A Surrey State of Affairs (8 page)

The suitcases are packed. Jeffrey’s skis stand in the hallway like a totem pole to the pitiless gods of the piste. There is no escape. We leave for St. Moritz tomorrow at five
A.M.

I have left Natalia with six pages of laminated instructions, including details for sewing the missing buttons back onto Jeffrey’s shirts, polishing the silver, and switching the lights on and off at regular intervals to deter burglars. A week of solitude can’t be an easy prospect, but she is putting such a brave face on things that I even caught her whistling as I was dragging my luggage toward the door. I knew the underwear would help.

I bid a long and solemn farewell to Darcy. He looked back at me with his glittering black eyes, ducking his head to run a claw rakishly through his emerald feathers. For once, he did not respond to me in Lithuanian. He simply cawed, “Oh, Jeffrey,” in a breathless tone, which I found rather touching. He might have
mixed up his owners, but at least he was expressing himself with a proper, and English, sense of loyalty. The memory will give me a warm feeling as I face the frigid slopes of the Alps.

  
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 9

I have arrived. So has Sophie. Her hair has been cut so that it hangs just below her left ear, then gets gradually longer in a sort of hideous diagonal until it falls to shoulder length on the right side. The nape of her neck has been “undercut,” which appears to be an alternative expression for “shaved to a piglike bristle.” It has been bleached a peroxide blond, annihilating the subtle tones of her natural color and making her look like a barmaid.

I do not have time to describe my outrage, as the porter is carrying our belongings to our room as I type on the lobby computer and Jeffrey is giving me a puzzled look.

  
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 10

Everything is worse than I thought, and I am not just referring to the aberration that is my daughter’s hairstyle. Do not get me wrong: the hotel is charming, the mattress firm, the hot water piping, the alpine views from our balcony sweeping and majestic. It is the company and the skiing that have proved problematic.

On previous trips, Jeffrey and I would always team up with Andrew, a senior partner at Alpha & Omega, and his wife, Barbara. Barbara is a woman after my own heart, a retired schoolteacher with firm views about necklines and weak indifference to snow sports. Together we would ski a few leisurely blue runs then stop to drink hot chocolate, take in the fresh air, and discuss the character flaws of our respective children. I looked forward to catching up with her and finding out if her daughter ever did
admit that she had cheated on her seventh-grade music theory paper.

Now I am perhaps never to know. Jeffrey did not feel fit to let me know in advance, but in the space of a year, Andrew has jettisoned Barbara and taken up with Amanda, a twenty-eight-year-old lawyer with a superabundance of glossy black hair and a waist that is offensively small, even in a ski suit. What’s worse, she is an unnaturally zealous skier, zipping past the men with consummate ease. Jeffrey said that it was marvelous to see a woman so good at it, but this did not stop him from poling his way forward in a frenzied fashion every time she overtook him.

You can imagine that I was not comfortable on the slopes with such company. Sophie insisted on going off for a snowboarding lesson, so she was no help. I held them up on every run, but just as I was about to offer to go back to the hotel and leave them alone, the weather closed in. Amanda carried on unperturbed, her tight black ski suit bobbing and fading in the swirling white fog. Jeffrey and Andrew followed her. As the visibility diminished, so too did my fragile sense of balance. I turned left, and it was as if the slope veered away to the right. I turned right, the piste veered up to greet me. I stopped. An eerie silence descended. Snowflakes gathered in the folds of my ski jacket. I felt dizzy. There was only one thing for it. I did what any Englishwoman would have done in the face of such adversity: I had a cup of tea.

Luckily, I am always well prepared. I had a flask of Earl Grey and a packet of currant biscuits from the hotel room in my pocket, so I scooted off the side of the piste, patted the snow into the semblance of an armchair, and settled down to wait for the weath-er to lift. To pass the time, I counted snowflakes. Mother always said that patience is a virtue. Just as I got to 5,683, I heard a strange whirring overhead. No sooner had I realized that it was
coming from a helicopter than I saw two skiers wearing orange snow patrol vests waving their arms and shouting. It was a horrible moment when I connected the two.

I do not wish to dwell on the mortifying details of my afternoon, but suffice it to say that Amanda insisted on alerting the mountain rescue team when I failed to appear at the bottom of the mountain. Luckily, Andrew has some business connection with the mayor of St. Moritz, who agreed to write off the expense.

  
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 11

After the trying events of yesterday, I have decided to spend today enjoying the hotel pool and sitting in front of the fire with a good book. Jeffrey did not spend much time trying to persuade me to do otherwise. He appears more embarrassed by the rescue debacle than I am. Every time he hears anything that sounds like a helicopter he flinches; the distant drone of the chambermaid’s vacuum set him off this morning.

In any case, a day at the hotel gives me plenty of time to update you on the subject of Sophie. I had hoped that her time away from home would make her grow up a little and teach her how to behave in the company of others. Sadly there is little evidence to support this view.

Take last night, for example. I knocked on her door for a little chat just before dinner. I had thought that my brush with death (or at least a nasty cold) on the mountain would have stirred up her daughterly concern, but she hardly looked up as I went in, and continued to apply what looked like globules of bright blue ear wax to her hair. I asked her what on earth it was and she replied, “Mirage extra-hold sculpting crème.” She was wearing a white vest top under which a fluorescent pink bra of the sort not stocked by M&S was clearly visible, with a pair of denim hot
pants layered over sparkly tights. The one nod to the fact that we were twenty-one thousand feet up in the Swiss Alps in winter, and not in Barbados, or indeed a brothel, was a gigantic pair of faux-fur-lined suede boots. I asked her when she planned to dress for dinner and she merely glanced down at herself and shrugged. I had no luck either persuading her to change or getting her to tell me what she had learned from counting sticklebacks. The only subject that enthused her was her “awesome” snowboard instructor, Jake. Having once glimpsed said instructor on the mountain, holding her hands to keep her upright, dressed in ludicrously baggy trousers and an oversized bobble hat that reminded me of a baby’s bonnet, I struggled to concur with her opinion.

I was worried about the impression she would create at dinner, particularly because she was seated next to a bright young lawyer named James, who was smartly dressed in a blue shirt and chinos. She regaled him with the story of my “mental” rescue, twirling the long side of her hair through her fingers for emphasis. James did not notice me rolling my eyes and buttering my roll with dismissive energy because he was too busy staring at her bra. I hope that this is because he too noticed that it clashed with her top and tights.

  
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 12

Little to report today. Stayed at hotel. Finished
Heart and Soul,
Maeve Binchy’s latest. Jeffrey, meanwhile, looks finished. After a couple of days of skiing he lumbers up the stairs like a grizzly bear that has been shot and stuffed.

  
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 13

Sophie is still effusive about snowboarding and little else. I asked her if she wanted to spend the morning in the pool with
me but she said she felt that she’d just reached an important point with Jake, her instructor. I suppose her determination is to be admired, though I wish she’d find a more appropriate activity: it is hardly very ladylike to spend so much time with her legs spread, even if snowboarding is in fashion.

  
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 14