Destiny

by Sally Beauman

  “Thad. You don’t need them now. And you don’t need me.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “No. You need your idea of me, that’s all. That was always the case.” Her voice had grown quieter. “It was the same with Lewis. I understand that now.”

  She turned away to the door, and opened it. For a moment, Thad did not move. Then, slowly, he came after her. The comparison with Lewis had angered him, she knew that at once. She could feel his anger, though his face remained expressionless and still. He came to a halt very close to her, and looked her in the face.

  “You’ve changed.”

  He made it sound like an accusation, as if she had committed an unpardonable fault.

  “You’ve changed—or he’s changed you.” He gave an odd little gesture of the hand. “I made you into something once. I made you into a woman. The kind of woman men dream about. I did that—not you. You were nothing when I met you. Just a teenaged girl, no different from a thousand other girls. Photogenic, that was all. I gave you a look. I gave you a voice. I gave you an identity. I even gave you Lewis. And you’ve thrown it all away. For this.”

  He gestured at the room, and looked at her again, a note of appeal creeping into his voice. “How could you do that? How could you be so dumb? What do you want with all this—this stuff?”

  “Thad—this is my home…”

  “One of your homes. How many do you need? It’s obscene. All these things…”

  “Thad. I care for this house. I love my husband. I love my children. I’m happy—is that so difficult to understand?”

  “Yes, it is.” Thad sounded combative once more. “Because it doesn’t last. Marriages don’t last. What people call love doesn’t last. You can’t be sure of something like that. Your husband—does he love you?”

  “Thad—stop this…”

  “Does he? Or does he lie about that, too, the same way Lewis did? Lewis was always going on about how much he loved you. That didn’t stop him screwing half of Hollywood. That didn’t stop him hitting you did it?” He paused, and gave a little giggle. “Where’s your husband now?”

  “He’s in London. Thad, this is none of your business…”

  “Is he? Where in London? Who with?” He looked at her intently. “You think you know, but you might be wrong. How long did he lie to you about Sphere? How many years? What else do you think he lies about, Hélène? He could be with another woman right now—you wouldn’t know. He had lots of women once, I read about that. He probably screws around. Most men do. Sex with the same woman gets boring, they all say that. And Lewis always said you were a lousy lay. I didn’t believe him, of course. Lewis couldn’t get it up, that’s all. But that’s what he said.

  Quite suddenly, the malice and the anger had become desperate. Just for a moment, when he began to speak, Hélène had felt the doubts begin to snake into her mind. She hated herself for them, and she despised herself for them. Then, somehow, he went too far, he pushed too hard, and she knew she did not believe him. She almost pitied him, and the doubts died.

  It was always a mistake to show Thad sympathy, however, for he capitalized upon it instantly, so she kept her voice cold.

  “Thad. You don’t understand love. And you don’t understand trust. It’s one of the things that’s wrong with your films. I’m not going to argue with you, and I’d prefer not to remember you like this. Please go…”

  “You’re boring.” Thad’s eyes were now intent on her face. He gave a sudden whistling little sigh, and rubbed at his beard reflectively. “How come I didn’t see that before? You know what you are now? You’re ordinary—just like anyone else. A married woman. A mother. A nothing. He did this to you, and you let him. I wouldn’t want to work with you now anyway. Not now that I really look at you. Here.” He thrust the script back into her hands. “If you really don’t want to do this, you can throw it away.”

  “Throw it away?”

  “Why not? I don’t want it.”

  A smug little smile moved his lips. He still did not believe her, even now. Hélène’s mouth set. She took the script, crossed the room to her desk, and threw it into the wastepaper basket. Thad watched her do it. He made no sound. As the script fell, he lifted his two pink hands in a quick involuntary gesture—perhaps of protest, perhaps of supplication. Then he let them fall.

  For a moment, Hélène thought he was going to cry. He removed his glasses, and rubbed his eyes. Then he put the glasses on again and turned to the door. He bustled out into the hall, as if nothing had happened, his manner composed and benign once again. Hélène followed him, a little uncertainly, aware that she had been made to feel cruel and unjust, which was one of Thad’s specialities.

  On the steps outside, he turned to her, and to her considerable surprise, shook her hand. He held it tight between his small plump palms, glancing over his shoulder in the direction of his Mercedes. It was chauffeur-driven; the engine fired.

  “Oh, well. I’ll find someone else, I guess. Someone special, the way you were once.” He smiled his gentle wolfish yellow-toothed smile. “I saw your daughter as I came up the drive. I guess it was your daughter. Dark hair, a white shirt. She was riding. A big black horse…”

  “Yes, that would be Cat…”

  Hélène was only half-listening. She was eager for him to be gone. From the garden beyond she could hear Lucien and Cassie calling her.

  “She’s got a very striking face, your daughter.” He giggled. “Someone should put her in the movies, you know that?”

  He saw the immediate uneasiness in her face, and he smiled again, the same old gentle smile. “Just a joke, Hélène. Just a joke…”

  He climbed into the car without another word, and it pulled away. The moment it was out of sight, Hélène felt a surge of release. If she could manage it, she thought, she would never see Thad again. And Cat would never meet him.

  She turned back into the house, wishing impatiently that Edouard would return soon. She would tell him about Thad’s visit at once. She would tell him she knew about Sphere…

  She stopped. Why had Edouard never told her? Could he possibly have feared that it would come between them? At once she felt certain that she was right: she knew, after all, how it was to be trapped by an evasion. Oh, if only Edouard would hurry back soon. Then she would tell him just how absurd that was, how little it mattered now, and how much she loved him.

  He did this for me, she thought as she came out onto the terrace on the far side of the house: all those years, and saying nothing. She felt a great intensity of love for Edouard then, and a longing to be with him. She looked out across the garden, to the rondel of yew. In the distance, the small figures of Alexandre and Lucien were waving. In his chair on the terrace, Christian was just stirring. The cricket commentator was going over the details of that morning’s play: England had been bowled out by Australia, just as Edouard had predicted, though rather sooner.

  A black horse. Thad’s sentence, to which she had paid so little attention at the time, suddenly floated into her mind again, through the surge of happiness. The scene before her froze; her body tensed. A black horse. There was only one black horse among the many in the stables, and it was not the horse Cat had said she would be riding.

  For a moment she stood absolutely still, telling herself that Thad must have made a mistake. Then, with a small indistinct cry of fear, she began to run across the lawns, along the rear drive toward the stables.

  The horses whinnied at her approach, and she ran frantically along the line of box stalls. Hermione was there; all the horses were there—except Khan.

  He had burnt the papers. He had burnt the file, the envelope, and the photograph, one by one, in the fireplace of the Eaton Square study, carefully and methodically.

  The letters between Jean-Paul and Gary Craig’s commanding officer. Jean-Paul’s careless note to Henry Smith-Kemp: “He tells me Craig will do it for five thousand dollars. That seems fair enough, and best for all concerned. Please make all the necessary arrangemen
ts, in your firm’s name, naturally. Craig has no bank account, I gather, so it will have to be in cash. And please make it absolutely clear to Miss Fortescue that I am acting merely as a friend. There must be no acknowledgment of paternity in writing. I have no doubts myself, but fortunately there is nothing that could stand up in a court of law, provided the whole matter is handled with your usual discretion…”

  He had seen the receipted bills for the delivery and the hospital expenses. He had seen the one letter from Violet herself, written from the hospital, to Henry Smith-Kemp: “Please inform M. Jean-Paul de Chavigny that his daughter is very beautiful and in good health. I should like him to know that I have called her Hélène; I felt she should have a French name. He need have no further anxieties. Please assure him that I shall not contact him again, nor make further calls on his already considerable generosity…”

  A proud letter. She had clearly kept her promise. There were only two other items in the file: a receipted bill from a Mayfair florist, for bouquets sent to Mrs. Craig on her departure for America; and a brief note, from Jean-Paul, hastily scribbled in Paris. The file on Mrs. Craig could be closed; he thanked Mr. Smith-Kemp for his efficiency and discretion in such a delicate matter.

  One match, carefully applied, and they all burned, one by one. Money as a way of buying off guilt; money as a way of avoiding responsibility. As Edouard watched the papers burn, he felt shame for Jean-Paul, but no censure. How could he? While these arrangements were being made, was not the accommodating Mr. Smith-Kemp also engaged on Edouard’s behalf, giving money, when he had once meant to give love?

  When the last paper was burned, Edouard, who had been kneeling, stood up and walked to the window. Below was the balcony where, as a boy, he had dreamed of firing at a phantom enemy. Across the street were the square gardens, where the air raid warden had once had his station: now, children played on the grass in the sun, while their uniformed nannies sat on benches and gossiped. No blackened gap beyond the terraces now; nothing left of the past; just peace, and prosperity, the closeness of a city summer.

  The turmoil was all in himself; the war was in his mind and his heart. For a moment, standing quite still, it was as if the two images were superimposed, the one upon the other: he saw them both. The sunlit square was light and dark; he heard the drone of the planes’ engines, and it mixed with the murmur of the traffic below. Peace, and yet he saw the bombs fall from the sky, silver in the searchlights; they fell with a hallucinatory slowness, aimed and randomly scattered; destruction from a distance. There was a long quiet time before their explosion, and when it came, the explosion was silent. A long, slow time; he thought: a lifetime.

  His brother’s daughter. He thought of Hélène, and of their children. His mind functioned with the hateful clarity of shock; it was ice cold, precise, and implacable: a series of images; a sequence of information; this and then that. It was quite clear to this machine of a mind that there was one course of action open to him, and one only. To destroy the evidence. To remain silent. He thought: Hélène must never know; our children must never know.

  There was a small box on the table next to him; he picked it up blindly, and blindly laid it down again. He thought: they will never know, and I shall never forget. Then he turned, and walked out into an altered world.

  He was in the Aston-Martin, the engine had fired, he was already driving, when, rebelling against the dictates of his mind, the pain struck him with the force of a physical blow. It fractured in his heart; it stabbed at his mind. He saw a future distorted by a necessary silence. Nothing happened: his hands on the steering wheel remained steady; the revolutions of the car’s engine remained regular; in a dark world, the sun still shone.

  He had stopped, he realized, at a crossing. In front of him, a young woman passed, with a small child in a blue and white striped stroller. The child was wearing yellow, the woman green. The child was pointing, the woman hurrying. He saw them with great exactness, these strangers.

  He thought: We can have no more children, and as the full implications of that were understood, the pain was suddenly so loud that he expected them to hear it, this woman, and this child. He expected them to look up, to stare at him.

  But they did not, of course. They crossed without a glance, they in their world, he in his. It was then, perhaps, that he decided. When they reached the sidewalk on the far side, he let in the clutch, changed gear, and accelerated. Up onto the overpass west; out of the city.

  Between London to the east, and Oxford to the west, there was now a stretch of fast open motorway, with few cars. There, some ten miles from Oxford, he gave the black Aston-Martin its head. Music and speed: he pushed a button, and the air became Beethoven. Seven Bagatelles, Opus 33, recorded by Schnabel in November 1938. Out of the past, the vision of the music sang to him. Gaiety and desolation; stress and resolution. Andante grazioso; quasi allegretto; scherzo: he drove faster. It was three o’clock. He was eager to be…at home.

  He saw the space, clearly, a second or two before he reached it, just at the edge of the perfect bend. A space, very bright, and very lovely, arching open to him out of the music. He saw it and recognized it, with a faint passing sense of surprise that he should see so late, and only now, this place which had been there all along, which had been waiting for him to come and claim it. Such light and such silence, he thought, at the heart of the music. Not a way out, but a way through. He touched the wheel very lightly.

  He felt no fear; the entrance was there; he had seen it or dreamed it many times, and its familiarity was reassuring to him. Peace, one pulsebeat away; the only impediment, pain. A quicker pain this, though, than its alternatives, for himself, and for Hélène.

  Allegretto: the music skidded, and the world turned. After the crash, it was dark, and very quiet. There was blood in his eyes, and he thought for a moment that he had lost his vision. Then he realized that he was not blinded; he had only to turn his head, very slightly. He did so, and the bright place winged its way to him. One last small tussle of breath, then the letting go was easy.

  It was past four o’clock, and Hélène was standing, with Cat, outside the stables, when she heard the car come up the drive.

  Cat was still holding Khan by his bridle; his flanks and withers were shiny with sweat; Cat was shaking. She, too, heard the car, and she looked at Hélène pleadingly.

  “It will be Daddy. Don’t tell him yet. Please. Let me deal with Khan. I’ll rub him down, and then I’ll come back to the house, and I’ll tell him. I want him to understand. I wanted to show him, that I could ride Khan, that I could do it, and I did do it. I did!”

  Hélène looked at her silently. “Very well,” she said finally, and turned away.

  Cat had no idea of the anxiety she had felt, and no idea of the relief she felt now. It was so intense that she did not trust herself to speak. Instead, leaving Cat where she was, she began to walk, and then to run, in the direction of the house. The sun was in her eyes, and she lifted her hand to shield them, searching eagerly for the first glimpse of Edouard’s car. As she rounded a corner, and the gravel sweep in front of the house came into view, she stared in confusion. It was not a black car, it was a white one, and two uniformed police officers, one a man the other a woman, were just climbing out of it.

  They wanted her to go into the house, but Hélène would not, so in the end, they told her in the garden, in a small private space, enclosed by yew hedges, where she and Edouard often sat together in the evenings.

  Her mind had been filled with Cat; she had had no presentiment, and she listened to this uniformed man and woman, who were speaking gravely about times and bends and speeds, and ambulances and hospitals. She found it difficult to understand what they were saying.

  “But he’s not dead?” She interrupted them, turned to them eagerly. “He can’t be dead. Is he hurt? How badly is he hurt? You have to tell me. I must go to him.”

  The uniformed man and woman looked at each other. They tried to persuade her to sit down, and when
she would not do so, they began to explain, again and again. The woman was speaking when, from Hélène’s face, they both knew that she had finally understood. The woman’s voice faltered then. She said, “It would have been very quick.”

  “Instantaneous,” the man added.

  Hélène looked at them, though she did not see them. She said, “Is there another kind of death?”

  Later, they drove her to some place. A cool quiet hospital place, on the outskirts of Oxford. It was where Edouard had been taken, though they must have known it was too late. They drove her there, and escorted her in, and stood in the doorway, until she rounded on them, her eyes flaring with anger, her face white.

  “I want to be alone with him.”

  They looked at each other; they retreated before the expression in her eyes; they left.

  When she was alone with him, and the door was shut, Hélène took Edouard’s hand, which felt cool and dry to her touch. She bent her head, and rested her face against his. She could feel that he was broken; she could see that he had gone. She pressed her lips against his hair; silently, willing the impossible with all her strength, she begged him to listen, she begged him to speak. Not a great many words: two; one; just her name. Let him hear me. Let him know. Please God. She thought the phrases, and they sounded to her immensely loud in the silence. Edouard’s hand lay still in hers; there was no answering pressure from his fingers. Someone had closed his eyes. Not her. She felt her heart break.

  They had placed his body on a bed. After a while, she sat, and then lay, beside him. She pressed her face gently against his chest, lying as she had lain so often, listening to the beat of his heart. After a while, quietly, she began to talk to him. She talked about things that had happened in the past, things he had said and things he had done, and how much they had meant to her. She told him, in a low voice, which broke off, and then began again, what had happened, how they had told her, what she had felt. The words choked her; she felt a terrible urgency. They would take him away. They would not let her see him again.