L'Affaire

by Diane Johnson

  ‘This is not Saudi Arabia, mademoiselle, we do not have intensive care units on planes.’

  ‘We want to do the right thing,’ she said uncertainly.

  ‘The man will never survive the trip, we are doing everything humanly possible right here. It is not rocket science, the man is nearly dead, we can only –’

  ‘You must try to arrange it. Whatever happens –’ said Osworthy.

  ‘But the danger, the expense…?’

  ‘Whatever happens, he would want to be in England,’ said Osworthy, and Posy didn’t actually see that she could argue with that.

  ‘I have said, there is no plane with an intensive unit, no one would take a patient in this condition –’

  ‘Or an equipped ambulance,’ Osworthy insisted. ‘I will look into it. If we can get him to the Brompton Hospital. I know the consultants there.’

  ‘And what about Madame Venn? And will all the children agree?’ said the doctor.

  ‘Agree? Why should they object?’

  ‘Well, to die in England and to die in France – it is two different things, evidently,’ said the doctor.

  This was not evident to Posy nor, at first, to Mr Osworthy. They were stopped, they reflected.

  ‘The point is, he should not die,’ said Osworthy with great assurance. ‘I’ll go the hotel. When do we expect Rupert, Posy?’

  Posy sat a little while longer with Father, half persuaded by Mr Osworthy that maybe English medicine would have an answer, and shocked at herself for not having looked into it, she who was usually able to see the practical side of things. How she wished for Rupert, if only to berate him for leaving her to deal with all this. She wondered if Father weren’t a little worse today, a bluish cast to his skin, dark blotches under his eyes that hadn’t been there yesterday.

  She had found a photograph of him, stuck in her book; she had clipped it from a newspaper a few months ago. Father is attending a publishers’ meeting with a member of a trade commission representing book manufacturers in Brussels, to oppose a projected tariff on books in stock, in the warehouse, or on publishers’ shelves. While others in the photo seem animated, or are simulating animated discussion, Father stares blankly at the photographer, not seeking the approval of the camera but uninvolved in what is going on around him, distanced or shadowed by something in the future or distracted by some memory. Posy had seen other photographs like this, of other people, who would die soon after. If it were in color, it might show the aura of death, if you believed in auras. At the time, they had said with some malice, ‘Looks like his life with Kerry isn’t a bed of roses.’

  She was shaken, and as she sat throughout the morning her dismay worsened, thinking that their easy acquiescence to the decision to probably pull the plug one of these days, their acceptance of the doctor’s dictum, made this bedside vigil a kind of act of bad faith, of hypocrisy. Here she was hoping for him to get better and at the same time planning his death instead of actively soliciting his recovery. She tried to force her mind around to a hope he could recover, this emotion in turn warring with her real vengeful feeling that he had brought all this on himself, silly bloke, with his girl-wife and a dozen other birds before, giving all that trouble to them all and especially to Mother.

  From time to time during these boring vigils, Posy allowed herself to dream of a vast inheritance. She knew Father wasn’t rich like that, of course, this was just a reverie. With the vast inheritence she could say sod the bras and knickers boutique and could open something of her own, dealing in old paisley shawls and steamer trunks, say, or get a job as a researcher at the BBC, which would pay nothing, but you met everybody and it led to something. Or just do nothing and buy a house to fix up. Of course she knew that her share of whatever Father had would not, ever, add up to an independent income, but she would invest wisely…

  Eventually she went back to the hotel. Dr Lamm had approached her one more time before she left, saying with Gallic certitude, ‘It is futile to move your father, it is wrong, and it is impossible.’

  The day was snowing and dark, so most of the skiers had come in or had stayed in, and were taking lunch at the hotel. Rupert got back from Saint-Gond as it was being served, and joined Posy and Osworthy at their table. Posy had just been pointing out Kip and baby Harry sitting nearby, with the American heiress, or such was the rumor about her that Posy had heard in the bar. Osworthy turned from his study of Kip and Harry to greet Rupert, delighted to see Rupert, a responsible male Venn.

  ‘I feel I must speak frankly, now that you’re here, Rupert. I was quite surprised to hear what you were off doing. It could have the appearance of crime. You wouldn’t want it to look like you were helping yourself.’

  ‘I suppose not,’ said Rupert, ‘but it seems to be commonly done here.’

  ‘Important to avoid getting implicated in something like that. I think you should know, too, if your father dies, you don’t come in for much – something, of course. You, too, Posy. The bulk of his estate goes to his wife, naturally enough. Nothing abnormal in that.’

  ‘We know that, or we expected it, anyhow.’

  ‘What did you actually find in the safe-deposit box?’

  ‘Pretty much what we’d been told: some gold coins, a small painting signed by Bonnard, old books, some jewelry. The notaire took everything out and we locked it in his office safe. He wrote out a receipt for me. I couldn’t tell if any of it had any value, but he seemed relieved the French tax people wouldn’t get their hands on it.’

  ‘I am sure there is a penalty for hiding things from the fiscal authorities. How long the arms of the French fiscal authorities are I couldn’t say,’ said Osworthy, his sniff suggesting his contempt for the sleazy local practices, opening private safe-deposit boxes, secreting funds. He rose.

  ‘I’ll just go over and have a look at young Harry, present myself, it looks like he’s in charge, the older boy I mean. He’s the brother of Mrs Venn? Who are the women? He may need some help with a baby that young. Posy, did you offer to help?’

  ‘God, no,’ mouthed Posy to Mr Osworthy’s back.

  ‘To tell the truth,’ Rupert told Posy, ‘when I saw Father’s stuff, it wrenched me in a way his situation hadn’t yet. There was a sort of presence to his things – you sensed the person who had chosen them, cared for them, loved these old books – or I guess he loved them. He valued them, anyhow, paid for them, put them away. He had thoughts and hopes – do you know what I mean? Suddenly in the midst of having thoughts, he’s lying like a vegetable. It was like looking at his diary or his clothes. It made me hope all the more that he’ll live. I hope he does, and I hope he won’t be too frosted that we got into his box.’

  Approaching their table, Mr Osworthy presented himself to Kip and Amy. ‘Adrian Venn’s solicitor. Came in last night. I take it this is Harry? What a fine fellow. I’d heard a lot about him from Adrian – apple of his eye, you know.’

  Kip started politely to rise, but was pushed back into his chair by the friendly paw of Osworthy.

  ‘This is Kip Canby, Harry’s uncle,’ Amy said. ‘I’m Amy Hawkins, a friend of Kip’s, and this is Miss, I mean Mademoiselle Walther, who helps with Harry.’ The Jaffes had found a teenager from the village, to be supervised by the hotel’s own chambermaid Tamara, and Kip would only have to look after the baby at night. Amy had told Christian Jaffe she would pay for it, it was little enough that she could do, though it occurred to her that it was really this man’s obligation, if he was the family lawyer.

  ‘Hello, Harry,’ said Osworthy, patting the baby’s head. ‘You’ve got Harry organized, I see, Kip. I just wanted to tell you how things stand. We think Harry’s father has a greater chance if we get him to England. I’ve decided to remove him to the Brompton Hospital in London if all goes well. They have expert teams for these things. Well known – all the sheiks and mullahs come right to England. Apparently it’s complicated, aerial transport with respirators and so on, but it can be done. I’ll be working on it this afternoon.’


  Kip heard this in amazement and with relief, followed immediately by a new fear. It was probably good they were planning to take Adrian to a bigger hospital, but what about Kerry, and what about him, and Harry?

  ‘What about Kerry?’ he asked.

  ‘They say she’s doing a bit better, so we’ll concentrate on Venn for the moment. I think the doctor would say there was no point in taking the risks involved in transport where the situation is not desperate.’ Osworthy’s voice had the falsely soothing tones of a school psychologist. Kip didn’t buy it. Despite what the doctors said, he couldn’t see that Kerry was any better at all, didn’t she need saving by the Brompton Hospital too? He glanced at Amy. She was the only person he had talked about all this to, plus she seemed to know about the law. He liked the idea of them all going to England where he could talk to people in English.

  Osworthy invited Kip to come to his suite before dinner tonight. ‘You too, madam, if you like. I should have some news by then. Bring everyone involved,’ he added in the authoritative voice of someone who is finally getting the bunglers organized. He nodded and went back to his table.

  Kip looked across the room at Emile Abboud. Though he came to the hospital meetings, Kip didn’t know how Mr Abboud was involved exactly, or whether he should be told about Mr Osworthy’s meeting. Abboud was reading the paper by the windows, apparently waiting for his soup. Kip didn’t really think he himself should go to Mr Osworthy’s meeting, either, it was more about Adrian. As usual, no one talked about Kerry.

  ‘As long as your sister’s doing okay, it might be better to leave her as she is,’ Amy said, agreeing with Osworthy. ‘It’s probably complicated to arrange moving someone in intensive care.’

  ‘They say she’s doing okay, but she hasn’t changed at all that I can see,’ Kip said. ‘She just lies there.’ He heard his voice quaver.

  On the other hand, Amy thought, with her practical concerns, it was possible these English people were trying to run out on Kip’s sister’s care, or planning to abandon her in some way, leaving Kip to make decisions and pay the bills. She promised Kip to have a frank talk with Mr Osworthy about some of these issues.

  Mr Osworthy’s voice almost shook with his outrage as he sat down again at his table. ‘You didn’t tell me, Posy, that the American boy had hired counsel, surely that wasn’t necessary? I’m certainly acting in the interests of everyone concerned, especially the baby; after all, he’s Adrian’s principle heir, with his mother, so I hardly think…’

  ‘I don’t think she’s his lawyer, but I don’t know anything about it, Mr Osworthy,’ said Posy in as docile a voice as possible. ‘How would I?’

  ‘American lawyers are notorious ambulance-chasers, probably she got wind of it,’ said Rupert.

  ‘I mean, why is it my bloody fault?’ Posy went on in a stronger voice.

  ‘I will advise her that she should move her client to a more up-to-date facility if they are not satisfied with her progress in Moutiers. But I had understood they expect Mrs Venn to wake up soon,’ went on Mr Osworthy in a tone that suggested he felt a deep sense of injury at Amy’s involvement.

  ‘It seems to me Kerry is your client,’ Posy pointed out. ‘I’ve never heard that the American is a lawyer.’

  ‘Time will tell,’ said Mr Osworthy.

  18

  In her room before dressing for Osworthy’s meeting and dinner, Amy did her CD-ROM French lesson, called her financial person, Sigrid, then turned on the radio and lay in the bathtub listening to music punctuated with announcements in the unfamiliar language. After the stormy morning, the afternoon had started out with a wintry glint of sun, and she’d gone out, but hadn’t worn a sweater under her ski jumpsuit (combinaison), so that when the skies clouded over again at the end of the day she had got cold but had been too far from the hotel to go in. Now, as she was chilled to the bone, the hot water felt wonderful. It’s nice being cold, then warm, being tired, being exhilarated, she thought. She had made progress under the eyes of Paul-Louis, the delightful French ski instructor who drove her up and down pistes that she had thought were too hard for her in a language she could not understand.

  It’s sort of nice not understanding what people on the radio were saying – something about Haydn, she thought. Any familiar word leapt out at her. It was soothing not to understand the rest and not be asked to understand. The mind seeks blankness from time to time, the way you have to run down the battery of your computer from time to time. An emptiness to fill with a headier, more concentrated program of new ingredients. Haydn, French literature, antiques correctly patinated, geopolitics. Once you’ve decided to jettison the old knowledge – both the baby and the bathwater – the possibilities are ripe for a new soup of limitless savor.

  Kip was getting help from Miss Walther, so he could go skiing and spend some time, without Harry, at Kerry’s bedside – he was conscientious about this. Yet he had Harry with him an awful lot, it seemed to him, especially all night. He found that if he kept Harry up watching TV he slept later. It was remarkable that a baby could watch TV. Kip remembered seeing on television an account of a school where girls in his same grade, though in another school, had to carry ten pound sacks of flour around all the time to make them conscious of what it would be like to have a baby. He wasn’t even a girl and he was conscious of it for sure. He had bought some blocks and other stuff at a shop in the village and had charged it on Adrian’s credit card. That made him feel sort of criminal though he knew it was all right. He thought as he went to Mr Osworthy’s room that he should explain this to Mr Osworthy.

  Osworthy, finding himself in a distant Alpine village with a decent allocation for expenses, had ordered several plateaux of oysters from room service and two bottles of champagne, to soothe his clients’ spirits and, not incidentally, since he found himself in a fine hotel, to sample its amenities himself. Though French, therefore transported here God knew in what conditions, the oysters should be all right, it being winter. The waitress had spread towels on the bureau to protect it, and arranged along it the platters of heaped crushed ice and the opened creatures on their icy beds. The two bottles in buckets on teetery stands were placed at the end with five glasses poised to be filled. Did it look too festive in view of the circumstances? He hoped not. Six dozen oysters divided among five people, five into seventy-two… maybe the American boy wouldn’t eat any, or Posy. Women often didn’t like oysters.

  He took this assembly most seriously. Having set his staff, in prospect, to looking into some of Adrian’s affairs, he had been surprised to find them in solid, even astounding, affluence. Even his vineyard, from a brief review of his French tax returns, appeared to have made money. His press, for years a losing self-indulgence, had recently sometimes made money, his investments, in the long boom of the eighties, had boomed. Osworthy was gratified but challenged. He would of course have given the humblest tinker all his advice and expertise if the fellow was his client, but the aura of money suddenly haloing the raffish Venn lent a certain sacred importance to the trust Venn had placed in him, and lent a certain bracing interest to the whole thing too.

  The heirs – he thought of them as the heirs though Adrian was not dead – arrived, a little somber. The American youth, still in ski clothes and après-ski boots, came in exuding a brisk boyish fragrance of outdoors and cold. He had brought with him the woman who had been sitting with him at lunch, the attractive Californian who was, or wasn’t, his lawyer. This person, Miss Hawkins, was dressed for dinner in a simple black dress, as though in mourning already. She was pretty, in his opinion, with a polished simplicity that made poor Posy seem all the more blowsy. Osworthy had noticed that Posy’s clothes were always quite inappropriate – rather low necked and tight. Some women couldn’t help looking like tarts no matter what they wore, and poor Posy was evidently one of them, though she had a good Cambridge degree. Doubtless, too, styles had changed. Both Miss Hawkins and the boy declined oysters, and took on panicked expressions when these were offered a seco
nd time. Tant mieux, as they say here, thought Osworthy, the more for the rest of us.

  He explained that he hadn’t made much progress that afternoon in organizing the transport of the patient, doubly difficult over the objections of the French doctors and with the absolute nonexistence of a vehicle of any kind capable of transporting a patient on life support. Fortunately, Adrian was holding his own, had not got worse, so there was still tomorrow. ‘I’ve been on the telephone the whole afternoon. I expect my efforts to bear fruit by tomorrow, but we may have underestimated the difficulties here. Mind you, I find the French doctors absurdly territorial. It wounds their vanity to imply they haven’t been doing all that can be done. It would help if they would cooperate. We must, we must, get him home,’ said Osworthy fervently.

  Osworthy wondered if the American boy understood the importance of transporting Venn. Of course, the boy’s interests were directly counter to those of Rupert and Posy, in that his sister would get virtually nothing if Adrian died here in France, with its Napoleonic prejudices against wives, and everything if (when?) he died in London, with things left according to his will. Was that why he had brought the American lawyer? He looked a young boy for such calculation, so it must be the woman who had thought it through. Osworthy asked if there were any questions, in part to learn what they did understand. He tried to clarify further.

  ‘I asked you all here, because I think everyone should understand the situation. There is no mystery, and I want no one to harbor false expectations. In the case of his death, Mr Venn’s will leaves his estate to his wife, Kerry Canby, with a small sum for his children Rupert and Posy, a few thousand pounds apiece as I remember. Young Harry is not mentioned in particular, but I think, without doubt, that the law would hold him to be included, because he was not excluded. There is no comma after the word children, and I don’t doubt that will be a matter of dispute, but –’