Dining Room, the Grand Hotel Mirabeau, Lausanne
10th November 1989
Fried Fillet of Perch
Perch fillets dipped in egg, then flour, salted and peppered with a hint of paprika, fried in butter … Speciality of the place. A finicky fish – hardly worth eating – bones like needles. Tastes of the riverbed.
She put down her pen and pushed her plate away. She wasn’t here to eat the food or drink the wine. She had no appetite anyway. She’d come by way of Natzweiler-Struthof, a Nazi camp two hundred miles north of here. A Nacht und Nebel place, Night and Fog. Apt name. Four British girls had died there, forgotten by almost everybody, tucked away in the back pocket of a secret war.
She’d laid four red roses in the black maw of the rusting oven. A pilgrimage of sorts.
If these do not die well, it will be a black matter …
They had not died well.
A ragged cheer burst from the kitchen. Through the flapping doors, she could see white-coated backs in front of a portable television. From the foyer, tinny, muffled commentary, crowd noise, clinking and chanting, mixed with the excited chatter of guests and staff clustered round a larger screen, drawn by the need to witness the drama taking place in Berlin, history erupting into the present, breaking through the muted formality of this grand hotel. An ending? A beginning? Both? Impossible to tell.
Not that it mattered. Very little mattered anymore.
‘Are you finished, Madame?’ The elderly waiter hesitated before taking her plate. ‘The dish not to your liking?’
‘I’m not hungry.’ She capped her pen and lit a cigarette.
‘You have been here before?’ He asked as he refilled her glass. A Chasselas. Swiss wine, none the worse for that.
‘Once. A long time ago.’
Just after the war. She doubted he would remember. How many people did he encounter? She’d been here under another name. A different person. A different time. She remembered him, though. His name was Joseph. She had a good memory for faces. She’d needed it in her line of business. A slender, solemn, graceful young man then, dark, thin-faced, with a pencil moustache. His hair silver now, the moustache still there – a thin line sketched in graphite. French, she recalled, and Jewish. He’d found safety here in Switzerland. She wondered if his family had been as lucky.
‘Anything else for you, madame? A little dessert, perhaps? Coffee?’
‘No, thank you.’ She knocked the glass, her hand suddenly as useless as a bat. Wine spilled across the table. Joseph sprang forward to repair the damage. ‘No need.’ She shook her head. ‘Clumsy of me.’
She held her hands on her lap and looked around at the immaculately laid tables, the stiff, starched linen, the gleam of the heavy silver cutlery, the glittering glassware, her fellow diners. Some of them frail, in wheelchairs, she noted, the staff must be used to different degrees of infirmity. She pushed herself back from the table. Anticipating that she was about to leave, Joseph was immediately at her side, whisking her chair away, offering her his arm.
She declined his help and made her way slowly, Joseph hurrying in front of her, nodding to two young waiters to open the double doors. He bowed as she left. She smiled her thanks and wished him farewell. This was the last time she would be eating here, or anywhere. In a little less than twenty-four hours, Stella Snelling, restaurant critic and cookery writer, acclaimed and feared in equal measure, would be no more.
She’d taken a suite with a view of the lake. The Art Deco furnishings were just shabby enough to be authentic. She’d had the black lacquer writing desk reversed, so that it faced away from the fussy, fluted fan-shaped mirror. She found her appearance disconcerting. She had never expected to get this old, to live this long. Even with ten years knocked off Stella’s passport, she was looking her true age now. She wore no makeup, her black hair an untidy grey mane; the dark eyes, deep and hooded, had seen too much; the grooved lines etched on the forehead, by the sides of the mouth, carried too much pain. She hardly recognized this person she had become. In her dreams, she was always young.
She opened the overnight bag that she’d brought with her, taking out a small green medical case. She removed the top tray holding the plasters, scissors, antiseptic cream, paracetamol and tablets that any traveller might carry, to reveal a number of disposable hypodermic syringes, ampoules of diamorphine, and more of the drug in capsule form. She placed the drugs in the small refrigerator and took out the Koskenkorva vodka. She poured a glass, lit a cigarette and went out onto the balcony.
The light had almost gone. The lake was a dark pewterish-purple, the mountains opposite lost in a cold, bluish haze. A mist had risen, diffusing the last of the sunset, layering the lake with bloodied gauze.
She sipped her drink, savouring the sharp, clear spirit. There were clinics here in Switzerland that offered a discreet service for the end of life. Such facilities were not openly advertised. She was wealthy, with no living relatives, and believed strongly in a person’s right to choose how he or she wanted to die. Arrangements had been made, monies forwarded (for certain services, the clinic demanded prepayment). Tomorrow at 10.30, she had an appointment. A substantial further donation had guaranteed the director’s personal attention. Nothing would be left to chance. Hence the diamorphine. The lake had turned to glittering blackness, the coloured lights of the quay dancing on its restless surface. Time to go back inside.
She opened a leather attaché case and began to lay out the contents on the desk. A brochure for the Endymion Clinic: situated on the beautiful shores of Lake Geneva, offering proven anti-ageing treatments and unrivalled levels of expertise in the areas of fertility and sexual health. The name of the director had been circled, Other services available on application, doubly underlined. The brochure had arrived at her Paris flat with an accompanying note from Adeline in New York. This is what we’ve been waiting for! in Adeline’s arthritic scrawl, with instructions to go ahead and make arrangements. They would do it together, Adeline had said, but she was doing it alone. Within days, it seemed, she was reading Adeline’s obituary.
ADELINE CURTIS CROFT PARNELL the celebrated female war correspondent, who covered every major conflict from World War II to San Salvador, died on Sunday in her New York West Village apartment aged 79.
Adeline Parnell was one of the first journalists to enter Germany with Allied Forces. She reported honestly and fearlessly about events as they were happening, including the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau. She went on to report on the Nuremburg trials and won a Pulitzer for her reporting from Korea. She covered the war in Vietnam and the conflict in San Salvador until ill health forced her retirement. She continued to photograph her home city of New York, which she described as ‘her war zone’.
Born Adeline Curtis Croft in 1910, in Poughkeepsie, New York State, she was educated at Bryn Mawr and Columbia University. She went on to work for various newspapers, including the New York Times and the Herald Tribune, as well as Life magazine. In 1942, she married fellow journalist Sam Parnell who was killed in 1944. She never remarried and leaves no close relatives. Her estate and considerable archive are bequeathed to Columbia University.
It was no surprise. She had last seen Adeline in her New York apartment a month or so before. She had tried not to show her shock at finding her old friend so diminished; slumped and twisted into her wheelchair, so thin that her blue shirt and fawn cord trousers seemed empty, like clothes on a puppet, her thick, blonde curly hair reduced to white wisps, her rings loose on the bird-claw fingers that twisted round the controls of her power chair.