L'Affaire (20 page)

‘What do you think you’ll do?’ asked the cashier, a woman, seeing their papers.

About what? Amy didn’t know. ‘Do?’

‘The people should be compensated at least,’ she remonstrated, shaking her head at the idea of human
perfidy, Amy’s in particular. ‘You can’t just act like nothing happened.’

As at other times, Amy felt she was being made to stand for all Americans, and she hardly knew how to contain her outrage at this personal criticism. She had nothing to do with the avalanche, yet she was being made to take moral responsibility for it, for a whole category, a whole nation of people who also didn’t have anything to do with it. It was stereotyping, it was profiling. They said ‘you Americans’ as if a Californian were like someone from Mississippi. Didn’t they know how big America was, how disparate? Anyway, as if Americans had something to do with the snow conditions in the Alps! Not that she wasn’t an American, but she was she, herself, not just a representative specimen of her countrymen. She hadn’t even voted for the present president, certainly not.

At the same time, she knew she should rise above mere private resentments; since European criticisms were generic, they were not directed at her personally. They blamed all Americans.

And now she must face Mr Abboud and, no doubt, more criticism.

‘Won’t you come with me?’ she proposed to Crumley as they walked back to the hotel, their newspapers tucked under their parkas to protect them from the still-falling snow. ‘You seem to get along with Mr Abboud better than I do.’

22

Mr Abboud, waiting at the bar, had a changed air from their encounter on the stair after the cooking lesson. Now he seemed relaxed and subdued, and had an eye on the door. But he rose cordially enough when Amy came into the bar with Robin. Would they have a kir? A whiskey?

‘What exactly is your interest in sending the dying Mr Venn to England?’ he asked Amy, returning to this subject as soon as they were served. ‘Since it is counter to my own advantage, I still find myself wondering.’

‘Amy is just an angel, she does things out of goodness,’ cried Robin. ‘And of course the Brompton Hospital is world famous.’

‘Do I have to have an interest?’ asked Amy. ‘What a cynical view of life! Perhaps that’s very French.’ She was not sure why this provoking man was goading her to make insulting ethnic slurs, which was not like her.

‘People usually have an interest. Mine is in part selfish, in part an unselfish wish to see the rational laws of France prevail over English chaos,’ he said.

‘Now, really,’ said Robin Crumley. ‘What’s the legal difference, by the way?’

Abboud now assumed a rapt camera-ready expression and a certain preacherly tone as he launched into an explanation. ‘It’s a telling difference. When it comes to his will, an Englishman, having earned his fortune, can
indulge any whim of his doddering mind – reward the housemaid, leave it all to a home for cats. He can punish any ungrateful or unsuccessful child of his by leaving it nothing.’

‘Quite right,’ said Crumley.

‘In France, who gets what is spelled out, children getting equal shares, a spouse only a small percentage – even parents inherit, rather than spouses, if there are no children. France has in view that property should remain in the family, children getting fair shares, no one generation impoverishing the next, ensuring the orderly progress of society. Which is the best system? The French, undoubtedly. More people are better off under a system of forced equity than when things are left to caprice.’

‘It sounds stifling,’ Amy objected. ‘Why does anyone bother to behave well to their parents if they’ll get the money anyway?’

‘I call
that
a cynical view of life. It’s a horrible view. People behave well to their parents out of natural good feeling, they love them.’ Though he loved his parents, at one stage Emile had been ashamed of them, brown, unfashionable Maghrebites, his mother barely able to control her inclination to put on a headscarf.

‘Often they hate them, never see them, refuse to speak to them,’ Amy pointed out.

‘Not if they expect to get any money. In England – people jump through hoops. In France, we naturally revere our parents. When you can’t control your children by threatening to change your will, you can be assured their feelings are of spontaneous, natural affection when they are nice to you.’

These were matters Amy had never considered. Her parents were in good health and lived two hours from her, in Ukiah. She knew she should go and see them more often.

‘The triumph of French law is that it protects French people,’ Emile continued. ‘That is not true of all bodies of law. Some have been designed to oppress, some to enrich a small constituency –’ Suddenly Emile looked beyond them and abruptly stood up. ‘May I present my wife, Victoire,’ he said, as they were joined by a pretty, ethereal-looking blonde, presumably, if Amy had it figured out right, yet another offspring of the mysterious Venn.

‘
Mais oui,
you are a friend of Maman,’ said Victoire to Amy. ‘She said I must say hello to you. She tells me she has found you a wonderful apartment.’ This allowed Amy a few seconds finally to put the situation in place: Géraldine Chastine was Victoire’s mother, Victoire was something – half-sister – to the Venns. The man was married to Victoire. The world at that moment seemed deliciously small to Amy, to have, even, the reassuring dimensions of Silicon Valley. But how sad that Géraldine’s nice daughter was married to this most disagreeable, if handsome, man.

After the Abbouds went in to dinner, Amy had stayed in the bar a minute to glance through the
Herald Tribune,
noting further a curious item pertaining to the avalanches, that there had been a small demonstration outside the American State Department by a group – it didn’t quite say of scruffy ideologues – demanding accountability a nd transparency when it came to American airplanes in foreign places, possibly inflicting damage again, this time
on valued allies. A spokesman had told the paper that the government was exposing innocent American tourists to risk by not telling them of developing enmity in formerly friendly places where America had caused damage and death. Amy wondered, but not seriously, if that could include Valméri?

At dinner, the guests at the Hôtel Croix St Bernard had the novelty of two American military officers in uniform dining at one of the tables. Some said army, some said air force, it was hard to tell from across the room.

‘I think army,’ said Marie-France Chatigny-Dové. ‘I think the air force wears blue.’ The prince and
princesse
agreed. In the bar after dinner, some guests were heard to criticize the management for admitting such people to the dining room. ‘Those are the same chaps we saw in the village questioning local merchants,’ Robin Crumley was able to inform them. All agreed that their presence must have something to do with the avalanches. That morning’s bulletin was still lying on the tables:

Americans deny presence of American overflights. Pentagon spokesman says no American planes were near the Alps at all, let alone in the area of Valméri where the destructive avalanches of last week had caused, finally, nine dead
.

Posy and Rupert’s dinner with their new sister Victoire and her attractive husband had not seemed awkward, although, as Posy had spent the afternoon in bed with the husband, it might have, and Emile treated both her and his wife with impassive politeness, his lovely smile and
rather cynical discourses delivered without regard to who received them, in the manner of other public performers. It was all Posy could do to refrain from pressing Emile with her foot or allowing her hand to brush his.

Both Rupert and Posy had loved Victoire at once. Rupert felt a true affinity, and he could tell that Posy did, too, with their newfound sister. There must be something magnetic, some pull of the DNA, that accounted for their recognition of Victoire, transcending mere acquaintance, so powerfully connected did they feel. There was the family resemblance, but it was more than that. It was as if some Platonic ideal of a sister was now his in the form of the (evidently) good Victoire, in place of the (bad) Posy. Not that Posy was very bad, but even during this dinner she exhibited some of her worst qualities – restlessness, lack of ease, even acquisitiveness. He caught her looking at Emile, just intercepted the tiniest glance of a kind that warned him that some outburst was preparing. Perhaps she wanted Emile to leave so they could talk to Victoire, or maybe she didn’t like Frenchmen.

They were recounting to Victoire their family life with Father, emphasizing his brilliance as a publisher and foibles as a parent, and had arrived at the divorce and the character and present life of their mother. In turn, Victoire told them about her mother, Géraldine, but said she was unable to imagine Géraldine separately from her stepfather, Eric, who, she emphasized, was her ‘real’ papa, let alone imagine her mother as a teenaged girl briefly involved with a Venn in his twenties.

‘It’s
trop dommage
that I should only learn about him now.’ She sighed. ‘Now that it’s too late.’

‘Oh, no,’ Posy protested. ‘The Brompton Hospital is world famous, we haven’t given up hope.’

‘Well,’ said Victoire, ‘tell me some more. Have he and your mother remained on good terms?’

‘Not really. They hate each other, actually. But I should think it was quite a happy marriage until Kerry,’ Rupert said.

‘Oh, poor Kerry,’ cried Victoire. ‘I must embrace her. She will revive? Oh, and the poor little baby, the little orphan boy.’

Yes, thought Rupert, it’s Victoire who has all the good instincts, and Posy is just a bitch. Strange to say, tears had sprung to Posy’s eyes just then.

They discussed tomorrow’s outing to Saint-Jean-de-Belleville. Posy knew that joy was never unalloyed. The happy prospect of driving somewhere with Emile was now marred by the arrival of Victoire. Luckily, Victoire declined to go with them to lunch; she would instead go to the hospital to see her unknown father, she said. Posy wondered if Victoire fully understood Father’s condition. Deep, deep coma, practically a vegetable, they emphasized, but perhaps Victoire didn’t recognize such absolutes as coma; perhaps she could shine through comas. She was evidently a person of unusual serenity, or maybe it was that since she didn’t yet have a personal feeling for Father – how could she? – she didn’t really care.

Posy was also thinking that Victoire didn’t have the air of a woman who watched her husband closely, though Posy could see her adoration and desire for him, and took pains to show none of that herself. Of course she wouldn’t want Victoire to know, but still more, she
wouldn’t want Rupert to know, he disapproved of her so much already. She knew there was no chance of a furtive embrace from Emile in the corridor later. Would this incestuous adultery, she was wondering, bring a tragic curse down upon the house of Venn? Was she enacting a destiny set in motion by her father’s adulteries? Were they all under a curse, as in a Greek drama? Which one? Aeschylus? For some reason, her eyes had again filled with tears.

Amy, feeling a sudden lapse in her capacity for sociability, went to her room after dinner and turned on the TV. She had missed the very beginning of the program that came up, but it was evidently some fable or costume drama. An aristocratic-looking man was talking to a governessy-looking woman in a mannish suit, with a beautiful château in the background, all soothing and European enough to bear watching for a few minutes. The aristocrat wore riding boots and reminded her of her mental picture of the baron. Together the man and woman look downhill to where a group of five pretty young women in girlish frocks are being handed by a chauffeur out of a large car, taking their suitcases out, laughing to one another. Cut to the aristocrat’s deeply absorbed stare at the pretty young women, the governess giving him a knowing smile. He smiles at her and shakes her hand. The girls carry their suitcases into the château.

Cut to a scene on the lawn. The girls are assembled on little canvas folding stools with their paintboxes and brushes. One girl is posing for the others in a white dress trimmed with a blue sash. The governess is holding a
postcard of a painting by Gainsborough, which the model is emulating. The governess shuffles her postcards and directs them to assume new positions,
après
Watteau. So much was clear without understanding the French, though Amy thought she had begun to improve her auditory skills and could discern
merci, À bientôt,
and several other phrases.

The governess shows the girls a picture from the classical nude to imitate. Laughing, the girls begin taking off their clothes. Now they are naked. Two of the girls stand on their heads, their crotches eye-level with the other girls and the camera. The right-side-up girls begin to trim the pubic hair of the upended ones. The governess, with the picture in hand, demands to know what they are doing, a very good question that Amy wonders about too. ‘
Pas de poil,’
they say. Amy looks up
poil
in her dictionary: coat, mane, pubic hair. The girls indicate the picture of marble nymphs who have no pubic hair. From his window, the baron watches lustfully as the naked girls assume the postcard tableau.

Amazed, Amy looked at the time, the channel: main channel, not some in-house rental channel. Porn! Children all over France could be watching this! All at once she felt shocked, even embarrassed, and abruptly turned off the television. She didn’t think of herself as a prude, but what if Kip was in his room watching at this moment? Completely disturbing to an adolescent boy. Also, how horrible if some porn charge would be added to her bill. How bizarre that the French would allow such programs in prime time. But of course, they are French. What was one to conclude?

PART
3
Snow

Être ou ne pas être. Telle est la question
.

– William Shakespeare,
Hamlet