Destiny (80 page)

But Lewis was obdurate, and he could back up his stand with such sweetly reasonable arguments that, in the end, Helene had to give in. This, after all, was a publicity tour. It was no place for a newborn infant. Heldne had a tight schedule of interviews, photographic sessions, and public appearances: it was she who was being launched, Lewis argued, not just the film. This, he was aware, was Thad's argument. He used it now without a qualm. He reiterated the fact that they would be away only three weeks, that Helene could telephone every morning and every evening, that the baby's nurse was highly experienced—far more experienced than Helene,

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he added, and that she had the backup of Anne Kneale. Lewis personally thought that Anne Kneale was an interfering dyke, and in his more paranoid moments felt that her kindness to Helene disguised a sexual attraction. But she was useful to him now as an argument, so Lewis suppressed these feelings. Madeleine and Anne Kneale could cope, he said firmly.

"Now that you're a mother, darling," he said, clinching his argument, "you mustn't forget that you're also my wife. And an actress," he added, but that was an afterthought. Lewis was not really thinking about the premiere of Night Game, or the press interest in Helene, which the publicity man Thad had hired was describing as phenomenal. He was thinking about the suite at the Plaza-Athenee; about its little balcony, where he and Helene would eat breakfast together in the spring sun; about the wide, wide double bed, in which, uninterrupted by Cat's plaintive cries, Lewis intended to make love to Helene again and again.

Recaptured joys: Lewis ushered Helene out to the hired limousine that would drive them to the airport. He felt nothing but optimism. Helene hngered. Madeleine stood in the doorway of the little cottage holding the baby; Anne Kneale stood behind her, looking up at the sky; Helene seemed unable to drag herself away. She bent over the baby. She kissed her. She embarked on a whole new series of instructions to Madeleine, all of which she had been over a thousand times before. Lewis, already in the car, tapped his fingers on his knees, looked at his watch. It was nine a.m. He leaned out.

"Helene. We must hurry. We'll miss the flight at this rate."

Helene finally tore herself away. She climbed into the back of the car, her cheeks pink. She said nothing.

As the car moved off, Lewis took her hand and pressed it between his own. By the time they were halfway to Heathrow, Lewis felt quite benevolent toward Cat. Left behind, in retrospect, she seemed to him sweet. He pressed Helene's hand, drew it down against his thigh, and then to his groin. "It will be like a honeymoon," he said.

Back at the cottage, as the car bearing Helene and Lewis rounded the comer and disappeared from sight, Anne Kneale and the nurse, Madeleine, looked at each other. Anne Kneale looked at her watch, and then down at the baby, who was sleeping. They paused for a moment, then turned and went back inside.

Madeleine fed the baby for a little while, then changed her, and laid her carefully in her crib. She came back downstairs on tiptoe.

Anne was sitting in front of the fire, staring into the flames thoughtfully.

494 • SALLY BEAUMAN

She was smoking a cigarette. The two looked at each other, and waited. Five minutes passed. Ten. Fifteen. There was still silence.

Madeleine, bom in the Landes region of France, trained at the exclusive Norland College in England, and a fully qualified nursery nurse for the past four years, three of them with Anne Kneale's sister, who had given her the excellent reference, sighed and sat down. She looked at Anne, and gave a httle shrug.

"Incroyable. It's as if she knew.'^

Anne stubbed out her cigarette, and said nothing. After a while, she got up, went to the studio, and fetched the portrait of Helene which she had finished some weeks before. She looked at it critically, aware that it was not quite as she had wanted it to be. There were things she had seen in that beautiful face, and which she had wanted to capture; some of them had eluded her. She looked at the picture irritably, and then, carefully and methodically, she began to pack it up. It gave her something to do. It kept her conscience at bay. She liked Helene, and she was not at all happy with this arrangement.

At ten o'clock, Madeleine, who was also uneasy, went out to the little kitchen to make coffee. At ten-thirty, precisely on schedule, the telephone rang. The two women jumped, and then looked at each other. Slowly, Anne tied the last knot on her packaging, and turned to pick up the receiver.

The voice of her old friend Christian Glendinning, whom she had known since childhood, informed her that Lewis Sinclair and Helene had boarded their plane ten minutes ago. It had just taken off for Paris.

"Stop panicking," Christian said calmly as Anne began to interrupt. "I'm phoning Eaton Square now. He'll be with you in fifteen minutes. Less, probably."

Ten minutes later, a black Rolls-Royce pulled up outside the door. Anne went to open it; Madeleine looked out the window. She saw the familiar figure, in a dark suit, step out, and cross the sidewalk. She heard Anne's greeting, then the door from the hall opened.

Madeleine blushed crimson. For this man, who had been so good to her, so good to her sister, and so good to her little nephew, Gregoire, Madeleine would have walked through fire. As she saw him, she gave an awkward half bob.

"Madeleine."

"Monsieur le Baron ..."

There was no need for him to ask the question; both women could read it in his eyes, and in the strain of his features. Anne held back the door.

"She's upstairs. The room on the right. She's sleeping." Edouard touched her arm as he passed.

DESTINY • 495

"It's all right, Anne. It won't take long, I promise you." They heard his feet on the stairs, heard him hesitate on the landing. A door opened, there was a brief pause, then it shut.

Madeleine, who had a romantic nature beneath her dark square fierce little face, sighed, and sat down. Anne Kneale, who was not a romantic, but who had been shaken by Edouard's expression, also sat down, bolt upright, counting the minutes, the time it took to sacrifice a new set of loyalties for others that went back a long way. She thought of the first time she had met Edouard, when he was a boy of sixteen—his sixteenth birthday, and that appalling trip Jean-Paul had organized to the theater. She had done this for Isobel, she told herself defensively; for Isobel, whom she had loved, and for Edouard, whom she had always liked, though she was aware she did not understand him. Men were such masochists, she thought. Why seek pain? She shrugged, and lit another cigarette nervously.

Upstairs, Edouard stood very still, looking down at the crib. The baby was awake; she lay there, quite silently, waving her fist before her eyes, and looking up at him. Edouard stared down into a tiny replica of his own face. It owed the delicacy of its features, the golden pallor of its skin, to Helene, but the hair was as dark as his own, as dark as his father's had been, and the eyes, that remarkable and unusual shade of dark blue, fringed by black lashes, were de Chavigny eyes. The baby blinked, as if to emphasize the point, and Edouard bent forward. He had so httle time.

He had rarely held a baby, and to lift one from a crib made him nervous. His hands shook as he disentangled the little body from the covers that swaddled it, and slipped his hand beneath head and neck to support it. He thought the baby might cry out, but she was quite silent, regarding him still with the myopic, slightly drunken gaze of all newborn babies. Edouard lifted her. Her tininess, her lightness, broke his heart.

He looked down into the baby's face, then lifted the tiny body higher, and cradled it against his shoulder. The cap of downy hair brushed his cheek silkily. He could smell the sweet warm milky scent of a very young baby's skin. The baby's head lolled a little; a small burp erupted, which seemed to please her. Edouard patted her back, and the baby swung her little fist, batting it against his lips.

Her mouth made small greedy seeking movements, then opened in a wide pink yawn. A tiny pink tongue, like a kitten's. Edouard lifted his hand, crooked his finger, and let the baby find his knuckle. She sucked on it hard, with an astonishing strength; then, quite suddenly, she wailed. A hiccuping mysterious distress: the tiny face contorted, reddened. Edouard, in response to an instinct he had not known he possessed, pressed her soothingly against his shoulder. The wailing stopped.

When Edouard was quite certain she was calm again, he lowered her

496 • SALLY BEAUMAN

gently. He held her in front of him, her body resting easily across the width of his two hands. He looked down into her face, and the baby regarded him with solemnity.

"One day," Edouard said to the baby, to his baby. "One day, I shall come back for you. I promise."

He bent forward and laid her back in her crib, then drew the covers around her warmly.

He stood looking down at her a moment longer, then, knowing that if he hngered he would find it impossible to leave, he turned abruptly, and went down the stairs. The door to the other bedroom was open; the brass rail of its wide double bed was visible. From it, Edouard averted his eyes.

He said good-bye to the two women quickly; Anne Kneale handed him the portrait he had asked her to paint.

He did not open the parcel until later that day, when he was sure he could be alone, and he looked at it, in silence, for a long time.

Later the same day, he had dinner with Christian, who managed to refrain from questions for the duration of the meal, but who, afterward, found it impossible.

"So—what will you do?" he said at last, having fortified himself with a large whisky before he risked the question. Edouard, whose manner throughout the meal had been perfectly normal, looked genuinely surprised at the question.

"Do? I shall wait, of course."

"Wait? But how long?" Christian burst out. Christian loathed waiting.

"For as long as it takes," Edouard replied. Christian sighed. He wanted to plot, to plan, to coerce Edouard into some immediate and dramatic course of action. He knew it was useless. Edouard was well schooled in waiting; his patience always brought results. A thousand wonderfully melodramatic plans surged through Christian's fertile mind in the space of a few seconds. But before he could speak, Edouard—as he had anticipated —discreetly but firmly changed the subject.

EDOUARD

PARIS—ST. TROPEZ, 1962

^ ^ 1 ancer," Philippe de Belfort said. He paused, accepted the glass I of whisky Edouard held out to him, and composed his features V^ solemnly. He shook his head.

"A terrible thing. Six months ago—in the best of health. Looking forward to retirement—he'd made some very clever investments, or so I hear. We had luncheon together—he had oysters, I remember it well. Couldn't have looked fitter. On top of the world. I said to him—Brichot, you're a lucky man. Out of the rat race. What are you going to do with all this leisure of yours? And you know what he said? He said—PhiUppe, I'm going to spend money. All these years I've been accumulating it, and now I'm going to spend it. I'm going to hve like there's no tomorrow."

The faintest gleam of malice appeared in de Belfort's even features. It was quickly repressed.

"And of course, he had no tomorrow. Well, none to speak of, anyway. Six months later—gone. Terrible. Absolutely terrible. Poor Brichot. Not that I was ever that close to him, you understand—but still, it makes one think, doesn't it? What a very unpredictable world we Uve in. Oh, yes. Sunt lacrimae rerum —I thought of that when I heard the news. The tears of life —oh, yes. Not that poor Brichot was particularly interested in poetry."

"The tears of things, " Edouard murmured.

De Belfort looked up. "What?"

"Rerum. Things rather than life. Virgil uses a loose term deliberately perhaps. . . ."

An expression of irritation passed across de Belfort's face. He repressed that too.

"Of course. I was forgetting . . . the classics were never my strong point. ..." There was a short silence. De Belfort gave a weighty sigh.

"It's his wife I feel sorry for. Having to carry on alone. They were very close, I beUeve. Still, still . . . You went to the funeral, of course?"

500 • SALLY BEAUMAN

"Yes. I was there."

"I would have gone, naturally." De Belfort shifted slightly in his seat. "Unfortunately, circumstances prevented—well, as you know, I was very tied up. The negotiations in London were at a very dehcate stage. Very delicate. I didn't like to risk jeopardizing them. . . ."

"But of course," Edouard said politely.

He waited. It was late afternoon, approaching six; they were seated at the far end of Edouard's office, where he held informal meetings, and where a group of austere black leather chairs were grouped around an equally austere glass and chrome table. Beyond them hung the Jackson Pollock; de Belfort looked at it occasionally, his eyes narrowed. He looked as if he might be calculating how much it was worth per square inch.

Edouard, who had a further two hours' work ahead of him, a dinner with Christian, and—after that—a reception at his mother's house to celebrate her birthday, felt impatient. De Belfort had requested this meeting, and he had not come here to lament the loss of Brichot, Edouard was sure of that. There would be another reason, but de Belfort was never direct. He always scuttled toward his main objective sideways, Uke a crab.

Now he was bending forward over the tabletop, turning his glass back and forth in a ruminative fashion. He was possibly thinking about his erstwhile ally, Brichot; possibly examining his own well-groomed reflection, Edouard was not sure. All he knew was that de Belfort now contrived these informal meetings on every possible occasion. Their pretext was always professional, though de Belfort also clearly hoped to establish a relationship of some kind, and to disarm. But Edouard suspected sometimes that de Belfort sought them for another reason. Not just because he wished advancement, that was too obvious, but because, in some strange way, de Belfort needed them. He needed to be near that which he loathed. . . .