Destiny

by Sally Beauman

  He frowned, and looked out across the square. On the far side he could see the house that had received a direct hit a few nights before. Its remains gaped blackly: tilting side walls and a pile of burned timbers and rubble. His valet said no one had been killed, that the house had been empty, but Edouard suspected he had been instructed to say that. He himself was not so sure. He wished he were not fourteen. He wished he were ten years older, like Jean-Paul. Or eighteen. Eighteen would be enough. You could enlist then. You could do something useful. You could fight Jerry. Not sit around at home like a stupid girl, and do lessons, lessons, lessons.

  One of the air raid wardens came into view, and Edouard aimed at his tin helmet, squinting down the length of his arm. Pe-ow! Got him in one!

  He felt a moment’s satisfaction, then a quick annoyance. With an angry gesture, he turned away from the window. He was too old for such games, he knew that really. He was fourteen, almost fifteen. His voice had broken, or started to break. There was soft down on his cheeks now; quite soon he was going to need a razor. There were other signs too: his body stirred, and hardened, when he looked at some of the maids. He had dreams at night, long glorious frenetic dreams, which left his sheets damp in the morning—sheets that his valet, not the maids, removed with a knowing smile. Oh yes, his body was altering; he wasn’t a child anymore; he was almost—almost—a man.

  Edouard de Chavigny had been born in 1925, when his mother, Louise, was thirty. Several miscarriages had punctuated the years between the birth of Jean-Paul and this son, her second and last child. During her final pregnancy Louise had been very ill, nearly losing the baby on several occasions. After the birth, a hysterectomy was performed, and slowly—first at the Château de Chavigny in the Loire, and then at her parents’ home in Newport—she recovered. To those who knew her only slightly, who encountered her only at parties, or balls, or receptions, Louise then seemed exactly as she had always been. A celebrated beauty, famed for her elegance and exquisite taste; only daughter of a steel baron, one of the richest men in America; brought up like a princess, her every whim catered to by an adoring father, Louise was—had always been—lovely, demanding, and irresistible. Irresistible even to Xavier, Baron de Chavigny—and he had long been regarded as one of the most elusive bachelors in Europe.

  When he first went to America, in 1912, to open the Fifth Avenue showrooms of the de Chavigny jewelry empire, Xavier instantly became the toast of the East Coast. Society matrons vied for his attendance at their parties. They paraded their daughters before the handsome young man without subtlety or shame, and Xavier de Chavigny was charming, and attentive, and infuriatingly noncommittal.

  To East Coast mothers he embodied the advantages of Europe: he was electrifyingly handsome, highly intelligent; he had perfect manners, a fortune, and an ancient title.

  To East Coast fathers, he had the additional advantage of a superb business head. This was no idle French aristocrat content to let his fortune dwindle away while he had a good time. Like most Frenchmen of his class, he understood the importance of land; he held on to, and built up, his already vast estates in France. Unlike most Frenchmen of his class, he had a thoroughly American taste for commerce. He built up the de Chavigny jewelry empire, founded by his grandfather in the nineteenth century, into the largest and most renowned enterprise of its kind, rivaled internationally only by Cartier. He enlarged, and improved, his vineyards in the Loire. He extended his investments into banking, steel production, and the diamond mines in South Africa, which provided the raw materials for de Chavigny jewelry—jewelry that had bedecked the crowned heads of Europe, and now bedecked the uncrowned heads of rich and discerning Americans.

  Oh yes, the East Coast fathers remarked in their clubs, de Chavigny was smart. He had American virtues as well as European ones. Sure, he called his racehorse trainer every morning, but he called his stockbrokers first.

  Xavier met Louise in London, when she was nineteen and he twenty-nine and she was being introduced to English society. It was late in 1914. Xavier had been wounded in the early months of the war, and—to his fury and disgust—released from active service. They met at one of the last great coming-out balls of the war years: she wearing a Worth dress of the palest pink silk; he wearing the uniform of a French officer. His leg wound had healed sufficiently to permit him to dance with her three times; he sat out three more dances with her. Next morning he presented himself to her father in their suite at Claridges with a proposal of marriage. It was accepted a decorous three weeks later.

  They were married in London, spent their honeymoon on the Sutherland estates in Scotland, and returned to Paris with their two-year-old son, Jean-Paul, at the end of the war. In Europe, Louise quickly became as celebrated for her charm, her taste, and her beauty as she had been in America. Their hospitality, their generosity, and their style became a byword on two continents. And the Baron de Chavigny proved to have one quality no one had expected in a Frenchman: he was a devoted, and entirely faithful, husband.

  So, seven years later, when Louise de Chavigny recovered from the difficult birth of her second son, and began to appear in society once more—to look, to charm, to dress just as she had always done—those who did not know her well assumed the charmed life continued. There had been a sad episode, a difficult period, but it was over. When, in 1927, the Baronne de Chavigny celebrated her return to Paris from Newport by purchasing Coco Chanel’s entire spring collection, her female acquaintances smiled: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…

  Those who knew her better—her aging parents, her husband, Jean-Paul, and the little boy whom she never nursed and infrequently saw—found another Louise. They found a woman whose capriciousness increased year by year, a woman given to swift and sometimes violent changes of mood, to sudden elation, and to equally sudden depression.

  This was not discussed. A series of physicians was hired and fired. The Baron de Chavigny did everything in his power to please her. He gave her new jewels: a set of perfectly matched sapphires; a magnificent necklace of rubies made by de Chavigny for the last Czarina, which had found its way back to the Baron in the wake of the revolution. Louise said the rubies made her think of blood; they made her think of a cellar in Ekaterinberg. She refused flatly to wear them. The Baron bought her furs: sables of such quality, each pelt could be drawn through the circumference of a wedding ring. He bought her racehorses; a superb Irish hunter, for she liked to ride to hounds. He bought her cars: a Delage, a Hispano-Suiza, a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost; a sports car built to order in Bugatti’s factory. And when these bagatelles failed to please her, he took her traveling. To England; to the West Coast of America, where they were guests at Pickfair, and her spirits revived, briefly. To India, where they stayed in the Viceroy’s palace, and shot tiger with the Maharaja of Jaipur. To Italy, where they had an audience with the Pope. Back to England. Back to France.

  Each night he would escort her to the door of her bedroom:

  Ça va mieux, ma chérie?

  Pas mal. Mais je m’ennuie, Xavi, je m’ennuie…

  Then she would turn away from his kiss, and close the door.

  In 1930, when his wife was thirty-four and the Baron was forty-four, he finally took the advice his male friends had been giving him for some years, and took a mistress. He made sure Louise found out, and to his delight, jealousy revived her. It also excited her, he observed with a sinking heart, when, in bed together once more, she questioned him feverishly, obsessively, about his affaire.

  Did she do this, Xavi? Or this?

  She leaned back on the lace pillows, her thick black hair tumbling around her perfect face, her dark eyes glittering, her full lips rouged. The Baron had torn the lace of her negligee in his impatience, and that had pleased her. She had high rounded childish breasts, which he had always loved, and her slender creamy body was still as lithe as a young girl’s. She lifted her breasts in her hands now, and offered them up to his seeking mouth.

  Calme-toi, sois tranquille, je t’aime,
tu sais, je t’adore…

  He took the small pointed nipples between his lips and kissed them gently. He would be slow, this time, he promised himself. Very slow. He could hold back, and he would, bringing her to climax once, twice, three times before he came—and she would tremble, and cling to him, the way she used to. The memory made him hard, and she felt his body stir against her belly. She pushed him, feverishly, quickly, lifting his head.

  “Not like that. I don’t want that.”

  She spoke in English now when they made love; before it had always been in French.

  “Put it in my mouth, Xavi. Go on. I know you like it. Put it there—let me suck you…”

  She pulled him up in the bed, maneuvered him so his stiff shaft was poised above her lips. She smiled at him, touched the tip of him once, twice, with a little snakelike flick of the tongue.

  “Your cock tastes of me. It tastes salty. I like that…”

  Her eyes shone up at him darkly. She opened the full red lips, and he shuddered as he felt the warmth of her mouth, the steady sucking. He shut his eyes. She was good at this, she always had been. She knew how to tease, to draw her tongue softly around the line of his retracted foreskin. She knew how to quicken his response, sucking him just hard enough, so he thrust against the roof of her mouth, sucking him sweetly, moistly, rhythmically. Now she drew her hands slowly down over his buttocks, slipped them between his legs, massaged him there where the skin was loose and damp from their lovemaking. She cupped his balls in her delicate hands, and tilted her head back, so he felt as if he were driving at the back of her throat. He felt the surge begin, start to build.

  Then suddenly she stopped sucking. She let the full penis slip from between her lips and looked up at him.

  “Did she do this for you, Xavi? Did she? Can she suck you like I can? Tell me, Xavi—say it into my ear while you do it—I want to know. What else did you do with her, Xavi? Did you just fuck her, or more than that? Does she like it up the ass? Xavi—tell me, tell me…”

  Her coarseness both repelled and excited him. He felt his erection start to fade as he looked down into those dark eyes, that rapacious mouth. He shut his eyes, and pushed her back on the pillows. Then he shifted position, parted her legs, thrust up inside her desperately. She arched her back and cried out. Xavier began to thrust: deep, then shallow, deep once more. The hardness was coming back into his penis. He drove it into her, pulled out, then thrust again. To his own surprise the image of his mistress came into his mind. He saw her plump accommodating body, her large breasts with their dark nipples, heard her panting breath. That image brought him to climax. He groaned, and spilled himself into his wife’s still body, hating himself, hating her. When he withdrew, she pulled her nails sharply down his back.

  “You bastard. You were thinking of her then, weren’t you? Weren’t you?”

  Xavier looked down at her.

  “I thought that was what you wanted,” he said coldly. Then he left her, and went to sleep in his own room.

  In the years after that he made love to his wife on occasion, and to a succession of other women with greater frequency, and with growing desperation. With a sense of despair he realized that, more and more, he was drawn to young women, women who resembled his wife as she had looked when he first saw her, and first fell in love with her. Sometimes, when the resemblance was too slight, and he had difficulty maintaining his erection, he would close his eyes and conjure up the image of his wife when she was young. Her rose-scented flesh; her mixture of shyness and ardor; the certainty of her love for him. This image never failed him. It brought him to orgasm even in the arms of a Les Halles whore.

  In private he drew back into himself, cutting himself off deliberately from his oldest male friends, immersing himself, when the women were insufficiently diverting, in the complexities of his business and his estates. In public, he and his beautiful wife remained as they had always been: devoted, extravagant, generous, everywhere seen, everywhere envied, everywhere admired. If tongues wagged occasionally—even the most perfect marriage needed certain divertissements eventually, and both the Baron and the Baronne were so commendably discreet—he ignored them. His wife had taught him one thing at least, he told himself. She had taught him the true meaning of ennui, shown him what it meant to live out your days in a prison of grayness. It was one of the few gifts he wished had never been bestowed on him.

  He foresaw the coming war quite clearly, several years before most of his friends and business acquaintances. In 1933, when Adolf Hitler became Reich Chancellor, he warned his friends that it would mean war, and they laughed at him. He sold his interests in the German steel industry in 1936 at a profit, and bought into the British and American industries instead. After the occupation of the Rhineland the same year, he transferred all his holdings, and a substantial part of his capital, from France to Switzerland and New York. Ownership of the de Chavigny company was transferred from his private hands to those of a holding company registered in Lucerne, in which he held ninety percent of the shares, and his son Jean-Paul, ten percent. His personal collection of jewels, his paintings, his silver, the most valuable and least replaceable of the furniture from three houses in France were packed up and sent likewise to Switzerland, where it was stored. In 1937 he began planning the arrangements necessary for his family to leave France, should the invasion he feared take place. By the time of the annexation of Czechoslovakia and Austria in 1938, these plans were complete. Their efficiency was proven eighteen months later. Louise and her two sons left France in May 1940, shortly before British troops were evacuated from Dunkirk. By June 14 the same year, when the Germans reached Paris, the de Chavigny showrooms were still open, but Xavier de Chavigny had apparently stripped himself of almost all assets.

  When called upon to do so, he made himself and his showrooms accessible to the officers of the German High Command, and through this polite compliance, often provided information of considerable assistance to his fellow members of the Sixth Cadre, Paris Resistance. He gave up women, and tried not to think of his wife.

  To his surprise he discovered that he missed neither Louise nor his mistresses, and that the ennui which had dogged him for so long had gone. He had a purpose in life again, a raison d’être, all the more intense because he knew his life was in constant danger.

  He was not fearful for himself, but he was fearful—still—for Louise and for his children. He would have felt safer, much safer, if they had agreed to his original plans, and gone to America. England, he knew, as he watched the progress of the war, was not far enough.

  The reason for this was simple: his wife, Louise, was half-Jewish. Her mother, Frances, had been born a Schiff, and had grown up within the confines of German-Jewish New York society, in which the distinction of being, originally, from Frankfurt—like the Rothschilds and the Warburgs—counted for a great deal. Frances grew up within the charmed circle of the “One Hundred,” and she numbered among her uncles, aunts, and innumerable cousins, a formidable roster of Warburgs, Loebs, Lehmans, and Seligmans. She was expected to make a dynastic marriage; when, at the age of nineteen, she eloped with John McAllister, her family cut her off, and the reverberations of shock from that mixed marriage continued for decades.

  Frances turned her back on her childhood, on that world of Fifth Avenue mansions, and worship at Temple Emanu-El. John McAllister was rich when she married him, for he had inherited an empire in steel from his Scots emigré father. He invested in the Northern Pacific Railroad, and became richer still. Frances McAllister concentrated her energies on being assimilated, and—since she was beautiful, clever, and charming, as well as very rich—she succeeded to a very large extent. Frances graced the McAllister box in the Diamond Horseshoe at the Metropolitan Opera, boxes from which her Jewish relations were excluded; she built a house at Newport, not, of course, at Elberon, where her uncles and aunts maintained their mansions. She brought up Louise very carefully; her own Jewish origins were not hidden, but reference to them was not encourag
ed. Louise, aware as she grew older that her mother’s background marked her out from the rest of her contemporaries, became extremely careful never to refer to them at all. Like the newness of her father’s wealth, it became a subject that was, quite simply, barred. She converted to Catholicism and, once she married Xavier, she bent her considerable energies to a new role, that of being the Baronne, and more French than the French themselves.

  So fierce were her efforts in this respect that Xavier de Chavigny, who was without racial prejudice, almost forgot the question of his wife’s ancestors. Since their race was a matter of indifference to him, he assumed, negligently and slightly grandly, that they were also a matter of indifference to everyone else. Until 1938: then, he knew, they could no longer be ignored. For if Louise was half-Jewish, his children were therefore one quarter Jewish. With an enemy prepared patiently to trace heredity back through eight, nine generations in their search for Jewish blood, a half-Jewish mother, a Jewish grandmother, was a terrible threat. So the plans had been thorough, and the Baron was in no doubt of their necessity. But still he worried: had they been thorough enough?

  Edouard lay back on the silk brocade-covered sofa, propped a cushion under his feet, opened the book on his lap, and stared into the fire. He felt extremely comfortable, and slightly somnolent, as he often did after finishing an English tea.

  Tea, he decided, was one of the meals the English understood. The other was breakfast. He disapproved of porridge—that was too disgusting even to consider—but grilled bacon, coddled eggs, devilled kidneys, or kedgeree—these were splendid, a great improvement on a simple croissant and café au lait. Edouard was already tall; he had inherited his father’s looks, and closely resembled him, with his almost jet black hair, and startlingly deep blue eyes. Like his father, he had the build of a natural athlete: wide shoulders, long legs, and narrow hips. He was growing fast—five feet eleven already—and he was always, always hungry.