Destiny

by Sally Beauman

  “Tomato juice?” Drew Johnson’s bushy white eyebrows rose. “What’s going on here? Billy, honey, ring the bell. Our friend Lewis could use a proper drink.”

  “No, thank you.” Lewis gave his cut-glass accent full rein. “It’s nine o’clock in the morning, and besides I have nothing to celebrate.” He paused, and as the strain told, his temper snapped. “Look. Why not be straight with me, and stop wasting my time? You hated the film. Yes?”

  “Hated it?” The Texan smiled. “How d’you figure that? Y’all taking a wrong turn there.”

  “Hated it. Disliked it. Probably didn’t understand it. Either way, I don’t know why I’m here, and I might as well leave.” He put down his glass, stood up, and moved toward the exit. It was outrage at the linenfold as much as anything that finally did it. He swung back.

  “It’s a good movie,” he said. “Maybe a great one. I can see that, even if you can’t. And I’m going to make damn sure Thad gets to make the next one. With or without your help.”

  There was a silence. Drew Johnson looked at his wife and began to smile. Suddenly he threw back his head in a great shout of laughter.

  “You know, I was beginning to think you were some kind of a eunuch? Well, what d’you know? They got balls in Boston after all…”

  Six feet five of brawny Texan advanced across the cabin, holding out its hand. Six feet three of elegant Bostonian looked at it with a doubtful disdain.

  Drew Johnson’s face sobered. His sharp blue eyes met those of Lewis.

  “Well, come on now, boy. Even in Boston I guess you get to shake hands on a deal.” He paused. “I authorized the financing last night. Your lawyers don’t pick too many nits in it, and you’ll find y’all just got yourself a backer.”

  Lewis stared at him. He reached out and grasped Drew Johnson’s hand. He smiled.

  “You know,” he said, “I think I might just change the habits of a lifetime. Right now a drink would be just fine.”

  “Break out the bourbon, Billy,” Johnson roared.

  The deal was signed on the first of May. Lewis looked at its fifty pages of closely typed script, and felt a soaring pride. For the deal, he and Thad had formed their own production company. They called it Mirage, because Thad liked that name, and as joint directors, they both signed: Thad in a thin spidery scribble, Lewis with his Mont Blanc pen, in his bold hand.

  The day he signed, he called first Hélène, and then his father. This moment, which Lewis had been promising himself for months, was sweet. Item by item Lewis lobbed the information down the line; it felt like a series of perfectly aimed grenades. A budget in seven figures. The possibility of a long-term partnership. Sphere Distribution. Partex Petrochemicals. Drew Johnson.

  Impatience at his father’s end changed to silence; after the silence came the questions—the exam. Lewis was eloquent; figures flew across the transatlantic cable, and at last he heard the note he’d wanted to hear so long creeping into his father’s voice, grudging but there: respect.

  Lewis smiled. “Oh, and by the way, I’m married,” he added, and hung up.

  Lewis had hoped that the deal with Sphere and the birth of Hélène’s baby would take place in the same week. But it was not to be. The baby was late: “Nothing to worry about,” Mr. Foxworth said. “Very common with first-time mothers.” Lewis fretted; finally, late on the evening of May 16, Hélène went into labor. Lewis rushed with her in a taxi to the clinic in St. John’s Wood. Mr. Foxworth arrived, smooth in a pearl-gray suit.

  Lewis paced the waiting room of the clinic, and smoked two packs of cigarettes. At four o’clock in the morning of May 17, Mr. Foxworth appeared at the door, undoing the strings of a green surgical gown. Lewis looked at him: it was like the movies; it was like the movies—only better, only worse. He stared at the physician in terror; one second stretched to eternity. Through the clouds of cigarette smoke, Mr. Foxworth smiled, indulgently: he congratulated Mr. Sinclair. Mr. Sinclair had a very lovely daughter.

  Lewis was ushered into Hélène’s room. He was trembling. Discreetly, doctor and nurse withdrew. In her arms Hélène held what seemed to him a tiny bundle, a little, little shape, swathed in a white wool shawl.

  She looked up, and Lewis approached the bed. He looked down at the shawl, at the tiny perfect face. He saw smooth pale skin, eyes tightly shut, and a little frown between the brows, as if the baby concentrated hard on sleep. As Lewis bent forward, the baby screwed its face into a tiny fierce grimace. Its lips parted, and it made a small rubbing, seeking movement, pressing its cheek against the shawl. It seemed disgruntled. It wriggled slightly, freeing one hand. The hand was plump-backed, with dimples for knuckles; there was a deep crease where hand met wrist, and Lewis saw, as the tiny fingers clenched and then relaxed, that the fingernails were the color of tiny shells. They needed cutting.

  Lewis began to cry. Gently, he reached forward and touched the newborn skin. The baby moved again, snuffled, and the shawl fell back. This seemed to alert her momentarily: she opened her eyes. Lewis stared. A little fuzzy cap of jet black hair. Eyes that were the strongest, darkest blue he had ever seen.

  “Isn’t she beautiful?” Hélène said softly, anxiously.

  “She’s lovely.”

  Lewis went to touch the soft black hair, and then drew back. The baby looked in his direction with wide unfocused eyes. Lewis wished then, wished passionately and sadly, that the baby’s hair had been fair, like Hélène’s, like his own. He hated himself for the wish at the instant he felt it. He could hardly fall now at the very first hurdle, when he had been so confident of his ability to stay the course. He turned back to Hélène awkwardly, trying to hide what he felt. He reached for her hand.

  “Her eyes are beautiful. And she’s so…I…”

  He heard himself failing, heard himself flounder.

  Hélène seemed trusting. She lifted her face to his, with a smile of tiredness and serenity.

  “Kingfisher blue,” she said. “The color of a kingfisher’s wing.”

  Lewis looked down at the baby uncertainly. It was not how he would have described the color. Hélène’s grip on his hand suddenly tightened.

  “I wonder,” Lewis said in a flat voice. “Will they stay that color?”

  They decided to call the baby Catharine. Because of her delicate little triangular-shaped face and the wide-spaced blue eyes, which reminded Lewis of a Siamese kitten his mother had owned, this quickly became shortened to Cat.

  Like her namesake, Cat was simultaneously aloof, and immensely demanding. When Lewis or Hélène held her, and cooed at her, and stroked her, Cat appeared indifferent. She would screw up her eyes and look away. But the second she was laid in her crib—fed, bathed, changed, ready for her nap—she would start to scream.

  She would cry, on a mounting plangent penetrating scale, until she was picked up again. Then she would stop—until they laid her back in the crib. Lewis found it charming at first, then, as the lack of sleep began to tell, irritating. Hélène never complained: she would climb out of bed and go to her at all hours of the night. The days seemed to Lewis to be one long chain of operations: bottles to sterilize, bottles to make up, diapers to change, diapers to soak. Lewis sometimes made up the formula, and sometimes held the baby while she fed—when, briefly, she was quiet—but diapers, he felt, were hardly a man’s domain.

  After two weeks he suggested that, rather than waiting until they were almost due to leave for Paris, as had been planned, the nurse should join them now. Hélène refused. They had their first quarrel, during the course of which Lewis told her that she cared more for the baby than she did for him, and at the end of which he drank half a bottle of whisky, which at least enabled him, he said snappishly the next day, to get a few hours’ sleep.

  The day after that, having sulked until he felt better, Lewis repented. If he could then have made love to Hélène, he told himself, he would have felt that the distance between them had been banished. But the doctor had forbidden intercourse for a month, and Hélène seem
ed not to share Lewis’s enthusiasm for alternative methods of release. She climbed into bed each night and fell instantly asleep; Lewis lay beside her, stiff in every muscle with a mixture of sexual frustration and moral indignation, his nerves taut as piano wire. He was waiting for the first wail. Sooner or later—usually sooner—it always came.

  By the third week, when the telephone calls from Thad became more frequent, and the packing began, Lewis looked down into Cat’s little triangular face with a sense of injured reproach. It seemed to him so unfair. This was not his baby, and yet he had welcomed it into the world. He had set out to love it; he had promised himself he would take care of it—and how did it repay him? Did it seem to sense his concern, his magnanimity? No, it did not.

  He decided to say nothing. He would keep the peace. The nurse was arriving that day; three days from now, he and Hélène would be in Paris. Alone.

  When, finally, the day came for them to depart, Lewis felt a certain triumph. It was not just that he looked forward to being alone with Hélène, or even to getting a night’s uninterrupted sleep, it was also the fact that his will had prevailed. Hélène had not wanted to leave the baby. Right up to the very last minute she had attempted to change Lewis’s mind.

  But Lewis was obdurate, and he could back up his stand with such sweetly reasonable arguments that, in the end, Hélène had to give in. This, after all, was a publicity tour. It was no place for a newborn infant. Hélène had a tight schedule of interviews, photographic sessions, and public appearances: it was she who was being launched, Lewis argued, not just the film. This, he was aware, was Thad’s argument. He used it now without a qualm. He reiterated the fact that they would be away only three weeks, that Hélène could telephone every morning and every evening, that the baby’s nurse was highly experienced—far more experienced than Hélène, he added, and that she had the backup of Anne Kneale. Lewis personally thought that Anne Kneale was an interfering dyke, and in his more paranoid moments felt that her kindness to Hélène disguised a sexual attraction. But she was useful to him now as an argument, so Lewis suppressed these feelings. Madeleine and Anne Kneale could cope, he said firmly.

  “Now that you’re a mother, darling,” he said, clinching his argument, “you mustn’t forget that you’re also my wife. And an actress,” he added, but that was an afterthought. Lewis was not really thinking about the premiere of Night Game, or the press interest in Hélène, which the publicity man Thad had hired was describing as phenomenal. He was thinking about the suite at the Plaza-Athénée; about its little balcony, where he and Hélène would eat breakfast together in the spring sun; about the wide, wide double bed, in which, uninterrupted by Cat’s plaintive cries, Lewis intended to make love to Hélène again and again.

  Recaptured joys: Lewis ushered Hélène out to the hired limousine that would drive them to the airport. He felt nothing but optimism. Hélène lingered. Madeleine stood in the doorway of the little cottage holding the baby; Anne Kneale stood behind her, looking up at the sky; Hélène seemed unable to drag herself away. She bent over the baby. She kissed her. She embarked on a whole new series of instructions to Madeleine, all of which she had been over a thousand times before. Lewis, already in the car, tapped his fingers on his knees, looked at his watch. It was nine A.M. He leaned out.

  “Hélène. We must hurry. We’ll miss the flight at this rate.”

  Hélène finally tore herself away. She climbed into the back of the car, her cheeks pink. She said nothing.

  As the car moved off, Lewis took her hand and pressed it between his own. By the time they were halfway to Heathrow, Lewis felt quite benevolent toward Cat. Left behind, in retrospect, she seemed to him sweet. He pressed Hélène’s hand, drew it down against his thigh, and then to his groin. “It will be like a honeymoon,” he said.

  Back at the cottage, as the car bearing Hélène and Lewis rounded the corner and disappeared from sight, Anne Kneale and the nurse, Madeleine, looked at each other. Anne Kneale looked at her watch, and then down at the baby, who was sleeping. They paused for a moment, then turned and went back inside.

  Madeleine fed the baby for a little while, then changed her, and laid her carefully in her crib. She came back downstairs on tiptoe.

  Anne was sitting in front of the fire, staring into the flames thoughtfully. She was smoking a cigarette. The two looked at each other, and waited. Five minutes passed. Ten. Fifteen. There was still silence.

  Madeleine, born in the Landes region of France, trained at the exclusive Norland College in England, and a fully qualified nursery nurse for the past four years, three of them with Anne Kneale’s sister, who had given her the excellent reference, sighed and sat down. She looked at Anne, and gave a little shrug.

  “Incroyable. It’s as if she knew.”

  Anne stubbed out her cigarette, and said nothing. After a while, she got up, went to the studio, and fetched the portrait of Hélène which she had finished some weeks before. She looked at it critically, aware that it was not quite as she had wanted it to be. There were things she had seen in that beautiful face, and which she had wanted to capture; some of them had eluded her. She looked at the picture irritably, and then, carefully and methodically, she began to pack it up. It gave her something to do. It kept her conscience at bay. She liked Hélène, and she was not at all happy with this arrangement.

  At ten o’clock, Madeleine, who was also uneasy, went out to the little kitchen to make coffee. At ten-thirty, precisely on schedule, the telephone rang. The two women jumped, and then looked at each other. Slowly, Anne tied the last knot on her packaging, and turned to pick up the receiver.

  The voice of her old friend Christian Glendinning, whom she had known since childhood, informed her that Lewis Sinclair and Hélène had boarded their plane ten minutes ago. It had just taken off for Paris.

  “Stop panicking,” Christian said calmly as Anne began to interrupt. “I’m phoning Eaton Square now. He’ll be with you in fifteen minutes. Less, probably.”

  Ten minutes later, a black Rolls-Royce pulled up outside the door. Anne went to open it; Madeleine looked out the window. She saw the familiar figure, in a dark suit, step out, and cross the sidewalk. She heard Anne’s greeting, then the door from the hall opened.

  Madeleine blushed crimson. For this man, who had been so good to her, so good to her sister, and so good to her little nephew, Grégoire, Madeleine would have walked through fire. As she saw him, she gave an awkward half bob.

  “Madeleine.”

  “Monsieur le Baron…”

  There was no need for him to ask the question; both women could read it in his eyes, and in the strain of his features. Anne held back the door.

  “She’s upstairs. The room on the right. She’s sleeping.” Edouard touched her arm as he passed.

  “It’s all right, Anne. It won’t take long, I promise you.” They heard his feet on the stairs, heard him hesitate on the landing. A door opened, there was a brief pause, then it shut.

  Madeleine, who had a romantic nature beneath her dark square fierce little face, sighed, and sat down. Anne Kneale, who was not a romantic, but who had been shaken by Edouard’s expression, also sat down, bolt upright, counting the minutes, the time it took to sacrifice a new set of loyalties for others that went back a long way. She thought of the first time she had met Edouard, when he was a boy of sixteen—his sixteenth birthday, and that appalling trip Jean-Paul had organized to the theater. She had done this for Isobel, she told herself defensively; for Isobel, whom she had loved, and for Edouard, whom she had always liked, though she was aware she did not understand him. Men were such masochists, she thought. Why seek pain? She shrugged, and lit another cigarette nervously.

  Upstairs, Edouard stood very still, looking down at the crib. The baby was awake; she lay there, quite silently, waving her fist before her eyes, and looking up at him. Edouard stared down into a tiny replica of his own face. It owed the delicacy of its features, the golden pallor of its skin, to Hélène, but the hair was as dark as
his own, as dark as his father’s had been, and the eyes, that remarkable and unusual shade of dark blue, fringed by black lashes, were de Chavigny eyes. The baby blinked, as if to emphasize the point, and Edouard bent forward. He had so little time.

  He had rarely held a baby, and to lift one from a crib made him nervous. His hands shook as he disentangled the little body from the covers that swaddled it, and slipped his hand beneath head and neck to support it. He thought the baby might cry out, but she was quite silent, regarding him still with the myopic, slightly drunken gaze of all newborn babies. Edouard lifted her. Her tininess, her lightness, broke his heart.

  He looked down into the baby’s face, then lifted the tiny body higher, and cradled it against his shoulder. The cap of downy hair brushed his cheek silkily. He could smell the sweet warm milky scent of a very young baby’s skin. The baby’s head lolled a little; a small burp erupted, which seemed to please her. Edouard patted her back, and the baby swung her little fist, batting it against his lips.

  Her mouth made small greedy seeking movements, then opened in a wide pink yawn. A tiny pink tongue, like a kitten’s. Edouard lifted his hand, crooked his finger, and let the baby find his knuckle. She sucked on it hard, with an astonishing strength; then, quite suddenly, she wailed. A hiccuping mysterious distress: the tiny face contorted, reddened. Edouard, in response to an instinct he had not known he possessed, pressed her soothingly against his shoulder. The wailing stopped.

  When Edouard was quite certain she was calm again, he lowered her gently. He held her in front of him, her body resting easily across the width of his two hands. He looked down into her face, and the baby regarded him with solemnity.

  “One day,” Edouard said to the baby, to his baby. “One day, I shall come back for you. I promise.”

  He bent forward and laid her back in her crib, then drew the covers around her warmly.

  He stood looking down at her a moment longer, then, knowing that if he lingered he would find it impossible to leave, he turned abruptly, and went down the stairs. The door to the other bedroom was open; the brass rail of its wide double bed was visible. From it, Edouard averted his eyes.