The Non-Skier
Mary Rose is an Olympic non-skier. Rule one: never get out of bed. It is frightful mistake to brave breakfast in the chalet before the skiers have left. Even venturing down for a preprandial cup of coffee risks a hailstorm of Camilla complaining that she only has one glove, Archie howling that someone has hidden his ski pass (probably behind the bar in Chez Gigi), and Freddie desperate for his avalanche bleeper. These are grown-up people. Not until nanny arrives in the shape of Jacques, the mountain god ski instructor, to whisk them away to be piste-off does peace reign. Mary Rose can then have a companionable boiled egg and toast with Sophie the chalet girl, whose parents she knows in Chipping Magna. Sophie hasn’t quite grasped that eggs boil more slowly at altitude but she is getting the hang of it.
The non-skier is seen by les sportifs as a PA/housekeeper. After all, she has nothing else to do, has she? Mary Rose actually has a delicious number of books on her Kindle: William Dalrymple’s
The Anarchy, Robert Harris’s
The Second Sleep, Lady Glenconner’s racy memoirs of a lady in waiting. But Mary Rose knows she has to pay her dues for being an idle sloth and sorts the menus, takes Sophie down to the supermarché
– which, needless to say, is at the bottom of the next valley – buys a phenomenal amount of oysters, offers up her credit card and books lunch at Les Enfants Terribles. This is where her patience is sorely tried. Her gang are late – always that last run – and, having arrived serenely on the ski lift, she is now holding their table against predatory Russian ladies keen to placate their stumpy oligarchs. Although ladies would be an exaggeration except under terms of the night. Mary Rose is radiating obliviousness while reading The Glossy Years
by Nicholas Coleridge, in which she is mentioned in the index. So stuff you, minxes, and I am wearing fur just as real as yours. The sneaking worry is that one of the gang might have needed a blood wagon. Mary Rose is not insensitive, she’d just like to have her steak tartare and frites and go back to bed for a siesta.
Victoria Mather
She is now holding their table against predatory Russian ladies
There’ll Always Be An England: Social Stereotypes (Constable, £12.99); Instagram/Facebook: @social_stereotypes