The hotel foyer smelled of the bouquets of flowers placed everywhere, but it was overrun with suitcases, tennis rackets, and other sports equipment. In the centre of the foyer was an enormous, strong-looking young woman, wearing a fur coat, her dark hair in braided loops pinned to her head. In one hand she held a lacrosse stick. There was a vase knocked over in front of her, the water turning the red carpet a darker shade.
“I want my own room,” the girl said loudly.
“If ladies are in a room together, their flowers will blossom together,” a woman in a purple dress with red frills and a matching hat said.
“I don’t understand what you’re saying,” replied the girl. “Where am I to put all my things.”
“It is beneficial to becoming well again. It is our policy,” the woman said and turned to Victoria and her family.
“A moment alone with the young lady, please,” she said, taking Victoria’s arm and bringing her behind the hotel counter into a small room.
The woman had a fob watch hanging down her skirt. She was Madame Flora. Her bustle was huge, an exaggeration of one. She looked like a dining room chair from the side. She wore a small glass vial on a necklace. She said it was full of Madame Flora’s, from one of the first bottles she had made. The liquid looked dried, dark, and old.
There wasn’t a desk in the room, but a matching set of patterned couches, a drink service on wheels with crystal glasses and tonic, and a few little side tables with more flowers on them and porcelain figurines and fruit made out of plaster. Madame Flora shut the door and told Victoria to sit down. The walls were covered in photographs and drawings of babies. “From former guests at Madame Flora’s, once their flowers returned,” she said. “Madame Flora’s is available for anyone to purchase, but our hotel is reserved for the most exclusive of clientele. I take a personal interest in all the guests here. Madame Flora’s is made in a factory in the north where the water is strong, but I prefer to be here, with the girls who need my help most, who need their flowers to return.”
“I don’t like it. It feels like a poison, I don’t like it coming out of my body,” said Victoria.
“And do you like taking your Madame Flora’s?”
Victoria would’ve blushed, if she had the energy, but she knew her cheeks remained pale and slightly green.
“Well medicine is not supposed to be tasty, now is it?” Madame Flora said.
She poured a glass of her tonic and handed it to Victoria. Under her gaze, Victoria drank it.
“It is a policy here that girls share rooms, as you may have heard.”
Victoria’s mother handed her a wine gum wrapped in a tissue as they said goodbye.
The girl in the foyer was named Louise and she was the daughter of a baron. She was assigned the same room as Victoria. They weren’t allowed to take the stairs, only the lift. The stairs were gated off. Behind the gate the red-carpeted stairs were dusty. Victoria was afraid Louise would make the lift break with all her things. There were only three floors. The halls had dim lights and were stuffy.
Their room was on the top floor, filled with small but pretty beds, with rose-patterned bed sheets. There were lots of small mirrors, and nightstands with powders and Madame Flora’s on them. There was a marble fireplace, lit, with a decorative brass fireguard in front of it, and potpourri in little china dishes. There was a small window looking out onto the sea, and a skylight. One wall had a mural of Mother Goose on it. A small pink door led to a bathroom. There was an indent with a curtain over it, which Louise pulled back, revealing another bed. There was a thin girl with pale blonde hair and a red scalp laying in it, holding a paper box to her chest. She wore a wrinkled cream-coloured nightgown.
“I was here first,” the girl said quietly, not looking at her intruder.
When Madame Flora left, Louise pushed one of the beds under the skylight and, standing on it, tapped it with her lacrosse stick.
A few more girls came into the room through the door, carrying carpet bags, hats. One with black hair who took the bed beside Victoria was named Eliza, and a girl with curls was named Matilda. None of them had shared a room with so many girls before.
They wandered around their small room, touching things. In the fireplace there was a bit of a stocking and a burnt crumpet. On the wall, behind Victoria’s metal bedframe, someone had scrawled “Mutton.” There was a collage on the wall, of horses and dogs, badly cut out of newspapers. In the bathroom was a framed picture of a lady riding a rabbit.
Without looking at any of the girls in particular, Louise talked, taking off her coat. Her dress had a sailor’s bib and a strange cut, with low hips, it wasn’t suited to her bustle. The sleeves were short. On one arm she had a Union Jack tattoo which the other girls thought shocking until Louise said her father had it done to her when she was eight, which meant her father loved her very much.
“After this I’m going to Fairy Palace, in Wales, to fix my teeth. My Hugh had his teeth fixed there. Then we are getting married.”
She suddenly looked at Victoria. “Are they going to send you somewhere to fix your nose next?”
Victoria covered her nose with one of her hands.
Louise continued talking “They’ve fixed my hymen twice now, both times it broke from riding horses. It has to be intact just before you’re married so that a nurse hired by your fiancée can break it with a metal instrument. It’s so he won’t be put off by the sight of blood after the wedding. Your fiancée gets a certificate from the nurse saying it was done.” Victoria didn’t understand what a hymen was, perhaps a little male china doll? Victoria’s dolls had never bled, though she often checked and made them diapers out of tissue.
Louise pointed to the collage of dogs and horses. “It’s shaped like the Kingdom of Wales.”
“No it isn’t, I’m from Wales,” said Eliza. Louise slapped her.
There was a diaper bustle dispensary: a tin box hung on the wall. Louise pulled out diaper bustles, throwing them into the room until they were called for dinner. The dining room was full of small round tables, only two or three girls could fit at each. There were many older women there who were married. The married women were in separate, individual rooms. It made Louise angry. “Bitches,” she said. They spent most of their time playing cards in the parlour or writing long letters to their husbands and children.
There were large bottles of Madame Flora’s surrounded by tiny bottles and oranges as table centrepieces. Oranges were said to help with the constipation that too much Madame Flora’s could cause. They were served bowls of mashed potatoes with sugar and milk, or bowls of white bread with sugar and milk, cups of tea with sugar and cream, and more oranges, there were bowls of peeled oranges and orange jelly, crumpets, tiny pots of jam, cabbage and boiled carrots, rice pudding. Victoria sat with a pudgy girl with dark circles under her eyes who said, quietly, “I’ve not stopped my flowers for the same reason as everyone else. Have you ever been in love?”
Victoria thought of her father, her father’s butler, and her father’s friends, and said no. The girl ate too much cabbage and rice pudding and had gas. She told Victoria that she knew a girl whose flowers stopped after she saw a dead man in a ditch, but she was cured at Madame Flora’s, and that she herself would never be cured, which she said with a little giggle Victoria didn’t like.