Judith Krantz

by Till We Meet Again

  The château had once been surrounded by oak forests where game abounded and the seigneurs of Valmont planted vineyards and made wine only for their own pleasure and that of their friends. Now, looking down from the raised terrace of the château, where the family was seated before lunch, on a brilliant day in early July, the sight of great trees was rare in the valley beneath them. Vineyards were planted in a precise, infinitely pleasing patchwork as far as the eye could see. The tenderly rolling hills, on which great richness of ripening champagne grapes lay, created a landscape as rural, as secure and as peaceful as any on earth, yet in the past hundred years, two great wars that changed the history of Europe had been fought over these valuable and too-vulnerable slopes on the eastern frontier of France.

  But war, even the thought of war, was impossible for Paul today. The bitterness with which his marriage to Eve had been greeted by his parents had finally been dissipated. During the previous winter his mother had written to him and apologized for the harsh words with which she had once told him that his marriage had cost him his career. “As the years go by,” she had written, “I have come to understand that without Eve and your children, you could never have been truly happy—no, not even if you had been named Ambassador to the Court of Saint James.”

  Her softening of a long-held position was not due to the legendary but largely nonexistent mellowing effect of age. The passage of time normally makes patrician Frenchwomen more dogmatic and less pliable in their opinions than when they were younger, a condition they share with women of every social class in every country in the world.

  If Guillaume, the elder Lancel son, had ever married and had children, Anette de Lancel might have felt the continuity of the family safe in his hands. She might possibly have continued to nourish her grudge against Eve. But Guillaume was an absolutely determined bachelor, who disliked children as much as he enjoyed the liberty of being wifeless. The Vicomtesse had finally accepted the fact that she would never have grandchildren who weren’t Paul’s children. Although she would always voice her disappointment at the undutiful, selfish and shortsighted conduct of her elder son, she knew that it was high time to make peace with her one, and almost certainly her only, daughter-in-law.

  Now, as she saw her Paul and his family gathered around her, still wearing their traveling clothes, she was deeply glad that she had brought herself to arrange this visit. Guillaume and Jean-Luc were both bending attentively toward Eve, as she told them about the trip. She had slung the scrupulously cut, wide-shouldered, blue piqué jacket of her Adrian summer suit around the back of her cast-iron garden chair, taken off her small, tilted-brim hat and crossed her legs casually under her slim, mid-calf skirt, a picture of animation and ease. Anette de Lancel scrutinized Eve strictly, and recognized that, hard as it was for her to admit it, she was a woman of whom any mother-in-law could be proud. However, it was her granddaughters who inspired her immediate love, particularly Delphine.

  Had there ever been such a lovely fifteen-year-old? she wondered. Delphine was not a peacock beauty, all immediate splash. There was something so delicate and touching about her creamy loveliness that each person who remarked on it felt as if he were making an original observation. Her huge, smoky eyes, of a mysterious gray that glowed like an opalescent mist on a twilight sea, were set almost too far apart under high, arched brows. She had a clearly defined widow’s peak from which her brown hair curled in delicious softness down around her neck, with the gleam of valuable, highly polished wood. Her hands were exquisite, and all her dainty proportions so well made that they looked as if she’d been assembled with enormous care. Her widow’s peak, wide forehead and small chin created the heart-shaped face that echoed those of a few of the noble ladies in the Lancel family portraits, the past châtelaines of Valmont. Delphine was of moderate height and so slender, so breakable looking, that her grandmother felt all her protective instincts aroused as she looked at her. She was that rare girl, the perfect jeune fille, she thought. She could have been brought up in France.

  Marie-Frédérique, or Freddy, as they insisted on calling her, Anette de Lancel told herself, not without a stirring of the mildest disapproval, could never be mistaken for anything but an American. Although how that was possible when both her parents were French she couldn’t fathom. It must be the California air, for no French girl of thirteen and a half would ever be allowed to be so rangy, so vivid, so present in every way. She obviously had inherited her height and the blueness of her eyes from Paul—she must be many centimeters taller than her sister—and the extravagance of her self-possession from her mother. But her hair! All that bright, messy, ungovernable stuff! Beautiful, yes, she couldn’t deny it, but so … so unsuitable, so flamboyant. So red. Of course there had been redheaded Lancels, from generation to generation, but had there ever been one with hair that so dominated the scene? Why didn’t Eve try to tame it? Or, if that proved impossible, why couldn’t Eve at least insist that her younger daughter achieve a more ladylike appearance? Still, Freddy was utterly lovable as she sipped cautiously at her first glass of champagne and looked around her in awe.

  Freddy had known that her father had grown up in a château, but the reality of Valmont dazzled her. She counted the three romantic towers and wondered who lived in them. And what, she speculated, could they do in all the rooms behind the windows? How many fireplaces must there be, to account for so many elaborate brick chimneys? She hadn’t understood before that a château would be a castle, and yet Grandmother insisted that it was only a small château, one of five in Champagne, and that the grandest of them, Montmort, had a moat, a much bigger park, and a spiral staircase so wide that a man on a horse could climb it. What a nifty idea!

  Anette de Lancel glanced at her wristwatch. Only ten minutes until lunch would be announced, and the surprise she had planned hadn’t yet happened. Well, lunch could wait, she thought.

  Five minutes later, as they all relaxed while they watched Guillaume open the second bottle of champagne, a horseman at a gallop suddenly appeared from the wood that lay on the right side of the château, separated from it only by a stretch of well-raked gravel Obviously the horseman had not expected to find anyone on the terrace, for he was looking away from them, toward the stables. When he saw them he threw his head back, and stopped abruptly only a few paces away. Expressionlessly, he loomed above them on an enormous bay horse. There was a moment of such silence that the faint stirring of the wind in the leaves of the vineyard seemed as loud as the slapping of the ocean at the side of a boat. Anette de Lancel’s voice broke the odd, uncertain hush.

  “Get down off that beast and greet the new arrivals, darling. When I promised you a surprise for lunch today, I didn’t exaggerate, did I, Bruno?”

  Quickly, yet moving with the suggestion of invisible armor that prevented his motion from seeming unpremeditated, Bruno, a tall and powerful eighteen, jumped from the horse and walked, with immediate composure, toward the group whose arrival his grandmother had so carefully concealed from him. As he came closer, everyone turned toward him with a different emotion.

  Freddy and Delphine were simply agog with curiosity about the half brother whom they had never seen except in old photographs. Bruno! At last! Paul felt a rush of the bitterest resentment, and yet he couldn’t prevent himself from thinking how magnificent the boy had become. Eve stiffened as if she had been struck in the face; this, then, was the son who had broken Paul’s heart with his obstinate, incomprehensible ways, promising to visit every year, and each summer finding another reason why it wouldn’t work out, until it became painfully evident that he had no intention of ever coming to see his father and his half sisters. Anette de Lancel felt an almost childlike glee in being the instrument of the reunion she had planned, without consultation with anyone except her husband, who had finally been persuaded that it was the right thing to do.

  As for Bruno, whatever emotions he felt were concealed by a perfect and automatic courtesy upon which he could call in every situation, a courtesy th
at, in other days, had not failed gentlemen even as they made their way to the guillotine. He embraced Paul as if he had seen him last week; he kissed Eve’s hand with a correct murmur of “Bonjour, Madame,” and he shook hands with Freddy and Delphine as if they were young ladies of his own age.

  “You might have warned me,” he said softly as he brushed his grandmother’s cheek with his lips.

  “Bruno, darling, I thought it best this way. So much easier for us all,” she said, dismissing his words in a manner so airy yet so certain that even he had nothing left to say.

  Anette de Lancel was well aware that Bruno had resisted the slightest acquaintance with his stepmother and half sisters. After Paul’s shocking second marriage, she and the Marquis and Marquise de Saint-Fraycourt had found themselves of one mind on the subject of Eve Coudert. She was their common enemy. In becoming a member of their families, she had wounded them all deeply, and in a way that their families would have to endure forever. Time would never wipe out the stain of such a misalliance. Since the Saint-Fraycourts were willing to share Bruno fairly frequently with his Lancel grandparents, they had never tried to argue that Bruno be sent to join Paul.

  As the years passed, and Guillaume remained obdurately but incontestably unmarried, Bruno’s importance to them increased. Just as he was the last male with Saint-Fraycourt blood, so he was the last male Lancel of their branch of the family. One day, far in the future, there would be no Vicomte de Lancel at Valmont except Bruno.

  The grandparents often discussed the future, as they sat in their favorite brocaded armchairs before the fire, in the small sitting room they used after dinner. After they were gone, Guillaume and Paul would inherit the château and the vineyards equally. If childless Guillaume died before Paul, Paul would inherit everything. But then, when Paul died, his widow, if she were still alive, and his three children would inherit in equal proportions.

  Their beloved Bruno would never be the sole proprietor of this family land. He would have to share these unique hectares with two diplomatic gypsies, two unknown foreigners who had not had the benefit of growing up in France, two girls who would probably marry other foreigners from dubious places and produce children, all of whom would inherit a portion of the estate until it was split into far too many pieces to retain any of that Lancel identity which was part of the very soil of Champagne.

  As Bruno went to his room to change quickly from his riding clothes, and Eve took Freddy and Delphine to wash their hands before lunch, Anette de Lancel felt her heart lighten. Delphine and Freddy, who had always spoken in French with their parents, had perfect accents, and they had been so eager to meet their grandparents, so affectionate, so instantly beguiled by the Château de Valmont, that it seemed suddenly as if they couldn’t be gypsies after all but true Lancels, back from wandering in the wastelands after many years. Oh yes, she had been so wise to invite them all at the same time. And even wiser not to tell Bruno.

  Impenetrable, Eve thought, as she observed Bruno during lunch, utterly impenetrable, encased in a politeness that was as polished, as massive and as solid as the heavy pieces of family silver arrayed on either side of each plate. It was more plausible to imagine herself able to take up one of the knives between two fingers and lightly bend it backwards until the tip of the blade touched the crest than it was to believe that Bruno would ever smile at her with a true smile instead of just an inclination of the corners of his lips in an upward direction. Without the slightest gesture or word that would have been noticed by anyone else in the family, he had conveyed to her one absolute: she did not exist for him, she had never existed and she could never exist in the future. He didn’t see her even when he seemed to be responding freely to words she had spoken. It was as if, under the lively surface of his brown eyes, there lived a secret blind man, icy and implacable. Was it just that false smile or was she right in not liking his mouth, in finding its deeply curved, almost plump outlines a contradiction in his firmly masculine face?

  Yet what had she ever done to him, Eve asked herself angrily. In the context of her understanding of the standards of the French aristocracy, she could understand—at least try to understand—why it had taken the Lancels so long to accept her, but Bruno was of another generation, of the generation of her children.

  Her own parents had long ago forgiven her for the old scandal. Her brilliant marriage had allowed them to hold their heads up again, and before they had died, both in the space of one year in the late 1920s, they had traveled to Australia and Cape Town to visit for weeks at a time.

  Under the surface of the lunchtime talk, as lively as it always is when winemakers of any land are at table, Eve asked herself if she should try to find a way to communicate with Bruno, or whether it would be wiser to retreat and simply accept his inexplicable enmity.

  Exciting, Delphine thought, as she watched Bruno talk in a grown-up way she had never heard before in an eighteen-year-old boy. None of the older brothers of her school friends carried themselves so erectly, as if the space they occupied was important, not even the ones who tried to act so high and mighty just because they had cars and could drive out to the beach, or to a drive-in movie, or to one of the Curries ice cream parlors for a fifteen-cent hot butterscotch sundae, or a “Mile High” cone. Delphine had laughed at dozens of them and amused herself at their expressions when she refused their invitations, for Eve had decreed that she couldn’t go out on dates until she was sixteen.

  Delphine decided that Bruno looked as if he must be in his twenties. His dark, strong eyebrows were like a yoke under his broad, well-shaped forehead, and his face was dominated by his handsomely arched, masterful nose. It was such a different face from the American faces she was used to, so much more … more … she groped for a word and could only think of civilized. It was, she sensed, without ever having seen a family portrait before today, a face that belonged to a long line of ancestors, a face with a history. Do I have such a face, Delphine wondered. Already, with deep delight, she knew the answer.

  A stranger, Paul said to himself. He found it impossible to recognize Bruno as the too-tall, too-thin, ambitious, eager boy he had met once eight years ago, a child with a high, enthusiastic voice who dreamed great dreams.

  Bruno had grown still taller, but as his muscles developed he had grown into his height, just as his nose, once too highly arched for his face, had grown bigger and more dominant. He looked powerful, even commanding, as he sat talking, in his man’s voice, his stranger’s voice, with a cool and finished ease, teasing his doting grandmother, deferring to his grandfather and uncle Guillaume, being charming to Delphine and Eve and even, it seemed to Paul, to Freddy.

  Surely he must be conscious that he had become the center of attention in spite of the visit of the four Lancels. It was as if they had all come to see him, and he was graciously allowing them to do so. He seemed to feel no embarrassment at meeting his father unexpectedly after so many years. He hadn’t said a word, not even a perfunctory one, about their long separation, about the years of broken promises, and Paul suddenly vowed that he never would ask why it had been like that. Whatever the reason, he didn’t want to know it, because it could only be painful.

  “Tell me, Bruno, when do you do your military service?” Paul asked.

  “This year, Father, right after the summer holidays. I’m going into the cavalry with a lot of my friends. It should be amusing.”

  “Take care you don’t kill those military nags,” Guillaume grunted. “They may not be as strong as my Emperor. He was exhausted when you brought him in today.”

  “I’m sorry, Uncle. Emperor hadn’t been ridden in so long that I knew he needed a really good run, and I felt it would be cruel to restrain him—but you’re absolutely right. It won’t happen again, I assure you. Your stable boys aren’t giving him enough exercise.”

  “I’ll talk to them,” Guillaume said, somewhat placated.

  “The cavalry,” Delphine breathed, impressed as she had never been.

  “And after yo
ur military service, my boy,” the Vicomte de Lancel asked, “have you made up your mind yet?”

  “Not really, Grandfather. I’m still busy considering many things.”

  “You mean you’ve dropped ‘Sciences Po’?” Paul asked sharply. “What happened to your plan to lead your country?”

  “Just take a look, Father. Paul-Boncour’s socialist cabinet lasted all of five weeks. The new Daladier government is filled with lamentable fools. Between his radicals like Herriot, weaklings like Laval, and the others, that bunch of liberals and labor leaders, we have a growing deficit and hundreds of thousands of men unemployed. Meanwhile, Daladier can think of nothing better to do than to try to raise the income tax. No, thank you, as an idealist, I prefer to keep clear of that mess.”

  “If you are so sure they are wrong, what would you propose in their place? It’s easy to criticize, particularly as an idealist,” said Paul, furious at the lofty tone in which Bruno dismissed the ambition that he had once convinced Paul was all-important to his future.

  “A strong man, one strong man, instead of twenty-three cretins.”

  “As simple as that, eh? Where do you think this strong man is going to appear from, Bruno? And how is he going to achieve power?”

  “We don’t have to look far, Father. Hitler has done just that in Germany since January of this year, when he became chancellor.”

  “Hitler! You approve of that … that … unspeakable criminal?”

  “Shall we say that I don’t think of him in such simple terms? Of course I don’t like him—what Frenchman could?—but I think we must grant that he is a political genius. He’s taken over a country in a matter of months and made it stick. He’s outlawed the Communist Party, he’s putting the Jews in their place. His methods are strong and positive and he lets nothing stand in his way.”

  “Are you proposing that France needs a Hitler of her own?” Paul roared, half rising from his seat.