Destiny

by Sally Beauman

  Afterward, she was shaken, and she cried. She clung to him, and told him this had never happened to her before. She begged him to come to her again.

  Edouard drew away from her instantly. His mind settled into a cold hard pattern: distaste and self-disgust. He caught her wrist and raised her face to him.

  “An hour after I leave here tomorrow, half an hour, sooner—I shall have forgotten your face. I won’t remember your name. I won’t remember anything that happened tonight. I never do. You should know that.”

  She knelt back on her heels, looking at him, her dark hair falling in deep wings on either side of her face. She had stopped crying.

  “I’ll make you remember,” she said. “I will. I’ll make it so you never forget.”

  Then she drew the palm of her hand steadily across his thigh.

  “You’re beautiful,” she said, and bent her head. “There,” she said gently. “There, like that, you see? Oh, yes.”

  Edouard lay back and closed his eyes. Her ministrations happened to someone else. Later, in the early hours of the morning, at first light, that other person, that other man, pushed into the shadows of her body again, fucking toward oblivion, and it was only when the brief oblivion came that he knew the man was himself.

  He left shortly after six, walking out into a deserted street. A cat yowled, leapt down from a wall, and pressed itself lovingly against his ankles. Edouard looked down at it, then up at Pauline Simonescu’s shuttered house. He had an image of two dark wings of hair, a pale face—but it was already fading. He hated himself at that moment, as he had hated himself all night.

  Two years, and it was over. He would not go back. Not to Pauline Simonescu herself, who on occasion still read the cards for him, and made up a fictitious future. Not to the women. None of it.

  He would stay away from women altogether, he told himself. He was sickened by the sequence, by a sexual respite which never lasted, but which must always, sooner or later, be repeated: emptiness after emptiness. And besides, he did harm, he had seen that tonight, though the details were already receding.

  He turned away, and with a mew, the cat left him.

  No more women, no matter how strong the need. It was a resolution he kept for three weeks.

  Three weeks, and a warm summer evening. Signing papers in a silent office, while a secretary waited, disguising the impatience she felt to join her lover.

  Three weeks, and the vacancy of his life appalled him. He looked out the window and watched the leaves dance. He turned away and tried to think of his work. He summoned up the image of the Wyspianski jewels, and they glittered coldly. He thought of Partex Petrochemicals, in which he and his mother held such a powerful slice of voting stock. He thought of the new chairman of Partex, the flamboyant Texan, Drew Johnson, his friend, his appointee; the putsch against the ineffective outgoing chairman had been perfectly planned and perfectly executed, the idea Edouard’s, the organization of it Johnson’s. He had enjoyed the plotting well enough, while it lasted—it had a point, it made a strong company stronger. But as soon as it was over, he felt the emptiness settle over him again.

  Johnson was full of plans. Partex was now the fourth largest oil-producing company in America. He wanted it to be the largest, quickly. Edouard admired that drive, that dedication, and that sense of purpose. He could even participate in it for a while. But then, increasingly, he would draw back. The fourth largest, the second largest, the largest of all: in the end, how much did it matter?

  He turned away and looked at the ranked cupboards that contained file upon file. He looked at the telephones. He could work. He could find himself a woman. The pursuit of profit, the pursuit of pleasure. He turned away from them both, angrily.

  Leaving his offices, he dismissed his driver for the night and climbed into the black Aston-Martin. He left the city so he could drive at speed, to Mozart.

  When he knew they were failing him also, he turned back toward Paris at the first opportunity. A woman then.

  Not the woman; he no longer believed in her existence. Just a woman, any woman. A foreigner. A stranger. Someone here today and elsewhere tomorrow—random sex in a random life.

  He drove through expensive streets on the Right Bank, glimpsed the bright ice of diamonds in the de Chavigny showrooms, and headed onto the Pont Neuf, along the Quai des Augustins.

  The past was beating its insistent pulse in his head; beside him the Seine sparkled. And a few streets away, a few minutes away, a tall slender girl came to a halt outside a small church.

  She had been walking the streets at random, also listening to the past. Now she stopped, and lifting her face to the sunlight, looked at the building in front of her. The Église St. Julien le Pauvre. She was poor. She had precisely ten francs in her purse. She smiled.

  Just past the church, there was a small park. There were children there, playing. She heard their shouts. She saw, in the corner of her eye, the colors of their clothes. Red, white, and blue. American colors. Independence colors.

  She had been in Paris almost a week, and before that in England: three days in Devon, three days with Elizabeth, her mother’s sister.

  She did not want to think of those three days. She had gone there so expectantly, bouncing along the narrow roads in a country bus, craning her head for her first view of the house, the first view of her mother’s garden. That place her mother had conjured up over the years, until, with repetition of the stories, Hélène believed she knew it: knew the green lawns, and the summerhouse; knew each tree; knew the place where the white-painted benches were drawn up in the shade; saw, quite clearly, the figures gathered there for the ritual of tea.

  It had not been like that. It had been ugly, and in Elizabeth—she had sensed it at once—there had been no welcome, only an old spite and an old hate.

  She looked now at the church, at the rounded archway, and she forced the memory out of her mind. She forced it back with the other memories, of Billy lying dead, of her mother, and the click of the nun’s rosary, of Ned Calvert, and a man with a gun, and a black Cadillac. She could not get rid of any of these memories, not altogether; at night they came to life in her dreams but during the day there was a certain place in her mind where they were bearable. There the images still replayed, but they were distanced, like a film she had once seen, like things that had happened to someone else. She would not let them into the forefront of her mind. She would not. She had come to Paris—the most beautiful city in the world, Hélène, even more beautiful than London—and it was beautiful. She walked around it each day, on her own, a series of pilgrimages. As long as she kept walking, and kept looking, she felt all right. She didn’t start to shake then, or to cry. That happened only if she stayed too long in one place, and let the memories start to snake back.

  Her new life was beginning, the one she’d planned and dreamed of so long. She was just thinking that; she remembered it, later, because it was at exactly that moment that she heard the car.

  It was a large black car of a kind she could not identify, and she was never quite sure which she saw first, the car, or the man who was driving it. For a moment she thought he had called out to her, then she realized her mistake. It must have been one of the children in the park. She turned away, heard the car come closer, and turned back.

  This time she looked directly at the man, and saw he was looking at her with a slightly puzzled expression on his face, as if he thought he recognized her. That was odd, because she felt the same, although the next instant she knew that was ridiculous—she had never seen him before in her life.

  Ever since she left Orangeburg, she had seen the world and her surroundings with a heightened clarity, as if she were still in shock. Colors, gestures, faces, movements, nuances of speech, they were all now startlingly vivid and clear to her, and she saw this man, too, in this way, as if he came at her slowly, out of a dream.

  The car he drove was black, his suit was black, his hair was black. As she looked at him, he bent forward slightly to turn off
the engine of the car, and as he straightened up, and looked at her again, she saw in a silence that was thunderous, that his eyes were a very dark blue, like the sea in shadow.

  She walked toward him then, and stopped at the end of the car’s hood. She knew quite suddenly what was going to happen next; the knowledge of it flashed through her mind. She thought perhaps he knew, too, because his face grew still for a moment, and very intent, and his eyes looked puzzled, as if he felt some blow, some unexpected stab—the knife had struck, and he had not seen it coming.

  She said something, and he said something in reply—it didn’t matter what the words were, she could see he knew that as well as she did. The words were just a transition, a necessary corridor between two rooms.

  Then he got out of the car and walked around to her. Hélène looked at him. At once she knew that she was going to love him; she felt the brightness of it in her mind; felt something within her shift, realign, and settle.

  She climbed into the car, and they drove through the streets of Paris on a summer’s evening, and she wanted the streets, and the driving, and the evening light to go on forever.

  He stopped the car outside the Dôme in Montparnasse, and turned to look at her. It was a direct look, and it instantly made her want to hide, to run away. But there were other ways of hiding from people, more effective ways; she had learned that since leaving Orangeburg. She thought of the woman on the train; she thought of other people since then, and other stories told to them. No decision was involved; all she knew was that she didn’t want him to know who she was; she didn’t want anyone to know who she was. She wanted them to know her only as the woman she meant to become, the woman she was going to invent. Not Hélène Craig: she had left Hélène Craig behind forever.

  “You know, you haven’t told me your name,” he said as he steered her gently into the crowded restaurant.

  “Helen Hartland,” she answered.

  And after that, nothing was simple.

  Her name was Helen Hartland, she said. She was eighteen years old, and English. Her family bore the same name as the village near which they lived in Devon. It was near the coast; their house overlooked the sea, and it had a very beautiful garden. Did he like gardens?

  Her father had been a hero, an RAF pilot, killed in the last months of the war. Her mother, Violet Hartland, had been an author—quite well known in England, though the romances she wrote were out of fashion now. She had lived alone with her mother, who had died when she was sixteen. Since then she had lived with her mother’s sister. She had left England a week ago and come to Paris on impulse. At present she was working in a café on the Boule Miche; she shared a room nearby with a French girl who also worked in the café. No, she hadn’t yet decided how long she would stay.

  She told him all this over dinner at the Dôme, in a quiet even voice, answering each question he put with careful consideration, apparently oblivious to the swirl of the famous and the fashionable around their table.

  They were speaking in English by then, and her voice fascinated Edouard. He had always had a precise ear for accents; his years in England during the war and his visits there since had given him the ability to place an English man or woman as precisely as he could someone French. He knew his own voice, speaking English, hardly betrayed the fact that he was a foreigner. It still had lingering traces of Oxford and of Hugo Glendinning’s prewar upper-class drawl. This girl’s voice he could not place at all. It had an unusual clarity and perfection of enunciation—a perfection usually encountered only in those for whom English was a second language. It betrayed no regional influence; it was educated, harmonious, slightly old-fashioned, and curiously classless. He could not place the voice, by accent, phraseology, or slang, and he could not place her.

  For someone so young she was remarkably self-possessed. Yet there was no attempt to make an impression, or even to try to please. She did not flirt; she did not pretend interest unless she felt it. She simply sat there, calmly cocooned in the perfection of her beauty, either unaware of, or indifferent to, the fact that every man in the restaurant between the ages of twenty and sixty had been staring in her direction from the moment she entered the room.

  She drank two glasses of wine, and refused a third. When the waiter addressed Edouard by his title, she glanced up at him with that level blue-gray gaze, but registered nothing more. She might have heard of him, she might not; he had no way of telling.

  When they had finished their meal and were drinking their coffee, she put down her cup and looked up at him.

  “This place is very famous, isn’t it?”

  “Very.” Edouard smiled. “In the twenties and the early thirties it was the great haunt of writers and painters. Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford…Here and at the Coupole—there’s great rivalry between them still. Only now—”

  He paused, glancing across at a noisy group in the corner. “Now they vie more for the attention of film stars and singers and fashion models. The writers go elsewhere—the cafés on the Boulevard St. Germain, for instance. Deux Magots—Sartre goes there, and Simone de Beauvoir…”

  “I’m glad you brought me here. Thank you.”

  She leaned back in her chair and looked carefully around the huge mirrored interior, at the waiters in their long white aprons, at the dazzle of people. A man at a nearby table raised his glass to her with a smile, and she gave him a cold stare. Edouard leaned forward.

  “You’ve not been here before?”

  “Oh, no. But I want to learn about places like this.”

  She spoke with complete seriousness. Edouard’s eyebrows rose.

  “You want to learn about them?”

  “But of course. And other places too. And things. So many things.”

  She lifted her hand and began to count items on her slender fingers, a little smile hovering about her lips.

  “About cafés and restaurants. About food. About wine. About clothes—beautiful clothes, like that woman over there is wearing. About paintings, buildings, books. About cars. Houses. Furniture. Jewelry. All those things.” She raised her clear eyes candidly to his face. “I expect you would find that hard to understand…” She paused. “Have you ever been hungry—really hungry?”

  “Very hungry, I suppose—yes, once or twice.”

  “I feel hungry for that. For all those things. To know about them. To understand them. I—well, I grew up in a very small place.”

  “Is that why you came to Paris?”

  Edouard looked at her curiously, for a note of emotion had crept into her voice for the first time.

  As if she were aware of that, too, and regretted it, she smiled quickly. “One of the reasons. And I’ve been working hard. Do you know what I do every morning before I start work, and every evening when I’ve finished?”

  “Tell me.”

  “I walk around Paris, and I look at things. Markets. Galleries. Houses. Churches. And shops, of course. It’s rather difficult to go into the very grand ones, because I don’t have the right clothes, but I look in their windows. I look at dresses, and hats, and gloves, and shoes, and stockings. I look at handbags and silk underwear. I’ve been to Vuitton, and Hermès, and Gucci, and yesterday I stood outside Chanel and Givenchy and Dior—I’d been saving those. You can’t see any clothes there of course, unless you go inside, so I made do with the nameplates.” She gave a wry smile.

  “I see.” Edouard, touched and amused, hesitated. “And of all the things you have seen, which did you like the best?”

  “That’s difficult.” She frowned. “At first everything seemed perfect. Then I began to know what I didn’t like—things covered in initials, things with too much gold, things that…that proclaimed themselves too much. But best of all—yes—best of all, I liked a pair of gloves.”

  “A pair of gloves?”

  “They were very beautiful gloves.” Her color rose a little. “At Hermès. They were very plain, the softest gray kid. Just to the wrist. They had three t
ucks there.” She indicated the place on the back of her hand. “And they had a small flat stitched bow, just there at the top of the wrist. And they were beautiful. I love beautiful gloves. So did my mother. She must have had dozens…”

  “I see.” Edouard looked at her solemnly. The gray-blue eyes met his defiantly, as if she dared him to mock her. He glanced down at the white linen cloth.

  “And jewelry,” he said carefully. “Do you want to learn about that too? Do you look in jewelers’ windows?”

  “Sometimes.” She lowered her eyes. “I have looked in yours. It is yours, isn’t it, in the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré?”

  “It is indeed.”

  “I went there two days ago. And then Cartier’s.” A mischievous glint came into her eyes.

  “And which display did you prefer? Mine, or my rival’s?”

  “To be truthful, Cartier. But I’m so ignorant. I know nothing about stones, nothing about settings…”

  “Do you know which stone you prefer?”

  “Oh, yes! I know that. Of course. I like diamonds.”

  “They’re not necessarily the most valuable…” He watched her closely. “A perfect emerald—a dark green emerald, which is very rare now, can be worth more.”

  “Oh, it’s not a question of value.” A little scorn crept into her voice. “I like diamonds because they are clear. Without color. Because they are cold and hot at the same time. Like fire and ice. The diamonds I looked at—” She hesitated. “It was like looking at light. Into the heart of light. You probably think that is stupid.”

  “Not at all. I think precisely the same. Do you know that the diamond has one very curious property—something that makes it unique among stones?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know how a diamond feels when you hold it in your hand? It feels cold. Ice cold. So cold it burns your skin.”