Till We Meet Again (37 page)

“And the drinking?”

“I think that someone must have slipped me something stronger than I asked for tonight. I should have been more careful. Margie too.” Delphine looked directly at Eve, her eyes, set below the wide, exquisite shield of her brow, as candid as ever.

Eve stood up, unable to endure her knowledge that Delphine was lying, that this was not the first time that Delphine had been drunk, any more than it was the first time she had been gambling.

“How old were the men you and Margie were with?” she demanded.

“Jed and Bob? Somewhere in their twenties, I guess,” Delphine said casually, looking in her closet for something to put on.

“And how well do you know them?” Eve insisted.

“Pretty well. They’re great guys. I hope they’re out of jail by now,” Delphine said with a rueful little laugh, choosing a pink cotton dress and putting it on the bed. “It’s lucky I left
so much of my old stuff here,” she said, smiling as serenely at Eve as if their discussion were over.

“Delphine, I’m going to tell Mrs. Robinson that you no longer have our permission to sleep over at Margie’s. There will be no exceptions. We can’t stop you from being friendly with that girl, but I will not
tolerate
the kind of life you’ve been living. At least your father and I can make sure that you have to obey the sorority rules and get in at a decent hour at night.”

“You can’t do that! You’ll ruin my life!” Delphine’s face was distorted with sudden rage.

“You’re ruining your life all by yourself, as far as I can tell,” Eve said firmly, her mind made up. She walked toward the door of the bedroom and opened it. There was no use in further discussion. Delphine had to be brought under control.

Delphine ran to the door and held it so that Eve couldn’t leave. She bent toward her and hissed,
“And who are you to talk?”

“What?” Eve said incredulously.

“I have some questions, Mother, since you intend to treat me like a child. Just how old were you when you were living with a lover in Paris? Younger than I am now, weren’t you? And just how many years was that before you married Father? And
how many
lovers?”

Eve apprehended the intention behind the words even before her brain was able to sort them out and try to make sense of them. No answer came to her lips, but she pushed the door shut with a quick gesture, so that no one would hear Delphine.

Delphine’s lips took on a look of righteousness. “I learned all about it from Bruno, that summer we spent in France.
What a hypocrite you are, Mother
. Why don’t you lock me up in my room here at home while you’re at it? That way you could be absolutely certain that I won’t do what you did. I happen to be a virgin, for your information, and I intend to remain one, but telling Mrs. Robinson that I can’t sleep over at Margie’s won’t ensure that. Your parents couldn’t manage to keep you from doing what you pleased, could they?”

How many lovers?
thought Eve, appalled by the question. No matter what she said to Delphine, she could never make her understand the truth. The poison was in her mind, the harm was done. She forced herself to speak calmly.

“Delphine, I don’t owe you any explanations about my
life. I can’t stop you from listening to any gossip that’s still floating around, and believing what you want. It doesn’t change my responsibility toward you. I intend to call Mrs. Robinson immediately.”

“Hypocrite! Hypocrite!” Delphine’s voice rose hysterically as Eve left the room.

She could never tell Paul what Delphine had said, Eve realized as she went back down the stairs holding on to the bannister as if she were an old woman. He would be too angry, too saddened by Delphine’s suspicions.
How many lovers?
Delphine would never believe the truth—
would Paul?
There had been no one after Alain Marais until she met her husband, but it was a subject to which they had never returned after their first dinner at the Ritz. She had always thought that he had understood those careful, distant, unapproachable years. What if he had just been afraid to ask?

At the Château de Valmont there were ten large guest rooms, and by the time Anette de Lancel received her daughter-in-law’s letter from California, most of them had been spoken for during every weekend of the summer. It was not a case of French hospitality, but of selling champagne, that caused the Lancels to entertain so often and so lavishly.

Centuries before French perfume and French fashion had properly organized their foreign sales, the seemingly natural human desire to drink as much champagne as possible, as often as possible, had been cleverly promoted by a group of young Champenois noblemen who owned vineyards at the time of the coronation of Louis XIV in 1666.

Forming themselves into a group, the Marquis de Sillery, the Duc de Mortmart, the Vicomte de Lancel, the Marquis de Bois-Dauphin and the Marquis de Saint-Evremond, among others, went to Versailles and deliberately set about making their own wines of Champagne the rage at court, for the court alone set the fashion for everything throughout France, from buttons to architecture.

After a triumphant success at Versailles, they spread out and conquered England, where the demand for champagne soon became so great that it commanded an enormously high price. Their equally enterprising sons and grandsons traveled thousands of miles, to sell champagne to the Grand Dukes of Russia and the founders of the new republic of the United States. Eventually great markets were also established in
South America and Australia. A similar vision motivated Monsieur Moët when the armies of Russia, Austria and Prussia invaded Champagne after Napoleon’s retreat at Waterloo. He encouraged looting of his bottles for the officer’s mess on the basis that it would cause the occupying forces to develop a taste for champagne, and as the saying goes, “He who has drunk once will drink again.” When the officers returned home, they became good customers indeed.

Along with this spirit of marketing and publicity, bred into the vineyard owners, there also developed a most untypically French attitude toward hospitality. There have never been many hotels in Champagne, so, for hundreds of years, the families of the region have received in their own homes or châteaux visitors from every place in the world where champagne is drunk. It is rare indeed that the maker of a great or small mark of champagne dines alone, except during the five cold months of winter.

“Just listen to this, Jean-Luc,” the Vicomtesse de Lancel said, so excited that she only read every other sentence of Eve’s letter out loud. “… important for Delphine to experience … a world in which tradition plays an important role, in which she has a place as well as a family … clearly impossible in a city as young as Los Angeles … both feel that she’s still young enough … a visit to you could make a crucial difference in her somewhat immature attitudes …”

“A visit? Of course. When?”

“Right away! That’s what’s so amazing. The
Normandie
leaves from New York in three days, and apparently she can fly there in a day or less. It does seem a bit sudden but, well, these young people nowadays.… Eve wonders if we could keep Delphine over for the entire summer—how can she doubt it! Of course it will turn our arrangements upside-down, but I’ll manage somehow. Jean-Luc, we must telephone immediately. What time would it be now in California?”

“Eleven at night?” he ventured, calculating backwards, but his wife had already disappeared toward the table in the entrance hall where the telephone was kept, rearranging the occupants of the guest rooms in her head as she proceeded at a stately trot. Somewhat immature attitudes, indeed! What did Eve expect from that darling child?

11

E
VERY well-run private bank needs at least one or more bank officers of a particular and very special sort, men for whom a knowledge of the business of banking is their least important qualification. Like the most accomplished and cultivated of geisha girls in Japan, these bank officers serve to attract a rich clientele, and to keep them faithful by making sure that they continue to be amused and charmed.

When Bruno de Lancel completed his military service in 1935, he found that it had become necessary to have some sort of job, an annoyingly boring price he had to pay for not being one of his Saint-Fraycourt ancestors, whose only concern had been how to occupy their leisure most pleasantly. Shockingly, he did not seem to possess a private income and he was no longer willing to live with his grandparents.

However, he discovered quickly that the demands made by the position he soon accepted with La Banque Duvivier Frères were not too unlike those that might have been made on a Marquis de Saint-Fraycourt before the Revolution. It was necessary to hunt as frequently as possible during the season; important to play cards well—but not too well—with the right people in the right clubs; desirable to appear at the opera, the theater, the ballet and the openings of important art exhibitions; essential never to miss a major race meeting at the tracks of France, England, or Ireland; and, it went without saying, out of the question not to be seen at every meaningful social event of Paris society. The bank paid his expenses so that he could engage in these activities, and a small salary as well, plus a commission on any new accounts he brought in.

Even if Bruno had wanted, in this June of 1936, to spend more than a few minutes now and then at the Duvivier bank, it would have been difficult, given the demands of his position. The three Duvivier brothers were delighted with him. He was more than worth what he cost them; already he had
attracted a number of new customers with whom they could not personally have hoped to make contact.

A bonus they had not anticipated to its fullest value in hiring Bruno was his bachelorhood. It doubled his worth, the youngest Duvivier brother reflected. “Tripled,” replied the eldest. The middle brother, as usual, thought they were both wrong: “Lancel’s worth is incalculable until he marries. Then we will have to reassess it.”

Would he pick a girl whose relatives and connections would come from the same unfortunately reduced financial circumstances as the Saint-Fraycourts? Would he deign to marry money, but from outside his own world? Or, best of all for the bank, would he manage to make an alliance with an heiress who also came from a great family, an heiress whose parents might reasonably expect her to marry someone as rich as she?

While the Duviviers pondered the ultimate results of their investment in Bruno, they had, unknown to them, an ally in the Marquise de Saint-Fraycourt, who never spent a day in which she did not ask herself the same questions. The only party to Bruno’s eventual marriage who had almost no concern about the success of the affair was Bruno himself. He was too certain of his entitlement to the ideal wife to worry about the future. Whoever she would be, since he was now only twenty-one, she would still be in a convent somewhere, learning whatever girls learned in convents.

Bruno knew the one essential thing about the girl he would marry, the only absolute on which he would insist: she must come to him with the assurance that she would inherit land. Money would never be enough. For enough land, a great deal of land,
family land
, Bruno would have been content to marry the devils daughter … as long as the devil was French. The Saint-Fraycourts had lost their ancient lands and most of their income in the crash of the
Banque de l’Union Financière
in 1882. The Lancel land would be divided among Bruno and his father’s wife and other children.

Although it was reassuring, from a financial point of view, to know that one day, in the far future—for Uncle Guillaume and his father both came from stock who lived to a great age—he would share in the income of Lancel champagne, the vineyards could never belong to him alone. Therefore, as some men must marry money, he must marry land. He hungered to possess forests and fields and a château of his
own, hundreds and hundreds of hectares over which he would walk and ride as sole and undisputed master.

Meanwhile, there were such a pressing number of appointments in his daily life that he actually had difficulty in carving aside precious time in which to go to his shirtmaker and choose new cloth for his shirts, time to visit his shoemaker, time to have a new dinner jacket fitted.

Nevertheless, there were things that even the best of valets couldn’t do for him, Bruno thought, as he stood impatiently while his tailor adjusted a shoulder seam. Sabine de Koville came into his mind, and he smiled faintly to himself. She was quite perfect in her way, once she had instructed him so precisely where her way led.

Yes, she had done him a great service when he was only seventeen and had not yet had a woman, Bruno mused, and he still continued to see her from time to time, for her needs were uncomplicated and direct. Perhaps he would take tea with her today. Perhaps not. There were many other women, less simple than Sabine in their requirements, equally gifted and equally … piquant. How he enjoyed each fresh surprise women could offer: the deliciously squalid fancies of a prince’s daughter; the thirst for punishment of a high-minded mistress of a literary salon; and Sabine de Koville, who could only respond to the orders of a servant. Degradation was his hobby.

After Bruno’s first experience with his school friend’s mother, he had discovered in a short time that he was not just the classic case of an adolescent being seduced by a woman of the world. His deepest sexual preference, indeed his only sexual preference, was for women in their late thirties and early forties. He couldn’t understand why a man would eat a green apple, if ripe fruit was available. A horse, perhaps, might, at the limit, be chosen unschooled, so that he could be broken in to one’s own requirements.

But a woman? How much more agreeable to take them when they had already discovered what they craved most deeply and secretly. In ten cases out of ten they weren’t satisfying their inadmissible needs with their husbands. How simple it was to give them their fantasies and watch them become utterly obedient, the proudest of them often the most submissive to his will.