Au Pair

by Fiona McGregor

  But I didn’t say anything about the frozen beans. Frozen green beans were eaten all the time. These people treated food like a religion, and the inclusion of frozen beans on the menu made it all seem fake to me. To register my disappointment, I said I couldn’t cook them. So Mme Durebex took over in this department, going from the freezer to the stovetop while I remained at the chopping board.

  I revelled in that kitchen – all the space, all those implements. I felt like a chef in a restaurant. The knives were sharp, there was always a pot just the right size, just the right thickness. I didn’t have to compromise with ingredients. If saffron should be used, I used saffron.

  At night, watching television in the study, I talked to Françoise. Françoise wasn’t very fond of words. Talk is cheap, she would scoff. She didn’t say much, but everything she did say was said with vehemence: vehement affection for Laurent, vehement disapproval of most other things.

  She told me a little about the Durebex. Victor had married Mireille when she was twenty-eight. They had lived in the fast lane from Paris to Mégèves to their villa in St Tropez, and the world beyond. M. Durebex’ age had begun to show only in the last few years, since the skiing accident. Françoise said she had never liked him. She said Mme Durebex had changed when she married him.

  – What was she like before then? I asked. In Perpignan?

  – Oh, me and Mireille got on then, when we were young. I mean very young, Shona, younger than you. She didn’t live in Perpignan, but she used to come and stay with us every holiday.

  – Doesn’t she ever visit you now?

  – Bof, she’s moved up in the world.

  – Has she changed that much?

  – Listen to her accent. More Parisian than a Parisian.

  I wondered if mine would change again, talking to Françoise, being in Savoie. I wondered if, when I got back to Paris, I’d have a layer of Perpignanais/Savoyard on top of the Aussie and Parisian that was already there. Layers of accents, like a millefeuille cake, like sedimentary rock.

  Françoise laughed and put a finger to the corner of her mouth. I felt jolted: was it a gesture that ran in the family, or an imitation of Mme Durebex?

  – Sometimes though, when she gets angry, she lapses back into her provincial accent. And that only makes her more angry.

  I knew the feeling. The other day, coming back up from the village, I’d dropped a bottle of olive oil on the road. Fuck! I cursed. Two Americans were coming up the path behind me.

  – What’s that accent? Where’re you from?

  – Australia.

  – Yo! Crocodile Dundee! Chuck another shrimp on the barbie, mate!

  – It’s prawn, actually, I smiled, trying to wipe the oil off my boot with a chunk of snow.

  – And as for that vegetarianism, Françoise scoffed.

  I said nothing. She patted my shoulder reassuringly.

  – It’s different for you, Shona, but for a Perpignanaise c’est couper ses racines.

  What about my roots in the land of beef and sheep; had I cut them too, with my selective eating? No, when I thought about home and food I had no such sense of dislocation. If I were in Sydney now, hungry, I would have headed straight for Bondi and fish and chips.

  I told Françoise about Australia. I made it sound big and bright and free. I never knew I had thought of it like that. She asked me about myself. I told her bits and pieces and realised in the telling the presence of my family. And I wasn’t even talking about cousins – they were just one big boring blur next to all the people I had to contend with in my immediate family.

  It irritated me, it embarrassed me. I expected more of myself – my ego demanded it shine alone. I sought anecdotes of me, the individual, but once unravelled, everything eventually snagged up again with my family.

  – They’re very important, Françoise nodded.

  Reluctantly, I admitted they were. I still couldn’t accept it.

  – It’s good, Françoise said in a reassuring tone. Family is important to everyone. It’s strong.

  She’s right, I thought. It is strong. It’s going to defeat me.

  Thieves

  I spent all afternoon making spinach and cheese ravioli. Claudine and Hugues were in the village with friends, so there were only five of us at dinner. M. Durebex’ hearing-aid whistled fiercely, and Mme Durebex and I talked about food over the top of it. He caught the word garlic and said to his wife that, as usual, she hadn’t put enough in the salad dressing.

  What perverse acuity. The salad dressing was Mme Durebex’ only contribution to this meal. Françoise said she thought the dressing tasted perfect. Mme Durebex said the garlic must have been old. She assured her husband she had put in the required two cloves.

  – Yuk! Laurent suddenly said.

  Everybody frowned at the foreign word.

  – This ravioli is tasteless, he explained in French. Then he got up and took some ham from the fridge. He grabbed a large knife and began to cut the ham into his ravioli. Shreds of it dropped around his plate. The knife wobbled dangerously in his little fingers. I hoped Laurent would cut himself, then hoped he wouldn’t, because of the fuss that would ensue. His mother watched him nervously, then began to tell her husband that the taxi driver had charged her five francs more than he should have that afternoon.

  – They’re thieves!

  – Oh là là là là. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? he rebuked. A measly five francs. I hope you didn’t say anything.

  – Yes, I said they were thieves.

  – Give me the knife, chéri, Françoise coaxed Laurent. I’ll do it.

  Françoise cut ham into her bowl as well. All over my beautiful ravioli. It didn’t matter anyway – the aura of punishment had ruined everybody’s appetite. We sat there motionless, looking at our food.

  – Oh là là, I’m never going down to the village again! It’s a disgrace, do you hear me? Une honte!

  – But I only said it in the entrance, Victor.

  – The driver didn’t hear you, Mireille, Françoise reassured her in a whisper.

  But now M. Durebex was shouting, waving his arms.

  – T’AS PAS HONTE? Oh là là là là, five francs, I’m never going to show my face in the village again. C’EST UNE HONTE!

  The silence over the table hardened – water into ice. Françoise and I sent looks to one another. Mme Durebex began to clear, quietly soothing her husband.

  – All right, Victor. All right.

  Did he realise how loudly he yelled, or was he that deaf it felt like talking to him? Even when he muttered, poking around the entrance outside my bedroom door because a light had been left on, I could hear his oh là là’s as clearly as if he were in the room with me.

  He was just like my own father, pacing around irritably, unable to rest if a light had been left on. Such waste! Was this how the rich got rich? When I moved back home Dad would pass my room as I read late at night. Without pushing the door open to check, his hand would come feeling down the doorframe to switch the light off. I might as well have not been there at all.

  It was too hot to sleep. I’d left the heater on all day. The skin on my face prickled, my whole body itched. I peeled off the long johns I’d bought Matthew last winter at Prisunic. I didn’t know how they’d ended up with me. I thought that when we broke up, everything we’d shared had been equally divided. But there was still evidence of things left behind. The socks, the scarf. I was positive now he’d taken that scarf – surely I hadn’t just given it to him. Too bad for him about the long Johns. They made good pyjama pants.

  I opened the window and let the cold air hit my face. I became aware of the muffled shifting silence of snow falling. My reading lamp illuminated the stalactites along the eave, and layers of snow on the branches of the fir tree.

  I picked up the Maupassant and continued reading: ‘Certes, je rencontrai beaucoup de pauvres filles cherchant aventure …’ But my eyelids were drooping, my head was beginning to ache in the cold air. It was three-thirty
by my watch. I closed the window and tried to sleep again.

  Three-thirty, the dead hour of night. Three-thirty on a summer day in Barcelona, the streets are dead. I am in the hotel room with Matthew. Sunlight through the shutters ladders the bed in which we lie. Restless, I watch the corrugation of his ribs shift as he sleeps. Silence tells me all the other guests in the hotel are sleeping too. I want to go for a walk; I know it’s siesta time but I can’t adjust to this daytime sleeping.

  I am on the other side of the Ramblas, the seedy side. The streets twist, dark and narrow. Hookers lurk, dealers hiss, Matthew comes running up behind me crying, This is awful, this is ominous. We’ll get mugged, let’s go back.

  I turn in surprise. I say, I thought you were such an adventurer, but you’re being a wimp.

  Matthew insists we go back to the bar near the hotel, and so we go, me thinking, This is the last time. It’s a small dim bar where men sit all day playing cards and drinking sharp wine. The kind of bar where Matthew feels safe and I feel suffocated.

  I take Matthew to the station. I negotiate tickets and times. He stands beside me looking ridiculous in the sewn-up long johns from Prisunic. The train pulls out and he leans from a window, watching me sadly. I walk rapidly away down the platform and Chantale grabs my arm.

  – Sophie, you can’t leave now! He’s waving!

  – I have to leave, I say, I have to get the recipe for paëlla.

  – But I don’t eat paëlla! Matthew calls.

  I just keep walking.

  I continue along the platform – it’s long, very long. I’m interested only in procuring this recipe and am vaguely troubled by this, thinking it’s Matthew I should be interested in.

  I approach the ticket gate. My father is waiting in a ticket collector’s uniform. Anxiously, I feel in my pockets for the ticket I know isn’t there.

  – Well, my father smiles at me, you’ve been through a bad time, and now you’re coming out of it.

  – What? I stop in surprise. The words seem kind. He repeats them.

  – You’ve been through a bad time, and now you’re coming out of it.

  He walks away laughing. The laugh is nasty. I’m rooted to the spot. I call out, What do you mean?

  M. Durebex turns and says, Shona? What sort of a name is that? C’est une honte!

  On the Mountain

  – Shona! Shona! Are you awake?

  I didn’t answer. I wanted to get back inside the dream because the ticket collector was old and weak and I knew I could get past him, but the rapping on my door grew frantic and my dream covering shrivelled, leaving me alone in the blue light of dawn, shipwrecked on a narrow bed.

  I went to the door, feeling for my sense of balance, feeling for the light switch.

  Mme Durebex’ eyes went straight to the long johns. I was acutely aware of the sewn-up fly, the false bulge down there. I did a mental about face, holding onto the door handle. Mme Durebex gave me a look that suggested a rude question, then regained her composure.

  – Can you meet me on the mountain at one-thirty? I have to do some shopping and Renaud has a class, so you can ski with the boys this afternoon.

  Relieved, I went back into my room. I dressed in the lightest, warmest clothes I had.

  It was a beautiful day. The snow was fresh, the sky was clear. I was going to ski! I would have to get out there now and practise before I met them. I wondered if I could get back my skiing legs in a few hours.

  I chose a pair of skis and boots from the room of gear and went down to have them adjusted and waxed. The boots were lighter than boots used to be; the skis too, and shorter and wider.

  I took the poma first. The sensation of ground sliding beneath me was soothing. I did a blue run, not trusting myself with more than a snowplough over a bump. Then I did a green run, lifting my inside ski and turning with deliberation.

  Other skiers were coming out. I moved up the mountain to the red runs. I leant forward, going faster, twisting around moguls, going straight over them now, letting speed carry me through the air. I kept my skis together. I fell, I got up. I turned outside the tracks to feel the fresh pleasure of last night’s snow.

  I took the cable car to the top of the mountain. I clicked into my skis and followed the curve down beneath the station. I stopped there to look.

  There were so many possibilities. I could descend under the cable car, zigzag that steep and bumpy terrain, then straight through the bottleneck of fir copses concealing the next station. I could go across to the right and make my way down a series of slopes, little vignettes connected by tracks through forest. Or to the left, a vast unadorned stretch, big-dipper to the bottom, where the skiers swooped back and forth like birds of prey.

  The Alps glittered in the sunlight. I could see Mont Blanc, a whitish mound beyond the purple-grey points, mottled with snow. The air was thin and pure in my lungs. I felt a rush of joy at being here, my options seemed as limitless as the landscape. I ate my chocolate, watching the skiers descend, watching them drop off the chairlift two by two diagonally below me. Laurent, Hugues and Mme Durebex were somewhere on the mountain. But I didn’t look for her lemon-yellow ski suit, I pushed off.

  Two more hours of freedom.

  An aerial view simplifies, and those moguls, inviting from the cable car, were treacherous to be among. I worked my way around them. I could even do the black runs, the most difficult. It was true I used to be able to wedeln, but more than a snowplough now was unexpected. I’d assumed this skill to be locked up in my childhood. I’d underestimated the permanency of things. Gradually, the moves were returning.

  Once again I stood beneath the station at the top of the mountain, contemplating my choice of runs. A family came down and stopped just below me. Ksh, ksh, ksh, ksh. Two adults, two teenagers. I could tell they were a family by the way they argued over which run to take. Now it was past midday and I had done every run, and every run was iced over by the people who’d skied it before me.

  What I wanted was a new path. I wanted virgin bush, just as I used to when I walked along the foreshore below my parents’ house in Sydney. A paltry strip of bush around the harbour it may have been, but I always walked through it fantasising that it was a wilderness, and that I would strike a new path. But whenever I left the track I struck a bullants’ nest, or a spider web, and all too quickly came across the track again.

  The family split up, calling to one another, On se voit en bas!

  I followed one of the teenagers. I overtook him. I was in a hurry.

  My rendezvous with Mme Durebex and the boys was at the top of the mountain. When we met it was like workmates from the office going out together for the first time. We looked at one another with curiosity and apprehension. Up here things were different. Mme Durebex was confident and lithe. She adjusted her attire and checked the boys’ with the efficacy of a motor mechanic. She ran her eyes over me, then said, Bon. On y va?

  We did the run halfway down. Not talking, absorbed in the sport, we did it again all the way down. Hugues was a timorous skier, Laurent was a maniac. It didn’t take long for us to spread out. I noticed Laurent watching me edgily, as though he were trying to decide whether I was friend or foe. We were definitely friends when I’d arrived at the chalet – the way he’d been so happy to see me, and the games of chess we’d played. I wondered what I’d I done to make him turn against me.

  I realised it was just that – I’d become friends with him. If Hugues was any indication, a friend to Laurent was a rival, especially on the mountain. And I was a friend with the weak yet insuperable authority of an au pair girl. I was helpless before Laurent’s resentment; if I were him I would probably have been just the same.

  I stopped just above Mme Durebex, who was waiting at the bottom of the slope.

  – Why didn’t you tell us you could ski this well? she said, almost resentfully.

  – I thought I’d forgotten how to, I mumbled, tucking my chin into the collar of my parka.

  I wished I hadn’t been so
self-deprecating to begin with. It made it hard to enjoy compliments when they came, it made it obvious to everyone else how much I expected of myself. Erasing the ego so carefully is just another way of paying it a lot of attention.

  We waited for Hugues, then took off. My spirits soaring now, I soared over a mogul and fell flat on my face. Laurent swept past me, jeering, then fell flat on his face. One of his skis speared down into the trees. Watching Mme Durebex sidestep all the way back up with it, and Laurent weeping and shivering, I remembered my parents with me, how patient they must have been.

  Mme Durebex left us after this run, and Laurent’s disgust with me increased. He jumped every queue, he took off as fast as possible when we reached the top. We would quickly lose him, then come across him sprawled behind some mogul, all skis and stocks, whimpering for help.

  It was not till the second time up in the cable car that I noticed Hugues had his boots on the wrong feet. I changed them around. Bent over, I saw Laurent’s legs moving away from us. He glared at us from the other side of the car, he glared back at the people he had pushed aside to get there. He hated everyone. There was nothing to be done with him. I turned back to Hugues, amazed his feet didn’t ache. He said phlegmatically, It was my mother that do it. I said in my head, But …

  We had to be home by four-thirty. The boys raced each other back to the chalet. It was like the hare and the tortoise, with Laurent’s speed broken by spectacular falls and Hugues going at it doggedly. I panted to keep ahead, my ears still hurting from Mme Durebex’ shouts when the boys had brought snow through the foyer the day before.

  I had to blockade the door.

  – Knock the snow off your skis.

  – No!

  – Prop them against the wall, don’t just throw them there. Neatly!

  – NO!

  – You can’t come inside in your ski boots. Take them off! Both of you!