Destiny (54 page)

There was a silence. Brichot looked up at the ceiling—one of those famous de Chavigny silences! De Belfort continued to look straight in front of him, his pale eyes fixed on a point somewhere to the side of Edouard's head.

"And have those rechecks been completed?" Edouard asked finally in a polite voice which made Brichot quake.

"Oh, yes." De Belfort's tone was almost casual. "They were completed this morning. All the problems have been ironed out. I gave the final authorization myself. An hour ago, actually. I would have informed you. But unfortunately you were out at lunch."

The pale eyes shifted for a second to Edouard's face. The reference to lunch had sounded reproachful. Brichot, detecting the criticism, gave a nervous sniff". He took his handkerchief out of his pocket, then put it back again.

"Good." Edouard stood up. "Then I need keep you no longer. Perhaps, Philippe"—he turned to de Belfort—"on another occasion, if you have doubts of this kind, you would come to me direct?"

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"But of course. It was just that I was reluctant to interrupt your vacation. ..."

He made his way to the door at a dignified pace. Brichot hung back, and then scuttled after him.

Edouard watched them go thoughtfully. Brichot was harmless. A timid man, close to retirement, who would be rewarded for a lifetime's work with a seat on the board—a backseat. But de Belfort was a different matter. Edouard was certain that de Belfort disliked him as much as he dis-hked de Belfort. A man who was an asset, and a man who was also, possibly, a threat. Edouard frowned and returned to his work.

Later, when he was just congratulating himself that everything had been tied up, and he could leave, he received a telephone call from his mother. He picked up the receiver resignedly. Louise launched straight into the attack.

Did she always have to hear from chance acquaintances that Edouard was in Paris? Did he never consider that weeks had gone by, and she had not seen him? That she was no longer young? That her doctors were quite concerned?

She went on in this vein for some while. Eventually, Edouard interrupted her: "Very well, Maman. I'll be with you shortly. But I can't stay long."

Louise's voice at once purred with pleasure. Edouard hung up. He knew the real reason for the summons, and he wondered how long Louise would take to come to the point.

She took half an hour. In that time, reclining on a chaise longue, pressing her hand to her brow but looking otherwise radiant, she told him about the failings of her servants, and of her previous doctor. She discussed her symptoms, real and imaginary, with zest. Most of her ailments were pure invention, and their quickest cure was usually a new lover. But she had fewer lovers now, and longer gaps between them. She must be enduring such a gap now, Edouard thought, shocked a little by his own detachment.

His mind drifted away to the Loire and to Helene. Louise gave him a gallant smile.

"But enough of my problems, my darling. I must say you're looking marvelously well. It must be all the fresh air, and the riding. . . . You should take a holiday more often. It obviously agrees with you."

"Thank you, Maman," Edouard said, and waited.

"Of course, I've been thinking about you a great deal, Edouard." She

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leaned forward elegantly, her dress falling in soft folds. "Shall I tell you what I thought? You won't be cross? I thought, darling Edouard, that it's really time you considered marrying again."

She let the sentence float away in the air. Edouard regarded her equably.

"Have you, Maman? How curious. I was thinking just the same thing myself."

"Were you, darling?" Louise's perfectly plucked eyebrows rose slightly. She smiled ingenuously. Edouard wondered how accurate the gossip was, and precisely how much of it Louise had heard. "I'm so glad. After all, one can't mourn forever—even I realized that eventually, after poor Xavi died. One must look to the future. One has a life to hve, after all. One has responsibilities. ..."

She gave a suitably vague gesture of the hand, and then stood up. "Of course, in your case, it's not a simple matter. I do understand that. You deserve someone so very special—and I just wondered, I had been thinking, when you return from the Loire, darhng Edouard . . . perhaps if I held a little party. It seems such an age since I had a party. Nothing too large—but there were several charming people I thought I might invite. The youngest Cavendish girl, you remember her, Edouard? And Sylvie de Castallane. Or Monique ... no perhaps not Monique. Plenty of money, of course, but not quite . . . No. And then there're some charming Americans. Gloria Stanhope—you remember? I stayed at their place on Long Island last year? The loveliest girl, and—"

"Maman. Forgive me." Edouard stood up. "I should hate for you to waste your time."

"Waste my time?" Louise's eyes widened. "Edouard, how can you think such a thing?" She gave a Uttle smile. "All right, I'm matchmaking, just a bit. But mothers do that, darling, they enjoy it. You mustn't mind. And I do so want to be sure you will be happy, darling, that you find someone suitable, because I'd hate for you to be hurt. You can be so unpredictable, Edouard—even rash, occasionally. Now, don't frown, you know it's true. . . ."

"Maman." Edouard cut her short. He looked at Louise, and Louise's gaze dropped. "Shall we stop this charade? You've been listening to Paris gossip. You've been listening to Ghislaine Belmont-Laon, who—God knows—has no idea what she's talking about. And now you're curious. It's why you invited me here. Might it not be easier just to say so?"

Louise glanced up at him and smiled. She was not in the least discomposed; he should have remembered, Edouard thought grimly, that she had a ruthless conviction in the power of her own charm. Now she gave him a rueful, almost flirtatious look.

"Very well. How clever you are, Edouard. I admit it. People have been

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talking a bit. And I was a little concerned. Well, a diamond was mentioned —she was wearing it when you took her to Givenchy. And Hermes. And then I heard she was with you in the Loire—you never take anyone there. So, naturally, I did begin to wonder. She's very young, I hear, and EngUsh, and no one seems to have the least idea who she is, and of course, Edouard, I know you have affairs, it would hardly be natural if you didn't, so perhaps it's just that, because it did not sound as if she were quite—"

"Her name is Helen Hartland." Edouard moved to the door. "And it isn't simply an aflfair, brief or otherwise. Beyond that, I think my private life is no concern of yours. ..."

His face was stony. Louise took a step after him and called his name, but the door had already closed.

In the Loire, the day was hot, and the hours without Edouard seemed to take an eternity to pass.

In the morning, after Edouard left, Heldne walked for a while through the formal gardens of the chateau, and across the park to the water meadows. She had ridden this way often with Edouard these past weeks; they had stopped their horses just here, on this bluff of land.

She sat there for a while, in the cool blue shade of the chestnut trees, looking out across the wide expanse of the Loire. It curved away into the distance, a calm silver, without ripples, so still it seemed not to move. A dragonfly hovered over the water, and she watched the sun catch the rainbow of its wings: she thought of the pool under the cottonwoods, and, picking up a small handful of stones, and tossing them into the water, she watched their circles widen, and thought of Billy.

She had tried to think of him these past weeks—when she was in Paris, when she first came here with Edouard. She had an odd superstitious sense that she ought to think of him, that she ought not to let one day pass without remembering him, and the things he had done, and the things he had said. If she did not think of him, it made his death so very final, as if his whole existence had been erased.

But she did not always think of him. Sometimes, she was aware, a day would go past—two days, sometimes three, and in her happiness, in her absorption with Edouard, Billy would be forgotten.

Now, without any conscious prompting on her part, he came back to her very vividly: she saw him as a child; she saw him as a young man. She could see the resignation in his eyes, the sad acceptance that no matter what she had done, she did not love him as he loved her.

She stood up quickly. She ought to have mourned him better, she

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thought with a sudden sense of shame; she owed him that, at the very least. If she had cared for him, if his death had really mattered to her, should she have come here at all?

It's wrong to be so happy, she told herself, as she had that day alone in Paris. She turned back toward the chateau, and at once, by some perverse mechanism of the mind, all the happiness she had felt began to drain away; she looked around her with new eyes.

She had walked farther than she intended, in any case; crossing the park there was very little shade, and the sun, now almost vertical above her, made her head ache. She stopped once or twice, shading her eyes and feeling an unusual lethargy come over her.

In the distance, the chateau shimmered in the heat. Light made its pale stone gleam; it glinted from the steep slate roofs; it reflected back at her from the turrets, from the great banks of windows. Alone, without Edouard, to whom it was simply one of several childhood homes, the house seemed curiously unreal, a mirage, or an illustration on a picture postcard: not a place where she could really be living, or had any right to live; not a place where a girl who grew up on the wrong side of the tracks could ever really belong. She had come to love this house, and yet today, the closer she walked to it, the more distant it seemed.

Once indoors, she was served luncheon, formally, exactly as they were served it when Edouard was there. One place at one end of a long shining table. Ranked silver knives and forks; ranked Baccarat glasses. The servant will stand on my left, Mother, and the napkin will be on my lap. . . . And if there is a finger bowl, the tips of the fingers only, darling, remember — you're not washing your hands!

She bent her head, shut her eyes, and then opened them again. The room was cool, and quiet, but she felt hot, and without any appetite for the dehcious food. She pushed it to one side; its taste was cloying. She felt a sudden quick rush of nausea, and stood up. For a second, the room blurred, then steadied. She saw the servant look at her, his face concerned; he took a step forward, and Helene looked at him in embarrassment.

She didn't know how to dismiss him; she didn't know what to say in English, let alone French; she stared at him for a moment in an agony of uncertainty, trying frantically to remember how Edouard behaved. She couldn't think; she couldn't recall; when she was with him, he blinded her to all else.

The servant saved her. Seeing the color come back into her face, he gave a half bow, and opened the door for her. Helene walked past, stiffly and self-consciously: did he despise her, this polite efficient well-trained man? Did they all despise her, did they gossip about her in the servants' hall, did they see her as an intruder? That was how she felt, she realized, as, thank-

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fully, she reached the privacy of her rooms: an intruder, a stranger, a woman who had no place here.

The rooms Edouard had given her adjoined his, and looked out across the park. They had once belonged to, and had been furnished for, one of his ancestors, Adeline de Chavigny, a great beauty of the court at Versailles. Both she and her husband had gone to the guillotine a few days after their king.

Helene wandered from the boudoir to the bedroom, gently touching the things that had once belonged to Adeline. The soft gray silk curtains on the four-poster; the chair covered in needlework—petitpoint, sewed by Adeline herself; the fan she had once held; the Aubusson carpet woven to her choice of design; the backgammon table whose ivory scorecard still bore her name, and beneath it the words Le Roi.

She had died bravely, Edouard said. Helene stopped in front of the gray marble chimney piece, and looked at the portrait of Adeline that hung above it. Coolly beautiful, she stood in the park of the chateau, flanked on one side by the bitch setter given her by Louis XVI, and on the other by her eldest son, who escaped the guillotine and grew up to become one of Napoleon's great generals. The old order and the new: Adeline stood between the two, gazing out of the frame, an image of serenity. She was smiling, beautifully and frostily. The smile made Helene feel like a usurper; she turned away.

She closed the shutters and adjusted the louvres so the afternoon light slanted into the room and striped the walls and floor. Then she lay down on the bed and stared at the portrait. Adeline and her pet dog; Adeline and her son. Perhaps it was easier to die bravely, she thought sleepily, if you knew your son would survive you, if you had sent him away to safety, as Adeline had done in sending her son to England.

She closed her eyes. The room felt airless and hot, and her head ached. Edouard's father had died bravely too, Edouard had told her. In front of a German firing squad, because of his work with the Resistance. He had looked so like Edouard in the photograph Edouard had shown her, and it was because of his father that Edouard cared so much about his work. Xavier de Chavigny and his son; Adeline de Chavigny and her son. The names moved dreamily through her mind; she felt herself grasp them, and then felt them eddy away. Generation after generation; Edouard's family had lived in this part of the Loire for centuries, and it was only now, she thought, that she was beginning to understand what that must mean for someone like Edouard. Such continuity: it made death quite a small thing, hke a baton-change in a relay race. My father is dead, Edouard had said, but in his work here he lives on. . . .He had gestured up at the house across the gardens and the park, toward the Loire in the distance. . . .

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She had not wanted to sleep, but sleep stole upon her, peacefully at first, so she felt as if she floated on water. Past the river bank, under the branches of the chestnut trees, drifting toward the cottonwoods, where she had expected to find Edouard, and then saw that it was Billy who was waiting for her. Billy smiled and helped her climb the bank; she lay down beside him, and because she knew he was going to die very soon it was terribly important that this be right. It was her last present to BiUy, the last present anyone would ever give him. She let her hands rest in the cool hollow beneath his shoulder-blades, and she told him that it was the right time, and the right place and the right thing, and Billy seemed to understand; she could see the comprehension clear in his eyes, and it was only when she began to stroke his back that she realized something was wrong. His skin felt so very cold, and when she looked down at his arm, she could see the color seeping out of it, and the skin growing pale.