Destiny (97 page)

It wasn't evidence of a lover, but it was hke a lover. It was a whole area of her life which she had shut off from him, kept secret.

Why, she had even bought property in the South of France, through that terrible shark they'd met at Cannes, Nerval. And now she was writing to Gould informing him she wished to sell it. There was other land she wanted to buy, in Alabama.

Lewis slammed the last of the files back, and hit the drawer back into place. He locked the cabinets, put the key back into his pocket, and drained the last of his whiskey in one gulp. He hated Helene at that moment. He thought of the time when they were in London, of how he had laughingly explained to her some of the most obvious aspects of investment. How gentle he had felt then, and how sweetly and quietly she had listened to him.

And now, for years, all this had been going on. And she had virtually never mentioned it. If she had such secrets, Lewis thought in a sudden agony of despair, what others were there, and where did she hide those?

Helene. Helene. Helene. Her name was beating away in his mind, and he looked around the room wildly as if somewhere, on the shelves, on the walls, he would see some thing, some httle clue, which would give his wife back to him, which would help him understand.

It was at that moment that the telephone rang. It made Lewis jump. He

594 • SALLY BEAUMAN

Stood Staring at it blankly for a moment—the telephone on Helene's desk, the one that was her private hne. He reached across and snatched it up. He knew what he was expecting to hear: a man's voice, the lover's voice, the voice that would make everything clear.

Lewis stared at the receiver with hatred; then he said, in a firm voice, "This is Lewis Sinclair."

There was a little silence. Lewis tensed. If the man hung up now, he thought, if the bastard just hung up ... He heard a woman's voice: soft, breathy, rather like the voice of a child.

"Oh, Mr. Sinclair," it said. "You won't remember me—though we did meet once, at Cannes. This is Stephani Sandrelli. I've just been filming with your wife, and she asked me to give you a call. When I got back to Los Angeles. She thought you might like to hear how things were going, how she is. ..." The voice gave a little giggle. "She told me to check up on you, to tell you the truth. Make sure you were okay. Make sure you were missing her, I guess."

Lewis frowned. Even in his present state, this did not sound convincing; it was very unlike Helene.

"I'm sorry. What did you say your name was?"

"Stephani. Stephani Sandrelli ..."

And then he saw her; walking across the gardens of the Hotel du Cap, a blaze of platinum-blond hair, a figure that burst out of its white dress. He hesitated only a moment. He thought: two years, and then he said easily, his old manner coming back to him quite efibrtlessly, "Well, let's see. I think we should meet, don't you? I don't suppose you'd be free for dinner tonight?"

"Actually, I would," said the httle breathy voice. And that was how it began.

The Runaways was completed: Helene flew to New York and checked into the Plaza.

She was given, as always, a suite overlooking Central Park. Inside, the air-conditioning made the room chilly; outside, the city sweltered. The leaves of the trees in the park were the heavy dull green of midsummer; across the street the carriage horses that took tourists for rides shifted and sweated in the heat. Late July: New York was as hot and as humid today as Alabama. Helene leaned against the window; across the city sirens wailed.

She was accustomed to hotel rooms, so accustomed that she hardly saw them anymore. Sometimes she felt as if she had no home, and that even the

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house in Los Angeles was just another impermanent base. A hfe of stopovers; she had been a traveler for five years.

Now she took in the details of this suite without interest. Stiff heavy silk brocade draperies at the windows, hung in elaborate loops and swags. On the bed, crisp white sheets, which crackled. Static in the air, so that every metal object touched gave her a shock. A series of pictures on the walls, placed at carefully calculated intervals—tasteful pictures, m that they were guaranteed to offend almost no one.

She unpacked methodically, hanging the expensive clothes in the closets with habitual care. A Valentino dress; shoes from Rossetti; the Saint Laurent suit she would wear, the following morning, for the meeting in James Gould's oflEices. You 've sold the place at Grasse? I see. Then we'd better meet to discuss this new proposal Gould had sounded irritable; it might not be an easy meeting.

She thought of her first meeting with Gould, in the autumn of 1960, and the memory made her smile.

She and Lewis had been staying at the Pierre; it had been hot, a day like this one, and Lewis said, "Darling. He's a very busy man. You mustn't be offended if you're in and out in ten minutes. ..." She had smiled, and said nothing. She knew exactly what she was going to do. She had had months to think about this meeting, she had planned, scripted, and rehearsed it in her mind. It was very important to her: the first step on the road back to Alabama and Ned Calvert. She had no intention of being in and out in ten minutes, and for months she had been trying to think what she could do, what she could say. How did you make someone hke James Gould III sit up and take notice, when you had just thirty thousand dollars, and he was seeing you as a favor to your husband?

When she first went into the large oak-paneled room, and was confronted with Gould, she had very nearly lost her nerve. He was tall, handsome, patrician—in his early fifties, she guessed. He had an inbred arrogance that reminded her of Lewis, though Gould was more impatient, and colder. He had also reminded her, shghtly, of Mr. Foxworth. There was that same cool courtesy; the same instinctive dismissal of women. She had looked at him, and hoped that he might possess a sense of humor. There seemed no sign of it.

He was through with the polite questions about Lewis, the necessary preliminaries, very quickly. Then, just a quick, shghtly impatient glance down at the papers in front of him, as if he were already regretting this favor to an old family friend.

"Let me see. Ah, yes, thirty thousand we're looking at. Well, perhaps it would be best, Mrs. Sinclair, if you were to tell me the kind of performance you were looking for? I assume you were thinking of something like gilts.

596 • SALLY BEAUMAN

perhaps? We don't have the means, unfortunately, for a very wide spread, and so I'd advise—"

"Mr. Gould."

She had interrupted him, which was possibly a mistake. She looked down at her hands, and then back up to his face. Then, since she had nothing to lose, and everything to lose, she said the sentence she had scripted, in the voice she had chosen, and felt as she did so, the same calm she felt in front of the cameras. "I want to make myself a rich woman. And I should like you to help me do that quickly. That's all."

He had been riffling through papers. He stopped doing so, and looked up at her.

"I should hke," she went on, in her coolest, most English voice, "to double this money, and then double it again. For a start."

"Mrs. Sinclair. This is Wall Street. Not Las Vegas . . ."

"I know that. If I thought I had a chance of doing it at Vegas, I'd go. But I think the odds are higher here."

There was a silence, and then quite suddenly, Gould began to smile. He looked at her—really looked at her—for the first time since she had come into the room. He picked up a piece of paper in front of him, on which he had scribbled some notes, tore it carefully in half, and threw it into a wastepaper basket.

"I see," he said slowly. "Then perhaps we'd better begin again."

Helene, looking at him, thought: he does have a sense of humor; it is going to work. And she had been right. Their friendship, and their highly successful alliance, had begun then, in that ten-minute meeting that went on for one and a half hours.

"You do understand what we would be doing?" he had said to her just before she left. "I have to be sure of that." He hesitated. "The higher the returns, the greater the risk. If we follow this course, you could make substantial gains, and they would increase, of course, as we reinvest. But it is very close to gambling, and the odds are just as bad as they would be— say—at roulette. You could make gains; the likelihood is that you will lose. Are you prepared for that?"

"I'm prepared for it, yes."

"Why are you doing this?" He looked at her closely.

"Do you need to know that?" She met his gaze levelly, and he was the first to turn away.

"No," he said with a small, slightly puzzled frown. "I suppose I don't."

She had not lost; she had won. As her earnings rose, rapidly, so she invested, and reinvested. One million; two million. It was only then that she began to feel safe, and she asked herself sometimes: was she simply making sure that she had enough to deal with Ned Calvert? Or was it

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something else? Was she also, step by step, ridding herself of the specter of poverty, until the point was reached when she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that it could never he in wait for her again? That it would never reclaim her—or Cat?

She adjusted the Saint Laurent suit on its padded silk hanger. She closed the closet door on it, and on the memories that it suddenly brought back— of her mother's pathetically cared for dresses, adjusted, unpicked, resewn, carefully pressed—all those castofifs from Mrs. Calvert.

She turned away; now, when she was incontestably rich, she sometimes felt poor, and with a bitter sense that her impoverishment was self-inflicted. She had more, but she felt less. She saw herself then, in the small room at the lodginghouse in Paris, hastily packing her few belongings into that cardboard suitcase, and then running down the stairs, running through the streets to the Seine. Then, when she had had nothing, she had felt as if she had everything, as if the world lay cupped in the palm of her hand.

Ah, but I was happy then, she thought, and turned away, angry with herself.

She unpacked the rest of her things, hardly conscious of what she was doing. Silk stockings; silk underwear, decorated with Brussels lace. Beside her bed, she placed her little Cartier clock, an exquisite thing of blue cloisonne enamel, with a face of rose quartz. She looked at it, and thought of the old clock on the icebox in the trailer, the old clock, and its little red stickers. Minutes ticking by; time passing.

She went into the bathroom, and unpacked her washing things, and her makeup. She held the unopened box of Joy, which Stephani had given her, and then, quickly and angrily, threw it away. Toothpaste. Shampoo. French soap, by Guerlain. The small mauve packet of contraceptive pills, the same brand she had been taking day after day for years. Originally prescribed by Mr. Foxworth, when they were still a novel method of contraception. She looked at them with sudden hate, and, on an impulse, opened the packet and pushed the tiny white pills out of their plastic bubble containers. One after another: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday ... a whole month's worth of time, and all of it empty.

They fell into the washbasin; she turned the tap on fully, and washed them away. What was the point of them now, anyway?

She went back into the sitting room of her suite and picked up the script Gregory Gertz had given her in Arizona. She had read it once; now that The Runaways was completed, she had promised him she would read it again. She would read it tonight, she decided. He was in New York; they could meet briefly tomorrow to discuss it, after the meeting with Gould. And then she could catch a plane and fly home to Cat.

598 • SALLY BEAUMAN

This thought usually calmed her, and filled her with a sense of excitement and expectation. But now, for some reason, it did not. She opened the script in front of her and began to read. But the words seemed quite meaningless; the sentences without sense. She shut the script, and looked at the delicate face of the Cartier clock. It was almost seven, almost time for her daily call to Cat.

She reached for the telephone, hesitated, and then, giving in to the temptation this time, asked to be put through to the international operator.

Her heart was beating very fast, as it always beat when she did this. How many times had she done it before, from hotel rooms across Europe, hotel rooms across America? No more than fifteen, perhaps, which was not so very much in five years. It felt like a hundred. It felt like a thousand. The first time she had done it she had been in London, in that little red room in Anne Kneale's house, sitting near the fire, waiting for Lewis, who had gone to a dance in Berkeley Square.

Her palms felt damp; her mouth was dry; she was shaking a little. She told the operator to do what she always told them to do: let the number ring three times, and then disconnect. She gave her the number in St. Cloud. The operator repeated it; she sounded bored. They always sounded bored. Perhaps they were used to such seemingly pointless requests.

"I'm connecting you now. . . ."

"Wait." Helene swallowed. "Let it ring, will you? I'll hang up. . . ."

The operator still sounded bored. She gave a little sigh.

"Surely," she said.

Helene sat very still, pressing the receiver tight against her ear. He would not be there. There would be no answer. George would answer, or one of the other servants. . . . What time was it in Paris, anyway? She could not think, her mind could not deal with the numbers of the differential. Ahead. Behind. Morning. Afternoon. Five years. Five hours.

She listened to the clicks, to the ringing, to the distance.

Once. Twice. Three times. This time, when she went to hang up, her hands would not move.

Edouard himself answered on the fifth ring.

"Yes?"

It was like an electric shock. A current straight to the heart. There was a silence that went on forever. When he next spoke, his voice was sharp with inquiry. He said, "Helene?"

Then she disconnected, very quickly.

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