Destiny (125 page)

Cat made a small rebellious face, and Anne, seeing her, repressed a smile. She turned back to Helene.

"However. You may look at it now. I suppose."

She led Helene around to the far side of the easel, folded her arms, and scowled at her own handiwork. But Helene was not deceived either by the tone, or the expression of dissatisfaction. She looked at the painting quietly.

In it. Cat was sitting much as she was now, perched on the edge of the table, poised to move—as she always was. Behind her, through the long studio window, were glimpses of Anne's wild, untamed garden. The garden was like Cat: abundant, generous, undisciplined, and also beautiful. There was her daughter—a little girl still, but with an unconscious grace in

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the disposition of her limbs, caught with an expression on her face, startled, alert, about to break into laughter, an expression that was very characteristic of her, and at the same time—Helene saw it now—curiously adult.

She looked at the painting for a long time, greatly moved. She turned to Anne, and embraced her warmly.

"Oh, Anne. It's beautiful. You've shown me my daughter—and you've shown me the woman she will become. ..."

Anne permitted herself a smile. She glanced across at Cat, who was not listening, and who had retreated to the far end of the studio.

"I hope so. I thought that—" Anne hesitated. She lowered her voice. "I showed it to her, Helene. She could see the resemblance to Edouard straightaway. She remarked on it—it was the first thing she said." Anne paused; she pressed Helene's arm. "You should tell her," she said. "I know you both wanted to wait for the right moment. Well, it's come."

They stayed to have tea with Anne, served in the old blue Spode cups that Helene remembered. Then, in the early evening, they found a taxi and opened all the windows, and settled back for the long journey to Eaton Square.

"Will Edouard bring Christian back, do you think?" Cat said.

"Oh, I expect so. It can't have been very pleasant for him, going back to his old home. I imagine he'll be sad, and we'll need to cheer him up."

"I'll cheer him up. I'll show him some of my card tricks. Cassie just taught me a new one. ..."

Cat was sitting on the jump seat, as she always did, leaning with the sway of the cab. Her long thin legs were stretched out; her hair, as ever, stuck up in disorderly waves and tufts. Her face, usually so animated, wore a slightly dreamy and abstracted expression.

Helene sat opposite her, watching her, thinking of what Anne had said. She knew she was right. Cat was seven now—they could not delay much longer. She tried now, as she had often tried in the past, to frame the correct sentences in her mind, so they were clear and comprehensible to a child, so that Cat was left, as much as was possible, without doubts or worries. But Helene could think of so many causes for doubt herself that, in the end, as in the past, the sentences would not be spoken, and she was silent.

They crossed Hyde Park; Cat lolled against the window, watching the people, the dogs, the children playing. She pointed to the Serpentine, and

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the boats on it, and then, as they reached the gates on the south side of the park, she looked back at Helene.

"You know I went to play with Lucy Cavendish the other day?"

"Yes, darhng."

"Well, Lucy says her daddy isn't her daddy. He's her—" she paused, frowning. "Her stepfather. Her real daddy used to be married to her mummy, but he isn't anymore. She's married to someone else, and he's married to someone else. ..."

"Yes?" Helene said cautiously. Her heart had begun to beat very fast.

"Lucy says it's nice. Having two. Daddys I mean." She paused; they were halfway down Exhibition Road. "Lewis wasn't my daddy, was he? I mean—not my real daddy?" It was the first time Helene had heard her mention Lewis's name in the past year. Her eyes were now fixed on Helene's face.

"No, Cat, he wasn't. Lewis was . . . was more like a stepfather in a way. When I was married to him. But I'm not married to him anymore. ..."

"Oh, I know." Cat sounded offhand. "You're going to marry Edouard. Which is much better." She hesitated. "I liked Lewis. Sometimes I did. But he wasn't there very often." Her brow wrinkled. "I don't think I remember him very well. A little bit. I remember the house, and my room —with the rabbits on the blind, and the garden. ..."

She stopped. There was a pause; they had reached Chelsea, they were turning in the direction of Eaton Square. Helene reached in her bag for her purse, her mind full of a thousand sentences now, all jumbled, all flurried.

"I look like Edouard. Just like Edouard. I could see it when I looked at Anne's painting. I never noticed before."

Helene leaned forward.

"Of course you look hke Edouard, Cat. You're his daughter."

There was a small silence. The cab drew up to a halt outside their house. Cat opened the door, bounded out, and then held it back politely for Helene. Helene paid the driver. As the cab began to pull away, and they stood on the sidewalk together. Cat gave a small skip and a jump.

"Edouard's my real daddy? He is? He is?"

"Darling, yes—and we would have lived with Edouard before, always, right from the day you were bom, but—"

Cat was not interested in such ramifications. She clapped her hands.

"I knew it! I knew it! Oh, I'm so glad." She stopped. "Does Cassie know? And Madeleine?"

"Yes, darling."

"And Christian?"

"Yes."

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"How Stupid of me. Lucy Cavendish said he was, and I said yes, and then I wasn't sure. I felt a bit muddled."

"But you don't feel muddled now?"

"Now?" Cat gave her a scornful look. "Oh, not now, of course not." She paused. "It's a pity we didn't always live with him, I think. But that was such a long time ago. And I was very httle. . . ." She tilted her face up to Helene. "We'll always Uve with him now, won't we?"

"Of course, darting, always."

"Oh, I'm so glad. " Cat gave another skip and a jump. "I'll talk to him all about it tonight," she said with a decisive air, and then she ran into the house.

^^ A H

/I nd your card was ...

li-Cat held the deck in her slender hands. Christian, stretched out in a chair, long legs crossed, arms behind his head, surveyed her quizzically.

"The king of diamonds! Le voildr With some dexterity, Cat extracted the card, and held it aloft. Christian obhgingly looked stupefied.

"Astonishing. Quite astonishing. Cat—I can't beheve it. Was it magic, or was it a trick?"

"Magic," Cat said firmly.

Christian shook his head and took a swallow of his whisky. "If I had not just witnessed it, with my own eyes—I should never have believed it. Will you do it for me again sometime? You're a wizard. Or a witch. What else can you do? Can you tell fortunes?"

Cat glanced at Cassie, who was standing magisterially by the door, arms folded, in an attitude that said: bed.

"Not yet." She began to move obediently and reluctantly to the door. "I might learn though. Madeleine says she knows how to do it. And Cassie can read tea leaves in the bottom of a cup. Her grandmama showed her. You look at the patterns the leaves make, and—"

"Cassie. You have hidden depths." Christian's eyes turned to her lazily; he smiled. "I took you for many things, but never a sibyl. ..."

Cat was giving beseeching glances toward Edouard and Helene, who were watching this scene from the far end of the room. Helene inclined her head very slightly, and Cat's face at once brightened. Cassie gave both Cat and Christian a stem look.

"I can see into the future all right," she said crisply. "And I can see when someone's playing for time. I can see it's seven o'clock now, and someone's not going to be in bed until nearly eight at this rate. And I can see—"

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"No, you can't, Cassie," Cat said in a meek tone of voice. "I'm coming now. And tonight I'll be especially quick. ..."

She went around the drawing room to say her formal good nights. Christian, who found her very droll, stood up, kissed her hand, clicked his heels, and smacked her bottom. Helene hugged her, and then, as Edouard went to kiss her, said quickly, "Maybe Edouard will come up and say good night. Cat. If you're very quick. Not too long in the bath now . . ."

Edouard smiled, and promised, and Cat scampered away. Helene crossed to Christian, and sat down next to him. "Now," she said. "Tell me all about it. Christian. Was it very hard? Were you glad Edouard went with you?"

"Oh, awfully glad. For all sorts of reasons," Christian began.

Edouard gave him a sharp warning look, and Christian, who enjoyed teasing him, settled back into a careful and innocuous account of their day. Edouard watched them both, half-listening for a while; he moved to the long windows, and the balcony that overlooked the square gardens. After a while he replenished their drinks, and then, at a sign from Helene, left them to say good night to Cat.

He climbed the stairs slowly. Today, for some reason, perhaps because of his conversation with Christian, and the visit to his parents' house, the past seemed very close. Just then, in the drawing room, when Cat produced that card— The king of diamonds, le voila! —he had both seen and heard Pauline Simonescu: The cards first, Monsieur le Baron. Then you can begin your future.

It was 1967 now: he had not seen Pauline Simonescu since 1959, on that occasion when, not long before he met Helene, he had decided to leave her house in Paris and never return there. She had left Paris—or so he had heard; he did not know now whether she was alive or dead. He had hardly thought of her for years, and yet tonight, when Cat produced that particular card, he had seen her vividly. For a moment it had been as if she had reached out, and laid her hand, with its ruby ring, on his arm, and he had felt again that tension, that sensation of curious force.

He stopped on the first landing, where he and Helene had their rooms— rooms which had once, during the war, been his mother's, and which were almost unrecognizable now. He thought of the occasions, then, when he had bounded up these stairs, two at a time, hastening to the security of his room, where, on his chart, he would enter the references to the progress of the war in blue ink, and the coded references to Celestine in red. He saw Celestine, with her red-gold hair piled on top of her head, her dressing gown falling open a little. He saw Celestine as he had seen her at the end, last year when she was dying, lying propped up against the pillows in a room in a nursing home in St. John's Wood, where her bills had, for years,

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been quietly settled through the offices of the eternally efficient, eternally discreet Smith-Kemp.

"I should like champagne," she had said once. It was almost the only thing she did say as she drifted back to consciousness, and then drifted away again.

He stopped on the second landing. He was glad, now, that he had always kept the lease on this house; glad he and Helene now used it so often. It was pleasant to feel the past so close. He leaned against the banisters, and thought of dancing, downstairs, with Isobel, slowly circling a room, while a scratchy dance tune played on a wind-up gramophone. Tonight the house was very quiet; he listened for a moment, almost expecting to hear the sound of that scratchy gramophone record, with its wartime gaiety: but there was only silence. Then, as he turned toward the room in which Cat now slept, and which once had been his room, he heard, quite distinctly, Jean-Paul's voice. He heard him laugh, felt the weight of his arm around his shoulders: "What a dance they like to lead us, women—eh, little brother?"

He felt a moment's sharp regret, a piercing nostalgia; all the old, intense, and increasingly hopeless affection for his brother came back to him, and he remembered Jean-Paul, then, not as he had been toward the end, but as he had been in the war years, in the time when Edouard would have forgiven him anything.

He gave a little shrug, and went into Cat's room. She was sitting up in bed, with a book in front of her, though she did not appear to be reading it.

Edouard smiled at her, and she smiled back; he at once felt the past shp away in the quiet of the room: Cat's room—not his anymore. That past had no reality for Cat: as all children do, she hved for the present.

He moved quietly around the room, looking at her books, and at the pictures which she had painted, of which she was very proud. He looked out the small high window: there, across the square, he had once been able to see the blackened gap where a house had been bombed: a direct hit. There was no trace now, of course. Looking at the view, he was no longer certain which house it had been.

Cat was watching him expectantly. With an apologetic smile he turned back to her, and sat down on her bed. He took her small hand, and let it rest between his own.

"I keep thinking about the past today. I'm sorry. Cat. It feels very close for some reason. This used to be my room once."

"I know. In the war. When you lived here." She hesitated a moment. Two bright points of color stood out on her cheeks. "Did you know mother then?"

"Goodness, no. I was only a boy—fifteen, sixteen years old." Edouard

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pressed her hand gently. "I didn't meet her until much later. Years after the war ended."

"Did you meet her in London?"

"No. In Paris." Edouard hesitated, and then, because he, too, Hke He-lene, had worried about Cat, and how much she knew or could understand, he did not stop there as he might have on another occasion, but went on.

"I met her in Paris. Standing outside a church. It's called St. Julien le Pauvre, and there's a small park—like a little square—just near it. I took you there once—you probably don't remember. ..."

"I think I do." Cat frowned. "Did you think she was beautiful?"

"I thought she was very beautiful." Edouard smiled gently. "I fell in love with her instantly. Just like that! Un coup de foudre —that's what we say, in France. Like a thunderclap ..." Cat giggled.