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 suddenly. 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.