Destiny (137 page)

It was past four o'clock, and Helene was standing, with Cat, outside the stables, when she heard the car come up the drive. Cat was still holding Khan by his bridle; his flanks and withers were shiny with sweat; Cat was shaking. She, too, heard the car, and she looked at Helene pleadingly.

"It will be Daddy. Don't tell him yet. Please. Let me deal with Khan. I'll rub him down, and then I'll come back to the house, and I'll tell him. I want him to understand. I wanted to show him, that I could ride Khan, that I could do it, and I did do it. I did!"

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Helena looked at her silently. "Very well," she said finally, and turned away.

Cat had no idea of the anxiety she had felt, and no idea of the rehef she felt now. It was so intense that she did not trust herself to speak. Instead, leaving Cat where she was, she began to walk, and then to run, in the direction of the house. The sun was in her eyes, and she lifted her hand to shield them, searching eagerly for the first glimpse of Edouard's car. As she rounded a comer, and the gravel sweep in front of the house came into view, she stared in confusion. It was not a black car, it was a white one, and two uniformed pohce officers, one a man the other a woman, were just climbing out of it.

They wanted her to go into the house, but Helene would not, so in the end, they told her in the garden, in a small private space, enclosed by yew hedges, where she and Edouard often sat together in the evenings.

Her mind had been filled with Cat; she had had no presentiment, and she listened to this uniformed man and woman, who were speaking gravely about times and bends and speeds, and ambulances and hospitals. She found it difficult to understand what they were saying.

"But he's not dead?" She interrupted them, turned to them eagerly. "He can't be dead. Is he hurt? How badly is he hurt? You have to tell me. I must go to him."

The uniformed man and woman looked at each other. They tried to persuade her to sit down, and when she would not do so, they began to explain, again and again. The woman was speaking when, from Helena's face, they both knew that she had finally understood. The woman's voice faltered then. She said, "It would have been very quick."

"Instantaneous," the man added.

Helene looked at them, though she did not see them. She said, "Is there another kind of death?"

Later, they drove her to some place. A cool quiet hospital place, on the outskirts of Oxford. It was where Edouard had been taken, though they must have known it was too late. They drove her there, and escorted her in, and stood in the doorway, until she rounded on them, her eyes flaring with anger, her face white. "I want to be alone with him."

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They looked at each other; they retreated before the expression m her eyes; they left.

When she was alone with him, and the door was shut, Helene took Edouard's hand, which felt cool and dry to her touch. She bent her head, and rested her face against his. She could feel that he was broken; she could see that he had gone. She pressed her lips against his hair; silently, wilhng the impossible with all her strength, she begged him to hsten, she begged him to speak. Not a great many words: two; one; just her name. Let him hear me. Let him know. Please God. She thought the phrases, and they sounded to her immensely loud in the silence. Edouard's hand lay still in hers; there was no answering pressure from his fingers. Someone had closed his eyes. Not her. She felt her heart break.

They had placed his body on a bed. After a while, she sat, and then lay, beside him. She pressed her face gently against his chest, lying as she had lain so often, listening to the beat of his heart. After a while, quietly, she began to talk to him. She talked about things that had happened in the past, things he had said and things he had done, and how much they had meant to her. She told him, in a low voice, which broke off, and then began again, what had happened, how they had told her, what she had felt. The words choked her; she felt a terrible urgency. They would take him away. They would not let her see him again.

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 hps, 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 Helene, 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 httle 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

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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 Helene flew with it, alone. It was to lie, the night before the funeral, in the chapel of the chateau, near the memorials to Edouard's father, to Jean-Paul, to Isobel, and to Gregoire. Helene 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."

Helene 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, Helene. 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

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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 cahn 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.

Helene stood and hstened 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; Al-phonse 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, Uke the old soldier he was; beside him stood his wife, Jacquehne, 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 Del-luc, 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 Helene had never met; a group of men who had been at Magdalen with Edouard. Representatives of various government departments; poUticians; senior

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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, Ughtly at first, then more heavily. One or two people glanced up in sudden consternation; Louise gave a moan. Someone handed Helene a little trowel, a ridiculous thing, containing a handful of earth. The rich, crumbly soil of the Loire. Helene 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 unaffected 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 formahty, 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.

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Helene 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 punctuaUty 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.