He looked at her for a long time, his face grave and still, then he said, very deliberately, although his voice caught on the words, “If I am wrong about this, then I am wrong about everything. Everything. Do you understand? If this is a lie, there is no truth left. Is that what you are saying? Is that what you mean, when you turn away your face like that?”
Hélène could hardly bear to meet his eyes, the pain and the anger in them were so intense. She felt burned by that look; the word no was clamoring in her mind, so loud and so insistent that she felt certain Edouard must hear it too. But her lips remained stiff; the word would not be spoken. Edouard continued to look at her, and all vitality left his face; it became hard, and set, and terrifyingly cold. Then, without another word, he let his hand fall and turned away.
He had almost reached the door when she said his name. She cried it out, hardly conscious of doing so, and Edouard swung round. She saw the hope come back into his eyes, although the uncertainty and the anger remained. Then he crossed back to her swiftly and took her in his arms. He pressed his lips against her hair; he tilted back her face and began feverishly to kiss her eyes, her mouth, her throat. Neither of them spoke, and because the closeness of anger and sexuality was not something which she had ever experienced before, what happened next shocked Hélène very much.
He undid her dress, his hands rough and hasty. He began to draw her toward the bed, and when she hung back, he pulled her down onto the floor beside him. Usually, she would have reached for him, she would have helped him, eagerly, to remove his clothes, and when she did not, she saw his face darken. He stood up then, his eyes never leaving her face, and began to undress. She watched him loosen his tie; she watched him undo his belt; she could not watch him do that without wanting him, but now the fact that she wanted him made her curiously and suddenly angry, as if wanting him were a weakness in herself.
When he was naked he knelt beside her and lifted her into his arms. He buried his face against her throat, and as Hélène felt the warmth of his bare skin against hers, she arched back with a little cry. At once, his eyes became intent; he looked almost triumphant then, as if he were determined that what she would not say, he would make her show. He touched her then, in a certain place, and in a certain way to which they both knew she responded, and she did respond, but this time some part of her mind remained locked away, shut up tight in some blind and female obstinacy. He was forcing her, he was using his knowledge of her and their past lovemaking, and for a moment she almost hated him for that. She drew her nails sharply down his arm, and the blood welled.
After that, it was not like making love at all, it was like a battle between them. Edouard was her enemy and her lover, and when he did not draw back, but forced her down under his weight, she knew that in some strange way he was closer to her now when he fought her, than he had ever been when he was gentle. She struggled against him, glad that the anger had come so suddenly, and had wiped out all the unhappiness and despair she had felt.
This, at least, was very quick, and very simple. Edouard meant to prove something to her, and she was determined not to let him. He was stronger than she was, though, a great deal stronger. It needed very little force on his part to hold her still, and very little force to enter her. He pushed once, and then, just when that dark blind part of her mind had resolved that she would lie motionless, and that she would defeat him with cold passivity, he gently turned her face to his, and looked down into her eyes.
He remained quite still, and Hélène, looking up at him, saw the love and the desperation naked in his face. There was no more contest then; it was over as suddenly as it had begun—there never had been a contest between them, she thought, except perhaps in her own mind.
“Oh, Edouard,” she said sadly, and, reaching for his hand, she lifted it and pressed it against her lips. There was blood on his wrist, where she had scratched him. She pressed her mouth against it, and as she tasted the sharp iron taste of his blood, he began to move, gently at first, then more strongly.
“No, wait,” she said then, and pushed him back gently, so he slipped out of her body with a soft sucking sound. He knelt back, and she bent her head and took him in her mouth. Edouard groaned, and cradled her head. He felt hard and alive against her lips; she loved the taste of him, she thought, with a sudden wild and yet gentle happiness; she loved the taste of him, which was also the taste of sex, tangy and salt.
She sucked him gently, drawing him deeper into her mouth, and when she felt him shudder, she felt also an extraordinary sense of power, the same power he had over her, quite equal. It filled her with great gentleness, that realization. When he began to lose control, she trembled also. He held her tightly, cupping her head in his hands; she touched him with her tongue, one particular place, and he came, spasm after spasm, life spurting into her mouth.
She cried then, and they stayed, clinging to one another, both shaking, their bodies wet with sweat, for a long time. Finally, Edouard drew back a little.
“You see,” he said quietly. “Ah, Hélène, do you see?” She nodded silently. She did see, she thought. She saw just how much she loved him, and how much he loved her. In anger and in gentleness, there it was between them, this bond. As if he read her mind, Edouard lifted her hand, and pressed it between his own. “You can say one of two things,” he said in a low voice. “You can say ‘yes,’ or you can say ‘no.’ But whatever you say, I am bound to you, and you are bound to me. We are as much married now as we could ever be—all the rest is just ceremony. Hélène—tell me you believe that.”
“I believe that.”
“Then why—earlier? Hélène, why did you turn away like that? Why?”
She hesitated. Then, because she could not bear to hurt him anymore, when she loved him so much, she bent her head.
“I don’t know. I was afraid,” she said finally. It was an evasion, and she waited for him to sense it, she waited for him to question her, but he did not. He gave a sigh of relief.
“My darling. Never be afraid. Not now. What can we fear now?” he said tenderly, and wrapped his arms around her.
Later, when they were in bed and Edouard slept, Hélène lay, tense and wakeful, and thought about the fear. She calculated its precise nature. She counted the weeks and months of it. She told herself she might be wrong. In the end she slept, and when she woke in the morning, there the fear was, waiting for her.
She rested her hands loosely across her stomach, and tried to will it away. Edouard still slept. Restlessly, she slipped out of bed, and went into the bathroom. As soon as she was on her feet, she felt the nausea. Cold sweat on the back of her neck, a sensation of weightlessness. She retched, leaning against the cool marble basin, and shaking. She splashed water on her face, and the nausea passed.
She turned the faucet off, on again, and then off once more. She looked at her own pale face in the glass, and saw the strain in it, the shadows beneath her eyes. Billy’s child, said a small flat voice in her mind; Billy’s baby. She had known at once, when she looked at the date on the letter to Cassie.
Billy was not dead; he lived on in her, he would live on in his child. That was the gift she had given him when they went down to the pool the day he died; that was the reason for the dreams she had and the guilt she felt. She turned away from the mirror and looked through into the bedroom where Edouard lay, still sleeping. She ought to feel glad, she told herself, for Billy’s sake. It was wrong of her not to feel glad. Billy had loved her and Billy was dead: she owed Billy this child.
She knew, she thought dully, what she would have to do. She could see the course of action quite clearly; she stood there, turning it back and forth in her mind, and for a moment it seemed quite simple. Then she went back into the bedroom and looked at Edouard’s sleeping face, and knew immediately that it was not simple at all.
Edouard’s face was still, his features composed. He looked, as sleepers do, both peaceful and vulnerable. Her heart twisted with love for him; the pain of it ached in her mind, a
nd her resolve immediately weakened.
She bent and pressed her lips gently against his forehead. She felt his breath warm against her cheek. After all, she told herself, it might not be true, there could be other explanations. It would be wrong and foolhardy to act before she was absolutely certain.
Edouard’s eyes flickered open, and the flurry of ideas in her mind resolved themselves into one phrase. She thought: Perhaps—but not yet.
Edouard knew that something was wrong, and the knowledge tormented him. It was an instinctual knowledge, and when he tried to confront it rationally, reasonably—when had it begun, how had it begun, why had it begun?—he could find no answers. There had been some shift, some very delicate change, he sensed it with every part of his being. He thought, sometimes, that he could date it: it had begun on the day he went to Paris; sometimes he felt quite certain of that. But on other occasions even that certainty slipped away from him. Had it begun then, or was that merely the first time he had been aware of it?
And what, precisely, was it that he sensed? Hélène’s behavior had not changed; they had not quarreled; there was no physical estrangement between them; nothing was wrong.
So he argued—but it was not what he felt. What he felt in her was slight, almost imperceptible, and difficult for him to name. A tension, perhaps; a reticence, which had always been there, but was now a little more marked; a withdrawal from him, delicate, sad, reluctant maybe, but a withdrawal just the same, step by step.
There was one thing in particular which she did—she had always done it, but now he noticed it more and more. She would be sitting quietly, listening to him, even talking, and then, quite suddenly, her eyes would change. He had the impression, then, that she saw something, or heard something, or remembered something very real to her; from that—whatever it was—he was totally excluded.
He had always found that quality in her mysterious, and because mysterious, arousing. It was like a challenge, a barrier he determined to break down. When he made love to her, he would have the illusion, while the act lasted, that the barrier had gone and he had reached her at last. Then the illusion would founder; it was as if he lurched, constantly, between a sensation of union and a sensation of loss.
He was used, he told himself cynically, to women who gave themselves easily in every sense; their eagerness to do so bored him very quickly. Hélène always eluded him. She was more candid, more direct, more forthright, than almost any other woman he had known. Her love was there; she spoke of it; it illumined her face and her eyes; she attached no conditions to it, seeming either unaware, or uncaring, that this affection she gave him so openly made her vulnerable to him. It might have occurred to her that he could hurt her—Edouard was not sure; she might have concealed that awareness out of pride, rather as he did. But he thought not. He thought the quality she possessed was simpler, and rarer: she had courage, and he loved her for it.
Yet still, in some way he could not define, he knew she was not open with him. She gave absolutely: she also withheld absolutely. The paradox disturbed him; it obsessed him; it was like a riddle which he had to solve.
Sometimes he thought the answer was quite simple: she had lied. Not about the important things between them, not about the love she felt—he never felt that—but about other things, yes, he felt she had not always told him the truth. She disliked being questioned about the past—he had discovered that almost immediately. Now, occasionally, he noticed slight inconsistencies, and vaguenesses. Tiny details, dates, places—they did not always quite square with things she had told him before. He felt that she was deliberately hiding something from him. Yet she was so young, what could she want to hide? What was the point of it? Some fact about her parentage? The circumstances which had made her leave England? A former love affair? His suspicions made him jealous, and he despised jealousy. So, when his instinct was to cross-examine her, to make her tell him whatever the truth was, he always held back. She would tell him eventually, that was what he told himself, and it was important that she should do so freely, of her own will. So he waited, and she volunteered nothing; she would not talk about the past, and she would not, he realized with growing despair, she would not talk about the future.
This, again, was unusual in a woman, in his experience. Most of the women he had known had been only too eager to tie the future down. When will you call me, Edouard? When shall I see you again? He had always loathed that kind of insistence, and resisted it. Now, positions were reversed, now when it was he who longed to make plans, and pledges, it was Hélène who stubbornly resisted all attempts to look further than tomorrow.
That refusal—or, rather, that gentle but firm evasion—tormented him most of all. Eternity, a lifetime: he felt like a gambler so convinced of the outcome of the game, that he had to stake all.
“I shall always love you,” he said to her once, and then held his breath.
“I shall always love you, Edouard,” she answered quite calmly, meeting and holding his gaze. He felt instantly, immoderately happy, and a little shamed by the simplicity and certainty with which she spoke. Assurances? He and Hélène did not need assurances—they were vulgar and trivial things. The next day, he saw again that distant look in her eyes, and he knew he would have given his soul for an assurance then, trivial or not.
Two days after he returned from Paris, sensing that barrier between them which he could not understand, he had made a conscious decision. Thinking that the barrier was perhaps of his own making, he had told her fully and for the first time, first about Grégoire, then about his marriage, the death of his brother, of Isobel and their child.
It was something he had spoken of to no one, and he found the words almost impossible to say. If she had attempted to comfort him then, if she had said any of the awkward consolatory things people said on such occasions, he knew he would find it unbearable, that, even though he loved her, he would wish he had remained silent. But she did neither of those things; she listened to him quietly, and when he had finished, she wept, fiercely, as if his grief were her own.
He loved her for those tears; he felt more bound to her then than he ever had before. But this sense of union did not last. By the very next day he once again despaired. He had shown his trust in her; yet still she held back: she could not, or would not, trust him.
A week passed. The end of September was approaching, and Edouard knew that he must soon return to Paris. Hélène must return with him; anything else was impossible. But in Paris, in the autumn, they could not be alone together as they had been here. He would have to begin a public life once more, and Hélène—of necessity—would have to be part of it.
Edouard wondered sometimes if that prospect frightened her, or if she disliked it, and if it was that feeling which she attempted to hide from him. It could be that simple, after all, he told himself, wanting to believe it. Perhaps, in bringing her here to the Loire, in giving them these weeks alone together, he had done the wrong thing. Perhaps he should have let her see, right from the beginning, the kind of life he had to lead. If he could just show her, he thought, that he wanted her there with him, that his public life need not be daunting, despite the gossip…
It was then that Edouard conceived the idea of holding a dinner party at the chateau before they returned to Paris. Hélène did not oppose the idea, though she tried to persuade him to postpone it, and Edouard, seeing her reluctance, became more and more certain that she was needlessly afraid of the transition from a private to a public alliance. He teased her gently for her objections, and went ahead with his plans.
The dinner was arranged for September 24. It was an occasion which Edouard never forgot. Afterward, whenever he looked back trying to understand the past, he saw that evening as a point of division in his life.
The guest list was formidable. The Duc and Duchesse de Varenges both elderly—they had been close friends of Edouard’s father. Jean-Jacques Belmont-Laon and his wife, Ghislaine, the interior decorator—their invitation an act of pure defiance on Edouard
’s part. People will talk, he had said with a smile. Let them. If we invite Ghislaine, we will give them all a head start…Christian Glendinning, the art dealer, and one of Edouard’s oldest friends. Clara Delluc, who worked with Ghislaine as a textile designer, and who had been Edouard’s mistress for many years. It has been over between us for a long time, my darling. There is no ill feeling. You will like Clara. She and Isobel were friends. I want you to meet some people you can trust…A quartet of American business associates, other couples, most of them French, the women very elegant, every single person at the table much older than she was and apparently perfectly assured. People who were part of the framework of Edouard’s life; people who had known him for years, some of them since before she was born. The Duc de Varenges on her right; Christian Glendinning on her left. The Duc, a kindly man who spoke excellent English, was discoursing on the subject of fishing. He had been doing so for some time.
Hélène’s head was turned toward him; she listened with seeming interest; she hoped she did so, for in reality she heard not one word.
Twenty people; Edouard and herself. She glanced up and met Edouard’s eyes. He was smiling at her gently, down the length of the table, as if to encourage her. The occasion itself frightened her; but the enormity of what she had decided she must do made her mind freeze with fear. Edouard would be hurt, and if she had had any choice, she felt as if she would rather have died than hurt him.
But there was no choice, not anymore. The certainty had grown, all week. She wished, passionately, that she could have persuaded Edouard not to hold this terrible dinner. She wished none of these people had met her. It might have been easier for Edouard then.
“Trout.” The Duc de Varenges shook his head. “I particularly like trout. Wily creatures. Full of guile. Better sport even than salmon, though most people wouldn’t agree with me. I don’t suppose you like fishing? Very few women do, in my experience.” He sounded regretful, quite sad. Hélène looked at him blankly; for a moment she had been quite unaware of his existence.
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