Tonight was, again, the weekly welcome cocktail in the upper lobby, and for those staying longer than a week, it gave almost the feeling of blasé belonging Amy could remember having as an Old Camper, to watch the uninstructed newcomers in their clean clothes, with their earnest, cooperative expressions. As she had done at the last party, Amy began by talking to the American, Joe Daggart, but now that she was more widely acquainted, she also had a few subjects in common with others of the cheerful Eurotrash skiers, like Marie-France Chatigny-Dové or the prince Mawlesky. It would not have occurred to her to bring up Silicon Valley with anyone. It had stopped amazing her how unconcerned everyone here was with software, a world apart. But now she could discuss outrageous rulings in Brussels, and war crime trials in The Hague.
‘Amy, my dearest dear,’ said Robin Crumley, taking both her hands. ‘To think we are leaving, the Mawleskys and I, first thing in the morning. Back to London for me. But tell me when you’ll be in Paris – I’ll come see you. With the Eurostar it’s a matter of three hours, and we mustn’t let our friendship die.’
Amy could not but be gratified to be designated the friend of a well-known British poet, and smiled despite the slight uneasiness his enthusiasm made her feel, at remembering her rudeness to him in the hotel van. She gave him Madame Chastine’s phone as a way of getting in touch with her, for she had no idea where she’d be.
Baron Otto, too, made his way to her side, pronouncing cheerful banalities – ‘the Boucle Noire was entirely glacée by this afternoon’ – remarks that she was not able to discover any double meaning in, if any were intended – along with special emphatic looks for her alone. She fervently hoped that he would not single her out for too much attention that others might understand. Despite herself, she found that she had a feeling of intimacy with Otto, which she was afraid must show, and she was glad the quarrelsome Frau Otto hadn’t come to the party.
To her discomfort, he had joined her and Paul-Louis at lunch on the pistes that afternoon, at one of the little mountain restaurants that dotted the vast slopes. In he came, in his Tyrolean kit of woolen knickers and green socks, looking for her. He used cross-country skis, telemarking impressively down the slope they could see outside the picture window of the restaurant, and bursting inside with a great deal of heartiness. Amy was wary, but his manner had been perfect. Even so, thinking of the attractive younger guys like Paul-Louis, or even Rupert Venn, whom she had seen in a new light when she noticed Marie-France looking at him at lunch, it had embarrassed her again to think of what had happened with the baron. Still, no regrets, as a matter of principle.
Now, at the party, however, she found his portly glow almost endearing. To her chagrin, Amy had found herself thinking about the baron all day, wondering, for instance, if he often slept with clients, and how old he was, and whether he had been good at school. Apart from the vague erotic yearning probably triggered by Emile, she was still at a loss to explain how she had found herself going to bed with Otto – was it his sudden, ardent declaration, his air of worldliness, his terrible wife, that had animated her sympathy? Or all of these? Yet there was nothing to regret – and no regrets was a rule for living if there ever was one. It crossed her mind that she might indeed like a little chalet in the Alps, but of course that was ridiculous. Still, she could come for a month or so each winter and rent it out the rest of the time, she and Otto would… But, no, she didn’t even like him. And to his credit, Otto had not brought up the subject of real estate again.
In truth, Amy had another more insistent worry. People at the cocktail were talking about the vision of Joan of Arc that Kip’s sister Mrs Venn had experienced before the avalanche. She had seen the short CNN sequence starring Emile, and then the TV in the bar before this party had been switched to Euronews, which ran twice through an avalanche sequence and then had shown statues and old engravings of Joan of Arc, the meaning clear enough to her without her understanding French. For the first time, it crossed her mind to wonder where she herself had been that afternoon of the slide.
This was because of something that had struck her that morning. After breakfast, as she put on her ski stuff and was leaving her room, a ray of light from the window, striking her reflection in the mirror, had startled her. What she saw was an image of glittering silver, now seeming, to her mind looking back, almost like a suit of armor, as if she herself could have been mistaken for Joan of Arc. Of course it was preposterous that it could have been her; yet she thought of it.
‘It is an alternative theory to the theory of American warplanes,’ she heard someone saying.
‘It is an American plot, exploiting local superstitions to divert attention from the warplanes,’ said someone else.
‘If someone saw a person uphill, that person would almost certainly have been killed in the slide,’ said someone else, a comfort for Amy in that as she wasn’t dead, it couldn’t have been her.
Emile Abboud was now here in this room, surrounded by admirers – people were such fools for anyone on TV – and it was said that he would be making other appearances on CNN, besides his normal round table on Antenne Deux, both channels interested in the mounting public attention to the Maid of Orléans so strangely transported to the Alps.
‘The U.S. has no female icon,’ Emile was in the course of saying to his admirers. Amy edged nearer.
‘The Statue of Liberty,’ said the princesse Mawlesky. ‘The Statue of Liberty is a woman.’
‘Yes, true, but sent them by France. Liberté, Egalité – the virtues are always feminine, in Latin languages if not in life, because the words are feminine. America has an icon in Uncle Sam, though whether he is a potent emotional symbol the way St Joan or the Virgin Mary are, I am unable to say, not being American.’
Amy thought about the skinny figure in striped pants, with his tall hat and rather scraggly beard – who was he? Definitely not a compelling personification of patriotic emotions, except perhaps feelings of guilt and duty: Uncle Sam wants you. But she had never felt he had wanted her, particularly.
‘We don’t need a rallying symbol,’ she could not forbear remarking, though it was intruding into the general conversation.
‘You rally around your presidents, even when they’re rascals. Of course, none have been such rascals as French presidents, I’ll admit.’ Emile and the others laughed indulgently, and someone said, ‘Félix Faure.’
‘Mitterrand.’
‘And they are Protestants,’ put in Madame Chatigny-Dové. ‘Americans, I mean.’
‘What has that got to do with it?’ Amy wondered.
‘The Catholic tradition of praying to the Virgin has accustomed them to matriarchal figures of reverence. The Anglo-Saxon countries are more macho,’ said Robin Crumley. ‘John Bull, Uncle Sam.’
‘We don’t rally around our presidents,’ Amy protested. ‘Only half the people do, at any one time. In France, people forget this, they think we are all alike.’
‘Honestly, one hears such very silly things about America, that French people believe, I mean,’ said Victoire. ‘Misconceptions, for instance that the dogs don’t bark there. I have actually heard that.’
She looked at Amy, as if waiting for assurance that this was not true. With patriotic indignation, Amy withheld it; let her think dogs don’t bark in America.
‘Buffon thought the dogs didn’t bark and the people were stunted on account of the climate,’ Emile said. ‘Is that not true then?’
‘He is joking. Of course we know that is very silly,’ said Victoire.
‘Poor Amy, the French are so savage on the subject of Americans,’ said Baron Otto. ‘Don’t pay attenion to them at all.’ He had an urbane smile for his French friends and gave Amy a sort of Teutonic bow.
‘We are also hard on ourselves,’ said Emile.
‘France began by swearing eternal friendship to us,’ Amy reminded them. ‘Lafayette named his child after George Washington even. He was helping our revolution.’
‘If you like, the French helped out th
e American revolutionaries in order to inconvenience the British, not from fellow feeling. Oh, I don’t deny the friendship between Washington and Lafayette, but by all accounts, Washington was a remarkable man. France has been unfaithful recently, perhaps, but there are always reasons, as in a marriage. Misunderstandings, collisions of temperament,’ said Emile. ‘Who is to say which of the couple is at fault? We blame you, of course, for your banalities, your vulgarities, your successful movies…’
To be reproached for vulgarity was more than Amy could bear. ‘We saved you twice!’
‘There is the fault,’ smiled Emile. ‘That is what we cannot forgive.’
‘Do you think there’s something between them?’ Robin Crumley whispered to Emile when the guests had moved on.
‘Who?’
‘The Teutonic fellow and Amy.’
‘I don’t see anything special. Why?’
‘A sort of intimacy?’
‘Do you care?’
‘Intensely. Girls like that should not be allowed out for people to feed on. She arouses all my chivalrous impulses. He is a fortune-hunting lout.’
‘I think you must be wrong about her money, Crumley. There is no aura of that. Look at Madame Renan, there, or the Croatian beauty over there, their jewelry, the afternoons spent at the coiffeur. Those are the poules de luxe. L’Américaine has none of that. She’s a single girl on the lookout for men is all.’
‘Millions, my dear, look again.’
Emile, looking again, shrugged. ‘I’m no expert,’ he said. But perhaps he was suggestible, he admitted to himself, for he did begin to detect something in her indifference to fashion or adornment that could mean money – or it could be the hopeless American lack of chic. Either way, it mattered not at all to him. Yet he kept thinking about her. He tried to brush aside these stirrings of interest.
He looked around for Victoire, ready to go in to dinner. She had been standing at his elbow during the conversation, and now had fled.
Victoire looked pale. She had received a bolt of understanding. Somehow she had intercepted Emile’s glance at, or with, Posy, and knew unmistakably in her blood that something had happened between them. Since she first arrived, Victoire had observed that Posy was always gazing at Emile, but she was used to people gazing at Emile, men and women both. His beauty was a part of the reason for her own adoration, not the essential, of course, but a part, and just a little bit because it is nice to have something that others desire. She had learned there was a price – nobody could resist the constant blandishments the world seemed to offer Emile, not just sexual but in all kinds of things, posts, contacts, and she was proud of the fact that he never connived and never exerted himself for money, wasn’t mercenary or corrupt. He didn’t have to be. But now the price was too high. The look he had exchanged with Posy was Emile’s look for someone he had been to bed with, where he had put his fingers, his sexe – oh, she couldn’t think of it.
The first effect of this intuition was physical, a chill that swept across her skin and clutched at her throat, her gorge rose. She drew her scarf around her shoulders, icy as a person in shock. Luckily the constriction in her throat prevented her from crying out in some indignant protest, so that the desire to scream and throw herself at Posy was replaced by a silent hot flare on her cheeks. No one seemed to notice the change in her.
It was unbearable that fate should trick her affections in the space of a few days, should bring her a new sister while giving her as a husband a man who would betray her with her own sister. No, that was thinking backward: she’d been given a sister, but a sister who would prey on her husband. All that she had ever thought and known, including that Emile, like all men, she supposed, was not always faithful, was now stood on end. Bitter to think that fortune had sent her an unknown parent, money even, and two siblings she had been prepared to love, and with it the poison gift of a heart broken, and a future entwined with them.
Her heart raced. Perfidious Albion. This was what the English were like, the horrible English with their poor personal hygiene, slippery morals, sleazy business practices, hopeless engineering… To find herself half-sister to a monster, conspiring against her and discussing her. Rage boiled up like steam in a kettle, whistled in her ears, and escaped, replaced by heartbreak. Certain that everyone could read on her face what she had seen, she murmured something and stumbled off to the ladies’ lounge, telling herself that maybe it had been her imagination. Maybe Emile, after all an only child, had a brotherly feeling for the buxom bright-cheeked Posy. But she knew better. It was the look he had had for her, and now for Posy, affectionate to his women, like some Mormon patriarch or African chieftain – though maybe there was some cultural influence from his parents living all that time in Senegal, something not entirely his fault.
Vicious imaginings seeped into her mind. How horrible Posy must look naked, big blubbery breasts, great purple nipples, probably strong English smell of – of sheep, fish and chips, soot, trains, the vomit she had once smelled in the British Museum as a child taken to Londres, hating the cold rooms, the flannel sheets, the unstrained tea, the greasy chops, the too sweet chocolate, the brown teeth, the tooting voices… what did they have, really, les Anglais, besides Shakespeare?
She sat on the dressing stool and gasped for breath. She saw the other woman there look at her in alarm – it was the American, Amy, dressed for cocktails, who had come in for a Kleenex. She looked concerned, saying ‘Is everything okay?’ Victoire leapt up and smiled brightly and rummaged for her lip gloss.
Amy, who had been inclined to like Posy better than Victoire, now included the so obviously upset Victoire in the range of her sympathy. She had liked Posy because she was English and endearingly ramshackle, had admired her mop of tousled curls, while Victoire’s perfection was slightly daunting, with her blond hair, good English, and radiance bespeaking some level of spiritual attainment. Now she saw that Victoire was suffering too – it was the death of their father, she was sure, and she was moved to touch her arm reassuringly, and murmur sympathy.
‘Oh, yes, it’s so sad about poor Papa. I never knew him,’ Victoire said. ‘That is so sad. It just came over me – never mind. I didn’t want Rupert and Posy to see me like this, it makes it harder for them.’ We will leave the hotel, of course, tomorrow morning, she thought. Emile would come with her, of that she was determined. She would not speak of this horrible intimation, would say they had to get back to the children, period. She need not decide now whether she would ever mention it, ever.
Amy hugged her, thinking how sad it was, truly, and how brave all these survivors were. Now she watched Victoire, she who seemed so natural looking, having mastered her tears, reapply a slight gloss to her lips, smooth her brows and lashes with a little brush, fluff up her hair, fold and refold her scarf, and dab perfume on her temples, earlobes, wrists, and between her last and fourth fingers on each hand, all this while turning brightly to the subject of the excellent local carp the dining room had served last night. Amy carefully noted each detail of the Frenchwoman’s toilette.
Kip was waiting with Harry at their table when Amy came in to dine. Harry had grown to enjoy Amy’s arrivals and count on them, and signalled approval by beating his spoon on his high-chair tray. Amy rather dreaded telling Kip that she had decided to leave Valméri a little early, for a variety of reasons, none of which she could exactly name. Madame Chastine had said that though her apartment was far from ready, it was habitable, and part of her sudden need to get to Paris, she told herself, was a wish to be in on the process of furnishing and choosing for it. Each day had brought a phone call, sometimes two, from Géraldine or the decorators, the Americans named Tammy and Wendi, with questions: Did she have strong aversions to any color, for instance robin’s-egg blue, in the version found in the Grand Trianon? How resolutely faithful did she want to be to the style of the seventeenth century? Transitional to Louis XVI? Some people found Louis XIV a little somber – what were her views?
She didn’t have answer
s for these questions, but she didn’t want other people to decide for her either. She wanted to examine the alternatives and discuss them. Nor had she said, ‘Spare no expense,’ though they seemed to have inferred something of the sort. Expenses were being run up with a confidence that she would agree that made her uneasy. She didn’t exactly know how to communicate this to Madame Chastine without seeming mistrustful or quibbling. Without indulging her uneasiness, she had gone so far as to read the real estate ads in the International Herald Tribune to get an idea of what things should cost, and had been interested to see that these employed expressions that would be thought politically incorrect in America. ‘Close to churches,’ or ‘walk to shopping’ (or even ‘dumb waiter’). The local consciousness was obviously not raised about the fact that not all people attend church, not everyone can walk, and that working in a restaurant is not to be sneered at. Perhaps their historical disruptions had rendered them less sensitive.
Another reason she thought she ought to leave was the tenderness with which the baron had said, in a low voice, as she left the cocktail party, ‘Unfortunately I am expected at a dinner tonight,’ as if she would be wanting him to account for his movements. She feared entanglement. She remembered the bouquet. So she must tell Kip she was going. He would be disappointed, she knew, but at least his sister was on the mend and things would soon be back to normal. He didn’t respond to this bracing view of it; he looked horrified.
*
Any of the guests passing through the lobby at the end of dinner would have noticed the tall, balding, imposing Frenchman registering. With him was a very beautiful, extremely pregnant woman, something not often seen in ski resorts. The man filled out little message forms for the Jaffe daughter to stuff in several mailboxes. Posy, coming by, noticed that her box now contained a message, which she hoped would be from Emile, who was set to leave in the morning, as they were themselves. Instead it said succinctly:
L'Affaire Page 23
