At dinner, the guests at the Hôtel Croix St Bernard had the novelty of two American military officers in uniform dining at one of the tables. Some said army, some said air force, it was hard to tell from across the room.
‘I think army,’ said Marie-France Chatigny-Dové. ‘I think the air force wears blue.’ The prince and princesse agreed. In the bar after dinner, some guests were heard to criticize the management for admitting such people to the dining room. ‘Those are the same chaps we saw in the village questioning local merchants,’ Robin Crumley was able to inform them. All agreed that their presence must have something to do with the avalanches. That morning’s bulletin was still lying on the tables:
Americans deny presence of American overflights. Pentagon spokesman says no American planes were near the Alps at all, let alone in the area of Valméri where the destructive avalanches of last week had caused, finally, nine dead.
Posy and Rupert’s dinner with their new sister Victoire and her attractive husband had not seemed awkward, although, as Posy had spent the afternoon in bed with the husband, it might have, and Emile treated both her and his wife with impassive politeness, his lovely smile and rather cynical discourses delivered without regard to who received them, in the manner of other public performers. It was all Posy could do to refrain from pressing Emile with her foot or allowing her hand to brush his.
Both Rupert and Posy had loved Victoire at once. Rupert felt a true affinity, and he could tell that Posy did, too, with their newfound sister. There must be something magnetic, some pull of the DNA, that accounted for their recognition of Victoire, transcending mere acquaintance, so powerfully connected did they feel. There was the family resemblance, but it was more than that. It was as if some Platonic ideal of a sister was now his in the form of the (evidently) good Victoire, in place of the (bad) Posy. Not that Posy was very bad, but even during this dinner she exhibited some of her worst qualities – restlessness, lack of ease, even acquisitiveness. He caught her looking at Emile, just intercepted the tiniest glance of a kind that warned him that some outburst was preparing. Perhaps she wanted Emile to leave so they could talk to Victoire, or maybe she didn’t like Frenchmen.
They were recounting to Victoire their family life with Father, emphasizing his brilliance as a publisher and foibles as a parent, and had arrived at the divorce and the character and present life of their mother. In turn, Victoire told them about her mother, Géraldine, but said she was unable to imagine Géraldine separately from her stepfather, Eric, who, she emphasized, was her ‘real’ papa, let alone imagine her mother as a teenaged girl briefly involved with a Venn in his twenties.
‘It’s trop dommage that I should only learn about him now.’ She sighed. ‘Now that it’s too late.’
‘Oh, no,’ Posy protested. ‘The Brompton Hospital is world famous, we haven’t given up hope.’
‘Well,’ said Victoire, ‘tell me some more. Have he and your mother remained on good terms?’
‘Not really. They hate each other, actually. But I should think it was quite a happy marriage until Kerry,’ Rupert said.
‘Oh, poor Kerry,’ cried Victoire. ‘I must embrace her. She will revive? Oh, and the poor little baby, the little orphan boy.’
Yes, thought Rupert, it’s Victoire who has all the good instincts, and Posy is just a bitch. Strange to say, tears had sprung to Posy’s eyes just then.
They discussed tomorrow’s outing to Saint-Jean-de-Belleville. Posy knew that joy was never unalloyed. The happy prospect of driving somewhere with Emile was now marred by the arrival of Victoire. Luckily, Victoire declined to go with them to lunch; she would instead go to the hospital to see her unknown father, she said. Posy wondered if Victoire fully understood Father’s condition. Deep, deep coma, practically a vegetable, they emphasized, but perhaps Victoire didn’t recognize such absolutes as coma; perhaps she could shine through comas. She was evidently a person of unusual serenity, or maybe it was that since she didn’t yet have a personal feeling for Father – how could she? – she didn’t really care.
Posy was also thinking that Victoire didn’t have the air of a woman who watched her husband closely, though Posy could see her adoration and desire for him, and took pains to show none of that herself. Of course she wouldn’t want Victoire to know, but still more, she wouldn’t want Rupert to know, he disapproved of her so much already. She knew there was no chance of a furtive embrace from Emile in the corridor later. Would this incestuous adultery, she was wondering, bring a tragic curse down upon the house of Venn? Was she enacting a destiny set in motion by her father’s adulteries? Were they all under a curse, as in a Greek drama? Which one? Aeschylus? For some reason, her eyes had again filled with tears.
Amy, feeling a sudden lapse in her capacity for sociability, went to her room after dinner and turned on the TV. She had missed the very beginning of the program that came up, but it was evidently some fable or costume drama. An aristocratic-looking man was talking to a governessy-looking woman in a mannish suit, with a beautiful château in the background, all soothing and European enough to bear watching for a few minutes. The aristocrat wore riding boots and reminded her of her mental picture of the baron. Together the man and woman look downhill to where a group of five pretty young women in girlish frocks are being handed by a chauffeur out of a large car, taking their suitcases out, laughing to one another. Cut to the aristocrat’s deeply absorbed stare at the pretty young women, the governess giving him a knowing smile. He smiles at her and shakes her hand. The girls carry their suitcases into the château.
Cut to a scene on the lawn. The girls are assembled on little canvas folding stools with their paintboxes and brushes. One girl is posing for the others in a white dress trimmed with a blue sash. The governess is holding a postcard of a painting by Gainsborough, which the model is emulating. The governess shuffles her postcards and directs them to assume new positions, après Watteau. So much was clear without understanding the French, though Amy thought she had begun to improve her auditory skills and could discern merci, À bientôt, and several other phrases.
The governess shows the girls a picture from the classical nude to imitate. Laughing, the girls begin taking off their clothes. Now they are naked. Two of the girls stand on their heads, their crotches eye-level with the other girls and the camera. The right-side-up girls begin to trim the pubic hair of the upended ones. The governess, with the picture in hand, demands to know what they are doing, a very good question that Amy wonders about too. ‘Pas de poil,’ they say. Amy looks up poil in her dictionary: coat, mane, pubic hair. The girls indicate the picture of marble nymphs who have no pubic hair. From his window, the baron watches lustfully as the naked girls assume the postcard tableau.
Amazed, Amy looked at the time, the channel: main channel, not some in-house rental channel. Porn! Children all over France could be watching this! All at once she felt shocked, even embarrassed, and abruptly turned off the television. She didn’t think of herself as a prude, but what if Kip was in his room watching at this moment? Completely disturbing to an adolescent boy. Also, how horrible if some porn charge would be added to her bill. How bizarre that the French would allow such programs in prime time. But of course, they are French. What was one to conclude?
PART 3
Snow
Être ou ne pas être. Telle est la question.
– William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Je suis ici envoyée de par Dieu… pour
vous bouter hors de toute la France.
– Jeanne d’Arc, letter to the
Duke of Bedford
23
Americans are often astonished when they find that the European Alps are more cragged, looming, beautiful, alien, and insurmountable than their majestic North American mountain range, the Rockies. Americans have popularly believed the Alps to be soft, rounded, and old. Amy had believed that until she saw them. In fact, the hotel brochure had explained, the only way they do not surpass the Rockies is that the Alps are not higher. It is
as if the whole continent of Europe somehow starts at a lower point, sunk under the weight of millennia. The Alpine mountain ranges were thrown up, however, more recently than those of the Rockies or the Sierra Nevada, hence the unworn and challenging summits, the durable glaciers and rivers of ice the Rockies don’t have.
From the promotional material, Amy had learned that the Valley of Valméri is one of a system of four valleys etched between the imposing peaks along the border of Switzerland and France; the mountains are covered with snow from November to May or June, with streams running through the crevasses in summer, and with wildflowers and small animals adding to an impression of Alpine idyll. In summer, cows, sometimes belled in the Swiss fashion, are brought up from the charming villages to graze. Humans have been here for millennia. Recently, the remains of a Stone Age climber, with cloak and touching, frayed sandals, were found embedded in the ice of prehistory only now risen to the surface.
It was these vastnesses that the skiing party would now traverse. Rupert went down to breakfast in his ski clothes, reassuring himself that if all went according to medical plan, Father would be flown back to London later today. Because only medical personnel would be allowed to fly with him in the small ambulance plane, Mr Osworthy, at his own insistence, would go back in a scheduled commercial plane from Geneva in time to meet the medical plane in London, and Posy and Rupert would drive home to England later tonight or even tomorrow morning. Meantime, as they would not be permitted to hover around the paramedics and pilots to impede them in their work, Rupert felt no sense of guilt about going off to spend the last day on skis instead. Their own role here was over. ‘Yet,’ he remarked, ‘odd to feel a pang about leaving.’
‘Yes, our last day here,’ Posy lamented, thinking about how blessings are always mixed, enjoyments are always shadowed with the premonition of their transience. She could not confide her reason for feeling the sadness of this, but Rupert caught her tone. He ate his toast and gazed out the windows of the dining room at the gaining light on the top of Mount Benoît, and the slip of cloud. Was the cloud arriving to herald a gray day, or departing to leave a sky clear and bright for the projected outing to Saint-Jean-de-Belleville?
‘You’ll stop at the hospital?’ he asked Posy, wanting there to be some representative there, even if it wasn’t he. ‘You can see Father off and come back here. Then when I get off the slopes, five-ish, we’ll set out for London.’ But his presumption of Posy’s dutifulness was wrong. She, Emile, and Robin Crumley were planning to meet him and the other skiers for lunch. She had volunteered to drive them. ‘I can’t let them down.’ She smiled.
The family would be represented at the hospital by Victoire. ‘I so look forward to spending the morning at the hospital with my newfound father, until he should be loaded onto the plane.’ At the moment she was playing with her new little brother Harry, while the baby-sitter looked on. ‘I will talk to him,’ she promised them. ‘At some level he will hear. I will tell him about his first grandchildren, and I will play the flute for him. Just think, his grandchildren are older than his youngest child! They say that music can penetrate the mind in its darkest caves of retreat.’
At nine-thirty, Kip, Amy, Rupert, and Madame Marie-France Chatigny-Dové met at the foot of the Equeriel lift and waited for Paul-Louis, who was to guide them. The prince had woken with a headache and was not coming. Joe Daggart, who also had been going to ski with them, came up to beg off too – he had to go with the American investigators, he said. The two military men Amy had seen the night before, now dressed in white jumpsuits, waited for Daggart by a snowmobile, but didn’t themselves come forward in greeting.
‘They really shouldn’t allow snowmobiles,’ Amy observed. ‘I believe that in our national parks, they’re forbidden.’
‘These count as emergency vehicles, I think,’ Daggart assured her. ‘Regular snowmobiles would not be allowed, no. I’m not so sure about in American national parks.’
‘Europeans are not very sensitive to noise,’ said Amy. ‘All those horns and scooters and Vespas.’ As soon as she said this, she realized it was a little tactless. The others forebore to mention noisy things they had witnessed in the U.S., but from Marie-France’s expression, Amy could see that she herself had been insensitive. And she hardly wanted the day to deteriorate into chauvinist arguments. ‘Almost as bad as America,’ she said, hastily trying to repair the situation. It came to her that this was the first time in her life that she would be the only American in a group of others – well, with Kip. At the same time, she felt at ease, as if she belonged here. At least on a ski slope she could fit in, quite unlike during cookery lessons or at the dinner table, not that she cared.
She attributed her enjoyment of the Hôtel Croix St Bernard to A. the high proportion of people who could speak English, even though they chose not to much of the time, and it wasn’t conducive to her learning French. And, B. the general level of friendliness and good manners of people here, even the French, unlike what you were often told to expect. And C. the good luck to have fallen among really nice, interesting people. Even the English brother, up till now so much that British combination of reserved and hearty, was getting to seem like an attractive, regular guy and a pretty good skier. She thought of extending the ski part of her little sabbatical before going on the Paris adventures ahead of her.
They had high hopes for a perfect day. The first blue traces of sky had extended into a full cloudlessness, the sun promised to appear, the snow was perfect after the addition of the powder layer in the night. In their brightly colored suits they all had the look of space travelers newly landed on a white planet, or athletes ready for the Olympics, especially Kip, whose parka had windows for showing passes and loops with bits of equipment hanging off, whose gloves were stout and worn, whose boots were venerably scuffed.
The pretty American, Amy, was especially calm and confident. Rupert was a little wary of her after the meeting in Mr Osworthy’s room, where she had raised some pointed questions. Her voice, also, though by no means as awful as the voices of some American women, was distinctly American in its intonation. He was wary of businesswomen in general, as you were always warned to be, though in her private capacity of skier, he thought her perfectly nice and feminine, and Madame Chevigny-Dové was calmly competent too. As to how well they skied – that’s the kind of thing you can’t know till you begin, like playing tennis with somebody for the first time. Paul-Louis was a reassuring presence, a handsome, deeply bronzed Frenchman with a cheerful, silent manner, who touched his gloved hand to Rupert’s when they were introduced, in the fashion of a boxer saluting his opponent.
‘Thanks for thinking of me for this outing.’ Rupert smiled at Amy. ‘I wouldn’t have missed it.’
‘Oh, don’t thank me,’ she said.
When they were all assembled, they started, paired off, and were hoisted into the sky by the lift chairs, and into their individual reveries. To get to Saint-Jean-de-Belleville required a promenade, as it was euphemistically called, of some thirty or forty kilometers, beginning from the top of the glacier three thousand feet above them, following a complex route of chair lifts and télécabines up, and thrilling descents over the ridges toward the farthest of the valleys. Rupert had been shown the route on the map, but now, seeing the reality of the heights and expanse, he felt a moment of compunction, wondering if his skiing would be solid enough to keep him up with the others, and if the terrain would prove to be too difficult after all.
‘Ooh-la-la, que c’est beau,’ said Marie-France to Rupert, with whom she was sharing a chair, looking at the shimmering mountain peaks laid out below them like beaten egg whites in a bowl. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘absolute beauty, man’s insignificance, that sort of thing.’ From her expression, she was quite astonished and very impressed to find such sentiments in an Englishman, and gaily tapped his knee.
‘Oui, c’est super-beau,’ said Paul-Louis to Amy, who, as his main client, was never out of his gaze, though he kept them all in view like an
anxious shepherd. Amy shouted back at them, as they swung through space, that she had never seen anything to equal the expanse of the white peaks covered with clouds and snow, untracked, indifferent to human incursion. This was the point of skiing, to share in this exhilarating beauty and be reminded of man’s insignificance. She wished she could have a more original, a more daring, response than that. How limited she felt herself, how tragic it was not to have been born a poet or some other creative, expressive person, someone who would know what to do with the emotions that moved her. She momentarily admired Robin Crumley for trying to express the inexpressable, and vowed again to read his poetry.
Kip was distracted and withdrawn. His thoughts were fastened on what he had seen yesterday, Kerry’s moment of consciousness. No one else had seen it or believed him, as if just because you were younger, you didn’t know what you had seen. He was still oppressed with the idea that he himself had sent the snow down on her, and he was worried because he hadn’t gone to see her this morning. He probably ought to turn back and ski down to the hospital. Maybe he’d take Harry to see her again. Maybe by now she could hear her baby, now that some of the cold had lifted from her brain. When would they realize it had been he who started the avalanche?
L'Affaire Page 16