Cleo

“Anyone would think Roy’s been hired for Cleo’s fitness training,” Andrea grumbled with (thank heavens) a smile in her voice, but she did confess to feeling resentful at times. Whenever Roy engaged Andrea in a particularly harrowing set of sit-ups, Cleo would upstage her by burrowing her head under the exercise mat or engaging Roy in her version of wrestling—wrapping her paws around his ankles and kicking him with her hind legs.

Upside down, her toes clinging to the Swiss ball while she attempted twenty-five push-ups, Andrea could sense Roy’s attention wandering to the feline flirting with him from behind the curtains. Roy was a self-confessed dog person, but he was beginning to change his mind. He asked Andrea where he could get a cat like that. She recommended house-sitting for unusual families who’d taken off overseas.

Even though Cambridge opened fascinating new worlds to me, nothing surpassed the joy of reuniting with Lydia and Philip after three months. On the pretext of having important business in Ireland, wonderful Mary, the fashion reporter, accompanied Lydia from New Zealand. Lydia rewarded her by throwing up orange juice on Mary’s jacket as the plane flew out of Auckland.

We met at Heathrow before flying to Geneva and boarding a train that wove along the lake front. The train stopped briefly at chocolate-box villages on its way to the medieval town of Lausanne.

I promised five-year-old Lydia she’d adore her new school and would be speaking French in no time. Wrong on both counts. Apart from having a regime as rigid as the Swiss Alps, the Swiss school was a nightmare for Lydia. She couldn’t understand a word anyone said. As we staggered up the vertical path to the local primary school every morning, I tried to divert her attention to rows of tulips standing to attention alongside the path, or the Alps sprinkled with icing-sugar snow across the lake. She always had a “sore tummy” by the time we reached the school gates. I hated leaving her red-faced and in tears as I abandoned her to the care of her teacher. Madame Juillard’s kindness turned out to be a form of inadvertent cruelty. She spoke to the class in French, then repeated everything in English for Lydia. As a result, Lydia remained unable to communicate with her classmates.

The one subject Lydia excelled in was swimming, due to long summers spent on New Zealand beaches. The Swiss sports teacher was intrigued by the Antipodean tadpole. Despite the humiliation of a preswim shower and the insistence on a bathing cap being worn at all times, Lydia could slap out a length of the indoor pool in her deep-sea overarm. Unable to relate to the wild freedom that creates a young surfer, the teacher amused us by suggesting Lydia had a future as a synchronized swimmer.

While I was flat-out failing to meet the standards of Swiss hausfrau-hood, Philip slogged through punishing hours at business school. On one of his rare days off when we were sailing up a mountain slope in a gondola not much bigger than a vitamin pill, Philip took my hand and remarked that the skin under my engagement ring was turning a delicate shade of green. I was startled to discover he was right. Our year’s betrothal was past its use-by date. He suggested if we were going to tie the knot, Switzerland was as good a place as any to do it. Besides, we both liked the idea of getting married far away from those who regarded our unusual setup as a source of gossip and amusement.

There are the Swiss Alps, chocolates, banks, watches, cheese and cuckoo clocks. While Switzerland is famous for many other things besides (including giant mountain horns and nuclear shelters for every household) it is not widely feted as a wedding destination. We were about to find out why.

If there was a competition for the most difficult place on earth to get married in, Switzerland would win the prize. But then, Philip and I had a talent for doing things the hard way. We decided the land of clocks and chocolate was ideal for us to tie the knot. Someone should have warned us. As usual, we were insane.

When he wasn’t studying the machinations of international business, Philip was warring with petty officials, who demanded to see and stamp every document that had our names on it (from birth certificates and proof of my divorce to Girl Guide sock-darning awards). After weeks of phoning and faxing lawyers across the globe, the Swiss officials were finally satisfied. Every scrap of paper was signed, countersigned and delivered in triplicate. But that wasn’t enough. They then demanded to know how many facial moles our parents and grandparents had, at what age they had sex for the first time and which side they slept on at night. The truth is, Swiss officials don’t want people getting married in their country, and they’ll do everything in their power to stop it. They don’t approve of holy union. It’s too much paperwork. They’d rather people lived in sin.