‘Did you just get here today?’ she asked.
‘Yes, just a half an hour ago.’
‘Are you skiing tomorrow?’
‘No. Are you?’
‘Probably not. I’m actually not much of a skier,’ Posy admitted. ‘The last time I skied was a few years ago, in Val d’Isère, and I savaged my knee on the first day. No, I’m here on business. With my brother,’ she added in case he had seen Rupert.
‘Yes, that is my situation too. “Unforeseen business.” Luckily I got here in time for dinner, which did much to reconcile me to passing a few days in the Alps. The table here is very good.’
‘Well, you must be a true Frenchman, we’re already having a food discussion,’ Posy said. His English was so good, so unaccented, she thought maybe he wasn’t French at all but some sort of sheik. Sheiks were always well educated, and had gone to Oxford or Cambridge or Harvard, not that she had ever met one.
‘We could turn to other subjects. You are easily the most beautiful girl in the room.’
‘You don’t expect me to discuss my looks.’
‘No, I suppose not. Female beauty is another French interest, though.’
‘We – English girls – are all very touchy about French girls, they are all so pretty and chic.’
‘You don’t find them rather thin and calculating and pulled together?’
‘Well, an Englishman would have no way of describing someone’s look, pulled together or the contrary. They don’t notice what women wear.’
‘That is a national difference, then,’ said Emile.
Posy could feel her mood lifting, like clouds drifting away and a big heavenly beacon beginning to break through, singling her out with its ray as if to warm a patch of fun and forgetfulness just for her. Things will be bad again in the morning, but for now all is permitted. That’s what ski resorts are like.
He had put his newspaper aside with the air of a man who is not going to resist the change of program.
‘We could dance,’ he suggested. ‘Less dangerous than skiing.’ Posy was not so sure about that, but agreed. They stood and moved a few feet toward the small chairless space in front of the musicians where a few couples had been dancing, but just as they stepped up, the musicians stopped the Tyrolean polka they’d been playing and went off on a break. He took her arm and they sat back down. Even his light touch on her shoulder made her feel short of breath.
‘Are you – what, a soccer player?’ she guessed. She had noticed his strength and lithe bearing in the instant he had led her to dance. It appeared that she could not have said anything that could have pleased him more. For an instant his handsome face wore the unmistakable expression of complimented vanity, then of modest denial.
‘I’m a teacher,’ he said, ‘and a sort of journalist.’ She would never tell him she was the credit manager of a chain of underwear stores. She wouldn’t even tell him her last name.
‘What kind of teacher?’
‘I teach at a university in Paris called Sciences Po.’
‘I just came down from university last year.’ He seemed charmed by her account of Cambridge, her studies in literature. She warmed to a man who appreciated women who had studied seriously, so not the case on the London job market at the moment, or the marriage market, for that matter. It was astonishing how a French person could have absorbed so much of Oxbridge lore – he wondered if she had ever been punting, and whether each student had a servant, as it appeared from books, and was it true there were no bathrooms, and no edible food, and did the cheese really come after the dessert? He was nice even if he had some negative ideas about England. As she told him about the traditions of Cambridge, she couldn’t forbear mentioning that she’d done well there, and people were bloody surprised too.
‘You know a lot about England, you must read a lot of English books,’ she said. She was a little dizzy. She knew absolutely that this was going to end in bed, it was almost just a question of how to pass a decent interval before they could go to it. She indulged this fine idea of sleeping with an unfamiliar sheik on her first night away from England – it would be to exact a sort of revenge for the cruel disruptions of fate. Quite apart from the stirring in her lower belly and the feeling of warmth between her legs, the prospect had a sort of abstract charm, a philosophical appeal, not that she had read philosophy (Rupert had, though). The idea of an acte gratuit, without motive (well, pleasure), something between people uncommitted, unconnected to each other, an act with no past and no future, an exercise of pure will and pure self-indulgence, came from Gide. Or was it Sartre?
Emile – or something similar, whatever he had told her his name was – waved for another pair of drinks. They carried on with the banal, arch sort of conversation that both knew was just killing time.
‘Oh, we cannot resist beautiful English girls,’ he said presently. ‘It is even a feature of our pornography, a perverse dream of sullying the pale, delicious, puddings with our dark passion.’ Posy believed him, and didn’t say aloud, but thought, that the opposite was also true, she was drawn to the idea of sheiks and pashas, though the only ones she had actually seen, in Harrods, say, or accompanying a bevy of black-covered women in Marks and Spencer, were seldom attractive, and usually fat. It was more the idea of sheiks that was sexually exciting. Though perhaps by ‘our’ he had meant Frenchmen? Frenchmen or sheiks, the attraction of opposites was another law of life, perhaps even a physical principle – it was all in D. H. Lawrence.
Thinking of D. H. Lawrence gave her courage, for people were always having impulsive sexual encounters in Lawrence. It was easier to think of doing so outside London, though she had done some fairly crazy things there, too, though never with an absolute stranger and mostly when she was a teenager and sort of miserable. There was a connection to misery now – poor Father – but lust was a better description of her present mood, a delightful feeling, and urgent in its promptings, above all signifying that you were your own person and not a pawn of fate, and no one knew her in distant Valméri anyhow. You were supposed to screw around at a ski resort. Then there was the idea of affirmation. Faced with death – that of a parent symbolizing and prefiguring your own – what was more defiant and positive than making love, even though, logically, it ought to include the making of a new life, but never mind that. You read of people in prison making love, and during the plague.
He answered her question: the idea of the acte gratuit came from Gide. He seemed to be thinking in a similar vein, for he now made some remark about the awkward moment between desire and the passage à l’acte.
Neither he nor she had any condoms, the search for which might have shaken their exhilarated mood; but some were to be had from the little store of sundries kept in the manager’s office for emergencies. That the youthful Jaffe had learned his hotel-school lessons well was attested to by the complete impassivity with which he responded to Emile’s inquiry, as Posy lingered out of sight in the corridor.
Once in his room, Posy experienced some embarrassment and some apprehensiveness, feeling a bit disheveled, though she had washed up before dinner, and wishing she had on better things underneath. There was also the thing she had heard about Arabs and depilation, though this was a Frenchman not a sheik, and some French girls she had seen on a beach when she was younger had gobs of hair under their arms though going topless. But she consoled herself by remembering that even if you were going to be an international adventuress on a global scale, you couldn’t possibly anticipate the erotic predilections of every nationality.
He, however, was clearly a man at home in his own territory, and she needn’t have worried. It was all smoothly, even brilliantly, performed, though with no complicated positions out of The Arab Art of Love, which was anyway maybe not a real book but a title invented by Anthony Powell, her own countryman, in the one of his novels she had read. She crept back to her own room at almost two, burning with the excitement of her clandestine adventure, glad not to run into anyone who could have spotted instantly
‘the lineaments of satisfied desire.’ (Blake)
PART 2
Hospital
L’hypocrisie est un hommage que le vice rend à la vertu.
– La Rochefoucauld (Maximes)
14
The printed program placed on each breakfast table each morning, after giving the weather report, gave the movie schedule for the two cinemas in the village, and then a brief reprise of the morning’s news. This morning, Wednesday, the guests were told, to general disapproval, that the American embassy in Paris had dismissed out of hand charges of American warplanes being responsible for the avalanches. There was even a hint that the embassy spokesman had laughed at the idea, just as Amy had. Journalists attending a press conference in Washington had met with the same response when asking the same question. When asked whether there would at least be an investigation, the American officials had derided the notion.
This American indifference to the feelings of Valméri was ill received by the skiers at the hotel. In the ski room in the morning, people discussed the typical Yankee arrogance. Joe Daggart, the only American besides Amy, sent her a commiserating glance. Amy bent to the work of putting on her boots, burning to protest to the Europeans that she was sure, whatever the facts, that the pilots could not have realized what had happened. She also knew her protests would fail to convince, and anyhow, in law, intention has little weight; but her blood speeded up throughout the morning whenever she thought of these unfair assumptions. Luckily the intense joys of the slopes prevented her thoughts from wandering too often. Resentment would recur when she was on the lifts, though never on the descent, when she felt only freedom and exhilaration. ‘Très, très bien,’ Paul-Louis encouraged her, and several times led her down black-marked pistes!
Posy woke in the morning feeling free of the oppression, guilt, and anger that had weighed on her since they had first heard the news of Father’s accident. No question but that the transient pleasures of love translate into some abiding chemical alteration of the brain and bloodstream. Sex was absolutely good for you and necessary, even as previously practiced in a British version with sweating, slightly overweight former classmates; but now a quantum-leap improvement, a revelation. She relished the advantages of her new lover – his handsome looks, staying power, enthusiasm, and above all tactful way of treating it all with just the right tone of affection, admiration, and slight detachment, as in a French film. What relief and happiness. A minor setback to her morale when on the way to the hospital she stopped in the village and tried to buy some lacy red underwear, only to be told that her size was not ‘local.’ But even this, even the prospect of the morning with Father, even the gray sky, could not mar her happy anticipation of a second rendezvous with the handsome Frenchman that afternoon.
Posy had set out to the hospital early. Once there, the reality of Father’s condition consumed her emotions again. She was slightly resentful that she would have to sit there all day while Rupert went off with Monsieur Delamer to wherever it was Father kept his safe deposit box. But they had agreed that both of them being at the hospital would not help Father. Even one of them could not help Father, as he lay there, his chest moving slightly with the wheeze of the machine, purple streaks developing on the one arm that lay outside the covers, pierced with needles attached to tubes attached to standing cranes with bottles hanging from them, the revolting bottle collecting yellow fluid that hung below the coverlet at the side of the bed, an appalling smell of stuffiness, medicine, and flesh.
She had a book, Joseph and His Brothers, by Thomas Mann, which she plunged into, to distract from stirring thoughts of her new French friend, but other concerns reeled through her brain too. She raised her head from time to time and spoke to Father. She would ask the doctor again if everything was being done. It didn’t seem right to be riffling in his safe-deposit box, but of course they weren’t taking anything, they were just taking things out of the box, in the event that – in the event. It would be looked after by his reputable man of business, whatever that role was called in France, Monsieur Delamer.
At times she glanced over at Father’s wife, Kerry, purplish and inert under the blue-white overhead light. Kerry lay as still as Father, but some quality of her condition animated the nurses to hover over her with more active concern, poking, shifting, clucking to her. Posy was able to feel, little by little, some pity for Kerry. It wasn’t her fault she’d been taken in by the homely old seducer, she wasn’t the first, mysterious though it seemed to Posy, thinking of his craggy face, his froggy, Rumpelstiltskin form. It was Father’s energy that drew people to him, her mother had always said.
Spending the long hours at Father’s side, punctuated, though, with lots of walking around and crossing the street for coffee and to smoke and notice things. French dogs are so small, she thought. Snow up to their bellies, freezing their little whatnots, they should keep the poor things inside. Little dogs, the wonderful smells of baking everywhere, no books in English. She had more than enough time to review the situation from all points of view. She couldn’t but admit she wasn’t sorry not to be in London at her job-hunting, it looked as if she was doomed to go back to her dumb job as credit manager for the Rahni Boutiques, tights and knickers for the rest of her life.
In a tangle of thoughts and erotic reveries, among hopes that Father wouldn’t die, another hope, glittering like a coin in a thicket, that if he did, he would have remembered her – and Rupert, of course – as he probably had, but it wasn’t impossible in his infatuation with his new wife, in his rejuvenated, no doubt Viagra-driven life – it was too possible that the American would get everything. He might have left her and Rupert a token sum, but he had been angry at them both for their support of their mother. Father and Pam had been married for twenty-five years, and their children naturally expected coming into something eventually, in the normal way. Posy had undoubtedly jeopardized their chances – she had even told him he was behaving like a swine, said it flatly to his face, ‘swine.’ How she wished she hadn’t. Plus at the time he had been criticizing everything about her – haircut (okay, somewhat punk, looking back on it, for one winter only), weight, about a stone greater than now, green nails. It had been a low moment for her; nonetheless, she got a good Cambridge degree, which he wasn’t even interested in. Rage, hope, greed, concern, and other turbulent emotions prodded her, her eyes fixed on Joseph and His Brothers – she was reading all Mann’s books. The theme of fraternal rivalry depressed her, though.
Kerry’s little brother came in once in the morning to stand gawkily for a few minutes talking to Kerry. At first he had seemed to feel shy to be speaking out loud with Posy sitting there, but little by little he had lost this inhibition, urging his sister to consciousness like a teammate. He was a well-mannered boy, for an American, and Posy wondered if he had some new Yankee medical information about talking to the comatose. Somehow she didn’t trust herself to speak to Father without giving him a piece of her mind.
At about eleven, the doctor and another man came into the intensive care ward. This second man was handsome, brown, compact, in an open shirt and a bomber jacket, too lightly dressed for the snow. She stared in stupefaction. It was her last night’s lover. For the first instant he was not sure he had recognized her. He glanced at her uncomprehendingly, then at the two beds, then spoke in French to the doctor. The doctor with him was the regular one, and whatever he whispered to Emile, Emile looked over again at her with a frankly shocked expression, then smiled politely, even warmly, and looked down at Father again. His suprise, perhaps stupefaction, was evident to Posy, if not to the doctor. But – how bizarre – she realized she had not told him about Father. Some other connection entirely must have brought him here. He had said he was a sort of journalist – was he here as a journalist with an interest in Father? Was Father so well known in France that journalists would concern themselves? Now she saw that his face had reddened slightly as he glanced at her again.
Each had now recognized the amazing, unfortunate fact that
the practically anonymous partner of the night before, with whom there was some expectation and hope of renewed transports later on this afternoon, had some connection to the comatose Venn, and that therefore they had some connection to each other. Knowing what she knew now, her responses of the night before, of visceral desire, became if anything more powerful. Still, she couldn’t imagine what his interest in Father could be.
For his part, Emile quickly divined from her dutiful station by Venn’s bed that Posy was a relative, probably a daughter, and therefore the half-sister of his wife. And therefore a potential wellspring of trouble and complication, which if anything increased his desire for her and heightened the discomfort of renunciation. For of course things must end here.
‘You know Monsieur Abboud, of course,’ said the doctor to Posy. This struck Posy in its guilty, carnal sense, chilling her with the idea that the doctor somehow knew what had happened last night and that it somehow compromised Father’s treatment.
‘Miss Venn and I have met at the hotel.’
Posy returned his polite smile as neutrally as she could, none the wiser as to why he was there. Rattled, they were unable quite to look at each other. Abboud continued staring down at Father, Posy back at her shoes.
‘Probably there is a special limbo for souls who have met with sporting disasters,’ said Abboud eventually, of Father. ‘It’s a far from heroic, but also not quite futile, not quite despicable fate. But, excuse me – Miss Venn – it’s not for me to be speaking of your parent’s fate.’
‘It’s kind of you to take an interest,’ she said.
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