Destiny

by Sally Beauman

  “He took part of my life.” Hélène raised her face to his. “A part I hated, a part I was ashamed of for a long time, and a part I was proud of, too, in some ways. Things that were unclear and confused—he took all those things, and he shaped them, and made sense of them. He made them into his film. He made them into art…” She paused, and her voice grew steadier. “And I minded—then, when I was watching.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I don’t mind. Isn’t that curious? Quite suddenly, I don’t. Because I see—it wasn’t like that. He made it more—and he also made it less. Both at the same time. Do you understand?”

  “I understand.”

  Edouard put his arms around her and held her close against his heart. They stood quietly together, and after the anxiety of the day’s events, Edouard felt himself grow still and calm. He felt at peace. He thought: I shall tell her now, and was about to speak, when abruptly, and with a sudden restlessness, Hélène withdrew from his embrace.

  “I just wish he hadn’t made the daughter die, Edouard,” she said with a sudden new agitation. “I wish he hadn’t done that. His films are uncanny sometimes—they predict the future. He’s done it before, I see that now. My marriage to Lewis, the things that went wrong—he put those in his films, too, they’re there—in Extra Time, in Short Cut. He wrote things before they happened. It’s as if he can see ahead…”

  “My darling, don’t be foolish. He was constructing a story, that’s all. It doesn’t mean—”

  “Oh, Edouard, I’m so worried about Cat.” Hélène turned back to him. “That quarrel today. Other things, just little things—I was thinking about them tonight. I wanted to talk to you about them…”

  Edouard sat down and drew her down beside him.

  “Then tell me,” he said gently.

  And Hélène began to do so. Edouard listened, and spoke, and they talked for a long time. But as he did so, Edouard felt a slight detachment, a passing regret. This was not what he had meant to discuss, not what he had meant to say.

  The conversation could not be turned. Hélène’s worries were of more immediate importance, he told himself, later, when he went to bed. But still, he was angry with himself: an opportunity, the right opportunity, had been lost.

  At the convent school, there was one girl in particular whom Cat had always loathed. Her name was Marie-Thérèse, and she had come to the school late, some time after Cat, and not long before the birth of Cat’s younger brother, Alexandre, in 1970, the year Cat was ten.

  The convent they both attended was an exclusive one, its intake of pupils coming, in the main, from old, distinguished, conservative French families. The criteria for the selection of pupils were primarily social, but there were certain exceptions. There were girls at the school whose places had been achieved on scholastic merit; there were some who were the daughters of newly rich businessmen of sufficient influence to obtain them entrance; there were one or two girls in each year who were taken on out of charity, because their mothers were widowed, perhaps, and whose fees were paid on a scholarship basis. But Marie-Thérèse came into none of these categories, and her presence in the school was, from the first, something of a mystery. Her parents were known to be pious, and reasonably well-off, though they were by no means rich by the standards of the school. They were neither influential, nor well-connected; her father was rumored to have something to do with the sale of automobile tires, and some of Cat’s friends, with a certain snobbish glee, would make jokes about this. According to them, Marie-Thérèse’s mother had obtained her place on the strength of her church connections.

  Marie-Thérèse had long blond hair, which she wore neatly, in regulation braids. Physically, she was well-developed for her age, and inclined to plumpness; she became the first girl in Cat’s class to acquire perceptible breasts, and this, combined with a habitual sweetness of expression, earned her some status, and some liking, for a while. The more snobbish girls disdained her from the first, and were not to be won over by her somewhat simpering attempts at friendship.

  Cat, seeing this, had at first felt sorry for her, and had even tried to initiate certain casual overtures. These were a mistake. Cat was aware that she was not being sincere: she disliked Marie-Thérèse instinctively. It took her some weeks to realize that Marie-Thérèse disliked her right back, and that Cat’s attempts to be polite to her had deepened the dislike into something closer to hate. Perhaps she found Cat’s overtures patronizing—for she was a prickly girl, who quickly took offense. Perhaps she merely hated Cat for her cleverness, or her appearance—though this did not occur to Cat. Whatever the reason, she hated her, and once Cat’s approaches had met with no response, she gave up the effort, and resigned herself to hostility; it was honest, at least. But she had never encountered hostility of this kind before, and as time passed, Cat began to believe that all the things that suddenly began to go wrong in her life had one root cause. Marie-Thérèse. I was happy until I met her, Cat sometimes thought; the girl’s advent became a demarcation point in her life.

  Before the arrival of Marie-Thérèse, Cat’s career at school had been a sunny one. She was naturally quick at her lessons. She made friends easily, and the nuns, though they sometimes shook their heads at her impetuosity, or her tendency to immodesty—such as hitching up her skirts and tucking them in her panties when they skipped in the playground—they were willing to forgive. They reprimanded, but they were, on the whole, won over by her openness of nature, her goodwill, her transparent honesty.

  Once Marie-Thérèse arrived, this began to change. Marie-Thérèse quickly discovered Cat’s temper, and the surest ways of provoking it. It was so easy to make the arrogant, stuck-up Catharine de Chavigny fly into a rage: she could tattle on one of Catharine’s friends; she could hide Catharine’s schoolbooks, spill ink on her drawings; poke fun at her figure, which was slender to the point of boyishness. She could snigger, and remark that Cat looked more like a boy than a girl. She could throw stones at the pigeons in the convent grounds—even when she missed, as she usually did, Cat would leap at her furiously, and could then usually be further provoked into a stinging slap. Then, when trouble ensued, and an investigation was launched, Cat would be punished, and—best of all—the stupid girl could even be relied on to remain unshakably silent, and never to accuse Marie-Thérèse.

  This campaign Marie-Thérèse pursued with zest throughout their eleventh year, and she noted, with spiteful delight, that in that year, the nuns became less indulgent to Cat, and more stern. On one occasion her parents were even called in to see the Mother Superior, and Marie-Thérèse quaked. But the truth did not come out, even then. Cat’s hateful parents, who swanked up to the school in their hateful Rolls-Royce, were informed Cat was becoming a problem; she was seriously undisciplined. When this news leaked back to Marie-Thérèse, she was in a fine humor for the rest of the week.

  Cat viewed this change in her own fortunes with bewilderment. She knew she associated it with all sorts of other things which also made her unhappy and uneasy. She hated that year. At home, there was not just Lucien, but also another baby boy. Her beloved Madeleine had left, to be married and have children of her own, and though Cat still sometimes saw her, she missed her very much. She resented Lucien, she knew she did, and the resentment made her squirm with guilt: he was only little, he was her brother, she knew she ought to love him. And she did love him, and Alexandre, sometimes, but at other times she wished they had never been born, she wished things had stayed as they were in the days when there were not three children clamoring for attention.

  This was wicked; she knew it was wicked. For a period, she became passionately and intensely religious, spending hours on her knees, fervently praying to God to make her a better and more natural daughter and sister. But the prayers did not work, and after a while Cat abandoned them. She began to regard piety with scorn: she began to resent the constant prayers, the constant services, the constant insistence on religion at school. She refused, abruptly, to attend confess
ion—and this created a storm.

  Her body was changing, too, everything was changing: she was almost twelve, and suddenly she felt the world was falling apart, nothing was stable. She would take off her clothes, sometimes, in the secrecy of her own room, and stare at herself in the mirror. The beginnings of fine hair between her thighs and under her arms; the first slight swell of her breasts. Sometimes she hated these signs of approaching womanhood, and hated them passionately. She would squash the breasts down, pretend they were not there, tell herself that she had never wanted to be a girl anyway, that she wished she had been born a boy. At other times she would stare at her own figure, and hate it for the slowness of its development: then she would wish that her breasts would grow faster, and the pubic hair be more discernible. When her periods began, she felt joyful and hopeless, freed and trapped, both at once, and, not long afterward, in a sudden frenzy of resentment at her own gender and at her incapacity to remain a child or to become a woman, she cut off her hair.

  She had worn her hair, at school, in unruly braids. She cut it one night, alone in her room, with a huge pair of Cassie’s dressmaking scissors. Snip—just like that—just below the ear, some sawing and tugging, and it was done. The two braids, like sad dead animals, lay in the palm of her hand. She came down to breakfast the next morning, and there was a terrible scene.

  She had expected the fiercest reaction to come from her mother, for her mother fussed about the way Cat looked and dressed in a way she had come to hate. But it did not: it came from her father, who was coldly furious.

  “It’s my hair. I suppose I have a right to cut it off.” Cat had tilted her chin defiantly; she was the ruder because his reaction shocked her, and she was close to tears.

  “It looks ugly,” he said coldly, and then, perhaps because he was trying to contain his anger, he walked out of the room.

  Cat was terribly hurt. It was the worst moment of her life. She felt as if she wanted to die. She prayed for the ground to swallow her up. She ran back upstairs and stared at her face in the mirror, and her father was right. It did look ugly; it looked worse than that—it looked grotesque.

  She wept then bitterly. She had a confused sense that she had done something irrevocable. Edouard cared for beautiful things—she knew that; he had taught her to care for them also. Hundreds of different kinds of things: it might have been a piece of jewelry or a perfectly tended vine; a Limoges plate, hand-painted in the eighteenth century; or the color of a wild flower growing in a hedgerow. He insisted on beauty; he insisted on excellence, whether the object in question was something very valuable or something very simple. He insisted on the same things in people. Cat had watched him, and she knew—he loathed, not ugliness of appearance, though that certainly did not draw him, but ugliness of nature or character or behavior or manners. Hypocrisy; insincerity; malice; obsequiousness; snobbishness; injustice—he hated all these things, and Cat hated them too.

  As she lay on her bed and wept, she felt as if she had destroyed herself in her father’s eyes: he saw her as she was, she thought, he saw all her jealousy, and her resentment, and her meanness, it was they he found ugly, not simply her hair.

  And he was right: she was detestable; loathsome. She hated herself for her temper and her pride and her arrogance; she hated herself for loving her father so much, and then being rude to him. She despised herself, and it seemed perfectly clear to her that her father must despise her as well.

  “Edouard. You must try to understand. It’s difficult for Cat just now. I remember how it felt, being half a child and half a woman, not sure if you want to be either. And also—she has brothers now. That makes it harder…”

  It was the same evening, and Cat, who had come creeping downstairs to the drawing room, intending to apologize to Edouard, who had just returned from his office, froze outside the door. She couldn’t bear to go in, or to turn away: she eavesdropped, with a lurching sense of shame.

  “Why does it make it harder?” Her father sounded impatient.

  “Well, I don’t know how much she understands…” Her mother paused. “All the resentment of Lucien. He’s not just your son, Edouard, he’s also your heir. She senses that, even if she doesn’t fully understand it. Perhaps she feels you always wanted a son.”

  “I did always want a son. That doesn’t affect my feelings toward Cat.”

  “It may not to you, Edouard—but it could seem so to Cat, can’t you see that? Why do you think she chose to cut off her hair? Because she’s frightened to look like a woman yet, and because—maybe unconsciously—she thinks we would love her more, value her more, if she were a boy.”

  There was a silence. In the room, Edouard looked at Hélène with sudden consternation. Hélène saw comprehension, and then both regret and tenderness come into his face. But Cat, of course, saw none of this. She heard only what he said.

  “Not ‘we.’ You mean I would feel that,” he said quietly, and outside, miserably, Cat crept away.

  Edouard talked to Hélène a little while longer, blaming himself, and then went up to Cat’s room to try to talk to her. Cat longed to throw herself in his arms; her throat felt tight and choked with the love and the pain she felt. But somehow she could not do it. Her face scarlet with repressed emotions, she answered Edouard shortly and proudly, and when he tried to put his arm around her, and be gentle, she pushed him away. When, finally, he left her, his face bewildered and sad, she sat alone, hating herself even more. If I had been a boy. If I had been a boy—a son…The words went around and around in her head: they would not go away. Sometimes she could hear a little voice crying out, somewhere in her head—but he loves you, you know he does. But she would not listen to that voice; it was a lying voice. Yes; her father loved her, but not the way he loved Lucien and Alexandre: not as much.

  After that, things became worse. She felt ugly and awkward and stupid. She constantly knocked things over; she seemed unable to frame sentences anymore without, in the very middle of them, becoming aware that what she was saying was foolish and inept. At home, she withdrew from her family, and spent hours in her room, reading novels about women who were impossibly beautiful and impossibly clever, for whom men were consumed with passion. She would have liked to resemble those heroines: once or twice, at parties given by school friends, she tried out some of their attitudes on the young brothers who were present, and discovered, with a precarious sense of triumph, that they were a success.

  She tried them out again, more flagrantly, that summer, the summer of 1972, during the weeks she spent in the Loire with her family. She was caught kissing the son of one of the estate managers, in the vineyards, by Edouard. The kiss itself had been a disappointment—Cat did not even like the boy very much—but Edouard’s subsequent anger was frightening.

  “Why shouldn’t I kiss him? He wanted to kiss me.”

  “I’m sure he did. He’s sixteen years old. I…Cat, his father works for me. It might have gone further. Apart from anything else, you’re too young.”

  “He didn’t think so.”

  “Go to your room.”

  They left the Loire shortly after that, and went to England, and to Quaires for the rest of her summer holidays. There, Cat knew, she was carefully watched over. She began to feel resentment, she began to feel a certain heady sense of rebellion. But when she returned to school for the fall term, things steadily became worse.

  Marie-Thérèse had found a new way of tormenting her. Her mother—despite her vaunted piety—was an avid reader of gossip columns and women’s magazines, and so, from conversations overheard at home, Marie-Thérèse was supplied with a rich fund of new material. She saw at once that these new weapons struck home.

  “Your father’s a stinking Jew,” she said one day, sidling up to Cat in the playground.

  Cat, that morning filled with a sense of martyred rebellion against both her mother and her father, was immediately stung. Rebellion translated itself into loyalty in a second.

  “My father is one quarter Jewish, and
you’re four quarters contemptible,” she said fiercely, with a toss of her head.

  But Marie-Thérèse had seen the flush, the moment of blank pain in her eyes: she resolved to try harder.

  “Your father used to keep mistresses. He probably still does,” she said the next day. This was very daring. No pupil was supposed to discuss anything so impure. It earned her a stinging slap.

  The best thing of all, Marie-Thérèse kept to herself, awaiting the perfect moment, the moment when she dared to say the terrible words, which her mother had only uttered in shaken tones, with a lowered voice. Marie-Thérèse kept this piece of information to herself. She nursed it for weeks, for months. Then, one winter’s day, the following February, when she had been particularly stung by one of Cat’s slighting remarks, she decided: now, when Cat was in the playground, surrounded by a group of her stuck-up friends. She approached them.

  “I know something about you, Catharine de Chavigny. You think you’re so pretty. You think you’re so clever. I bet your friends don’t know what I know.”

  “So, tell us.” Cat shrugged. “Then we’ll see.”

  Her arrogance, her casualness, were unbearable. Red in the face, stammering with pent-up dislike, Marie-Thérèse finally came out with the word.

  “You’re—you’re a bastard.”

  Catharine went white. Marie-Thérèse felt a surge of triumph.

  “You are! You are! My mother read it in a paper. You were seven years old before your father married your mother. She was married to someone else. She made horrible films, and took off all her clothes. She’s immoral, my mother said so. You might not even be Catharine de Chavigny. You might be Catharine Anybody…”

  “That’s a filthy lie!”

  Cat had been sitting on a wall. Now she leapt down, fists bunched.

  Marie-Thérèse was scared, but she held her ground.

  “Your mother’s divorced—”

  “So what, you little bourgeoise?”

  “Your mother’s divorced, and your father’s a playboy, and you’re a bastard, so there, Catharine de Chavigny…”