“Mother doesn’t like that Madame Dupont, with the blue-rinse hair, who rustles when she walks. She thinks she’s hard and crusty, but she’s not.” Georges passed the horse an apple. “She’s soft as dough inside.”
He knew this because of the soppy romances Madame Dupont read, and more than once he’d had to pick up a paperback that had fallen from her hand, replacing the bookmark and laying it gently on the cover next to her.
“You wouldn’t think it, but Twenty-seven wears a toupee.” It gave Georges quite a fright, seeing it draped over the footstool. He thought it was a rat. “Someone should tell him he looks a lot younger without it, though.” Unlike Madame 27, whose teeth snarled at him from the glass beside her bed. “She snores, as well,” he said.
In fact, it was quite a revelation, seeing what the guests were really like, as opposed to what they wanted you to think. For instance, Georges could tell who was putting on a front, pretending to read highbrow literature when they were sneaking tabloid news inside their daily papers. He knew who was sloppy and who was not from the way they folded their clothes or tossed them on a chair, and, even more importantly, by squeezing the towels, he knew who took a bath every day and who only took one once a week and disguised their lack of personal hygiene with cologne.
Darker secrets came out, too. Major Chabou, for instance, swapped dirty pictures with the banker in the room upstairs. Suzette the chambermaid was having an affair with No. 14, even sleeping in his bed after his poor wife had had to rush back home to see to her sick mother. Mind you, Suzette didn’t sleep in curlers, like the other female guests. Or wear a hairnet, either, for that matter.
So summers came and summers went, and even though Georges assumed the Year of the Cat was just one more Chinese holiday, who cared? The same people booked the same rooms for the same two weeks in the season, and simply by taking stock of their toothbrushes, their writing pads, their cosmetics, and their clothes, he was able to follow the changes in their lives and circumstances.
Some guests never changed, of course. Monsieur Prince still put his dirty shoes on Irene’s clean white linen sheets. The Bernards still stashed the hotel’s face flannels at the bottom of their suitcase. Madame Morreau still treated Georges the same way she did when he was seven, only now instead of ruffling his hair and giving him a bag of aniseed, she had to reach up on tippy-toes just to pat his shoulder. But she still brought him aniseed, which Georges had never liked but which he could at least feed to Parmesan, even though it made him kick and swish his tail. And Georges still very much looked forward to her visits.
Which made it doubly hard when Madame Morreau died.
“Take a look at these architect’s plans, love, and tell me what you think.”
From the outset, his parents had involved him in their projects, but to be honest, the squares and boxes on the page confused him. What did it mean, “drawn to scale,” he wondered? Fish had scales. Kitchens had scales. But gardens? And this 250:1 stuff. Georges didn’t understand where bookmakers fitted into plans for new extensions, and whenever he saw things like this, he was glad he hadn’t been forced to stay on at school.
“Ten new bedrooms to be built during the winter shut-down, and what about this?” The excitement in his mother’s voice was catching. “No more trotting down the corridor in the middle of the night for our guests. As of next spring, they’ll all have their own individual, private bathroom!”
“And now the world’s opening up to foreign travel, son, what do you think about including couscous on the menu?” Marcel said.
Would that be meat, or some exotic vegetable, he wondered?
“Every room’ll have its own mini shampoo and soap.”
“Osso buco, perhaps?”
“Hair dryers in the bathrooms.”
“Definitely paella — are you all right, son?”
“Yeah.”
But there was no fooling his mother. “Oh, Georges.” She laid down her fountain pen. “You’re not still upset about Madame Morreau, are you?”
Marcel had brought him up that it was wrong to tell a lie, but for some reason he felt ashamed of saying yes out loud. Madame Morreau had been different from the other guests, somehow. Special. For a start, she was one of the few who weren’t wary of this big, shambling young man, who was constantly wandering round the hotel with a distant expression on his face and a toolbox in his hand. And she didn’t talk down to him, either. In fact, quite often she had to rebuke that weasel-faced nephew of hers for poking fun at him.
Georges is a wee bit slow, Jean-Paul. You need to make allowances.
Jean-Paul. That was Weasel’s name. Jean-Paul. And it was a funny thing, but until Madame Morreau said that, Georges had never thought of himself as slow. And yet, now he came to think of it, he had always been in the tail of any school race. How she knew all that was a mystery to him, but even so, Georges always made a point of quickening his pace when he saw her coming. Especially once Jean-Paul began to mouth Slowpoke at him behind her back.
“A bit,” Georges admitted.
“Don’t be, love.” His mother squeezed his hand. “The old dear had a long and happy life, and you should be pleased she died peacefully, snuggled in her pillows.” She turned to Marcel and pulled a face. “Even if it was in our hotel.”
“The undertakers were very discreet, I thought.”
“Only because you slipped them lorry loads of francs, but it’s the chambermaids I’m proudest of. None of them so much as screamed.”
“They wouldn’t bloody dare,” Marcel muttered under his breath, but Irene wasn’t listening.
“The guests had no idea that anything was amiss, and even Madame Morreau’s nephew carried himself well, I thought. Considering.”
When Georges closed his eyes, he could see Jean-Paul in conversation with the doctor that the hotel had been obliged to call. Saw him showing him the pills Madame Morreau took for her bad heart. Heard him telling how she’d had two seizures this year already.
“Nice boy,” Irene added, with a sigh. “Always so conscientious when he stayed here with his aunt.”
“No, he wasn’t.”
If anyone was an expert on the subject of being chivvied up, it was Georges. But never on account of being lazy.
It’s very good of you to do this for me, Georges.
I like doing it, Madame Morreau. Honest.
Unlike some, who wouldn’t be seen dead supporting an old lady’s arm while she took a walk along the lake.
I don’t know where Jean-Paul’s got to, I really don’t.
Georges did. As soon as she said she wouldn’t mind a stroll, Weasel had been off. Greyhounds on a track don’t run that fast.
It’s so nice to be able to take a walk, while I’m still able. He remembered the sad little smile she’d shot him, as she patted his arm. I’ll be in a wheelchair next year, Georges.
That’ll be good, though, won’t it? I’ll be able to push you round the lake. In fact, I’ll run.
Will you? Will you, Georges? Her laugh suddenly became happy and girlish, and for a moment he saw how she must have looked sixty years ago. You’ve no idea how exciting it’d be for an old woman to feel the wind in her hair again.
You bet, he’d promised, and he meant it.
“Jean-Paul thought fetching things and looking after her beneath him,” he told Marcel and Irene.