Destiny

by Sally Beauman

  “Trust yourself,” Thad said.

  Trust herself? She had almost wanted to laugh. How could she trust herself? She felt, those first days, as if she no longer knew who she was. Eventually, shyly, expecting some caustic remark, she told Thad this. He smiled his gentle yellow-toothed smile; he seemed pleased.

  “That doesn’t matter,” he said. “In fact, it’s good. You aren’t Helen, you’re Anne.”

  Anne was the name of her character, and somehow, after Thad said that, she had come to love Anne. Anne freed her. Anne made her able to forget about her arms and her legs and hitting her mark. Anne had a life and an independence of her own, and as the days passed, she became more and more familiar. Now, when Hélène stepped in front of the camera and the lights, she felt no fear at all, only a marvelous freedom and release. It was Anne who spoke, Anne who moved, and Hélène merely embodied her.

  Anne grew, and it seemed to Hélène that she herself shrank. She accepted this gladly; she came to look forward to the moment when a take began and the transition took place. During those hours, when she worked, the rest of her life went away. She never thought of Orangeburg, or Edouard; she never thought about the baby; she felt no anxiety and no pain. Anne lived, and she died. She came to crave the moment when that happened, and—after the first month—she realized something that was obvious but which had never occurred to her before. She was doing something, quite on her own, because for all the skill of the crew, for all Thad’s expertise, it was she who brought Anne to life. She was doing it, and she knew, just knew, that she was doing it well.

  She had never felt that before in her life—she saw that now. Never. And it had a profound effect upon her. It made her feel strong.

  Not always, it was true. Sometimes the new confidence in herself would waver, sometimes she would feel like the old Hélène, uncertain, unsure. But those moments of uncertainty came only when she was away from the set, and away from Thad. When she was there, working with him, the certainty would always come back.

  She felt it now, as the scene with Lloyd Baker began. Anne was waiting for her, and she greeted her like a friend. Two takes; three; four.

  Across the room, Thad rose busily to his feet. He said, “Print,” and then, looking at Hélène, with the light winking on those glasses of his, he smiled.

  “Okay, we’ll do the final sequence now. Victor and I will do this on our own with Helen. Clear the set.”

  He looked oddly excited; he waved his pink hands in the air. It must be because it was nearly over, Hélène thought, and at once felt regret.

  Lewis had instructed the Chase Manhattan bank to transfer some ten thousand dollars to a branch of the Banca Nazionale on the Via Veneto. When he reached the bank, he realized he had set off too soon. It was still too early, and the bank was closed.

  Half an hour to kill. Well, the Via Veneto was as pleasant a place as any to do that. He walked up the street a short way and sat down in a sidewalk café close by, opposite the Excelsior Hotel. He ordered an espresso, and lit the first cigarette of the day. The sun shone down warmly. Hard to believe it was November; it felt almost like a summer’s day. Lewis settled himself comfortably in his chair and prepared to wait. He glanced idly at the other customers sitting outside: Italian businessmen, most of them, men in dark suits and dark glasses, stopping off for coffee on the way to work, reading the morning paper. He glanced away from them, lifted his face to the sun, and began to make plans. One of the dark-suited men was looking at Lewis intently, but Lewis did not notice. Once again, he was thinking about Helen.

  If Thad finished on schedule today, as it now seemed certain he would, he would then be tied up editing the picture for six to eight weeks, finishing, he said, around Christmas. He intended to do the editing in Rome, in a friend’s cutting room, and he had already suggested that, while he was busy, Lewis should take a vacation. He further suggested, with a kindly smile, that Lewis should take Helen with him. “We don’t want to lose her again,” Thad said.

  Helen, however, had not commented upon the plan. She evaded all Lewis’s attempts to elicit a definite promise. Lewis, meanwhile, was full of ideas.

  He had several address books, all of them bulging with the names of affluent and generous friends of his parents, and acquaintances of his own, all of whom could be counted on to have Lewis and Helen as their guests for a while.

  That, Lewis thought, would look less compromising to her than a hotel. He was sure she would balk at that. But friends—and friends who lived in such marvelous places: Tuscany, for instance, or Venice. Nice. Cannes. The Swiss Alps. Gstaad—no, he had caused a lot of fuss at Gstaad, that might not be a good idea. London, perhaps. London was fun in the pre-Christmas season, and by now everyone would have forgotten that party the police raided.

  They could go even farther afield. Mexico—Acapulco, for instance. The Bahamas. The West Indies. He surveyed the possibilities dreamily; it somehow pleased him, the idea of offering Helen her choice of the world. Come to that, they could even go to Boston. He could take Helen home, to the house on Beacon Hill. Home, to his mother and father, who—whenever he spoke to them, which was not often—pressed him to come back. Helen might even like it there, he thought. That superbly understated house, filled with English antiques, organized by discreetly efficient servants who’d been with the family nearly twenty years. He saw an image of Helen sitting by the fireside, taking tea with his mother.

  But no; he pushed the idea away quickly. Why should he have thought of taking her there? He hated Boston. He never wanted to go back. He knew what Boston was. He’d been running away from it long enough, after all.

  As far back as he could remember, Lewis Sinclair had been trying to escape. As far back as he could remember, his family had had his life all mapped out for him and were blindly dismissive when Lewis tentatively suggested that there might be alternative routes.

  Lewis understood why this had happened; that didn’t make it any easier to bear. His parents, Robert and Emily, had had to wait twelve years for the birth of a son. The four daughters who preceded Lewis were much loved, but in certain respects a daughter was of no use. A daughter could not carry on the Sinclair name and tradition; a daughter could not run an investment bank. “I was so happy when you were born that I wept, Lewis,” Emily would say. It was a story she repeated often. When he was small it made Lewis feel proud; when he was older, it made him feel trapped.

  From the very beginning he was given only the best, and from the beginning, his privileges were accompanied by high-minded lectures. To his parents, to whom the conspicuous consumption of wealth was anathema, privilege and money were acceptable only if they were counterbalanced by a sense of social duty. Lewis’s upbringing was simultaneously indulgent and stern. He was given generous presents: beautiful books, serious toys—construction kits, drawing boards, paints. Lewis still remembered the agony of those Christmases and birthdays: how he had longed for guns, skates, comic books, go-carts. How he had had to pretend not to be disappointed when they were smilingly and charmingly withheld.

  He was taken to dancing classes. He was taken to the Boston Symphony concerts. He was carefully introduced to art, first in museums and galleries, then in the private collections of his innumerable uncles and cousins and aunts.

  When he was older, he was introduced to tennis, swimming, and squash. Lewis had athletic potential, and he enjoyed sports. But he loathed these private coaching sessions as much as he loathed the culture he was force-fed: there was no fun in them; like everything else, they were lessons. Life was one long lesson, and as he grew older Lewis learned something terrible: it was a lesson in which he never got top marks.

  He had tried, then; he had tried so very hard, his mind swimming with information it obstinately refused to digest. But he never met his parents’ standards. He must try harder, they explained—his father directly, his mother more delicately: he was a Sinclair; it was not enough to get by—he must excel.

  He loved his mother dearly, and he was
in awe of his father; his own mystifying inability ever to please them hurt Lewis very much. “I love you, Mama,” he would say when he was small, running to Emily and trying to climb on her lap, trying to hug her. But Robert Sinclair had expressed the opinion that Lewis was too indulged, and so Emily—looking guilty—would ease him away when he did this. “Don’t be babyish, Lewis,” she would say. “You have to try harder, that’s all.” And then she would kiss him, also guiltily.

  Lewis put down his small cup of espresso; it clattered against the saucer. He looked irritably at his watch. Still another fifteen minutes to wait. Why had be begun to think about Boston, why? He was twenty-five years old, a grown man, and yet whenever his thoughts took this particular tack, the years were immaterial. He felt, then, as confused and as helpless as he had when he was a child; the memories came winging back, they churned in his mind—humiliation after humiliation. They made him feel impotent, and they filled him with a blind, painful anger. Even now, sitting here, he could feel it, the great cry of his childhood welling up again in his heart: it isn’t fair—it isn’t fair.

  Quite deliberately—it was a trick he used, and a soothing one—he tried to concentrate on the successes of his life, those occasions—and there were not many of them—when he knew what he was doing, and was sure that he was doing it well.

  There had been his achievements on the football field, first at Groton, then at Harvard: they had the power to thrill him still, though his parents had always been dismissive of them. Arrayed in helmet and pads, so much taller than most of his contemporaries, Lewis had felt like a god. There were women: he had always been successful there, right from the beginning. And finally, there was his friendship with Thad.

  Lewis smiled to himself, shifting a little in his seat. His parents would not have approved of most of the past women in his life—shocked was more like it. They would not have approved of Thad, either. That fact pleased Lewis very much. To take the opposite course, to flout his parents’ wishes—it filled him with a sense of almost vindictive triumph. No more a life always lurching toward the next lecture; no more failures; he had rejected all that, he had abandoned Beacon Hill and all the stuffy values it embodied. He was his own man now, leading his own life, and he wasn’t a failure anymore—never had been, really; that was just his parents’ interpretation, and he rejected that along with everything else.

  He lit another cigarette. A hooker passed, and Lewis winked at her. He could feel the cloak of his new identity settling serenely on his shoulders once more. He was a rebel, he told himself. He had always been a rebel, really, he could see that now. Not a misfit, a rebel. He had become very certain of that fact since meeting Thad.

  The bank was opening. Lewis stood up and stretched. He tossed a few lire onto the table, picked up his briefcase, strolled over to the bank, and joined the line at one of the counters. One of the dark-suited men from the café followed Lewis into the bank, and stood not far behind him in the line, but Lewis did not notice him; nor was he aware, when he left the bank some fifteen minutes later, that the man also left, without waiting for his turn at the teller’s.

  Lewis hailed a cab, and made for his familiar hunting grounds, the beautiful and expensive shops that lined the Piazza di Spagna and the Via Condotti. He ordered the champagne for the party at the palazzo that night, and then spent an anxious but pleasurable half hour window-shopping, and deciding on a present for Helen.

  He was not familiar with buying gifts for women, other than members of his own family, and it perplexed him a little. His own inclination was for something pretty, frivolous, luxurious—silk lingerie, clothes of some kind, perhaps jewelry. He lingered outside the windows of de Chavigny: there was a very beautiful sapphire pin in the window, and the color of the stones reminded him of Helen’s eyes. But some residue of Boston which he could never quite purge made him hesitate. His mother would have considered such a gift quite improper.

  Reluctantly, he moved on. His mind fogged. He began to panic. He wanted so much to get her something exciting, but now, everywhere he looked he heard his mother at his elbows saying that no, it was quite unsuitable under the circumstances. Except for his own clothes, Lewis was never very certain in his tastes at the best of times—they had been ridiculed too often in the past. He thought with shame of the presents he had bought his mother as a little boy, things he had saved up for secretly for weeks, and had then purchased in an orgy of excitement. A large dog, made of plaster of Paris and brightly painted; a little clinking bracelet, with gilded charms. “How sweet, Lewis, thank you,” his mother had said. The china dog had disappeared into a cupboard; the bracelet had never been worn.

  Standing in the Via Condotti, Lewis blushed for a miscalculation sixteen years old. The panic grew worse. A book? No, books were too impersonal. Flowers? He wanted to give her more than that. Perfume? He thought Helen never wore it; perhaps she disliked it.

  In the end, compromising, and reminding himself that if Helen did agree to go away with him, this gift would at least be useful, he went into Gucci. There, after further agonizing, he selected a weekend bag. It was extremely expensive, shaped like a Gladstone bag, and made of maroon crocodile skin. It was flamboyant; Lewis was sure his mother wouldn’t like it. But he wasn’t buying it for his mother, he reminded himself. He was buying it for Helen.

  Growing excited, he asked if they could monogram it. They could—but it would take a few hours. Lewis hesitated once more, and then decided to go ahead. The initials were H. C., he told them; he arranged for the bag to be delivered later that day to the Principessa’s.

  At the mention of that name and that address the stiff assistant unbent considerably; her manner began to approach charm. Lewis left the shop feeling extremely happy. On the way out, he half-collided with a man going in. Lewis looked up at him in annoyance: a tall dark man, wearing a black suit. Someone important, presumably, because two assistants were already bowing and scraping at the door. He brushed past Lewis with a curt apology in Italian; Lewis glanced back, then passed out into the street, and instantly forgot him.

  He took another cab across the river to Trastevere, and was stuck for what seemed hours in the hooting, yelling mayhem of a Roman traffic jam. By the time he reached the house where Thad was filming, it was past noon, and Lewis—knowing Thad usually broke for an hour then—was looking forward to joining Thad and Helen for lunch. He let the cab go in the Piazza di Santa Maria, and strolled cheerfully down the narrow side streets, whistling. When he reached the entrance to the house, and went into the hall, he found his way barred. The assistant director, Fabian, a tall languid Frenchman, was lounging at the bottom of the stairs.

  Lewis looked up then, past the snaking cables, to a closed door.

  “Salut.” Fabian gave him a lazy grin, and didn’t move.

  “Excuse me…” Lewis took a purposeful step forward.

  “Sorry. It’s closed. Thad doesn’t want anyone up there.”

  “That doesn’t mean me.”

  Fabian grinned amiably. “It means everyone. Sorry, Lewis.”

  Lewis hesitated. He glanced at his watch, then back at Fabian. He felt a sudden nervous dart of alarm. Thad had discouraged him from attending shootings before, but never barred him.

  “Aren’t they going to break? What the hell’s he doing up there?”

  Fabian shrugged. “He’s on the final sequence. Thad’s there—and Victor, and Helen. C’est tout. It shouldn’t take much longer—then it’s a wrap.”

  Lewis frowned. He knew how this film began—in close-up on Helen’s face. He knew how it ended—the same way. It was the bits in between where his knowledge was sketchy. He knew enough, though, to remember that the final sequence took place after the murder, and featured Helen alone; in bed.

  He listened carefully. Through the panels of the door above he could just hear the drone of Thad’s voice. He pushed Fabian aside and ran up the stairs. The door was locked, and Thad stopped talking the moment he heard Lewis’s footsteps. Lewis rattled the d
oor handle furiously. From inside came the familiar high-pitched rasping giggle, then the sound of Thad’s footsteps.

  “Lewis?” he said through the door. “Fuck off.”

  Lewis glowered at the door. He considered for a second whether to smash it into matchsticks by barging it with his football player’s shoulders, or simply to kick in its panels with his foot. On reflection, he decided either course lacked dignity. Answering Thad lacked dignity. He retreated down the stairs again without another word.

  Fabian gave him a fatalistic glance and a very Gallic shrug.

  “You would like me to give Thad a message when he comes out?”

  “Sure. Tell him I’m going out to get drunk.”

  “Bien sûr.” Fabian yawned.

  “And tell him I’m coming back here in an hour.”

  At this Fabian looked doubtful. “An hour? I think an hour may not be long enough.”

  “Why not, for chrissake?” Lewis rounded on him belligerently. “The way he described it to me, it’s one tiny sequence. One set-up. How long can something like that take?”

  “Who knows?” Fabian smiled resignedly.

  “Is she naked up there—is that it? Has he got her undressed?”

  Fabian slowly lowered one eyelid. “Lewis, mon ami, I swear to you, I have no idea. But if he has—he is a lucky man, yes?”

  Lewis turned away without another word. He was trembling with an emotion he could not identify. He walked down the street to the edge of the piazza, and went into the first bar he found.

  The first strega made him feel better; the second, better still. The third was a mistake, and the fourth was a disaster.

  It was a small bar, patronized by local workmen. Lewis sat and stared at the bare wooden table, and listened to the clicks of the machine as they played pinball. A television set was on in back somewhere, and dimly he could hear the screams of an Italian football commentator. On another world, another planet, someone, somewhere, was playing Real Madrid.