The look in Camille's eyes haunts me

By Julie Myerson, Financial Times

Published: Jan 26, 2008 

The summer I was 16 - that long, parched, UK heatwave of 1976 - we were living in a house in the middle of town; the one with the stained glass windows, Hammer Horror turrets and monkey puzzle tree in the garden.

It was the house next door to the red-haired woman who made the best chocolate ice-cream and had a ghost called Lily. The house where the old lady opposite used to enjoy seeing our bare feet appearing above the top of the wall when we were turning cartwheels on the lawn. It was the house where I first read Wuthering Heights and listened to Abba's "Dancing Queen" and painted my toe-nails pearly pink. It was the house where I got the letter saying my father didn't want to see me any more. It was also the house where I (finally!) got kissed by a boy.

The idea that so much can happen to a person in such a short space of time in one single small house still amazes me. I can't think of any other place where so many aspects of my self have altered and expanded so quickly. And sometimes even now, deep in some adult task or other that must be done, I'll have to jerk myself out of a dream that's still somehow a dream of that particular house. Why? Has this always happened or did it start just recently? Is it hormonal? Is it seasonal? Or is it just the years gathering a kind of forlorn pace and, in their razzed-up confusion, flinging me straight back to one single place? I don't know. I can't answer these questions. I'm not sure I even want to.

That summer 30-odd years ago we had a French au pair to look after us. Camille was 19 and blonde but she wasn't at all how that makes her sound. She wore shirts and jeans, sensible brown leather shoes and no make-up but underneath her glasses she was beautiful in the Frenchest way. She also painted her short, square fingernails the brightest, chicest crimson I'd ever seen. I took immediate note of this, quickly ditching my pale pink polish for pillar-box red.

I liked Camille but I couldn't see why we needed an au pair. I wasn't a child, after all. Our mum said she wasn't really there to look after us - more to entertain and keep order. In fact what she mostly did was organise endless card games - Rummy and Black Jack and Switch. I can still see her long, tanned French fingers holding a fan of those cards, her nails an exact and satisfying match for the hearts and diamonds.

Camille used no deodorant and always smelled faintly of sweat. But it wasn't the cheesy, obnoxious smell of the school gym changing rooms. More a faint, careless whiff, which even back then we recognised as sex. In her room she had a bottle of dry shampoo that she used between washes. She also had a boyfriend who had followed her over from France and who spent hours sitting on the wall across the road waiting for us to release her for the evening. As soon as our mum understood this, she asked him in. From faraway he'd looked nice but up close he was probably the dishiest man we'd ever seen apart from in films. Once again my estimation of Camille just soared.

All through that long, hot summer we played with Camille. Sometimes we'd play cards; other times lazy, half-hearted tennis in the park with the boyfriend watching from a wistful distance because Camille had firmly explained that she was working. Sometimes in their company I felt like exactly who I most wanted to be: a young woman, mysterious and almost pretty. Someone who didn't necessarily look as if she'd never been kissed. Other times I reverted to exactly what I was: the quite obviously inexperienced oldest of three girls, who behaved pretty badly when she didn't get her own way.

Two particular memories still shame me - memories that in my mind are irrevocably tied to that action-packed house. Sometimes instead of cards we played Ludo and one time, on the verge of losing to my youngest sister, I tipped the board over in one quick, sulky, impetuous movement, ending the game. The look in Camille's eyes - utterly unsurprised recognition of my lack of maturity - still shakes me now.

Then, later that summer, I got a cold, a really bad, feverish summer cold. I was in bed coughing and coughing when Mum brought me some hot milk and honey and ordered me to drink it. I had always loathed this drink so, once she'd gone downstairs, I opened my bedroom window and poured it out, completely forgetting that Camille was in the room below. She would have seen the hot stream of liquid go past. She would have quickly (and contemptuously) worked out who had poured it.

She and my mother laughed about it later but in my dark little heart I knew it was all over. Camille left when the summer ended and we all hugged and she promised to write. I think she did write and so, I think, did we. There might even have been another summer when she came over and stayed briefly as our guest. But in my dreams of that house that is not what has stuck. All I see, replaying over and over in slow motion, are the Ludo board, pieces flying. And a stream of hot, sweet, milky liquid flowing through the balmy night air.

julie.myerson.com