Authors: Diane Johnson
‘I think Victoire needs to come down here,’ he told Géraldine later on the telephone. ‘Just remind her that it’s the
patrimoine
of Nike and Salome that’s at stake.’ He explained to her what he suspected the motives were behind the effort of his attorney to move the moribund Venn to England.
‘Vee would never go anywhere just for money,’ Géraldine said. ‘I’ll have to give her a better reason. Perhaps to please you, Emile, if you told her you’d like a few days together.’
‘Why not?’ said Emile.
Pourquoi pas?
Emile, now that he had been here awhile, had begun to feel less impatient to be back in Paris, though he would be forced to go back on Monday at the latest for his weekly appearance on a Tuesday television roundtable. Meantime, at the Hôtel Croix St Bernard, there was a quiet cardroom where he could work, there was the exotic company of skiers, English people, an assortment of pretty women – though the little dash with Miss Venn was not to be continued – and the very good food, which interested him as it would any Frenchman, however intellectual. The rhythm of life in a gracious hotel had its soothing effect on him, as it did those of most of the hotel guests who weren’t partying in the village discos or soaking in their tubs in the spa room after a day outside.
The Venn affair and the numbers of people who kept
showing up because of it made Emile wonder if the money involved weren’t more substantial than he had supposed. He hadn’t asked Géraldine about the sums – he himself was not venal. Géraldine was, however, so he should have guessed from her concern that some money came into it. Still, Venn was English, and the English were all poor as grasshoppers, judging from the frayed cuffs and hole-riddled sweater of the noted English poet Robin Crumley, like himself a nonskier, so also to be found writing in the mornings in the cardroom. They had become acquainted when they exchanged a few words on the book Emile was reading, by P. G. Wodehouse. Emile had found it on the hotel shelves, and it amazed him. Emile had heard of Crumley, and Crumley, the latter seemed to imply, had heard of Emile.
It was from this poet that Emile had gleaned some bits of hotel gossip, for instance that there were uncrowned heads of European royalty and an unattached, very rich American girl, something about an electronics fortune or anyway some commodity more ephemeral than the classical sources of American fortunes like timber, railroads or oil. Emile had doubted the extent of this fortune much as he did that of Venn, for he saw no bodyguards or duennas, though he had no doubt the girl in question was Géraldine’s friend, and he could easily find out the true story. He agreed that she was beautiful.
‘But it seems unlikely that immensely rich girls just walk around,’ he objected.
‘And she’s very sprightly and sweet,’ said Robin Crumley. ‘I don’t know when I’ve been so struck by someone’s freshness, sweetness – a rose, veritably.’
‘You’re married, I expect,’ said Robin during one of their conversations. Emile agreed he was.
‘I’ve never married. Not inclined to. To tell the truth, I’ve never much related to the female body.’ There was a certain practised smoothness to this confession that told Emile he had made it before, was used to making it. For his part, Emile was used to sexual overtures from men as well as women and usually just pretended not to have heard them, if this was one.
‘Perhaps you guessed that. So I’ve never really explored my heterosexual side – I do believe that everyone is bisexual, don’t you? And now to have fallen in love at last – I speak of the delectable Amy.’
‘I agree that she is very pretty. But she’s an American,’ said Emile sternly.
‘I like Americans. Their simplicity and sense of entitlement enchant me. Especially their simplicity.’
‘Doesn’t that describe women in general?’ said Emile.
‘In fact, I think less and less about the physical.’ His concerned expression suggested to Emile that,
au contraire,
he was thinking more about it, and finding it troubling.
‘I would agree there is a certain theoretical or arbitrary aspect to sexuality,’ said Emile cautiously, ‘but the body must be willing to go along with whatever is decided.’ He was thinking of Foucault,
pauvre type
.
‘For some the body rules, but that was never my case,’ sighed Robin Crumley.
Emile had ignored Géraldine’s suggestion that he meet Amy Hawkins. He had no wish to meet Americans. He had devoted considerable thought, ink, and airwaves to
the subject of cultural difference, and as a certified French intellectual, he had one especially dogmatic, unwavering, and largely unexamined belief, clung to with almost religious fervor: the unregenerate wickedness of America. This naturally extended to Americans themselves, though he knew only his mother-in-law’s appalling
décoratrice
friends. (Géraldine herself he liked as well as men ever like their mothers-in-law, ambivalently, in that they incarnate the eventual metamorphosis of their wives.) She seemed to understand very well the ways Victoire, with her goodness and political correctness, could be impossible. It was paradoxical: though he liked Géraldine – he appreciated her reluctance to comment on the situation between him and Victoire, for instance – he mistrusted her mixture of good taste and commercial instinct.
He everywhere found examples of the detestability of Americans – brash, arrogant, loud-talking, and loud-dressing bullies with no understanding of other cultures, a complete lack of interest in things beyond themselves, and concerned only with American hegemony. He would not voluntarily make the acquaintance of one, and didn’t anticipate that he’d have to.
He had noticed Géraldine’s little friend Amy, in fact of above medium height, in the bar after the lifts had closed, or at meals, often being monopolized by Crumley and an elderly Polish prince, and increasingly by others too. An heiress? He deplored the crass materialism of the Englishman and the others who fawned over her, something that didn’t escape him, though he had no doubt that Crumley’s infatuation had other grounds too. She, for her part, from afar seemed natural and full of smiles –
Americans with their smiling masks and the rather impervious beauty of their bland features, perhaps the reflex of their inner emptiness.
He was a little disconcerted to notice, in the bar before dinner, Kip, the boy in charge of Victoire’s baby half-brother, in the company of this same American friend. Despite Géraldine’s urging, he made no attempt to introduce himself to her, and his greatest dread was that something in his present situation would require him to.
Amy and Kip both somehow felt his, or someone’s, gaze on them, which made them both turn. Having been caught staring, Emile made a little bow of his head. Amy felt an almost unpleasant crawl of apprehension. This man seemed to have the same effect on others too.
19
The hotel had now formalized Amy’s habit of sitting at meals with Kip or someone else by giving away her former single table and showing her directly to Kip and Harry when she came to the dining room. She and Kip had installed Mademoiselle Walther, the baby-sitter, there, too, for lunches, but after one dinner, because she was running out of things to talk about with Kip, Amy invited someone else to join them, tonight the American from Geneva, Joe Daggart, whose hotel room, she discovered, was actually right next to hers. She especially wanted to ask him what he might know about the available rescue services in Switzerland.
He didn’t know much. ‘I’m an extradition consultant,’ he had explained. ‘Or call it facilitator. I represent various American state governments, and the feds, in negotiating extraditions. European governments often won’t extradite an American criminal when the death penalty is involved, so my job is to negotiate the concessions we are able to make – new trials, reduced sentences, life instead of death penalty, and so on – to accommodate their notions. I find out what assurances we are able to make to the Europeans, and what compromises they’ll take. I’m working on a horrible case at the moment, the guy who strangled the four ten-year-olds behind the ice rink, he’s holed up in Deauville.’
‘Goodness, I hope you aren’t trying to get him off,’ she said.
‘Not exactly. It’s a problem in the capital cases,’ he said. ‘We try to get the American prosecutors to ask for life with no parole instead, but it’s often tough because they face political pressure in the States. Everybody wants to fry this bastard. Sometimes an impasse can last for years.’
Amy, who knew little about criminal law, found this fascinating. She liked Daggart. She would ask him more generally how he found living in Europe, whether he missed America and so on, though it might be well to stay away from politics, as she sensed that his were not hers.
For now, she knew enough to steer clear of the inheritance issues too, even though they would affect Kip, and she sure wasn’t going to meddle in issues of European medical ethics; all the same, she didn’t see how it could hurt to get Daggart’s help in arranging a medical ambulance of some sort that might save Kip’s sister and her husband.
‘You must know the Red Cross, Médecins Sans Frontières, people like that,’ she implored. Daggart did know some agencies. The insurance would eventually repay the cost of this expensive venture, she wasn’t worried about that, but she had seen immediately that as in America, when insurance claims were involved, rescue agencies would be wary. At home, the plane would be faster in coming if she could offer the money up front – how different could it be in Europe? She set a mental cost limit – how could you put a price on human life, though? She had made her suggestion to Mr Osworthy as she had left his meeting, and he gratefully considered it.
‘You mean you have some means of advancing the funds?’ he asked warily, it occurring to him that maybe there were financial implications he hadn’t been aware of, big money somewhere behind Kerry Venn, perhaps. ‘The people here are only used to organizing the transport of uncomplicated fractures or the odd woman in labor, or getting a stroke victim to Lyon. People are flown to England all the time, but evidently not on life support and not if they’re not stable. Venn looks stable enough to me, he hasn’t so much as twitched since I’ve been here.’
‘I expect the money in advance will help. It’s an expensive trip, insurance companies are slow to repay, nobody likes to deal with them.’
‘Money does seem to overcome many a scruple. Thank you, Miss Hawkins, this is most understanding. Of course it’s also in your client’s interest.’
‘I’m not sure what you mean. I’m just concerned about Mrs Venn.’
She put the matter now to Joe Daggart. ‘If they need the money up front, I could advance it. I’d like to help.’
‘I have no idea who would do it. I do know something about the cost, on account of another situation I was in; it would be about twenty thousand dollars.’ He looked at her alertly.
‘It’s okay, lives are at stake. After all, I’ll be getting it back eventually.’
‘Victoire,’ Géraldine said, ‘I’m going to keep Nike and Salome for a few days for you, and you are going down to Valméri to help Emile. It isn’t fair for you to make him go through it all, stuck among perfect strangers in the middle
of a family drama. He ought to have his wife with him.’
‘I doubt he said that, Maman,’ said Vee. ‘That doesn’t sound at all like Emile.’
‘That is my understanding of his simple remark “I wish Victoire were here.” Interpret it however you will. Anyhow, a few days alone together in a nice hotel is good for any couple.’ It was the closest she had ever come to mentioning Victoire’s marital problems.
With it put this way, Vee could have few objections, and Géraldine met each of them: she could cancel the play group for one session, could go down after the performance of her trio at the opening of a department store Saturday afternoon. Now some subtle mental revisions set in, and Vee began to ask herself if maybe she hadn’t been flippant and unfilial on the matter of her dying father. Probably it was just injured vanity, and disappointment that he had never cared to see her that had made her refuse to go to him. Now she almost regretted her, hasty reaction, and she had begun to see that it had been selfish of her to deny a dying man the satisfaction, if such it would be, of seeing his long-lost daughter.
Perhaps his other children had been a disappointment to him, and it would make him happy to see a child of his who was blooming and productive, with lovely children of her own. Perhaps she should take Nike and Salome? Perhaps the glimmer of happiness and hope from seeing them could actually make a difference to his chances of living? She had heard it could. How could she not go if she had a chance of saving him, whatever her personal feelings? When Géraldine urged her yet again, she was on the point of having decided anyway, and the idea that
Emile would like it made her duty even clearer. She’d go. She organized a substitute flautist, collected Nike and Salome from school on Friday afternoon, took them to Géraldine’s, and set off by metro for the Gare de Lyon.
Getting Emile into bed again proved easier than Posy had dared to hope. It was not the matter of a conscious plan, she told herself, but more like destiny guiding both their impulses. Opportunity: after dinner, Rupert had gone up early, bearing in mind the ski expedition for the following day. There was the natural geniality prompted in all of them by the wine at dinner – Emile had eaten with Robin Crumley and a stylish couple from Munich who were mad Francophiles and had seen both Crumley and Emile on the Arte book program
A Lire
. Then, a couple of drinks at the bar afterward, and a discussion of their mutual concerns about the nationality of poor Venn’s death, put them in a mood of accord that soon moved beyond this depressing subject back into the more life-affirming realms of attraction and desire.
For Emile, at heart a romantic like all left-inclined intellectuals, Posy appeared to be his wife Vee perfected – rounder, more impulsive, absolutely throbbing with possibility and sexiness, and with the added charm of epitomizing that frosty race the British, whose conquest gave a certain political satisfaction as well. Here was the sister fate had actually intended for him.