Till We Meet Again (2 page)

Eve surveyed her two astonishingly different but equally lawless, brave, willful, and outrageous daughters, whom time had blessedly transformed into women. “Will you join me in a glass of champagne?” she said, and bent to uncork the bottle of Lancel ’47 with a quick twist of the blunt-edged tweezers that had been designed generations ago, especially for this
task. She poured three inches into her own glass, gave the crystal an experienced twirl to wake the wine from its slumber, and watched the white froth vanish on the surface of the pale pink liquid. Eve took a sip, found it sublime, as she expected, deftly filled all three glasses, and handed one to Freddy and one to Delphine
.

“I’ll never forget my first taste of champagne,” Freddy said. “It was here, outside on the terrace, when we all came over from California to visit for the first time. What year was that, Mother?” Unaccustomed nostalgia filled her gaze. Her eyes were of such an intense and unlimited blue that they seemed saturated with sky
.

“Nineteen thirty-three,” said Eve. “You were only thirteen, but your grandmother decreed that you weren’t too young.”

“What did Great-Grandmother say?” a voice asked from the doorway as Annie, Freddy’s fourteen-year-old daughter, slipped into the room wearing jeans and a man’s shirt, with the sleeves rolled up. “And why wasn’t I invited to this party?”

“Aren’t you supposed to be out with the others, Annie?” Freddy asked, taking a pass at sounding like a proper mother
.

“Do I resemble a daddy or some sticky little boy?” tall, larkish Annie demanded with her seraphic, impudent grin. “I’m the only girl in my generation of this family and I wouldn’t be caught dead hanging around with that crowd. I’ve been in my room. I actually fell asleep for a half hour. I intend to stay up all night—or I would if there was anyone here to dance with who wasn’t a relative.” Annie contemplated the three of them with delight. She considered herself far and away the most mature and wisest of all the Lancel females, even, in some ways, more grown-up than her adored grandmother
.

“What are you going to put on for dinner, Annie?” Eve asked
.

“I don’t have a thing to wear,” Annie said, shaking her curly head dolefully
.

“You brought over two suitcases full of clothes,” Freddy laughed
.

“But nothing exactly right for the occasion. Grandma, may I go take a look in your armoire?”

“First have a glass of champagne,” Eve suggested. There
was nothing she could deny Annie, not even a Balenciaga, no matter how unsuitable
.

Annie approached the wine with curiosity. She’d never had champagne before, but every time she tasted something for the first time, French tradition said that she could make a wish. She wrinkled her enchanting nose and took a large sip, tasted it thoroughly, as she had seen others do, and swallowed it thoughtfully
.

“Hmmm.” She made a silent wish and bent to take another sip
.

“Did you notice anything special about it?” Eve asked
.

“Yes. It tasted one way in my mouth, and then, when I’d swallowed it, there was another taste, a sort of glow at the back of my throat.”

“That,” said Eve, “is only possible because it is a perfect champagne. The taste is called the Farewell.”

Annie took another big sip, put down her glass, and vanished in the direction of the biggest armoire in the bedroom
.

“That child is the only one of you with a natural palate,” Eve informed her daughters excitedly. “Neither of you has ever noticed the Farewell in all these years. Freddy—what would you think of sending Annie here next summer to let her start to learn about the creation of champagne? Somebody has to take over the House of Lancel someday.”

“I think that she’s going to be learning to fly next summer, but if she wants to—well, why not?”

Annie came back into the bedroom holding a hanger from which was suspended a red chiffon dress with tiny shoulder straps above a small, tucked bodice. The shoulder straps and the belt that was buckled around the small waist were thickly encrusted with rhinestones. They glittered with an unexpected freshness, as if a spotlight had just been turned on them. The skirt of the red dress flirted with the air, its layers of chiffon dancing into a flickering hemline that dipped in points of many different lengths. Even on a hanger the dress seemed magical, as if it had led a life of its own, as if it possessed a history and, somehow, a complicated personality, a thousand selves
.

“Grandma, look at this! I’ve never seen it before—it’s fabulous! And I bet it would just fit me,” Annie said meaningfully
.

“Where did you find that dress?” Eve asked, jolted
.

“All the way at the back of the armoire. It winked right at me.”

“I’d … forgotten it was there. It’s an old dress, Annie—it must be—oh, more than forty years old.”

“I don’t care how old it is, it’s better than new. What did you wear it for?”

“I didn’t wear it, Annie—Maddy did.”

Both Delphine and Freddy leaned forward with fascination. So this was the famous dress Maddy had worn, Delphine thought, a dress that was part of the family scandal she’d learned about years ago. She’d never laid eyes on it before, although she’d heard about it, far more, indeed, than she had ever wanted to. Freddy was intrigued. She knew about Maddy, of course, but she’d never imagined that a dress could be so alive, almost like another person in the room. She had an attachment to a certain red dress herself, she’d never throw it away, but it hadn’t occurred to her that her mother would be that sentimental about Maddy’s dress
.

Eve filled all four glasses again. “I think we should drink to Maddy,” she decreed, her eyes alight and playful, a faint blush rising on her cheeks. Whatever her daughters thought they knew about Maddy, they’d never be able to understand why she’d kept that dress. There were some things you could never totally communicate … nor did you ever intend to
.

The Lancel women held their glasses high. “To Maddy!” they said
.

“Whoever she is,” Annie added, as she raised her glass
.

1

E
VE Coudert held out her five-franc note to the ticket seller. She gave him a nonchalant smile as she paid for a ride in the hot-air balloon that lay tethered on the huge field of La Maladière, outside of Dijon, where the great Air Show of 1910 was in its last day.

“You’re alone, Mademoiselle?” he asked in surprise. It was rare to see such a young woman unaccompanied, particularly one so appetizing. He eyed her with interest, taking a rapid, knowing inventory of her charms. Under the brim of her straw hat, she looked up at him with gray eyes, dark enough to snare the devil, under brows that flew upward, as slanted as a pair of wings. Her heavy chignon revealed hair that was some unnamable but intoxicating shade between red and gold, and her full, smiling mouth was as naturally rosy as her cheeks.

“My husband is afraid of heights, Monsieur,” she said, and added a delicate shade of meaning to her smile which told the ticket seller that she understood full well that he himself wasn’t afraid of heights and that she admired him for his courage.

Oh ho, he thought with pleasure, this bewitchingly young bride of the provinces isn’t as nearly innocent as she’s supposed to be, and with a longing look, but without further question, he gave Eve the ticket that entitled her to a ride. Taking her gloved hand, he gallantly helped her step up into the basketlike woven wicker gondola that was big enough to hold five people.

She gathered her narrow white piqué skirt in one hand and, with the other, held on tightly to her fashionably wide-brimmed hat trimmed with floppy pink silk cabbage roses. Eve’s pointed, laced-up low boots tapped nervously as she waited for the removal of dozens of sand bags that kept the huge red balloon on the ground. She took care not to look around at her fellow passengers. Eve turned her back on
them, leaned against the waist-high rim of the gondola, and tucked her chin tightly into her high boned collar, so that its lace petals were articulated clearly against her delicate skin and almost hid her face.

It was Sunday, the twenty-fifth of August, a particularly hot afternoon, but Eve shivered with repressed impatience while the workmen ran about, shouting at each other. Suddenly the enormous red balloon rose in the air with utterly unexpected speed and silence.

Stunned by the magical upward soaring, Eve ignored the city below, the lovely old capital of Burgundy, about which King François the First had exclaimed, “Ah! The beautiful city of a hundred church towers.” She looked directly toward the distant blue horizon, astonished by her first glimpse of the far line of green and yellow fields that grew wider by the second.

But the world is so
endless
, she thought, overwhelmed by the same childlike wonder felt by everyone in the gondola. Forgetting the caution with which she had resolutely held herself apart from the three men who had also bought tickets for the ride, Eve turned around and gazed enraptured at the panorama in which she was so miraculously encompassed.

Unconsciously, she opened her arms to try to embrace the sky. In that moment of irrepressible impulse, the balloon was caught in a sudden strong gust of wind. Her hat was torn free from the pin that held it on her head and was sent sailing away.

“Oh, no!” Eve exclaimed, and as she cried out in an incredulous tone, the men all looked at her. They saw a horrified girl whose inexpertly constructed chignon had been taken by the wind, so that her hair was now blowing about in as many directions as there are on a compass. The sight of her face and of her waist-length hair betrayed her age just as the hat had disguised it.

“Mademoiselle Coudert!”

“Eve!”

“Good day, Monsieur Blondel, good day, Monsieur Martineux,” Eve said with trembling lips, attempting the polite smile with which she usually greeted these friends of her father’s on those rare occasions when she encountered them, for Eve Coudert was only fourteen and had not even reached the age at which her mother would allow her to help pass the pastries at an afternoon tea party. “Is this not thrilling?”
she added, reaching for composure in her most adult voice.

“Never mind that nonsense, Eve,” Blondel sputtered indignantly. “What are you doing here? Where is your governess? Do your parents have any idea … no, of course they don’t!”

Eve shook her head. There was no point in trying to explain that she had to go up in the balloon at all costs, that she had waited during the first three deliriously exciting days of the Air Show in mounting anxiety, that she had seized the minute when her father was called to attend a sick patient and her mother was taking her usual afternoon nap, to elude her governess, Mademoiselle Helene—no, somehow none of that seemed useful to tell him.

“I am here,” she said calmly, now that she knew the inevitable price would have to be paid, “because everyone says that we French have finally conquered the atmosphere and I wanted to see it for myself.”

Blondel’s mouth fell open, the other two men didn’t bother to repress their laughter. Doctor Didier Coudert’s only child was unquestionably a pert minx, Martineux thought, but her presence added a particular charm to this extraordinary moment. He had an eye for a neat waist and a slender ankle, and these she already possessed, as well as the tentative but unmistakable outline of a young bosom under the short piqué bolero and tucked lace blouse of her very best costume.

“Blondel,” he said with authority, “Mademoiselle Coudert can come to no harm here. When we return to earth, I myself will escort her safely home.”

“Do you think, Monsieur, that first we could look for my mother’s—for my hat?” Eve asked.

“I think the hat is still flying under its own power, Mademoiselle. It was headed south toward Nuits-Saint-George, if I’m not mistaken. Still, we will try.”

“Thank you, Monsieur,” Eve said, gratefully. If only they could find the hat, perhaps her mother wouldn’t be quite as angry as she anticipated. But even if it had been eaten by a goat, it was worth it, oh, so worth whatever happened to her, just to have floated in the air and seen, at last, the greatness of the world.

She couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to be one of the pilots who had come from all over France to participate in Dijon’s great race meeting, pilots like Marcel Hanriot, just
sixteen years old, who had already won most of the prizes. That national hero had actually flown faster than a kilometer a minute. Nevertheless, Eve reflected, as the balloon began its descent, and she looked down on the twenty-five thousand people who were milling about far beneath her, nevertheless, she too had mounted into the atmosphere, she too had seen beyond the familiar horizon of her childhood. She felt a link with all the buccaneers of the sky, if only for these minutes she would never forget.

Doctor Didier Coudert, Eve’s father, was a busy man. He specialized in diseases of the liver, a well-chosen field in a country in which liver problems were four times more frequent than in any other nation in the world, since good living is never without its day of reckoning. He loved Eve, although he regretted having no son, but he was far too occupied by his practice to pay any attention to her education. That was the province of his wife, and if, after Eve’s escapade at the Air Show, she felt it necessary to suppress Eve’s unsuitable curiosity about the world by keeping all the books in his library under lock and key during the girl’s next, dangerously impressionable years, he made no objection.

The Coudert family lived in a particularly handsome house on the Rue Buffon, a splendid street in the heart of the old city of Dijon. Doctor Coudert, a modern man, owned the first Dion-Bouton automobile in the city. However, he still kept a coachman and two fine horses so that his wife, Chantal, could pay her customary round of visits in the shining dark green coupé as she had since their marriage.