Destiny

by Sally Beauman

  Newspapers and magazines, of course, speculated at some length on this new liaison. And, elsewhere, other lives continued. Lewis Sinclair sold Ingrid Nilsson’s house in the hills to a rock star, and moved into a house in San Francisco close to the junction of Haight Street and Ashbury. He shared it with Betsy, whom he had met for the first time at the Ellis party, and in whom he had quickly found a substitute for Stephani Sandrelli.

  There were riots, that summer, in the Watts district of Los Angeles, and Thad Angelini watched them on his silent television, occasionally averting his eyes to look at the quiz show, or soap opera, or old movie, which played on the other.

  He was making a new film, for A.I. and Joe Stein: it was still in its early stages, and he never spoke of the Ellis sequels to anyone.

  In the small town of Orangeburg, Alabama, the Calvert house was demolished, and the earth movers of Merv Peters’s new construction company dug up the fields of the Calvert plantation.

  In Bella Vista Drive, an overweight housewife, who had reverted to her maiden name of Priscilla-Anne Peters, decided that, when her father’s new estate was built, she might move back to Orangeburg. She spent her afternoons reading magazines, and planning her decor, drinking vodka, while the kids screamed in the yard. Occasionally she came across articles on Hélène Harte, who seemed to have landed on her feet again, according to the gossip columns, anyway. These items of information about her childhood friend always made her especially ill-tempered: life, she told herself, was unfair—to be her age, and still to get small-town blues…

  But these things, all these things, happened somewhere else. Hélène and Edouard knew of some of them, but they seemed distant, and part of another reality. Sometimes, standing at the windows of the château, and looking out across its park, over a view that excluded the twentieth century, Hélène would feel that she had never left this place, and that all the events of the past five years had happened to someone else. But at other times, she knew that was not the case. She looked at her room, she looked at the furniture of Adeline de Chavigny, and her portrait which still hung above the fireplace, and she no longer felt like an intruder. She felt that she had, now, a right to be here, and that this place now accepted her.

  After the wine-harvest, and the annual supper that followed, they returned to Paris for the fall. Then, in December, they went back to the Loire to celebrate Edouard’s fortieth birthday. They dined alone and drank a bottle of the claret Xavier de Chavigny had laid down in 1925, the year of Edouard’s birth. A prewar wine: Edouard looked down the table at Hélène, and smiled; he thought of all those prewar summers of his childhood, and of all the summers to come. When he looked to the future, he realized, he saw no very precise images, just himself, and Hélène, as they were now, and—from outside—the cries and shouts of the children they would have, who would be in the gardens, playing.

  After dinner, they wrapped themselves in coats, and pulled on boots and scarves, and walked, down across the park, and toward the water meadows.

  It was a cold night, with a clear sky, and a high thin sickle of a moon. They walked through the chestnut woods, and came to a halt on a bluff of land that looked over the Loire. The river was wide at this point, and its shores wooded; the water was calm, gray rippled with silver.

  There, they stood still, looking out over the river. It was to this precise place, where he had often walked as a child, that Edouard had once dreamed of bringing Célestine. When he had been sixteen years old, and planning that impossible future, it was here that he had envisaged himself, with the woman he loved.

  He had brought Isobel here, often. He had come here, years before, with Hélène, when they first came to the Loire, and he was teaching her to ride. He had come to this place, alone, on many occasions afterward, during the years they were apart, and had stood here, on this exact spot, thinking of her. Now the night was quiet; the wind lifted the bare branches of the chestnut trees, and then was still; the moon cast a band of light across the water. He was thinking of the past, and out of the past, an image came to him, suddenly, and—as it always did—without warning. For an instant, he saw not the river, but a wall of debris; he saw a sunlit square in which the silence after the explosion was deafeningly loud, and the dust was settling.

  The image was there, and then was gone. Hélène moved slightly, and lifted her face to him; Edouard moved close to her. The image had come to him, he thought, for the last time; and with that thought came a sense of great release, of hope. Trying to shape a conviction which was fierce in his mind, but unformed, he told himself that—this time—there would be no tricks of fate, no twists, no pain, no darkness, no abyss.

  He took Hélène’s hand, and they turned to walk back toward the house. Halfway across the park, laughing because it was so cold, laughing because they were happy, they broke into a run.

  As they reached the house, a clock was chiming midnight.

  Edouard and Hélène

  1967–1975

  “A CLEAN SWEEP,” CHRISTIAN SAID. “Have done with the past. I’d absolutely made up my mind.” He paused, looking around him, an expression of almost clownish despair on his features. “But now that I actually look at it all, it doesn’t seem so simple. Edouard—what do you think? Shall I try to find a bottle of wine? Do you think a drink might help?” He made a plaintive face. “The dismals are coming upon me.”

  “Some wine, definitely. Then you’ll feel better. You can’t expect it to be easy.”

  “I’d better try the cellar. There might be some cooking sherry in the kitchen, though I doubt it. There won’t be anything else up here. Ma never touched the stuff. My father did, of course. Two pink gins before luncheon. One whisky and water before dinner, and one afterward. It never varied.” Christian stopped. “Isn’t it extraordinary? I’d quite forgotten that until this moment. He’s been dead ten years. Why pink gins, I wonder? He was an army man, not navy. How odd.”

  “Army?” Edouard looked blank.

  “Gin. It’s a naval drink. When the sun sets over the yardarm, or possibly the Empire, British naval officers have a drink, and for some reason it’s supposed to be gin. But my father never set foot on a ship in his life if he could avoid it. He was a cavalry officer, and he thought you could date the decline of this country from the introduction of the tank. So—it’s odd, that’s all. Now I wished I’d asked him.” He attempted a wan smile. “Never mind. I’ll go and raid the cellar before I feel any worse. You wait here—I shan’t be a moment.”

  He opened the drawing room door, and went out into the hall. Edouard listened to the sound of his footsteps, loud on the old flagged stone floors, disappearing in the direction of the kitchen regions. He looked around him. The house seemed unnaturally silent, and very still; Edouard had, for a moment, the sensation that it was waiting for something.

  He stood, listening to the quality of the silence. Quaires Manor: Christian’s childhood home, close to the borders of Berkshire and Oxfordshire, looking across country to the Berkshire downs. In the last few years Edouard had visited it rarely, usually to provide moral support for Christian when he came to visit his mother. But twenty years before, when he and Christian were at Oxford, this house had been like a second home to him. Which meant he must have stayed here in the winter—he knew he had done so—yet when he thought of this house, he realized, he associated it always with summer.

  One of those tricks of the mind, by which certain passages of the past are erased, and others heightened: in his mind’s eye, Edouard saw this house, and this garden, in the first flush of May and June, bathed in a particular light, the thick dusty gold of late afternoon, that space at the end of the day when evening approaches very slowly, its progress measured in the shadows across the lawn.

  It was June now, and late morning. The sun was moving around to the south façade of the house, and beginning to slant in through the tall sash windows. Nothing had changed in twenty years, the house was scarcely altered—but then, that was not surprising: it had altered v
ery little in the previous two hundred.

  It was a very English house, and a very English room. Compared to a French house of similar grandeur, it was informal; it made no acknowledgment to fashion. Pale, much-washed chintzes, garlanded with flowers, hung at the windows, and covered the deep chairs and sofas. The furniture, much of which was very fine, was disposed about the room with a settled air, as if each piece had stood there always, and could stand nowhere else. It smelled of beeswax, and, muskily, of the potpourri Christian’s mother made each year, and which lay in a Worcester bowl on the Pembroke table next to him. Edouard touched the dried petals with his fingers, and the scent of the past, of last summer, and summers twenty years before, rose up to him.

  On the walls hung that idiosyncratic mixture of paintings which so infuriated Christian, in which eighteenth-century family portraits of an excellence even Christian could not deny rested next to an assortment of Victorian watercolors, fading images of Swiss lakes, and Indian vistas, many of them the handiwork of long-dead cousins and aunts. Edouard liked their juxtaposition; he liked this room; he liked this house.

  In the fireplace, as always in summer, the iron basket was piled high with pine cones collected from the garden. Next to it, by the chair in which Christian’s mother had always sat, was the rug sacred to her succession of pugs; the work basket containing her tapestry wools and silks; a table piled high with copies of The Field, and Royal Horticultural Society journals, and—on top of the pile—the last books mailed to her, as a country member, by the London Library. Her spectacles, round, tortoiseshell-framed, uncompromising as she had been, still lay on top of the books.

  She had died three weeks before, quietly, as she had lived.

  Edouard looked at that pile of books. He picked up the one on top and saw that it was an account of the plant-gathering expeditions of Ernest Wilson, in China. As he picked it up, a small piece of paper fluttered out, and Edouard saw that it was a note Christian’s mother had written to herself. It read: Delphiniums in South Border must come out. They are too big, and too bogus. Rosa turkestanica—in the rondel? Good against the yew—like a harlequin.

  When had she written that? Edouard gently placed the note to one side, where it would not be lost. He moved toward the windows, frowning thoughtfully, and looked out across the famous garden. He could see Christian’s mother now, bending to smell a rose here; stooping to pull out an offending weed there; pausing to look down her celebrated herbaceous borders, and then pulling out a small notebook, and scribbling something.

  “You’re not going to change the plantings, surely?” he had said to her once when she did this. He had been twenty, and Christian’s mother forty-five, perhaps fifty. He had been in awe of her.

  “They’re perfect,” he had added, and Christian’s mother had smiled. She had looked at him with her sharp blue eyes, which so resembled Christian’s. Her face was shaded, by an ancient straw hat which she wore always when gardening in the summer.

  “Edouard. Gardens are never perfect. That is why I like them.”

  Edouard stood now, looking across the lawn to the high brick wall which enclosed this first part of the garden. The roses which were trained against it in such carefully contrived, apparently natural abundance, were now in flower. Aimée Vibert, Madame Isaac Pereire, Celestial, with its soft gray foliage; Zepherine Drouhin, Lady Hillingdon, Gloire de Dijon, fading now, its beautiful buff-colored flowers smelling fragrantly of tea. Edouard heard their names, spoken in Christian’s mother’s voice.

  He opened the window and stepped out onto the terrace. It had rained earlier, and now the sun was drawing moisture from the grass: its scent was intensely strong—the scent of summer.

  For a moment Edouard saw the lawn peopled: young men in white flannels; a game of croquet, at which Christian fiendishly excelled; a covey of young women in the distance. He heard and saw the past vividly: the click of balls against mallets; laughter at some remove. He looked away, looked back, and it was gone.

  The house was quiet once more; the garden was quiet once more. He turned back into the drawing room, just as Christian reappeared.

  “So. There we are.”

  Christian tilted his panama hat over his eyes, and leaned back against the wooden bench on which he was sitting; they were outside on the terrace, half in sun, half in shadow. The bottle of Montrachet was half empty: Christian had immersed it in a watering can into which he had tipped as much ice as the elderly refrigerator could provide.

  He lit one of his Black Russian cigarettes, and Edouard saw, to his surprise, that Christian was truly upset. His hand was shaking slightly.

  “It’s the past,” Christian said, with sudden vehemence. “It was stupid of me, but somehow I didn’t expect it to come rushing back like this. I thought I’d done with this place, and all the memories, years ago. I didn’t think it would affect me at all.” He made a wry face. “Temps perdu: and I thought it was lost. Now I find it isn’t.”

  “The past never is,” Edouard said gently. “It’s always there, just below the surface. You shouldn’t fight it, Christian, you ought to be glad it’s there.” He paused. “We are our past, after all. Everything we’ve done, everything that has happened to us—that’s what we are.”

  “That’s all very well for you to say.” Christian reached across and poured the remaining wine for them. “You’ve come to terms with your past. You were always better at that than I was, anyway. You’ve always had the ability to use the past to shape the future. Even when we were at Oxford, even then. You wanted to build on your father’s work, take what he had done a step further, and a step further after that. I was terribly impressed. I knew you’d do it, and you did. It was the same with Hélène. You were determined you would have a future together, and now you have.” He sighed.

  “And I’m glad of that. You’re happy, and Hélène is happy, and that makes me happy. Also—well, it’s reassuring, I suppose. It restores one’s faith in the power of the will. There you are—author of your own fate. Oh, hell.” He took a large swallow of his wine. “I’m not sure it does make me feel better. Maybe it makes me feel worse.”

  “I don’t know that I agree with you.” Edouard paused. “Sometimes I think as you do—I think I see a clear pattern of cause and effect: because I did this, and Hélène did that—sometimes I feel we chose. At other times…I’m not so sure. After all, so much is chance. If my father had not died when he did, if Jean-Paul had lived, if Hélène had walked in a different direction on the day I met her—do you see?”

  “Oh, God. You’re going to be determinist and French.” Christian shrugged. “Well, I don’t believe any of that. I take an extremely sanguine and English view of the matter. The fault, dear Edouard, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves, and all that…”

  “All right.” Edouard could hear the exaggeration and affectation coming into Christian’s voice, and knew it was there to disguise the emotion he felt. “But in that case, I see no reason for you to reproach yourself. You always knew what you wanted to do—every bit as much as I did. And you’ve done it, with great success. You wanted to open your gallery, you wanted to introduce the work of new painters to this country, you wanted—”

  “I wanted to break away from my past. All this.” Christian waved his hand in a wide gesture that took in the house and garden and the countryside beyond. “That’s the difference between us. You were always close to your past—you were loyal to it. And I couldn’t wait to kill mine off. Christian Glendinning, the self-invented man. Nothing to do with England—not this England, anyway. I tried awfully hard, Edouard. I read the wrong books, and wore the wrong clothes, and said the wrong things. I voted for the wrong party—when I bothered to vote at all. And of course, I went to bed with persons of the wrong sex.” He paused. “Do you know I once told my mother I was homosexual? I actually said the words. I was so bloody sick and tired of the fact that nobody took the least bit of notice—though they all knew perfectly well—that one day I actually told her. We were sitt
ing in there.” He jerked his thumb in the direction of the drawing room. “Mother was sewing. Petitpoint. And I said: ‘Of course, you do know, don’t you, Ma? I’m homosexual. A pansy. A queer. A nancy-boy—one of them.’ And do you know what my mother said?”

  “No.”

  “She looked up from her sewing, over the top of her spectacles, and said, ‘Well, Christian, if it makes you happy. But it might be better not to say so in front of your father. Certainly not before dinner, anyway.’ That was it. I couldn’t believe it. Then she started talking about planting hostas in the north border.”

  Edouard repressed a smile.

  “I was so angry, I walked out. I couldn’t bear it, you see. I wanted them all to see that I was different from them. That I didn’t belong—anymore than Hugo ever belonged. But they would never acknowledge that. No matter what I did, they accommodated it. That’s what the British do, you know. They accommodate, and then they assimilate. It’s very effective. It’s their way of disarming the opposition, and it works. It’s why we’ve never had a revolution, and never will. If Robespierre or Danton had been English, you know where they’d have ended up? I do. They’d have been justices of the peace. They’d have been given seats in the House of Lords. They’d have died an ornament of committees. Just like me. Do you know I sit on committees now? I do. Isn’t that terrible?”

  “There are worse fates, perhaps,” Edouard said mildly.

  Christian gave him a waspish glance. “Possibly. I shouldn’t have said so when I was twenty.” He paused. “Anyway, the point of all this is—they were right, and I was wrong. I’ve just discovered that. I never escaped from all this. I just thought I had. But here it was—all this. Waiting for me. Waiting to claim me as its own.” He gave a tragic sigh.

  “Do you feel that?” Edouard looked at him intently.