Destiny (29 page)

"I miss Jean sometimes." She stood up restlessly. "He made me smile. He could be so predictable. I'm afraid I behaved rather badly." She paused. "Of course, I miss the emerald too. You know, I was dispropor-

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tionately fond of that emerald." The green eyes met his, and the Ups widened into a smile.

Edouard hesitated. "It's an unlucky stone. I didn't want to say that when you chose it. But it is supposed to be unlucky."

"Is it?" She was looking at him very intently. "Well, that would explain an awful lot of things." She turned and looked at the door across the room. "Is your bedroom in there?"

"Yes. It is."

"Oh, good."

She crossed in front of him and went into the bedroom. There was a silence, then she called to him. He walked slowly over to the door and stood looking down at her. The emerald dress was in a heap on the floor, and Isobel's slender pale boyish body was stretched out naked on his narrow college bed. Her hair flared across the pillow; there was a triangle of red-gold between her narrow thighs; the Conway pearls lay between her small white breasts.

"Darhng Edouard. You don't mind, do you? You see, I wanted to do this ages ago. ..." She paused, and her wide greenish cat's eyes shone up at him. "I'm going to be married, Edouard, did I tell you? The racing driver one, after all. Next week, I think, after some Grand Prix thing he's racing in. If he isn't killed first, of course. And so I knew I must do this now. I couldn't bear to be married if I hadn't. . . ."

Edouard crossed to the bed, sat down beside her, and took her slender hand in his.

"You don't have to worry about anything." She smiled. "I have one of those beastly Dutch cap things. I put it on before I left London. They tell me you'd never know it was there. ..."

He bent his head and gently kissed her lips, then he drew back and touched her cheek with his finger.

"You're crying."

"Only a little bit. I'll stop in a moment. It's probably all that waiting. Tell me, darling Edouard—you did know, didn't you?"

He looked at her steadily.

"I suppose I did. Yes."

"Oh, I'm so glad. That makes it much simpler. Dear Edouard, would you mind if I just watched—while you undressed?" Edouard smiled. He took off his clothes, and Isobel curled up on the bed watching him, like a little cat. Then she drew him onto the covers and pushed him gently back. "Darling Edouard. Don't kiss me. Not yet. You don't need to do anything. I'm quite ready. I'm wet. I was quite wet when I was drinking the first martini. You have the most wonderful ... the most beautiful . . . I've ever seen. And I just want to do— this. . . ."

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With great grace she straddled his body and paused for a moment, upright above him, her body as pale and slender as a wand. Then she touched his full penis with one slender hand, and guided its head between her legs. He felt the moistness, felt the narrow aperture, then slowly, her eyes never leaving his, she lowered herself down as if she were impaling herself on his flesh.

"Darling Edouard. I shall come almost at once if you move just the tiniest bit. Oh, yes . . ."

He moved, and she did. Then she kissed him. They made love all afternoon, and sometimes she was creamy and calm and slow as a cat being stroked, and sometimes the cat arched her back, and revealed claws. Edouard came into her body with a feeling of shuddering release, and the afternoon seemed to pass in a dream he had had, or she had had long before.

As dusk fell, he kissed her damp thighs, and then her mouth, and Isobel held his head and looked into his eyes. Her own glittered like emeralds, but without tears this time. "Darling Edouard," she said. "I love you in a very special way and I knew you would understand. I did do the right thing, didn't I?"

"Most certainly." He smiled.

"Do you like me? I've always liked you."

"Yes, I do." He kissed her gently. "I've always liked you very much."

"I thought so. I'm glad. I'd much rather be liked than loved. On the whole. And now I must go home." She sprang up from the bed with that quick restless grace which had always delighted him, and pulled on her green dress.

"I shall send you a piece of my wedding cake." Her Ups curved mischievously. "It will be encrusted with that terrible white icing pastry cooks are always so proud of, and far too sweet. But I love those little box things with the lacy paper that they pack it in. So I'll send it. You can eat it before your finals, and wedding cake is terribly lucky—everyone says—so then you'll be certain to get your First, and . . ."

"Isobel . . ."

"If I stay one more minute, I shall cry again," she said. "And that would be in very poor taste. Good-bye, darling Edouard. And take care of yourself."

The following week he sent a telegram: Thank you for the cake, Edouard. Three months later, after his First was announced with the other Oxford and Cambridge examination results in The Times, he received a telegram at the house in St. Cloud. It read: / see you ate it. Isobel. He did not hear from her again for another eight years.

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When Edouard left Oxford and returned to France to begin work on the administration of the de Chavigny companies and estates, he was appalled by what he found. During his years at Oxford, he had spent part of his vacations in France, but those relatively short periods had given him no idea of the chaos that had prevailed since his father's death.

With Jean-Paul's casual agreement—"Of course, go ahead, Uttle brother. You'll find it's a terrible bore"—he began a systematic investigation of the de Chavigny empire: the jewelry company, its workshops and showrooms in Europe and America; the estates and vineyards in the Loire and in Algeria; the stockholdings; the capital assets; the property the Baron had retained in France and abroad. Everywhere he found the same thing: elderly employees attempting to run things as they thought the old Baron would have wanted, out of touch with new ideas, fearful of making any decision on their own, and consequently stalling, allowing problems to build up. No new blood had come into the affairs of de Chavigny for years: everywhere Edouard found stagnation and apathy. It was as if a great machine had been left running so long that no one had noticed, or cared, that it was running down.

After the execution of Xavier de Chavigny, the German High Command had taken over the house and gardens at St. Cloud, and had used the beautiful late-seventeenth-century mansion to quarter troops. This Edouard knew: what he could not understand was that in the years since the end of the war, Jean-Paul had made no attempt to restore the house. He had carved out a small apartment for himself in one of the wings, kept on the remnants of an elderly staff of servants, and left the rest of the place as it was.

Knowing what he would find when he went there, and knowing that it would pain him, Edouard delayed the moment when he would make a formal inspection of the house. He went, finally, on a beautiful September day in 1949, some three months after he came down from Oxford.

From the distance, as he drove toward it, the great house appeared unchanged. The sun struck the steep blue slates of the roof, and the glass of the tall ranked windows of the main facade.

The elderly servants greeted him nervously; silently, Edouard went on a tour of the house. There was little furniture, for most of that was stored in Switzerland, and the few pieces that remained had been damaged beyond repair. The walls were bare of the famous Brussels tapestries; his footsteps echoed on uncarpeted floors. Edouard stared around him in mounting disbelief and anger. The paneling was scarred with initials and obscenities;

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greenish damp from blocked gutterings seeped through walls hung with silk that was torn and ripped. On the great curving staircase that was one of the most celebrated features of the house, half the banisters had been ripped out and used for firewood. In the ballroom, the Venetian mirrors that lined the walls had been smashed; doors hung on broken hinges; the place stank of mice and damp.

The servants had done their best: they had tried to clean the house for his arrival, but their efforts only heightened the destruction Edouard found. Slowly he went upstairs: his father's bedroom, his dressing room, his bathroom, where the mahogany paneling had been axed and the old fittings of brass and copper had been wrenched from their sockets and looted. His mother's bedroom, once hung with hand-painted eighteenth-century Chinese wallpaper, now ripped and defaced and stained with urine. The library, where the bookcases had been smashed. Room after room, twenty bedrooms in all, and then the attics, where the roof had leaked, and where ceilings had caved in. Edouard went back down the stairs; he stood in the huge marble-floored foyer and closed his eyes. He saw the house as it had once been, in his childhood—still, ordered, each thing in it the finest and most beautiful example of its kind. He thought of the dinners, for eighteen, twenty, thirty people; he thought of the dances, and the whisper of music from the ballroom; of the quiet afternoons he had sometimes spent in his father's study. He opened his eyes again; the old butler looked at him anxiously.

"We tried. Monsieur Edouard ..." The old man gave a helpless gesture. "You see. We have washed all the floors."

Edouard wanted to weep with anger and frustration, but he hid his feelings out of consideration for the old man. The next day, he returned to the house with Louise. His mother, who had taken one look at the place when she first returned to France, had been firm. She was beyond coping with it; she had no intention of living there; she had moved, instead, to an early eighteenth-century town house in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, a quarter of Paris still preferred by the pre-Napoleonic French aristocracy. She returned to St. Cloud with obvious reluctance. Paris was more convenient in any case; the memories of St. Cloud were too painful. When Edouard pressed her, she shrugged irritably. "Edouard. The place is too far gone. It belongs to the past. I think Jean-Paul should sell it. . . ."

She left, half an hour after she arrived, in her stately dark blue Bentley. Edouard stood for a while, alone in the gardens. He watched her car depart; he stood on the terrace and looked across toward the city, then back toward the house. The gardens were overgrown and neglected, the gravel paths a wilderness of weeds, the formal hedges undipped for years. A few late roses struggled through the encroaching tangles of nettles and

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bindweed. Edouard stood looking around him, his mouth set, his hands clenched. His mother was not interested; Jean-Paul was not concerned: very well, then, he would do what had to be done, and he would do it alone.

It was the same in the Loire, at the Chateau de Chavigny, where the famous mirrored salon, built for the seventh Baron de Chavigny, had been used as a shooting gallery. It was the same in the vineyards there: production of wine had almost ceased during the war years; acres had been decimated by disease; attempts at postwar wine production had been sporadic and ill-organized. Edouard tasted some of these thin sour wines with disgust, and gave orders that the entire cellar stock be jettisoned forthwith.

"But Monsieur de Chavigny, what shall we do with it?" The elderly regisseur looked around the vast cellars in despair.

"It's of no consequence. Pour it down the drains if necessary. I will not have such wine sold under the de Chavigny label." He paused, feeUng a momentary pity for the old man. "Would you drink this?"

The regisseur hesitated, then smiled a slow gap-toothed smile. "No, Monsieur de Chavigny. I should prefer not to."

"I also." Edouard pressed his arm, not unkindly. "Scrap it. We shall begin again."

This grand tour of Edouard's took over six months. At the end of that time, by working ceaselessly, he had been through every file in every office. He had seen every room in every house, and had personally interviewed every one of the old Baron's servants, and all his senior employees. He had been to his father's lawyers; to his father's banking partners and advisors; to his stockbrokers at the Bourse; to his accountants. He had visited Switzerland, London, Rome, and New York. In that time, he had despaired. It had seemed to him, about halfway through his investigation, that in the past five years Jean-Paul had done one thing and one thing only. He had, with Edouard's assistance, erected a memorial to their father in the chapel at the Chateau de Chavigny where he and his ancestors were buried. But the true memorial to his father, the empire Xavier de Chavigny had so painstakingly and brilliantly built up during his lifetime—that he had simply allowed to decay.

By the end of the six months, Edouard's old resolve grew fiercer: he would restore that empire to its former glory, and then he would develop it, increase it, expand it. It could be done. Gradually, in the second half of the six months, he grew in confidence. He began to see ways, to make plans. Thanks to his father's prewar prudence, a fortune was there; it

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simply had to be deployed. And it should be deployed: it would be his tribute to his father, his memorial to the reticent man he had scarcely known but deeply loved, and who had died so courageously. His and Jean-Paul's tribute. He did not doubt for an instant that once he explained things to his brother, once he made him see what assets were available and how they could be used, Jean-Paul would rise from his lethargy and be as engaged, as excited, and as determined as Edouard.

Armed with papers, his head filled with lists of stockholdings, production figures, statistics of pre- and postwar profits and losses, with preliminary architectural plans for the restoration, first, of the three houses in France, and ideas for those property holdings abroad, Edouard arranged to meet his brother for a week-long series of discussions. Jean-Paul was at first resistant; eventually, when Edouard pressed him, and after changing their proposed schedule three times, he agreed to a week in the autumn of 1950, when he would be on leave. They would meet in Algeria, at the Maison Alletti, the large low-built white house which the old Baron had had built in the late 1920s and which formed the base for his Algerian vineyards and timber plantations. It was built among gardens on the slope of a hill, overlooking the city and the breathtaking bay of Algiers.