Waking Beauty

Staying in a French hotel is trying at the best of times. There are the bolsters; the carpets on the ceiling; the snooty staff who underline just why Dunkirk was a great moment in British history. But staying there with teenagers is much, much worse. Back home in England, I passed for a good-enough mother, I liked to think. My children weren’t outstandingly clever, or beautiful (though of course I thought them so) but they were nice kids: a little exuberant, perhaps, but full of imagination and good-will. At least, that’s what I thought until we stayed in the Hotel d’Usse, and saw the way the Duras girl behaved.

"Sit up! Use your napkin. No, you may not have ketchup with your meal,” I hissed. "Haven’t you learnt to cut meat up without sending half of it over the table? Stop making that horrible noise with the straw. Stop it, or you’ll be grounded tonight. I’m warning you –"

"What’s bugging you, Mum?” asked Lottie.
"Are you getting PMT?” asked James.
"No I am not. Your table manners are atrocious,” I said, angrily. "Dreadful. It’s time you learnt how to behave.”

The problem was not just that they were teenagers, and as impossible to control as a pair of ferrets. They were used, like most modern British children, to eating the kind of food that needed very little skill with utensils. The contrast with the French family, eating at the table next to ours, was painful. Their daughter was, as far as I could tell, the same age as my Lottie, but seemed infinitely more sophisticated. The roasted chicken that was causing my two to send their knives screeching across the china, was cut with immaculate precision at the next table. She drank watered-down wine, not Coke. She didn’t speak with her mouth full, but conversed with her parents almost like an adult. By the time I stopped watching her, James and Lottie had shot off to play together in the hotel garden. I was left to drown my mortification in coffee.

To my surprise, the couple rose, approached me and said, in excellent English,
"Would it disturb you, Madame, if our daughter practices her English with yours?”
No, I said, it would not.
The father gave a beaming smile.
"Very good. Alors, Isabelle, parlez Anglais!”
Obediently, his daughter trotted off to mine, who were by now whooping and pretending to be rock stars. Although they were fourteen and fifteen, Lottie and James were still childish enough to forget their adolescent dignity at times. Before she went, the girl curtsied to me.
"Your daughter is very polite,” I said, half-way between astonishment and amusement.
"I am of the old factory,” said the father. "I let her have anything she wants, but she has to obey me.”
I thought this sounded marvellous, providing that you could afford it. However, it was evident that the Duras family were wealthy. Madame wore a gold necklace so thick that it looked more like a shackle than an ornament, and they drove the sort of car that I could only have afforded if I’d taken out a second mortgage. They were staying at the Hotel d’Usse for a week, whereas I had only booked into its creamy walls and velvet lawns for a night, because nowhere else was available.

It turned out that the Duras family, too, were visiting castles. One, Azay les Rideaux, they had already seen, but the other, the Chateau d’Usse, they were visiting the following morning, like ourselves.

"Perhaps we can all go together,” said Monsieur Duras.
His wife said, in a lecturing tone, "It is the castle that inspired Perrault to write La Belle au Bois Dormant, that is to say –"
"Sleeping Beauty,” I interrupted, smiling to conceal my irritation.
We chatted for a while after that. The father was the more talkative, not just because his English was better, I suspected. This was a traditional marriage of the kind that I had never enjoyed, even if I could have chosen it. The wife was supposed to look after the house, the husband and the children and keep her mouth shut. They were not French but
Swiss. By the end of the evening I had heard as much as I ever wished to about M. Duras’s business, his self-discipline and, in particular, his suspicion of foreigners, especially the wretched refugees who tried to escape across the Channel to Britain. Mme. Duras joined in.

"Once, yes, once, I was in a shop with my daughter and these foreigners came in and they stole some lipsticks. If they are so poor, what do they need with make-up?” she demanded, her plump face mottling with fury. "My Isabelle was so upset for a week after. Why did they steal, mama? she keep asking. What can I say? They are bad. We do not want them in Switzerland.”

Despite this, the Duras child and my own were getting on remarkably well. I watched them partly out of concern, and partly because of something else. As I have said, my own children were pretty normal. But Isabelle was another matter.

Her long, thick hair was a rich blonde, which really did look like spun gold, although her lashes and brows were dark. Her eyes were a deep navy blue and her lips so red that Lottie couldn’t believe she wasn’t wearing lipstick. Even at 14, usually the worst stage of a young woman’s life, she was perfectly proportioned, diving into the hotel pool with the grace of a swallow.
My son said later, with a kind of awe,
"She’s prettier than Claudia Schiffer,” but my daughter burst into tears that night and said that she was worried about having a fat stomach. I comforted her, but I knew what she meant.
"You must be kind to her because she’s a Lonely Only,” I said sternly. "She doesn’t have anyone else to hang out with.”

They did not need encouragement. Lottie and Isabelle struck up one of those sudden intense holiday friendships. All three children played incessantly the next day, and now mine, to my relief, were not the only noisy teenagers in the hotel. In the afternoon, we all visited the Chateau d’Usse, its turrets rising dreamily above its vast trees as if conjured from river-mist. The pigeons cooed in the tall boughs, as we examined the stables where even the flies had fallen asleep on the enchanted horses. I had feared my children would consider themselves too old for this, but they wanted to climb the nearest tower and see the much-advertised scenes from Sleeping Beauty. Isabelle came with us, while her parents toured the rest of the castle. Up we went, grateful for the breeze, and soon were peering through glass windows at a room with dusty life-sized dummies in medieval costume. There were the king and queen, with their cradle, and a handful of courtiers or fairies. There, in front, was –
"Maleficent,” said my daughter, a child of Disney, "but they call her Carabosse.”
"Gosh, mum, she looks awfully like you,” said James.
We all looked, and it was true, there was something familiar about her.
"Mum doesn’t have big black horns, though,” said Lottie.
"But you aren’t bad, are you?” said my son. He gave me one of his rare smiles, the sort that reminded me of when he had been little, and that reassured me he was still brushing his teeth.
I hesitated. It’s easy to be good when you’re happy and secure. I had recently become neither.
"Well,” I said; "just think what good Maleficent actually did to Sleeping Beauty.”
Isabelle opened her blue eyes very wide.
"Madame?”
"Mum,” said Lottie, rolling her eyes. "You wouldn’t like it if I went to sleep for a hundred years, would you?”
"I might prefer it to watching you with dozens of awful boyfriends,” I said.
"My father says I must never have boyfriends,” said Isabelle. "Only a husband. He must be Swiss.”
"Oh? I think he’ll find he can’t stop you,” I said, dryly.
Lottie sighed. "Isabelle’s parents are really like, Victorian? They won’t let her get her ears pierced or wear nail polish, even.”
"Aren’t you lucky, then?” I said. "To have a single parent.”
By this time, the Duras family had caught up with us. Lottie and Isabelle went to examine the second tableau, featuring a candyfloss Prince waking a blonde Princess in her four-poster. My children made retching noises.
"You do not like?” asked Isabelle.
"Honestly,” said Lottie, "as if one should just lie there, waiting.”
"A Princess should find her own Prince,” said James, who living with a feminist mother and sister had naturally imbibed our points of view.
Isabelle looked shocked.
"But she cannot help it.”
"A spell is only a state of mind,” said James, with that adolescent pomposity I found hilarious and touching.
"It is good that they practice their English,” said Monsieur Duras, mopping his brow. I complimented him, rather stiltedly, on how well Isabelle spoke it already, and he explained that in Switzerland, they learnt English at 9, German at 11 and a third language at 13.
"That sounds like a lot of work,” I said.
"But of course, our daughter works almost as hard as we do!” said his wife. "On Monday, she have piano after school, on Tuesday gymnastics, on Wednesday tennis….”
Her voice droned on, outlining all the extra-curricular activities that I had neither the time nor the money to give my own. I smiled and nodded, and all the while resented them for their smug, unseeing lives, and resented, too, being made to feel like this. James was right, I was Carabosse, envious at their good fortune, and their beautiful, polite child.

All the same, nothing would have come of it if my daughter and theirs hadn’t swapped addresses on departure. They promised each other, fervently, that they would be pen-pals.

We returned to England, and to our good-enough home. The children went back to school, I went back to work, and the memory of our week in France receded, although my daughter still complained about having a fat stomach, at least until acne became a greater preoccupation. I think we’d have forgotten all about Isabelle, but then a letter arrived. It was written in curly foreign handwriting, and had a stamp with a gentian on it.

"Dear Lottie, I am hoping to find you well. I am well. I am writing this in my bedroom. My bedroom is pink, and my bathroom is pink also. I like pink! My family live in a house by Lake Geneva and it is very nice. I hope you and your brother will visit one day. I have a goldfish and a rabbit.

With love from your friend,
Isabelle.”

Lottie read this out.

"That’s so boring.”
It was boring, and what made it worse was that she enclosed a photo of herself with a house like a mini-castle in the background. Lottie refused to write back. Typical, I thought, mortified once again at my children’s lack of manners. Poor Isabelle. She must indeed be lonely, to have tried to make a new friend of a casual holiday acquaintance. Then, I suddenly thought: why shouldn’t I write instead? It would amuse me to plant some new ideas in that beautiful, conventional head, like weeds in a municipal rose-bed.

"Dear Isabelle, Why do you like pink?” I typed. "Is it because you really like it, or because girls are dressed in pink and expected to like it? Boys are dressed in blue because they are supposed to come from heaven, but girls are only allowed to like the colour of flesh. My own favourite colour is…purple!”

I didn’t forge my daughter’s signature, as she so often forged mine, only signed with my initials. Soon another letter arrived.

"Dear Lottie, Your letter was so interesting. Nobody is telling me about pink before! Perhaps liking pink is wrong. But there are many pink flowers in nature, so is it bad? Can a colour be bad, itself, or just the way it is used by people?

Your friend,
Isabelle.”

I was pleasantly surprised by this. I wrote back, still pretending to be Lottie, and received another reply. She was not stupid, and soon we were debating whether beauty and goodness were the same thing, and whether women should work when they had children. I explained to her how important it was for girls to have a career because of my "mother’s” divorce. I was then shocked to learn that in her canton in Switzerland, nobody was divorced. You could be fined for planting the wrong flowers in your window-box. She went to Church every Sunday, never wore jeans and was expected to stay at home until she got married. Yet Isabelle could cook and sew and iron and do all the things that my own could or would not, and that, too, made me worry that in emphasising the importance of academic success I had failed to teach my children how to be civilised. Soon, we were exchanging letters every fortnight or so. Lottie didn’t notice, but James did because he liked collecting foreign stamps.
"Why are you writing to Isabelle, Mum?” he asked.
"Oh, you never know,” I said, deliberately vague. "You might want to go and stay with her to improve your French some time.”
"Isabelle’s boring,” said Lottie. "She’s just like that Sleeping Beauty. She’s going to lie there like a doll and wait for her Prince to come.”
"I could write,” said my son. "I’m going to do French A-level, remember.”
I was surprised. He shrugged.
"It might be better than some official pen-pal.”
"OK. As long as it doesn’t become a snore,” I said. "The secret of a good letter is liveliness.”
He looked doubtful.
"I don’t know if my French is good enough.”
He wrote, however, and Isabelle wrote back - to me. She explained that it was more educational for both of them this way, for she could practice her English and James his French. I wondered whether her parents, with their strict ideas, knew she was now corresponding with a boy, and a foreigner. We were scarcely the kind of people her conventional family would approve of. By now, Lottie had decided that pierced ears weren’t enough, and had gone on to have studs in her eyebrow, belly-button and tongue. James insisted on wearing clothes so baggy that his trousers appeared to be held up by will-power, and was deeply into garage music. His room was a chaos of old socks and decaying cups of tea positioned round his new, second-hand computer. However, he passed his GCSEs with flying colours and was predicted to get an A in French A-level, so I wasn’t complaining.

Sometimes at night I would hear the rattle of computer keys in my son’s bedroom.
"What are you up to?” I asked, suspicious.
"Oh, just swapping emails with Isabelle.”
"You’re still in touch?”
"Yeah.”
I didn’t say anything. Privately, I was more relieved than not, because my son didn’t seem to be too interested in English girls.
The summer after his A-levels, James said,
"Mum, Isabelle wants to visit us. Can she?”
I paused.
"It might be interesting,” said James, casually.

I made all kinds of objections. I pointed out that our house was too small, messy and not posh enough for what Isabelle was used to. I was over-ruled. For the first time in five years, I spoke to Madame Duras as we made arrangements for her nineteen-year-old daughter to visit mine. She had never left home alone. All my hostility flooded back, as did my mortification that I would soon be judged by this child of perfection. For the next fortnight, I exhausted myself after work and at week-ends getting my house a little cleaner and tidier. To my relief, James helped, repainting the kitchen, hacking back the jungle of shrubs in the garden, mowing the lawn and even getting a haircut. It was astonishing how nice he looked when clean. He had somehow been transformed into a young man. Thank God, I thought, though I still regarded her visit with dread.

At last, Isabelle arrived, smiling shyly. She was just as beautiful as before, though her hair was a darker gold and reached to her waist. My daughter was instantly overcome by self-hatred. I was also struck dumb. It was James who said,
"Hallo Isabelle. Did you have a good journey?”
She said, "Hallo James. Thank-you for your letters. They were very interesting. They -”
Then she, too, stopped.
"Oh, Lord,” said my daughter, disgustedly, looking from one blushing face to the other.

I couldn’t exactly blame them. We could all see what had happened, and after a bit Lottie and I left them to it. There’s nothing like love for making you feel ugly and unwanted, we agreed, hugging each other mournfully. Above out heads, wood pigeons cooed sleepily, just as they had done in the grounds of the Chateau d’Usse. I don’t think Isabelle noticed the cracked tiles in the bathroom or the patchy grass or indeed our table-manners however. For Isabelle, far from despising us, seemed to love us all. She said that knowing my family had saved her.

"From what?” Lottie asked.
"From never being alive,” Isabelle said, passionately. "From never being young. From never having any real friends.”
My daughter forgave her, then, and took her to where she could have her ears pierced. (Isabelle, strange to say, refused to have a tongue stud.) They swapped clothes, they shopped, they went out clubbing and sight-seeing together, but it was James who was the real focus of her interest. As she was of his. We were all under her spell: for just as my family improved her understanding of the world, so she improved us. We’d never behaved so nicely to each other, not even in a French hotel. Once we got over the shock of saying "please” and ironing our clothes, it was surprising how much pleasanter life felt. We stopped being god-enough, and became quite good at simply being good.

I don’t know at what point during that fortnight she moved out of Lottie’s bedroom and into James’s, for the mother of a teenagers learns not to enquire too deeply into these matters. Not that it stopped there.

Her parents were mortified. Goodness knows what they had intended should happen to their daughter once she was grown up. Perhaps they hoped that she, too, would have slept on and on in the Swiss castle, and never woken up.

"But they reckoned without you, dear Carabosse,” said my daughter-in-law.

Woman & Home, June 2003

Amanda Craig’s new novel, Love in Idleness, will be published this summer by Time,Warner.

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