Climb every mountain
Jeremy Clarke tries the high life at the Carlton hotel, St Moritz We slid the picture window of our mountain railway carriage right down to let great gusts of alpine air cool our faces. The ascent was steep, almost funicular. Roaring tunnels punctuated astonishing vistas of lakes and snow-streaked Alps, then flower-filled meadows, intricate waterfalls and fairy-tale log chalets.
We stepped down from the carriage at St Moritz. The clarity of light and sounds in the thin air made me feel like a ghost. Black limousines whisked us along a final few upward turns to the foyer of the Carlton hotel.
I checked in and was shown up to my room by an extraordinarily polite young man wearing tails and waistcoat. The room was in darkness. Diffidently, as if presuming on my hospitality, he pressed a switch on the wall and four motor-driven blinds on two sides of the enormous room rose simultaneously, dramatically revealing a schoolbook lesson in glacial physical geography — actual size. I stood out on one of the balconies to take it in. It might have been the balcony of an airship gondola. Far below, a pellucid lake, with the famous old alpine sports resort (pop. 5,000) clinging about its southern shore. Above, a snow-streaked mountain range: proper mountains — almost lunar above the conifer line and slightly intimidating.
The polite young man said he was my butler. Was there anything he could do? Unpack my suitcase, perhaps? The thought of him carefully laying out my faded Bench underpants was too much. I shook my head sadly. After he’d gone I lay on the bed, whose surface area was the size of my bed room at home, and anxiously contemplated the sunlit peaks.
Dinner was at eight. I was dreading it. Fine dining terrifies me. It’s more than chippiness: it’s actually a phobic thing. I have a deep-seated and irrational belief that I’m not socially eligible and might be exposed at any moment by a waiter as a shameless parvenu, and held up to the ridicule of the other diners. To prepare for the ordeal, I took a shower in the palatial bathroom. The jets of water came at me from unexpected directions and beat me half to death. I think I received a colonic irrigation at the same time. Then I put on my 100 per cent polyester Cancer Research suit and my best Adidas trainers and took the lift to the dining-room.
At the doors of the Romanoff restaurant I was greeted warmly and sincerely by a line of smiling staff, each of whom were better dressed and seemed more intelligent than I am or ever will be. The head greeter then escorted me across half an acre of carpet to a round table in an alcove with a panoramic view of the brooding mountains and lake. Down beside the lake, the lights of St Moritz were twinkling expensively in the gathering dusk. To my dismay I saw that the table I was being led towards was the equivalent of the captain’s table, and I was to be seated next to the hotel manager, Mr Christopher Cox: youthful, blonde, unobtrusively German.
Once everybody was seated and settled, Herr Cox conferred on me a leather-bound book, thick and heavy as a Victorian family Bible. Was I to select a Psalm, perhaps, to get things rolling? I opened it. It was the wine list. There were 680 wines to choose from. And how did I like my room? asked Herr Cox. The Carlton, St Moritz has very recently undergone a £20 million refurbishment. The 103 rooms and suites have been reorganised into 60 front-facing suites, each one uniquely decorated by the flamboyant Italian designer Carlo Rampazzi.
Fantastic, I said.
Which colour was my suite? pressed Herr Cox. He had me there. I hadn’t a clue. I was too busy trying to come to terms with my recent ascent, physical and social, and the spectacular views, to notice details like the colour of my suite. Green, I said? He didn’t think they had any green ones.
A saintly-faced waiter then stepped forward and humbly introduced himself to the company. The sommelier, Raphael. Someone affectionately asked him how he was keeping. ‘Last night,’ he announced, ‘I was drinking wine and speaking about philosophy with some very good friends of mine until four o’clock. And as we all know, a lack of sleep is a tragedy for the intellectual.’ Unless we had any ideas of our own about which wine to choose, said Raphael, to my very great relief, he would like to recommend first a red, a personal favourite of his, the Fattoria le Pupille Saffredi 2004. It comes, he said, from a 70-hectare vineyard near his home in Tuscany. The winter of 2003 was bitterly cold there, and the spring average. But a hot summer and three thunderstorms in July and August brought the grapes along to perfection. Graciously asking our permission to quote from the political philosopher Herbert Marcuse, he continued: ‘A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilisation. It is a token of technical progress. But tonight, ladies and gentlemen, this Saffredi 2004 will gently steer us back to freedom and humanity.’ And then words failed him and he just stood there helpless with tears in his eyes. Someone guffawed.
The heart on Raphael’s immaculate sleeve, and the utterly unpretentious, frank, cheerful evening that followed were my first clues that at St Moritz’s newly refurbished Carlton hotel at least, having seen it all over the years and now inundated during the winter with oil-rich Arabs and Prada-clad Russians, the management now prefers guests — especially its esteemed and slightly paranoid English guests — to be only themselves. ❑
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