Free The Little Hotel by Christina Stead

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.
    ‘This is my cousin,’ said Rosa boldly.
    ‘How do you do?’ said Mrs Trollope politely, but even she noticed their smiles.
    Rosa had sold Mrs Trollope two tickets for the play, which was called The Dark Spot , meaning a dark spot in someone’s career, and was in dialect. The tickets also had lottery numbers on them. Mrs Trollope was quite excited about the play, saying Rosa was bold but smart and ambitious. She said:
    ‘I don’t understand German and I don’t suppose I’ll know what it is about.’
    ‘If you did understand German you wouldn’t know what it is about,’ said my husband, smiling disagreeably and meaning that no one could understand the dialect in the play but someone like myself.
    But Mrs Trollope asked what colour dress Rosa would be wearing in the last act and she sent her a shoulder-spray to match. Mrs Trollope did not understand that this kind of thing upsets the servants and makes them jealous. During the two days after that, Mrs Trollope would call to Luisa as usual when she heard her on the stairs, saying, ‘My head aches so much, do come and rub it, please, Luisa’; and Luisa, so kindhearted, pretended to be deaf. When she did at last come in, it was with the expression of an angry cat and she said:
    ‘Madame thinks Rosa is very clever, the German young lady is very clever, eh? Like an electric lamp! When she wants to! She pulls it on and off, like a lamp. No doubt she is beautiful too? As beautiful as a dancing bear! And I can imagine how beautifully she would dance the ballet. Beautiful! Bell-is-si-ma!’
    Luisa gave a rascally laugh. She was pale and irritable. ‘The English admire horses also.’
    She came down to me and said, ‘She is a very wellborn English lady, a little altered in appearance by her residence in the Orient!’
    ‘Luisa! That is forbidden,’ I said firmly.
    ‘Ah, yes. I am not beautiful and clever. A Catholic daughter indeed. An occasional Catholic daughter, a semi-occasional Catholic daughter.’
    Mrs Trollope asked me: ‘What is the matter with Luisa? She won’t come near me and my head is so bad.’
    I tried to explain about sending the shoulder-spray.
    ‘Ah, Selda, I must love people. It is all that consoles me for living abroad. And you know, my daughters and my son are not writing to me, to punish me, to force my hand. It is not my fault.’
    I could not stop her calling me Selda. She said I was the same age as her eldest daughter. She had married very young out East.
    On the Saturday morning Mrs Trollope and Madame Blaise set off along the esplanade. Sometimes they walked as far as the crumbled Haldiman Tower, sometimes only as far as the Sandoz monkeys in the public gardens. At