Singing for my supper
Petronella Wyatt
The builders are supposed to start work on the inside of my house next month. Last November they finished the underpinning, with the result that the house looks like a national monument. This is in the sense of it being covered in scaffolding. Moreover, the roof above the front door is propped up by two metal poles painted in red and white stripes. So perhaps it looks more like a barber's shop.
Seeing all the scaffolding, people have assumed that the house is unoccupied. By people, I mean burglars. The number of attempted burglaries has increased by 200 per cent. So far they have taken three items of garden furniture, two columns, which were cemented to the ground so they got away with 4lbs of turf too, and busts of Pitt and Addington. They must have been culture vultures.
But I am about to say goodbye to all that. When the builders begin on the bedrooms I will have to move into a hotel for three or four months. The insurance company is paying for me to stay at Claridge's. I always thought that living in a London hotel was something only rich Americans did. I shall be like Elliott Templeton in The Razor's Edge, of whom Somerset Maugham wrote, 'He asked me to lunch at Claridge's, where he lived when in London.'
Templeton was an indefatigable snob. When he had fixed his eye on his prey he hunted it with the persistence of a botanist who will expose himself to floods, illness and hostile cannibals to find a plant of peculiar rarity. He sat in Claridge's and just waited. Perhaps I shall do the same. But for whom should I wait? There's no kudos nowadays in sniffing the air for dowager duchesses. The social equivalent, I suppose, would be the head of a television production company or a Labour party donor.
When they pass by, I shall be waiting. I have chosen as my lair an art-deco room on the first floor which, as the manager pointed out, negated the necessity of taking the lift. (Was this a withering condemnation of my figure?) The sitting-room looks like the one in Royal Wedding that Fred Astaire danced all over. Silver-gilt and glass mirrors throw shadows resembling, in an uncanny way, what the past patrons of the hotel might have looked like: a bent old spinster with a lapdog, a pools billionaire, a young homme du monde.
All hotels have their ghosts. Someone was supposed to have thrown themselves out of the window on the second floor. At least this was the recollection of a friend of mine who was born at Claridge's during the war.
I hope I am not reduced to doing the same, owing to the fact that my financial circumstances are in danger of being considerably reduced. The fly in the ointment is that I have not yet agreed with the insurance company on a food and drink allowance. What if they won't give me more than £50 a week? That would hardly buy breakfast, let alone meat and veg two times a. day. It would be embarrassing to stay at Claridge's but never to eat there. The restaurant manager would think I was Ally McBeal.
It would be awkward, too, taking food in. I could smuggle a sandwich under my coat, but what if it fell on the floor in front of the concierge? 'Do you object to the food here, Madam? Is it not up to standard?' Even less appealing is the idea of running a booze ring. One smashed bottle of wine on the lobby floor and I would have to pay for the carpet to be cleaned. There is about 60 metres of it, so that's a hefty dry-cleaning bill. The only solution is astronaut food. You know, that air-dried stuff that looks like blocks of cow-dung and comes in shiny packets. I think they sell it in Harvey Nichols. There are two flavours — chocolate and strawberry sundae. Is that really what astronauts eat?
No. Dried cow-dung is not the answer. I had better get a job — apart from this one, I mean. I noted on my last visit to Claridge's that a three-piece jazz band plays in the lobby at drinks time. It lacks a singer. If Martine McCutcheon can sing Eliza in My Fair Lady. I can croon at Claridge's, then I could afford to pay to eat there. Who knows, a Labour donor might even drop in and donate something to me.
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