Till We Meet Again (62 page)

Freddy’s veil had long ago been laid aside and now her hair was flung in shafts of brilliance about her face, from the exertions of dancing with so many men, aged from twelve to eighty, each one of whom claimed close kinship with her. The best man was the only male here she hadn’t expected to make any demand on her confused brain.

Puzzled by his words, Freddy looked up at Jock Hampton. A California face, was her first thought. She’d gone to high school with types like him, the campus football heroes, standing taller than anyone around them, athletic heroes, golden boys, not much younger than this character, whose scorched blond hair flopped over his forehead in a way that was both against regulations and the fashion of the day, which made men use some kind of goo to keep their hair neatly plastered to their skulls. He looked tough, she decided, as she realized with relief that he danced marvelously, tough and insubordinate, and there was a curiously laughing light in his clear blue eyes, around which the sunburst of squint lines were deeper than any man’s but a pilot’s would ever be. This chivalrous Viking, who had appeared unexpectedly at her wedding, was undomesticated and unsubduable, she was sure of it. All his strong features were blunt, as if he’d kept a lot of rough edges. He was a bit of a thug, Freddy thought. Where had Tony found him? She looked at him questioningly. What was he talking about?

“The other day,” he explained. “I was trying to say thank you for saving my life … the guy in the dinghy … don’t you remember me? Do you do that every day?”

“your?”

“Yep. Mighty nice flyin’, Mrs. Longbridge.”

“Why, you bastard! You bigmouth! You
cretin!
You damn near got me kicked out of the ATA with your story. Why the bloody hell couldn’t you keep the details to yourself, jerk? Creep! No, you had to go and blab about it to some reporter … of all the stupid, moronic …” She stopped dancing abruptly, and almost slumped in his arms, too amazed by her outburst to go on.

“You do have a definite gift for expressing yourself,” Jock said as he held her up. “I’m glad you haven’t got your guns loaded today.”

“I didn’t have any the other day, either. We fly unarmed, wise guy.”

“You were
bluffing
a Messerschmitt?”

“I didn’t give it much thought, to tell you the truth.”

“My, my, Mrs. Longbridge, I’m not sure I envy my splendid Squadron Leader. Does he know what kind of maniac he married?”

“Oh, fuck off, smartass! I had to have a little fun for a change! You fellows grab all the action, and we just get to creep along with our delivery service. How would you like to have to do that all the time? What’s your name again, anyway?”

“Jock Hampton, ma’am.”

“Well, Jock Hampton, don’t you ever dare tell Antony what I did. Don’t you ever even think of mentioning it to anybody else on the face of the earth, do you hear? Or I’ll get you, and I’ll get you good. And when I get someone, he stays got.”

“You have my promise. I’m too terrified of you even to remember …”

“Remember what?” she asked, eyes narrowed suspiciously.

“I don’t remember whatever it was that I wasn’t going to remember.”

“Maybe you’re not as incredibly thick as I thought,” she said.

“I believe it’s time to cut the cake, Mrs. Longbridge.”

“Stop trying to change the subject.”

“No, it really is. They’re waiting for you. But could I just say one word of explanation, extenuating circumstances and all that? And then I’ll never say anything again, ever?”

“Oh, all right, get it over with.”

“I didn’t tell the reporter you were a girl. I only said red hair. I saw right away that it was too long for a man.”

Freddy thought over his words.

“I guess you didn’t, at that,” she replied slowly. “Does that mean I should apologize for all the mean things I said?”

“A bride never has to apologize for anything.”

“I will anyway. I shouldn’t have told you to fuck off. Not on my wedding day.”

Oh, but I want this girl
, Jock Hampton thought.
She should have been mine
.

18

T
HE poster that had been plastered all over the walls of buildings throughout France, in early 1943, showed a monumentally well-muscled and well-nourished young Frenchman, dressed in blue overalls, standing boldly below an orange sky, in front of a group of tools. Far in the distance could be seen a tiny Eiffel Tower, and the lettering on the poster, in tall red, white and blue letters, announced, B
Y
W
ORKING IN
G
ERMANY
, Y
OU
A
RE THE
A
MBASSADOR OF
F
RENCH
Q
UALITY
.

French quality, Bruno reflected, whenever he passed that particular poster, would always be a desirable commodity, in whatever form it was found … although he congratulated himself that he did not personally have to demonstrate French quality in the form of the forced labor in Germany that the poster presented so glowingly. His duties at Valmont provided him immunity from such work. Since 1942, when his grandfather, Jean-Luc de Lancel, died of pneumonia, Bruno had found himself master of the House of Lancel, of the Château de Valmont and all its vineyards. After her husband’s death, Anette de Lancel, heartbroken, had retired permanently to her rooms and taken no further interest in running the property.

In spite of the relative goodwill that Bruno had cultivated and maintained with the Führer of Champagne’s representatives, he could not change the basic fact that his champagne was treated as spoils of battle. True, the Germans had finally permitted the growers to sell almost twenty-five percent of their annual production of wine to civilian sources in France, Belgium, Finland and Sweden, but that concession merely made it possible to continue to produce the crop and allowed for no luxury.

What a damnably unprofitable business champagne had become, Bruno thought wrathfully, after his grandfather’s funeral, looking out over the ocean of vineyards in the rolling
valley below the château. French quality, yes, he didn’t deny it, but he might just as well be a butcher looking at a counter covered with offal—tripe, liver, brains and sweetbreads—for all the sense of aesthetic pleasure the sight gave him. After the past two years he knew quite as much as he needed to know about how to oversee the cultivation of the grapes of champagne, and far, far more than he had ever intended to learn.

He had no intention of remaining in this infernally boring corner of France after the war ended, and end it must eventually, when all the countries of the world had exhausted themselves. Yet who could guess how many years in the future the end would be? Who could be certain where the new centers of power would lie? They knew little of the progress of the war in Paris, and even less here in Champagne, far from the fields of battle. He assumed, like millions of others, that eventually France would be somehow attached to Germany and, with luck, would be treated as a junior partner in the Reich rather than as a defeated territory.

Bruno fingered the key to the vast cellars full of hidden Lancel champagne, which had lain untouched since the war began, their existence unsuspected by the Germans, and now known only to him and to the three Martins, who had last brought in bottles of the vintage of 1939. Only the day before his death had his grandfather finally allowed him to take possession of that sacred key.

When he had first been taken to visit the cellars, in 1933, Bruno remembered, his grandfather had said that in case of war a Lancel, returning to Valmont, could restore and rebuild the vineyards by selling this great stock of champagne. As far as he was concerned, Bruno mused, the château could tumble into ruins, and the chalk soil of the vineyards be used to grow cabbage—he would be perfectly content never to lay his eyes on another vine, never to oversee another harvest. French quality be damned!

Would he love this land if it were all going to belong to him someday, untainted by the equal inheritances of his half sisters? No, he thought, never, not even then. He’d be … gratified … by its possession, but he could never love land that demanded so much from its owner. Land should exist to be enjoyed, not to be served. A château should be renowned for its richness in game, its horses and hunting, for the magnificence of its art objects and architecture, for the visits
of long-dead kings and the pomp of centuries, as the Saint-Fraycourt châteaux had been before they were lost. Valmont was not splendid enough; its art consisted of family portraits and good but unspectacular furniture. And this land of Champagne was resolutely agricultural, no matter how much was made of the specialness of its soil, the nobility of the grape.

If he were its sole owner, he would hire a manager to wring the last drop of profit out of each hectare, and only come to Valmont to make sure that he wasn’t being cheated. What was the point of being an aristocrat, when, at Valmont, he had the same worries as if he were a peasant, one of the many workers who owned their few
arpents
of champagne grapes?

But that hoard of champagne in the cellars, ah, now that was another matter entirely. It was riches, better now than gold, and it must be made to yield itself to him. The death of his grandfather had freed him to sell it, and the arrangements must be made soon, for each day that the green bottles lay sleeping, festively dressed in their glittering foil labels, brought the end of the war one day sooner. With that inevitable cease-fire, no matter if the Germans became the undisputed masters of all Europe, there would be a period of uncertainty and confusion, as there had been after the Fall of France.

But this time, Bruno promised himself, he would be better prepared. The champagne would have been converted into a safe currency and deposited in a stable country so that he could seize the best opportunities that peace would offer. He was already twenty-eight, and three years had been wasted here. French quality indeed!

Bruno went to pay a call, as he had done with as much frequency as could be managed, on his pleasant friend, General von Stern, who, by now, felt entirely at home in the house on the Rue de Lille. It did not take them long to reach a gentleman’s agreement as to the fate of the many hundreds of thousands of bottles, lying in piles twenty feet high, that were the hard-won strength of the House of Lancel, its heart’s blood, its future.

The general had acquired, in the course of his search for works of art, a far larger knowledge of who was selling what to whom, in Occupied France, than was strictly necessary for his mission. He understood Bruno’s problem immediately, and with several phone calls, a meeting, an agreement on the division of the spoils, he solved it to their mutual satisfaction.

Arrangements were made for a steady diversion of an inconspicuous convoy of trucks that were at the general’s disposition, to make the short night run to Valmont. Well-disciplined German soldiers lifted the bottles of Lancel champagne in their arms and onto rolling carts, filling the trucks as carefully and respectfully as they moved paintings and sculpture. There was no breakage, no looting, no vandalism, no disturbance that would attract the attention of a soul at the château. Nor were the officers from the Führer’s office any the wiser, for they did not linger in Champagne cellars after dark.

The hidden cellars of Valmont bled their treasure, month after month, until the strength of the Lancels disappeared forever into the black market, and Bruno, through banking connections in Switzerland, had laid a sound basis for his fortune. No one was harmed, except for the three Martin cousins, the loyal cellarmen, who were unfortunate enough to know of the existence of the wine. Bruno judged it only prudent to dispose of them and their inconvenient memories. They must never see the empty cellars of
Le Trésor
.

The next time an officer from the Führer’s office in Rheims came to inspect the Lancel vineyards, he found Bruno deeply troubled, again needing the advice he had so often sought.

“I feel it is my duty to tell you that I have reason to be sure that three of my most trusted men have joined the Resistance,” Bruno admitted to him. “I don’t know what to do—my grandfather loved these men—but I cannot, in good conscience, shield them, for to shield them would be, in effect, to join them.”

“Vicomte, you have made a prudent and patriotic decision. Give me their names and think no further about it. I will turn the matter over to the Gestapo office in Rheims.”

He would miss their experienced labor, Bruno reflected, when he heard that the three Martins had been executed. However, he had to admit that even the Gestapo had its uses.

She’d give a lot to hear Cary Grant utter his ironic laugh, or watch Fred Astaire tap his insouciant way up a staircase, or see Myrna Loy wittily make an idiot out of some man, Delphine thought, as she held her head steady so that the hairdresser could hide all her own hair under a wig that would turn her into the Empress Josephine. But American films were only
nostalgic memories, since they had been banned in 1940. Today she was being made up for yet another of the formal, lavish, historical and biographical dramas that had become so popular with the producers of French films in the last few years.

“Prestige” and “high art” were now the key words in filmmaking, and producers sat in the commissaries debating the values of a script on the basis of whether or not it sufficiently glorified French culture and tradition. Occupied France was isolated from the world, but it would always own its sublime past. Backward the cinema turned, backward toward the proud nationalism of that former grandeur, backward toward a vision of past splendor.

Many producers claimed that they used epics to offer hope and inspiration to the French people in this period of defeat; others, openly resigned to the new regime, admitted that they took a welcome shelter in the safe refuge of history, as well as in the timelessness of myth and legend, since no breath of the tragic reality of the present could ever be presented on the screen. The conqueror was far too shrewd not to understand that the show must go on, particularly for the people of a defeated nation who crowded the cinemas as never before.