Destiny (124 page)

"God, how everything changes." He turned to look at Edouard. "We're both over forty now. Do you know I used to think that would be quite ghastly? And now it's come upon me, I find I rather enjoy it. The perspective alters. I hke that. People come and go—they drift into one's life, and then out of it again. One hears stories about them—httle snippets of information, hke Ghislaine's marrying Nerval, and zipping off" to Marbella— some go up, and others go down. Some alter in the most unexpected ways, and others remain precisely the same. It's so interesting. Like reading a marvelous novel. Heigh-ho. I wonder how we'll be in another twenty years —when we're sixty."

"We'll still be friends." Edouard glanced across at him with a smile.

"Oh, yes." Christian smiled back. "I've no doubts on that score. That's one of the better things. And I know just how we'll be, actually, now that I come to think of it. You'll be even more powerful and distinguished— you'll serve on a million committees. You'll be a paterfamilias. God, Cat will probably be married, you'll be a grandfather by then. And I—I shall be an aging enfant terrible. People will be rather rude about me, and say I'm old hat. And then, when I get to seventy, they'll all discover me again, and turn me into a national monument. The Cecil Beaton of the gallery world. That's the thing—to hang on until you're seventy. You can't go wrong then. You become a sage, and everyone says what perfectly marvelous style you have. Then we sell our memoirs to the Sunday newspapers, and all our friends publish their diaries and letters, and we become an industry—like the Bloomsbury Group. I can't wait. That's when the past really begins to pay off"." He gave Edouard a provocative glance.

"So—I hope you're keeping a record of everything. Otherwise all those academics and research students are going to be awfully disappointed. Diaries. Letters. Notebooks ..."

"Absolutely not." Edouard saw a small space in the flow of traffic, eased

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through it, and accelerated. "I hate that kind of thing. As you know perfectly well. I rarely even keep photographs."

"No, you don't, do you?" Christian frowned. "I remember. When we were looking for Helene—you didn't even have a photograph of her—just that one your groom brought. Why is that?"

"I don't know, really. I prefer not to document my past, that's all. I prefer just to think about it. Letters, photographs—I don't know. I think they distort."

"Doesn't memory?" Christian glanced at him sharply.

"Perhaps."

"After all, everyone remembers the past differently. It isn't a fixed thing. Even one's own perceptions of it change all the time."

"It doesn't stay still, you mean?"

"God, no. My past is constantly popping up. It manifests itself in the most surprising ways."

"That's because you have an extremely disreputable past."

"Oh, I know. " Christian gave a smile of self-satisfaction. "And so do you, I might point out."

"That—all that—is over," Edouard said firmly.

"I wouldn't count on it. You never can. You can't even count on the present. Just when you think it's marvelously calm and placid, there's something else going on, just out of your field of vision. Down the street, 'round the comer, in another country: you're perfectly happy, and meanwhile . . ."

"I know that. I learned that lesson the night of my sixteenth birthday." Edouard spoke rather abruptly. Then, regretting that, for he enjoyed Christian when he was in a talkative mood, he turned back with a smile.

"You know Helene's in London? And Cat. We're staying at Eaton Square overnight—why don't you come back and have dinner?"

"Marvelous. I'd hke that."

"If you want to, we could go and see my solicitors in the morning. Then we could make all the arrangements about the house—unless you want to think it over?"

"Absolutely not. And I'd love to visit your solicitors. Smith-Kemp, isn't it? My father used them. Do they still have those deliciously Dickensian offices?"

"Oh, yes."

"And a glass of sherry, when you've come to the end of the meeting?"

"Invariably."

"Too wonderful. I shall certainly come. It's pleasant to know some things don't change."

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"And not a word to Helene about the house. You promise? I want it to be a surprise."

"Edouard—would I?" Christian sounded wounded. "You know I adore secrets. I shall be as silent as the grave."

"Don't promise the impossible. If you could just refrain from your usual little hints ..."

"Hints? Hints? You do me an injustice there, Edouard."

"Do I?" said Edouard dryly, and accelerated into the city.

A secret. A surprise. Helene loved surprises, and she loved to give presents, especially to Edouard. This present, which was still a secret, and would be a surprise, her wedding present to him, filled her with great excitement. She felt as if she were walking on air. She still felt that— although she had been walking a long way. All the way up Bond Street where she had been shopping; across Oxford Street; through the narrow winding Marylebone Lane; into the High Street, parallel with Harley Street, where Mr. Foxworth still had his consulting rooms; north past the church where Robert Browning had married Elizabeth Barrett, and north again, heading for St. John's Wood, where Anne Kneale now had her studio, across Regents Park.

She could have picked up a taxi at any point along the way, but today she felt she could not bear to be confined in a car: she wanted to walk, she felt borne along on happiness. In just over a week, she would be married to Edouard; she increased her pace as she came into the park; she felt she wanted to dance rather than walk. Such a long time—two years of lawyers, and then more lawyers, two years in which progress had been so terribly slow, not because Lewis was opposing the divorce, but simply because, these days, he never answered letters, and it took weeks for his lawyers to prise so much as a signature from him.

She paused, and then turned off", making a small detour toward the boating lake, and the brightly painted bandstand. In that time, she had sometimes despaired, though Edouard never did. This unlocking, this disentangling of a marriage, of the past—it had seemed to her so sad that it had to be done in this dry and official way, even when both parties were perfectly amicable, and the arrangements to be made—for she wanted nothing from Lewis—were straightforward. Signatures; documents; letters from one lawyer to another—she had hated it all.

She still felt guilty toward Lewis, she still felt that she had played a part in his decline—and the decline had been so sharp, so accelerated, since she left America.

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She stopped near the lake, in the sunlight, and thought of the letters which Lewis had sent her. Long, rambling, confused letters, pages of them, in which he hardly seemed to be aware of what time of year it was, let alone what was happening. She had spoken to him on the telephone, too, several times, in the first year she was in France, and the conversations had been impossible. She could hear the pills in his voice: the bursts of frantic confidence, or—on another occasion—the slow, disoriented groping after a reality which clearly pained him.

This year, she had hardly spoken to him at all, and he had answered none of her letters. Whenever she telephoned him now, either Betsy, or one of the other, ever-changing cast of people who seemed to stay in the house, would answer. And they might make an excuse. Sorry, Lewis is asleep. Lewis is a bit spaced-out just now. Or sometimes they wouldn't even bother to do that: they might just laugh, and say, Lewis? Who's he?

It alarmed her, sometimes. Once, in desperation, she wrote to Thad, asking if he would go to see Lewis, and make sure he was all right. On another occasion, she even wrote to his mother. Thad never answered. Emily Sinclair sent a small frosty note: Lewis's family were perfectly well aware of Lewis's situation. In a few lines, she managed to suggest both that Helene's concern was unnecessary, and that it came too late. Helene had not tried to write again, and when she had told Edouard her worries, he had been firm: "My darhng. Lewis is an adult, not a child. Look, you see, he's answered the last letter from my lawyers now—he's signed the documents. Helene. You can't worry now about trying to prop Lewis up."

He had even shown her Lewis's signature on the legal papers, and Helene had looked at it in silence. He had used the familiar broad-nibbed Mont Blanc pen; the signature he had scrawled, which ended his marriage, was large, flowingly inscribed, the individual letters cramped, the up-and-down strokes exaggerated. The writing she remembered; the person she remembered. She could see all Lewis's paradoxes, the flamboyance and the insecurity, just in those two words. She thought then of those letters he had sent her from Paris, with their wild aflfirmations of love, their boyish optimism, and she felt very sad. She had loved Lewis, she thought, though he could never see that, and she had, in any case, loved him in the wrong way, the way he could never accept, as a mother might love a child.

Protectiveness. She stood still, looking across the lake. Several couples and some children were rowing back and forth in the sunshine. Around her, on the lawns surrounding the little bandstand, people sat in deck chairs, and read, or slept, or simply lay lifting their faces to the sun. Edouard was right, she thought suddenly; he was right—but it was not easy.

She turned away from the bandstand and the water. She began to walk,

DESTINY • 759

more quickly, toward the northern boundary of the park. At once, irre-pressibly, her spirits rose again. She could not be unhappy on such a day; she could not; it was impossible.

They were to be married in the Loire, in a small country town some ten kilometers from the chateau: a civil wedding, of course; as a divorced woman she had no alternative. A quiet marriage, a simple marriage: it was what they both wanted. No fuss. No publicity. Just a very few friends. Christian would be there, of course, Edouard was to ask him today; and Anne Kneale; Madeleine, who would be marrying shortly herself; Cassie, who had a new outfit for the occasion, of which she was inordinately proud; and Cat—who did not comprehend any of the complications attendant on this wedding; Cat, who seemed to have forgotten she ever knew someone called Lewis Sinclair; Cat, aged seven, who adored Edouard, and who regarded this marriage as the happiest, most exciting, and most inevitable thing in the world.

Helene smiled to herself, and quickened her pace. North again toward the leafy streets and quiet backwaters of St. John's Wood. Past the grand and rather vulgar houses of Avenue Road, which always reminded her of Hollywood, and into a network of smaller streets, and leafy gardens. The hlac was in bloom: huge heavy trusses of vanilla-white flowers hung over the sidewalk; she stopped to smell them as she passed.

She loved London now, she thought with a sudden passion. She loved it as she loved Paris, and the village of the Loire, because these places she associated with Edouard, and with their love for each other. They came to London often, and now, when she walked as she did today, she constantly passed places which brought back memories. Here they had driven; there they once discovered a little restaurant; there they once went to a party, and then, very late, when the streets were deserted, just walked together, hand in hand, and talking, taking no particular direction, just letting their footsteps guide them. In so many places—in Paris, when she looked across the Seine to the lie de la Cite; in the Loire, at the neighboring market, perhaps, which they sometimes visited, for they both loved markets; here, by the slopes of Primrose Hill, where they had once walked at night, and stopped at the summit to look across the city; or even in crowded places— Piccadilly Circus, the Bayswater Road, one particular comer in Knights-bridge—all these places were alive with Edouard. These places were their places, and the fact that other men and women, other lovers, before and after them, might pass the same way, and feel the same sense of claim, only strengthened the intensity of her feelings.

She stood quietly, just near the lilac tree: for a moment their love seemed to her very large, a great thing, so powerful it made the city silent. The next it was small but vital, part of a long continuum. Lovers and a

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city; she quickened her pace once more, and as she did so feh a great serenity and contentment: she and Edouard, she felt, were now part of London's past; they were part of the spirit of the place.

Anne Kneale's studio was now in the garden of a gabled, rambling white-painted house, where, it was rumored, Edouard VII once entertained Lily Langtry. Inside, it was very similar to her old Chelsea studio, which she had abandoned promptly when the waves of fashion threatened to engulf it.

"My greengrocer is now a clothes shop," she had said gruffly. "They don't call it a clothes shop, or even a dress shop. They call it a boutique. And I can't buy a cauliflower the length of the King's Road. I'm moving."

She had moved, and taken her ambience with her. In the sitting room of the new house, there were still faded kelim rugs, still two fat red velvet chairs, still a line of pebbles, and a vase of bird's feathers on the mantelpiece. And her studio was every bit as disorderly as the old one had been.

Today, Helene entered it apprehensively, for Anne had been painting a portrait of Cat—the wedding present. The surprise! And she herself was to see it today, for the first time. When she came in, the session was clearly over, and she thought Anne was pleased: she was being extremely truculent, and—just as with Cassie—that was usually a good sign. Cat was sitting perched on the edge of a table, eating an orange with a fine unconcern for the mess she was making. The juice ran down her bare brown arm, and she licked at it, and then gave Helene an orangy kiss.

"Like painting an eel," Anne was saying in her most churlish voice. "I bribed her. I threatened her. None of it the least bit of good. She can't keep still for more than five seconds. I shall never, under any circumstances, paint a child that age again. ..."