Hotel Belvedere

By Barbara Kastelin

Hotel Belvedere is a Belle Epoque hotel in Montreux on the shores of Lake Geneva. It was built by the Krugers and, in the last months of the 20th Century, it is still owned and run by the family: Vanessa, the grande dame and former opera singer; her daughter, the somewhat ailing Candice, and practical husband Thierry; Philippe, their playboy son, and Paloma the wayward daughter. Nearby, the rival Excelsior is owned by Karl Mercier, whom Candice “should have married”. There resides Dr DeBraye, a suave provider of medical services to society ladies. Below stairs in the Belvedere are Fosse the housekeeper, Concierge, Cook, and waiters and chambermaids.  
As the novel opens, a goatherd’s daughter, Odile, comes down from the mountain to become a chambermaid. She faces the swirling emotions of management and staff with simple alpine good sense, and her future seems bright. But a secret from 30 years earlier emerges, when English waiter, Noel, moves from the Excelsior to the Belvedere. The hotels work towards the Millennium celebrations, as rivalries mount, mysteries surface, and romance springs. The crisis is reached as Storm Lothar descends on the lake, and one death brings clarity and resolution.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Aug 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781838595777

Barbara Kastelin

Barbara Kastelin was brought up in Switzerland. She studied copywriting and design at the New School NY, worked for the UN Secretary General and finally ended up in advertising in Procter & Gamble Geneva. She later married a British diplomat and had two daughters. She is now an artist, specialising in oil paintings.

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Praise for Barbara Kastelin

A passionate writer

An extraordinary tour de force featuring brilliant characters in fantastic fascinating situations and surroundings…

Thought-provoking!

Books Monthly

This first novel… complex, colourful, adventurous, romantic and written with great style.

Mojomums

The book is full of surprises; a thoroughly

enjoyable read.

Freaky Green Eyes

Also by Barbara Kastelin

THE PARROT TREE

When Snow Fell

A bad lot

Book cover painted by the author

Web: www.barbarakastelin.co.uk

Facebook: @BarbaraKastelin

Goodreads: barbara_kastelin

Copyright © 2020 Barbara Kastelin

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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ISBN 9781838595777

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Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER ONE

New Year’s Eve 1969/1970

It was the last day of 1969, New Year’s Eve. In the high-ceilinged dining room of Hotel Belvedere only one table was laid – like a spot-lit prop on a theatre set – amid bare tables and stacked chairs. The candles in the candelabra blazed in the crystal glassware, casting prismatic splendour on the silver cutlery. The lights danced in the long mirrors, which were set into the pink plastered walls and reached up to the stucco coving. An oil-filled heater emitted warmth near the festive table.

Outside the double-arched windows, snowflakes twirled in a fierce north wind, turning Montreux, the picturesque town at the end of Lake Geneva, into a snow-globe. Music from the marketplace wafted, tinny and fragmented in the freezing air, and red-cheeked revellers rushed past the hotel on their way to the public festivities.

Hotel Belvedere was closed to guests. The table had been prepared for the Krugers, the owners, who were, at present, proceeding into the room. The founding couple and their children were long dead, but their grandson, Oscar, was now the director, and his daughter and son-in-law led the procession.

‘Oh dear,’ Thierry said, pulling out a high-backed chair for Candice. ‘I think she’s too large for the chair now.’

‘Don’t make fun of me,’ his pregnant twenty-seven-year-old wife said reproachfully, as her husband guided her chair closer to the table. ‘I hate myself this way quite enough as it is.’ She pushed her dull corn-coloured hair away from her face, and the charms on the bracelet that Thierry had given her for Christmas clinked on her wrist.

Her mother, Vanessa, dark hair pulled back severely and knotted into a chignon, wearing plum-velvet trousers and a pirate shirt, glided towards the lit table. Next to appear was Dr DeBraye in his typical mustard-coloured blazer and paisley cravat. The middle-aged physician had seen to the health of the family for the previous seven years. He and the tall young woman on his arm seemed ill-matched.

‘Look at DeBraye’s new conquest. They get younger and younger,’ sniped Vanessa, now seated at the table. ‘This one’s a redhead and is almost a head taller than him.’

When the couple reached the table, the young woman detached herself from DeBraye, almost pushing him away from her. ‘Hi, everyone.’ She looked around her, along the sculpted plasterwork on the pink walls. ‘How quaint.’ She smiled to herself. ‘I’m Nancy Bell-Johnson, of the Boston Bell-Johnson family,’ she declared grandly.

It wasn’t the right tone, and it wasn’t endearing. This young American woman, in a green figure-hugging dress and odd canvas-material shoes, seemed full of herself. A crocodile-skin clutch bag was clamped under one arm.

Aware of the awkwardness, DeBraye tried to ease it by explaining that Nancy was staying at the Excelsior and hoped to do some serious skiing.

‘I’ve always wanted to try out this neck of the woods. Aspen gets flat after a while.’

‘And you hope to ski with Dr DeBraye?’ asked Vanessa, dead-pan.

DeBraye shot her an irritated look.

Once they were seated, and after a calculating glance at her daughter, Vanessa vigorously rang the little bell next to her plate. It caused the door from the pantry to swing open and the waiter to appear. ‘When my husband, whom we’ve lost on the way, joins us, you can start serving,’ she said.

The waiter and cook, who had prepared the meal, were the only employees working in the seventy-room hotel this Saint Sylvester’s night.

‘Sorry!’ A charming Oscar-smile shone on his ruddy face as he entered. ‘Something came up.’ Vanessa’s husband was heavy, with a round head and teeth with a gap between them. He wore a new grey suit which had a silver sheen, and a large single-pearl pin in his silk tie. Sitting down, he unceremoniously shook out the fan-shaped serviette on his place setting. ‘It’s getting nasty out there. The temperature is going to reach minus twelve by midnight. Not many will stay for the fireworks on the pier.’

‘It’s chilly in this room.’ Candice pulled her shoulders up in a shiver and crossed her arms in front of her swollen breasts. ‘And spooky, as if the ghosts of our guests were sitting at those empty tables.’

‘We have to close for inventory sometimes,’ said Vanessa.

‘Permit me.’ DeBraye reached across Vanessa for the bell to summon the waiter again, and he asked for another heater to be brought for his pregnant patient. The doctor was taking good care of her second pregnancy. Three years ago, he had helped Candice birth a daughter. The way she turned her face up to him in childish timidity showed her fondness for the attractive man, whose early-greying hair curled lazily over the crown of his head, even teasing the tips of his ears. Gold-framed spectacles sat low on his nose, and he looked at people over their rim, as if expecting more than was offered. It was a tic of his to push the glasses on to the bridge of the nose with his middle finger before talking about something he deemed serious.

‘Bon appétit,’ Vanessa wished the gathering, her eyes lingering on DeBraye’s trophy girlfriend, whose entire back was revealed in a dress which only began at the first hint of her buttocks. ‘Calculating minx,’ she muttered, noticing the young woman trying to play footsie under the table with a man who sprang from one of the few titled Swiss families and who, at least, was not responding.

In the old days in the fifties in Rome, the ladies on Robert DeBraye’s arm had been grandly sedate and worn expensive perfumes. He was then a freshly graduated doctor from the Sorbonne in Paris. She, Vanessa, at the age of thirty-six, had returned to the opera after the Second World War, once her daughter, Candice, was ten and could be left with her father and nannies. Of course, she had been introduced to the toast of the town. DeBraye was a handsome young Adonis who charmed and flirted with older opera singers and lady aristocrats. She had been one of them. Did he ever feel real desire for her? She could not imagine DeBraye being willing to expose himself to such an emotional involvement. More likely, he had fashioned himself into a textbook romantic. This Nancy was nothing more than a new aftershave scent that, like the others, would wear out quite quickly. She was far from the first since DeBraye had returned from Rome and moved into a suite in the nearby Excelsior Hotel.

When the porcelain plates of beef carpaccio with olive-oil-marinated artichoke hearts were put in front of them, Vanessa, with a sigh of irritation, rotated her plate so the garnish was at the top.

Oscar lifted his wine glass for a first toast that evening and made it a gesture of gratitude for yet another successful year for the Belvedere.

‘Hear, hear!’ Thierry raised a glass along with his father-in-law, voicing his own intention to run the hotel more profitably in the next decade. Then they all toasted to Candice’s unborn baby, silently hoping for a boy this time round.

‘There’s something else to drink to.’ Nancy leaned in, her shoulder touching the mustard jacket of DeBraye. ‘Karl Mercier, you know, the owner of the Excelsior—’

‘We know him,’ Candice cut in sharply.

‘He has offered me an extra week at the hotel. I guess he wants to push the Boston market. Anyway, he’s going to take me up in a helicopter for glacier skiing.’

DeBraye turned to her. ‘Let’s not talk about that now, hmm?’

‘They are family, you said. I could relax with them, you said. Why is everyone around this table so uptight?’

‘We are,’ Vanessa said, ‘less outspoken in this neck of the woods.’ She was interrupted by the appearance of a three-year-old girl in a pink dressing gown at the main door, pushed into the penumbral room by a nanny. The child shuffled towards the magically lit table in slippered feet, aiming for Candice, her mother.

‘Say Happy New Year,’ the nanny prompted, but the child just stood there, looking from one to the other, pale in the dancing light, her mouth in a downward arc.

‘Paloma wants to stay up to see the New Year arrive,’ Nanny explained.

‘It’s really nothing that special,’ Oscar said. ‘None of us here will see it either.’

‘Why not, Grandpa?’

‘My little dove.’ Vanessa pulled her grandchild toward her. ‘Grandpa means that we’ll all be too …’ She hesitated. ‘Happy and dizzy.’

‘Yes, drunk as skunks,’ Oscar added.

‘What is a skunk, Grandma?’

‘Darling, remember to call me Vanessa and not Grandma.’

‘I’ll tell you what.’ Thierry got up. ‘I personally shall wake you at midnight if you go to sleep now. How’s that?’

Candice rolled her eyes and shook her head. ‘Doting Daddy.’

They all watched the little pink person being ushered to the door. Immense love and pride shone on Candice’s face.

*

After the dessert of pear meringue, they blotted their lips and abandoned the serviettes next to their plates. Vanessa dismissed the waiter and cook; she oversaw the employees, just as her mother-in-law had done before her. The management was taken care of by Oscar and her only daughter’s husband, Thierry. As a genuine artiste, she did not want to know the mercantile details, as long as the business was lucrative. Candice was of an anxious nature, unsuitable for running a tough hotel business; she loved motherhood and home life – traits not inherited from me, Vanessa thought.

They left the dining room and slowly crossed the sparsely lit foyer, in which cold columns stood imperiously, dividing the space. From the top of a sweeping double staircase came random noises – perhaps just the glass drops of a chandelier colliding in a draft from an open door, only noticeable now because of the loss of human traffic: voices, the concierge’s bell, the moving of luggage. It was a perennial pattern. Now void of guests, the Belvedere seemed to have recorded, like imprints on film paper, what had happened since the Belle Epoque – 1880, when the hotel was built – and was also projecting things to occur in the future – the new decade of 1970 to start in less than three hours.

Oscar held out a searching hand and touched Vanessa’s shoulder in an intimate gesture. She gasped with secret pleasure. Thierry opened the door to the bar, which led through an arch into the smoking room where a mature wood fire burned in the large fireplace. There, Vanessa felt at ease. Pregnant Candice was helped into a deep-seated armchair.

Nancy went up to the wall with the photographs. ‘Eighteen hundred and eighty,’ she read from a picture of the Belvedere as a building site. ‘That’s when the Bell Corporation started manufacturing metal cans in the USA. These people’ – she tapped the glass over Oscar’s grandparents – ‘had a boutique hotel built. Funny,’ she added.

Thierry could not hold back. ‘If you didn’t have the excuse of being so young and inexperienced, you could be considered rude.’

She gave a little tinkly laugh. ‘You don’t get it. I love that sepia feel, the backwardness of it all.’

‘Adding insult to injury,’ muttered DeBraye. ‘And without even knowing. It’s refreshing in a way.’

At the upright ebony piano, Vanessa raised the lid and wriggled her firm bottom on the stool before diving into Somewhere over the rainbow. She sang in that extraordinarily clear soprano which comes from operatic training, while her long nimble fingers crawled over the keys. Thierry, who had moved behind the bar in the other room, poured brandy. Oscar reclined on the cushions of a large sofa. Next to him, DeBraye was equally deeply ensconced. Both men inspected the gold colour in the brandy balloon against the light before gulping the liquid, eyeing each other with contentment.

Vanessa ended the song with a series of high notes and sonorous plonks, before twisting round on the piano stool.

‘My darling, that was utterly wonderful,’ Oscar gushed insincerely.

DeBraye checked his wristwatch. ‘Two and a half more hours to go till midnight.’

‘It’ll be a smashing New Year, I can tell. Round figures always are. Shall I sing Moon River?’

‘If you must, my dear.’

Candice levered herself out of the armchair. ‘Loo,’ she said. ‘Again. Sorry.’ And waddled out of the room.

‘I’ve almost forgotten what a thin delicate woman she used to be,’ said her husband.

Oscar looked up. ‘I must say, she seems to be a lot larger than she was with Paloma. That should be a fine healthy boy she’s carrying.’

When Candice returned, she kicked off her pumps and, on swollen feet in support tights, went to the window in the square bay. Pushing the heavy curtain aside, she shuddered. ‘It’s vicious out there. I can see the moon cutting through the clouds. Everything looks glassed over. There will be a lot of road accidents tonight.’

‘How uplifting you are for us, Candice.’ Oscar held out the cigar box to DeBraye.

‘It’s because I feel as if I am simply going to burst.’ Candice threw her arms out dramatically. ‘My body can’t take it much longer. It wasn’t like this when I was carrying Paloma.’

DeBraye pushed his spectacles up. ‘I advise you to sit down and put your feet up on the pouf. Every pregnancy is different. Some women suffer from water retention and swelling. Hormones encourage the body to hold on to excess fluid. Your baby is due on the seventh of January. Not long now.’

‘Not long!’ Her brow furrowed and with a quivering lower lip she announced, ‘Too long to bear it.’

He smiled with a trace of worn patience and then sniffed along the Havana cigar. With a groan, she landed in the armchair.

‘All right, my dearest?’

Sprawling unladylike, with knees apart and her blue lace dress stretched between them, Candice smiled pitifully over at her husband. On the enormous mound, her pushed-out belly button was visible through the cloth.

Thierry fetched the pouf and loaded her legs on to it. ‘You’ll get your slim figure back quickly,’ he said placatingly, in large part to reassure himself. ‘Stay calm for the baby’s sake.’

‘That was kind,’ she said to him breathlessly and then contemplated her sore feet in silence.

Vanessa, who had stopped singing to watch the scene from her stool, hands poised in the air ready, now played a few bars only, letting them run out. Her daughter was making quite a meal of this pregnancy.

Nancy was perched on the scroll-end of a chaise-longue, crossed-over leg whipping to and fro and shoe dangling precariously from her curled big toe. ‘Does Candice really have to suffer so much? Don’t you have appropriate private hospitals with trained staff around here?’

‘It’s a simple birth,’ DeBraye snapped. ‘Not a liver transplant, and I am as qualified a physician as you can find.’

Nancy held both hands up in surrender. ‘Okay, okay.’

‘Why aren’t you enjoying this?’ asked Thierry. ‘Since you came to experience quaint and backward people …’

‘I just think Candice has an enormously large bun in the oven. Scary, actually.’

Shocked, DeBraye choked on his cigar. ‘Don’t be vulgar. A pregnant woman is something holy.’

‘Yes,’ Vanessa joined in. ‘In Italy, pregnancy is sacred.’ And she deduced with satisfaction that DeBraye and Nancy were not close; it was just a temporary attachment. He was parading her to show how virile he was and at the same time protect himself from the advances of society women, possibly including Candice. Vanessa left the piano and went over to DeBraye, suggesting they had a little private talk about Candice outside.

Once she had him to herself in the vast foyer, she slid her arm into the crook of his. ‘Should I be worried about Candice? Tell me the truth. And should I be worried about your choice of female companion?’

She saw him squeeze his eyes together and realised that he was dizzy and too drunk for a serious conversation. He even pushed her roughly away from him. ‘I feel out of sorts,’ he said.

Back with the others, he took refuge on the sofa again, while Vanessa chose to escape by playing Italian arias. Her mind went to her first short stay in Rome where, at twenty-three, she had sung in the chorus of the Teatro dell’Opera, before it closed its doors when Italy entered the war. That very morning, she had just been offered a solo role, but found herself packing her bags in the afternoon to return to her father, mayor of Montreux, and her Italian mother. Vanessa thought of how she had married Oscar, given birth to Candice and done her motherly duty while, in the back of her mind, always humming Tosca’s aria I Lived for My Art. Pictures on the wall above the piano testified to her triumphant return and a performance with Tito Gobbi, the most famous Roman baritone. More pictures of fame hung in the fourth-floor apartment where she and Oscar lived amid the Kruger furniture which had belonged to his parents. Thierry and Candice had moved out into a town apartment after Paloma was born.

Vanessa came to the end of her piece. Those lolling in the soft furniture applauded. Bedrooms upstairs awaited them all; they could let themselves go. All they had to do was crawl up the staircase once 1970 had been rung in.

‘We are privileged to have our very own Callas.’ DeBraye offered his compliments with a relaxed slur before continuing to discuss New Year resolutions with Oscar. The winner so far was a formal invitation to the Belvedere accepted by the Queen of England. Utterly relaxed in the bulky cushions, they extended the invitation to the Queen Mother and the corgis.

‘Surely Her Majesty and entourage would stay in the Excelsior,’ said Nancy, flicking absent-mindedly through a copy of Vogue, shoes now off, her figure stretched out on the chaise-longue. She reached out for the burning cigarette resting in the ashtray on the coffee table, her lithe figure bending with ease.

‘Don’t rub it in. We’re just playing.’

She twisted her cigarette in the ashtray suddenly, dropped the magazine on the floor and grabbed the brandy bottle off the coffee table by its neck. ‘Playing is for kids.’

‘Permit me.’ Thierry took the bottle from her.

From Oscar came, ‘Make that two more, Thierry. She’s right. We’ve got to up our game. The Excelsior offers a French gourmet chef. We say we have a French cook. He’s French because he was born in France – five kilometres from the Swiss border and that is it.’

‘I must say,’ added Thierry, distributing half-full brandy glasses, ‘Cook’s soupes du jour taste of blended leftovers. His menu has become increasingly unimaginative.’

‘Because he’s been here for twenty years. Nobody even remembers his name. Besides, he has a beastly temper,’ added Oscar.

‘There is that.’ Thierry nodded. ‘I hear the Excelsior offers multilingual waiters and concierges. It’s a must nowadays.’

‘Our young night concierge can speak English,’ Vanessa piped up.

‘With whom?’

A piercing scream from Candice stopped all conversation. ‘Oh dear God!’ she cried. ‘Oh Thierry, the baby. It’s coming.’

‘Keep calm everybody.’ DeBraye crawled out of his comfortable position. ‘It is not due yet. Trust me.’

Candice screamed in agony again and spasms arched her back.

‘Shit,’ said Oscar, who had snipped his thumb cutting the cigar end. ‘Stop that wailing. I can’t stand it.’

‘I don’t care! And nor does the baby, who wants to come now.’

‘It can’t. Not now. It’s New Year’s Eve and there is a blizzard,’ Thierry pointed out.

‘Not a blizzard, a snowstorm,’ DeBraye corrected him.

‘Oh! I’m leaking. My waters have broken.’

‘Shit, shit, shit!’ DeBraye bashed his forehead with the heel of his hand.

The others looked from one to the other, and Candice whimpered pitifully.

‘Excuse me for a minute.’ DeBraye stumbled from the room. Walking in spurts, he sought out the men’s room and banged his shoulder against the doorframe on his way in. At the sink, he splashed cold water into his face. ‘She did this on purpose,’ he muttered to the alcohol-blurred man in the mirror.

At the reception desk, he made a plan. Since his arrival from Rome, he had had no formal medical practice so, in order to be able to write prescriptions, he had persuaded a private rehabilitation clinic above Lausanne to register him. The staff nurse should be on duty there. He concentrated on punching the hazy numbers and then tapped his shoe while listening to the ringing. ‘Come on, come on. Doris, be there!’ And she was.

On his return to the smoking room, he found Candice had almost slipped off the seat. He was just about able to force himself to cope. He would drive Candice to the clinic in his Jaguar. Although they had no obstetric facilities, it was the closest, and they knew him. Thierry would follow them in his car. The others had to stay put and wait for news. It was one and a half hours to midnight.

*

Candice, splayed out on the leather rear seat, fretted and screamed while DeBraye drove along the icy motorway at seventy miles an hour, realising what an unsteady state he was in. Normally, he was able to absorb alcohol efficiently, but tonight he had been too upset. He would not have drunk so much, so fast had Nancy, the predatory heiress, behaved as expected. She did not know the rules. After all these years of women making big eyes at him and gratefully pulling his linked arm against their ample warm bodies, he had made a tactical error.

Nancy had approached him on the staircase of the Excelsior. ‘I hear you are a doctor. Busy fixing broken legs during the skiing season?’

He had told her he was a rare kind of independent private physician, and now did not remember how the conversation had gone after that – until the moment he had invited her to accompany him to a New Year’s family party at the Belvedere.

Ah yes, he recalled, she had wanted him to show her Montreux and who was who, besides advising her on skiing outfits – he, who had never been near a ski slope. ‘Come on, funny guy,’ she had said with a wink. He had felt out of his depth.

The mere thought that she assumed there would be copulation between them was nauseating, because he was afraid of her. The pain of concealing it was part of the ordeal he had been dousing. It now came back to bite him in the arse as he slalomed on the insufficiently salted road. Fortunately, there were few cars out. What if he had to perform an emergency birth on the frozen hard shoulder in ten below zero?

His knuckles were white on the steering wheel and his teeth were clenched. He opened the window to help clear his head, while behind him the woman in labour filled the car with her body heat. His window wipers ploughed the snow aside to reveal a fireworks display on the French side of the lake in Evian.

‘Christ,’ he muttered to himself. ‘There had better be no complications.’

*

In the eerily blue-lit entrance to the clinic was the outline of a young porter with a wheelchair. The minute he pushed it outside, its wheels got stuck in the snow.

‘I’m Louis. Doris has prepared the downstairs treatment room,’ he explained as they dragged Candice to the door, her stockinged feet making tracks through the snow. On her upturned furrowed face, snowflakes melted when they touched her hot skin. She did not fit into the chair, and they hauled her along the corridor, Louis looking constantly back at her legs, half-fascinated, half-appalled by the thought of the gore that might appear.

At the door to the room, Candice grabbed a door jamb and stopped for a contraction.

‘Don’t push,’ DeBraye ordered.

Inside, they hoisted her on to an examination bed. While DeBraye washed his hands, Doris rapidly attempted to get the pale-blue lace dress off, but in vain. She rolled it right up under Candice’s breasts and then attacked the supporting tights, flinging the soaked knickers on to the floor. Slipping a pillow under Candice’s back, she pushed the labouring woman’s knees further apart and planted her feet on the bed. Then she stood back.

DeBraye took a deep breath and bent to check the dilation. Fear made him suddenly hot and tremulous; he was not wearing his spectacles! He remembered leaving them in the men’s room at the Belvedere before splashing his face. He could barely see up to two hand-spans in front of him – and that was when he was sober. He could hardly confess this now. The fuzzy image of the vaginal area rendered him nauseous. The dark bit was large, so she was probably fully dilated. Perhaps even the head of the baby was showing. Furious with himself, he forced himself to live up to the challenge. He was only forty-one and should not have to panic about his eyes not working when he needed them to.

Doris patted the birthing mother’s brow with a cloth dipped in cold water while, with the other hand, she held down the pain-arching body.

Candice was weeping freely, with an open drooling mouth. ‘I am going to die. It hurts too much.’

‘Any useful medication at hand?’ he asked.

‘We make our addict patients drug-free, so we don’t hand any out. But there is ether,’ Doris said. ‘Perhaps the war hospital way?’

A gauze was put on Candice’s mouth and nose, and a few drops dripped on to it.

After a period of silence, Candice declared, ‘Has nobody noticed that the picture on the wall is wrong? Monet’s lilies all look like tomatoes filled with cottage cheese.’

‘What is she talking about?’ asked DeBraye.

‘She’s delirious, Doctor. It’s working,’ said Doris.

‘I can see the foetus’s cranium. Now, a deep breath and push.’

‘And the leaves are blue omelettes.’

‘Never mind the lily pond. Now give me a big push. And Doris, don’t give her more ether.’

The door opened. ‘I couldn’t get the bloody car working. How’s my wife doing?’ Thierry unrolled the scarf from his neck.

‘Go away. Wait in reception. We have work to do.’

‘All right, all right.’ He disappeared.

If Doris noticed that the eminent Dr DeBraye was in no state to help give birth, then she did not show it. It was New Year’s Eve, and one hour short of a new decade. To be drunk was the norm. The situation was unusual, the pregnancy enormous, but then the birthing mother was young and strong, and nature could make babies all by itself. ‘Not long now.’

After three more pushes and more irrelevant conversation about impressionism, the dark-haired head was out and, with one more groaning push, the rest of the body slithered out, together with much liquid. DeBraye clipped the umbilical cord, and Doris wrapped its end into alcohol gauze and then a plaster.

DeBraye took a deep breath and the intake of oxygen made him dizzy. It did not matter any longer. The newborn, being cleaned with a sterilised wipe, was yelling healthily. It was handed to the sweat-covered woman on the bed. Born on the thirty-first of December, 1969, 11.45 pm. He had not been able to see clearly enough to discern the sex of the child. He staggered into the corridor and found Thierry studying the noticeboard: Nothing is so bad a drink won’t make it worse. Real recovery is a complete lifestyle change. See the difference in and on you. Order the photographs from Louis.

‘Congratulations. Come and see your new child.’

‘Boy or girl?’

‘You can find out for yourself. Much more fun that way.’

Doris, noticing how diminished her idol of a doctor was, took over. She decided to put the mother and baby in a bedroom upstairs for the night. They had not accepted in-patients over the end of year holiday so the clinic was empty, and Doris lived on the premises and had nowhere to go for New Year. She promised to stay up and take care of them. Louis would be there to guard the establishment and would use the time to work on his successful Before and After rehab photographs in the photo lab he had installed in the basement. The father of the newborn could return to the Belvedere and take his family home tomorrow. The rehab clinic would only charge for linen service.

That settled, Thierry bent over the baby boy in the arms of his exhausted wife, who smiled softly at the ceiling. He kissed them both. ‘Well done, love.’ With tears in his eyes, he tiptoed out of the room and drove back to the hotel.

DeBraye, trying to control his impatience, waited for the afterbirth, while Doris prepared the room upstairs, rigging up a cot from a strong cardboard box Louis had found.

‘I know you are spent and giddy, Candice, but you need to push out the afterbirth. Sometimes it doesn’t just come by itself. We both want to get this over with.’

‘I can’t.’

He scanned the room, and then, from a desk, he took a tongue spatula and inserted it into the distended bloody vagina to scoop around in it.

‘Ahh! I’ve just had another contraction. Take the baby from me, will you?’

Bristling, DeBraye shouted into the empty house, ‘Doris, come and get the baby.’

When she appeared, he held the bundle