Destiny (19 page)

"You're growing up. You're a man, at last," he said, as if welcoming him, belatedly, to the club.

At the time, this remark pleased Edouard. He was then much swayed by Jean-Paul, and was later to see that it was at this point in their hves that they were closest to each other. Jean-Paul absorbed a love and a loyalty which had once been directed to his father, to his mother, and to Celestine: for a while, Edouard's devotion to him was unquestioning. Sometimes, it was true, he had doubts. He would remember Jean-Paul's promises of reform and see how quickly they had been forgotten. He would observe that his brother could be coarse and occasionally cruel. But his loyalty overrode these criticisms, and Jean-Paul's approbation warmed him.

When he heard of Celestine's financial predicament from one of Jean-Paul's fellow officers, it was to his brother that he turned. Haltingly, he

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explained that despite everything that had happened, he wanted to make some provision for Celestine.

Jean-Paul found the idea vastly amusing. The house would cost—what? Six hundred pounds? And an annuity as well? He shrugged. The sum of money was minimal. If Edouard wanted to be indulgent, why not?

"As a gift?" He frowned sUghtly, and took another swallow of brandy. "Out of your trust fund?"

"I feel I owe her something, Jean-Paul. ..."

"Very well—I'll authorize it. Go and see Smith-Kemp, our sohcitor here. He'll fix it. A very discreet man. He understands these matters. ..."

He paused, his brows still drawn together, as if he were calculating something. Then, with another shrug and a sigh, he downed the last of his drink.

"Why not, after all?" He stood up. "Pay her off. Always a sound policy with women, eh, little brother?"

Again Edouard felt that sense of doubt and distaste. Was that what he was doing—paying Celestine off? He had not seen it in that way, and Jean-Paul's interpretation seemed to him brutal.

But this feeling passed, and the matter was not discussed again. Jean-Paul seemed to forget about it. Edouard saw the solicitor, the arrangements were made, and once that embarrassment was over, Edouard felt as if he had passed through some baptism of fire. He had taken the proper course; he was indeed a man of the world now. He felt quite proud of his new identity.

"You've changed, Edouard," Isobel said to him on the day after she had broken her engagement, when Edouard had called on her.

She had been looking at him for a long time before she said this, watching him across the vast space of the Conway House drawing room. Then she stood up and crossed to him. She looked down into his eyes.

"You have. You're harder. I liked you better before. Oh, Edouard, why do things change? Why do people?"

Her candor touched him. His faith in his new detached and cynical persona suddenly wavered. He had been proud of it a moment before, and probably had been flaunting it. Now he stood up.

"I haven't changed," he said quickly. "Not in that way. I still—" He broke off", uncertain quite what he had meant to say next.

Isobel continued to look at him closely, and then, slowly, she began to smile. "Maybe not." Her eyes danced at him. "Maybe there's hope for you still. I think there is—I see it, there in your eyes. When I look very closely. Just a little trace of a soul. Dear Edouard. I shall look for it next time I

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meet you. Tell Jean he's a bad influence on you—will you do that? Tell him tonight. Tell him from me. ..."

Edouard did so, thinking Jean-Paul would be amused. His brother's response was truculent.

"Typical," he said. "A typical woman. She knows how close you and I are, and she can't stand it. Bad influence? What the hell does she mean by that? You're my brother. I open my heart to you. Really, Edouard, I feel that." He gave a gusty sigh. "I have no secrets from you."

When he said this, Jean-Paul meant it most sincerely. He was aware that it was not strictly true, but his interpretation of truth was comfortable and elastic. He shared with Edouard everything that mattered, he told himself. The few things he chose to leave out were unimportant.

One of the things he neglected to mention concerned the little actress, Violet Fortescue. During the period immediately after his father's death, when Jean-Paul's mind had been filled with muddled intentions of reform, he did—just as he said—make an effort to avoid the easy sophisticated women he had sought out before. He found to his own surprise that he needed comfort from a quite different type; he renewed his acquaintance with Violet on an impulse, and found her astonishingly soothing. She was shy, sensitive, and undemanding. She was touched by the story of his father's death; she was not without snobbery, and was flattered that the new Baron should confide in her; she was grateful to sit and listen to him talk. Jean-Paul found her quietness soothed him, her silences calmed him, her obvious sympathy touched him. She fell in love with him very easily, and when he realized that, it seemed natural to him to make love to her— something that had not occurred to him before, for though he liked her eyes, he found her physical type unappealing. She proved to be a virgin, and the Baron found her lovemaking too shy and too passive; they did not make love very often, the Baron finding he preferred just to look down into those wide violet eyes and talk.

When she became pregnant, he was very angry. He felt he had been cheated, trapped. To have made love—what?—four or five times, not very enjoyably at that, and then to find himself in this situation. At once the appeal of the violet eyes faded; the expression of unquestioning love and trust began to annoy him. Suddenly she seemed to him clinging—a quality he had always detested in women—and vulnerable. When he could not disguise the irritation he felt, and he saw her face become pinched and fearful, he became angrier still. She seemed to invite rejection even before

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he offered it; the more overt he was, the more brutally frank, the more she wept and clung. He loathed such masochism.

She refused absolutely to consider an abortion. The Baron was obliged to make himself clear: marriage was out of the question. There was the war; he hoped shortly to be returning to France. He regretted it, but for a man in his position, marriage could not be undertaken lightly; his wife would be the Baronne de Chavigny. Only a woman from a certain kind of background could undertake a position such as that. . . . There he floundered.

Violet folded her hands in a way he had come to hate.

"You think I am not good enough for you."

"Please, my dear. It's not a question of that."

"My father came from an old Devon family." Her voice shook. "I was brought up to be a lady. ..."

The Baron decided to lie. He said he knew that, of course he knew that; he had been aware of it the first time he met her. But unhappily his family fortunes had been adversely affected by the war. To save the family companies, the family estates, he himself had no choice: he must make a dynastic marriage; it must be an heiress or nothing.

She listened to all this very quietly, and accepted it. The Baron never knew whether she believed him or not. But from that point she seemed to give up the fight. She became utterly passive, as if she no longer had any mind of her own. Physically she was not strong, and her pregnancy weakened her; for the first two months she was frequently sick and could keep down very little food. The Baron hoped she would lose the baby, have a miscarriage. He knew it was brutal, and was half-ashamed, but really it seemed the best solution for everyone involved.

By the end of 1942, when she was four months pregnant and had not suffered a miscarriage, the Baron came to a decision. He could make arrangements for her and the child to be kept, of course, but he foresaw an eternal saga of pleading demands if he did that, and besides, the thing that seemed to appall her most was the stigma of bearing an illegitimate child. So the Baron decided to find her a husband. He found the perfect candidate in an American G.I., Corporal Gary Craig of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, at present serving with the U.S. Army, 4th Infantry Division, to whom he was introduced by his commanding officer, a friend and drinking companion in London of the Baron's.

Craig was a giant of a man, a heavy drinker, not overly bright, but not a man to pass up an opportunity to earn himself a few bucks. The Baron had to meet him only once, and that was on the occasion when the money changed hands. The preliminary work was all kindly undertaken by the Baron's buddy, who also ensured that all the paperwork involved when a

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G.I. married a British national went through with the minimum of fuss. It cost the Baron five thousand dollars, and Gary Craig, who had never seen so much money in his life, thought it was a gas.

"She's a real pretty girl, I'm told?" He grinned. "Sounds like y'all got yourself a deal, gentlemen."

Violet agreed to the proposition without argument or emotion. Her eyes looked to the Baron now like a sleepwalker's; she neither abused him nor thanked him, she just said yes. To the Baron's great relief Gary Craig avoided getting killed the next year at the D-Day landings. Both men, the one with the 4th Infantry, the other as an officer in General Jacques Leclerc's French 2nd Armored Division, were among the victorious troops who liberated Paris on August 25, 1944. By this time the baby, a girl whom neither man had seen, had been bom in a private London clinic, the costs being met by the Baron as previously agreed, and was fourteen months old.

Sergeant Gary Craig was discharged from the U.S. Army late in 1944, after the death of his father, and returned to his parents' small farm in Louisiana to await his bride and child.

Violet and the little girl joined him in late 1945, saihng from Southampton on the Argentina along with many other G.I. brides. The Baron, who was not without feelings, arranged for a glorious bouquet of white roses and violets to be delivered to the ship, and then instructed his London solicitors to close their files on Mrs. Craig, formerly Fortescue. That done, Jean-Paul heaved a sigh of relief. It was an unsavory episode and a close shave; he was profoundly glad Edouard did not know of it, as he would almost certainly have been censorious.

Jean-Paul felt relief. Louisiana was a long way away.

Edouard, still in London, heard of the scenes of the liberation of Paris at second hand in his brother's letters. But together with his mother and French friends, he watched the newsreels and saw General de Gaulle lead his victorious troops down the Champs-Elysees.

He watched for Jean-Paul proudly, and when he saw him marching, not so very far behind the General himself, he cheered wildly and wept, just as everyone else was cheering and weeping.

He was eighteen years old; France was free; and his brother, the Baron de Chavigny, had never looked more like a hero.

HELENE

ALABAMA, 1955-1958

^ ^ ^ ou ever done it with a boy?"

I Priscilla-Anne had her hair in a new pony tail. It was scraped ^ right back off her face and tied with a pink ribbon. It wasn't too big a ponytail, because Priscilla-Anne was waiting for her hair to grow, but Helene looked at it enviously. She'd like to wear her hair Uke that, and wear a skirt like Priscilla-Anne's, that flared right out in a circle and had stiff crinkly petticoats underneath. Priscilla-Anne was chewing gum. When Helene didn't answer, she took the gum out, inspected the pink globule carefully, then stuck it back in her cheek. She lay back on the dried-out grass, and put her hands underneath her head, and sighed. Her breasts stuck up provocatively in their new Maidenform bra. Helene looked away miserably. She wanted a bra; her mother was resisting the idea. Priscilla-Anne swore blind that hers was now 34C.

"You gone deaf, or what?" Priscilla-Anne poked her with her toe. She raised herself back on one elbow and looked at Helene thoughtfully. "I said —have you ever done it with a boy?"

They were up on the bank behind the ballpark, waiting for the school bus to take them back to Orangeburg. Down below, the senior boys of Selma High were working out. Helene could just make out the figure of Billy Tanner. He was taller and more muscular than anyone else. She broke off a short stem of grass and chewed on it, keeping her eyes on the ballpark, avoiding Priscilla-Anne's curious stare. She hesitated. The question was a difficult one: she knew it, and Priscilla-Anne knew it.

She didn't want to admit the truth, not even to Priscilla-Anne, who was her best friend, and she didn't want to lie either. Most of the girls lied—or exaggerated, anyway. At least, she suspected they did, but she couldn't be sure. And if they weren't lying when they boasted in the locker room, what did that make her? Helene sighed. She was beginning to think there must be something wrong with her. Sometimes she was positive she was the only girl in Selma Junior High who'd never even been kissed. She turned

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around to Priscilla-Anne reluctantly. Her one hope was that Priscilla-Anne's question was a fairly idle one, just a cue, maybe. Priscilla-Anne was looking dreamy again, the way she often did these past months. He-lene cleared her throat.

"Not exactly," she said carefully. "No." She waited a beat. "Have you?"

"Well now . . ." Priscilla-Anne's eyes took on a cunning look, and her wide, pink-lipsticked lips spread apart in a conspiratorial smile. Helene relaxed. It was all right. It was just a prompt. Priscilla-Anne wanted to talk.

She lay there for a moment, just staring up at the sky. Then, quite suddenly, she stopped smiling and sat up abruptly. Her breasts jounced. Helene looked jealously away.

"I haven't been all the way—okay?"

"Sure. Sure. Of course."

"I mean, there's petting and there's petting—you know?"

"Sure."

"But ..." She hesitated, and her voice fell. "You remember Eddie Haines—lives out Maybury way? His daddy owns that big gas station on the highway there. Tall. Big." She giggled. "Some jock. You remember him at the Maybury game last fall?"

"You know I remember." Helene smiled. "I also remember how you looked when he first asked you out on a date. Sort of weak at the knees, and misty-eyed, and—"