Destiny

by Sally Beauman

  It was, however, the first time in his professional life that a woman had come to him and attempted to claim that her pregnancy was more advanced than it was; this Miss Craig had attempted to convince him that she was five months pregnant, which would mean that conception had occurred in mid-July. This was out of the question, and he found it curious. He also found it curious that, when he attempted to convey to her the facts, she did not listen. It was as if she quite deliberately blotted out his words, even as he spoke them.

  Mr. Foxworth pursed his lips. His professional life was dedicated to the care of women, and yet he did not greatly like or admire the female sex. Women, he felt, had an ability to displace facts that did not suit them, particularly at that nexus where their emotional and sexual lives intersected. This young woman, he assumed, wished, for reasons of her own, to reassure herself that one man was the father of her child rather than another.

  Well, that was a phenomenon he had encountered before. All men, including married men, were putative fathers in Mr. Foxworth’s eyes, and a number of men of his acquaintance were proudly presenting sons and daughters to the world which, Mr. Foxworth knew for certain, were not theirs, the oddity being that the women concerned seemed able to erase this stubborn truth from their minds altogether. After a certain point, they not only claimed their husbands were the fathers of their lovers’ children—they actually believed it themselves.

  He roused himself from this reverie to look up at his patient. She looked back at him. Her face was flushed, her eyes bright, and her expression was defiant. Mr. Foxworth did not like her; she was extremely young, she was unmarried, and he considered an expression of humility or distress would have been more appropriate.

  By way of a reprimand, he eased back his snowy cuff, and looked at his watch. The young woman bit her lip. She unclasped her hands, and thanked him for seeing her. She did so graciously enough, but with a certain irony in her voice to which Mr. Foxworth took exception.

  He asked her, pointedly, if she had understood what he said, whereupon she smiled, and asked him how much she owed him. Mr. Foxworth was distressed. He was sure the question was deliberate, and not merely due to ignorance of etiquette. He flushed slightly, rose to his feet, and suggested she leave her address with his receptionist. Notification of his charges—he pronounced this word with some difficulty, since his fees were high and he found it undignified to refer to their existence—would be sent in due course.

  Hélène left. Down the wide and elegant staircase, out the heavy front door, down the flight of steps onto the sidewalk of Harley Street. Immediately outside, a taxi had halted: a tall man in middle age descended; holding open the door, he assisted a woman out of the cab—a pretty woman, wearing furs; she leaned upon his arm and looked up at him laughingly. She was roundly, splendidly, obviously pregnant.

  Hélène stood for a moment, clutching her thin cloth coat around her, pulling up its collar to shield her face from the cold wind. She looked at them, this man and this woman, oblivious of her existence, and then—as they passed up the steps to the house—she stepped quickly forward and claimed the cab.

  May 4—her baby. She could think of nothing else; she was possessed with a sense of urgency. Leaning forward, she gave the driver the Chelsea address. She glanced back at the man and the woman once more, and then—leaning forward again—asked the driver to hurry.

  When he heard the front door of the cottage open and shut, Lewis was upstairs, half-dressed and half-undressed, changing to go out. He was not in a good temper. He was annoyed with the room, which was cold. He was annoyed with the ceiling, which sloped, and did not easily accommodate a man six feet three inches tall. He was annoyed with Thad, who telephoned constantly now, badgering him to return to Paris. He was annoyed with Helen, who was anxious about Night Game, and who would talk on the phone to Thad at great length. He was annoyed with the girl he had promised to escort that evening to a dinner-dance in Berkeley Square. Above all, he was annoyed with himself. Something was happening to him which he did not understand, and he seemed to have no power to control it.

  For a moment, hearing the footsteps downstairs, he hesitated. Then, irritably, he pulled on the starched evening shirt, picked up his black tie, and stared at his handsome reflection in the mirror. He did not have to go to the dance. He could telephone the girl, even this late, and simply cancel. He could stay home. This alternative seemed oddly tempting; he had felt its pull grow stronger and stronger these past weeks, and this burgeoning taste for domesticity alarmed him: he had certainly never experienced it before. However, Helen had suggested he stay home only that one time; the suggestion had not been repeated. Lewis frowned, and decided to go. He began to fashion the tie into a bow.

  He was beginning to find it harder and harder to sit in the same room as Helen, a feeling that coexisted unhappily with his intense desire to be there. When he was with her, he wanted to touch her; he wanted to take her hand; he wanted to put his arm around her…the need to do these things was beginning to drive him crazy. After all, if he wanted to take her hand, why the hell didn’t he? Lewis had been asking himself such questions for months—of which fact he was bitterly aware.

  He had no answers. All he knew was that he looked at Helen, and his habitual sexual advances seemed to him shoddy. Some new approach was called for. Lewis had no idea what it was.

  He slipped his arms into the sleeves of his black dinner jacket, and pulled it on. A stranger looked back at him from the mirror. He felt he did not know who he was anymore. His whole identity seemed to him in flux, as if it were being forged from minute to minute, and depended, in some mysterious way, upon Helen. Some act of recognition was needed from her, Lewis felt. It was as if Helen alone had the power to free him to be himself.

  Lewis disliked introspection. This thought sneaked down the backstairs from that attic in his mind to which he confined old ideals. Firmly, he thrust it back were it belonged: in the lumber room. He turned away from the mirror and made for the stairs. He needed a cure, a cure he had tried before, and which—this time—he was determined should not fail him.

  Helen did not attempt to persuade him to stay in, but she did do one thing which she had never done before. As Lewis opened the door, she solemnly picked up his scarf, and placed it around his neck. Her hand brushed his skin gently as she did so. He caught the clean newly washed scent of her skin and hair. Then she reached up and placed one brief chaste kiss on his cheek. Lewis reeled out into the street. He nearly forgot about his cure there and then; he nearly abandoned both the girl and the dinner-dance. Then he saw a taxi at the end of the street, and he ran after it fast, before he had time to change his mind.

  He directed it to Mayfair, and leaned back in the seat, feeling calmer. As the taxi gathered speed up Sloane Street, he began to relax, and to grow more confident.

  It would work, he told himself firmly. This time it would damn well work. It was almost seven now. Drinks. Dinner. Dancing. By eleven o’clock at the latest, earlier if possible, Lewis Sinclair was going to get laid.

  At ten, there was a pause in the dancing, and supper was served. The supper room was crowded with braying young Englishmen in tails, and fringed with debutantes and post-debutantes flushed from their exertions on the dance floor. Lewis pushed through the throng to the long tables, where a sumptuous array of food was displayed. Lobster; quails’ eggs; filet de boeuf en gelée; at the far end, wine jellies as tall as castles, pyramids of fruit, ices and sorbets in silver dishes. The man next to him dropped a quail’s egg and promptly trod on it. A bowl of caviar was being rapidly emptied; the lobsters, so beautifully arranged and decorated a moment before, were already in disarray.

  Lewis was hot, and sweating, and in a very bad temper. He stuck his elbow into an Englishman’s ribs, and maneuvered to the front. He held aloft two plates, one for himself, one for the ex-debutante he had selected for the evening. A harassed waiter put one cracked lobster claw on each, and a ladle of mustard-yellow mayonnaise. Some poached salmon was a
dded and some wilting cucumber; that would damn well have to do, Lewis decided.

  He fought his way back to the ex-debutante who, unaware of the fate Lewis intended for her, was talking to a friend. She was wearing a dress of pink chiffon, with a very full skirt. There was a ridge of flesh where her long white kid gloves cut into the plumpness of her upper arms. When she saw Lewis approaching, she unbuttoned the gloves and rolled them back from her wrists.

  “Oh, salmon,” she said, and made a face. “I rather wanted some of the beef, actually.”

  “It’s all gone,” Lewis lied.

  “Oh, what a bore. And the caviar?”

  Lewis gritted his teeth.

  “Hang on a second,” he said. “I’ll just go and get us some more champagne.”

  “Hang on to what?” she answered. She clearly considered this a great witticism, because she and her friend dissolved into laughter.

  Lewis set his face, and prepared to battle his way to the drinks table. It was barred by lines of Englishmen four deep.

  Lewis stood and waited. He hadn’t the heart to push; he scarcely had the heart to go on, and it was only obstinacy that prevented his leaving right then. No, he thought, he’d made that bet, and he’d damn well stick to it.

  He had already spied out the land, ruled out the possibility of a bedroom, and decided on a bathroom upstairs. The bathroom might be less comfortable, but at least it had a door that locked. All the bedroom keys, Lewis had noted, had been removed: the English were a suspicious bunch.

  He leaned against a pillar resignedly, waiting his turn. Once, sex had seemed so marvelously easy. He cast his mind back over some of the women in his past. Their faces and their bodies were shadowy; he couldn’t remember most of their names, but then, that was not surprising; none of them had lasted very long.

  He liked older women best—or he had once. His longest affair, six weeks, one summer up at Cape Cod, had been with a woman who was his mother’s contemporary. She taught literature at a women’s college; she taught Lewis the meaning of erogenous, and other things besides. “You will rush so, Lewis. Slow down. You do it as if you hate it…”

  Lewis frowned. The remark had stung him, perhaps because there was some truth in it. He had left her not long afterward, anyway.

  He didn’t like intellectual women, he’d decided. Come to that, he didn’t much like women of his own background. All dead from the neck down. No, he much preferred the company of the hookers he picked up off Times Square, or the Baltimore strippers, who cooed over his body, and laughed at his accent, and stung him for a good twenty bucks more than they charged their sailors. So what? It was honest at least, and these girls, with their sharp street language, at least made him laugh. He saw two of them now, quite vividly, one white, one black, one on either side of him in the bed, all three of them bombed out of their skulls on Jack Daniel’s.

  “C’mon, sugar,” the black girl said. “Your mama ever tell you ’bout a chocolate sandwich?”

  “Not this kind,” Lewis had replied, making a grab at both of them. The words had stimulated him; the two girls had wriggled, and sucked and licked, and all the time, somewhere inside his head, Lewis could see his mother’s shocked face. He felt as if he came for a thousand years, pumping and pumping, and afterward the black stripper said, “Hey, big boy, you’re sumthin’, you know that? You come see me again, and I swear to you, baby, we’ll do it for free…”

  He never had seen her again. Now he couldn’t remember her face either. Just the sweet feeling, fucking that felt like revenge. And what she said, of course.

  Lewis shook his head. He had reached the champagne table at last. Two glasses; champagne that was too warm.

  How odd, he thought, to forget their faces, and remember their words.

  It was ten forty-five, and he had gained the sanctuary of the bathroom upstairs. Lewis had made love in bathrooms before; the ex-debutante, it seemed, had not. She had consumed enough champagne to be persuaded upstairs easily enough. The moment the door was locked, she started having second thoughts. Lewis reached for her. He thought, dully: fifteen minutes to go. It was all right as long as he kissed her. He did that for some while, at the same time furtively exploring the geography of her ball gown, which appeared impenetrable.

  It had a lowish neckline, with a tight underbodice. Lewis squeezed experimentally, and felt a handful of whalebone. The full skirt was floor-length. Lewis managed to ease this up to knee level, and then to insinuate his hand underneath. He felt the curve of a thigh, and a nylon stocking. Better still, he felt the metal fastening of a garter. He kissed the girl with slightly more fervor, and shifted his hand an inch higher. She was wearing, he suspected, that ultimate passion-killer, the step-in girdle. Lewis had experience of getting girls out of girdles, and it was not encouraging. He abandoned her skirts, and concentrated his hands, both at once, in the breast area: whalebone and a suggestion of plump flesh—it was like handling a pouter pigeon.

  Lewis was aware that he was not all that aroused. There was still a dim sense at the back of his mind that he did not want to be here, and he did not want to be doing this, but he had begun now, and he still felt obstinate. Eleven o’clock. He’d start getting interested in a minute, he told himself. He kissed the girl again, noted that her color had risen, and that her breathing was more rapid; he decided on a bold move—one hand, in a firm scooping movement, straight down her cleavage.

  The debutante reacted swiftly. She made a noise of whinnying outrage, and slapped Lewis’s hand, hard.

  “Beastly American. What do you imagine you’re doing?”

  She stepped back, and looked down her long English nose at him. Lewis shrugged, and put his hands into his pockets. He gave her a lazy and insolent smile.

  “You came up with me. You saw me lock the door. What do you think I’m doing?”

  He had drunk a considerable quantity of champagne, enough to make him feel this was irrefutable logic. The ex-debutante clearly disagreed. She gave Lewis a withering look.

  “Do you imagine,” she said, swaying only very slightly on her feet, “that I intend to lose my virginity to an American, in a bathroom?”

  “Which is worse, my nationality, or my choice of location?”

  She started to give him another haughty stare, then, redeeming herself slightly, she giggled.

  “Honestly, Lewis. You do have the most colossal nerve…”

  Lewis hesitated. He estimated that if he tried now, and if he bothered to be persuasive, he could probably make progress of sorts: rebuff, even rude rebuff, was all part of the game. He could woo her. He could kiss her. And the thought of either, he realized, bored him to distraction.

  He looked at the ex-debutante, and she looked back at him. She was pretty, and Lewis, who had known her a couple of weeks, liked her. He sighed. The champagne, and also a kind of desperation, made him bold.

  “Why not?” he demanded finally. “I mean, in the end, why not? What is it, after all? Why does it have to be such a big goddamned deal?”

  To his relief, and also to his surprise, this question did not seem to offend her; Lewis had the distinct impression that it had also, at some point, occurred to her. She frowned, and looked thoughtful.

  “I don’t know.” She paused. “I think, I suppose, that you ought to love me.”

  “Oh, great. Terrific.” Lewis suddenly felt very tired. He leaned back against the wall. “We don’t have to be married then? Or engaged?”

  The girl giggled. “No, Lewis, relax. That’s Mummy’s generation.”

  “Well, I suppose that’s progress. Of a kind.”

  “So. If I loved you—it would probably be all right,” she went on magnanimously. “Also, if I was sure I wouldn’t get pregnant or anything…” Here she became a little pink. “But I don’t—love you that is—and you don’t, and so I won’t.”

  “That’s neat.” Lewis sighed. “It seems reasonable. Up to a point.” He pushed himself off the wall again. “So we couldn’t do it just for the hell o
f it, just because it was fun?”

  “No, Lewis, we couldn’t.” She giggled again.

  “It has to be love, huh?”

  “That makes it different, Lewis.” She regarded him earnestly. “It alters things.”

  “Alters things. It does?” Lewis nodded solemnly. He was aware that he was still slightly drunk, but that somewhere, at the back of his mind, a space was clearing. Quite suddenly everything she said was beginning to make sense.

  “It would feel different then, would it?” he said slowly. “You know. If we…when I…when one…”

  “I think so.” The girl looked uncertain. “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know.” Lewis sighed. “I’ve never been in love.” The girl gave him a narrow look. “You said you were twenty-five.”

  “Even so.”

  “Lewis, you’re a coldhearted seducer,” she said cuttingly, and moved to the door.

  “I’m not coldhearted,” Lewis protested weakly. The space in his mind was still opening and opening, and he was beginning to feel wonderful.

  “Yes, you are. The choice of a bathroom was definitely coldhearted.”

  Lewis suddenly felt stricken. He swung around as she turned the key.

  “You’re right! You’re absolutely right! I apologize!”

  “Lewis, you’re drunk,” she said sternly. Then smiled. “But I forgive you.”

  She walked out then, in a rustle of chiffon, and Lewis stared into space. From the stairway came the sound of a Viennese waltz. The sweetness of the music, and the sweetness of the new open space in his mind became one.

  He looked at his watch. It was eleven, and suddenly, quite clearly, with no more evasions, he understood. He loved Helen! There it was—it was so very simple. There was nothing wrong with him after all; the confusion he had felt these past weeks had one cause and one only. He had been confused because he had refused to acknowledge this central, this wonderful, this all-important fact.