L'Affaire (41 page)

Today she was extremely supportive when it came to Pam’s worry about Posy. Madame, at the hotel, had that morning asked Pam where Posy was. Mademoiselle had left a parcel at the desk two days ago, saying she would come back for it – had she forgotten and returned to Angleterre? This simple query had chilled Pam. Posy was an independent girl and it was not unusual for her to keep to herself, or, especially right now with the inheritance unpleasantness, to avoid her mother and Rupert. But not to have been here for two days? Even if she had met the dashing Frenchman of her dreams, she would have stopped in her room to change, or come back to sleep.

‘Non, non,’
Madame had protested, she had not been there, had checked out two days before. Pam now found herself telling Géraldine about this, emphasizing how depressed and difficult Posy had been finding this time, how flighty Posy could be, how unfamiliar with France, and Géraldine had soothed her with observations about
young women in general, even when they became mothers, like Victoire, who even as they spoke was sobbing and flinging herself about at her parents’ apartment like a schoolgirl, and it seemed to them leaving most of the child care to Géraldine and Eric. The two women commiserated.

‘There is no reason she can’t be home in her own apartment,’ Géraldine complained. ‘Emile is apparently not there. At first I assumed she needed moral support, but now I think it is our babysitting that keeps her with us. It is clearly not my advice and counsel! That she ignores with impunity.’

The parcel Posy had left at the desk was the oblong cardboard box containing Adrian’s ashes. This horrible discovery meant that Posy had not taken them to Kerry Venn as assigned. Pam discussed with Rupert what to do, but neither of them had any ideas. Rupert took charge of the box, and pledged to take it to Kerry. Pam was concerned about Posy, to the extent of ringing Mr Osworthy, who had not seen her since the meeting in Persand’s office on Monday. Nor did he have any theories.

‘Posy’s in a very bad mood,’ Rupert reassured his mother. ‘Father, and then things generally. I don’t know what’s getting her down, exactly. The legacy, for sure. She’s just avoiding us.’ There was really nothing to say against this analysis. They left a message for Posy at the hotel desk and would wait to see.

Posy continued missing. Pamela Venn was more and more worried as the days passed, and even weighed calling the widow, at her clinic, to learn if Posy had
telephoned or been there. But she couldn’t bring herself to. She didn’t really want to talk to the new Mrs Venn, and had no concern about Posy being in real trouble, that was silly. All the same, the more she reviewed the past weeks of death and disappointment, and thought of the huge financial uncertainties ahead for both of her children, the more uneasy she became that Posy might in some way have done something impulsive – her imagination shirked thinking what. To imagine her throwing herself into the Seine was ridiculous, but there were also serial killers, traffickers in women, and incommunicado French jails, the latter only a bit less primitive in her English mind than a jail in Turkey or Argentina. There was also sudden illness – she could be lying in a French hospital, their hospitals only slightly less dangerous than their jails. Pamela didn’t like to share all her real fears with Rupert, lest she be seeming to accuse him of somehow being responsible for Posy’s state of mind. How difficult it was to sort out the dynamics of a family. How simple everything would have been if it hadn’t been for the wretched Adrian.

Rupert, for his part, was trying to find a way to avoid selling the château. The château and press had come to seem to him his whole future, his whole life. With every passing day, in Rupert’s mind, the vines became more fruitful, the one turret of Father’s castle more majestic, its shallow, dried-up moat a silvery pond stocked with little fish and lilies, and the publishing business a national treasure of selfless service to the arts, the whole a monument to Father’s memory and a haven for his loved ones. Rupert was fairly sure Posy was lying low to avoid
discussions because she was ashamed of wanting to blight this perfect, preordained plan.

He bore in mind his mother’s offer to sell her house. Was the offer still good if the house truly hadn’t been registered as hers, or was that simply a detail to be straightened out? They discussed it, tentatively. The house might not have been Pam’s during all this time, but if it was, she was willing to sell, she said, between strolls with Rupert around the Louvre or down the Avenue Montaigne. She knew that he would never have gone shopping with her if these issues had not meant a great deal to him, but she could not see that selling her house would help. It might cover the tax liabilities of one, maybe even both, of the children, but where would Victoire and Harry get money to pay theirs? Pamela realized that she, Posy, and Rupert would have to go back to England; Rupert had to work, and Pamela had her normal life to return to. One couldn’t stay indefinitely in a French hotel, as desirable as that seemed. Pam was torn about her duty to her children and still worried about Posy – part of her said that Posy must be all right, but part was frantic.

‘You’ll have to take the ashes to Kerry,’ she said to Rupert. ‘I’m not going to do it.’

‘Mr Osworthy should do it, that would be more fitting,’ said Rupert. ‘He’s staying here, we can leave – the box – here for him.’ They uneasily decided on this course.

‘Have you by chance heard from your sister?’ Géraldine asked Victoire after talking to Pamela. Victoire had not. For all she knew, Posy was installed somewhere with Emile, but she didn’t share this concern with her mother. Géraldine also mentioned Posy to Emile, one afternoon as he stopped by to see the children.

‘They don’t know where she is. She has vanished from her hotel, leaving her father’s ashes with the concierge!’

Emile had no reply, but felt a twinge of concern. He was always very fond of people he had slept with. He remembered Posy’s agitation and sadness in Valméri, and hoped she hadn’t done anything desperate. He wondered if he should confess his role to Géraldine, who always had an accurate reading of human, especially female, nature, and would probably reassure him. But he delayed doing this, would wait a few days longer.

Despite the shadow of Kerry’s lawsuit, Amy’s week returned her to the normal rhythm of her Paris life. Beyond the photograph in the paper, there had been no repercussions of events in the Alps, though she could not shake the feeling that word of her money was somehow coloring the way people saw her, in Paris as in the Alps, at the sorts of occasions Géraldine was taking, or, increasingly often, sending her to, or that she was being invited to by others as her acquaintance grew – posh charity cocktails, art openings, theater. She was always going somewhere; she could never just see a movie or have a hamburger.

She also couldn’t escape the feeling that despite her meek cooperativeness, Géraldine didn’t approve of her. Géraldine may have liked her all right, but when it came to her clothes and hair, and to her general presentation of herself to the world, she knew she was globally unsatisfactory. Géraldine had made her have various ‘
soins de visage,’
and leg waxes
(jambe entière),
though these things were hard to work into her strenuous schedule of lessons and social occasions. On her own she had tried the method she had observed Victoire using, perfume between the fingers and, her own idea, why not toes?

Amy was certainly not the first American to feel inadequate to some concept of womanhood known to the French – Tammy and Wendi had reported still having the same abashed feelings, and between them they had lived in Paris nearly forty years. Yet it seemed to Amy that when you studied them objectively, most French people looked no better than Americans, just thinner. The clothes of people on their way to work or waiting on you in shops usually were the same slightly misjudged skirts and pants and jackets, the same last year’s overcoats, as Americans would wear.

In fact, Amy had begun to find that Americans also looked odd to her now, when spied on the street or overheard talking, their clothes too casual and too brightly colored. She found herself dressing with care even to go to the Monoprix, as if expecting, even hoping, to run into someone she knew. In all, she felt daunted and confused by the general issue of culture and increasingly wished to go home, though she despised herself for it. She found herself calling her parents quite often – she could tell it amazed them. But talking to her parents also had the effect of stiffening her resolve to stay, as they conjured up visions of Ukiah, SUVs, and freeways, things she didn’t miss at all. Though she loved her parents, she had resolved since about the age of ten not to live like them. She could remember resolving to have an unusual life, but
when she got older, she realized she didn’t have a definition of life, if only because she didn’t know enough. Her definition was forming now, now that all was possible, and that was why she must stay.

After a week of blissful separation from familiar things, Posy had relented and called home; once back in England, Pamela Venn found a message from her on the answering machine that all was well, she was travelling, and she would be keeping in touch with Monsieur de Persand about the legal situation. She hoped her mother had found a parcel at the hotel, and she apologized for not dealing with it herself. Pamela was reassured, but Rupert had less to feel happy about. Alas, hours spent poring over the vineyard and press accounts and talking to bankers in both London and Paris had produced no feasible plan for saving the château – it didn’t look like a good investment to anyone. There seemed no way to avoid having to sell.

37

Amy was looking out from her apartment at the Seine River, a scene in monochrome gray and brown of mud-colored water and bare trees, a scene in
grisaille,
a word she had learned looking at charcoal-colored pictures in the Louvre that seemed to render accurately the actual palette of nature in wintry Europe. Perhaps the sun never shone here in March, but she told herself it didn’t matter, a small price for the pleasure of acquiring a word like
grisaille,
not that she would be likely to need it.

She could look down on the very spot where she had bumped into Emile. In recent days Amy had not stopped thinking about Emile. She tried to think about him calmly, but was conscious that she couldn’t. She went over and over their coffee at the Flore, regretting her rudeness and remembering everything he had said, the very words and also his tone and expression. This was a severe attack of
esprit de l’escalier,
remembering every wrong word she had uttered.

Perhaps his sudden friendliness hadn’t been what she hoped for, an attraction to her person – instead, he had congratulated her on her character. She had never been congratulated for her character before, that she knew of. People usually liked each other for more visual, superficial reasons – reasons that could describe her liking for Emile. She could no longer conceal from herself that he was the
only person she had met in France she really wanted to talk to, let alone go to bed with. Yes. Nor could she refuse to recognize, alas, that of all the men she had met in France, he, the man she was most drawn to, was exactly the kind of bad-news man her aunts, mother, and an immense literature of those rich-girl tragedies warned her against – married, faithless, foreign. Maybe she was having the ultimate French experience after all.

Everyone found him attractive, even French cabinet ministers, why should she be any different? And she had refused his friendship, his apology, his overture, even though it was probably nothing romantic, though he had mentioned beauty… She wondered if he believed that beauty was an idea thought out in detail, for this was also a definition of character. Waves of self-reproach made her almost dizzy. She had mishandled every relationship – her ski instructor, the baron, and now the one she really would like to have. The way a desire, once hardened into consciousness, becomes acute, so did her hindsight condemnation of her actions. She had ruined her own life by rudeness to the one man in France she wanted, and this failure symbolized the entire failure of her enterprise here. Defeat, in fact. She would never want the things she could have, and couldn’t have what she wanted, even if she knew what it was. How American, Emile would say.

As the days passed, she had been trying to cure herself of her infatuation for Emile – for such she had come to call it – by thinking about his relentless, rather ignorant criticism of Americans, based on no knowledge, and about his suspicious knowledge of enlightened social
thinkers like Kropotkin. Was he a communist? Not a category of person Amy had ever personally met, as they didn’t exist in northern California, though of course there were Marxists at the numerous local universities, just as there were deconstructionists and new historicists – it depended on when you went to graduate school. But if he were a communist, he probably wouldn’t be in this conservative French government.

Well, she didn’t need to try to understand French politics, an impossibility, just as it was impossible to believe in French religious superstitions. She had heard that people were being taken to see the spot in Valméri where Joan of Arc had stood.

She had called Paul-Louis for the latest Joan news, and he’d told her that more than one hundred eighty people had now made the chilly trip by Sno-Cat, twenty-five euros each, an optional excursion they were offering at the Ecole de Ski Française. The saint herself had not been seen again.

She also called Joe Daggart. He had no news of Joan of Arc, but reported in a friendly way that a German town was petitioning to be rid of its American air base, citing the Alpine avalanches as evidence of their claims that the noise of American C-5 Galaxies had ruined their lives.

‘Valméri is not on the normal flight path for those planes,’ Joe said. ‘But we don’t know everything yet.’

Despite her belief that she was in no legal jeopardy, Amy was also unsettled by the daily phone calls from Sigrid, and now from the firm of San Francisco lawyers to whom her legal problems had been referred, affirming that Kerry’s lawsuit had indeed been filed; they were
talking to their overseas colleagues about who should represent her in France, if she insisted on staying there, instead of prudently skipping.