Another Long Day on the Piste by Will Randall

Author:Will Randall [Randall, W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: [2011.06.22]
Publisher: [Côte d’Azur]
Published: 2005-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

∨ Another Long Day on the Piste ∧

10

A Merry Mountain Christmas

Christmas Day in Mont St Bernard turned out to be one of the best days’ skiing to date, and so Mireille had rung around her various guests and suggested that they only come over once they had finished on the mountain. Feeling sun-scorched and extraordinarily hungry, I climbed the wooden staircase to the first-floor balcony of the handsome new chalet clutching my Christmas presents. Although I am by no means antisocial, I always have a feeling of vague nervousness prior to any social gathering, and on this particular occasion, given the sad events of that year, I perhaps felt more apprehensive than normal.

I need not have worried. Mireille, who greeted me at the doors of a large sitting-room open to the eaves and pressed a glass of vin chaud into my hand, had made great efforts to put her guests at ease. No doubt to lend her moral support, her cousin had come up from Grenoble and they had spent the day before getting the house ready and preparing the food. Through the lattice partition was a dining area, and the long table was laden with the finest produce that France has to offer. As a centrepiece, a long silver dish bearing a roast suckling pig, or more precisely a marcassin – a baby wild boar – was flanked by a beautifully decorated goose and two roast duck. Terrines and pates, foie gras, smoked hams and sausages overflowed from wickerwork baskets alongside trays of oysters, crabs and langoustines. Over on another table nearby were iced bottles of champagne, fine red and white wines, and a variety of home-bottled digestifs.

The preparation of such a feast, even with the assistance of another pair of hands, would have required me to book into a sanatorium for a week even before the arrival of the guests, but Mireille and her cousin looked, as so many French women manage effortlessly to do, as if they were guests at their own party.

I was the first person to arrive apart from Aubrey, who was looking surprisingly debonair in an American-style tuxedo and had even eschewed his normal bandanna. Of course, he was still wearing his sunglasses as he attempted to repair a meat-slicing machine in the kitchen under the watchful but silent gaze of Olivier. Aubrey waved a screwdriver in my general direction with a quick ‘Yo, dude’, and the boy summoned up a weak smile of recognition.

Although I was itching to load my plate from the delicious array of food, good manners suggested that I should wait until others had arrived. To pass the time Mireille offered to show me the house.

Like many chalets built into the side of the mountain, the living accommodation was spread out over the first floor, the ‘ground’ floor being given over to garage space, ski lockers and storage areas. This being a fairly spacious example, there were four bedrooms all with their own bathrooms, an office that had belonged to

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