Till We Meet Again (19 page)

Eve was overjoyed by the move to Australia because of Delphine. The baby was afflicted with the malady called croup, which attacked her without warning, signaled only by a sudden cough that sounded exactly like the barking of a dog, followed by anguished gasping for air. The only way to ease the croup was to hold Delphine in a cloud of steam until her throat expanded and she was able to breathe normally, but steam was a priceless commodity in France during the first year after the war. The shortage of coal was worse than it had been before the peace, and electricity was still so precious that the Métro ran on a wartime schedule.

Australia, with its plenty, was a blessing to the anxious parents. There, in one of the comfortable Victorian villas of Canberra, with its wide verandas and large garden, Eve could almost relax, secure in the knowledge that she could fill the large bathroom with hot steam in a matter of minutes.
The best pediatrician in Canberra, Doctor Henry Head, examined Delphine and pronounced her perfect in every respect.

“Don’t worry yourself too much about the croup, Madame de Lancel,” he said. “There’s nothing you or I can do that you don’t know about already, and I can promise you that this young lady will grow out of it. There’s a theory that it’s caused by a baby’s short neck. As soon as her neck grows longer, and it will, you know, all by itself, you won’t hear that cough again. Keep a steam kettle going, night and day, in her room for three days after an attack and call me at any time if you need me.”

On the ninth of January, 1920, not even a year and a half later, another daughter, Marie-Frédérique, was born to Eve and Paul de Lancel. Doctor Head, who had been called in by Eve’s obstetrician to look over the new baby, hoped fervently that this little girl wouldn’t be a victim of croup too. He knew how often Delphine had given her parents days and nights of tormenting worry, and in the privacy of his thoughts, he wondered why they had had another child so soon. It seemed to him that Madame de Lancel had more than enough on her plate, coping with the constant crises caused by the sickly baby, without the burden of another infant.

Eve had engaged a capable nurse for the two children, but in the year following Marie-Frédérique’s birth she rarely slept for more than an hour or two at a time, waking constantly during the night to listen for Delphine’s breathing, only able to return to the bed she shared with Paul after she stood listening, by the child’s crib, for a half hour at a time.

At first Eve had been anxious for Marie-Frédérique too, but the baby demonstrated the kind of good health the British called “rude.” Just looking at her was a reassurance. She had the red hair of the Lancels, and the blue eyes as well. She was as plump and sturdy and red cheeked and smiling as her sister was delicate and pale and given to crying for no reason anyone could discover.

Yet Delphine was of a rare and ravishing beauty, a beauty that had nothing childlike about it, a beauty so exceptional that her parents could take little pleasure in it, since it was so often threatened by that doglike barking cough in the night.

During the first four years after the war, until Marie-Frédérique’s second birthday, Paul had been forced to agree with the Marquis de Saint-Fraycourt that Bruno should remain in Switzerland with his grandparents. During those two
overwhelming years, when Marie-Frédérique was under two and Delphine was enduring the worst years yet of croup, Paul admitted, unhappily, that to burden Eve with the responsibility of a third child would be asking too much of her.

However, in 1922, when Bruno was seven, Paul wrote his former father-in-law and asked that his son be sent to join him as soon as possible.

“He writes,” the Marquis de Saint-Fraycourt said to his wife, his tone as measured, as spare as ever, his concise, small lips set in their usual compressed lines, “that at last it is time for his son to join his daughters.”

“He used those words?” the Marquise asked indignantly.

“Precisely. As if they were all part of the same pack, our Bruno and the two brats he has got from that person.”

“How will you answer him?”

“I do not intend to answer this letter. It took weeks to get here, so presumably it could have been lost in the mails. It will be several more weeks before Lancel can expect my response. Then he will wait, believing perhaps that we are traveling, and after a month he will write again. Then you, my dear, shall answer, pleading my ill health. You will tell him that the doctors inform you that I have not many months to live, and you shall request that Bruno stay with us just a short while longer. Even a brute such as Lancel cannot deny this request. My illness will last and last … indeed, I shall
linger.”
The Marquis permitted himself a brief smile. “You will, of course, write to him to report on my condition frequently. He must not be allowed to worry about our eventual intentions.”

“And when shall you be forced to recover your health, my dear?”

“It is now almost March. Sometime next autumn, as late in the year as possible, I will send him a letter myself, explaining that although I am still extremely weak, I believe that I am on my way to recovery. However, I will throw myself on his mercy. I will tell him that my only joy during the months of my illness—I beg your pardon for saying this, my dear—was the daily visit of Bruno to my bedside. I will ask for a few more months in which to complete my recovery, just until the Christmas holidays are over, until the beginning of 1923, and I will promise to send Bruno out to Australia at that time.”

“Then what?”

“I fear that you must be the next of us to fall ill. Far more seriously than I. And for a longer time,”

“You can’t expect Lancel to wait indefinitely just because one of us is sick,” the Marquise protested. “This is the man who left for the war when Laure was expecting a child.”

“That is
exactly
what I am counting on. He cannot have forgotten that our poor child implored him not to leave her. He cannot have forgotten that if he had only remained with her a few more months, as he so easily could have done, she would be alive today. And if he should have forgotten how guilty he is, you may count on me to remind him. He will not want another death on his conscience. Furthermore, I shall tell him, if he doesn’t understand it by now, that Bruno has never known another mother than you. It is unthinkable that he could tear a child away from his mother when that mother is dying.”

“For how long can my terminal illness be drawn out?” the Marquise asked, with a faint, superstitious quiver.

“Fortunately for a very long time. You have the best medical attention in Europe and you are a strong woman. You will have complications—complications upon complications—yet you will continue to draw breath, thanks only to the miraculous presence of Bruno, who gives you a reason to live. In this way we will gain—oh, at least a year and a half, perhaps two. By 1925, who knows what may have happened?”

“What if Lancel decides to come suddenly, without warning, and fetch Bruno himself?”

“Nonsense. He cannot come from Australia in a twinkling of an eye. It is a long journey. Like all First Secretaries, he has a heavy schedule of official duties—I have made it my business to keep myself informed of his affairs, and I assure you that my friends at the Quai d’Orsay will not allow him to take several months’ leave for purely personal matters. But …”

“What?”

“One day, unquestionably, he will come.”

“Bruno is seven now. Can we hope for more than four years’ respite before Lancel demands his rights?”

“I am counting on no more than four. But by then Bruno will be eleven. No longer a child, my dear. And a Saint-Fraycourt in every sense.”

In 1924, after almost five years in Australia, Paul de Lancel was posted to Cape Town as Consul General. The
domestic upheaval caused by the new position forced him to postpone yet again a journey back to Paris, which he had long planned, in order to see the ailing Marquise de Saint-Fraycourt and arrange, finally, for Bruno to join his family. The frequent letters and photographs he received from the Marquis, and from Bruno himself, had done much to relieve Paul’s mind on the subject of his son. Certainly the boy seemed entirely happy and busy in the Parisian life to which his grandparents had returned in 1923. He did not lack for friends or family pleasures, since he took his place, as a cousin, among the many grandchildren of the family.

However, it was growing increasingly difficult to realize that he actually had a son, Paul thought. The newborn baby he had seen only once during the first year of the war had lived more than nine years without being reunited with his father. If he were not a career diplomat, condemned to go to the ends of the earth at the command of his government, the boy would have been returned to him as soon as the war ended. The subsequent ill health of the Marquis and Marquise had created an impossible situation, but he felt he was too indebted to them for their care of his child during the war years to take Bruno away suddenly. It would be condemning to a tragic end people who had already lost so much.

With every letter from them he was reminded again of the loss of Laure. They wrote stoically, yet the letters were all the more powerful for a restraint he suspected they forced themselves to maintain so as not to reopen his own wounds.

But Bruno was his son. His place was with his father. The situation was unnatural in spite of its having happened so inevitably. No one was to blame. Everyone was to blame. And as soon as he had settled into the Consulship in Cape Town, as soon as the office was running smoothly, as soon as Eve and the girls had moved into their new home, he would return to Paris and not come back unless Bruno was with him.

Troubled, Paul de Lancel walked along the Rue de Varenne toward the entrance to Bruno’s school. It was June of 1925. He had just arrived in Paris and immediately paid a visit to the Marquise de Saint-Fraycourt. What an effort she had made, he thought, actually to receive him in her sickroom. He knew that for such a proud woman to be forced to be seen lying helplessly in bed, with an embroidered bed jacket
modestly covering her nightgown, must have been a humiliation, no matter how much she had protested that she must greet him in person. She had been so pale, so slow to speak, and obviously in pain, although she had insisted, as of course she would, that she was on the road to recovery. It must be cancer, he decided. In his letters the Marquis de Saint-Fraycourt had been unwilling to dwell on the exact nature of her illness in the way that, in Paul’s experience, always meant cancer.

The Marquis still insisted that only Bruno’s presence kept the Marquise alive, yet surely, Paul told himself, the Marquise must be putting the boy’s future ahead of her own suffering. She had visibly repressed her unhappiness when Paul told her of his plans for Bruno to rejoin him, and she had not attempted to dissuade him from his intention. Could it be that she saw her own end near, and therefore was able to make this sacrifice? Was she so weary that she had no power left to try to keep the boy, or was she being ultimately unselfish?

He didn’t understand her and he never would, Paul realized, as he approached closer to the school. The Marquise de Saint-Fraycourt belonged to this part of Paris, this walled, closed, secret heart of the
Ancien Régime
, where great houses stood like a maze of splendid gray fortresses, protected by their walled courtyards to which the uninvited could never gain entrance, their huge gardens hidden forever from view to anyone but their noble proprietors who lived in vast rooms with creaking parquet floors and sublime proportions. How different it had been for him, growing up in the open air of Champagne, running in and out of Valmont with his dogs, a part of ever-renewing nature. The Lancels had been too busy supervising the growth of the grapes, and the honor of the
Marque
, to make a ritual out of pure tradition, he mused, but in the Seventh Arrondissement, where the descendants of the highest nobility in France still lived, ancestor worship hung like incense in the air.

Paul turned a corner and stood on the curb, waiting. In a few minutes, Bruno would emerge from school. Bruno knew his father was going to be there, but Paul had not yet written him of his plan to be reunited with him. That, he decided, must be announced in person.

The massive doors swung open as the first group of boys rushed out into the sunshine. They were too young, Paul saw
immediately. Bruno would not be among them. Paul was tense with suspense. He had thought it would be easier to first meet his son like this, in the open air, but now he longed for the formality of the Saint-Fraycourt salon, for the presence of other people, to blur the edges of this difficult, too-long-postponed reunion.

Another swarm of boys left the school, all dressed alike in their blue blazers and gray flannel shorts, the school caps on their heads, and heavy, brown book bags slung across their chests. They lingered in the doorway, joking in high animation before they disappeared in different directions, each boy giving his fellows the brisk, indispensable handshake of farewell.

The tallest boy of all approached Paul.

“Good day, Father,” Bruno said with composure, extending his hand. Paul took it automatically, too surprised to speak. He had no idea that ten-year-old Bruno would be so tall, as tall as any fourteen-year-old Paul had ever seen. His voice, clear, high and even, was that of the child he still was, but his handshake was vigorous and his features were already well formed. Paul blinked with startled eyes at his son. Dark hair, well cut and well kept; dark eyes flecked with green that met his own with frank curiosity; a high, thin, arched nose, the Saint-Fraycourt nose; and, unexpectedly, a small smiling mouth, the only somewhat disappointing feature of a handsome face which otherwise was remarkable for its definition and purpose.

The moment had passed when he could have embraced his son, Paul realized in confusion, as he found himself walking by Bruno’s side. Just as well perhaps, for the boy’s poise was surely hard-fought-for, and a hug, certainly a kiss, might have destroyed it.

“Bruno, you can’t know how happy I am to see you,” Paul said.