Not your average hotel
Their honeymoon hotel occupied a commanding position on a hill. The view to the front was of the coast, a short walk away through a thick growth of sea-grape, coconut palm and Cuba bark trees. To the rear, the ground fell away sharply until it rose again in another hill, densely covered with the ubiquitous, dark green shrubs of the island. The hotel had been built as a private house in the early years of the twentieth century by an artist called Wilma Paterson. She was famous in Jamaica for painting only one scene – the view from the front veranda – to which she returned in canvas after canvas. “I shall get it right one day,” she said. “The sky keeps changing. It’s most vexing.”
Wilma Paterson was American, the daughter of a professor of human anatomy at Harvard. She married Macfarlane Paterson, a wealthy dipsomaniac originally from Portland, Maine, and left him after five weeks. It was widely believed that he only became aware of her departure two years after she had gone; they had lived in separate wings of a large colonial-style house in Concord, and during the brief marriage they rarely saw one another, and when they did he was almost always drunk.
The more-than-generous divorce settlement set Wilma up first in Key West and then in Jamaica. While the house was being built, she stayed in Kingston, in a house she rented from the French consul-general. The consul-general had a son called Hubert, who was a fascist. He was twenty-five, five years younger than Wilma, but she found him irresistible. She paid no attention to his political views – “I always thought he was joking,” she said – and took great pleasure in showing him off to her girlfriends. “Isn’t Hubert unspeakably handsome?” she used to ask them, and they all agreed. “Handsome and dangerous,” said one, but Wilma paid no attention to the warning, as is often the case with friends.
Hubert moved in with her and after a year of co-habitation Wilma became pregnant, giving birth in 1920 to a daughter, Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de la Pagerie, named after Napoleon’s first wife, who had been born in Martinique, where Hubert himself had been born. In 1930 Wilma was widowed when Hubert, who had organised a picnic for a small group of French fascists, fell off the edge of a cliff. Three of the fascists, seeing him lying on a rock halfway down the cliff face, attempted to rescue him, but failed to do so. There had been heavy rainfall the day before and the ground was unstable. A large slab of cliff face tumbled into the sea below, taking with it all three rescuers and Hubert. Only two fascists returned from the picnic.
Wilma decided that she had never really liked Hubert, nor his friends, about whom she felt there was always a reek of sulphur. She took to being a widow, and devoted her energies to painting and entertaining. Marie Josèphe was sent to a convent school in Kingston, from which she was expelled at the age of seventeen for spitting at a nun. She married Haldane Mcintosh, a coffee planter, and gave birth to a daughter, Barbie, in 1950.
On Wilma’s death, Marie Josèphe inherited the house and in 1955 turned it into a hotel, naming it after her grandmother, Wilma. She was a natural hotelier, and as that part of the island became increasingly popular with a racy, artistic set, the hotel became the favourite haunt of the high-living and the socially ambitious. Hemingway stayed there shortly after it opened and was said to have worked in one of its rooms on Islands in the Stream, a novel that he had begun many years before and never published. Noel Coward and Ian Fleming lived nearby, and were to be seen with their glittering visitors in the bar and sometimes in the dining room, where the speciality of the house was lobster thermidor. Local legend had it that it was in this bar that a friend had asked Fleming whether he had been to the doctor that day. “Doctor? No,” replied Fleming, and then said, “However, that gives me an idea …” Like most stories about such places, this was almost certainly apocryphal.
Marie Josèphe handed the hotel over to her daughter Barbie, who in due course passed it on to her own daughter, Clottie, who was the result of an ill-judged affair she had with a dive instructor called Captain. Barbie did not enjoy managing the hotel, and after training Clottie to run it, she left the island to live on Antigua with an ill-mannered tax accountant. Clottie’s main interest was tennis, and since the hotel had its own tennis court, she was happy to stay there, spending a lot of time on arranging specialist tennis holidays. She renamed the bar the Centre Court, but the locals ignored this name and continued to refer to it as Wilma’s Bar.
Clottie had a woman friend called Tippy, who was German. She invited
Tippy to run the hotel with her, and Tip - py agreed. They lived in a small cottage behind the main house, outside which a round sign, of the sort that normally pre - vents parking, or walking dogs, or some other such activity, showed a picture of a man, with a red line crossing him out.
“Did you see that sign?” Elspeth asked Matthew after she had completed her exploratory walk around the hotel grounds.
“Yes,” said Matthew. “And I’m not sure how to interpret it.”
Elspeth looked at him. “I think that …” She did not get to finish. They were in their room at the time of this conversation, and there was a sudden, rather peremptory knock on the door. Elspeth opened it, to find herself faced with Clottie.
“Dinner,” Clottie said, “has been served for the last twenty minutes.”
Elspeth glanced at her watch. “All right,” she said. “We were just going to have a bath and then we’ll come along.”
Clottie glared at her. “I would appreciate it if you showered,” she said. “That uses far less water – particularly if you don’t linger.” She looked past Elspeth, to where Matthew was sitting on the bed. “And if you could possibly tell him about that – about the need to conserve water, I’d appreciate it.”
Elspeth gave a momentary start. “Him? Matthew?”
Clottie nodded. Her lip curled. “Indeed,” she said. “And 7.30 for dinner, by the way, doesn’t mean 8. It certainly doesn’t mean 9 either. It means 7.30.”
Elspeth opened her mouth to say something, but Clottie had turned on her heel and was half way down the corridor. “Well!” she said, turning to Matthew. Matthew smiled. “There you are,” he said.
‘She was widowed when Hubert, who had organised a picnic for a small group of French fascists, fell off the edge of a
cliff. Only two fascists returned from the picnic’
© 2020 Alexander Mccall Smith Alexander Mccall Smith welcomes comments from readers. Write to him c/o The Editor, The Scotsman, Orchard Brae House, 30 Queensferry Road, Edinburgh, EH4 2HS or via e-mail at scotlandstreet@scotsman.com