M. Antoine de Persand, de la part de Madame Chastine and Madame Crawford Venn, voudrait parler avec Mlle. Posy Venn. Téléphonez ch. 40, s’il vous plaît.
Posy went straight to look for Rupert, to discuss what this new person could want. The newcomers had gone directly to the dining room, apparently quite delighted with the snowy Alpine ambience and the prospect of a delicious dinner, and their eyes never left each other.
A candlelight memorial service for the victims of the avalanches was to be held tonight after dinner, in the village church, and Amy, who hadn’t planned to go, changed her mind and duly went along to it, as a cooperative gesture, out of loyalty to Kip and because of her acquaintance with the Venns. The little church with its picturesque steeple had been remodelled inside in a modern style at the time of the building of the tourist center, with a gaunt Christ on a cross of blond wood against a brick wall behind the altar, tasteful pews the color of ash, and abstract stained-glass windows influenced by someone like Mondrian. People tiptoeing in and ranging along both sides of the center aisle were each given a candle. Amy gathered that there would be a signal, she hoped internationally comprehensible, to light them at a given moment. She supposed this was a Catholic church, the first she had ever been in.
Many hotel guests were recognizable among the crowd thronging in, all in après-ski boots and warm coats, bringing the smell of wool and damp. There were Otto and his wife. She carefully sat well behind them. The Venn siblings filed in and sat in the second and third rows behind what appeared to be the entitled mourners of others lost in the slides, Victoire sitting with Harry, Kip, and Mr Abboud, behind Posy and Rupert. Amy was pleased to see that they had included Harry and Kip, a sign of accord among the Venn family, yet it was somewhat strange they didn’t sit all together.
It seemed a long wait and it was rather chilly in the church. You were apparently meant to keep your coat on, though Amy saw Posy Venn throw hers off. Eventually, a priest in his robes entered, nodded, and began to speak in a grave voice. She could imagine what he was saying: prayers for the souls of the lost, thanks for preserving the rest of us. There were responses from the people, but only the name of Adrian Venn leapt out for Amy from among the names of the people in behalf of whom they had gathered. Despite her general disapproval of religion (following Prince Kropotkin) and incomprehension of the language, she was seized with the general reverence, and meditated sincerely on the issues of danger and death, and felt gratitude for having personally escaped the self-invited perils of the mountains. She knew she had made the right decision to leave before tempting fate any further. When the moment came to light the candles, she, like other nonsmokers (all Americans?), was obliged to turn to others for a light. It was Paul-Louis who reached over her shoulder with a lighter.
‘Pay, pay, pay,’ people said all around her, a stark litany, but not an unrealistic analysis, of life’s guilty feelings of obligation.
‘Peace,’ said Paul-Louis to Amy. Oh. Paix, paix, paix. How embarrassing to have heard their word for ‘peace’ as ‘pay.’
‘You haven’t seen my place,’ he said to her as they shuffled out of the church. ‘If you aren’t doing anything now?’ Amy sighed. She felt a little frisson of temptation, but it was too late. Why had he waited so long?
‘Tonight I have to get back,’ she said. ‘My office is calling me at ten. But I have time for a drink. My treat!’ Then, not wanting to foreclose any options, she touched his arm and said, ‘I’ll be coming back a lot to Valméri.’
As they stepped into the lighted vestibule, Amy, wearing the jacket of her ski suit, felt herself to be bathed in silvery guilt. Everyone must notice that she shone in the lumière like an armored apparition. Looking around to see whether Baron Otto noticed her walking with Paul-Louis, she saw an expression of surprise on his face, surely remembering – he was the only one to know – that she had been out skiing the afternoon of the avalanche.
Then Madame Chatigny-Dové said it out loud. ‘My word, mademoiselle, you could be Jeanne herself.’ And instantly, Amy was sure that it was true, she was. She felt everyone’s gaze, heard the murmur of voices she took to be expressing shock and even – was she imagining this – condemnation. She heard the European anger at her, Amy Hawkins, singing in her ears, and clinging to Paul-Louis, she fled.
Outside, she tried to think more calmly. She was clear about her decision to leave Valméri, though her appointed sojourn was not up, and go to Paris a bit early. She had already grasped, in this short time, that you have to learn to be idle, it was a skill, and skiing constituted a kind of idleness she hadn’t mastered yet. In Paris she would try to do more reading.
Of course she wouldn’t be idle eventually – would have her foundation and the work of mutual aid. But in the interstices of her time here in Europe learning one thing and another, she could be learning more. French and German for sure, by the Crakes method; with a teacher, as she could already see that by yourself you tended to let your lessons slide. And perhaps diction or voice lessons, for she had noticed the several references to American female voices, and now that these had been brought to her attention, she could begin to hear what people meant when other American women were in the room. She had no idea whether she herself had this sharp, overloud voice. Not that the Europeans sounded so great, speaking in high, unnatural, singsong voices she found irritating, though Madame Chatigny-Dové had a sexy growl that sounded good.
In Paul-Louis’s favorite bar, Les Neiges, she told him she would have to cancel her abonnement for the coming week. ‘Mais, Amy, you have just found your form,’ he said, dismayed. She assured him she would come back often, she would e-mail in advance, he had been wonderful. She was firm. She could not resist asking him why he had only now proposed she go up to his rooms?
‘I like you a lot, Amy…’ he said.
‘Too bad you didn’t – um – give a sign.’ Amy smiled regretfully. ‘Why didn’t you?’
‘Can I tell you truly?’
‘I’d like to know, actually. No one ever turned down my most blatant overtures before. Almost never.’
‘I didn’t know you were leaving so soon.’
‘Yes, but?’
‘Well, we talk – the other ski instructors, we all tell each other things, and they all say it is just better not to fuck the American girls, because they think you are going to get married to them.’
Amy laughed. Could that be true? It sounded like an international misunderstanding, but how had it arisen?
In her nightly chat with Sigrid, Amy told her about the Joan of Arc excitement, and the shiny silverness of her own expensive gray Boegner combinaison. ‘Do you think it could have been me? How horrible if I thought that! But it can’t be. I think I’d know it if there’d been a slide right there, avalanches are unbelievably loud – they’ve been replaying them endlessly on TV. I didn’t hear anything that day, it was as silent as a tomb.’
‘Amy,’ said Sigrid in a voice suddenly somber, ‘say nothing to anyone. Promise me. This is very important. Do you understand what I’m saying? Not a word.’
Amy did see. She tended to forget how drastically her personal liability situation had changed.
30
This morning the Alpine rescue people were at the hospital interviewing Kerry, encouraging her to explore her memory more deeply, minutely, so they could judge whether someone else might not be buried in the path of the avalanche, either the woman Kerry had seen or something that could explain her vision. They had tentatively concluded that the slide had developed between the Venns and the figure above them, and they were planning to take dogs and some sort of sonar into the area to search for another possible victim.
Finding the whole phenomenon fascinating, Emile had begun interviewing local citizens, clergy, and psychiatrists, and dragging them before the cameras. He was now discussing the fruits of his interviews, and their implications, with other media representatives, who turned up their tape recorders whenever Kerry spoke.
‘She poin
ted her spear at us, specifically at my husband, and then we heard a low rumbling and something began to move toward us.’ Kerry’s tale had become more detailed as she was pressed to remember more and more of it. Emile was particularly fascinated by the elaborations, both with the form they were taking and the extent to which they appeared to incorporate the questions she was asked. Setting aside the possibility that she was manipulating the situation in a state of clear-minded purposefulness, it was as if the coma had left her brain in a condition where anything could be suggested to her and become transformed into memory. Thus, both Paris Match and L’Express were able today to find new aspects of her account that were convincingly Joan of Arc, in particular details of the armor. When they asked her if she was close enough to see any signs of the saint’s recorded wounds on the armor, she said, ‘I was fairly far away, but it seems to me there was something, a mark, over the breast.’
Triumphant glances from the media: Joan famously suffered a chest wound. Sportwear logo, thought Emile.
‘Yes, I do believe that in the near-death experience one might have access to perceptions that are valid even if you never can find them again. The vision itself fades when you return to consciousness, but the memory of having seen something remains very clear. That accounts for the desperation people feel trying to recover or recapture that moment of clear vision…’ Kerry was telling L’Express.
Kerry had let Rupert know first thing this morning that she had rethought and relented about Father’s burial. She was still adamant that he not remain in England, but now that her mind was stronger, she admitted that something must be done, though she herself was in no condition to do it. She asked Rupert to let Mr Osworthy know that she would not oppose cremation in England, with the ashes to be brought back to her for burial, or storage, or scattering, in France.
‘After all, St Joan was cremated too,’ she remarked, mysteriously and, to Rupert, rather inappropriately. ‘It’s not as if Harry is old enough to remember anything,’ she added.
With this final issue settled, Posy and Rupert could at last leave for England to represent Kerry, and of course themselves, at the event – was cremation a ritual? A ceremony? Posy didn’t know how to describe it; and one of them would bring the ashes back to Kerry. From London, Mr Osworthy, sounding relieved, and evidently under some pressure to remove Father’s body from the Brompton Hospital Morgue, urged them to make haste.
It was just as well she was leaving, Posy thought. As well as with mindless longing and grief, she was struggling with remorse – struggling not to feel it whenever she was with Victoire, when it took the form of shame for her betrayal of her beautiful new sister, or with Emile, when it took the form of desire and her sense of its hopelessness, her feeling that only to see him would be enough, in the long future of, if she was lucky, buying trips to Paris on behalf of the Rahni Boutique. She had never felt such longing as she felt for Emile; it kept at her like a rash.
Before leaving this afternoon, they were to have a word with Monsieur de Persand, whom Victoire knew as a friend of her parents, and who at her mother’s request would presumably be counseling them on their rights – hers, Harry’s, Posy’s, and Rupert’s, now that Papa had died in England where things were so different. He had suggested an eleven o’clock meeting in the dining room.
Rupert decided to go out for a few runs first. It was certainly his last day of skiing for God knew how long. As he was putting his skis on at the edge of the run from the hotel to the uphill lift, he could watch Robin Crumley and his friends the prince Whatevers piling into a taxi. The doorman was heaping suitcases into the trunk. Then Amy came out of the hotel with Kip, and as they were laying out their skis, Crumley saw her and waved violently.
‘Amy, Amy, à bientôt à Paris ! A bientôt!’ he cried. She fastened him with her dimpled smile and waved her mittened hand. He continued to wave through the back window of the taxi as it pulled away. Rupert waved too.
He came in at ten-thirty and turned in his skis for good. Persand was sitting at a table for four in the deserted dining room. Oddly, his companion at last night’s dinner – they had presumed she was Madame de Persand – sat at another table reading the International Herald Tribune and didn’t greet them. Perhaps her pregnancy made her dislike strangers before lunch, or perhaps it was a discretion issue, to do with the privacy of Father’s will. Kip and Harry weren’t there, and needless to say, not Kerry.
After the formalities of ordering them coffee and croissants, Monsieur de Persand gave a little peroration. ‘Madame Chastine and Madame Crawford Venn – the latter I have not met – have suggested I explain to you a little of the process following the death of someone who owns property in France. Mr Venn’s notaire in the village of Saint-Gond has requested sealing the château while an inventory is made of the contents. This is being done. As Madame Venn is not in residence, it is a normal precaution – there is danger of burglary or pilfering in these remote areas.’ He didn’t need to say, ‘So none of you can go help yourselves,’ but Posy and Rupert both took this sense of his explanation, and saw Victoire rustle and draw herself up with her Gallic pout.
Since they had no intention of looting the château, and not seeing what this had to do with them, they nodded with puzzlement. It seemed a hardship for Kerry, if she planned to go home, to have her house sealed up. Rupert pointed this out. Persand shrugged.
‘With the notaire, Maître Lepage, I have already written the Tribunal of the Conseil d’Etat to begin the necessary process of the disposition of the estate. There will be taxes, that is the most serious concern for you.’
Only Victoire frowned in alarm. Posy and Rupert, believing themselves out of it, took some little satisfaction that it would be Kerry, at least, who would pay the taxes.
‘Then, when it comes to a large property – some might say a cumbersome property – and with several heirs in common, you will need to discuss whether you will be selling it, or if not, how to maintain it and to whom assign responsibilities. I have not yet heard whether Madame Venn – the present Madame Venn – has the usufruit, that is, whether she has a right to stay in it for her lifetime. Unless a French will is found, that would not be automatically the case. Of course, the infant will have his share in it, along with you, and no court would deny her the right to stay there to care for her child. Nor would you, I’m sure, but in case of a sale… you can see there are issues to be settled. There is a commercial press, I’m told? Who is to run it?’
‘Wait a minute,’ Rupert said. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘What can happen is that some heirs will wish to sell, others wish to keep a property, some to buy out the others, et cetera. The worst thing that can happen is acrimony; I do advise you to keep things as cooperative and amicales as possible.’
‘But Father didn’t leave us his château,’ said Posy. ‘Naturally.’
‘The château is in France and therefore subject to the laws in France, mademoiselle, that much is clear. French law will govern property in France.’ He went on to explain some of the conditions of French law, delicately noting that there was also an issue covered by French law, originally the ‘Loi de 12 Brumaire, An II,’ 1793, though subsequently amended, wherein even an illegitimate daughter was to get a share.
That is, Father’s French property would go to his children. They gaped. His children, themselves. They asked him to repeat this, to explain it. This startling reversal of fortune, or poison gift, whichever it was to be, so caught them unaware that they at first fell silent.
‘My God, my God,’ Posy moaned deliriously. ‘It’s true, then? We’re rich?’
‘Rich?’ Monsieur de Persand cautioned. ‘I wouldn’t say so. The taxes alone will be immense – but we will know more after our consultations with the English tax people.’
Sad as he was about Father, Rupert, hearing Monsieur de Persand’s words, suddenly saw what a gift he was to receive. Beyond the château, he would receive a vocation. He would take over Father’s press! This filial a
ct would solve all the problems of his life. He had always had a taste for books, and now his experience of the world of finance, though not extensive, had given him a certain familiarity with business, and at least the conviction that he could learn publishing. He’d established rapport with Mr Delamer, who ran other aspects of the modest empire Father was being discovered to have had. It all made perfect sense. His heart overflowed with relief and love for Father.
The more Rupert thought about it, the more he was drawn to the life of a publisher. In fact, the idea was thrilling. He relished a publisher’s independence, and a life in the south of France, a terrain practically reserved for English people. The only obstacle was Kerry, who might possibly hope to run the press herself and naturally had a superior claim to it, if she wanted it. He had no idea about Kerry, what her hopes and tastes might be, if any – he didn’t think that Americans were often drawn to such chancy, humanistic enterprises. But it was clear that whatever the moral thing to do, it was they, not Kerry, who were inheriting and would decide, a remarkable reversal of fortunes that put him in an entirely admiring frame of mind about France. Victoire said, ‘Bien sûr! It is wisely done, and I for my part have no doubt we will all be models of cooperation.’ Then she moved off so rapidly after the interview, barely telling them goodbye, so cold in manner that cooperation seemed unlikely.
‘Sealed? She cannot even stay in her home?’ said Osworthy on the telephone later, worrying about Kerry. ‘The French treat widows appallingly – it’s practically suttee.’ If he was at all pleased for Posy and Rupert, he didn’t say so.
*
Rupert was elated, but after the interview with Monsieur de Persand, Posy went to her room to cry, in a mixture of sadness and relief. Tears had crowded against her nose during the conversation and made her head hurt. She felt that a week of tears was waiting to flow, but when she got into her room, she couldn’t make them come. The crushing hopelessness of everything, Father’s tragedy, the stupidity of living, the complete ruin of her own life, the sudden gift of a château – mortal and worldly, these things were all impacted in her sinuses and behind her ears, making an intolerable ache that would not dissolve into tears.
L'Affaire Page 24