L'Affaire (22 page)

The beauty of skiing is that you cannot dwell on your hopes and life decisions while doing it: while skiing you must think about your skis, the slope, the shift of the weight of your body, the knees, the release of the ankles. He was skiing faster than before, almost as fast as Kip. For a couple of hours they worked their way eastward through the mountain valleys, up on trams and chair lifts, down, on- and sometimes off-piste. Finally, Paul-Louis stopped them at the top of a run and pointed ahead. They could see below them the jaunty little spire of the church of Saint-Jean-de-Belleville and the smoke of the chimneys of the village houses, small stone structures barely set off from the rocky boulders among which they nestled, all dusted with snow. A well-regarded bistro, L’Edelweiss, had been recommended, and the hotel had phoned ahead to book their table.

As they had skied with enthusiastic and slightly
competitive speed all morning, the sight and promise of lunch, and the apparent ease of the long run before them to the restaurant, brought a cheer from the whole party. Now Rupert was skiing much faster than Amy, who, with the village in sight, moderated her speed as if fearing that something might endanger her safe arrival for the well-deserved repast. They flew on down toward the village, leaving graceful, symmetrical tracery arcs behind them in the snow, testimony to their smooth rhythmic turns and strengthening thighs.

24

Posy’s party left the hotel in her car at about eleven, planning to stop in Moutiers at the hospital, which was on the way out of the valley toward Saint-Jean-de-Belleville, to see Father and drop Victoire. The plane was not expected until the afternoon, so they were surprised to find a group of men in green coveralls already standing at Venn’s bed discussing in German the problems involved in transporting a patient on life support.

‘The man is only alive because he’s being breathed,’ the doctor was ranting to them for the hundredth time. ‘It is a most shameless plot so that he may breathe his last artificial sigh in England.’ Perhaps he hoped that Anglophobic feelings would cause the Swiss paramedics to resist this wily English maneuver. Now that transport was a reality, a not quite disinterested indignation had arisen in Emile in Victoire’s behalf, to think of her losing her inheritance, and he expressed his support for the doctor’s position: the man should not be taken to England. Posy agreed, and the paramedics, accustomed to praise and urgent encouragement from the people they were helping, were confused and dismayed by these contradictory objections from members of a victim’s family.

‘You should confront the English lawyer, or the American woman, let them know you are wise to their cynical and hypocritical plot,’ said Dr Lamm to Emile and Posy
in a tone so bitter that Emile dismissed it as owing to wounded professional pride. Emile in truth felt ambivalent about how to spend the morning, both looking forward to an outing in the mountains and inclined to stay and meddle in Victoire’s behalf, for she was, after all, his wife.

A respite provided itself. A special piece of equipment the medics had not thought of would be needed for the electric generator in the ambulance that was to transport Venn to the nearby town of Albertville, to the only airport. This article was being driven up from Geneva during the morning, but it didn’t appear that departure would be ready before late afternoon. Posy and Emile each felt relieved, not to have to forgo the pleasant prospect of lunch together outside the valley, and there was still time for another impediment to develop. Perhaps Venn would miraculously wake up in the meantime. ‘Do you think he looks better? It’s as if he knows he’s going home,’ said Posy.

Somewhat uneasily they took their leave just as Mr Osworthy was arriving, and set off on the snowy road for Saint-Jean-de-Belleville and their lunch rendezvous with the skiers – Amy, Rupert, Paul-Louis, and Madame Chatigny-Dové. Posy, wracked with premonitions, took a long look of farewell at her father just in case, but no one wanted to articulate the gloomy forebodings they all felt.

Victoire sat down next to Venn. After studying the face of this stranger and finding no resemblance to herself, she nonetheless tried to feel regret for having missed the chance to become acquainted with him. Bringing out her
flute, she seated herself at her father’s bedside. She was able to feel the tender concern one felt for anyone who was ill, but she was disappointed that she didn’t feel anything more than that for this inert person to whom she owed her biological existence. She accepted the fact of his paternity. She had to. If her father had been someone else, she herself would be someone else.

She thought about this wonderingly, knowing these were thoughts appropriate to childhood – it was just that she hadn’t had them before; the feeling of narrow escape from being someone else impressed her with the luck of being herself, though it didn’t do to dwell on the ways one might have been better. The inevitability of her fragile spine and straight nose. These thoughts didn’t intensify her feeling for Mr Venn, though. She would do whatever she could to help. As the paramedics checked him, discussed, and waited for their missing piece of hardware, she performed the adagio from Lully’s
Andromache
.

To an American and city dweller like Kerry Venn, who had grown up in Portland, Oregon, background music, omnipresent in American stores and elevators, was an integral part of consciousness itself, so that a few hours later when she began to recover consciousness, it was not as a fresh sensation that she heard music, knew it, even – ‘Sheep May Safely Graze.’ She heard it as the reflex of her own mind. The melody, played on a flute, replaced actual thoughts, was her whole consciousness for some moments until the components of the experience of hearing it gathered in her consciousness. She supposed she was dreaming, then separated herself from the dream and
came to feel the bed under her and the light covers over her. She recognized that she was in bed, that real sounds were being addressed to her.

She opened her eyes. Ceiling. Some constraints, something attached to her arm pulling painfully at the skin on the back of both hands. Tube or something between her legs. A hospital, then, but why the beautiful music, suitable to being on the other side of some immense blank, somewhere she felt she had just been? The music stopped and a beautiful face smiled over her.

‘Superbe,’
said the voice, ‘she’s waking.’ Other faces peered down at her. Kerry floated back to wherever she’d been, then back here again. Someone wrapped something around her arm. Kerry squeezed a hand when asked to.

‘Oui, oui, oui,’
said a nurse. ‘
Elle serre la main.’
She obeyed the instruction to open her eyes. The nurses smiled at each other, and Sister Bénédicte went to call the doctor, for it was he who would decide when to remove the apparatus of coma, for her coma was lifting, and soon she would not need the breathing tube, the heart monitor, and the rest, and could speak and reward their patience. This gratifying moment communicated itself even to the paramedics concerned with transferring the comatose husband and his complicated tubes and cumbersome machines onto a stretcher for transport. They left this business for a moment to take turns staring into the eyes, opening and shutting on command, of the tractable, increasingly sentient wife.

‘Bienvenue, madame,’
someone said, moved, and other voices were saying ‘
Bon,
Kerry,
bon
.’ She tried to find the
first face again, so lovely had it been, so welcoming. Now jubilant flute strains again, and someone stroked her hair, and men’s voices now rose. She tried to lift her head but couldn’t. She became aware that something was blocking her throat, hard impediments like sticks stuck down her throat, hurting her, and she tried to reach for them, to pull them out.

‘Sedative,’ someone said. ‘We cannot take out the tubes until tomorrow, until we are sure. Or perhaps late this afternoon. Light sedation until then. She does not need to speak.’

‘She’ll come back rapidly now,’ said another.

‘Poor woman,’ said the nurses to each other as the complicated removal of Venn proceeded, after her
calvaire
to wake up and find her husband taken off to London.

‘Think how happy the others will be,’ said Victoire, laying aside her flute. ‘Now I almost think I should have gone to London with Mr Osworthy. I see that my father had the more need of music – it seems his wife was about to wake up on her own.’

Other voices discussed this. Kerry heard part, slipping in and out of consciousness, in and out of dream. Someone did something to the IV fluids and then she slept deeply.

It was already after one o’clock. The village of Saint-Jean-de-Belleville was made up of mossy gray stone houses, sturdy, avalanche proof, planted self-satisfiedly in the narrow gorge of a little ice-covered river. Amy thought she had never seen anything so pretty. Bistro Edelweiss was visible across the flat field at the bottom of the run,
and they made toward it, walking in or carrying their skis and placing them in a rack outside the stone building. The proprietor was waiting for them, remarking that their companions had already arrived. Inside, a table for eight had been set in a window alcove, where Posy, Emile, and Robin were pouring from a pitcher of the local white wine. They had left Victoire at the hospital, and, in answer to Rupert’s anxious inquiries, said things appeared to be going well with the airlift.

The automobile party greeted the skiers with admiration and congratulations slightly tinged, perhaps, with envy. Amy was waved into a place next to Robin Crumley and across from Emile and Posy, who were sitting side by side with an air Amy recognized but couldn’t put a name to – of acquaintance, or ease. Paul-Louis sat next to her on her other side and poured her a glass of wine. ‘I give you not too much,’ he warned, ‘my skiers ’ave to return safely.’

Monsieur le propriétaire
proposed several local specialities –
tartelette,
fondue, raclette, and a liqueur made from a local bush; they were shown one of them growing in a tub by the window. Amy left her choice up to Paul-Louis, who decreed they all have raclette, green salad, and more wine.

‘What was it like? What did you do?’ the others demanded, but there is a sameness to the events of a good morning of skiing that baffled their powers of description. They, or rather Rupert, recounted what he could of their exploits in the dazzling chutes, on the expanse of glacier. Soon there was more delight as the raclette machine, an imposing sort of broiler, was set up, under which they
would melt lumps of cheese onto boiled potatoes, as the waiter demonstrated.

Amy was still entranced by the national diversity of her companions. In Palo Alto, though everyone was of course an individual, there was a sameness to her friends and colleagues, all Americans except for three Indians from India. English Mr Crumley she thought especially gallant in the way he braved the elements. Though he didn’t ski, and seemed so spidery of frame, he probably had the blood of polar explorers in his veins. French Marie-France was elegantly thin and fearless, though she should be counseled about sunscreen, the wonderfully athletic Paul-Louis, too, though tan was in the nature of an occupational hazard in his case. Nothing seemed to be happening with Paul-Louis, but he had given her many really helpful pointers about visualization on moguls. He, Marie-France, and Emile, French though from different worlds, appeared to have bonded, attested to by their in-jokes about the French, their slight apprehensiveness about what the English people might say or do, and their uniform reaction to what happened next. Amy also noticed that Posy was uneasy with the Frenchman, even though he was her brother-in-law, but she could understand it, he somehow made Amy uneasy too.

As the process of setting up the raclette got under way, all at once the quiet of the mountain village was ruptured by the aggressive intrusion of violent sound, unmistakably of internal combustion engines, vrooming and choking beneath the windows of the restaurant, men’s voices, and even, Amy thought, the smell of gasoline seeping into the woodsy calm of the cozy room. The door banged open,
and a party of eight coveralled and helmeted men came in, all too clearly Americans, the ones they had seen setting out on snowmobiles, among them Joe Daggart.

‘Mon Dieu,’
said Emile. ‘
Quel ennui
. What a bore.’

‘At least if they’re in here, they’re not outside running their machines,’ remarked Posy.

‘They are very noisy,’ agreed Marie-France, nodding her head toward the men, who were talking loudly.

‘Male, at least. What’s tough is a restaurant with noisy American women, they are so… uh, not you, Amy, of course,’ said Robin Crumley.

‘At least there’s only one of me,’ said Amy, rather tartly, but she, too, was disappointed to have her countrymen throng in, diminishing the quaint foreign Alpine charm of the occasion and her feeling of distance and adventure, though she would never say this to the others.

‘Good heavens, I didn’t mean you,’ Robin insisted.

‘They’re trying to figure out what caused the avalanche,’ Amy said. ‘Shouldn’t they be allowed to have lunch?’

‘They’re trying to figure out how they didn’t cause the avalanche,’ said Emile.

‘What exactly is the matter with that?’ Amy asked.

‘Oh, nothing really. But do they need to be here? America is ‘often in our thoughts,’ but better in our thoughts than in our restaurants or, needless to say, our skies.’

‘What objection specifically?’ Amy persisted, but received no answer.

The arrival of the newcomers also strained the resources of the little restaurant. The men were out of scale. Tables had to be pushed together to form a surface big enough for their party, chairs brought up. The new table
of Americans was placed so close to Amy’s group that all were obliged to nod to each other with an appearance of civility. The exception to this friendliness seemed to be Joe Daggart, who sat at the opposite side of their table and seemed anxious not to acknowledge any of them.