Chapter 18 The New Booking
The journalist arrived on a Tuesday and was, to her enormous credit, completely charming.
I want to be honest about that, because it’s the part that matters.
“Eva Maier” came up the cable car at thirty-three, a chestnut bob cut sharp at the jaw and an athletic, economical way of moving, and she came into the front hall and made Poppy laugh inside ninety seconds, made the porter feel important, asked after the cook by name as if she’d read a very good profile of the place, and settled into the lobby like a woman delighted to finally be somewhere she’d dreamed about.
She was funny. She was warm. She paid in full without blinking.
She was, in every visible particular, the easiest guest of the season.
And every single thing about her was one degree too bright.
Poppy caught it before I’d finished carrying up the woman’s bags, and Poppy’s amber flag went orange over the course of one afternoon, in pieces.
“The luggage is new,” she murmured to me at the desk, watching Eva cross to the lounge. “Not new-for-the-trip new. New like she bought an entire life last week. The tags were still creased in the folds, I felt them.” She tapped a form straight. “And the robe.”
“What about the robe.”
“She wears it like a costume.” Poppy nodded at the woman, who had the house robe on over her resort wear, belted just so, a careful drape.
“Guests live in those robes by day two. They wear them like dressing gowns, like pajamas, like the thing you put on to be a person who isn’t performing.
She’s wearing hers like she’s about to be photographed in it.
Nobody relaxed wears a robe that well.” She straightened the last form in the stack.
“And at breakfast she forgot her own surname for a moment when the waiter asked. Maier, she said, a beat late, like she was checking a note.” Poppy smiled, and it was not a nice smile, it was the switchblade. “Shy widow with a slow bank, my eye.”
I’d have dismissed it as Poppy being Poppy, except that I fixed Eva Maier’s window that afternoon, and the window told me Poppy was right.
The casement in her room had jammed in the cold, swollen in the frame, and I went up to free it, and she was good company throughout, genuinely good company, which was the trouble.
She leaned in the doorway and made me laugh twice before I’d got the cover off the latch, a dry observation about the cable car and a better one about the lobby’s piped birdsong, and she had a gift for the thing I always notice in people, which is that she asked a real question and then actually listened to the answer, or appeared to.
“That’s not a swollen frame, that’s the building settling,” she said, watching me work, and she wasn’t wrong, which was annoying. “My father restored an old farmhouse. I spent my childhood holding the torch lower. You’re holding your shoulders the way he did. Bad back?”
“Bad everything. It’s the job.”
“What is the job, exactly? Up here?” Lightly. Smiling. “Half of you seem to do four things. The handsome handyman who’s also, I gather, on the massage rota. It’s a very efficient operation.”
“It’s a small staff.”
“Mm.” She let it go and came back to it from a different doorway a minute later, never quite leaving any subject alone.
“And the famous success rate. Is it really as remarkable as people whisper? Because I have to say, having met the place, I can’t see the trick of it.
Good mountain water and good massage doesn’t usually… ”
“It’s mostly rest,” I said, planing the sash. “Wealthy women never rest. You’d be amazed what eight weeks of nothing does for a body.”
“I would,” she said, “be amazed,” and there it was, the beat too long, the bright eyes cataloguing the answer for later, every clever question bending toward the same low point in the floor like water.
Staff tenure. Guest turnover. That success rate one hears about.
And when I gave her nothing but a smile and a planed-down sash, she changed the angle and tried again from a new direction, smooth as anything, never once pushing hard enough to alarm a person who wasn’t already watching for it.
“You’re very discreet,” she said, pleased, when the window swung free at last on its freed runner.
“It’s most of the job,” I said.
“I imagine it would be.” She looked at me a moment longer than the line needed, cataloguing, charming, filing, and I thought: Poppy’s right, and the dangerous part is that I like her.
She’s funny and she’s quick and her questions are good and if she’d checked in as anyone else I’d have fixed her window and chatted and thought nothing of it. Which is exactly why she’s dangerous.
But that was Eva’s week to begin, and it was Greta’s week to end, and the house had a send-off to throw.
They’d planned it for days, the staff, a conspiracy of warmth.
Ute baked, which from Ute is a love letter, a tall thing with cream and the last of the winter preserves that she set down in front of Greta and refused to be thanked for.
Poppy presented, with the absolute gravity of a state ceremony, a laminated certificate she’d made on the office machine: Alumna of the Decade, it read, in a font she’d agonized over, awarded to G.
Lindqvist for Services to the Brochure, and Greta laughed until she had to hold the belly and Poppy looked prouder of it than of anything she’d done all season.
And Bianca, at the end, gave Greta a small bottle of the good oil, the almond-and-green one she hoarded and pretended she didn’t, and said, gruff, “For when you’re home.
So you don’t forget what being looked after feels like,” and then had to leave the room briefly to be busy with something, the loudest, least sentimental woman on the staff undone by her own gift.
Even Yuki contributed, in her way. She produced, with a perfectly straight face, a slim booklet she’d had printed and properly bound at the stationer’s down in the valley, a complete feeding-and-sleep schedule for the first six weeks, color-coded across the pages, hand-corrected in two places where the printer had got her spacing wrong, with a note on the inside cover that said call any hour.
I keep odd ones. Greta turned the pages and pressed it to her chest and said it was the most romantic gift she’d ever received, and Yuki said, “It’s a logistics document,” and a flush climbed her throat, and Greta kissed the top of her head, which Yuki allowed.
Ute’s contribution was a tin. She didn’t say what was in it.
“For the road, and the week after,” she said, and set it in Greta’s hands with both of her own, holding the grip a beat longer than a woman who never held anything too long, and Greta, who knew exactly what that meant, held the tin like it was the baby itself.
Simone watched the conspiracy of warmth from the edge of it, the auditor observing a thing she had no column for, and at the end she crossed the room and put a slim envelope on the pile of gifts, and when Greta opened it later it was a card with one line in that slashing imperial hand: When you need a second chair, I have a logistics company.
We move anything. S.D. Greta laughed and then didn’t, because it wasn’t entirely a joke, and Simone had known it wasn’t when she wrote it.
Greta booked her last slot with me, and then traded it, as was her way, to dawn, off-chart, her balcony, because her season had started in the dark of a winter arrival and she wanted it to end where the light started.
The garden room balcony at first light is the best seat the place has.
She’d built a nest of blankets out there, two mugs of cocoa gone cold, and she drew my arms around her from behind, the two of us wrapped against the alpine cold while the valley below us went from black to grey to the first pink, and she gave me the agenda in her lullaby voice.
“Slowly,” she said. “While the sun comes up. And quietly, because sound carries downhill in the morning and I absolutely refuse to become a village legend.” A pause, smiling. “Refuse is strong. I would mind a little.”
Warm, slow mechanics, the counter-scene to all the gymnastics.
No acrobatics anywhere. Just the two of us spooned under the blankets in the cold dawn air, her back warm against my chest, the belly heavy and full in my lap, and I reached down between her thighs and stroked her slow, parting her, circling her clit until she was wet and sighing and lifting her top leg to open for me, and then I pressed myself to where she was slick and open and eased into her from behind in a slow tide, sinking deep into her warmth, the heat of us a stolen thing against the cold of the morning.
She gasped, soft, and reached back to grip my hip and hold me buried deep a moment before she let me move, and then we moved together in long languid rolls, my cock filling her slow and full, while the light climbed the far ridge and our breath fogged in the cold.
I filled my hands with her heavy breasts, full to aching with the morning, and they were leaking, the dampness already soaking through to the blanket, and my fingers went slick with her milk as I cupped and squeezed them, the warm wetness of it spilling over my palms, beading from the swollen nipples with every roll of my hips into her, and she made a low laughing sound against the pillow.
“Such a waste,” she whispered, delighted, “all that, on your hands, on the blankets. Or not a waste. Nothing’s a waste.
Lick your fingers, go on, the village can’t see that.
” And I did, brought my milk-slick fingers to my mouth over her shoulder, the sweet warmth of her on my tongue, and she watched me do it half-turned and shivered against me and pressed back harder onto me, taking me deeper.
“Greedy,” she breathed, all lullaby-soft, smiling. “I’ll miss greedy. Nobody at home will be greedy for me. Again. The other hand’s all wet too.”