Till We Meet Again (73 page)

Freddy stood and looked at the house for a few minutes, without moving toward it to check out its condition. “I’ll take it,” she said. “Phone me with the price tomorrow. I’ll make a counter-offer, of course, but I intend to buy it.”

“Mrs. Longbridge, you haven’t even been inside!”

“I know what it looks like,” Freddy said. “I grew up in it.”

21

“G
ET the employment agency on the phone, Miss Kelly,” Bruno told his secretary as he walked into his imposing office at the Beecham Mercantile Trust, a powerful private investment bank that had been firmly established in New York City for more than a hundred years.

“Yes, sir. Here are your messages, and your mail’s on your desk.”

Bruno gave her his overcoat to hang up in his closet. It was windy and cold in Manhattan on this day in early December 1949, but he made it a practice to walk to work from his Sutton Place house in all weather but driving rain. He was thirty-four, and his important position at the bank frequently meant that he had to cancel his daily squash game in favor of a business lunch. At least the walk, from 57th Street and the East River down to Wall Street, ensured a minimum of exercise.

“Mrs. McIver’s on the phone, sir.”

“Good morning, Viscount de Lancel. What can I do for you, sir?” asked the owner of Manhattan’s most expensive agency for domestic help, in an optimistic tone of voice.

“Mrs. McIver, send me more people to interview. Butlers, chefs and valets.”

“Sir, I supplied you with the best people I could find, only two weeks ago. Haven’t any of them worked out?”

“There isn’t one of them who could get a job in Paris. You’ll have to do better than that, Mrs. McIver.”

“Viscount de Lancel, I assure you that I have personally placed each of those men before in positions in which they remained for years. There wasn’t one I wouldn’t be happy to have working in my own home.”

“As far as I’m concerned, they’re not good enough. Try again.”

“I’ll do my very best for you, sir. As you know, it’s never easy. I’ll get on it right away and I’ll call Miss Kelly to arrange the interviews.”

“Do that.” Bruno hung up abruptly. On the other end of the line, Nancy McIver smiled lovingly at the telephone. If all her clients were as insanely hard to please as this Frenchman, her gold mine of an office would be producing pure platinum. Each time he had a problem with some member of his staff, she collected a commission on the replacement, and no one had lasted more than two months at Lancel’s in the three years she’d been doing business with him. Yet he had nowhere else to go but her agency, for no one in New York handled such exclusive help, the cream of the crop, the ultimate in every kind of domestic worker, from hand laundresses who would barely condescend to wash any but heirloom linen, to majordomos who wouldn’t consider a job with a family that didn’t have at least three fully staffed homes. The names of the people she placed, and the names of the families with which she placed them, formed a stately principality of its own, that moved regularly from a few square blocks of Manhattan to Sea Island to Palm Beach to Saratoga to Southampton, depending on the season of the year.

“Lancel’s on the rampage again, Genny,” she said cheerfully to her assistant.

“What’s with him? He’s the most difficult man in the city. There isn’t a single dotty dowager on our books who gives us as much trouble as that one bachelor.”

“Who knows? Remember, Genny, when there’s no turnover, we don’t make money. Give me his file, please.”

“But he’s had just about everybody on our available lists already. We’ve scraped the bottom of the barrel for him, over and over,” Genny protested as she pulled out the bulging folder.

“If I have to send him people he’s already fired, he’ll never notice. His house is run like a subway turnstile. When a client can’t keep good help, it’s invariably his problem, not yours. That’s the golden rule of this business. Never forget it.”

“I wonder what he’s really like?”

“Take my word for it, you wouldn’t want to know,” Nancy McIver said scornfully. “The real question is, who does he think he is?”

“Bruno de Lancel? Marjorie, that’s a ridiculous suggestion,” Cynthia Beaumont said to her secretary.

“I thought that with Larry Bell canceling dinner at the last minute, it was worth a try,” Marjorie Stickley replied.

“Damn Larry Bell! A strep throat is no excuse. Is he incapable of making a little effort? How does he expect me to get an extra man at such short notice? Nobody would have noticed—I wasn’t planning to look down his blasted throat with a stethoscope.”

“Perhaps he was afraid he’d be contagious,” Marjorie ventured, as her employer, Cynthia Beaumont, raged back and forth in her sitting room, looking wrathfully at the ruined seating plan for her carefully planned, black-tie dinner party.

“Not him! He’d give people leprosy if he knew they’d never find out. He’s just worried about his own precious health, the selfish wretch. What does he care about my dinner?”

“Oh, Mrs. Beaumont, you know it’s going to be the party of the season,” Marjorie said as soothingly as possible. She knew, after years of being a social secretary to a number of New York’s most important hostesses, that nothing could so upset even a highly sophisticated and secure woman as the last-minute defection of an extra man. There wasn’t one of them who could face up to the dreaded prospect of seating two women next to each other, although, in her private opinion, men added little gaiety or charm to a party as they sat back and waited to be entertained, while any vivacious and interesting extra woman could be counted on to sing for her supper.

“What to do, Marjorie? What to do? It’s a catastrophe! And we only have a few hours left. Do you suppose that Tim Black might be—no, he just announced his engagement. Cross him off my list permanently, I never liked him anyway. What about—never mind, I swore I’d never ask him again, after he got so revoltingly tipsy and made an indecent remark to Mrs. Astor at the last party. Oh, why do I ever try to give a dinner in December? I should know by now that from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day there isn’t a single halfway presentable extra man who has a free night.”

“But it’s Mr. Beaumont’s birthday celebration,” the social secretary protested. Even in busy New York society, this particular annual occasion was sacred.

“Well he’ll just have to change it next year, that’s all. I won’t go through this hell again. Now, Marjorie, be creative!”

“I’ll go to my office and ring up every single warm body on your emergency list.”

“Try all our doctors and our dentist too. Maybe one of them is single, or getting divorced. I’ll call James Junior at Princeton myself.”

“He’s in the middle of final exams, Mrs. Beaumont.”

“Surely he could make a little sacrifice for his mother? Oh, it’s too utterly maddening to have five sons, and four of them married right out of college. What’s the point! Why did I bother to give birth to those ungrateful brutes? Just think, if none of them had married, I’d have my hands on the four best-looking young extra men in the city—five, when James Junior graduates. But no, not even one of them bothered to consider me or my problems. Ingrates! All they care about is their own happiness. Today’s young people have no sense of duty, tradition, family. You’re lucky you have no children, Marjorie. You’ve been saved a lot of pain.”

“Maybe I’d have had a girl, Mrs. Beaumont.”

“An extra woman? God forbid! I’ll try to dress while you phone.”

“I’d still like to try Bruno de Lancel.”

“Marjorie! How could I possibly ask him at the last minute—I plan a party
around
that man. One thing I’ll say for Bruno de Lancel, he’d never cancel at the last minute unless he were on his deathbed. He’s too well bred to dream of it. What marvelous manners he has.”

“You did ask me to be creative, Mrs. Beaumont.”

“Creative in a reasonable way. I didn’t expect your Christmas list. And anyway, he’d be insulted to be asked for the same night, to fill in when someone else has dropped out.”

“He’s been here so often that surely he’ll understand. Any good friend would. It should be quite all right.”

“He’s not that kind of friend. If he were American, I’d say yes, he’d be glad to lend a hand, but you know how … cold … he is. I’ve never felt I knew him better than the first time I met him, yet I’ve seated him on my right more times than I can count. His marvelous manners don’t include talking about himself. However, one can’t deny that he’s absolutely divine looking, very, very rich, and unmarried—plus the title, of course—so he can be as uncommunicative as the Sphinx for all I care, as unapproachable as the Pope without an audience, as formal as the Queen of England … wait a
minute … the Pope … perhaps Cardinal Spellman? What do you think, Marjorie?”

“As an extra man at the last minute—no, somehow I shouldn’t think so, Mrs. Beaumont.”

“Oh, I suppose you’re right.” Cynthia Beaumont sighed in vexation, but it was just these little nuances that Marjorie Stickley was so terribly good at. It paid to have the best social secretary in town, even if she earned twice what any other secretary did. Even if the Cardinal were free, and she’d bet he was, it wouldn’t be fitting.

As Cynthia Beaumont emerged from her bath, and began to put on just enough makeup to cope with the florist who was arriving to start decorating the house, Marjorie returned, brimming with triumph. “I’ve got Bruno de Lancel. He said he’d be delighted to come.”

“How fantastic! What a treasure you are! You’ve saved my dinner. What did you say? How did you put it?”

“Ah, that’s just my little secret, Mrs. Beaumont. Now I must go and tell the florist that you’ll be with him in a few minutes or he’ll have a nervous breakdown.”

As she vanished down the corridor toward the dining room, the social secretary reflected on her own Golden Rule: The worst someone can say is “No, thank you.” She’d built a long, satisfactory career and a comfortable nest egg on making phone calls her employers were basically too timid to make for themselves. Society women—sometimes she could almost feel sorry for them. But not often. As for Bruno de Lancel, his reputation for being stiff and standoffish had made so many hostesses terrified of him that it had been an even bet he’d be free tonight. It was all right for him to be a snob, society understood that, but not with people who were just as good as he was. Who, she wondered scornfully, did he think he was?

Bruno left the bank early on Friday afternoon and walked up to J.M. Kidder Inc., for the fourth fitting on a new riding jacket he had ordered months ago.

“So you’ll be going down the Main Line to hunt, Viscount de Lancel?” Allensby, the ancient head fitter, asked pleasantly.

Bruno grunted noncommittally. He couldn’t understand why a tailor could possibly consider that his comings and goings were any concern of his.

“We take care of a lot of gentlemen from the Main Line. Always have. Good hunting there, they all tell me.”

Bruno snorted. If you considered good hunting going out with a bunch of dull, pompous stockbrokers, lawyers and businessmen from a collection of tedious suburbs, men who knew nothing of noble sport, men who had never spent an entire day chasing over their own lands, then he supposed it must be considered good hunting. In any case, it was the pitifully best hunting within a few hours of New York—Fairfield was a joke—and life without hunting was unthinkable.

“The collar still isn’t cut right, Allensby.”

“Now, now, sir, I recut it after your last fitting. This is an entirely new piece of cloth. Look how well it hugs your neck.”

Bruno moved his neck backward and forward and twisted his head from side to side, managing to make the brilliantly cut collar gape a fraction of an inch as he pulled away from it. “No, it won’t do. It simply won’t do at all. Rip it off and start all over again.” He struggled out of the jacket and threw it on a chair. “Call my secretary when you’re ready for another fitting.”

“Yes sir,” Allensby said agreeably. As he took the coat away, he thought of his own Golden Rule: Only a certain kind of man would ever take out his temper on his tailor, and that kind of man wasn’t worth worrying about. The Frenchman, with a title he seemed to think mattered here, could have as many fittings as he wanted; such contingencies were built into the price of the jacket from the beginning. The old firm had survived generations of difficult customers, although never one with such a fine torso. He’d be a pleasure to fit, Allensby thought scornfully, if he weren’t such a bastard. Just who on earth did he think he was?

As he left the tailor’s, Bruno looked at his watch. He still had almost two hours before he had to begin to dress for dinner. A short walk away, there was a woman waiting for him, curled with the proud grace of a rare and valuable cat, in front of a fruitwood fire. There would be low music in the air, and on her face, with its pouting, full mouth that drew the eye as if it were a barbaric ornament, there would be a look of impatience. She was lazily lush, with creamy, marvelously abundant flesh, dark brown nipples as large as quarters, a mouth that would rather suck than talk, and a full bottom that
had been shaped to invite the delicious punishment Bruno was so expert in inflicting. She had urgent, vicious, inventive hands, this woman who was one of the great ladies of the city, not quite forty, and enormously rich in her own right. She had belonged to him for three months.

Bruno considered the fact that at this very minute the woman was ready for him, ready to let him do anything to her that he pleased, for earlier in the day he’d phoned and told her in explicit detail how he wanted her to caress herself before he arrived. He could see the way her thighs must be spread apart so that she could reach down easily to touch herself, with the moist and knowing fingers she had been licking. He knew that she would be stretching restlessly and biting her lip to keep from reaching any premature spasm.

If he entered that room and flung himself down on the couch and said that he was tired, that he wanted nothing more than for her to bend her head over him and bring him to slow satisfaction with only her wide, waiting mouth, she would do so. If he lay on the couch and didn’t touch her, if he just waited until she made him hard with her clever hands and then told her to straddle him and take him into her body, and if he gave her harsh orders to raise and lower herself until he obtained the release he had come to her for, she would obey without a word. If he told her to lie on the rug and pull up her skirt and raise her knees and spread her legs for him, and if he then entered her and took her as quickly and selfishly as any schoolboy, she would be grateful. If he told her to stay in her chair while he stood in front of her and opened his trousers and shoved himself into her mouth, she would give him exquisite pleasure and never protest. If he merely sat on the edge of a chair, a spectator, and told her to touch herself until she writhed with her own pleasure, she would comply.