L'Affaire (21 page)

Je suis ici envoyée de par Dieu… pour
    vous bouter hors de toute la France
.

– Jeanne d’Arc, letter to the
         Duke of Bedford

23

Americans are often astonished when they find that the European Alps are more cragged, looming, beautiful, alien, and insurmountable than their majestic North American mountain range, the Rockies. Americans have popularly believed the Alps to be soft, rounded, and old. Amy had believed that until she saw them. In fact, the hotel brochure had explained, the only way they do not surpass the Rockies is that the Alps are not higher. It is as if the whole continent of Europe somehow starts at a lower point, sunk under the weight of millennia. The Alpine mountain ranges were thrown up, however, more recently than those of the Rockies or the Sierra Nevada, hence the unworn and challenging summits, the durable glaciers and rivers of ice the Rockies don’t have.

From the promotional material, Amy had learned that the Valley of Valméri is one of a system of four valleys etched between the imposing peaks along the border of Switzerland and France; the mountains are covered with snow from November to May or June, with streams running through the crevasses in summer, and with wildflowers and small animals adding to an impression of Alpine idyll. In summer, cows, sometimes belled in the Swiss fashion, are brought up from the charming villages to graze. Humans have been here for millennia. Recently, the remains of a Stone Age climber, with cloak
and touching, frayed sandals, were found embedded in the ice of prehistory only now risen to the surface.

It was these vastnesses that the skiing party would now traverse. Rupert went down to breakfast in his ski clothes, reassuring himself that if all went according to medical plan, Father would be flown back to London later today. Because only medical personnel would be allowed to fly with him in the small ambulance plane, Mr Osworthy, at his own insistence, would go back in a scheduled commercial plane from Geneva in time to meet the medical plane in London, and Posy and Rupert would drive home to England later tonight or even tomorrow morning. Meantime, as they would not be permitted to hover around the paramedics and pilots to impede them in their work, Rupert felt no sense of guilt about going off to spend the last day on skis instead. Their own role here was over. ‘Yet,’ he remarked, ‘odd to feel a pang about leaving.’

‘Yes, our last day here,’ Posy lamented, thinking about how blessings are always mixed, enjoyments are always shadowed with the premonition of their transience. She could not confide her reason for feeling the sadness of this, but Rupert caught her tone. He ate his toast and gazed out the windows of the dining room at the gaining light on the top of Mount Benoît, and the slip of cloud. Was the cloud arriving to herald a gray day, or departing to leave a sky clear and bright for the projected outing to Saint-Jean-de-Belleville?

‘You’ll stop at the hospital?’ he asked Posy, wanting there to be some representative there, even if it wasn’t he. ‘You can see Father off and come back here. Then when
I get off the slopes, five-ish, we’ll set out for London.’ But his presumption of Posy’s dutifulness was wrong. She, Emile, and Robin Crumley were planning to meet him and the other skiers for lunch. She had volunteered to drive them. ‘I can’t let them down.’ She smiled.

The family would be represented at the hospital by Victoire. ‘I so look forward to spending the morning at the hospital with my newfound father, until he should be loaded onto the plane.’ At the moment she was playing with her new little brother Harry, while the baby-sitter looked on. ‘I will talk to him,’ she promised them. ‘At some level he will hear. I will tell him about his first grandchildren, and I will play the flute for him. Just think, his grandchildren are older than his youngest child! They say that music can penetrate the mind in its darkest caves of retreat.’

At nine-thirty, Kip, Amy, Rupert, and Madame Marie-France Chatigny-Dové met at the foot of the Equeriel lift and waited for Paul-Louis, who was to guide them. The prince had woken with a headache and was not coming. Joe Daggart, who also had been going to ski with them, came up to beg off too – he had to go with the American investigators, he said. The two military men Amy had seen the night before, now dressed in white jumpsuits, waited for Daggart by a snowmobile, but didn’t themselves come forward in greeting.

‘They really shouldn’t allow snowmobiles,’ Amy observed. ‘I believe that in our national parks, they’re forbidden.’

‘These count as emergency vehicles, I think,’ Daggart
assured her. ‘Regular snowmobiles would not be allowed, no. I’m not so sure about in American national parks.’

‘Europeans are not very sensitive to noise,’ said Amy. ‘All those horns and scooters and Vespas.’ As soon as she said this, she realized it was a little tactless. The others forebore to mention noisy things they had witnessed in the U.S., but from Marie-France’s expression, Amy could see that she herself had been insensitive. And she hardly wanted the day to deteriorate into chauvinist arguments. ‘Almost as bad as America,’ she said, hastily trying to repair the situation. It came to her that this was the first time in her life that she would be the only American in a group of others – well, with Kip. At the same time, she felt at ease, as if she belonged here. At least on a ski slope she could fit in, quite unlike during cookery lessons or at the dinner table, not that she cared.

She attributed her enjoyment of the Hôtel Croix St Bernard to A. the high proportion of people who could speak English, even though they chose not to much of the time, and it wasn’t conducive to her learning French. And, B. the general level of friendliness and good manners of people here, even the French, unlike what you were often told to expect. And C. the good luck to have fallen among really nice, interesting people. Even the English brother, up till now so much that British combination of reserved and hearty, was getting to seem like an attractive, regular guy and a pretty good skier. She thought of extending the ski part of her little sabbatical before going on the Paris adventures ahead of her.

They had high hopes for a perfect day. The first blue traces of sky had extended into a full cloudlessness, the
sun promised to appear, the snow was perfect after the addition of the powder layer in the night. In their brightly colored suits they all had the look of space travelers newly landed on a white planet, or athletes ready for the Olympics, especially Kip, whose parka had windows for showing passes and loops with bits of equipment hanging off, whose gloves were stout and worn, whose boots were venerably scuffed.

The pretty American, Amy, was especially calm and confident. Rupert was a little wary of her after the meeting in Mr Osworthy’s room, where she had raised some pointed questions. Her voice, also, though by no means as awful as the voices of some American women, was distinctly American in its intonation. He was wary of businesswomen in general, as you were always warned to be, though in her private capacity of skier, he thought her perfectly nice and feminine, and Madame Chevigny-Dové was calmly competent too. As to how well they skied – that’s the kind of thing you can’t know till you begin, like playing tennis with somebody for the first time. Paul-Louis was a reassuring presence, a handsome, deeply bronzed Frenchman with a cheerful, silent manner, who touched his gloved hand to Rupert’s when they were introduced, in the fashion of a boxer saluting his opponent.

‘Thanks for thinking of me for this outing.’ Rupert smiled at Amy. ‘I wouldn’t have missed it.’

‘Oh, don’t thank me,’ she said.

When they were all assembled, they started, paired off, and were hoisted into the sky by the lift chairs, and into their individual reveries. To get to Saint-Jean-de-Belleville
required a promenade, as it was euphemistically called, of some thirty or forty kilometers, beginning from the top of the glacier three thousand feet above them, following a complex route of chair lifts and
télécabines
up, and thrilling descents over the ridges toward the farthest of the valleys. Rupert had been shown the route on the map, but now, seeing the reality of the heights and expanse, he felt a moment of compunction, wondering if his skiing would be solid enough to keep him up with the others, and if the terrain would prove to be too difficult after all.

‘Ooh-la-la, que c’est beau,’
said Marie-France to Rupert, with whom she was sharing a chair, looking at the shimmering mountain peaks laid out below them like beaten egg whites in a bowl. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘absolute beauty, man’s insignificance, that sort of thing.’ From her expression, she was quite astonished and very impressed to find such sentiments in an Englishman, and gaily tapped his knee.

‘Oui, c’est super-beau,’
said Paul-Louis to Amy, who, as his main client, was never out of his gaze, though he kept them all in view like an anxious shepherd. Amy shouted back at them, as they swung through space, that she had never seen anything to equal the expanse of the white peaks covered with clouds and snow, untracked, indifferent to human incursion. This was the point of skiing, to share in this exhilarating beauty and be reminded of man’s insignificance. She wished she could have a more original, a more daring, response than that. How limited she felt herself, how tragic it was not to have been born a poet or some other creative, expressive person, someone who would know what to do with the emotions that moved
her. She momentarily admired Robin Crumley for trying to express the inexpressable, and vowed again to read his poetry.

Kip was distracted and withdrawn. His thoughts were fastened on what he had seen yesterday, Kerry’s moment of consciousness. No one else had seen it or believed him, as if just because you were younger, you didn’t know what you had seen. He was still oppressed with the idea that he himself had sent the snow down on her, and he was worried because he hadn’t gone to see her this morning. He probably ought to turn back and ski down to the hospital. Maybe he’d take Harry to see her again. Maybe by now she could hear her baby, now that some of the cold had lifted from her brain. When would they realize it had been he who started the avalanche?

The others were puzzled that from time to time, Kip, strangely, would go off piste and utter loud shouts and yips into canyons, no one knew why. Boyish exuberance didn’t seem quite to explain it. He was trying to see if he could dislodge snow with noise alone.

‘This is where the Valméri avalanche caught the skiers, look there, the litter of broken twigs and bent trees.’ Paul-Louis pointed across the slope. Amy wondered where the unfortunate people had been standing, and how they had been found in the huge, deep deposit of snow that filled a gulley to their right: Had she herself skied right here? Something about the sight frightened her unduly.

Skiing is the most solitary of occupations, the skier alone with his knees and ankles, the feel of his boots, thoughts only of the next mogul or angle of the hill, until he reaches
the bottom, when, in the lift line, rejoining his companions, observations are exchanged, joy expressed. On the chair lift, swinging out into chilly space, brief conversation was possible, but it was also the moment to reapply sunscreen or struggle with a boot. The next kilometers were accomplished without difficulty in companionable solitude, and everyone was reassured, especially when Kip seemed content to stay with them, which must mean that their levels of skill didn’t appall him. There were some glassy patches on north-facing slopes, but in general they found themselves making good progress, enjoying the beautiful scenery, the sting of the frozen, glittering air, the sound of their skis. The light remained good except for momentary streams of fragile veil across the morning sun, quickly pushed away by a little rising wind. Little troops of French children, like tiny forest trolls, whizzed by them with their Snow White
monitrices
.

‘The school vacations have started,’ Marie-France said.

To her chagrin, Amy fell twice, Paul-Louis cheerfully sidestepping up the slope to help her to her feet. Marie-France fell, too, but Rupert’s stolid weekend style bore him along without mishap. He was enjoying the feel of his edges in the turns, their increasing authority, the action of his knees. In fact, he was well pleased with his returning prowess. Another week here and he’d be in form, maybe even improve. This evidence of his powers raised entire questions about the rest of his life. Did he want to spend it in the City, in the direction in which he’d embarked, bonds? Shouldn’t he at least switch to commodities futures? Shouldn’t he return to philosophy, and lead a life that gave him time to ski and other things like skiing, a life
glorious and active, filled with poets and pretty girls like Amy or glamorous Frenchwomen like Madame Chatigny-Dové, both of whom seemed so much brighter and more useful than the rather Sloaney girls he took out in London or indeed than the Sloanes here in Valméri? He had discovered a whole nest of English chalet girls in the village, where he had taken to going after dinner. They were all named Henrietta or Lavinia, were mostly already paired off with ski instructors, but were jolly and welcoming, and there was something of a scene, people his own age at least, and unlike the people at the hotel, easy to fall in with. He’d drink a few beers, maybe dance, maybe chat someone up promisingly, and then remember Father and go on back to the hotel sorrowing.