Destiny

by Sally Beauman

  “Of you. Of—who you look like. Nothing.”

  Cat frowned. She looked puzzled.

  “I look like me,” she said after a pause.

  And at that Hélène felt relief sweep through her. Her heart lightened. She smiled, and kissed Cat gently.

  “That’s right. You do. You’re you and there’s no one else like you, and I love you very much. Now, you must lie down, and try to go to sleep…”

  Afterward, the doubts came back again, very often at first, but less as time passed. Hélène looked for resemblances to Billy, and found them. She collected them in her mind—this turn of the head, that way of laughing, a certain gesture of the hands—all these things she noted, and stored, and replayed, until, gradually, the force of Lewis’s words diminished. What he had said could not be true; Billy was not really dead—he lived on in Cat.

  Hélène spent a great deal of time alone now, and she came to like it. She began to refuse invitations. She stayed at home, often not leaving the house for days at a time, and in the evenings, when it was quiet, she would sit and fix her mind on her childhood. She would summon up the trailer park, and her mother and Ned Calvert; she would relive the things that had happened, the things that had been said: those southern days, those southern summers.

  And she began to feel, more and more strongly, that what she was planning to do was not revenge—revenge was a stupid word, a word out of a melodrama—no, it was righting a wrong for her mother and for Billy that they, dead, could not right for themselves.

  At night, when she went to bed, she had the most vivid dreams. In these dreams, her mother and Billy were so close, and so real to her, that sometimes, when she woke, she could still hear their voices, and feel their gentle presence in her room. She wanted them to stay, and fought against waking, against the moment when she must finally acknowledge that they had gone.

  Thanksgiving came, Christmas approached, but this tangible passing of present time meant nothing to her. It seemed less real than the past, which she thought of and dreamed of.

  The future seemed least real of all, a flimsy and thin construct. She was glad that she had agreed to do Gregory Gertz’s film. She knew it was important to have it ahead of her, a fixed and definite point. Otherwise, she felt sometimes, she would not have been able to see beyond her return South; the trip to Orangeburg would have been a final destination.

  Of Edouard she would not let herself think at all. The night she found Lewis in her room, she had not made the telephone call she had promised herself; now she would never make it. Lewis’s accusations had put fortifications around that possibility: she would never consider it again.

  It seemed to Hélène, during this time, that she was very well, but neither Cassie nor Madeleine shared this estimation of her physical state. They discussed it: Hélène did not eat enough, she was getting very thin, she often seemed strained.

  Was it, Madeleine suggested, tentatively, once when she and Cassie were alone, was it simply because of Lewis’s departure?

  “If she had a grain of sense, she’d have been glad to see the back of him years ago.” Cassie sniffed. “I don’t think it’s that. She always was a secretive girl. She doesn’t want to talk, and nothing on God’s earth will make her. But there’s something—something on her mind.”

  Madeleine said nothing. She liked Hélène; she pitied her, and it would have satisfied her own nature very much if she had believed that Hélène’s strange state had one obvious and splendidly romantic explanation.

  One night, in their sitting room, while Cassie knitted, she suddenly decided to test this idea even if she did so indirectly.

  She drew in her breath, and counted to ten, and then she said: “Perhaps what is wrong is very simple. Maybe she is in love.”

  A long silence greeted this remark. Cassie’s fingers stitched faster, then stopped. She looked up.

  “Who with? Seems to me there’s not many candidates.”

  Madeleine swallowed. She stared at her skirt with great concentration. “Perhaps,” she said finally, “it could be someone from the past. Someone she doesn’t see any longer…”

  Cassie pursed her lips. “What kind of talk is that? If she’s in love with him, she’d still see him, wouldn’t she? Talk sense.”

  Madeleine sighed. Sometimes, she thought, Cassie was a woman of very limited imagination.

  “It could be,” she said obstinately. “I think so. If you love someone very much, why should this go away, just because you do not see them? What kind of love is that?”

  Cassie gave a cackle of laughter. “The best kind, I’d say. Love? The French think far too much about love. Women think too much about love, in my opinion. Better off without it. What does love do, that kind of love? Turns everything every which way, inside out and upside down. Causes nothing but trouble, and never lasts.”

  Here Madeleine felt a little outraged. She set her lips in a firm line. “This,” she said, “I cannot accept.”

  “Makes no difference. That’s the way it is.”

  “Weren’t you ever in love, Cassie?”

  “Yes. Sure, I was. When I was sixteen, seventeen, thereabouts.” Cassie began to knit again, faster than ever. “And I got over it, same way I got over the chicken pox and the measles. I never had them but once, and I never had that but once…”

  She stopped knitting suddenly, looked up, and caught Madeleine’s eye. She began to smile a little.

  “Mind though—he was a fine-looking man. A real fine-looking man. And I still remember him. Little ways he had. You know. Just sometimes.”

  She returned to her knitting once more, and with that, Madeleine had to be contented.

  Christmas came and went. Lewis mailed a Christmas card from San Francisco, but did not write, or telephone. At the end of December, James Gould reported from New York that Major Calvert had been late in his monthly loan repayments, had been warned, and had finally made the payment, a week late.

  “I think,” he said in his cool voice, “that it could be soon. Are you prepared for that?”

  “I’m prepared.” Hélène paused. “James—when the notice of foreclosure is served, I want to do it myself. In person.”

  There was a small silence on the other end of the line.

  “That’s not usual. It’s not necessary, as I’m sure you know.”

  “Even so.”

  Gould sighed. “Very well. But don’t be surprised if it’s soon. I’ll telephone you.”

  Hélène knew it would be soon—she did not need James Gould to tell her. She sensed it with every instinct she possessed. Five years, and it was very close. She would start to feel the triumph soon, she told herself. All the old passionate hatred would come back, and she would feel the way she had years before, when she sat in Cassie’s living room and emptied out all the dollar bills, watching them flutter to the floor while she let the loathing loose.

  Gould telephoned at the end of January, on the same day she learned she had been nominated for an Academy Award for Ellis.

  “Calvert has defaulted,” he said. “He has until midday to come up with his repayment. If he doesn’t—and I think he won’t—I’ll set the wheels in motion. You’ll have the foreclosure notice tomorrow. It has to be served within a certain number of days—I’ll let you know exactly how many…”

  “As soon as it’s here, I’ll fly to Alabama.”

  “You’re going to regret this, you know,” he said mildly. “It’s not a pleasant job. Which is precisely why professionals are employed to do it.”

  “I still want to do it.”

  Gould sighed. He knew that obstinate voice.

  Late the next day, the notice of foreclosure arrived from New York. Hélène held the envelope in her hand, and waited again for the triumph and the hate to come back, and nothing happened.

  Everything: exactly according to plan. It was all working out, Hélène told herself, precisely the way she had arranged it. The plane, on schedule. At Montgomery airport, the black Cadillac, rente
d, hired in the name Mrs. Sinclair.

  The Cadillac, chosen for Ned Calvert’s benefit, had worried her a little. Not too many single women dressed in jeans and a headscarf rented a car like this at Montgomery airport. She had expected curious looks, and she received them; the filling in of forms took, perhaps, slightly longer than was necessary. But no more than that. She altered her voice; she altered her stance; she acted, and it worked.

  When she drove away ten minutes later, she knew she had not been recognized.

  The route she took to Orangeburg had also been carefully planned. First, she skirted the suburbs of the city, past the Howard Johnson’s where Billy had taken her for her fifteenth birthday. Then around the edge of the recent housing development where she knew Priscilla-Anne now lived—alone with her three children, according to Cassie’s informants. Dale Garrett, after years of cheating on his wife, had finally traded her in for a new and fancier model.

  She stopped at the end of the road where she knew Priscilla-Anne had her house. It was called Bella Vista Drive. A line of small neat red brick houses stretched into the distance, each one of them almost identical. Houses for junior executives; each had a carport and a garage; each had bright white shutters; some, in an attempt to dignify them, had had pillared porches added in imitation of a plantation mansion. The porches were out of proportion, and period; they looked pompous and absurd.

  Hélène stared at them, and the green strips of lawn in front of them, intersected by short driveways, and thought of Priscilla-Anne, with her small-town blues, her ambition to move up in the world, to move here.

  She wheeled the car around and headed for the Orangeburg road. There, once the strip of gas stations and used car lots had been left behind, the fields opened up, flat, on either side of the road. There were few houses, and fewer cars. The air was warm, and not yet humid, for it was still early in the year. The sky, cloudless, was the color of palest pewter. Hélène looked at the sky, and slowed, some two miles outside Orangeburg. She had decided that before she saw Ned Calvert, she would go to the cemetery.

  It was a large place, serving not just Orangeburg, but also Maybury and some of the smaller towns beyond. It was bounded by a wall, and shaded in places by clumps of cottonwood trees. She parked the car, and as she climbed out, the warmth of the sun touched her skin. The cemetery was empty.

  She walked along a cinder path, flanked with crosses and stones and the occasional angel. Behind her, on the road, the Montgomery bus passed, its wheels throwing up a dust cloud.

  Her mother’s grave had a headstone of gray marble, which Hélène had paid to have erected some years before, and had never seen. It bore a simple inscription:

  Violet Jennifer Culverton. Born in England, 1919. Died in America, 1959.

  Forty years. Hélène looked at the inscription doubtfully. At the time she had ordered it, it had seemed right to use her mother’s family name rather than the name of the husband she so rarely spoke of, and had dismissed from her life. Now Hélène felt uncertain. Her mother had used the name Craig, after all. She might have preferred that. She might have preferred her stage name of Fortescue. She knelt down, the sun warm on the back of her neck, and pressed her hand against the short springy turf.

  It took longer to find Billy’s grave. It was far over at the other side of the cemetery, and in the end she found it almost by accident, when she was about to give up. The ground there rose in a hillock, and was neglected, trailing with ivy and brambles. Billy’s grave was in the extreme corner, marked with a wooden cross, the letters faded by the sun and only just legible. Beside it was a more recent grave, that of his father, and beyond it, one more—that of a baby born to the Tanners the year after Billy died. Three months old; a boy, also called William.

  Balanced between the graves was an empty coffee jar, and a bunch of immortelles, faded to the color of dry straw. Hélène stood looking down at the three graves. She kicked at a trail of bramble with her foot. She was filled then with a painful anger, painful because she knew it to be futile. Anger against Ned Calvert, she told herself, but she knew that was not truly the case. The anger was directed at larger and less specific targets: at a God she did not believe in; at the briefness of life; at the random and casual way in which it was extinguished.

  For a moment the anger, and its accompanying sense of injustice, were so strong, that her purpose in coming here faded in her mind. She saw it from a distance, a tiny speck, a small and pointless thing, an irrelevance that had distorted her life, wrenched it out of kilter, and dominated her thinking for five years to no effect. She was no longer even sure that this action was one her mother or Billy would have wanted.

  She stood, staring fixedly at Billy’s grave, and then quickly turned away. She walked back to the car, stumbling a little on the rutted and uneven ground. Just outside Orangeburg, she pulled onto a patch of wasteland and changed her clothes. She made up her face with the quick skill of an actress, and arranged her hair. Then she directed the Cadillac into town.

  Past the gas station and the new motel. Down Main Street. Past Cassie’s old beauty parlor; past Merv Peters’s drugstore and grocery; past the hardware store; past the men lounging against the shop fronts, and the groups of women shopping. Past the liquor stores on the far side of town; past the Southern Baptist church; past the Orangeburg crossing.

  The world once. It looked smaller now, and shabby. Then, when she reached the point on the road, just past the trailer park, the place where Billy was shot, the hatred came back, quite suddenly. Hatred of Ned Calvert, hatred of the men in his car with him that day, hatred of the town and the people who lived in it, and the things they went on believing. Hatred of the South, and also hatred of herself, because she had been part of it once, and if she did not do this thing now, she felt she would never escape from it.

  The gates to the plantation house were rusty, and hanging on their hinges. The long driveway was rutted. When the lawns in front of the white house came into view, she saw they needed cutting.

  She stopped the car in front of the portico. Its paint was peeling; from the guttering above, weeds sprouted luxuriantly. It was a large house, but not as large as she remembered.

  Above the roof a patch of color drooped in the still air. As she climbed from the car, she looked up at it. The Confederate flag, still flying; Ned Calvert, still keeping faith with his ancestors.

  It has to change, Hélène. It’s wrong. It just has to.

  She heard Billy’s voice, as if he stood by her side. She felt an absolute sense of his presence.

  She walked toward the house; from now on, it was going to be easy.

  The butler and most of the other servants had left, some years before. She was shown into the living room by a young black woman she did not recognize, who shouted the name “Sinclair” in a singsong voice, as if the occupant of the house were deaf. She went out, and closed the door, and Hélène looked at the room.

  At first, she thought it was unchanged, that it remained exactly as it had been when she sat there, a nervous child. A rank of windows, their holland blinds half lowered; heavy dark carved furniture; palms in pots; walls crowded with pictures; a grand piano, every inch of its surface dotted with photographs in silver frames. Light slanting, and motes of dust dancing: it was the same, and it was different. It was a moment before she realized that the change was in herself, and in her eyes: the room was ugly.

  She thought at first that it was empty. She had imagined Ned Calvert would be sitting where he had always sat, on the couch; he would be smoking a cheroot, wearing a white linen suit, and watching her.

  But the couch was empty; the chairs were empty. When she saw finally that a man—a man in a light tweed jacket—was standing by the windows, she could not believe it was Ned. She wanted to say, You’re in the wrong place, and the wrong clothes. She stared at him as he slowly turned, and began to walk forward, hand outstretched.

  “Mrs. Sinclair?”

  He had stopped, and was looking at her uncertainly,
screwing up his eyes, as if he were nearsighted. He hesitated, and then advanced once more, smiling.

  “You’re mighty punctual. You had a good flight? You were coming in from New York, I guess…”

  The same easy charm she remembered; the rich lazy southern voice, which she had once found so attractive. She looked at him closely: he was so little changed. From Cassie’s stories, from the Orangeburg gossip about his decline, she had imagined a man much coarsened; this, she had told herself to expect. It was not the case: he was perhaps heavier than he had been, but he still maneuvered his way across the room and between the pieces of furniture with the grace of a natural athlete and fine rider.

  He still looked, almost to the point of parody, the army officer, the southern gentleman; he still looked, as she had remembered, like Clark Gable in Gone With the Wind, more correct, perhaps, but with the same slight suggestion of raciness, the confidence of a man who knew himself to be handsome, who knew he rarely failed to charm.

  His skin was tanned; his hair had grayed a little but was still thick; the military moustache was neatly clipped, and his mouth was as she had remembered it, full and red. She could not look at his mouth; she lowered her gaze to his hand, which he was extending to her. A square, well-formed hand, perfectly manicured. He had come to a halt a foot away, and was staring at her. He glanced down, his gaze taking in her clothes, and the jewelry she was wearing. As she looked up again, he frowned, as if groping for something in his memory.

  Hélène, who had expected this, smiled. “How do you do?” she said in her English voice.

  His mind at once made the connection. She could almost see the pieces of memory fall into place. A deep flush spread up from his neck to his cheeks; his eyes at once became wary; he let his hand fall.

  “Ned. I’m so glad—you remember me, don’t you? It’s such a long time. Would you mind if we sat down?”

  He had never been stupid, and he had certainly been cunning. She had remembered that, and planned for that, calculating what his response would be. At first, exercising all his charm, he played for time, putting the pieces together one by one: the girl he had known; the film star; the wife of a man called Lewis Sinclair; the owner of the company which had bought his land, and taken over his loans.