Till We Meet Again (9 page)

“Read this, Marie-France,” Doctor Coudert said grimly. “And tell me what you think.”

“You could always hire detectives,” the Baronne said after she had read the few lines, “but I doubt that they’d be able to trace her. There’s nothing to go on, no leads. Paris is so vast.”

“Precisely what I thought. I’ll hire them anyway, but I don’t have much hope.”

“What are we going to do?” Chantal Coudert cried in despair.

“If Eve hasn’t returned by the end of another week, I can’t keep on pretending that she has the mumps. They don’t last forever. Marie-France must stay here until it’s time for Eve to feel better, and then she will persuade us to let her take her niece back to Paris. Louise will pack Eve’s trunks and they will leave, unexpectedly and without farewells to anyone but you, Chantal. I myself will drive them to the station, to catch the night train.”

“And then, Didier?” Marie-France asked.

“And then, until she comes home, Eve will be remaining with you in Paris. What could be more normal? None of our friends will question it when we tell them. She will make a good recovery, as they will be happy to hear from us, and soon she will be well enough to enjoy the pleasures of Paris to the point that we will allow her to continue to live under your care and supervision until … until she comes home as she must, sooner or later.”

“What makes you so sure?” his wife asked.

“Because the kind of man who would run off with a girl like Eve must be so fundamentally bad that she will have to discover it for herself. Or he will tire of her. But, mark my words, from everything I’ve ever learned in my years as a doctor, she will be forced to come back to the one place she belongs, as soon as her life becomes difficult. After all, Eve
has no money, no way to make a living, no skills, no abilities. She’s still a baby. She’ll come back, and with her reputation intact, so long as we all remember to play our parts. For that we are indebted to you, Marie-France.”

“Oh, my dear, it’s nothing. I’ll do anything, anything at all. My poor little Eve … oh, I thought all along that you were too strict, Chantal, but I was wrong. You can’t be too strict, I see that now. Thank God I don’t have any children, that’s all I can say.”

In a deliberate celebration of laziness, Eve stretched under the linen sheet and moaned in an excess of total well-being. Sleepily she glanced around for Alain, although she had already guessed from the quality of the sunlight in the room that once again she had slept late and he had gone out to rehearsal without waking her. Getting up in the late morning was still a novelty to Eve, but the rhythm of her days since she came to Paris was as different from the pace of Dijon as her newly kindled awareness of the possibilities of her body was different from the days when a good game of tennis had been enough to satisfy her.

Eve was utterly enslaved by her sexual passion for Alain. Although in many ways he was a selfish man, he knew precisely how to take an inexperienced girl and train her appetites, an art few men ever had the leisure or the interest to perfect. Night by night, one deliberate, experienced, breathtaking step at a time, he led Eve down a pathway of erotic knowledge that most courtesans never trod in their lifetimes.

It was early in the month of October, an October in which the languor and perfume of summer still blew in through the windows on warm breezes; sunny days followed by nights untouched by more than the faintest hint of autumn; a blissful, heady, lovers’ October that seemed as if it might last until spring; that final October of the
Belle Epoque
.

Eve almost fell asleep again, but just as her eyes closed she remembered that today she had promised to have lunch with a new friend, or rather a new acquaintance who might become a friend. She lived across the landing from them and called herself Vivianne de Biron, which Alain thought a good choice, neither too flowery nor too blatantly aristocratic. Scarcely any woman in the world of the music hall used her own name. Eve herself was known as Madeleine Laforet,
because she knew that her parents must still be trying to find her.

Yawning, she slid out of the big bed and put on her peignoir of soft toweling. As she washed and dressed she realized that she was beginning to feel comfortable in this new skia of hers, no longer like a chick that has, just that second, pecked its way out of its shell.

Alain’s small, fifth-floor apartment, on a side street just off the Boulevard des Capucines, the neighborhood of Offenbach and Mistinguett, was reached by an untrustworthy elevator. Indifferently but adequately furnished, it contained a salon, a bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom and a little semicircular dining room in which Alain had installed his piano. Tall windows of the salon led out to a tiny balcony which soon became Eve’s favorite place to stand, as she ate her morning
tartine
, the thickly buttered bread just slightly stale from being bought the night before, and drank her coffee, which Alain had brewed earlier. Sometimes she just gazed at the visiting peach and pink clouds that blew over Paris from the open skies of the Ile de France, or watched as the apricot light of late afternoon turned to violet, but often Eve found herself at the piano, playing and singing to herself for hours on end. Music was the one link with her past that she wanted to remember, although each week she wrote to her parents. Even if they were so angry at her that they did not read the letters, the sight of her handwriting would, she thought, let them know that she was still alive.

Eve’s domestic duties were minimal. A maid who had worked for Alain for years came in every afternoon to make the bed and clean the apartment, accepting Eve’s presence with a polite nod that clearly discouraged conversation. Eve’s only concern was to select one of the splendidly cut shirts which Alain had made at Charvet on the Rue de la Paix, and lay out one of his three-piece British suits from Old England, the department store on the Boulevard de la Madeleine, so that he could dress before he left for his performance. Every other day she took his precious shirts to be hand-laundered and the suits to be pressed, for Alain set great store by his somber elegance.

He explained to Eve that he had had the inspiration to stand out from the crowd by the way he dressed, even when he had only been an extra in the crowd scenes at the Moulin Rouge. It was then, five years earlier, that he had bought two
songs from the songwriting factory of Delormel and Garnier and, at his very first audition, been given a small turn in a minor café-concert. Eve couldn’t hear enough of the details of his rise in his career. Every new fact he told her was touched with the flavor of first love, as impossible to describe as the scent of a gardenia. Everything, no matter how banal, was precious and embedded in layers of deeper meaning. Old England and Charvet became, to her, not the names of actual stores, but words that resonated with romance and mystery.

Eve knew no one in Paris. Alain’s own days were largely filled with rehearsals, performing, and the free-spending entertainment which constituted the necessary professional elbow-rubbing of his métier. Eve joined him only after the performance, accepted by his dozens of friends without any sign of surprise. She was Alain’s new girl, the little Madeleine, a lovely bit of fluff, charming enough, if a trifle silent and timid. That was as much as they needed or wanted to know about her, she realized, without surprise, since it was plain that she wasn’t one of them, even as she joined them for those nightly feasts in boisterous cafés and brasseries, where a hilarious camaraderie took the place of conversation.

Although all her days were spent alone, Eve never felt solitary. Downstairs lay the world of the Grands Boulevards, where everyone who was important in the world of the music hall lived. She explored the outdoor show of the wide streets, almost dancing along the pavements to the new syncopated rhythms that came from America, the beat of the maxixe, the bunny hug and the turkey trot, which were fast displacing the tango. She didn’t dare to order a coffee on the terrace of a café, although she yearned to, because the sight of a young woman sitting alone in a public place might, Alain warned her, be misunderstood. Nor did she ever venture outside of the neighborhood for a walk on the Rue de la Paix or the Champs Élysées, or any of the other elegant promenades, because of the danger of being seen by Aunt Marie-France. No real woman of fashion ever walked on the Grands Boulevards by daylight, that much she could be sure of.

Now it was close to noon and Eve stood in front of the armoire that contained her new wardrobe, and tried to decide if today she should wear her best fall costume. So far she had only tried it on in the privacy of the bedroom. She was still not accustomed to the inconvenience of the hobble skirt, narrowed all the way down to her feet. To make it possible to
walk, the skirt had been partially slit up the front, showing her new, “tango-laced” shoes. Difficult as this constraint was for a girl who was used to the freer stride of the fuller Edwardian skirts, Eve was wickedly pleased at how grown-up she looked in the skirt and its matching, pleated tunic, which, in turn, was topped by an angular, bolero-style jacket with a vee neckline over her bare neck, the vee that felt so free and playful after growing up in high boned collars.

She would wear the vivid green costume, no matter how warm the day, she decided, for Vivianne de Biron must be, by Eve’s guess, thirty-five, and she dressed in the height of Parisian elegance. Eve needed all the assurance that her new clothes would give her, for this would be the first time since she ran away from Dijon that she had been alone with anyone but Alain.

Eve was more excited than she realized by the prospect. Alain gave her money to dress properly in front of his friends, he didn’t ask her to do housework, but when he went off to the theater in the morning for rehearsal of the new show, he forgot her existence. Eve’s unfamiliar and idle life revolved entirely around thoughts of him.

For his part, Alain Marais was pleased, indeed more than pleased, with Eve, for there was much she still had to learn before she became as accomplished a mistress as he intended her to be. It would only be then, as so often happened, that he would begin to tire of her.

Vivianne de Biron had been born Jeanne Sans, in a gloomy, lower-middle-class suburb of Nantes. Her superb body had gained her a first audition in a music hall, and although it turned out that she didn’t possess even the ability to keep time to the music of the orchestra, she walked like an empress.

For twenty years she had carried the heavy, elaborately sequined costumes of the showgirl with magnificent dignity and remote allure. She knew that in the world of the music hall she and her fellow showgirls were like a maharajah’s elephants, majestic, useless but indispensable. She prided herself on the fact that within her appointed role she “sold her salad” as well as any other “Walking Girl” and far better than most.

Now, honorably retired for five years, Vivianne de Biron had achieved one of the three possible ambitions of any veteran of the métier. Although she had not become a star
(not that there had been any question of that), nor had she become the wife of some honest man (which certainly wouldn’t have suited her), she had, however, acquired two middle-aged, not overly demanding yet solid protectors, whose advice had enabled her to make excellent placements of their generous gifts.

Her income was more than sufficient for a peaceful, quiet, luxurious life in the center of the only part of Paris in which she ever wanted to live. The music hall, Vivianne’s world for so long, was her chief interest, and she never missed a new performer or a new
revue à spectacle
. Her knowledge of the life was vast since her quick mind had had little else to occupy it during thousands upon thousands of hours backstage. At forty-five she looked forward to the day, perhaps five years in the future, when she could bid farewell to her protectors and be assured of seven good nights’ sleep out of seven. Meanwhile, the young woman who had moved in next door aroused her curiosity. She was so different from any other of Alain Marais’s conquests. She had distinction as well as beauty, a naïve but unmistakable authority, for all her obvious provinciality.

“How do you find Paris, Madame?” she asked Eve as they began their lunch at the Café de la Paix, well placed in the large and sumptuous room with its celadon green
boiseries
and a ceiling painted as if to satisfy the taste of the Marquise de Pompadour.

“It’s the most marvelous place in the world. I love it!” Eve’s eyebrows flew upward with her fervor.

Vivianne inspected her new neighbor shrewdly. Eve was dressed in the very latest style. On each of her cheeks, under the little toque that came down over her hair, there was the spit curl that had just come into fashion, yet all her experience told her that the elegant Madeleine Laforet was as green as a country girl come to sell chickens in a market. If she were a “Madame,” as politeness demanded she be called, she, Vivianne, was the mother of many children. And yet … and yet … there was the matter of the music.

“I have enjoyed your singing, Madame, more than I can say.”

“My singing!”

“You didn’t know that I can hear you in my kitchen?”

“No, I had no idea, none at all.” Eve was flustered. “I thought, in fact I was sure, that I wasn’t disturbing anybody,
that the walls were thick enough—I’m sorry, it must drive you mad. I’m glad you told me,” she apologized, deeply chagrined. To discover that the popular love songs she had picked up here and there, and sung to herself, had been overheard by a stranger who was probably trying to cook her dinner in peace and quiet was so embarrassing that she scarcely knew what to say.

“It’s the way the walls are built in these apartment buildings. You can always hear your neighbors, but allow me to assure you, never has anything I’ve heard given me such pleasure. And I have heard Monsieur Marais too, many a time, just like a private performance.”

“But you never said anything to him?” Eve asked.

“Certainly not. He has to try out new songs. That’s perfectly understandable. And I admire his voice. But you, Madame, I feel safe in saying, are not a professional?”