“I did tell you, Edouard,” she said with a little smile. “I’ve been wanting to liquidate some of my assets for some while…”
“I know that, Maman,” Edouard said patiently. “But this sale isn’t a small matter. These are sizable holdings. You will realize a lot of money…”
“Shall I?” Louise tilted her head to one side coquettishly. “Such fun…”
Edouard frowned. His mother was looking, that day, particularly well. She seemed relaxed and happy; there had, for once, been no complaints about her health. But her behavior worried Edouard nonetheless. Louise was now seventy-six, though this was a closely guarded secret. She had become, in the past year or so, even more unpredictable. Sometimes, as today, she dressed like her old self, and would seem gay and lively; at other times, for no apparent reason, she would revert for weeks to her previous gloom, to the gray dresses, the lowered blinds, the priests. Her temper, always uncertain, was now very volatile, and she had become very ticklish over the most minor matters. Now she disliked Edouard to visit, as he had used to sometimes, either with no advance warning, or after a casual telephone call made as he was leaving his office.
“It fusses me so, Edouard,” she would say. “I like to plan my days. I’m not young now. I don’t like unexpected visits—it’s so inconsiderate.”
This meeting had been carefully and politely arranged three days in advance. And now, as he sat looking at her, Edouard wondered whether Louise’s grip was slipping, whether she had any idea of the seriousness of the moves they were discussing. Privately, he resolved to have a word with her doctors; there and then, ignoring the odd quality of her smile, he attempted to explain that if she sold this stock, they were talking, not in hundreds of thousands, but in millions of dollars.
Louise cut him off. “I understand, Edouard,” she said pettishly. “You’ve explained once. You don’t have to do so again.”
“I’m just trying to make you see, Maman, that it’s not just a question of selling the stock. I can arrange that for you very simply.”
“Please do.”
“But you then have to decide where you want to reinvest, and I thought…”
Louise stood up. She glanced at her wristwatch, which she still always wore fastened to her wrist by a black velvet ribbon.
“Edouard, if I need your advice, I shall ask for it. As it happens…” She gave another little smile. “I have some ideas of my own. I do have them, you know, and it is my money…” Edouard also rose. It was growing late; he had to return to St. Cloud to change for the première; Louise’s attitude was annoying him.
He was inclined, then, simply to walk out, and let her have her way. He began to move to the door, and then he had second thoughts: Louise was not young anymore. However angry she made him, he still had responsibilities to her…He turned back.
“Perhaps if you’d just tell me your ideas, Maman. Then, perhaps, I might be able to assist you—”
Louise did not give him time to complete the sentence.
“I’m going to invest in property, Edouard. I’ve always liked that. I understand it. Houses, not silly little pieces of paper. I shall buy property, and I shan’t need your advice, Edouard, and I’m sure that will be a relief to you—after all, you’re so tied up with your family now, it must be a great burden to you, having to concern yourself with all my little affairs…”
“Property where, Maman?” Edouard said tiredly.
Louise smiled. “Portugal,” she said sweetly.
Edouard hesitated, then, abruptly, his patience snapped.
“As you wish,” he said coldly, and left.
Gettysburg began on a battlefield: Thad had always photographed death beautifully, Hélène thought, and he did so now. One long slow tracking shot in on a field still covered with thin morning mist; it was only as the camera moved in closer that the carnage became apparent: not hummocks, or tussocks of grass, as they appeared from a distance, but bodies. The battle had long been over, and in the field nothing moved.
Men with arms outflung, backs arched, legs sprawled; men lying two, three, four deep, their attitudes a parody of an embrace. It was as formally, as confidently and as beautifully composed as a painting by Delacroix. Too beautifully composed: Hélène looked, and then looked away.
She was already regretting that she had decided to come, and wishing that it were possible to leave. Beside her, Edouard sat stiffly, his face turned to the screen, his expression cold. He had been angry when he returned, late, from his visit to Louise, and his temper had not been improved by his arriving home in the middle of an impassioned quarrel between Lucien and Cat, into which, by the time he arrived, Hélène, too, had been drawn.
It was the first such quarrel Edouard had witnessed; Hélène, who had watched their growing frequency these past months with a sense of sadness and confusion, had tried to keep them from him, telling herself that it was simply a phase. Both Cat and Lucien were at difficult ages, and occasional jealousy between them was inevitable. But the quarrels had continued, with no sign of abating, and today, as always, the squabble flared up suddenly, the result of one small incident.
Today, it had been a drawing, on which Cat had been working for days. She loved to draw, and to paint, and took painstaking care over her work. This drawing, of the garden at Quaires, had just been completed. Somehow Lucien, while Cat was at school, had managed to give his nanny the slip, and had found his way into Cat’s room. When she came home, she found the drawing had been scribbled on, her work almost hidden under Lucien’s red crayon marks. By the time the shouts and screams of temper reached Hélène, and she had run up to the nursery with Cassie, the damage had been done. Lucien was scarlet with rage; Cat was shaking; the drawing was lying on the floor torn in pieces, and on Lucien’s arm there was a bright red mark where Cat had slapped him.
“He did it on purpose. He did! I know he did…” Cat was almost sobbing with outrage. “I showed it to him yesterday. He knew it was special…”
“Stupid drawing…” Lucien kicked the torn pieces of paper with his foot.
Cat sprang at him again, and might well have slapped him again had not Hélène managed to stop her. In the room beyond, confined to his crib, Alexandre joined in the mêlée: he began to wail.
“Cat. Control yourself. You mustn’t lose your temper like this. Lucien’s only three. Of course he didn’t do it intentionally…”
“That’s right—take his side! You always take his side. Always. Always…”
Cat’s voice had risen uncontrollably; her eyes were vivid with tears. Lucien was standing stock still, holding his ground; as Hélène turned to look at him, he gave her one of his still, measuring looks, which Hélène found unnerving in a child so young. There was a curious element of defiance in them, as if Lucien were waiting for the opportunity to test his will against hers. She was just thinking this, and at the same moment telling herself not to be absurd, when Edouard walked into the room, his face pale with anger.
“Exactly what is going on?”
His voice cut through the noise, and there was a silence. Then everyone began to speak at once, Cat and Lucien most stridently, claim and counterclaim.
“He spoiled my drawing—he did it on purpose!”
“Cat smacked me. She smacked me on my arm…”
The expression on Edouard’s face eventually silenced them. He said, in a cold voice, “Lucien. You will not go into Cat’s room again. And you will not touch her things again. If you do, you will be punished—do you understand? And Cat, you will not bully Lucien. You will learn to control your temper. How dare you slap a three-year-old child?”
Cat swallowed. Her mouth was trembling, and Hélène could see that she was about to burst into tears. She looked at Edouard, then down at the drawing, then back at Edouard. Then she burst out, “It wasn’t a hard smack. I lost my temper, that’s all. I worked on that drawing all week. I—”
“Go to your room.”
Edouard cut across the rising torrent of words, a
nd Cat stopped. She stared at Edouard, still shaking with the emotion she felt, and then, without a word, she turned and ran out of the room.
Lucien watched her go, his small face quite expressionless. Edouard looked down at him.
“And you, Lucien. You will apologize to Cat in the morning. You will never do anything like this again. Do you understand?”
Lucien lifted his blue eyes to his father’s face, and gave him an angelic smile. “No, Papa,” he said quietly.
Edouard looked at him for a moment, then turned, and abruptly walked out of the room.
Now, in the theater, Hélène glanced again at Edouard’s averted face. She could see that he was still angry, and she wondered if he, too, was thinking of this scene, as she was, or if he had had a quarrel with Louise. She tried to force her attention back to the screen, but she could not concentrate. She kept thinking about Cat, suddenly seeing a connection between a whole series of small incidents which she had dismissed at the time; these were not simply the quarrels between brother and sister, but other occasions over the past year, when Cat had seemed unhappy, or uncommunicative, or withdrawn. She had explained these to herself in so many ways: it was Cat’s age—she was approaching puberty; it was a process of adjusting to the presence of a new baby; it was, perhaps, her school, which Cat had once liked passionately but now claimed to hate. She thought suddenly: we are not as close as we were; Cat does not turn to me as she once did. And the conviction that this was true, that it was also perhaps inevitable, a part of Cat’s growing-up, made her both guilty and miserable.
Oh, why had they come? She longed, then, to be able to talk to Edouard, who, in the car coming here, had scarcely uttered one word. Unhappily, she forced her eyes back to the screen and made herself concentrate. She had missed half the plot; she stared at the actors with a sense of confusion: they were somewhere in the South; there was a young girl, and a much older man, a major in the Confederate army…She tensed, she watched more closely, and then, with a growing sense of shame and of anger, she realized what Thad had done.
The film lasted two hours. When the lights came up, Edouard’s face was grim. He leaned across and took Hélène’s arm, but although he gripped it tightly, his voice was gentle.
“We’re not staying for the reception. Come on. We’re leaving.”
“No. I won’t do that.” Hélène stood up. “I’m staying. And I’m going to speak to Thad. I want to know why he did that.”
“It will only upset you, Hélène. It’s better just to leave it.”
“No. I won’t.”
“Then let me speak to him.”
“No, Edouard. I shall.”
She saw him hesitate; his reluctance was obvious—but he gave in. They went to the reception, and for forty-five minutes, Thad managed to avoid her. Hélène watched him coldly from across the room, hemmed in on all sides by journalists and well-wishers. She could sense the excitement in the room, that odd vicarious excitement she remembered from Hollywood, which told her the film would be a success here, just as it had been in America. She waited. Then, seizing the moment when Edouard was drawn away from her side for the first time, and there was at the same instant a gap in the people surrounding Thad, she crossed quickly to his side, and looked down at him.
He appeared unchanged; he showed no signs of pleasure, or surprise, or embarrassment; he behaved just as he always behaved, as if the last six years had never been. The small dark eyes glinted up at her behind the tinted glasses; he was sweating slightly, but then, the room was hot.
The other people melted away. Thad nodded, and then smiled. He said, “Hélène.”
“Why did you do that, Thad?”
“Do what?” He lifted his face to hers, and blinked.
“I thought this was supposed to be a film about the Civil War?”
“So it is.”
“It’s also the story of my life. Part of my life. You’ve changed the period and the names, that’s all. I suppose I should be grateful for that.”
“It’s an original story.” Thad shifted from foot to foot. “I should know. I wrote it.”
“It’s unforgivable. It’s cheap.”
Thad sighed. “It would have been better if you’d been in it, I admit that. That girl’s all right. But she’s not special. It’s a good film though. It’s the best thing I’ve done since Ellis.”
Hélène looked at him. He appeared quite unconcerned: the same old rocklike certainty, not the smallest flicker of doubt.
“The daughter, Thad,” she said in a cold voice. “Why did you kill off the daughter?”
“How d’you mean?” Thad tilted his head to one side and looked up at her owlishly.
“You know exactly what I mean. You have a character based on me, and that character has a daughter. At the end of the film, the daughter is killed. You do remember that, I suppose?”
“Oh, that.” Thad shrugged. “I don’t know why I wrote it that way. It was just right.”
“You did it to hurt me.”
“Does it hurt you?” He looked slightly interested.
“Yes. It does. The whole film does.”
“I didn’t think it would. I really didn’t. I never thought of that once.” Thad shook his head. He appeared genuinely surprised, even contrite. “I’m sorry, Hélène. You ought to know I wouldn’t want to hurt you. Why should I? I want to work with you again. I still do. I want you to come back…” He glanced across the room, hesitated, and then began to speak more rapidly. “I’m going to start a new script. When it’s finished, I want you to read it. That’s why I wanted you to come tonight. So I could tell you. I didn’t want to just send it. It will be a good script: a great part. We could shoot it in six weeks. It’s a love story—well, a kind of love story. It’s set in Paris and London, and—”
“I’ll never work with you again.” Hélène interrupted him. “If you send me any scripts, I’ll tear them up.” She stopped. “Paris and London?”
“Yes.” Thad looked impatient. “And I wouldn’t even need you for the whole six weeks. I could work on the schedules, dovetail your scenes, get it down to a month. You could spare a month, couldn’t you? You must want to work again. You must be bored with all this.” He gestured at the room. “You know what you’re doing? You’re frittering away your life. You…” He did not complete the sentence, for Edouard had joined them. Through her own indignation and anger, Hélène could immediately sense the tension. The two men looked at each other. Thad rocked a little, back and forth on his heels. The light twinkled against his spectacles. He smiled. “Did you like the film?”
He attempted to keep the challenge out of his voice, but he did not entirely succeed.
Edouard looked at him levelly. He appeared to give the question serious consideration.
“No,” he said calmly, after a pause. “I found it rather third rate.”
Thad had perhaps not been expecting direct rudeness, and was in any case unfamiliar with Edouard’s ability to insult with deadly politeness. For a moment, the smile remained fixed on Thad’s face; when he realized, belatedly, that it was inappropriate, it disappeared.
“Hélène. Shall we go?”
Edouard took her arm and led Hélène from the room. It was a deliberately leisurely departure, Edouard stopping, here and there, to speak to acquaintances and friends. Neither he nor Hélène looked back, and Thad remained in the same position, for some time, watching them until they finally left the room.
When they reached home, and were alone, Hélène said, “Was it third rate, Edouard? Did you really think that?”
Edouard did not reply at once. He was standing, his face slightly averted from her, looking out the windows of his study toward the gardens, and the city beyond. Now that the anger he had felt as he watched the film had abated, he realized that he felt very tired, and the tiredness was connected with the continuing deception about Sphere. To lie was curiously debilitating, he thought, and decided, at that moment, that he would tell Hélène the truth tonight.
But not yet: in a little while, when she was calmer. He turned back.
“No,” he said quietly. “It has the faults of all his work, and I could hardly look at it objectively. But it wasn’t third rate. It was good.”
“I’m glad you felt that,” Hélène said simply. “I’m not sorry you said that to Thad—he deserved it. But I’m glad it’s not what you really felt.”
“My darling, why?”
“Because it was good. There’s no point in pretending to oneself that it wasn’t. Thad is an artist—I always knew that. It’s because he’s an artist that he uses people as he does. Their lives mean nothing to him, they’re simply material for his work. Happiness, suffering, love, hatred—they’re all one to Thad. They interest him. He observes them. He watches all the little ways they manifest themselves, and then he uses them. Mine, or anyone else’s. He feels no direct concern, and certainly no compassion.” She sighed. “And I’m sure, if you told him that, it would puzzle him very much. He wouldn’t know what you were talking about. If he said anything at all, which he probably wouldn’t, he’d say all artists were like that. And that they had to be. Perfectly detached. And perfectly amoral.”
Edouard looked at her silently. She was frowning slightly, and she spoke quietly, without emotion, as if it were necessary for her to define this to herself. She looked away, and then back at him. Her hands moved, in a sudden, quick, flurried gesture, and she began to speak again, more rapidly.
“I tried to explain that to him once. That there were things that were more important to me than my work. Just living. Just perfectly ordinary everyday things, like being here with you now, or being with Cat. Little things. The stuff of life…But he could never understand that, of course. Those things don’t last, so they’re unimportant to him. Just incidents that he might be able to use, or might decide to cut. Whereas his films will always be there. Forever and ever. Long after he’s dead, or I’m dead.” She broke off. “He said that to me once.”
“Hélène…” Edouard was moved by her sudden distress. He turned toward her.
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