Till We Meet Again (25 page)

As the years passed, and Guillaume remained obdurately but incontestably unmarried, Bruno’s importance to them increased. Just as he was the last male with Saint-Fraycourt blood, so he was the last male Lancel of their branch of the family. One day, far in the future, there would be no Vicomte de Lancel at Valmont except Bruno.

The grandparents often discussed the future, as they sat in their favorite brocaded armchairs before the fire, in the small sitting room they used after dinner. After they were gone, Guillaume and Paul would inherit the château and the vineyards equally. If childless Guillaume died before Paul, Paul would inherit everything. But then, when Paul died, his widow, if she were still alive, and his three children would inherit in equal proportions.

Their beloved Bruno would never be the sole proprietor of this family land. He would have to share these unique hectares with two diplomatic gypsies, two unknown foreigners who had not had the benefit of growing up in France, two girls who would probably marry other foreigners from dubious places and produce children, all of whom would inherit a portion of the estate until it was split into far too many pieces to retain any of that Lancel identity which was part of the very soil of Champagne.

As Bruno went to his room to change quickly from his riding clothes, and Eve took Freddy and Delphine to wash their hands before lunch, Anette de Lancel felt her heart lighten. Delphine and Freddy, who had always spoken in French with their parents, had perfect accents, and they had
been so eager to meet their grandparents, so affectionate, so instantly beguiled by the Château de Valmont, that it seemed suddenly as if they couldn’t be gypsies after all but true Lancels, back from wandering in the wastelands after many years. Oh yes, she had been so wise to invite them all at the same time. And even wiser not to tell Bruno.

Impenetrable
, Eve thought, as she observed Bruno during lunch, utterly impenetrable, encased in a politeness that was as polished, as massive and as solid as the heavy pieces of family silver arrayed on either side of each plate. It was more plausible to imagine herself able to take up one of the knives between two fingers and lightly bend it backwards until the tip of the blade touched the crest than it was to believe that Bruno would ever smile at her with a true smile instead of just an inclination of the corners of his lips in an upward direction. Without the slightest gesture or word that would have been noticed by anyone else in the family, he had conveyed to her one absolute: she did not exist for him, she had never existed and she could never exist in the future. He didn’t see her even when he seemed to be responding freely to words she had spoken. It was as if, under the lively surface of his brown eyes, there lived a secret blind man, icy and implacable. Was it just that false smile or was she right in not liking his mouth, in finding its deeply curved, almost plump outlines a contradiction in his firmly masculine face?

Yet what had she ever done to him, Eve asked herself angrily. In the context of her understanding of the standards of the French aristocracy, she could understand—at least try to understand—why it had taken the Lancels so long to accept her, but Bruno was of another generation, of the generation of her children.

Her own parents had long ago forgiven her for the old scandal. Her brilliant marriage had allowed them to hold their heads up again, and before they had died, both in the space of one year in the late 1920s, they had traveled to Australia and Cape Town to visit for weeks at a time.

Under the surface of the lunchtime talk, as lively as it always is when winemakers of any land are at table, Eve asked herself if she should try to find a way to communicate with Bruno, or whether it would be wiser to retreat and simply accept his inexplicable enmity.

Exciting
, Delphine thought, as she watched Bruno talk in
a grown-up way she had never heard before in an eighteen-year-old boy. None of the older brothers of her school friends carried themselves so erectly, as if the space they occupied was important, not even the ones who tried to act so high and mighty just because they had cars and could drive out to the beach, or to a drive-in movie, or to one of the Curries ice cream parlors for a fifteen-cent hot butterscotch sundae, or a “Mile High” cone. Delphine had laughed at dozens of them and amused herself at their expressions when she refused their invitations, for Eve had decreed that she couldn’t go out on dates until she was sixteen.

Delphine decided that Bruno looked as if he must be in his twenties. His dark, strong eyebrows were like a yoke under his broad, well-shaped forehead, and his face was dominated by his handsomely arched, masterful nose. It was such a different face from the American faces she was used to, so much more … more … she groped for a word and could only think of
civilized
. It was, she sensed, without ever having seen a family portrait before today, a face that belonged to a long line of ancestors, a face with a history. Do I have such a face, Delphine wondered. Already, with deep delight, she knew the answer.

A
stranger
, Paul said to himself. He found it impossible to recognize Bruno as the too-tall, too-thin, ambitious, eager boy he had met once eight years ago, a child with a high, enthusiastic voice who dreamed great dreams.

Bruno had grown still taller, but as his muscles developed he had grown into his height, just as his nose, once too highly arched for his face, had grown bigger and more dominant. He looked powerful, even commanding, as he sat talking, in his man’s voice, his stranger’s voice, with a cool and finished ease, teasing his doting grandmother, deferring to his grandfather and uncle Guillaume, being charming to Delphine and Eve and even, it seemed to Paul, to Freddy.

Surely he must be conscious that he had become the center of attention in spite of the visit of the four Lancels. It was as if they had all come to see
him
, and he was graciously allowing them to do so. He seemed to feel no embarrassment at meeting his father unexpectedly after so many years. He hadn’t said a word, not even a perfunctory one, about their long separation, about the years of broken promises, and Paul suddenly vowed that he never would ask why it had been like
that. Whatever the reason, he didn’t want to know it, because it could only be painful.

“Tell me, Bruno, when do you do your military service?” Paul asked.

“This year, Father, right after the summer holidays. I’m going into the cavalry with a lot of my friends. It should be amusing.”

“Take care you don’t kill those military nags,” Guillaume grunted. “They may not be as strong as my Emperor. He was exhausted when you brought him in today.”

“I’m sorry, Uncle. Emperor hadn’t been ridden in so long that I knew he needed a really good run, and I felt it would be cruel to restrain him—but you’re absolutely right. It won’t happen again, I assure you. Your stable boys aren’t giving him enough exercise.”

“I’ll talk to them,” Guillaume said, somewhat placated.

“The cavalry,” Delphine breathed, impressed as she had never been.

“And after your military service, my boy,” the Vicomte de Lancel asked, “have you made up your mind yet?”

“Not really, Grandfather. I’m still busy considering many things.”

“You mean you’ve dropped ‘Sciences Po’?” Paul asked sharply. “What happened to your plan to lead your country?”

“Just take a look, Father. Paul-Boncour’s socialist cabinet lasted all of five weeks. The new Daladier government is filled with lamentable fools. Between his radicals like Herriot, weaklings like Laval, and the others, that bunch of liberals and labor leaders, we have a growing deficit and hundreds of thousands of men unemployed. Meanwhile, Daladier can think of nothing better to do than to try to raise the income tax. No, thank you, as an idealist, I prefer to keep clear of that mess.”

“If you are so sure they are wrong, what would you propose in their place? It’s easy to criticize, particularly as an idealist,” said Paul, furious at the lofty tone in which Bruno dismissed the ambition that he had once convinced Paul was all-important to his future.

“A strong man,
one
strong man, instead of twenty-three cretins.”

“As simple as that, eh? Where do you think this strong man is going to appear from, Bruno? And how is he going to achieve power?”

“We don’t have to look far, Father. Hitler has done just that in Germany since January of this year, when he became chancellor.”

“Hitler! You approve of that … that … 
unspeakable
criminal?”

“Shall we say that I don’t think of him in such simple terms? Of course I don’t like him—what Frenchman could?—but I think we must grant that he is a political genius. He’s taken over a country in a matter of months and made it stick. He’s outlawed the Communist Party, he’s putting the Jews in their place. His methods are strong and positive and he lets nothing stand in his way.”

“Are you proposing that France needs a Hitler of her own?” Paul roared, half rising from his seat.

“Now, now,” Anette de Lancel commanded hastily, “I absolutely forbid you to talk politics at the table. Especially not today. This is a great day for us, and you simply cannot ruin it! Jean-Luc, give Paul some more wine. And girls, I have a very special dessert for you.” She rang for the butler, satisfied that the men had subsided into silence. “If you like it, I’ll have the chef teach you how to make it. I always say that the mistress of a house must know how to cook, no matter how good a chef she has. Don’t you agree, Eve? After all, how else can you tell when he does it wrong?”

“I agree entirely,” Eve said quickly as she watched Paul’s hands shaking with rage. Bruno’s admiration, she reflected, was not, after all, something she’d care to win. How could he be Paul’s son?

When the long lunch was finally over, Delphine and Freddy went to their room to change into country clothes.

“Isn’t it exciting, having a brother, Freddy? I think he’s absolutely marvelous, don’t you?” Delphine said to her sister the minute they were alone.

“You’re welcome to my half of him,” Freddy answered.

Delphine turned sharply in disbelief. Just because Freddy had been too shy to say boo to Bruno didn’t mean that she had to say something nasty about the handsomest boy either of them had ever seen. “What are you talking about?”

“He thinks he’s hot shit,” Freddy said defiantly.

“Marie-Frédérique! I’m going to ask Grandmother if I can have a room to myself. I don’t want to share with you anymore. You’re disgusting.”

“Shit on a stick,” Freddy repeated. “With sugar on it.”

Several days later, early in the morning, while the night’s coolness was still on the flowers, Eve went out to cut roses, carrying two long, flat, English trug baskets and one of the sharp pairs of secateurs that she had found in the flower room on the ground floor of Valmont, where three deep sinks had been designed to hold flowers as they waited to be arranged. Her mother-in-law had entrusted her with the task the evening before. “I always do it myself,” she had said at dinner, “rather than allow the gardeners to do it—the Valmont rose garden has always been my special pride. I was wondering—would it amuse you to do the flowers tomorrow, Eve?”

“I’d love it,” Eve had answered happily, knowing that this turning over of a job no one else was allowed to touch was a sign of just how much her mother-in-law had changed toward her.

“You do know …” the Vicomtesse said, and hesitated.

“To recut the stems underwater?”

“How did you know what I was going to say?”

“My mother taught me to do that when I was a child,” Eve answered.

“Did she also tell you to put a few drops of bleach and a little sugar into the water to make the roses last longer?” Anette de Lancel asked.

“I’ve never heard of that. We used a centime in the vase. Does it work?”

“Not terribly well, but I do it anyway.” The two women exchanged a look of camaraderie that mystified the men at the table, who had never anxiously eyed a cutting garden, trying to calculate whether the roses would be at their best for a party or whether they would be in one of their maddening interim stages, in which all the bushes would be covered with promising buds, but not showing any color, or, equally infuriating, whether all the flowers would be overblown the day before they were needed.

The Valmont rose garden was reached through a series of tall hedges, severely pruned into an almost mazelike design, in which Lancel children had played hide-and-seek for centuries.

Eve wandered about, secateurs poised, taking only the roses that were ready to be cut, for buds cut too soon would sometimes not open indoors. Nevertheless, both baskets were
soon piled high with blooms, and although she knew it was taking a risk, she couldn’t resist piling them over-high, for roses left on the bushes even a day too long would, in the heat of summer, open too quickly and be wasted. Holding one of the overflowing baskets at arm’s length in front of her, and the other behind, she followed the narrow path back to the château. As she turned a sharp corner around a hedge, Bruno suddenly appeared, walking quickly on his way to the stables. Eve stopped abruptly, starting in surprise. The basket she held outstretched overbalanced and the roses all slid off onto the gravel path in front of her feet.