Destiny

by Sally Beauman

  They could not stay at Eaton Square indefinitely, and Lewis had been fretting about this when, quite suddenly, he received the telephone call from the portrait painter, Lady Anne Kneale. He knew her only slightly; she had heard, through a friend of a friend, that he was looking for somewhere to stay, and she offered her cottage.

  “It’s there. I use the studio behind the house,” she said in her gruff way. “But I’m living with a friend at the moment, so you can have it if you want it.”

  They went around to see it the next day. The inspection did not take long, since it was a tiny terraced house with two bedrooms upstairs, a sitting room and a kitchen downstairs. The bedrooms had brass bedsteads and patchwork quilts, rag rugs and oil lamps. The kitchen had a huge black stove on which to cook, a dresser stacked with a disorderly array of old blue and white Spode china, and a York stone floor which was exceedingly cold. The little sitting room was shabby and pretty, its wooden floor covered with old Turkish kelim rugs, its walls covered with paintings and improvised shelves of books. Two fat red chairs were stationed either side of the fireplace, and on the mantel were two Staffordshire dogs, a blue glass vase filled with brown bird’s feathers, an ostrich egg, and a line of smooth gray pebbles. It was not tidy, nor, perhaps, very clean. Lewis’s face fell, and Hélène exclaimed with delight.

  “Oh, Lewis. I like it so much.”

  “It’s like a doll’s house. Christ, it’s cold. Why don’t the English understand about central heating?”

  “Please, Lewis.”

  “Oh, all right. If you like it.”

  She discovered then what she had suspected before: Lewis found it difficult to refuse her anything.

  They had moved their things there the next day, and they had been here ever since. Lewis used it as a base for his forays to smart parties; Hélène stayed alone. Apart from Anne Kneale, whom Hélène met for the first time, briefly, when they came to look at the house, and who had asked if she might paint her the week after they moved in, she met no one, and she realized then how much she had craved solitude for months, perhaps because she had been used to it as a child, perhaps because solitude was necessary to the healing.

  Sometimes she went for walks alone, by the river; once she took the bus north and went to Regents Park, and looked at the lake, and the ducks, and the bandstand where, in the summer months, music would be played.

  She stood there, looking at the bright neat wooden structure, and she heard her mother’s voice telling her about London, telling her about the parks, the band, the marches they played, and the waltzes. She turned away at last; her mother felt very close.

  Then she would return to the little house, and if Lewis was not there, and he rarely was, she would sometimes sit for Anne Kneale, or read, or simply rest in front of the fire, watching the patterns the flames made, or feed Anne Kneale’s cat, a huge majestic creature the color of marmalade, who visited periodically, lapped milk, sat on her lap, and watched her with his great amber eyes.

  If she had had to explain why she wanted to pass the time like this—and Lewis did sometimes press her, with a kind of mild, good-humored exasperation—she might have said she felt safe.

  The little house seemed to her sometimes like a place in a fairy story, a woodcutter’s cottage perhaps, in which you were protected from the evils and dangers of the forest beyond. She knew she could not stay there forever, or indeed for very long, but meanwhile she needed to be there, where it was safe and quiet and warm.

  Here, she could let the past rest. Here she could plan the future, and this was necessary, more urgent with each passing day, and each passing week. She had to plan; not just for herself, but also for the baby. Billy’s baby, she said to herself, lacing her hands across the very gentle curve of her stomach. It had not yet begun to move, but her sense of its presence was strong. She could feel it lulling her mind, as it began to alter her body.

  Sometimes, sitting in front of the fire, she talked to it.

  In Rome, when she had first begun work, the sickness had been very bad. Morning and evening, before work and after it: it had left her weak and drained. That had been the worst time. It was then, in the evenings, when she locked herself in her room at the palazzo, that she had written the letters to Edouard.

  She wrote compulsively, night after night, telling him on paper all the things she had never told him face to face. She sent none of the letters, and she never reread them when they were finished; she locked them away in a drawer.

  Then, as the work continued, there had been a change. “Trust yourself,” Thad had said, and those words had seemed to give her strength, not just when she was filming, but also afterward, when she went back to the palazzo, and when she was alone.

  One night, when they had been filming for about a month, she went up to her room at the palazzo, took out that bundle of unsent letters, put them in the empty fireplace, and set light to them. The very next day, as if sensing that something had changed in her, and her mind had set, the sickness stopped. It never returned, and as her confidence in her work grew, she had felt a sense of extraordinary physical well-being, a new abundant energy.

  But the turmoil of the past and the anxiety of the future were waiting for her; they began to stake their claim the moment the film was over, the moment she left Rome. Then, the nightmares she had had once or twice in France returned, and they still continued; night after night she had the most horrible dreams.

  She held Billy in her arms, then Edouard, and it was Edouard who was dying and bleeding. Her mother danced through her dreams, danced to the song about lilacs, her violet eyes wide and unseeing. Ned Calvert came back, in his white suit, and took her up to his wife’s room, and told her she was his wife now, she was trapped, she would be his forever and forever. Hélène looked at him, and at the bright glass bottles that glittered on the dressing table, and she wanted to pick one up and kill him. She picked up the glass bottle, and it turned into a diamond; the diamond was very cold, and it burned her.

  These dreams frightened her; she would have liked to tell someone about them, but there was no one to tell except Anne or Lewis, and she could not bring herself to do that.

  In the daytime they receded, but still she could not quite shake them off. This frightened her too: she had to be well and strong, she told herself, she had to be—for the baby. She felt she knew this baby: it had become her friend and her confidant. She knew what it would look like, she knew everything about it, even the exact day on which it was conceived: July 16, of course, July 16, because that was the day also on which Billy died. Because of the baby, Billy lived on—they hadn’t been able to kill him.

  “I have to be well. I have to be strong.” She would say it out loud to herself sometimes, rocking backward and forward, her hands clasped tight around her stomach. Strong for the baby’s sake, and strong for Billy’s. It was important to think about Billy as much as she could, because the baby would never know him. So she tried very hard not to think about Edouard, and when—in spite of her efforts—he crept back into her mind, she always felt guilty.

  She hated that almost as much as the dreams. There was no time for guilt now; guilt raised too many questions. It started her mind racing off in all sorts of directions; it hinted at possibilities, choices she might have made, that she refused to face.

  Billy’s baby. Billy’s baby. She said it over and over again, like a litany. She drew the curtains, shut out the world, and retreated to the fire. The litany lulled her mind; it helped her to spin plans for the future.

  These plans, she began to realize, had to be specific. They had to be practical.

  She had been telling herself this on the afternoon Lewis had allowed to slip by over a protracted lunch. It was evening when he returned to the cottage, and it was raining. He came into the little red room, with its fire, and its pools of amber light, stamping his feet, pulling off his cashmere scarf and his beautiful gloves, brushing the rain from the shoulders of his expensive overcoat, laughing and in mid-complaint abou
t the horrors of the English weather. Quite suddenly, for no apparent reason, he stopped in mid-sentence.

  He looked at Helen, who was sitting on a rug in front of the fire. Often, when she looked at him, he felt she did not see him; it was as if she looked beyond him to a quite different face. Now, perhaps because his arrival had startled her, she was looking at him directly and intently, her wide gray eyes thoughtful. Lewis hesitated, then took off his overcoat, pulled off his wet shoes, and sat down.

  He was supposed, that evening, to be going on to the theater and to dinner; they both knew this. They looked at each other for a moment; then she looked down, her dark lashes shadowing her cheeks; her color rose slightly. Lewis shifted in his seat; the fire was warming him pleasantly.

  “Must you go, Lewis?” she said finally, in a quiet voice. Lewis instantly felt the most extraordinary joy; he felt as if he had been running up an endless succession of escalators and—quite suddenly—he was able to get off.

  “I don’t have to,” he answered quickly. “It’s a ghastly night. In fact…I don’t think I will.”

  She looked up; the quickness of his capitulation seemed to startle her; then, shyly, she smiled.

  She was thinking, in a cool detached and practical way, that she was very young, that she had virtually no money, and that Billy’s baby needed a father. She looked at that fact with dispassion, weighing the needs of the baby against the needs of Lewis Sinclair, who, as she had come to understand, was far more vulnerable and uncertain than he had at first seemed to be—Lewis Sinclair, who could be hurt.

  Her face did not betray the calculation; Lewis, looking at her, thought his decision to stay home pleased her, but that she was too modest to say so. He felt a startling jolt of pure happiness.

  Nothing else was said, but in that small moment the future course of both their lives began to change.

  Three weeks later, as Christmas approached, it snowed heavily. Hélène awoke to find her bedroom unusually light. She slipped out of the high brass bed, and opened the curtains.

  It was still early morning, and the snow outside was undisturbed. She looked out on a perfect morning, in which clear and radiant sun shone on a pale new world. Just then, and for the first time, she felt her baby move.

  She stood perfectly still, pressing her hands against her stomach, which felt hard under her nightdress. It was a strange sensation, quite unlike any description she had read, and for a moment she thought she had imagined it. Then she felt it again: a slow fluttering, like a bird cupped in the palms of the hands, part of herself and yet separate. That stirring filled her with a sudden and intensely fierce protectiveness; tears stung her eyes. That morning she asked Anne Kneale, as she sat for her in her studio, if she could recommend a London doctor. She paused: a gynecologist.

  There was a little silence. Anne looked up, her brush poised. Her clever angular face, with its sharp eyes, rested on Hélène for a moment.

  “Yes. I can do that. He’s a sanctimonious son of a bitch. Eminent, however.”

  She paused, and then began to stab at the canvas again, with quick short brushstrokes. Nothing more was said—it was an extremely English moment, Hélène thought. She went to see the eminent man, Mr. Foxworth, at his Harley Street rooms the next afternoon. She did not tell Lewis where she was going.

  Mr. Foxworth was tall, and looked distinguished. He wore a pearl-gray three-piece suit, a pearl-gray tie, and a pearl-headed tiepin. In his buttonhole was a pale yellow rosebud, and he sat behind a very large and highly polished desk, writing. On the wall behind him was a neatly arranged row of English landscape paintings, each carefully lit, each small, and each harmonizing gently with the dull but tasteful Regency striped wallpaper. Hélène kept her eyes fixed upon these paintings; Mr. Foxworth kept his eyes fixed upon his desk. He was asking her about her periods, and Hélène could tell that he found her answers unsatisfactory. She had never discussed her periods in front of a man before; she was scarlet with embarrassment.

  Eventually he sighed, in a manner that contrived to suggest that not just Hélène but all her sex were a mystery to him, a slightly tiresome mystery. He suggested that she might go next door to his examining room, where a nurse was waiting. He would then examine her. He sounded as if he found the necessity of this regrettable.

  The nurse was brisk.

  “Remove all your undies,” she said, “including the panties. You’ll find a gown on the hook.”

  Hélène did as she said. When she came out in a green linen gown, the nurse assisted her onto a narrow table. It had metal stirrups at the foot, and was protected by a sheet of white paper. Hélène began to feel unclean. The nurse pressed a discreet bell, and after a well-timed pause, Mr. Foxworth joined them.

  Staring at a space somewhere above her head, he produced a metal object that resembled a pair of hair tongs. He dangled it from one rubber-gloved hand, while, with the other, he made a few deft preliminary probes.

  “This will feel cold at first. Relax your muscles, please,” he said. It was the only remark he made during the entire examination.

  Hélène instantly tensed. Mr. Foxworth looked mildly irritated. He put Hélène’s feet into the stirrups, raising her legs. He inserted the metal object, made some adjustments, and turned a screw. He peered, and felt. Hélène shut her eyes.

  When she opened them again, Mr. Foxworth was peeling off the rubber gloves. He snapped them into a ball, and dropped them into a wastebasket. He then pressed her stomach, eased aside the thin gown, and—still gazing at a space somewhere above her head—felt her breasts. Touching her at all seemed to him a distasteful business, and Hélène wondered if this was because she was unmarried, and whether he looked the same way when he examined respectable matrons. When she was dressing again, and the nurse called her Mrs. Craig, she became certain of it.

  This discreet unspoken distaste terrified her. She wished that she had put on a ring, pretended to be married—anything rather than face that wall of disapproval.

  She went back into Mr. Foxworth’s rooms, feeling branded. He was writing; he indicated she should sit; he continued to write. When, finally, he looked up, he was frowning; he began to speak, measuring his words carefully, in the manner of a busy man addressing a small and backward child.

  “Miss Craig. The duration of a normal pregnancy is forty weeks. It is now December twenty-second. You are at present around nineteen weeks into pregnancy. It is difficult to be more precise given your incertitude regarding the dates of your menstrual periods.” He paused. “I have to tell you, therefore, that if you were to raise the question of termination, I should have to refuse. The requirements of the law are stringent. When the pregnancy has advanced beyond twelve weeks, then the possibility of termination is ruled out…Miss Craig, do you understand what I am saying?”

  Hélène’s eyes swung back to his face. His words seemed to her completely meaningless, and to come at her across a great divide.

  “Termination?” she said finally. “You mean an abortion? But I don’t want an abortion. I want to have this baby.”

  Mr. Foxworth compressed his lips. The term abortion was clearly one that pained his sensibilities. He adjusted the calendar on his desk by a few inches.

  “Of course. Of course.” He sounded suave, soothing, and entirely disbelieving. “Naturally, I understand. You wished to have your pregnancy confirmed. I might have wished you had done so earlier…However. You are in excellent health. We can estimate with a very good degree of accuracy that you will reach full term on or around May fourth—a spring baby. Always so pleasant for the mothers, I think.” His face brightened automatically, then sobered, as if he had made this pleasantry many times before, and had only now realized its inaptness. “It is also, of course, still some considerable time away—which is fortunate, as it gives you the opportunity to look ahead, Miss Craig, and to make plans which are in the best interests of yourself and of your child. I wonder…” His face became grave. “Had you considered, Miss Craig, the possibilities of ad
option?”

  He put the question perfectly coolly, as if it were one so obvious as to be hardly worth mentioning. Hélène swallowed; he was looking at her, and at her clothes, his expression blandly dismissive. She was wearing a plain and inexpensive cloth coat, which she had bought some weeks before. She realized that to him it looked like what it was—cheap. And she felt an angry certitude that the way he was speaking to her was somehow related to that coat. To the coat, and the fact that she was not married. She looked at him with a furious loathing, and she thought of her mother. Was that how the little back-street abortionist in Montgomery had looked at her too?

  In that second she made herself a promise—which was the old promise really, but given new force: that this would never happen to her again. She would never be patronized again. And, whatever she had to do, her baby was not going to grow up the way she grew up, filled with that painful awful pride that is the by-product of poverty. She stood up.

  “I told you. I want this baby. I am not interested in the question of adoption.”

  Her chin lifted. Mr. Foxworth looked at her narrowly, and then looked back at his notes.

  Hélène, staring at his bent head, at the pearl-gray suit, at the two neat wings of gray hair at his temples, thought: He is regretting he ever agreed to see me. If I hadn’t used Anne Kneale’s name—and title—when I telephoned, he wouldn’t have seen me at all…

  In this she was quite wrong. Mr. Foxworth was thinking about dates. Given the laws regarding abortion then current in England, he was exceedingly familiar with women who came to him and lied, charmingly and unshakably, about the date of their last period. Rich women; society women; older women; younger women: occasionally they smiled brightly, sometimes they wept. Their object, of course, was to persuade him that they were not as far advanced into pregnancy as they were, and that—therefore—a termination was possible. These women, most of whom were used to getting their way, could become angry, and insulting, when Mr. Foxworth informed them quietly that—as he put it—they must be mistaken.