Destiny

by Sally Beauman

  “Why not? Why don’t they last?” Cat turned to him fiercely.

  “Oh, we get older, I suppose. People die, Cat. That’s why.” And he stood, and left her, with an odd abruptness.

  Cat, who was used to Christian’s sometimes sudden changes of mood, watched him go. Then she sat quietly, hugging her knees, looking out across the garden.

  She tried to figure out what he meant. She tried to think about death, but she had never seen a dead person, or even a dead animal; it was something out of books, and not real to her. “Death,” she said to herself under her breath, trying out the word. “Death.”

  An owl flew over. She sat very still and watched the pale shape quarter the lawn with a slow deep beat of white wings. In the undergrowth beneath the boundary hedges, a small animal squeaked, and the owl flew on, into the fields and out of sight. She stayed very still, breathing quietly; she watched a soft fuzzy moon as the branches of the trees first obscured, and then revealed it. She felt quiet and still and secret, as if she were invisible, and she liked that; she hugged the feeling to her. Then, from inside the house, her mother called, and she realized she was cold.

  She jumped up and ran quickly into the warmth and the light. She hugged her mother, her father, Christian, everyone, with a sudden quick fervor which she did not understand, and they said she might stay up, just this once, for supper with them. And that was so grand, so unprecedented, so exciting, that while it lasted, she forgot what Christian had said, she forgot how she had felt when she sat in the garden.

  It came back to her when she went to bed, and lay in the quiet of an unfamiliar room. She could hear the voices downstairs. She heard the owl hoot. She felt, for a moment, as if she were on the brink of some huge discovery, which excited her, but of which she was also a little afraid. She tried to unwind it, this thought, this feeling, which was tangled away somewhere in her mind. But she was tired, and the thought would not unravel: she fell asleep.

  She thought of the feeling again though, one week later, when they returned to Paris. She was in the room with Edouard and Hélène, when Hélène opened the letter.

  She saw her mother go pale, and give an odd kind of gasp. She saw Edouard go to her quickly, and take the letter from her hand. She knew something had happened then, something that somehow connected, and she couldn’t think what it could be, until—much later—Edouard came up to her room and explained, quietly and gently, that there had been an accident, and Lewis Sinclair was dead.

  She cried then—because she was shocked, and suddenly afraid. Edouard held her in his arms, and talked to her, and soothed her until the tears stopped. And Cat clung to him, very tightly. She was not quite sure why she cried, and afterward, much later, when Edouard left her, she felt a little guilty. She tried to think of Lewis, she tried to remember him, but she knew the memories were vague and imprecise. I ought to remember better, she said to herself.

  Then she cried again, fiercely and bitterly. But she knew, in her heart, that she was not crying for Lewis—not exactly. A little bit for him, because it was horrible not to be alive anymore: but also for her father and her mother, and a look that had passed between them; also for Christian, and also for herself: sitting in a garden, alone, and watching an owl fly over.

  “This is my fault,” Hélène said to Edouard that night, with a sudden bitter intensity. She picked up Emily Sinclair’s letter, and then laid it down. The color rushed into her face and then ebbed away. She stood up, her eyes glittering with agitation.

  “Edouard—I did this to him. I began it. I made him marry me. I made him miserable. I knew it was wrong, and I still did it.”

  “That isn’t true.” Edouard gripped her by the arms. “Nothing is that simple, Hélène. Nothing.”

  Hélène looked up at him, and then turned her face away.

  “Nothing,” Edouard said again. He felt suddenly the most angry and passionate conviction. “Hundreds of factors,” he said sharply. “Thousands of incidents. They all contribute to something like this. Chance contributes to it. You can’t just impose one shape, and say—it was because of that, and only that. Blaming yourself is futile…” He paused, and his face hardened. “It’s also selfish. I know, because I’ve done it.”

  Hélène’s face grew still. Edouard knew that some of his words, at least, had reached her.

  “Do you believe that?” she said, more quietly.

  “Yes. I do.”

  He said no more then, but let Hélène cry. Her grief, he knew, would not be like Cat’s. Cat was a child, and could not grieve for long. The process, for Hélène, was much more difficult, and more drawn out. He waited, patiently, comforting her when she needed to be comforted, listening when she needed to talk, and remaining quiet when she needed to be silent. It touched him that someone so capable of giving should feel that she had been destructive, and that she should blame herself, and never Lewis, for what had happened.

  Time would alter that view, he hoped. He felt compassion for Lewis Sinclair, and it was not for him, he thought, to point out that Lewis’s self-destructiveness had always been there; Hélène would come to see that in the end.

  A month after they returned from Istanbul, her pregnancy was confirmed, and when Edouard saw the happiness in her face as she told him, he knew that she would come through this, as she had come through grief in the past, in her own way, and at her own pace. He watched her anxiously, watched the silences grow less frequent. He watched the irrepressible contentment break through, and was glad.

  “One cannot mourn forever,” his mother, Louise, remarked, one day, when they called to visit her. She sighed, and pressed her hand against her heart. She was not referring to Hélène, of course: Hélène’s experiences did not pierce the shell of Louise’s egotism. She was referring to herself, merely harking back to a refrain that had always been one of her favorites.

  Edouard, who could never hear her say this without remembering precisely how brief a time she had mourned his father, looked away impatiently. Hélène met his eyes.

  “I know,” she said quietly.

  There was a moment’s unspoken understanding between them, which Louise sensed, and which made her irritable. She brushed at the skirts of the pale lavender dress she was wearing, and changed the subject. Edouard at once became impatient to leave. The recent atmosphere of his mother’s house, its air of quiet and bogus religiosity, he found suffocating. Now Louise chose to have her blinds always half lowered. She sat in a dim light, and fingered the crucifix she had taken to wearing around her neck. She had dressed for the past two or three years, not in the chic highly fashionable clothes she had once favored, but in loose gowns that were an echo of her youth, that were modest, and flowing, and always in the subdued colors of semi-mourning—dove-gray, a muted blue, occasionally, if she were feeling very assertive of her new role, deep black.

  She devoted herself now to good works: her constant companions were either the priests, or other widows of impeccable mournfulness, who spoke to her of their mutual good works. Once, making one of his routine brief visits, Edouard had come across one such gathering. Louise had sat there, listening to the talk of starving orphans in Africa, and her eyes had sparkled with an unmistakable rage and malice. The new role was a replacement for the old one, that was all: it was Louise’s way of acknowledging that, alas, she could no longer fascinate as she had once done; she could no longer attract lovers.

  Her hypocrisy and her fretfulness irked him now more than it used to. He could not enter her house without being eager to leave, and Louise, sensing this, would look at him with a cold measured dislike, occasionally risking—if Hélène were present—the overtly reproachful.

  “It’s all a sham,” he said angrily on that particular occasion, when they finally left. He took Hélène’s arm. “My mother has never in her life grieved for anything except herself.”

  “Oh, I expect she has, in her way,” Hélène said. She stopped suddenly on the sidewalk. She stood very still, and then turned to him with a quic
k impulsiveness.

  “Anyway, what she said was true. Right or wrong, I feel happy, Edouard. I can’t help it. Here. Feel.” She took his hand and pressed it against the swell of her stomach. All around them, people moved, cars roared down the Faubourg. But Edouard was conscious of none of them. Beneath his hand, he felt his child move for the first time. A slow, hesitant, rolling bumpy motion.

  Hélène frowned, and then laughed. Edouard gathered her in his arms and, oblivious to Paris, kissed her.

  “It’s a boy,” Hélène said happily. “Edouard, I know it’s a boy—I’m quite certain.”

  She was right. It was a boy. He was born in April 1968, and they called him Lucien. The year of his birth was a violent one, memorable for assassinations, for invasion, and for riots, which, in Paris, tore a city apart, divided families and generations, and caused Louise de Chavigny, in her view, not only spiritual agony, but also a great deal of inconvenience.

  “In America perhaps,” she said acidly, one summer’s afternoon when she had been persuaded by Hélène to come out to St. Cloud to have tea, and to see Lucien, on whom, to Edouard’s surprise, she doted. “America has always been a violent country. But here—in Paris. To find streets closed off. To hear them shouting slogans, and see them marching, building barricades…” She gave a small shudder, as if the demonstrators had been encamped outside her own house. “I simply cannot understand what they’re protesting about. It’s the work of foreign agitators. In my view, they should all be deported…”

  She spoke with some spirit. She was, Edouard noted, in an excellent humor, in spite of her complaining, and he assumed this must be the events of the past month, which had enlivened what she now referred to as her “drab” existence. Her animation was apparent not just in her voice, but also in her appearance: for the first time in three years she had cast aside the somber and unflattering dresses: she was wearing, today, one of pink silk. Her pearls, not the crucifix, were around her throat. She had altered her hairstyle, and was even wearing discreet makeup once more. She looked much younger, and still lovely: it was perhaps the knowledge of this, as well as the stimulus of outrage, Edouard thought, which made her so animated.

  He was hardly listening to what she was saying, in any case. Louise’s political opinions were of no interest to him, and he had long ago learned to block them out. He was looking with affection at Cat, who lolled against her mother’s chair, and at Lucien, who sat on Hélène’s lap, and occasionally, almost regally, waved his silver rattle.

  Lucien had clear blue eyes, of a lighter shade than Edouard’s or Cat’s. He had a cap of profuse reddish-gold curls, the face of an angel, and the temper of a devil. Cassie called him a little tyrant, fondly; even George could not look at that small, oddly imperious little face without breaking into a smile.

  “Such a little darling. So handsome.” Louise, having disposed of the riots to her own satisfaction, leaned across and cooed at Lucien. He regarded her levelly, with his wide blue eyes. Louise looked at him closely, and then looked up at Edouard. She smiled her sweetest and most maternal smile, and Edouard at once tensed.

  “Of course, you know who it is that he resembles?” Louise’s eyes were now fixed on Edouard’s face. “I noticed it at once.”

  “Both of us, I suppose…” Edouard shrugged.

  Louise’s smile widened.

  “Edouard, how absurd you are. Men are so blind. It’s perfectly obvious. He’s precisely like, exactly like, my darling Jean-Paul.”

  Quite how, or when, Hélène first began to play a part in Edouard’s business activities, neither of them could afterward say: the process was gradual, and to begin with almost imperceptible. “It crept upon me,” Edouard would later say with a smile.

  Hélène had, from the first, taken an interest in his work, and Edouard had, from the first, seen that she possessed a quick understanding and an instinct for financial affairs which he had always believed to be rare in women. Before and after their marriage, she continued to manage her private portfolio of investments, still through the offices of James Gould in New York, and also through brokers in Paris and in London. She did not bother Edouard with the details of these investments, but they were, on occasion, discussed; Edouard noted then her shrewdness, was impressed, but thought no more about it. Hélène noticed this, and was amused by it, but said nothing: Edouard’s attitude to women was chivalric, conditioned by his generation and his upbringing. Hélène knew perfectly well that deep down Edouard held very simple beliefs: he believed in marriage, he believed in the family; if he had been called upon to define his own role in that union, he would probably have said that he saw himself as a provider, and as a protector, though his natural reticence on such matters might have inclined him not to define at all.

  Clara Delluc, with whom Hélène gradually, in Paris, became friends, once said with a smile, “Edouard is full of paradoxes. He admires independence, in men and in women. When I was beginning my work, trying to build a career, Edouard helped me more than anyone.”

  She seemed about to go on, and then hesitated. Hélène smiled. “But?” she prompted.

  Clara laughed. “But I think he still believes it’s a little unnatural. He can’t quite believe that a woman—any woman—can be truly happy unless she is married and has children. Though, of course, he would say the same of a man.” Clara paused; she had not married, and she had never had children.

  “And who knows?” She gave a wry smile. “He may not be entirely wrong. Perhaps women need both. Though I would never admit that to Edouard…”

  Shortly after the birth of Lucien, Edouard began to explain his business concerns to Hélène in more detail. Hélène saw that, although the ramifications of the company were extensive and complex, its central organization was very simple. It remained a private company; within that company, Edouard held ninety percent of the voting stock, and his mother ten. Louise’s holding, which had come to her through Xavier, and would pass to Edouard on her death, entitled her to a seat on the board. In thirty years, she had never attended a board meeting.

  Edouard explained, hesitantly, as if expecting possible opposition from Hélène, that this division of stock needed review: he wanted to transfer a fifteen-percent holding to Hélène direct; he wanted her to join the board of the company.

  Hélène knew quite well why he had done this: with the birth of Lucien, he had had to alter his will, and Edouard, cautious and methodical in all such things, was ensuring that, should anything happen to him, Hélène, who would hold Cat’s and Lucien’s interests in trust for them until they came of age, would feel familiar with the workings of the company.

  She accepted, gladly: she attended her first de Chavigny board meeting in the spring of 1969: she was, as she had known she would be, the only woman present.

  The other board members, all much older than she, were precisely as she expected. They were able, they were astute, and to her they were deferential. They welcomed her charmingly—and then they proceeded to ignore her completely. Very occasionally, when one of the men present feared the discussions might have become a little too technical for her, he would call a gentle halt to the proceedings in order that they might be explained to Hélène in words of one syllable.

  Hélène accepted this gracious patronage quietly. For the first four or five board meetings she attended, she said very little. She bided her time, watching the men around the table, listening to their arguments and their counterarguments, deciding in her own mind which of the men present had most to contribute, and which least. She watched them, and she weighed them, noting with interest their various alliances and rivalries, and—she was pleased to note—her relative silence was effective. After the first two or three meetings, they seemed almost to forget that she was there: their behavior was then the more revealing.

  Edouard did not underestimate her, and occasionally she would catch a gleam of amusement in his eyes when one of his colleagues patiently and laboriously explained some terms or practices with which, Edouar
d knew perfectly well, Hélène was already familiar. But he never said anything, either during the meetings, or afterward when they were alone. He was waiting, Hélène knew, and it amused him to wait.

  So, possibly, Hélène’s involvement began then, when she was appointed to the board. Hélène knew Edouard would not have pressed her: had she been content to remain simply a silent ornament to the board table, Edouard might have been disappointed, but he would have accepted it as her choice. She herself felt, however, that her involvement dated from a point later in 1969, when she first discussed with him openly the other board members, and the agenda of the meeting she had just attended.

  “Shall I list the factions for you?” she said with a smile, when they were at dinner together that night.

  “Please do.”

  Edouard leaned back in his chair. Hélène dealt swiftly, and accurately, with the factions. When she had finished, Edouard’s smile had grown broader.

  “So—you think all those weighty and carefully researched arguments Temple was putting forward against the further expansion of the hotel division—you think they were biased?”

  “I’m certain they were.” Edouard noted with amusement that Hélène’s pretense of detachment was slipping away: her color had risen, and she spoke rapidly, and with animation. “I’m quite sure. Temple can’t bear Bloch—they’re equally influential at the moment, but if Bloch’s plans for the hotel division were implemented, it would divert assets Temple wants earmarked for the Sardinian villa development. It would give Bloch more influence and more power, and Temple doesn’t want that to happen. Besides, I thought his arguments were wrong. The hotel division has been virtually static for the past three years, you’ve consolidated your existing holdings—it looks like the moment to expand.”