L'Affaire (14 page)

16

After dinner, Posy, like everyone else, headed for the lounge bar, and sat thinking both of Emile and, enviously, of Rupert dining with the provincial business manager, surely not as well as the guests at the Hôtel Croix St Bernard had dined, but blissfully removed from her turbulent discoveries. Her pulse quickened when she was joined (as she had hoped) by Emile, husband of her supposed sister, another alluring mystery. She welcomed a chance at last to understand more about it, though the relationship was now clouded with renunciation and awkwardness. He, however, appeared perfectly at ease, had conquered his earlier air of embarrassment and passed into the easy familiarity of a brother-in-law.

‘
Bonsoir
. Hello,’ he said. ‘
Copains de la tempête,’
and instantly picked up her lack of comprehension. ‘Companions in the storm. Don’t you say that in English? Would you like something? A cognac?’ He disappeared for a few moments and came back to sit beside her with two snifters of brandy. He lit her cigarette. She told him about Rupert and the safe-deposit box journey, hoping to signal Rupert’s absence.

‘And what “treasures” were unearthed in the fabled
coffre
? Have they reported?’

‘They can’t get into it till tomorrow.’

‘Ah. The poor fellow has another day of life, then.’

‘Father’s life does not depend on that,’ she said, indignation stirring at the detachment of his tone, its vague accusation of callousness and pragmatism.

‘No? Lucky for him,
alors
. My wife refuses to come, you know – that’s why it is I who am here.’

‘I wondered about that,’ Posy said. ‘We had never heard of your wife. It was quite a surprise. What’s her name?’

‘Victoire.’

‘I meant, who is her mother?’

‘Ah – the redoubtable – is that the word I mean? – Géraldine Chastine.’ He told her what little he knew about the early marriage, or nonmarriage, or one-night stand, of Géraldine and Venn.

‘Did my father know about Victoire?’

‘I believe so… Actually, I have no idea.’

‘Does she look like me?’

‘Not much. Maybe something about the fair coloring – we dark fellows are like moths to flames. She is older than you, thinner perhaps. I should say has not your voluptuous beauty.’ His eyes met hers. Again she had an almost unpleasant visceral stirring.

‘Perhaps Father will have left her something,’ Posy said.

‘In France, you know, Father has no say in the matter. Of course he has left her something, if there’s anything to leave. Do you know anything about how your father was fixed?’

‘Not really. I was surprised to hear about gold coins and a Bonnard.’

‘Though it may be that the illegitimate children don’t get quite as large a share as the legitimate ones.’

‘There are Rupert and me, and of course the baby,
Harry. But we think he may have left it all to his new wife. He would have done, wouldn’t he?’ She couldn’t bring herself to say ‘Kerry.’ This man was her ally, after all, and would understand. ‘He was very stuck on her…’ Her mind reviewed the unpleasant scenes she had happened to witness between her mother and father on the subject of Kerry.

‘Madame Venn was better today,’ he said. ‘But no, she cannot inherit it all, we are in France. Through the “majesty” of Napoleon’s vision, successions are mostly secured to the children.’

‘Well, anyway, Father isn’t dead,’ she guiltily said. A pause.

‘He is dead, you know, Posy.’

Posy stared into her drink, heart pounding, but it was not the idea of father’s death, it was the presence of Emile. She had a sudden intimation of where proximity, conversation, and the brandy could lead them again, and she was saying to herself, why not? What did she care about some hypothetical half-sister who wasn’t here? If you couldn’t be totally bad at a stressful, unnatural time like this, when could you? Tonight was perfect, with Rupert not here… Her mind trailed on, trying to think of something to say in the present moment.

‘I loved going to bed with you,’ she suddenly said, surprised at the elegaic, plaintive tone of her own voice. ‘Don’t you think we could, one last time… I mean…?’

She would afterward think about his expression. Was he about to say no or yes? With her rotten luck, she was never to know, for here was Christian Jaffe coming toward her, and bending to whisper that Mr Osworthy
had arrived, and had asked him to let her know and would she follow him?

‘Right, thanks,’ sighed Posy. She got up. ‘Mr Osworthy is my father’s solicitor, and I guess I have to go speak to him.’

Emile nodded, rose as she rose. He might have indicated that he would wait till she had finished with Mr Osworthy, but instead he said, ‘Good night. I’m sure we’ll meet tomorrow,’ his expression now seeming quite indifferent to this revision of her erotic hopes, whatever he had been going to say. As Posy left the bar, she immediately began to see the moment in a more sensible way – what had she been thinking of? – but she forgave herself, in view of the stress they were all under, for having these inclinations toward her exotic stepbrother-in-law, whatever that made them as relatives.

Mr Osworthy stood by the front desk, bending over his valise. His white hair and city clothes marked him immediately as British, out of place and damp with snow, and he wore a cross, punitive expression, like a bailiff. When he saw Posy he shook her hand, but with a frown, and said, ‘Where’s Rupert, then?’

‘Hullo, Mr Osworthy. He’s with Father’s French man of business, taking some things out of Father’s safety-deposit box while he’s still alive.’

‘Really? The French amaze me.’ He frowned more severely. ‘I’ll have a whiskey and turn in, I suppose. Rupert can tell me about it tomorrow. What time will he be back?’

‘Sometime tomorrow afternoon, I guess.’ She gave him such details as she knew, not failing to notice that
Rupert seemed to be, in Mr Osworthy’s mind, the only responsible person in the family.

Mr Osworthy handed his valise to Mademoiselle Jaffe. ‘
Poovez voo déposer ma valise?’
he said in clear British French. ‘
Je vais au bar
. Well, Posy, I won’t keep you up. I know how hard this is on you.’ Posy felt herself sent to bed, but she obeyed. She supposed she ought to tell Mr Osworthy about the existence of the sister, or maybe he knew. It was clear Mr Osworthy could see into her heart and would know that she had been thinking about going to bed with Mr Abboud, and would impede all her other desires too. She lay awake a long time, half hoping for Emile’s tap at her door, though of course she knew he didn’t know which was her room, but she could think of ways he could find out if motivated.

Amy, sitting with Kip and Joe Daggart in the bar, noticed Posy and the dark, handsome man. Did Kip know who he was?

‘He was at the hospital,’ Kip said.

‘Emile someone – I’ve seen him on television,’ Joe Daggart said. Emile someone was a newcomer. At dinner tonight, Amy had sat at table with a prince, even if Romanian, and princess, even if American, a nationality distant and submerged in this individual. The prince and
princesse
, though aristocrats, were little wizened people in their seventies, with hair dyed black and speaking an English of incredible vivacity. Joe Daggart had eaten with them too. Amy felt pleased with the number of her new acquaintances. By now she could meet the eyes of several other of the hotel guests with a friendly nod and smiles,
and it all gave her a pleasant sense of being familiar and worldly. She knew better than to be impressed – this friendliness was owing to no quality of her own except that she could afford to stay at this hotel; but she marvelled at the ease with which you could enter an alternative and fabled reality. Whether you could stay there or would want to was another matter.

She could happily stay awhile longer in the world of skiing, for certain. Today the slight anxiety that had hung over the entire valley since the avalanches had eased further, and she had had the intermittent sense of exhilaration and power skiers are meant to have. At one period in college she had lived for skiing. It was the same period when her friends – so fortuitiously, it would prove – had been the geeky physics and math majors who would later make her fortune, and they had been skiers too. Many was the night she had slept over at their computer dump of an apartment littered with hard drives and smelling of solder, so they could get up at three and be at Tahoe and on the slopes by nine. But since then she hadn’t had time for it, and now wanted to have again the thrilling sense of speed and freedom it brought.

She thought about the dinner conversation. ‘We heard about your good deed,’ the
princesse
had said in a perfectly American accent. For a millisecond, Amy couldn’t place her good deed: paying for Kip’s baby-sitter apparently was meant. She wondered how they could have heard of it.

‘What a handsome thing!’ exclaimed the prince.

‘It was very thoughtful,’ said the
princesse
. Amy, grateful for a subject, told them what Kip had told her of his sister’s condition.

‘It’s so terrible for him,’ she said. ‘His sister in a coma, and they have no relatives or anyone.’ The others turned their faces to where Kip sat at his table, jamming food into the tot.

‘The eyelids fluttering is apparently a very good sign,’ Amy went on. ‘They expect her eventually to be okay.’

‘And you, dear, are from California, Robin says.’ All in all, it made Amy uneasy to have the light of their interest directed on her. She knew what people really thought of Californians and people from Silicon Valley.

‘Have you been there?’ she asked, to change the course of the conversation. They had been to Carmel and Monterey, where the prince had played the course at Pebble Beach.

It had come up at this dinner that there is something the French call
l’esprit de l’escalier
, stairway wit. It refers to the things you think up later that you should have said. She had been suffering from it her whole life long without knowing it had a name, and it was what kept her awake now. Whole passages from the dinner conversation ran through her mind now, in which she had been inevitably really lame.

‘How many languages does the educated person speak?’ she had asked at one point, meaning to launch a spritely debate (a group team leadership technique promulgated widely in Silicon Valley, which, in the main, she scorned but could not be unaware of.)

‘Ah. Speak or read?’ asked Robin Crumley.

‘Well, isn’t it the same?’ (Definitely not, she now saw. Dumb.)

‘Not at all,’ said the
princesse
Mawlesky.

‘I haven’t really begun my French lessons, I’m planning to do that in Paris, but I’m starting to read,’ Amy had said. (Two errors: non sequitur, talking about self.)

‘Four, I think,’ said Robin Crumley. ‘Speak two fluently, have a reading knowledge of two more, that’s a minimum, but we Anglo-Saxons are at a disadvantage, we’re so bad at languages.’

‘What languages do you speak? “Have,” I should say,’ asked Amy. ‘What languages do you have?’

‘English, and French, a little Italian. I’d always been planning to read Dante in the original, but I’m ashamed to say I’ve never done it. Of course I do have a little Welsh, but I don’t count it. People say that Catalan… it’s a funny story about how I came to learn Catalan…’

Oh, God, thought Amy, doubting she would ever learn even two.

Then, to her chagrin now, she had gone on to tell them about the Crakes method, a technique where you learn four languages at once, for which she was hoping to find a teacher.

‘Good God, whatever for?’ said Robin Crumley.

‘Yes, four at once. While you’re learning the French word for tree, say, you might as well learn the German and the Italian and the Greek at the same time.’ Or was the fourth one Latin?

‘Albero? Baum?’
said the prince wonderingly, as if these words had been in his brain from birth, and he couldn’t remember a time he didn’t know them, or envision a being so low she would have to struggle to acquire these simple basic nouns.

And, worst of all, at another moment she had mentioned Darwin. ‘Do Europeans believe in Darwin?’ She had thought she had an opening for a discussion of mutual aid.

They had looked at her, as if to say, Believe in? In the religious sense?

‘I’m not aware that the ideas of Darwin are an issue of faith,’ said Robin Crumley. ‘Are they not agreed upon? Natural selection, the survival of the fittest?’

‘Not in America,’ said Amy. ‘Of course, with our tradition of dissent, nothing is agreed upon. Many people are challenging Darwin, both from the left and the right – the latter the fundamentalists, but that’s another thing. The point is, the survival of the fittest is what stuck in your mind. I expect you regard that as the abiding principle of social organization.’

‘Undoubtedly. Darwin seemed to be a master psychologist, whatever he lacked as a biologist.’

‘No, no,’ she had cried, ‘the other way round! He was a masterly biologist, but not much of a student of human behavior. He never noticed that the fittest species survived because of strategies of cooperation.’

‘As we see among the tribes of Africa, or in Kosovo,’ laughed the
princesse
.

‘A good example. The people who are going to survive there are the NATO powers who are cooperating against all those factions and nationalities who are destroying each other instead of cooperating…’ How she regretted now her earnest tone, the flush she had felt rising to her cheeks.

At the same time, now, she despised herself for feeling
the least chagrin. Why should she feel concern for the opinions of a bunch of seedy Europeans whom she could buy and sell, probably, not that that was a criterion. What she hated was confirming by her own example their notions of the naive and unlettered American. She was not a crass rube, she was an intelligent and hardworking person, immensely successful by her own efforts, whose experiences with cultural subjects had been limited until now by circumstance. She had to keep reminding herself of this.

17