Destiny (78 page)

"The name," Thad said with a sudden firmness. "We have to do something about the name. I don't like it."

"Which name?" Lewis rounded on him belhgerently. "Helen Craig, or Helen Sinclair? Which is, I might just remind you, Thad, what's she's going to be called very soon."

"Both of them," Thad answered irritatingly. "They both sound Enghsh. Ordinary. Dull. I don't like Helen. I don't like Craig. And Sinclair is a bummer."

"Thanks."

"No offense. It's great for a banker. Really, Lewis, just great. But for a movie star, it sucks. Now . . ."He drummed his fingers on his fat thighs. "Let's just go over this. Think. Like—Greta Garbo—two G's right? Marilyn Monroe. Two M's. This new French bimbo, Brigitte Bardot—two B's, and in French it sounds hke bebe —clever, huh?"

"I'm thinking about them." Lewis returned to his chair and sat down. "I'm also thinking about Carole Lombard. Bette Davis. Katharine Hep-bum. Gina LoUobrigida. Marlene Dietrich. They all seem to have gotten by okay without the same initials. ..."

"I give you that. I'm not laying down the law here. Just making suggestions—you know."

The two men looked at each other. Helen stood up. Her color had risen. She stood there quietly, and both men, suddenly guiltily aware that they had been wrangling over her as if she were not present, fell silent.

"I was christened Helene. It's on my passport, if you remember, Lewis." She hesitated. "My mother always called me that. She liked it pronounced that way. She said . . . she said that it sounded like a sigh."

There was silence in the room. Lewis saw that her hands trembled slightly, and it seemed to cost her considerable effort to say this. Thad was looking at her intently, his expression unreadable.

"Helene," he said at last. "That's interesting." The small dark eyes

482 • SALLY BEAUMAN

flicked up to her face, and then away. "And it was your mother who called you that?"

"Always."

"Uh-huh." He gave a little secretive smile. Helen glanced at him, as if something in his tone were curious, but Thad said nothing more. He began to hum tunelessly, as he often did when he was thinking. It was some bars before Lewis recognized The Marseillaise.

"Also ..." She went on stiffly. "I grew up in a village called Hartland. I always liked that name. I don't know if . . ."

Lewis looked at her in astonishment. He didn't understand why she was going along with all this, why she didn't protest. She seemed even to like the idea of a new name, a new identity. He was just about to start protesting again, when Thad looked up. The light glinted on his shiny spectacles.

"Hart." He said. "Hartland's too long. Hart. No, Harte with an e on the end. Helene Harte. That's it. That's perfect. Great. What do you think, Lewis?"

Lewis hesitated, looking at Helen. He could see how tense she had become, how pent-up. Color stained her cheeks; her eyes were bright. He felt a moment's anger, an intuition that Thad was playing with her in some way he did not understand, treating in a brusque way something that clearly mattered to her very much. He looked at her eyes, enormous and dark in her delicate face, and the image of a frightened animal at bay came into his mind: hart, heart, Harte . . .

Thad looked away, and, as he did so, Helen, meeting Lewis's eyes, inclined her head. A little nod, a private hint, from which Thad was excluded. At once Lewis's spirits rose.

"I think it might work," he said slowly. "Yes."

"Let's sleep on it." Thad rose. "See you at the airport in the morning, Lewis."

On that note, he left, much to their astonishment—no further delay, no further appeals about the sofa, nothing. He just went. One minute he was there. The next minute he was out the door. The relief was so total, and so unexpected, that Helen and Lewis were left staring at each other in disbelief.

Helene, Lewis said to her, later, when they made love. Helene.

It was like a sigh. It suited her; the softness and the gentleness of the sound pleased him.

Helene, he said once more, when, after many kisses, long farewells, he left finally for the airport.

Helene Harte, Helene said to herself as she looked in the mirror when Lewis had gone. She lifted her hair and turned her face from side to side,

DESTINY • 483

learning her own features. Helene Harte, who would be rich and famous. Helene Harte, who would be a star, more than a star, a legend. Helene Harte, who would be the woman she had always imagined, who would go back to Orangeburg, Alabama, in a Cadillac. Helene Harte, who would show Orangeburg, and Ned Calvert, that she still remembered. It was possible; anything was possible if you wanted it enough, if you willed it enough.

She let her hair fall again around her face, and for an instant, Helene Craig looked back at her—the girl she had been. She would be her no more. She turned away from the mirror thinking, with a smile, that she would be giving birth twice, to her baby, and her new self.

She did not see the new self with any great precision yet, but that would come. She imagined her, meanwhile, without weakness, immensely strong, remote as a star, but also an avenging angel who came with wings and a sword.

That night she dreamed of Edouard.

The next months passed very swiftly. Lewis felt as if his life were measured by two clocks which kept very different time. One ticked away his progress, and occasional lack of it, with Thad; the other triumphantly recorded the advances of his love.

Lewis threw himself energetically into the wheeling and dealing in Paris. Certainly, he would have preferred to be back with Helene, but meanwhile he felt that everything he did was on her behalf He wanted to prove himself to her, he wanted to return to London with triumphs, deals which he could lay before her Uke the spoils of war. So he worked hard, tried to learn fast, and amazed himself with a toughness and tenacity he had always hoped he possessed but had never before tested to the full.

He took a room overlooking the courtyard in the Plaza-Athenee, his mother's favorite Paris hotel. His first action, on arrival, was to buy himself a fat Mont Blanc fountain pen, and a bottle of black ink. His second was to give the head porter the tip of a lifetime to ensure that the switchboard operator would put his calls through to London without hitch.

He then entered a round of meetings with a fierceness and vivacity that took even Thad by surprise. Sphere, in spite of Thad's claims, was proving elusive, so Lewis chased other contacts. He made endless telephone calls. He pinned people down and refused to allow them to avoid him or palm him off with evasive promises. He haggled, he wheedled, he cajoled, he bulUed, he hyped. He employed to the full his patrician manners, his social contacts, and his considerable charm. He took planes around Europe as

484 • SALLY BEAUMAN

casually as he took taxis, he had meetings before breakfast, and meetings at midnight. And slowly, painstakingly, he began to make progress: he began to be able to sort the wheat from the chaff—and when it came to raising money for movies, there was a great deal of chaff.

There was Henri Lebec, voluble, eager, who took him to dinner at the Tour d'Argent, and gave Lewis's genitals the most flagrant squeeze under the table at precisely the moment their waiter ignited their crepes suzette. Lebec had to be discarded: Lewis saw him now for the amateur he was. It reminded him how amateur he himself had been, and he determined to do better. He stopped returning Lebec's calls, and after a while, the Frenchman drifted away to some other project; he appeared more disappointed that Lewis was not homosexual than anything else.

There was the German steel magnate, interested in a tax shelter. There was the production company in Rome, backed by a spaghetti baron, who was interested in Thad's next movie—provided it was made at Cinecitta, and starred the spaghetti baron's girlfriend. There was a Yugoslav group, who seemed under the impression Thad was about to make an epic: they could raise government backing; they could provide an army of three thousand Yugoslavs very cheap—provided, of course, the picture was made in Yugoslavia. There were feelers from an American agent, who passed the word to a producer, who talked to a lawyer, and who then burned up the lines between Hollywood and Paris with thirty-seven phone calls in three days. Then he stopped calling. When Lewis next called back, he had been fired.

Lewis enjoyed all this. He was new to the game, and he refused to be disheartened. Thad, who sometimes gave way to gloom, and who liked to be dramatic, said, "It's a jungle out there, Lewis. A fucking jungle." Lewis supposed it was: it seemed to him also like a fairground—a fairground in which there were a lot of hucksters.

He would outtalk, outhuckster them all, Lewis resolved. And while he was at it, he'd develop his own instinct for the jugular: he might not need it yet, but one day, he was sure, it would be useful.

Meanwhile, no matter how little progress he made, he could always return to the Plaza-Athenee in the evenings. Then he would make his telephone call to Helene, his private line to reality. When he had hung up, Lewis, who had never written letters in his life if he could avoid it, would pick up his Mont Blanc pen, and cover pages of hotel writing paper in his large rounded schoolboyish hand. Letters to Helene; love letters: My darling, my sweet one, my life, my love. Helene kept all his letters, and answered them. Her own were simple. Lewis read them and reread them, and

DESTINY • 485

then reread them again. He kept them in his pocket; he took them out on planes, in taxis, in bed, in restaurants. They became worn and creased with handhng, and to Lewis they were the taUsmans of love.

They were married at Chelsea Town Hall in January. Helene wore a white woolen dress, a white woolen coat; it was again snowing. The clerk who married them was very solemn; Lewis hardly heard a word he said. The room in which the brief ceremony took place was decorated with plastic chrysanthemums. Lewis dared not look at Helene until he slipped the ring onto her ice-cold finger, and realized that her hand, too, was shaking.

Outside, they paused on the steps above the snowy street. Helene looked down at the small bouquet of flowers she was holding. Tiny white roses, white violets, white freesias. She touched their leaves, dehcately; the flowers were held in place by thin wires through the calyx.

They had four days together then, before Thad again started calling and sounding plaintive. Then Lewis went back to Paris, began a new set of meetings, and a new set of letters. My darling, my sweet wife: that particular term fired him with pride; he used it whenever possible.

He met Simon Scher, the representative of Sphere Distribution, for the first time the week after his marriage. Before that, when Scher had been mysteriously unavailable, Lewis had begun to think that all Thad's optimism had indeed been misplaced.

The first thing Scher did after shaking hands was to congratulate Lewis on his recent marriage, which Lewis assumed he must have heard of from Thad. The second thing was to remark that, like Lewis, he had been at Harvard—the business school in his case. The third thing was to open his briefcase. He took out several neat sheaves of paper and laid them on the table between them. Lewis looked at Scher, a small neat man, conservatively dressed: this man did not look like a huckster. They continued to meet, at intervals, throughout February. Lewis continued to seek other sources of finance; he did not intend to make the mistake of putting all his eggs in Scher's basket.

Sphere purchased the distribution rights to Night Game, and it began to look as if the film might have a profitable future, on the European art-house circuit, anyway. Thad had been bullied into producing a screenplay for the next film, and a shooting script—though he said in private that he

486 • SALLY BEAUMAN

had no intention of adhering to either. They had a detailed budget. There was a detailed schedule. Locations had been chosen, and permission to use them obtained. There was some casting—all of it still provisional apart from Helene and Lloyd Baker, who was eager to work with Thad again. There was a strong technical and production team. Lewis assembled all this material and information, disseminated it widely, and felt pleased with himself.

Scher took this weighty dossier away with him early in February—he needed to consult, he said. Lewis snatched two days back in London, where Helene was eager he should meet her gynecologist.

Mr. Foxworth blandly congratulated Lewis on the forthcoming birth of his child; Helene stared fixedly at the paintings on the wall behind his head. Mr. Foxworth, noting Lewis's Savile Row overcoat, his Tiffany watch, his handmade shoes, was most affable. He noted Lewis's accent, and his unconscious inbred arrogance, and became more affable still. He was sure, he said charmingly, that Mr. Sinclair would prefer his wife to give birth in a private clinic rather than a National Health hospital— excellent though those hospitals indubitably were. His own clinic, in St. John's Wood ... He allowed his voice to tail away.

Lewis, used to such physicians since childhood, felt reassured. St. John's Wood, he said; naturally. Helene gave Mr. Foxworth a glance of triumph, which Lewis did not observe.

They went shopping. They went to The White House, in New Bond Street, and bought an exquisite layette, adorned with Brussels lace, embroidered by nuns, and—in the case of the baby's shawl, which was like gossamer—hand knit by elderly craftswomen in Scotland. They discussed the hiring of a nurse for the baby—a nurse was essential in any case, and it would be necessary to leave the baby with her for a few weeks in June, when Helene and Lewis had to undertake a brief tour to publicize Night Game in Europe. Luckily, Anne Kneale's sister could recommend someone very good: Lewis interviewed the young woman, who came with excellent references; he began to feel, day by day, more responsible, more grown-up—though Lewis's own term was mature.

One day, coming back to the cottage unexpectedly, he found Helene reading—of all things—the Financial Times. Lewis found this highly amusing, and when she confessed, shyly, that actually she was quite interested in such matters, but she found them hard to understand, Lewis was touched. Here, he felt, he could dazzle—was he not, after all, a Sinclair, his father's son?