Destiny

by Sally Beauman

  Grégoire did not want to visit Louise. He opposed the expedition to the Faubourg Saint-Germain with an obstinacy and a truculence that surprised Edouard.

  “She doesn’t like me,” he said in a small flat voice. “I know she doesn’t. I don’t want to go.”

  Nothing Edouard said could overcome this opposition. When the day came, Grégoire was carefully prepared: he was given a new haircut; George himself supervised his washing procedure, which was inclined to be haphazard. The boy was arrayed in a neat gray flannel suit, with a tie, a white shirt, and beautifully polished shoes. In the back of the car taking them in to Paris, he sat with his hands clasped on his bare knees, and a tight, closed expression on his face. Edouard tried very hard to persuade him to talk, and to relax; Grégoire would not say one word.

  When they arrived at Louise’s house, Grégoire raised a small pinched face to Edouard’s, and Edouard took his hand and pressed it.

  “Half an hour, Grégoire. That’s all. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  Grégoire marched into the house like a small marionette. In the drawing room he took a great deal of persuading to sit down, and then, when Louise finally joined them, drifting in in her rose silk dress, Grégoire seemed so overcome that he forgot to rise. He remembered, but too late, and then stumbled to his feet too quickly, almost knocking over the tiny wine table that stood by his side.

  “Grégoire—how lovely that you could come. Do sit down again…”

  Louise straightened the table a little too ostentatiously. Grégoire crimsoned, and slowly sat down.

  “Now, Grégoire. I’m so longing to hear. You must tell me everything you’ve been doing. Do you like it at St. Cloud? How are your lessons coming along? Do you work hard at them? Edouard always did—but then, darling Edouard was such a clever little boy…”

  So she began, and so she went on. Edouard sat to one side, helplessly, while Louise bombarded Grégoire with questions, and Grégoire stammered increasingly brief replies.

  The tea was brought in by two of Louise’s housemaids. Grégoire sat on the extreme edge of his chair. Louise poured tea from a silver pot into cups of Sèvres porcelain.

  “Edouard, if you’d pass that to Grégoire—on the little table there—yes, that’s right. And then—I thought—perhaps one of these?” She indicated a silver dish on which were cucumber sandwiches one inch square. “Or those?” Another dish, with exquisitely decorated little biscuits. A third, with elegant little mouthfuls of patisserie. “An English tea. Edouard always adored that when we stayed in London. And little boys are always so hungry, aren’t they? Now, Grégoire, which would you like? I chose them specially for you…”

  “None, thank you, Madame…”

  Grégoire raised his small face; his lips were set.

  “None?” Louise’s eyes rounded. “You’re sure? Well, of course, perhaps you’re not used…Edouard, won’t you have one of these?”

  Edouard took one of the tiny sandwiches, and sat down again grimly. Grégoire was now hemmed in by the tiny precarious wine table. Balanced upon it were a Sèvres plate, a Sèvres cup and saucer. Grégoire was sitting with his legs tucked firmly back, his elbows pressed against his sides.

  “So, tell me Grégoire,” Louise went on brightly after a pause. “If you don’t like Latin, and you don’t like arithmetic, what do you like? There must be something, I suppose?”

  “Grégoire is very clever with his hands,” Edouard put in quickly. “He can take a clock apart and put it back together again. And a car engine too—François has been helping him, hasn’t he, Grégoire?”

  “Sometimes.” Grégoire looked sullenly down at the floor.

  “I don’t need him now. I can do it on my own.” He raised his eyes to Louise’s face. “I worked on a Porsche last week, all on my own. And one day Uncle Edouard said he might let me work on the Aston-Martin. It’s my favorite car.”

  This was the longest speech he had made. Edouard could see the pleading expression come into his eyes, and the desperation for approval. Perhaps Louise saw it, too, for she gave a little laugh.

  “Grégoire, how charming! But that wasn’t quite what I meant. I’m sure Edouard doesn’t need another mechanic…Oh! You’ve finished your tea—how quickly you drink! Here, let me pour you another cup…”

  This was so overtly rude that Edouard was about to intervene; but before he could speak, Grégoire rose to his feet. He lifted the Sèvres cup and saucer from the table in front of him, and advanced toward Louise, who was sitting there smiling at him, silver teapot poised.

  When he was perhaps one foot away from her, Grégoire dropped the cup. It fell to the floor and instantly smashed. Louise gave an exclamation of displeasure, and Edouard rose to his feet; Grégoire remained absolutely still, looking down at the smashed cup. Had it been deliberate? Edouard hesitated, unsure; it had happened so quickly that it was difficult to know.

  Grégoire raised his eyes from the floor to Louise’s face: “I’m sorry,” he said in a flat voice. “It’s broken. That was clumsy of me.”

  The defiance in his tone was masked, but it was there. Louise heard it and flushed. Edouard heard it, too, and it was then that he became almost certain that the dropping of the cup had been no accident.

  The episode was passed over; shortly afterward Edouard and Grégoire left. In the car, returning home, Grégoire was very quiet. As they reached St. Cloud, he turned to Edouard with a sudden anxiousness in his face.

  “I don’t think I’ll be asked to go there again. Not after breaking that cup, do you think?”

  The hope that this might indeed be the case was transparent in his face—so transparent that Edouard suppressed a smile.

  “I’m sure my mother will not mind—it was only a cup. But perhaps we might not go there again—for a while anyway.” He paused. “Grégoire, did you mean to do it? Tell me truthfully now.”

  A small frown appeared on Grégoire’s face. Edouard saw a brief struggle take place.

  “She doesn’t like me,” Grégoire said at last in a small stubborn voice. “I told you she didn’t. I told you I didn’t want to go there.”

  It was no answer, and it was a complete answer; Edouard, recognizing something of Jean-Paul in the implacability of the reply, hearing in it, too, that note of bland stubbornness with which some of his workmen in the Loire would resist argument and change with an age-old peasant resilience, sighed and decided it might be wiser to leave the subject there.

  The episode was better forgotten, he thought; he would not risk exposing Grégoire to Louise’s unkindness again. Days passed; weeks passed. Once Grégoire was certain that he was reprieved from all further visits to the Faubourg Saint-Germain, his nature became open and sunny once again.

  In the spring of that year, 1955, not long after this meeting, the tutor Edouard had hired for Grégoire left to take up an appointment elsewhere. Edouard, searching around for a replacement, hit on the idea of Hugo Glendinning.

  He had seen Hugo from time to time in the intervening years; he knew from Hugo’s cousin Christian that his former tutor had fallen on hard times. A prestigious teaching post at Winchester had been terminated abruptly some years before, and Hugo had failed to hold another since. The regimen of the major public schools did not suit him, Christian explained. He was too individualistic, too eccentric. Christian was sure he would be delighted to go to France and work for Edouard. Private tutors in England were less in demand these days, Christian said with a smile; times were changing.

  Edouard was a little uncertain about the decision. He would have preferred Grégoire to go to school and mix with other children. But the little boy, having missed so many years of schooling, was backward in his lessons, and Edouard feared that he would be teased. He would wait another couple of years, he told himself, until Grégoire had had a chance to catch up, and was more confident. He thought of Hugo, who had revolutionized his own thinking, who had made him challenge and question for the first time. He thought of Hugo’s ability to excite
interest, to stimulate thought. He reminded himself of Hugo’s dedication, his wisdom, his kindness, and his wit. He heard Hugo’s voice saying lines of poetry to him that remained with him still: he came to a decision, and wrote to him. It was his first major mistake.

  Hugo had never suffered fools gladly. Edouard, not a fool, and possessed of a quick and nimble mind, had forgotten that side of his nature, which he, in any case, had rarely seen. Also, time had passed, and Hugo had changed. A youthful tendency to impatience had, over the years, modulated into a marked irascibility. Hugo looked at his contemporaries, less clever than himself, and saw them outstrip him. He blamed political bias, but when he had stood as a Labor candidate in the 1945 elections in which the Socialists swept to postwar victory, Hugo had not won his seat. He was in his fifties, unmarried, and out of touch with postwar educational methods. He had never taught boys who were less than well grounded in traditional academic subjects. He and Grégoire met, and it was almost instant dislike.

  Grégoire’s ability to take a clock to pieces and put it together again, to strip down a car engine, to harness a horse and ride it well, to know and to cherish the names and characteristics of plants and animals—all these abilities meant nothing to Hugo at all.

  At first, Hugo tried to be patient. He understood that the boy had had little formal education until Edouard took him under his wing. He could now read and write in French, and had learned a little English from Edouard, but that was the extent of his achievements. Enthusiastically, curbing the dislike he felt, Hugo embarked on a plan that would give Grégoire a solid foundation in all the subjects he considered of importance. These did not include anything remotely mechanical, certainly not the workings of the internal combustion engine. Education, to Hugo, was literature, history, and languages first, everything else a very poor second.

  Their tutorials did not go well. Grégoire could be stubborn. It did not take Hugo long to decide that the boy was willful: he could learn, he just did not want to. He was lazy; he refused to concentrate. To his own horror, Hugo, the lifelong Socialist, found himself blaming the boy’s peasant stock. Hating himself for that snobbery, he drove the boy harder, refusing to admit to himself that he was failing.

  He knew he had failed at so many things, but never as a teacher, never as that. Now here was a boy who listened stolidly while Hugo read to him some of the greatest literature in the world; who yawned over Villon; who stared out the window longingly while Hugo read de Maupassant or Flaubert.

  Hugo would not, could not, lower his standards; the boy would not, could not, raise his. They reached an impasse very soon—but neither told Edouard, Hugo out of pride, Grégoire because he could not bear to disappoint him.

  Late in the summer of 1955, when the weather was very hot, Edouard left for America on business. He had decided to investigate for himself the question of his mother’s land investments in Texas, the holdings her Wall Street advisors seemed so eager she should sell, so eager that Edouard was a little suspicious. He would be away two weeks: when he returned, he told Grégoire, they would go away on holiday, to the sea perhaps, as they had the year before.

  Grégoire missed Edouard; his concentration did not improve. The schoolroom at St. Cloud was stiflingly hot day after day; Hugo’s temper did not improve either. Once, to his own dismay, he almost hit the child out of frustration, and only just curbed himself in time. Furious, he decided to abandon Latin for the moment and concentrate on French. If the boy would not listen to poetry, then he should be forced at least to understand some grammar.

  He set Grégoire pages of text to learn, sequence after sequence of rules. Then he tested him on them.

  One afternoon, about a week after Edouard’s departure, he noticed the boy was quieter than usual, and slightly flushed. He asked him sarcastically if he felt all right. Grégoire looked down.

  “I have a headache,” he said eventually.

  “I also have a headache.” Hugo slapped his textbook down on his desk. “I would have less of a headache if you concentrated. Now. The conjugations of these irregular verbs. We will go over them again. Perhaps if you remember them, you will forget your maladies.”

  The boy bent his head over the book with a docility unlike him. The next day it was the same. He volunteered nothing. He sat in sullen silence. He refused to eat his lunch. At two they returned to the schoolroom.

  “You are sulking, Grégoire. Would you like to tell me why?”

  The boy raised his flushed face. “I don’t feel very well.”

  “You would feel better if you worked. Laziness is enough to make anyone feel ill.”

  “Truly. My head aches. I would like to lie down.”

  The little boy lowered his head on his arms, and Hugo gave a sigh of exasperation. He got up, crossed to the boy, and felt his forehead. He felt a little hot, but the schoolroom was stifling, so it was hardly surprising.

  “Grégoire—these devices may have worked with your previous tutor, they will not work with me.” Hugo returned to his desk. “If I told you lessons were over for the day and you could go swimming, no doubt a miraculous recovery would take place. I have no intention of doing that. Now, sit up, please, and make an attempt to concentrate. Open your grammar to page fourteen.”

  Slowly the boy did as he was told.

  By half-past three, when their lessons were normally over, Hugo felt he was getting into his stride. The boy was quiet; he appeared to be listening; certainly he wasn’t staring out the window for once. Hugo glanced at his watch and decided to press on for another half hour.

  At five minutes to four, Grégoire went into convulsions. It happened very suddenly, and without warning. Suddenly Hugo heard a harsh sibilant inhalation of breath. He looked up in alarm. The boy’s head had arched back; his eyes had rolled up; one arm and one leg jerked, then his whole body. He fell off his chair and onto the floor. Hugo had no idea what to do. Frantically he rang for the servants. He fetched water and splashed it over the twitching boy. He loosened his collar, attempted to put a ruler between his teeth, and failed. Just after four, the convulsion stopped.

  An ambulance was called. Grégoire had a second convulsion on the way to the hospital. The top pediatrician in Paris was summoned from his home in the suburbs. He informed a white-faced Hugo that the boy almost certainly had meningitis. They would perform a lumbar puncture to make sure. And after that…

  “Then what? Then what?” Hugo was distraught.

  “Then you pray, Monsieur. I will do the best I can, naturally. If he had been admitted sooner, I should have been more optimistic. That is all I can say.”

  Hugo first telephoned the de Chavigny offices, and told them to contact Edouard immediately; then, for the first time in many years, he prayed. Edouard was contacted in the middle of a meeting at six-fifteen Eastern Standard Time. He left immediately for the airport and chartered a jet. Grégoire died the next day, in the early morning, two hours before Edouard reached the hospital.

  He took the boy’s small still limp body in his arms, and wept with a passion of which his business associates would not have believed him capable.

  Three months later, Hugo was drowned in a boating accident; there were rumors of suicide, which were hushed up. He left Edouard his library, and when Edouard heard this, he angrily sent the whole collection to auction. Grégoire was buried in the de Chavigny chapel, to the fury of Louise and the indifference of Jean-Paul, and Edouard tried to begin to rebuild his life.

  It was from that time, his friends judged, that he became a changed man. They had always respected Edouard de Chavigny. Now they began to fear him.

  In the early fifties, Edouard had commissioned Émíl Lassalle, pupil of Le Corbusier, and the leading Modernist architect in France, to design the new administrative headquarters for the de Chavigny parent company in Paris. By late 1955, the tall black glass tower Lassalle designed was completed; it was the first building of its kind in Paris, the subject of much controversy and subsequent imitation, to become a landmark in the c
ommercial sector.

  In the winter of that year, Edouard arrived there punctually at nine, as he always did. As always, he was driven from St. Cloud in his black Rolls-Royce Phantom; as always, when his driver held back the door, and he climbed out, he looked up at Lassalle’s building, that tall dark tower, and then passed inside. He was not looking forward to the events that he knew lay ahead of him that morning, but he dismissed all such thoughts from his mind: pleasant and unpleasant, most tasks were equal to him now: he viewed them with the same cold dispassion—so many tasks in each day, so many days in each week, so many weeks in each year. He stepped into his private elevator and pressed the button for the eighteenth floor.

  In his office on the twelfth floor of the same building, Gérard Gravellier, head of the archive department of de Chavigny, was standing at the window. He had watched the Rolls-Royce pull up, as he did most mornings. He had watched the tall black-suited figure pass quickly inside. Once Edouard was out of sight, he turned away from the window thoughtfully, brushing a few flecks of dandruff absentmindedly from the shoulders of his suit. The suit had been tailored for him in London at a cost of some one hundred and fifty guineas—not by Edouard de Chavigny’s own tailors, Gieves of Savile Row, but by another man who could do a cheaper, and passable, imitation.

  Gravellier felt nervous, so nervous he’d been unable to eat breakfast. But now he tried to calm himself: there was no reason for nerves, he told himself. He knew the reason for this meeting. It was to discuss the new storage and filing systems to be used for the archive of de Chavigny designs, which had been replanned from scratch at Edouard de Chavigny’s insistence, and which would become fully operational that week, when the archive was finally moved to its new headquarters. The new system involved some staffing reductions, voluntary retirements; it was probably that which Edouard de Chavigny wanted to discuss, or some details of the system. Edouard de Chavigny’s eye for detail was well known; no aspect, however small, connected with the running of his companies escaped his notice. The remembrance of that brought the nervousness back. Gérard Gravellier was beginning to sweat.