Destiny

by Sally Beauman

  “I told you. The girl was in a disturbed state,” she said abruptly. “She was quite calm at first. But there were crying fits. Long silences. Then various garbled stories about her mother and herself. When she left, I decided it was all too highly colored. To be charitable, she was still obviously very shocked by her mother’s death, which was sudden. And this place was clearly a disappointment to her…” She paused, the blue eyes growing hard. “And, to be uncharitable, she was a fantasist. Just as her mother always was. Frankly, I’m glad she left.” She moved to the door as she spoke, as if to indicate that the interview was over. The men got to their feet, but at the door she suddenly turned back, fixing Edouard with her sharp blue eyes.

  “I’ve heard of you, of course.” She made it sound like a concession. “You have horses, don’t you? Jack Dwyer’s your trainer.”

  “Yes.” Edouard looked slightly puzzled.

  Elizabeth Culverton gave a tight malicious smile. “Then perhaps you’ll understand when I say that in my experience, whether it’s horses, or dogs…” She gestured across at the labradors. “Or people. Breeding will out. I know nothing of her father’s pedigree, of course. But I would say that Hélène was very much her mother’s daughter. It might be as well for you to remember that. Men are exceedingly foolish where women are concerned, so I don’t suppose you’ll listen. However, you’ve come a long way, so you may as well have the benefit of my advice, as well as my information.”

  She turned, and walked out into the hall. Christian, embarrassed by her rudeness, found himself blushing. Edouard appeared quite unmoved. In the hall, he shook hands courteously, and thanked Elizabeth Culverton for her help. Her failure to rile him irritated her, Christian thought.

  In the Rolls, Christian leaned back in the seat and sighed. “Dear God. What a ghastly woman. ‘Her father’s pedigree.’ Women like that make me ashamed to be English.”

  Edouard shrugged. “As a species, they’re not confined to England, you know. It is possible to encounter them elsewhere.”

  “Not if I can avoid it.” Christian glanced at him sideways. “You’re taking it all very calmly. I was a little disappointed. I was absolutely dying for you to be frightfully rude.”

  “There was no point. Besides, she was helpful, I thought.”

  Edouard turned his face to the window and looked out at the dark. Christian watched him curiously.

  “Was she? I thought she was no help at all.”

  “Not of immediate help perhaps. But in the long term…” Edouard paused, and then turned back to Christian impulsively. “I feel I need to know her, Christian. That I have to know her to find her. Know who she is. Know what she wants.”

  Christian looked at him levelly. The eagerness in Edouard’s face, the expression in his eyes, reminded Christian of a much younger Edouard, the Edouard he had known as a boy; he was touched, and simultaneously fearful for him.

  “You’re assuming that what she wants will be you,” he said gently, resting his hand on Edouard’s arm. “Supposing, when you find her, that isn’t the case?”

  Edouard hesitated. “Even so,” he answered shortly, and turned away once more.

  At the airport at Plymouth, an aide was waiting for Edouard. The Rolls drove out to the edge of the runway; across the tarmac Edouard’s plane waited, ready to taxi, its engines warming up, a steward hovering in its lighted doorway. Christian remained in the car, which would take him back to London. Edouard got out and stood at the edge of the runway, talking to the aide.

  It was raining now, and a strong wind was blowing. Edouard stood there, talking to the man, apparently oblivious to the wind and the rain. Christian saw his face, alert and pale in the flare of the landing lights; the wind gusted; Edouard appeared to question him, and the man nodded. Just for a moment Edouard lifted his head, and looked up at the sky; then he pressed the man’s arm and turned back to the car.

  Christian rolled down the window. Even before he saw Edouard’s expression he knew what must have happened.

  “They traced Sinclair?”

  “Yes. This afternoon.”

  “You’re going back to Paris?”

  “No. Not Paris. Rome.”

  “Well, well, well.”

  Their eyes met for a second, then Edouard stepped back.

  “Good luck,” Christian called as the car started to move. He wasn’t sure if Edouard heard him. He glimpsed his face, pale and set, the rain beating down on his bare head.

  The car wheeled. When Christian looked back, Edouard was already in the plane, and its doors were closing.

  The movie was called Night Game, and it took place entirely during the daylight hours; a fairly typical example of Thad’s perversity, Lewis thought. Lewis disliked the title, which suggested to him some pornographic romp, but Thad was adamant. When Lewis argued, Thad simply giggled, and said it sounded better in French.

  Beyond that, as Lewis had become irritably aware over the past six weeks, he, who had put up some fifty percent of the backing and had managed to produce free accommodation for the entire crew, had very little idea what the movie was about. On this, the final day of shooting, he was still as much in the dark as he had been on day one. He stood at the top of the stairs in the Principessa’s palazzo, in his pajamas, clutching a glass of Alka-Seltzer. It was six o’clock in the morning, and he had a bad hangover. In the vast marble-floored foyer below, the production manager, who was French, was supervising the transfer of the last of the equipment into the vans waiting outside. A straggle of crewmen were variously assisting and delaying him; one was French, one was American, and the rest were Italian. It was their polyglot conversation that had wakened him.

  Lewis watched them gloomily. Thad and Helen had already left; the final sequences were being shot in Trastevere. Lewis was not needed. He had not been needed for the past six weeks. He drained the last of the Alka-Seltzer. From the kitchen regions, some distance away, he heard the muffled sound of a dog howling. Well, he could always walk some of the damn dogs: that was useful, he supposed.

  The trouble was that Thad was by nature extremely secretive, Lewis decided, as he returned to his room and rang for strong black coffee. When working, as Lewis had discovered, he became almost pathologically so. He had still shown Lewis nothing on paper, certainly nothing resembling the shooting script of which he often spoke. Each morning, Thad would turn up at the shoot with handfuls of crumpled paper covered in spidery notes. He would then go into huddles with the actors, with his lighting cameraman, Victor, or with one of his crew. He would brandish the bits of paper, and pull his beard, and rub his glasses, and mutter. He did not like Lewis around at all, and he became very annoyed if Lewis muscled in on any of these huddled whisperings, as he had at first tried to do.

  Lewis himself had no experience of filming, but it seemed to him that Thad worked in a purposely created atmosphere of chaos. He constantly changed his mind. He told one actor one thing about a scene, and another actor something entirely different. He changed lines. He did one take when the scene had seemed to Lewis a hesitant mess, and take after take when the first had been clearly the best. He never sat still. Lewis had some idea that a director sat in a canvas-backed chair and directed. Thad didn’t even have a chair, and he was always on his feet, squeezing his fat body around equipment, tripping over cables, peering, poking, adjusting, fiddling. He might spend an hour setting up a shot, another hour moving one of his two leading male actors around like a clockwork toy. His feet had to be here; his head had to be there—exactly in a line with the edge of the window. After Helen’s line, he had to count to five, and then turn his head to the camera, so—no, not at that angle, at this angle, yes…

  The actor in question, Lloyd Baker, was a young American Thad had picked up somewhere in Paris. Thad had cast him because of his eyebrows, or so he said; Lewis had agreed because he came cheap. He was not very bright, but he had spent six months at the Actors Studio.

  “What’s my motivation here?” he would whine despairingly as T
had adjusted his elbow by half an inch. “I mean, like, what do you need to see in my face? What am I thinking here, Thad?”

  “Who gives a fuck? Think about some broad. Think about your mother. Think about Bing Crosby. But get your fucking face in a line with the edge of the window…”

  “I can’t do it.” The actor’s handsome face composed itself into a sulk. “If I don’t have my motivation, it won’t work.”

  “Listen.” Thad took him by the elbow. “You heard of Greta Garbo?”

  “Sure I’ve heard of Garbo. I’m not dumb.”

  “You know one of the great shots of Garbo? One of the greatest shots in all her movies? The end of Queen Christina, right, and it’s the last shot of the film, and we get this big, big closeup of her face…And it’s, like, mystery, you know, unfathomable mystery. You know how Mamoulian got that shot? You know what he said to Greta? He said, ‘Think of nothing, Greta, nothing,’ and she did…”

  There was a long silence. Lloyd Baker sighed. “Okay, I’ve got it. I turn to the camera. I think of nothing. But what’s my motivation?”

  “Jesus Christ. Forget what I said. Forget the moves. Forget the window. Just do it.”

  They did it. It looked completely undisciplined to Lewis, but Thad simply said, “Print”; afterward, he looked craftily pleased with himself.

  On that occasion, Lewis had retired to a nearby bar, and consoled himself with a stiff drink. He had decided there were two alternatives: either Thad was the genius he claimed to be, or he was a total clown. If Lewis had had to take a bet on it at that point, he’d have said the odds were even.

  Some years later, of course, when Thad became Hollywood’s number one hot property, the wonder boy of the American cinema, Lewis never admitted these early doubts. I always knew; I never questioned his genius, he would say sententiously—and who was to argue? Lewis was later profoundly grateful that when he had doubted, he had at least kept his mouth shut.

  He kept quiet—he thought now as he sipped the black coffee, and put off a little longer the moment when he would have to acknowledge that the day had begun—he kept quiet for two main reasons. One, he was a little afraid of Thad, though he would never admit it. Two, he could see that his doubts were not shared by anyone else: no matter how much Thad seemed to mess them around, Helen and the other actors listened to him reverently.

  The crew adored him, to a man. The majority were French, and Thad had met many of them the previous year, when he worked in France assisting the young director François Truffaut on the film that was now causing a European sensation, The Four Hundred Blows. Only his cinematographer, Victor, was American—Victor had trained with Thad at the UCLA Film School, and had worked in America with him on various low-budget shorts. He clearly respected Thad. In the crew’s eyes, Thad could deliver the goods, and—since they were all professionals, with growing reputations on the European film circuit—to some extent Lewis bowed to their judgment.

  They all seemed to Lewis to be very intense, and very intellectual—not good for too many laughs. They talked about films noirs, and mise en scène; they discussed the auteur theory at length, and read Cahiers du Cinéma in their breaks. They had weird taste in movies: one minute they were singing the praises of directors he’d never heard of, like Wajda and Franju and Renoir, and newcomers like Godard and Chabrol and Truffaut; the next they were hymning the American movies Lewis had loved as a boy—westerns and detective movies and comedies. But whereas Lewis never thought beyond the fact that he enjoyed such films, these people discussed them earnestly, take by take, frame by frame, as if they were great art or something. It made Lewis feel out of his depth; if it went on too long, it made him feel embarrassed.

  At such times Lewis, who was not an intellectual, and who distrusted intellectuals per se, would wonder how he had gotten himself involved in this crazy circus. He wondered it now, as he drained the last of his coffee and headed for the shower. He knew the answer, of course. He had gotten involved because of Thad. He had stayed involved because of Helen.

  He thought about her now, as he got into the shower: the singular delicacy and beauty of her face. He thought about her cool, slightly husky voice. He thought about her unshakable reticence, her quietude, and her physical modesty, which was so inflammatory. He imagined her body, which he had never seen unclothed. The effect was arousing, which was predictable. Less predictably, it was perturbing; it awoke in him all kinds of shadowy emotions, which Lewis was entirely at a loss to explain.

  The nearest he could come to summing up his feelings was that Helen made him feel protective. This alarmed him. Protective? There was something badly wrong.

  On several occasions during the past week, Lewis had found himself unaccountably unable to sleep. He had padded along the corridors of the palazzo to the door of the room where Helen slept. In pajamas and robe, feeling ridiculous, he had then waited outside her door, unable to knock, unable to go in, and equally unable to go back to bed. Once, twice, he thought he had heard the sound of weeping from within. Once, twice, he had tried the handle of the door, and found it locked. Then he had finally crept away.

  This lackluster behavior was uncharacteristic, and Lewis could not explain it. Sometimes he tried to imagine what he would have done had he opened the door and gone in. He had expected an arousing fantasy to spring to mind—Lewis thought of himself as a stud—but to his own surprise, he saw himself sitting on the bed beside Helen. Helen needed him, and he held her very gently in his arms.

  Lewis stepped out of the shower, and began to towel himself dry. There were innumerable things he should be thinking about. That night’s party, to celebrate the end of filming—he had to complete the arrangements for it; he had to pick up the money he’d arranged to have transferred from his bank; he wanted to buy Helen a present; he intended to drop in on the location in Trastevere. But to his dismay, his mind was filled instead with images of Helen. And one image in particular, which dated from a few weeks back, when they were about ten days into the film.

  It had been a sequence shot in the palazzo, a scene in which Helen was standing at a window, and then turned around. She was turning to look at one of the two lovers she had in the film—Lewis couldn’t remember which; it was a simple setup, and there were no words. Thad made her do it twenty-four times. Stand; turn; look. Twenty-four times.

  Between takes, Thad would go across to Helen and mutter. Then she would do it again. She never complained once. She showed no sign of irritation, or impatience, or tiredness, though the scene came at the end of a day’s shoot. She did not argue, as Lloyd Baker always did; she simply listened to Thad quietly, occasionally said something Lewis could not hear, and then did it again. Until that moment, Lewis thought, his attitude to Helen had been quite simple: he wanted her, period. But that afternoon, something had happened to him. He had been squashed at the back of the room, leaning against the wall, hemmed in by crewmen and equipment, and all he knew was that he didn’t care how repetitive it was, or how cramped he felt, he could have stayed there forever, just watching her face, just watching her move. Stand, turn, look. Stand, turn, look. Her image moved in Lewis’s mind then, just as it had moved all those weeks before. He could not rid himself of it, nor could he explain its fascination.

  Afterward, he had asked Thad to explain the scene, and Thad had smiled, knowingly, secretively. Lewis felt excluded by that smile; it suggested mysteries to which he did not have access.

  “So tell me about this character Helen’s playing, Thad,” he had said aggressively. “She doesn’t make much sense to me. I mean—why does she behave that way? Who the hell is she?”

  Thad had smiled gently. “She’s the missing woman,” he’d said. The remark had only irritated Lewis further. But it had stayed with him. Now, as the image of Helen turned and turned again in his mind, he began to see what Thad had meant.

  “The missing woman?” Lloyd Baker’s brows contracted. “Why missing? I mean, I know where she lives, for God’s sake. I’m screwing her, Thad. I�
��m screwing her, and the other guy’s screwing her, too, and when I find out about it, it drives me crazy. So how come she’s missing?” He shook his head as if to dislodge something stubborn that had lodged in his brain. Then, slowly, his face cleared. “Oh, I see. I begin to get you. You mean, like, she’s lost, and it’s only when she meets me that she—”

  “No, Lloyd.” Thad sounded very patient. “That’s not what I mean.”

  Lloyd hung his head sulkily. “Well. I think we’re going off-track here anyway. I mean, this is one of my major scenes. I was up all night working on this. If we could just concentrate on my character for a second. It seems to me that my motivation here is a little unclear.”

  “Everyone’s motivation is unclear, Lloyd. That’s life.”

  “It is?”

  “Yeah.” Thad yawned. “Let’s just do it, okay? I want to move on.”

  Hélène had been watching this conversation from a seat at one side of the room. It was a small room, dominated by a bed, and crowded with equipment. Now she got up.

  This scene, which came early in the film, was the next to the last one they would shoot. After that, there was only the final sequence to do. She walked forward, and as she did so, she thought: It’s almost over. How quick it has all seemed.

  The first week she had begun work, she had been so frightened. It was all so strange, and so complicated, and so unnerving. Every day she’d come in, her hands sweating and shaking with fear. None of it had made any sense. It confused her, shooting out of sequence, going forward in the story, then back. She didn’t know what half the equipment was for; she didn’t understand the terminology. She couldn’t find the spot where she had to stand, and kept missing it. Her arms and legs felt stiff and unnatural, her voice seemed to belong to someone else, and she was waiting, every second, for Thad to start yelling at her, and telling her that she was hopeless, a fraud.

  But Thad never yelled at her, though he yelled at most of the others. He never made fun of her or became impatient, as he did with Lloyd. He would just come up to her, and talk to her very quietly in that funny flat voice of his, and when he did that, somehow, it all began to make sense.