Things I Want My Daughters to Know (38 page)

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Jennifer stood in line for the chairlift and looked at the people around her. The mountain was alive with skiers. Were they all honestly having a good time? It seemed so alien to her.

She started to worry about the chairlift when the queue in front was still three or four people deep. She shuffled forward on her skis, desperate to stay in the tracks of the man in front of her. You could never let your guard down, you had to concentrate at all times. It was when you got distracted that you fell. And then you had to get up. With dignity.

And speed. The encroaching throng had no time for fallers. Nothing could be allowed to interfere with their passage to the top of the mountain. It was like
Lord of the Flies
out there. She felt every muscle in her body tense as the lift swung around behind her, then caught her sharply at midthigh and set off. Then you had to make sure you had your poles in the right place before the overhead safety bar came down and trapped you in, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to get off at the top. This maneu-ver successfully completed, Jennifer looked at the traveling companions on her left. Three young guys, with peculiar facial hair, in trendy volu-minous jackets, on snowboards. Well—that was another thing entirely.

They ignored her completely, chatting loudly and raucously in what she thought was German. They made it look so simple, damn them, with their arms flailing about in expansive gestures, and their easy laughter.

Her own hands were firmly gripping the bar, white knuckled beneath her gloves. That was another thing. This was a sartorial challenge like no other. Even eight-stone women looked like yetis in this getup.

She turned to her right. It was so beautiful up here. Just like a round of golf spoiled a good walk, skiing ruined perfectly lovely scenery for her. If she could sit in a troika (she had no idea what a troika was, but it sounded impossibly romantic), covered in furs and blankets, and be driven around here, she’d be in heaven. The snow was so white, the trees were so pretty, their evergreen branches dusted with powder. The air was pure; you could really taste the nothingness in it. And beyond, the sky was that particular shade of blue you so seldom saw at home.

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Lovely. Snowshoes, even—a walk. That would be wonderful, too. It was this incessant need for speed, and the fear it induced in her, that spoiled everything.

This was her seventh year. She’d been shocked to realize it. They both had been novices the first time they came, not long after they were married. Skiing hadn’t been a feature of either of their childhoods—it was a modern pursuit for the middle classes. Stephen had some mates at work who were putting together a chalet, and they’d both been excited.

Jennifer was fit, an effortless long-distance runner, with a couple of half marathons under her belt, and she enjoyed lots of the sports they’d tried together, especially in their earlier years. Stephen had been good at everything. He had that natural sporting ability thing. He’d been a Scout at school, and done the Duke of Edinburgh awards scheme, and he’d taken to almost everything he’d tried. He had persuaded her to have a go at wind-surfing and then, when that had been a hit, kite surfing, and paragliding, and, while she knew she wasn’t particularly good at any of them, she loved trying. Loved being with him, too. She knew she had no problem with speed, nor with heights . . . just with speed, heights, and snow. The feeling she got, standing at the top of a run that was anything beyond green, with the snow falling away from you at an angle that its bright whiteness made it almost impossible to calculate—but which you knew for sure was too bloody steep—was like nothing she had experienced before.

Maybe she was too old when she started. Amanda could ski, having been taken by a boyfriend’s family when she was eighteen, and although she’d never actually seen her do it, she knew she was of a reasonable standard. She’d even done some instructor’s course, in New Zealand, a few years ago when she was traveling, so she had to be pretty good. Hannah had been going with the school since she was twelve and was obviously excellent. She always said she’d rather be on the beach, but she was nevertheless a competent skier. Even Mark could do it. Jennifer had started in her thirties. Maybe it was just asking too much of an old dog in the way of new tricks.

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Not that Stephen had felt the same way, predictably enough. Duck to water. He’d only stayed in ski school for a couple of days that first time, then he’d been off with his mates—leaving after breakfast and returning, full of stories of daring, late in the afternoon. He had loved it from the first day—when, incidentally, he had not fallen once. The end of that first week, she’d watched him, from the haven of a café on the piste, swoosh down the run, legs tight together, knees bent at the perfect angle, turning effortlessly, huge wide grin on his face, and she’d known she was in trouble.

Every year the conversation went more or less the same way. They were carefulish with their money—they had plans and schemes, and they put away a larger chunk than most peers of their salaries into pen-sions and savings plans. They allowed themselves one “grand” holiday each year. When they’d started, after a luxurious, beyond-their-means honeymoon in the Maldives, they’d agreed that they should do what they could, before children came, because afterward, it was Devon and Cornwall for them, the self-catering cottages of their childhoods, for the foreseeable future. They didn’t say that anymore, obviously—mustn’t mention the C word—but the principle remained. Jennifer would collect brochures, for Hawaii and the Seychelles, for Capri and South Africa. And Stephen would get the Snowline brochure his mates were passing around at work and figure out which part of the three valleys he wanted to conquer next. She had never pushed. She knew how much he adored skiing. She just wondered, annually, why he hadn’t quite worked out how much she hated it.

The other people in the chalet were okay. There were changes, every year—a couple would drop out, or be somewhere else—but a caucus of four or five couples remained faithful. They were quite nice, actually.

The evenings were always fun. Someone else was cooking a ludicrously old-fashioned three-course meal, with sparkling wine and canapés, and peach schnapps flowed. It was the only place in the world, apart from at home with Hannah, that Jennifer played, and enjoyed, games—she was 284 e l i z a b e t h

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even pretty good at charades. The trouble was that after the big meal, and the copious quantities of alcohol, and the late night, you were expected to get up, before eight, shrug yourself into four layers of restrictive, unflattering clothing in a too-hot chalet, and go skiing.

She’d abandoned formal tuition herself, after the second year. Not for the same reasons as Stephen, but rather because she decided that she preferred her humiliation to be less regimented. The Ecole du Ski Français was not renowned for its sympathy and gentleness. At thirty-three, she had reasoned that she didn’t need to take unreasonable orders barked impatiently at her by some suntanned kid smoking a Gauloise and planning a night out with his mates on a mobile phone. She skied alone, pouring over the piste maps to find the longest, widest green runs available, the ones with the fewest lift hazards, as she had come to think of them, and the most opportunities to stop for hot chocolate. Occasionally one of the other wives or girfriends would tag along with her, but they usually got bored and peeled away after the first three or four times around, and that suited Jennifer. She would rather fall down in front of total strangers than people she would be sharing raclette with later that evening.

She was rescued by the baby years. In the fourth year, she had been, suddenly, the only wife or girlfriend not chalet bound by a small infant or a large bump. She had skied the first two days that year, but then realized that a decision to stay home and help could be entirely “blamed” on the babies, and how adorable they were, and how maternal she must be, and could easily enough have nothing whatsoever to do with skiing. In years five and six she hadn’t even bothered to rent skis and boots. (That was the stage in the skiing holiday when she really remembered how much she hated it—the never-ending, winding route through the Alps from Geneva could be slept through, the chalets were hospitable enough, but the sensation of pushing her socked foot into a hard ski boot in a crowded and sweaty ski shop on the first night brought it all flooding back.) This year, there were ten adults and seven babies. The oldest were three or four now, old enough to be indoctrinated, careening down the
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nursery slopes with no discernible skill or fear, wearing helmets that practically outweighed them; and it was the second round of children, the youngest of whom was six weeks, who held court in the chalet all day. They were all getting more affluent, and the chalets had increased in comfort and grandeur over the years. Now there were ruddy-faced, perpetually smiling nannies, bused in at 8:00 a.m. to free the women up for a morning’s sport.

They had no business being there, really, she and Stephen. It was in the company of these perfect nuclear families that Jennifer most felt a failure. She just wasn’t performing as she should. These people were not good enough friends to ask the inevitable questions. She assumed that they assumed there was a problem and were too polite and frightened to ask. Without being unkind, they had their heads down in the task of obsessive motherhood, and she could help out, and she could make the right noises about their babies, but she couldn’t really belong.

It spoiled the fun, too. Late nights of screaming drunken hilarity were out completely. Now, it was two glasses of wine with dinner and an early night, because the nannies did not sleep in, and the babies did not sleep through. At night, not too tired from a hard day’s skiing to lapse into the coma that seemed to creep up on everyone else, Jennifer lay listening to the traffic of young parents. Babies being fed, and burped, and comforted. And toddlers being lifted for the toilet and calmed down after nightmares or, more spectacularly, falls from bed.

They’d driven her out of the chalet, these babies and their sunny caregivers. Back onto the mountain. Talk about Hobson’s choice.

So, in a last-ditch attempt to conquer her fear, she’d booked a course of private lessons. With an English company, who promised her an English instructor. She was to share with one other—a woman, her own age, who had never skied before. That sounded all right.

And she was on the chairlift to find the instructor for her first lesson.

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she’d looked at him reproachfully and he’d apologized, briefly squeezing her shoulders on his way out early that morning and wishing her well.

She wondered fleetingly whether one of the things Stephen loved about these skiing holidays was the opportunity they afforded him to escape from her. If they’d been side by side on sun loungers on a deserted beach, he would have to talk to her. Here they were never alone, except for the five minutes he was in bed before her, while she washed her face and brushed her teeth, and he was always apparently deeply asleep by the time she climbed in beside him.

If you didn’t talk much, you didn’t have to acknowledge that there was anything wrong. If neither one of you drew attention to the widen-ing gap between you, you could pretend it didn’t exist.

The skiing instructor was just where he was supposed to be, standing beside a flag bearing the company’s name, a little way from where the chairlift disgorged its passengers. She tried to come to a graceful stop in front of him, but ending up planting her pole at an un-natural angle to her body, too far away, and jamming herself into an ungainly skid, just barely managing to stay on her feet. He was short and slight, with dark wavy hair that was too long, and very dark brown eyes.

He was deeply tanned, but the hollow of his neck was very white. When he spoke, it was with an incongruous Newcastle accent. He was on his phone when she arrived at the appointed meeting place, and her heart sank, but he raised his hand in apology and continued to talk in Geordie French. Her translation and his tone told her that he was begging his landlady for an extension on his overdue rent. He had mastered “louer”—

to rent, and “Vendredi,” which she knew was Friday, and clearly several days later than it should have been, but not “pay” or “promise,” both of which he said, with emphasis, and increased volume, in English. She smiled sympathetically and turned to look for her fellow instructee.

At that moment, a woman with a comedy hat and a startled expression, her poles raised in a defensive gesture, slid into view.

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“I’m Wendy,” she said, her voice full of surprise and laughter, as though she wasn’t entirely sure she was.

“I’m Jennifer.” They dared not shake hands, but nodded emphatically to each other in greeting.

“I feel like I’m at one of those anonymous meetings!” Wendy continued. “Skiers Anonymous. I’m Wendy and I’m an absolute beginner. Actually, I’ve been taught by amateurs for the first part of the week, but they’ve given up on me.”

Jennifer found her giggle contagious. “I’m Jennifer and don’t I wish I was a novice. I’ve been coming for seven years, and I’m still this bad.”

Wendy laughed out loud, and Jennifer found herself laughing along. For the first time in ages, she realized how ludicrous it was.

“Great—we’ll have a ball together then!”

Jennifer thought they just might.

“I’m Justin, and I’m going to change all that,” the little guy said, clearly warming to their theme and clearly now off the phone. “Sorry about that. Bit of a problem with the rent.”