cbr16bingo golden
Mrs. Palfrey, recently widowed, has had to make a decision regarding the rest of her life. She has no home of her own, since she had spent most of her life stationed in Burma with her husband. She had been temporarily staying with her daughter in Scotland, but clearly that was no permanent solution. So she eyed the London papers and settled on the Claremont Hotel in South Kensington. After all, her grandson, whom she had rarely seen, worked nearby at the British Museum, and as she firmly tells herself, “If it’s not nice, I needn’t stay.” She does, however, have some firm rules. “Be independent; never give way to melancholy; never touch capital. And she had abided by the rules.”
The grandson, though, never manages to come by, but one evening, as she is walking back from the library, she falls. A young man sees what has happened from his rooms below a shop, and hurries out to help her. He helps her down the stairs to his austere room and gives her some water and a towel to wipe the blood from her leg, and this being England, makes her some tea. Ludo by name, he is an aspiring writer and clearly impoverished. In gratitude for his kindness, she invites him to be her guest for dinner at the hotel (choice of two entrees!) and when he does indeed show up, impulsively introduces him as her grandson.
This works out rather well for the both of them for awhile, so much so that when the actual grandson finally makes an appearance, he is indignantly rejected by rest of the hotel’s guests as an imposter. Mrs. Palfrey says not a word. But in the end, all things must give way to the inevitable, and Mrs. Palfrey does, indeed, stay.