‘Goodbye,’ she said. At breakfast she had seemed to have recovered her composure. She smiled at me now, saying she was sorry I was going.
‘Goodbye, Pamela.’
Hubert stood by the open hall door, not looking at her, gazing out into the sunlit garden. On the way to the railway station we talked again about incidents at school. He mentioned the two nurses we’d accompanied to their doorstep and the luck we’d had at the races. ‘A pity we wouldn’t have time for a gin and orange,’ he said as we passed the hotel.
On the slow train, close at first to the sea and then moving into the landscape that was just beginning to seem parched because of the heatwave, I knew that I would never see Hubert again. A friendship had come to an end because when a little more time went by he would be ashamed, knowing I would not easily forget how he had made his cousin a casualty of the war with his grandfather. There would always be an awkwardness now, and the memory of Hubert at home.
A Trinity
Their first holiday since their honeymoon was paid for by the elderly man they both called Uncle. In fact, he was related to neither of them: for eleven years he had been Dawne’s employer, but the relationship was more truly that of benefactor and dependants. They lived with him and looked after him, but in another sense it was he who looked after them, demonstrating regularly that they required such care. ‘What you need is a touch of the autumn sun,’ he had said, ordering Keith to acquire as many holiday brochures as he could lay his hands on. ‘The pair of you’re as white as bedsheets.’
The old man lived vicariously through aspects of their lives, and listened carefully to all they said. Sharing their anticipation, he browsed delightedly through the pages of the colourful brochures and opened out on the kitchen table one glossy folder after another. He marvelled over the blue of the Aegean Sea and the flower markets of San Remo, over the Nile and the pyramids, the Costa del Sol, the treasures of Bavaria. But it was Venice that most instantly caught his imagination, and again and again he returned to the wonder of its bridges and canals, and the majesty of the Piazza San Marco.
‘I am too old for Venice,’ he remarked a little sadly. ‘I am too old for anywhere now.’
They protested. They pressed him to accompany them. But as well as being old he had his paper-shop to think about. He could not leave Mrs Withers to cope on her own; it would not be fair.
‘Send me one or two postcards,’ he said. ‘That will be sufficient.’
He chose for them a package holiday at a very reasonable price: an air flight from Gatwick Airport, twelve nights in the fairyland city, in the Pensione Concordia. When Keith and Dawne went together to the travel agency to make the booking the counter clerk explained that the other members of that particular package were an Italian class from Windsor, all of them learning the language under the tutelage of a Signor Bancini. ‘It is up to you if you wish to take the guided tours of Signor Bancini,’ the counter clerk explained. ‘And naturally you have your own table for breakfast and for dinner.’
The old man, on being told about the party from Windsor, was well pleased. Mixing with such people and, for just a little extra, being able to avail themselves of the expertise of an Italian language teacher amounted to a bonus, he pointed out. ‘Travel widens the mind,’ he said. ‘I deplore I never had the opportunity.’
But something went wrong. Either in the travel agency or at Gatwick Airport, or in some anonymous computer, a small calamity was conceived. Dawne and Keith ended up in a hotel called the Edelweiss, in Room 212, in Switzerland. At Gatwick they had handed their tickets to a girl in the yellow-and-red Your-Kind-of-Holiday uniform. She’d addressed them by name, had checked the details on their tickets and said that that was lovely. An hour later it had surprised them to hear elderly people on the plane talking in North of England accents when the counter clerk at the travel agency had so specifically stated that Signor Bancini’s Italian class came from Windsor. Dawne had even remarked on it, but Keith said there must have been a cancellation, or possibly the Italian class was on a second plane. ‘That’ll be the name of the airport,’ he confidently explained when the pilot referred over the communications system to a destination that didn’t sound like Venice. ‘Same as he’d say Gatwick. Or Heathrow.’ They ordered two Drambuies, Dawne’s favourite drink, and then two more. ‘The coach’ll take us on,’ a stout woman with spectacles announced when the plane landed. ‘Keep all together now.’ There’d been no mention of an overnight stop in the brochure, but when the coach drew in at the Edelweiss Hotel Keith explained that that was clearly what this was. By air and then by coach was how these package firms kept the prices down, a colleague at work had told him. As they stepped out of the coach it was close on midnight: fatigued and travel-stained, they did not feel like questioning their right to the beds they were offered. But the next morning, when it became apparent that they were being offered them for the duration of their holiday, they became alarmed.
‘We have the lake, and the water-birds,’ the receptionist smilingly explained. ‘And we may take the steamer to Interlaken.’
‘An error has been made,’ Keith informed the man, keeping the register of his voice even, for it was essential to be calm. He was aware of his wife’s agitated breathing close beside him. She’d had to sit down when they realized that something was wrong, but now she was standing up again.
‘We cannot change the room, sir,’ the clerk swiftly countered. ‘Each has been given a room. You accompany the group, sir?’
Keith shook his head. Not this group, he said, a different group; a group that was travelling on to another destination. Keith was not a tall man, and often suffered from what he considered to be arrogance in other people, from officials of one kind or another, and shop-assistants with a tendency to assume that his lack of stature reflected a diminutive personality. In a way Keith didn’t care for, the receptionist repeated:
‘This is the Edelweiss Hotel, sir.’
‘We were meant to be in Venice. In the Pensione Concordia.’
‘I do not know the name, sir. Here we have Switzerland.’
‘A coach is to take us on. An official said so on the plane. She was here last night, that woman.’
‘Tomorrow we have the fondue party,’ the receptionist went on, having listened politely to this information about an official. ‘On Tuesday there is the visit to a chocolate factory. On other days we may take the steamer to Interlaken, where we have teashops. In Interlaken mementoes may be bought at fair prices.’
Dawne had still not spoken. She, too, was a slight figure, her features pale beneath orange-ish powder. ‘Mingy’, the old man had a way of saying in his joky voice, and sometimes told her to lie down.
‘Eeh, idn’t it luvely?’ a voice behind Keith enthused. ‘Been out to feed them ducks, ’ave you?’
Keith did not turn round. Speaking slowly, giving each word space, he said to the receptionist: ‘We have been booked on to the wrong holiday.’
‘Your group is booked twelve nights in the Edelweiss Hotel. To make an alteration now, sir, if you have changed your minds –’
‘We haven’t changed our minds. There’s been a mistake.’
The receptionist shook his head. He did not know about a mistake. He had not been told that. He would help if he could, but he did not see how help might best be offered.
‘The man who made the booking,’ Dawne interrupted, ‘was bald, with glasses and a moustache.’ She gave the name of the travel agency in London.
In reply, the receptionist smiled with professional sympathy. He fingered the edge of his register. ‘Moustache?’ he said.