Till We Meet Again (24 page)

As they came in for the landing he asked, “Tell me what you feel, Freddy.”

“What do you mean?”

“What you feel about the plane as I land it.”

Puzzled, Freddy sat as still as if she were listening for a revelation from on high, as the Piper started on its final leg of approach to the airstrip, flying lower and lower every second.
“She wants to land,”
she shouted excitedly. “She wants to land, all by herself!”

“Yeah, and how’d you know that?”

“I felt it, I really felt it, Mac.”

“Where?”

“In … on … in my seat.”

“The seat of your skirt?”

“Right.”

“Right. That’s where you have to feel it. Next time you go flyin’, wear pants.” He landed the plane and taxied to a stop in front of his school. Paul rushed over to the plane as they were climbing out, furiously angry.

“Do you realize that you’ve been gone for an hour? I couldn’t believe it! I’ve been worried out of my mind. Damn it, McGuire, where’s your sense?”

“Hold on, now. A lesson lasts an hour. We’re about three minutes early when it comes to that.”

“A lesson?” Paul said incredulously. “A lesson? I asked you to take Freddy up for a ride, I never said anything about a lesson.”

Terence McGuire looked at Freddy, who looked back at him with eyes that he knew saw farther than eyes could see, with a mouth set in a firm, proud line that said that she knew she was dead guilty of a lie, but that it had been worth it.

“I’m sorry, but I could swear that you’d said Freddy wanted a lesson,” the pilot said. “Sorry about the misunderstanding. I hate to have worried you. This should be six dollars—four for the rental of the plane and two for the lesson—but I’ll make it four since you only wanted a ride. Oh, and I’d better get a logbook for this young lady.”

He hurried off to his office, found a logbook, and came back, carefully making the first entry. “Here’s where you sign, Freddy. And keep this safe, now, don’t lose it.”

“I will,” Freddy breathed, her gratitude shining from her face. “I will. And, Mac, I’ll be back. I don’t know when, but as soon as I can.”

“Give me some credit, kid. I never doubted that. Not for a minute. See you, Freddy.”

“See you, Mac.”

7

I
T was the summer of 1933 in Champagne, and on the terrace of the Château de Valmont, Vicomte Jean-Luc and Vicomtesse Anette de Lancel greeted the visit of Paul and Eve, accompanied for the first time by their daughters. It was a Lancel tradition that the châtelaine herself pour from the bottle when they raised the first glass at any gathering at Valmont, and today was a moment of more than sentimental or symbolic value. “Of course Freddy is not too young to drink champagne,” Anette said, “especially on such a great occasion,” and she filled thirteen-year-old Freddy’s glass just as high as those of the others.

As Paul drank, he realized how much he’d missed Valmont, how carefully he’d trained himself not to think about his boyhood home. He’d almost forgotten that nowhere else that he’d ever lived had there been such a palpable sense of harmony between the land and the crop it produced, an invisible bond he felt he could reach out and touch. Well-being and lightheartedness and an extraordinary sense of hospitality were in every breath of the air of Champagne. No ocean he’d known had ever given him the sense of expanding beyond his own physical and emotional boundaries as did the lazy, open-armed sea of vineyards. Above each of them, during the weeks of harvest, the blue and red Lancel flag would be flown, just as at Pommery they raised a white flag and at Veuve Clicquot a yellow one.

Paul looked proudly at Eve, Delphine and Freddy, as they sat in the sun. They had just arrived from Paris by car, a trip of less than two hours. Two weeks earlier they had left Los Angeles by train, crossed the United States, and taken an ocean liner to France. Paul, with a two-month leave from his post, had decided that it was time at last to bring his family to the ancestral home they had never seen.

The flowering of the vines, accompanied by a perfume like that of the passionfruit flower, had lasted two and a half
weeks in early June, blessedly free of the dreaded frosts of spring; the pollination of the flowers had taken place during weather that had been ideally warm and humid, with the moderate wind that grape growers pray for, and now the vines lay calmly filling out their grapes in the valley spread out below the château.

Valmont lay north of Hautvillers, the village where, in the 1600s, Dom Pierre Perignon had come to the thousand-year-old Abbaye of Saint-Pierre d’Hautvillers, and settled down to a monk’s busy, regimented life during which, in the next forty-six years, between hours spent in devotion to God, he managed to find the way to turn the excellent local wine into champagne.

The château had once been surrounded by oak forests where game abounded and the seigneurs of Valmont planted vineyards and made wine only for their own pleasure and that of their friends. Now, looking down from the raised terrace of the château, where the family was seated before lunch, on a brilliant day in early July, the sight of great trees was rare in the valley beneath them. Vineyards were planted in a precise, infinitely pleasing patchwork as far as the eye could see. The tenderly rolling hills, on which great richness of ripening champagne grapes lay, created a landscape as rural, as secure and as peaceful as any on earth, yet in the past hundred years, two great wars that changed the history of Europe had been fought over these valuable and too-vulnerable slopes on the eastern frontier of France.

But war, even the thought of war, was impossible for Paul today. The bitterness with which his marriage to Eve had been greeted by his parents had finally been dissipated. During the previous winter his mother had written to him and apologized for the harsh words with which she had once told him that his marriage had cost him his career. “As the years go by,” she had written, “I have come to understand that without Eve and your children, you could never have been truly happy—no, not even if you had been named Ambassador to the Court of Saint James.”

Her softening of a long-held position was not due to the legendary but largely nonexistent mellowing effect of age. The passage of time normally makes patrician Frenchwomen more dogmatic and less pliable in their opinions than when they were younger, a condition they share with women of every social class in every country in the world.

If Guillaume, the elder Lancel son, had ever married and had children, Anette de Lancel might have felt the continuity of the family safe in his hands. She might possibly have continued to nourish her grudge against Eve. But Guillaume was an absolutely determined bachelor, who disliked children as much as he enjoyed the liberty of being wifeless. The Vicomtesse had finally accepted the fact that she would never have grandchildren who weren’t Paul’s children. Although she would always voice her disappointment at the undutiful, selfish and shortsighted conduct of her elder son, she knew that it was high time to make peace with her one, and almost certainly her only, daughter-in-law.

Now, as she saw her Paul and his family gathered around her, still wearing their traveling clothes, she was deeply glad that she had brought herself to arrange this visit. Guillaume and Jean-Luc were both bending attentively toward Eve, as she told them about the trip. She had slung the scrupulously cut, wide-shouldered, blue piqué jacket of her Adrian summer suit around the back of her cast-iron garden chair, taken off her small, tilted-brim hat and crossed her legs casually under her slim, mid-calf skirt, a picture of animation and ease. Anette de Lancel scrutinized Eve strictly, and recognized that, hard as it was for her to admit it, she was a woman of whom any mother-in-law could be proud. However, it was her granddaughters who inspired her immediate love, particularly Delphine.

Had there ever been such a lovely fifteen-year-old? she wondered. Delphine was not a peacock beauty, all immediate splash. There was something so delicate and touching about her creamy loveliness that each person who remarked on it felt as if he were making an original observation. Her huge, smoky eyes, of a mysterious gray that glowed like an opalescent mist on a twilight sea, were set almost too far apart under high, arched brows. She had a clearly defined widow’s peak from which her brown hair curled in delicious softness down around her neck, with the gleam of valuable, highly polished wood. Her hands were exquisite, and all her dainty proportions so well made that they looked as if she’d been assembled with enormous care. Her widow’s peak, wide forehead and small chin created the heart-shaped face that echoed those of a few of the noble ladies in the Lancel family portraits, the past châtelaines of Valmont. Delphine was of moderate height and so slender, so breakable looking, that her
grandmother felt all her protective instincts aroused as she looked at her. She was that rare girl, the perfect
jeune fille
, she thought. She could have been brought up in France.

Marie-Frédérique, or Freddy, as they insisted on calling her, Anette de Lancel told herself, not without a stirring of the mildest disapproval, could never be mistaken for anything but an American. Although how that was possible when both her parents were French she couldn’t fathom. It must be the California air, for no French girl of thirteen and a half would ever be
allowed
to be so rangy, so vivid, so
present
in every way. She obviously had inherited her height and the blueness of her eyes from Paul—she must be many centimeters taller than her sister—and the extravagance of her self-possession from her mother. But her hair! All that bright, messy, ungovernable stuff! Beautiful, yes, she couldn’t deny it, but so … so
unsuitable
, so flamboyant.
So red
. Of course there had been redheaded Lancels, from generation to generation, but had there ever been one with hair that so dominated the scene? Why didn’t Eve try to tame it? Or, if that proved impossible, why couldn’t Eve at least insist that her younger daughter achieve a more ladylike appearance? Still, Freddy was utterly lovable as she sipped cautiously at her first glass of champagne and looked around her in awe.

Freddy had known that her father had grown up in a château, but the reality of Valmont dazzled her. She counted the three romantic towers and wondered who lived in them. And what, she speculated, could they
do
in all the rooms behind the windows? How many fireplaces must there be, to account for so many elaborate brick chimneys? She hadn’t understood before that a château would be a castle, and yet Grandmother insisted that it was only a small château, one of five in Champagne, and that the grandest of them, Montmort, had a moat, a much bigger park, and a spiral staircase so wide that a man on a horse could climb it. What a nifty idea!

Anette de Lancel glanced at her wristwatch. Only ten minutes until lunch would be announced, and the surprise she had planned hadn’t yet happened. Well, lunch could wait, she thought.

Five minutes later, as they all relaxed while they watched Guillaume open the second bottle of champagne, a horseman at a gallop suddenly appeared from the wood that lay on the right side of the château, separated from it only by a stretch of well-raked gravel Obviously the horseman had not expected
to find anyone on the terrace, for he was looking away from them, toward the stables. When he saw them he threw his head back, and stopped abruptly only a few paces away. Expressionlessly, he loomed above them on an enormous bay horse. There was a moment of such silence that the faint stirring of the wind in the leaves of the vineyard seemed as loud as the slapping of the ocean at the side of a boat. Anette de Lancel’s voice broke the odd, uncertain hush.

“Get down off that beast and greet the new arrivals, darling. When I promised you a surprise for lunch today, I didn’t exaggerate, did I, Bruno?”

Quickly, yet moving with the suggestion of invisible armor that prevented his motion from seeming unpremeditated, Bruno, a tall and powerful eighteen, jumped from the horse and walked, with immediate composure, toward the group whose arrival his grandmother had so carefully concealed from him. As he came closer, everyone turned toward him with a different emotion.

Freddy and Delphine were simply agog with curiosity about the half brother whom they had never seen except in old photographs. Bruno! At last! Paul felt a rush of the bitterest resentment, and yet he couldn’t prevent himself from thinking how magnificent the boy had become. Eve stiffened as if she had been struck in the face; this, then, was the son who had broken Paul’s heart with his obstinate, incomprehensible ways, promising to visit every year, and each summer finding another reason why it wouldn’t work out, until it became painfully evident that he had no intention of ever coming to see his father and his half sisters. Anette de Lancel felt an almost childlike glee in being the instrument of the reunion she had planned, without consultation with anyone except her husband, who had finally been persuaded that it was the right thing to do.

As for Bruno, whatever emotions he felt were concealed by a perfect and automatic courtesy upon which he could call in every situation, a courtesy that, in other days, had not failed gentlemen even as they made their way to the guillotine. He embraced Paul as if he had seen him last week; he kissed Eve’s hand with a correct murmur of
“Bonjour, Madame,”
and he shook hands with Freddy and Delphine as if they were young ladies of his own age.

“You might have warned me,” he said softly as he brushed his grandmother’s cheek with his lips.

“Bruno, darling, I thought it best this way. So much easier for us all,” she said, dismissing his words in a manner so airy yet so certain that even he had nothing left to say.

Anette de Lancel was well aware that Bruno had resisted the slightest acquaintance with his stepmother and half sisters. After Paul’s shocking second marriage, she and the Marquis and Marquise de Saint-Fraycourt had found themselves of one mind on the subject of Eve Coudert. She was their common enemy. In becoming a member of their families, she had wounded them all deeply, and in a way that their families would have to endure forever. Time would never wipe out the stain of such a misalliance. Since the Saint-Fraycourts were willing to share Bruno fairly frequently with his Lancel grandparents, they had never tried to argue that Bruno be sent to join Paul.