When he opened his eyes, he had felt a moment of relief that the dream was not real, then a rush of sick dread when he remembered that the reality was worse. It was morning. Harry was not in his crib. Kip bolted from the sofa, but almost immediately heard noise in the bathroom, and rushed in there. The chambermaid, an Australian named Tamara, was holding Harry’s bottom over the washbasin cleaning him, his fat little legs churning.
‘Didn’t you even hear him? He was shrieking up a storm,’ she said. ‘So I came in.’
‘God, no, I didn’t hear him.’
‘Yeah, well, plain you’re not his mum. Everyone else could.’
Tamara rather crossly helped him get Harry ready – diaper, little terry-cloth suit, little shoes you had to shove on his feet – and they went in to breakfast. He could see that it was going to be easier to deal with Harry at mealtimes than other times. Stuck in his high chair, with stuff to smoosh around on his plate, he was a cheery, cute baby, drawing smiles. No one spoke to Kip this morning about Kerry’s state, but people looked at them as they had last night, with sympathy and admiration.
There ought to be a phone number he could call this morning, or some word from Christian Jaffe. The normalcy of things made Kip uneasy, dining room full of people in ski clothes ordering their coffee and piling their plates from the breakfast buffet. He filled his plate with ham and some yogurt, stuff both he and Harry could eat, and got two glasses of orange juice. He decided they would finish breakfast before trying to find out anything about Kerry. If she were worse, they would have told him, or wakened him in the night. But he couldn’t shake a feeling of sick dread.
When they had spent as much time as possible over breakfast, Kip lifted Harry out of his high chair and they walked into the lobby. Kip was hoping to see his new friend Amy, perhaps with the baby-sitter she had suggested. Even from the dining room they could hear stout voices asking questions in English in the foyer in demanding tones. New bags were piled by the front desk. A tall, handsome couple stood by the sofa, evidently waiting for their room to be ready, and Christian Jaffe was coming toward Kip waving his hand toward these new people.
‘Mr Canby, here are Monsieur and Mademoiselle Venn. This is Mr Canby, Mrs Venn’s brother.’
Hearing their names, these Venns looked at Kip and especially at Harry. They mustered polite smiles, and the young man explained that they were Adrian Venn’s children. The term seemed to exclude Harry.
‘So nice to meet you,’ they said vaguely, with reflex courtesy. ‘Is that the baby?’ asked the man. Kip felt a momentary hope that these people were here to help with Harry.
‘Our little brother!’ said the woman in a slightly acid tone. She was a bit scary, Kip thought, big, solidly beautiful, with scornful eyes. When Kip led Harry over to them, their unconscious first response was to shrink away, peering with distaste at the cute little child, symbol of Father’s betrayal.
‘I’m sorry, you are who, actually?’ said the man to Kip.
‘Kerry’s brother.’ Now Kip could see they were in a state of high agitation, not meaning to be rude. Posy’s objections to some transaction with the desk rose and swirled around Christian Jaffe – why couldn’t they get into their rooms? They had driven all night. They were still in shock from the sight of their father, down there in the terrible little hospital, no more than a corpse, how had it happened? Christian Jaffe murmured reassurances, rooms had been prepared or would be, all would be well.
‘Do you know how my sister is this morning?’ Kip ventured to ask them, but the highly intimidating Posy didn’t know, hadn’t noticed her, hadn’t been told.
Could she be dead? But they would know that, would have been told.
Posy looked theatrically around, saying with a wail, ‘This is all so unbelievable. Unbelievable. Unbelievable.’
The Venns turned to their luggage – Christian Jaffe himself bore it away – apparently finished with Kip. In her room, Posy unpacked her valise and carefully put things in the drawers, like someone planning a long visit. At first she had thought they should be staying nearer the hospital, but now she was glad to be in this cosier ambiance, with an optimistic, smiling woman at the desk, and the sound downstairs of healthful stamping of snow off boots, the rattle of skis being donned outside, skiers returning joyfully to the slopes. They would get Father sorted out.
She was tired. They’d driven all night, taking turns at the wheel, having to change over to the wrong side of the road at Boulogne. French roads were so straight, the same defect as the French character, revealing a Gallic lack of imagination, a repellent literalness. She and Rupert had been quarreling over what was probably going to happen next. Father would or wouldn’t be awake, he would or wouldn’t be glad to see them, the new girl-wife would be there (of Posy’s own age), and the famous and embarrassing baby. They touched on one especially delicate matter: If Father should die, would he have already changed his will to include the baby, or made it totally in the baby’s favor and that of the new wife? But they were embarrassed talking about such things, and guiltily dropped the matter almost as soon as it came up.
They had gone directly to the hospital before coming to the hotel, so they already knew the reality, Father in a coma with no prospect of recognizing them, at least not very soon, and the teenaged boy the only person looking after the baby, and the girl-wife in a coma of her own. Posy saw it would be up to her and Rupert to decide what must be done, but she felt this as an imposition. She struggled against anger. Her father had had no compunctions about going off with the American bird and putting them all out of his life, and now he needed them back in it. Of course they would do the right thing.
Of Pamela’s two children, Posy had been the more censorious about Father, the more rebellious, and the more irritating to him. Perhaps this made her sadder and more frightened now. She had never been able to please him, while he had completely approved of Rupert, for instance of his present job in the City selling bonds. ‘A good thing to have a practical money person in the family,’ he had said, expressing surprise that it was Rupert, and thereby conveying that he had expected it would be Posy who would have such a soulless, mercenary career. Rupert had read history and philosophy, and had seemed headed for a donnish life, tutoring or writing, except he was rather fond of parties and London life too. Pamela had been worried at one point that he might be gay, but Adrian had scoffed and said he himself had been just like Rupert at that age. All the same, they were relieved when Rupert for a time was seeing something of Henrietta Shaw and some other nice girls.
Now, they none of them quite understood what Rupert did, but it involved bonds, and sitting at the computer all day. He hated it, really, should have gone on to read law, should have gone to Australia to work on a sheep ranch, or signed onto a freighter. Pamela had said that a strong, active young man like Rupert ought to be outdoors, and when asked by his father what he saw himself doing – this was when he had been seventeen or so – he had been unable to think of anything whatsoever. Venn had laughed and said that probably meant that Rupert would write a novel, but Rupert had no literary aspirations either. Posy could imagine writing a novel, but she knew that Father, the great publisher, would never take it seriously.
She sat on the bed and telephoned her mother in London, to recount things as they had found them. ‘The doctor says there isn’t much hope, and that he probably won’t wake up, but they haven’t quite finished warming him.’
‘How do they do that?’
‘They’ve covered him with blankets, and I think they put warm salt water in his veins, something horrible like that. I didn’t quite understand the doctor, his English was rather…’
‘Dear God,’ said Pamela, thinking that it was redundant to ill-wish someone who was so badly off; one was left with nowhere to stand, tipped off balance. Her innate kindness, and the good memories of twenty-three years of marriage, however much of a philanderer he had been, softened her tone momentarily.
‘The baby is cute, but he doesn’t
look anything like Father,’ Posy said. ‘There’s a boy taking care of him, the younger brother of the wife. It’s quite a strange situation.’
‘Probably I should call his solicitor,’ said Pamela, whose heart was very hard toward that individual, Trevor Osworthy, who had acted for Adrian during the divorce, against herself. ‘Or, at least, a British doctor.’
‘Could you, Mummy? Maybe you could even get them over here today. I’m afraid it may be – you know. Over.’ At this her voice broke, reassuring her that she was indeed capable of feeling some more decent emotion than the superficial exasperation that seemed to be rising in her.
‘I’ll call Mr Osworthy. Give me your number there.’
Posy finished unpacking and went down to the lobby again. It seemed odd to her to be attending a tragedy when the world outside the hotel seemed so full of health and cheer. The hotel guests were suited up in vivid Gore-Tex parkas, booted, chatting in the lower lobby. The youthful personnel of the hotel, wearing plain morning faces, scurried through the corridors with the guests’ skis and dry cleaning. She and Rupert faced the grim duty of returning to the hospital, when anyone would rather have been on the slopes. She envied the bronze skins and air of mindless health emanating from one and all, the same people to be seen in their bikinis in summer – she had twice been to Cannes and Nice in the school holidays, and had felt the bad luck of being a pale, large-scaled Brit who only had limited holidays, next to these slim, carefree people who had, apparently, nothing to do, and all the time they needed for pleasure and laughter.
Again at the hospital, they saw no change in Father, who had been lying just like this when they had seen him earlier in the morning, so unmoving he might as well be dead, preserved like Mao or Lenin, except for the wheezing of the machine and the almost imperceptible rise and fall of his chest. The color of his skin was not altogether alive, but not altogether dead, his eyes were closed serenely. Posy could not believe that thoughts weren’t streaming across his interior mind.
Oh, ha, isn’t this ironic, she imagined his mind’s voice saying, lying here in the power of all those I have wounded, who are now assembled together to wreak their collective vengeance because I am helpless, off in another realm. They did love me, I see that now, I shouldn’t have abandoned them. Aren’t you sorry now, Venn, foolish sod, to have forsaken poor Posy, poor Pam? Oh, and poor Rupert, of course.
‘I think that by late this afternoon or tomorrow, things will be clearer,’ the doctor said, interrupting her reverie. ‘But you must be prepared. I would like to speak to Mr Venn’s family this afternoon, say at five,’ he said.
Kip had the idea of taking Harry to the hospital to see his mother, in hopes that the voice of her baby would penetrate her coma, as on General Hospital. Harry’s voice might melt through the ice in her brain. He had weighed the question of whether the fright to Harry of seeing his mom frozen and inert would outdo the good to her of hearing her baby; and concluded that since Harry was so little, even if he recognized her, he’d forget the weird sight of the tubes. Anyway, he had to take Harry with him because he didn’t think he could ask Tamara to sit anymore, and had no money to pay her besides. He also didn’t think he could ask Christian Jaffe for another ride to the hospital, but there was a shuttle to Moutiers that ran often. Harry was cute in his bunny-eared snowsuit, and people laughed when he chased a dog at the bus stop.
Standing at the bus stop keeping Harry out of the road, Kip was scared, even more scared than yesterday. Something about the ordinary Alpine morning slowly lightening the gray sky, a trace of sun piercing the clouds, the mighty peaks looming all around, dwarfing the merely human village, the cold – it all made him feel desperate whereas yesterday he had only been shocked.
The hospital, by daylight a frayed nineteenth-century mansion with remodelled windows and doors, seemed inadequate and retrograde, but there was a reassuring, professional smell of antiseptic and medicine. Today no one stopped Kip from walking into the intensive care room, where nothing had changed. In the daylight, he could see that the covers mounded over Adrian were an ugly pale green. Kerry was more lightly covered in folded sheets. A third person in another bed had been placed between the two Venns, and a nurse was doing something to this new person’s machine. She looked at Kip and said bonjour. A fourth bed was occupied too. He wondered if these were also avalanche victims.
It seemed to Kip that today Kerry looked somehow rosier, was more alive looking, though really there was no sign she was coming to, she lay as still as ever. The noise of the machines was more terrible today, wheezing and beeping, gasping and strained, the monitors pale like old black-and-white TVs. Some of Kerry’s clothes were folded over the foot of her bed, as if she were at camp. Kip held Harry up and said, ‘Say “Hi, Mommy.”’ Harry stared and said nothing. ‘Hi, Mommy,’ Kip repeated. After a few more promptings, Harry said, ‘Hi,’ in a wee voice.
Kerry didn’t react, didn’t budge. ‘Hi, Kerry, it’s me, and Harry’s here to see you.’ Kip went on like this as long as he could bear to, until he began to feel as if he were berating her, so resolutely still did she lie, refusing to listen or react. When the nurse wasn’t looking, he held Harry closer, his hand over Harry’s tiny hand, and together they patted Kerry’s arm. ‘Hi, Mommy,’ squeaked Kip in Harry’s voice.
‘There is not much change today,’ said the nurse. ‘But she is definitely not worse.’
Kip tried putting Harry down, but had to pick him up again when he saw the dangling bags of urine and rolling carts and other things Harry could push over or pull off. When he had stared long enough at Kerry’s inert body, he turned to leave, his notion of correct behavior warring with his wish to be out of there. What could you do in a sickroom, anyhow, and what good did it do to just sit there, which wasn’t really an option with Harry there, but you did hear that talking to coma victims helped them.
‘So, bye for now, Kerry, I’ll come back later. Harry says bye-bye. Harry says you’d better wake up soon, Mommy. Uh – bye, Adrian,’ he added, remembering that Adrian had no one to talk to him in his coma, in case it made a difference, though the brother and sister could do it, but did they know to?
In the hall the doctor approached him. Kip felt wary – the doctor hadn’t sought him out before. ‘If you could be here when Monsieur Venn’s children next come, I would like to speak to all of you together. Perhaps late this afternoon? Say at five?’ Kip was about to protest that he wasn’t a family member, but he saw that he sort of was, on Kerry’s behalf, maybe even on Harry’s behalf, in case there was something he had to represent Harry’s opinion about. Kip promised to be there, but he felt full of dread.
As they left the hospital, the Venn brother and sister were coming in. It seemed to Kip that as Harry was their half-brother, they ought to take a turn with him, but he could see from their grim, distraught faces that they weren’t going to. In the chill of their unconcerned glances at Kerry, Kip felt his and his sister’s isolation. Kerry wasn’t the object of these people’s concerns, Kerry was just collateral damage, he himself a forlorn emissary of a small state whose fate was incidental. He foresaw that no one but he would lift a finger or make an inquiry in Kerry’s behalf. No one would ask whether she was getting good care or if she ought to be taken someplace else or what she was like, a sister sometimes nice, sometimes horrible, like all sisters he had ever heard of. He saw he’d have to fight for Kerry, but he had no idea how.
For a while, they walked around Moutiers. There was a newsagent and some little restaurants and not much else. He wondered how old you had to be to drive in France. He didn’t have his license yet but he knew how to drive. What was he going to do with Harry for a whole day? Ski school? How old did you have to be to learn how to ski? He’d seen some really little kids in the ski school, tiny toddlers with short little one-foot-long skis, going like bombs, but none of them was as small as Harry.
Eventually they took the bus back to the hotel. The doctor’s words, so portentous and uninformative, stayed on K
ip’s mind all afternoon, even when he managed to stash Harry with the chambermaid Tamara for a nap after lunch, and make a couple of runs down the boucle blanc. He told himself that his not making a couple of runs wouldn’t help Kerry. On his board hurtling downhill, he could feel free, unencumbered, outrunning tragedy. Once he saw his new friend Amy, who was supposed to be helping him, but she was talking intently to a ski instructor at the bottom of the lift and didn’t see him. Kip thought she was incredibly foxy. Someday he would be a ski instructor. It was a well-known perk of being a ski instructor that women would do anything you wanted.
‘You know what it’s about,’ Posy had said to Rupert at lunch, talking of the doctor’s summons at five.
‘Perfectly. We’re going to have to decide whether to pull the plug on our father,’ Rupert said.
‘Of course we couldn’t possibly.’
‘How can we know? We haven’t heard the medical details. Maybe it would be a kindness, or maybe…’ His voice betrayed the poorly mastered panic she felt herself. She saw that he had shaved and cut himself since they arrived, and had stuck a little tissue on the place.
‘This is so – so extraordinary. What a thing to happen,’ said Posy. ‘Father has always been just a bloody whole lot of trouble.’ She dabbed at tears and tried to sound calm. It was true. Growing up, their lives had always been organized around his comings and goings, trips to France, purchases – new car, new place in the country, boat, once even a racehorse – the sorts of things that would suddenly be sold. When he and Pam had divorced, a sort of boring lull had oppressed them, and she had thought it was Father they missed; perhaps it was only the excitement.
L'Affaire Page 6