L'Affaire Read Online Free PDF

had heard he was going skiing with his young wife and their baby. It had provoked their bitter mirth. Now they sat in somber amazement. All were thinking of Father’s beautiful château, which housed his press and publishing business, and the vineyard – vignoble – the whole side of their lives that took place in France. They talked of how they had loved the summers in Saint Grond the whole time they were growing up, and thought, but didn’t mention, how they always ignored Father’s unseemly capers with the college girls who came to pick the grapes – one of them, one year, Kerry Canby, from Eugene, Oregon. ‘In those days when we thought of France, it meant summer and life,’ cried Posy.
    ‘And now, it appears, it is to mean winter and death,’ Rupert said. They thought about this harsh formulation. Soon Posy went off to her flat to pack her suitcase. Rupert sat with his mother a few moments longer before going upstairs to do the same.

5
    There was very good food at the Croix St Bernard. Cooking lessons were given on snowed-in days and in summer by the ambitious chef Monsieur André Jaffe, and meals were elaborately served by local young people training as high-class waiters, in tailcoats and jackets handed down from one generation of stagiaire s to the next with the minimum of alteration, which gave them a look of being ill at ease in their clothes.
    Despite the unusual day, vibrant with crisis and the distant booms of TNT, these waiters were now beginning the preparations for dinner, polishing glasses and placing the cheeses, still in their wrappings, on the cart, and the guests began to move into the dining room. By now, all had heard the rumor that one of their number had been caught in the stirring avalanches of the afternoon, had listened with interest to the versions that swept through the lobby during cocktails. In the bar, others, fascinated, watched on the overhead TV set near the bar the televised rescue efforts in Méribel, the images strangely brighter than the actuality of the dark sky outside.
    ‘Since skiing is not ever without drama, this catastrophe seems to me only a little more sobering than the concussions, fractures, and plastered sprains that people regularly turn up with,’ Robin Crumley was remarking to the princesse as they passed to their table. Of people stayingthere for any length of time, some would eventually appear in the dining room in plaster casts and on crutches, to the surreptitious pitying and slightly triumphant glances of those still intact. ‘I notice that nothing impedes them from the delicious food,’ he added.
    In the dining room, a process of elimination confirmed what people had heard, that it was Mr and Mrs Venn, he a British publisher, who had been overtaken on a slope normally considered quite safe, the snow possibly dislodged by airplane noises. They had not at all been hors piste , they were returning for the day and been struck by an unexpected small slide that had carried them into the well-marked depression known as Hilary’s Hole, named after an unfortunate Englishwoman who had been lost there and dramatically rescued some years before. Though as a single traveller she was placed at a table alone, Amy Hawkins gleaned all these details from Joe Daggart as they walked in, from the hovering waiters, from the walls, as it were – and felt natural, human concern.
    Venn, a man in his seventies, was near death. The much younger wife, in a coma, was also still alive, and the two had been helicoptered to Moutiers. The young man at that table over there, with the baby, was one of their party, but evidently had not been skiing with them, luckily for him. The waiters hovered anxiously around him, set up the high chair, warmed a bottle for the baby. The boy sat in a trance, in shock, apparently. A sturdy-looking youth of fourteen or fifteen, pleasant face – maybe a relative, maybe the old man’s son by another marriage? He wore the somewhat scruffy sport coat and