A

Gentle reader, what follows are extracts from a work in progress (as
my therapist insists I call it) dealing with the suffering inflicted on
me and my family by the numerous (sixteen and counting) young women who
have drifted in- and all too slowly- out of our lives over the past
seven years. The less sleepy amongst you will notice that this work is
incomplete (as is my therapy). Time will heal this particular wound, so
visit often (but don't bring your folks). If you are a publisher, or
movie mogul, feel free to throw large amounts of cash in my direction
(therapy isn't cheap, you know). If , however, you are some other kind
of pirate and wish to rip me off, for God's sake, at least give me a
credit.

Fit the First

"Ooh, aah, pants and bra" I chant to myself purposefully as we listen
to the announcements on the tannoy. Precisely six weeks after we
started our search, my wife, my four year old daughter and myself are
standing in Manchester airport awaiting the arrival of our first au
pair. We examine each face as it comes into the arrival hall. I examine
a few bodies too; well a man has to pass the time somehow. What we're
looking for, who we're looking for is a certain Mademoiselle Claudine
Lefebvre. That's right, I hit paydirt first time, I got myself a French
au pair. I really must get one for the child too, sometime.
Mademoiselle Claudine agreed - after a remarkably short telephone
discussion- to come and live with us en famille. God bless the agency
that sent her to us. What a pity they never managed to send a
photograph of the gorgeous little French thing, just so my darling wife
could check on the dimension of the poor girl's moustache, and any
other facial hair she might be sporting, say like a beard, or
two.

That lack of any identifying photograph is the reason we are hopping
anxiously from foot to foot as people arrive from the flight. Little
daughter thinks she has the problem cracked, however. Having borrowed a
very large sheet of my most expensive water colour paper, she has
written, in the tiny letters of her childish scrawl, our new au pair's
name way down in one corner of the sheet. I point out that the keenest
eyed hawk would have difficulty in spotting this sign, even if my
daughter was holding it up (which she isn't; it lies between her bottom
and the polished floor of the arrival hall, on which she is resting her
tired legs). Just as I am beginning to despair of ever seeing anyone in
that maid's outfit, a strikingly beautiful young woman, with rich dark
brown hair, tanned skin and eyes like chocolate sways towards us. Can
this be Claudine? Have I died and gone to Heaven? Is that my wife
punching me in the kidneys?

Well, two out of three isn't bad, I think to myself as I take
Claudine's bag. I engage her in the kind of conversation that
middle-aged Englishmen think thrills young French girls to the very
core of their bodies. I talk to her of Paris, of warm spring evenings
under the trees in the park. My wife talks to me of this cold evening
with me sleeping under a tree in our park. Claudine smiles sweetly as
we walk to the lift that will take us down to the car park. It is
almost the last time I will see her smile. My spouse tries to squeeze
our daughter between Claudine and me, but Claudine pretends not to
notice the presence of a child in the lift, or later on, in the house.
This does not go unnoticed by my little darling, and her innocent eyes
narrow, all the better to focus the intensity of her glare. Well-oiled
cogs, made of brightly coloured plastic, slowly rotate in my tiny
angel's curl-covered head. Died and gone to Heaven? Oh, no, this is a
fast trip to the other place. Those of a nervous disposition should
alight here. Hold on, wait for me, I want to come with you?
Uncertain as to what nubile young Parisian beauties ate (or whether, as
rumour has it, they ate at all) we laid out, on returning from the
airport, a varied and sumptuous spread of Monsieur Sainsbury's finest
pat?s and other charcouteries. These were not given a second glance by
Claudine, but only a first, which was one of undisguised disgust. She
went straight up to her room, on her own (thus depriving me from
pointing out the many qualities her large double bed possessed) coming
down later only to ask if she could use the telephone and to
unceremoniously drop a large wrapped package on the floor in front of
my daughter, whose desire for attention, or revenge, was almost
tangible.

While my little treasure ripped open the package- imagining it was
someone she knew with a French accent- my wife and I exchanged
whispered concerns about Claudine's apparent personality problem.
"Perhaps she doesn't like children" I hissed. "Perhaps she doesn't like
you" said my wife as she held a speedily drained wine glass to the
wall. She is twice as erudite in French as any English person I know,
which I admit isn't saying much. But while the thin walls of our
ranch-style estate house (rented, mais oui) proved no barrier to
eavesdropping, Claudine's fast and accented French was as
incomprehensible as a Natural Law Party Political broadcast.
The tell-tale sound of a telephone handset being smashed back into
place alerted us to the possibility that Claudine's conversation might
have finished. We jumped back from our listening post at the wall and
assumed an air of untroubled insouciance, trembling on the edge of our
chairs, as we awaited Claudine's entry into the living room. Instead we
heard the speedy drumming of her stiletto heels up the stairs, a noise
insufficient to drown out the heaving Gallic sobs that escaped from her
charming bosom. I opened the door into the hall and tentatively called
out a cheery "Bonne nuit". She slammed the door of her bedroom so hard
the cutlery drawer in the kitchen rattled for a full five
minutes.

My wife and I exchanged horror stories with our eyes. We were
speechless with Anglo-French hostility. Finally I loosened my tongue
enough to swallow a brimful of fine Medoc and say "What the hell's
wrong with her?" A voice came from the living room floor. "It's a game"
said my daughter, referring to the contents of the package in front of
her. She shuffled the little wooden objects over a board divided into
numerous sections and colours. I should have paid more attention. It
was a game, but we weren't to find that out until a few more days had
been spent in Hell. In the meantime the girl wanted to play the game,
our little girl, that is. My consort and I sat on the floor next to our
only begonia and struggled to make sense of the pieces it contained and
the board they so casually rested on. This game, in it's devil may care
fashion, defied us to fathom its complexities, aimed as it was at a
three year old French child. Out-fathomed, we created our own rules,
one of which required a certain French person to die every time anyone
threw a six.

The adroitness gained from my early schooling in ballet (my branch of
the cubs was particularly forward-looking) helped me to walk on the
eggshells that Claudine had scattered willy-nilly around our happy
home. As she descended the stairs on her first full day with us, she
brought with her a lowering cloud of gloom, out of which the eggshells
fell thick and fast.
Our cupboards might have come straight out of Old Mother Hubbard's
kitchen for all the interest Claudine showed in them at breakfast. She
ate nothing, sniffed dismissively at our offer of freshly made coffee
(specially ground in a mill in one of the sunnier reaches of the
Yorkshire dales) and sat sulking in the living room while we chewed our
toast like the condemned people we were. Unable to bear the strain, my
darling wife took her breakfast and sat in her car in the drive to
consume it, honking on the horn when she wanted a refill of her coffee
cup. I tried to bribe my little angel with promises of a month long
holiday in a villa with a pool in Cadbury's World in order to get her
to say "Good morning" to Claudine. "She won't talk to me" she pointed
out in that arrestingly simple, if flawed, logic children often
display, "so I won't talk to her".

As it was her first day on the job, I accompanied Claudine and my
treasure on the cab ride to the nursery my daughter attended. I tried
to crack the frosty silence by pointing out the many interesting sites
on the route. Sadly, as we were in a small town in the midlands and
heading for the flat drab fields that begin a few miles from our door,
there were no interesting sites to point out.

My daughter was no help, steadfastly refusing to let a single word
(even a hostile one) slip through her firmly clenched baby teeth. The
cab had barely come to a halt in the drive of the nursery when my baby
slipped her bonds and raced for the barren little building like her
life depended on it. Claudine stayed determinedly in the cab while I
sloped into the nursery and begged the staff to let me spend the day
with them polishing up my finger painting skills and improving my
toilet training.

Alas, no moulded plastic potty could be found in my size (although I
was pleased to note a degree in design was not seen as an unfair
advantage in the finger painting area). With all the jaunty ?lan of a
pair of Bourbons travelling in a tumbril for an appointment with Madame
Guillotine, Claudine and I headed back to the house.

I sensed that Claudine's heart was not totally gripped by my litany of
instructions regarding the proper use of the washing machine, oven,
vacuum cleaner, microwave, juicer et.al. Cutting short my light-hearted
ode on the intricacies of the central heating system, I threw a thumb
in the general direction of the drawer containing all the pamphlets and
users manuals for our panoply of gadgets and suggested she read them at
her leisure. Claudine ignored the severed digit as it twitched on the
laminated work-surface. Instead, she asked if she could use the 'phone.
Nodding silently, I left her to it and went to build an ark, in
preparation for the floods of tears I felt were certain to come. The
thumb, which has met a few hammers in its time, knew it was safer where
it was, and remained.

Nothing cheers up a miserable French person like a tour around a tiny
miserable English town in the midlands. That was my theory, anyway, as
I escorted Claudine (still soggy about the eyes) through the dull grey
streets of our adopted home town. There was so much for her to
ridicule, she couldn't fail to cheer up once she realised the obvious
supremacy of the French way of life. We had no bakery worthy of the
name (though the bread was bad enough to inspire a revolution), no
patisserie, no delicatessen, no designer label shops. Nothing. Not even
a decent supermarket. Ignoring the stunned young men who dropped dead
as her gorgeousness passed by, Claudine grasped the comparative
cultural poverty of her new home in a flash. "I want to go home" she
said, as we stood in the narrow aisle of our local supermarket. "What?"
I said, taking from her the jar she had been examining, "Just because
we don't have decent mustard?"

She lowered her Bournville eyes. "I want to be with my lover" she
murmured. "Why I'm right here" I said, twirling an imaginary moustache
and smirking in a devastatingly cute way I have. Her chocolate met my
china and I saw she looked a little puzzled. "Is lover not the correct
word?" she said in her flawless English. "Lover, lady-killer, tiger,
Don Juan de nos jours" I said and moved closer to her, "You know I have
this terrific little outfit you would look just dandy in-" . Her voice
cut across mine; "Please, I don't understand what you say; I want to
see my boyfriend. I want to go back to Paris for the weekend".
"But you've only just got here" I reminded her, in case the time
difference and the lack of croissants had coddled her mind. Then I
recalled the short but sweet 'phone conversation I'd had with Claudine
before she arrived. "Wait a minute," I told her as she swung her lush
hips towards the checkout: "You told me you didn't have a boyfriend. I
distinctly remember asking you, and you said you didn't have one". It
was one of the reasons I'd hired her- no competition. "I don't have a
boyfriend, and yet I do" she said, looking wistfully at the tips of her
perfectly manicured nails. Ah, yes, the French are all such
philosophes. Silently cursing Derrida and all of his works, I begged
her to shed some light on this paradox. It might explain who she was
having the fraught 'phone conversations with. But Claudine simply
clamped her perfectly red lips shut and refused to say another word on
the subject.

Instead she said she wanted to go back to the house. Feeling another
telephone call coming on, I made a small request of her. "Do you think
you could move around a little bit while you're on the 'phone?" I asked
as we walked back through the leafy private lane that led to our
executive-style dump: "you know, sort of move up an down the hallway as
you, er, talk. Only the carpet under the 'phone table is getting
awfully waterlogged." The look she threw me in response gave me second
degree burns, and I wondered whether I might be able to exchange the
maid's outfit for something more appropriate, like a lion
tamer's.

The afternoon's phone call was just as waterlogged as any other had
been, so as I made my daily report to the commandant general that
evening I told her I doubted if Claudine would be splitting to Paris
just yet. My wife was all for purloining Claudine's passport and hiding
it somewhere Claudine never went, like our daughter's bedroom. I
recognised the evil satisfaction that this would give her, but urged a
more relaxed approach. "Take it from me" I smirked, " Mademoiselle C.
will be spending this weekend en Angleterre". Mid-simper, we were
disturbed by a timid knock at our bedroom door. As the flunky was
without, I had to open it myself. There on the threshold was the
flunky. "It's Claudine" I called to my wife. "I'll fetch a mop" she
called back. Claudine stood nervously on the doorsill and launched into
a hurried speech. "I will be going to Paris this weekend to see my
boyfriend. May I go on Friday night? I will be back on Sunday evening".
She paused. "I promise". I leaned against the doorframe and took out my
meerschaum. "This boyfriend you're going to see" I began, "is he the
boyfriend you don't have, or the boyfriend you do have?". Twin Niagaras
spouted from Claudine's mahogany orbs and splashed noisily below onto
her Manolos.

I don't know whether it was the revelation of my fallibility or the
confirmation that the girl really was going that irked my wife most,
but by God she was irked! Smoke hissed from her funnels and all the
lamps on her bridge lit up. I just managed to call out "Thar she
blows!" before my wife steamed into Claudine. "You've only just got
here" she roared, bearing down on the doomed girl. "You've been here
three days, you've ignored my daughter, barely spoken a word to us,
cried non-stop and now you want to go to Paris to see your boyfriend?
What the hell's the matter with you girl? Don't you..." she began to
splutter, plates creaking, "don't you..". "No" I implored my beloved,
"darling, don't say it!!". But it was too late, the completed sentence
soared out of my wife's mouth and hit us both right in our Achille's
heel. "Don't you want to be an au pair?". Claudine stopped sobbing just
long enough to spit a venom-tipped "No!" in our direction. It hit my
wife dead centre, holing her below the water line and knocked her back
in a swoon on to the bed, then it ricocheted and caught me right were
it hurts; in the wallet. Claudine perforated the carpet all the way
back to her bedroom and something like a sonic boom was heard
throughout the land.

As the echoing thunderclap died away, a faint voice came from the bed:
"Then what the hell is she doing here?" I left off from trying to stem
the losses flowing from my wallet and said, "Why don't we let the kid
have a go at her, see what she can find out? She's been itching to get
her own back on Claudine". I could barely hear my wife's words, muffled
as they were by the pillow she was pressing firmly over her face. "O.K.
But set her controls on kill" she grunted.
It's often been noted by friends that our daughter has the aura of one
who has lived before. Perceptive as they are, none of them for a moment
suspect that she has previously been Torquemada, Attila the Hun, and
several of those people who turn up at your door and won't go away
until you switch your gas supply to them. I briefed the baby pink
incorruptible on her mission, pointed her in the general direction of
Claudine's blubbering and withdrew.
An ill-fitting silence sat uneasily on the house, like a suit bought on
the internet. Only the sound of my wife's knitting needles pierced the
eerie silence as they pierced the eerie voodoo doll of Claudine she was
clutching gleefully. Minutes passed, the birds in the garden grew
strangely mute, window cleaners trembled on their ladders, their jolly
whistling frozen mid-quaver, the life gone out of their
squeegees.

Suddenly the calm was broken by sheets of atonal squealing. "Listen to
her squawk" chuckled my wife merrily. "Our child is a genius" I
effulged. The shrieking continued. "I don't know what she's doing to
Claudine" said my wife, slipping her arm through mine, "but it's
certainly working". We lay back and let the vivacious thermals of the
jacuzzi lap at our throats. The door to our hammam burst open and there
stood Claudine, pulling at her locks and weeping copiously. "Tell 'er
to stop please! I do whatever you want." Not wishing to dazzle the
already distressed girl with the sight of my manly form, I sank lower
into the foaming water, generating a small tsunami. Over her sobbing I
could still hear the shrill yelping. My wife and I exchanged puzzled
glances: if it wasn't Claudine making that noise, who was? As if to
answer this unspoken query, our precious angel marched in, puffing
fiercely at her clarinet. "Please! Please! Make 'er stop it" begged
Claudine, sinking to her knees and kissing my soapy hand in a most
becoming fashion.
I signalled for her to stop. "No, not you Claudine" I told the dejected
handmaiden, and addressed my one and only child: "Sweetheart, enough
Coltrane already. I think Claudine is ready to talk". Unwillingly, the
child removed the reed from her purple lips and skulked off to find
some other target for her liquorice blow-pipe.

Later I floated in to the living room, wrapped in a kimono and
sporting, as a sign of authority, an ornamental brass dagger thrust
rather too carelessly into the waistband of my pyjama trousers- it
severed the cord around my waist and I was forced to hold the trousers
up for the duration of my interview with Claudine. She was standing in
the middle of the room, her wet eyes downcast. "I think you owe us an
explanation" I began. She sniffed and looked over my shoulder, out
through the window behind me.

"My boyfriend went away to university," she began, "and I thought, if I
came over here to England, he would come back to me?..but he won't. He
has stayed at the university. Now I want to go and see him, to talk to
him". I nodded sagely and stroked my imaginary concubine. "You live in
Paris, do you not?" I asked. "In Montmartre" she confirmed. "And where
is your boyfriend at university?" She began to sob loudly, "The
Sorbonne". Frowning, I took down my French Baedeker from the bookshelf
and, without opening it, hurled it with all my strength at the dippy
girl.

As Claudine's Air France flight to Paris nosed its way skyward, we
nosed our way into her room. Purely for professional reasons, we were
invading her privacy (it was as nought to what she had done to ours).
Our plan was merely to examine her cupboards and drawers for evidence
that she was gone for good. My wife opened the wardrobe and gasped.
"Empty or what?" I said as I danced a reel on the duvet. My spouse
pulled me by my one good ear off the bed and over to the wardrobe. It
was jammed full of clothes, and not just any old clothes, as my wife
began to point out.

"Gucci" she said, pulling at a transparent polythene covering on a
little black thing, "Jil Sander" she said, fingering the next,
"Versace" she gulped, holding a monstrous multi-coloured nonsense. I
could go on, but I'm afraid these names mean little to me, and after
about thirty minutes, my attention wandered. The love of my life was by
now going furiously through Claudine's drawers. She held up a
rose-coloured, flimsy, gauze-like thing, like a finger stall with
over-long straps. "Do you know what this is?" she snorted. "Heavenly"
was the thought that went through my head, but wiser counsel kept my
lips tight shut. "It's La Perla" snapped my love. "And there's drawers
full of it. She's got better clothes than I have. Do you know what this
means?" "A shopping trip first thing tomorrow?; a small accident at the
dry cleaners?" I winked. "No, you stupid oaf" barked the queen of my
heart, "It means she's richer than we are". "Not possible" I scoffed,
trying to reassure my wife, who is sensitive about this (and nothing
else).
She sat on the edge of the bed, chewing an Agnes B cardigan she had
found. "Why would someone so rich want to be an au pair?" she muttered
through clenched teeth. "She wants to get back at her boyfriend" I
reminded her. "It just doesn't make sense" she ruminated, spitting a
mother of pearl button out of the side of her mouth and flossing her
teeth with the silken fibres.

Claudine seemed happy enough to be back on Sunday evening when she
returned. Any ideas we had about interrogating her further were stalled
by her announcement that her boyfriend was coming to England the
following weekend to see her. Her plan seemed to be working. There was,
however, the question of where he was going to stay. Claudine supplied
the answer before we got our lips properly formed to raise the point.
"Are there any chateaux, I mean hotels, in the country near here where
Laurent and I can stay?" she asked, "Of course" she shrugged, "We could
not stay here". "Of course" echoed my wife, with only the merest hint
of friendliness, "that would be slumming it, wouldn't it?" "Yes" said
Claudine, moving up the hallway toward the stairs. My, but her English
is good?

I was under no illusion about the nature and quality of inns and hotels
in our county. I'd quaffed many an over-priced warm sweet white wine in
them in the name of socialising with the morons who ruled my wife's
life. If the bedrooms in these places were anything like the toilets
then Claudine would be sleeping standing up, that's if she was planning
on doing any sleeping. I tried gently to explain the generally poor and
uninspiring state of these dumps to Claudine, but she was not
listening; partly out of excitement about the arrival of Laurent, and
partly basing her image of midlands country hotels on her memory of the
stylish French country hotels she had stayed in. She brushed aside my
advice and, picking up the Yellow Pages, went off to call some hotels
herself.

Ten minutes later she came back to tell me she had found a lovely hotel
to canoodle the weekend away in. "I ask them if they have grass and
field around them" she said "and they tell me 'yes'. Laurent and I can
go for long walks in the countryside". I glanced at the piece of paper
on which she had written the name of the hotel, and drew my breath
sharply. The hotel she had chosen was right by a junction for the
motorway. It did indeed have grass around it- it was situated on a
large roundabout covered in the stuff. The field was just across the
other side of the dual carriageway.
I was faced with a conundrum. Moving slightly to the right, I was able
to get around it and concentrate fully on whether or not I should
inform Claudine of the true nature of the frightful hole in which she
was intending to re-seduce Laurent. I looked at her svelte profile as
she stood against the light pouring in through the windows. She was a
lush, lithe set of curves and she was dreamily thinking of the man she
loved. "Great choice" I barked, pointing to the scrap of paper with the
hotel address on it, adding conspiratorially, "you won't want to leave
the bedroom". Winking in my best Gallic manner, I slipped away.

In another part of the house (no, I'm not telling you where) the little
woman and I sat smaning like MPs on a freebie.
.......................

Claudine's once beautiful eye's, hollow and red-rimmed though they were
through constant weeping, were no match for the madame's and my own.
For every tear she shed, we shed at least a dozen. What was happening
to our beautiful family? Where did this monstrous teenage daughter
spring up from? Why couldn't I remember philandering with Claudine's
mother all those years ago in Paris? I stopped chewing the carpet for a
moment and lifted my head up. All those years ago, I'd been in a
condemned building in the north of England, breathing in photocopier
fumes and using Cow Gum for hair gel. I hadn't been in Paris. I wasn't
Claudine's father!

I rushed into the garage to give my wife the good news. Shouting over
the engine noise and fighting my way through the fumes gushing from the
tube connected to the exhaust, I gave her the good news. "Does this
mean I'm not her mother?" she coughed weakly. "Yes, yes," I roared,
taking her in my arms and turning off the engine. We kissed. "It's
alright sweetheart", I told her, "we don't have to worry about her and
her problems with her boyfriend! We're just her employers". "Are you
sure" she said, looking me in the eye. "Of course" I soothed. "She's
nothing to do with us. She's only our au pair". My wife slipped her arm
out of mine and reached for the ignition.
....................

I know every cloud has a silver lining, but very few linings have the
kind of creases that cut you in half every time you sit down. For
although Claudine shunned my daughter with a froideur that was
positively biblical in style and scale, though she screamed and sobbed
hysterically into the telephone at least twice a day, she did have her
plus points. She was an absolute titan on domestic matters, up and
cleaning ferociously while Hercules and his ilk were still drowsing in
their cots and picking lion meat out of their teeth. She spent the
greater part of each day spraying and buffing, scrubbing and shining.
Every surface gleamed like a polished jewel, even the carpets. This
girl even cleaned toilets, twice a day; more if they'd been used. My
wife, a woman for whom a clean toilet is next to Godliness (she was
brought up in an obscure branch of the Armitage sect) was in seventh
heaven. I was in the hall on the 'phone to my old school friend, now a
psychoanalyst. "Compulsive cleaning disorder" he mused thoughtfully
down the line "no, I must have missed that lecture. Can't say it means
anything to me. Have you tried Faulkner?" "What d'you think I got the
maid's outfit for?" I spat.

I was standing on some duckboards spread over the damp patch of carpet,
which was now home to several species of wildfowl. Sitting was out of
the question. For apart from burnishing the wallpaper until you could
shave in it, Claudine was a demon at the ironing board. Socks, shorts,
towels- all came back starched to the consistency of lacquerwork,
replete with knife-sharp creases. You could saw wood with the creases
she put in my boxer shorts. Fortunately there was nothing of that
consistency in my boxer shorts, no sir! However, a thoughtless sideways
step or sudden move could slit open your Daks from thigh to knee in
seconds. While this sort of look might have gone down well in the days
of the Armada, contemporary tastes found it less than appealing. Always
a careful dresser, a new sense of caution governed my every move and I
shimmied around with all the aplomb of a man with several snoozing
ferrets down his trousers.
Donning my protective sunglasses I ventured toward the gleaming white
kitchen, tripping over a water vole chewing the telephone cable on the
way. In the kitchen my wife was marvelling at the whiteness of the
sink, a modernist affair made of some strange, unnatural substance
extracted from the dark side of the moon, or the darker inside of a
marketing manager's head. Previously this sink had proved impossible to
both use and keep clean. The merest mention of 'washing up' turned the
whole thing a mottled brown and no amount of remonstration or cajoling
would restore it to its pristine virginity.

Yet here it was, pure as driven snow, and about as useful for washing
up in. We stood over it, scratching our heads and making the kind of
noises heard from country folk when they are first told they shouldn't
marry people they're already related to. "How does she do it?" said my
wife in awe, "is it bleach that makes it so white?" I thought of
Claudine and her turbulent temper; "No" I whispered, "it's white with
fear".
.........................

Fit the Second

While it's true that all good things must come to an end, has anyone
else noticed how bad things just seem to drag on forever? Even though
the aeroplane that was to whisk Claudine into the arms of her loved one
was revving up on the runway, it seemed like years before the little
drama queen was finally out our hair??? By this point I was holding up
my hands to the charge (made so eloquently by my wife each night, just
as I was reaching for the land of nod) that when it came to selecting
au pairs I was only one step away from needing the legal assistance of
Alan J. Dershowitz.

The madame then seized the reins and began to take a larger interest
than heretofore in the various foreign gals who were to take care of
her pride and joy, when they weren't flicking chicken nuggets through
the bars to her daughter. You see that's where I'd been going wrong;
I'd tried to pick women who were good with children, when what we
really needed was a housekeeper.

Accordingly my darling wife summoned the representative of the au pair
agency and demanded strong workhorses with an appetite for forced
labour and living outdoors. Eastern Europe was judged the most likely
location for such creatures and within moments my wife had whittled
down the list of former shot-putters of doubtful gender and wild
mountain women to her chosen candidate. Zlrwepvdfnja (apparently it
meant vrenka in Czech) was a chip off the old Eastern bloc, and quite a
sizeable chip at that. She stood over six feet tall in her turnip skin
boots, weighed far more than our pathetic bathroom scales could ever
register and had the puzzled brow and sour, puckered face of someone
who's just been told her last throw was disqualified and she has to
cough up a urine sample. In others words, my wife told me, grinning
from here to paternity, she was ideal.

Our usual method of making first contact with au pairs so far had been
to lurk in an airport arrival hall in dark glasses and wigs (just in
case we didn't like the look of them in the flesh). Zlrwepvdfnja (as we
never referred to her, at least, not to her face) changed all that.
Coming home from a hard night mining Cabernet Sauvignon we found the
little light on our answering machine flashing a message in morse code.
Zeddy, or Vrenka as we decided to call her, was arriving in two days
and wished to be met at the railway station in town. I consulted the
timetables but could find no train from Obluscz-Hzernjfa (Vrenka's
lair) that called at our little halt.

"Why isn't she flying here like they usually do?" wondered my wife as
she waited for the froth to settle on her liver salts and paracetomol
nightcap. I looked at the meaty legs poking out from the bottom of
Vrenka's dirndl skirt in the photo the agency had sent us. "With those
seven league legs" I groaned, sinking back onto my downy pillow, "it's
probably quicker to walk".
Although my intention was to sit down on the steps of the grand central
station and weep while I awaited the arrival of Vrenka, en route I
remembered the station was anything but grand, and the steps had been
bull-dozed to make room for a branch of Sock Shop. In any case she was
already bestriding the car park like a colossus when I shuffled up.
Shielding my eyes I tried in vain to espy her head through the misty
barrage of cumulus that surrounded it. Setting up my base camp in the
foothills of her coarse woollen socks I made for the summit. Two days
later we were shaking hands and exchanging greetings in faulty English,
me dangling by a participle caught in Vrenka's massively cleft
jaw.

She wisely refused my offer to carry her suitcases the few feet to the
cab rank, out of respect for my glass back, which she could see right
through. The driver looked on fearfully as she squeezed herself slowly
into the back of his mini-cab, settling her bulk while the front of the
car rose up and down like the pride and joy of some Angeleno mariachi
fan. Playing La Cucaracha through my nose I bid the driver start his
engine before we sank into the tar pits beneath the car park and Vrenka
was re-united with the other giants who used to walk the earth.
Lurching drunkenly back and forth the plucky little Daewoo finally
picked up enough speed to breast the brow of the hill that led down to
our Chad Valley mansion house. It was touch and go whether we would
manage to come to a satisfactory halt this side of my hallway, and if
Vrenka hadn't leaned out of the window to get a better look at an
electricity sub-station and overturned the car, things could have
turned nasty.

Vrenka seemed overjoyed at all the modern conveniences we possessed,
such as a roof, ceilings and walls with windows. She played so long
with the automatic igniter on the gas hob, her nose pressed close to
the ring in order to see "the little man who lighted the fire" that the
whites of her eyes were singed sooty black and the tip of her snout was
smouldering. She struggled for several weeks to establish clearly in
her mind the difference between the television and the microwave (and I
for one can understand her problem). Eventually she clarified the
situation by remembering that the things that came out of the microwave
were hot, and the things that came out of the television were not. It
seemed even up in the caves they had MTV.
At least she appeared to be keen on children. Well that's what I
thought until Vrenka and my little golden-haired sweetie rushed out
into the garden to play. Vrenka playfully grabbed my giggling treasure
by the ankles and began to spin her round and round before loosing her
off in the general direction of the stratosphere. While my wife and I
stood aghast, staring into the blue, Vrenka shook her head and went off
to put some more chalk dust on her palms.

It was a week before my daughter saw terra firma again, her little snub
nose touching down on a broccoli farm in Rhode Island. The poor kid,
she never did like the stuff.

I was beginning to think I would have to turn this into a work of
fiction if I was going to find real fault with Vrenka when, just before
the printer's errand boy turned up spotty and snarling at the door,
Vrenka blasted us with both barrels.

Unlike Claudine, who was, like the rest of the household, tucked up in
bed and sobbing softly into a pillow by 8.30 every evening, Vrenka
enjoyed a hectic and varied social life. How she ever managed to in
this one pit pony town, I'll never know. She constantly came back with
tales of pubs she'd been to. Yet when in daylight we would go to the
location she gave us we never found anything other than grassy
wasteland littered with broken sinks and the remains of two-legged
chairs. Theorising that this might well indeed be all that was left of
any establishment Vrenka had kicked up her heels in, I never quizzed
her much about where she was all night.

What fools we mortals be? I knew Vrenka often sipped a six-masted
schooner or two of sweet sherry with a neighbour of ours, a sturdy
little ball of anger with two wild animals for offspring and a husband
who was as vivid and perspicacious as a glass of water. (This addled
loon was the person who, when I informed his wife I had in former times
been the wearer of a beard, exclaimed: "You had a beard? Whereabouts?"
Showing him the elbow of my left arm seemed to answer his question.)
This wretched mother often took Vrenka on sodden evenings of debauchery
throughout the region, and we did not grow suspicious when the
frequency of such gallavanting increased until there was barely a night
when Vrenka's bulk did not block out the light in a smoky bar-room
somewhere in the midlands.

But what we thought was a duo of drunks was actually a tipsy trio. The
third person singular was a friend of our neighbour and had until
recently formed, with her husband and two children, a third person
plural. Deciding, on a whim, to divorce her husband (his ruddy
colouring clashed with the bottle green curtains in the bedroom, and
those curtains had been in her family for years) she found herself
short in the child-care department.

But none of this was known to my wife and I. So it was with heavy heart
and trembling chequebook that we were summoned by Vrenka for a serious
discussion. Ever the father figure to the young women who pass like
ships in the night through our happy home, I feared the worst when
Vrenka announced that she had something important to tell us.
"Oh my god she's pregnant" I thought (Vrenka had repeatedly been wooed
by a local youth, a behemoth himself, astride his motorbike. They
seemed like an ideal couple. He was the kind of desperado who could
tattoo his entire vocabulary on the knuckles of both hands- and he
had). Puzzling over whether an au pair with a child would need her own
au pair, I barely heard Vrenka when she said "I am leaving tomorrow".
What disturbed my thoughts was the dull thud of my wife hitting the
floor in a dead faint. Immediately revived by the contact with the cold
kitchen tiles my dream girl screamed "You're what?!" Vrenka repeated
her statement. "But what about the baby?" I squealed. The two women
looked at me as if I was something the cat had brought up. Vrenka
continued: "I am going to a family that needs me more than you do". My
wife, only just returned to an upright position, threw herself down in
a pose of abject supplication and pulling at the worsted of my turn
ups, insisted I join her. "But Vrenka" she bawled, "nobody needs you
more than we do". But it was to no effect, the girl was already
crunching the stairs into sawdust as she went up to pack her
bags.

To lose one au pair is??oh what the hell, you can fill in the rest
yourselves, I'm too busy trying to get an emergency replacement for
Vrenka. Madame has had to cancel her trip to New York and my teaching
responsibilities at one of the region's new universities (formerly a
shop selling trinkets and souvenirs) are now being carried out by a
sheep dog.

While the love of my life screams blue murder, yellow perils and purple
prose down the 'phone at the agency we got Vrenka from, I'm on the
other line trying to squeeze blood out of the stones who run every
other au pair agency this side of the Wash. But the flinty hearts are
hanging on to their haemoglobin, and not matter how sharply I prod with
my sob story, I cannot hit a vein. My betrothed, unusually for her, is
visibly weakening and ready to throw in the towel. "You mean, you're
willing to go back to being a housewife?" I ask incredulously. A
shudder runs through her elfin, Prada-clad curves. The colour drains
from her Gucci shades and for the first time in years I see her eyes. I
could have sworn they were green. She recovers herself immediately and
marches back to the telephone, shouting her demands for 'an au pair,
now!'. "Darling, precious" I soothe, "Dial first, then shout". She
looks at me in wrath. "Are you doing this or am I?" she snarls. I demur
into the cupboard under the stairs and bite my trembling lower
lip.

Once the roof tiles have settled back into place I feel safe to leave
my hiding place. My spouse however, does not appear to be that calm.
"All they can offer us is a Polish boy over here researching his PhD on
Shirley Bassey" she growls. I raise my eyebrows slowly toward my
rapidly greying hair. "And if he thinks he's getting his hands on my
dresses" she continues, "he's got another thing coming". I picture the
feathers and the sequins flying, and go cold. "Or", my true love adds,
bringing the blood flowing back into my extremities, "they've a
Bulgarian girl who's visiting her sister in Birmingham for the summer.
I've told them to fax her details over".
The fax began to chunter and burp into life in the studio. Things were
looking up. My wife strode across to the studio door, pausing only to
ask "Where exactly is Bulgaria?". "I think it's somewhere in the
nineteenth century" I offer helpfully.

While my wife runs the Bulgarian wench's details through Interpol's
database, I am summoned by the university to come and fill in the
module feedback forms for the collie who has replaced me. I anticipate
a slow walk around the studio examining the mountains of work on my own
in silence, balancing all the various assessment criteria against each
other. Instead I am merely to be the pooch's secretary. As it trots
from one messy pile of papers to another, I follow in its wake,
scratching the results down on the hundreds of forms I am carrying: one
bark for pass, two barks for fail. Surprisingly, we get through the
marking in record time. If this dog ever learns to wield a pen, I'll be
in the doghouse and Lassie will be Dean of all he surveys.

After coming a poor second to a dog in a beauty contest I felt in need
of some reassurance and support, some human warmth and affection.
Failing to find it, I had no choice but to return home.

From the hallway I could hear the sound of jolly voices emanating from
the living room. There, decorously sprawled out on the carpet, was a
captivatingly gorgeous stranger. Dark, sleek and curved- like mercury
wrapped in satin- she was playing with one of my daughter's Barbie
dolls and squeaking softly in some strange language.

"She's been like that ever since she arrived" whispered my wife,
tiptoeing cross the carpet toward me, "she really likes playing with
dolls." I looked around the room "Where's my precious gene pool?" I
asked. "Oh, she's upstairs tidying up her room, she got fed up playing
with dolls after about four hours" said my wife. "Who is she?" I asked
in wonderment. "She's Mariana, the Bulgarian. She arrived while you
were out." My first wife beckoned Mariana to meet me. Goosebumps burst
out all over my body like fights at a wedding, as she rose gracefully
and swayed across the room the greet me in a dark brown voice and some
very fetching skin tight hipsters. The Siren was coming to Ulysees.
Fortunately there was plenty of wax in my ears, otherwise I would have
fallen prey to her right there and then on the shag pile in front of
the mother of my child.

While to a hungry man two plus two is four loaves of bread, to me two
plus two is four au pairs, and this girl could be six of the best. I
drank in her beauty, heedless of the subsequent hangover the current
missus would surely visit on me. Mariana was stunning, her perfection
marred only by the merest hint of a Groucho Marx-like moustache below
the perfect arc of her nose and by the fact that she was not my wife. I
knew the moustache could be waxed, but I was uncertain about the
correct procedure to remove other imperfection.
"Would you like a bib?" my wife snapped, bringing me out of my
reverie." Huh?" I mumbled. "You're drooling" she barked. What sort of a
world is it when a man can't salivate over a beautiful stranger in his
own home? Mariana giggled decorously. "Dueeling?" she said softly, "is
this an English word?" "Yes" I swaggered, "it means to fight for the
honour of a woman you love". Her eyes sparkled and dwelt on mine rather
longer than was strictly necessary, given that my wife was not only
present but cocking her pistol and counting to ten as she paced the
room. Something told me I would soon have the honour of fighting with
the woman I loved.
While under no illusion that my wife would hesitate to shoot an unarmed
man (that was, after all, how we met) I banked on her inability to see,
let alone hit, a barn wall through the midnight murk of her
shades.

It must have been one hell of a lucky shot to hit me right there?

Once I got out of hospital I figured my wife would never leave Mariana
and I alone for a nanosecond. Bu, au contraire, she was forever leaving
us alone, only to jump out of a cupboard or appear from behind a door
at the drop of a hat (the sound of which she mistook for underwear
falling to the floor). After several days of this, I put all the hats
in the basement and my wife stayed in the cupboard all day, leaving
Mariana and I to while the hours away undisturbed. No hanky panky took
place, she wasn't that kind of girl, she told me (who was, I asked, and
what was her 'phone number?). Believe it or not, Mr, Ripley, our time
was spent in intellectual pursuits. OK, her's was: mine was a pursuit
of a different kind altogether.
....................................

Fit the Third

It was only the photograph of Danielle that swung it, otherwise we
would never have agreed to another French au pair. The maid's outfit
had long been sent secretively to the PDSA charity shop (in another
town, naturally). But the sight of Danielle standing in the sunshine in
her parents' farm, her long legs reaching all the way up from the Isle
de France to God alone knows where (and I hoped He was going to let me
in on the secret) persuaded me at least she could be the one. These
legs, barely covered by the little black skirt, spoke volumes, as did
her application form which mentioned her gymnastic prowess. A long,
lithe and flexible young French woman in my house? Risking a sharpened
nail file between the ribs over breakfast, I had told the agency to
have her rolled into a carpet and deposited at our door.

My but she's tall, I thought as I fingered the photo. I based this on
the fact that her father, standing some way behind her seemed tiny by
comparison. (Perspective has never been one of my graces.) Fantasies
involving the use of crampons to achieve the summit fluttered through
my mind. You can imagine my shock then, when we were met at the airport
by David Ginola in a skirt. My God, she had the wrong legs on! These
legs could score tries for Wales. They were long alright, but they were
so wide! And so was the rest of her; the mountain had come to Mohammed,
but Mohammed had been expecting a taller, slighter mountain; more like
two pairs of deftly arranged hillocks. My wife's gleaming eyes barely
concealed her delight at my crestfallen face. Danielle, hardly moving
her lips lest the Gauloise glued to her lower lip was disturbed,
grunted "Hello" in a voice an octave or two below Paul Robeson's.

"I thought you said on your application form you didn't smoke" said my
wife as we sped along the motorway, air conditioning blasting the hair
out of my head. "Oh, well, I'm trying to give eet up" croaked Danielle
from the back of the car. "How many a day do you smoke?" I shouted over
the air conditioning. "Er, just one or two a day" she lied, fingering a
bag we were later to discover contained five hundred of the beasts- her
weekly supply. It wasn't just my daughter's and my own asthma that made
us request non-smokers. We were still living in the ranch-style house,
the owner of which had, among other Mosaic laws, one which banished
smoking in or outside the house. Accordingly, hyper-sensitive smoke
detectors were fixed to the hideous wallpaper in every room, including
the kitchen . The merest hint of a slice of bread in the toaster was
enough to set off all of the alarms in the house and bring the fire
brigade crashing through the locked security barrier at the end of the
road and screaming up our drive. This had happened so often I had had
to buy extra-large jars of Marmite: firemen are hungry devils. I pitied
the fireman who tried carry Danielle over his shoulder. It would be
easier if her let her rescue him.

Outside of a three-foot high ash and stub pile under Danielle's bedroom
window every morning, and a phenomenally large number of air fresheners
dotted around her bedroom, there was barely any indication of her
smoking habit. She performed her au pairly duties relatively well, and
like all previous incumbents, displayed an ignorance of the function
and purpose of a kitchen that was breath-taking. I continued with my
cook's duties and dreamed of the day when I would be unchained from the
microwave and begin to taste fresh, home-made foreign foodstuffs.
As a result of our neighbours' dictats of no shoes, (or children
playing) in their houses and no children at all in their gardens, we
provided the only child-friendly play zone in the complex. Accordingly,
the children of our nouveau neighbours expended the energy they built
up (consuming all the awful junk food they were fed) on our carpets,
furniture and shrubbery. The nearest house to us was packed to the
gunnels with children. All except the youngest were male. This little
girl, more or less the same age as my own delicate angel (she wasn't
sure how old she was, or for that matter, who she was) had learned
early that the only way to get any attention in a house full of males
was to dress like a prostitute. Her rotund little form was swathed in
lace and polyester velvet two sizes too small for her. Spangled shoes
glittered on her porky little feet. Her long unnaturally blond her was
carefully curled and pulled up in a mushroom cloud over her
well-upholstered face. A vision of loveliness unable to speak in
anything less than a roar, she became a regular at our house.

In an attempt to burn off the e-numbers whizzing through the kid's
system, Danielle offered to teach this little tyke some gymnastic
moves. Oh, yes, she had told the truth about that; she had been a keen
and regular tumbler on the mats for France "Until" she explained with a
sly smile " I discovered something else". "And what was that something
else," I asked, "weightlifting?". I left Danielle, my little darling
and her tubby chum warming up on the thick carpet of the living room
and locked myself in the studio. Over the scratching of my nib on a
fine piece of parchment no noise could be heard save the screaming, at
first in English, and then later in French, of Danielle as Tubby the
Little Tart and my precious angel jumped up and down on her back. Ever
the dutiful employer, I reached for my headphones and put on the
loudest CD I had. But even the thrash of The Clash couldn't drown out
the awful noise. Wearily I rose from my chair and headed for the living
room, slowly dragging the midi system behind me.

Danielle was lying on her stomach on the floor screaming in agony. From
behind the armchairs at the far end of the room came a tittering,
giggling sound. Bending down to inquire after Danielle's health I
offered to assist her to her feet. Pulling on her sturdy paw I
struggled to move her an inch. Trying harder I heard a popping noise
and felt a sharp pain in my lower back. I released Danielle's hand and
fell cursing to the carpet, where I lay next to her, grieving in agony.
The tittering from behind the chairs turned into loud uncontrollable
guffaws.

My disdain for the ignorance of the medical profession is as great as
the next man's, that is to say it knows no bounds. I almost told the
doctor this as he assured me there was nothing seriously wrong with my
back that a hot bath, a few painkillers and a bottle of cognac wouldn't
cure. The only thing (apart from the stabbing pain in my back) that
stopped me was the knowledge that he had correctly, in my opinion,
diagnosed Danielle's continual screaming for her mother as 'hysteria'.
"There's nothing wrong with her at all" he said as he packed his bag.
"She should just get up off the living room floor and get on with it".
Doctors, eh; you can only pay attention to half of what they tell
you.

Perhaps because the doctor wasn't French, or perhaps because the
diagnosis was free, Danielle refused to believe it. She lay screaming
in French for her mother on the living room carpet until my wife
returned from her office. Then the pair of us struggled with the rather
noisily dying swan up to her smog-filled room. Here, lying on the bed,
she continued to scream well into the night.

About two o'clock in the morning, roused from our slumbers by the
repeated shouts of "Maman", we called the doctor again. The locum who
turned up ruefully viewed the collection of smoke detectors in the hall
as he fingered his cigarette pack. He felt more at home in Danielle's
bedroom, I'm sure. After a few minutes he re-appeared, brushing ash
from his sleeve and said there was no sign of any damage. A few
painkillers and a good night's sleep was all she needed, he said.
"She's as strong as an ox" he told me, and while this may or may not
have been true, she was certainly bellowing like one.

My wife and I returned to our bed with the painkillers, the bottle of
cognac and some ear plugs. "I do wish she'd shut up" said my wife,
"I've got to be up at six to catch a flight to Japan". Even through ear
plugs I can hear flight details. "You're what?" I gasped. "How long
for?" "Just a week" replied my wife, plumping up her pillow and
settling down. "You can't leave me here with her for a week" I bleated.
"How the hell am I going to manage?". "The doctor says there's nothing
wrong with her. She'll be fine in the morning. Now let's get some
sleep". I lay back on my pillow staring at the ceiling and tried to
calculate how many times Danielle would screech for her mother in the
next seven days. As it turned out, it would be me who was screaming for
his mother.

The golden-haired child, my daughter and back-breaker, was kept off
school so that I might spend all day ministering to the invalid.
Danielle, by now mercifully only crying out with pain during hours of
the day that had an odd number in them, steadfastly refused to even
attempt to get out of bed. I foresaw a couple of problems. Not so much
a case of: problem one, problem two, but a case of problems with er,
number one and number two. Do you, er, catch my drift?
Heaven knows we have a pretty well-equipped house. I willingly hold my
hands up to any accusation of over-consumption. If it's on the style
pages, it's chewed a hole in my credit card and it's now cluttering up
a cupboard somewhere in the house. There's nary a gadget that does (or
more likely does not) improve the quality of our humble existence that
we don't own. Digital or analogue, hand-crafted or mass-produced, we
got 'em all.

What beats me is how we managed to survive all these years without
bed-pans. Personally I blame all those style editors in the glossies
who, in the race to bring us the latest pentium powered intelligent
wine glass that tells you when it's empty, neglect the more everyday
concerns. Let's say it right out loud: Yes, even designers need
bedpans! Where is Phillippe Starck when you need him?

I'd be lying if I said it was Starck's name I was taking in vain when I
heard Danielle thumping in French on the floor of her bedroom to summon
me. Oh, I was taking someone's name in vain alright, but it wasn't his.
I had amassed at Danielle's bedside a range of suitable receptacles
(vases of various shapes and sizes, jugs, coffee and tea pots, even a
pint glass, the latter out of pure wickedness). You see the poor girl
needed "to make the water" and found herself unable to make the short
journey to her bathroom. As I lifted and presented each potential
receptacle to her she shook her head vigorously: "Non, non, non!". I
went through the objects again, in a different order this time, in the
hope of catching her out. With frosty hauteur she dismissed me. Unable
to leave her alone in the house while I went into town to fetch a
suitable receiver of her water, I paced up and down in the kitchen
pouncing on a cupboard every now and then in the hope of catching a
bedpan unawares.

These Holmesian tactics were disturbed by yet another thumping on the
ceiling. From her bed of pain, Danielle was pointing with a look of
plain horror to something on the other side of her bed, out of my line
of sight. "It eez deezgusting" she kept repeating. "Take eet away".
Purely out of curiosity, I sauntered around to other side of the bed.
There, on the carpet lay a red, scrunched up bath towel. Steam was
rising from it. "Take eet away!" shouted Danielle, "Eeet eez
deezgusting!". Gingerly I picked up the towel. It was warm, wet and
slightly too heavy. What the hell had she done with it, in it? I looked
at her but she turned her face away and just repeated her mantra.
Holding the towel at arm's length, I ran all the way downstairs trying
not to inhale, or to visualise just exactly what was in the towel.
Rushing straight out into the back garden I threw it onto the patio and
ran straight back inside to scrub my hands with every available toilet
cleaner we possessed (and we possessed quite a few).

After I had removed all traces of possible contamination (and several
layers of my epidermis) I fetched some petrol from the garden shed, and
some matches from the kitchen. I sprinkled petrol- on what had once
been an article I used to dry my face on for God's sake!- lit a match
and consigned the festering, fetid thing to oblivion. While it
spluttered and fizzed and gave off warm, animal odours, I went inside
and poured myself a very large brandy. Then I drank it real
quick.
A cursory examination of the airing cupboard told me this method of
assuagement couldn't go on for too long. Within a day or two I'd be
reduced to drying myself on the Colefax and Fowler chintz in the
bathroom. And, as any grimy revolutionary who has stormed a palace will
tell you, chintz is just too damned slippery to dry yourself on. Ditto
for silk. I made a mental note, that should I ever be so cursed as to
own a palace, all the furnishings would me made of towelling.
Danielle took my ultimatum with regard to towels lying down. She had no
option; she still couldn't get out of the bed. Each time I visited her
room, bringing drinks or removing plates licked clean of food, I
noticed an increase in a certain musty, acrid aroma. Either she had
changed her brand of cigarette, or she had found something
architecturally acceptable to wee into. I soon discovered that the
large peculiarly shaped glass Habitat vase was the only one I hadn't
brought back down to the kitchen. After a day or two I asked her where
it was: she pointed under the bed. Lifting the overhanging duvet I saw
the vase, three-quarters full of a foaming yeasty liquid. Danielle
withdrew under the duvet and I withdrew, steaming vessel held at full
stretch, under the memory of a quotation from Virgil: "In time, even
these things will seem amusing". So much for the wisdom of the
ancients. Virgil never had to slop out for his au pair.

The only thing that did happen 'in time' was that the damned girl was
cured, just as my wife returned, bearing gifts for all except the
master of the chamber pot, from her trip to Japan. Now that there was
another responsible adult in the house to share the disgusting
responsibility, there was no disgusting responsibility to share.
Wouldn't you know it? Just my luck.
The days grew shorter, shops were decorated with twinkling lights and
tinsel. Images of Santa Claus hung from every supermarket aisle: August
was drawing to a close. The wife and I fully expected Danielle to want
to return to the goose-greased bosom of her family for the festive
season. For us, Christmas was a time of almost spiritual retreat. Each
year, we would withdraw from the world, put on the answering machine,
close the curtains and pretend the whole thing was a mirage. Having a
visitor in the house would ruin our fantasy.

Later, the mother of my child and I would argue as to exactly whose
responsibility it was to find out what the au pair's plans for
Christmas were. I reckoned my time in the stinking trenches had more
than freed me from any further part in the action. My wife felt that
her onerous responsibility to travel the world and wear down the
numbers on her corporate credit card left her with no energy for, or
interest in, domestic matters. But by this time it was too late, we had
already learned the awful truth.

Far from intending to return to France to be with her loved ones for
the season of goodwill to all card companies, Danielle had-
unbelievably- decided to stay with us. It took us some time to adjust
to the shock of this news. Why didn't she want to be with her family?
What would they think of her staying here? Casually tossing these
questions into her breakfast cereal one morning we received an answer
so frightening we had to ask Danielle to repeat her reply.
"My parents, zey come to England for Christmas" she beamed. I was too
frightened to ask the supplementary question and left it to my wife,
who was slowly turning white at the gills. Danielle's response
confirmed our worst fears: "I thought zey could stay here" she said,
smiling. My eyes rolled up and my head went back until all I could see
was the calendar hanging on the kitchen wall. The day's date had been
circled by our little angel that very morning: December 19th. I turned
to my wife and weakly, asked, "Who do we know who has a stable?"
Only half comprehending, Danielle insisted her parents could sleep in
her room. What alternative did we have so close to Christmas? What
hotel in our little midlands town would have room this late on? Why the
hell didn't Danielle tell us sooner? Through the haze of
incomprehension came the deep growl of our au pair's voice: "And ze
uzzers can sleep on ze floor, maybe in ze living room". Ze uzzers? What
uzzers? My wife and I reached out and gripped each others hands under
the table. I wanted to know who 'ze uzzers' were almost as much as I
didn't want to hear the answer. "Oh, my cousin and his friend, zey come
too" replied Danielle, removing the breakfast things and any hopes we
had about a quiet Christmas. My God, we banned our own flesh and blood
from us at Christmas and here we were about to play host to a family of
complete strangers. Two thirds of my life flashed before me. The other
third was held in reserve for when this troupe of Gauls arrived. Now we
knew why there was no English version of the French 'fait accomplis'.
We were beaten. My wife, sensing I was less than calm, asked the
fateful question: "Er when do they arrive, and how long do they plan to
stay?". I winced in anticipation. "Zey arrive on twenty fourth and stay
until about Janvier four or five" muttered Danielle over her broad
shoulders as she loaded the dishwasher.

This was too much: even the three wise men knew not to overstay their
welcome, and they were bearing gifts. My wife and I withdrew to our
bedroom to cry, stick pins in models of Danielle, and plot how we were
going to get them all out of the house. It was inconceivable that this
four bedroomed house, en suite as it was to the point of incontinence,
could cope with seven adults and one child for such a long period
without tempers flaring (and ours were already smoking ominously).
Danielle would have to be told they couldn't all stay as long as they
intended. My wife and I played scissors, paper, rock in order to decide
who would break the bad news. After twenty minutes, and by dint of
inventing a new category ('dynamite') I won, and my beloved made the
long march downstairs.

Even children know Christmas is a stressful time. (This year my little
darling had written only one request on the letter to Santa that she
had stuffed up the artificial chimney that graced our inglenook
fireplace in the living room. "Dear Santa" she wrote, "This year I
would like magic powers , love, me". Fifteen minutes on the 'phone to
Hamley's removed any lingering doubt I had about my daughter's
understanding of the use of capital letters at the beginning of titles;
there was no such toy or game as 'Magic Powers'- she meant the real
thing.) I had already started artfully tearing my hair out in
preparation for the invasion that was to come. My wife stayed longer
and longer at work, only daring to return home when she thought
Danielle would be hanging out of her bedroom window, exchanging cold
fresh air for her exhaled cigarette smoke. This would prevent any
meeting between the two which might result in a discussion of the
joyful event to come. The air was hung as heavy as the Christmas
tree.

As the date of the group's arrival drew closer, we grew more depressed
and Danielle grew more joyful. She was singing French carols and
smoking openly, setting the alarms off in the kitchen as she washed up.
Still, a brave face must be put on; this was supposed to be the season
of goodwill to all men, even the ones you hadn't invited. Needless to
say, radiant smiles of loving warmth, as genuine as our fireplace, were
fixed to our faces as the interlopers arrived in their hire car. So
here at last were maman, papa, cousin Didier and his friend Etienne.
Maman and papa looked to be in their late 'fifties, and my god, papa
was tiny; no wonder I got the wrong impression about the height of his
daughter. Only Didier spoke any English, if you could call it that. "I
am thinkly for you coming" he beamed at us over an Alp or two of
baggage in the hallway.

Once ensconced in the palatial living room, traditional Christmas
greetings were exchanged. From the diffident way they reciprocated it
appeared the French didn't celebrate Christmas that much; New Year was
obviously more their sort of thing. Too bad they wouldn't be around, I
thought to myself as I examined the potato-printed label on the bottle
of wine they brought for us. Danielle, finally earning her keep as
translator for her band of brigands, explained it was from Etienne's
vineyard. "Grows potatoes there does he?" I whispered under my breath
as I cast my designer's eye over the crude typography. Etienne spoke
again, and with a fixed smile on her face Danielle told me the wine was
"sweet, like the English like it". The girl had seen many a bottle of
white wine pass before her eyes since she came to live with us (rather
more frequently of late, it had to be admitted) and she knew damn well
we were fully paid up oenophiles; we liked our Chardonnay oaked,
thankyou very much! We were sophisticated now. I squeeze out a smile
between gritted teeth and send it in Etienne's direction. He laughs and
nods back. Everyone is laughing. I look down at the bottle; is it my
imagination or is the damned thing laughing too?

Not even El Cordobes, performing a risky veronica under the steamy
snout of a half-crazed steer, felt as much fear as the average
Englishman does when cooking for a group of French people. Around these
parts I pass for quite a chef, but then around these parts a sandwich
made with wholemeal bread can cause riots. A baked bean and pineapple
pizza that doesn't automatically come with fries is not, my neighbours
advise me, real Italian food. And they should know, they've all been to
Florida.

So naturally I had spent one or two fretful nights planning just what I
should feed my guests- for their first meal, at least. After that I
figured they would be living in casse-croute land. I had greeted
Danielle's assertion that her family would expect no special efforts in
the kitchen with a raised eyebrow and a re-doubling of my efforts to
make quenelles that wouldn't bring down an elephant at fifty paces. I
planned a simple, six course meal, cooked in the 'European Style' (that
is to say English, with a nod to French, Italian and Spanish; a sot of
mini tour of Europe ending up, with the chocolate, in Belgium). As the
washboard stomach under my Issey Mayake sweatshirt testifies, I eat
sparely, but well. Six courses is about what I usually consume in a
week.

My plan was to stretch the meal to fill out the whole evening. This
would avoid any unnecessary longeurs that might arise should we be
forced to sit stiff-faced in front of the dreadful slop oozing out of
the television at this (or any other) time of year. Even a lack of
English is no protection here; Christmas television programmes are full
of bad sight gags (come to think of it, isn't Jerry Lewis French?). As
it transpired, I needn't have bothered with four of the courses. Maman
and papa, when presented with the first course (a delicate but pungent
mixture of fried chicken livers tossed in salad leaves and hosed down
with a raspberry vinaigrette) eyed their plates and muttered
instructions to Danielle which she nervously translated. "Zey want to
eat like zey do at home". I shrugged and began to remove the cutlery.
"No, no. Zey will 'ave ze salad, zen ze chicken livers". Retracing my
steps from the dining room to the kitchen I cursed every French person
since Charlemagne (excluding only the blessed Django Reinhardt from my
litany).

Having surgically separated my zygotic twins of a dish into two sets of
rather limp individuals, we all sat down and began to eat 'in the
French style'. While I mashed the livers into mousse in my mouth I
realised that they would probably want to eat the whole meal like this,
each ingredient on its own, in splendid isolation. This meant that my
calculations for the cooking time required for the huge salmon were way
out. It would, I computed, be ready hours before it was needed. What a
quandary. Should I let it cook on and verify every criticism ever made
by the French of the English and their culinary skills? Or should I go
out and turn the oven off right now, cross my fingers and hope it would
continue to cook in the residual heat, rather than flapping hither and
thither on the table the moment I loosed the restraining foil wrapping?
Should I let it cook on and grow cold while we munched away at its
antecedents on the menu? Should I give a damn?

Reader, I marinaded him.

What a sense of utter calm enshrouds the house. The curtains are once
more drawn against the hostile 'Christmasness' that pervades the air;
telephones are disconnected; no word of French is uttered within the
confines of this Englishman's castle, and even the mother tongue is
left lolling warmly by the side of the mock fire. We are alone.

Danielle's family had taken with comparatively good grace their
temporary exile to other parts of England. Lear like, they were
wandering between the great tourist sights of the midlands; Stratford
on Avon, Oxford, er, Anne Hathaway's cottage, Shakespeare's
birthplace?well, I guess I don't have to spell them all out for you.
Clutching the details of the b&;b's and small hotels I'd booked them
into, they had driven off with the wind in their hair, heading for the
open road. Too bad the route they were following led only to the
log-jammed and a congealed motorway.

Meanwhile we settled down to enjoy four days of joyous solitude,
punctuated only by the shrieks of our little one as her head grazed the
ceiling while bouncing on her new trampoline. (She may not have magic
powers but my God, you'll believe a girl can fly.) Sadly, it was not to
be. Like the first sexual encounter of a teenage boy, it was over
almost before it began. The party of travellers were back within less
than thirty-six hours.

It appeared that two members of the company had contracted salmonella
in one of Stratford's many Michelin starred tea rooms. The resulting
physical problems at the business end of their bodies meant they felt
safer not travelling too far from a toilet. Accordingly, they had
abandoned their progress and headed back for the comfort of our
well-provisioned home. Papa launched himself straight through the front
door and into the downstairs cloakroom, sighing like a cow in
child-birth. Maman, slightly more discreet, waddled, upper legs firmly
clamped together, into the hallway before rushing upstairs, hell for
leather, into the bathroom off the landing.

By evening, not only were Maman and Papa giving forth issue from both
ends, but Danielle, Etienne and Didier were displaying clear signs of
having eaten England's finest bacillus. Like characters in a Feydeau
farce, the entire group were constantly running in and out, doors
slamming behind and in front of them. As English houses go, it was true
we did suffer from a surfit of toilets and bathrooms, but those rooms
were certainly put under strain now. No sooner was one vacated than it
was occupied again. My darling wife, our little angel and I could only
stand amidst the milling crowd and thank heaven we had only French
people as guests, and not some merciless pathogen.

And by jingo, I wanted it to stay that way. Needing to visit the
bathroom, for the usual purpose of testing my throaty baritone against
the tiled walls, I chanced upon one that had only recently been vacated
and my hand reached out for the door handle. I paused, mid-motion, so
to speak. That handle was still warm from the touch of the last
occupant. Possibly millions of bacteria lurked expectantly on its
polished brass. I looked at all the other door handles around me, each
one an incubator of villainous succubus. Within seconds I had slipped
out the back door and over the fence into my neighbour's garden.

In the crazy labyrinthine world that is the male ego, all bored
suburban housewives live in hope of a devilishly handsome man tapping
on their french windows one dark night. I'm absolutely certain my
neighbour Carol never takes her eye off the knicker blinds once dusk
has fallen. Sadly, she was out the night I called, and I was met by a
beefy grimace from her hockey-playing husband Ed. Fortunately he is as
poor a judge of men as he is of drapery, and he saw nothing untoward in
the manner of my arrival.

All human brains resemble a walnut, but Ed's brain is an almost perfect
replica of one, right down to its size (and taste, for all I know).
Most of its limited capacity is taken up with sporting statistics, so
it was easy to convince him that a seasonal game of charades
necessitated the borrowing of some surgical ephemera (rubber gloves,
masks, enemas) from Carol's personal collection. Now before you go off
thinking Carol's the type who figures in tawdry television
documentaries, photographed smoking in an imperfect silhouette in what
is quite clearly her living room (you can usually see the street name
through the window), did I mention she was a nurse? Quite. You should
get out more.
While Ed procured the requested latex, cotton, polished chrome and
rubber devices, I took the opportunity to test the plumbing in his
downstairs cloakroom. A miniature Versailles, as envisioned by an
inhabitant of one of our more secure mental hospitals, the toilet
played the theme from "An Officer and a Gentleman" when the lid was
raised. I too have a dislike of Richard Gere, but I don't take it that
far. Dazzled by the decoration and nauseated by the soundtrack, I fled
as soon as I'd dried my hands on the Fluffy Bunnikins pelt on the towel
rail. I waited for Ed at the foot of the stairs, passing the time by
scrutinising his collection of sports shoe innersoles. These curious
objects had all the qualities of a fine Emmenthal, right down to the
holes. I held my breath and hoped he wouldn't be too long.

Returning, fleet of foot, by the route I had arrived, I called a family
meeting in the sound-proofed safety of my book-lined studio. Issuing my
two darlings with rubber gloves et.al, I spelled out in graphic
language the need for a standard of cleanliness unknown outside of
Howard Hughes' motel room. No door handle, toilet seat, flush, sink tap
or towel to be left unsprayed with proprietary disinfectant cleanser; a
new roll of toilet paper to be opened for each visit; gloves to be worn
when approaching or leaving a toilet or bathroom; masks to be worn
inside the toilet or bathroom only (so as not to frighten the guests).
Otherwise, act normal. With this plan I felt sure we would escape the
beasts that were so clearly gnawing the bowels of our guests. After
all, someone had to stay well and minister to our poor, sick, French
cousins.

Within two days, 99\\% of all household germs were packing their bags
and looking for easier saps to roll. Along with the bugs, Danielle's
family also decided it was time to go; they'd had more than their fill
of English culture, especially the kind that grows in petrie dishes.
Danielle accompanied them to the airport, leaving us with nothing to do
but link our latex clad hands and dance a merry jig around the
Christmas tree.

I hadn't intended to start my daughter's sex education until she was
about nine or ten. I figured it would take that long for her mother to
pluck up the courage to mention the subject. True, my little cherub had
briefly strayed into the world of aviaries and apiaries as a three year
old on a trip to EuroDisney. We were squatting in a tiny bar just on
the edge of the prisoners' compound, sheltering from the rain and the
teeming hordes of pixies, little pigs and other costumed French youth,
whose joie de vivre and bonhomie seemed to have been suffocated by
their nylon costumes, if not dampened by the unseasonal showers. A few
tables across from us, a couple of be-bobbed French women, sans
enfants, were sitting talking into each others mouths like Inuit
throat-singers. They soon gave up on talking and got down to some
serious French kissing.
I, of course, looked away (there's nothing so displeases a red-blooded
heterosexual male as the sight of two beautiful young women kissing
each other) but my little treasure gawped, giggled and shouted out ,
"Look, those two girls are kissing each other! Only boys kiss
girls!".

Fortunately, all that lingual contorting had loosened their cochleas,
so Sappho and her pal appeared not to hear and they continued fording
each others gorges, while my wife and I struggled to explain to our
progeny the vagaries of sexual alignment. The little mite took it all
in before declaring quietly that she too must be gay. Only slightly
stunned by this declaration (I had, after all, seen the price list in
this dive- nothing could be more stunning than that) I asked her to
elaborate. "Well" she said, "I'm a girl and I love mum, and she's a
girl, so I must be gay too". "No, no" I shouted over her mother's
sobbing, "that's a different complex altogether. Don't they teach you
anything at that nursery?"

Well, the chickens were well and truly coming home now, but not to do
anything as restrained as roost. Danielle, forgetting how close she had
sailed to the force ten gale over her parents' visit, let drop the news
that her boyfriend had two weeks leave from his enforced sojourn in the
French armed forces. Preparing to repel boarders, my wife and I took up
our positions. While I paced up and down muttering salty words of the
kind frowned on by the BBC and most national newspapers, my beloved
fired broadside after broadside at the enemy.

Minutes later, masts shattered, rigging in tatters, my stately wife
hove to in defeat, shipping salty water faster than I was shedding it.
The fourteen days the little Napoleon was free were the only fourteen
days that we couldn't spare Danielle to return to France to conube in
her mother tongue with her lad. There was no alternative (well, to be
truthful there was, but it would be damned hard to hide the body); the
boy was coming aboard.

While Danielle went to telephone her amour with the good news, we
sobbed alone in the kitchen. "Did you see her face when I asked her
what she was going to do with him for two weeks?" said my wife, blowing
her nose on my tie, "she blushed". Well, I thought, there has to be a
first time.

While Moslems keep a tuft of hair on their shaven pates so Mohammed can
pull them up to Eternal Bliss when they time is come, French soldier
boys must be hauled into the after-life by some other part of their
body. Looking at the glabrous-headed string-bean Danielle brought back
from the airport, and at the gleam in her eye, I could guess straight
away which part of her boyfriend's anatomy she would be yanking to get
him to Paradise.

Danielle's swain was tall, pale to the point of transparency and had
teeth the size, shape and colour of gravestones. I guessed he must have
looked more impressive in a jauntily tilted kepi, for Sacha Distel he
wasn't. He was called Quentin, but he looked like the kind of bucolic
youth who wouldn't have tolerated that name for ten seconds had he been
English. (My daughter, in a passable attempt at a French accent, would
later repeatedly refer to him as 'Cretin'. Needless to say, this
brought us no amusement whatsoever.) He'd barely got his Duty Free
reticules, heavily laden with finest virginia, over the threshold ere
Danielle was guiding him up the wooden path to Nirvana. The door to her
bedroom was still hinging its way back to its frame when there was the
distinctive reverberation of wood on plaster, as the headboard of her
bed began to repeatedly make contact with the thin facade of Laura
Ashley that covered the wall.

Downstairs in the living room, no amount of erudite discussions on the
varieties of confectionery available but a gnat's leap from our door at
the local newsagent's could distract my daughter from her intense
examination of the ceiling above her, through which came the echoing
reports. "Is that noise coming from Danielle's room?" my little
treasure inquired innocently. I confirmed her suspicion. "Do you think
she has a rope?" she said. I coughed and spluttered at my daughter's
apparent knowledge of the ways of the bedroom. "I don't think so" I
replied nervously. "Don't you think it sounds like she's skipping
something?" she continued. "Only the foreplay" I mumbled.

Still, I surmised, my daughter was in no danger of getting a crick in
her upper vertebrae. For shortly after the speedy thumping started, it
stopped. My wife looked at her wristwatch, raised her right hand, index
finger pointing skyward, and began to count silently. Some forty-five
seconds later she uttered the single word "Now" and lo, the slow
drumming recommenced. I looked at my beloved in frank awe. "How on
earth did you calculate that?" I shouted over the noise. "Memories of
our courting days", she smiled girlishly, and coloured slightly. "I
simply recalled how long it takes to light two cigarettes and take one,
deep, drag on them before the flush of passion returns, and one
surrenders to it again". I shook my head and smiled; "Ah, memories", I
crooned. Then my brow darkened. "But, darling," I stuttered, "I don't
smoke".
Instantly she leaped from her chair and accelerated past me out into
the hall muttering about having left something important in the car.
The front door clicked shut behind her and seconds later the sound of
her car roaring off into the distance was all that could be heard, save
for, from the creaking bed above, the sound of a match being struck on
stubble.
To be continued......