Destiny (3 page)

"You bastard. You were thinking of her then, weren't you? Weren't you?"

Xavier looked down at her.

"I thought that was what you wanted," he said coldly. Then he left her, and went to sleep in his own room.

In the years after that he made love to his wife on occasion, and to a succession of other women with greater frequency, and with growing desperation. With a sense of despair he realized that, more and more, he was drawn to young women, women who resembled his wife as she had looked when he first saw her, and first fell in love with her. Sometimes, when the resemblance was too slight, and he had difficulty maintaining his erection, he would close his eyes and conjure up the image of his wife when she was young. Her rose-scented flesh; her mixture of shyness and ardor; the certainty of her love for him. This image never failed him. It brought him to orgasm even in the arms of a Les Halles whore.

In private he drew back into himself, cutting himself off" deliberately from his oldest male friends, immersing himself, when the women were insufficiently diverting, in the complexities of his business and his estates. In pubhc, he and his beautiful wife remained as they had always been: devoted, extravagant, generous, everywhere seen, everywhere envied, everywhere admired. If tongues wagged occasionally—even the most perfect marriage needed certain divertissements eventually, and both the Baron and the Baronne were so commendably discreet—he ignored them. His wife had taught him one thing at least, he told himself She had taught him the true meaning of ennui, shown him what it meant to live out your days in a prison of grayness. It was one of the few gifts he wished had never been bestowed on him.

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He foresaw the coming war quite clearly, several years before most of his friends and business acquaintances. In 1933, when Adolf Hitler became Reich Chancellor, he warned his friends that it would mean war, and they laughed at him. He sold his interests in the German steel industry in 1936 at a profit, and bought into the British and American industries instead. After the occupation of the Rhineland the same year, he transferred all his holdings, and a substantial part of his capital, from France to Switzerland and New York. Ownership of the de Chavigny company was transferred from his private hands to those of a holding company registered in Lucerne, in which he held ninety percent of the shares, and his son Jean-Paul, ten percent. His personal collection of jewels, his paintings, his silver, the most valuable and least replaceable of the furniture from three houses in France was packed up and sent likewise to Switzerland, where it was stored. In 1937 he began planning the arrangements necessary for his family to leave France, should the invasion he feared take place. By the time of the annexation of Czechoslovakia and Austria in 1938, these plans were complete. Their efficiency was proven eighteen months later. Louise and her two sons left France in May 1940, shortly before British troops were evacuated from Dunkirk. By June 14 the same year, when the Germans reached Paris, the de Chavigny showrooms were still open, but Xa-vier de Chavigny had apparently stripped himself of almost all assets.

When called upon to do so, he made himself and his showrooms accessible to the officers of the German High Command, and through this poUte compUance, often provided information of considerable assistance to his fellow members of the Sixth Cadre, Paris Resistance. He gave up women, and tried not to think of his wife.

To his surprise he discovered that he missed neither Louise nor his mistresses, and that the ennui which had dogged him for so long had gone. He had a purpose in life again, a raison d'etre, all the more intense because he knew his life was in constant danger.

He was not fearful for himself, but he was fearful—still—for Louise and for his children. He would have felt safer, much safer, if they had agreed to his original plans, and gone to America. England, he knew, as he watched the progress of war, was not far enough.

The reason for this was simple: his wife, Louise, was half-Jewish. Her mother, Frances, had been bom a SchifF, and had grown up within the confines of German-Jewish New York society, in which the distinction of being, originally, from Frankfurt—like the Rothschilds and the Warburgs —counted for a great deal. Frances grew up within the charmed circle of the "One Hundred," and she numbered among her uncles, aunts, and innumerable cousins, a formidable roster of Warburgs, Loebs, Lehmans, and Seligmans. She was expected to make a dynastic marriage; when, at

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the age of nineteen, she eloped with John McAlhster, her family cut her off, and the reverberations of shock from that mixed marriage continued for decades.

Frances turned her back on her childhood, on that world of Fifth Avenue mansions, and worship at Temple Emanu-El. John McAllister was rich when she married him, for he had inherited an empire in steel from his Scots emigre father. He invested in the Northern Pacific Railroad, and became richer still. Frances McAllister concentrated her energies on being assimilated, and—since she was beautiful, clever, and charming, as well as very rich—she succeeded to a very large extent. Frances graced the McAllister box in the Diamond Horseshoe at the Metropolitan Opera, boxes from which her Jewish relations were excluded; she built a house at Newport, not, of course, at Elberon, where her uncles and aunts maintained their mansions. She brought up Louise very carefully; her own Jewish origins were not hidden, but reference to them was not encouraged. Louise, aware as she grew older that her mother's background marked her out from the rest of her contemporaries, became extremely careful never to refer to them at all. Like the newness of her father's wealth, it became a subject that was, quite simply, barred. She converted to Catholicism and, once she married Xavier, she bent her considerable energies to a new role, that of being the Baronne, and more French than the French themselves.

So fierce were her efforts in this respect that Xavier de Chavigny, who was without racial prejudice, almost forgot the question of his wife's ancestors. Since their race was a matter of indifference to him, he assumed, negligently and slightly grandly, that they were also a matter of indifference to everyone else. Until 1938: then, he knew, they could no longer be ignored. For if Louise was half-Jewish, his children were therefore one quarter Jewish. With an enemy prepared patiently to trace heredity back through eight, nine generations in their search for Jewish blood, a half-Jewish mother, a Jewish grandmother, was a terrible threat. So the plans had been thorough, and the Baron was in no doubt of their necessity. But still he worried: had they been thorough enough?

Edouard lay back on the silk brocade-covered sofa, propped a cushion under his feet, opened the book on his lap, and stared into the fire. He felt extremely comfortable, and slightly somnolent, as he often did after finishing an English tea.

Tea, he decided, was one of the meals the English understood. The other was breakfast. He disapproved of porridge—that was too disgusting even to consider—but grilled bacon, coddled eggs, devilled kidneys, or kedgeree

DESTINY • 23

—these were splendid, a great improvement on a simple croissant and cafe au lait. Edouard was already tall; he had inherited his father's looks, and closely resembled him, with his almost jet black hair, and startlingly deep blue eyes. Like his father, he had the build of a natural athlete: wide shoulders, long legs, and narrow hips. He was growing fast—five feet eleven already—and he was always, always hungry.

Now he had just consumed an excellent tea brought in on silver trays by the butler. Parsons, and by the senior parlor maid, and solemnly laid out for him before the fire on several small tables. Hot buttered crumpets with English honey, tiny cucumber sandwiches, three different kinds of cake, his favorite tea, Lapsang Souchong, with its delicate smoky taste.

Edouard read The Times each morning; on sorties around the city he had glimpsed the long lines of shoppers outside food shops, and the limited stock on sale. He was perfectly well aware that the kind of meals his mother took for granted would be served in her household were now, in wartime, exceptional—possibly even unpatriotic. But he knew the household had been carefully stocked before the war, and besides, he was always so hungry. Was it really going to help the war effort if he refused a second shce of filet de boeuf en croute, or a second spoonful of Sevruga? He thought not. It would only offend the cook.

He glanced down guiltily at the book on his lap. His Latin assignments. He was supposed to have translated at least five pages of Virgil before tomorrow morning; so far he had completed only two. In France he was taught Latin by an elderly Jesuit who was given to dozing off most conveniently as Edouard stumbled through The Aeneid. But his English tutor was another matter.

He had been hired by Edouard's mother on the recommendation of a friend, and Edouard was perfectly sure that his papa would have disapproved of him deeply. Hugo Glendinning was a man of uncertain age, too old to be drafted, and probably in his mid-forties, though he could look older. He was very tall, very thin, and very elegant in a raffish kind of way. He had graying hair, worn slightly too long in Edouard's conservative opinion, and he would run his hands through it before uttering the melodramatic groan that signified Edouard had just committed another appalling solecism. He was an old Etonian, an Oxford classics scholar, his eyes were habitually vague, and he had a mind like a razor. On the day of his arrival he had confounded Edouard by chain-smoking Black Russian cigarettes throughout their tutorial.

Of his family background and his academic qualifications Papa would have approved—Edouard had no doubts about that. But of his politics? Edouard was more doubtful. Hugo Glendinning had fought in the Spanish Civil War; it had become rapidly obvious to Edouard that he was a politi-

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cal radical—something Edouard had never encountered before; more than that, he was probably a Socialist.

His tutorials were unconventional, to say the least. The first day he had tossed two books at Edouard: the first was The Iliad, the other the dreaded Aeneid.

"Right." He put his feet up on the table in front of him and stretched. "The first page of each. Read them. Then translate."

Edouard groped his way through the texts while Hugo Glendinning leaned back with closed eyes and a pained expression around the mouth. When Edouard fumbled to a halt, he sat up abruptly.

"Well. You're not a total dunce, which is something, I suppose." He looked at Edouard keenly. "There might be some glimmerings of intelligence there. Deeply buried, of course, but latent. I could do a great deal better than that when I was nine. I wonder . . . are you lazy?"

Edouard considered this possibility, which had never been put to him before.

"I do hope not." Hugo extinguished one cigarette, and lit another. "It's extremely boring, laziness. I detest it above all things. Now . . ." He leaned forward, suddenly, and fixed Edouard with his gaze. "What is The Iliad about?"

Edouard hesitated. "It's about—er—well, the Greeks and the Trojans ..."

"And?"

"The Trojan War."

"Precisely so." Hugo smiled. "War. You have possibly observed that there is a war going on at present?"

Edouard rallied. "A very different war."

"You think so? Well, literally, yes, you are right. Homer is not going to describe the activities of tanks and aeroplanes. However. War is war. Killing is killing. The Iliad is perhaps not the remote and irrelevant document you seem to consider it. I suggest you compare—let me see—Book Sixteen, The Death of Patroclus,' with this morning's account in The Times of yesterday's aerial battles over the south coast. The one is bellicose propaganda of the most unimaginative kind, and the other is—the other is art." He paused. "Possibly, if you heard it read with slightly more correct pronunciation, and a genuine attempt to honor the rhythms of Homer's verse structure. . . . Let us see. ..."

He leaned back in his chair again and shut his eyes. Not once looking at the book before him, he began to recite in Greek. Edouard sat silently.

At first, he resisted. Hugo Glendinning seemed to him dreadfully arrogant and extremely rude: none of his French tutors would have dared to speak to him in this way. He had no intention of being impressed or

DESTINY • 25

interested. Then, gradually, in spite of himself, he began to listen. And it was extraordinary—that Uquid, fluid, impassioned language, so very different from the dry halting way it sounded when his Jesuit tutor read it, stopping every two lines to construe them.

He began to listen more closely, looked down at his own book, and the words—already familiar to him—began to take new shape and life of their own: he saw the battlefield, saw the light glint on the weapons, heard the cries of the dying men. From that moment he was hooked. For the first time in his life, Edouard looked forward to lessons, and worked. One day, one day he was going to force Hugo Glendinning to pay him a compliment; if it killed him he'd do it.

When they came to Latin, Hugo tossed Caesar's Gallic Wars aside. "Good clear pedestrian stuff." He sniffed. "Ditches and ramparts. We'll stick to Homer for war, I think. Now . . . what about love? Sexual attraction? Passion? You're interested in that, I presume? I was, at your age. . . ."

"Aren't you now?" Edouard put in slyly, and Hugo smiled.

"Possibly. That is beside the point. We shall read The Aeneid, naturally. But also Catullus, I think. You've read Catullus?"

"No." Edouard felt a pulse of excitement. As far as his Jesuit teacher was concerned, Catullus was most definitely not on the curriculum for fourteen-year-old boys.

"Then let us begin." Hugo paused. "Catullus is a wit and a cynic. He mocks his own passion, but at the same time acknowledges his enslavement. We may usefully compare some of these poems with certain of Shakespeare's sonnets. In both cases the emotions described may be a little difficult for a boy to understand. Are you able to imagine how a man feels when he is obsessed, physically and spiritually, with a woman? A woman whose character and moral worth he despises?"