Destiny (34 page)

Gregoire's abihty to take a clock to pieces and put it together again, to strip down a car engine, to harness a horse and ride it well, to know and to cherish the names and characteristics of plants and animals—all these abilities meant nothing to Hugo at all.

At first, Hugo tried to be patient. He understood that the boy had had httle formal education until Edouard took him under his wing. He could now read and write in French, and had learned a httle English from Edouard, but that was the extent of his achievements. Enthusiastically, curbing the dislike he felt, Hugo embarked on a plan that would give Gregoire a solid foundation in all the subjects he considered of importance. These did not include anything remotely mechanical, certainly not the workings of the internal combustion engine. Education, to Hugo, was literature, history, and languages first, everything else a very poor second.

Their tutorials did not go well. Gregoire could be stubborn. It did not take Hugo long to decide that the boy was willful: he could learn, he just

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did not want to. He was lazy; he refused to concentrate. To his own horror, Hugo, the Hfelong SociaHst, found himself blaming the boy's peasant stock. Hating himself for that snobbery, he drove the boy harder, refusing to admit to himself that he was failing.

He knew he had failed at so many things, but never as a teacher, never as that. Now here was a boy who listened stolidly while Hugo read to him some of the greatest literature in the world; who yawned over Villon; who stared out the window longingly while Hugo read de Maupassant or Flaubert.

Hugo would not, could not, lower his standards; the boy would not, could not, raise his. They reached an impasse very soon—but neither told Edouard, Hugo out of pride, Gregoire because he could not bear to disappoint him.

Late in the summer of 1955, when the weather was very hot, Edouard left for America on business. He had decided to investigate for himself the question of his mother's land investments in Texas, the holdings her Wall Street advisors seemed so eager she should sell, so eager that Edouard was a little suspicious. He would be away two weeks: when he returned, he told Gregoire, they would go away on holiday, to the sea perhaps, as they had the year before.

Gregoire missed Edouard; his concentration did not improve. The schoolroom at St. Cloud was stiflingly hot day after day; Hugo's temper did not improve either. Once, to his own dismay, he almost hit the child out of frustration, and only just curbed himself in time. Furious, he decided to abandon Latin for the moment and concentrate on French. If the boy would not listen to poetry, then he should be forced at least to understand some grammar.

He set Gregoire pages of text to learn, sequence after sequence of rules. Then he tested him on them.

One afternoon, about a week after Edouard's departure, he noticed the boy was quieter than usual, and slightly flushed. He asked him sarcastically if he felt all right. Gregoire looked down.

"I have a headache," he said eventually.

"I also have a headache." Hugo slapped his textbook down on his desk. "I would have less of a headache if you concentrated. Now. The conjugations of these irregular verbs. We will go over them again. Perhaps if you remember them, you will forget your maladies."

The boy bent his head over the book with a docility unlike him. The

next day it was the same. He volunteered nothing. He sat in sullen silence. He refused to eat his lunch. At two they returned to the schoolroom.

"You are sulking, Gregoire. Would you like to tell me why?"

The boy raised his flushed face. "I don't feel very well."

"You would feel better if you worked. Laziness is enough to make anyone feel ill."

"Truly. My head aches. I would like to lie down."

The little boy lowered his head on his arms, and Hugo gave a sigh of exasperation. He got up, crossed to the boy, and felt his forehead. He felt a httle hot, but the schoolroom was stifling, so it was hardly surprising.

"Gregoire—these devices may have worked with your previous tutor, they will not work with me." Hugo returned to his desk. "If I told you lessons were over for the day and you could go swimming, no doubt a miraculous recovery would take place. I have no intention of doing that. Now, sit up, please, and make an attempt to concentrate. Open your grammar to page fourteen."

Slowly the boy did as he was told.

By half-past three, when their lessons were normally over, Hugo felt he was getting into his stride. The boy was quiet; he appeared to be listening; certainly he wasn't staring out the window for once. Hugo glanced at his watch and decided to press on for another half hour.

At five minutes to four, Gregoire went mto convulsions. It happened very suddenly, and without warning. Suddenly Hugo heard a harsh sibilant inhalation of breath. He looked up in alarm. The boy's head had arched back; his eyes had rolled up; one arm and one leg jerked, then his whole body. He fell off" his chair and onto the floor. Hugo had no idea what to do. Frantically he rang for the servants. He fetched water and splashed it over the twitching boy. He loosened his collar, attempted to put a ruler between his teeth, and failed. Just after four, the convulsion stopped.

An ambulance was called. Gregoire had a second convulsion on the way to the hospital. The top pediatrician in Paris was summoned from his home in the suburbs. He informed a white-faced Hugo that the boy almost certainly had meningitis. They would perform a lumbar puncture to make sure. And after that . . .

"Then what? Then what?" Hugo was distraught.

"Then you pray. Monsieur. I will do the best I can, naturally. If he had been admitted sooner, I should have been more optimistic. That is all I can say."

Hugo first telephoned the de Chavigny offices, and told them to contact Edouard immediately; then, for the first time in many years, he prayed. Edouard was contacted in the middle of a meeting at six-fifteen Eastern Standard Tune. He left immediately for the airport and chartered a jet.

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Gregoire died the next day, in the early morning, two hours before Edouard reached the hospital.

He took the boy's small still limp body in his arms, and wept with a passion of which his business associates would not have believed him capable.

Three months later, Hugo was drowned in a boating accident; there were rumors of suicide, which were hushed up. He left Edouard his h-brary, and when Edouard heard this, he angrily sent the whole collection to auction. Gregoire was buried in the de Chavigny chapel, to the fury of Louise and the indifference of Jean-Paul, and Edouard tried to begin to rebuild his life.

It was from that time, his friends judged, that he became a changed man. They had always respected Edouard de Chavigny. Now they began to fear him.

In the early fifties, Edouard had commissioned Emil Lassalle, pupil of Le Corbusier, and the leading Modernist architect in France, to design the new administrative headquarters for the de Chavigny parent company in Paris. By late 1955, the tall black glass tower Lassalle designed was completed; it was the first building of its kind in Paris, the subject of much controversy and subsequent imitation, to become a landmark in the commercial sector.

In the winter of that year, Edouard arrived there punctually at nine, as he always did. As always, he was driven from St. Cloud in his black Rolls-Royce Phantom; as always, when his driver held back the door, and he climbed out, he looked up at Lassalle's building, that tall dark tower, and then passed inside. He was not looking forward to the events that he knew lay ahead of him that morning, but he dismissed all such thoughts from his mind: pleasant and unpleasant, most tasks were equal to him now: he viewed them with the same cold dispassion—so many tasks in each day, so many days in each week, so many weeks in each year. He stepped into his private elevator and pressed the button for the eighteenth floor.

In his office on the twelfth floor of the same building, Gerard Gravellier, head of the archive department of de Chavigny, was standing at the window. He had watched the Rolls-Royce pull up, as he did most mornings. He had watched the tall black-suited figure pass quickly inside. Once Edouard was out of sight, he turned away from the window thoughtfully, brushing a few flecks of dandruff" absentmindedly from the shoulders of his suit. The suit had been tailored for him in London at a cost of some one hundred and fifty guineas—not by Edouard de Chavigny's own tailors.

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Gieves of Savile Row, but by another man who could do a cheaper, and passable, imitation.

Gravellier felt nervous, so nervous he'd been unable to eat breakfast. But now he tried to calm himself: there was no reason for nerves, he told himself He knew the reason for this meeting. It was to discuss the new storage and filing systems to be used for the archive of de Chavigny designs, which had been replanned from scratch at Edouard de Chavigny's insistence, and which would become fully operational that week, when the archive was finally moved to its new headquarters. The new system involved some staffing reductions, voluntary retirements; it was probably that which Edouard de Chavigny wanted to discuss, or some details of the system. Edouard de Chavigny's eye for detail was well known; no aspect, however small, connected with the running of his companies escaped his notice. The remembrance of that brought the nervousness back. Gerard Gravellier was beginning to sweat.

When the buzzer went off" on his new chrome and ash desk, he jumped. Calm down, he said to himself He began to recite a litany of his own successes to himself as he passed down the quiet, thickly carpeted corridors to the executive elevator that went up to the eighteenth floor: a new apartment in the smart suburb of Beausejour; a smaller apartment, in Montpamasse, with a most accommodating young mistress; two cars, one of the largest and latest registration Citroen Familiale; a generous expense account, which was not queried too closely—he hoped was not queried too closely. He had a degree in fine arts from the Sorbonne; he had further training from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Beaux Arts in Paris; he knew more about the history of the design of jewelry in general, and of the de Chavigny company in particular, than anyone else except the man he was going to see now. He sighed and mopped his brow. He was indispensable. He hoped.

It was his first visit to Edouard de Chavigny's oflBces in the penthouse suite on the eighteenth floor. When he stepped out of the high-speed elevator, his eyes widened. The break with tradition was complete. The outer reception area was vast, an ocean of pale beige and white, glass and chrome. Three huge natural leather couches surrounded a Corbusier table; two extremely beautiful receptionists sat at Corbusier desks. They both wore plain silk blouses, pearls, and Hermes scarves knotted loosely around their throats. Gerard Gravellier looked at them sideways. Both were highly desirable, the one on the left especially; both looked as if they wouldn't get on their backs for anyone less than Edouard de Chavigny himself; both had the kind of accent that made his toes curl, and wish he'd opted for the more costly tailor. Bon genre. It was a type he detested.

"You'll have to wait just a little while, Monsieur Gravellier," one had

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said. No apology; no explanation; no offer of coffee; nothing. He sat there sweating for forty-five minutes.

Then the inner office, even more discreetly sumptuous, and two more smooth bitches, secretaries this time, both looking as if they had starch in their well-bred pants. Jesus! Then the inner sanctum; precisely one hour after he'd first been called; he was sure it was deliberate.

He went in through the plain mahogany door, and stopped. The office was very large and startlingly austere. He had expected antiques, flowers, the portraits of past Barons de Chavigny, which had always hung in the old Baron's offices. There were none. The walls were hung with abstracts; his jaw dropped slightly as he took them in: one Picasso, from his Cubist period; two superb Braques; an early Kandinsky; a Mondrian; one of Rothko's red series; a vast and tormented Jackson Pollock. On the black bookcase behind the desk were three exquisite bronzes: a Brancusi, a Henry Moore, a Giacometti. He swallowed. It was a long walk to the chair in front of the desk.

He made it hesitantly. Edouard de Chavigny looked up. Gravellier looked at him curiously. He was thirty now, he knew, but he looked slightly older. Tall, well over six feet, with wide shoulders, and the same magnetic good looks as his father. Tanned skin, strong features; that striking combination of very black hair and dark blue eyes. Gravellier felt as if the eyes looked straight into his head and out the other side. He glanced enviously at the suit: plain black, with a vest, four buttons at the cuff, whereas his had only three. He swore silently to himself. The difference between a two-hundred-guinea suit and a five-hundred-guinea one was only too obvious at close hand. A white shirt; a black knitted silk tie. The man looked as if he were in mourning.

"Do sit down."

Gravellier sat. The huge black desk was flanked by a complicated system of telephones and intercoms; on the top of it was one platinum de Chavigny pen and one plain white folder. Nothing else—and this man knew what was happening in Rome, Tokyo, or Johannesburg about two months before the men on the spot found out about it. How did he do it? He eased his collar away from his neck. There was silence. He knew these silences, they were famous. They were designed to unnerve you, to make you start jabbering indiscreetly. He swallowed, and started jabbering.

"I am filled with admiration for the new headquarters, Monsieur de Chavigny. I just wanted to say that. It will make a great difference to our —er—corporate image, I feel sure. To have the privilege of working in such modem, such advanced offices. Already I hear that—"

"I did not call you here to discuss the offices."

Gravellier coughed. The voice was incisive, and cold, and he knew he

ought to relax, to keep calm, above all to shut up, but somehow he couldn't.