L'Affaire (4 page)

Posy Venn was a large, beautiful young woman of
twenty-two with high color, a cascade of shining, unruly chestnut hair, English skin and ankles, and the air of slightly heartless confidence that goes with having been good at games, school, driving, amateur theatricals, her summer job as credit manager for a chain of boutiques, and everything else she had turned her hand to. Rupert, her brother, referred to himself as an ordinary mortal next to Posy. To others, they seemed very much a pair, both handsome, ironic, ambitious. Rupert worked in the City, not enthusiastically, and was the elder of the two by three years.

Posy, although the younger, had moved into a flat with two other girls. Rupert, however, still lived at home. Though he planned to move out soon, inertia and the distraction of his new job had delayed this. Having him at home was all right with Pam as a temporary measure, though she had begun slightly to resent that her new freedom, though unasked for, was impinged upon by maternal duties now that she was in a position to start life anew.

This was not a secret but more the source of jocular remarks: ‘Rupe, at least mow the garden lawn,’ or ‘Earn your keep, boy, and take this out to the bin.’ Luckily, Pam and Rupert got along, as Rupert was equanimity itself, always believed by his mother to be hiding depths of turmoil but also artistic talent. He wrote delightfully, was rather good at the piano, and appeared to have no ambitions at all. After university he had taken a business course, suggested and paid for by Adrian, and was now installed with a midrank-sounding title at Wigget’s as a bond salesman. Unfortunately for him, he was rather
good at this, so that bond selling became part of his family’s definition of him. He had a wide circle of friends, no particular girlfriend, and was everybody’s extra man, which seemed to suit him.

They brought their vodka tonics to the table, which was set in the corner of the living room, while Pam finished in the kitchen. They heard the phone ring, heard her high, clear voice, scales of agitated tones punctuated by exclamation, murmurs in a descending register. These notes, too, had their reverberations in childhood memories. They exchanged sympathetic glances; their mother was excitable. She came in. Her eyes were bright with an unreadable expression. It was the moist look she had worn when they were little and had a surprise or big news for them.

She sat down, touched her glass but didn’t lift it, shook her hair (she had the English prematurely white hair worn shoulder-length to emphasize the freshness of her skin). They saw that she was not calm.

‘Your father. It seems he’s been killed, or practically,’ she said in a stifled, overcome voice. Rupert and Posy stared, too shocked to comment, maybe not believing her. ‘In hospital in France, but not expected… not expected…’ Her voice caught.

She stopped, sipped a little of her drink, and tightened her face, the fate of Adrian Venn being nothing to her now, officially. She briskly repeated what she had been told. An avalanche in the French Alps. He had been buried alive, and pulled out almost dead. His new wife had perhaps been with him – the person calling hadn’t said. Huge avalanches. They were still rescuing people.
She looked out at the dark garden. It was an hour later in France, they couldn’t still be digging.

‘My God,’ Rupert said, hearing the banality of this simple exclamation, but what else was there to say? He contemplated the finality and the more than poetic justice, the malign retributive nature of fate. He could see that Posy, too, was thinking of the horror of their father buried alive in an icy grave. Their father was nothing if not fully alive, vital, irascible, unpredictable in this as in everything that had come before.

Posy sniffled, feeling she ought to cry. ‘Who was it that called?’ she wondered.

‘Someone – Alpine rescue people, I suppose. Spoke English.’

‘How did they know about us?’ Posy insisted. Practical Posy, Adrian had always called her. A sob caught in her sternum.

‘I don’t know,’ Pamela said. ‘Someone asked if I were Madame Venn.’ She was not, but had been.

‘Well!’ she went on in a moment, against the silence of her stunned children. ‘Do you feel like eating? We might as well eat. We can talk. You’ll have to go over immediately, you know. Are you all right?’

Posy felt tears come even with the rise of an inner reservation. Was she all right? She had not got over her anger at her father. She glanced at cool Rupert, who also looked rather blinky and hot eyed. All three had mixed feelings about Adrian Venn, but none extended to wishing him dead, especially in a horrible way. It was as hard to believe as any accident, or harder, their slightly grotesque elderly parent lost in an avalanche, the stuff of anecdote.

They had heard he was going skiing with his young wife and their baby. It had provoked their bitter mirth. Now they sat in somber amazement. All were thinking of Father’s beautiful château, which housed his press and publishing business, and the vineyard –
vignoble
– the whole side of their lives that took place in France. They talked of how they had loved the summers in Saint Grond the whole time they were growing up, and thought, but didn’t mention, how they always ignored Father’s unseemly capers with the college girls who came to pick the grapes – one of them, one year, Kerry Canby, from Eugene, Oregon. ‘In those days when we thought of France, it meant summer and life,’ cried Posy.

‘And now, it appears, it is to mean winter and death,’ Rupert said. They thought about this harsh formulation. Soon Posy went off to her flat to pack her suitcase. Rupert sat with his mother a few moments longer before going upstairs to do the same.

5

There was very good food at the Croix St Bernard. Cooking lessons were given on snowed-in days and in summer by the ambitious chef Monsieur André Jaffe, and meals were elaborately served by local young people training as high-class waiters, in tailcoats and jackets handed down from one generation of
stagiaire
s to the next with the minimum of alteration, which gave them a look of being ill at ease in their clothes.

Despite the unusual day, vibrant with crisis and the distant booms of TNT, these waiters were now beginning the preparations for dinner, polishing glasses and placing the cheeses, still in their wrappings, on the cart, and the guests began to move into the dining room. By now, all had heard the rumor that one of their number had been caught in the stirring avalanches of the afternoon, had listened with interest to the versions that swept through the lobby during cocktails. In the bar, others, fascinated, watched on the overhead TV set near the bar the televised rescue efforts in Méribel, the images strangely brighter than the actuality of the dark sky outside.

‘Since skiing is not ever without drama, this catastrophe seems to me only a little more sobering than the concussions, fractures, and plastered sprains that people regularly turn up with,’ Robin Crumley was remarking to the
princesse
as they passed to their table. Of people staying
there for any length of time, some would eventually appear in the dining room in plaster casts and on crutches, to the surreptitious pitying and slightly triumphant glances of those still intact. ‘I notice that nothing impedes them from the delicious food,’ he added.

In the dining room, a process of elimination confirmed what people had heard, that it was Mr and Mrs Venn, he a British publisher, who had been overtaken on a slope normally considered quite safe, the snow possibly dislodged by airplane noises. They had not at all been
hors piste
, they were returning for the day and been struck by an unexpected small slide that had carried them into the well-marked depression known as Hilary’s Hole, named after an unfortunate Englishwoman who had been lost there and dramatically rescued some years before. Though as a single traveller she was placed at a table alone, Amy Hawkins gleaned all these details from Joe Daggart as they walked in, from the hovering waiters, from the walls, as it were – and felt natural, human concern.

Venn, a man in his seventies, was near death. The much younger wife, in a coma, was also still alive, and the two had been helicoptered to Moutiers. The young man at that table over there, with the baby, was one of their party, but evidently had not been skiing with them, luckily for him. The waiters hovered anxiously around him, set up the high chair, warmed a bottle for the baby. The boy sat in a trance, in shock, apparently. A sturdy-looking youth of fourteen or fifteen, pleasant face – maybe a relative, maybe the old man’s son by another marriage? He wore the somewhat scruffy sport coat and used-looking tie of a boy who went to a boarding school somewhere.

A profile emerged of the victim, for he was a relatively well-known figure, flamboyant for a publisher, and well off, perhaps rich, several times married. An Englishman who had founded, in the Luberon, the arty press Icarus, which had made its name at first, in the nineteen-fifties, by printing works not allowed in England, published by Maurice Girodias at the Olympia Press in Paris; later by introducing remarkable facsimiles of famous rare editions of Blake or Dalí or Breton or even Gutenberg.

The victim was located by means of a glove that had floated on top of the crushing snow mass. He was not carrying his wallet, but his Barclay card was in the zipped pocket of his parka, and the twenty-four-hour help number was able to assist with details of his identity and give his rescuers an address in England, and this was the reason relatives in England had heard about it first and were already on their way. Barclay had not offered a way of finding which hotel he was staying in here in Valméri. Luckily, the skis, only one of which was found, were marked with the name of Jean Noir, a ski shop he had rented his equipment from. The trouble was, many hotels in the area used the services of this agency, so it had taken some time for the shop to track down the renter ...

Yes, it was through the magic of the computer that relatives somewhere else heard first of the catastrophe that had befallen Venn.

It was known there were older children, other wives. What a tragedy for them all. How unwise for a man of that age to be out skiing!

There were other details, repeated from one party to
another around the room. ‘His face was covered with an ice carapace formed from his breath freezing; his breath had suffocated him.’

‘His hands were extended before him, as the sinners of Pompeii had tried to avert the fiery ash, or perhaps he had tried to claw against the filling trough of snow the force had tumbled him into.’

‘Beneath the icy mask his face had the congealed resignation of a mummy.’

Kip took Harry up to Kerry and Adrian’s room, where the crib was, and stuffed his little limbs into some sort of too-small pajamas with feet. He didn’t know if Harry was too young for a story. He started to tell him ‘The Three Bears,’ but Harry wanted to climb down off his knee and wouldn’t listen, and began to run around. Kip plunked him into the crib, where he cried for a little while, without conviction, and fell asleep sucking his thumb. Kip supposed turning on the television would wake him up, so he sat there in semidarkness awhile in silence. But he didn’t like sitting there with his thoughts of Adrian and Kerry, remembering the horrible cauls of tube and mask over them. With a sense of life boiling downstairs, or ebbing in the hospital, when he thought it was safe, he tiptoed out and down to the comfortable stone-walled lounge, one floor below the lobby.

Here in the center of the room stood a circular bar, from which waiters filled their trays, and around the perimeter, banquettes and low coffee tables invited the guests to loll or mingle. The walls were still festooned with pine branches from Christmas. It was here people
stood around after dinner with their coffees, moving on to brandies, and beyond to whiskey sodas, and a small combo of musicians or a pianist played cocktail tunes and café oldies.

Kip felt the friendly, pitying smiles. ‘Terrible thing,’ a man called out as he went by. ‘Reinhardt Kraus from Bremen,’ said another man, sunburned and bald, standing near him. ‘My wife, Berthilde. Terrible thing.’

Everyone wanted to know what had happened, even though they seemed to know already, and when Kip began to tell what he knew, others drew nearer. ‘Still in the hospital. They have to thaw them out very slowly. My sister is still unconscious but she might be all right. My brother-in-law is not doing too well…’

It was comforting but embarrassing to feel their interest. Maybe it was only curiosity, but it seemed like kindness that animated the smiles. It was if he himself had done some big heroic deal. Mr Kraus asked him if he’d like a beer, and he said yes. But when it came he didn’t drink it, he remained standing near the fireplace, its warmth like the emanations from the people in the room. Their languages rose around him unintelligibly. Though they spoke English to him, left to themselves they spoke German, or French, or Slavic languages he’d never heard before. It was a babel of sympathy and concern. Sometimes English leapt to his ears from among the murmurs and formed phrases – still in a coma, unconscionable neglect by the piste keepers and ski patrol. He had the sudden thought that the hospital couldn’t call him if anything happened – could they? Did they know where he was? Who he was?

Christian Jaffe was coming toward him, so Kip asked him these questions.

‘They know you are here. We are all in communication,’ Jaffe said. ‘Members of Mr Venn’s family are on the way.’

With an air of authority, Jaffe answered the questions of the guests who crowded around him. Kip had known that Adrian had other children beside Harry, that Adrian had been married before, but he didn’t know to whom. He felt sort of relieved to think others would be coming to back him up, and to look in their turn at the cold, moribund figures. He wouldn’t be alone.

But his head was spinning with new problems, that he’d have to sleep in Kerry’s room tonight or else bring Harry down to his, which would mean transporting all that baby gear. With this, it was as if he had pulled out the one thought that had held back the barrelful of other worrying thoughts, so that the other thoughts now came rushing out – about Harry’s clothes and how to pay the chambermaid if he could get her to help tomorrow, could he put it on the hotel bill, how many days would Kerry be in the hospital? Beneath all these thoughts was the main fear about Kerry, and, of course, Adrian, two immobile forms encircled by gurgling tubes and an eerie blue light in a strange Alpine hospital in a land where he could not speak to anybody.