Destiny

by Sally Beauman

  Outside, a large cat, a stately tabby, uncurled from a window ledge, stretched, and then ambled across the square, her tail a waving plume. Hélène watched her; she watched the light catch the leaves of the tree, listened to the sounds of a city coming to life in the early morning. She turned to Edouard impulsively, unaware that he had been watching her gravely.

  “I used to think so much about what I would be—about what I would become. Oh, Edouard—I used to make so many plans!” She gave a little shake of her head. “When I’m with you—I don’t think of that at all. It doesn’t seem to matter. I don’t have to become anything. I just am…” She raised her eyes anxiously to his face. “Do you understand that? Do you think it’s wrong?”

  “I feel the same,” Edouard said quietly, “so I can’t judge.”

  “It’s beautiful here. Paris is beautiful. I love you, Edouard,” she said, and then—with one of the quick shy gestures he loved, she turned her face and buried it against his shoulder. Edouard held her gently, and pressed his lips against her hair.

  “My darling,” he said gently. “My darling.”

  They left the hotel hand in hand, talking and laughing, just after nine. As they stepped into the square, Edouard halted, paused for an instant, and then, taking Hélène’s arm in his, walked on. Looking up, she saw a tall, extremely elegant woman, her eyes obscured by dark glasses. The woman stared in their direction, then turned away down a side street.

  When they were out of earshot, Edouard sighed. “Ghislaine Belmont-Laon,” he said. “The greatest gossip in Paris. She decorated a number of our showrooms some years back. She haunts the shops off the Rue Jacob. She also haunts my mother…”

  Hélène stopped; she looked up at him. “Did she recognize you?”

  “Oh, certainly, I imagine. Ghislaine misses nothing.”

  “You mean, she’ll tell your mother, your friends…” Hélène asked; Edouard had begun to smile.

  “That she saw me coming out of an extremely insalubrious hotel at nine in the morning with a beautiful young woman? Oh, without a doubt. My mother, by lunchtime, and the rest of Paris by this evening…”

  “And do you mind?” Hélène looked at him curiously; she felt a little afraid.

  “Mind? I don’t give a damn. They’ll find out sooner or later, anyway. That’s inevitable. I don’t intend to hide you away. It’s just that—” He paused, and his face grew serious. “I’m used to their gossip and their lies, and you’re not. I don’t want you to be hurt by it, and I had hoped we might avoid it for a few more weeks.”

  He said nothing more, indeed seemed to forget the incident, but it left Hélène with a small nagging sense of unease. She wished they had not been seen; she wished Edouard had mentioned no time span; it was as if she and Edouard had been locked away in a special place, until suddenly the cold world had intruded. She saw herself for a moment, then, as an outsider might see her: a young girl, without money or friends; an older man, both powerful and rich.

  That afternoon, Edouard took her to Chanel, and then to Hermès, where he had arranged that she be fitted for riding clothes.

  “Why should I need riding clothes? Edouard, that’s crazy…” she had said, but Edouard had only smiled and said, “Wait and see.” He had bought her dresses before, in the two weeks they had been in Paris. Then, she had accepted the presents with a free heart, gladly and excitedly. But that afternoon, everything was sullied. The assistants at Hermès were courteous, but Hélène prickled with shame under their careful expert eyes. A rich man’s mistress; a gold digger: she felt as if she saw contempt in their gaze. She said nothing to Edouard. That night, his mother, Louise de Chavigny, telephoned him at St. Cloud.

  The conversation was brief, and on Edouard’s side, uninformative. He took the call in his bedroom, and when it was over, Hélène saw that his face was clouded. She watched him fearfully.

  He sat still for a moment, staring at the floor. When he looked up and held out his hand to her, his face cleared. “Shall we leave Paris for a while?” he said abruptly, taking her by surprise. “Shall we? I want to show you the Loire…I want to take you riding there.” He had been planning this, then: she instantly felt giddy with happiness. It was only later, when Edouard had offered no further explanation of the phone call, that the former unease returned.

  Was he taking her to the Loire, in spite of what he said, because an unsuitable mistress was less visible there than in Paris? She hated the thought; she argued with it; it left her, and then returned. She thought of Edouard’s friends, she thought of his mother, and felt a flurry of panic. If they met her—worse, if they knew who she really was—what would their reaction be then? She imagined their cold and hostile stares: the latest girl Edouard’s picked up—she could almost hear their drawling voices. It was like Orangeburg, only much worse than Orangeburg: they would look down on her; they would see her for the sham she was—and if they did that, they might influence Edouard. Edouard might come to see her with their eyes.

  They traveled to the Loire in Edouard’s private plane. And for the first week, in that fairy-tale house, she oscillated between intense happiness and dragging despair. The more she longed to tell Edouard the truth, the more urgent and imperative it became to do so, the more frightening and impossible it seemed.

  He loves me; he cannot love me: the two phrases beat a constant tattoo in her mind. Days passed; a week passed, and sometimes Hélène felt as if she were going mad: one moment on the mountaintop, the next deep in the valley; in the sun one instant, the next in shadow.

  Edouard taught her to ride; she learned quickly. It was late August, then September, day after day of strong clear sunshine with no hint of autumn, but Hélène felt as if April inhabited her mind and her heart and made them volatile. She would go to bed at night feeling rapturously happy; then, some nights, she would dream of Billy. She would hear his mother’s accusing voice, and it would stay with her when she woke, so that the next morning would be sullied. She would withdraw a little into herself, and she could see that Edouard sensed that withdrawal, and that it pained him. If only she could explain to him, she felt then, if only she could tell him the whole truth…she would even turn to him sometimes, impatiently, all the necessary sentences framed in her mind and crying out to be spoken. And then, at the very last moment, she would find herself unable to say them; she would say something else instead.

  “I feel so uncertain one moment, and so sure the next. Edouard, is it like that when you love someone?” she asked him one night, kneeling beside him, tightening her arms around his neck, and looking anxiously into his eyes.

  “In the beginning, perhaps. I feel it too.” He bent his head and pressed his lips against her hand; he was afraid, sometimes, to let her see how much her innocence and her candor touched him. When he looked up and saw that her face was troubled, he pulled her close to him and held her tightly in his arms.

  “Never doubt,” he said fiercely. “Doubt anything else, but not this. You can’t. I won’t let you.”

  At the end of the second week of September, Edouard was forced, reluctantly, to return to Paris for business reasons. The first Wyspianski collection was due to be launched, first in Europe, then in America, later that year, and although the collection itself was all he had hoped for, and the arrangements for the launch had been proceeding smoothly, there were certain elements within de Chavigny that had been opposed to the collection, and the scale of it, for some time. Two of his directors in particular had been fighting a patient rearguard action; since he had left Paris, they had been dragging their feet.

  “But why should they do that?” Hélène asked. Edouard had shown her some of the Wyspianski designs, and even she, without expert knowledge, could see that they were exquisite.

  “A thousand reasons, my darling.” Edouard gave a dismissive gesture of the hand. “Sometimes I think it’s because they just like to oppose me for the sake of it. Sometimes I think they’re empire-building. Sometimes they have arguments which seem cogent en
ough to them—commercial arguments. I don’t always blame them. They’re interested in balance sheets, in boosting profits. They’re not interested in producing art—particularly art they think won’t sell. Wyspianski’s designs are unusual and expensive. They’re aimed at a tiny clientele. There have always been people at de Chavigny who think that market is dying, that we should concentrate our energies on our other divisions—property, hotels, that kind of thing. They’d be quite happy to run down the jewelry division—even sell it off. They can’t do that now, not while I’m here, so they content themselves with being uncooperative. That’s all. There used to be someone in the company who took care of this sort of thing for me—he’d see a minor revolt brewing, and deal with it quickly. But he’s working for me in America now—and I haven’t found another trouble-shooter. Don’t worry.” He smiled. “I can sort it out very quickly. I’ll fly there and be back the same day.”

  He left early the next morning, carefully making sure that word of his impending arrival was spread at his Paris headquarters. Once there, he was equally careful to behave as if there were no particular urgency about his visit. He spent the morning going over routine matters; he had a brief luncheon with his old friend Christian Glendinning, who was in Paris to supervise the new exhibition just transferred from his Cork Street gallery in London to his Left Bank gallery. Christian remarked, with a certain glint in his eye, that Edouard seemed in excellent spirits. He returned to work, and then and only then did he summon the two executives in question to his offices.

  He watched them with interest as they came in. Monsieur Brichot, the elder of the two, was pale and voluble, clearly nervous. He was a man in his early sixties, a thorough, hardworking, unimaginative man who had long ago risen as high as he ever would. He perhaps resented the fact that his promotions had ceased; certainly, he liked to meddle, interfering here, probing there, firing off long memoranda concerning the affairs of other departments. Perhaps he thought such meddling was proof of his energy and devotion; perhaps he was merely fussy. It was the first time that he had, however, gone as far as blocking a directive from Edouard himself, and Edouard felt fairly certain that he had been put up to it by de Belfort, the man who came into the room with him now.

  Philippe de Belfort was also pale, but not from nerves, Edouard was sure of that. While Brichot made a little rush across the room, approached a chair, and was then not quite sure whether to sit in it, de Belfort came in at a leisurely, unhurried pace. He was a tall thick-set man a few years younger than Edouard. He was stately in all his movements, and always spoke with a slow, ponderous weight. He had pale fair hair above his heavy pale face, and eyes of an indeterminate color, heavily lidded. They gave his face an expression of arrogance, almost of sneering. He reminded Edouard, then and always, of some fish, large and pallid, which flourished in the deepest regions of the sea, where light could not reach. Edouard did not like him, but he admired him. He could appear pompous, and he was certainly lacking in charm, but he was smart, astute, and determined, the ablest recruit to the company since the days of Simon Scher.

  He had come to de Chavigny some five years previously, armed with impressive credentials: a father, now dead, who had been a distinguished and famous stockbroker; first class degrees from the Sorbonne and the London School of Economics; a period with the Rothschilds, where he had been recognized from the first as a high flyer. A man who spoke French, English, German, and Spanish with equal fluency; a man who was not afraid of responsibility or decision-making, who weighed matters with a quickness and deftness of mind that was at odds with the ponderousness of his speech; a man who, Edouard knew, pursued social connections in Paris and in London with the same energy and resourcefulness which he applied to his work; a man who would go far, and who behaved, always, as if he were not on the way to some future eminence, but had already arrived there, perhaps at birth.

  Now, while Brichot hesitated awkwardly, gazing at Edouard across his desk, de Belfort moved to a chair and sat down, in one heavy assertive movement, as if to say, I will sit here for the meantime; my proper place is the other side of the desk.

  He and Edouard looked at each other; then de Belfort turned his head; his gaze slowly took in the entire room. He did this each time he came into this office, as if it amused him to enumerate its contents. Edouard looked at him with a slight frown. It was a source of constant irritation to him that de Belfort, a man who had already galvanized the accessories section, where he was responsible for the manufacturing and selling of a highly profitable new kind of merchandise for de Chavigny, should be a man to whom he felt an instinctive antipathy. De Belfort had drive; he had a kind of commercial imagination and daring which Edouard knew he himself also possessed; they were, in some ways, alike—and yet Edouard could never feel at ease with him. Between them, always, and he had sensed it from the first, there was a barrier of will, an unspoken antagonism.

  Brichot, who finally sat now, had already given up; that much was obvious. Edouard had hardly begun his questions, when, with a small nervous fluttering of the hands, Brichot burst out, “I did feel…I’m afraid that…de Belfort said…it seemed wise…” He dried up.

  “We felt,” de Belfort cut in with a cold glance at his colleague, “we felt that although the promotion budget for the Wyspianski Collection had been discussed and approved, there were numerous signs of an escalation in costs.”

  “That’s right. Escalation. That’s what we thought…”

  “And so,” de Belfort continued firmly, “it seemed advisable to delay final authorization while we ran some rechecks.”

  There was a silence. Brichot looked up at the ceiling—one of those famous de Chavigny silences! De Belfort continued to look straight in front of him, his pale eyes fixed on a point somewhere to the side of Edouard’s head.

  “And have those rechecks been completed?” Edouard asked finally in a polite voice which made Brichot quake.

  “Oh, yes.” De Belfort’s tone was almost casual. “They were completed this morning. All the problems have been ironed out. I gave the final authorization myself. An hour ago, actually. I would have informed you. But unfortunately you were out at lunch.”

  The pale eyes shifted for a second to Edouard’s face. The reference to lunch had sounded reproachful. Brichot, detecting the criticism, gave a nervous sniff. He took his handkerchief out of his pocket, then put it back again.

  “Good.” Edouard stood up. “Then I need keep you no longer. Perhaps, Philippe”—he turned to de Belfort—“on another occasion, if you have doubts of this kind, you would come to me direct?”

  “But of course. It was just that I was reluctant to interrupt your vacation…”

  He made his way to the door at a dignified pace. Brichot hung back, and then scuttled after him.

  Edouard watched them go thoughtfully. Brichot was harmless. A timid man, close to retirement, who would be rewarded for a lifetime’s work with a seat on the boards—a back seat. But de Belfort was a different matter. Edouard was certain that de Belfort disliked him as much as he disliked de Belfort. A man who was an asset, and a man who was also, possibly, a threat. Edouard frowned and returned to his work.

  Later, when he was just congratulating himself that everything had been tied up, and he could leave, he received a telephone call from his mother. He picked up the receiver resignedly. Louise launched straight into the attack.

  Did she always have to hear from chance acquaintances that Edouard was in Paris? Did he never consider that weeks had gone by, and she had not seen him? That she was no longer young? That her doctors were quite concerned?

  She went on in this vein for some while. Eventually, Edouard interrupted her: “Very well, Maman. I’ll be with you shortly. But I can’t stay long.”

  Louise’s voice at once purred with pleasure. Edouard hung up. He knew the real reason for the summons, and he wondered how long Louise would take to come to the point.

  She took half an hour. In that time, reclining on a chaise longue, pressing
her hand to her brow but looking otherwise radiant, she told him about the failings of her servants, and of her previous doctor. She discussed her symptoms, real and imaginary, with zest. Most of her ailments were pure invention, and their quickest cure was usually a new lover. But she had fewer lovers now, and longer gaps between them. She must be enduring such a gap now, Edouard thought, shocked a little by his own detachment.

  His mind drifted away to the Loire and to Hélène. Louise gave him a gallant smile.

  “But enough of my problems, my darling. I must say you’re looking marvelously well. It must be all the fresh air, and the riding…You should take a holiday more often. It obviously agrees with you.”

  “Thank you, Maman,” Edouard said, and waited.

  “Of course, I’ve been thinking about you a great deal, Edouard.” She leaned forward elegantly, her dress falling in soft folds. “Shall I tell you what I thought? You won’t be cross? I thought, darling Edouard, that it’s really time you considered marrying again.”

  She let the sentence float away in the air. Edouard regarded her equably.

  “Have you, Maman? How curious. I was thinking just the same thing myself.”

  “Were you, darling?” Louise’s perfectly plucked eyebrows rose slightly. She smiled ingenuously. Edouard wondered how accurate the gossip was, and precisely how much of it Louise had heard. “I’m so glad. After all, one can’t mourn forever—even I realized that eventually, after poor Xavi died. One must look to the future. One has a life to live, after all. One has responsibilities…”

  She gave a suitably vague gesture of the hand, and then stood up. “Of course, in your case, it’s not a simple matter. I do understand that. You deserve someone so very special—and I just wondered, I had been thinking, when you return from the Loire, darling Edouard…perhaps if I held a little party. It seems such an age since I had a party. Nothing too large—but there were several charming people I thought I might invite. The youngest Cavendish girl, you remember her, Edouard? And Sylvie de Castallane. Or Monique…no perhaps not Monique. Plenty of money, of course, but not quite…No. And then there’re some charming Americans. Gloria Stanhope—you remember? I stayed at their place on Long Island last year? The loveliest girl, and—”