“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 little 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 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 Hermès. 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 English, 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 affair, 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, Hélène walked for a while through the formal gardens of the château, 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 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 château, 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 château 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 delicious 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 Hélène 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. Hélène 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, thankfully, 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.
Hélène 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. Hélène 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 château, 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 Hélène 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, like 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…
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 Billy, 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.
She shook him a little; he felt heavy and inert in her arms. A moment before he had been touching her, but now he was so very still, not moving at all. She felt something cool and wet against her face, and thought it was Billy’s tears, but when she looked up, there were no tears, just blood. She could feel it in her hair and on her breasts and on her face and in her eyes. It was sticky and it smelled sweet and sour, and then Ned Calvert was there, telling her it was the best skin lotion in the world, and she opened her mouth and started screaming, very loudly and quite silently.
She woke, and jerked herself upright, shaking. She was bathed in sweat; her head was pounding. She looked around the still room, with its stripes of light, and for a moment she did not know where she was. She was still trapped in the dream, which was the worst dream she had ever had.
She sat very still; the colors of the dream were vivid in her mind. She drew in her breath, tried to steady herself, and waited, her heart beating very fast, until the dream began to fade. It was only a nightmare, she told herself; it was entirely normal that she should dream like this. It would go away in a while. It would leave her.
But there was something she had seen in that dream, there had been an item of truth in its distortions. There, somewhere there, was something she should look at, something she should confront with her waking mind. I must think, she told herself; and she tried to make the dream come back, sequence after sequence. On the river, drifting toward the cottonwoods, and then…but the dream would not come back. Obstinately it evaded her, even as she reached for it, and now the room was reasserting itself, and the afternoon was reasserting itself, and the dream had gone. She stood up, and went into the bathroom, and splashed cold water against her hot face. She dried her skin on the soft white towels and felt calmer. Only a dream. Only a dream.
She went back into her bedroom and opened the shutters. The sun was lower in the sky, and the air was cooler. She walked back and forth in the room, one part of her mind still intent on pursuing the dream, and another part already beginning to calculate the number of hours left before Edouard would return. Time seemed very slow; it was inching forward.
Against one wall of the room there was a small inlaid bureau which had been made for Adeline de Chavigny. It was supplied with writing paper and pens, and after a while, Hélène sat down and idly drew out a sheet of paper. She picked up a pen. She toyed with the idea of writing to Cassie.
There was no one else to write to; she uncapped the pen, and looked down at the paper in front of her. Then, hurriedly, she wrote the date, and, under it: Dear Cassie. Then she stopped, and laid down the pen. Just the action of writing Cassie’s name brought the past back. There it was, sharply, all around her: the trailer park, the hot air, her mother leaning back listlessly in the old red chair. She saw Cassie’s kind, careworn face: Take this, honey, I won’t be needing it…
She lifted her head and looked at the room in which she sat. So many beautiful things; so many valuable things. All the people she had grown up with, all the people she had loved—they had all been so poor. They’d worked and scratched and saved, and at the end of it, they couldn’t have afforded to buy one thing in this room, not one single exquisite item. Could Edouard understand that? she wondered. Could a man like Edouard ever understand what it meant to be poor? No, she told herself, he could not, and in that moment, she felt a little distanced from him. In her world, she thought, people died and left no trace. They did not leave houses and gardens and portraits and traditions behind them; they had little, and they left nothing—in Billy’s case, not even so much as a photograph.
She looked down at the paper in front of her, unsure if she were angry with herself, or with Edouard, or with life itself. She would not write to Cassie now, she decided. If she wrote, what would she say? That she was so much in love that the past no longer seemed real, and that when she was with Edouard, she was so happy she was content to let the future take care of itself? Cassie would not even be surprised if she wrote that. She’d expect it. That was what people did: they made all sorts of solemn resolves and promises, and then they didn’t keep to them, and people who were kind, like Cassie, were careful never to remind them of that fact.
She stared down at the paper, and her eyes blurred with tears. Irritably, she brushed them away. She could not go on telling lies, she decided. Tonight, when Edouard returned from Paris, she would tell him the truth. Who she was and what she had been. She would tell him about her mother and about Ned Calvert. She would tell him about Billy. She would tell him about being poor. She would leave out nothing.
It was wrong to go on lying like this, as if she were ashamed, and it was terrible to have kept Billy a secret; it was like killing him twice. Perhaps that was why she had those horrible dreams, she thought, because she went on telling lies. She picked up the writing paper impatiently, and was about to crumple it up into a ball and throw it away when something stopped her. Perhaps it was thinking of the dream again, which made her mind uneasy; perhaps the idea had been there in her mind before, and she had resolutely pushed it away until then—but whatever the reason, she hesitated, and then smoothed out the paper again and looked at it, and her skin grew chill.
She looked at the words; she looked at the date she had written. The letters and the numbers seemed to grow very large and then very small. They danced before her eyes, and, as she stared at them, their significance altered, re-formed, and took on a new and implacable shape.
Her mouth felt dry; her body tensed. She continued to stare at the date for a long while, her mind frantically calculating. Then, with a little cry, she ripped the paper into fragments and threw them away.
The date she had written was September 15th. It was two months almost to the day since her mother had taken that last bus trip into Montgomery; two months since Hélène had waited for her in Orangeburg; two months since she had gone down to the pool with Billy. It’s the right thing, Billy, the right thing…
September 15th. It was the day she realized nothing would be right ever again. It was also the day Edouard asked her to marry him.
He asked the question in a way very typical of him—without preamble, tacked on at
the end of other sentences, other pieces of information, so that he startled her. He had not noticed that anything was wrong. A moment before, he had been talking about his mother.
“She had heard about us. I was summoned for an interrogation. Like all my mother’s interrogations, it was oblique—but she has a certain instinct, I admit that. She has never once questioned me about my private life before, so she had perhaps guessed…I don’t know. It doesn’t matter, in any case. Except that I was delayed, and I wanted very much to be here.” He paused. “I wanted to be here, and to be with you. I wanted to ask you to marry me.”
His voice was level, almost matter-of-fact. Only one small gesture, a quick lifting of the hand, betrayed any emotion. They were standing in his bedroom; it faced out across the park of the château, and beyond the window, the light was beginning to fade. Early evening, and a day which seemed to Hélène to have gone on forever. She looked at Edouard; she would always remember him, she thought, as he looked then, his hair slightly disheveled, his face intent, his dark eyes watchful, a smile—because he was happy; she could feel the happiness radiating from him—beginning on his lips.
He said the words, and she went on hearing them, echoing through her mind. She couldn’t move, she couldn’t speak; she couldn’t think or even feel anymore; all her faculties seemed numb. The silence that followed seemed intensely loud, and to last a very long time. In the silence, she saw his face change, and when she could bear it no longer, she turned her face away miserably. Still he waited, and then, very slowly, he crossed to her, lifted his hand, and turned her face to his, so that she was forced to look into his eyes.
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