Destiny (4 page)

Edouard hesitated. He thought of his mother and father, and of certain scenes, certain conversations overheard.

"Possibly," he said cautiously.

Hugo's eyes turned dreamily to the window.

"Sexual infatuation—and that is what we are talking about, of course— sexual infatuation seems to me a very interesting condition. A great deal more interesting than romantic love, with which it is often confused. It is powerful, and it is deadly. It is also, alas, commonplace. As commonplace for us as it was in Rome in 60 B.C. or in Elizabethan London." He smiled dryly. "I have no doubt you will experience it yourself at some time. Then you will no doubt assume, as we all do, that your experience is unique. Of course it is not. Let us begin then. By the way, did you know Catullus was thirty when he died?"

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And so it went on. No matter how hard he tried, Edouard could never predict the course of the next day's lessons. Sometimes they would dart about in history—not carefully working their way through the French kings and learning their dates as he had always done before, but leaping centuries and continents. The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the American Civil War. Suddenly, Hugo would pounce.

"Why was that war fought, do you think, Edouard?"

"Well—to free the slaves in the South."

"Nonsense. Yankee propaganda. It was no such thing. It was fought primarily for commercial reasons, because the northern states regarded the wealth of the South with acquisitive eyes. It improved the lot of the Negro slave only marginally. You are aware, I take it, that a black man in the southern states of America still does not possess the vote?" He paused. "Not that the English have any cause for smugness in that respect, of course. Next week we will look at the lamentably slow extension of suffrage in this country, the abolition of property requirements, which previously protected the interests of the ruling classes, and the extension of voting rights to women." He stopped. "You find that amusing?"

Edouard shrugged. "I've read about Suffragettes. I can't see that women need to vote. Papa says he never met a woman who was remotely interested in politics. Maman never bothers to vote."

Hugo frowned. "Do women have minds?"

"Of course."

"Then do you not think that they should exercise them? As you should yours. It is the mark of a lazy mind, Edouard, to rely on idees reques. Question. Always question. And think. . . ."

Edouard tried. He could see the logic of Hugo's arguments, but it was often very difficult to apply those arguments to life. It was all very well to talk about suffragettes, and women's minds, but Edouard found it exceedingly difficult to consider their minds at all. How could you think about that when, he found, his eyes were always drawn to their sUm ankles, to the whisper of their petticoats, to that sweet line between the soft curve of their breasts?

He shut the Virgil midway through Dido's impassioned pleas to Aeneas. Damn, damn—he could not concentrate. He could feel that stirring, that tension between the legs; his head was filled with rapturous and confused images: breasts, and thighs, pillows and tumbled hair, moistness and mounting pleasure. He knew what he wanted to do; he wanted to go up to his bedroom, and lock his door, and shut himself up with those images, touch himself, slowly, rhythmically bring his body to shuddering and guilty release. Guilty, because the priests' lectures about the evils of self-abuse, the temptations of the devil made flesh, had begun years ago, when

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he was eight or nine, and had continued ever since. Jean-Paul said that was all rubbish, that all adolescent boys masturbated—it was a stage you went through, that was all. Once you started having women, you needed it less and less. Edouard was sure he was right; he hoped he was right; he thought that if he dared to ask Hugo, Hugo would certainly agree. But still, he couldn't quite shake off the warnings of the priests.

Father Clement said it made hair grow on the palms of your hands even if you only did it once. "It will be there, my child, hke the mark of Cain, for all to see. Remember that."

Edouard surreptitiously looked down at his palms. There was no hair there yet, and if Father Clement was right, there certainly ought to be. Surely it couldn't be true? But Father Clement also said masturbation was a sin; it had to be acknowledged in the confessional, and Edouard had acknowledged it. The conversation had been hideously embarrassing.

"Were you alone when you did this thing, my son?"

"Yes, Father."

"You are sure of that, my son?"

"Yes, Father."

That confused Edouard. Who else would he have been with? he wanted to ask. But he didn't dare. Each time resulted in thirty Hail Marys and an admonition never to commit the sin again. Yet he was hardly out of the confessional before he felt the need more strongly than ever. He sighed. What he had really wanted to ask the priest was why the fact that it was forbidden seemed to make him want to do it more. But he didn't dare to ask that, either.

He stood up, and looked at the clock. Then opened The Aeneid again, because distraction was the best remedy, he knew that. When fifteen lines of Latin translation had taken effect, and the stubborn erection had finally faded, he felt the satisfaction of virtue triumphant. He looked at the clock again. Nearly six. At six, Jean-Paul was due back, and with luck, if Jean-Paul hadn't forgotten all about it, he might have news for him. Important news—the most important there could possibly be. If he had been in Paris, Papa would have arranged it, as he had for Jean-Paul. But since he wasn't, Jean-Paul had promised him, sworn, that he would take on the responsibility. Jean-Paul, this very day, was going to arrange Edouard's first woman.

From Edouard's earliest childhood, Jean-Paul had been the most important figure in his life. He loved his papa, and admired him greatly, but his father, though always kind, was remote. As a small child, Edouard saw him, as he saw his mother, at appointed times. He would be brought

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down to the drawing room from the nursery wing at St. Cloud at precisely four each day, accompanied by his elderly English nanny. There he would sit, trying not to squirm about or make too much noise, while his parents either questioned him politely about his day and the progress of his lessons, or occasionally, seemed to forget he was there at all and simply talked to each other.

At four-thirty he was returned to the nursery, and made to eat a horrible Enghsh nursery supper, because his nanny had made it quite clear from her arrival that her word was law, and her charge would be brought up in the proper English manner. So Edouard would eat loathsome overboiled eggs from an egg cup, or—even more horrible—bread and milk from a bowl, and all the while the most delicious smells would drift up the back staircase from the kitchens below: roast partridge in autumn, grilled salmon in summer. Oh, the delights of that kitchen! The huge bowls of thick cream; the mountains of freshly picked raspberries and wild strawberries. The tiny shrimps, the dark blue lobsters that turned clear pink when the cook boiled them. The freshly baked bread, the pale butter, the rows of cheeses laid out on Uttle straw mats in the larder. Occasionally, on Nanny's one afternoon oflf a week, he would creep down to the kitchen, and Francine, the cook, would seat him at the long deal table and gaily feed him little tidbits—tastes of the glories destined for the Baron's dining room, of whose secrets she was fiercely proud.

But those were the special days. Ordinarily, he had his nursery supper, presided over unsmilingly by Nanny, then he was bathed, and then he was put to bed. Once or twice a week his father or mother would make the journey to the nursery wing to kiss him good night. His mother would sparkle with jewels, the silk of her dress would rustle, she would smell of roses, and he would hear her laughter on the stairs before she came into the room. She came up to him only when she was happy, so she always seemed to be laughing. She had a high brittle laugh; when Edouard was young, it used to frighten him a little: she sounded as she looked—frail, as if she might break.

His papa smelled of cologne, and sometimes of cigars, and it was more fun when he came, because he stayed longer than Maman, and could sometimes be persuaded to do imitations, or to talk. Edouard liked to talk to his father. He was interested in what Papa did. His father explained to him about grapes and vines and vintages; about diamonds and the secrets of their cutting. Sometimes, at the four o'clock visits when his mother was out. Papa would dismiss Nanny and take Edouard into his study. Then, if he was in a good mood, he would unlock his safe and show Edouard jewels, teaching him about settings, about design, about quality. By the time he was seven Edouard could see at once if a diamond was flawless,

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even without a glass, just by holding it against the light. But those were rare days, hedged in by rules and formalities. It was to Jean-Paul that he was close, to Jean-Paul that he could talk.

One of his first memories of his brother was of his glorious return for the holidays from his ecole militaire. He must have been about four or five, his brother about fourteen. He wore the uniform of the college, a uniform that was plain, but to Edouard magnificent. He ran to his elder brother, and Jean-Paul gave a whoop of welcome, and hfted him up in the air and perched him on his shoulders. It had seemed to Edouard then, and ever since, that his brother was a model of everything a French gentleman and a soldier ought to be.

He was handsome, but in a very different way from Edouard himself, being shorter and more heavily built. He took after his American grandfather—with his Scots ancestry—being fair-skinned, with thick reddish-blond hair and eyes of a paler blue than his brother's. His beard was red, or would have been had he ever allowed it to grow, which he did not; but he had to shave twice a day, and that seemed to Edouard the epitome of manliness.

He was always, unfailingly, good-tempered. Edouard never had to worry with him, as he did with his mother, that his mood might suddenly change, or that his temper would spark. Edouard had hardly ever seen him angry, unless his horse had gone unexpectedly lame in mid-hunt, or he had had a poor day's shooting. Even then, his anger was brief and soon forgotten. He was easygoing, lazily, irrepressibly so: it was the great source of his charm, to men as well as to women.

Nothing could persuade him to do anything that bored him: as a boy, he disliked lessons, rarely read a book, never attended a serious play, though he became fond of chorus girls. He liked popular music—easy tunes, which he could whistle or hum; the only paintings he liked in his father's collection were those by Toulouse-Lautrec. The Cezannes, the magnificent Matisse, the Gauguins, the Monets—these interested Jean-Paul not at all. The Lautrecs, Edouard suspected, found favor only because of their subject matter. Jean-Paul preferred champagne or beer to the complexities of clarets, horses to art, certainties to questions. The de Chavigny jewelry empire, which he would one day inherit, frankly bored him. It was useful to have expert family advice when he wanted some pleasing trifle for a woman, but that was all. Apart from the difference in price, Jean-Paul couldn't tell garnets from rubies, and he had no intention of learning.

He was so certain of everything, that was what he most admired and envied in his brother, Edouard sometimes thought. Perhaps it was because he was the elder, the heir. Jean-Paul had grown up safe in the knowledge that without lifting one finger or exercising one muscle of his brain, he

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would one day be one of the richest men in Europe. He would be the Baron. He was bom to a role, a position in life, and it would never have occurred to him to question it.

Edouard, too, would be rich, that went without saying. But he would not inherit the title, and if he was not to fritter away his life, he would have to find some function, some purpose—and he had no idea what it might be. He felt himself, in contrast to his brother, to Jean-Paul's massive sure-ness on every matter from politics to the bedroom, to be insubstantial, shot through with uncertainties and doubts. He knew he was more intelligent than Jean-Paul. He knew he saw things and understood things more quickly and more acutely—but that ability seemed to him useless. Jean-Paul simply didn't bother, and Jean-Paul was happy. That was the other source of his charm—his capacity to enjoy life, to revel in the moment, and never once to worry about the past or the morrow.

Also, Jean-Paul was not stupid. Anything that interested him, he mastered; he had always wanted to go into the army, and his mihtary record was exemplary. He was without physical fear, Edouard knew that, whether he was on horseback or battleground. He was one of the finest shots in France; he was unexpectedly graceful on a dance floor. He could drink his fellow officers under the table, and had never been known to experience a hangover. And he was irresistible to women.

According to Jean-Paul, he had his first woman when he was thirteen— it was one of the maids at the chateau in the Loire—and had not looked back since. When he was fifteen, his father, as was customary in their class, had arranged for him to be initiated into the pleasures of the act of love by a Frenchwoman renowned in Paris for her tact in such matters.

Jean-Paul had not admitted to his father his previous experiences, and the woman in question had, according to Jean-Paul, been pleasantly surprised by his accomplished performance. Jean-Paul had from the first been only too delighted to explain to his eager younger brother exactly what a man's requirements were, what he did, and what he could expect the woman to do in return. His descriptions were couched in the language of the barrack room, and were marvelously exact.

He needed a fuck a day, he said negligently, as Edouard's eyes rounded. Sometimes more, but on average, one a day. The time of day didn't matter, though he himself favored the afternoon—that way the evening could be given over to drinking, and after drinking a man performed less well. All kinds of women were delightful to fuck: experienced women, inexperienced women, young ones, old ones, beautiful ones, plain ones, thin ones, fat ones.