Till We Meet Again (38 page)

It was a combination as undemanding as it was convenient, for, with the almost impossible demands of a job like
his, Bruno reflected, he most certainly had not so much as a minute for courtship. Happily, his own unappeasable appetite, for well-tended flesh that was past the awkwardness and ignorance of youth, coincided with such a large and easily available supply. He couldn’t understand his friends who spent time and money running after girls as if they possessed something worth having. How could any intelligent man prefer his meat unseasoned?

“Hello, Bruno,” a voice said behind his back.

“Guy—I can’t move. I should be finished soon,” Bruno answered. He had an appointment for a lunchtime tennis game with Guy Marchant, a relatively recent friend. Now Guy, Bruno thought, would be able to try to explain the attraction of young women, for he was always falling for one or another of them, but it was not a question Bruno could ask, for it would betray too much of his own private arrangements.

“What do you think of Schmeling beating Joe Louis by a knockout yesterday?” Guy asked, drawing up a chair. He was a tall and skinny young man with a pleasantly lopsided smile and clever eyes.

“I wasn’t surprised, were you?” Bruno replied. “Actually, I don’t much care about boxing. Next month I’m going over for Wimbledon—why don’t you come along? Gottfried von Gramm, Fred Perry—you shouldn’t miss it.”

“I’ll see if I can get away from the office,” Guy answered. “It isn’t always possible.”

“Monsieur de Lancel, if you please, turn a few inches toward me,” the fitter requested, reaching for more pins. Bruno turned and found that he was facing himself squarely in the mirror. He gave himself a quick, perfunctory glance, devoid of vanity. He knew perfectly well what he looked like, and he had no need to reassure himself by checking the mirror as so many men did. That women found him extraordinary was gratifying, but hardly surprising. The fact that something about the way his features were put together made men trust him—that, yes,
that
was important.

Bruno had found, to his surprise, that he liked the banking business, or rather that he liked making money, and certainly banking was among the few gentleman’s ways to that end. When he started with Duvivier Frères he had done so because it was necessary to have an occupation. His first successes at attracting new clients to the firm had occurred
almost by themselves; on a squash court, during a hunt weekend near Tours, after a thoroughbred auction at Newmarket.

The commissions from these clients had given him his first taste of economic freedom. He had found a flat to his liking in a vast private house on the Rue de l’Université. It belonged to a distant cousin who, like so many others, had recently lost most of his money in the Bourse and had been forced to convert half of his home into flats with private entrances. More commissions, which Bruno now sought with alert foresight, soon paid for a housemaid, the best of tailors, the services of a valet, and the first two horses he’d ever owned.

Now, in the year since he’d joined the bank, he had grown seriously ambitious. He realized that although there was a great deal of money to be made without venturing beyond his own class, there was far more money in that busy world which lay utterly outside the strict and immutable limits of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, in that wealthy bourgeois world of Guy Marchant, who sat tapping his foot, impatient to be on the tennis court.

Attracting that kind of money was a matter of accepting invitations, or rather of
provoking
invitations, that would not normally be extended to him because of who he was, Bruno thought, as the tailor, with maddening precision, pinned a perfect cuff. It entailed acting in a way that made him seem more accessible, a little less of a standoffish aristocrat, than people anticipated; in picking out older men who would never, under any circumstances, have set foot in his Grandmother Saint-Fraycourt’s salon; and in unbending toward them ever so slightly, so that their wives dared to issue an invitation that they normally would not have tendered for fear of being rebuffed.

These first invitations were always, he noticed, for large, formal gatherings, the sort of invitations that could, in theory, be refused without making the would-be hostess feel as if she had presumed. When Bruno accepted them, his hosts were flattered and, encouraged by their wives, grew more bold.

His youth was a priceless asset. One could invite a twenty-one-year-old Vicomte de Saint-Fraycourt de Lancel when one would not invite, not dream of inviting, an older member of that aristocracy of the
Ancien Régime
. Bruno’s commissions fattened. Of his many invitations, those he decided to encourage were for intimate dinners, yachting trips, weekends
in the country; invitations that gave him the opportunities for which he was hunting. Soon Bruno’s salary was ridiculously small in comparison to his income from his commissions.

Guy Marchant, whom he had met less than six months ago, was the only son of Pierre Marchant, who owned the most prosperous newsreel business in France, Marchant Actualités. It had worldwide distribution and was larger than Fox-Movietone, Pathé Journal and Eclair-Journal combined.

Bruno had first become acquainted with Monsieur and Madame Marchant at the Polo Club in the Bois. Soon he had met Guy, who was only three years older than he, yet already deeply involved in the day-to-day running of the vast family enterprise.

He was a fairly good sort, Guy, Bruno had decided, the kind of well-educated and shrewd product of the upper middle class who could eventually, by marriage—for of course that was the only way—rise up to the lower reaches of the upper classes. By the time he was fifty, he might expect to have a daughter who had married a man with a good title, even an excellent one, if that was what he wanted. His grandson could be born an aristocrat.

Guy Marchant was as much a part of the future as Bruno himself, and the two of them had become friendly, although not in the way Bruno would always reserve for the boys with whom he had gone to school. There had as yet been no placement of the Marchant funds in the Duvivier bank, and Bruno thought the better of the Marchants for this. Had they rushed to do business with his employers, as so many others had done, he would have found Guy less attractive, less worthwhile cultivating. The Marchants actually expected him to associate with them for themselves. That, in itself, was worthy of some grudging respect. It showed, if nothing else, a sense of self-worth.

“Bruno, how long will you be?” Guy asked, looking at his watch.

“Will you be finished soon, Monsieur?” Bruno asked the tailor impatiently.

“All in good time, Monsieur de Lancel,” the tailor answered impassively. Another man who knew his own value, Bruno realized, and resigned himself to the expenditure of another quarter hour.

It was mid-July, and in her bedroom at the Château de Valmont, Delphine sat on the floor of the best guest room, surrounded by the contents of an enormous wardrobe trunk that had arrived only an hour earlier. Margie, faithful Margie, in a futile gesture of comfort, had packed up all of Delphine’s evening clothes and sent them on by boat Delphine ransacked the trunk, pulling out gown after gown, cloak after cloak, holding them lovingly up to her, and then placing them carefully on the carpet in a pinwheel of sumptuous colors and fabrics. In their hundreds of years of cultural superiority, the clever French had never managed to invent the closet; her armoire was already over-crammed, and there was no place to hang her dozens of evening clothes.

The trunk was completely unpacked now, and Delphine, filled with a growing grief, opened one of her evening bags and peeked inside. She found a lace handkerchief, a black and silver compact for loose powder, a pearl-headed pin that had once held a corsage at her shoulder, two quarters, a Coty lipstick, a book of matches from the Trocadero, and one of her many cigarette cases. Reverently, as if she were looking at relics of a dead civilization, she took out the objects and placed them in her lap, brooding over them as her melancholy grew. She opened the cigarette case and found a single wrinkled Lucky Strike. She rolled it lovingly in her fingers, sniffed it, and then, remembering that her door was locked, she lit the cigarette on a Trocadero match, inhaled deeply, and promptly burst into tears.

The familiar act brought it all back: the dance music that filled the air; the delicious flirting, always just on the edge of being dangerous; the first sip from a cold cocktail glass; Margie’s conspiratorial wink; the sound of dice; the croupier’s bark; and oh, the excitement, that breathless diet of excitement to which she had become accustomed, knowing that one wild, gay evening would be followed by another, that nothing would ever be humdrum or predictable.

She hated Champagne, she thought as the tears coursed over the curve of her cheeks, hated it! There was nothing to do here, nowhere to go, nobody to talk to except her grandmother, who seemed persuaded that she was interested in the remote details of the history of the family, and her grandfather, who tried to explain the mysteries of the vine to her until she almost fainted with boredom. And to be obliged to eat meal after meal politely with the many visitors, all too
old to be interesting, who talked of nothing but vintage years and food, while she filled the role of the visiting granddaughter from America who must be asked several benevolent questions and then forgotten as a new bottle was uncorked. She hated it! And she was a captive here until it was time to return to college, and then what was there to look forward to but life at the sorority house, under the stern supervision of Mrs. Robinson?

Delphine put out her cigarette after that one puff, because she had to conserve it for further consumption. There was no tobacco in the house except her grandfather’s pipe tobacco and her uncle Guillaume’s cigars, and they never smoked until after dinner, taking themselves off to the smoking room, where she was never invited. It would have been unthinkable to them if she had bought French cigarettes—those vile things—in the village, and smoked in their presence.

No, she was expected to sit with her grandmother and learn gros point or read Balzac or listen to classical music on the Victrola until it was time to go to bed. It was essential, Delphine knew, to become a paragon of all the virtues in her grandmother’s eyes, since she had realized that she had gone too far, much, much too far, in her last interview with her mother. She had made a major mistake in tactics, and only her grandmother’s reports that she had become a model of decorum and goodness would, perhaps, cause some relaxation in her parents’ plans for her next two years at UCLA.

Each night she went to bed, early and sober, in this big lonely room where the walls were hung in a delicately faded blue and white paisley toile, and the matching wings of fabric on the bed were slightly threadbare, and the highly polished wood floor creaked. No closets, Delphine wept, feeling more and more sorry for herself, no closets and creaking floors and faded fabric and probably not a drop of gin in the whole blasted grape-growing province, not that anyone would offer her some if there were.

Anette de Lancel, walking by in the corridor outside of the room, heard Delphine’s sobs through the thick door. She paused uncertainly. She didn’t want to seem to be snooping, but how could she just go about her business as if she hadn’t heard her beloved granddaughter weeping her heart out? She was a little homesick, of course, that much had been evident from the first, but she had been so sweet and attentive and had shown such an interest in hearing everything about the
château and the family and the vineyards, that it seemed that Eve had been right about Delphine’s need to feel a deeper connection with her family.

She made up her mind and tapped on the door.

“Who is it?” Delphine’s muffled voice called.

“Grandmother, darling. Is there anything I can do?”

“No. No, thank you. I’m all right.”

“Darling, you’re not all right. Please, let me come in.”

Delphine dried her eyes on the little handkerchief, sighed, and opened the door to Madame de Lancel, who advanced into the room and stopped abruptly as she saw the carpet covered with its silky, satiny treasure heap of glittering long dresses.

“Where did they come from?” she asked in amazement.

“Los Angeles. My evening clothes … just look, Grandmother … just look how pretty … how pretty …” Delphine broke into a fresh flood of tears, clasping a white fur jacket to her breast and rocking back and forth in grief. Anette de Lancel took the girl into her arms and tried to comfort her, patting her as if she were a baby while she looked in astonishment at a larger collection of evening clothes than she had ever imagined anyone, even a Paris society woman, would possess.

“But, Delphine, darling … do you
need
all that at home?”

“Oh yes,” Delphine wept, “everyone does … we have such fun … oh, so much fun, Grandmother.”

“But it must be so terribly, terribly dull for you here, darling. I simply never realized.” Anette de Lancel was appalled at the realization that Delphine had been exiled from a life in which, as a matter of course, she went out so often that she owned such quantities of evening clothes. At the very least, Eve could have warned her … and how tactful and good Delphine had been about not letting them suspect that she must be bored.