Destiny

by Sally Beauman

  She looked at him, and felt one last temptation, one last hope. She could tell him; she could explain. And if she did…She pushed the temptation aside. It would still be over; she knew it as she looked at his face. She had been part of his youth, part of that short sweet time between boyhood and manhood, and that time was over. A man, not a boy, turned back to look at her as his brother left the room. His features were stiff with repressed emotion.

  “I apologize for asking this. But does my brother owe you anything?”

  “No,” she answered quietly.

  “I owe you—a great deal.” His control almost broke.

  “Nothing, Edouard.”

  He inclined his head, looked at her once more, and left the room.

  A month later, Célestine received a short formal note from him, asking her to contact him if she were ever in need. She kept the note but did not answer it.

  A month after that, her elderly English protector suffered a stroke and, after a brief illness, died. Some weeks later, when Célestine was daily expecting notice to leave her flat, she received a small parcel from solicitors acting on behalf of Edouard de Chavigny. Inside it was the deed to the house in Maida Vale, made out in her name, and details of an annuity to be paid to her monthly for the duration of her life. She thought of sending both back, of writing to Edouard; but she knew he meant well, and besides, she was nearly forty-eight and more than ever a realist.

  So she acknowledged the gifts in a letter of formal thanks to the solicitors. It was eventually passed on to Edouard; Célestine did not hear from him again.

  After a few months, cutting her losses and closing her heart, she took a new lover, and began once more to entertain the brave young men from Free French Headquarters. Occasionally, they gossiped idly about their friends, and the name de Chavigny would be mentioned.

  So she learned that the Baronne de Chavigny had been quick to find consolation for the loss of her husband in the arms of an English banker; that—to no one’s surprise—the engagement of Jean-Paul to Lady Isobel Herbert was broken off at Lady Isobel’s request a respectful two months after the death of his father. And she heard that the younger brother, Edouard, was proving a firebrand, cutting a swath through the women of London society. He and his brother were very close, her informants said with a wink. They were notorious, they hunted in pairs.

  Célestine was surprised to hear this. She felt a certain sad pride that her lessons in lovemaking were being put to good use, but the closeness of the two brothers disturbed her slightly. She knew how much Edouard admired his brother, and sometimes, thinking of that, she worried for him. Such fierce loyalty! He would be disillusioned, she thought, before long.

  What Célestine could not know was the degree to which grief first drew the two brothers together. They had both loved their father; he had seemed to them indestructible. In the horror and confusion and pain of the days immediately succeeding the news of his death, days in which Louise took to her bed and refused to see anyone, the two turned to each other, and all the barriers between them fell away.

  Jean-Paul found it impossible to contain his grief; he wept openly; he turned to Edouard, who could not weep, and sought consolation from him like a bewildered child.

  Night after night, they stayed up late, talking and talking, going over the past. Jean-Paul drank a good deal on these occasions—it helped him, he said—and as it grew late, so he grew lachrymose and self-pitying.

  “I feel such guilt,” he said one night, clutching Edouard’s arm. “Using his title—that very night. How could I have done that? God, I hate myself, Edouard.”

  “It made no difference. Not then. And anyway—as it happened—you had the right.”

  “I know. I know. But it doesn’t make me feel any better. And to have gone to that bitch Simonescu’s—to have been there, when…God in heaven, I can’t bear to think of it.” He bent his flushed face, and wiped his eyes, and gripped Edouard’s arm more tightly.

  “I hate myself, Edouard—yes, I do, I mean it. I’m ashamed of the way I’ve behaved. Drinking—women—I’m going to give it all up, you know. Reform. I feel I owe it to Papa—I have to do it for him. I don’t know why I do it in any case—women, what do they mean to me? Nothing. You can’t talk to them—I’d rather talk to a man any day. You can’t trust them. Look at Célestine—I feel terrible about that, Edouard, but perhaps it’s done some good. If it’s opened your eyes, it will have been worth it. She didn’t hesitate, you know. Straight into bed. Couldn’t wait to get it. They’re all the same, women. Bitches. Liars. Every one of them…”

  “Jean-Paul…”

  “Say you’ll never let that happen again, Edouard. Tell me. Never let a woman come between us again…” He lifted his face to Edouard’s, his eyes watering. “They do that, you know. They try it every time. And I can’t stand it. I need you, little brother. I need you now, more than ever. This terrible grief, this pain—thinking about all the responsibilities Papa has left me. It makes me afraid, Edouard. I can’t cope with it, not without you…”

  He bent his head and sobbed. Edouard knew that the tears came from brandy as well as from grief, but he was touched. He thought of Célestine, and felt only a cold anger; she had betrayed him, she had perhaps lied to him all along. What did such a woman matter compared to the love he felt for his brother?

  “Jean-Paul.” He put his arm around his brother’s shaking shoulders, and attempted to calm him. “Don’t say those things. Don’t think them. I’m your brother. We have to think about the future now. We have to think about Papa, and all the things he worked for. When the war is over, we can go back to France. We can begin again. Papa laid the foundations. We can build on them, you and I. It’s what he would have wanted.”

  “I suppose so.” Jean-Paul wiped his tears away with the back of his hand. He straightened up and blew his nose.

  “Think of it, Jean-Paul. All those companies. They’re our legacy. We can build them up—it will be a memorial to Papa.”

  “Yes. Yes.” Jean-Paul sounded irritable. “But I can’t talk about that now. I can’t think about it. I’m a soldier—I have other responsibilities. There’s a war on. Edouard—be a little realistic…”

  Edouard sighed. Each time they returned to this topic, Jean-Paul’s reaction was the same. So, come to that, was the response of Louise. When, one afternoon, thinking it might console her to speak of Xavier and his work, Edouard asked her what she thought his father would have wanted to happen in the future, Louise turned pettishly away.

  “With his companies? Edouard, how should I know? What extraordinary questions you do ask.”

  “I just thought…”

  “Well, don’t. You will meddle. Jean-Paul is the Baron, not you. When the war is over, he will take care of these things. There’s no need for you to concern yourself at all. And it’s most unfeeling of you to ask me at such a time! Really, you can be so insensitive. How can you discuss his business affairs at a time like this?”

  “His work, Maman.” Edouard’s mouth set obstinately. “It mattered to him very much. I want to feel we’re carrying it on—that we’re doing what he would have wished…”

  “What you want to feel is entirely irrelevant. And you have no right to bother me at such a time. I never concerned myself with Xavi’s business affairs. In fact, I always thought that he paid far too much attention to them himself. It was an eccentricity—all his friends said so. He could perfectly well have devoted himself to his estates, just as they did. This obsession with finance, with commerce—I never understood it at all…”

  She gave a little haughty toss of the head; Edouard felt suddenly very angry. He stood up.

  “Really, Maman?” He looked at her coldly. “You surprise me. After all, you grew up with commerce, I thought. It was steel—not estates—that provided your father with a fortune.”

  Louise’s lovely face flushed crimson. All references to the source of her own family’s money had long been forbidden.

  “You may leav
e me,” Louise said. “And send Jean-Paul up,” she added as he reached the door.

  It was from the day of that conversation that Edouard found his attitude to his mother changing. Before, she had dazzled and perplexed him; her coldness to him, which he had never understood, had made him all the more eager to win her affection. But now, and he knew this, he began to draw back a little, and to judge her. The grief he felt for his father sharpened his vision; he looked at his mother in a new cooler dispassionate way; he no longer made so many excuses for her. When, some months after his father’s death, he realized that she had begun a new affair, something in his heart closed to her forever.

  That, he knew, he would never forgive.

  He began to feel as if, with Xavier’s death, all the certainties in his world had disappeared, and he lived in a state of flux and change, in which there were no longer any sureties. His loyalties, to his mother and his mistress, had been misplaced; the patterns he had seen in the world were all broken.

  “That happens,” Hugo said to him kindly, when Edouard tried to explain his feelings. “It passes. Don’t clutch at beliefs. Wait, and let them come to you.”

  “Wait?” Edouard looked up. “For what? What do you believe in, Hugo?”

  “I?” Hugo smiled dryly. “Well now. I believe in good claret. And Sobranie cigarettes…”

  “Don’t joke. The English always joke.”

  “Very well.” Hugo smiled at his earnestness. “I believe in some of the things we have read together. I believe in hard work.”

  He hesitated. “I believe in certain people. Sometimes.”

  “Not God?”

  “Not really, I’m afraid, no.”

  “Politics?”

  “Ah, politics. Well, I believe in certain creeds—as you may have gathered. I don’t have a great deal of faith that they will substantially alter the world. I did once perhaps. Less now.”

  “What about love?” Edouard fixed him with his gaze, and Hugo, after a pause, let his eyes drop.

  “Edouard.” He sighed. “We should have read less poetry.”

  “But you said you believed in the things we read. How can you believe the words if you don’t believe the things the words are about?”

  “I believe in them while I read.”

  “And afterward?”

  “Ah, afterward—I waver.”

  Edouard pushed his books across his desk. “It’s not a great deal,” he said at last in a bleak voice, and Hugo, paying him the compliment he felt was his due, spoke seriously.

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “But don’t you mind, Hugo?” He turned to him passionately. “Don’t you want things to believe in? Don’t you want to feel a sense of purpose?”

  “Certainly not. A terrible heresy. A delusion and a snare. Much better to see the world as it is.” Hugo turned away. “Very little endures. Much of life is random. We invent ideals and beliefs to give shape to the shapeless. Love. Honor. Faith. Truth. They’re words, Edouard…”

  “I don’t think you really believe that.”

  Edouard lifted his face stubbornly, and Hugo turned back. He looked at the boy’s face and gave a little shrug.

  “Maybe not. You could be right.” He paused. “If I sound bitter and cynical, and I probably do, there are reasons for it just now.”

  “My mother?”

  “Partly that. Yes. I told you I should find it difficult to stop. However, that’s something we ought not to discuss. Shall we return to the Virgil now? If you intend to sit Oxford entrance, you have a considerable amount of work to do.”

  “Hugo…”

  “What?”

  “I like you.”

  “Excellent. I find that reassuring. Now, turn to page fourteen.”

  Edouard bent his head; he applied his mind to the words, and he found they calmed him.

  Afterward, he was grateful to Hugo. Dryness and irony helped; they gave him a new detachment, a different perspective on life. Time passed; he discovered that he was able to compartmentalize his feelings and his thoughts in a way he had not done before.

  It was, after all, perfectly possible to contain the grief he felt for his father. He locked it away in the part of his mind that made plans for the future; it did not need, anymore, to affect his behavior every moment of each day. He could grieve and get drunk with Jean-Paul, he discovered; he could grieve, and still work with Hugo.

  When, one night, after weeks of melancholy abstinence, Jean-Paul turned to him with a groan and said, “The hell with it, little brother. What we need is a woman,” he made another discovery. He could make love, too, perfectly pleasurably, without feeling any emotion at all, without any desire ever to see the woman again. When he confided this discovery to Jean-Paul, his brother seemed pleased.

  “You’re growing up. You’re a man, at last,” he said, as if welcoming him, belatedly, to the club.

  At the time, this remark pleased Edouard. He was then much swayed by Jean-Paul, and was later to see that it was at this point in their lives that they were closest to each other. Jean-Paul absorbed a love and a loyalty which had once been directed to his father, to his mother, and to Célestine: for a while, Edouard’s devotion to him was unquestioning. Sometimes, it was true, he had doubts. He would remember Jean-Paul’s promises of reform and see how quickly they had been forgotten. He would observe that his brother could be coarse and occasionally cruel. But his loyalty overrode these criticisms, and Jean-Paul’s approbation warmed him.

  When he heard of Célestine’s financial predicament from one of Jean-Paul’s fellow officers, it was to his brother that he turned. Haltingly, he explained that despite everything that had happened, he wanted to make some provision for Célestine.

  Jean-Paul found the idea vastly amusing. The house would cost—what? Six hundred pounds? And an annuity as well? He shrugged. The sum of money was minimal. If Edouard wanted to be indulgent, why not?

  “As a gift?” He frowned slightly, and took another swallow of brandy. “Out of your trust fund?”

  “I feel I owe her something, Jean-Paul…”

  “Very well—I’ll authorize it. Go and see Smith-Kemp, our solicitor here. He’ll fix it. A very discreet man. He understands these matters…”

  He paused, his brows still drawn together, as if he were calculating something. Then, with another shrug and a sigh, he downed the last of his drink.

  “Why not, after all?” He stood up. “Pay her off. Always a sound policy with women, eh, little brother?”

  Again Edouard felt that sense of doubt and distaste. Was that what he was doing—paying Célestine off? He had not seen it in that way, and Jean-Paul’s interpretation seemed to him brutal.

  But this feeling passed, and the matter was not discussed again. Jean-Paul seemed to forget about it. Edouard saw the solicitor, the arrangements were made, and once that embarrassment was over, Edouard felt as if he had passed through some baptism of fire. He had taken the proper course; he was indeed a man of the world now. He felt quite proud of his new identity.

  “You’ve changed, Edouard,” Isobel said to him on the day after she had broken her engagement, when Edouard had called on her.

  She had been looking at him for a long time before she said this, watching him across the vast space of the Conway House drawing room. Then she stood up and crossed to him. She looked down into his eyes.

  “You have. You’re harder. I liked you better before. Oh, Edouard, why do things change? Why do people?”

  Her candor touched him. His faith in his new detached and cynical persona suddenly wavered. He had been proud of it a moment before, and probably had been flaunting it. Now he stood up.

  “I haven’t changed,” he said quickly. “Not in that way. I still—” He broke off, uncertain quite what he had meant to say next.

  Isobel continued to look at him closely, and then, slowly, she began to smile. “Maybe not.” Her eyes danced at him. “Maybe there’s hope for you still. I think there is—I see it, there in your eyes. W
hen I look very closely. Just a little trace of a soul. Dear Edouard. I shall look for it next time I meet you. Tell Jean he’s a bad influence on you—will you do that? Tell him tonight. Tell him from me…”

  Edouard did so, thinking Jean-Paul would be amused. His brother’s response was truculent.

  “Typical,” he said. “A typical woman. She knows how close you and I are, and she can’t stand it. Bad influence? What the hell does she mean by that? You’re my brother. I open my heart to you. Really, Edouard, I feel that.” He gave a gusty sigh. “I have no secrets from you.”

  When he said this, Jean-Paul meant it most sincerely. He was aware that it was not strictly true, but his interpretation of truth was comfortable and elastic. He shared with Edouard everything that mattered, he told himself. The few things he chose to leave out were unimportant.

  One of the things he neglected to mention concerned the little actress, Violet Fortescue. During the period immediately after his father’s death, when Jean-Paul’s mind had been filled with muddled intentions of reform, he did—just as he said—make an effort to avoid the easy sophisticated women he had sought out before. He found to his own surprise that he needed comfort from a quite different type; he renewed his acquaintance with Violet on an impulse, and found her astonishingly soothing. She was shy, sensitive, and undemanding. She was touched by the story of his father’s death; she was not without snobbery, and was flattered that the new Baron should confide in her; she was grateful to sit and listen to him talk. Jean-Paul found her quietness soothed him, her silences calmed him, her obvious sympathy touched him. She fell in love with him very easily, and when he realized that, it seemed natural to him to make love to her—something that had not occurred to him before, for though he liked her eyes, he found her physical type unappealing. She proved to be a virgin, and the Baron found her lovemaking too shy and too passive; they did not make love very often; the Baron finding he preferred just to look down into those wide violet eyes and talk.

  When she became pregnant, he was very angry. He felt he had been cheated, trapped. To have made love—what?—four or five times, not very enjoyably at that, and then to find himself in this situation. At once the appeal of the violet eyes faded; the expression of unquestioning love and trust began to annoy him. Suddenly she seemed to him clinging—a quality he had always detested in women—and vulnerable. When he could not disguise the irritation he felt, and he saw her face become pinched and fearful, he became angrier still. She seemed to invite rejection even before he offered it; the more overt he was, the more brutally frank, the more she wept and clung. He loathed such masochism.