Till We Meet Again (53 page)

She got up and put another log on the fire. Soon they would go downstairs to eat in a small neighborhood restaurant as they did most nights. Neither of them ever cooked. When they didn’t eat out, they bought prepared salads, cheeses and sausages from one of the many delicacy shops in the neighborhood, and had a picnic in front of the fire that had been necessary almost every day since the beginning of October. Every morning Armand went downstairs and brought her up a croissant to eat while she still nestled in bed, with a cup of the
café au lait
he had somehow learned to prepare.

It was, thought Delphine, a life in which she no longer needed the clothes she had bought in the past, a life in which a lingerie maker had no place, nor a
bottier
. It seemed to her that the clothes she had brought over, bit by bit, from the Villa Mozart, would last the rest of her life, for she spent most of her time in her old, sailor-style trousers from Chanel and Armand’s sweaters, often wearing two or three of them at once. When she returned for a few hours to the Villa Mozart, to pay her staff and make sure that the house was still there, she wore a proper suit and hat, but she never used her car or her driver to come from or go to the Boulevard Saint-Germain. She hadn’t sold the house or the car, for she knew that their possession provided her with a façade it was still necessary to maintain.

Delphine was convinced that she had protected her life with Armand Sadowski from the eyes of the world. After he had spoken of his distaste at becoming another in the string of her lovers, she determined that their attachment must remain secret until she was ready to get married. She turned down all the films that had been offered her from the first night they spent together, giving her agent one ingenious
excuse after another. She could not tell Abel the truth: that she was too emotionally focused on her love to spend her energy on acting, on learning lines and dealing with the complications of the life of a star. She had also refused to do the new film with Armand, knowing that she would give her feelings away to the entire studio if she worked with him. Make-believe held no further allure for her.

Nor did reality. Franco had conquered Spain and been recognized by France and England, but Delphine managed not to read about it in the same way that she managed not to read about the success of Marcel Pagnol’s film
The Bakers Wife
. Katharine Hepburn’s triumph in
Bringing Up Baby
was no less foreign to her than the reasons for Enrico Fermi’s Nobel Prize for atomic reaction.
She didn’t want to know
. Even marriage was an act that would involve coping with public reality. She managed not to deal with it each time Armand suggested that they get married.

All of Delphine’s powers of perception were totally engaged in blocking out the world, in remaining invincibly safe within the cave of true love that she and Armand had created, in which the only subject for her concern was assuring the supply of wood for the fireplace, a matter of tipping the boy from the nearby wood-seller to carry it up the stairs.

She would cross the street to keep from walking by the kiosks of newsdealers, she never looked at posters plastered on walls, she picked restaurants where you couldn’t overhear the conversation of the people at the next table, she never sat and had a drink at a café, all of which were filled with people talking politics, she never turned on the radio, and Armand knew never to bring home a newspaper.

All during the ominous winter and dire spring of 1939, Delphine kept the world at bay and lived a lifetime of joy with Armand Sadowski, who loved her enough to understand what she was doing, and too much to destroy her fragile structure of illusion by so much as a single word.

“Mademoiselle de Lancel,” said Violet a week later, in early April, when Delphine next paid a visit to her house on the Villa Mozart, “Monsieur le Vicomte has telephoned twice in the past week. I told him you were not at home, and promised to give you a message that he had called. What am I to say when he calls again? He seemed worried that he had not heard from you.”

“Never mind, Violet, I’ll telephone him myself,” Delphine
said reluctantly. She had managed to avoid Bruno since September, finding for him a different, but equally clever, set of excuses from those she had concocted to avoid accepting film offers. However, Bruno was more persistent than Abel, and unlike Abel, his requests to see her had been personal, not professional. She knew that she couldn’t continue to elude him any longer, even though her deepest instinct was not to let anyone, not even Bruno, break into the firmly constructed idyll of her existence. Nevertheless, her reason told her that in his case at least, she had to cope. Perhaps a lunch, she thought, as she called him at the bank.

“Delphine, I simply must see you,” Bruno said. “It’s been months and months.”

“I’m miserable that I’ve neglected you so, Bruno, my angel, but this has been an absolutely crazy winter for me. Business without end, so many conferences, so many producers, all wanting something, not a second for myself, I feel as if I’ve been a prisoner. The cinema! But I do miss you. Can we have lunch? Dinners are impossible.”

“How about the day after tomorrow?”

“Perfect. Where shall we meet?”

“How about my new little place? You haven’t even seen it, and I have an excellent cook. I don’t like to lunch in restaurants—I have to do it too often for business.”

“You’re on the Rue de Lille, aren’t you? I have the address.”

“At one, then. Until Wednesday.”

Delphine hung up the phone with a sigh of resignation, and went to her closets to find something to wear to Bruno’s. She had not bought any new spring clothes at all, but there were dozens of ensembles from last year hanging, perfectly pressed, in her wardrobe. She picked out a navy blue Molyneux suit with a white and blue printed silk blouse that matched the lining of the jacket. It had a tightly fitted waist, a flared skirt that fell just below her knees, and the slightly exaggerated, puffed shoulders that were still the style of the day. Molyneux didn’t date, she thought, and navy and white would always signal spring. Violet gathered together the wide-brimmed, saucerlike straw hat from Reboux, with a bow at the back made of the silk of the blouse, and the high-heeled shoes, the bag, the gloves and stockings that had all been bought to go with the suit.

“Could you please put these all together for me, Violet, and call me a cab?” Delphine asked.

“You do not have need for any other clothes, Mademoiselle? Only this outfit? Nothing, perhaps, for evening?” Violet asked.

“Not today,” Delphine answered in a voice that silenced any other questions.

As she stood on the Rue de Lille, two days later, she was surprised to see that Bruno evidently occupied all of the good-sized private house. A butler in a tailcoat answered the bell and admitted her into a large entrance hall, with a floor of black and white marble. Suits of armor and tapestries of battle scenes were the only decoration of the severely masculine, museumlike room, which looked to Delphine as if it belonged in a medieval château. She was led up the wide central staircase into a magnificent red and gold library, where Bruno jumped up to greet her.

“At last!” he said, as he kissed her on both cheeks. “And more elegant than ever.”

“Thank you, Bruno, angel. I’m so happy to see you. And this is your new ‘little place,’ is it, you joker? Things must be going well for you.”

“They are, as a matter of fact, though no thanks to you, you wretched girl.”

“When did you start to collect suits of armor?”

“They belonged to my Saint-Fraycourt ancestors. When Grandfather died, he left me everything. I finally found a home for them.”

“Ah yes, I’d forgotten the sainted Saint-Fraycourt ancestors. It’s too bad I never met your grandparents before they died.”

“You know how ridiculously old-fashioned they were. They never could overcome their feelings about your mother.”

“It was, perhaps, their loss,” Delphine said lightly, refusing to be piqued by the absurd snobbery of people for whom she cared nothing. What could her mother have done that she hadn’t done herself ten times over? She wished she could tell Eve, in one of the letters she wrote home, that she understood her now, but it would be too revealing.

“It was most assuredly their loss,” Bruno replied, giving her a glass of champagne. “Shall we toast our mutual grandparents? To the Lancels!”

“To Grandmother and Grandfather,” Delphine said, feeling guilty. She had neglected them for her love, as she had neglected everyone. From time to time over the winter she had telephoned them at Valmont, but she had not been back to visit since she had taken refuge there to try to get over Armand Sadowski. It seemed like another life, but it had only been last August, eight months ago. Too long, far too long, at their age, she thought, and vowed to drive out soon, even if it were just for the day.

Delphine ate, without appetite, a five-course lunch served by two menservants, while Bruno talked about his latest horses, his new passion for squash, his travels for La Banque Duvivier Frères. He was going to try to get her to do something for him, she knew, or else why the urgency, why did he have to see her? Still, until he came right out and asked, she was content to sit in her ravishing suit and her ravishing hat, and respond with her ravishing smile, while she wondered why an unmarried man would choose to live in such an elaborate way.

“You are a great beauty, Delphine,” Bruno remarked suddenly, when they were back in the library, having coffee by themselves.

“There seem to be people who think so,” she replied. So she was right, she thought. He wanted her help, and it was something to do with a man he needed to win over.

“A great beauty, and a true talent. What is more, you are a great charmer, which is more rare than beauty and as valuable as talent. In addition you are a Lancel, an aristocrat, from one of the oldest families of the provincial nobility. You have everything a woman can have. There is no man you could not subjugate.”

“Bruno, are you about to try to
sell
me to somebody?” Delphine had to laugh at his solemnity.

“You must stop
wasting yourself
, Delphine. It’s a crime.”

“What on earth are you talking about?” she asked, puzzled. Did he know she hadn’t made any films in months?

“I am talking about your affair with Armand Sadowski.”

“Now
that
is none of your business, Bruno! How dare you? You go too far!” Delphine put down her cup with a crash.

“No, Delphine, you have to listen to me! It’s for your own good. Everyone in Paris knows that you’re living with him. I’ve heard it from a dozen different people.”

“How could people possibly know?” She spoke in astonishment, her anger forgotten.

“You can’t hide from anyone in this neighborhood. You live only a few streets from here—your apartment is in the heart of the Sixth Arrondissement, bohemian as it may seem to you. You eat in all the neighborhood bistros … you are not their only customers, I assure you. You buy food in the same shops that are patronized by everyone’s cooks, you go in and out of an apartment house that’s next door to Chez Lipp, where sooner or later everyone in the world of film and theater and politics has lunch or dinner.”

“So what, Bruno? Do they spend their time looking at passersby? Have they nothing better to do?”

“People
recognize
you, Delphine, don’t you realize that? You have a face so famous that you cannot cross the street without causing a stir. No matter how you dress, they know who you are the minute they lay eyes on you, and once you’ve gone out the door of a shop with your eggs or your cheese, they say, ‘Did you see her, Delphine de Lancel, the film star? She’s having a fling with Sadowski, the director, they were in here just the other day, acting like lovebirds.’ The shopkeeper tells the duchess’s cook, the cook tells the duchess’s personal maid, and the following week the duchess teases me about it. It’s that simple. As far as the world of the cinema is concerned, Guy Marchant knew about it months ago. He’d actually heard from three different people, all regulars at Lipp. He was the first one who told me.”

“They can choke on their gossip! All the duchesses in the
Bottin Mondain
and all the Guy Marchants in the film world. Choke! And for that matter, Bruno, so can you!”

“God damn it, listen! If it were just an affair I wouldn’t have bothered to try to bring you to your senses, but Sadowski,
that Jew
—how could you, Delphine?”

Delphine gasped at the cold contempt in his voice. She was as shocked as if she had just been smashed in the face by a piece of dung thrown by a boy in the street. Bruno could not possibly have said what he’d just said.

“ ‘That Jew’?” You don’t mean those words, do you, Bruno?”

“Yes I do. He’s a Jew, a Polish Jew, you can’t deny it.”

“Why should I? Of course he’s a Jew. So what? As for his being Polish, his parents were born in France, and he feels a
lot more French than I do. He’s as French as you are, Bruno.” Delphine was shaking with fury.

“He’s two generations out of some Polish ghetto, but even if he had ancestors who’d lived in France for hundreds of years, that wouldn’t make him less Jewish,” Bruno shot back.

“So, it’s nothing but anti-Semitism that you have against him? Aren’t you ashamed, Bruno? Aren’t you sick inside to know that you feel like that?”

“I knew you’d misunderstand. I’m no more anti-Jew than the next man. If they stay out of my way, I’ll stay out of theirs. But it’s my duty to protect you. You’re my sister … half sister … but still of my blood. If you’re involved with a Jew, it’s going to mean nothing but trouble for you. You must have read about the measures Hitler has taken against the German Jews. You must have realized that they’re pouring into France from every country in Europe, not just from Germany, trying to find a place where they’ll be safe. Some of them, the smartest ones, are leaving for the United States or Switzerland. Do you think that your Sadowski is going to become less Jewish because he’s French? Do you think that the Germans will treat him differently because his parents were born here?”