by Tony Hawks
We were still talking about it as we left the coffee bar half an hour later. Brad was thrilled at the news. He’d not met Fi when the two of us had first been spending time together but he claimed that he’d heard me talk so much about her that it felt like he knew her.
“It feels like we’ve been going out for ages,” I said.
“That’s because you’ve known each other such a long time.”
“Maybe.”
“But the big question is—when are you going to take her to the house in France?”
“Immediately after Christmas. I want her to see the house when there’s snow on the ground.”
“Excellent romantic work,” said Brad, looking most impressed. “I wonder what the house looks like in a winter wonderland.”
“Why don’t you come out for New Year and find out for yourself?”
“That sounds fantastic. I’m definitely up for that.”
“Well, let’s see, but I think we can make it happen.”
§
I started dating la petite Anglaise in London and we nearly overdosed on fun. We were clearly enjoying the golden period of euphoria in a new relationship when both parties look adoringly at their partner, firmly believing that the sun shines out of every available orifice. Experience had shown me, though, that what comes next is a trickier period when it begins to cloud over a bit. Each party discovers, somewhat to their horror, that their partner doesn’t agree with them on absolutely everything, and actually dares to quarrel with them on some matters too. Worse still, they don’t always want to do the same things as the other one, or at the same time, or whilst wearing the skimpy outfit they’ve just bought. People, it seems, can be inconsiderate.
Then there are the additional problems created by the fact that men and women are completely different creatures. I had to keep reminding myself that Fi was from Venus and that I was from Sussex. We began to have the occasional quarrel, but we did so healthily, and more often than not we both ended up apologising to each other by the end of it. There was every sign that we were making it through the tricky cloudy period, and that we were ready for the sun to burn its way through, making way for us to start thinking about what it might be like to have a fortieth wedding anniversary attended by our daughter and her new boyfriend.
The future, in so far as it ever can, looked rather rosy.
19
Nature Boy
“Hey, it’s so beautiful!” said Fi, as we drove down the narrow lane that had first led me to this haven of tranquillity a year before. “Look at the snow just nestling on the trees. It’s heaven on a stick.”
A fresh fall of snow had deposited a white blanket over the green fields, and the trees looked like they’d been touched up with white paint by an over-exuberant decorator. Brad hadn’t been far off the mark when he’d referred to it as a winter wonderland.
“Snow is amazing stuff, isn’t it?” I said, gazing out across the whiter than white horizon. “You know, scientists say that no two snowflakes are the same.”
“I’ve heard that too, but quite how they can be sure of that I don’t know. I mean, unless someone checks every snowflake that falls, then how can they be entirely certain?”
“That’s a fair point, Fi. I don’t think scientists should make bold statements like that until they’ve found an enthusiastic enough team of volunteers to check every snowflake.”
“It’s only fair.”
“I agree.”
It felt good to have found someone who was also a heavyweight thinker on matters of such importance.
Fi liked the house. Thank God for that. I don’t know what would have happened to our relationship if she’d turned up and said, “It’s horrid. Looking at mountains gives me a headache, and swimming pools make me sick.”
Not that there was a swimming pool yet, of course. Just a hole that was more sophisticated than it had been before, and which had been lovingly prepared for the imminent fitting of the blue liner by Fabrice and the Three Musketeers. The water would be added shortly afterwards. My project-management skills had ensured that I would have a pool just in time to be able to take advantage of January’s arctic conditions.
We awoke on our first full day in the house together to be greeted by a healthy dose of December sun. Somehow the sky seemed clearer than it ever had before, and bluer too. The light was crisper, the definition of the snow-capped peaks more pronounced. The mountains were majestic. I felt proud—almost as if this being such a beautiful day was somehow down to me.
“Can we ski today?” asked Fi.
“Oh all right, if we must,” I replied, with mock reluctance.
One of the many things I liked about Fi was that she was as keen on skiing as I was. I hoped that she could last longer than Kevin had done almost a year before, because I wanted more than half an hour on a day like this. I looked at Fi and saw someone who looked likely to deliver just that. She was younger, fitter and considerably prettier than Kevin. Pleasingly, too, she collected less wood.
“So what are you like at skiing then?” asked Fi, just as the sense of excitement was building as we viewed the white peaks in the distance.
“I’m pretty good actually,” I said.
“Oh. You’re ‘pretty good actually’, are you?” said Fi, mockingly.
“Well, I can’t see the point in false modesty. I’m pretty good, so I may as well say I am.”
I could tell that Fi thought I was cocky. I didn’t mind, though. I reckoned that over the years I’d developed enough skiing technique to be able to fulfil the description of my skiing that I’d just given.
“What about you?” I asked. “What are you like?”
“Crap. But I can get down most slopes.”
“Great. In the end, that’s all that matters.”
§
Bizarrely enough, downhill skiing was invented by the British. Pretty impressive, given the amount of snow-capped mountains available to them at home. Having learnt how to ‘Telemark’ from the Norwegians, adventurous (and wealthy) Brits headed off to Switzerland where they came up with the idea of the downhill race. Lord Roberts of Kandahar introduced the first one ever at Montana-sur-Sierre in 1911. The result was a marvellous 1st, 2nd and 3rd place for the British—a dominance that we continued to hold over the sport until the following year when we let some other countries have a go.
Fi and I followed in these historic footsteps, and having got together all our paraphernalia—skis, boots and poles, gloves, goggles and salopettes—we then had half an hour of queuing for our lift passes before we were ready to take on the slopes. I was excited. I love this sport. However, I wasn’t without nerves as Fi and I set off for the first chairlift of the day with a spring in our ungainly, ski-boot-laden steps. I’d talked up my skiing prowess and perhaps this had been a mistake. Maybe false modesty would have been the better option after all. At least then I would have had nothing to lose. I could warm up slowly. Now, thanks to my big mouth, I would have to look good from the word go, and that might not be easy given that I hadn’t skied for nearly a year, and that had been for only half an hour thanks to Kevin’s needless five-a-side-football ankle injury.
There was only a small queue for the lift. It moved much faster than we’d expected and we were happily chatting away when suddenly it was our turn to jump on the next chair as it was whizzed round. We were bellowed at by the burly ski-lift attendant and he hurriedly manhandled us into position. Something went wrong and I seemed to get a ski caught somewhere, so instead of being in position for the chair to sweep me up neatly, I was sideways on when the chair arrived and I fell direcdy on top of Fi.
“Ouch!” she said, appropriately enough.
“Sorry.”
“Can you get off me, please? This isn’t the time or the place.”
“You’re right. I’ll just haul myself back into position.”
By this stage the burly chairlift attendant had seen the mess we had made and had hit the button that stopped the chairlift so we could
sort ourselves out. He had obviously taken an executive decision that it wasn’t safe to send the chair to the top of the mountain with a man dangling precariously from it, holding onto his girlfriend for dear life. By the time he’d halted the lift we were already thirty feet in the air, though, so I was finding it very hard to manoeuvre myself off Fi, not having the ground to use for leverage.
“The problem is that your left foot seems to be stuck under mine,” said Fi. “Pull.”
“I am pulling.”
Boy was I pulling. But nothing was happening. Meanwhile the chairlift attendant had decided that the best thing to do was to shout at us in French. Good, that would help. Just what I needed right now.
I pulled some more but to no avail.
“I don’t believe it!” said Fi, who had managed to lean forward into a position that meant she could see what had caused me to become trapped. “Your ski seems to be caught underneath mine. If you spin yourself round to the left you should be able to see for yourself.”
I contorted myself in mid-air, ignoring the unintelligible instructions that were being bellowed to me from the burly man below. And then I saw what the problem was.
“God. It’s even worse. I don’t believe what’s happened. It doesn’t seem possible,” I said to the woman lying beneath me.
“What’s happened?”
“We appear to be joined at the feet.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, there’s a gap between the bottom of your ski boot and the top of your ski.”
“And?”
“Unbelievably, the tip of my ski seems to have found its way between that gap and it’s wedged in there.”
“No!”
“Yes. Honest.”
“So you can’t pull it free just by moving?”
“No. You’ll have to take my ski off or I’m stuck like this.”
“But I can’t take your ski off- you’re in the way.”
“Yes. This seems to be the root of the problem.”
It was a problem that had now been identified by the chairlift man below.
“YOU MUST TAKE OFF ZE SKI!” he shouted in English, having realised that I’d not been overly responsive to his French.
“I KNOW!” I shouted back. “BUT IT’S NOT THAT EASY!”
The worst thing about this situation was that our entanglement had brought the entire chairlift to a grinding halt. People who were anxious to get out there on the slopes were being held up by the daft English couple. Time was of the essence or we might be close to causing an international incident.
“You must be able to get it off,” said Fi.
“I’m trying. Honest. The problem is that I can’t get myself into the right position. I’m too tangled up with you.”
“I thought you liked being tangled up with me.”
“I do. But I’d prefer it if there were less people inconvenienced by it.”
Others further up the chairlift had begun to shout at us. Great. That really made the process of releasing my ski from the binding that much easier. And more help was at hand below.
“YOU MUST TAKE OFF ZE SKI!” repeated the burly one.
One thing was certain. If we ever got out of this mess, we wouldn’t be using this chairlift again today. I couldn’t face seeing the burly man again for quite some time. To be fair, he probably wouldn’t be overly anxious to see me either.
I exerted all my efforts into one big shove against the binding, nearly falling from the lift to guaranteed hospitalisation as I did so. I grunted and I strained and finally I got the result. The ski binding released and I was able to pull my leg free. An ironic cheer went up from those who were looking on anxiously from above us on the chairlift. I managed to hold onto my ski, slide myself sideways and, with a helping hand from Fi, hoist myself back up into the conventional position for chairlift transportation.
“That was all quite embarrassing,” giggled Fi. “Do you reckon we can get through the day without further incident?”
“I’m not confident,” I replied, as the chairlift started up again. “The trouble is that it’s quite a fast lift, this one. I could have a problem if the lift guy at the top doesn’t see that I’m carrying one of my skis and slow the thing down when it’s time for me to get off.”
Needless to say he didn’t. He was too engrossed in reading OK magazine to notice that I was anything but OK. We undid the bar of the chairlift and I attempted to ski off on one ski. As a matter of routine I fell over, taking a bash on the head from Fi’s ski pole as I did so.
The couple coming up in the chair behind ours arrived and landed in a heap on top of me. Only then had we created enough chaos to distract the lift operator from his reading, and he duly stopped the lift so that the pile-up wouldn’t become bigger, giving us time to disentangle ourselves. I apologised profusely to the couple, who had already spent more of their morning than they would have liked watching me contorted on the chair in front of them. They mumbled something that was almost certainly derogatory and then they skied off.
Fi was laughing hysterically.
“So this is ‘pretty good actually’ is it?” she managed to say between convulsions.
“It gets better.”
“I do hope not. This is much more fun. Are you always this funny?”
“Tragically, no,” I said, remembering some of the tougher gigs I’d done to late-night crowds in comedy clubs. “Now let’s get out of here. I can’t handle any more dirty looks.”
And finally we skied off—thankfully into a day without any further incidents that would have made Lord Roberts of Kandahar turn in his grave.
§
The next three days were made up of a blissful combination of amusing tumbles in the snow, warm hugs by the open fire and evenings whiled away by the piano. The summer’s practice schedule, ill disciplined though it may have been, was finally paying me dividends. I indulged in shameless showing-off. A bit of boogie-woogie and some blues, interspersed with the occasional self-penned composition, left Fi suitably impressed.
“How do you do it all without any music?” she asked.
“Well, when I was sixteen I used to spend hours just messing around on the piano and experimenting with chords—and I’ve done it ever since.”
“Will you teach me?”
“Of course.”
The piano, it seemed, was going to perform a new and unexpected role.
Our guests arrived on the morning of New Year’s Eve. Fi and I were being joined by two couples—Nic and Kevin, and Ron and Brad. Not that the latter were an item as such, but they’d developed an affectionate banter that may well have been misinterpreted by anyone meeting them for the first time.
“What’s on the agenda for tonight, the big night?” asked Kevin, as I drove the eager new arrivals from airport to mountain retreat.
“There’s a dinner at the village hall.”
“But of course!” said Kevin’s fiancée Nic. “As if they’d let an occasion go by without a dinner at the village hall.”
“I’ve bought us tickets,” I explained. “And Fabrice and Marie-Laure are driving up to join us. It should be a good night.”
“Are you coming along with us, Ron?” asked Brad, tentatively.
“Nope. You lot go. I’m happy enough back at the house.”
“Really? That’s a shame,” I said, disguising the fact that I’d been so sure that he wouldn’t come that I hadn’t bothered to buy him a ticket. Ron’s improved state of mind didn’t yet mean that he was ready to cope with more than two or three humans at a time.
“Fi is back at the house, I take it?” asked Nic.
“Yup. And there’s an outside chance she might have a salad ready for us when we get there.”
“Will this be the first time everyone in the village gets to meet Fi?” asked Brad.
“Yes. I hope they like her.”
“Of course they will,” said Kevin. “And you’ll be well on the way to losing that cèlibataire label.”
; About time too.
§
As usual we turned up too early for aperitifs at the village hall. Fabrice and Marie-Laure, predictably enough, were running late and had told us that they’d join us later. Only the old guard were there—Odette and Andre. Fi began speaking to them in her rusty school French, and I looked on proudly as I watched her charm them with each laboured and disjointed sentence. Like many a rusty French speaker, Fi claimed that she could ‘understand much better than speak’. Later in the evening, however, I was to discover that her powers of comprehension left something to be desired when she returned from a brief chat with a lady from a neighbouring village. “That’s amazing,” she said. “That lady’s husband used to be a nightclub singer in Paris.”
It wasn’t until half an hour after when I began chatting with the lady in question I learned her husband had in fact worked for the French railways in a ticket office. The mind boggles as to how great a misapprehension could have occurred, but the reality was that this was just an exaggerated example of the kind of thing that had happened to me on a daily basis. The number of times I had ended conversations with only the faintest grasp of what had been said must have run into the hundreds. The levels of concentration involved made it all so tiring, too. Sometimes an evening of French speaking left my brain feeling like it had undergone a frontal lobotomy. I knew that this linguistic barrier would prove a huge obstacle if I ever decided to live in the Pyrenees permanently. Being a student in the language means that you miss out on the witty asides, the plays on words, the cultural references and the subtle nuances in the repartee. All this passes you by, leaving you feeling like a child at an adults’ party.
The room began to fill with guests. Aperitifs continued to be poured and there was not the remotest sign of any intention by anyone to sit down and eat, even when the clock passed ten. There was too much chatting to be done. I looked around me and saw Nic and Kevin babbling away in French to Fabrice and Marie-Laure, flanked by a furiously nodding Brad, who had developed the admirable skill of being able to have a good time even though he was totally oblivious to what was going on around him.