Destiny

by Sally Beauman

  Hélène sighed. She returned to the scene ahead, and tried to concentrate, tried to force Maria to come back.

  She died beautifully again. The blood spurted beautifully again. But this time it worked. Maria came back to her just in time. They did only one take, and afterward Greg Gertz came over. He pressed her hand lightly, just once.

  “You see?” he said, and then he walked away.

  They were having drinks in the Polo Lounge. Lewis was in the middle of the third draft of Endless Moments, and it was not going well. His friend, an experienced and successful screenwriter, there to give him advice, was being patient. Lewis explained the plot once. It didn’t sound right, and so he explained it again; his friend, he felt, didn’t seem to understand the problems he was having; he appeared unimpressed; he appeared nonchalant.

  “Look, Lewis,” he said finally over their second martinis. “Someone very famous once said it all. There are two plots, right? Love. And money.”

  Lewis looked at him anxiously. The man lit a Corona Corona, and blew the smoke in contemplative rings. He frowned.

  “Who was it who said that? I think it was Balzac. On the other hand, it might have been Graham Greene.”

  There was a silence.

  “Only two?” Lewis prompted eventually. “Ever? Like, that’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Jesus.”

  “So, just relax, Lewis. Go with the flow. The way I look at it, most motion pictures are just a love story in a journalistic setting. You think of a new setting—a railway station, postwar Vienna, the Deep South in the Civil War—it doesn’t matter what the fuck it is, just make it original. Then you get two nice big bankable stars to play the leads—and there you are. Never agonize, Lewis, believe me. It doesn’t pay. My main creativity goes into my tax returns.”

  Lewis thought about this advice all the way home. He drove fast, in his new red Porsche, with Bob Dylan playing loudly on the radio. Love. And money. It couldn’t be that simple. He began to feel irritated. He began to feel sure that his friend had been putting him on.

  He did not particularly like the house in the hills in which he and Hélène lived, and he never approached it happily. Ingrid Nilsson, for whom it had been built and who had lived in it before them, had been obsessed with security. For some reason, Lewis had found this catching. When he bought the house, it already had more locks than a bank vault, and the gardens were already surrounded by high walls surmounted by wire. Lewis had added to this innumerable expensive devices, all of them the latest thing. The gates were electronically operated, and could be opened only from the house, or from his or Hélène’s cars. The garden itself was wired up; it was a place of electronic eyes and ears, activated by movement or body heat. The system was a nuisance, constantly being set off by birds or small animals, and now, as Lewis approached those high impenetrable gates, he wondered: was he trying to keep something out, or keep something in?

  That was a stupid idea, he told himself, and it was just then, as he slowed, that he saw the man for the first time. He was standing outside Lewis’s walls, looking up at them. A tall, big-boned, sandy-haired man, wearing a hat tilted on the back of his head, a cheap suit, and down-at-the-heel shoes. He was holding in his hands a map, the kind that marked movie stars’ houses by name, the kind sold to tourists.

  Lewis, gunning the engine of his Porsche, waiting for the remote control gates to swing back, gave the man a hard cold stare. He could see the neck of a bottle protruding from the pocket of his pants, and he thought: a lush, a bum. Lewis glared at the man, and accelerated past him in a cloud of dust. He paused to make sure the gates had shut him out, and then roared up to the house.

  His irritation was growing, and he felt quite pleased that he now had a legitimate excuse to make a fuss. “There’s a man hanging around the gates,” he said to Cassie as soon as he could find her.

  Cassie gave him one of her polite bland looks. She did not like Lewis, and Lewis did not like her. They were both usually careful to disguise this fact.

  “Tall? Red-haired? Wearing a hat?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Oh, I’ve seen him a couple of times. He’s okay, I reckon. Some down-and-out, that’s all.”

  “If you see him again, Cassie, you will please notify the police. He should be forced to move. That’s what they’re there for. After all, sometimes you and Madeleine and Cat are alone in the house.” He regretted this the moment it was said.

  “Jenner is usually here, Mr. Sinclair. And Mr. Hicks is in the lodge.”

  Jenner was the butler, Hicks, their chauffeur, and it was true, one or the other of them was almost always in the house. The person who was not was Lewis himself. Cassie, naturally, did not mention this, but the fact remained in the air between them, unspoken. Lewis turned away.

  “Has Hélène phoned?” he said as an afterthought.

  “Yes, Mr. Sinclair. At seven, just as she always does.”

  “And is Cat in bed?”

  Cassie looked at her wristwatch. She hesitated. “Just about, I reckon. But she won’t be asleep.”

  “Yes—well, it’s a bit late to go up now. I don’t want to get her excited. I’ll see her in the morning. Oh—and Cassie. I won’t be wanting dinner. I’m going out.”

  He had not known this until the moment he said it. Cassie merely nodded, and left.

  Lewis walked through the wide hall, and into the drawing room. Hélène’s room; Hélène’s house; he had bought it, and she had created it, carefully, painstakingly. Lewis could see that it was beautiful, but somehow it always put him on edge.

  He prowled around the room, unable to settle, unable to make up his mind what to do. He looked at the Coromandel screens, at the Chinese vases which had been a belated wedding present from his parents—his parents, who had been so appalled by his marriage but who, like everyone else, had been won over by Hélène. For a moment, he thought, sadly, of the little red room in London, with its fire, and its shabby furniture. He had been happy then; yes, he was certain. It was only later that things began to go wrong.

  He poured himself a whiskey, added a little ice, and stood by the window, looking out over the garden. He could work, he supposed. He could phone Hélène—she would be home soon, anyway. The movie was almost finished; another week. He could go out; there were plenty of friends who would be glad to see him, though he had noticed that the invitations fell away a little when Hélène was not at home. There was another thing he could do, too, and he was aware of the temptation there, at the back of his mind. He pushed it aside for a while, not letting it come close. He poured himself another whiskey, and the temptation came closer. Just a look, it said; just one little look.

  I’ll just go into the room, Lewis told himself. I won’t do any more than that. The second whiskey seemed to have disappeared, which surprised him, so he poured another, and walked through the library into a room which Hélène used as an office.

  It was quite unlike all the other rooms in the house, being plainly and practically furnished. There was a desk, some bookshelves, a row of filing cabinets. Lewis leaned against them; he felt out of breath, and he had begun to sweat.

  He looked at the desk. It had eight drawers, and he had, on various occasions, been through all of them. They contained stationery, notebooks full of columns of figures which seemed to relate to investments, photographs, domestic bills, things of that kind. Not the evidence for which he was searching.

  He looked at the filing cabinets. They were locked, and inside the pocket of his jacket was the key. A duplicate: it had been quite easy to obtain.

  He stared at the locks, felt in his pocket for the key. What kind of woman kept love letters in a filing cabinet? Hélène’s kind, he said to himself. She must. They weren’t anywhere else. He’d looked.

  Exactly when he began to be obsessed with the existence of these letters, Lewis could not have said. But the obsession was there, and it grew day by day. He imagined who they might be from; he imagined
what they might say; sometimes they were old love letters and sometimes they were current ones. Lewis felt he must find them, he must look at them. It didn’t matter if it hurt—he knew it would hurt, but he didn’t care; he wanted to understand.

  He took one more swallow of his whiskey, put the glass down on the desk, and took the keys out of his pocket. His hand was shaking; he felt a curious heady mixture of contempt for himself and pride. He opened the top drawer of the first filing cabinet, and went through it quickly and methodically. He opened the second, and the third…He moved on to the next cabinet; the same thing: top drawer, middle drawer, bottom drawer.

  It took him a long time, and by the end of it, Lewis was almost crying. He rummaged about desperately at the back and bottom of the drawers, but there was nothing hidden, nothing there. No love letters. No letters of a personal description at all. The files contained exactly what they looked as if they contained: all the details of Hélène’s professional life. Her contracts, letters from her two agents, the one on the East Coast, the other on the West. Correspondence with various studios. Insurance policies. A note stating that her will was deposited with her lawyers; a copy of that will.

  Lewis stared at it. He hadn’t even known Hélène had made a will. He never had. He felt filled with a terrible self-disgust, a bitter self-hatred. He began to push files back into drawers, wildly, hardly caring that they went back in the right place. And then suddenly he realized something. By far the bulk of the files concerned Hélène’s investments. He had only scanned them before, now he looked at them more carefully. He stopped, looked again.

  He had known that Hélène was now rich. Obviously, she now earned a great deal of money. But this rich! He had had no idea. He stared at the listings of holdings, at the carefully documented transactions. He had introduced Hélène to her broker when they returned to America from England. James Gould, a friend of his father, whom Lewis had known since childhood.

  He remembered how touched he had been; Hélène had thirty thousand dollars to invest—earned on Night Game—and she had been so thrilled. “I want to start that portfolio, Lewis. You remember—the one we talked about.”

  “Darling,” he had said. “Go out and buy yourself some pretty things. Leave the portfolio till later…”

  But no, she’d been adamant, and Lewis hadn’t had the heart to tell her that on Wall Street, her thirty thousand dollars was chicken feed. So, he’d made the appointment with James Gould III, and before Hélène set off, he warned her, “Darling, he’s a very busy man. You mustn’t mind if you’re in and out of his office in ten minutes. All right?”

  “All right, Lewis,” she’d said in that funny solemn way she had, and out she’d gone. Lewis had stayed in their room at the Pierre, and waited. And waited. She came back two hours later. One and a half of them had been spent with James Gould.

  Lewis had been angry. And jealous—but it had worn off. Gradually he almost forgot James Gould. He was aware, dimly, that he and various other people gave Hélène the advice and instruction which he had once given her, and he had minded that, but there were so many other things he minded more.

  Now, he stared at the papers in front of him in stupefaction. Her advisors had made Hélène richer than he had ever imagined, richer than she had ever hinted to him. He looked at them; the dealings on the commodity market, the currency speculation, the property bought and sold, and as he did so, he felt the rage and indignation swell, the sense of betrayal deepen.

  It wasn’t evidence of a lover, but it was like a lover. It was a whole area of her life which she had shut off from him, kept secret.

  Why, she had even bought property in the South of France, through that terrible shark they’d met at Cannes, Nerval. And now she was writing to Gould informing him she wished to sell it. There was other land she wanted to buy, in Alabama.

  Lewis slammed the last of the files back, and hit the drawer back into place. He locked the cabinets, put the key back into his pocket, and drained the last of his whiskey in one gulp. He hated Hélène at that moment. He thought of the time when they were in London, of how he had laughingly explained to her some of the most obvious aspects of investment. How gentle he had felt then, and how sweetly and quietly she had listened to him.

  And now, for years, all this had been going on. And she had virtually never mentioned it. If she had such secrets, Lewis thought in a sudden agony of despair, what others were there, and where did she hide those?

  Hélène. Hélène. Hélène. Her name was beating away in his mind, and he looked around the room wildly as if somewhere, on the shelves, on the walls, he would see some thing, some little clue, which would give his wife back to him, which would help him understand.

  It was at that moment that the telephone rang. It made Lewis jump. He stood staring at it blankly for a moment—the telephone on Hélène’s desk, the one that was her private line. He reached across and snatched it up. He knew what he was expecting to hear: a man’s voice, the lover’s voice, the voice that would make everything clear.

  Lewis stared at the receiver with hatred; then he said, in a firm voice, “This is Lewis Sinclair.”

  There was a little silence. Lewis tensed. If the man hung up now, he thought, if the bastard just hung up…He heard a woman’s voice: soft, breathy, rather like the voice of a child.

  “Oh, Mr. Sinclair,” it said. “You won’t remember me—though we did meet once, at Cannes. This is Stephani Sandrelli. I’ve just been filming with your wife, and she asked me to give you a call. When I got back to Los Angeles. She thought you might like to hear how things were going, how she is…” The voice gave a little giggle. “She told me to check up on you, to tell you the truth. Make sure you were okay. Make sure you were missing her, I guess.”

  Lewis frowned. Even in his present state, this did not sound convincing; it was very unlike Hélène.

  “I’m sorry. What did you say your name was?”

  “Stephani. Stephani Sandrelli…”

  And then he saw her; walking across the gardens of the Hotel du Cap, a blaze of platinum-blond hair, a figure that burst out of its white dress. He hesitated only a moment. He thought: two years, and then he said easily, his old manner coming back to him quite effortlessly, “Well, let’s see. I think we should meet, don’t you? I don’t suppose you’d be free for dinner tonight?”

  “Actually, I would,” said the little breathy voice. And that was how it began.

  The Runaways was completed: Hélène flew to New York and checked into the Plaza.

  She was given, as always, a suite overlooking Central Park. Inside, the air-conditioning made the room chilly; outside, the city sweltered. The leaves of the trees in the park were the heavy dull green of midsummer; across the street the carriage horses that took tourists for rides shifted and sweated in the heat. Late July: New York was as hot and as humid today as Alabama. Hélène leaned against the window; across the city sirens wailed.

  She was accustomed to hotel rooms, so accustomed that she hardly saw them anymore. Sometimes she felt as if she had no home, and that even the house in Los Angeles was just another impermanent base. A life of stopovers; she had been a traveler for five years.

  Now she took in the details of this suite without interest. Stiff heavy silk brocade draperies at the windows, hung in elaborate loops and swags. On the bed, crisp white sheets, which crackled. Static in the air, so that every metal object touched gave her a shock. A series of pictures on the walls, placed at carefully calculated intervals—tasteful pictures, in that they were guaranteed to offend almost no one.

  She unpacked methodically, hanging the expensive clothes in the closets with habitual care. A Valentino dress; shoes from Rossetti; the Saint Laurent suit she would wear, the following morning, for the meeting in James Gould’s offices. You’ve sold the place at Grasse? I see. Then we’d better meet to discuss this new proposal. Gould had sounded irritable; it might not be an easy meeting.

  She thought of her first meeting with Gould, in the
autumn of 1960, and the memory made her smile.

  She and Lewis had been staying at the Pierre; it had been hot, a day like this one, and Lewis said, “Darling. He’s a very busy man. You mustn’t be offended if you’re in and out in ten minutes…” She had smiled, and said nothing. She knew exactly what she was going to do. She had had months to think about this meeting, she had planned, scripted, and rehearsed it in her mind. It was very important to her: the first step on the road back to Alabama and Ned Calvert. She had no intention of being in and out in ten minutes, and for months she had been trying to think what she could do, what she could say. How did you make someone like James Gould III sit up and take notice, when you had just thirty thousand dollars, and he was seeing you as a favor to your husband?

  When she first went into the large oak-paneled room, and was confronted with Gould, she had very nearly lost her nerve. He was tall, handsome, patrician—in his early fifties, she guessed. He had an inbred arrogance that reminded her of Lewis, though Gould was more impatient, and colder. He had also reminded her, slightly, of Mr. Foxworth. There was that same cool courtesy; the same instinctive dismissal of women. She had looked at him, and hoped that he might possess a sense of humor. There seemed no sign of it.

  He was through with the polite questions about Lewis, the necessary preliminaries, very quickly. Then, just a quick, slightly impatient glance down at the papers in front of him, as if he were already regretting this favor to an old family friend.

  “Let me see. Ah, yes, thirty thousand we’re looking at. Well, perhaps it would be best, Mrs. Sinclair, if you were to tell me the kind of performance you were looking for? I assume you were thinking of something like gilts, perhaps? We don’t have the means, unfortunately, for a very wide spread, and so I’d advise—”

  “Mr. Gould.”

  She had interrupted him, which was possibly a mistake. She looked down at her hands, and then back up to his face. Then, since she had nothing to lose, and everything to lose, she said the sentence she had scripted, in the voice she had chosen, and felt as she did so, the same calm she felt in front of the cameras. “I want to make myself a rich woman. And I should like you to help me do that quickly. That’s all.”