L'Affaire (18 page)

For Posy, whose own responses were less theoretical, there was no complication she would have to brood warily on, apart from the possible one of his relation to her hypothetical half-sister. In the main, her relationship
to the unknown Vee was forgotten entirely in the hot mood of determination to be penetrated by this gorgeous sheik/Frenchman. They went to Emile’s room. They deserved a little last fling, they said, for all they were enduring – the distress, the sadness, the boredom. It was a tremendous success, a sensual feast, as sticky and energetic as Posy had ever had, leaving her wondering if there might not be huge national differences no one ever spoke of. The subject certainly deserved some research. They enthusiastically agreed to meet again tomorrow, maybe after lunch, or just before dinner, when it would be supposed they were up changing and their deathbed duties were over for the day.

20

This was Friday, the day they had planned their expedition to Saint-Jean-de-Belleville, but snow was falling so heavily they would have to postpone it. The sky was thick and gray-yellow, with snowflakes hurling themselves in swirling flurries against the roofs, and a howling wind had shut down the lifts. The sound of snowplows already gearing into action to groom the pistes was muffled by the thick storm, and the breakfast bulletin informed the guests that the upper runs were impassable, the temperature minus twelve. Even though she had no feeling for centigrade, Amy knew that was cold.

Despite this, Rupert got himself outfitted with skis and proceeded up and down several slopes with the stately pace of someone who goes skiing once a year for a week, competent but cautious, correct, resolving to hit the moguls with more attack tomorrow when the visibility was better. Kip Canby, recognizable in hindsight by his khaki suit and blue helmet, went flashing by him on a snowboard before he registered who it was.

Amy was somewhat relieved there would be no skiing for her today, so she could feel no ambivalence if she stayed in to work on the issue of transporting Mr Venn to England. That done, at eleven she could take one of the cooking classes she so far had not had time for. She had breakfast, alone – Kip and Harry weren’t down yet – and
waited till nine, when she presumed Swiss offices would open, then went back to her room to make a few phone calls, and had no problem at all making herself understood; everyone spoke English.

Amy was good at challenges, and had no thought of failing even though Mr Osworthy had failed. Paying for Venn’s plane was also a karmic gesture in the service of mutual aid. Good fortune can only pull you along with it for so long before you start to feel you should keep making little deposits, to keep up a minimum balance of deserving, so she was happy at the chance to make this effort.

She saw Osworthy’s error, had grasped immediately that to invoke insurance at this stage was counterproductive. Even though transporting Venn was ultimately an insurance matter, she knew that everyone from the Red Cross to Doctors Without Borders would respond better to being paid for the flight with money up front, and this she could easily guarantee with her platinum card. How expensive could it be? Insurance claims would be settled eventually – she had no concerns about that, but meantime, following the general instructions of Joe Daggart, she called the numbers on her list of agencies compiled from the Minitel in Christian Jaffe’s office, and it was not long before she was able to give Mr Osworthy the news that a medevac plane, supplied by the Swiss Alpine Aerial Rescue Mission, SAARM, could be in Albertville by tomorrow morning, weather permitting, and assuming it wasn’t needed for some more urgent humanitarian task. Transferring Venn to the plane in Albertville would take an hour, the flight an hour and a
half, and they could be in Stansted by tomorrow noon. She loved the drama of this – the ambulances, the heroic haste, white-coated paramedics waiting at the airport in London.

‘Thank God, brilliantly done, Miss Hawkins, I couldn’t budge those fellows. You Yanks!’ said Mr Osworthy.

She also liked the idea that it was she putting up the money for it. She was not indifferent to her money. She loved the idea of how truly amazed people would be if they knew how really rich she was. It amazed her whenever she thought of it, which she did surprisingly seldom – once a day, more or less, when she checked her brokerage accounts or spoke to Sigrid. But her money didn’t control her, it freed her, and the little reminders, like this, from time to time, of what having access to a large sum of cash could actually accomplish for others startled her like sweetness or cold on a tooth.

She also spoke to Géraldine on the telephone. That morning, Géraldine, Tammy, and Wendi Le Vert had met to discuss Amy’s apartment, but before getting down to business they heard each other’s news of husbands and children. They were loyal mothers and loyal friends, intimate up to a point – the point of intrusiveness or criticism. They laughed ruefully at the things that befell Victoire or Laure or Corinne, and often were able to help each other out if someone’s husband knew a consultant at Hôpital Salpetrière, or was looking for a bookkeeper, or had found a reliable painter. (Madame d’Argel, on the third floor – Estelle – to whom they spoke cordially, was not included in the closer friendship, in part perhaps because of her busy career as a novelist, but more because
of her tendency to crow about the successes of her perfect children, especially the recently married Anne-Sophie.) The objection Géraldine, Wendi, and Tammy felt to this transgression was too delicate to articulate even to themselves: the possession by another of too-perfect offspring jeopardized the mood of supportive loyalty each woman liked to feel in herself toward her friends. But of course, Géraldine had Victoire, who was perfect in her own way.

‘I have Salome and Nike this weekend. Victoire is going down to Valméri to be with Emile. Her father’s still in intensive care.’ Géraldine described the situation. They all agreed that Emile had behaved with unusual complaisance and that Victoire was right, and also prudent, to go sit by the bedside of her father.

Passing to decor, ‘I see the salon in that same darkish turquoise they have at Sceaux. Have you seen the château at Sceaux?’ Tammy asked. ‘It’s in the park there. The main salon is painted this lovely dark turquoise with the woodwork in paler green, white ceiling, and then a chandelier. Amy’s room screams for a real downright unabashed crystal chandelier. I tell people, if you can afford it, go for it.’

‘A lot of people get Wendi Le Vert to help them. It’s tricky getting things done if you don’t speak French,’ Géraldine assured Amy. Amy had mixed feelings about using someone like a decorator, believing she would profit from making her own mistakes. On the other hand, the idea of going into a French store and buying something like a mattress seemed to call for more effort and expense of spirit than it could be worth. She would prefer to go
along with Wendi for the decorative items. While Wendi spotted things and negotiated, she, Amy, could indicate her feelings by imperceptible nods, slowly gaining confidence and experience. But meanwhile Wendi could handle the bed and bath towels and stuff like that alone. She gave the go-ahead.

When she and Géraldine hung up, Amy had had a moment of forlornness, not exactly homesickness, but she felt far away from home, a bit as if she had been standing on an iceberg that had broken off and was bearing her on a cold, dark ocean of mystery and incertitude toward elusive and slightly unfriendly new civilizations, where she would be required to change all of her ways. She thought for some reason of the large form of Baron Otto, and of how she was skiing much better than before, and of how each day brought challenge and improvement, and with that she went down to the cooking lesson in a better frame of mind.

The subject of the cooking lesson was announced on the bulletin board posted by the front desk in the lobby:
bisque d’homard
and
timbale de saumon
. Amy reported at the appointed hour of eleven at the door of the spotless and elegant kitchen – stainless steel tables, racks of shining copper pans, and vats of steaming soups. She was given an apron, along with two Japanese women, a German couple, the handsome television celebrity she had now figured out to be Géraldine’s son-in-law, the poet Robin Crumley, a man from Luxembourg, a pudgy Russian woman and one of her daughters. Chef Jaffe entered with an air of majesty. He would be speaking French, he told
them affably, and his daughter Christine would translate into English. He hoped they could all get along in just the two languages. All assented. Behind Chef Jaffe, two huge lobsters glared balefully from the counter where they were upended, waving their rubber-banded claws.

Chef Jaffe explained that the class would observe each step of the preparation, then, assembled into two teams of five, they would duplicate the maneuver the chef had just performed. Thus Amy found herself rolling flour and butter into a ball, not a hard thing to do, and chopping a shallot, also decidedly within her powers.

‘A roux – a roux,’ Robin Crumley chanted, poetically entranced by the music of these syllables as he worked awkwardly beside her. The two Russians, also on her team, seemed not to want to perform these hands-on tasks, but smiled encouragingly as Amy relinquished the knife to Crumley, and he to the other man, an investment councilor from Luxembourg. Smiling and deferring to each other, they sautéed their shallots, browned their roux, and began to add a fishy liquid that Chef Jaffe explained had been made beforehand but which they would be duplicating from scratch with the shells of the lobsters.

‘Now we prepare Monsieur Homard,’ Chef Jaffe said, picking up the first of his victims and displaying the living creature to the admiring students, its claws and antennae waving at them resentfully. All at once, the chef viciously dismembered it before their eyes. Rip, crack. He tore the head off, then the claws, then divided its spine. Amy thought she heard it scream. Shaken, she looked away. Even the Japanese, supposedly a cruel race,
what with their samurai tradition and Bataan, gasped with shock.

When the first lobster had been hacked into lumps, the chef handed the second lobster to the television personality, Mr Abboud. This man took the thing and stared at it, holding it well away from his body. After a few seconds, he handed it back.

‘I don’t think I can do it,’ he said. ‘I know, how can I call myself a “Frenchman”? Still – I cannot.’ He smiled. He was incredibly handsome, Amy thought, if you liked that type, and she certainly honored the man’s reluctance to kill. All the other class members appeared to shrink with the fear that they’d be chosen next. Briskly, half apologetically, with a contemptuous smile for her companions, the Russian lady took the lobster and tore it, claws from body, head, tail, with her strong hands, and put it on the counter in front of the chef, who proceeded to extract the meat from claws and tail, and pulverize the shells with the back of his implement. In seconds, what had been alive – though, Amy hoped, unreflective – was now an inert soup ingredient. This, at any rate, had a certain Darwinian finality. Thus was life fleeting and harsh, thus were the French hard pragmatists, lacking empathy for lesser members of the food chain, especially when it was a question of the honor of their famous cuisine.

Or so remarked Robin Crumley afterward as they sat over their tiny cups of lobster bisque and nibbled at their timbales of salmon. The two teams sat at separate tables in the kitchen itself, and while they ate, Chef Jaffe lectured them on what they should be tasting. Amy noticed that
Robin was apparently friendly with Mr Abboud. Though each sat with his own team, the two men commented to each other on the lesson.

‘Of course, in England we have the Royal Humane Society. I don’t know if it covers lobsters,’ whispered Robin seditiously. ‘To say nothing of PETA, the people that liberate lab rats. I believe it originated in England, but perhaps you have it in the States too?’

‘Maybe there isn’t a humane way to kill lobsters,’ said Amy, who had always thought that boiling water seemed awfully cruel too.

They went back to their workstations. Amy filled her notebook. Each phrase from Christine’s lips had brought new evidence of Amy’s complete ignorance of the basic essentials of cooking. Every Frenchman knew more than she did.
Roux. Relever
– brown a little. Who could have dreamed of bashing lobster shells and then boiling them? Pleasure coursed through her veins to think of the hours of discovery ahead of her, and to discover that such hands as hers could create a pastry case. It was no more than diligence. What a revelation! She saw that she could become a brilliant cook.

At the end of the session, their minds and notebooks stuffed, Chef Jaffe released them.

‘You’ve met Miss Hawkins?’ said Robin to Emile on their way up the stairs. ‘Amy, let me present Emile Abboud.’ Not in position to shake hands, they murmured acknowledgments of each other and the Géraldine connection, Emile somewhat abstractedly, having begun to think of his rendezvous with Posy. Up to then, Amy had
thought the man she was personally most attracted to in the hotel, in terms of sleeping with, was either her ski instructor, Paul-Louis, or, weird to say, the baron Otto. This she ascribed to the mesmerizing effect of the Nazi villains in movies she and her friends had watched as children, sinister blond men in jodhpurs with riding crops, though of course they rooted for the American prisoners and valiant British spies. Now here was Emile Abboud. Never mind, men were far from being her concern at the moment. She did wonder if Baron Otto would have killed the lobster, and felt sure he would.

Despite her favorable impression of Emile, he was looking at her with undisguised dislike, not something she was used to. ‘I heard about your unwelcome intrusion into the Venn
affaire
,’ he said. ‘I should not have been surprised. You people are not known for minding your own business.’

‘You mean the plane or the baby-sitter?’ Amy asked, quite surprised by his quarrelsome, critical remark, and not immediately sure how Géraldine’s son-in-law was involved with the Venns.