L'Affaire (11 page)

‘I hate to go. I have the feeling Father will die if I don’t watch him,’ he said.

‘I’ll be watching for the two of us,’ Posy assured him.

‘Yes, but what if he dies when I’m not there?’ They agreed that could happen, but didn’t believe it would. In his heart, Rupert believed that Posy would somehow mess up the job of sitting by Father’s bedside; on the other hand, it was only he who could speak French to Mr Delamer.

*

When Posy sat alone in the bar, people spoke pleasantly to her, she to them, but nothing ripened into a conversation, nor did she care. She saw Kip come in, order a Coke, and sit at one end of the bar. Posy might have talked to him but didn’t – she knew she wasn’t being very nice to Kip, but she supposed she was angry about Harry’s existence, and the wife’s, neither thing Kip’s fault. She couldn’t bring herself to get involved with him or to go down to the hospital one more time tonight, which she supposed she ought to. Now the American blonde with the long braid who had sat with Kip at dinner entered with a tan chap who looked like a ski instructor. Posy admired the poise and confidence of American girls – sometimes verging on the brash – admired their boyish clothes. This one was talking to Kip and motioned him over to sit with them. Posy wondered what their connection was, Americanness, no doubt.

Her mood, between grief and a passive, rather comfortable acceptance of waiting at this hotel, suited her. There was nothing she could do but sit smoking in an agreeable Alpine refuge, and she had the feeling of anonymity and freedom that vacationers experience, despite this not being vacation but a painful family trauma. Making an effort to stop thinking about her own situation, she directed her attention outward, and couldn’t help noticing the handsome man who sat down near her reading a newspaper from the rack of newspapers on sticks.

Posy, looking at him, experienced a strange visceral turmoil, out of the blue having the irrational image of herself putting her lips to his brown throat, where his collar was open, where a pulse must beat, feeling his life at her
lips. She shivered; it was the image of herself as a vampire. Had she been staring? His dark eyes met her blue stare; she looked at her shoes, her breath taken away by the horrible inappropriateness of her thoughts at this time, but it must have something to do with Father, mustn’t it, these thoughts of life beating, life force? Death and – this – were related; it was all in Thomas Mann, it was in nature.

Despite these compunctions, Posy smiled. He nodded civilly and looked again at his paper, evidently considering whether conversation was inevitable, then looked up again, acknowledging her empty glass.

‘Would you like something? I’m just getting myself a cognac,’ he said in French. He was amazingly good looking, she thought.

‘Non, merci,’
she said.

‘A brandy?’ he repeated in English. ‘Please, allow me.’

‘Oh, well, thanks,’ she reconsidered, recognizing that this simple exchange, the essence of a classical pickup, would commit her to conversation and to staying up awhile longer, though she was actually dead tired after driving through the night last night. He went over to the little bar and came back with two cognacs in big snifters.

‘I’m Emile Abboud,’ smiled the handsome man, his face somehow harmonizing a manly square jaw with graceful curves of eyebrow, lashes, cleft chin shadowed with beard, upcurving lips displaying a smile of astounding whiteness. She heard his name as Abbot, or maybe Booth, and he had pronounced it with a certain flourish, as if she ought to have heard it before.

‘I’m Posy,’ she said.

‘Anglaise ou américaine?’

‘English.’ And she certainly wasn’t going to struggle on in French. His English was fine, she saw, even his accent was not too pronounced.

‘So I thought. I was just now reading the words of your prime minister, so sycophantic in his pro-American effusions. Do you find him so? Sycophantic and pro-American? A lackey to the American president, a bully and a liar?’

‘I suppose he is,’ Posy admitted. ‘I’ve given up thinking about politics. Politicians are so dreadfully boring.’ Though she was not in the habit of picking up men in bars, it came to her as almost primal knowledge that since they were required to expend so many words, and get through so many minutes of conversation, before reaching the right stage of alcohol-abetted friendliness, the right feeling of camaraderie, attraction, and accord that could then run to further things, or not – this was only an incubation period, and they might as well talk about politics while coming down with the full-blown thing. But politics wasn’t her strongest subject. For instance, who was the prime minister of France? She was suddenly blank on that.

‘Did you just get here today?’ she asked.

‘Yes, just a half an hour ago.’

‘Are you skiing tomorrow?’

‘No. Are you?’

‘Probably not. I’m actually not much of a skier,’ Posy admitted. ‘The last time I skied was a few years ago, in Val d’Isère, and I savaged my knee on the first day. No, I’m here on business. With my brother,’ she added in case he had seen Rupert.

‘Yes, that is my situation too. “Unforeseen business.” Luckily I got here in time for dinner, which did much to reconcile me to passing a few days in the Alps. The table here is very good.’

‘Well, you must be a true Frenchman, we’re already having a food discussion,’ Posy said. His English was so good, so unaccented, she thought maybe he wasn’t French at all but some sort of sheik. Sheiks were always well educated, and had gone to Oxford or Cambridge or Harvard, not that she had ever met one.

‘We could turn to other subjects. You are easily the most beautiful girl in the room.’

‘You don’t expect me to discuss my looks.’

‘No, I suppose not. Female beauty is another French interest, though.’

‘We – English girls – are all very touchy about French girls, they are all so pretty and chic.’

‘You don’t find them rather thin and calculating and pulled together?’

‘Well, an Englishman would have no way of describing someone’s look, pulled together or the contrary. They don’t notice what women wear.’

‘That is a national difference, then,’ said Emile.

Posy could feel her mood lifting, like clouds drifting away and a big heavenly beacon beginning to break through, singling her out with its ray as if to warm a patch of fun and forgetfulness just for her. Things will be bad again in the morning, but for now all is permitted. That’s what ski resorts are like.

He had put his newspaper aside with the air of a man who is not going to resist the change of program.

‘We could dance,’ he suggested. ‘Less dangerous than skiing.’ Posy was not so sure about that, but agreed. They stood and moved a few feet toward the small chairless space in front of the musicians where a few couples had been dancing, but just as they stepped up, the musicians stopped the Tyrolean polka they’d been playing and went off on a break. He took her arm and they sat back down. Even his light touch on her shoulder made her feel short of breath.

‘Are you – what, a soccer player?’ she guessed. She had noticed his strength and lithe bearing in the instant he had led her to dance. It appeared that she could not have said anything that could have pleased him more. For an instant his handsome face wore the unmistakable expression of complimented vanity, then of modest denial.

‘I’m a teacher,’ he said, ‘and a sort of journalist.’ She would never tell him she was the credit manager of a chain of underwear stores. She wouldn’t even tell him her last name.

‘What kind of teacher?’

‘I teach at a university in Paris called Sciences Po.’

‘I just came down from university last year.’ He seemed charmed by her account of Cambridge, her studies in literature. She warmed to a man who appreciated women who had studied seriously, so not the case on the London job market at the moment, or the marriage market, for that matter. It was astonishing how a French person could have absorbed so much of Oxbridge lore – he wondered if she had ever been punting, and whether each student had a servant, as it appeared from books, and was it true there were no bathrooms, and no edible food, and did the
cheese really come after the dessert? He was nice even if he had some negative ideas about England. As she told him about the traditions of Cambridge, she couldn’t forbear mentioning that she’d done well there, and people were bloody surprised too.

‘You know a lot about England, you must read a lot of English books,’ she said. She was a little dizzy. She knew absolutely that this was going to end in bed, it was almost just a question of how to pass a decent interval before they could go to it. She indulged this fine idea of sleeping with an unfamiliar sheik on her first night away from England – it would be to exact a sort of revenge for the cruel disruptions of fate. Quite apart from the stirring in her lower belly and the feeling of warmth between her legs, the prospect had a sort of abstract charm, a philosophical appeal, not that she had read philosophy (Rupert had, though). The idea of an
acte gratuit
, without motive (well, pleasure), something between people uncommitted, unconnected to each other, an act with no past and no future, an exercise of pure will and pure self-indulgence, came from Gide. Or was it Sartre?

Emile – or something similar, whatever he had told her his name was – waved for another pair of drinks. They carried on with the banal, arch sort of conversation that both knew was just killing time.

‘Oh, we cannot resist beautiful English girls,’ he said presently. ‘It is even a feature of our pornography, a perverse dream of sullying the pale, delicious, puddings with our dark passion.’ Posy believed him, and didn’t say aloud, but thought, that the opposite was also true, she was drawn to the idea of sheiks and pashas, though
the only ones she had actually seen, in Harrods, say, or accompanying a bevy of black-covered women in Marks and Spencer, were seldom attractive, and usually fat. It was more the idea of sheiks that was sexually exciting. Though perhaps by ‘our’ he had meant Frenchmen? Frenchmen or sheiks, the attraction of opposites was another law of life, perhaps even a physical principle – it was all in D. H. Lawrence.

Thinking of D. H. Lawrence gave her courage, for people were always having impulsive sexual encounters in Lawrence. It was easier to think of doing so outside London, though she had done some fairly crazy things there, too, though never with an absolute stranger and mostly when she was a teenager and sort of miserable. There was a connection to misery now – poor Father – but lust was a better description of her present mood, a delightful feeling, and urgent in its promptings, above all signifying that you were your own person and not a pawn of fate, and no one knew her in distant Valméri anyhow. You were supposed to screw around at a ski resort. Then there was the idea of affirmation. Faced with death – that of a parent symbolizing and prefiguring your own – what was more defiant and positive than making love, even though, logically, it ought to include the making of a new life, but never mind that. You read of people in prison making love, and during the plague.

He answered her question: the idea of the
acte gratuit
came from Gide. He seemed to be thinking in a similar vein, for he now made some remark about the awkward moment between desire and the
passage à l’acte
.

Neither he nor she had any condoms, the search for
which might have shaken their exhilarated mood; but some were to be had from the little store of sundries kept in the manager’s office for emergencies. That the youthful Jaffe had learned his hotel-school lessons well was attested to by the complete impassivity with which he responded to Emile’s inquiry, as Posy lingered out of sight in the corridor.

Once in his room, Posy experienced some embarrassment and some apprehensiveness, feeling a bit disheveled, though she had washed up before dinner, and wishing she had on better things underneath. There was also the thing she had heard about Arabs and depilation, though this was a Frenchman not a sheik, and some French girls she had seen on a beach when she was younger had gobs of hair under their arms though going topless. But she consoled herself by remembering that even if you were going to be an international adventuress on a global scale, you couldn’t possibly anticipate the erotic predilections of every nationality.

He, however, was clearly a man at home in his own territory, and she needn’t have worried. It was all smoothly, even brilliantly, performed, though with no complicated positions out of
The Arab Art of Love
, which was anyway maybe not a real book but a title invented by Anthony Powell, her own countryman, in the one of his novels she had read. She crept back to her own room at almost two, burning with the excitement of her clandestine adventure, glad not to run into anyone who could have spotted instantly ‘the lineaments of satisfied desire.’ (Blake)

PART
2
Hospital

L’hypocrisie est un hommage que le vice rend à la vertu
.

–
La Rochefoucauld
(Maximes)