Destiny

by Sally Beauman

  “I’m not keeping the money I make from the sale.” Her voice was quiet, and that seemed to enrage him further.

  “Oh, you’re not? I’ll believe that when I see it happen. You wouldn’t give a goddamn thing away, I can see that just looking at you. You always wanted money, and you’ll want more. Oh, you’ve dragged yourself up out of the dirt, you come in here with a fortune on your back—you probably earned it on your back. But I can still see what you are. What you always were…”

  “The bulk of the money will be given in the form of a bequest to the NAACP.” She cut across his words. “For the furtherance of civil rights. Considering the history of this plantation, that seemed the right thing to do. The balance of the money, also in the form of a bequest—”

  “A bequest? That sounds mighty grand, coming from a piece of white trash like you…”

  “The balance will be used to endow a private scholarship. It will provide the college tuition for a student from this county—black or white.” She paused. “It will be a form of memorial to someone I very much admired. It will be called the William Tanner Memorial Scholarship. I think Billy would have liked that.”

  There; it was said. It was all said. Her hands were shaking a little, and she clasped them together in her lap. There was absolute silence, and for a moment the room blurred before her eyes. She saw only the slanting rays of light, and the motes of dust, dancing. She could go now, she thought with relief. Everything had been perfectly planned, and perfectly executed, and she felt no desire to gloat. All she wanted to do now was leave, while her mind was still clear and cool, and before she had a chance to feel either anger or, worse, pity. She reached for her gloves. Across the room from her, Ned Calvert leaned back in his chair.

  “The William Tanner Memorial Scholarship, well, well, well…” He spoke into the silence, his voice full of amusement. Then he gave a low chuckle. He levered himself to his feet, and stood looking down at her. When Hélène looked up at him, she saw he was smiling. “That has a mighty fine sound, Hélène. A mighty fine sound.” He turned away, crossed the room, picked up the bourbon bottle. “I’ll drink to that. I surely will.”

  He poured a large measure into his glass, swallowed deeply, and took his time returning to his seat. Hélène could sense his returning confidence, his new composure; she felt a tiny stabbing of unease.

  “The William Tanner Memorial Scholarship.” He rolled the words around his tongue, shaking his head. “In memory of someone you very much admired. That’s neat. I have to say that. Real neat. You had it all worked out.” He paused. “Of course—‘very much admired’—that’s kind of a weak way of putting it, don’t you think? I’d have said it went a bit further than that, wouldn’t you? I mean, sure, Billy Tanner was a dumb boy, none too bright. But you never could see that, could you? Not even that time I warned you about him…”

  “I didn’t come here to discuss Billy with you…” She reached quickly for her purse. “I came here to give you information. There’s nothing to discuss.”

  “Oh, now, hold on there, honey. I think there’s plenty to discuss.” He smiled lazily. “I’m beginning to get the picture now. You had me kind of confused back there, talking about your mother and all. But now it’s starting to add up. I see now. It wasn’t on account of your mother you did this. It was Billy Tanner. Good ol’ dumb Billy Tanner. The high-school sweetheart. The boy you loved…”

  “I’m going.” Color flared in Hélène’s face. She stood up.

  “Now, just you wait a minute, honey. I want to get this straight. I mean, you did love him—or am I wrong? The way I figured it, you must have loved him, going down to the pool with him the way you did, taking off all your clothes, lying down beside him, leading the poor boy on…”

  Hélène had started to turn away. Now she stopped. Slowly she turned around and looked at him. He was smiling broadly.

  “Well, I watched you, honey—you didn’t know that? I saw it all. It was kind of touching in a way. The two of you. Both so young, naked as the day you were born, lying there under the cottonwood trees. It looked real pretty. I watched you, honey, and I said to myself, now, if that isn’t the nearest thing to Adam and Eve in paradise, then I don’t know what is…”

  “You’re obscene—do you know that? I’m not going to listen to this…”

  “Oh, you should listen, honey.” He leaned forward and fixed her with his gaze. The smile had disappeared, and his face was now hard and intent. “You listen now, and you listen well. I don’t take too kindly to the way you come in here and tell me I’m lying, when all the time you’re lying through your pretty little white teeth. Don’t you try and pretend to me about Billy Tanner, make out you were just friends, and no more. Because I know that’s not true. You’re planning on funding that scholarship, then you’re doing it out of guilt. Let’s get that straight. Don’t tell me you didn’t figure it out, honey, a real smart girl like you. You must have known. After all, Billy Tanner died because of you.”

  There was sudden quiet in the room. Hélène stared at him, and for a moment, she thought she must have misheard, misunderstood. He was smiling again now, smiling broadly, and it was then, when she heard the new confidence in his voice, and when she saw him smile, that the past five years fell away; the scorn and the loathing of this man, and all he stood for, returned. She rounded on him, her voice cold with contempt.

  “All right—you want to talk about it, we’ll talk about it. And we won’t lie. I know why Billy died, and so does everyone in Orangeburg. Billy was killed to stop him giving evidence about the riot. Evidence that would have incriminated a white man. I know that, and you know that. Things like that happen here. They happen all the time, they’re still happening now. How long does it have to go on? How many more people have to die—because of people like you? Protecting yourselves—protecting your interests—protecting all this.” She gestured angrily toward the window, and to the cotton fields beyond. Her breath caught, and she steadied herself. “I know who killed Billy, and why. It was either you, or one of the men with you in your car that day. And whoever it was who pulled the trigger, you were all responsible. Every one of you.”

  “Oh, I killed Tanner.” The smile had gone, and his voice was very quiet. “I took my shotgun, and I blew him away. But not because of any evidence he might give. You think I gave a goddamn about that? You think anyone did? That evidence of his would have been thrown right out of court. Every white man in Orangeburg would’ve gone up on the stand and sworn blind it wasn’t the way he said. Oh, no, honey. I killed Tanner, so I know. And I killed him on account of you.”

  “You’re lying.” Her voice choked in her throat. “You’re filthy. How can you lie about something like that?”

  “Well, now, honey, maybe I am, and maybe I’m not. I guess you’ll never be able to know for sure. Either way.” He leaned back in his chair; he crossed his legs easily; he began, once more, to smile.

  “You see, honey, the trouble with you is, you want everything to be simple, right and wrong, black and white. That’s not the way it is. You just think about what I’m telling you now, and you’ll see. It makes sense. I was wild about you, Hélène—you remember that? You just pause a while. You think now. You remember—not the way you want it to be, but the way it was. You liked me to touch you. You liked to see me get all worked up. I’m not blaming you, lots of women get a kick out of that—leading a man on, winding him up, so he’s real jealous, so he’s gotten so heated up he hardly knows what he’s doing anymore. I tell you, when I went down through those trees, and I saw my lovely little girl giving it away to that dumb boy, all the things she wouldn’t give away to me—well, I guess something just snapped in me, honey. My control just went. Couldn’t bear to see a decent white girl giving it away to a nigger-lover like that…”

  He paused, watching her closely, and when she could not hide the doubt and the sudden fear in her face, his smile grew wider.

  “Mind you, I stayed there a while. Stayed till you both le
ft. Stayed long enough to see it didn’t quite go the way you wanted it to go. Saw Billy-boy couldn’t make it. Saw you find out for yourself that Billy wasn’t quite the man you took him to be. Saw him storm the gates, so to speak—I don’t want to be indelicate now, not with a fine lady like you—and then saw him weep when he didn’t have the manpower to go on. Wept in your arms, like a little baby. I saw that, honey—I’m not upsetting you now? Then he got himself dressed, and you got yourself dressed, and I came back here, and I found me my gun.”

  Hélène stood very still. Her skin felt as cold as ice. He had stopped. That horrible suggestive voice had stopped, and the room was quiet. For a moment, she did not see Ned Calvert at all. She felt the coldness of the water on her skin, then the warmth of the air, drying it. She felt the smooth dry ground beneath her body, and Billy’s weight as he held her in his arms. She saw the anxiousness in his blue gaze, and—high over his head—in the gaps between the branches of the cottonwoods, the blue of the sky. The right moment. The right thing.

  “I dreamed of it too long, maybe,” Billy said.

  She touched his hair, which was still wet and spiky from the water.

  “Don’t cry, Billy,” she said. “Please don’t. It doesn’t change anything. Next time…”

  A bird moved in the branches. No next time, ever.

  She heard herself draw in her breath; her hands moved in a shocked incoherent movement, pressing themselves against her ears, as if she could block out his words, but she knew she could not. There the past was, and Ned Calvert was right: she had lied, though not in the way he thought.

  “I wanted it to be different.” She swung around to him, her voice shaking with emotion. She heard it rise, so that it sounded higher, and childish suddenly, with the simplicity of a child, and the passion of a child. “You won’t understand it, it won’t matter to you—but that was what I wanted. I wanted one thing—just one thing—to be simple and good and right. That’s why I went to the pool with Billy that day. Not because I loved him—I didn’t love him, and he knew that. Because I cared for him, because he cared for me. Because I wanted to give him something—something that was pure and good, not all twisted up with lies and hatred like everything else in this place. And afterward—when he was dead—I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t bear to think that the very last thing for him, the last thing before he died, that it went wrong…”

  She stopped. Tears had come to her eyes, and she brushed them angrily away. “So I did this. For Billy and my mother. Because otherwise they’re dead, and there’s nothing left. It’s as if they never lived. No one will care how they died, or why. Just a few people will remember them, then they’ll die, too, and it will be over. Wiped out. And that shouldn’t happen—it’s horrible. It’s wrong, and it happens all the time.” She stopped. Ned Calvert had not moved, and as she became conscious of his presence, and his silence, she saw that his expression had changed. The malice had gone from his face; his eyes regarded her with an odd blank dulled expression.

  “That’s what you thought then, that day? That’s what you felt, afterward?” His voice was slow; he shook his head.

  “Yes. It was.” She felt a second’s shame now, for her outburst, and she hesitated. She would not have wanted Ned Calvert, of all men, to see her like that. Then she looked back at him, and she realized she did not care what he had seen, or what he had thought. What she had said was the truth. She sighed. In a flat voice, she said, “I know you won’t understand. Or care. I’ll go now.”

  “I can understand. Maybe.” He sounded surprised. “Yes. I reckon I can. Some of it, anyway.”

  He stood up and turned away from her. He moved to the windows and looked out over the gardens with that same abstracted gaze. He frowned, lifted his hand, and then let it fall again.

  “My place. My father’s place.”

  He seemed to hesitate, then he turned around slowly. “I didn’t kill him.” His voice was tired. “It was nothing to do with you. That was just talk. I saw you together—true enough. Then I came back here. That’s all. That’s the way it was.” He walked past her as if he hardly saw her, and went across to the liquor cabinet. He poured himself some bourbon, and then looked down as he swirled the liquid in his glass.

  “I didn’t know about your mother. Or the child. Not until today. Violet never said a word. It might have been different if she had—I don’t know. You see—” He paused, and lifted his head. “You see, I thought I couldn’t father a child.”

  Hélène stared at him silently. He took a deep swallow of the bourbon. She watched his throat move. He hesitated, and then set down the glass.

  “It probably would have made no difference—even if she’d said. Maybe I’d have done nothing. No guts maybe. Frightened—frightened of Mrs. Calvert, I guess. She held the pursestrings. She kept me in on a tight leash—or tried to.” He shrugged. “So I didn’t have me a whole lot of choice. She owned me, you see. I think, maybe, that’s why—well, I talked to you about it once. Sometime. I think I did. Your mother understood, Violet understood—I reckon you thought I was shooting you a line. And I probably was. It was also true. That’s the way of things, I guess. The truth’s never simple.”

  There was another silence. He looked much older suddenly, not bitter, but fatigued. After a while, when he seemed almost to have forgotten that she was still there, Hélène said quietly, “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Why not?” He gave an odd resigned smile. “Something you said got to me. Or the way you looked—just now. I don’t know. There’s no one else to tell, that’s for sure.” He looked up. “I’m not trying to change your mind, if that’s what you think. I was mad at you earlier. Now I’m not. And you know, it’s kind of odd, in a way, but it’s almost a relief. Getting shed of it all. Getting shed of the lies. Even this place maybe.” He frowned. “Never thought I’d hear myself say that. But it’s what I feel. You’re looking at a free man, Hélène. Yes, sir.” He picked up his glass again, and lifted it; a small mocking salute. “First time in my life I ever felt that. A free man.” He paused, then smiled suddenly. “You’d better go—while we’re still ahead of the game, don’t you reckon?”

  “Maybe so.”

  She looked back at the manila envelope, still lying on the chair where she had left it. Then she moved to the door.

  “I won medals, you know. In the war.” His voice came to her suddenly, across the shadows of the room. “The Silver Star. Funny, how you can be brave in war and a coward in peace.”

  He was talking to himself, standing half in shadow, the slanting light falling across his body, and not striking his face. Just for an instant, then, she saw him as she had seen him that very first time, outside on the veranda, when she was five years old. A tall man in a white suit, reaching out to take her hand. “Good-bye,” she said.

  “Good-bye, Hélène Craig.”

  He chuckled. As she opened the door, and went out, he lifted his arm, and drained the last of the bourbon.

  She did not drive straight back to the airport. She took the Cadillac, and parked it on the Orangeburg road. Then she walked back to the edge of the trailer park, and looked at it through the trees. She looked at it for a long time, then she turned away, and took the old route down to the pool, the route Billy had shown her. It was more overgrown now; the brambles tore her stockings, and caught on her clothes. But it was still discernible, and she knew she could have followed it blindfolded, just as she had so often followed it in the past, and in her dreams.

  As she walked, her mind worked and worked. It laid out pieces of her past one by one. She saw them like a series of pictures, or stills from a film, none of them random, each interlinked. She saw herself here, with Billy, and then with Edouard in the Loire. She saw Mr. Foxworth sitting in his Harley Street consulting rooms, irritably explaining about dates. She saw Cat, her features a tiny replica of Edouard’s, swinging her legs in the Hollywood pool, and singing a French song. She saw Lewis, standing in his room, his face puzzled, and suddenly
intent, asking her why she should have lied to him about this.

  When she reached the cottonwood trees, she took off her shoes and climbed down the bank. She looked at the still water, and at a dragonfly that whirred in the still air. All this; and one of the last things Billy had ever said to her—she remembered it now—was, no lies.

  The jet banked over Los Angeles, and Hélène turned her face to the dark of the window. Below her, she saw a map of lights, the framework of a city; she looked at it, and saw only the framework of her past, voices and images, forming and re-forming, linking and unlinking, the geography of a city, the geography of the past.

  She had not stopped to change back into her anonymous clothes, and, as she passed through the barrier at the terminal, she was recognized. A small cluster of people, staring at her, proffering pens and pieces of paper. She signed automatically, scribbling her name hastily, eager to get past. It was only when she saw the puzzled expressions that she looked down and saw she had written Hélène Craig.

  It was dark in the hills after the glare of the freeway, and at the gates of her house, she stopped, and listened to the silence, listened to the dark. It welcomed her, she felt, and drew her on.

  There was a light breeze, cool air, blowing down from the hills. She lowered the window of the car, and felt it brush against her face as if the air were substantial. The branches of a tree scratched against the high walls that protected the garden; the bushes by the side of the road bunched with shadows, but she felt no sense of threat. The gates swung back on a silent drive, and she thought, with a sense of peace and of relief: I am coming home.

  It was late, and when she let herself into the house, it was in darkness; everyone slept. She walked slowly from room to room, switching all the lights, until the ground floor was flooded with light, and it spilled out onto the terrace and the gardens beyond.