L'Affaire (43 page)

She was also oppressed by the poem Robin was reading, a translation from Beaudelaire to do with seeing a female corpse by the side of the road being picked at by crows. No doubt it was a meditation on mortality, but still, like mortality, it was revolting:

‘Yes, such shall you be, O queen of heavenly grace,

Beyond the last sacrament,

When through your bones the flowers and sucking grass

Weave their rank cerement,’

intoned Robin to the attentive, well-dressed people standing around with glasses of champagne.

Well, ugh, thought Posy, but it was wonderful how Robin’s light voice had picked up authority and sonorance as he read. The French people nodded with solemn concentration, determined to discern the Frenchness of the old poem in its new guise of clumsy English words.

‘How delicious,’ said Madame de Ditraison as he finished, ‘and now, some dinner!’

Posy could only dart imploring glances at Robin during dinner, as she was seated between two Frenchmen who twinkled at her in turn in the friendliest way, but gave up after their first moments of gallantly speaking English to her. She tried to think of a French phrase or two to bring herself back in, but lines of French poetry were all that came to her.

‘Où sont les neiges d’antan?’
she said to Monsieur Brikel on her right, hoping he would take it as bringing up the subject of Villon. But he simply looked astonished and turned to the French lady on his other side.

‘Ah,
nos amis les Anglais,
’ said Monsieur Requart on the other side.

Perhaps Robin, too, felt, even if for the first time, this sense of estrangement with his
amis
the French, for as they walked home, he said, ‘Posy, we should think of the future.’ Posy agreed without reflection, and later, upon reflecting, found that everything she thought about the future was better than it had been.

Kip was permitted to visit a parent figure until eleven P.M. two nights a week, so tonight Amy had invited him to go to a movie and have dinner. Though they spoke often on the phone, she wanted to reassure him in person that she was not blaming him for the behavior of his sister, and she also just sort of wanted to see him, a familiar face, a companionable American, though young.

He still had the reserved air he had worn since Géraldine’s party, owing, Amy now understood, to Kerry’s lawsuit, which still embarrassed him. Amy planned to bring it up, to reassure him, saying she wasn’t worrying about it, her lawyers were confident, and so on. All this was true. Whatever Kerry’s case against the hospitals, it was weak against Amy. She also had to tell him she was leaving Paris for California, soon. She worried about this, because Kip depended on her, and seemed to be fond of her, hardly surprising with the poor boy so alone in the world.

‘What do you want?
Croque-madame?
That’s what you usually have. Something different?’

‘
Croque-madame,
’ Kip agreed.

‘We need to talk about what will happen to you. I’m going back to California soon. Do you want to come back with me, and go to your old school next semester? Do you want to stay here? You’d have to learn French and the whole bit if you stayed.’

‘Why are you going? I thought you were staying for a while, you’ve got an apartment and everything.’

‘Oh, I think it’s time for me to move on, and get on with my life.’ Amy smoothed her napkin
(serviette)
.

‘It’s Kerry’s lawsuit, isn’t it? That is so fucked.’

‘Not your fault! Anyhow, that’s not why I’m going. It’s because, I don’t know, I’m an American, so that’s where I ought to live. And I have my foundation, I want to get started with that…’ She couldn’t tell him the other reason – why burden a person of his age with an intimation of erotic and intellectual setbacks to come?

‘It isn’t Kerry so much as her lawyers,’ Kip said. ‘They’re making her do it.’

‘I know,’ said Amy, though she wondered why Kerry had gotten new lawyers when after all she had Mr Osworthy; and who were the new lawyers? Sigrid knew.

‘I don’t think they should have had a service for Adrian without Kerry,’ Kip said.

‘Did they? I don’t actually know. Just the cremation, probably. Wouldn’t they be waiting till your sister was well enough?’

‘Kerry wanted to talk at it, but they did it without her. I would have talked too. About how he was. Adrian was nice. He was nice to me. I feel really sad for him.’

‘Mmm, I’m sure he was nice.’

‘He was funny, he made you laugh. He made French dishes – cassoulet and some kind of French pot roast. Kerry can’t cook worth um – anything. I wish you wouldn’t go!’

‘I know. I have mixed feelings,’ Amy admitted.

‘What I wish is you would buy the fucking château, Amy. You’re supposed to have all this money, why wouldn’t you like a nice French château? That’s what rich people are supposed to buy.’

‘Right, just what I need, a French château.’ Amy laughed, shocked that he should know she was – well off, though of course she was.

‘Anyway, it’d be cool. I could come there at Christmas, you know, summers. You could have a horse.’

‘I don’t want a horse.’

‘What’s it like to be rich, anyhow?’ Kip wondered.

Amy thought about it. She didn’t know. She hadn’t really faced her mixed feelings of guilt and pleasure or the duties she saw were coming. She had been trying to behave as though everything was the same. Running away to Europe had been part of her escape. She quickly changed the subject – they caught up with Kip’s news as if Amy were family. How was Harry? How was Kerry’s recovery? She was sorry to learn that Kerry would never walk correctly.

‘You should go see her, Amy. No one goes but me. Rupert and Posy haven’t been out there at all, or anyone but Mr Osworthy. Mademoiselle Walther has gone back to Valméri – there’s some new nurse, Farad, and Harry misses Mademoiselle Walther. He’d be glad to see you too. Harry has feelings like everybody else.’

‘You don’t always need to lecture me, I’ll go,’ Amy said. ‘I know I should.’

In the night, she had one of those moments of dream clarity that rise to consciousness as you are waking up. The complete plan occurred to her as if she had thought of it herself, a solution so perfectly in accord with her inner wishes and social principles, a textbook example of mutual aid so obvious, that she wondered why it hadn’t occurred to her sooner, and to everyone. Well, it had occurred to Kip. It was he who had suggested she should buy the château. Well, depending on the price. This would accomplish a number of ends: she would let Rupert run his press, and Victoire do whatever she wanted to do there, and Posy would get her share of the money, and little Harry could scamper in the grounds and corridors, not that she knew if it would have corridors.

Further advantages swirled in her head: the publishing business, a huge tax write-off. With luck the publishing business could pay the overhead, though a profit was unlikely – she’d look at the books – so there would be no ongoing expense… Kerry – it would be stipulated – would withdraw her lawsuit against her, which didn’t have much chance of succeeding anyhow, in return for this haven for her child.

The château, at a couple of million euros, was miles cheaper than many, if not most, houses in Palo Alto, California, it was even grotesquely cheap – and who has not dreamed of a château? The idea was archetypically alluring. She would take a tower suite for herself, for when she visited – she hoped there would be towers,
perhaps a moat. Of course she would go down to see it, but her mind, she knew, was fixed in advance, there was almost no need to. Then, they could market some products, maybe a line of cosmetics made from grapes, or dishes with a crest. She would visit from time to time, an annual write-off trip to France, the prospect of which sweetened the idea of going back home, and almost lightened the anguish of her silly crush on Emile Abboud, and her general feeling of having been defeated by France, two subjects somehow connected.

38

The Clinique Marianne occupied a couple of hectares of the forest between Saint-Cloud and Versailles, in an imposing nineteenth-century house and stables, with a circular drive and very secure hedges to confine those of its inmates who needed confinement. Halfway between a madhouse and a luxurious spa, it had served the drying out, the breaking down, the tired, at a price, for a hundred and fifty years. Amy took a taxi from the end of the RER line, with some feeling of trepidation at finally meeting Kerry Venn under awkward circumstances. She reproached herself that if she had been normally, responsibly, civil and gone to see Kerry in the beginning, she might have headed off this lawsuit. Now it was too late to pretend to be paying a concerned call on her countrywoman as she should in decency have already done.

Evidently it was not madness that accounted for Kerry’s long stay here, for the woman at the desk in the foyer indicated that Kerry would be found in the garden with her baby, through that door, unconfined and no doubt pleased to receive visitors. Amy wandered out into an extensive garden, somewhat shabby at this season, with some new pansies just put in, and the gardener’s implements stacked on the steps.

At the bottom of the garden, across a stretch of the bare, impacted earth that Amy had learned was included
in the French idea of a garden, she saw a thin, tallish woman with a toddler – Harry, if she was not mistaken – pushing a wheeled toy. The woman, Kerry, was strangely lopsided, one shoulder higher than the other, and her legs twisted oddly. How horrible! On the train she had been sitting down, so Amy had not noticed this. Had she always been handicapped? But no, she’d been out skiing.

She approached, thinking maybe she should just pretend she hadn’t heard about the lawsuit yet. ‘Hello!’ Amy had learned that her own person was nonthreatening, benign, and was usually met with smiles, so she was surprised when Kerry looked unwelcoming and dour. ‘I’m Amy Hawkins. We met on the train? I’m very late in paying you a visit, I’m afraid. I hope Kip has given you my good wishes? He is such a nice boy, we’ve become friends…’

‘Yes, he’s mentioned you.’

‘Harry too,’ feeling thankful that Harry had seen her and was running over to her with a big smile and his little arms outstretched. She bent over to give him a kiss, genuinely thrilled that he seemed happy to see her, though she knew it was probably because all his experiences with her had been food-related. Amy’s affection for Harry didn’t erase the expression of hostility on Kerry’s face. Now Amy saw that Kerry was bandaged around the middle under her loose blouse, and one of her legs was stiffish, so that when she moved to pick Harry up, she listed to the side, and she seemed to be in pain.

‘Do you have someone to help with him while you’re getting better?’ She picked him up.

‘Yes, there’s a woman who comes in.’

‘How long do they say…?’

‘They say I’ll always walk like this. Unless I have some operations in the future.’

‘Do you have enough’ – Amy thought of things Kerry might need – ‘books, things to read? I can go the English bookshop. Tell me what you’d like.’

‘I know you’re here because of the lawsuit. I suppose you want me to drop it,’ Kerry said. Perhaps embarrassed at her confrontational tone, she turned away. Amy tried to think of the right thing to say. She couldn’t deny, of course, that she wanted Kerry to drop the lawsuit. But that was not altogether it. She was filled with sympathy and chagrin about her own bad behavior, and horror at the power of the snow that had battered this woman’s body, taken her husband, left her in this state.

‘Of course I’d prefer that,’ Amy agreed, ‘but I understand the legal situation. I really just came to see how you and Harry were – to pay a call.’

‘Do you know anything about my situation?’ Kerry asked, and without waiting for an answer began volubly to explain about what Adrian’s horrible children were doing to her, the sealing of the château, inventories. ‘In France, the spouse is just dirt, the children are everything, but all Harry gets, basically, is a lot of taxes and debt. This is a police state that decides what happens to a person’s money. I’m not allowed in my own house.’ Amy had not heard any of this. It was clear that Kerry included Amy in the list of people who were harming her.

‘Briggs, Rigby, Denby, Fox, say I have a huge case.’

Amy did not utter the retorts that occurred to her, but she could not keep from a reproving tone. ‘You must feel
lucky to be alive,’ she said. She was rather shocked by Kerry’s not feeling her good luck along with her disappointments.

‘Oh, sure. I feel that St Joan was looking after me. How can I not feel that? She must have been the one that called the rescue team. A woman called them to dig us out. Someone who saw where we were buried. Of course I feel the miracle of that.’

Amy now noticed that Kerry was wearing a religious medal, presumably St Joan – had Kerry become a crazy votary of Joan of Arc? She tried again for a mollifying tone.

‘I wanted to discuss something with you. My idea is to buy the château, that is, your château, but then make it available so you and Harry could live there, and the others.’ She went on to explain her plans for the château, the press, the vineyard.

‘Oh please! Get real! I’d have to be crazy to live with Adrian’s children. Look what they’re doing to me! I truly don’t give a shit what happens to them, or the press, or the vineyard, I’d like to live in my own house, yes. We’ll see, when the suit goes to court.’ Amy had been about to apologize for her role in sending Venn to London, but thought of what Sigrid would advise and didn’t. She couldn’t resist saying, with asperity, ‘I’m afraid you don’t have much of a case, but time will tell,’ and taking her leave as quickly as she could, shocked at how wrong her idea of Kerry had been. How odd that Kip should love this disagreeable woman! As she calmed down, though, she tried to imagine how she would feel in Kerry’s shoes.

*

The same night, Géraldine took Amy, Wendi, and Tammy to the
Comédie Française
. Alas, the play was in French, but Amy bore up, dreaming of one day being like the two other American women, who apparently were able to follow the words. As it was, her inability to understand forced her back into her own thoughts, which had been increasingly restless and disturbed anyway. Behind the rhythmic declamations of
Phèdre,
a chorus of self-reproaches took the stage of her consciousness: meddling with Mr Venn’s medical fate; not applying herself at French; being rude to Emile Abboud; being slow to visit Kerry Venn; possibly starting an avalanche… Her self-reproach about her rudeness to Emile was the sharpest among these faults.