Fire and Ice (9 page)

“Excellent!” exclaimed the
Tessinoisse. “I do like a bit of a challenge. Although I must warn you, if it
comes to a competition, I have more years of experience. Now let us see if
together we can keep the men from speaking about work all through dinner.”

“Pardon me?” Kate was surprised,
uncertain if this was an invitation.

“Mais oui, you will be joining us
for a fondue tonight, Michelle. The whole family must get to know you if we are
to be living together on weekends over the winter. And now we must leave the
kitchen to the men. Fondue is the one meal that is the men’s department.”

With this, the dynamic woman swept
out of the kitchen, leaving Kate in a cloud of subtle perfume and confusion.  Kate
never liked finding herself in situations that no musical hit had been written
to accommodate. She was out of her depth.

Chapter Ten

“Have you ever made a real Swiss
fondue before, Michelle?” Stefan asked her, leaning over the comfortable
armchair where Kate was curled up painstakingly trying to read the
French-language newspaper that she’d picked up from the coffee table. A
dictionary lay open on the carpet below her chair.

“I’ve made fondue from a package,”
she answered guardedly. “I don’t know if that counts as the real thing.”

Stefan clucked disapprovingly and
held out his hands to help pull Kate to her feet. “That just won’t do. All
chalet girls MUST know how to make a proper fondue. It’s in the contract. Or it
would be, if we weren’t too lazy to draw up a contract. But then we’d have to
deal with work permits and striking chalet girls demanding unions and all hell
would break loose. Now come with me.”

For the second time in an hour
Kate found herself being led by the hand into the kitchen. She was relieved to
hear that there was no legal document she was meant to have signed to
incriminate her still further.

“Now, the secret is in the
cheese,” Stefan said, cracking his knuckles and donning an apron. He handed
another one to Kate. “You have to use local mountain cheeses, from cows fed
only on summer wildflowers and prepared over a wood fire above fifteen hundred
metres. Which could be tricky in the UK, I will grant you that.”

                Kate listened with amusement as
Stefan chattered away, obviously enjoying himself. As they grated Gruyere
cheese and chopped Vacherin into small cubes she had ample opportunity to study
his famous looks. The elder son took after his Germanic father as much as
Sebastien showed his mother’s Ticino heritage.

Stefan was definitely handsome in
a smooth, polished way, with blonde hair pushed back from his high forehead and
finely angled cheek bones. He was easy company, the opposite of Sebastien, as
gregarious as his brother was taciturn.

He was definitely an attractive
man, Kate decided, with his lazy charm and winning smiles. He had a way of
making a person feel noticed and special. She was sure it was all an act and he
wasn’t her type, but it was still flattering and enjoyable attention.

They talked a lot about Verbier. He
asked about the locals, about gossip from the pub Mont Fort, about places she
had visited in her brief time here. She could tell that he was missing his role
as chalet host and could imagine that he was good at it. There was genuine
fondness for Verbier in his voice when he spoke. Kate had tried to remember all
the gossip Emily had told her about the social scene and passed it on as best
she could.

“I suppose I did bring the exile
on myself,” he admitted grudgingly, seeming to read her mind. “But it was worth
it for the lovely company of the incomparable Rashmi Tewari.”

“Rashmi Tewari?” Kate repeated in
surprise. “The star of “Bombay Mix”?”

It was Stefan’s turn to be
surprised. “You’ve seen Bollywood blockbusters? I didn’t think that one ever
made it off the subcontinent.”

“Ah, but I love musicals,” Kate
explained, looking at him with renewed curiosity. “And Bollywood has taken them
to an extreme. I can’t believe you know Rashmi Tewari. What was the hit song
that they dance to in the forest scene?”

“You mean “Gharam Chutney?”” he
asked, laughing out loud. “I still can’t believe you know that.”

“Know it? I can even sing along
with it,” she said almost sheepishly.

“In that case, here we go. But
first, see how the wine has nearly started to boil? This is when you start
adding the Gruyere, stirring constantly. We’ll add the Vacherin at the end.
It’s so creamy it dissolves easily. Let me just fetch my ipod.”

Kate was left alone in the kitchen
stirring in the grated cheese, handful by handful. Moments later Stefan was
back, attaching his player to a small speaker on the kitchen shelf. He spun
through his repertoire quickly and found the song in question.

A female voice introduced the
theme in two lines that warbled plaintively along an eastern scale before the
instruments joined in with a catchy beat and a male voice took up the theme.
Kate joined in unselfconsciously, singing along with the female parts while
Stefan hummed along to the male vocals. Soon they were imitating the Bollywood
dance style, each one dancing around an imaginary tree in the way the actors
did in the film, laughing at themselves.

Sebastien burst in at the same
time that Stefan suddenly remembered the fondue with a loud “Oh merde, the
cheese,” as he scrambled to turn off the music. Sebastien glowered at his
brother and leapt to pull the fondue pot from the stove. Most of the wine had
evaporated and the cheese had formed a solid lump.

Looking highly unimpressed with
both of them, Sebastien opened the kitchen window and dumped the fondue
contents into the snow. “I think I’ll take over from here if we want to eat
before midnight,” he said coldly to Stefan. “At least it looks like most of the
cheese never even made it to the caclon so it shouldn’t take too long to start
again.”

Kate, who had remained posed in
mid-step during the short-lived fondue emergency, suddenly felt foolish. She
remembered Axelle’s cool poise and wondered what Sebastien thought seeing her
dance so badly to a Hindi pop song.  She decided to follow Stefan out of the
kitchen in disgrace as Hans Peter and Jorg came to check on the dinner’s
progress.

Sebastien reached for her arm as
she passed him by, but she shook his hand away crossly. She didn’t need to hear
what he thought of her unprofessionalism or have him blame her for burning the
family fondue. If he wanted cool, calm and collected, he could go to Axelle. If
he wanted spastic, loud and emotionally unstable, he could speak with her. He
made the wise choice and let her walk out of the room.

“I must say, it’s nice to have
another woman to share the burden of keeping these family dinners from sounding
like a shareholders’ meeting,” Teresa said conversationally, smiling across the
dining room table at Kate.

Kate felt four pairs of male eyes
turn towards her, and busied herself with putting a small square of bread on
her fondue fork. She was grateful for the soft light which hid her flushed face,
and the flickering glow of the little flame underneath the fondue pot.

The Pichard family was sharing
their Christmas fondue with Kate. This seemed to be a family tradition for
them, but Kate felt on the spot. This time it was Teresa who was working to put
her at ease, immersing her in the friendly banter of the sons.

“Mother, don’t start this,”
groaned Sebastien, rolling his eyes as he reached across to dip his bread in
the melted cheese.

His mother was undaunted. “I was
hoping by now to have wives and little children filling this chalet,” she
observed, looking around the large room. “It was originally meant to host
several generations, you know. I know your generation doesn’t feel as rushed as
ours did to have children...”  

“Maybe we just have better options
for birth control, Mother,” Stefan said sweetly.

Stefan was seated beside his
mother, directly across the table from Kate where he managed to animate her
dinner with comical facial expressions to match the conversation. His blonde
hair glowed like a halo in the candlelight, although his behaviour put her more
in mind of a clown.

His father, seated at the head of
the table, looked as if he had also been blonde in his youth, although his hair
was now largely white. The grandfather had been placed between Kate and
Sebastien, in the hopes of being able to hear what was said.

“Or perhaps you are too spoilt to
find a woman who will have you!” Teresa returned emphatically. “But you had
better hurry up. I want to be strong enough still to be able to pick up my own
grandchildren.”

 “I thought I was banned from
pursuing the fairer sex,” Stefan mused aloud. “Does this mean that I’m out of
the doghouse? Even encouraged to continue the hunt?”

“If you are out of the doghouse,
you are still on a short leash,” growled his father warningly.  Hans Peter
loomed over the table in a menacing way, trying to hear the conversation, but
he spoke with a hint of humour behind his gruff voice.

“I know, we’ll just get you a
puppy, Mother,” Sebastien suggested. “They are much easier to manage than
grandchildren.”

“A puppy, eh? We can call it
Audrey,” Jurg broke in, looking delighted. “After Audrey Hepburn, of course.”
He leaned toward Kate. “I met her, you know, when she lived near Morges. She
came to us to buy a watch. Charming.”

Hans Peter looked directly at Kate
and raised his eyebrows in a theatrical aside. “Teresa looked a bit like Audrey
Hepburn herself when I met her, you know.”

“So you’d name a dog after me?” his
wife protested with pretended indignation.

Kate smiled. To her relief, she
was starting to enjoy the evening. The family was much more down-to-earth than
she had expected, and the relaxed ambiance was a pleasant contrast to the grand
dining hall. The gentle teasing reminded her of family dinners when she was
growing up with her numerous siblings.

The fondue was delicious. The
cheese was from the valley just below Verbier, and the white wine came from
Sion, only twenty kilometres further away.

As dinner wore on, she watched the
dynamics in the family. She caught Sebastien watching her out of the corner of
his eye a few times, but each time she turned towards him he looked away to
talk to his brother. As for herself, she found it easier to listen to Teresa
and Stefan and to try not to think about Sebastien at all.

The mix of emotions that washed
over her was not all positive, but there was a simplicity in simply avoiding
each other which made it easier for Kate to act naturally and to forget
whatever hidden feelings she’d been harbouring.

Still she felt a tiny knot of
tension slip away when they had managed to empty the big porcelain dish. The
father had even fried an egg in the final bits of cheese, “to complete
Michelle’s introduction to Swiss culture,” as he put it.

“This is la religieuse,” he
informed her, mixing the egg into the melted cheese in a heavy mess. “It is
very tasty, but then you must not drink cold water all evening or it will form
a hard ball in your stomach. Instead you must drink a little digestif.”

They all moved out to the living
room for their after-dinner drinks. Kate jumped up to serve them, but
Hans-Peter waved her away. “Tonight you are our guest,” he said graciously,
ushering her to sit by the fire. “And now you must watch to learn how to play a
uniquely Swiss card game, chibre or jass.”

“It really is part of the Swiss
tradition,” Stefan explained to her. “You know we still have compulsory
military service here, so all men learn to play this.”

“What isn’t forbidden is mandatory
here,” Sebastien quoted dryly, trying again to catch her eye.

Kate avoided looking at him and
made a mental note to use that quote in her next column. Meanwhile Stefan had
launched into a funny tale about compulsory volunteer fireman duty in the small
village they had grown up in.

“We were all on a roster to take
the old truck out for a drive once a week or the engine would seize up. Well,
Seba and I took our shift together, and one night there were these young women
we wanted to impress, so we put on the fire engine sirens as we passed.”

Sebastien started to chuckle.
“There was no way to turn them off after that. We panicked and went screaming
down the road, sirens ringing and lights flashing, and all the other men in the
village who did fireman duty came tearing out of their houses, calling each
other to try to figure out where the fire was.”

Stefan grinned ruefully. “We had
to supervise a lot of car parking at special events to make up for that,” he
remembered. “But we certainly managed to attract the attention of those girls.”

Kate sat back and watched as the four
of them seated themselves around the low coffee table. For her sake they played
a few open hands, explaining their strategies and the complicated
score-keeping. Hans-Peter bellowed as if everyone else was deaf, which added a
comical rowdiness to the table, but was yawning loudly by the third hand.

“Next time, you will take my
place, Michelle,” said Teresa as she stacked all the cards again neatly. “But
now it is bed-time for us old folks. I will see you all at breakfast.”

She got up gracefully, bidding
them all goodnight. At the doorway she paused, looking back pointedly at
Stefan. “And I expect to see you at the breakfast table as well. With no
surprise guests.” Without waiting for Stefan’s indignant response, she swept up
the stairs after her husband.

Stefan grinned at Kate. “Those
Tessinoise mothers put Italian moms to shame when it comes to treating their
thirty-something sons as little boys still. Or is this a more universal
phenomenon?  How is the mammaissimo where you come from, Michelle?”