Miss Walther took Harry to walk in the corridor. Amy tried to master a certain irritation she felt as she sat there. Even stuck, she reminded herself, a train was a wonderful invention, collective and efficient, a fine example of mutual aid. It was the automobile, an aspect of selfish individualism, that had ruined America. Who had invented the train? The steam engine, for that matter? She could almost remember. Robert Fulton? Or was that the steamboat? Watt? Other inventors came to mind. Eli Whitney: cotton gin. What good had school done if you were doomed to forget the simple facts you learned there? She hoped the familiar names had simply retreated to another storage area of her brain, blocked by French words, and phrases like Défense de fumer, that no one paid attention to and smoked anyway.
In the growing cold, her mind reviewed the past days. Besides the Otto mistake, she understood that she had made a mistake meddling in the affair of Mr Venn: life’s lessons must be assimilated, not just received. The lesson was that having the money to solve a problem does not absolve you from examining the problem personally to be sure you do the right thing. She should have informed herself about Mr Venn’s condition and not accepted at face value wishful opinions flavored by hope, venality, or nationalism. Had she talked to the doctor herself, for instance, she might have appreciated the true situation as she now saw it: Osworthy spiriting away the moribund Venn for reasons of his own. Okay, she’d assimilated that.
Her reflection in the dark window showed someone who looked exactly as she had ten days ago, yet concealed, already, some experiences, some conclusions, unavailable then. Some things remained to be understood, but they eluded her. Were they intellectual or to do with the heart? Were they specific to Europe, or could she learn them anywhere? Was there something about California that impeded these hoped-for discoveries? Maybe Paris would provide whatever they were. Despite her self-reproach, her spirit lifted at this reminder that her adventure was to continue.
PART 4
Paris
When it comes to happiness, it has only one use,
to make unhappiness possible.
– Albert Camus
Personal salvation is granted to those
who seek the salvation of all.
– Nikolai Berdaeyev
32
‘Makeaballbouncy, makeaballbouncy, makeaballbouncy…’ Amy sang this phrase at various pitches until it satisfied April Stanton, her teacher, another member of what Amy had come to think of as Géraldine Chastine’s American Paris Mafia. Her homework was a series of ohms and eehms, which, though April had assured her that her speaking voice didn’t have the timbre Europeans seemed to detest, was designed to cure it anyway. Amy had hoped for a French teacher, a little professor – someone in a garret; but April lived in an Haussmanian apartment in the sixteenth arrondissement and her husband did investment banking.
Amy walked home, across the Pont d’Alma and along the Left Bank. Paris seemed warm compared to Valméri. There was no snow, and steam rose invitingly out of the vents and manholes from an immense underworld beneath the city. You would have expected the homeless to congregate at these points of warmth, but, as Géraldine had explained, ‘There aren’t any homeless in Paris, oh, except the few clochards who resolutely cling to their way of life on metro platforms and never bother anyone.’ Now that she had been here some weeks, it was these outcasts Amy had the most fellow feeling for, as lonesome and without direction as herself.
A lot of minor things had gone wrong, and these had begun to produce doubts, and undermine the normal cheerfulness she had thought she would recover once she got here. Not that everyone hadn’t been nice. Of course they had been as nice as anyone could be, or nicer, making her wonder whether her money might be playing a role. She could not bring herself to really believe this. Apart from the uncertainties of the cooking school, the language school, the voice lessons, and the French dinner parties, three more important things, at least, were seriously worrying her, maybe four.
First, a ripple of unease from California. Her computer and fax machines offended Tammy with their utilitarian ugliness because they were obliged to be in the living room – ‘salon’ – where the phone plug was, and hence had to sit on the beautiful Louis XIV–style bureau, a good eighteenth-century copy. (Bureau = desk.) Amy didn’t understand why the phone company couldn’t put the plug in another room, but so it was.
When the fax was plugged in for the first time, it had almost immediately produced clippings from The New York Times sent by Sigrid regarding impending war plans, and one from the San Jose Mercury News about herself, with an old photo and the story of Joan of Arc, emphasizing the stubborn persistence of Alpine superstitions, now being invoked to conceal military buildups, and accidentally involving innocent Bay Area dotcom entrepreneur Amy Hawkins, accused for mysterious geopolitical purposes yet to be revealed. As Amy so far as she knew had not been accused of anything, this odd news item had something like the effect of a projection of some inner vibration of her own secret worries, mysteriously telegraphed to a California newspaper editor. She tried not to think about this menacing item, but couldn’t quite put it out of her mind.
Then, a growing, vague confusion about having money. Her apartment was extremely pretty and comfortable – she was pleased. It was two floors up, with no elevator, though of course she didn’t need an elevator.
‘It’s just that for this much money, you’d expect one,’ she had observed meekly to Tammy. ‘Really, Amy, you can’t have all the American comforts if you want seventeenth century,’ Tammy had said, as if Amy were a Beverly Hillbilly.
The curtains of gray silk, hugely voluminous, matched the sky. All the time Amy was at Valméri, Tammy or Wendi had been calling with such questions as what did she think of gray, or of silk? Fine, great, Amy had said, and now just slightly permitted herself the observation that a more cheerful color in this cheerless weather might have been prettier.
‘That’s a really Californian idea,’ Tammy had said. ‘Blue and yellow don’t actually look that great in Paris. It’s a question of the light.’
So far, any friction with this unfamiliar culture had been smoothed by Géraldine Chastine or this battery of American women who seemed so attentive and friendly, at first Amy had thought out of fellow feeling. But then she’d had a bill from Tammy for fourteen thousand euros, for some chairs, ‘service,’ and ten percent. This didn’t seem unfair, of course, it just made Amy aware of an element she hadn’t been aware of before, of commerce, reminding her that no one takes you shopping for the fun of it.
Still, Amy knew she would never herself have had the wisdom and experience to choose these particular chairs, which looked somewhat plain, not what you thought of as French-looking chairs with gilded legs and flowery upholstery; these had backs upholstered in black leather, with blond wood arms, and were ‘signed.’ She didn’t completely like them. Tammy’s bill had prepared Amy to expect a number of bills from people who had been helpful this week.
She was worried about Kip too. It had taken a few days to deal with Kip’s situation, a school outside Paris, not very convenient to Kerry’s clinic but only a short trip on the RER, which was a thing they had here in addition to trains, buses, and the metro. Amy missed having a car, would have liked to get into her Audi and whiz around Paris some midnight when all the other cars would be holed up, God knew where they went.
Yet, wandering around on foot was quite thrilling – the beauty of each street, the way the buildings leaned into each other or out over the cobblestones like disapproving elders, the serene Louvre right across the bridge, ‘St Germain,’ the ‘Deux Magots’ – names familiar to her by some mysterious process of osmosis even though she had never for one second instructed herself in the geography of Paris. But she had to work at keeping her level of attention, of being thrilled, up to pitch. She would find herself lapsing into her own thoughts about what was happening in Palo Alto, or the market, or even about her brother’s expected baby. She hoped she wasn’t going to morph into one of thos
e sad, professional aunts with no lives of their own.
Maybe she and Kip would go to the château at Fontainebleau some Saturday and look at what color the curtains were. Poor Kip had been rather ruthlessly installed in the Ecole Bilingue de Versailles, a day school with a small number of boarders, which had consented to take him for a few weeks while his fate was decided or the term ended. Though she had informed herself about all this, Amy had no further hand in making decisions about Kip’s future; but she spoke to him often, almost every night, and knew he was hoping to go back to his regular school in California. Amy admired Kip, he was a brave boy to have done his job by little Harry and now to find himself in a strange land in a strange language – she tried to remember what she herself had been like at age fourteen, and couldn’t remember at all, except to be sure she had been restless and unhappy, and determined to get out of Ukiah.
What happened to Kip next term depended on Kerry’s fate – how the unforeseen death of her husband had left her fixed, whether she could afford his school fees in America, or even whether it might not be better to send him to England, where there were more boarding schools and he would be closer by. Then there were the Swiss schools, though these tended to be depositories for the attention-deficit children of American corporate employees abroad, divorced Eurotrash, or the generally wayward who had gone through all the American schools who would have them.
It was on Amy’s mind that she still had not been to see Kerry. Her ostensible reason had been Kerry’s reserve on the train, giving the strong impression Kerry didn’t want to see her, and perhaps anyone, but she knew this was only a weak excuse. Maybe she was afraid Kerry would realize she had seen Amy on that slope.
She had had more than a few moments of wondering if she should have come to Paris at all. It was going to be a little difficult, unlike at the Hôtel Croix St Bernard, which had been easy, with pleasant people, food and amusement to hand. Here she was on her own alone, despite the charm of her apartment that this pack of nice women had organized in a miraculous period of time, and the list of phone numbers – friends of Géraldine, friends of friends, Tammy, Kerry’s clinic, her doctor, the French teacher, the Etoile Cooking School that everyone said was great, and in English besides. In truth she was a little forlorn. Yet inner resource was a goal in itself; solitude led to it. She reminded herself she had not experienced solitude since – well, she had never experienced solitude, until now, and she didn’t like it. For the first time, and this was her main worry, she felt that her enterprise of self-improvement might fail.
33
Posy had uneasily been able to tell that something was wrong when they first got back to London and Mr Osworthy still hemmed and hawed about the legal situation in England. Finally, Posy and Rupert had been convened to the offices of Osworthy, Park, and George, a straightforward legal firm in Mayfair, to hear about the legacy that Father had left her as his final expression of her value and place in his heart.
Mr Osworthy began by saying, ‘It would seem that England takes the position that the last will and testament of its citizen the late Adrian Venn is in order, leaving everything to his wife, this to include his property in France, a small painting by the artist Bonnard, a house in Randolph Avenue – this latter perhaps the object of some litigation, as it had not been properly rerecorded after his divorce from Mrs Pamela Venn, to whom it had been legally awarded – and a portfolio of shares. If England had its way, Mrs Kerry Venn could expect to have, at the end of the day, more than a million pounds, assuming that the nation of France would allow the death duties on property in France, which was, alas, the main part of Venn’s estate, to be paid in England.’ There would be negotiations; there were tax treaties.
Kerry was getting everything, as expected. Posy had been prepared for this. Rahni boutique, Rahni boutique, forever. Obviously, her and Rupert’s prospects here were dim. All the way back from France she had been telling herself that, and was used to the idea of getting little or nothing, telling herself that her suffering for Father must be a disinterested, even ennobling sort of suffering, a harmonizing emotion with no end but some sort of spiritual idea of being at peace with herself and with her idea of Father, and for him, too, if he could at some level hear her.
But Mr Osworthy had much more to tell them, his jowly face long with concern. Much was to do with the France/England situation, but finally he got to the delicate subject of Posy’s inheritance.
‘Of course he has mentioned you both in his will, as I had told you. Rupert will have ten thousand pounds. Posy – I’m afraid here you have not fared so well.’
‘Just tell me, Mr Osworthy,’ said Posy, with foreboding despite herself.
‘Well, your father was an old-style Englishman, he evidently believed in leaving things to the oldest son, but he did remember you, to the sum of ten pounds, which is a testamentary way of acknowledging you and your position as his daughter… He doesn’t have a large fortune in England, just some shares, things like that…’
‘He left me ten pounds?’
Posy could see that Rupert and Mr Osworthy were watching her for signs of tantrum or breakdown. Though she wanted to say Sod Father and Sod you, Mr Osworthy, she thanked him in a dignified way. She didn’t just then feel how crushing the blow was, maybe had expected it. The capricious unfairness of life in general had been weighing on her so much that this was only confirmation of it. She felt unbodied, a person without weight or power in the world, like a feeble breeze, to have had no effect or such a negative one on her own father, on Emile, no effect on anyone anywhere, as if she had never been born. So she was beyond being wounded by his ten pound legacy, though bitterness was a harder feeling to control. She would have to struggle against bitterness, as she knew it was a soul-destroying emotion, let loose in her like cancer. Such was Father’s wicked power from beyond the grave that he had managed to tarnish all of them with distrust and exasperation.
Rupert for his part was tarnished in his own eyes because he had reacted badly, or felt that he had, to a proposal put to him earlier by his mother, who had by now been forewarned by Mr Osworthy about the unequal treatment Posy and Rupert would receive. He blamed the soulless boredom of bond trading, an activity his colleagues seemed to find wildly exciting, for having affected his character. Before Posy found out about Father’s will, Pamela had floated the idea to him, behind Posy’s back, of splitting his own legacy, the ten thousand pounds, with Posy, without telling her what Father’s will really said, thereby sparing her the sadness of knowing what Father had intended.
She explained her reasoning. ‘We would just say he left you each five thousand. She wouldn’t have to know what the will actually said. I’d pay you back the five thousand, over time – I don’t have the money now, I’m afraid, Rupe. In the long run, you’d come out the same. Could you do this? I’m afraid for Posy. She’ll mind so much.’ She saw Rupert’s startled and disappointed expression.
Rupert was ashamed of himself for hesitating and at the same time felt resentment of his mother for making this request. He couldn’t help thinking that Posy should have anticipated some sort of effect before she pissed Father off. Of course, no one expected Father to die.
‘I could sell the house,’ said Pam. ‘It’s too big anyhow.’
‘God, Pam, can’t you think of something else to make me feel really like a shit?’ But even with his mother’s promise to pay him back, he couldn’t bring himself to split the money with Posy. He thought he might need it right away to get the publishing business. He dithered and temporized, and finally refused.
After the meeting with Mr Osworthy, over tea, Rupert had told Posy about their mother’s handsome concern, and of his own moral failure. He left dangling there for Posy a sort of half offer to loan her the money if she ever needed it. Anyway, it would be months before they actually saw any cash, whether ten or ten thousand, and in the meantime, Rupert was plainly troubled by the feeling that he’d behaved badly, and so had Pam, in putting him in the position of doi
ng so. Pam, for her part, felt that both of the children blamed her for some unstated failing, perhaps in the bedroom, or as a cook, to account for their father’s leaving them in the first place, eventually to find Kerry and perish.
Inheriting part of a château in France went some way to cheer Posy, enough that she’d behaved well to Rupert about the English legacy. ‘I’d rather die than take the bloody money anyway.’
‘Well, five thousand, I don’t know what you’d plan to do with it, but ... if you want it, I ...’
But the château, too, portended problems, just as the suave Monsieur de Persand had predicted. If she was ever to have any money for her own plans (antiquities store, shop dealing in Cashmere shawls, little house in Chelsea…) she would need to sell her share. A piece of crumbling real estate was no use to her. Rupert, on the other hand, was hoping to keep the château and direct Father’s publishing business, the perfect escape from Bondage, as he’d come to call his job in the City. He assumed that their stepmother, Kerry, would welcome some effort like that, though no one had yet discussed it with her. He therefore would prefer to use his English ten thousand pounds toward the death duties owed in France so they would not have to sell the château, a view directly opposed to Posy’s.
In the weeks since then, Posy had languished, less boisterous and combative than Rupert had ever seen her. He spoke of it to Pam. At first they had been thinking that Posy was overreacting to Father’s death, as if she were the sole bereaved. Hadn’t Rupert, too, lost his father? As everyone must eventually lose his father – she wasn’t singled out. Still, she seemed to mourn Father as if his loss was meant to symbolize all the disasters of her life – even though, from what Rupert could see, her life had been relatively disaster free: she was good looking, had a responsible job, a Cambridge degree. Once he was moved to lean across the table and put his arm around her; from the stiffness of her body he came to think that she was worried about more than just Father. Perhaps she was sick, or nearing a breakdown.
L'Affaire Page 26