen Wilhelmina's girls, a photo for every year she had been headmistress.

Miss Nightingale's room had a surprising red-lacquered Chinese marriage bed in an ornate cupboard, which was almost like a little room in itself, and Miss N told me she had slept in it as a child in Shanghai, where, she astonished me by saying, she had been born.

She lifted the lid of an old leather trunk and showed me silken cheongsams and old fans, and tiny little shoes worn by the bound-foot women, and which looked suitable only for dolls. There was a splendid Queen Anne chest with the luster of generations of careful polishing, soft Persian rugs, and heavy linen curtains patterned with more roses, which matched the sofa next to the Victorian iron fire grate. Leading off was a comfortable modern bathroom, and down the hall and up another couple of steps was my sweet little room, tucked under the eaves with a sloping ceiling and a pair of those dormer windows, diamond paned and looking like something from a fairy tale.

There was a regular bed, not a Chinese one, covered in a green and white patterned quilt and piled with pillows. A shaggy white rug on dark chestnut boards, a lovely old dresser in blond burled walnut with an oval mirror, a comfortable chair, a reading lamp, a small table by the bed, piled with books. I checked the titles: Lawrence Durrell's
Justine;
the poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay;
Steps in Time,
Fred Astaire's 1960 biography, a first edition at that, signed by the man himself; a leather-bound memoir of the Blakely Nightingales;
The Leopard Hat,
the story of a daughter's relationship with her mother and their Park Avenue life in the sixties, written by Valerie Steiker; and a couple of the latest novels by Anita Shreve and Nora Roberts.

“Plenty to choose from,” I said, smiling.

“Sometimes the nights can be very long, my dear,” Miss N said.

“And here's your own little bathroom.” She showed me the tiny room where the ceiling sloped so steeply no man could have ever stood up in it without cracking his head on the massive oak beam that ran through it.

“Everything a girl could need,” I said, smiling at my friend. “It's like a cottage in a fairy tale.”

And she laughed and said, well, maybe not quite, then she led me back downstairs where she made us both a cup of tea. The fire crackled and spit and flared up nicely, settling into a delightful orange-red glow that warmed our feet, while the tea warmed the rest of us. It was time to say good night. “How can I ever thank you?” I said, hugging Miss N. “This is so lovely, so different…”

“It's always good to get away when things are a little difficult,” Miss N said, throwing another log on the fire. “A little distance between you and your problems can put a different perspective on things.”

Curled up in that comfortable bed, my head on the soft pillows covered in lavender-scented linen pillowcases so old and soft they felt like silk, I thought about my life and my worries, and about Patrick who was alive after all.

I wondered whether it was he who had set fire to the hotel. Did he have something to do with Scramble's death? Was he still involved with Giselle, or with Evgenia Solis? I could think of no answers, only that now I was afraid of him. I did not know what he might do. But here, in my cozy room, curtains drawn, rain spattering on the windows, with the duvet pulled up to my chin, I felt safe.

Miss N

Mollie Nightingale sat on the rose-patterned sofa in front of the fire, gazing into the flames and thinking about the past. Returning home always brought back memories of the old days, when Mr. Hemstridge, the head gardener of Blakelys Manor, had lived in this very cottage and where she, the daughter of the manor and the granddaughter of Sir Blakely Nightingale, would come by to visit on her pony. She would stop for a chat with Mrs. Hemstridge, and a glass of milk, fresh from the cow, still warm and smelling almost as good as the fresh lemon cake Mrs. Hemstridge somehow always had tucked away in her pantry, and which Mollie doted on.

“Ah, how times have changed,” Miss Nightingale said to Little Nell, who shook her long bronze hair out of her sharp little dark eyes and cocked one ear, listening. “You never knew Blakelys Manor, Nell, but it was a fairly grand house,” Miss Nightingale said, and the little terrier climbed onto her knee and settled down, anticipating perhaps a long night of reminiscences. “Though it wasn't by any means a stately home,” Miss Nightingale added, “just a rambling seventeenth-century stone pile surrounded by acres of parkland.”

 

There used to be more land, of course, but that was in the old days when Mollie's grandfather, Sir Blakely Nightingale, whom she never knew, had received his baronetcy for services rendered to his country. In fact, his “services” meant the lavish party he had thrown for Queen Alexandra, who'd been visiting nearby and who had consented to open the annual Blakelys Village Fête. But with four deaths in quick succession, inheritance taxes had taken care of the family fortune.

Miss Nightingale's father became assistant to the British Commissioner in Shanghai, and Mollie, as she was named, grew up in the British sector of the international concessions, where all the foreigners then lived, under the warm and loving care of Chinese servants who doted on her. Which was perhaps as well because her parents lived the Shanghai high life and traveled a great deal, leaving her alone with the gentle cheongsam-clad nannies while they attended balls at Government House in Hong Kong, or sailed with friends down the big yellow Yangtze River, or partied in Shanghai's sophisticated nightclubs.

Even when they were home, sometimes Mollie wouldn't see her parents for days; her father would be “too busy” and her mother would be shopping in the smart boutiques that lined the Nanking Road, or taking afternoon tea with friends in the lobbies of the grand skyscraper hotels, or dancing the night away, because Shanghai then was one of the most swinging cities in the world. A couple of times her parents even returned to England, leaving her alone with the nannies she had come to believe were really her “mothers.”

And that's how it was that Mollie's first words were Mandarin. In fact for several years that was all she spoke, learning from the scary ghost stories the servants would tell her at bedtime, and which she still remembered with a
frisson
of fear today. The Chinese servants also taught her to respect her elders and to kowtow, touching her forehead respectfully to the floor, something her parents found hilarious. They showed her off to party guests—“our little Chinese daughter” they called her, and Mollie blushed, wondering what she had done wrong.

Anyhow, it all came to an end with the death of her father and her return to live at Blakelys.

Parting with her “little mothers” at the age of six broke Mollie's heart and she never did become accustomed to the dampness of an English summer, or the bitter cold of an English winter. Especially in that by-now crumbling pile called Blakelys, where the few radiators managed only to melt the frost from the inside of the great oriel windows, and where the many coal fires tended by an ancient retainer who went by the name of Fire Bob left a layer of black dust on everything, including the scones you were eating for afternoon tea.

Lady Teresa was as vague as ever about bringing up her daughter, drifting through her days in a miasma of needlepoint and tea parties and local “good works.” A lonely child, Mollie passed the long days (and sometimes half the night too, with the help of a flashlight) reading anything and everything in the manor's library, or else rowing her boat alone on Blakelys' lake. She named her boat
Li Po
after the master poet of the Tang dynasty, whom she was studying in her spare time, of which she seemed to have an endless amount.

She rowed across the lake to the small island she called home, where she'd built a treehouse furnished with cushions stolen from the drawing room sofas, and a table made from a wooden kitchen tray balanced on four bricks. She'd discovered a Chinese tea set in a glass-fronted china cabinet in the dining room, brought back, she supposed, by her father and probably horribly valuable. It had never been used, except now by her when she drank her homemade brews of tea or lemonade and munched on gingersnap biscuits, with her nose in the latest book from Blakelys' extensive library.

It was only through the intervention of a friend that matters changed. Lady Teresa was told in no uncertain terms, in fact, she was told
forcefully,
that she had better do something or the child would be completely socially unacceptable. So Lady Teresa, in the one helpful thing she ever did for her daughter, enrolled her in boarding school.

Mollie did well; she relished the companionship of the other girls and she enjoyed her lessons, particularly Latin. From there, it seemed but a short journey to Oxford and then to teaching and her progress to head of a small girls' school, and then to the “jewel in her crown,” head of Queen Wilhelmina's.

She'd been an agreeable girl, plain and sturdy, who'd grown into a plain sturdy woman, though there was something commanding about her presence. It must be the blue blood, her mother had said, puzzled.

When Lady Teresa died, the manor was sold for taxes and Mollie was left with her great-grandmother's pearls and just enough to buy the tiniest flat off Sloane Square in London, as well as the rundown former gardener's cottage in Blakelys village.

And then, of course, came Tom. “Her” Tom, as she always thought of him, affectionately, oh so affectionately.
Tom.
A big man with strong opinions and a working-class north-country reserve that was hard to penetrate and distinctly off-putting, until she'd realized that the trouble was he was Shy with a capital
S.
Shy with women, that is. She herself had never been the backward sort, having quite a strong personality, and somehow after she'd discovered this, their temperaments had meshed.

They'd met in the bar of the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square, just around the corner from where she'd lived. It was a fine performance of Noel Coward's
Private Lives,
a perennial favorite of hers. And, so it turned out, surprisingly, of Tom's.

She'd been alone, sipping a small gin and tonic, when he'd bumped into her. The drink had spilled; he'd insisted on buying her another; they'd chatted about this and that. At least she had—Tom had mostly listened. But he'd been waiting outside for her after the show. He'd asked if she fancied a coffee and it had taken off—rather slowly—from there. It was four years before he'd asked her to marry him and six weeks later she'd said “I do” in the small church at Blakelys, where she'd been brought up.

The village had turned out in full force for the “daughter of the manor.” They manned the old pine pews in their Sunday suits, best frocks, and “wedding” hats, their faces happy with memories of the way life used to be when the Blakely Nightingales still lived at the manor, instead of the car-sales mogul who owned it now, pleased that Mollie had finally caught herself a husband.

The tiny gray-stone Norman church was piled with bouquets of iris and daffodil. It was spring and of course still chilly, and the flowers looked frozen in their perfection, too cold to be able to drop so much as a leaf. Miss N wore a silvery-gray silk dress with her inherited pearls (thank heavens the tax man hadn't taken them away; they were all she had of real jewelry) and carried a bouquet of horribly expensive out-of-season lilies that smelled divine and whose scent she would remember to her dying day.

“So that's that, darling Tom,” she said after, and Tom beamed back at her, smart in his dark suit and gray silk tie (the one she'd bought for him). He said, “That's that, my love, now you are Mrs. Tom Knight.” Of course she'd put him straight about that little matter later, and she remained Miss Nightingale, as she would for the rest of her days.

And they had lived happily ever after, the two of them from their different worlds, enjoying each other, caring for each other, loving each other with a love so true Miss Nightingale knew it would last forever.

Then Tom, so full of life, had died. She'd buried him here, in Blakelys' churchyard and planted the primroses and daffodils he liked so much on his grave. Eventually, because life had to go on, she'd come to terms with it, and that's when she'd taken to traveling.

But it was her remembered loving childhood in Shanghai's sun and heat and her hatred of those bleak, lonely English winters when she'd shivered in her frosty room that had first brought her to the Mediterranean. Now, of course, she went because she'd found the Hotel Riviera. And because she loved Lola like a daughter.

And that was it. Mollie Nightingale's life story. From China to the Cotswolds, to the south of France. And to the unsolved mystery of Patrick Laforêt's disappearance. And his equally mysterious reappearance.

How she could have used her Tom now, used his experience, his shrewd knowledge of people, to find out the truth.

Ah well. It was up to her to solve this one.