Destiny

by Sally Beauman

  She fussed over him then, with small fluttering hopeless movements. Resting his hands, stroking his hair. And then she stopped, and grew still, and just stayed there, in the quiet, with him. Finally, she rose. She turned away. She turned back. She kissed him for the last time, bending over him. It seemed wrong to kiss him on the lips, so she kissed his cheek, and then his closed eyes. Then she left him. They drove her back to Quaires, and carefully, as gently as she could, she told Lucien and Alexandre and Cat. Christian, who was distraught, offered to help, and to come with her when she did this. But Hélène, who was calm and still, refused him gently.

  “No, Christian. I must do it,” she said. This calm would not leave her, it would not break. It remained with her, so that she felt as if she moved in slow motion through a dream, when she told the children, when Cassie embraced her and wept, when Christian broke down.

  It would not go away. At night it was with her when she could not sleep; in the morning it waited for her to open her eyes. Nothing seemed able to pierce it: she could not weep. It was with her when Christian fetched Edouard’s belongings from the hospital. A watch; a platinum pen; a wallet. Just three things. In the wallet, there was a little money—Edouard rarely carried much money—and a driver’s license. No photographs. No item of any kind that could give her one last message after death. She laid them out on the table in front of her, and touched them, thinking: I shall cry now. I shall be able to cry now. But she could not.

  The calm was like a shield, and it protected her. It took her through the arrival of Louise, the arrival of a white-faced Simon Scher. It took her through the headlines in the newspapers, and the renewed, and often sensational, coverage of Edouard’s life. It took her, unscathed, through the inquest, through the letters which began to arrive from all over the world, and which she answered, methodically and carefully and promptly, each afternoon. It remained with her when she made the arrangements for the funeral, which would be in the Loire, and when the endless meetings with the lawyers began.

  All this was real, and it was not real. She looked at these people and these events from behind the glassy shield of her calm, and she cut their condolences short, however sincere they were. She knew that behind that shield her mind, her whole body, ached with the pain of her loss, but she did not want anyone to glimpse it: it belonged to Edouard, and she was too proud.

  Edouard’s body was flown back to the Loire in his private plane, and Hélène flew with it, alone. It was to lie, the night before the funeral, in the chapel of the château, near the memorials to Edouard’s father, to Jean-Paul, to Isobel, and to Grégoire. Hélène stayed there, sitting upright, her hands folded, for many hours, until it had grown dark, and her body was stiff with cold. When, finally, she went back to the house, Christian, who was staying there with her, pressed a small package into her hands, when he wished her good night.

  “It’s the Beethoven tape,” he said quietly. “The one Edouard had in his car. I know he would have been playing it. I thought you might want to listen to it.”

  “The Beethoven?”

  “When my mother died, I went all over the house—looking for something, I don’t quite know what. Some letter. Some message. There was nothing, of course. I thought you might have felt that. I thought you might be glad to have this.”

  Hélène looked down at the small cassette, her face blank.

  “This tape? You mean this is the tape from Edouard’s car?”

  Christian’s face grew gentle.

  “No, Hélène. The same recording, not the same tape. The tape in the car—well, that was broken…”

  “Oh, yes. Of course. Thank you, Christian.”

  She went upstairs to her room and played the tape. She had listened to it many times before, when she drove with Edouard, and when she heard it now, quite suddenly, the music broke through the defenses she had erected. Andante grazioso; quasi allegretto: then she wept.

  The next day, when she needed the calm again, it came back. She put it on, with her black clothes, like a cloak. It protected her, through the service itself, through the burial, which took place in the de Chavigny burial ground, close by the chapel. It was set on rising ground, overlooking the vineyards and the water meadows beyond, with their groves of chestnut trees; its boundaries were marked by a line of thin dark cypress trees, planted in the lifetime of Edouard’s great grandfather.

  In the fields below, nothing moved; the air was cool and the sky milky, lit by a thin sun and diffused by banked pale clouds. There was already an autumnal scent in the air, though it was still summer, and the grapes were not yet harvested. The leaves of the chestnut trees in the distance had just begun to turn; there were touches of yellow among their leaves, and in the air there was the scent of rain, and of woodsmoke.

  Hélène stood and listened to the words she had known she would hear, among the faces she had known she would see. This crowd of people in black: Edouard’s best friend on one side of her, his closest associate on the other. She looked across to the still pale faces of Lucien, Alexandre, and Cat; Alexandre too young to understand; Lucien defiant and fearful; Cat’s face twisted and pinched with grief.

  Beyond them, other faces; so many faces. Louise, in deep mourning, her face veiled; several members of the Cavendish family, from England; Alphonse de Varenges, who had once been so kind to her in the Loire, and who had talked to her about trout fishing, standing very upright, like the old soldier he was; beside him stood his wife, Jacqueline, frowning, perhaps in an attempt to keep back the tears which she would certainly have scorned to shed in a public place. Jean-Jacques Belmont-Laon, head bent, with his new wife; Drew Johnson, who had flown from Texas; Clara Delluc, whose eyes were puffy and red from weeping. Cassie, standing very upright, with Madeleine, her husband, and her two children. George, standing toward the back, looking suddenly aged, head bowed. Floryan Wyspianski, lifting his great bearlike head to the sky, his gentle face a mask of bewilderment. Representatives from the de Chavigny companies—she saw Monsieur Bloch, and his rival, Temple. Faces from the recent past, faces from further back: Isobel’s brother, William, whom Hélène had never met; a group of men who had been at Magdalen with Edouard. Representatives of various government departments; politicians; senior colleagues from other companies and from the Paris Bourse; friends from London, from Paris, from New York. She saw them, and she did not see them; she heard, and did not hear, the priest’s words.

  Toward the end of the ceremony, it began to rain, lightly at first, then more heavily. One or two people glanced up in sudden consternation; Louise gave a moan. Someone handed Hélène a little trowel, a ridiculous thing, containing a handful of earth. The rich, crumbly soil of the Loire. Hélène took it, and leaned forward. Drops of rain fell on her head, on the polished surface of Edouard’s coffin, on the silver plate on which they had engraved his name. She tipped the earth from the trowel into her bare hand, felt its coolness and weight for an instant, and then scattered it, steadily, not letting her hand shake, for Edouard’s sake.

  It was over, and as some of the people began to move away, she could sense their embarrassment, she could almost smell it. Death made people awkward, she thought. Christian took her arm; he and Simon Scher began to lead her away.

  She stopped once, and looked back. With a conscious effort, straining all the resources of her body and her mind, she willed her love to Edouard, as she had done before, on other occasions, across other distances. The narrow columns of the cypress bent with the wind, then straightened; a cloud moved across the face of the sun, and then passed. For a moment the sky was lit with a watery radiance; she turned away.

  The calm was there, waiting for her. It protected her, as she shook hands with so many people, heard so many brief words of condolence, as those who were not returning to the house grouped, regrouped, and then left.

  The last of all was a tall, stout man, with a pale complexion and heavily lidded eyes; he was dressed in the most correct mourning. He had been standing, hatless, apparently unaff
ected by, or unaware of, the rain, a little to one side, toward the back, when they stood by the graveside. Afterward, she had seen him speak to Louise, but Louise had departed indoors, weeping, at the first sign of rain.

  Now the man came forward; he halted; he bent, with great formality, over her hand.

  She did not recognize him; she looked at him from behind her calm, hardly seeing him.

  “My sincere condolences, Madame.” He straightened up. “Your late husband and I once worked together. Many years ago now.” Seeing the blankness in her face, he inclined his head.

  “Philippe de Belfort,” he said, backed off a few respectful paces, and then turned away.

  Hélène watched him walk away, down the narrow road, in the direction of the gates, where a large black Mercedes was waiting.

  When he was a decent distance, and perhaps when he thought he was unobserved, for he glanced over his shoulder first, he unfurled the umbrella he was holding, shook it once or twice, fussily, opened it, and then raised it above his head. Thus protected, he hastened the remaining distance to his car, and climbed in, without looking back.

  After that, she lived, and she did not live. The glassy calm rarely left her; she functioned, looking at the world with a detachment which left her only when she was at home, or when she was alone.

  Time inched forward, day after slow day. Yesterday; today; tomorrow. Fall became winter, and winter, spring. She watched this alteration of the seasons, and resented the predictability and the punctuality of their change. Once in the early morning, when they were staying at Quaires for Christmas, she walked for a long way out of the grounds, and up a bridle path onto the Downs, where the hills sloped westward. It had snowed during the night, and she was the first person to walk that way that day, her feet cutting into the crisp new snow. It was very cold, and when she eventually stopped, on high ground, she looked out at a landscape made scarcely recognizable by the snow. The land was white; the trees of the woods were bare and black against a sky of unrelieved pallor, heavy with the threat of further snow. She thought, then, of the morning she had stood in the small cold bedroom in London, looking out at the snowy street, and feeling, for the first time, her child quicken inside her.

  She turned back to the house sadly; feeling, as she had felt for months, that something within her was broken, destroyed, and it would never stir again. She stopped, and then walked on again, taking a path that led back through the gardens. In the rondel of yew, she stopped again, and thought of Edouard, and then let her mind travel back, and further back, over the years: Edouard, Lewis, Billy. Three deaths, three fatalities. She broke off a small icicle from the hedge, took off her glove, and let it lie in her palm, bright as the diamond she wore on her finger. After a while, the warmth of her skin melted it, and she turned and walked back to the house, and the other memories which waited for her.

  Other people adjusted—that was the term, she knew. She could see them, watching her, taking their cue from her, waiting for the moment when it would be possible to behave as they had before all this happened. Life went on, people forgot, and she did not resent this; she tried very hard to behave in the same way that she always had. It was perhaps a success; those who did not know her well seemed to think so, but Hélène herself felt only half alive.

  She watched her children, inevitably, come to terms with their loss. Lucien, the most robust, recovered the most quickly. With Alexandre, it was difficult to tell, for he was so young. To begin with, he kept asking for his father, and demanding to know where he was; but as the months passed, these questions became less frequent, and one spring evening, in Paris, when Hélène came up to him to say good night, he took her hand, and said, “Papa won’t come again, will he?”

  “No, Alexandre.”

  His small face looked up at her anxiously. He paused, and then said, “I should like to see him.”

  His tone was wistful, but accepting; he settled down to sleep. Hélène bent and kissed him: she loved Alexandre very much, painfully, and protectively. She loved him for his gentleness, for his slowness, for the fact that he had been late to walk, and late to speak, for the fact that he looked so exactly like Edouard. She thought, as she straightened up, and he closed his eyes: our last child. Tears came to her eyes; she knew she would have no more children.

  Cat grieved more angrily, more fiercely, than the younger children: she was old enough to understand her loss. This shared sense of loss brought them very close to each other again; but Cat, too, had her own life. She had insisted on going to her boarding school in England, because her father had chosen it. She began to settle in and make friends there; Hélène was frightened to burden her with a past she herself could not shake off, and so she made a conscious effort to steer Cat away from such thoughts and memories, and toward her future.

  Meanwhile, she continued her life. She continued her work, but its meaninglessness without Edouard repelled her, and made her lose patience with it. For a while, in the first year after Edouard’s death, she continued to supervise the arrangements for the new Wyspianski collection, and she continued to attend board meetings at de Chavigny headquarters. She sat now in Edouard’s chair, at the head of the table.

  Once, those meetings had amused and absorbed her. But now, with her new detachment, she viewed them with increasing distaste. The politics, the maneuverings—these all seemed so petty now. Even the decisions reached seemed without point; how much difference would it have made, she felt, if they had elected, not this course, but its very opposite?

  In the fall of 1974, she ceased to attend the meetings. When Simon Scher came to her with decisions so major they required her consent, she would listen to him listlessly, hardly taking in his arguments; usually she would simply ask him which course had the support of the majority of the board, and then she would authorize it.

  Even when he told her that, for a number of reasons—all cogent, for he listed them—it was felt that the plans for the next Wyspianski collection should be postponed, she agreed. Scher, who had opposed this move, looked at her intently.

  “You can overrule them on this, you know, Hélène,” he said quietly. “I didn’t expect you to give in. Not on this.”

  She turned away irritably, because she could hear the reproach in his voice.

  “Hélène. Apart from your personal holding, you also have your children’s share in the company, in trust. Technically, until they come of age, the company is in your hands, just as it was in Edouard’s. I can only argue with the board. You can do much more than that.”

  “It’s only a postponement.”

  “For the moment. Yes.”

  “Then I agree to a postponement. That’s all.”

  “Won’t you come to the next meeting—Hélène?”

  “I would prefer not to.”

  He left her then, without further argument. Three days later, Wyspianski came to see her, to ask her to intercede. When she refused, he looked at her in bewilderment; for a moment, she thought he was going to burst out into angry reproach, but he did not. His face grew sad, and then he shook his head.

  “Edouard believed in my work. He fought for it, he fought for me. I always thought that you—” He broke off, and seeing the expression on her face, apologized.

  “I am sorry,” he said stiffly. “I understand. I should not have troubled you with this.”

  It was not the last reproach she received. She received a rebuke from Cassie, who turned on her suddenly one day, when Hélène had just agreed, without interest, to some domestic arrangement on which she had been consulted.

  “When you going to snap out of this?” Cassie’s face had become quite red. “You’re going about like you was walking in your sleep. You think that’s what he’d have wanted? Well, I’m telling you, he wouldn’t.”

  That stung her; when she was alone, it made her weep, hopelessly and angrily. But the next day, the calm came back again, and she began to avoid Cassie, fearing another attack.

  But the fiercest rebuke of all ca
me from Cat, when she returned to France for the summer holidays, and discovered that the Wyspianski collection had been postponed again. She went to have tea with Floryan, at his atelier, as she often did, and when she returned, she came storming into Hélène’s room.

  “Floryan says the collection’s been postponed again. I know he thinks it will never be made—he didn’t say that, but I know it’s what he thinks. What are you doing, Mother? Why are you letting it happen like this?”

  “It’s the board’s decision. They felt it was wise…”

  “Who cares what they thought! If Daddy had been alive, this would never have happened. He wouldn’t have let it happen. He cared about Floryan’s work. I thought you cared. And you just sit there, and do nothing. It’s so awful. It’s so cowardly…” Her voice rose. “Please, Mother, don’t do this…”

  “Cat, you don’t understand…”

  “I do! I understand!” Cat lifted her flushed face, her eyes bright with anger and frustration. “I understand only too well. Daddy’s dead. And you’ve given up.”

  She ran out of the room and banged the door behind her. Hélène stood alone, quietly, thinking. The next day, she sent for Simon Scher, and also for Christian.

  “There are a number of factors.” Simon Scher sat opposite her in the drawing room at St. Cloud. Christian lounged on her right, listening carefully, smoking a chain of Black Russian cigarettes. “In the first place, there are a number of people within the company, and they’re jockeying for power—chiefly Temple, and Bloch, but there are also others. I expected that, and it can be contained, just as it was contained when Edouard was alive. Both Temple and Bloch are valuable to the company—they just need to have it made very clear to them exactly how far they can go. Once they see that, and they accept it, I don’t think they’ll cause further trouble.”