It was a curious invitation. I wondered if Mme Durebex intended to buy me a ticket. She approached a man putting skis on his roof-rack. The weather was driving the faint-hearted from the ski slopes. Mme Durebex had told me it was easy to go out in the afternoon and get a ticket from someone who had decided to come in early. You could offer them half of what the ticket was worth. I had tried this a couple of times, but I’d always been ignored. This man simply handed his ticket to Mme Durebex with a smile and refused her money. What did I have to do, bleach my hair? Wear a lemon-yellow ski suit and pretend to be pleasant?
– Merci Monsieur, she simpered. It’ll do for my jeune fille.
I followed her down to the ski lifts. It snowed and snowed. Mme Durebex wanted to swap goggles, saying mine were better than hers. I swapped willingly, knowing mine fogged and let in the snow. She jumped all the queues, never ceasing to complain about the cost.
I vowed if I ever had money like her I would enjoy it. I vowed to enjoy what was left in my bank account.
We went up the back of the mountain in the fourseater cabin. We ascended through cloud and snow; if there was anyone on the slopes beneath us we couldn’t see them. The cabin stopped. For a long time we stayed there, buffeted by wind, and I felt sure, as I did every time the cable car broke down, that it wouldn’t start again.
Quite suddenly, Mme Durebex began telling me about her childhood. She talked about the farm in the French Pyrenées where she had grown up. They had struggled to make ends meet; she had lived with her grandparents. Her parents she hardly remembered, both dead in a car crash when she was seven. She told me her grandmother made the best soup in the world. Garlic soup, nothing in it but a few cloves of garlic and some herbs.
– I’ve never tasted anything like it since, she said.
She told me she’d grown up speaking Catalan with her grandparents, but speaking Catalan in the classroom, on the village streets, was an offence punishable by law in the French Republic.
– So you’re bilingual, I said. Say something in Catalan.
– I’ve forgotten it, she laughed. Her laugh sounded uneasy.
– Does it come back to you when you visit?
– I haven’t been back. My grandparents are dead.
– I don’t have any grandparents either, I said, by way of exchange. It was the most dramatic detail from my childhood I could think of. The laws of language I’d grown up with, the cultural conflicts, the strict diet, all paled in comparison with those of Mme Durebex. Next to her I felt like a dull old colonial.
The cable car lurched on. We began to move as well, rubbing our hands together, stamping our feet, getting our goggles ready. I shifted in my seat, wanting to get a good look at Mme Durebex, coloured now by her childhood. Her sources helped explain her. The dark Catalan eyes and olive skin, the horror of and desire for money, the generation gaps in her family, the privilege of education. She was similar to my own parents in a lot of ways, and had come from something so different. She rubbed a viewing hole in the condensation and looked through it.
– I don’t want to go back, she said. It’s another life. I always wanted to live in Paris, ever since I was a little girl. But you know, I wouldn’t exchange my childhood for anything. It’s very hard for a child in a lot of ways, growing up in Paris. That’s why we take Laurent out of Paris as often as we can.
I wanted to ask her if she thought Laurent liked Paris. It was on the tip of my tongue to use her first name, it seemed inappropriate to call her Mme Durebex after her confessional. I saw the profile I knew well already, the small nose, the groove down by the corner of the mouth like a barrier of some sort, the large eyes beneath brows that had been plucked so much for so long you could have counted the hairs remaining. She was a likeable person.
She began to bat at something on her thigh.
– Oh zut! The stain’s still there and I only got these back from the dry-cleaners yesterday. Look, Shona, can you see?
– Oh yes, I said, though I couldn’t see anything.
– C’est pas vrai! I spent fifty francs getting these pants cleaned; no, sixty. C’est un scandale! They’re thieves!
I followed Mme Durebex down the Black Princess. She skied like a bird, rapid neat hops, glissades around moguls. I went in her path, squinting through the microcosm of snowstorm in my goggles. My hands were frozen, my nose ran, and icicles formed on my chin. I tried to copy her moves, but my legs would not form them. Mme Durebex stopped at the bottom of each slope and waited for me. Then we conferred on which way to take down.
– Oh là là, I can’t see a thing.
She pulled off her goggles and rubbed them.
– These goggles aren’t any better, are they, Shona?
– No.
We exchanged an ironic smile.
– It’s hard keeping up with you, Madame Durebex. I can’t manage those fast turns, and I can’t see a thing either.
– Ski with your feet, Shona, she said. It’s the feet that count.
We battled our way down. Each run took at least half an hour. After the last Mme Durebex skied back to the chalet, leaving me to buy bread and milk.
Walking back up the road in the mist, I heard a dog whimpering. It materialised: an alsatian chained to the bumper bar of a Porsche. In its struggle to free itself, the dog had wrapped itself even tighter in the chain. It was shivering, one leg twisted in the air. When it heard me it twitched against the chain and began to bark. I put down my skis and went to help it, but as I got nearer the whimpers turned to snarls. I retreated and continued up the road to the chalet.
When I walked in Claudine emerged from the study rolling her eyes.
– Shona, you can finish the French with them. I’ve had enough. And then do an hour of English.
The boys followed her out, demanding food.
– But you only ate lunch a few hours ago! Claudine said.
– It’s Shona’s fault, Mme Durebex said to her, as though I couldn’t hear or understand. She had nothing prepared for lunch.
I undressed in my room, furious. And so! Only a couple of hours ago she was skiing with me, talking to me like an equal. I shouldn’t have taken it personally; she had just wanted a companion, anyone would have done. I felt like such a sucker, grabbing at those moments of friendship.
I was called up to the kitchen and given a plate of bread, salami, cheese and chocolate to take down to the boys. Que des choses dégueulasses! All those disgusting things the boys should never eat. I went into the study to give the English lesson. I went into battle.
The first manoeuvre was to feign sleep. They rolled around the floor.
– We sleep! We sleep in English!
I separated them. I gave a dictation of twenty words. Throughout this they laughed, talked, burped, imitated me; they ran around the room then collapsed with mortal illness’.
I screamed at them. I threatened them. I yelled at them. I slapped them. Finally, subdued, they sat and wrote out the words.
Hugues had five mistakes. Quickly, he wrote out the corrections. I sent him out to the corridor so I could deal with Laurent alone. What words Laurent had scrawled across the page were illegible. There were rents in the paper from angry up-strokes. Laurent tried everything to avoid writing out the corrections.
He flatly refused. I insisted.
He joked about it. I didn’t laugh.
He was foul mouthed. I adopted my most fearful look of contempt.
He whimpered that my writing was so bad he couldn’t read it, so how could he possibly copy out the words? With the other end of my pen I retraced the perfect shape of my letters.
Hugues stuck his head in the door.
– I don’t know what to play. Hurry, Laurent! Travaille!
– You stay out there till we’ve finished, I snapped.
Hugues came back in. He looked at Laurent for support. His pale eyes flicking nervously, he said to me, T’es bête! It’s been ONE HOUR. Salope!
I got up and walked to the door. I felt like a tank rumbling across a field. Hugues collapsed at my feet in the doorway, terrified.
– Never call me that again! I stood over him, feeling power, feeling disgusted by it. I went back into the study and closed the door.
Laurent wrote out the words, slowly, carelessly, but correctly. Claudine had left her Dunhill on the desk. They looked nice. I took one from the pack and put it in my pocket. When Laurent had finished the words, I brought Hugues in to read Mister Punch. He read like an angel, smiling superciliously when he handed the book to Laurent. Laurent began.
– Mais noooon, c’est là! Hugues jabbed the page.
– Thank you, Hugues, I said. It doesn’t matter which page he reads.
Laurent continued reading and gradually the tears he had been suppressing came through, disguised as obnoxious sounds.
Then, when he’d finished reading, he began to weep properly. Embarrassed, Hugues left the room. I closed the exercise books while Laurent howled on the couch. There was no sweet taste of victory, I felt terrible. I felt as upset as Laurent looked. I went over and gave him my crusty handkerchief. He sobbed and clung to me, and all my anger melted.
– It’s not me you have to fight, Laurent. I don’t want to fight. I just have to give you an English lesson every now and then.
I’d wanted to make him laugh, but this only seemed to make him cry more. He seemed so small, crouched inside my shoulder; he seemed so alone, back to school in Paris in a couple of weeks, back to life with his parents in that apartment. I held him to me and comforted him, wiping his tears with the cuff of my shirt.
– It’s okay, it’s okay.
His tears soaked through my shirt, then through my T-shirt.
– I’m your friend, Laurent. Okay?
– Oui.
Gradually his tears subsided. He looked into his lap, shamefaced.
– It’s okay to cry. I hugged him. Feeling better now?
– Oui.
I wiped his face with the other cuff. A fishing-line of mucous stretched between us.
– Oh god, I groaned. You and your snot.
Laurent’s eyes went wicked and he sucked the stream from his nose into his mouth. Then he smiled and gave me back my handkerchief.
– Je peux regarder la télévision?
I opened the cupboard and turned on the television. I could tell he wanted to be alone and left him there, glassy-eyed in front of Loony Tunes. I went to my room thinking, as I had so many times before, that the battle was over. Still looking for an ally, still thinking about the enemy.
To me, everything was a battle.
I don’t think you can escape your roots.
Australian, fourth generation – Little Aussie Battler.