Destiny

by Sally Beauman

  “I’m thinking about them.” Lewis returned to his chair and sat down. “I’m also thinking about Carole Lombard. Bette Davis. Katharine Hepburn. Gina Lollobrigida. Marlene Dietrich. They all seem to have gotten by okay without the same initials…”

  “I give you that. I’m not laying down the law here. Just making suggestions—you know.”

  The two men looked at each other. Helen stood up. Her color had risen. She stood there quietly, and both men, suddenly guiltily aware that they had been wrangling over her as if she were not present, fell silent.

  “I was christened Hélène. It’s on my passport, if you remember, Lewis.” She hesitated. “My mother always called me that. She liked it pronounced that way. She said…she said that it sounded like a sigh.”

  There was silence in the room. Lewis saw that her hands trembled slightly, and it seemed to cost her considerable effort to say this. Thad was looking at her intently, his expression unreadable.

  “Hélène,” he said at last. “That’s interesting.” The small dark eyes flicked up to her face, and then away. “And it was your mother who called you that?”

  “Always.”

  “Uh-huh.” He gave a little secretive smile. Helen glanced at him, as if something in his tone were curious, but Thad said nothing more. He began to hum tunelessly, as he often did when he was thinking. It was some bars before Lewis recognized The Marseillaise.

  “Also…” She went on stiffly. “I grew up in a village called Hartland. I always liked that name. I don’t know if…”

  Lewis looked at her in astonishment. He didn’t understand why she was going along with all this, why she didn’t protest. She seemed even to like the idea of a new name, a new identity. He was just about to start protesting again, when Thad looked up. The light glinted on his shiny spectacles.

  “Hart.” He said. “Hartland’s too long. Hart. No, Harte with an e on the end. Hélène Harte. That’s it. That’s perfect. Great. What do you think, Lewis?”

  Lewis hesitated, looking at Helen. He could see how tense she had become, how pent-up. Color stained her cheeks; her eyes were bright. He felt a moment’s anger, an intuition that Thad was playing with her in some way he did not understand, treating in a brusque way something that clearly mattered to her very much. He looked at her eyes, enormous and dark in her delicate face, and the image of a frightened animal at bay came into his mind: hart, heart, Harte…

  Thad looked away, and, as he did so, Helen, meeting Lewis’s eyes, inclined her head. A little nod, a private hint, from which Thad was excluded. At once Lewis’s spirits rose.

  “I think it might work,” he said slowly. “Yes.”

  “Let’s sleep on it.” Thad rose. “See you at the airport in the morning, Lewis.”

  On that note, he left, much to their astonishment—no further delay, no further appeals about the sofa, nothing. He just went. One minute he was there. The next minute he was out the door. The relief was so total, and so unexpected, that Helen and Lewis were left staring at each other in disbelief.

  Hélène, Lewis said to her, later, when they made love. Hélène.

  It was like a sigh. It suited her; the softness and the gentleness of the sound pleased him.

  Hélène, he said once more, when, after many kisses, long farewells, he left finally for the airport.

  Hélène Harte, Hélène said to herself as she looked in the mirror when Lewis had gone. She lifted her hair and turned her face from side to side, learning her own features. Hélène Harte, who would be rich and famous. Hélène Harte, who would be a star, more than a star, a legend. Hélène Harte, who would be the woman she had always imagined, who would go back to Orangeburg, Alabama, in a Cadillac. Hélène Harte, who would show Orangeburg, and Ned Calvert, that she still remembered. It was possible; anything was possible if you wanted it enough, if you willed it enough.

  She let her hair fall again around her face, and for an instant, Hélène Craig looked back at her—the girl she had been. She would be her no more. She turned away from the mirror thinking, with a smile, that she would be giving birth twice, to her baby, and her new self.

  She did not see the new self with any great precision yet, but that would come. She imagined her, meanwhile, without weakness, immensely strong, remote as a star, but also an avenging angel who came with wings and a sword.

  That night she dreamed of Edouard.

  The next months passed very swiftly. Lewis felt as if his life were measured by two clocks which kept very different time. One ticked away his progress, and occasional lack of it, with Thad; the other triumphantly recorded the advances of his love.

  Lewis threw himself energetically into the wheeling and dealing in Paris. Certainly, he would have preferred to be back with Hélène, but meanwhile he felt that everything he did was on her behalf. He wanted to prove himself to her, he wanted to return to London with triumphs, deals which he could lay before her like the spoils of war. So he worked hard, tried to learn fast, and amazed himself with a toughness and tenacity he had always hoped he possessed but had never before tested to the full.

  He took a room overlooking the courtyard in the Plaza-Athénée, his mother’s favorite Paris hotel. His first action, on arrival, was to buy himself a fat Mont Blanc fountain pen, and a bottle of black ink. His second was to give the head porter the tip of a lifetime to ensure that the switchboard operator would put his calls through to London without hitch.

  He then entered a round of meetings with a fierceness and vivacity that took even Thad by surprise. Sphere, in spite of Thad’s claims, was proving elusive, so Lewis chased other contacts. He made endless telephone calls. He pinned people down and refused to allow them to avoid him or palm him off with evasive promises. He haggled, he wheedled, he cajoled, he bullied, he hyped. He employed to the full his patrician manners, his social contacts, and his considerable charm. He took planes around Europe as casually as he took taxis, he had meetings before breakfast, and meetings at midnight. And slowly, painstakingly, he began to make progress: he began to be able to sort the wheat from the chaff—and when it came to raising money for movies, there was a great deal of chaff.

  There was Henri Lebec, voluble, eager, who took him to dinner at the Tour d’Argent, and gave Lewis’s genitals the most flagrant squeeze under the table at precisely the moment their waiter ignited their crêpes suzette. Lebec had to be discarded: Lewis saw him now for the amateur he was. It reminded him how amateur he himself had been, and he determined to do better. He stopped returning Lebec’s calls, and after a while, the Frenchman drifted away to some other project; he appeared more disappointed that Lewis was not homosexual than anything else.

  There was the German steel magnate, interested in a tax shelter. There was the production company in Rome, backed by a spaghetti baron, who was interested in Thad’s next movie—provided it was made at Cinecittà, and starred the spaghetti baron’s girlfriend. There was a Yugoslav group, who seemed under the impression Thad was about to make an epic: they could raise government backing; they could provide an army of three thousand Yugoslavs very cheap-provided, of course, the picture was made in Yugoslavia. There were feelers from an American agent, who passed the word to a producer, who talked to a lawyer, and who then burned up the lines between Hollywood and Paris with thirty-seven phone calls in three days. Then he stopped calling. When Lewis next called back, he had been fired.

  Lewis enjoyed all this. He was new to the game, and he refused to be disheartened. Thad, who sometimes gave way to gloom, and who liked to be dramatic, said, “It’s a jungle out there, Lewis. A fucking jungle.” Lewis supposed it was: it seemed to him also like a fairground—a fairground in which there were a lot of hucksters.

  He would outtalk, outhuckster them all, Lewis resolved. And while he was at it, he’d develop his own instinct for the jugular: he might not need it yet, but one day, he was sure, it would be useful.

  Meanwhile, no matter how little progress he made, he could always return to the Plaza-Athénée in the ev
enings. Then he would make his telephone call to Hélène, his private line to reality. When he had hung up, Lewis, who had never written letters in his life if he could avoid it, would pick up his Mont Blanc pen, and cover pages of hotel writing paper in his large rounded schoolboyish hand. Letters to Hélène; love letters: My darling, my sweet one, my life, my love. Hélène kept all his letters, and answered them. Her own were simple. Lewis read them and reread them, and then reread them again. He kept them in his pocket; he took them out on planes, in taxis, in bed, in restaurants. They became worn and creased with handling, and to Lewis they were the talismans of love.

  They were married at Chelsea Town Hall in January. Hélène wore a white woolen dress, a white woolen coat; it was again snowing. The clerk who married them was very solemn; Lewis hardly heard a word he said. The room in which the brief ceremony took place was decorated with plastic chrysanthemums. Lewis dared not look at Hélène until he slipped the ring onto her ice-cold finger, and realized that her hand, too, was shaking.

  Outside, they paused on the steps above the snowy street. Hélène looked down at the small bouquet of flowers she was holding. Tiny white roses, white violets, white freesias. She touched their leaves, delicately; the flowers were held in place by thin wires through the calyx.

  They had four days together then, before Thad again started calling and sounding plaintive. Then Lewis went back to Paris, began a new set of meetings, and a new set of letters. My darling, my sweet wife: that particular term fired him with pride; he used it whenever possible.

  He met Simon Scher, the representative of Sphere Distribution, for the first time the week after his marriage. Before that, when Scher had been mysteriously unavailable, Lewis had begun to think that all Thad’s optimism had indeed been misplaced.

  The first thing Scher did after shaking hands was to congratulate Lewis on his recent marriage, which Lewis assumed he must have heard of from Thad. The second thing was to remark that, like Lewis, he had been at Harvard—the business school in his case. The third thing was to open his briefcase. He took out several neat sheaves of paper and laid them on the table between them. Lewis looked at Scher, a small neat man, conservatively dressed: this man did not look like a huckster. They continued to meet, at intervals, throughout February. Lewis continued to seek other sources of finance; he did not intend to make the mistake of putting all his eggs in Scher’s basket.

  Sphere purchased the distribution rights to Night Game, and it began to look as if the film might have a profitable future, on the European art-house circuit, anyway. Thad had been bullied into producing a screenplay for the next film, and a shooting script—though he said in private that he had no intention of adhering to either. They had a detailed budget. There was a detailed schedule. Locations had been chosen, and permission to use them obtained. There was some casting—all of it still provisional apart from Hélène and Lloyd Baker, who was eager to work with Thad again. There was a strong technical and production team. Lewis assembled all this material and information, disseminated it widely, and felt pleased with himself.

  Scher took this weighty dossier away with him early in February—he needed to consult, he said. Lewis snatched two days back in London, where Hélène was eager he should meet her gynecologist.

  Mr. Foxworth blandly congratulated Lewis on the forthcoming birth of his child; Hélène stared fixedly at the paintings on the wall behind his head. Mr. Foxworth, noting Lewis’s Savile Row overcoat, his Tiffany watch, his handmade shoes, was most affable. He noted Lewis’s accent, and his unconscious inbred arrogance, and became more affable still. He was sure, he said charmingly, that Mr. Sinclair would prefer his wife to give birth in a private clinic rather than a National Health hospital—excellent though those hospitals indubitably were. His own clinic, in St. John’s Wood…He allowed his voice to tail away.

  Lewis, used to such physicians since childhood, felt reassured. St. John’s Wood, he said; naturally. Hélène gave Mr. Foxworth a glance of triumph, which Lewis did not observe.

  They went shopping. They went to The White House, in New Bond Street, and bought an exquisite layette, adorned with Brussels lace, embroidered by nuns, and—in the case of the baby’s shawl, which was like gossamer—hand knit by elderly craftswomen in Scotland. They discussed the hiring of a nurse for the baby—a nurse was essential in any case, and it would be necessary to leave the baby with her for a few weeks in June, when Hélène and Lewis had to undertake a brief tour to publicize Night Game in Europe. Luckily, Anne Kneale’s sister could recommend someone very good: Lewis interviewed the young woman, who came with excellent references; he began to feel, day by day, more responsible, more grown-up—though Lewis’s own term was mature.

  One day, coming back to the cottage unexpectedly, he found Hélène reading—of all things—the Financial Times. Lewis found this highly amusing, and when she confessed, shyly, that actually she was quite interested in such matters, but she found them hard to understand, Lewis was touched. Here, he felt, he could dazzle—was he not, after all, a Sinclair, his father’s son?

  The temptation to demonstrate to Hélène some of his own skills—she would, unfortunately, never see him play football—was suddenly strong. Lewis began to explain a few terms, to elucidate certain simple facts, and Hélène listened quietly and attentively and occasionally asked quite intelligent questions. In the end they spent the entire afternoon discussing the stock market, and Lewis enjoyed himself very much. He, who had always been instructed, always lectured, was suddenly the teacher. It was a new role, and his pupil was his wife: Lewis found the experience almost erotic.

  “Is it very difficult—to start a portfolio?” Hélène asked him, the next day. Lewis gave a shout of laughter.

  “Of course not! Do you want to try? Why not? I’ll help you—but later. When the film’s launched. When you’ve had the baby. You’ve got other things to think about now.”

  “I know, Lewis,” she said, and smiled at him obediently.

  Back in Paris, Sphere procrastinated. At Simon Scher’s suggestion, the budget for the new film was revised, and some changes were made to the script. Thad made these swiftly.

  “Just tell me what they want, Lewis, and I’ll stick it in. It’s just words, Lewis, whatever they think they want, I can work around it. Just get the money.”

  This attitude of Thad’s caused Lewis some alarm, but he concealed it. He had, by then, seen the master print of Night Game—Thad had perversely refused to let him see the rough cut, which, it seemed to Lewis, had been seen by half of Paris.

  The moment he saw that print, Lewis’s alarms faded. Whenever they reawoke, he reminded himself of its excellence and was reassured. Night Game was a wonderful film. It was startling, lucid, and gripping. It was simultaneously very sad, and at moments extremely funny. Thad knew what he was doing: forgetting the doubts of Rome, forgetting his current anxieties, Lewis felt proud. He had always had faith in Thad, he told himself; he had never really wavered; and now that faith was vindicated—triumphantly so.

  And Hélène—on film, even to Lewis, she was a revelation. He had read that there are some faces the camera loves: now he knew the meaning of that phrase. Seeing her on the screen, Lewis forgot he knew her; it was like meeting her for the first time, and he fell in love with her all over again. Later, having had a few drinks to calm himself, he explained that to the assistant director, the amiable Fabian.

  Fabian smiled, and winked. “Mais, évidemment,” he said with a shrug. “The film itself—it is like a love letter to her, is it not?”

  This annoyed Lewis. He tried to forget the remark immediately.

  Scher had also seen the film, in its final version, and had pronounced himself impressed. He went to see it again, with various advisors and aides, at the beginning of April. By the middle of April there was still no final deal for the next movie, and Lewis began to lose patience. At the end of the month Scher suddenly announced that he needed to see it again, this time with the chairman of his parent company P
artex, a Texan called Drew Johnson.

  Lewis was irritated. He despised Texans. He foresaw this whole saga going on for months more, and then disintegrating, just like all the others. One more bubble burst.

  However, he still had no formal commitment from Sphere after months of hard work, so he had no alternative but to agree.

  Drew Johnson proved the embodiment of all Lewis’s Bostonian prejudices. He attended the private screening, together with his wife, Billy; she wore Givenchy; her husband a shoelace tie, cowboy boots, and a Stetson. Lewis sat beside them in the screening room, bristling with the disdain of his class.

  They went on to dinner at the Grand Vefour. The movie was not mentioned once. They went on after that to the Crazy Horse cabaret, renowned throughout Europe for its sauciness and wit. There Drew Johnson had a ball. He whooped. He applauded. He ordered magnums of champagne. Lewis sat in stony silence, and gazed at the beautiful strippers with a new and puritanical distaste. They did nothing for him at all. The biggest breasts, the slenderest thighs, the most salacious gestures, did not stir his body once.

  A black Rolls-Royce Phantom collected the Texan and his wife from the club. They were staying outside Paris, with friends; Drew Johnson crushed Lewis’s hand in a mighty paw, and invited him out to Orly to his plane the next morning.

  Lewis went back to his hotel, wrote to Hélène, and then—for once feeling despondent—decided to get smashed. Next morning, certain the chairman of Partex had loathed Night Game and the deal was off, he dragged himself, hung over, out to the airport.

  The plane was a Boeing 707. Inside, it had antique linenfold paneling. On the paneling, their frames screwed in, were a Renoir and a Gauguin the Jeu de Paume gallery would have been proud to own. Lewis looked around him sourly, sat down on an eighteenth-century couch that had been converted to hold seat belts, and asked for a glass of tomato juice.