A Perfect Waiter (13 page)

At first Erneste took them for what they also were, of course: two quite unexceptional guests. A newlywed couple on their way to Italy, they were spending a few days beside the Lake of Brienz because many people regarded a stay in the Swiss Alps as essential a part of a honeymooner's itinerary as a visit to Venice. If Erneste noticed anything about these newlyweds, it was that they bore a startling resemblance to each other—indeed, they looked so alike they might easily have passed for brother and sister had it not been for their newly acquired marital status and the purpose of their trip. In other respects they were indistinguishable from the big batch of guests who checked in the same afternoon, three days after Klinger's arrival. There was no reason why the young couple should have attracted any more attention than the day's other new arrivals.

Erneste was supervising the transfer of luggage from the steamer to the cable car and up to the hotel, so he had little time to pay more than the requisite attention to individual guests. He hurried his assistants along and reassured anyone who had mislaid pieces of luggage.

Three days after her arrival in Giessbach, Erneste ran into Madame Jolivay, as the young woman who bore
such a resemblance to her husband was called, in the corridor outside her room on the second floor. She was alone and dressed for going out, with a peacock feather in her hat. Was it chance, or had she contrived this encounter? Erneste had seen her in the interim, but only at a distance, and they hadn't exchanged a word before. It was Madame Jolivay who seized the opportunity to accost him.

She asked his name. It had scarcely escaped his lips when she cried:
“C'est toi, je n'ai pas tort! Erneste, mon petit Erneste! Ämschdli! C'est toi! Dü bisch es!”
At that moment, of course, he recognized her, his cousin Julie from Erstein. In defiance of all the conventions he embraced her in the middle of the dimly lit corridor, in which no other guest or member of staff could be seen. The two cousins hugged each other like a pair of lovers after a long separation, and they remained in that position until Julie gently pushed him away and scrutinized him more closely. She screwed up her eyes and put out her right hand to touch his shoulder, then slowly let it fall. Erneste followed the gentle movement with his gaze.

“Julie, Julie,” he said, “how long is it since we saw each other last?” And Julie said, “A long time. Ten years? No, it must be even longer!” They weren't speaking French now, of course. Being as drunk on memories as they were, they had lapsed into Alsatian German, the language they'd spoken together as children, which Erneste had never forgotten.

Erneste hadn't seen Julie since he was eleven, because that was when she and her parents had moved from
Strasbourg to Paris. In spite of her promise to write to him and think of him and see him every summer when they came back on vacation, she had never returned to the village because things didn't work out that way. Her parents had employed a notary to sell the house they owned in Erneste's native village, so they never visited Erstein again. All that Erneste ever received from Julie after the move to Paris, where her father, an engineer, had landed a job he'd been after for ages, were two or three postcards that anyone could read including the postmistress, the mailman, and his parents and brothers and sisters.

The woman he embraced in the corridor had grown up. She bore no resemblance to his little cousin of years ago. Her blue eyes were still the same, but that was all. If she hadn't accosted him he wouldn't have recognized her, because she was every inch an elegant Parisienne who smelled fragrantly of face powder and wore a
grain de beauté
on her left cheek, not a rumbustious girl who imitated her elders. No, he hadn't thought of Julie for ages. His memory of her had gradually faded like that of the village in which he had grown up and been unhappy, leaving behind a residue that dissipated as soon as he tried to grasp it. He had no wish to grasp it, either, because Erstein was as unimportant to him as if it had never existed. He wouldn't have recognized Julie by her voice or her walk. By her eyes, perhaps? Not knowing what it was about himself that had caused her to recognize him, he forbore to ask.

On the evening of the same day Julie introduced him to Philippe, her husband, who was interested solely in the design and manufacture of toys and board games, card games and construction sets, for which he had developed a boyhood passion that obviously meant more to him than anything and anyone else, even a new wife. Julie had known what she was letting herself in for when she married him three weeks earlier. Philippe saw marriage as a board game complete with live pieces, rules and penalties, winners and losers. Today's loser could be tomorrow's winner. He was blind to any infractions of the rules that occurred off the board because he never left it. To Julie marriage represented an opportunity—the only one she found acceptable—to gain her independence. To Philippe Jolivay it meant an opportunity to acquire a ready-made audience. He wanted children and she knew it.

Twenty-six years old, Philippe had for months been tirelessly engaged in constructing a new factory of his own outside Paris, a modern production facility in which he intended to put into practice all the ideas he had dreamed of since his boyhood.

His meeting with Erneste in the hotel lobby didn't take long: he stood up and shook hands, nodded and said a word or two. The
chef de réception
peered suspiciously in their direction. Protracted conversations between employees and guests disrupted the subtle social equilibrium. It was restored, however, when Philippe flopped back into his armchair, opened his notebook, picked up a pencil,
and returned to his diagrams and calculations. It seemed that Julie's husband had something of an aversion to being distracted. All that interested him, Julie said as she sat down beside him, were “toys and games, toys and games. And now, Erneste, please bring us some nice, chilled white wine.” Erneste was relieved to be able to withdraw and do as he was asked.

Philippe, he learned later, had been able to carry out his plans only because he'd inherited a substantial fortune a year before his marriage. “What was I supposed to do,” Julie told Erneste, “marry a pauper? No, no, I always knew he'd be rich someday.” Julie's contribution to the fulfillment of Philippe's dreams was to leave her husband in peace and lend her name to his factory at Vincennes. His firm,
Juliejouets
, which had maintained a satisfactory turnover during World War II and achieved unforeseen successes thereafter, kept Philippe and his family well provided for. As for Julie, she bore him two daughters and two sons over the years.

Because Philippe and Julie were so seldom on the same wavelength, it was inevitable that the inevitable would happen and that, when it did, he noticed nothing. Dissatisfied with Philippe, Julie deserted the board and, at a stroke, invalidated the unwritten but universally familiar rules of the marital game on which she had embarked by saying “I do.” This she did at Giessbach by committing her first and soon-to-be-repeated transgression, commonly known as adultery, under the noses of her unsuspecting husband and her cousin Erneste.

What rendered the affair even more hectic was that Julie's parting from her lover was as foreseeable as the affair itself had been. The prospect of saying goodbye was painful, but nothing could better allay the pain than to reopen the smarting wound at every opportunity. Erneste, who was initiated into the liaison, helped as best he could. He became the secret messenger responsible for exchanges of billets-doux between Julie and her English lover, Steve Boulton, just as he had been in other cases, for clandestine affairs were far from unusual at the Grand. A vacation fling like this one, in which no holds were barred provided you didn't get caught, was as routine there as at any other big hotel.

While Jakob concentrated on Klinger and his family, Erneste became more and more involved with Julie and Boulton, so it was only natural that at night, when they had finished work, they found plenty to tell each other about the people they waited on and had dealings with.

Boulton, who was on vacation without his family for the first time ever, already had two children, whereas Julie's first child, a girl, was born exactly nine months later. She was christened Victoria. Not Victorine or Victorienne, but Victoria—like the English queen, Julie liked to point out. She even, quite unnecessarily, drew attention to the fact that Victoria looked nothing like her or her husband, which seemed odd, given that Julie and Philippe might have been mistaken for brother and sister. Later, when her features gradually developed, the girl turned out to be the spitting image of Steve.

If someone had asked Philippe Jolivay whether he remembered a Mr Boulton he would merely have shaken his head, never having been introduced to the gentleman in question, but no one ever did. The truth was, as Julie often recalled with a girlish frisson, that their paths had probably crossed more than once in the dining room of Giessbach's Grand Hotel in 1936. She enjoyed recalling this. Her affair, she told herself, couldn't be over yet.

The affair between Erneste's cousin Julie and Steve Boulton, the London businessman, was far from over, in fact it seemed likely to endure for the rest of their days. In 1937, the year after they first met, they resumed their clandestine liaison, which they had maintained by letter in the meantime, and continued to do so regularly up to the outbreak of war. Until then their relationship was renewed every summer at the Grand, in the immediate vicinity of their unwitting spouses and children. After the war, when the Grand was ruled out as a rendezvous because it had closed down in the interim, the lovers had to devise a convincing pretext for deserting their respective families in London and Paris for at least three weeks every summer. Boulton officially devoted that period to an extended business trip on the Continent, mainly in German Switzerland, whereas Julie ostensibly stayed at a Swiss spa named Zurzach, where she took the waters for her arthritis. There was no reason to doubt their bona
fides. Even when their relationship had long ceased to be an escapade, having become almost a habit, the need to keep it a secret from Philippe Jolivay and Angie Boulton still lent it a clandestine flavor. So Julie and Steve went on meeting at a small hotel farther along the lake, where they had no need to fear discovery as they had at Giessbach. No one there had a right to suspect them, still less spy on them. Although they were getting on in years, they long persisted in feeling like young lovers, at least during their secret assignations. It wasn't until the early 1960s that a certain constraint made itself felt when they were reunited, because no one could have failed to notice the gradual development of Steve's paunch and Julie's crow's-feet.

The mineral baths at Zurzach and the business trips to Switzerland were effective remedies for marital and professional tedium. Although Julie had paid only one visit to Zurzach, Steve really did do some traveling on business in Switzerland, so not all they told their spouses was fictitious.

Erneste got up at nine the next day. He dressed, looked in his wardrobe for a woolen cap, put it on, pulled it down over his eyes, and left the apartment to report in sick. The phone booth was on the other side of the street around a hundred yards from his door. To the surprise of all who knew him, Erneste would fail to turn up for work for the very first time.

He found it as much of an effort to call in sick as he had to get up and dress. His body felt empty—empty but unbearably cumbersome. It seemed to be reverberating from the blows it had sustained last night. He could hardly move, but he contrived to do so in the end, albeit slowly and with an immense effort. He managed to stand up and get dressed, swayed but didn't fall, put on his cap and went downstairs, crossed the street. His injuries didn't prevent him from phoning, and it struck him while he was doing so that he didn't think of last night as long as he was occupied. His cut lip split open and started to bleed while he was speaking, but no one saw it. No one could be allowed to see what a mess they'd made of him, and because the street was almost deserted at that hour and he
was shielded from any inquisitive glances by the woolen cap, which he'd pulled down low over his eyes, no one did see him. He didn't call Julie. He had to work out what to do next. He'd known he had to do something ever since he woke up. His first thought had been of Jakob, his second of Klinger, with whom he had to get in touch. The only thing was, he didn't know how to go about it. Should he write to him, call him, or pay him a surprise visit at his home? He needed time to think. Well, now he had a whole day in which to think, and if necessary the night and the following day as well. That should be time enough.

He couldn't inflict his appearance on the patrons of the Restaurant am Berg—it was all too obvious what had happened to him—so he would stay away for the next few days. He told the manager he'd had a bad fall and might need hospital treatment. “Will you be all right?” he was asked. “Yes,” he said, “I'll be fine.”