Authors: Maeve Binchy
It was the most awkward thing I have ever done. Each foot seemed to weigh a ton and to be 20 feet long. It was impossible to point oneself anywhere without doing damage to someone else and the woman became quite hysterical because she found herself sliding sideways with gathering speed and couldn’t stop. Mike had to go and head her off before she went into a wall at a hundred miles an hour and that caused a lot of alarm in those of us who stood rooted to the ground. Skiing sideways was a new horror we hadn’t thought of.
He put us in two circles like a Paul Jones and we were asked to walk around to get used to the feel of the things. The space between each walker increased to huge distances because everybody seemed to be sticking a ski into the bottom of the person in front, and you couldn’t turn around to protest because you fell over at once if you moved in any direction except purposefully forward. So there were great oaths in many languages, as we marched gloomily around the churned-up snow dragging these fiendish appendages.
Just when I was wondering would it be time for the après ski to begin, Mike said that it was now nine-thirty a.m. and that we should all have the feel of the skis, so would we please follow him and we would learn walking on a slope. A small gradient, he explained, in case the nursery school became frightened by the word ‘slope’.
It looked like the wrong face of the Eiger when we had to climb it, and the scene began to be like one of those dreams where you try to move but find yourself constantly in the same place. Worse really, because in those dreams you are at least vertical, there is no sense of constantly hitting the ground. The Falling Man and The Hysterical Woman and a Twitchy Swede and I spent most of our time clutching each other and dragging each other down again. About ten of the group seemed to have mastered it and were scaling the small gradient as if they had been born to such things.
‘Cheats,’ said The Falling Man. ‘I’ve read about those kind, they know all about skiing. They only join nursery classes to look good and improve their egos.’
‘I think I’m going sideways again,’ screamed The Hysterical Woman, and we all plunged out to rescue her, knocking her to the ground in the effort.
‘The rarified air is doing nothing for my heart, he is beating too rapidly,’ said The Twitching Swede. So The Falling Man gave him a nip of brandy, thinking that this might slow it down.
Mike skied back to us in a show-off way from the front of the group. He rolled his eyes to heaven. ‘Drinking is bad,’ he said in many languages.
We were all sitting in the snow drinking The Falling Man’s brandy at this stage, and if ever spirits are said to be medicinal it was in this case. Mike thought, however, it was loose living. ‘I will take that,’ he said like a school prefect and confiscated The Falling Man’s flask. We watched it disappearing like you would a life raft, but were too mute with fear to do anything except agree. Drinking was bad, we admitted humbly and repentantly.
Mike dragged us all to our feet, and pushed us towards the ascent again. It was a sorry progress. The Swedish heart was beating much too rapidly, hysteria was coming on strong with The Nervous Lady, The Falling Man and myself dragged ourselves painfully towards the summit, and Mike whizzed around us like a butterfly telling us always first in German, then in Italian and finally in English that we mustn’t lift our feet so high, and finally we made it to the group who were on top of the hill. ‘Now comes the interesting part,’ said Mike.
Great, I thought, about to take off my skis and run back to the hotel, it’s time for lunch. Not at all. The interesting part was apparently the exercises. The limbering up, the bending and stretching. The kind of thing in fact that I used to tell terrible lies in school to avoid, and here I was on a glass mountain abroad, at great cost, trapped and unable to get out of them. It went on until my body cried out with the agony of it all, and I wondered what would happen if I said I felt faint.
I tried it. ‘You are out of condition,’ said Mike. ‘Keep bending, it will make you less faint and more fit.’
I don’t remember coming back to the hotel, but I gather we stumped and spiked our way down, falling, and knocking down others, and the good ones in the group were beginning to be released from the rest of us and to have two beginners’ classes: one for good beginners and one for bad beginners. I went to bed immediately, and didn’t wake until the next morning, which was roughly 18 hours’ sleep.
We kept it up for three days, the bad beginners. We were joined by a fifth bad beginner who was an elderly Brazilian learning to ski secretly so that he could accompany his young wife on her winter sporting holidays. The third day he agreed that he didn’t mind if she made off with every ski instructor in Europe. He wasn’t going to join the game. We assured him that if they were all like the dreaded Mike, he would have no competition at all, she’d only be screaming to get back to him and to Rio.
This cheered him so greatly he decided to hire a sleigh one day and take us on a tour. So we climbed in with rugs and flasks and great goodwill and roared past the good beginners and Mike, who were walking around in circles practising an elementary turn, and we had a beautiful day in a forest where there was no cracking ice, and you could walk in powdery snow without falling at all. The next day we advised the Brazilian to write to his wife saying he was passing through a posh ski resort but the snow didn’t seem to be good. We advised this because he was becoming morose and guilty and wondering what she was thinking; he was the kind of man who sends telegrams rather than letters, and that night he had one back from her saying she loved him, so he took us all to a great log cabin and we kept drinking her health all night.
And The Falling Man taught us to play canasta, so we sat all day out on the terrace and got great suntans playing cards. And the Swede, who had stopped twitching, said that his heart felt much better and he had gone and discovered a very cheap place where they had schnitzel and salad so we wouldn’t get fat. The Hysterical Woman had become as calm as the Mona Lisa. She asked us to take pictures of her in various ski poses, and we did, and in return she gave us a great recipe for cheesecake, and we went to the kitchen of the hotel and tried it one day when everyone else was out doing elementary bends and falling and breaking their limbs. I told them all about proportional representation, which is a great party piece for foreigners, and wrote down how it worked, with explanations of quotas, first counts, eliminations, distribution and transfers. They loved it and said that the whole trip had been worthwhile for this alone.
And then the week was up, and we avoided Mike’s eye and went to the station, where nobody fell and the porters remembered me and said that it was always the same, people came nervously but they left being able to ski like birds.
A
friend of mine who emigrated some years ago used to drive me mad when she came back to Dublin for holidays. Firstly her accent had changed and had overtones of Chelsea, then she was using phrases that the natives do not know, like ‘Isn’t that a pretty little house?’ ‘That was naughty of you to buy me a large drink.’ Having lived perfectly happy for 20 years in Dublin, she suddenly saw all its faults and filth on her return. The streets had become covered with litter, she would say how terrible to see children begging, all the lovely buildings were being knocked down, wasn’t it odd that you found Irishmen always drinking in pubs without their wives, and wasn’t it amazing to see so many people outside churches on Sundays?
I determined that I would never behave like a returned emigrant and at least nobody has detected the slightest change in the way I speak – only, I suppose, surprise that I still speak so much after exposure to the more taciturn British. But I am making the same kind of mistakes, the little tell-tale things that show you have been living in another world, and it’s worrying.
Like the phone, I can’t believe that you have to pay fourpence. I simply can’t take it in, and it looks absurd to come back from a telephone in my own home town saying, ‘It doesn’t work and I did put the tuppence in.’ I had forgotten you couldn’t get beer in a restaurant, which is idiotic since I spent at least two years shouting in the paper that the licensing laws should be changed.
The minimum fare on the bus startled me so much that I thought the conductor didn’t understand I only wanted to go four stops. My first gin and tonic of the weekend nearly knocked me out after the pathetic drop in the bottom of the glass that goes as an English measure. I had brought people home grand cheap little velvet jumpers you can get in Marks and Spencers and thought they would be ecstatic with them. The ecstasy was dimmed by the fact that you can buy the same ones here and everyone had already bought half a dozen.
At least half a dozen men I know have nice long, clean hair when they used to tell me that they hated their sons having the same thing not two years ago; at least 20 women who used to have a great line in chat about their deep freeze and their au pairs have joined some kind of helpful thrusting organisations and are helping and thrusting all round the place. People ask me did I hear about things like us having a new President, and Ireland beating England at the international, and I begin to wonder where they think I am and who I work for.
Nobody at all speaks about doom, nobody has mentioned that we should be hoarding food, or putting money into building societies or taking it out of building societies. Things seem to be as dear, if not dearer, than in London, salaries don’t seem to have jumped accordingly and yet everyone thinks we’ll be fine once the warm weather comes.
Food seems to be extraordinarily expensive, and so do clothes, but nowhere do I hear great cries about how hard it is to live, to manage to eat, to dress or to get by. They ask me is Britain breaking up, which is a bit difficult to answer because I have no idea, they don’t seem to be worried about Ireland breaking up and think that it will all be grand once the fine weather comes.
Nobody mercifully has had one conversation about the drop in share prices or the rise in them or whatever, which is great because even though the people I meet in England don’t have any shares either they always seem a bit worried about other people’s and the consequent ill-health of the nation if they go below a certain figure.
Out in Killiney I saw people walking Afghan hounds which, I feel, must be a sign of prosperity, but I am assured that it’s just the same person with the same hound that I keep seeing. A few people who should have done it years ago are talking about medical check-ups, and cholesterol, and increasing their subscription to the voluntary health, but that is probably a sign of nothing except that we are all getting older and more worn out. I took two taxis and both taxi drivers knew me but didn’t know I had been away, they just thought I had got mean about taking taxis. You can get telephone messages in pubs, and leave your suitcase in restaurants again, which is lovely, and you can meet 20 people in the space of a morning just by walking about, which is lovelier still. You can’t say a word about anyone because either they or their best friend are sitting at the next table.
I hear the most outrageous and utterly unfounded stories about people that nobody has checked out but everybody accepts and then forgets. Half my friends disappeared suddenly out of Dublin to go to the Merriman School, which I get a feeling seems to be occurring every six weeks. I can’t even talk about films like
The Front Page
because they’re here already. I thought they were joking me when I had to pay 7p to post a letter. England nearly rose in rebellion when it went up to 4½p not long ago.
It’s wonderful to be able to go and see everyone again without undertaking mammoth journeys across a huge city, and even better when everyone will agree to come into Bowes pub to see me, instead of having to arrange rendezvous places halfway between me and them, as you would in London. You can cash a cheque in lots of places without hunting for your credit card, and I got over the fact that cigarettes were so much dearer because the woman in the shop was so nice and told me that they were ruining my health, she remembered when I had rosy cheeks and wasn’t bent double whooping and wheezing over the counter.
I can take up any conversation where I left it off a month or two ago. I didn’t have to explain about the IRA to anyone and everyone kept asking me when I was going back.
S
he had a lot of very good skirts and some really expensive soft twinsets. She knew how to knot a scarf around her throat so that it didn’t look like a bandage. She would read the
Daily Mail
at breakfast while he read the
Daily Telegraph
; their dog waited obediently out in the hall since animals were welcome but not in the dining room. She had nice bright awake eyes and looked as if she might want to have a chat as they ate scrambled eggs and toast, but in her circle she had probably learned early that men aren’t communicative at that hour. So she would look out the window a bit at the seagulls over the harbour, and at the life of the village getting underway, and say nothing.
Every morning he said the same thing when the last cup of coffee had been drained and his mouth carefully wiped for danger of a last lurking crumb. With a rattle of the newspaper, and with the air of a man who has put up with ladies being late and slow and unpredictable all his life he would say, ‘Right, if you’re ready, we might as well push off, what?’
She had always been ready at least ten minutes ahead of him. But a bright little smile would come on cue and she would say, ‘Yes. Why not, I’m ready now, I think.’
And smiling at the waitress with the friendly but not familiar smile that those who are at ease in country houses or good hotels always have, they would walk from the dining room, pick up the dog’s lead and stroll down the street to their car. It was very like them, their car – good, expensive, well-kept but not showy.