A Foreign Country

30

The years, as they say, had been kind to Jean-Marc Daumal. From Tunis, in the first months of the new decade, he had been posted to Buenos Aires, where he had enjoyed a front-row seat at the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands and embarked on a suitably tempestuous affair with one of the girls from the secretarial pool at his office in Avenida San Juan. In due course, his infatuation with Amelia Weldon had been, if not forgotten, then replaced by something closer to resentment and shame. It irked Daumal that a young woman should have exercised such a hold over his emotions; had he met her at a particularly vulnerable moment in his life? None of the other women with whom Daumal had become involved in the remaining twenty years of his working career had meant much more to him than brief, diversionary pleasures.

Daumal had finally solved the enigma of Amelia’s disappearance some sixteen years after leaving Tunisia. At a wedding reception for a wealthy client in Atlanta, Georgia, who should Jean-Marc espy across the snow-white marquee but Joan and David Guttmann, the WASP and the Jew who had sheltered his lover on the night of her flight from La Marsa. In those first gruelling days in 1978, Jean-Marc had quickly abandoned his theory that Guttmann had stolen Amelia from under his nose, for the simple reason that he had been in Israel for six weeks either side of her disappearance. In fact, everything had later been clarified by Joan. At a lunch three days after Amelia had gone missing, she had vouchsafed to Celine that one of the English boys with whom Amelia had been spending time in the city had made her pregnant. According to Joan, she had taken the very difficult decision to fly home and to have an abortion. She hoped that the entire matter would now be forgotten and that the Daumals would find some way of forgiving their au pair for her rash and morally contemptible behaviour.

Jean-Marc had known, of course, that the baby was his, and in spite of his overwhelming feelings of love for Amelia, could not suppress a parallel sensation of intense relief that she had decided to abort the pregnancy. An illegitimate child would have steered Celine to the divorce courts, no question; the scandal would have ruined his chances of promotion to the Argentine office and had a deleterious long-term effect on the personal development of Thibaud and Lola. No, upon reflection, he was glad that Amelia had shown such maturity and good sense.

But there was a final twist. On that radiant summer afternoon in Atlanta, David Guttmann had had too much to drink. Forgetting the carefully assembled lies of 1978, he had assumed that Jean-Marc knew all about the long months that Amelia had spent in Tunis at an apartment near their house, as the baby grew inside her. Trying to disguise his astonished reaction, Jean-Marc had come to realize that Amelia had not aborted their child but instead given birth to a son. It was only when Guttmann had drunkenly registered the extent of his mistake that he grabbed a lie out of the clear Georgia air and tried to backtrack on what he had said.

‘The great tragedy, of course, is that the baby passed away a few weeks later.’

‘Is that true?’

‘Sure. It was just a heart-rending thing. Some kind of blood poisoning. We never really got to the bottom of it. Joan will remember, but probably best not to bring it up tonight, huh? Far as I recall, the hospital wasn’t as clean as it should have been. Some problem with septicaemia.’

By 1996, Jean-Marc Daumal was living back in Paris and flew home determined to find out what had become of his child. He found no trace of Amelia Weldon in the United Kingdom, despite employing the services of a private detective in Mayfair, at eye-watering expense. His various enquiries with adoption agencies in Tunisia drew a series of similar blanks. It was only a decade later, long since retired and living at the family home in Burgundy, that Daumal finally discovered what had become of Amelia. Daumal’s son, Thibaud, now a journalist in Paris, had brought home one of his girlfriends, who happened to work in the Ministry of the Interior. Keen to impress the man whom she hoped might one day become her father-in-law, the girlfriend, whose name was Marion, had agreed to find out what she could about Mademoiselle Amelia Weldon. Her subsequent enquiries into a known officer of the British Secret Intelligence Service had attracted the attention of France’s overseas intelligence service, which had promptly interviewed Marion in order to discover the reason behind her enquiry. She, in turn, had pointed the DGSE in the direction of Jean-Marc Daumal, who agreed to have lunch in Beaune with an officer identifying himself as ‘Benedict Voltaire’.

‘Tell me, Monsieur,’ Benedict had asked, as their waiter snapped open a couple of menus at the outset of what was to become a memorable meal. ‘What do you remember of your time in Tunis? Is there anything at all, for example, that you can tell us about a woman named Amelia Weldon?’