Destiny

by Sally Beauman

  He rested his hands between his thighs in recognition of that fact, and closed his eyes. The figure of Edouard receded; the figure of Helen advanced. To scan those features, which chance had made perfect for his purposes, made Thad content. He had been given a priceless gift: the perfect instrument, an instrument of flesh and blood: Thad’s mind sang with the future harmonies this instrument should play. Composing them, Thad shut his eyes, and let his mind dwell in the sweet negative dark: its blackness and its blankness refreshed him. Soon, as always, it became silvery with images. Thad watched them and assembled them. He listened to them sing.

  In Paris, in his study at St. Cloud, Edouard reached across his desk and drew the telephone toward him.

  He was thinking about the conversation with Thaddeus Angelini; he was thinking about Hélène; he was thinking about gifts.

  On the desk, next to the telephone, were three things: the photograph of Hélène; the pair of gray gloves from Hermès; the square-cut diamond ring. He looked at them thoughtfully, trying to remain calm. The pain, when he had found those gloves and that ring in her room, had been intense. To have left those—of all things—when he had believed that they were like a sign between them, a talisman of their love.

  Now he could look at them more calmly, and the pain was less. It hurt him to think it, but he could see Angelini might be right: the gift of the diamond, like the gift of his love, had been given at the wrong time.

  He thought instead now of other, less tangible gifts, gifts Hélène would not even know she had received from him: the gift of time, for instance; the gift of choice; the gift, even, of his absence.

  He did not find any of these easy to contemplate. All the way back from Italy he had been thinking, and planning, yet now he almost rebelled. He touched the telephone, and knew that he could go to London, and see her; knew it was more than possible that he could then bring her back.

  The temptation was so very strong: he sat, his hand on the telephone, quite still. To have come so far, to have come so close—and then not to follow her to London. For a moment it was unbearable to him: he must go—he had to. Then he thought again of all the things Angelini had said, and again he heard the ring of truth in them.

  Hélène was the age now that he had been in London during the war; at her age, he had loved Celestine, worshipped Jean-Paul, learned of the death of his father. A time when the world had changed from second to second; a time when he had grabbed at certainties, and been filled with ambitions, as perhaps Hélène was now. No, he would not go to London.

  Instead, as he had planned, he placed a call to Simon Scher, who—two years before—he had transferred to Partex’s Texas headquarters. Scher was now Drew Johnson’s right-hand man; when he came on the line, Edouard’s voice was entirely unemotional.

  “Simon? We made a number of acquisitions as part of our diversification policy recently. Correct me if I am wrong…”

  In Dallas, Simon Scher smiled at this pleasantry: when was Edouard ever wrong in business matters?

  “…But one of them was a distribution company, I think. A film distribution company.”

  “That’s right. It was called Sphere. It was an asset-stripping exercise on our part. As a company, they were all washed up, but we bought for a good price, and they had some useful real estate.”

  “What have we done with it?”

  “Nothing yet. It was only two months back. We’re still investigating the development potential of the property holdings.” Scher paused. “You want me to run a check?”

  “No.” There was a brief pause. “What would it take to relaunch the company?”

  “What, as a distribution operation?” Scher’s surprise was evident in his voice. “Not a great deal, I suppose. It would depend on the level of commitment we wanted. Two million. You could reactivate for less, but if you were envisaging expansion…” He paused. “I can get you some figures, but we ruled out that option. The movie industry is highly volatile at present, and without a production arm, a distribution company is weak. Sphere was in competition with the major studio distribution divisions, and it lost out. It was also weak at the executive level, of course, but that wasn’t the only problem by any means. We decided Partex would—”

  “I want to reactivate the company.”

  “What?”

  Scher’s jaw dropped. He could as soon imagine Edouard’s being involved in movies as he could envisage his playing the slot machines at Vegas.

  “I want to reactivate it as a distribution company, with a view, shortly, to investment in independent film production.”

  “Production?” Scher felt as if he were going crazy. He couldn’t have heard correctly. “You mean you want us to make movies?”

  “Not make them, back them. I’m serious about this, Simon. I’d need to go into it, obviously, but I was thinking in terms of an initial injection of funds in the region of six million. A probable three-year loss period, aiming at turnaround and profit in the fourth year…”

  “Edouard. Hang on a minute. This is movies we’re talking about…”

  “I would be financing the operation personally, and underwriting it, but I do not want my name associated with it in any way. I want Sphere as a fronting operation.” He paused. Scher could tell from the tone of his voice that he had begun to make notes. “You’ll need a headhunter, a good one, someone who knows the studios inside out. I need Sphere’s trading figures for the past ten-year period, and the trading figures of its nonstudio competitors. I need—”

  “You need me on a plane,” Scher finished for him. He began to smile. It was an insane idea, and all Edouard’s insane ideas had a formidable track record.

  “I can’t make it yesterday,” he said dryly. “But I can make it tonight. You want Drew in on this?”

  “Of course. He is the chairman.”

  Scher chuckled. They both knew that as far as Edouard was concerned, that fact need mean nothing.

  “Very well then, he’s my friend,” Edouard corrected himself. “Tell him I need his help.”

  “If I tell him that, he’ll fly over too.”

  “Then definitely tell him.”

  There was a brief pause, while Scher spoke to his secretary about flight times, and realized suddenly that it was the first time in ten years’ association that Edouard had expressed a need for help. That fact perturbed him slightly. When he came back on the line, his voice was wary.

  “You do know the kind of loss we could make on this, Edouard?” he began, feeling foolish. “I’m sure you do, of course, but it would be an entirely new departure for all of us. Distribution is bad enough, but production…It’s a snakepit, Edouard, it’s notoriously unpredictable. We—”

  “We have a diversification policy, yes?” Edouard sounded amused.

  “Oh, certainly. But with a view to profit. Here, we stand to make—you stand to make—a very heavy loss, and—”

  “Oh, I can calculate the loss,” Edouard said.

  He was looking at the photograph of Hélène as he spoke, and the exact nature of the loss was vivid to him. He saw it for a moment, a future that was a wasteland, a future without Hélène, a future that was a terrible extension of the bleakness of his past.

  He hesitated, then he turned the photograph over.

  “I can calculate the loss,” he said again more firmly.

  Part Three

  Lewis and Hélène

  London–Paris, 1959–1960

  “I’M HAVING LUNCH AT that new Italian place I told you about, with some terrific people. Why don’t you join us?”

  “No, thank you, Lewis.”

  “I’ve got some tickets for Covent Garden tomorrow night. They’re like gold dust. Callas is singing. Please come.”

  “No, thank you, Lewis.”

  “There’s a party in the Albany tonight, and we’ve both been invited. It’s one of the most amazing places in London. You must see it.”

  “Lewis, no. Really.”

  A hunt ball in Oxfordshire. T
he opening of a new nightclub in Mayfair. Jazz at the Chester Square home of a newly rich and fashionable Royal Court Theatre playwright. A breakfast party in Brighton. Dancing at the Dorchester…after months in Paris and Rome, months of uncustomary social quietude, Lewis had bounced back. He was indefatigable.

  “A private viewing at the Glendinning Gallery. Champagne at noon. It’s Sorenson’s new exhibition. Everyone says it’s incredible.”

  “Lewis, I can’t. I’d rather stay here. And besides, I’m sitting for Anne tomorrow.”

  “So what? Tell her you can’t. Anne Kneale is a pain in the neck. You realize she’s a dyke, do you?”

  “Lewis…”

  “Well, all right. Maybe she is, maybe she isn’t. She certainly looks like one. I don’t like her.”

  “Lewis, we’re living in her house…”

  “Cottage. You can’t swing a cat in here. I hardly know the woman. I can’t imagine why she offered to lend it. And I certainly can’t imagine why I accepted…”

  “I like it here. It’s quiet. It’s peaceful.”

  “It’s bloody cold. My bed has a mattress made of iron. Last time I ran a bath it took three quarters of an hour to produce three inches of lukewarm water.”

  “There’s a fire. It’s pretty. My bed is extremely comfortable.”

  Lewis’s color rose slightly. There was a silence. He was never quite sure, when Helen made remarks like this, whether they sprang from innocence or a desire to tease him. The next day, he began the campaign again.

  “We could stay at the Ritz—just move in there to a couple of suites. Why not? We’d be there for Christmas.”

  “No, Lewis. You move if you like, but I’d rather stay here.”

  “No. I intend to keep an eye on you. You need looking after. You might disappear again, the way you did in Paris.”

  “I won’t disappear, Lewis. Aren’t I always here? You go to your parties, and you come back, and I’m here.”

  “But I want you to see London. I want London to see you. It must be so dull, staying here all the time. Lunch today—just lunch. Please—join us.”

  “No, Lewis. I want to be alone. I told you.”

  “I see. Like Greta Garbo, huh?” He pulled a wry face.

  “No, Lewis. Like me.”

  Lewis gave in. Next day, he returned to the attack, and the day after. Lewis was persistent, and eclectic. The first night of a big new musical. A party on a boat on the Thames. Dinner with the American ambassador. A banquet in the Guildhall. The reception at de Chavigny to launch the new Wyspianski collection of jewelry.

  “No, Lewis,” she said to each of these invitations in exactly the same tone.

  Lewis went anyway, and—sometimes—the next day, she asked him to tell her about his adventures the night before. She asked about the Guildhall banquet. She asked about the de Chavigny reception. Lewis smiled.

  “Well, the champagne was incredible, I can tell you that. And everyone was there, of course.”

  “Was the jewelry beautiful?” she said. She thought of Edouard, showing her the designs.

  “I guess so.” Lewis shrugged. “I don’t know much about jewelry. There were some incredible rubies. And the women there were going crazy over the stuff. Though they were all dripping with jewels already. The Cavendishes—I went with the Cavendishes—had actually gotten all their loot out of the bank. Usually they don’t bother. The insurance is hell. They wear paste. Actually—” he gave his Bostonian frown—“I thought it was a bit much. De Chavigny himself was there, of course, and the woman with him—that designer woman, Ghislaine something, I forget her other name, but everybody’s using her in New York now—well, she was wearing so many diamonds around her neck she could hardly turn her head. Lucy Cavendish said her mother was miffed. She was wearing their Romanov stuff, and she felt eclipsed…”

  “Ghislaine Belmont-Laon,” Helen said, surprising him. She frowned slightly, and changed the subject.

  The next day she was very quiet, and Lewis thought she looked pale. It worried him, and her refusal to venture out of the little cottage alarmed him slightly. It seemed, increasingly, unnatural and defensive, as if she were frightened of something.

  It crossed Lewis’s mind that she might be ill in some way—certainly she looked, sometimes, as if she were under strain. But Helen dismissed these worries whenever he voiced them, and after a few days, began to look less pale and washed out. Lewis, after two days’ abstinence, began to accept invitations once more. He did so with a certain bravura: it piqued him that Helen seemed indifferent whether he went or stayed.

  By late November, when they had been in London for three weeks, a pattern had established itself. Lewis sallied forth, and still tried, sporadically, to persuade Helen to accompany him. He took her continuing refusals with a resigned good grace, an air of bewilderment.

  One morning, Lewis was leaving for a lunch appointment, and he was late. Helen was sitting on a couch in front of the window, reading The Times. Lewis, putting on his vicuna overcoat, his scarf and his gloves—it was very cold outside—was annoyed to observe that his departure hardly rated a glance. She said good-bye to him absently, though, when he had gone, she did look up to watch him hurry down the street outside.

  He had his back to her: she watched him set his face in the direction of the King’s Road, where he would pick up a taxi; the wind lifted his fair hair; he thrust his hands into his pockets. He looked elegant; more English than the English.

  She watched him until he was out of sight, and then looked down at the newspaper again. It contained a report from New York on the reception held to launch the Wyspianski collection there. There was an erudite and enthusiastic review of Wyspianski’s work, and a photograph of the Baron de Chavigny at the reception. Next to him, wearing a dog collar of diamonds, was Ghislaine Belmont-Laon, whose company, it was noted, had just redesigned the interiors of the de Chavigny showrooms off Fifth Avenue.

  She put the newspaper down. To have known that Edouard was in London had filled her with a terrible, painful nervous perturbation. Now he was no longer there, she felt glad, she told herself: glad. She looked at the photograph dully. It was only to be expected. Two months—more—had gone by. If it was not Ghislaine Belmont-Laon, it would have been someone else, sooner or later.

  After a while, she picked up The Times again, and turned to the financial pages. This was something she had begun to do every day, though not if Lewis was there, because he would have laughed at her. Patiently, she made herself read: trusts; equity issues; bonds; commodities. She found it all difficult to understand, yet curiously soothing, and she had an optimistic faith that she could learn, if she tried hard enough. Behind the dry wording of the reports, and the figures which still confused her, she sensed passion and drama, lives, careers, fortunes, made and broken very swiftly—and that interested her. It had occurred to her, reading these reports one day, that money was a means of revenge in ways she had not thought of before. She was thinking of Ned Calvert when the idea came to her: now, if there was a report about the cotton industry, she read that first. Of course, to accumulate money by these means, you first had to have some. She, as yet, did not; she would have to earn some. The necessity to do so was becoming more urgent.

  She put down the paper and stared fixedly across the room. The panic was starting to come back, and she fought it down. On one of the chairs, Lewis had tossed a dark green cashmere sweater he had been wearing the previous day. It was an expensive sweater, and she looked at it thoughtfully. She was aware that it would have been very easy to have gone with Lewis to his luncheon. It would have been equally easy to persuade him to stay here. One word. One gesture. She could have made that little, little move at any time since they left Rome.

  But she had grown to like Lewis, and so—scrupulously and carefully—she had not made the gesture, nor spoken the word. She did not want to hurt Lewis, and something else, too, held her back—an obstinacy, a stubborn clinging to the memory of Edouard, a reluctance to kill off
that quick bright thing that animated her still. But she felt lonely. She also felt afraid. She looked out now at the street, which was wet, and empty. She thought of Lewis, felt relief that she had acted as she had, and then, quite suddenly, an irritable regret.

  In the afternoons now, the light faded fast. At half-past four, Hélène would draw the scarlet woolen curtains across the small windows, and light the lamps, and sit in front of the coal fire that burned in the black Victorian grate. Sometimes, she made herself tea. She grew to like these simple rituals. In Alabama, even at the turn of the year, it was never as damp and cold as it was here now.

  But she liked this misty weather. She delighted in the russet of the leaves of the London plane trees, the heaps of wet leaves on the sidewalk, the hoarfrost that made grass and branches white in the mornings, and the smell of the London air, which was earthy and acrid, slightly sooty. Best of all, she loved the light, for its softness and grayness, for the haze that sometimes hung over the Thames.

  It gave her pleasure to watch time pass so tangibly; to watch the afternoon darken toward evening; to see the streetlamps lit, and the people, heads hunched against the cold, hurrying home from the tube after work. These very ordinary things soothed her. She began to hope that it would snow soon: she had never seen snow except in photographs.

  The house had been lent them quite unexpectedly. When they first arrived in London, they had stayed with a friend of Lewis’s mother, in a large fashionable apartment in Eaton Square. Their hostess, an American, was in the throes of the pre-Christmas season of parties; a chic woman, she was negligently hospitable. Hélène had shrunk from her, and shrunk from the whirl of activities into which Lewis prepared to plunge with such enthusiasm. Once the work of filming was over, she felt anxious and exhausted; all the events of the previous summer, which had succeeded one another at such speed, pressed in on her; they had begun to enter her dreams at night in chaotic and malign confusion. What she had wanted—she realized, now it had been given her—was a quiet still place, into which she could crawl, and curl up, like an injured animal, and let time pass.