Hotel Life

One of the perks of my job is travel. And since most of my work trips require an overnight stay, I’ve become increasingly familiar with hotel rooms in the last couple of years. I still feel a flutter of excitement when I open the door of a hotel room to see it for the first time – and thankfully the flutter only occasionally turns to disappointment. And the delight of the bedroom is often matched – or surpassed – by the breakfast choices on offer in the hotel restaurant the next morning.  

But however much I enjoy the hotel experience, it’s not home. After a couple of nights away I’m always keen to get back home: to stop living out of a suitcase and return to my own space.

That in-between nature of the hotel – a homely place but one that is most definitely not home – is perhaps what makes it such a popular setting in novels. It is the ideal setting to bring together characters at the start of a novel, as is the case in E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1908) and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938).

Hotels can also provide a place of refuge for characters. That is the case in Anita Brookner’s novel Hotel du Lac. Published in 1984, Brookner’s Booker prize-winning novel, tells of Edith Hope, a romantic novelist, who has been ‘banished’ to Switzerland by her friends after an ‘incident’. Only two thirds of the way through the novel is it revealed that Edith jilted her fiance on her wedding day, unable to go through with the marriage because of her involvement with her married lover.

The Hotel du Lac on the shores of Lake Geneva, described as ‘a stolid and dignified building, a house of repute, a traditional establishment, used to welcoming the prudent, the well-to-do, the retired, the self-effacing, the respected patrons of an earlier era of tourism’ offers Edith the chance to step away from her London life, to spend time in a place where she and her past are unknown, and to find out what she wants.

Initially she focuses on writing, struggling to write her next novel and writing long anguished letters to her lover, David (who does not reply). But as time goes by, she opens her eyes to the other guests in the hotel, each of whom has their own story, including Mr Neville who, scarred by the scurrilous behaviour of his ex-wife, offers Edith marriage but without love. Edith is faced with a stark choice between her desire to escape spinsterhood and occupy a respectable position in society, and her longing for true love. I’ll leave it to you to read the book and find out what she decides to do.

As well as negotiating matters of the heart and her own trajectory in life, Edith also has to negotiate eating alone in public. On her first day, once unpacked, Edith descends the staircase to the hotel salon for afternoon tea. Initially she immerses herself in her book. However, once fortified by ‘tea and a slice of excellent cherry cake, Edith plucked up the courage to look around’. She sees a handful of guests, including a glamorous older lady and her younger daughter (Mrs Pusey and Jennifer) whom she spends some time observing.

That same evening, Edith ‘sought for ways of delaying the moment at which she would be forced to descend into the dining room and take her first meal in public’. However, the experience is much more positive than she anticipates: although the details of the meal are not revealed, the food is described as ‘hot and excellent’, and at the end of the meal Edith is invited to join Mrs Pusey and Jennifer for coffee: Edith’s absorption into her new environment has begun.

The ‘excellent cherry cake’ that Edith eats for afternoon tea was an obvious choice for me to make as I’ve loved cherry cake since my childhood. I had a block of left-over marzipan from Christmas in the freezer which was crying out to be used up, so I grated it into the cake mixture and it added a pleasing denseness to the mixture – but you could omit it.

HOTEL DU LAC CHERRY CAKE
Ingredients (makes 1 large cake to serve 10-12):
200g glace cherries
225g unsalted butter, softened
175g caster sugar
3 large eggs, beaten
2-3 drops almond essence
175g self-raising flour (or plain flour with added baking powder)
175g ground almonds
100g marzipan (optional)
6 tablespoons milk

Method:
Grease and line a 20cm diameter cake tin, ideally a springform one.
Halve the cherries, rinse them under cold water and then toss in a couple of tablespoonfuls of flour. This helps prevent the cherries sinking to the bottom of the cake (though, from my experience, it’s not foolproof!).
Preheat the oven to 170C / 150C fan / Gas mark 3.
Either in a food mixer, or by hand, cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Beat in the egg in three or four goes, adding a spoonful of flour each time to prevent the mixture curdling. Stir in the almond essence, the fold in the remaining flour and the ground almonds until well-combined. Finally fold in the cherries and milk – and marzipan, grated or chopped, if using.
Spoon the cake mixture into the prepared cake tin. Bake for ¾ – 1 hour (though if you use the marzipan it may take longer), until risen and golden and a cake-tester or skewer comes out clean.
Leave to cool in the cake tin before turning out.
Serve with crème fraiche for a bit of extra indulgence.