Destiny (51 page)

He never brought women back to St. Cloud. The only exception to that rule had been his wife. Now, just as he had done with Isobel, he walked first through the gardens, fragrant with lilies, and stood at the edge of the

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parterre, looking across the silver sky to the red glow of the city in the distance. He did so deliberately, in a frantic last-ditch attempt to save himself, thinking that comparisons and memories would then come to him, and sever the fine strong thread with which this magical woman bound him.

No comparisons occurred to him; no memories came back. He, who had always felt he could never escape from the past, now found that the past had relinquished its hold; it had gone; he was free of it. Standing there in the garden, he was aware of nothing but the woman beside him. Without speaking a word—and she was totally silent—she obliterated everything but the present.

After a while, Edouard took her hand, and held it in his. Then, slowly, they walked back to the house together. He took her up to the study in which, in another life, another man had proposed to Isobel. Hardly aware of what he was doing, he poured drinks. She moved slowly around the room as he did so. She lightly touched the needlepoint cover of one of the chairs; the Spitalfields silk of another; she looked at the Turner watercol-ors. Edouard put down the drinks, forgetting their existence, and moved to her side. She turned to look up at him, and quite suddenly he found it easy to speak.

"Do you know what is happening? Do you understand?" he said gently.

"I don't know. I'm not sure." She hesitated. "It frightens me a httle."

"It frightens me too." Edouard smiled.

"I could leave ..." She glanced toward the door, then back at him. "Perhaps, if I left now . . ."

"Do you want to do that?"

"No." Two wings of color mounted in her cheeks.

"It's just that—I hadn't expected ... I hadn't planned—"

She broke off, and Edouard reached across and took her hand in his. He let it rest there gently, and looked down into her face. He was touched, and a little amused, that a woman so young should speak so earnestly of plans, and perhaps she sensed that, because she frowned slightly, as if even the gentlest mockery made her unsure.

"You think that's foolish?"

"No, I don't." Edouard's face grew serious. "I Uve my whole Ufe by plans. Everything ordered and scheduled and precise. I have hved that way for years, ever since—" He hesitated. "For a long time."

"And now?"

"I know they don't matter in the least. I always knew that, anyway." He gave a shrug, half-turned away. "Plans. Schedules. Strategies. They pass time. They order it—they enable one to forget how empty it is."

He still held her hand hghtly, but his face was averted. Helene stood

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very still, looking at him. Light danced in her mind; she felt a dreamlike calm, and through the calm, a hectic certainty. It had been there from the moment she first saw him, and all evening she had been trying to argue it away. All evening, while she sat there opposite him in the Coupole, pretending to be calm, her mind had been filled with argument. This is not happening, it said at first; then—it is happening, but it is not too late, it can still be stopped.

Then, when they first reached St. Cloud, and she saw this house in all its magnificence, other ugly voices began, with other ugly refrains. They spoke with her mother's voice; they spoke with Priscilla-Anne's; they reminded her that men lied to women, especially when they wanted them; they lied the way Ned Calvert had lied.

Those warnings had been whispering away in her head until she came into this room, and until Edouard began to speak. Now they were still chattering away somewhere at the back of her mind, but their messages seemed not just mean, but also absurd. It occurred to her, as she looked carefully at Edouard, that even a man like this could be vulnerable.

"Edouard." It was the first time she had used his name, and he swung around to her at once. "Do you think you know—do you think one knows, when something is so right that there aren't any choices anymore?"

"Yes. I do."

"So do I." She looked at him solemnly, and then, before Edouard could speak again, she drew in her breath as if to steady herself, and took a small step forward.

"I want to stay," she said. "I don't want to go at all. I never did, really. There—I've said it." She hesitated then, her chin lifted, and her face took on a slightly defiant expression.

"Women aren't supposed to say things like that, are they? But it seems stupid to lie about that. I don't see the point. I do want to stay. I would have stayed with you last night if you had asked me. Probably when I first met you. We could have gotten into your car and driven straight back here, and I would have—stayed. Just like that. Not knowing you at all. Except I do feel as if I know you. I like you. Do you think that's wrong? Are you shocked?"

Edouard was amused, and also touched. The quaint and serious way in which she spoke, the odd combination of directness and shyness, the innocent assumption that what she was saying was somehow forward, when he was used to women who expressed their desires casually—all these things affected him deeply. He felt curiously rebuked by that innocence, and he knew that if he let her see the amusement he felt, she would be deeply mortified. He stepped forward and took her hand gently.

"No," he said seriously. "I'm not shocked. And I certainly don't think

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it's wrong. I want you to stay. I want it more than anything in the world. Now—do you find that shocking?" Her lips curved in a slow smile. "No."

"When I left my office the night we met—" Edouard hesitated. He wondered if he should go on, and almost broke off. She lifted her eyes to his face, and he felt suddenly that he owed it to her to be truthful. "That night—I was looking for a woman. Any woman. There were reasons for that—there's no point in saying what they were, not now, they'd sound Uke excuses, and I don't want that. I was looking for a woman—which is something I've done often in the past, and I met the woman. That was what I felt. You have to know that. I want you to know that. I'm aware of how that must sound. There's no reason why you should believe me—but I swear to you, it's the truth."

He stopped abruptly, and let his hand fall. Deep color had washed up over her face. Edouard turned away, furious with himself for having spoken. She was too young to understand; he had no right to introduce complexities of that kind. ... He must have sounded like the most hackneyed of seducers.

"I'm sorry." His voice was very formal. "I should not have said that. You'll want to go now. ..."

He started to move away from her, his face averted. Helene looked at him, frowning slightly. She knew how it felt, to invite rejection, to anticipate pain and thus prevent others from inflicting it: she had learned that technique in Orangeburg, year by year. She had assumed, naively, that it was one peculiar to herself, and yet now she recognized it in someone else.

She stepped forward, and he turned. "Edouard, that makes no difference. I'm glad you said it. I still want to stay."

The light came back into his eyes then. She reached out, took his hand, and pressed it against the swell of her breast.

They looked at each other. Beneath his fingertips, Edouard felt the beating of her heart.

In his bedroom, she stood at a little distance from him, and unfastened her dress. When she was naked, she stood perfectly still, her hands by her sides, only the rapidity of her breathing, the rise and fall of her breasts, revealing her emotion.

Her breasts were the color of ivory, their aureoles wide, the nipples

already hard. Edouard looked at the long perfect curve from thighs to hips

to narrow waist, at the grave child's face and the woman's voluptuousness.

Helene bit her lip; she stood quite still, watching him as he undressed.

When he was naked, she stepped forward and sank to her knees. She

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pressed her face against his stomach, and then, with a quick animal directness, she gently kissed the dark hair that ran in a line from chest to navel, and then down.

Across his bed there was a length of embroidered Chinese silk, cream silk embroidered with butterflies and birds of paradise, and flowers. She looked at the silk and, just for an instant, she saw Mrs. Calvert's room again. She saw Ned drape the silk cover with that square of white sheeting; she saw that confident smile spread across his face. The image was there; she shivered, and it was gone. Edouard lifted his arms and drew her down onto the cover beside him. She felt the warmth of his skin; his body brushed against hers, and she heard herself give one small startled sigh; then she lay still.

They lay quietly side by side for a long while, hardly moving. Then, very gently, Edouard turned her face to his; he looked into her eyes, and she looked back at him.

She felt his breath brush her skin, then the touch of his lips, then his hands. She closed her eyes; there was no sound, only a touching that washed her mind clear. He entered her very gently, and she felt a Uttle pain, then a great peace. She felt, as she moved under him, as if he took her down under the sea, fathom upon fathom, into the emerald dark, a place where the tides moved and shifted in her blood.

"Wait," Edouard said once, when her climax was very close, and he could sense that because she was inexperienced she was struggling too frantically to reach it.

"Helene. Wait. With me, not against me."

He said her name in the French manner, instinctively; she opened her eyes, and was still for a moment. Then her eyes fluttered shut, and she began to move with a new rhythm, so attuned to his, so powerful and so sweet that he almost lost control.

She came suddenly, arching beneath him; Edouard felt the control, the expertise acquired in years of meaningless lovemaking began to slip, to desert him, and with relief he let it go. There was a hot dark star in his mind, a source he must reach; Helene said his name at the moment he possessed it, and he felt his body shudder in the violence of the release.

Afterward they lay still, and neither spoke. When his mind grew calmer, and he eased himself from her body, Edouard felt a certain fear. He waited, tensing, for the self-hatred to come back, for the countersurge of disgust that always followed desire. It did not come; he felt only a great quietude, and—after a while—the tension left his body and dissolved.

Helene spoke first. She reached for his hand and pressed it. Her voice was a little broken still.

"Edouard. You took the past away. . . ."

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He could hear the wonder in her voice, and—since he feh it, too, and how many years since that had happened?—he smiled from pure deUght. "The past, yes," he said. They fell asleep together.

The next day, much later the next day, he suddenly remembered the present from Hermes. Carefully wrapped, tied with the distinctive Hermds ribbon, it was still in his study, forgotten from the night before. He fetched it, and brought it back to her. Helene was sitting up in bed, leaning against a pile of lace pillows. He rested it carefully in her hands.

"It's a present. For you. I meant to give it to you yesterday but . . ."

"A present? For me?" For a moment she looked touchingly young, hke a child at Christmas; then her eyes dropped, and he saw a strange hesitancy, a wariness, come into her face.

She looked down at the box, afraid to open it. For an instant, she heard Ned Calvert's voice, that slow seductive southern drawl. You're my sweet little girl; I like to give my little girl presents. . . .

Then she looked up and saw Edouard's face. On it there was an expression of such gentleness, of such excitement—masked by an attempt to appear nonchalant—that she felt instantly ashamed of the memory, of connecting those two events and those two men. The image of Ned Calvert disappeared, and for an instant new images came, of the long night and the long morning, pulsing in her body; then, eagerly, she pulled at the ribbon and opened the box.

A pair of gloves— the gloves. Her heart lifted that he should have remembered. A diamond ring; a most beautiful ring. She stared down into the blue-white fire of the stone, and then looked up at Edouard uncertainly.

He moved to the bed and sat down beside her, taking her hand in his.

"When I was a boy . . ."he spoke awkwardly, as if he had rehearsed this speech in his mind, and now that he came to say it, the words eluded him. "When I was a boy—fifteen, sixteen years of age—a httle younger than you are now, I fell in love with a much older woman. It was during the war. I was living in London—she was my first love affair, my first mistress, if you like. My brother introduced us. . . ."He paused. "It was an infatuation, I suppose. My brother thought so then—but I've never been able to think of it like that, even now. It was perfectly real to me. I was very young, and very obsessed, and after a while— & year, a Uttle longer, it ended. Her name was Celestine."

He broke off", and Helene watched him silently.

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"She was a kind woman, I see that now. She was always very patient with me, and very generous. There were things she said to me that I will always remember—but one in particular . . ."He hesitated. "I hadn't learned to be wary of words then, I was too young and too inexperienced. I was given to making the most passionate declarations—I had convinced myself we had a future, you see. When I did that, whenever I did that, she would always stop me. She said I shouldn't squander words; that one day I would meet the woman I loved, and I should save the words until then. Use, careless use, devalued them; they became common currency. . . . When she said that, I was very angry. But I came to realize that she was right. Since then, whatever else I've done, and whatever else I've been, I've never lied to a woman. I've never pretended an emotion I did not feel." He gave a quick impatient shrug. "I'm aware that's not much of an achievement."

He stopped then. Helene looked at him quietly.