‘Can we talk about expenses for one minute,’ interrupted the American, Miss Hawkins, and her demure, appealing face had suddenly a rather set expression. ‘Kip and Harry are dependent on Mr Venn, or his estate, to defray their current living expenses, and I have some concerns about Harry’s future, both the expenses and custody.’
‘Harry’s mother is expected to recover,’ said Osworthy severely.
‘A. Will she be liable for her husband’s medical expenses if in French law she doesn’t inherit? B. For the hotel bill?’ said Amy, looking at her notes.
‘Ah, Miss Hawkins, that is my point,’ said Mr Osworthy, seeing a way to enlist her support, for they were, after all, on the same side as to where poor Venn should die. ‘That’s why, whatever happens, it’s essential it happen in England, where Kerry Venn has the natural widow’s rights and obligations according to Mr Venn’s clear intentions. Here – I’m not clear, but it appears to be otherwise. I cannot speak for France, and I cannot off the top of my head resolve the question of which national law would prevail in the case of an Englishman dying in France or vice versa. God alone knows who the French would think should pay the hotel bill.’
‘Kip is in no position to take care of financial matters himself,’ Amy said. ‘Mr Venn has been supporting him and paying his school fees.’
‘Unfortunately, no one dies without effect. We cannot help what we cannot help,’ sighed Osworthy.
‘But the French doctors think he’s certain to die no matter where,’ Posy said in her quarrelsome way. ‘If that’s true, I don’t know that I want Father to die in England. Why would I? From what I’m hearing, if he dies in England, Rupert and I get two beans, and if he dies here, we get our full share of his money.’
‘It’s hardly a time to privilege your personal motives, Posy,’ Osworthy said, deeply shocked. ‘There may be a chance of saving him. Surely you want that?’
Posy’s defiant outburst could not prevail against such a reproach. ‘Of course,’ she said meekly. ‘But our other sister may not be so compliant.’
‘For God’s sake, what other sister?’ Osworthy snapped.
‘You mean nobody’s told you?’ said Posy with great enjoyment at seeing the stunned expression that momentarily froze Osworthy’s jowly face.
Posy and Rupert, having thanked Mr Osworthy for his efforts in behalf of their father, said they would see him at dinner and took themselves off to the bar for something stronger than champagne.
‘I’m going skiing tomorrow,’ Rupert announced, somewhat defiantly. ‘I’ll look in at the hospital early and come in again at the end of the day.’
He had been cheered at the addition to the gloomy conference orchestrated by Osworthy of the unexpected American lawyer, or whatever she was, who had seemed both lovely and reasonable, and not as if she would make trouble. She was here to take cooking lessons and skiing lessons, she had said, and had invited him to join a skiing party with them in the morning – the boy Kip, some other people she’d met, and Robin Crumley, the famous poet, not that he had read much poetry since leaving school, but Crumley was often on the telly, writing about country life, the roses blowing in the hedges and so on, and then a thorn. There was always a thorn, or a worm. ‘I thought that was Robin Crumley,’ he had said to Posy. Crumley didn’t ski but would come by car to meet them at lunch in some village their monitor would take them to. He stole a glance at Posy to see if she would utterly resent his defection, and saw from her scowl that she would.
‘You could come in the car with Robin Crumley,’ he said, and she brightened. ‘I’ll see to it.’
‘Do you secretly think Father’s wife is going to die too?’ said Posy, who had evidently been thinking about this.
‘Supposedly not.’
‘I would hope they would tell us the truth, because if they’re both going to die, it would be better if she died first,’ Posy said. Rupert, to his chagrin, instantly saw what she meant. If Father died first, his money went to his wife, and then when she died the baby would get it all; but if she died first, they were directly in line. That’s if they were both going to die.
‘That’s just in England,’ he said.
‘I cannot believe we’re saying these things, but anyway, it’s plain that Father must die in France. It’s going to turn out that way anyhow,’ Posy said. ‘We aren’t causing it by saying it. Mr Osworthy will never find an airplane willing to transport him.’
They made their way to where Emile was sitting. They all nodded cordially and Rupert and Posy slid in next to him.
‘I looked in at the hospital at about five,’ he told them. ‘They were quite encouraged about something to do with Madame Venn’s condition. No change in that of your father.’
‘Could we speak frankly?’ Posy asked, fooling with a cigarette to master the confusion that seized her whenever she met this man. ‘Have you heard that Father’s lawyer wants to move him to England, in hopes he can be saved there? That would be marvelous, but who can believe he can be saved? Not the doctor, that’s clear. We think it’s more that Mr Osworthy wants Father to die under the British flag because it makes a difference to what happens to – well, everything, his château and money.’
Emile considered this. ‘I suppose it would. The laws of succession are probably very different in the two countries, though I don’t know what they are. England, I’m sure, is very capricious.’
‘Why capricious?’ They bridled alertly.
‘The English indulge the caprices of the dying, I gather. France disregards them for good reason, to avoid the stupid or inappropriate things people do at the last minute to seal themselves to life.’
‘You don’t think people should be able to do what they want with their money?’
‘Certainly not,’ said Emile.
Rupert intervened smoothly. ‘The point is that you – that is, your wife – and Posy and I are sort of on the same side in this. It’s better for us all, if Father were to die, that he did it in France. It was you who told me that in France you can’t disinherit your children.’
‘Which has been held by many to be a great pity,’ said Emile.
Emile was a natural troublemaker in part because he was intelligent, and delighted in the complications a moment of obstinancy or a noncompliant gesture or impulsive action could bring on. He had always enjoyed observing these complications, and submitted to the deepening cynicism they inspired in him with a sense of his own perfectability. In time he could become a perfect cynic. But first he would have to master his own inclinations to give in to joy, love, and the like, emotions that got in the way of calculation. Now he wavered between having a laugh with these attractive but apparently perfidious English people, whose interests were the same as Victoire’s, and suggesting that they just pull the plug on their father, who was effectively dead anyhow, as no one seemed able to admit.
‘I think Victoire needs to come down here,’ he told Géraldine later on the telephone. ‘Just remind her that it’s the patrimoine of Nike and Salome that’s at stake.’ He explained to her what he suspected the motives were behind the effort of his attorney to move the moribund Venn to England.
‘Vee would never go anywhere just for money,’ Géraldine said. ‘I’ll have to give her a better reason. Perhaps to please you, Emile, if you told her you’d like a few days together.’
‘Why not?’ said Emile. Pourquoi pas?
Emile, now that he had been here awhile, had begun to feel less impatient to be back in Paris, though he would be forced to go back on Monday at the latest for his weekly appearance on a Tuesday television roundtable. Meantime, at the Hôtel Croix St Bernard, there was a quiet cardroom where he could work, there was the exotic company of skiers, English people, an assortment of pretty women – though the little dash with Miss Venn was not to be continued – and the very good food, which interested him as it would any Frenchman, however intellectual. The rhythm of life in a gracious hotel had its soothing effect on him, as it did those of most of the hotel guests
who weren’t partying in the village discos or soaking in their tubs in the spa room after a day outside.
The Venn affair and the numbers of people who kept showing up because of it made Emile wonder if the money involved weren’t more substantial than he had supposed. He hadn’t asked Géraldine about the sums – he himself was not venal. Géraldine was, however, so he should have guessed from her concern that some money came into it. Still, Venn was English, and the English were all poor as grasshoppers, judging from the frayed cuffs and hole-riddled sweater of the noted English poet Robin Crumley, like himself a nonskier, so also to be found writing in the mornings in the cardroom. They had become acquainted when they exchanged a few words on the book Emile was reading, by P. G. Wodehouse. Emile had found it on the hotel shelves, and it amazed him. Emile had heard of Crumley, and Crumley, the latter seemed to imply, had heard of Emile.
It was from this poet that Emile had gleaned some bits of hotel gossip, for instance that there were uncrowned heads of European royalty and an unattached, very rich American girl, something about an electronics fortune or anyway some commodity more ephemeral than the classical sources of American fortunes like timber, railroads or oil. Emile had doubted the extent of this fortune much as he did that of Venn, for he saw no bodyguards or duennas, though he had no doubt the girl in question was Géraldine’s friend, and he could easily find out the true story. He agreed that she was beautiful.
‘But it seems unlikely that immensely rich girls just walk around,’ he objected.
‘And she’s very sprightly and sweet,’ said Robin Crumley. ‘I don’t know when I’ve been so struck by someone’s freshness, sweetness – a rose, veritably.’
‘You’re married, I expect,’ said Robin during one of their conversations. Emile agreed he was.
‘I’ve never married. Not inclined to. To tell the truth, I’ve never much related to the female body.’ There was a certain practised smoothness to this confession that told Emile he had made it before, was used to making it. For his part, Emile was used to sexual overtures from men as well as women and usually just pretended not to have heard them, if this was one.
‘Perhaps you guessed that. So I’ve never really explored my heterosexual side – I do believe that everyone is bisexual, don’t you? And now to have fallen in love at last – I speak of the delectable Amy.’
‘I agree that she is very pretty. But she’s an American,’ said Emile sternly.
‘I like Americans. Their simplicity and sense of entitlement enchant me. Especially their simplicity.’
‘Doesn’t that describe women in general?’ said Emile.
‘In fact, I think less and less about the physical.’ His concerned expression suggested to Emile that, au contraire, he was thinking more about it, and finding it troubling.
‘I would agree there is a certain theoretical or arbitrary aspect to sexuality,’ said Emile cautiously, ‘but the body must be willing to go along with whatever is decided.’ He was thinking of Foucault, pauvre type.
‘For some the body rules, but that was never my case,’ sighed Robin Crumley.
Emile had ignored Géraldine’s suggestion that he meet Amy Hawkins. He had no wish to meet Americans. He had devoted considerable thought, ink, and airwaves to the subject of cultural difference, and as a certified French intellectual, he had one especially dogmatic, unwavering, and largely unexamined belief, clung to with almost religious fervor: the unregenerate wickedness of America. This naturally extended to Americans themselves, though he knew only his mother-in-law’s appalling décoratrice friends. (Géraldine herself he liked as well as men ever like their mothers-in-law, ambivalently, in that they incarnate the eventual metamorphosis of their wives.) She seemed to understand very well the ways Victoire, with her goodness and political correctness, could be impossible. It was paradoxical: though he liked Géraldine – he appreciated her reluctance to comment on the situation between him and Victoire, for instance – he mistrusted her mixture of good taste and commercial instinct.
He everywhere found examples of the detestability of Americans – brash, arrogant, loud-talking, and loud-dressing bullies with no understanding of other cultures, a complete lack of interest in things beyond themselves, and concerned only with American hegemony. He would not voluntarily make the acquaintance of one, and didn’t anticipate that he’d have to.
He had noticed Géraldine’s little friend Amy, in fact of above medium height, in the bar after the lifts had closed, or at meals, often being monopolized by Crumley and an elderly Polish prince, and increasingly by others too. An heiress? He deplored the crass materialism of the Englishman and the others who fawned over her, something that didn’t escape him, though he had no doubt that Crumley’s infatuation had other grounds too. She, for her part, from afar seemed natural and full of smiles – Americans with their smiling masks and the rather impervious beauty of their bland features, perhaps the reflex of their inner emptiness.
He was a little disconcerted to notice, in the bar before dinner, Kip, the boy in charge of Victoire’s baby half-brother, in the company of this same American friend. Despite Géraldine’s urging, he made no attempt to introduce himself to her, and his greatest dread was that something in his present situation would require him to.
Amy and Kip both somehow felt his, or someone’s, gaze on them, which made them both turn. Having been caught staring, Emile made a little bow of his head. Amy felt an almost unpleasant crawl of apprehension. This man seemed to have the same effect on others too.
19
The hotel had now formalized Amy’s habit of sitting at meals with Kip or someone else by giving away her former single table and showing her directly to Kip and Harry when she came to the dining room. She and Kip had installed Mademoiselle Walther, the baby-sitter, there, too, for lunches, but after one dinner, because she was running out of things to talk about with Kip, Amy invited someone else to join them, tonight the American from Geneva, Joe Daggart, whose hotel room, she discovered, was actually right next to hers. She especially wanted to ask him what he might know about the available rescue services in Switzerland.
He didn’t know much. ‘I’m an extradition consultant,’ he had explained. ‘Or call it facilitator. I represent various American state governments, and the feds, in negotiating extraditions. European governments often won’t extradite an American criminal when the death penalty is involved, so my job is to negotiate the concessions we are able to make – new trials, reduced sentences, life instead of death penalty, and so on – to accommodate their notions. I find out what assurances we are able to make to the Europeans, and what compromises they’ll take. I’m working on a horrible case at the moment, the guy who strangled the four ten-year-olds behind the ice rink, he’s holed up in Deauville.’
‘Goodness, I hope you aren’t trying to get him off,’ she said.
‘Not exactly. It’s a problem in the capital cases,’ he said. ‘We try to get the American prosecutors to ask for life with no parole instead, but it’s often tough because they face political pressure in the States. Everybody wants to fry this bastard. Sometimes an impasse can last for years.’
Amy, who knew little about criminal law, found this fascinating. She liked Daggart. She would ask him more generally how he found living in Europe, whether he missed America and so on, though it might be well to stay away from politics, as she sensed that his were not hers.
For now, she knew enough to steer clear of the inheritance issues too, even though they would affect Kip, and she sure wasn’t going to meddle in issues of European medical ethics; all the same, she didn’t see how it could hurt to get Daggart’s help in arranging a medical ambulance of some sort that might save Kip’s sister and her husband.
‘You must know the Red Cross, Médecins Sans Frontières, people like that,’ she implored. Daggart did know some agencies. The insurance would eventually repay the cost of this expensive venture, she wasn’t worried about that, but she had seen immediately that as in America, when in
surance claims were involved, rescue agencies would be wary. At home, the plane would be faster in coming if she could offer the money up front – how different could it be in Europe? She set a mental cost limit – how could you put a price on human life, though? She had made her suggestion to Mr Osworthy as she had left his meeting, and he gratefully considered it.
‘You mean you have some means of advancing the funds?’ he asked warily, it occurring to him that maybe there were financial implications he hadn’t been aware of, big money somewhere behind Kerry Venn, perhaps. ‘The people here are only used to organizing the transport of uncomplicated fractures or the odd woman in labor, or getting a stroke victim to Lyon. People are flown to England all the time, but evidently not on life support and not if they’re not stable. Venn looks stable enough to me, he hasn’t so much as twitched since I’ve been here.’
‘I expect the money in advance will help. It’s an expensive trip, insurance companies are slow to repay, nobody likes to deal with them.’
‘Money does seem to overcome many a scruple. Thank you, Miss Hawkins, this is most understanding. Of course it’s also in your client’s interest.’
‘I’m not sure what you mean. I’m just concerned about Mrs Venn.’
She put the matter now to Joe Daggart. ‘If they need the money up front, I could advance it. I’d like to help.’
‘I have no idea who would do it. I do know something about the cost, on account of another situation I was in; it would be about twenty thousand dollars.’ He looked at her alertly.
‘It’s okay, lives are at stake. After all, I’ll be getting it back eventually.’
‘Victoire,’ Géraldine said, ‘I’m going to keep Nike and Salome for a few days for you, and you are going down to Valméri to help Emile. It isn’t fair for you to make him go through it all, stuck among perfect strangers in the middle of a family drama. He ought to have his wife with him.’
‘I doubt he said that, Maman,’ said Vee. ‘That doesn’t sound at all like Emile.’
L'Affaire Page 13