“I’ve never fished, I’m afraid,” she said quickly.
“Ah, well. Ah, well.” He smiled at her kindly. “You must persuade Edouard to teach you.”
“I would like that.”
The words were spoken before she could stop herself. It was the truth, and it was also a lie, because it would never happen. The Duc was benignly assuming a future which did not exist; so were most of the other people at the table, she could tell it from their curious glances. So was Edouard. She knew that, she had let it happen, and she should have stopped it.
Oh, God, she thought. Oh, God. What have I done?
From his vantage point, at the head of the table, Edouard looked at Hélène. She was wearing the white dress he had bought her at Givenchy, and he thought she looked more beautiful than he had ever seen her. Givenchy was a genius, and these dresses of his, famous for their pure lines, were made for Hélène. He had known that, and Givenchy himself had sensed it immediately. Plain white silk satin, cut with a narrow boned bodice, the long skirt a slender bell. It left her throat and her shoulders quite bare: absolute severity and absolute sensuality: Givenchy had seen at once the paradox that was at the heart of Hélène’s beauty.
Her pale gold hair was drawn back from her forehead, and fastened simply at the nape of her neck, emphasizing the oval of her face, the calm and dazzling perfection of her features. She was pale—she was afraid of this dinner, he knew that—but now, he saw with relief, a little color had come back into her face. It stained her cheeks, and made her eyes glow; the Duc had been talking to her, and she had just answered…perhaps she was beginning to relax, to see that there was nothing to fear. Edouard felt a surge of optimism. His instinct in arranging this evening had been right, he thought.
He glanced to his left. Ghislaine Belmont-Laon was looking at Hélène coldly. She had accepted the invitation with a transparent eagerness for which Edouard felt contempt. His mistress, being put on trial for his friends: Ghislaine had come as insolently near to hinting at that as she dared, but then, Ghislaine was a fundamentally stupid woman, he thought impatiently. If they but knew it, it was his guests, not Hélène, who were on trial…
He looked down the table, which was covered in an embroidered muslin cloth; it covered, in the country manner, another cloth of a richer color—a fashion begun in his grandmother’s day and adhered to ever since.
The lights of the candles softened the rich yellows and blues and pinks of the Limoges porcelain. They deepened the colors of the pyramids of fruit. The center of the table was decorated as it had been in his childhood, with wildflowers and vine leaves. He loved the simplicity and the charm of the arrangement—one Louise de Chavigny, with her sharp sophisticated taste, had never understood, and always hated.
He felt a momentary sadness, a powerful nostalgia then, for the past, for all those lost summers between the wars. The tennis parties at which Papa always allowed Louise to win; the games of Racing Demon and Bezique with his grandmother in the evenings; the adventures with Jean-Paul…He had tasted his first glass of wine in this room, at this table, his father carefully adding a little water, in case, for a three-year-old, it should prove too strong. A Chinon; it had tasted of raspberries…
He looked once more at Hélène. She was talking to Christian now. He thought: We could come here with our children. Every summer. For so many years…
Around the table, Edouard’s tendency to abstraction, to an uncharacteristic lack of attentiveness, did not go unremarked. The Duchesse de Varenges, among others, noted it, and smiled indulgently. She was devoted to Edouard, and it was time he remarried; the girl—she knew nothing about her of course, but still—the girl seemed charming. She had been very patient with poor dear Alphonse, who could be a little tedious on the subject of fishing. Bon genre, the Duchesse decided, and felt pleased. She was not in sympathy with modern manners; it was a pleasure to meet a young woman so beautiful and so modest, though it was perhaps a pity she was not French. At one time she had entertained hopes that Edouard might come to appreciate the virtues of her niece, her favorite niece, who would in many ways have made him a most excellent wife. But there: her niece was plain, and this young woman was exquisite; Edouard was as susceptible to looks as any other man…
Her eyes turned from face to face at the table, giving each person there a magisterial stare. She looked at Ghislaine Belmont-Laon and her husband with frank dislike, and at one of the Americans with fascination. The man was wearing a white jacket, which his wife referred to as a tux. Extraordinary. Her eyebrows rose. Could such a thing be de rigueur in America? Really, Edouard had the most colorful friends…
Opposite the Duchesse, seated close to Edouard, though not as close as she would have liked, Ghislaine Belmont-Laon glanced across at Jacqueline de Varenges, and noted, to her own satisfaction, that the appalling woman was looking even more of a fright than usual. Her tiara, for which Ghislaine might cheerfully have bartered her soul, was perched on top of her head like a cozy on an egg. And her dress! Where could she have found one that particular shade of bilious green?
Ghislaine looked down at her own dress, which was Balenciaga, and at the diamonds around her wrists, which were borrowed. She gave a small smile of satisfaction. She felt less satisfied when she looked up again, and saw again the Givenchy this new woman of Edouard’s was wearing. Givenchy was inimitable, of course, and she had to admit that those sculpted dresses of his were very hard to wear. To look good in them, a woman must be tall and slender; it also helped to be beautiful. The girl was carrying it off well, she had to admit that. Quite well. Though she looked no more than a child…She glanced across at Edouard again. It was a pity. Men of Edouard’s type were always the first to be attracted by apparent innocence, by the lack of guile that accompanied youth. It made her extremely impatient: men could be so very stupid. Such qualities never lasted, and besides, a man like Edouard would find them boring before long. Edouard was a sensualist, for all his apparent asceticism, and he was after all notoriously fickle. A girl like that had been lucky to hold him for a month, two months, or however long it was. She certainly could not hope to hold him much longer. What Edouard needed, Ghislaine told herself, was a woman of sophistication and understanding; a woman of resources; a woman who understood the kind of games and ploys necessary to maintain the interest of a clever, and dangerous, man. A woman such as herself…
This thought, one she had had before, on many occasions, made her body stir with a quick secret pleasure. She looked at Edouard, and tried to imagine how he would be in bed.
Across the table from Ghislaine, her husband Jean-Jacques, who had been watching her with a certain amusement, saw her glance, and knew at once what his wife was thinking. Well, she could try, he thought, and no doubt would in due course; he had no objections—when Ghislaine had a new lover, she left him wonderfully free to pursue his own inclinations. But she would have to wait until this girl had disappeared from the scene, as, presumably, she would: all Edouard’s women did, sooner or later. Right now, Ghislaine was wasting her time. Edouard’s face bore an expression no man could misinterpret; he looked as if he had been in bed with this girl all afternoon, and couldn’t wait for his guests to leave, so he could go back to bed with her.
Jean-Jacques turned his head. He regarded Helen Hartland with a practiced and expert eye. Well, he didn’t blame Edouard for that. He would have liked the chance himself; just looking at her, just imagining, made him hard. Was she good? He felt instinctively that she would be; there was something about the mouth, something about the way she moved—and she looked so pure. The untouchable ones, the ones who looked like ice—they were invariably the hottest ones, when it came to it. He stared resentfully at the dress she was wearing. Givenchy; and Edouard had chosen it, he’d have laid a bet on that. It was typical of Edouard’s taste. Who but Edouard would take a woman with a body like that, and put it in a fifty-thousand-franc straitjacket, so you couldn’t see a damn thing…
Next to Hélène, Christian G
lendinning was making an attempt to be charming. He was aware that it did not seem to be getting him very far, which was surprising. Christian had no compunction about using his well-known charm: it had moved mountains in the past—so why not now? He was a little suspicious of this young woman, and she was astute. Perhaps she sensed his wariness, and it was that which undermined his efforts?
He sighed, and tried harder. He had, after all, promised Edouard to be on his best behavior—this dinner would be an ordeal for anyone in her position, and she seemed so very young. Younger than she claimed, he would have said, though why should she lie? And certainly very tense. He had tried to talk about England, thinking that might put her at her ease, but it seemed to make her even more tense, which was curious…
Christian looked at her carefully: he had heard rumors about her in Paris, and he had been longing to meet her, because he adored dramas of any kind, and the arrival of this woman was clearly a drama of the most splendid kind. For a start, Edouard was quite clearly wildly in love: bouleversé. Christian had never seen him so stricken, and he was enjoying the spectacle tremendously. He himself fell in and out of love with monotonous regularity—and always, alas, with such wildly unsuitable young men—but Edouard, well, he had begun to think that Edouard was immune from the condition.
It was easy to see how it had happened, of course: she was astonishingly lovely, just as everyone had said. He liked her voice, which was distinctly unusual, low, and slightly halting in its rhythms, so that he had to lean quite close to her sometimes to catch what she said. And her face: Christian, who was not attracted by female beauty, was nonetheless interested in it. He regarded it with a critical eye, just as he might have a face in a painting. So grave, and so still: a face from another era, he thought; she reminded him, in that stiff, sculpted dress, of certain Spanish portraits he had always loved. A young infanta, yes, that was it; and there was just a suggestion, as there was in certain of those portraits, that the beautiful child was trapped…
He sighed. He was getting fanciful, and had probably drunk too much of Edouard’s excellent wines. Now the Sauternes had been brought, a Château d’Yquem. He lifted his glass.
“Nectar and ambrosia,” he said in his extremely affected clipped voice. “Really, dining with Edouard is a little like dining with the gods…”
Hélène laughed; it was the first time she had laughed all evening. Across the table, Clara Delluc, who had been watching her gently and sadly, suddenly straightened up. How extraordinary, she thought. She had not noticed the resemblance before, but when she smiled, this Hélène was so very like Jean-Paul…
The guests were leaving: Alphonse and Jacqueline de Varenges first, then the group of Americans to whom, Hélène realized, she had hardly spoken all evening, then several other French couples, then Jean-Jacques Belmont-Laon and his wife, who said, “My dear! In Paris—we must meet again. I shall arrange a luncheon—no, not you, Jean-Jacques, just Hélène and I. À deux. I shall so look forward to it…” A glance down at the diamond ring Hélène wore on her finger; a smile on her taut beautiful face that was like honey and vinegar, and then she was gone. Hélène watched her sweep across the room, her husband in her wake. At the doorway, she stopped, the skirt of her Balenciaga swirled. She reached up to kiss Edouard on both cheeks.
“Hélène?”
She felt a touch on her arm, and, turning, found Clara Delluc by her side. She was smiling.
“I have to leave now, and we’ve hardly had a chance to speak. I’m so sorry. I do hope we shall meet again, in Paris…”
This time the sentiment was sincere. Hélène looked at Clara, and knew that she liked her, just as Edouard had said she would. She had short unruly hair, and wide-spaced dark brown eyes; they were regarding Hélène kindly, a little uncertainly, as if there were something which she wanted, and hesitated, to say.
“I felt—I wanted you to know…” She pressed Hélène’s arm impulsively. “I’m so happy. For you, and also for Edouard. You’re very young, and you perhaps don’t realize—how changed he is. How much happier he looks. I’m grateful to you for that—all his friends will be. I just wanted you to know, we, all the people who care for him, we wish you both well…”
She spoke rapidly, frowning a little as she did so, as if it cost her some effort to say this. Hélène looked into her face, and the sympathy she saw there was so genuine that for one insane moment she longed to take Clara’s arm and confide in her, ask her advice, anything…But the moment passed, and then Clara was gone.
Hélène watched her leave, sadly. She would not be meeting Ghislaine for luncheon. She would not be meeting Clara. She would never see any of these people, ever again, and yet none of them seemed to sense it. None of them seemed to realize there was anything wrong.
Perhaps she was a natural actress, after all, just as Priscilla-Anne once said, she thought with a sudden sense of derision. Perhaps, without being aware of it, all those years of childish deceptions and secrecies had paid off, and she had just given a performance she had been rehearsing for years.
But it was one thing to keep up a pretense to strangers; it was quite another to do so to Edouard. He was standing talking to Christian, the last of the remaining guests, and Christian, who was staying at the château, was insisting volubly, and with elephantine discretion, that yes, he really was most frightfully tired, and that if they would both forgive him, he would leave them.
She looked at Edouard as he talked to his old friend. His face was relaxed, animated, as he spoke; she could see the happiness in it. He glanced at her, amusement in his eyes, as if to say—we shall be alone soon.
She realized then that her choice was a very simple one. Either way, hurt was involved, but one way the hurt was less—for Edouard, if not for herself. Christian was leaving, and as Edouard turned back to her, she thought that she had to act—just a little while longer. She had to act very very well, so that Edouard did not suspect, and then it would all be over.
When they went to bed later that night, Edouard left the shutters open, and the curtains undrawn; he liked to look at her body in the moonlight, which shadowed its curves and crevices, and lit her skin with silver. That night, the moon filled the room with a strong unfaltering radiance, and Edouard said, “The moon is full. Look at it, Hélène. So bright. And no stars.”
She turned her face to the window, and then turned back to him, drawing him to her with a kind of desperate urgency.
Later, when they lay quietly together, she suddenly twisted up, pulling him with her, so they knelt in front of each other. She lifted her hands and pressed them on either side of his face, and Edouard saw, to his consternation, that her face was very pale, and her eyes glittered with tears.
“Edouard. You do believe that I love you? Tell me you do. Promise me you do. Promise me you will.”
In answer, he bent to kiss her, but she stopped his lips with her hand.
“No. You must say it. I want to hear you say it. Just once.” She was trembling, and her voice had risen slightly, as if it mattered to her very much that he should say this thing which he had always assumed to be obvious.
“I believe it. You know I believe it. My darling—what’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I wanted to be sure. I don’t know why,” she said. Then she lay back down against the pillows and closed her eyes. Edouard lay down beside her, puzzled, but touched, by this curious plea. It was the first time she had ever asked anything of him, he realized, and that thought made him suddenly very happy. He kissed her face, and tasted the salt of her tears on her cheeks. He wiped them away gently with his hand; her eyes opened, and she smiled at him.
Edouard clasped her in his arms, and they lay still. Nothing else was said, and after a while, Hélène’s breathing grew soft and regular, and Edouard was sure she slept.
He closed his own eyes, and let his mind slip into the dark. In the past, sleep had often eluded him. That night he rested as peacefully as a child.
When he woke in the morning, the
space beside him was empty, and Hélène, who had made her decision, was gone.
Part Two
The Search
1959
“SHE WILL COME BACK,” Christian said.
It was late at night. Helen Hartland had now been missing for forty-eight hours, and Christian and Edouard were alone in his study at the Château de Chavigny. Edouard had been speaking for some time, and Christian had listened to his story quietly. He injected his remark into the long silence that followed, trying to bring conviction to his voice. Usually, he was adept at the social lie, the accommodating untruth. Now, perhaps because it mattered, and he wanted very much to be of comfort, he knew his words sounded hollow. Edouard looked up at him, his eyes watchful and dark in the pallor of his face. Their gazes met.
“You think so?” Edouard said coolly, and he attempted a smile, one Christian recognized from their undergraduate days: the English smile, the Oxford smile, the smile that said, Anything is bearable if you treat it with irony. The attempt was a failure; Christian averted his eyes.
Edouard bent his head once more to his desk. On it was a photograph of Hélène, taken by one of his stable boys and brought to him with some embarrassment, but an obvious desire to help, by his groom that morning. It had been taken the previous week, as he and Hélène returned from their ride. It was the only photograph of her which he possessed; she had just reined in her horse, and she was smiling—at him, Edouard thought, but he was outside the frame.
He stared at it now, frowning, as if the image in front of him held some secret, as if it could somehow answer all the questions that thronged and ached in his mind, all of which resolved themselves into one question, one ache of pain: Why? Also, of course, where? But, his mind numbed with shock and incomprehension, the question of where she might have gone, which he knew to be the most practical one, kept slipping away from him. As he tried to get a grip on his thoughts, they constantly veered back to the “why,” and the great void that opened up in his heart. If he only understood why, he felt, then the answer to all the other questions, including the “where,” would somehow follow.
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