Destiny

by Sally Beauman

  It was 1967 now: he had not seen Pauline Simonescu since 1959, on that occasion when, not long before he met Hélène, he had decided to leave her house in Paris and never return there. She had left Paris—or so he had heard; he did not know now whether she was alive or dead. He had hardly thought of her for years, and yet tonight, when Cat produced that particular card, he had seen her vividly. For a moment it had been as if she had reached out, and laid her hand, with its ruby ring, on his arm, and he had felt again that tension, that sensation of curious force.

  He stopped on the first landing, where he and Hélène had their rooms—rooms which had once, during the war, been his mother’s, and which were almost unrecognizable now. He thought of the occasions, then, when he had bounded up these stairs, two at a time, hastening to the security of his room, where, on his chart, he would enter the references to the progress of the war in blue ink, and the coded references to Célestine in red. He saw Célestine, with her red-gold hair piled on top of her head, her dressing gown falling open a little. He saw Célestine as he had seen her at the end, last year when she was dying, lying propped up against the pillows in a room in a nursing home in St. John’s Wood, where her bills had, for years, been quietly settled through the offices of the eternally efficient, eternally discreet Smith-Kemp.

  “I should like champagne,” she had said once. It was almost the only thing she did say as she drifted back to consciousness, and then drifted away again.

  He stopped on the second landing. He was glad, now, that he had always kept the lease on this house; glad he and Hélène now used it so often. It was pleasant to feel the past so close. He leaned against the banisters, and thought of dancing, downstairs, with Isobel, slowly circling a room, while a scratchy dance tune played on a wind-up gramophone. Tonight the house was very quiet; he listened for a moment, almost expecting to hear the sound of that scratchy gramophone record, with its wartime gaiety: but there was only silence. Then, as he turned toward the room in which Cat now slept, and which once had been his room, he heard, quite distinctly, Jean-Paul’s voice. He heard him laugh, felt the weight of his arm around his shoulders: “What a dance they like to lead us, women—eh, little brother?”

  He felt a moment’s sharp regret, a piercing nostalgia; all the old, intense, and increasingly hopeless affection for his brother came back to him, and he remembered Jean-Paul, then, not as he had been toward the end, but as he had been in the war years, in the time when Edouard would have forgiven him anything.

  He gave a little shrug, and went into Cat’s room. She was sitting up in bed, with a book in front of her, though she did not appear to be reading it.

  Edouard smiled at her, and she smiled back; he at once felt the past slip away in the quiet of the room: Cat’s room—not his anymore. That past had no reality for Cat: as all children do, she lived for the present.

  He moved quietly around the room, looking at her books, and at the pictures which she had painted, of which she was very proud. He looked out the small high window: there, across the square, he had once been able to see the blackened gap where a house had been bombed: a direct hit. There was no trace now, of course. Looking at the view, he was no longer certain which house it had been.

  Cat was watching him expectantly. With an apologetic smile he turned back to her, and sat down on her bed. He took her small hand, and let it rest between his own.

  “I keep thinking about the past today. I’m sorry, Cat. It feels very close for some reason. This used to be my room once.”

  “I know. In the war. When you lived here.” She hesitated a moment. Two bright points of color stood out on her cheeks. “Did you know mother then?”

  “Goodness, no. I was only a boy—fifteen, sixteen years old.” Edouard pressed her hand gently. “I didn’t meet her until much later. Years after the war ended.”

  “Did you meet her in London?”

  “No. In Paris.” Edouard hesitated, and then, because he, too, like Hélène, had worried about Cat, and how much she knew or could understand, he did not stop there as he might have on another occasion, but went on.

  “I met her in Paris. Standing outside a church. It’s called St. Julien le Pauvre, and there’s a small park—like a little square—just near it. I took you there once—you probably don’t remember…”

  “I think I do.” Cat frowned. “Did you think she was beautiful?”

  “I thought she was very beautiful.” Edouard smiled gently. “I fell in love with her instantly. Just like that! Un coup de foudre—that’s what we say, in France. Like a thunderclap…” Cat giggled.

  “It’s true. It can happen. I never thought so before…” He paused. “I remember my father telling me that. When he met my mother, Louise—it was a very long time ago, at the beginning of the First War, not the second one. He saw her dancing…and he fell in love with her. Just like that.”

  “But you didn’t marry her then. You’re going to marry her now, instead…”

  Cat’s expression had become a little anxious. She was leading up to something, Edouard could see that, and it seemed to make her both excited and a little fearful.

  “No. I wanted to. But all sorts of things happened—complicated things—I’ll explain them to you one day.” He paused. Cat’s gaze was fixed on his face. “The important thing to remember, always, is that your mother and I always loved each other very much. We did things in the wrong order perhaps—grown-ups do that sometimes, for all sorts of reasons. But we’ve straightened them all out now, and that’s why we have this wedding to look forward to. You are looking forward to it, aren’t you, Cat?”

  “Oh, yes!” Her eyes lit. “Very much. Cassie has a new hat, with a feather. And I have a new dress…” She paused. “I’m not supposed to tell you about the dress, because it’s a surprise. But it’s blue. Like cornflowers. I like blue. It’s my favorite color, and this dress is very pretty.” She stopped. “I know you’re my real daddy now. I thought you were, but I was a little muddled, so today I asked Mother, and she told me.”

  He could feel her excitement and agitation. Her small fingers tightened and then relaxed against his. Edouard’s heart welled with love for her; he was very moved, and tears came to his eyes. He looked quickly away, afraid she might misinterpret them, and then back at her.

  “But of course. My daughter. My only child.” He managed to control his voice. “And we look like each other a little bit, don’t you think?”

  “Oh, yes. I could see it when—” Cat suddenly broke off mysteriously. “I noticed,” she added, and at once became sternly practical. “And so I have to decide. I’ve been thinking about it. I have to think what to call you. I could still call you Edouard, or I could call you Papa, or Daddy. Which do you think?” She looked at him earnestly.

  “I think any of them will do. All of them. You could even take turns. I could be Papa when I was stern, and Daddy when I was indulgent, and—”

  “You’re never stern!” Cat laughed.

  “Ah, that’s because you’ve never been truly naughty. Just you wait. I can be very stern indeed. I can be quite terrifying. Look.” Edouard composed his features into the most cold and intimidating look he could manage.

  Cat was unimpressed. She laughed again. Her hand tightened its grip. “I like you,” she said simply.

  “That’s fortunate.” Edouard looked at her solemnly. “I like you too. I’ve liked you since the day you were born.”

  “Truly?”

  “Oh, yes. Someone once said to me—” Edouard glanced away. “They said they’d much rather be liked than loved. What do you think?”

  Cat frowned. She gave the question serious consideration. “Both,” she said finally.

  “That’s good. Because I like you very much, and I love you very much. And I’m also very proud of you.” He bent forward and kissed her. Cat put her arms tight around his neck, and planted a loud wet kiss somewhere in the region of his nose.

  “And now you must lie down and go straight to sleep. And no reading
after lights out—promise?”

  “I promise.”

  She wriggled farther down under the bedclothes, turned on her side, rested her hand under her cheek, and closed her eyes. Edouard switched off the small lamp by her bed and moved quietly to the door. There he stood for a moment, watching her; her eyes flickered open once more, and then closed. She let out a little sigh; her breathing quietened, and became regular. Edouard watched her for a while, happiness fierce in his heart, and then, seeing that, with the ease of a child, she was almost asleep, he left the room quietly, leaving the door ajar, as she liked it.

  As he came into the drawing room, Hélène was saying, “So what will you do, Christian? It would be very hard for you to sell it, surely?”

  And Christian, loyally, was saying, “Oh, God, I don’t know. A solution will come to me, I expect.”

  They broke off as Edouard came in.

  Hélène knew at once, from Edouard’s face, what Cat had spoken to him about. She sprang up, and went to him. Edouard put his arm around her, rested his head for a moment against hers. It was the briefest of gestures; Christian, watching them from across the room, could see in it, brief as it was, an intimacy, and a certainty of affection; they were, for an instant, so strong, that they were like a presence in the room. He was excluded, he was aware of that, but he did not mind. Happiness was infectious, he thought: he could see it transfigure Hélène’s face, Edouard’s face; he felt it transfigure him.

  What had happened was explained, and Christian was delighted.

  “Ah, well, then,” he said in the drawl he used to disguise extreme exuberance. “This is splendid. I feel rather avuncular. I feel benign—and we haven’t even had dinner yet, and Hélène says there’s salmon, which I particularly like, and strawberries, which make me dreadfully greedy, and then we can all sit and talk—really, it’s turned into a splendid day, memorable for all sorts of reasons…”

  Edouard gave him a warning glance, and Christian smiled with a certain glint in his eye. He lifted his glass.

  “We should have a toast. I know—the old Oxford one, Edouard. Do you remember? Champagne and punts, and the appalling spectacle of the dawn coming up over Christ Church meadows, after a Commem. Ball?”

  He stood, lifted his glass a little higher, and waved it about, so the whisky slopped dangerously.

  “Edouard. Hélène. Happy days…”

  The marriage took place on the twenty-third of June. On that day, a Friday, Lewis Sinclair was sitting alone in the room he shared with Betsy, high up on the attic floor of the tall house near the junction of Haight and Ashbury. From the outside, it was a San Francisco house, a gingerbread house, with gables and dormers, and elaborately carved clapboarding; inside, it was not like being in San Francisco at all. It was a little like being in India, Lewis imagined, though he had never been to that country, or possibly in Turkey, or possibly nowhere at all, in a room that was outside space, and outside time.

  Lewis lay on a rug on the floor, a kelim rug. Behind his back was a pile of cushions, embroidered in brilliant peacock colors, and decorated with fragments of mirror glass. It was a quiet room, high above the traffic, and through the small window he could see only the sky. Sound was muffled further by the rugs and hangings which entirely covered the walls. Above the door, Betsy had painted the words Peace and Love, in Day-Glo orange. Lewis looked at the words: through the floorboards, beneath the layers of rugs, he thought he could hear voices—Betsy’s voice, Kay’s voice; the Shaman’s voice.

  Sometimes he thought he heard Hélène’s voice, too, but he knew that was an illusion. Hélène was not in the room underneath, she was in the past. He frowned, and her voice went away. He looked down: propped against his knees there was a calendar.

  It was a very long time since Lewis had used or looked at such a thing. He thought that it was today that Hélène was marrying Edouard de Chavigny, but he was not entirely sure. Of late, time seemed to him to have its own rhythms. He had known long before that time did not proceed in an orderly manner, as other people seemed to think that it did. Even when he had been living with Hélène, he had found that. But now it did not just bend back upon itself, and loop, as it used to do, so that he was not quite sure whether he had done or said something, but merely imagined it—now, time had a life of its own, and it took Lewis with it, it bore him up, like a feather on the wind. Sometimes it rushed forward, sometimes it sped back; sometimes two, three, or four apparently separate things seemed to happen at once, and the barriers of years between them were simply not there at all.

  He stared at the calendar fixedly. Obviously, dates existed; they had some kind of reality, and he felt that he would have liked to be sure whether it was today that Hélène was marrying, or next week, or last year.

  Lewis stared at the small numbered squares. They made him think of those horrible math problems he had been assigned at school. During vacations, his father used to go over them with him, trying to keep his voice patient. Lewis, if you will concentrate. Now. Let us suppose that five men take three hours to plow a field of three acres. That means, if seven men plowed the same field…

  He shut his eyes. He let the calendar fall to the floor. Today, last week, next year. It was all meaningless.

  Sometimes, when he shut his eyes, he felt weightless; he floated. He felt this now, as if his body rose from the floor, and moved gracefully above the cushions and rugs and little incense holders, and Tiffany lamps, occasionally bumping pleasantly against the ceiling, like a cork carried by a wave.

  He rather wished, as he floated, that Betsy might come up. He considered the possibility of his going down to her, but it seemed such a long way to the door, and besides, Betsy wouldn’t be alone. She was never alone. This house was too full, Lewis thought: it was too full of people who came and went, and he was not sure which of them were real. Had his mother been here, for instance? He thought she might have been, because once, lying here, floating here, he had smelled not joss sticks but lavender. And Stephani—had she been here? He thought she might have been, because he had seen the fur against her white skin, and the diamonds like stars between her thighs. But that would not have been Stephani, of course: that would have been Hélène. When Stephani came she wore a fishtail dress, with sequins like iridescent scales, so she looked like a mermaid.

  Betsy came: of that he was certain. He bobbed against the ceiling, and thought about Betsy, whose body was tiny and fragile, whose wrists he could circle, easily, with finger and thumb. Betsy covered him with that long thick curtain of auburn hair, and she wound her legs around his waist, and at the moment of climax, her small hands beat a tattoo against his spine. He could hear this sound now, like the falling of raindrops on leaves, and then the tintinnabulation of her bracelets, jingling in his ears like distant bells.

  Now, or yesterday, or last year, or tomorrow. When had he last heard those bells? Again he was not certain. He opened his eyes and then shut them again. The ceiling was beginning to feel soft, and this relaxed him. He dreamed. In this dream, Thad came to visit him, and sat down cross-legged in his black suit, and nodded like a Buddha, just as he always used to do.

  In this dream, Thad asked Lewis questions. So many foolish questions. All about some past which he seemed not to realize was very, very distant. He wanted to know about Sphere, and Partex Petrochemicals, and about people called Drew Johnson and Simon Scher. In particular, he wanted to know who made the decisions at Sphere—who, as he put it, called the tune.

  “I only met Scher. I was never interested in all that,” he kept saying. “But you were, Lewis. You met Scher a lot. You met Drew Johnson in Paris. You went out to his plane—remember, you told me, Lewis?”

  In his dream, Lewis stared at Thad. The names he was using were familiar; Lewis thought he might have read them in a story, heard them used in some film. He didn’t answer Thad, because of course he knew it was a dream, so there was no point. Thad seemed not to realize this. He stood up. He shook Lewis. He gave his arm a sharp pinch.
<
br />   “Lewis, will you listen? I met someone. A girl—never mind what girl. She used to work for Simon Scher as a secretary. Now she works at Fox. She told me something interesting, Lewis. Really interesting. All the decisions, the budgeting, when we made our movies—we thought it was Scher who gave the final okay, yes? Well, she said it wasn’t. She said he never made a move, not one move, until he’d checked first with—”

  In the dream, Thad stopped at this point. He took off his glasses, and panted on them and rubbed them on his sleeve, and Lewis said, “Thad, she would have introduced us to Fellini. She said so.” Thad stared at him again. His mouth pursed up small and tight. “Can you hear me, Lewis?” he said. “Is one single word getting through to you?”

  Then Lewis began to laugh. It seemed so funny that Thad, who knew everything, who was always so certain, didn’t realize that this was a dream, and that none of it was happening at all. Once he began to laugh, he could not stop. But that was not because of Thad, that was because of the pill Betsy had given him, which the new candyman had brought. These pills made your stomach ache, as if you’d pulled a muscle in a football game, and then they made you laugh.

  In the dream, this laughter made Thad very angry. He stood up. He said, “Jesus, Lewis, you are sick. You smell. You’re pathetic. No wonder Hélène walked out.” He knelt down, and put his face very close. “She never wanted you. I never wanted you. You had money, that’s all, Lewis. Money. Did you realize that?”

  Lewis stopped laughing then, and began to cry. Thad seemed pleased, and not long afterward, he left.

  Lewis opened his eyes. He watched the words Peace and Love grow large, then small, bright then obscure, until he was sure the dream was over. He had this dream quite often, and it had different endings. Sometimes he stayed here, floating and weeping, and sometimes he stood up, and ran after Thad, and Thad waited for him. Then they went off down the street together, arm in arm, and Lewis knew Thad had not said any of those things, and they were friends again. “We’ll go see The Seventh Seal, Lewis, it’s a great movie. I’ve seen it thirty-five times…”