L'Affaire

by Diane Johnson

  ‘Well, it seems to me they’re just trying to cooperate in an effort to get to the bottom of the avalanche,’ Amy persisted. ‘Cooperation is a useful social ideal.’ She recognized from their smiles that she was being earnest and literal-minded.

  ‘Few social ideals survive their translation from the abstract to useful application,’ Emile said. ‘In their abstract form they are useful, in their practical application they amount to meddling.’

  ‘So you think we shouldn’t apply social ideals for fear of damaging them?’ said Amy, taking a certain legalistic interest in the point.

  ‘Apply them by all means, forgivingly. Be aware of the practical difficulties.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t that apply to absence and presence? In your argument, you should be forgiving of their snowmobiles, or my airlift.’

  Emile looked at her sharply and said, ‘I suppose so.’

  Just now, great platters of beef jerky, potatoes, and slices of cheese were brought, and they turned to the business of sticking little panfuls of cheese under the grill to melt, and scraping it over the other stuff, engrossed in the gooey, fatty, and delicious result. This process was admired by the Americans at the next table, who leaned over with friendly smiles.

  ‘Say, what is the name of that, that you’re having?’ asked one. Paul-Louis told them, and the Americans ordered it for themselves.

  ‘I think they are charmants in their white combinaisons,’ said Marie-France, sliding her glance toward the Americans. ‘In any case, it wouldn’t be these men who set off the avalanche.’

  ‘Tomorrow we’ll be in England,’ said Posy suddenly, over a mouthful of cheese and grison. ‘All of this a dream.’ It seemed to Amy a banal observation; she was surprised at the gloom of the young woman’s tone. Despite the legalities, shouldn’t they be happy to have their father safely installed in England, with specialists, royally appointed consultants, and modern expertise?

  Paul-Louis refilled their glasses with wine, skipping Emile, who was obliged to advance his glass.

  ‘Oh, excusez-moi, monsieur. I thought that, well – I thought in your religion…’

  Emile gave a sardonic smile, which seemed to say, What do you think my religion is?

  Paul-Louis looked mortified, and reddened as if he had been struck.

  ‘I’ll always think of this lunch,’ Posy persevered on the socially neutral topic, but wondering what Emile’s religion was, actually.

  ‘So will I,’ said Robin Crumley, with what seemed a rather inappropriate romantic smile at Amy, or perhaps she was the only person to notice it. She was at pains not to react, beyond her usual, to some minds rather general, smile, so American.

  Rupert understood Posy’s sadness, not unlike his own, after this taste they were having of unmediated freedom and hotel luxury – enjoyable except for the bedside duties to do with Father. His boring job in the City and Posy’s boutique would henceforward seem even more confining and low. A taste of pleasure ruins you for sacrifice, he had to admit.

  Raclette ingredients were prepared for the Americans, the long forks distributed, two other machines plugged in at their table. At the insertion of the second plug, all the grills on both tables sputtered and died as one, the lights went out, and the music went off. The distant fuses had blown. Those at Amy’s table, in their satiated state, merely blinked with regret, but a great cry of dismay rose from the hungry Americans. The proprietor rushed off somewhere; bustle and alarm ruled for rather longer, it seemed to Amy, than would have happened in the U.S., where you could just reset the circuit breakers.

  ‘Father must be in the sky by now,’ continued Posy in the dimness. ‘Mr Osworthy too. They could be in London right now, and we are here.’ There seemed no necessary reply. The waiter appeared with a pitcher of a clear liquor, the local gennepi, he explained, to ease them through this unexpected hiatus, as the cheese hardened on their plates. The hungry Americans remonstrated good-naturedly, and one, standing up, offered to help with the situation.

  ‘Go, Mr Fuse,’ said his companions.

  ‘Yes, Mr Venn is in the air, thanks to Miss Hawkins,’ said Emile. ‘Beyond the reach of the quirky laws of France.’ Posy and Rupert didn’t need reminding of this aspect of the airplane rescue.

  ‘I must say, we weren’t entirely convinced that Father needed to go… in his condition,’ Rupert said to Amy. By convinced, said his tone, he meant ‘happy.’ Weren’t entirely happy that Father should go, had mixed feelings perhaps.

  ‘Another example of unilateral American meddling, with no regard for the consequences to others,’ Emile went on.

  ‘Why didn’t you just come out and say you didn’t want him to go?’ said Amy, beginning again to feel put upon, tired of this subject the man seemed unable to let go of. ‘I don’t understand all this terminal reticence. I was only trying to help. Your lawyer, Mr Osworthy, seems to feel he can be saved.’ It was only now getting through to her that maybe they didn’t want their father saved, even. How naive she was, not to have seen that. Of course! They had explained to her that there was some detail of international law, and now she finally grasped that the noble Mr Osworthy was having to override a rebellious group of disappointed would-be heirs. Amy respected even more their polite reluctance to have said anything, a reticence, after all, known as a national characteristic they probably couldn’t even help having.

  ‘Americans are generally good natured, they try to be helpful,’ said Robin, whether speaking of the American fuse-mender or trying to repair his remark about the female voice.

  ‘No one cares about my sister,’ said Kip suddenly. Receiving their startled looks, he stammered on. ‘She was awake yesterday. No one talks about her at all, she might as well be a big lump of cheese… she might as well be dead.’

  Startled, they protested. ‘But she is doing so well, we are all so concerned…’

  ‘Harry too. Harry is a person, you know – he’s a little kid, he doesn’t know what’s happening…’

  Amy, despite her affection for him, had consigned Kip to the category of adolescent boy, that is to say, an unknown and unknowable being. Now she looked at him more closely. He had expressed these feelings before, but she hadn’t considered she could do anything about them, and so had paid little attention. Now she could see the passionate expression of his eyes, the depth of his uncertainty and resentment. The others muttered reassuringly that they thought of Kerry all the time, she was doing so well, it wouldn’t do to uproot her and so on.

  ‘If Kerry has a chance, it should have been her that went to London. That’s what they do on M*A*S*H, they airlift the people that have the best chance,’ said Kip.

  Amy saw she was at fault about that, absolutely, hadn’t paid enough attention to Kerry’s situation, had believed what Kip had told her about the reassuring things the doctors were saying about his sister.

  ‘I’m sure we all deserve these salutary rebukes,’ Emile said, but his was the only mea culpa, and of questionable sincerity.

  As the interval without electricity extended, others of the Americans got up and left the table, apparently to help Mr Fuse in the troubleshooting effort. Since no one in Amy’s party knew anything about electricity, they all sat passively, glumly regarding their lumpy blobs of congealing cheese. Despite Emile, a measure of camaraderie was developing between the two tables, especially between the Americans and Madame Chatigny-Dové, who was seated closest to them, and passed them over some potatoes and cornichons. ‘To keep you alive.’ She laughed flirtatiously.

  Eventually the lights came back on and the grills began to reheat. The Americans came back to their table, shaking their heads at what they had seen of a Byzantine wiring system completely outside their experience. The gratified proprietor attended them with excessive friendliness, and poured large vials of his fiery pine-bush liqueur for them, their cheese melted, talk rose. Marie-France and Rupert fell into more conversation with them; they confirmed that they were there to look into the snow conditions and avalanche control pr
ograms in the area.

  ‘Damage control,’ said one. Amy didn’t think they made it clear enough that they’d had nothing to do with the avalanches. She noticed that Kip hung on their words.

  When they had finished and the machines were taken away, the waiter, with that special smirk waiters use to discuss dessert, proposed sorbets and tartes au pommes. Amy was relieved that they weren’t expected, after all that cheese, to eat another cheese course, too, though she had already learned to like it, and to distinguish Bries from Camemberts. They followed with coffee and more of the local gennepi. She had begun to be worried that the hour was getting late, but the others seemed content to linger at the table, and now Paul-Louis had stopped glancing out of the window. Perhaps in his mind they had already gone past the time they had to leave if they were returning on skis. The Americans called for their check, paid, and clattered down the wooden stairs to the toilets in their heavy snowmobile boots, then up them and out to start up their noisy vehicles again. Kip said he wanted to look at these machines and went outside with them. Paul-Louis made no effort to move his party.

  The noise of snowmobile engines again split the Alpine peace: Emile rolled his eyes at Posy and Rupert. Now Paul-Louis had signalled for the check. This brought to them all the usual moment of check anxiety. They were seven, not all of them Paul-Louis’s clients, so Amy hoped he wasn’t going to think of paying for everybody from his low wage. If it were just Paul-Louis and she, she would pay, the established protocol for client and instructor, but the authority with which he waved at the waiter made her fear that some impulse of proprietary French hospitality had carried him away. With luck, the other men would intervene and slap down their credit cards the way Americans would have known to do.

  However, this didn’t happen. The others stirred and buttoned their sweaters. Only Rupert said, ‘Let me…’ in a concerned voice unmatched by any gesture toward his pocket. Everyone seemed under a spell, including Paul-Louis, who, as the waiter placed the big bill before him, had the numb look of someone who has just put his life savings on a horse to win. Such a moment of unspoken struggle, both interior and social, lasts only a split second but seems much longer, eons, until Amy got out her card and placed it on the tray. This brought on a flurry of movements and murmurs, ‘Oh, no, let me, let’s split it, thanks,’ as if they had all been released from the evil force that had paralyzed them. Posy pulled on her red sweater and went off to the bathroom. Amy just hoped her card wasn’t maxed out after the big expense of the airplane to London. But no.

  Amy certainly didn’t mind paying for lunch, but one detail troubled her a little: why had the others let her do it with such docility? It must mean they knew she could afford it, not that it was a secret, but them knowing made her uneasy in a way she couldn’t identify, which was strange, because she was totally happy to pay, it was nothing. She hoped she wasn’t getting complicated and paranoid about this issue of money, or stingy, the way rich people often got.

  The waiter brought the mound of parkas. Though from inside the restaurant the weather had only been perceptible as a darkening sky, when they stepped outside they could see that it was snowing heavily. ‘Eet ees too late now to ski,’ Paul-Louis said. Perhaps he had allowed them to sit there so long because he’d known all along they wouldn’t be able to ski back. Perhaps he had planned it like this, thought them too feeble to make it back, or figured he’d done enough. ‘It’s better if you go in the shuttle,’ the little mountain bus that travelled a circuit of villages returning skiers and hotel workers to where they had started. Amy had to admit she felt a certain relief. Like the others, she was full of juniper liqueur and wine.

  There was another problem. Kip had vanished. So had his snowboard, indicating that he had set off alone, or with the Americans, to return by the pistes the way they had come. Paul-Louis frowned, his expression concerned, though he only shook his head as if in despair at youth, recklessness, Americans. He seemed to hesitate about what to do. In only a couple of hours, the snow had made more progress than they could have imagined, a cold wind had mounted as it had done every afternoon all week, and the road was already glassy with ice.

  Paul-Louis did decide that Posy should not drive her car. ‘Not without chains. You can get your car tomorrow.’

  ‘We have to go to London tonight,’ Posy protested.

  Paul-Louis was still weighing whether he should go after Kip or stay to help the others. ‘I will drive your car back, mademoiselle,’ he decided. ‘I cannot let you do it. This is my fault for letting you eat for so long. You will not be able to leave Valméri tonight, either, mademoiselle.’ Posy gratefully handed over her keys, but mentally reserved the option to leave if she felt like it. Paul-Louis called the ski patrol to alert them that the boy was skiing alone on the way back to Valméri, and showed the others where to wait for their bus. ‘I’ll go with Paul-Louis,’ Rupert said, ‘in case of a problem with the car.’

  25

  The little van with its load of skiers and hotel workers was on time despite the weather, and, though feeling full and relaxed, they put their skis onto its rack and climbed aboard with a mild sense of anticlimax at missing the ski home. The bus was already crowded with skiers and chambermaids in printed housedresses and serviceable boots and parkas, chattering away among themselves in the rather harsh-sounding local dialect. Posy and Marie-France were given seats by men who stood up, but Emile, Robin, and Amy had to stand in front by the driver, swaying and clinging, beginning to catch some of the hilarity that seemed already to be infecting the van. It was clear that the driver was hurrying on his rounds, perhaps fearing that people could be stranded in a worsening storm. No road conditions served to abate his speed as they swayed and swerved, people laughing louder with every skid.

  It was only minutes until, with a dreamlike deliberation, the van seemed to sway its rear end to and fro like a dog shaking off water, and then began to slide sidewise as if carried on a moving sidewalk. The passengers felt themselves hurtle around inside, banging into one another, and then they found themselves buried in a bank of snow, blueish darkness against the windows, all this enacted in a strange, elongated, silent instant. Immediately cries rose up. The driver shouted ‘Ça va?’ – a phrase Amy had learned means ‘Is everything okay?’ ‘Ça va, ça va,’ everyone shouted back, though a child had begun to cry. The driver got out of his seat and pushed past those who were lying against the entrance to try the sliding door, which opened. Snow tumbled in.

  They had gone off the road and come to rest in a gully already filled with soft snow, which had saved them but now engulfed them. They lay only a few feet below the roadbed, but would have to be dug out before they could move, and in the end would probably have to be towed. The relative calm with which the passengers reacted suggested that such events were commonplace. The first step seemed to be to dig a means of escape for themselves, but in the meantime it bothered Amy that the driver restarted and kept the motor running so that the mufflers were undoubtedly blocked by snow. Didn’t they know about carbon monoxide? She couldn’t begin to explain, and she comforted herself that as she had never heard of whole parties of Alpine bus passengers dying together of carbon monoxide poisoning, perhaps she was being overanxious.

  ‘Restez-là restez là,’ the driver enjoined them. The men hoisted themselves out through windows and counseled the lightly dressed maids and the children to stay inside. Amy followed Marie-France when their turn came to clamber out, but got right back in again, feeling herself in the way of the digging as the men, including Emile and Robin, these two with their hands bare, began to flail away the snow from the sides of the vehicle. To Amy’s relief, the engine had died and the driver didn’t get back inside to start it again. The cold grew intense.

  Tribal forms of cooperation are sometimes quite exotic, including those practiced by Alpine tribes, to Amy’s admiring analysis. The digging lasted for forty minutes before the men declared a path to be cleared, the engine was started again, and the men came back into
the van, voices raised in laughter and satisfaction at the teamwork and manly duties manfully performed. The French maids praised them, and, amazing to Amy, took the icy hands of the men and guided them up inside their anoraks, and even inside their blouses to warm them. The men gleefully thanked the ladies, with a great deal of leering laughter, the women laughing too, despite cold hands on their breasts. ‘Ici, pauvres hommes,’ they said, crossing their arms across their chests the better to enfold the hands.

  To Amy’s further surprise, Robin Crumley had fallen into the collective mood of jubilation and made a move to put his hands inside her jacket. She jumped back, startled, and eluded him; the instant passed, almost simultaneous with her regret and feeling of shame at being so uptight and prudish, so unequal to the French mood, so American not to be able to fall in with this odd event. Crumley’s face took on an expression of injured innocence, as if to say she had misunderstood his gesture. She felt her face grow as red as his ears.

  It became clear that the bus could not move by itself, and the driver called for assistance, urging his passengers up to the highway where rescuers with cars would be picking them up. Why this had not been arranged before wasn’t clear – perhaps some local code would have prevented the women passengers from deserting the male passengers at their snow-shovelling labors. As they waited on the highway in the swirling snow, Amy, clutching her skis and stomping her feet in their heavy ski boots, was now worrying both about Kip and about how she had behaved just now to Robin Crumley. His impulse had been strange – it was more as if he meant to emulate, without really understanding, the hearty show of lust, or form of gallantry, as he perceived it being practised by others. Perhaps she had shrunk less from puritanism (specifically an American flaw?) than from injured vanity (a universal tendency?), hurt and shocked that someone so elderly and stringy would think himself qualified, or think her so needy, that she would let someone like him feel her up, even though this supposedly wasn’t feeling up, it was handwarming, and he had been as stalwart as any of the other diggers, and just as much in need of warm hands. Looking at the episode as a flaw in herself made her action seemed uncalled for, a defeat of her principles, a failure to live up to the spirit of community she saw the local people so joyfully embodying. Never mind, personal flaws can be remedied; she’d be nicer to him in the future.