Till We Meet Again (57 page)

“Don’t be silly. Mummy still has mountains of wood.” Abruptly, Jane went to the bathroom door and threw it open.

“HAPPY BIRTHDAY!” came a chorus of voices, and Jane’s three little sisters marched in, each one of them carrying a steaming kettle of hot water. They were followed by Lady Penelope, smiling broadly, lugging a huge kettle from which more steam rose. They surrounded the tub and, led by Jane, sang a chorus of “Happy Birthday to You” while they ceremoniously poured more hot water into the tub. As the last line, “Happy birthday, dear Freddy, happy birthday to you,” began
to fade away, a male voice joined in the singing. “Stand up, stand up, stand up and show us your face,” the voice rang out and all the five female Longbridges dropped their empty kettles with a clatter and shouted, “Tony!” forgetting their guest as they wrapped themselves around their older brother.

Cowering under the water, almost bent in half, Freddy watched the scene, shaking with giggles. Had Jane planned this too? Could anything so typically Jane be an accident?

“Tony, come over here and say hello,” Jane commanded. “Second Officer Marie-Frédérique de Lancel, may I present my brother, Squadron Leader the Honorable Antony Wilmot Alistair Longbridge. Freddy, Tony.”

“You’re absolutely sure?” Freddy asked her friend suspiciously, her arms securely tucked over her breasts.

“Oh, quite. I remember him well,” Jane said.

“Good evening, Squadron Leader Longbridge.” Freddy managed to nod graciously, without lifting her head.

“Good evening, Second Officer. Out of uniform, I see.”

“On leave, sir.”

“They always say that.”

“I assure you, sir, it’s true.”

“Can you prove it?”

“No.”

“Then I shall have to take your word.”

“Thank you, sire.”

“No need to go so far. A simple ‘sir’ will do. At ease.”

“Antony, come out of the bathroom this minute!” Lady Penelope said. “Let Freddy finish her bath in peace.”

“But it’s her birthday, Mum, don’t you think she wants company? I’ll just sit down here and chat with her. Jane, you may leave us. Kiddies, go get the second officer more hot water.”

“Antony, you try my patience,” his mother said warningly.

“Oh, all right, me old Mum, since you insist,” he said reluctantly, not moving away from the edge of the tub. “You do know there’s a war on, don’t you? Old standards must make way for new, and all that. Now, Mum, no need to pinch me, damn it. I’m coming.”

Muttering what sounded like Druid incantations, Jane rummaged through her closet, picking through her rows of prewar evening dresses.

“I didn’t think people still dressed for dinner,” Freddy said as she watched.

“Did you imagine that you were going to be allowed to eat your birthday dinner in your uniform?”

“Since my public bathing exhibition, I don’t know what I thought … or what to expect.” Freddy brushed her hair, trying to make it lie down, but today, because of the snapping cold air it had more of a mind of its own than usual, and although she kept it cut to standard ATA length, so that it cleared her uniform collar, she could hear it crackle and feel it sparking up so vigorously that it tickled the backs of her hands.

“Such luck, Tony showing up,” Jane chortled. “I think he rather liked you.”

“I hope that with all that steam he couldn’t really see me. I certainly couldn’t look at him.”

“Are all Americans so proper?”

“Are all Brits so fresh?”

“Tony? He’s absolutely harmless,” Jane replied, over her shoulder, with the judicious air of a younger sister’s appraisal of her twenty-five-year-old brother. “He didn’t climb in with you, did he? Now that might have been fresh, or impudent, possibly rude—it might even have indicated a lack of basic good manners. He was just hoping to make a new friend. Our Tony’s a gregarious chap, good-hearted, salt of the earth. He’ll give you no trouble, poppet. Unless you’re looking for it … or unless you’re a German pilot stooging around upstairs in a Messerschmitt or a Junkers 88, in which case you have indeed found trouble, serious trouble. Ah-ha! Here it is. I was wondering where it had got to.”

Jane emerged from the closet holding up a hanger on which was suspended a dress of cloth of silver, a strapless dress that splintered the light in the room with darting arrows of brightness. It had a skirt so full that it looked as if it could take off and waltz by itself. Its waistline was marked by a wide black velvet sash with a bow on one side, from which streamers of velvet almost touched the ground. On another hanger there was a black velvet wrap in the form of a huge draped bow, bordered with silver. “Festive enough, I think,” Jane said, holding out the hangers, “and, should you feel chilly, there’s the wrap. Try this on and see if it fits.”

“It will, it will! Nothing will stop me from wearing that dress.” Freddy was breathless with a sense of almost incommunicable
delight. Everything that had happened since she had walked into Longbridge Grange seemed like a picnic on the grass, impromptu, spur-of-the-moment, and so gloriously inappropriate to the realities of England at war. She felt giddy, indecently excited, inadmissibly pleased with herself. Even her chilblains didn’t hurt.

“Shoes!” Jane said, slapping her forehead, and darted back into the closet, returning with silver shoes and a handful of filmy chiffon underthings. “What else have I forgotten?”

“No tiara?”

“Not absolutely necessary for dinner. Although … although …”

“I was kidding.”

“They’re in a vault anyway. No tiaras for the duration. Pity, that … We’d better dress. Papa should be home by now, and if he doesn’t get his drink before dinner he’s apt to grumble. Shout if you need any help. Otherwise, downstairs in half an hour?”

“Oh yes. Thank you for finding that dress, Jane.”

“I was proposed to five times in it … a lucky dress … but, of course, not for them, poor things. I
do
feel sorry for them.”

“That was their hard luck,” Freddy said, whirling around and around, watching the skirt of the silver dress billow. “Screw them, Jane.”

“I did, poppet, I did.”

By the time Freddy had managed to dress herself in the unfamiliar garments, put on her lipstick and make a fruitless attempt to tame her shiningly clean red hair, which foamed back from her face in celebratory disorder, the adult Longbridges had just gathered in the library in front of a large fire, all of them talking quickly and, it seemed, simultaneously, while Lord Gerald, armed with a silver cocktail shaker, had started to make martinis.

Freddy hesitated just outside the door, unseen, feeling a confusing combination of emotions. They were a family, she was an outsider, yet she had been welcomed today as she had never been welcomed before by any group of strangers. She felt that she knew Jane better than she’d ever known her own sister, but she’d never met Jane’s father and she’d only glimpsed Tony as a looming figure in an RAF uniform. She felt unquestionably shy—an emotion she hadn’t felt for years—but she
couldn’t feel
timid
, not in this dress of sublime theatricality that, as she had known it would, fit her perfectly. This was her twenty-first birthday. She was the guest of honor. And, dear Lord, they were all waiting for her.

That thought—Jane’s father was shaking the gin and vermouth and she could tell from the sound alone that in a second he’d be ready to pour—propelled her into the room in one long, fluid step. Then she stopped, shyness again gaining the upper hand, because all four people in the room had stopped talking and had turned to look at her. There was a moment of utter, stunned silence that Freddy didn’t realize was an ultimate tribute to her loveliness, and then Lord Gerald Longbridge put down the cocktail shaker and advanced toward her.

“Happy birthday, Miss de Lancel,” he said, taking both of her hands in his and looking, startled, into the victorious blue of her untamable eyes. “My son tells me that I missed the high spot of the day, indeed of the year. I call that downright unfair. I don’t know how you’re ever going to get on my good side after such wretched treatment. I suppose I’m going to have to make an exception for you, or, better yet, you could repeat the performance tomorrow, but give me fair warning so I won’t be left out again. I wonder if, by any chance, you happen to drink martinis?”

“Yes, please, Lord Gerald. And will you call me Freddy?” she laughed, shyness banished by the gray-haired, handsome charmer whose eyes were as wicked as Jane’s.

“Freddy it is,” he replied, offering her his arm. “Now come over to the fire. I must pour those drinks before they get watery.” He led her across the large, dim, high-ceilinged room to Jane, far from demure in sweeping scarlet satin, and Lady Penelope, magnificent in brown velvet and old-ivory lace. Tony had retreated, rapidly and unnoticed by the women, to the ornament-frosted Christmas tree in the corner, and pretended to fiddle with a string of lights, so that he could watch Freddy before she greeted him.

From the moment she entered the room, it had seemed to him that she walked within a nimbus of light. There was something almost celestial in her sudden, silent, silver apparition in the doorway, something that made him think of the first, always surprising, always somehow dangerous, always heart-stabbing glimpse of the evening star. Could she be the larky, joky seal of a girl in the tub? Was metamorphosis so
easy? Would she turn into a glade of flowering trees before dinner was over?

“Tony, give me a hand,” his father asked. “Take Freddy a martini, would you?”

As he carried the chilled glass over to the fireplace, Squadron Leader Antony Longbridge almost tripped over his feet on a rug that had been in the same place for five generations before he’d been born. Freddy looked up. “Good evening again, Squadron Leader,” she said. “Out of uniform, I see.”

“Oh, this.” He looked down at his dinner jacket. “I thought … well, a special occasion … my tunic needed pressing … this seemed, well, more comfortable … after all, at home … on leave …”

“They always manage to have an excuse, don’t they, Jane?” Freddy shook her head disparagingly.

“Shocking. No morale, these RAF types. Dress like billy goats. Think spit and polish is for everybody else. He probably didn’t even shave before dinner,” Jane agreed.

Freddy stopped herself from lifting her hand to find out. She’d have known Tony had to be English if she’d so much as caught a split-second glance at him in Sumatra or Antarctica, she thought, as she accepted her drink. He had that unmistakable fine, clean facial structure, that unmuddled sweep of bone, that clean, long, almost knifelike purposefulness that permitted no neutrality of feature. His forehead was high and his plain brown hair, parted sternly on the side, swept straight backward with a slight wave. His eyes were pale, pale blue under light brows, his nose as pointed and distinct as a Crusader s, his mouth wide, firm and thin, his cheeks flat and ruddy, his ears big and set close to his head. There was nothing relaxed, nothing frivolous to his lean, imposing head. Tony was big-boned, yet he seemed, for all his height, almost slender. He bore himself with the habit of authority and the presence of command. No British overbreeding here, Freddy decided, and smiled at him as she had smiled at no man in almost three years.

“I did manage to shave,” Tony said, ignoring his sister, “although the water was not as hot as it might have been.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Freddy replied lightly, and, inspired by the most totally calculated flirtatious move of her life, turned away from him so that she could ask Lady Penelope a question about the provenance of her lace.

Dinner, in a room warmed by two huge fireplaces, was
served by an elderly woman assisted by a fourteen-year-old boy, both of whom lived in the nearby village and were still available to assist the cook on special occasions. This odd assortment of domestic help was the only reminder, throughout the blithe and playful meal, that England was at war. Everyone at the table blessed the crushing freeze that had brought hostilities to a temporary halt, but no one mentioned the weather, as if to notice it would be to break the spell.

If the Wright Brothers had been strangled in their cradles, if the descendants of George III still reigned over the New World and the descendants of Louis XIV held sway over France, it would have made no difference to the conversation around that civilized, candlelit board. But if champagne grapes were no longer growing in Champagne, if Mozart and Gershwin had never lived, if horses were not bred to swiftness and strength, if Bloomsbury had never bloomed, or Fred Astaire not bought his first pair of tap shoes, they would have had to find other things to talk about.

As the leisurely meal ended, Lord Gerald disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a Jeroboam of Dom Perignon. He opened the bottle almost as expertly as Freddy remembered her grandfather doing, and served them all, with Tony’s help.

“This is a very special toast,” he said. “Today Miss Marie-Frédérique de Lancel—Freddy to her friends—has reached a most interesting age. Alexander Pope wrote of ‘the brisk minor’ who ‘pants for twenty-one’ … Samuel Johnson spoke of ‘towering in the confidence of twenty-one’ … Thackeray wrote of ‘the brave days when I was twenty-one.’ Everyone else in this room is past that magical age, perhaps by only a few months, like you, Jane, or by many years, like me, but no matter. The important thing is that Freddy need no longer pant for twenty-one—she is living in brave days, and she deserves all the joy of them. May the joy be great and may it grow with every year that passes. To Freddy!”

Freddy sat blushing while they all drank her health. Her blush deepened when Lady Penelope rang the bell and the young boy, who had obviously been just behind the kitchen door, walked out with several gaily wrapped boxes and placed them in front of her.

“Oh no,” she protested. “You’ve all been so good to me already. That fantastic bath was my present.”

“Nonsense, my dear. These are just improvised—we
couldn’t get to the stores, but you have to have souvenirs of such an important occasion,” Lady Penelope said.

“Go on, Freddy, open them,” Jane echoed eagerly.