Rupert, for his part, was trying to find a way to avoid selling the château. The château and press had come to seem to him his whole future, his whole life. With every passing day, in Rupert’s mind, the vines became more fruitful, the one turret of Father’s castle more majestic, its shallow, dried-up moat a silvery pond stocked with little fish and lilies, and the publishing business a national treasure of selfless service to the arts, the whole a monument to Father’s memory and a haven for his loved ones. Rupert was fairly sure Posy was lying low to avoid discussions because she was ashamed of wanting to blight this perfect, preordained plan.
He bore in mind his mother’s offer to sell her house. Was the offer still good if the house truly hadn’t been registered as hers, or was that simply a detail to be straightened out? They discussed it, tentatively. The house might not have been Pam’s during all this time, but if it was, she was willing to sell, she said, between strolls with Rupert around the Louvre or down the Avenue Montaigne. She knew that he would never have gone shopping with her if these issues had not meant a great deal to him, but she could not see that selling her house would help. It might cover the tax liabilities of one, maybe even both, of the children, but where would Victoire and Harry get money to pay theirs? Pamela realized that she, Posy, and Rupert would have to go back to England; Rupert had to work, and Pamela had her normal life to return to. One couldn’t stay indefinitely in a French hotel, as desirable as that seemed. Pam was torn about her duty to her children and still worried about Posy – part of her said that Posy must be all right, but part was frantic.
‘You’ll have to take the ashes to Kerry,’ she said to Rupert. ‘I’m not going to do it.’
‘Mr Osworthy should do it, that would be more fitting,’ said Rupert. ‘He’s staying here, we can leave – the box – here for him.’ They uneasily decided on this course.
‘Have you by chance heard from your sister?’ Géraldine asked Victoire after talking to Pamela. Victoire had not. For all she knew, Posy was installed somewhere with Emile, but she didn’t share this concern with her mother. Géraldine also mentioned Posy to Emile, one afternoon as he stopped by to see the children.
‘They don’t know where she is. She has vanished from her hotel, leaving her father’s ashes with the concierge!’
Emile had no reply, but felt a twinge of concern. He was always very fond of people he had slept with. He remembered Posy’s agitation and sadness in Valméri, and hoped she hadn’t done anything desperate. He wondered if he should confess his role to Géraldine, who always had an accurate reading of human, especially female, nature, and would probably reassure him. But he delayed doing this, would wait a few days longer.
Despite the shadow of Kerry’s lawsuit, Amy’s week returned her to the normal rhythm of her Paris life. Beyond the photograph in the paper, there had been no repercussions of events in the Alps, though she could not shake the feeling that word of her money was somehow coloring the way people saw her, in Paris as in the Alps, at the sorts of occasions Géraldine was taking, or, increasingly often, sending her to, or that she was being invited to by others as her acquaintance grew – posh charity cocktails, art openings, theater. She was always going somewhere; she could never just see a movie or have a hamburger.
She also couldn’t escape the feeling that despite her meek cooperativeness, Géraldine didn’t approve of her. Géraldine may have liked her all right, but when it came to her clothes and hair, and to her general presentation of herself to the world, she knew she was globally unsatisfactory. Géraldine had made her have various ‘soins de visage,’ and leg waxes (jambe entière), though these things were hard to work into her strenuous schedule of lessons and social occasions. On her own she had tried the method she had observed Victoire using, perfume between the fingers and, her own idea, why not toes?
Amy was certainly not the first American to feel inadequate to some concept of womanhood known to the French – Tammy and Wendi had reported still having the same abashed feelings, and between them they had lived in Paris nearly forty years. Yet it seemed to Amy that when you studied them objectively, most French people looked no better than Americans, just thinner. The clothes of people on their way to work or waiting on you in shops usually were the same slightly misjudged skirts and pants and jackets, the same last year’s overcoats, as Americans would wear.
In fact, Amy had begun to find that Americans also looked odd to her now, when spied on the street or overheard talking, their clothes too casual and too brightly colored. She found herself dressing with care even to go to the Monoprix, as if expecting, even hoping, to run into someone she knew. In all, she felt daunted and confused by the general issue of culture and increasingly wished to go home, though she despised herself for it. She found herself calling her parents quite often – she could tell it amazed them. But talking to her parents also had the effect of stiffening her resolve to stay, as they conjured up visions of Ukiah, SUVs, and freeways, things she didn’t miss at all. Though she loved her parents, she had resolved since about the age of ten not to live like them. She could remember resolving to have an unusual life, but when she got older, she realized she didn’t have a definition of life, if only because she didn’t know enough. Her definition was forming now, now that all was possible, and that was why she must stay.
After a week of blissful separation from familiar things, Posy had relented and called home; once back in England, Pamela Venn found a message from her on the answering machine that all was well, she was travelling, and she would be keeping in touch with Monsieur de Persand about the legal situation. She hoped her mother had found a parcel at the hotel, and she apologized for not dealing with it herself. Pamela was reassured, but Rupert had less to feel happy about. Alas, hours spent poring over the vineyard and press accounts and talking to bankers in both London and Paris had produced no feasible plan for saving the château – it didn’t look like a good investment to anyone. There seemed no way to avoid having to sell.
37
Amy was looking out from her apartment at the Seine River, a scene in monochrome gray and brown of mud-colored water and bare trees, a scene in grisaille, a word she had learned looking at charcoal-colored pictures in the Louvre that seemed to render accurately the actual palette of nature in wintry Europe. Perhaps the sun never shone here in March, but she told herself it didn’t matter, a small price for the pleasure of acquiring a word like grisaille, not that she would be likely to need it.
She could look down on the very spot where she had bumped into Emile. In recent days Amy had not stopped thinking about Emile. She tried to think about him calmly, but was conscious that she couldn’t. She went over and over their coffee at the Flore, regretting her rudeness and remembering everything he had said, the very words and also his tone and expression. This was a severe attack of esprit de l’escalier, remembering every wrong word she had uttered.
Perhaps his sudden friendliness hadn’t been what she hoped for, an attraction to her person – instead, he had congratulated her on her character. She had never been congratulated for her character before, that she knew of. People usually liked each other for more visual, superficial reasons – reasons that could describe her liking for Emile. She could no longer conceal from herself that he was the only person she had met in France she really wanted to talk to, let alone go to bed with. Yes. Nor could she refuse to recognize, alas, that of all the men she had met in France, he, the man she was most drawn to, was exactly the kind of bad-news man her aunts, mother, and an immense literature of those rich-girl tragedies warned her against – married, faithless, foreign. Maybe she was having the ultimate French experience after all.
Everyone found him attractive, even French cabinet ministers, why should she be any different? And she had refused his friendship, his apology, his overture, even though it was probably nothing romantic, though he had mentioned beauty… She wondered if he believed that beauty was an idea thought out in detail, for this was also a definition of character. Waves of self
-reproach made her almost dizzy. She had mishandled every relationship – her ski instructor, the baron, and now the one she really would like to have. The way a desire, once hardened into consciousness, becomes acute, so did her hindsight condemnation of her actions. She had ruined her own life by rudeness to the one man in France she wanted, and this failure symbolized the entire failure of her enterprise here. Defeat, in fact. She would never want the things she could have, and couldn’t have what she wanted, even if she knew what it was. How American, Emile would say.
As the days passed, she had been trying to cure herself of her infatuation for Emile – for such she had come to call it – by thinking about his relentless, rather ignorant criticism of Americans, based on no knowledge, and about his suspicious knowledge of enlightened social thinkers like Kropotkin. Was he a communist? Not a category of person Amy had ever personally met, as they didn’t exist in northern California, though of course there were Marxists at the numerous local universities, just as there were deconstructionists and new historicists – it depended on when you went to graduate school. But if he were a communist, he probably wouldn’t be in this conservative French government.
Well, she didn’t need to try to understand French politics, an impossibility, just as it was impossible to believe in French religious superstitions. She had heard that people were being taken to see the spot in Valméri where Joan of Arc had stood.
She had called Paul-Louis for the latest Joan news, and he’d told her that more than one hundred eighty people had now made the chilly trip by Sno-Cat, twenty-five euros each, an optional excursion they were offering at the Ecole de Ski Française. The saint herself had not been seen again.
She also called Joe Daggart. He had no news of Joan of Arc, but reported in a friendly way that a German town was petitioning to be rid of its American air base, citing the Alpine avalanches as evidence of their claims that the noise of American C-5 Galaxies had ruined their lives.
‘Valméri is not on the normal flight path for those planes,’ Joe said. ‘But we don’t know everything yet.’
Despite her belief that she was in no legal jeopardy, Amy was also unsettled by the daily phone calls from Sigrid, and now from the firm of San Francisco lawyers to whom her legal problems had been referred, affirming that Kerry’s lawsuit had indeed been filed; they were talking to their overseas colleagues about who should represent her in France, if she insisted on staying there, instead of prudently skipping.
‘Come home, Amy. With the changing world situation, we’d all feel better if you just came home.’
However she decided about that, perhaps she should accede to Géraldine’s suggestions and cut her hair. She had not cut it since high school, since she had learned to braid it by looking behind her in a mirror. Her long pigtail suited her, she had always thought, and people had always affirmed. She had done other things Géraldine had hinted must be done to achieve a soignée perfection – for instance a sort of sandpaper massage, gommage, so like their word for damage: dommage. Géraldine was usually right about everything, so maybe Amy should listen to her about her hair.
She didn’t think her plans were working. She didn’t feel more cultivated and wise, though her skiing had improved in Valméri. She could make cream soups but would never speak French. The thought of home continued to draw her, and the negatives of staying outweighed the positives. A. in little more than a month she had found herself in legal jeopardy, B. she had contributed to a death, C. her heart was broken, or soon would be, D. she had no one to talk to, really, and was not making progress in those skills that had formerly seemed so desirable, or at least these were turning out to be nothing she couldn’t learn at home. She herself was the same! She didn’t feel herself to have changed. Still, would you know if you had changed, or was change a more insidious process imperceptible to the subject of it? She hoped she might have changed a tiny bit… Yes, she would go home. And she would go see Kerry.
Once these courses of action were definitively decided, her heart lifted with an almost jubilant sense of relief. She would have a huge party – let Géraldine figure out how to do it – throw around a lot of money and leave, and never have to think about grisaille and gouache again, or, better yet, would have permanently acquired these useful art terms and lots of other terms and upgraded her skiing by quite a lot, and these would stand her in good stead forever. Nothing was a waste! Yet she knew that underneath her happiness at having taken a decision lay a core of misery, perhaps the most intense – and nearly the only – misery that she had experienced, life till now having given her little to complain of. Was she at last in the crucible of pain that would forge for her a fine, perceptive character, an infinite understanding – maturity? Well, she hoped so – she hoped this misery, this feeling of being close to tears at any minute, would net some benefit.
For Posy it was a time of heady delight. Days ago, after the scene with Rupert and Mr Osworthy, Posy and Robin had crept off for a few days in a slightly dingy hotel near the Gare du Nord until they could take up an invitation from Bette Maricheval at her country place. After Bette’s, they had spent a few days at a sweet, ivy-covered auberge in Normandy. Now they were back in Paris, fulfilling an oath Posy had taken to perform a reverence at the tomb of Napoleon. Maisie de Contelanne, off to the country, had loaned them her apartment for the rest of the week, a luxurious place in the sixteenth arrondissement, where the maid was circumspect and let them sleep late – and nap impulsively. Otherwise it was a little desultory sightseeing or a social engagement in the evening. Robin’s French acquaintance was nearly as wide as his English one, and he rather enjoyed the reactions when he turned up with a Miss Venn. It had begun to dawn on him that the hostesses weren’t entirely pleased at the addition of Posy, but at least he had the fun of astonishing them.
‘I have been coming to Paris since my schooldays, and yet I’ve never been here,’ he remarked now, his face pensive, looking at Posy. How beautiful she is, he was thinking, so fresh and high-colored, so blooming, the epitome of the girl to tumble between the hedgerows, if hedgerows there had been in the seventh arrondissement of Paris. If he could not quite separate her from his notion of her family’s château, it was because his idea of her as châtelaine was so stirring. She would know about gardens, about roses – two subjects he had already worked on with distinction. His lines on the rose were widely quoted. He and Posy of course would not live in a castle but in a cottage, and also in his flat off Kensington Road. He saw her warming milk, arranging flowers in a simple blue jug, the scene presenting itself to his imagination as if painted by Matisse in primary blues, reds, and yellows. So much younger! Eventually, her appetites would exceed his, if they didn’t already. Never mind, it was possible that by blooming late, desire would last longer, like autumn chrysanthemums or asters.
‘Oh, Robin,’ Bette Maricheval had rebuked him at her drinks party on the Wednesday. ‘I knew in my heart you’d choose an English rose eventually. As a française and as a hostess, I cannot but be disappointed with you. In fact I had already made a cross over you. He is lost, I told myself.’ She smiled at Posy to show she didn’t mean to be rude to her. ‘I didn’t even think of you for the Longchamps party you used to love so much…’
Robin too clearly had seen that his French circle was going to dwindle; for an instant he weighed the relative merits of la vie mondaine on the Continent and the domestic comforts of England, and had no question but that the latter were preferable, but anyway why should the French not also love his comely girl in her charming flowered dress, and – he knew, if they didn’t – underneath, her red lace bra and suspenders?
So handsome, though thin, Posy was saying to herself. He’s got to gain weight, needs some taking care of. They say he has a good chance of being poet laureate next time round. Posy loved to look at Robin thinking. She had been surprised by the transformative power of love, no matter whom you loved, evidently, since she could just barely remember being in love with Emile a few days ago. By love itself
she was transformed, and the transformation in her perception of Robin had been sudden, too, almost like one of those electronically generated images on a police screen, his face morphing from thin and a bit older to handsome, sensitive, and in his prime. Never mind about Emile. Perhaps being in love with one man makes you more receptive to the next? Perhaps love is just a state of vulnerability, or receptivity, as in newborn ducklings. Is receptivity the same as ‘the rebound’? No matter, she could see the healthy side of it, for the feeling was the same, of intense joy at being with the loved one, and unreserved admiration. By means of this emotion, she would be suddenly transformed into a good person, joined to a man whose work commanded admiration, and in English, thank heavens. Whatever the role of desire in her now almost forgotten feeling for Emile, her feeling for Robin included desire and was more intellectually involving. So there.
She was performing a promised pilgrimage to Napoleon’s tomb, Napoleon, wise author of the law that had provided for her over Father’s wishes. Gazing down on the tombeau of the emperor, she could not but think of Father’s ashes, back at that hotel, and of how she had shirked the unpleasant, sad task of delivering them to his wife. She knew she was dilatory but so much had intervened, and Rupert could jolly well do it. Besides, ashes weren’t Father, they were just matter, inert powder, the very enemy and opposite of life and memory.
L'Affaire Page 32