Destiny (71 page)

"No, Lewis," she said to each of these invitations in exactly the same tone.

Lewis went anyway, and—sometimes—the next day, she asked him to tell her about his adventures the night before. She asked about the Guildhall banquet. She asked about the de Chavigny reception. Lewis smiled.

"Well, the champagne was incredible, I can tell you that. And everyone was there, of course."

"Was the jewelry beautiful?" she said. She thought of Edouard, showing her the designs.

"I guess so." Lewis shrugged. "I don't know much about jewelry. There were some incredible rubies. And the women there were going crazy over the stuff. Though they were all dripping with jewels already. The Cavendishes—I went with the Cavendishes—had actually gotten all their loot out of the bank. Usually they don't bother. The insurance is hell. They wear paste. Actually—" he gave his Bostonian frown—"I thought it was a bit much. De Chavigny himself was there, of course, and the woman with him—that designer woman, Ghislaine something, I forget her other name, but everybody's using her in New York now—well, she was wearing so many diamonds around her neck she could hardly turn her head. Lucy

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Cavendish said her mother was miflfed. She was wearing their Romanov stuff, and she feh eclipsed. ..."

"Ghislaine Belmont-Laon," Helen said, surprising him. She frowned shghtly, and changed the subject.

The next day she was very quiet, and Lewis thought she looked pale. It worried him, and her refusal to venture out of the httle cottage alarmed him slightly. It seemed, increasingly, unnatural and defensive, as if she were frightened of something.

It crossed Lewis's mind that she might be ill in some way—certainly she looked, sometimes, as if she were under strain. But Helen dismissed these worries whenever he voiced them, and after a few days, began to look less pale and washed out. Lewis, after two days' abstinence, began to accept invitations once more. He did so with a certain bravura: it piqued him that Helen seemed indifferent whether he went or stayed.

By late November, when they had been in London for three weeks, a pattern had established itself Lewis sallied forth, and still tried, sporadically, to persuade Helen to accompany him. He took her continuing refusals with a resigned good grace, an air of bewilderment.

One morning, Lewis was leaving for a lunch appointment, and he was late. Helen was sitting on a couch in front of the window, reading The Times. Lewis, putting on his vicuna overcoat, his scarf and his gloves—it was very cold outside—was annoyed to observe that his departure hardly rated a glance. She said good-bye to him absently, though, when he had gone, she did look up to watch him hurry down the street outside.

He had his back to her: she watched him set his face in the direction of the King's Road, where he would pick up a taxi; the wind lifted his fair hair; he thrust his hands into his pockets. He looked elegant; more EngUsh than the English.

She watched him until he was out of sight, and then looked down at the newspaper again. It contained a report from New York on the reception held to launch the Wyspianski collection there. There was an erudite and enthusiastic review of Wyspianski's work, and a photograph of the Baron de Chavigny at the reception. Next to him, wearing a dog collar of diamonds, was Ghislaine Belmont-Laon, whose company, it was noted, had just redesigned the interiors of the de Chavigny showrooms off Fifth Avenue.

She put the newspaper down. To have known that Edouard was in London had filled her with a terrible, painful nervous perturbation. Now he was no longer there, she felt glad, she told herself: glad. She looked at the photograph dully. It was only to be expected. Two months—more— had gone by. If it was not Ghislaine Belmont-Laon, it would have been someone else, sooner or later.

444 • SALLY BEAUMAN

After a while, she picked up The Times again, and turned to the financial pages. This was something she had begun to do every day, though not if Lewis was there, because he would have laughed at her. Patiently, she made herself read: trusts; equity issues; bonds; commodities. She found it all difficult to understand, yet curiously soothing, and she had an optimistic faith that she could learn, if she tried hard enough. Behind the dry wording of the reports, and the figures which still confused her, she sensed passion and drama, Uves, careers, fortunes, made and broken very swiftly —and that interested her. It had occurred to her, reading these reports one day, that money was a means of revenge in ways she had not thought of before. She was thinking of Ned Calvert when the idea came to her: now, if there was a report about the cotton industry, she read that first. Of course, to accumulate money by these means, you first had to have some. She, as yet, did not; she would have to earn some. The necessity to do so was becoming more urgent.

She put down the paper and stared fixedly across the room. The panic was starting to come back, and she fought it down. On one of the chairs, Lewis had tossed a dark green cashmere sweater he had been wearing the previous day. It was an expensive sweater, and she looked at it thoughtfully. She was aware that it would have been very easy to have gone with Lewis to his luncheon. It would have been equally easy to persuade him to stay here. One word. One gesture. She could have made that little, little move at any time since they left Rome.

But she had grown to like Lewis, and so—scrupulously and carefully— she had not made the gesture, nor spoken the word. She did not want to hurt Lewis, and something else, too, held her back—an obstinacy, a stub-bom clinging to the memory of Edouard, a reluctance to kill off that quick bright thing that animated her still. But she felt lonely. She also felt afraid. She looked out now at the street, which was wet, and empty. She thought of Lewis, felt rehef that she had acted as she had, and then, quite suddenly, an irritable regret.

In the afternoons now, the light faded fast. At half-past four, Helene would draw the scarlet woolen curtains across the small windows, and light the lamps, and sit in front of the coal fire that burned in the black Victorian grate. Sometimes, she made herself tea. She grew to like these simple rituals. In Alabama, even at the turn of the year, it was never as damp and cold as it was here now.

But she liked this misty weather. She delighted in the russet of the leaves of the London plane trees, the heaps of wet leaves on the sidewalk, the

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hoarfrost that made grass and branches white in the mornings, and the smell of the London air, which was earthy and acrid, slightly sooty. Best of all, she loved the light, for its softness and grayness, for the haze that sometimes hung over the Thames.

It gave her pleasure to watch time pass so tangibly; to watch the afternoon darken toward evening; to see the streetlamps lit, and the people, heads hunched against the cold, hurrying home from the tube after work. These very ordinary things soothed her. She began to hope that it would snow soon: she had never seen snow except in photographs.

The house had been lent them quite unexpectedly. When they first arrived in London, they had stayed with a friend of Lewis's mother, in a large fashionable apartment in Eaton Square. Their hostess, an American, was in the throes of the pre-Christmas season of parties; a chic woman, she was negligently hospitable. Helene had shrunk from her, and shrunk from the whirl of activities into which Lewis prepared to plunge with such enthusiasm. Once the work of filming was over, she felt anxious and exhausted; all the events of the previous summer, which had succeeded one another at such speed, pressed in on her; they had begun to enter her dreams at night in chaotic and malign confusion. What she had wanted— she realized, now it had been given her—was a quiet still place, into which she could crawl, and curl up, like an injured animal, and let time pass.

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 hving 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 Helene exclaimed with delight.

446 • SALLY BEAUMAN

"Oh, Lewis. I like it so much."

"It's hke 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; Helene stayed alone. Apart from Anne Kneale, whom Helene 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 stom-

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ach. 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 \hQ 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. Helene 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 hked 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.