Authors: Diane Johnson
‘Sealed? She cannot even stay in her home?’ said Osworthy on the telephone later, worrying about Kerry. ‘The French treat widows appallingly – it’s practically suttee.’ If he was at all pleased for Posy and Rupert, he didn’t say so.
*
Rupert was elated, but after the interview with Monsieur de Persand, Posy went to her room to cry, in a mixture of sadness and relief. Tears had crowded against her nose during the conversation and made her head hurt. She felt that a week of tears was waiting to flow, but when she got into her room, she couldn’t make them come. The crushing hopelessness of everything, Father’s tragedy, the stupidity of living, the complete ruin of her own life, the sudden gift of a château – mortal and worldly, these things were all impacted in her sinuses and behind her ears, making an intolerable ache that would not dissolve into tears.
How odd for an English girl to be saved by the wisdom of Napoleon, if Napoleon it had been, second only to Hitler in the list of tyrants who had attempted to conquer their sacred isle. She lay on her bed, she stood up and got a wet cloth, which trickled uncomfortably into her ears, she took a bath, and there, as if by suggestion, her tears blending with the rush of the faucet, she wept, sadness and joy intermingled. She decided to stay here in her room until it was time to go, to avoid seeing anyone, especially Emile, and when Rupert called her at four, she said she was ill and was lying down. She was not ill, she was just gobsmacked.
‘Ill? We have to go.’
‘I know.’
‘When will you be ready?’
‘I’ll go on the train.’
‘No, no. I’ll wait till you feel better.’
She saw it was useless to delay what was inevitable. ‘I’ll be ready by five.’
‘Let me know if you need help,’ he said. ‘We can talk in the car. What’s the matter, anyway?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. But she did know, it was the hopelessness of life, poor Father gone to his grave in a state of spiritual imbalance because estranged from his daughter, and poor Emile never to know the passionate devotion she might have given him, and poor Posy herself, faced with an entire future of tormenting sibling visits in which she would have to see him, his children, his wife… Certain other scenarios were enacted in her mind. The death of Emile was one, in a spectacular snowslide or road accident, with sweet, French Victoire claiming his corpse. Such harsh fantasies kept coming into her head unbidden, though she tried not to give in and enjoy them.
He expected Posy and Rupert would be back late tonight. In London, poor Osworthy was brooding about the coming explosion. Posy Venn would have to be told, by himself, alas, of the manner in which her father had treated her in his will, a codicil he had not personally supervised the drafting of, and would certainly have advised against. He was strictly against vengeance from beyond the grave, and had seen too many situations where impulsive codicils had been regretted even by those who made them. It was bad of Venn. Here the capricious father’s consideration was not primogeniture but revenge, or, rather, resentment, petulant resentment, not something that should be indulged. It was not as if there was a name to be handed down, these weren’t lords. And he had personally seen several instances where the girl in a family was the more intelligent and deserving – not necessarily the case here,
but sometimes the case. Luckily, English girls must be used to getting less than their brothers. Though not strictly fair, it was perfectly natural.
Amy and Kip made a quick trajet to Méribel and back, Amy on skis, Kip slithering ahead or around her on his board, discussing recent developments during their pauses or on the lift. The decision to leave Valméri seemed to lighten Amy’s skis and ignite her turns with rapturous ease, but she knew she had to inform Kip about her plans to leave, a less happy prospect. Receiving this news, after the first shock Kip seemed to recover his equanimity. He didn’t know what was going to happen to himself, but he thought things were going to be okay now that Kerry was better.
As Amy listened, little by little his fears came out. At first so relieved by Kerry’s awakening, he was plunged again into a wash of uncertainty. He was expected back at his school in California, but nothing had been said about his airplane tickets, or when he could go, and no one had stepped in to take charge of Harry’s future. It was plain that Kerry wasn’t ready to go home, she couldn’t even walk yet, and every hour they seemed to find something smashed in her, or a new nonworking part. Anyway, she was locked out of her house. Kip told Amy that the new plan, suggested by the doctor this morning, was to take her to Paris, to a convalescent clinic, but no one said what was supposed to happen to him. He hated how he was always whining to Amy, but she always had good ideas.
She would think about it, she said. She asked him what
he thought of the bizarre French thing of people believing in Joan of Arc, whom Kerry had never claimed to have seen, exactly, but the claim that was now being imputed to her. They discussed the possibilities.
‘Anyway I think I started the avalanche,’ Kip said with sudden vehemence. ‘I could have started it. I was right up there above them on my snowboard. That’s probably what Kerry saw, it’s sort of shiny green on the bottom if you pick it up. I had just been with them, and they said they were going to have lunch in the Arbre de Pin, so I said I’d go in and take over Harry and they said great. So I took the lift up so I could ski down to the hotel, and then I went through the snowboard chute right there.’
‘It couldn’t have been you. What about the spear?’ Amy asked. ‘It was someone with ski poles.’
‘But I made a lot of noise. I whooped and hollered. That could cause a slide.’
Amy hated herself for feeling at least a little glad that there were other possibilities besides herself. And there remained the possibility that Joan of Arc, whoever she really was, had been buried in the slide and lay frozen up there beneath the snow.
‘It could have been me for that matter, in my silver-gray ski thing, waving a pole,’ she reassured him.
Coming down to the hotel for lunch, they had run into the French lawyer who Kip had told her was coming on a mission that concerned Harry. He was just stepping outside with a pretty pregnant woman and Emile Abboud, all three of them carrying snowshoes. Amy quickly explained her role as Kip’s friend, counselor in effect, and
mentioned her concerns about Kip, his school, decisions needing to be made. She and Kip were both baffled to gather from Monsieur de Persand’s taciturn responses that fortunes had changed from what they had understood only yesterday, when Kerry and Harry had been heirs to a fortune. Today it was Kerry who had no right to be in the château, and little orphan Harry was of small concern to anyone, though he would inherit with his half-sisters and half-brother. This new man didn’t seem prepared to help organize a baby-sitter in Paris or say what Kip should do; he seemed to regard Kip as outside his sphere of concerns.
‘If Harry has a share in the estate, shouldn’t there be a means of advancing some money for his lodging?’ she persisted.
‘These are matters to discuss with the
notaire,
’ he said. ‘It is he who will be charged with the practical dispensations.’
‘Who is he?’
‘I really don’t understand your interest in all this, madame.’
Amy was exasperated. ‘Kip is a fourteen-year-old boy entirely dependent on his sister. I think it’s appalling the way people are treating him.’
‘These practical details are outside my purview, I’m afraid,’ said Monsieur de Persand. ‘I understand that Kip’s sister is better and will be able to decide what she will do. I do not represent the family except informally, as a friend of Madame Abboud’s mother.’
Amy did wonder what role Géraldine was playing in all this, but recognized a stonewall tone. It seemed clear to
her that Kip should stay in Europe as long as Kerry was ill, so maybe there was some school he could go to in Paris, near the convalescent place where Kerry would be. This was not a negative – some exposure to French education would be good for him. Maybe she would get a tutor for herself and Kip at the same time. She didn’t understand why everyone was so unhelpful and mean about Harry and poor, virtuous Kip.
The ungrateful Kip did not seemed pleased at her conversation with Monsieur de Persand. ‘You just think of me as a fourteen-year-old boy, don’t you?’ he asked as they went inside.
‘Okay, you’re almost fifteen, and a much better skier than I’ll ever be. You’ve got respect, okay?’ Her tone tried to be jocular, but she suddenly realized how charged with emotion his words had been. When Amy spoke to Mr Osworthy on the telephone and reported on the service, she raised the question of Kerry not being allowed to go home. Osworthy confirmed it, was furious.
‘Sealed up, people doing inventories. It’s the two mothers, Pam Venn and a Madame Chastine, who are insisting, protecting the interests of their children, as they see it.’
‘Oh, yes, I know Madame Chastine,’ said Amy, still bemused by the connectedness of all things in an old society, so different from the abrupt disjunctions of California.
Amy supposed it was in the interests of connectedness that she had suggested that the Abbouds join her for dinner. Posy and Rupert were gone back to London, the
rest of them would be off in the morning. This last night would be her only chance to encourage some contact between the Abbouds and Kip and Harry, in the hope that the Abbouds would feel some responsibility or interest in Kip, perhaps invite him in Paris, or at least acknowledge the sibling bond between Victoire and Harry. She was doing this for Kip’s sake, otherwise she would surely not have wished to associate with Mr Abboud, such an unpleasant person, though she had decided the wife was lovely. How could she for a moment have blamed her ill-considered dash with the baron on an attraction to this conceited television personality?
They accepted, and joined her in the bar at eight-thirty, spruce in city clothes. She had not seen the couple together, but together they were more than picturesque – she so fair and angelic, he so dark in contrast; they almost made Amy uncomfortable. You couldn’t help thinking of them in bed together. Kip and Harry sat for a while on a stool near them, Kip eating pretzels and olives; then Mademoiselle Walther came for Harry, and the others went into dinner.
Joe Daggart was joining them, too, and was waiting at the table. Amy had already begun to feel it was an unlikely conjunction of dinner companions, these stiffish Parisians with an American teenager, the mysterious Joe, and herself; but she persevered in the name of her project of bringing them together. Poor Kip would need to know people in Paris, if her plans went well. Across the room, she could see the unhelpful Paris lawyer and his expectant wife, probably their last fling before parenthood weighed them down.
Joe Daggart rose when the others joined him. He seemed to know Emile.
‘May I present my wife Victoire? Joe Daggart,’ Emile said. ‘This afternoon Daggart was telling us about the avalanche inquiry.’
‘Warplanes after all?’ said Amy, hoping it was so.
‘Not American planes,’ said Daggart. ‘We think the planes people claimed to hear were French or English, from the joint SST project, but the French won’t confirm this. The SSTs are not supposed to fly over land. Remains to be seen if a plane can cause an avalanche anyhow. A sonic boom certainly could, but no one heard an actual sonic boom, and skiers declench more avalanches than airplanes. I think the airplane theory is a red herring, frankly.’
‘Just another convenient way to blame the U.S.,’ agreed Amy, trying to remember if she had seen or heard planes that fateful afternoon. It had been snowing. How could people have seen anything?
‘I think the best theory so far is that put forward by the French ski patrol – that the Venns caused the avalanche themselves. They were just under the crest of a convex slope, traversing rather than in the fall line, just asking for an avalanche, in fact.’
‘I am so
désolée,
we have to go back to Paris in the morning, to leave all this,’ Victoire said suddenly. ‘Mama says we must… the children…’
Emile looked at her with an air of surprise, as if this was the first he had heard of these plans. Other memorable exchanges at dinner, as Amy thought about it later, included the inevitable clash with this same
quarrelsome man. Why had she thought him attractive? Turning to her, he asked, ‘Have you ever read a French book?’
‘Of course.’ What did he take her for?
‘A book in French, I mean to say.’
‘Well, in translation.’
‘Which?’
‘Les Misérables.’
‘Oh? Before or after you saw the play?’
‘I haven’t seen the play.’
‘And that’s the only book?’
Amy had to think. ‘
The Three Musketeers.’
‘Any more?’
‘I don’t think so,’ she apologized. ‘But I don’t read much fiction.’
‘Le Comte de Monte Cristo?’
‘I saw the movie,’ she sighed, adding, ‘
Tale of Two Cities,’
before remembering that was not a French novel. But she had one triumphant title in reserve. ‘I’ve read de Tocqueville! Well, in English.’ For she had. His eyes widened in astonishment, or perhaps doubt. She wanted to know why he wanted to know all this. Only later did she think she should have asked him what books he had read in English, if any.
After dinner, Abboud excused himself to have a word with Monsieur de Persand, who had recently been appointed to a position in the government, underminister of finance or something, and from whom he wanted, wearing his journalist hat, to elicit an opinion about some world event. Amy walked with Victoire and Joe back to the bar. The pianist, who had been playing show tunes,
now launched into some classical piece for his own amusement, drawing Amy’s attention to the music. It gave her a kind of hopeless feeling. Not only French literature but the whole subject of music lay before her. Oh, God, it was vast. Something about this piece brought the name of Chopin to her mind; was it some emphatic chords in the left hand? Maybe she wasn’t hopeless. In Paris, she would go to concerts relentlessly and improve her ability to discern at least the works of Chopin from among the tumult of all the music pulsing through the world.