Till We Meet Again (16 page)

Paul de Lancel never asked for a song for himself, for he was unwilling to take the place of any of his men, Finally there was a lull in their requests even though, to a man, they were still awake, and he spoke up. “Do you know any of the English soldiers’ songs?”

“ ‘The Roses of Picardy,’ of course, and ‘Tipperary’—everyone knows them, even if they don’t speak English.”

“ ‘Till We Meet Again’—do you know it too?”

“ ‘Smile a while, you kiss me sad adieu’… that one?” Eve asked.

“Yes,” he said eagerly. “Please.”

“Smile a while, you kiss me sad adieu
,
When the clouds roll by I’ll come to you
.
Then the skies will seem more blue
,
Down in Lovers’ Lane, my dearie …
Wedding bells will ring so merrily
,
Every tear will be a memory
,
So wait and pray each night for me
,
Till we meet again.”

Eve looked up as she came to the last line, and he said only, “Again … oh, just one more time.” Before she finished the short, simple, unforgettable melody, she saw that the captain had fallen asleep, a smile on his lips.

5

“T
O think that some people have the luck to be born Swiss,” Vivianne de Biron sighed pensively as she and Eve sat in her kitchen on a day in the last week of December of 1916, sharing a pot of herb tea.

“Swiss? You always said that it wasn’t a country as much as a convalescent home,” Eve retorted, disbelievingly. Two and a half years of war had made little outward change in her splendidly preserved friend. Vivianne was as irreducibly Parisian as ever, like a metal that cannot be further refined by any means.

“ ‘A calm neutrality,’ that’s what the Schultess has promised them. That and fresh cream in their real coffee, no doubt. No boring herb tea for them.”

“Schultess?” Eve’s winged brows rose higher than ever under the small black Persian lamb toque that almost covered her siren’s hair. She was elegantly thinner than she had been when she first arrived in Paris three and a half years before, and when she walked down the street she strode with the inimitable confidence and panache of a woman who belonged to this city, a woman to whom the city, without question, belonged. “Who is Schultess?”

“The new president of Switzerland, as you’d know if you read the newspapers, Maddy. And our government finds nothing better to do than to raise the tax on adultery! Oh no, don’t laugh, my girl, I’m serious. Before this miserable war, the fine for adultery was twenty-five francs. Today they’ve changed it to a hundred francs and a few days in prison! I ask you, is that reasonable? Is it logical, is it rational? Is it even French? That they’ve rationed our gas and electricity and food makes sense—but what could a little adultery take away from winning the war? In my opinion this new tax is positively unpatriotic.”

Vivianne poured another cup of tea and regarded it without favor. “Reflect on it, Maddy. If a soldier is away from
home and is able to take a little comfort with someone who isn’t his wife—or if his wife misses him but in his absence finds a small pleasure to enable her to endure her loneliness—why should anyone have to pay a tax? And who is the voyeur who is going to be searching under beds for adulterers instead of being at the front where he belongs, can you tell me that?”

“It’s beyond my capacities, Vivianne. I haven’t got that much imagination,” Eve replied, trying to repress her giggles.

“Ah, Maddy, you refuse to take anything seriously. Well, that’s your privilege,” Vivianne sniffed. “I suppose you think it’s intelligent that the government won’t allow the public to come into the theaters except in street clothes, too? No more evening gowns, no dinner jackets … as if that might impress the Germans enough so that they’d all swallow a few good mouthfuls of their own poison gas, and go running back to Berlin.”

“It’s worth trying,” Eve said absently. She did read the newspapers and she was aware, as much as Vivianne, that the battles of the Somme and of Verdun, during 1916, the most frightful year yet known in human history, had taken a toll of lives so vast that it was beyond the power of the mind to comprehend.

Abruptly she pulled her thoughts back to join her friend’s chatter. “Our allies are doing their best, even you must admit it, Vivianne,” Eve said. “The King of England has vowed not to drink alcohol, not even wine or beer, to help win the war. Imagine, if the rest of the country follows his example. Think of it—all those English without their whiskey—what could it lead to?”

“A certain victory—for the Germans,” Vivianne retorted. “At least no one is suggesting giving up the music hall. There isn’t a seat in any theater in Paris, with all the soldiers on leave wanting to be distracted.”

“I know. Since Jacques Charles got out of the military hospital and took over the Casino de Paris he’s more dynamic than ever—at the Olympia we never had such sumptuous costumes, such elaborate decors. Just wait till you see dozens of girls, with nothing on but G-strings, climbing up and down ladders ten meters tall. The band is playing something from America that I’ve never heard before—it’s called ragtime.”

Vivianne looked unconvinced, not at all pleased to be told
that the Casino de Paris surpassed the theater in which she had known her days of glory.

“And do you like to sing this ‘ragtime’?”

“You don’t sing it, you dance to it, more or less. But I must leave you, Vivianne, dear. Time to do a little work. At least now I can come and visit you since the coast is clear” Eve nodded in the direction of the landing, toward the apartment in which she used to live Alain Marais, thanks to the weakness of his lungs after his bout of pneumonia, had noncombatant status in the army and was stationed at a supply depot far from Paris.

Eve got up to go. Vivianne thought she looked even more vivacious and alluring than ever before, in her coat of Parma violet wool, trimmed with an immense Persian lamb collar and cuffs, and a deep fur hem. As Eve turned toward the door of the kitchen she changed her mind and turned back to Vivianne.

“Let me ask you something, Vivianne. When you took me to the Olympia for my audition, didn’t it occur to you that I’d have to see Fragson perform and then I’d discover the truth about Alain?”

“That was more than three years ago,” the older woman protested.

“That’s not the answer to my question”

“I suppose it should have crossed my mind.… Perhaps it did, and I didn’t realize it … or perhaps … well, what if I had the notion that it wouldn’t be such a bad thing for you to know how less-than-wonderful your Monsieur Marais was? Perhaps I hoped it might keep you from throwing yourself away on him for too long. In any case, I didn’t do it from conscious malice—but I wouldn’t be ashamed of myself if I had.”

“I knew about Fragson months before that audition. I went to the Olympia alone one day.”

“Ah.”

“Precisely. Women in love are such pathetic fools, Vivianne. It’s like a dreadful attack of willful stupidity. And once they’re out of love, they ask themselves how they could ever have made such utter misjudgments, such obvious mistakes, but they never do find an answer. Since Alain, I’ve decided that it was much wiser never to fall in love—and I haven’t, not even a little bit He did me a favor, although it didn’t seem that way at the time.”

“Ah.”

“That’s all you have to say? ‘Ah’?”

“You’re almost twenty-one. When you’re three times as old, you can tell me that again and I promise to begin to believe you.”

“I thought you were a professional cynic, Vivianne.”

“I am. About men—and a romantic about women.”

“He says he knows you, Maddy. But he says you don’t know his name. Shall I let him in?” The guardian of the stage door at the Casino de Paris was accustomed to mobs of soldiers trying to gain entrance backstage after the curtain fell on the show, and normally, war or no war, he told them to wait until Maddy came out. However, this one had obviously given him a good tip to induce him to approach Eve directly.

“What does he look like?” she asked, preoccupied. Her stage makeup had all been removed, and her arms were raised over her head as she brushed out her hair in every direction. Eve wore a light dressing gown of pale yellow silk, for it was warm in the month of May 1917. With the aureole of strawberry blond hair like a halo around her face she looked as positive as summer yet as tentative as spring, like a flower, ravished by the sun, with its open heart showing.

“He’s an officer, lots of ribbons. Good looking, since you ask me.”

“French, English or American?”

“French, of course, or I wouldn’t have bothered you. The Americans just got here, after all. Although they do find their way to Paris quickly, I’ll say that for them.”

“Show him in,” Eve decided. “Just give me time to put on my dress.”

In a minute the guardian was back, closely followed by a tall, impatient figure in a colonel’s uniform, carrying his cap under his arm.

“I hope I’m not disturbing you, Madame.” The formula of politeness was at odds with the intensity of the way he said the traditional words.

“Not at all,
mon colonel
.” There was a question in her voice. She couldn’t remember ever having met this big, blond man, with weatherbeaten skin and deep-set blue eyes, yet there was something disturbingly familiar about him, as if she had dreamed about him, forgotten the dream, and now was on the verge of remembering it again.

“I didn’t have any idea who you were until tonight,” he said, “and I didn’t know how to find you—but then when I heard you sing—at the very first note … I … that night …” He fell silent, as if he didn’t know what to say next, as if the urgent need to tell Eve something was too complex to put into words.

“That night?” she asked. There had been an eternity of nights since the war started.

“You can’t have forgotten, even though it was almost two years ago.”

“That night?
Yes, oh yes
, the night in the farmhouse! You … oh yes, of course—the officer—yes, I remember—naturally I remember—how could anyone forget that night? Now I remember your voice, I just didn’t remember your face. You fell asleep while I sang.”

“And I dreamed of peace,” he answered. “A happy dream … it stayed with me for days. Two of my men would not have lived through that night if it hadn’t been for you. I had to tell you that.”

“What is your name,
mon colonel
?”

“Paul de Lancel. Will you dine with me, Madame?”

“It would give me pleasure.”

“Tonight?” he asked, so hopefully that his deep voice almost cracked.

“Why not? As I remember, on the night we met we went hungry. And yet I sang for my supper … and almost for my breakfast as well. So I believe you owe me a dinner. But you must promise me two things.”

“Anything,” he said seriously. “Anything you ask.”

“You must not tell me again that I’m mad or a damn fool.”

“I’d hoped you’d forgotten how unforgivably rude I was.”

“On the contrary, it was too memorable ever to forget.”

In the past few years, Eve had been taken out to supper after the show night after night by military men from every part of France Distraction was what they sought in a restaurant, a feverish bustle and brightness that brought its own gaiety.

Paul de Lancel, however, chose to take her to the dining room of the Ritz. It was an exceptionally formal room, high-ceilinged, with elaborate moldings, deeply carpeted and hung with brocades of a quality that would be justified in a queen’s bedroom. The tables were placed far from each other, and
one of its walls opened onto a semicircular garden where jasmine and trailing pyramids of geraniums surrounded a fountain. Each element of the service was attended to by a maître d’hôtel, waiters and busboys whose tasks were performed too silently to encourage bustle, the room was lit too discreetly to be bright, each table glowing in quiet invitation in a pool of light made by small lamps with pink shades.

Yet, for all its ornateness, the dining room of the Ritz was conceived under the spell of celebration and gaiety, and it had retained that mood throughout the war. Although the sum total of the details of the room made it the most splendid place to dine in France, Paul de Lancel was snugly and familiarly at home there. He ordered dinner without any unnecessary fuss, yet with an authority that was as complete as it was mild. As he spoke to the maître d’hôtel, Eve felt herself relaxing into a quietude of security that had nothing to do with the prospect of a peaceful meal.

In the soft light, Paul studied Eve intently. She sat with her normal serene confidence in the brocade armchair, her long earrings glimmering. Her hair was parted in the middle, and then brought forward so that it coiled, in the latest style, over her ears. Her dress had a low, square neckline trimmed in a band of lace, and two other broad bands of lace covered her shoulders, yet her strong, smooth neck and her slender arms were left completely bare.

He realized that this denuded style suited Eve, as it did few others, for it emphasized the exquisitely curved angle at the widest part of her jawbone, and the marvelously fresh tint of her skin. It was impossible for him to see into the depths of her eyes in the available light, but as she talked, the slow flutter of her eyelids under her upslanting brows was mysteriously important. The striking immoderation that her Aunt Marie-France had first become aware of seven years earlier had been sculpted and firmed by life, but not in the least tamed, so that now it appeared as a startling independence of spirit, a freedom and a composure that joined to give Eve a quality that was noble in its lack of conventionality. As they talked, he recognized the dancing lance of her intelligence, the teasing contagion of her inner playfulness.

“Who
are
you?” Paul de Lancel suddenly heard himself ask her.

“What do you mean?” Eve asked, although the beat of her blood in her veins knew perfectly well what he meant.