Géraldine saw that it was probably the prospect of inheriting money that had made Victoire suddenly feel independent – though it was not to be that much money, either, if Géraldine had guessed correctly. Certainly not enough to live on forever, with no other income. She tried to think how to explain this to the impractical Victoire. If only Victoire were more like Amy, she could not help but think.
‘I know. Emile will have to help. Men must support their children. Of course they must. I will insist on everything, everything will be correct. It has been hard, Maman, but I know I am right…’ And much more in this vein. Géraldine found herself rather irritated to find such willful wrongheadedness in her formerly sweetnatured, long-suffering daughter. What was the eloquent but inscrutable American phrase? The worm, something about the worm turning.
The doorbell. It would be the guest of honor, Amy Hawkins, who had said she’d come early to help. Géraldine looked at the clock, and postponed further discussion with Victoire.
‘Nothing hasty, ma chérie, it is complicated – men, marriage. We will talk about this.’
Amy had heard that it was rare for French people to invite Americans and others to their private dwellings, so she was touched by the gesture of a party. She had insisted on contributing something, but Géraldine had refused so firmly that it was quite an impasse until Amy was finally allowed to pay for the champagne, which Géraldine ordered and had sent.
Amy looked forward to seeing her various new friends from Valméri – the sweet Victoire, undoubtedly, maybe the irritating Emile, even Robin Crumley, who was to be in town and had telephoned from London. It would be nice to meet old friends, welcome presences among the strangers Géraldine was inviting. Amy had insisted on asking Kip, of course, though his sister was more or less confined to the clinic place, which Amy had not yet been to. She knew she ought to go see Kerry, for Kip’s sake, and out of simple American solidarity, but she still had not. Kerry had been so distant, so tired, on the train… actually, Amy faced it, she hadn’t liked Kerry. She scolded herself for this imperfect sympathy, and tried to put herself in Kerry’s place.
Tonight she would wear the stunning French black dress Géraldine had made her buy. Amy had been more than docile on the matter of clothes, since Géraldine seemed to enjoy the expeditions to buy them. Probably she didn’t have this vicarious pleasure with Victoire, who, though chic, was rather low key. Clothes here were quite pricey. Amy knew intellectually about the existence of, but had never confronted, dresses, off the rack at that, that cost four thousand dollars. There were no such dresses in Palo Alto, though perhaps in San Francisco, since the brand names were the same, Yves St Laurent, etc., names you could get anywhere. Amy was firm with Géraldine about buying only one of these imposing garments, an elegant sheath that could be worn over and over. She was shocked to realize this was a secondhand dress at that, from a smart shop in the Palais Royal that sold black dresses only. Two thousand dollars!
‘But it is Balenciaga,’ Géraldine had explained. When Amy mentally looked in her California closet, she realized that both of her dresses at home were black, too.
‘It is ravishing on you, and you carry it well,’ Géraldine said.
There was no time now to meditate on whether to follow Géraldine’s instruction to get her hair cut off. She had refused, but now she did wonder if there was something hopeless about her hair that had animated such personal consternation from a relative stranger. She also wondered why Géraldine was so solicitous. She didn’t think it was her money, entirely. She had begun to see that her entrance into French society was important to Géraldine, as if she were her daughter. Maybe the real daughter, Victoire, had not come up to Géraldine’s hopes for social success – she seemed too unworldy and sweet for that.
They had gone to lunch the day before at a restaurant grand but unpronounceable, Carré des Feuillants. Near them, a table of beautifully groomed people caught Amy’s eye. For an instant, she indulged the dream of being like them, effortlessly speaking French, effortlessly ranging over the menu, knowing what to expect. The women all wore designer dresses and were draped in scarves. The men, too, far more elegant than American men, wore dark suits, i.e., matching pants and coats, ties, their collars higher than at home, perfect haircuts. She thought she might be making progress in the awareness department, to be able to notice such subtle cultural differences as collars, though she wasn’t sure she respected thinking about such subjects. Géraldine glanced at them too. Amy was stunned, as, when one woman got up and wended her way toward the bathrooms (‘toilettes,’ she had been instructed to say, though it sounded a little too frank), the other people at the table switched into English, with heavy Texan accents.
‘Bien sûr Americans. What did you think? French people wouldn’t go to the toilettes in the middle of a meal,’ Géraldine pointed out. ‘Also, the jewelry…’ rolling her eyes as if something un-French about the jewelry was self-evident, though it looked okay to Amy.
She had noticed the frequent remarks people had made in Valméri about the American female voice. It had bothered her that she was herself unable to hear whatever it was they heard, but presumably her singing lessons were training it out of her own voice. She had other projects for self-improvement, too, but it often seemed impossible to think of organizing them all – she who had organized, practically, a whole corporation. Luckily, Géraldine, Tammy, and the others seemed to have endless connections and had summoned up a voice coach as easily as they had found the cooking school and the French teacher.
Géraldine had invited two other American women to lunch. Amy hated them instantly: Dolly Martin and Elaine Deutz, two well-groomed American divorcées approaching forty, recently arrived in France for reasons very much like Amy’s own, with the added hopes of finding Frenchmen to marry. Dolly was from Connecticut and Elaine from Redwood City. These two women had become friends, were both protégées of Géraldine, and both wore smart suits, high heels, and buckets of perfume in the French style. Thus Amy realized that Géraldine didn’t really understand Americans. If she did, she could not have supposed that she, Amy, could have anything to do with these cheerful, in Amy’s view supremely dumb, women, who were also very snobbish about other Americans in Paris.
‘I met an adorable boy, who does the flowers at the Georges Cinq; he has a budget of fifty thousand euros a month. He’s doing the flowers for Dana Whittaker, too, on the side. Imagine! Really, the French have no idea who anyone is.’
‘Have you been invited to the embassy? The paintings are okay, but the hors d’oeuvres are really tacky.’
‘The Roaches have a château, but only a nineteenth-century château.’
‘Oh, you bet she did the Etoile cooking school. Boy, can she prepare a terrine de foie gras. But she still can’t boil an egg.’
The day of this lunch with Géraldine, the Joan of Arc affair had surfaced again. By some mysterious process, the French press, which as far as she knew could have no idea of where to find her, had obtained the American newsphoto, an old photo taken at the time of the Dootel sale, with Amy standing slightly behind Ben and Forrest, all of them holding up papers and grinning. The French caption translated to ‘Telecom Heiress Implicated in Alpine Tragedy’ and, like the American item, noted the filing of a civil process, while ‘criminal investigations were ongoing.’
She had rushed to call Sigrid, and also Mr Osworthy in London, to demand to know what it meant, and he soothed her by saying he had not heard of any process involving any of them, and if there were such a thing, it was certainly not his doing. Probably her name was involved because of her hiring the rescue plane. Probably investigations were routine after accidents. Look at the prominence the papers and television had given to Adrian Venn, singled out among the other victims for mention by name. Amy was particularly galled to be called an heiress, since she had earned her money herself, but there didn’t seem to be any way of setting this straight, or any other point either.
‘Amy, are you sure you’re safe
over there? Are they – attacking Americans or anything?’
‘Where?’
‘In Paris. Where you are. The war – you read these awful things here.’
‘Really? No, it’s fine,’ Amy protested. What on earth had Sigrid been reading?
As she had not yet visited Géraldine’s apartment, Amy had no idea what to expect. She was slightly disappointed, perhaps surprised was a better word. Though large and comfortably furnished with antiques, it fell short of the grandeur she had imagined of French interiors. The ceilings were only slightly more than normal height, with beige curtains and wall-to-wall carpet, and a modern coffee table in the salon. Only the chandelier in the dining room and the pale walnut armoire said ‘France’ loudly enough for Amy, the rest could have been saying New York or London, not that she had spent much time in either place. She noted, however, that the tablecloth, of heavy linen, bearing no creases at all, might have come from the stock of the expert Herr Hoffmannstuck himself and had the air of having lain in some ancestral cloth press until Géraldine’s day. Amy tried to picture how it could be ironed, but was unable to.
The doorbell rang again. The newcomer was Emile Abboud, clearly a cherished son-in-law, and one who obviously admired Géraldine. Amy noted their complicitous, affectionate greeting, so unlike the cliché sitcom renditions of the mother-in-law and son-in-law relation. Perhaps his nature had a sweet side. One must always be prepared to change one’s opinion of someone one has judged harshly. Géraldine rushed to commandeer him before he stepped out of the foyer.
‘Emile,’ she said, ‘Victoire is here, with the girls.’ Her eyes slid around to indicate the direction in which Victoire could be found. The two ravishing, dark little girls came rushing into his arms, and even the barman hired for the night turned to look at him. It was impossible not to notice the little stir he seemed to cause whenever he came into a room, as he had at the Hôtel Croix St Bernard.
‘There is nothing to say,’ said Victoire loudly to her mother and Emile, behind Géraldine. ‘Rien à dire.’
‘Salome and Nike, les enfants, allez à la cuisine, je viendrai vous donner à manger,’ said Géraldine again. The two little girls again scampered away. Emile moved off behind them toward the bar that had been set up in the dining room. Géraldine said something to Victoire that Amy could not catch, though this was easy French to understand.
‘Of course I love him, Maman, he is l’homme de ma vie.’
‘Then try to understand men, chérie…’
‘Non, Maman, you can only forgive a man if you don’t love him,’ said Victoire.
Amy, recognizing a drama of some kind between the Abbouds and Géraldine, began to retreat toward her coat, thinking this would be a good time to go buy flowers, as she had forgotten to bring any; she should not be a witness to a family discussion, though perhaps it was only some asperity because Emile had been late, had been told to come even earlier. Anyway, seeing him embroiled in domestic quarrels required her to contemplate Emile as a married man. As far as Amy had gleaned from Géraldine at lunch, the situation of Emile and Victoire was now financially promising – he had a new job and she would have some money from the château and the vignoble, unexpected good luck. Amy fled into the outside hall, hearing behind her the raised voice of Géraldine, who seemed to be scolding Victoire.
On the street she bought tulips and waited twenty minutes, window shopping at the antique stores, where the prices were too high to be mentioned. She knew she would never ever bring herself to enter one of these shops, nor, frankly, would she want these peculiar tables with talonned feet and mirrors with wings. Napoleonic, she knew. It was odd that a villain of history should have had such a large and deleterious influence on interior decorating. No doubt Mr Abboud would have an explanation.
When she got back, carrying her giant bouquet, the tension had diffused, and numbers of guests had begun arriving, greeted by Géraldine and a maid hired for the occasion whom Géraldine minutes before had been instructing in the operation of the interphone. Amy, too, hovered near the door, feeling it her duty to be introduced whenever new people arrived. Tammy and Wendi came in, also Elaine Deutz, of the lunch, and later, Elaine’s friend Dolly Martin.
Here, too, were Mr Osworthy and with him a woman who was introduced as Mrs Pamela Venn – evidently the mother of Rupert and Posy. Pamela Venn and Géraldine liked each other immediately, the one so sturdy and English, with her lovely white hair and flowered, slightly too-long dress, the other so adroitly dyed, wearing one of the tailored suits run up by a little woman behind the Madeleine. They made plans to lunch later in the week.
‘But I had so hoped to meet Posy and Rupert!’ cried Géraldine. Osworthy and Pamela explained that Rupert would be coming to Paris on the weekend. They didn’t say they were uneasy about Posy’s whereabouts. They did say she was to have arrived yesterday carrying Adrian’s ashes, but had not been at the hotel just now, though it was quite possible she was already delivering the ashes to Adrian’s widow. The two women grimaced their indifference to these ashes. Pam explained about the vicious revenge Adrian had taken on the restive Posy, the legacy of ten pounds.
‘Thank heavens such things cannot happen in France,’ said Géraldine.
Amy had not realized Emile was in politics, which would explain his relentless chauvinist criticisms of the U.S. Amy had heard him issue a number of dogmatic historical analyses in Valméri, always digging at Americans. Another time, of someone’s medal, ‘Of course it means something. It’s a British medal. It’s only the Americans who give out medals just for turning up.’ Amy had felt rather cross that Robin Crumley had agreed with this.
Even now, as he moved around the salon, he was delivering one of his diatribes on the subject in answer to someone’s question: ‘You think Americans are bad now? One can think as far back as the Algerian War – that war was really the Americans’ fault. After the invasion of 1942, they distributed leaflets calling for the freedom of colonized people. Not that un peuple colonisé should not be liberated, but it was innopportune, and stirred up factions, and encouraged political developments Algeria wasn’t ready for. Plus it was another blow at the French army, ostensibly an ally of the U.S.’ Amy would have liked to stick up for America, but she didn’t know anything about the Algerian War; had never heard of one.
‘Tiens, I didn’t know you were Algerian,’ said someone else to Emile, at which he frowned.
‘I’m not, actually.’
Amy could imagine that Victoire would be a perfect political wife, self-controlled and cultivated, and not interested in Algeria or medals. Amy could imagine being wife to a politician. In fact, anything less than such a challenge would hardly be worth the trouble of wifedom. It was suddenly what she most wanted in the world; did Victoire know how lucky she was to have this role?
She had not expected the baron Otto von Schteussel, who apparently was one of the large acquaintance of the amazing Géraldine. She was startled to see his familiar face, with its embarrassing associations, yet here he was, kissing her hand and clicking his heels. ‘I’ll see you home,’ he whispered, with an imperceptible nod at the door. ‘As soon as you can leave.’
‘Oh, please don’t bother, I’ll have to be one of the last,’ Amy quickly reminded him, but he said he would wait for her. She recognized that in some perverse way she was a little glad to see him; their intimacy, however regretted, was unlike anything she was likely to experience with anyone else present, which made him at least a friend. Her essential isolation struck her anew, a feeling of being alone in a crowd. Given neither to introspection nor self-pity, nonetheless she felt a stab of the notion that, favored by fortune though she was, there was something that was going to elude her, maybe, she just wasn’t sure what.
Collectively, Géraldine’s friends seemed the essence of France: animated, slender people in suits, the perfumed women carrying perfect handbags, the men in ties that gave meaning, Amy remarked, to the word cravate, though, since men in Palo Alto didn’t wear ti
es at all, maybe any ties would impress her as ineffably European and elegant. Many of the men wore little badges or had tiny red lines in their lapels. The room had a sound in a different key than a roomful of American people would give off, different even from the international buzz of the Valméri guests as they gathered in the bar in a dozen languages.
A Frenchman kissed her hand. That this was still done! The rules of French mutual aid dictated a large place for politeness, which seemed to ooze out of the pores of Géraldine’s friends. Amy recognized the French lawyer whom she had tried to talk to in Valméri – Antoine de Persand – who had in some capacity an interest in the Venn children and had been so unhelpful about Kip and Kerry. She caught him glancing at her, rather startled, not being able to place her as Géraldine’s guest of honor, and not appearing to associate her with the intrusive meddler of Valméri. Now, however, he bowed over her hand. Of course, in her devastating dress, she felt quite unlike the woman in ski clothes he had seen. With him was a woman of his own age whom Amy had not seen before.
‘Did his wife have her baby?’ Amy wondered to Géraldine. ‘In Valméri she was about ready to pop.’
Géraldine paused. ‘Mmm, you must mean Clara. I did hear she was pregnant. She’s the mistress. Whether the baby is Antoine’s or her husband’s… is not spoken of.’
Amy noticed that at one moment Victoire would be gazing with tightened lips at Emile, who was deep in talk with Antoine de Persand, or surrounded by the smart ladies, or if he extricated himself, he could be seen looking pensive, or talking intensely to his mother-in-law, Géraldine. It was plain that Géraldine’s mind was half on her party but half, or in some other proportion, on something else, perhaps related to the new job taken by her son-in-law. Perhaps the family was not in agreement about it and that was the origin of the strains Amy had observed. These were only her fleeting impressions as Emile made his way around the salon. Like a political team, Victoire and Emile seemed to work opposite parts of the room, the one moving off to fresh territory as the other neared. Amy noticed that Emile and Victoire had not spoken to each other even once, like a perfect team in silent harmony.
L'Affaire Page 28
