Drinks were served in the lobby, from a long table covered with a white cloth or by waiters from the dining room walking among the guests with little trays. A hot fire in the large fireplace drove people from its immediate vicinity to cluster nearer the door, where the owner, Chef Jaffe, and Madame Jaffe in her Tyrolean-style suit of loden-green, greeted and chatted, helping the guests to get to know each other, and trying to deal with anxious questions regarding avalanches.
This was the first general social occasion of the new week, so most people didn’t know each other, and stood with expectant, cooperative smiles. Amy looked around. One or two little old ladies glowed with diamonds, making her think of cat-burglar movies. Over there, a very heavy Russian wife was astoundingly bemedalled, decorations up and down her bosom. Amy had her usual sense of cocktail party hopefulness, knowing intellectually that the room would be as full of fools and bores as any party, but always with the belief that among these particular people some would be worldly, kindly, and friendly, and that kindred spirits would emerge. Why wouldn’t they? She struggled to suppress a surge of love for them – not these particular people, but for the powers of human organization, our gregarious natures, the kindliness of our impulses to share food and talk to each other, the sweetness of agreeing to dress up for others. Sometimes she saw these activities as products of the struggle for power, as Darwin might have, or at least Herbert Spencer, but for tonight she was touched by the sight of humans wishing to be liked by others and to make them lovely things to eat.
She saw this cocktail party and parties in general as aspects of mutual aid, a subject of her passionate interest since high school, when she had joined the Mutual Aid Club, an extracurricular activity frankly designed to embellish the chances of getting into good colleges, in this case by taking pets, small children, and CD players to old persons’ homes to cheer the elderly residents. The faculty advisor was a Miss Steinway, and Miss Steinway had in her own youth come under the influence of the works of an old Russian anarchist, P. Kropotkin, whose idea was that contrary to the teaching of Darwin, the human species had progressed not through competition but through mutual aid; that this was true of other species, too, ants and baboons and all sorts of creatures; that whereas individuals might compete for food, successful species had insured survival by developing highly elaborate forms of cooperation, and that in imagining every being locked in a struggle for survival of the fittest, Darwin had it wrong or had been misinterpreted.
Amy had already decided that at the end of this European period of narcissistic self-improvement, she would establish and fund a foundation for propagating the ideas of Prince Kropotkin. But that was eventually. For now, she accepted a soft-boiled egg – no, it was an eggshell filled with eggy custard, with caviar on top – and smiled around her.
‘Like Queen Victoria,’ a man said to her, with a kind of Kentucky accent, looking with her at the bemedalled Russian. She recognized him as the American who been in the van from Geneva with her. She had also seen him in the ski room, but he did not appear to ski. Anyhow, he would solve the other cocktail-party problem, whom to talk to, for one must not be standing by oneself, a rule he evidently also believed in, edging nearer. This man would do, attractive and open-looking. ‘Joe Daggart,’ he said.
She smiled at him. ‘I took an oath, coming over, not to talk to other Americans. Should I break it?’
‘What have you got against Americans?’ he asked.
‘Well, nothing, naturally. It’s just that I know them already,’ Amy said, noticing his glance at her shoes. ‘Since I am one, I want to meet other people. But I’ll count you as an other.’
He worked in Geneva, but often came here to stay, for the skiing and food. Companionably, they waded into the assortment of people, introduced themselves, smiled, agreed that the day had been unusual. It was disconcerting to notice that people switched into English when either she or Joe Daggart spoke, when they had been talking some other language to each other, but of course it was necessary, if she was to talk to them. Joe, she noted, could speak French. Her disadvantage strengthened her resolve to get to work on languages.
In general, everyone was nice, though there were one or two moments that surprised, even daunted. ‘Isn’t it awful, so much smoking?’ she had said at one point in a low voice to Joe. ‘Why aren’t they all dead?’
‘It’s typical French bravado. Since Americans think it’s bad for you, the French have to show us what sissies we are.’ He spoke loudly enough that all could hear, and looked around him combatively.
A nearby woman took him up. ‘French cigarettes don’t cause cancer, you know. Cancer is caused by the additives put there by the American tobacco companies. This is well known, only of course the tobacco companies don’t allow this fact to be published in the United States.’
‘Really?’ Amy wondered, thinking that it could even be true.
The speaker was a glittering woman with dark auburn hair, wearing high heels with her narrow evening pants, and she introduced herself as Marie-France Chatigny-Dové. This conversation led directly to another faux pas on Amy’s part.
‘I think you are quite right, you two, to come in here as if nothing had happened. Of course it isn’t your fault,’ said Madame Chatigny-Dové presently.
Amy didn’t understand what she was talking about, and her blankness must have shown. ‘The perfidy of American tobacco companies?’
‘American planes yet again dropping things willy-nilly, not caring who might die on the ground,’ explained another woman, in a mid-European accent. ‘Quite an irony that one of the people buried in the snow actually was an American. I’m sure your pilots didn’t think of that beforehand.’
‘The avalanche,’ said someone else by way of explanation, seeing Amy’s baffled expression. Amy, somehow thinking they were joking, laughed good-naturedly. Her laughter produced an array of astonished expressions on every nearby face. Americans laughing at how they have killed innocent skiers! Yet again, they might have added, for no one had forgotten an Italian incident of some years before. The red-haired woman turned and hurried over to Baron Otto, as if appalled to be in the presence of someone as callous as Amy.
‘Mon Dieu,’ other people said. Amy quickly understood her gaffe; these people seriously believed U.S. airplanes had set off an avalanche.
‘It can’t be true,’ she protested. ‘No one who knows anything about physics could believe… I don’t believe it.’ It occurred to her that loud noises were routinely used to set off avalanches.
‘There have never been avalanches this early in the season. How else can you explain it?’
‘I saw them myself, saw the cornice tremble just after they came over.’
‘It can’t be true,’ Amy insisted, but people had moved on, turned away, withdrawn. She found that her heart was pounding irrationally. Why had she so stupidly laughed?
‘If we live over here long enough, finally we come to appreciate other Americans,’ said Joe Daggart at her elbow. ‘Our jokes, shared status of pariah.’
She turned to him gratefully, but what might have been a promising and instructive conversation was soon interrupted or augmented by the intrusion of another man, who now languidly strolled up to them. She had seen him in the lobby and guessed correctly from his height, purplish cheeks, and shock of pinkish-white hair that he was British.
‘Robin Crumley,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t help but overhear you speaking American. You know, divided from us by a common language.’
She tried to guess his age – late forties or even fifty. He wore a sort of sagging pinstripe suit, and had a high, slightly quavery voice. He had said he was a poet, or perhaps he had said ‘the poet,’ but it was hard to imagine him saying his poems in that voice. Crumley dismissed the unpleasant little moment that had just passed. ‘Pay no attention to them, my dear. For all his vaunted rationality, the Frenchman is a compendium of received opinions, unlikely to think for himself.’ Amy smiled gratefully at this assurance. ‘I know the Venn
s,’ he added. ‘Him, slightly, a terrible business. He is an Englishman.’
‘Oh?’ said Amy. She had not heard of the Venns.
‘Quite surprised to see them here. I’m travelling with the Mawleskys. Prince de Mawlesky. Over there. Did you meet them?’ He nodded discreetly toward a small couple standing at the drinks table, each of the pair with shining dyed black hair. Amy hadn’t met them, but they had been pointed out – people had not failed to mention the hotel’s small store of princes and barons. They had for Amy a sort of stagy unreality, making her think of Masterpiece Theatre. But of course these people weren’t actors, they actually existed. Somehow there was a warming satisfaction to being in the same place as titled people, the better to verify the existence of European history, the reality of alternative social structures, the arbitrariness of being an American at all, when but for the discontent of some ancestor you might have been speaking French this minute, or Romanian or Dutch.
She herself might have been speaking Dutch; some of her ancestors were Dutch, back in the time of Peter Stuyvesant, though who knew what had been mixed in since. Her family had no tradition of remembering Europe at all, but in her Palo Alto set, European ancestors were somewhat unfashionable, and the idea of finding your European roots had been attacked as incorrect Euro-centricity, and worship of a passé civilization of wicked colonialists; but she was interested in finding out about them. She hoped to combat the national failing of being too uninterested in history, though part of her agreed – why dwell on history when it couldn’t change anything?
It would be interesting to meet a prince, she decided, but what would you say to him?
‘Where did you ski today?’ she asked Mr Crumley.
‘Ski? Moi? I don’t ski, dear, but I have a taste for the snow, a feeling for the magic mountain, for the health-giving properties of mountain air.’
She wondered if he were ill. The idea cast him in a romantic light, a poet in the Alps for his health. He looked quite sound, if elderly. She wondered if he drank, which she had observed all English people to do quite a bit, at least the ones who came to Palo Alto. Robin Crumley swooshed two champagnes off a passing waiter’s tray and handed one to her.
‘And you, a Yank obviously, what brings you here?’
‘Well – the skiing.’
‘How tiresome, it means you’ll be away all day and you won’t have lunch with me. However, some night you must join the Mawleskys and me for dinner. So hard about the Venns. Still, they are alive, if barely, and that’s something. Of course, heaven knows for how long. Buried alive, always a fate for which I have had a particular dread. Skiing is for fools, really.’
3
Kip Canby, another of the guests, also American, an attractive, open-faced boy of fourteen, had not been paying attention to the snow or sky. He felt himself in a spot, having to deal with his nephew Harry, a baby aged eighteen months, while Harry’s mother and father were skiing. Kip had no skills as a baby-sitter. He was thinking a nice hotel like the Croix St Bernard should have some toys, a playpen, whatever would be needed for a kid, but there was nothing. Of course, he hadn’t asked.
The others had not come in yet. He’d volunteered to baby-sit because he was conscious of his brother-in-law Adrian’s generosity bringing him along on this trip. Now, four o’clock, Adrian and Kerry weren’t back, and little Harry was crying and bored. Kip bobbled him around on his knee and said things like ‘Now, now, buddy,’ and ‘This is the way the farmer rides’ to no avail. Eventually he put on his Walkman and ignored Harry’s whines, but as the afternoon dragged along, he was obliged to address the matter of a bottle for Harry and some cereal for Harry, and eventually, changing Harry. Ick.
At four forty-five, Adrian and Kerry still hadn’t come back. Kerry was his sister, Adrian her elderly husband, surprisingly spry for someone his age – he was still on the slopes, and evidently had fathered Harry. Kip found Adrian self-involved and demanding, like many old persons, but Adrian was nice to him, and Kip was sensible of that.
Kip’s own room, damp from the shower steam, now smelled like dirty Pampers and talcum powder. Adrian and Kerry had a suite for themselves and the baby, but Kip had felt uncomfortable there, their stuff all around, and had thought Harry could crawl around in his room while he read or something. He called their room yet again. He had no special apprehensions, was puzzled more than worried. As the light fell outside the window, and the snowdrifts turned a gray-blue, his room darkened.
Later he put on his Walkman again and took Harry out into the corridors. Harry had only recently learned to walk, and occasionally doddered into the walls or sat down with a plop, so that the back of his coverall was sopping from where the carpets were wet with the snow off people’s shoes and boots. Kip found it hard to walk as slowly as Harry. People smiled at this nice boy Kip, for being in charge of a little tot.
They dawdled up and down the green-carpeted corridors of the lobby floor. Harry raced, fell, giggled with mad baby merriment. Outside the cardroom, Kip saw that Christian Jaffe, the chef’s son, who managed the front desk, was following them, tentatively, wearing a grave expression, the expression of an adult who was facing the need to discipline you. He saw that Christian Jaffe was probably only a little older than he, maybe nineteen. Behind Christian was one of the daughters, the plain one, hands clasped at her waist. Kip knew something was wrong, and that it involved him and Harry. He picked up Harry and waited.
‘Monsieur Canby, there has been some bad news,’ Christian said. ‘I suggest we go upstairs. Come up to the office.’
Kip obeyed, not asking what the bad news was, not wanting to hear it yet. He had a crawl of apprehension in his stomach. It must have to do with Kerry and Adrian. The daughter reached out her arms to take Harry, and without words they moved up the stairs, past the pool table and coffee lounge, into the small room behind the front desk. The daughter saw Kip installed in a chair, then left, carrying Harry.
‘This is very bad news,’ Christian said. He sat down and faced Kip. ‘Mr and Mrs Venn have been taken in an avalanche. We were just telephoned.’
‘Taken?’
‘Swept away. Excuse me, my English.’
Kip heard this without grasping it. Taken or swept? ‘But I just saw them. They were going to have lunch, they were just there on La Grange,’ a simple run down to a cluster of houses at the bottom of the western slopes. Well, a couple of hours ago.
We never know where an avalanche or other act of God might capriciously, or purposefully, strike us, said Christian Jaffe’s look.
‘Are they dead? Is that what you’re saying?’
‘No, no!’ cried Jaffe, happy to be able to adjust the bad news upward. ‘They are still alive, thanks, God, but their condition is not so good. A helicopter is coming to take them to the hospital in Moutiers. Has done so.’
Now Kip felt his face getting red with relief, Kerry not dead. He realized that he’d been expecting bad news all afternoon, dread resonating with the distant echo of dynamite along the snowy ridges. But broken legs had been more in his mind. ‘Where?’ he asked, as if it mattered.
‘They didn’t explain. They found them a few hours ago, but we weren’t notified because the rescuers had no idea what hotel they were staying in. They – we always advise avalanche detection devices when people are skiing hors piste, but – but they weren’t skiing hors piste, they were quite low down, I only heard that they weren’t hors piste.’ A quaver of concern suggested anxiety about the liability issues.
‘But will they be okay?’
‘They – I gather the condition of Monsieur Venn is – grave. They were buried in snow for an unknown length of time, many minutes, an hour.’
Kip’s eyes stung. This was bad. He didn’t know how to feel or react. He felt the weirdness of Adrian and Kerry buried like corpses in the snow. Was it really them? Should he go and look at them? His stomach turned – he bet that they wanted him to identify Adrian and Kerry. He sat, jammed with thoughts and amazement. At least K
erry wasn’t dead.
‘I guess I should go to the hospital,’ he said finally. ‘If that’s where they are.’
‘Yes, I thought you would want that. We’ll try to make it down to Moutiers. My sister will look after the child.’ Christian, evidently having ready a recitation of what they were prepared to do to help, some lesson learned in hotel school about service, concern, humanity.
In the car, Kip asked Christian Jaffe over and over to tell him the story, exploring the phrases for additional information, but Jaffe knew no more than had been told. Dug out of the snow, Adrian more dead, Kerry more alive, some delay in notifying the hotel because at first there had been no way of telling where they were staying.
‘But they found a ski to go on, with the rental number, only one ski, but they could trace it.’
The hospital was small, a nineteenth-century building that might have been a school, or one of the sanitoria where the tuberculous came in the old days. A couple of people sat in the hallway on folding chairs. On the wall a large three-dimensional map of the region. At the far end of the corridor, through an open door, Kip could see lights and hear electronic beeps, intensive care noises familiar from television and from when their mother had died.
With Christian Jaffe, he approached and paused in the doorway. A figure nearest them, mounded in wraps, could be Kerry. Another machine sighed in the corner under another mound of dark blankets. They entered. There were no doctors, just a couple of nurses pottering with the tubes and watching the monitors. It seemed the consultations were over, the measures implemented, the accident victims were now absorbed into the routine of the nighttime shift. No one stopped them coming closer.
L'Affaire Page 2