L'Affaire (6 page)

At first she had advised people from simple good nature – she had good connections and liked being of help. Because of this, her classmates at Wellesley had begun to call on her, or direct their friends to call on her, with increasing frequency. She had always been glad to help; she understood the personal dissatisfactions and the specifically Paris-based projections of hopes for a new life that brought a certain number of Americans to Paris each year to reinvent themselves. When the calls had become too numerous for her to handle, gradually a fee structure had evolved. It had shocked some of them a little, at first, to be asked to pay for friendly
advice from a friend of a friend, but they came to see it as reasonable.

As her business expanded, Géraldine brought in some American women living in Paris to help her. She knew Americans who were going away leaving apartments to rent, knew the directors of cooking schools, knew interior decorators of both nationalities, penniless teachers of French, and so on. By now she had a little Mafia of American women who had shops, or did personal shopping, or interior decoration, or taught Pilates System exercises to the newer arrivals, who were always so relieved to be able to avoid speaking French. This activity kept her busy and surrounded by friends. Putting people together with people they should meet suited Géraldine’s motherly and worldly nature, and made a little money, though Eric was well off, was an executive at L’Oréal, a cosmetics firm.

Géraldine had often sent people to Monsieur Jaffe’s cooking school at the Hôtel Croix St Bernard in the summers – for instance, very recently she had sent another American woman there for the skiing who had had a wonderful time. So she knew the place would be perfect for Amy. She had understood something about Amy’s situation from her school friend, who on the telephone seemed a bit reserved about
l’Américaine
in a way that hinted at much: ‘She’s a girl who has done very, very well, and thinks she’d like to spend six months or so over there. She’s apparently done so well… I guess she thinks she’s earned a little time off…’ Of course, neither of them really knew how well was well, or, more to the point, what the girl’s taste was.

Even before meeting Amy, she had marshalled her troupe of decorators and real estate ladies to begin preparing Amy’s apartment in Paris, for it was in the Paris phase of Amy’s sojourn that Géraldine expected to do her the most good. First of all she had called her friend Tammy de Bretteville, who had a private real-estate consultation business serving other Americans, primarily on the Web. ‘Be on the lookout for an apartment
de standing
, with a couple of bedrooms. An American friend is sending me a darling girl – at least she sounds darling, and she’ll be needing something, I’m told she will want something
quite
nice.’

‘Will she lease or buy? If we find something right away, Mr Albinoni would be free in March to do the kitchen,’ Tammy said. ‘I’ll pencil in March.’

‘Louis Which?’ Wendi Le Vert, the interior designer, had wondered about the general emphasis of the decor.

‘
Tous les Louis,
I would think,’ said Géraldine, ‘with contemporary accents.’ When she finally met Amy, briefly, at the Aéroport Charles de Gaulle where Amy was to change planes for Geneva, though she thought her lovely looking, so dimpled and creamy-skinned, she also understood that Amy had no taste of any kind, and it was this she wanted to remedy. Amy interested her – the girl’s unpretentiousness, evident intelligence, and somewhat unfilled mind, a remarkable tabula rasa ripe for European impressions and perhaps emotional experiences. Géraldine’s clients were usually hoping for a sentimental adventure; but she had not detected in Amy the usual restless qualities that signalled such a need.

Géraldine knew that Adrian Venn had published Chef
Jaffe’s cookbook in his glamorous series about French regional cookery, so she easily deduced that Venn had been staying at Chef Jaffe’s hotel. Now, with the excuse that she desired to be reassured about Amy’s health, given the catastrophes, she had rung Amy. Marvelling at the way Europeans all knew each other, Amy told Géraldine what she had heard, confirming that two of the guests, a Mr and Mrs Venn, had been caught in an avalanche and were in the hospital, an atmosphere of horrible gloom had swept the whole valley, and so on.

‘Oh,
mon Dieu,
’ Géraldine said, again and again.

Eventually, returning her attention to her charge Amy’s own welfare, Géraldine asked about the après-ski action, for this inevitably interested single women in their life-changing modes. Was there anyone attractive or friendly? But Amy firmly dismissed her questions. Yes, there had been a cocktail party, there appeared to be some unattached men, but she was not at all interested in meeting people, certainly not men, that was the last thing she wanted.

‘My current male friend is fourteen years old,’ she said, and explained about the plight of the little brother, all alone, a teenaged boy for whom she planned to do what she could to help.

In Paris, later in the morning, the worldly and well-connected Géraldine heard more about the disaster from Baron Otto von Schteussel: in the rest of the Haute Savoie, the west slope of the village of Belregarde had lost four of its eight houses, though all the inhabitants, weekenders, had survived by not being there. Because of being
on the train, the baron had not heard the most recent news of the fate of anyone staying at the Croix St Bernard, but he knew three permanent residents had died in luckless Pralong, four kilometers away – this was the slide that had been captured on Antenne Deux at the moment of its
déclenchement
, so that all of France had seen the eerily slow-motion grace with which the monster slab of snow detached from its lofty site and slid in one mass toward the unfortunate valley, in a sheet, like a pane of glass or building facade in a demolition scene, sending a giant plume of snow a half kilometer into the air, simulating the spray of some magnificent vessel.

‘Nothing about the Venns? Monsieur Venn?’ she asked.

‘No, no, not when I left.’

Despite all the disruptions caused by the storms, the baron had succeeded in reaching Paris last night, and had come by appointment to Géraldine’s for coffee and a real estate chat this morning. A large blond man, he had a cheerful, florid face and spoke good French with a British accent, no trace of the Germanic. He had earlier sent her his card with its string of seedy-sounding Austrian honorifics, Graf, Baron and whatnot – she didn’t believe any of them, but they looked splendid on a business card. During his frequent business trips to Paris, Otto never failed to importune the Chastines on a certain real-estate matter; he worked for a multinational developer, and was constantly writing to them about a proposed luxury complex the corporation was hoping to build in Belregarde. Géraldine’s husband Eric’s family had a little chalet in that village, and now Otto had come
to make another offer to buy it, in the hope that minds had changed since avalanches earlier in the week had swept into Belregarde itself.

Géraldine was naturally concerned about that, though she didn’t ski and so had never cared about the place in winter – picturesque though some found it – stone chimneys chugging smoke over ice-dripping roofs and the straw and dogshit embedded in the ice of the paths, people wearing violent purple anoraks. She loved the mountains in summer, with the wildflower walks and climbing. The baron Otto’s company had already bought up several chalets, including some that had been flattened in the avalanches of yesterday. He talked enthusiastically of the future. ‘Of course you would keep the right to reserve one of the best deluxe mountain-view units in the new complex,’ he was saying. The situation reminded Géraldine of movies she’d seen in America, westerns, when the little family that refused to move was to be swept away by the dam/railroad/mining development the villains were representing.

Baron Otto had accepted a second cup of coffee, which he now finished, and, mentioning another engagement, stood to take his leave. He hoped to see his several prospects this afternoon and head back to Valméri by the late TGV, removing the need for another hotel night in Paris. ‘Naturally the local architectural style will be respected – none of the cement horrors you see at other stations. Allow me to leave the sketches with you.’ The sketches showed pitched shake roofs, wooden balconies with fretwork decoration, symphonies of geraniums blooming from window boxes of the clustered
condominiums. They would see each other in the mountains over Easter no doubt, they’d discuss all this again, hello to Eric. Otto’s wife, Fennie, had sent her best wishes.

Baron Otto, experienced in sizing up clients and investors, had always pegged Géraldine perfectly, a well-groomed woman in her late fifties, early sixties, even at this hour in the morning dressed smartly for the day in stockings and winter beige suit, hair tinted reddish blond, glasses on a string. She obviously had a native business sense, but he was not sure what drove her or explained her somewhat tense manner, for her position was that of a comfortable bourgeoise. Today she seemed a little more agitated than usual, struggling to maintain a serene and courteous semblance of attention to his words, which he could see weren’t playing. ‘The avalanches have apparently spared us,’ she pointed out. ‘We weren’t in the path at all.’

‘The global warming is supposed to produce many more of them,’ Otto warned.

‘Not in my lifetime anyhow.’ Géraldine didn’t care about global warming. She had withdrawn her attention from politics before the advent of environmentalism and had not caught up with its mood.

‘I believe you have a young American friend who is staying at the Croix St Bernard this week. Do you think she might like to buy a condominium in the Alps, or somewhere? Might it be within her… budget?’ Otto asked.

Though it was a part of Géraldine’s character to bring buyers and sellers together, to facilitate, to explain people
to each other, her indignation rose with her sense that he might try to influence her protégée Amy. She still had not heard where Amy’s money came from, it was a mystery, for the girl had neither the manner of an heiress nor any palpable métier that could explain it. Probably she’d had a lucrative divorce, that was usually it. But whatever the size of Amy’s fortune, Géraldine saw it as her duty to protect her from the sharks who were already encircling her. And, of course, to advise her about how a fortune should be spent.

‘I believe I may have met her. She has a certain un-familiarity with Alpine conditions,’ Baron Otto went on.

‘She seems quite eager to spend some time in Europe,’ Géraldine agreed, and the baron’s peony-bright face brightened even more. ‘But I should tell you, I am already making arrangements for her in Paris. I do not think you need trouble about her.’

‘Maybe she’d like to have both something in Paris and something in the mountains?’ He was thinking that he had always found Madame Chastine, for a
française
, uncharacteristically frank about money, and he would appreciate information – in case he could be helpful to Miss Hawkins.

‘Mademoiselle Hawkins will be better off with an apartment in Paris than a chalet in Valméri, Otto,’ said Géraldine firmly, ‘and I will thank you not to try to suggest otherwise.’ She made herself clear.

When the baron had gone, she rushed to watch more of the morning television news, anxiously studying the pictures and waiting for the phone; but she didn’t think that any of the sticks and rubble shown sticking out of
snowdrifts could be theirs, and no one had telephoned from Belregarde with bad news. Not that she would have minded terribly, and there was insurance. There was nothing more about Adrian.

8

Géraldine had sometimes regretted that her daughter, Victoire (also called ‘Vee’ as in
vie
, ‘life,’ or as in ‘victory’), alone among the children of people she knew, had taken the step of legal marriage. Mostly, marriage was out of fashion among French young people. Some were exploring the advantages of the quasi-marriage called PACS now being offered by the state, but, no, Vee had wanted marriage, white dress, assembled friends. Perhaps her bridegroom Emile had also wanted this, had liked a liaison with a solid bourgeois French family. His own had come to France only a month or two before his birth. They were Tunisian doctors, Christians who had been living in southern Senegal when warfare among local tribesmen had sent them fleeing to avoid massacre. He often had to recite this pedigree to avoid misunderstandings about his religion.

Géraldine worried constantly about Victoire; Victoire, on the other hand, thought of herself as a fortunate person. For one thing, she had recently got an apartment in one of a group of buildings designed as a social experiment under Mitterrand by a famous architect to show that public housing need not be grim: a verdant courtyard planted in box and willow, elegantly trimmed, big sunny windows, a secure gate and elevator code. Vee and Emile and their two children, Salome and Nike, had three
comfortable rooms, plus kitchen and bath, or shower, rather, for there was no tub, well located off the boulevard Général Brunet near the Métro Bozaris. True, it was public housing, but many if not most of their friends from university lived in worse conditions. Architecture students were forever being found in the courtyard of the building, sketching and photographing this admirable place.

It was the sweetness of Vee’s nature and temperament that made her feel lucky and thankful, even when the evidence was against it. There were moments when she herself questioned her luck, but she was unquestionably lucky about the apartment, and her children, less so about the omnipresent back pain, which the doctor felt would disappear in time, and mostly the problems with Emile. In general, Vee was too busy ever to feel low. Bilingual, she ran an English-speaking play group for bilingual toddlers and kids whose families wanted them to learn English, she played the flute in an ensemble, and was active in the parents’ association of Salome’s
école maternelle
.

Her love for her children and passion for her husband were her conscious life definitions, her project. Not that she was a deluded, self-sacrificing young woman, she told herself, not at all. You decided freely on the values that would motivate your life, and because you were doing as you pleased, you were free. She valued freedom, temperamentally and intellectually. It was
willingly
that she ran the play group, which also did keep the wolf from the door, and she had a government supplement from the social security, and occasionally was paid for a flute gig, so even the most consternated sighs from her parents didn’t make her feel sorry for herself. In fact, she had a
merry disposition, and graceful fair looks to go with it, like the dancing women on posters by Chéret.