In the first place, it did not seem quite right that a girl that young should be free to wander the hotel and seaside town without a chaperone.

She looked respectable enough, though she was pale as alabaster and thin as a wet string. She was clothed in a brown wool dress, perhaps a bit too big, that fell decently to the ankles, and her leather boots still had a shine of newness on them. She was some sort of connection and companion to Mrs Fog, an old lady from a grand family in the shires, but it seemed to Klaus Zieger that the old lady encouraged far too much independence. Since her arrival at the Meredith Hotel, the girl was always to be found tripping through the grand public rooms alone, or curled up in an armchair deep in a book, oblivious to all. And now, with the old lady having ordered dinner in her room again, the girl wished to be seated in the Grand Dining Room alone.

‘I hoped, because it was early . . .’ she said, peering past Klaus into the high-ceilinged room, which functioned as both restaurant and ballroom.

She spoke respectfully but there was a firmness to her tone and a faint lift of the chin. ‘A quiet corner somewhere?’ Only two tables were occupied; each with a pair of elderly ladies nodding their hats at each other. The room echoed a little. Silverware pinging against glass, shoes loud against the parquet floor. The tall potted palms stirred in an unknown draught and from beyond the tall French windows came the murmur of voices from the seafront and the low booming of the sea against the pebbled shore. Later would come the dancing crowds, the loud hotel orchestra and the crude drunken Saturday night carousing – all things that would never have been countenanced before the war.

‘I’m very sorry, miss,’ Klaus repeated, drawing himself up. He was the lone waiter at this hour, and in the absence of the headwaiter, who was having his own dinner in the kitchen, he felt keenly the need to defend the ragged standards that were left. ‘Can I arrange to have something sent to your room?’

‘Please don’t be sorry,’ the girl said. ‘We are all bound by our duties, are we not?’ She gave him a brief smile and walked away down the long marble floor of the glass-enclosed Palm Terrace. Her smile made him ashamed. Not answering him about the dinner tray made him irritated.

Turning away a hotel customer added a new string to the vibration of anxiety that hummed in his veins…

Continue reading the extract here…

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