Daughter of Riches (16 page)

‘Business!' He laughed, then tried to sound serious as he saw her hurt expression. ‘Lola, sweetheart, I don't know anything about business. I'm a sailor, remember?'

‘Then you go back to sea and leave it to me!' she flashed. ‘ I've never been in business either but I am willing to try. Is plenty of things that don't require more than common sense and the determination to succeed.'

‘Such as?'

‘Jersey is beautiful island. Is the perfect place for people to go on holiday. Oh yes, I know, until a few years ago only the rich go on holiday. But times are changing. Transport is easier – the trains, the boats, even motor cars. Soon more people go on holiday, not just for day trip, and when they do they will come to Jersey. I think it will be good if we are ready for that. We sell Grandpa's cottage and buy a house where we can have visitors. Then we have business. Is good idea, don‘t you think?'

Charles laughed again, not scornfully this time, but more from sheer delight at Lola.

‘A boarding establishment, you mean? I don't see you as a landlady, cooking cabbage and keeping a lock on the bathroom door.'

Her finely arched dark brows drew together.

‘Why should I cook only cabbage? I make good food. People will like to come and stay with me. Will be very nice boarding house – you see.'

Charles had thought the idea was just a whim that Lola would soon forget, but he was wrong. A few days later when he came home from work at the docks she greeted him with the news that she had found the very place.

‘Is big house by harbour,' she told him. ‘Dining room looks out to sea. Is room for visitors and for us.'

Charles was tired; all he wanted was to eat his tea and have a rest before going to bed, but Lola's eyes were shining with excitement and he did not have the heart to disappoint her. He put his jacket on again, and leaving Nicky with his parents, they walked down town towards the harbour.

When he saw the house Charles was quite taken aback. It was large and square, three stories high and built of Jersey granite. The paint was peeling on the shutters that framed the windows and a tile or two was missing from the roof – blown down by the winds that gusted in from the sea, Charles supposed – but it was still a very impressive place.

‘I don't know that we could afford anything as grand as this,' he began doubtfully, but Lola interrupted him.

‘We can afford. I have done sums.'

‘Well, we'll have to see …' he hesitated. But Lola caught his arm excitedly, looking at him with those huge eyes of hers, and he knew he was lost. Just why she should be so set on running a boarding establishment and waiting on others when her regal bearing made her look as if they should be waiting on her he could not understand, but then it was because she was an enigma to him that made her so irresistible. He adored her and could refuse her nothing. Just as long as she was happy, then so was he.

La Maisott Blanche
advertising itself as a ‘First Class Guest House' opened the following spring. Lola had wanted to change its name to something with a Russian influence but Charles managed to dissuade her.

‘If we call it something foreign it might put people off.'

‘But
La Maison Blanche
is foreign,' Lola protested. ‘ To me, is foreign. And to English people.'

‘But not to Jersey,' Charles explained patiently. ‘ If they are coming to Jersey they will be prepared to accept French or even Jersey patois. But not Russian.'

At last Lola conceded the point. She was too happy with her new venture to argue for long, although giving in was not something she was in the habit of doing. Besides, she was really too tired to argue. She was working from morning to night to get the boarding house ready for guests, scrubbing floors, washing curtains, cleaning cupboards and even wielding a paintbrush to brighten up peeling window sills and skirting boards, all with Nicky, who could now crawl like lightning and even walk a few steps when he had a mind to, hanging onto her skirts.

When the first letter booking a holiday arrived she wanted to frame it and hang it on the wall but she knew that would never do. Instead she contented herself with putting it into a neat file and entering the names and dates in the thick diary she had bought especially for the purpose, then panicked madly in case the family were the only visitors that particular week – embarrassing! – or the whole of the summer – disastrous! But to her relief the bookings kept coming in a steady trickle. It was still necessary to hang a notice announcing
VACANCIES
over the brass knocker on the freshly painted front door, but perhaps that was not such a bad thing, Lola decided – at least it gave her the chance to get used to running a guest house a little more gradually.

That summer was one of the most exciting – and the busiest – that she had ever known. The visitors who came were impressed by the smart appearance of
La Maison Blanche
and the amenities it offered. It wasn't everywhere one could get a bath, for instance, even if it did have to be paid for as an extra (a shilling for hot water, fourpence for cold), a cup of tea or coffee could be had at any time of the day for threepence, and the food served at luncheon and dinner was good and wholesome and also different enough to be exciting. As for the landlady … more than one entranced visitor went home to tell friends and relatives about the Russian beauty who had looked after them, adding the romantic embellishment that she might even be one of the daughters of the Tsar, not murdered at Ekaterinburg after all but alive and living in St Helier.

Soon the guest house was thriving and the second season Charles gave up his job in the docks and stayed at home to help Lola. There was so much to do besides the cooking and cleaning, which she managed single-handed. There was the paperwork, which Lola found difficult because although she spoke English fluently the written word still puzzled her. There were numerous odd jobs to keep the big old house in good order and there was the garden to maintain – neat flower beds and lawns at the front and a large vegetable plot at the rear where Charles grew fresh vegetables to put on the table for the guests.

But busy as he was Charles still found time to take Grandpa's old boat out for a sail with Nicky sitting proudly in the well. Though he had repaired it so that it was no longer in danger of sinking it still leaked to a certain extent and more often than not he returned Nicky to his mother with his little rompers soaked with sea water.

‘My baby will catch pneumonia!' Lola would cry dramatically, but he never did. ‘ He must be the hardiest child in the whole of the Channel Islands,' she said, but Charles only laughed and remarked that Nicky was exactly like his mother.

When Nicky was two years old Lola discovered she was pregnant again and the following year Paul was born. Where Nicky had been a good child, Paul was a scamp. Even before he could walk he was into everything, shuffling round on his bottom ‘like greased lightning' as Charles's mother described it and doing more mischief in a morning than Nicky had done in a week. In the kitchen he was a menace – the moment Lola's back was turned he was pulling tins and jars out of the cupboards and emptying the contents onto the floor; in the bedrooms he untucked the beds as fast as she made them; in the dining-room he had been known to pull at the corner of a tablecloth bringing knives, forks and glasses tumbling down around his ears.

‘Never again!' Lola cried in exasperation. ‘Is my last child, Charles, you hear me? Never, never again!'

But a year later, in the summer of 1925, just when the season was at its height, the third little Carteret put in her appearance.

‘At least she is a girl. Girl will not be so much trouble,' Lola said.

I wouldn't bank on it, Charles thought, but since he knew Lola was holding him entirely responsible for the fact that she had had to go back on her promise to herself he did not say so.

Against all doctor's orders Lola was back in the kitchen cooking for the visitors less than a fortnight after Sophia, as she had named the new baby, was born, and soon the strain began to tell.

Sophia was indeed quite good, but all babies mean broken nights and coupled with the long working days it was simply too much for Lola. First she became weepy and, because of her volatile nature, almost hysterical at times; then the milk dried up so Sophia had to be put on a bottle, much to the nurse's disgust, and lastly she became so thin and drawn that Charles grew frantic with worry. The trouble was she would take absolutely no notice of him. ‘I am fine!' she would shout at him. ‘Is nothing wrong with me. There can't be, can there! I have too much to do to be ill!'

Her face grew steadily more gaunt, great hollows accentuating her high cheek bones, and her violet eyes looked huge and dark, but still she continued working at the same pace, like an automaton set to self-destruct.

One night Charles woke and found her missing from bed. Worried, he went downstairs in search of her and found her lying on the floor of the kitchen. At first he thought she was dead, then, because the baby's bottle was lying beside her, he thought for a panicky moment that perhaps Sophia had been in her arms and was now lying suffocated beneath her mother's prone body. But he soon realised neither fear was justified. Sophia was still in her cot – for the first time ever she had slept though the night – and Lola was not dead, nor even collapsed in the way he might have feared. She was asleep, deeply, completely asleep, but when at last he managed to wake her she could give no explanation for what she was doing there on the floor.

‘But the baby wasn't crying,' he said, trying to make head or tail of it. ‘You could have been in bed.'

‘I think I woke up and was expecting
her
to wake,' Lola said in an exasperated tone. ‘I thought if I made her bottle it would be ready for her and she wouldn't keep crying while I was doing it.'

‘But how did you get on the floor?' he asked and she flared up again, close to tears.

‘I don't know – I don't know! I suppose I just felt sleepy and lay down.'

‘On the kitchen floor? Lola, something has to be done. You are a danger to yourself and the baby if you don't know what you are doing.'

‘How danger?' she asked scornfully and he did not even bother to reply. Arguing with her was useless – at least until he had found a solution.

Two days later he presented Lola with a
fait accompli
. His mother had promised to help with the cooking and he had engaged a girl to come in the mornings to help make the beds and clean up and another to wash up in the evenings.

‘We can't afford to pay help,' Lola objected.

‘If I go back to work in the docks we can.'

‘But you hate the docks.'

‘I would hate it more if anything happened to you.'

‘Very well then. But I don't want your mother in my kitchen. She does things a different way to me.'

‘That's just too bad,' Charles said flatly. ‘If I can put up with going back to the docks, you can put up with having my mother in the kitchen. It's only for a little while, anyway, until you are strong again.'

‘I suppose I haven't any choice,' Lola complained.

‘No, you don't,' he said, kissing her.

Looking back over the years Charles supposed that had been the turning point, though there were to be many more ups and downs before they had finally got the guest house running on an even keel. They had gained another daughter, Catherine, who had been born in 1930 when Sophia was five years old, and lost his mother, who had died after a long and painful illness that the doctor had termed ‘a growth' the very same year. There had been a couple of very lean years followed by a mini-boom and as the bookings flooded in they had bought the cottage next door to provide an annexe now that their growing family were taking up so much room. They had arranged entertainment for the guests – coach trips every day to places of interest around the island and whist, bridge and chess games after dinner and at least one musical evening each week. Gradually they had increased the staff so that nowadays they employed two waiters, a chambermaid, a maid-of-all-work to prepare vegetables and do the washing up and a gardener. The guest house coach trips had proved so popular that Charles had had the bright idea of setting up an agency to cater for all the visitors to Jersey not just their own guests. He had taken an office in town and the tourists had come flocking to him to arrange their yachting and sea fishing trips, their rounds of golf and theatre tickets as well as their sightseeing tours.

Now, in the summer of 1938, things were going very well, but although the day when Lola had collapsed from exhaustion seemed a very long time ago, when she spoke of getting rid of one of the waiters in mid-season the memories came rushing back to Charles as clearly as if it had been only yesterday.

‘I don't understand,' he said, hoisting himself up on his pillow. ‘Why do you want to send Dieter home?'

Lola sat down on the edge of the bed, reaching for a jar of cream and smoothing it liberally on to her face and neck.

‘For one thing he is German.'

‘But you knew that when we took him on,' Charles objected.

‘Just so. As I said, I wish I had listened to my own better judgement. I don't like Germans. I never have. I am Russian, remember. In the war …'

‘That's a long time ago, sweetheart.'

‘Perhaps. But my memory is long also. And besides, I'm not so wrong, am I? The things they are doing now are just as bad … worse. It's terrible what they are doing to the Jews. And they will try to be masters of Europe, see if I'm not right. Already they have annexed Austria.'

‘The Austrians don't seem to mind …'

‘They didn't have much choice, did they? They are like you, Charles, they like the quiet life. If Hitler came here and tried tor take over Jersey, what would you do? Would you fight? No – not you. You would roll over like a little puppy dog and let him tickle your tummy.'