Judith Krantz

by Till We Meet Again

  “I thought you wanted to go for a drive,” Tony said. “We haven’t been on the road for fifteen minutes.”

  “Do you like this house?” she asked.

  “Actually, yes. This is probably the only kind of house that looks absolutely right in California. I’ve always said that, as well you know.”

  “We need a new house, don’t we?”

  “I certainly can’t disagree about that.”

  “Something like, as an example, this one?” she asked eagerly.

  “I assume that means that you’ve already bought it?” Tony glanced at Freddy’s face. Her eyes were downcast to hide her expression, but from her heightened color and the carefully neutral look on her always mobile, readable face, he knew the answer. “It looks very pretty indeed, and in good condition, I imagine,” he continued, without waiting for her reply. “Shipshape from top to toe. All systems working, checked out and ready to be lived in.”

  “You’re not surprised.” Freddy felt flat with extinguished excitement. Every day, while the contractor and the landscape people had been working on the house, she’d managed to sneak away from the office and drop in and oversee their progress, bullying and cajoling, threatening and vamping shamelessly, until it had all been done exactly to her specifications and in less time than anyone would have anticipated. She’d been on the phone to her decorator a half-dozen times a day, and had met with her to make final choices every week, without anyone at Eagles knowing what she was doing. She’d been filled to the brim with her wonderful secret.

  “Well, in point of fact, how could I be?” Tony answered. “Now that we’re filthy rich, a new house was only a matter of time. You do like to get things done, don’t you, Freddy?” He spoke with a gentleness of tone that touched her as uneasily as would an unfamiliar chord in a well-known tune. It wasn’t a gentleness she’d ever heard before from this essentially gentle man. There was something new about it, something forced, as if gentleness were covering up another feeling she couldn’t identify.

  “Even if you’re not surprised,” she said, hiding her childish disappointment at the way he was taking her achievement for granted, “aren’t you dying to see what it looks like inside?”

  “I’m certain it’s perfectly charming. And I know I’m going to get the grand tour, so push on,” Tony said, getting out of the car and starting toward the front door.

  In all the times Freddy had played this scene in her head, trying to picture Tony’s response to the new house, imagining his delight at the new vision of daily life that it offered, the new possibilities it opened up to them, she had never thought of such a low-key, almost resigned reaction, as if he were being offered a dish that he had to eat out of politeness, even though he wasn’t hungry. Maybe he had a hangover, she thought as she followed him, digging in her purse for the key to the front door. Maybe he was being as nice as he could be with a terrible headache and a dry mouth. It was impossible to tell with Tony. He held his liquor far too well. His drinking was deceptive. Sometimes it was only after he passed out that she realized how drunk he’d been.

  Freddy led Tony through all the main rooms of the house. There were palms and flowering plants in baskets everywhere; the floors were covered in large squares of Mexican terra-cotta on which soft-toned rugs had been placed; the furniture, beautifully made but uncomplicated in design, was an illustration of the deepest meaning of the word comfort, and the fabrics were mellow linens and cottons, hand-printed in unfussy patterns. There were so many windows that in each room, people could spend hours of tranquility watching the light change. It was, deliberately, a house without grandeur, in spite of the generous scale of the rooms and the high-beamed ceilings; just as deliberately as it was a house in which a man would feel as much at home as a woman.

  As they went from one room to another, Tony paused in each doorway and murmured, “Charming, really charming,” until she wanted to punch him. He sounded like a well-bred visitor, not like a man seeing his own house for the first time. He hadn’t peered into a closet or opened a single drawer or demonstrated as much curiosity about any single detail as a person entering a new hotel room might show the bellman. “Charming.” But she hadn’t bought the house and fixed it up to charm him. She’d done it to make him happy. Or, at the very least, happier.

  “Where’s the bar?” Tony asked as they sat down at last in the living room, where six arched, floor-to-ceiling doors opened out on three sides to the beckoning gardens.

  “Over there,” Freddy said, pointing out a long, hospitable-looking table on which were placed crystal glasses of every shape and kind, a gay array of bottles, club soda, ginger ale, jars of nuts and olives, and a silver bowl of lemons.

  “What does one do about ice?” Tony asked, pouring himself a whiskey.

  “One brings in an ice bucket from the kitchen,” Freddy answered, forcing a smile. It was the first question he’d asked. “But you don’t use ice, do you, darling, so we’ll only have to do that when we have guests,” she added, feeling like a saleswoman pushing a product on a reluctant buyer.

  Tony drank his whiskey in one gulp and poured another. “Do you fancy a wee dram?” he asked.

  “Please. Same as yours.”

  “Cheers,” she said, as he handed her her glass and sat down on the other side of the coffee table. Never, she thought, had she spoken that word in such a curious atmosphere. It was so … tentative … yet he knew the house was definitively theirs, even if he lacked the enthusiasm she’d been so sure he’d feel.

  He hoisted his glass a few inches, in a vaguely sketched salute, but he didn’t say anything before he drank half of it.

  A silence fell. Freddy inspected the contents of her heavy crystal tumbler as if there might be informative tea leaves lurking at the bottom. Nervously she finished her drink. He must be getting the feel of the house, she told herself, just letting it seep into his pores. Perhaps he’d actually been far more surprised than he’d seemed, and didn’t quite know what to say.

  “You don’t think it’s too big, do you, Tony?” Freddy asked, breaking the silence. “Because when we have more children and when we entertain and have houseguests and later, when the kids bring their friends home, it won’t seem nearly as big as it does with just the two of us sitting here.”

  “So you have all that planned already, do you? You’re a bloody wonder, you are, Freddy. I should never underestimate you. I know you can’t have conceived a child, but you may well have sent out invitations to a house-warming by now, isn’t that so?”

  Freddy felt herself bristle. What was wrong with him? Why this disapproval? What was he blaming her for?

  “Of course I haven’t sent out invitations,” she said as lightly as she could, ignoring his tone. “The house was only finished yesterday. The paint’s barely dry. Anyway, what’s wrong with my dreaming about the future? How about another drink?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “What?” she said, startled.

  “I have to be sober for this,” Tony said, and Freddy’s blood froze. Now his voice had a truly chilling edge, as if he were restraining himself from anger.

  “Sober?” she asked.

  “Sober, stone cold sober. Frequently I am not, as you may have noticed. I hoped I could do this drunk, but as it turns out, Dutch courage never works for me. Particularly not for this.”

  “ ‘This’? Don’t you like the house? Are you trying to tell me that you don’t want to live in it?”

  “It’s a very nice house. It also happens to be exactly the sort of thing you do that I cannot endure. Here’s a house for you, Tony, all ready to move into. Here’s a future for you, Tony, parties, houseguests, a big family, oh, but you’re going to have such fun. Here’s a business for you, Tony, you can call yourself a vice-president, here are millions of dollars, Tony, here’s your whole cocked-up life, Tony, on a silver platter! Freddy will give it to you!” He took his glass and threw it straight against the stone of the fireplace. “Sweet Jesus, Freddy, your dreams are to
morrow’s facts! When you want something, nothing stands in your way until you get it. On your own. I’m incidental, I’m your fucking consort! We’re wrong together, Freddy. That’s what I’ve had to tell you for a long, long time. I had to stay sober to spit up that bare fact. We’re dead wrong. I want to get out of this marriage. I want a divorce. I cannot be married to you anymore.”

  The brutality in Tony’s voice stunned her as much as his words. He sounded as agonized and as determined as an animal that was biting off its own paw to free itself from a trap.

  “You’re crazy! You are drunk! I don’t care if you say you’re not. You’ve probably been drinking since you woke up, you bastard!” Freddy listened to herself from some distant place, even as she jumped up and screamed at him. “If you could hear yourself you’d be so ashamed.”

  “I am ashamed. I’ve been ashamed for years. I’m almost used to it—but not quite, thank God. Look, Freddy, just listen to me, hear me out. It doesn’t matter if you think I’m drunk or sober. That’s not the issue. The fact is that you took over our lives from the minute we moved here, five years ago. Damn soon, you became the whole show. You were invincible, unbeatable. And I hadn’t a clue. If it hadn’t been for you, we’d have been bust and back in England in a few months. You made Eagles work. Jock and I couldn’t have done it without you. You needed Swede, but nobody needed me. I haven’t contributed a damn thing except to fly cargo—any pilot could have done that. I’ve been excess baggage right from the beginning, and you—”

  “Tony, stop! How can you be so horribly unfair? I couldn’t possibly have lasted all these years without you, I’d never have had the guts, I couldn’t have hung in there when it was so tough—”

  “Bullshit. You could and you would. You would never have given up, you’d have found a way. I kept selling myself that same face-saving lie, I told myself that you needed me. That Annie needed me. It was the only way I could keep from facing up to the truth … that and the booze. Now that we’re a big success, there’s no excuse left, no way to keep on kidding myself. The big struggle’s over. But don’t try to make me believe that you’re ever going to stop running the show. That’s not the way you’re made. I can’t compete and I won’t live this way. It’s killing me, Freddy. I have no self-respect left. Do you realize what that means?”

  “Tony, look, I’ll go back to England with you, I’ll stop working, we can go back to the way it was before, only now we’ll have money—remember, coming home was only an experiment, nobody ever said that it was forever.” Freddy spoke as collectedly as she could. He couldn’t mean all the things he was saying. If she stayed calm, if she didn’t get upset, if she reasoned with him …

  “Poor little Freddy. You really believe you can fix everything, don’t you? Even change your basic character? Do you honestly think you could ever again play the part of the lady of the manor? You were so utterly miserable then—though you were such a damn good sport about it when we didn’t have any options that I didn’t guess what it was doing to you. But now—it would be a ridiculous charade, like a great racehorse at the peak of its form, pretending to prefer to pull a cart along a country lane. Didn’t you hear what you just said—‘coming home was only an experiment’—home is right here in California for you, just as home is Longbridge Grange for me. I miss it dreadfully, Freddy. Rain and all. We—you and I—are not to blame. Neither one of us has the stuff to be a happy expatriate. You’re too American, I’m too British. It was never meant to work. If we hadn’t moved to California, you wouldn’t have been able to keep on living in England without stamping out all the things in you that made you … the girl I used to love.”

  “But—but—what went wrong?” Freddy asked. Tony was sober, she realized in anguish, and even in her great pain she couldn’t deny that her country gentlewoman years had felt like a bad joke. There had to be words to explain this, words that would take them back to the beginning and let them start over, words to stop this nightmare, to change it, to make it not be true. “Tell me—please, oh please, tell me, Tony.”

  “When we got married we only knew a part of each other,” Tony said “Don’t you remember how all we ever talked about, when we weren’t making love, was flying and fighting? We were in the same game, you and I, we had the same passions. I loved that fighter in you, but how could I have guessed that when the war was over you’d still be dashing off to do battle? To run the world? I never understood what kind of woman you really were, until we started Eagles. I admire you, Freddy, I always have, but you’re not a woman I want for my wife. We have nothing truly in common except Annie and the old glory days. It’s not enough. I’m sorry, but it just is not enough.”

  Freddy looked at him hard. Tony looked ten years younger than he had when they’d walked into the house, and the look of relief on his face was too obvious for her to doubt the truth of his words.

  “You have a girl, don’t you, Tony?” she said with sudden certainty.

  “Yes. I rather thought that would be understood. What could you have imagined when I didn’t touch you all this long while?”

  “I don’t know. Not that. Who is she?”

  “Just a woman. Quiet, pliant, pleasant, relaxing, the kind of woman you’d suppose I’d have.”

  “Do you want to marry her?”

  “Good God, no. I don’t want to marry anybody. I just want out, Freddy. Out. I want to go home.”

  Delphine read Freddy’s letter and handed it across the breakfast table to Armand. He scanned it quickly, then more intently, and finally studied it at length while Delphine watched his face. As soon as he put it down, she pounced. “Are you surprised?”

  “I’m stunned. Who would have expected a divorce? Eight years of marriage without any terrible trouble, at least none we’ve known about, and then this, out of nowhere—it’s over, finished, and she says it’s nobody’s fault? When two decent human beings stay married for eight years, when they have a child together, a life together, how can they possibly get divorced without reasons, without fault? Is this some bright new American idea?”

  “No, that’s Freddy’s shorthand for letting us know that she’s never going to talk about it in the future and doesn’t want to be asked questions. It’s her pride, poor baby. She’s infernally proud about exposing her emotions. She has no vanity, I don’t mean that, it’s something different—a sense of privacy that’s almost—savage. You remember the first time they visited us, when they were still living in England? She never even hinted to me how unhappy she was, in fact she tried to persuade me that her life was a dream of bliss, but if she couldn’t tell her own sister she was having trouble, who could she tell? She’s never learned how to let people help her. She’s stiff-necked and stubborn.”

  “And are you so different, babe?”

  “No, I’m a tough customer too—except with you,” Delphine answered slowly. At thirty-two she still had three years to go before her vast French public would consider her to have arrived at a really intriguing age, and she was enjoying every second of her youth. “That’s why I understand Freddy. You got my number the minute we met. I’ve never been able to hide anything from you for a second. I may even stop trying someday. Tony never had Freddy’s number, didn’t you sense that?”

  “My newly ex-brother-in-law was always a mystery to me … there’s something about being the heir to fifteen generations of British aristocracy that I’ll never comprehend, vast as is my knowledge of human nature. That’s one of the reasons I haven’t tried to direct a film about Anglo-Saxons at play or in love—I don’t understand their games as well as they do.”

  “I don’t know why, but this makes me think of that love affair Freddy had when she was a kid.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Last summer, when we were at Valmont with the children, Mother and I were having a heart-to-heart talk, and she told me that when Freddy was sixteen she fell madly in love with her flying instructor and actually left home and lived with him for years. Nobody guessed, bu
t Mother happened to see them together and she knew. She said it was a grand passion, the real thing, for both of them … but, after the war, when she asked Freddy what had become of him, Freddy only said that they hadn’t been in touch for years, and changed the subject. I’d never have believed it, if Mother hadn’t been so certain.”

  “So that’s what mothers and daughters talk about when they’re alone together.”

  “Naturally. When we’re not complaining about our husbands. You still have a lot to learn about women, Sadowski. Stick around. Little innocent, tomboy Freddy, living in sin with a man in his forties … and I thought I was the red-hot scandal of the family. Well, it’s obvious to me what happened. She got tired of Tony and all that British restraint. Fed up to here. She finally faced up to it and ditched him. I’ll bet anything that Freddy has another man waiting in the wings, and we’ll hear about him when she’s good and ready to tell us. That’s the subtext of this letter. Still, I feel sorry for her … those eight years weren’t easy. I feel sorry for Annie. I particularly feel sorry for Tony, poor guy. It’s bad enough to go through a divorce without feeling as if you’ve been rejected. It’s a kick in the teeth.”

  At Valmont the mail didn’t arrive until noon. Eve put Freddy’s letter aside to read at her leisure, for she was too busy arranging a lunch for a group of buyers to give it close attention. She circled the long oval dining room table, its wood gleaming, heavy lace-encrusted mats before each chair, as she set out place cards, a task she never entrusted to anyone else. Here she put the wine buyer for a growing chain of British hotels; there, Eve decided, was the place for the buyer from the Waldorf Astoria in New York and his wife; and right here, at her right, in the place of honor, she put the wine buyer for the Ritz in Paris. His wife would sit on Paul’s left. As for the couple from dear little Belgium, where more champagne per capita was drunk than in any country in the world, he would sit on her left and his wife on Paul’s right, next to the chef de cave, who always joined them. Thank God, Eve reflected, she’d been a diplomat’s wife for so many years that these delicate decisions could be made almost automatically, for her week included at least four such lunches and almost as many dinner parties.