Destiny (128 page)

He lifted her face to his, and looked down into her eyes, his gaze growing still and intent.

"Loving you and being with you gives meaning to every moment of each day," he said. "It will always be so. Helene, come back to the house."

They walked slowly across the lawns, and then, just as Helene was about to say, impulsively, that she wished Cat were there, a door burst open, and Cat, unable to bear the suspense any longer, rushed out to greet them, and Cassie, Madeleine, and Christian came out from hiding, too, so that the lawns, quiet and empty a moment before, were suddenly peopled.

"Champagne, champagne," Christian was shouting.

Cat was tugging at Edouard's hand. "There's a surprise for you, there's a surprise for you too. Daddy, come quickly, come quickly. ..."

And she pulled Edouard into the drawing room, where, carefully and artfully hung by Christian, Anne Kneale's portrait of Cat was waiting for his inspection.

Edouard looked at it for a long time, one arm around Cat, one arm around Helene. Cat peeped up at him anxiously, watching the play of emotions on his face—the surprise, the pleasure, the pride, then a gentleness which became almost sad.

Helene, also watching this, understood. But Cat was too young. She pulled at Edouard's sleeve.

"Do you like it. Daddy? Do you?"

"I like it very very much. It makes me very happy."

"But you don't look happy—Daddy, you look sad."

Edouard bent and lifted her in his arms. "That's because I'm older than you, Cat. When grown-ups are most happy, they sometimes feel a little sad, just at the same time. You'll understand when you're older." He hesitated, and glanced at Helene.

"We think of time passing. Cat," Helene said quickly. "That's all."

778 • SALLY BEAUMAN

Cat glanced from one to the other. Edouard kissed her. When she was quite certain that he truly liked the painting, she wriggled free of his embrace, with her characteristic quick impatience. Grown-ups, she thought, could make things so complicated when they were really very simple. She was about to break away, and run out again, when something in the quietness of the room, something in the looks her father and mother exchanged, made her pause. Here was a mystery; an adult mystery. For a second, she felt it touch her, and it made her want to shiver, hke the touch of a shadow after the sun on her skin. She shifted from foot to foot, looking up at them uncertainly.

"Like I feel, sometimes? At the end of a nice day? When it's been so nice you don't want it to end—you don't want to go to bed?"

Edouard smiled. "A little like that, yes."

Cat's face cleared. "Oh, that's all right then. When I feel Uke that, I know it's silly really. Because it will be just as nice tomorrow. . . ."

She smiled at them blithely, eager to reassure them both, and when she saw them smile, she was content. She ran out to the garden, where Christian allowed her to help open the champagne. He poured her a glass, very solemnly—the first champagne she had ever tasted—and afterward. Cat always remembered that evening with a special precision. She would tell herself that it was because of the surprise, or because of the champagne, and because drinking it made her feel grown-up. But she knew that was not truly the case. It was because of the way her parents had looked at each other in that still room.

"Why are grown-ups a little sad when they're most happy, Christian?" she said later, when she and Christian were alone in the garden, and the shadows were lengthening.

Christian could always be relied upon to give an answer, and he gave her one now. He frowned a little, looking toward the roses that grew against the walls, and Cat was not to know that he could not look at them without seeing, and hearing, his mother. "Because they know the best things, even the really good things, never last," he said quietly. "That's all, little Kitten."

"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

DESTINY • 779

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 hked 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 hght. 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 httle 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 Helene, when Helene 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 httle guilty. She tried to think of Lewis, she tried to remember him, but she knew the memories were vague and imprecise. / 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

780 • SALLY BEAUMAN

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.

I his is my fault," Helene said to Edouard that night, with a sudden X 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's isn't true." Edouard gripped her by the arms. "Nothing is that simple, Helene. Nothing."

Helene 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."

Helene'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 Helene cry. Her grief, he knew, would not be like Cat's. Cat was a child, and could not grieve for long. The process, for Helene, 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; Helene 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 anx-

DESTINY • 781

iously, 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 Helene, of course: Helene'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. Helene 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 moumfulness, 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, hstening 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 Helene were present—the overtly reproachful.

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

"Oh, I expect she has, in her way," Helene said. She stopped suddenly on the sidewalk. She stood very still, and then turned to him with a quick impulsiveness.

782 • SALLY BEAUMAN

"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.

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

"It's a boy," Helene said happily. "Edouard, I know it's a boy—I'm quite certain."

She was right. It was a boy. He was bom 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 Helene 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

DESTINY • 783

her mother's chair, and at Lucien, who sat on Helene'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.