– Claudine has managed to get here, but not Nadenne. I don’t see why he couldn’t get the train. Fool! Moron! Idiot! Il est con! Con! Con! What did he say? What did he say?
I realised M. Durebex was addressing me. I said I’d only managed to get hold of Nadenne’s wife and I couldn’t understand her as she spoke only Tamil.
– What? What? What language is that?
– Tamil.
– J’ai horreur de ces gens, he spat. Musulmans!
I didn’t think Tamils were Muslims, but I didn’t say anything.
We sat down to eat. Claudine told us about a friend of hers who taught French as a foreign language. She said he played practical jokes on his students by giving wrong meanings which sounded right.
– For example, he would say poire – pear, singular. Poireau – pears, plural. When of course poireau really means leek!
We all laughed. Mme Durebex stopped herself.
– I hope you don’t do that with Laurent, Shona, she said sternly.
– Bien-sûr que, I began, only to be bulldozed by M. Durebex.
– How many times have we rung Nadenne, Mireille? Eh? MORONS! This idiot understands nothing. Strike? What strike? This strike is nothing but a manipulation of the leftists. They’ve been putting up posters for over a month at the universities, telling them to go on strike. They want to create a REVOLUTION!
His fist crashed to the table. Laurent looked at his father as though he were a stranger.
– Il sont tous des cons! Morons, the lot of them! Ninety per cent of people are morons!
Mme Durebex was constantly up from the table, as her husband demanded his plate be changed for every course. Claudine was occupied with the boys’ eating habits. So I, opposite M. Durebex, was his captive listener.
– And he works like a PIG!
I nodded dumbly, watching the smoked trout wobble as his fist came down again. He told me his telephone was filthy because Nadenne hadn’t touched it for two weeks. Again and again he asked Nadenne to clean it. Finally, Nadenne obeyed. He washed it. The appliance flooded with so much water and broke. Claudine and I looked at one another and bit back smiles. M. Durebex’ cheese was placed before him and he growled at it.
– I only like right-wingers. I’m very sectarian, I am. Que la droite.
I had to clear some plates to hide my expression. Laurent saw it and smiled triumphantly.
– And Shona, is she on the right or the left?
– Neither, I said.
I liked to think I was on another plane altogether, a plane where such divisions were obsolete. I put the plates in the sink and turned on the hot water. It gushed out fiercely, scalding me.
– Ouch!
Everybody looked at me.
– The leftists are evil. M. Durebex said.
– All your friends are right-wingers, Victor, said Claudine in her sweet voice, so how would you know? You don’t know any leftists, so how can you say they’re evil?
M. Durebex said nothing. I removed the salt and pepper with my unburnt hand. Claudine crooned at him.
– Pass me the cheese, please Victor.
– No.
– Can you please pass me the cheese, cher Victor.
– No, he smiled. No.
– Victor, I’ll never come and see you again.
– Oooh, what must I do for you to keep seeing me, chère Claudine?
– Pass me the cheese.
Then they joined hands and began to sing old French songs together. I wanted to share my amazement at this scenario with someone, but Laurent was peeling the skin off his piece of camembert and Mme Durebex stood by the window, finger to the corner of her mouth, staring out at the weather. It had snowed non-stop for the last two days. The chalet was getting smaller. The ski slopes would be getting better and the roads worse.
Visa
I slept in one of two tiny rooms near the entrance to the chalet. It would be more accurate to say I lay there every night, because a good night’s sleep was something of the past for me. The room was big enough for a small writing table and a single bed. My window looked out onto a bank of snow, rising beyond the eave. Each day a little bit more tumbled towards me. I could see part of a fir tree submerged in it, and the edge of the driveway beyond. Some twenty metres away a chalet, the Rothschild’s chalet Mme Durebex had told me proudly, was just visible in the clearing mist.
M. Durebex was in the foyer yelling at his wife, Why doesn’t this light work? Mireille, come and change this light bulb!
What a tyrant. I was dreading the drive to Geneva – a whole hour in the car with him. While I got my visa, M. Durebex was going to do business and Mme Durebex was going to shop.
I lay on the bed, allowing the routine of pre-visa panic to run through my body.
– Why have you stayed so long in France?
– I just love it, I have to keep coming back.
– You know it is illegal to work?
– Yes, of course. I have a private income.
– What about this, what were you doing in Spain?
– Visiting Spanish churches. I wrote a thesis about them.
– When are you going back to Australia?
– Soon, very soon.
I finished unpacking. I stacked my books on the writing table and put my journal in the drawer. There was a roll of sticky-tape in there. I took it out. I unzipped the pocket of my pack and took out the photos Paul had sent with his letter.
I stuck up a photo taken from the headland near my parents’ house. Sydney Harbour was blue, blue. Deep ultramarine to the city in the distance, rich dry green of eucalyptus in the foreground. I stuck up a photo of Bondi Beach. Paul lived there now. He had crouched on the beach in the evening with the sun going down behind him: sand to the top of the photo, yellow-white, pockmarked, the stroke of a surfer walking through the waves at the edge of the frame. Paul had taken another photo from his window of storm clouds coming over the burnt orange roofs of North Bondi.
The colours of Sydney pulsed through my room.
The last picture I stuck up was one I had seen many times. But it was a reprint from an old negative. Gone the familiarity. This was a fresh, compelling image.
It was taken from below the house, in the garden. The children were lined up along the verandah, eldest to youngest. Caroline standing back a little, a teenager uncomfortable with her young company; Paul, both hands on the railing, looking earnestly at the camera; David in a cocky attitude, hands on skinny boy-hips; Tom grinning in a T-shirt smeared with grass stains; Nora plucking at her dress, smiling crookedly. And last of all me, so small I’m on tiptoes straining to see over the railing.
There was a slight gap between Tom and David. That was where my other sister would have stood. The missing link. It was a tempting metaphor for all the gaps I felt in my knowledge of my own family. But it was too neat. My childhood friend Jane McCaughey had seven brothers and sisters – eight children born in the span of ten years – and she used to say she found out more about her family from inner-city gossip than she did from going home to a Sunday lunch.
I stretched out on the bed in the little room of dark pine. I thought of them, my siblings, flying into Sydney as I lay there. It was only a few days to Christmas. I imagined them circling over the city like so many vultures. I wanted to be there, although I didn’t want to be with them. I just wanted to know what was going on.
I heard a car horn. I looked out the window and saw the Mercedes had arrived to take us to Geneva. I was pulling my coat on when Mme Durebex began calling me.
The mist cleared as we descended, and for almost an hour the autoroute curved between sheer cliffs. Snow highlighted the bands along the rockface. They were so regular they looked to have been carved by a huge lathe. We drove in silence, a cool imposing silence like the silence of the landscape around us. I sat behind the driver, Mme Durebex next to me. M. Durebex sat on the far side engulfed in a dark fur coat.
– It’s so far away, Australia, he said suddenl
y. What an idea to come here!
– Are there mountains in Australia, Shona? asked Mme Durebex. Can you ski there?
So, they’d finally got my nationality right. I told Mme Durebex we skied, but there was often not much snow.
– They say that if you learn in Australia you can ski anywhere because there are so many rocks.
We used to go every year. The cawing of crows, anywhere, any time, still recalls those days at Perisher. We were always up early, the first passengers in the chairlift, the icy silence of the mountains broken only by the crows and our skis clacking together.
– Ah, said Mme Durebex, you must be a good skier. – I doubt it. I haven’t skied since I was fourteen.
The skis would still be lodged across the beams in my parents’ cellar. The first time I went skiing I got the old leather ski-boots that had been worn by my brothers and sisters before me. Overnight, in the warming-room, the boots hardened into inhospitable shapes. In this heated car, speeding towards the border, my body located easily those cold early mornings. Sobbing as my feet were squashed into the boots, confounded by all the holes and hooks for laces, limping down to the village with my heavy skis and stocks, full of resentment before the day had begun.
Mme Durebex was talking about Nadenne again. All the trouble she had gone to for him and his family, she complained, the papers, the political refugee status, the room the Durebex rented to Nadenne and his wife and two children. All the things she had taught him to cook, and he had no serving skills when he first came to her. And this was how he repaid them.
– You had better sack him, said M. Durebex.
– You can be sure I will, his wife replied.
– As soon as we get back to Paris.
– I’d do it right now if I could get through.
Gradually, the cliffs diminished. Vegetation emerged, the fields we drove by grew browner. I thought about those long drives to Perisher in a station-wagon packed with kids. Europeans would have considered us mad, the distances we went in Australia to get anywhere.
You would think those ski holidays more feasible when I was fourteen, when Nora and I were the only ones left at home. But my parents were probably spent by then. They must have started out ambitious, determined to give us everything, and found it was all a bit much. Holidays like this were just grains of sand in my childhood impressions. Everyone was older, finishing school, embarking on an adult life, and my parents were caught up in that. They were worrying about academic performance and career choice and wayward behaviour.
And if the focus of childhood falls on the family and the family is a group of individuals, there would be many other views; there would be a whole country of landscapes, dry and wet, dull and lush. How different Caroline’s impressions would be, I reflected as we drove around Lake Geneva. She would be looking down the years of repeated childhoods, while I was looking up at the coming of age, again and again. I imagined Caroline’s impressions to be full of the noise of kids, their more transitory joys and pains, whereas mine seemed like one long, aching adolescence.
M. Durebex mumbled something to his wife, which she repeated to me.
– Who speaks better English, Laurent or Hugues?
– They’re the same, I said. They both understand more than they speak.
– What did she say? said M. Durebex.
His wife interpreted.
– She said they both understand perfectly, but they speak less.
I corrected her embellishment.
– Not perfectly.
– Ah, she smiled stiffly, and repeated this to her husband.
And I tried to imagine how Laurent would look back on his childhood. It was hard for me to imagine; there would be only his impressions, no one else’s, and these parents pushing him, pushing him.
Cousins
There was, however, someone in this family I hadn’t heard about. Françoise was at the chalet when we returned from Geneva that evening. She had come from Perpignan, where she ran a farm with her brother. She was short and stocky with two deep lines arching across her forehead that gave her an expression of bemusement and disapproval. The rest of her face was battered, healthy and warm. She had messy hair, vaguely blond, like the tufts of grass by the roadside that reappeared at the end of a sunny day.
Mme Durebex kissed her, then turned to me, saying brightly, You’d never guess we were cousins, would you? We don’t look anything alike.
But I could see that they might have: the same deep-set eyes, almost black, like singed bark. The face around them formed by exterior things: wind and sun, in the case of Françoise; interior things, like cosmetics, in the case of Mme Durebex.
They were the same age but had not much more than blood in common: Françoise had no money, no vanity, no husband or child. It was, as she told me in her rough accent, Laurent she had come to see.
– No one else, just Laurent.
Françoise was given a small room upstairs, opposite the salon. After mine, it could have been called the worst room in the chalet. It was narrow, the walls covered in ugly dark paper. But like a treasure in a cave, an antique wash-basin painted finely with pink roses glowed at the foot of the bed in there. Claudine and Hugues were in the room adjacent, which was large, with peach-coloured carpets and an ensuite bathroom. The pecking order was shifted at dinner because of my vegetarianism: while the rest of us ate smoked salmon, Françoise was given a cold meat salad made from leftovers.
– It’s good to see you eat so much, mon petit poisson, she clucked over Laurent.
– This salmon is too thick, Laurent grumbled, one eye on his father, who had remarked on how badly it was cut.
– Shona can ski, she can do the black runs, said Mme Durebex, changing her husband’s plate. She can go out with you when Renaud is taking classes, Laurent.
Laurent rolled his bread into little balls, unsure whether this was a good thing or not. Renaud was a ski instructor employed by the Durebex to ski with Laurent.
– I want to do the black runs too, piped Hugues, who had only been skiing twice before.
– Finish your salad, Hugues, said Claudine.
– I hope I remember how to ski, I said, finding a finer slice of salmon for Laurent.
– Don’t you think this wine I got out is good? said Mme Durebex to her husband.
– Quelle horreur! It’s terrible. And you should serve it chilled.
Françoise raised her eyebrows at me. I returned her look with relief. We were collaborators in enemy territory.
Françoise took Laurent down to the study to watch television and I cleaned up with Mme Durebex and Claudine. Claudine was efficient in the kitchen. She twisted her long hair back and cleared briskly, while Mme Durebex fussed with less results. Claudine and I used the tu form with one another, and I called her by her first name. In the company of her and Mme Durebex my role switched from one of the girls to subordinate jeune fille and back again, sometimes in the space of one sentence, and I found this more demanding than a dinner party conversation with French intellectuals.
I wrapped the cheeses and began to put them in the fridge. Mme Durebex rushed over.
– No! Never put the cheese in the fridge. The Monsieur hates that.
I dragged the broom around them. Three were not needed and I was in the way, but I knew I had to be there. It was the fourth day and obvious to everyone that Nadenne wasn’t going to turn up. Still, each mealtime he was cursed. It was mandatory, like the saying of grace.
Each morning Mme Durebex would go out skiing with the boys. Françoise didn’t ski and spent her days walking on the mountain. Sometimes Claudine went out with her, sometimes M. Durebex. I stayed inside, reading, writing, cleaning the kitchen, cooking, secretly hoping someone would break a leg on the ski slopes so I could go out on their ticket. Mme Durebex had given me an outfit from the room of ski gear. As abundantly stocked as the kitchen, this room was a testament to her meanness in wanting me to buy my own gear before we left Paris.
I didn’t dar
e go beyond the kitchen or my room, expecting M. Durebex to suddenly materialise and berate me, though in reality he hardly addressed a word to me and when he did it was always in the vous form.
A tall Senegalese called Honorée came and cleaned for two hours every day. Honorée worked in a red pork-pie hat, and high heels that showed off her fine ankles to full advantage. In spite of Honorée the kitchen needed constant attention, as people were in and out of it all day, and it was me that Mme Durebex yelled at if she found it in disarray.
I was ready to teach English in the late afternoon when the boys got back. They had hardly any work from school, so I taught them other things. Laurent had wanted to know what ouch meant. I also taught them yuk, bewdy mate, and the jewel in the crown: supercalafragilisticexpialadotious. Ever since Laurent had seen Mary Poppins, he’d badgered me for this word.
They wanted me to teach them all the expletives. I said I didn’t know any. Each day they became more persistent, more insolent, using the French ones on me to force an exchange. Each day I lost a little bit more of my control over them.
Mme Durebex often sent me down to the village to do the shopping. These expeditions were big splurges. I had hundreds of francs to spend on food. Everything was overpriced but I didn’t care. I bought wheels of the best camembert, deliciously putrid goat’s cheese, tropical fruits, and trays of tiny containers of crème fraîche. Figaro was always on the shopping list; I bought myself Libération to wrap around it. When I got back Mme Durebex stared so hard at the change I put down in front of her that I wondered if she noticed the beginning of my private rebellion – the purchase of a pain au chocolat – a rebellion against her stinginess with money and my own austere diet.
I began doing most of the cooking. Mme Durebex showed me how to start off a salad dressing by rubbing a clove of garlic against the end of a fork placed flat at the bottom of the bowl. She showed me how to make tart pastry in five minutes – let the butter soften during the afternoon, rub it into the flour with your fingertips until it’s fine as breadcrumbs, add a bit of water. She tasted everything at first, then in silent approval left me to my own devices. She said my tomato sauce reminded her of the south. In the kitchen we became friends.
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