L'Affaire (24 page)

25

The little van with its load of skiers and hotel workers was on time despite the weather, and, though feeling full and relaxed, they put their skis onto its rack and climbed aboard with a mild sense of anticlimax at missing the ski home. The bus was already crowded with skiers and chambermaids in printed housedresses and serviceable boots and parkas, chattering away among themselves in the rather harsh-sounding local dialect. Posy and Marie-France were given seats by men who stood up, but Emile, Robin, and Amy had to stand in front by the driver, swaying and clinging, beginning to catch some of the hilarity that seemed already to be infecting the van. It was clear that the driver was hurrying on his rounds, perhaps fearing that people could be stranded in a worsening storm. No road conditions served to abate his speed as they swayed and swerved, people laughing louder with every skid.

It was only minutes until, with a dreamlike deliberation, the van seemed to sway its rear end to and fro like a dog shaking off water, and then began to slide sidewise as if carried on a moving sidewalk. The passengers felt themselves hurtle around inside, banging into one another, and then they found themselves buried in a bank of snow, blueish darkness against the windows, all this enacted in a strange, elongated, silent instant. Immediately cries rose
up. The driver shouted ‘
Ça va?’
– a phrase Amy had learned means ‘Is everything okay?’ ‘
Ça va, ça va,’
everyone shouted back, though a child had begun to cry. The driver got out of his seat and pushed past those who were lying against the entrance to try the sliding door, which opened. Snow tumbled in.

They had gone off the road and come to rest in a gully already filled with soft snow, which had saved them but now engulfed them. They lay only a few feet below the roadbed, but would have to be dug out before they could move, and in the end would probably have to be towed. The relative calm with which the passengers reacted suggested that such events were commonplace. The first step seemed to be to dig a means of escape for themselves, but in the meantime it bothered Amy that the driver restarted and kept the motor running so that the mufflers were undoubtedly blocked by snow. Didn’t they know about carbon monoxide? She couldn’t begin to explain, and she comforted herself that as she had never heard of whole parties of Alpine bus passengers dying together of carbon monoxide poisoning, perhaps she was being overanxious.

‘Restez-là restez là,’
the driver enjoined them. The men hoisted themselves out through windows and counseled the lightly dressed maids and the children to stay inside. Amy followed Marie-France when their turn came to clamber out, but got right back in again, feeling herself in the way of the digging as the men, including Emile and Robin, these two with their hands bare, began to flail away the snow from the sides of the vehicle. To Amy’s relief, the engine had died and the driver didn’t get back inside to start it again. The cold grew intense.

Tribal forms of cooperation are sometimes quite exotic, including those practiced by Alpine tribes, to Amy’s admiring analysis. The digging lasted for forty minutes before the men declared a path to be cleared, the engine was started again, and the men came back into the van, voices raised in laughter and satisfaction at the teamwork and manly duties manfully performed. The French maids praised them, and, amazing to Amy, took the icy hands of the men and guided them up inside their anoraks, and even inside their blouses to warm them. The men gleefully thanked the ladies, with a great deal of leering laughter, the women laughing too, despite cold hands on their breasts. ‘
Ici, pauvres hommes,’
they said, crossing their arms across their chests the better to enfold the hands.

To Amy’s further surprise, Robin Crumley had fallen into the collective mood of jubilation and made a move to put his hands inside her jacket. She jumped back, startled, and eluded him; the instant passed, almost simultaneous with her regret and feeling of shame at being so uptight and prudish, so unequal to the French mood, so American not to be able to fall in with this odd event. Crumley’s face took on an expression of injured innocence, as if to say she had misunderstood his gesture. She felt her face grow as red as his ears.

It became clear that the bus could not move by itself, and the driver called for assistance, urging his passengers up to the highway where rescuers with cars would be picking them up. Why this had not been arranged before wasn’t clear – perhaps some local code would have prevented the women passengers from deserting the male passengers at their snow-shovelling labors. As they waited
on the highway in the swirling snow, Amy, clutching her skis and stomping her feet in their heavy ski boots, was now worrying both about Kip and about how she had behaved just now to Robin Crumley. His impulse had been strange – it was more as if he meant to emulate, without really understanding, the hearty show of lust, or form of gallantry, as he perceived it being practised by others. Perhaps she had shrunk less from puritanism (specifically an American flaw?) than from injured vanity (a universal tendency?), hurt and shocked that someone so elderly and stringy would think himself qualified, or think her so needy, that she would let someone like him feel her up, even though this supposedly wasn’t feeling up, it was handwarming, and he had been as stalwart as any of the other diggers, and just as much in need of warm hands. Looking at the episode as a flaw in herself made her action seemed uncalled for, a defeat of her principles, a failure to live up to the spirit of community she saw the local people so joyfully embodying. Never mind, personal flaws can be remedied; she’d be nicer to him in the future.

Baron Otto had welcomed the call soliciting volunteers in private autos with chains to rescue stranded bus passengers and hotel guests. He had just weathered a scene with his peppery wife, Fennie, who was American by passport, though raised in Germany in a military family, and had an American directness. He had always believed that cultural disconnection accounted for her chronic discontent and jealousy. Feeling slightly mystified by both the American and the German sensibilities, she tended to misconstrue almost everything he did, and now had
misunderstood his list of Paris errands, beginning with ‘Géraldine C, 10:00,’ taking it as a record of his assignations, an unreasonable interpretation given that it would have taken the stamina of a bisexual stallion, as he thought resentfully (‘Antoine de Persand, 14:00’) to work through the whole register of names. But Fennie had held to the belief that Paris was iniquity and men were wanderers.

Amy was conscious and rather gratified that the baron Otto made a point of attending to her, though also to two chambermaids whom they deposited quite soon at a hotel down the road. He took considerable time affixing her skis to the roof rack of his Mercedes station wagon, and installed her in the front seat next to him.

‘Miss Hawkins, you must be tired. Your ordeal –’

‘Not really. We only skied to Saint-Jean-de-Belleville. Then we had a long lunch.’

‘The accident not too stressful?’ He thought her dimples adorable.

Oh, Baron Otto, I’m not that fragile, she wanted to protest. He always thought the worst of her, perhaps of Americans in general – people who ignore warning signs, cause avalanches, speak only English, and are easily tired. She couldn’t explain to herself why she wanted the good opinion of this slightly portly Austrian with the pale Alpine eyes of a husky. ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘No one was hurt.’

‘It would be possible – we are just near – I would very much like to show you our chalet – a real mountain chalet, if you would consent to a small detour?’

Amy, in the spirit of adventure that had borne her along thus far through the day, suspended any theory
about what this could portend. ‘I’d love to see a chalet,’ she said.

The baron drove a few more minutes, then parked by a towering snowbank, alongside which a path was just visible in the late afternoon darkness. ‘We’ll have to walk up the drive, it isn’t yet plowed.’

Getting out, Amy slipped in her ski boots. He took her arm, and she stumped clumsily alongside him toward a distant light shining on the stone porch of a chalet whose architectural charm could only be inferred – steep-pitched roof, gingerbread eaves, barrels on the porch to be planted in geraniums in summer, a modern expanse of glass updating the classic details, a massive door, opened with one of the keys on his massive key ring. What about the size of a man’s key ring? Amy saw she must be tired after all: Her thoughts were getting silly.

‘My wife must be at her class.’

This development, no wife around, was classic enough to alert Amy but not to alarm. She hadn’t been especially expecting a wife.

‘Here we are,’ said the baron, touching light switches that silently illuminated the room. Rustic sofas, a mezzanine across one end, bright wall hangings, gave a luxurious, if routinely mountainlike, atmosphere, rather like a condo in Aspen or Vail. An ancient butter churn had been made into a lamp, and a sled into a coffee table. Antlers. Was this Americanization of the Alps or had Americans borrowed this kitschy but authentic decor? She was learning that she didn’t have to judge.

‘Of course you can get no idea of the view at this time of day,’ he said, touching another button that drew back
the curtains from across the massive windows. ‘This is one of the larger units, but even the smallest have all the luxury features. Sit down, sit down!’

‘Oh, I’m kind of wet,’ she said, but sat down anyway.

‘Drink? We can have our apéritif here. I expect you would like to see the kitchen and so on.’

Amy had little interest in kitchens, but knew them to be part of her program and that she had better develop an interest in learning what you would need to cook, say, a lobster, or things au gratin. ‘Yes, indeed!’ she said, getting up again. The baron led the way through a door at the back beneath the mezannine.

‘What will you drink?’

‘Do you have any
gennepi
?’ she said, remembering the name of the delightful local liqueur they had drunk in Saint-Jean-de-Belleville. She saw at once from the baron’s expression this was not something in his cupboard, or maybe you didn’t drink it at this time of day? The more you knew, the more the possibilities for social miscalculations extended themselves, still, it shouldn’t be a serious faux pas to have asked for the wrong liqueur.

‘Campari, or perhaps martini? Gin?’

‘Gin, please,’ accepting the most familiar.

‘All units have the American Amana refrigator, the Miele stovetop and dishwasher, German, all state of the art,’ said the baron, opening the refrigerator.

Amy was about to frame a perceptive question on stovetops when they both became aware of someone coming into the kitchen. They turned. A woman of the baron’s age in trousers and turtleneck stood there, a pretty woman if she hadn’t been scowling.

‘Oh, my God, Otto, isn’t this a bit blatant? I see I shouldn’t have opened my mouth, I’ve goaded you into bringing them home.’ An American accent with the slightly foreign intonations Amy had heard in the speech of other Americans long resident in Europe, like Princesse Mawlesky.

‘Yes, you have,’ agreed Otto, grimly. ‘But I don’t think we have to continue our conversation in front of Miss Hawkins.’

‘Miss Hawkins. Where did you find Miss Hawkins?’ as if Amy weren’t there. ‘Never mind, I definitely don’t want to know.’

‘Miss Hawkins, my wife Fennie.’

Amy, embarrassed by the discomfort of the baron and the anger of his wife, gave him a sympathetic glance and smiled placatingly at Fennie.

‘My class was cancelled, which you didn’t bargain on,’ went on Fennie.

‘I was bringing Miss Hawkins to meet you. She’s your countrywoman, from…’

‘You thought I wouldn’t be home till eight o’clock.’

‘…Excitement around here, Fennie, today – people stranded, accidents. Miss Hawkins was in an accident in the St Croix van.’

‘Luckily she’s come through fine, it looks to me.’

‘Probably I should be getting back,’ said Amy. ‘Thank you for showing me the lovely unit.’

The angry Fennie now turned a strained smile on Amy. The baron, looking uncomfortable, said that they must finish their drink. ‘Fennie, what will you have?’

Amy had imagined the baron in Palo Alto, or more like
Woodside, where it was horsier, in boots and jodhpurs, which he would look good in, a burly, strong-looking man. Summer in Woodside, winter here in his chalet, with lots of skiing and European company. This was a more promising fantasy than any involving the serious, responsible Paul-Louis. Too bad about this wife. Her eyes met the baron’s. As he read her thoughts, she read his: embarrassment and desire, and she realized it was in her power to cheer him up a lot. Fennie perched tensely on a chair and accepted a gin and ice. She seemed all too intuitive and continued her needling as they drank.

Embarrassed by his outburst at lunch, Kip had left the others and taken the gondola, which was still optimistically sending its little eggs up into the face of the blizzard; but at the top he judged the visibility too bad, and wended his way down the most visible pistes toward Méribel. Here the intervalley jitneys and buses assembled for the skiers coming off the slopes, and he took the one that went direct to Moutiers. He came into the hospital upon the scene of excitement surrounding Kerry’s awakening. Kerry had been on his mind all day, and now he saw that it had been ESP, because there must have been a further change in her condition. At first he feared it was a change for the worst, and he drew nearer with a sick feeling. But the expressions on the faces of the nurses and the doctor reassured him.

‘Is she waking up?’

‘Yes, indeed!’

‘Is she okay now?’

‘She is doing so well!’ agreed one of the nurses.

Much to his embarrassment, Kip burst into tears. He couldn’t control these babyish sobs, he could be Harry. He stood at Kerry’s bed sobbing and laughing at the same time.

‘Right on, Kerry. Hey, hey, Kerry,’ sobbing and laughing. Victoire was there, and smiled at him.