Authors: Diane Johnson
14
The printed program placed on each breakfast table each morning, after giving the weather report, gave the movie schedule for the two cinemas in the village, and then a brief reprise of the morning’s news. This morning, Wednesday, the guests were told, to general disapproval, that the American embassy in Paris had dismissed out of hand charges of American warplanes being responsible for the avalanches. There was even a hint that the embassy spokesman had laughed at the idea, just as Amy had. Journalists attending a press conference in Washington had met with the same response when asking the same question. When asked whether there would at least be an investigation, the American officials had derided the notion.
This American indifference to the feelings of Valméri was ill received by the skiers at the hotel. In the ski room in the morning, people discussed the typical Yankee arrogance. Joe Daggart, the only American besides Amy, sent her a commiserating glance. Amy bent to the work of putting on her boots, burning to protest to the Europeans that she was sure, whatever the facts, that the pilots could not have realized what had happened. She also knew her protests would fail to convince, and anyhow, in law, intention has little weight; but her blood speeded up throughout the morning whenever she thought of these
unfair assumptions. Luckily the intense joys of the slopes prevented her thoughts from wandering too often. Resentment would recur when she was on the lifts, though never on the descent, when she felt only freedom and exhilaration. ‘
Très, très bien,’
Paul-Louis encouraged her, and several times led her down black-marked pistes!
Posy woke in the morning feeling free of the oppression, guilt, and anger that had weighed on her since they had first heard the news of Father’s accident. No question but that the transient pleasures of love translate into some abiding chemical alteration of the brain and bloodstream. Sex was absolutely good for you and necessary, even as previously practiced in a British version with sweating, slightly overweight former classmates; but now a quantum-leap improvement, a revelation. She relished the advantages of her new lover – his handsome looks, staying power, enthusiasm, and above all tactful way of treating it all with just the right tone of affection, admiration, and slight detachment, as in a French film. What relief and happiness. A minor setback to her morale when on the way to the hospital she stopped in the village and tried to buy some lacy red underwear, only to be told that her size was not ‘local.’ But even this, even the prospect of the morning with Father, even the gray sky, could not mar her happy anticipation of a second rendezvous with the handsome Frenchman that afternoon.
Posy had set out to the hospital early. Once there, the reality of Father’s condition consumed her emotions again. She was slightly resentful that she would have to
sit there all day while Rupert went off with Monsieur Delamer to wherever it was Father kept his safe deposit box. But they had agreed that both of them being at the hospital would not help Father. Even one of them could not help Father, as he lay there, his chest moving slightly with the wheeze of the machine, purple streaks developing on the one arm that lay outside the covers, pierced with needles attached to tubes attached to standing cranes with bottles hanging from them, the revolting bottle collecting yellow fluid that hung below the coverlet at the side of the bed, an appalling smell of stuffiness, medicine, and flesh.
She had a book,
Joseph and His Brothers,
by Thomas Mann, which she plunged into, to distract from stirring thoughts of her new French friend, but other concerns reeled through her brain too. She raised her head from time to time and spoke to Father. She would ask the doctor again if everything was being done. It didn’t seem right to be riffling in his safe-deposit box, but of course they weren’t taking anything, they were just taking things out of the box, in the event that – in the event. It would be looked after by his reputable man of business, whatever that role was called in France, Monsieur Delamer.
At times she glanced over at Father’s wife, Kerry, purplish and inert under the blue-white overhead light. Kerry lay as still as Father, but some quality of her condition animated the nurses to hover over her with more active concern, poking, shifting, clucking to her. Posy was able to feel, little by little, some pity for Kerry. It wasn’t her fault she’d been taken in by the homely old seducer, she wasn’t the first, mysterious though it seemed to Posy,
thinking of his craggy face, his froggy, Rumpelstiltskin form. It was Father’s energy that drew people to him, her mother had always said.
Spending the long hours at Father’s side, punctuated, though, with lots of walking around and crossing the street for coffee and to smoke and notice things. French dogs are so small, she thought. Snow up to their bellies, freezing their little whatnots, they should keep the poor things inside. Little dogs, the wonderful smells of baking everywhere, no books in English. She had more than enough time to review the situation from all points of view. She couldn’t but admit she wasn’t sorry not to be in London at her job-hunting, it looked as if she was doomed to go back to her dumb job as credit manager for the Rahni Boutiques, tights and knickers for the rest of her life.
In a tangle of thoughts and erotic reveries, among hopes that Father wouldn’t die, another hope, glittering like a coin in a thicket, that if he did, he would have remembered her – and Rupert, of course – as he probably had, but it wasn’t impossible in his infatuation with his new wife, in his rejuvenated, no doubt Viagra-driven life – it was too possible that the American would get everything. He might have left her and Rupert a token sum, but he had been angry at them both for their support of their mother. Father and Pam had been married for twenty-five years, and their children naturally expected coming into something eventually, in the normal way. Posy had undoubtedly jeopardized their chances – she had even told him he was behaving like a swine, said it flatly to his face, ‘swine.’ How she wished she hadn’t. Plus at the time he had been criticizing everything about her – haircut
(okay, somewhat punk, looking back on it, for one winter only), weight, about a stone greater than now, green nails. It had been a low moment for her; nonetheless, she got a good Cambridge degree, which he wasn’t even interested in. Rage, hope, greed, concern, and other turbulent emotions prodded her, her eyes fixed on
Joseph and His Brothers
– she was reading all Mann’s books. The theme of fraternal rivalry depressed her, though.
Kerry’s little brother came in once in the morning to stand gawkily for a few minutes talking to Kerry. At first he had seemed to feel shy to be speaking out loud with Posy sitting there, but little by little he had lost this inhibition, urging his sister to consciousness like a teammate. He was a well-mannered boy, for an American, and Posy wondered if he had some new Yankee medical information about talking to the comatose. Somehow she didn’t trust herself to speak to Father without giving him a piece of her mind.
At about eleven, the doctor and another man came into the intensive care ward. This second man was handsome, brown, compact, in an open shirt and a bomber jacket, too lightly dressed for the snow. She stared in stupefaction. It was her last night’s lover. For the first instant he was not sure he had recognized her. He glanced at her uncomprehendingly, then at the two beds, then spoke in French to the doctor. The doctor with him was the regular one, and whatever he whispered to Emile, Emile looked over again at her with a frankly shocked expression, then smiled politely, even warmly, and looked down at Father again. His suprise, perhaps stupefaction, was evident to Posy, if not to the doctor. But – how
bizarre – she realized she had not told him about Father. Some other connection entirely must have brought him here. He had said he was a sort of journalist – was he here as a journalist with an interest in Father? Was Father so well known in France that journalists would concern themselves? Now she saw that his face had reddened slightly as he glanced at her again.
Each had now recognized the amazing, unfortunate fact that the practically anonymous partner of the night before, with whom there was some expectation and hope of renewed transports later on this afternoon, had some connection to the comatose Venn, and that therefore they had some connection to each other. Knowing what she knew now, her responses of the night before, of visceral desire, became if anything more powerful. Still, she couldn’t imagine what his interest in Father could be.
For his part, Emile quickly divined from her dutiful station by Venn’s bed that Posy was a relative, probably a daughter, and therefore the half-sister of his wife. And therefore a potential wellspring of trouble and complication, which if anything increased his desire for her and heightened the discomfort of renunciation. For of course things must end here.
‘You know Monsieur Abboud, of course,’ said the doctor to Posy. This struck Posy in its guilty, carnal sense, chilling her with the idea that the doctor somehow knew what had happened last night and that it somehow compromised Father’s treatment.
‘Miss Venn and I have met at the hotel.’
Posy returned his polite smile as neutrally as she could,
none the wiser as to why he was there. Rattled, they were unable quite to look at each other. Abboud continued staring down at Father, Posy back at her shoes.
‘Probably there is a special limbo for souls who have met with sporting disasters,’ said Abboud eventually, of Father. ‘It’s a far from heroic, but also not quite futile, not quite despicable fate. But, excuse me – Miss Venn – it’s not for me to be speaking of your parent’s fate.’
‘It’s kind of you to take an interest,’ she said.
‘In effect, he is “dead”?’ Monsieur Abboud asked the doctor.
‘Yes.’
‘In a dream of death? Does he hear? See?’
‘A futile dream,’ said the doctor. ‘Some believe they hear, but I have never seen anything to suggest it.’
‘Reveillez-vous, monsieur,’
said Abboud sternly to Father.
‘Miss Venn, we will want to speak again at five this afternoon,’ said the doctor, taking Abboud’s arm in the proprietary manner of a tour guide.
‘Is Miss Venn returning to her hotel?’ Abboud asked Posy.
‘No – I guess I should stay here,’ she said, longing to go with him. He nodded.
‘Until this afternoon, then,’ he said, and went out with the doctor, leaving Posy completely ignorant of his connection to medicine or to Father.
She immediately felt her mistake. Out of some sort of dread of what would happen to Father if she didn’t sit there every minute, she had not gone back to the hotel, despite her intense wish to talk to Mr Abbot. Now, for lack of a certain name, she found herself thinking of him
as Monsieur Abbot. Mr Abbot had violated the perfect anonymity of their encounter by turning up in her actual life. She also felt she deserved the personal suffering attendant upon sitting there in ignorance and confusion.
The afternoon passed with stupefying slowness, but the identity of Emile gave Posy something to brood about beside Father’s condition. She tried out every possible explanation for his presence in Father’s life, and none was plausible. This didn’t mean that her heart didn’t pound when thinking of being in his arms. Had she made a minor error – it was nothing irreversible, after all – or really embarked on a serious complication? Why was she sitting here like a stone, poisoning Father with her complicated vibes, when she ought to go back to the hotel, find Monsieur Abbot, and have a talk?
Posy also didn’t like it that there were so few other people there when they assembled yet again to talk about Father at five. Rupert and Monsieur Delamer, who had gone to the Luberon to open Father’s coffer, had not returned, and she – to her everlasting ignominy, she felt – was still somewhat resentful of Rupert’s trek to the south of France on an apparently dutiful mission. He had always had a talent for evading the unpleasantest chores. She knew she ought not to think of sitting by Father’s bedside as an unpleasant chore. Irritation rose in her, as it was wont to do since childhood when Rupert had compelled her with pinches to pick things up or dry the dishes when these tasks had been allotted to him. It was just a reflex now to feel a knot of temper swell at the least infraction by Rupert of the rules of sibling fairness. Her rational self
could overrule these feelings, but, sitting here by Father, she had no access to her rational self.
She tried to get Rupert on his cell phone, but couldn’t. She herself had called Mr Osworthy, Father’s solicitor, and learned from his office that he was hurrying to Valméri, but he hadn’t yet arrived. Here in the doctor’s office were only Kip and Monsieur Abboud. She had corrected her understanding of his name, but his connection to Father was still unknown. Undoubtedly decisions would fall upon her, but she was still in the dark, and the idea of illness or accident had always made her sick, and brought out her anger at anyone who could make her suffer like this. Father and – it was her sudden intuition – Mr Abboud. It was hopeless.
They sat in a row of chairs. ‘Miss Venn,’ Emile began, with heavy emphasis, as if she had lied about her identity, and he looked unhappy, even angry at her. He was about to say more when the doctor came in with an air of brisk normalcy, took off his white coat, and reached for his suit coat from the back of his chair. He nodded to them as he put it on. ‘
Bonjour.’
‘Bonjour,’
they said. Without prologue, the doctor plunged into a recitation of what they had seen for themselves, that there were no changes in Monsieur Venn’s condition. Madame Venn was somewhat improved, but Monsieur still required medicine to support his blood pressure and showed no neurological signs of recovery, not the slightest. Dr Lamm was sorry to tell them that the medical staff and the family were likely facing a decision about when to end the futile treatment.
“Pulling the plug’ on Father, then?’ Posy asked, using the bitter, shocking phrase she imagined that callous doctors used. ‘Even though it isn’t always possible to tell what will happen?’