L'Affaire (33 page)

‘The English are very fond of Berlioz,’ said Victoire, nodding at the pianist. ‘He suits the primitive, wild natures they conceal behind their polite facades. I did not think he composed for the piano – perhaps this is someone else’s arrangement.’

The baron and his wife came in, in the company of the wealthy German couple from Bremen. Amy could hear them at the end of the bar, conversing in German. Once or twice Otto sent her an affectionate, knowing, but discreet glance, and the silver buttons on his loden jacket glittered in the firelight. Her face felt hot with the wish it all had not happened.

‘Did you learn your English here? How old were you when you learned it?’ she asked Victoire.

‘I learned as a child in school, but also Maman insisted we were sent to England in the summers. I stayed with an English family, such experiences as that.’

Yes, you have to learn other languages as a child, Amy consoled herself. ‘Your English is perfect,’ she said.

‘Oh, thank you, no, I make
beaucoup de
faults.’

Strangely they heard Emile Abboud’s voice doing
another guest spot on CNN, evidently on tape, since the speaker himself was right here in the bar. His words had an uncanny appropriateness: ‘That is the beauty of a powerful symbol, it is mutable and can signify for the times, any times. Joan has a meaning for our era different, no doubt, than for her own. She might now stand for, say, resistance to Anglophonia, or for the rising power of the female sex.’ Amy glanced up to see that the actual Emile, coming back into the bar, was listening to himself, rating his own performance.

‘Have you read Max Weber?’ she found a moment to ask him. ‘He says that religion is an invention of the unconscious, expressing our anxieties and fears. But what fear does St Joan of Arc express?’

‘Fear of the alien invader,’ Emile said.

It occurred to her she had one thing to do before she left Valméri. As she packed that night, she rolled up her silver Boegner
combinaison,
stuffed it in the laundry bag, and put it in the wastebasket, where it didn’t quite fit. Feeling like a criminal, she took it out again, and went downstairs and outside to leave it in one of the giant bins the village provided for the many local chalet guests who did their own cooking and generated mountains of trash.

31

Amy would have preferred to take the four-hour train trip to Paris by herself, reading a book or working on her laptop. She had neglected letters to write, business concerns, and she was not making much progress with
The Red and the Black
. But she found herself agreeing, in her role as Kip’s friend, to accompany him, Harry, and Mademoiselle Walther, Kerry, and a nurse for Kerry. They would be met at the Gare de Lyon by some sort of ambulance for Kerry, who would be taken directly to the private clinic outside Paris that had been selected by Dr Lamm. Géraldine Chastine would meet Amy and the others. A hotel had been organized for Kip, Miss Walther, and Harry at a level of comfort thought suitable by the lawyers, i.e., rather basic. Géraldine had hesitated over what would be suitable for Amy, and decided to put her in the Bristol for the few days until her apartment was finished being equipped with basic bed, chairs, kitchen gear – though the process of adding elegant details would be ongoing. Despite the early-morning hour in general darkness, Amy felt optimistic, even eager to be turning another page in her life.

They settled into their seats with all the calm of a train journey – so different from the misery of a plane trip, Amy thought. Kerry was tired and silent – perhaps it was too soon for her to move. Her large, rather strangely luminous eyes were closed, her head resting back with an air of being
in pain. Amy had introduced herself, but Kerry seemed uninterested in who she was, or in talking, even to Kip. She made no responses to Amy’s overtures. How was she feeling? Her baleful silence seemed to say, How do you think I’m feeling? Did she look forward to Paris? ‘Not really’ was the only thing she said. Kip, sitting next to Amy, was excited and talkative. Amy put down her book. She would have liked to read, and to think about the possible significance of her time in Valméri. Had she gained? Lost? Learned? But she listened patiently, affectionately, to Kip’s conclusions about European skiing, extreme events for snowboarders, what Paris would be like.

But they had just left Moutiers when silently the train glided and lurched to a stop, and with a few convulsive jerks settled into inertia and blackness. A voice spoke in the darkness of the rapid restoration of lights, which came back on, and heat, which didn’t. Though the compartment had been hot, now it began almost immediately to be cold. Amy, next to the window, pressed her forehead against the icy glass to peer into the dark, but could make out only an impression of a siding, and people with male voices banging around in the snow.

Miss Walther took Harry to walk in the corridor. Amy tried to master a certain irritation she felt as she sat there. Even stuck, she reminded herself, a train was a wonderful invention, collective and efficient, a fine example of mutual aid. It was the automobile, an aspect of selfish individualism, that had ruined America. Who had invented the train? The steam engine, for that matter? She could almost remember. Robert Fulton? Or was that the steamboat? Watt? Other inventors came to mind. Eli
Whitney: cotton gin. What good had school done if you were doomed to forget the simple facts you learned there? She hoped the familiar names had simply retreated to another storage area of her brain, blocked by French words, and phrases like
Défense de fumer,
that no one paid attention to and smoked anyway.

In the growing cold, her mind reviewed the past days. Besides the Otto mistake, she understood that she had made a mistake meddling in the affair of Mr Venn: life’s lessons must be assimilated, not just received. The lesson was that having the money to solve a problem does not absolve you from examining the problem personally to be sure you do the right thing. She should have informed herself about Mr Venn’s condition and not accepted at face value wishful opinions flavored by hope, venality, or nationalism. Had she talked to the doctor herself, for instance, she might have appreciated the true situation as she now saw it: Osworthy spiriting away the moribund Venn for reasons of his own. Okay, she’d assimilated that.

Her reflection in the dark window showed someone who looked exactly as she had ten days ago, yet concealed, already, some experiences, some conclusions, unavailable then. Some things remained to be understood, but they eluded her. Were they intellectual or to do with the heart? Were they specific to Europe, or could she learn them anywhere? Was there something about California that impeded these hoped-for discoveries? Maybe Paris would provide whatever they were. Despite her self-reproach, her spirit lifted at this reminder that her adventure was to continue.

PART
4
Paris

When it comes to happiness, it has only one use,
      to make unhappiness possible
.

– Albert Camus

Personal salvation is granted to those
who seek the salvation of all
.

– Nikolai Berdaeyev

32

‘Makeaballbouncy, makeaballbouncy, makeaballbouncy…’ Amy sang this phrase at various pitches until it satisfied April Stanton, her teacher, another member of what Amy had come to think of as Géraldine Chastine’s American Paris Mafia. Her homework was a series of ohms and eehms, which, though April had assured her that her speaking voice didn’t have the timbre Europeans seemed to detest, was designed to cure it anyway. Amy had hoped for a French teacher, a little professor – someone in a garret; but April lived in an Haussmanian apartment in the sixteenth arrondissement and her husband did investment banking.

Amy walked home, across the Pont d’Alma and along the Left Bank. Paris seemed warm compared to Valméri. There was no snow, and steam rose invitingly out of the vents and manholes from an immense underworld beneath the city. You would have expected the homeless to congregate at these points of warmth, but, as Géraldine had explained, ‘There aren’t any homeless in Paris, oh, except the few clochards who resolutely cling to their way of life on metro platforms and never bother anyone.’ Now that she had been here some weeks, it was these outcasts Amy had the most fellow feeling for, as lonesome and without direction as herself.

A lot of minor things had gone wrong, and these had
begun to produce doubts, and undermine the normal cheerfulness she had thought she would recover once she got here. Not that everyone hadn’t been nice. Of course they had been as nice as anyone could be, or nicer, making her wonder whether her money might be playing a role. She could not bring herself to really believe this. Apart from the uncertainties of the cooking school, the language school, the voice lessons, and the French dinner parties, three more important things, at least, were seriously worrying her, maybe four.

First, a ripple of unease from California. Her computer and fax machines offended Tammy with their utilitarian ugliness because they were obliged to be in the living room – ‘
salon
’ – where the phone plug was, and hence had to sit on the beautiful Louis XIV–style bureau, a good eighteenth-century copy. (
Bureau
= desk.) Amy didn’t understand why the phone company couldn’t put the plug in another room, but so it was.

When the fax was plugged in for the first time, it had almost immediately produced clippings from
The New York Times
sent by Sigrid regarding impending war plans, and one from the
San Jose Mercury News
about herself, with an old photo and the story of Joan of Arc, emphasizing the stubborn persistence of Alpine superstitions, now being invoked to conceal military buildups, and accidentally involving innocent Bay Area dotcom entrepreneur Amy Hawkins, accused for mysterious geopolitical purposes yet to be revealed. As Amy so far as she knew had not been accused of anything, this odd news item had something like the effect of a projection of some inner vibration of her own secret worries, mysteriously
telegraphed to a California newspaper editor. She tried not to think about this menacing item, but couldn’t quite put it out of her mind.

Then, a growing, vague confusion about having money. Her apartment was extremely pretty and comfortable – she was pleased. It was two floors up, with no elevator, though of course she didn’t need an elevator.

‘It’s just that for this much money, you’d expect one,’ she had observed meekly to Tammy. ‘Really, Amy, you can’t have all the American comforts if you want seventeenth century,’ Tammy had said, as if Amy were a Beverly Hillbilly.

The curtains of gray silk, hugely voluminous, matched the sky. All the time Amy was at Valméri, Tammy or Wendi had been calling with such questions as what did she think of gray, or of silk? Fine, great, Amy had said, and now just slightly permitted herself the observation that a more cheerful color in this cheerless weather might have been prettier.

‘That’s a really Californian idea,’ Tammy had said. ‘Blue and yellow don’t actually look that great in Paris. It’s a question of the light.’

So far, any friction with this unfamiliar culture had been smoothed by Géraldine Chastine or this battery of American women who seemed so attentive and friendly, at first Amy had thought out of fellow feeling. But then she’d had a bill from Tammy for fourteen thousand euros, for some chairs, ‘service,’ and ten percent. This didn’t seem unfair, of course, it just made Amy aware of an element she hadn’t been aware of before, of commerce, reminding her that no one takes you shopping for the fun of it.

Still, Amy knew she would never herself have had the wisdom and experience to choose these particular chairs, which looked somewhat plain, not what you thought of as French-looking chairs with gilded legs and flowery upholstery; these had backs upholstered in black leather, with blond wood arms, and were ‘signed.’ She didn’t completely like them. Tammy’s bill had prepared Amy to expect a number of bills from people who had been helpful this week.

She was worried about Kip too. It had taken a few days to deal with Kip’s situation, a school outside Paris, not very convenient to Kerry’s clinic but only a short trip on the RER, which was a thing they had here in addition to trains, buses, and the metro. Amy missed having a car, would have liked to get into her Audi and whiz around Paris some midnight when all the other cars would be holed up, God knew where they went.

Yet, wandering around on foot was quite thrilling – the beauty of each street, the way the buildings leaned into each other or out over the cobblestones like disapproving elders, the serene Louvre right across the bridge, ‘St Germain,’ the ‘Deux Magots’ – names familiar to her by some mysterious process of osmosis even though she had never for one second instructed herself in the geography of Paris. But she had to work at keeping her level of attention, of being thrilled, up to pitch. She would find herself lapsing into her own thoughts about what was happening in Palo Alto, or the market, or even about her brother’s expected baby. She hoped she wasn’t going to morph into one of those sad, professional aunts with no lives of their own.