Destiny

by Sally Beauman

  Lewis sat up. Suddenly he felt extremely nervous, so that his hands shook. He had to know, he thought. He had to know about Thad, and whether it was really a dream. He had to know what the date was. He had to know now.

  He pushed himself to his feet and made his feet walk. One in front of the other, across the room, out the door, down the stairs. He struggled with the door of the room below, and when he opened it, the wail of the music hit him so hard that he staggered.

  The beat of drums, the whine of a bass guitar. He looked around the room, expecting to see Hélène, because he had heard her voice, quite distinctly, from the stairs. But Hélène wasn’t there: just Betsy, and Kay, and the Shaman. The Shaman was six feet six inches tall, his head shaved and gleaming. The Shaman was dancing.

  “Thad,” Lewis said. He said it very clearly, so there could be no mistake. “Thad. Was he here just now? Was I talking to him?”

  “It’s Lewis. What d’you know? He can walk.”

  Kay looked up at him from the floor where she lay. Betsy, who was sitting beside her, stood up and came across to him. A drift of hair; leaves the color of maples in the fall.

  “Lewis? Are you all right?” She looked up at him. “That was three weeks ago, Lewis. I told you before, remember? Three weeks. Maybe four. He didn’t stay long.”

  The Shaman paused in his dancing. He smiled. He said, “Angeliiiini, Angeliiiini…” And then he began to spin, around and around, very gracefully, chanting the name like an invocation.

  Lewis watched him. The Shaman’s hips swayed; he lifted his arms above his head, and described circles and spirals through the air. Betsy pulled at Lewis’s arm. She was trying to make him sit down.

  “I don’t want to sit down,” Lewis said as he sat. “I want to watch the ballet.”

  “The ballet. Jesus.”

  Kay stood up. She came across and moved so that she was blocking Lewis’s view. Then she knelt down and put her face very close to Lewis. Too close. Lewis blinked at her. Her eyes looked small and red and hot and full of hatred. He could smell that hatred, it was as sharp as the smell of sweat, and it frightened him. He couldn’t understand why Kay felt like this. He couldn’t understand why Betsy let her live here, why she didn’t make her go away.

  “I’ve got something for you, Lewis. Something special. I’ve been keeping it.”

  She was wearing jeans. She always wore jeans. Men’s jeans, and a man’s shirt, and with her hair cut short like a man too. Now she put her hand into the pocket of the jeans, and pulled out a scrap of paper. Inside the paper was something small and round and white. Lewis looked at it.

  “Kay. Don’t give him that stuff—not now.” Betsy made a little rush forward, and Kay reached up, and put an arm around her waist.

  “Why not? It’s all right. He’ll like it. He wants it—you do, don’t you, Lewis? You like pretty things, I know you do. Pretty cars, and pretty houses, and pretty clothes and pretty girls. You take this, Lewis, and you just won’t believe how pretty life is. Beautiful colors. Beautiful shapes. Beautiful sounds. You want the sun and the moon to play with, Lewis? You’ll have them—right there in the palm of your hand. Oh, Lewis, you’ll see the moon so close you wouldn’t believe—”

  “Kay…”

  “It’s okay, Betsy. It’s okay.” She leaned forward, and kissed Betsy on the lips. Lewis watched. He could feel something, and he thought it was anger, but it was so far away, so buried…He was still groping for it, when Kay turned back to him.

  “Come on now, Lewis,” she crooned, her voice very sweet. “Open wide, now. That’s a good boy. Now, swallow it, Lewis. That’s it. Down the little red lane…”

  Lewis swallowed, and Kay began to laugh.

  After that, she left him alone, so Lewis felt glad he’d done as she said. She went back and lay down on the cushions, and then Betsy went, and lay down next to her. They were smoking, and the Shaman was dancing, and the music was playing. Lewis watched the Shaman’s muscles ripple across his bare back. He watched Kay, who was stroking Betsy’s hair; she was kind to Betsy; Lewis closed his eyes.

  He looked at the blackness, and watched time begin to dance. There was a rocking horse he had had as a child, with a thick mane, and black and white spots on his haunches. There was the crowd at the Harvard-Yale game, their applause like the buzzing of a million flies, like the music of the sea in a shell. There was his father, and the gates of the Beacon Hill house were barred against him; he rattled them gently, and they mixed with the sound of Betsy’s bracelets. There was his mother, and the scent of lavender, as she bent over his bed to kiss him good night. And there was Hélène, cradling him in her arms, while behind her there was a flight board, and its numbers were spinning. They spun slowly at first, then gradually faster, so fast that Lewis opened his eyes.

  What he saw then was so lovely that he cried out in wonder at it. Colors so emblazoned in the air that he could smell them; shapes so fluid and so composed that he could hear them; music whose blue he could taste on his tongue. A universe of light; a room in heaven.

  He lifted his hand, and raised it slowly in front of his face. He saw the fingers and the palm, the knuckles and the wrist. He saw into the texture of the skin, and beyond, to the tiny capillary veins of blood. He saw into the river of the artery, and saw the sweet sure pumping of his heart. There was the structure of tissue: he saw and understood the beautiful mechanism of muscle and nerve. He bent his head, looking closer, and saw God.

  So close. Inside him. Not far away, or insubstantial, but there, inside the tissue, inside the muscle, inside the bone. A God in each particle, in each gene: a God, there, in the flexing of his finger. Lewis lifted his eyes from his hand, and there in the blazing brightness of the room, the stars moved and the planets danced.

  Lewis heard the salt of his tears falling. He saw the words that he spoke. He watched them curl from his lips, and spiral gently across the room, a curl of words, a helix as delicate as butterflies. They glanced and flickered against the white and the red and the sapphire and the green. They touched and flowered against the blackness of Kay’s hair, and the crescent moons of her closed eyes. They fluttered against Betsy’s white neck, and brushed the long curve of her bare spine. Shadows and valleys; air mauve as woodsmoke; and the Shaman, who could make magic, rising and falling, rhythmic as an ax, into Betsy’s body and out of it; ivory and ebony. A man and a woman: God in each gleaming stroke. Lewis watched with a still heart: he had never seen anything more lovely.

  “Hélène.”

  He touched the word, and felt it humming.

  “Hélène,” he said again. “Hélène. Hélène.”

  And then, out of the quiet of the color, Kay uncoiled. She said, “Betsy. He’s watching you. Lewis is watching you fucking.”

  The words came at him like a great and malevolent hissing. All the peace and the color in the room fractured and distorted. Lewis stared at the universe, and saw it bend and bulge: it flew apart into a million fragments. The air was gray with its debris.

  He stood up. He said, “You don’t understand. You can’t see.”

  No one spoke; no one seemed to hear him, though he thought he shouted the words into the debris very loudly.

  He knew he must move. He dreamed his passage to the door, dreamed it again and again, so the four steps became forty. He dreamed the stairs, and the door of his attic room; he dreamed locking the door to keep the debris out; he dreamed the sound of the debris outside, knocking.

  He stood very still in the quiet of the room, and let God come back to him. When he felt God’s breath and pulse, he grew calmer, and the darkness of the room began to glow for him. He moved to the window and looked out at the touchable stars, at the moon which he could pluck as easily as an orange. He thought of flying.

  He knew he could fly. He had flown once before, somewhere—down through the eye of the storm, where the air spun him gently. It seemed important to know when and where, and—as he climbed up onto the windowsill—the memory came to him like a
vision.

  Standing at the top of the stairs, looking down into a ballroom, that was when it began. Outside, Berkeley Square glittered with snow, and the trees were frosted silver. But inside, the house was warm and fragrant. He saw the men and women circling; he saw the swirl of dresses…In the cool night air high above the streets of San Francisco, a sound began, faintly at first, then more strongly. Music; sweet music; the sound the stars and the planets made, waltzing. Perfect time: perfect love. He heard the woman calling to him, with a voice like starlight. His mother. His wife. Pale as moonshine, dark as night, eyes like diamonds, calling.

  “I’m coming,” Lewis cried.

  He stood a moment, poised. Outside the door, the debris knocked.

  When he dived into the dark and flew downward, the air was singing.

  After their marriage, Hélène and Edouard went away together for three weeks. They went to Istanbul, and stayed at a yali, once the summer residence of a Romanian nobleman, which Xavier de Chavigny had bought in the twenties. It was on the eastern shore of Turkey, and it overlooked the waters of the Bosporus.

  The house, unchanged since the turn of the century, and rarely visited, was cool and quiet. From the wide, brass-postered bed, with its white canopy, Edouard and Hélène could look out the tall windows opposite, to the water which lapped to within a few feet of the glass. The outside of the windows was barred with a delicate fretwork of iron. It was fashioned in intricate patterns, and when the sun moved around to shine on this side of the house, it cast a filigree of shadows on the floor of the room: Ottoman lace, a carpet of monochrome.

  Beyond the window, light danced on the water, and they both grew fascinated by this endless movement and refraction. They were reluctant to leave that room, or each other. They took breakfast there—strong coffee, bread, and rose-petal jam. They watched the boats that plied back and forth between the two shores, between the Western world and the Eastern. Across the water, shimmering in a miasma of light, they could see the city of Istanbul, the domes and minarets of its palaces and mosques. Sometimes they took dinner in this room, too, and sat quietly together afterward, watching the moon rise, and watching the patterns it cast upon the water.

  Their second child was conceived in this room, conceived one night when few words were spoken, conceived—Hélène sometimes felt afterward—out of the shadows and the silver, out of touches that were as slow and rhythmic as the movement of the water.

  They both knew a new life had begun: locked together, they had an absolute sense of its conception. Edouard lifted himself a little, and looked down into her eyes. Hélène felt she moved in the depths of his gaze: she lifted her arms, braceleted with silver light, and wrapped them around his neck. The warmth of his skin, and its dampness, delighted her.

  White light in her mind. Time out of time. She pressed her lips against his hair; she said his name, and other things, with a sudden feverish need, as if words could hold this moment, and fix it. Then she stopped speaking: the words were too small.

  Edouard took her hand and pressed it against his lips. He held her, and they lay quietly together, listening to the lapping of the water.

  The next day, they flew back from Istanbul in Edouard’s plane. Hélène could sense some excitement in Edouard, which she could see he was at pains to conceal, and which puzzled her. She was more puzzled still when she saw their flight plan, and discovered they were flying, not to Paris, but to Heathrow.

  “Are we going to London, then? But Edouard, I thought…”

  “Not London. London is just en route. Wait and see…”

  She could persuade him to say nothing more.

  At Heathrow, the black Rolls-Royce Phantom was waiting for them. They settled themselves in the back, and still Edouard could not be persuaded to explain.

  Hélène felt a tiny sense of disappointment, but she concealed it. She had been looking forward to seeing Cat, and Cassie and Madeleine. She had been looking forward to taking Edouard into his study, and showing him the portrait of Cat, which she had been saving for this moment. But this would wait, she told herself. She glanced at Edouard. His face was composed and still, and told her nothing. She watched the road signs: they seemed to be driving in the direction of Oxford, and—as they cleared the outer suburbs of London—she found that Edouard’s suppressed excitement was catching. She forgot about Paris; she became more and more intrigued.

  After some time they turned off the main Oxford road, onto a smaller road, and then one smaller still. They began to climb: it was late afternoon, and, as the hills and valleys of the Downs opened before them, Hélène gave an involuntary cry of pleasure.

  “Oh, Edouard—it’s so beautiful. Where are you taking me?”

  “Wait and see,” Edouard answered infuriatingly.

  Five minutes later, they came to a small lodge house, and a pair of tall iron gates between stone pillars. They entered a long winding drive lined with tall beech trees and bordered with paddocks on either side. Then the drive curved around a bend, and Quaires Manor and its gardens came into view. A long brick house, with sash windows, and a steep roof; Hélène looked from the house to the garden, and gave a cry of delight. As if her exclamation were a cue, Edouard’s driver halted the car, Edouard opened the door, and helped her out. He placed one finger against her lips, and then, taking her hand, he led her along a gravel walk, and through into the gardens.

  The gardens were empty and quiet, except for birdsong. They passed through an archway of clipped yew, along a path that led past a small octagonal gazebo, and toward a central rondel, fragrant with roses in the still, cooling air. There they stopped, and looked back up toward the house, and there Edouard explained.

  “For you,” he finished gently, “and also for your mother, whom I never knew. And for Christian’s mother, who would have liked you, and who would have liked to know—” He paused. “Well, that all this would be taken care of, perhaps. For Cat, and for all the other children that I hope we shall have.” He broke off, and seeing the expression on her face, held her close, until she was calmer.

  Hélène clasped his hand. She closed her eyes and let the past come back: the child in Alabama, the woman here. Edouard made sense of her life, she thought confusedly, and when she tried, in a rush of words, to explain this to him, she knew that he understood.

  He lifted her face to his, and looked down into her eyes, his gaze growing still and intent.

  “Loving you and being with you gives meaning to every moment of each day,” he said. “It will always be so. Hélène, come back to the house.”

  They walked slowly across the lawns, and then, just as Hélène was about to say, impulsively, that she wished Cat were there, a door burst open, and Cat, unable to bear the suspense any longer, rushed out to greet them, and Cassie, Madeleine, and Christian came out from hiding, too, so that the lawns, quiet and empty a moment before, were suddenly peopled.

  “Champagne, champagne,” Christian was shouting.

  Cat was tugging at Edouard’s hand. “There’s a surprise for you, there’s a surprise for you too. Daddy, come quickly, come quickly…”

  And she pulled Edouard into the drawing room, where, carefully and artfully hung by Christian, Anne Kneale’s portrait of Cat was waiting for his inspection.

  Edouard looked at it for a long time, one arm around Cat, one arm around Hélène. Cat peeped up at him anxiously, watching the play of emotions on his face—the surprise, the pleasure, the pride, then a gentleness which became almost sad.

  Hélène, also watching this, understood. But Cat was too young. She pulled at Edouard’s sleeve.

  “Do you like it, Daddy? Do you?”

  “I like it very very much. It makes me very happy.”

  “But you don’t look happy—Daddy, you look sad.”

  Edouard bent and lifted her in his arms. “That’s because I’m older than you, Cat. When grown-ups are most happy, they sometimes feel a little sad, just at the same time. You’ll understand when you’re older.” He hes
itated, and glanced at Hélène.

  “We think of time passing, Cat,” Hélène said quickly. “That’s all.”

  Cat glanced from one to the other. Edouard kissed her. When she was quite certain that he truly liked the painting, she wriggled free of his embrace, with her characteristic quick impatience. Grown-ups, she thought, could make things so complicated when they were really very simple. She was about to break away, and run out again, when something in the quietness of the room, something in the looks her father and mother exchanged, made her pause. Here was a mystery; an adult mystery. For a second, she felt it touch her, and it made her want to shiver, like the touch of a shadow after the sun on her skin. She shifted from foot to foot, looking up at them uncertainly.

  “Like I feel, sometimes? At the end of a nice day? When it’s been so nice you don’t want it to end—you don’t want to go to bed?”

  Edouard smiled. “A little like that, yes.”

  Cat’s face cleared. “Oh, that’s all right then. When I feel like that, I know it’s silly really. Because it will be just as nice tomorrow…”

  She smiled at them blithely, eager to reassure them both, and when she saw them smile, she was content. She ran out to the garden, where Christian allowed her to help open the champagne. He poured her a glass, very solemnly—the first champagne she had ever tasted—and afterward, Cat always remembered that evening with a special precision. She would tell herself that it was because of the surprise, or because of the champagne, and because drinking it made her feel grown-up. But she knew that was not truly the case. It was because of the way her parents had looked at each other in that still room.

  “Why are grown-ups a little sad when they’re most happy, Christian?” she said later, when she and Christian were alone in the garden, and the shadows were lengthening.

  Christian could always be relied upon to give an answer, and he gave her one now. He frowned a little, looking toward the roses that grew against the walls, and Cat was not to know that he could not look at them without seeing, and hearing, his mother. “Because they know the best things, even the really good things, never last,” he said quietly. “That’s all, little Kitten.”