The Eleventh Year (24 page)

“But you don't love her.”

He sighed. “I
love
her. I'm not
in love
with her. I wish I could be. Jamie is the most intelligent woman I know. But it's not quite right. Why should I lie to her?”

“And you didn't love Martine?” In spite of herself, Lesley leaned forward, sipping her sherry, interested.

“I was fascinated by her. She was—a bit like my mother. A woman who had tantalized the most important men of an entire epoch. They say”—he looked away, and she saw the discomfort on his face— “that my mother had an affair with Edward the Seventh, when he was Prince of Wales. I wouldn't doubt it. Martine was kept by men of letters, men of the arts. She was clever and attractive. She had that special something that draws men much more than sheer, unflawed beauty. Martine wasn't at all a classic beauty. When I met her she was a sophisticated woman, and I, a young man with no experience, with no special talents. That she even noticed me was like a gift. That she loved me was like a miracle. Can you understand, even a little?”

She had never heard such a stream of words from Paul, and they sounded true. She nodded. “Yes. Why is it so difficult for you Varennes to love?”

“Alex and I were reared by a stupid father who thought only of his gambling and by an extremely clever mother who thought only of herself.”

“But Alex loved Yvonne de Larmont.”

“He wanted comfort from her. Mama made life extremely difficult for him. More so for him than for me. She never even liked, let alone loved him. She doesn't love me either, but she thinks she understands me.”

How impossible this was to relate to! Priscilla, for all her neat British primness, was still a loving mother. And Ned. Lesley was homesick for Ned, right this minute, as never before.

“Why don't you marry Jamie?” Lesley asked, miserably twisting a piece of material from the sofa over and over in her hands. “If it's so rare to encounter perfect love, why not grab it when it comes?”

“Because it's not mutual. Have you ever encountered perfect love?”

His brown eyes bore into her with an insistence that she sought to avoid, that probed too deeply. She looked down.

“Well?”

“I don't know. Once, before Alex, I loved a man. But it was wrong, anyway. When love is right, no one lets it go. You pursue it to the end.”

“You're a romantic, Lesley.”

“Maybe. And you're a cynic.”

They were silent, each drinking from the tall silver goblets. Lesley stood up, took Paul's glass, refilled it. As an afterthought she also filled her own. “We should go to dinner,” he suggested.

She shook her head. “I'm too tired. And look at you—”

“Yes. Well. I thought Alex might be here, that we might try to work this ridiculous situation out—”

“He must have gone home. When are you going to move to Jamie's?”

“Tomorrow.”

The sherry was warming her, dispelling some of the forlorn gloom. She thought that perhaps Alex's brother wasn't so bad. She had been creating drama in making him out to be so black. He was only a man, with his own wounds, inside and out. “Don't marry Alex,” he suddenly said. “Don't get married to please other people.”

“But I'm not! I love Alex deeply—totally.”

“Then why the hesitation?”

She watched her own reflection in the amber liquid in the glass. “That's your imagination, Paul.”

“Alex never got over the war and never got over Yvonne. This is not a man to marry. He has too much of a past, too many hurts.”

“I have my own hurts. He's accepted me with them.”

“But you are, shall we say, a normal human being. Alex was never normal. Our mother never allowed him to be. Would a normal man have tried to kill his own brother? You should have seen his face, Lesley. He
wanted
to kill me.”

Lesley could feel the slight tremor beginning inside her. He saw it, watched the glass unsteady in her hand, and came over beside her. Gently, he placed an arm around her shoulders. She stiffened. He said: “Lesley. Be careful.”

She looked into his face, read a strange concern, and was even more frightened. Where was Alex, now that she truly needed him? Reassurance was what she needed, his reassuring gray eyes, his love, his hands on her back, his body close to hers.

Paul bent down over her chair, and she could see the bandage and was transfixed. Everything was happening too fast around her. She didn't want Priscilla to come to meet Charlotte, didn't want Ned to sign papers with Alex—didn't want to be handed from one man to another as a piece of chattel worth so many thousands of dollars. A surge of rebellion surfaced, and she straightened up, spilling a bit of sherry on her skirt. Deftly, to help her, Paul took the goblet from her hand and put it safely down on the side table. She opened her mouth to thank him, but he placed a finger over her lips and shook his bandaged head. She stared at him, mesmerized.

Slowly he took her face in both his hands, brought his lips to hers, probed them softly. She tried to draw away but he refused to let her, parting her lips with his tongue. She blinked, wanting to fight back but suddenly dizzy, from the sherry and the depression and the total surprise. Had it really been such a surprise? She tried to shake herself free, but he was pushing her down on the sofa, and she was not really resisting enough, and as he unfastened her blouse she found herself crying, the tears blinding her, mingled with his kisses. How could one fight back when the world was falling apart in little bits and pieces, all around her like broken glass from a shattered bottle
of vin ordinaire?

Suddenly vivid images of herself on the operating table, not fighting back, letting the woman cut away into the insides where the child had already been formed, flashed into her dazed mind. Her blouse was already opened, Paul's hands trying to find her nipples. She cried out and pushed, her elbows flailing out at his torso, and he backed off, his lips parting. “Get out of here!” she screamed. “Get out of my life!” She brought her hands over her half-exposed breasts and covered them, her heart thumping wildly.

Paul had enough good grace to make a quick exit, and she didn't even hear the door close on his retreating back.

She wanted to be sick, at her own ineptitude, at her disloyal doubts about Alex, for poor Jamie, tying her life to this dreadful person. Maybe it was her own fault. She had slept with one man, a crook, and then had had his baby ripped out of her own body; now she was afraid ever again to conceive a child. Was it Alex himself that made her afraid of marriage, or her own wish to blot forever the memory of what she had done in Yorkshire and later, in Poughkeepsie? But these actions had had nothing to do with Alex, only with herself. Could Paul have suspected something about her past, or had he merely tried to avenge himself on his brother for trying to kill him?

Lesley Richardson stumbled blindly to the bedroom and fell upon the bed. For the first time in her life, she wanted to die.

When the telephone rang she had no idea what time it was. She reached for the receiver, and when she heard Alex's voice, she burst into hysterical sobs. He had wanted her comfort. He was still shaking from having tried to kill his brother Paul. She could hear his words and could only sob. When he asked her what on earth was wrong, she considered, for one wild moment, admitting the truth, ugly as it actually was. She could not speak. At length she burst out: “Oh, Alex, I love you so much! I want us to be married
now,
and I never want to be apart from you again—”

“Yes, my darling, yes, of course,” he answered soothingly, not understanding at all. He would have to protect her more, to make certain that, at all times, there was safety around her.

She blotted everything out with sleep, the heavy sleep of the drugged, and when she awakened the next morning she had resolutely made up her mind to forget what had happened. If she did, if she steered clear of Paul—

And yet, agonizing, sitting by her vanity, she knew that he would never let her forget.

Paul, watching the pigeons from an open air café, drank his morning
express,
thick and brown, and pursed his lips. He nodded, smiled to himself, and went to the nearest florist. Twelve red roses, or only one? Pensively, he considered the dark-red buds, like proffered breasts. Then he said to the attendant: “Thirteen. To the Ritz, Suite 213. With this message: ‘For the one I owed you yesterday, when I imposed on you: and the dozen that represent my thanks for your tact.' No signature is necessary.”

He checked his watch and paid quickly. He was late for Jamie, who would be waiting for him at the museum of the Jeu de Paume.

O
n the last
day of November 1919, one year after the signature of the armistice and eleven months after Lesley's arrival in Paris, she was married to the Marquis Alexandre Jacques Edmond de Varenne, Deputy to the newly formed Lower Chamber of the French Parliament. She wore a white gown of silk and pearls confectioned by Worth and diamond earrings that had been her grandmother's when she had been wed to the Earl of Brighton at Westminster Abbey fifty years before. At the reception at the Ritz, the mixture of guests who drank to the health of the new Marquise came from both shores of the Atlantic and from across the English Channel. Many were hybrids such as Lesley herself: Wineretta Singer, the sewing machine heiress who had married the Prince de Polignac; Marie-Laure de Noailles, another American wed to the
ne plus ultra
of French nobility; and members of the British peerage who hovered near the Moët et Chandon, their lorgnettes held out to observe nubile young French debutantes in their newest outfits by Chanel and Poiret.

The bridegroom in his morning coat, his fine hair parted in the center, his gray eyes shining in a face rendered pale by the physical strain of the religious ceremony and its aftermath at the Ritz, remained the single constant among changing groups of men discussing politics. He had been approached earlier that year to run as deputy from Eure-et-Loir, where Beauce spread its plains, and had allowed himself to be talked into this by some of his clients, conservative financiers who saw in him a brilliant young exemplar of postwar France. He would protect them from the income tax; he would protect them from labor riots such as the one that had occurred on May Day, with open fighting in the streets of the capital; he would shut the gates of Paris to an invasion of Bolsheviks, the red menace of Europe. He had run, and, being a veteran, a wounded one at that, he had run with an advantage. He possessed the muted good looks of the old established families of France and a name that made the old guard remember his grandfather, Adrien, and forget his ill-fated father. “De Varenne” rang of the Crusades, of patriotism, of well-balanced budgets and filled coffers. And one was willing to forgive current family debts, because to boot, this clear-headed young man had allied himself to old British peerage and new American dollars in a single stroke. Lesley Anne was a credit to him, petite and lovely on his arm, dressed in the finest clothes and the most exquisite jewelry. The Americans had come to the aid of the French at the last possible moment. But nevertheless, the Treaty of Versailles might never have been signed if they had not sent over their armed forces. And the American girls, with their short hair and slinky figures, represented everything new and daring, a new era of jazz bands and Negro blues, of new, crisp fortunes that could be spent on the French shores and on the debt-ridden French nobility. Lesley would be the ideal partner for the new deputy. She had been told so many times, had seen serious bankers kiss her hand when they brought it to their pallid lips, had seen the glint of approval in the eyes of Hélène Berthelot, wife of Philippe, who ran the Quai d'Orsay from whence emerged all decisions relating to foreign affairs. For while Philippe ran the Quai, Hélène ran the social and intellectual side of Paris, and to be accepted, a newcomer had to have passed the test at her salon.

Alexandre, while he had often toyed with the notion since his university days, had not considered politics before the war with any seriousness. He enjoyed the quietude of legal study more than he did his court appearances. He was a sober, contained man. But with Lesley he felt different, renewed. She was filled with optimism about the new turn in his career, convincing him of the need for better men to reach public office. His clients used a different approach: guilt. The Bolsheviks might take over Europe. Germany might not pay back its debts, and to sit back and allow these things to happen would be an act of cowardice on his part. He knew now that he was not a coward. The war had proved this to him. Now when he looked at Lesley he was not afraid. He could become a true winner in the chess game of life.

But of course he would not follow the outdated Varenne family tradition of royalism. He believed in the Church and saw with pleasure that France was returning to a less anticlerical attitude than before the war. He believed in principles. It was not that he was a fanatic, but he had been steeped in catechism since his earliest days, and there were parts of Catholicism that still seemed important to him. He could ignore the simplistic sermons of priests less intelligent than he, but he went to Mass because the transmigration of the Host touched him and communion made him feel cleansed. He thought that institutions such as the Church were needed in society, that people of all types functioned more effectively within the security of systems and rules. He himself needed them. Lesley's mysticism amused him, but to please him she went to Mass and sat quietly beside him, her triangular face attentive. She so wanted to please him that it moved him. He had thought of joining the Catholic Right, but part of him found this too extreme, and he was a cautious man, a realist, he thought. So instead he had become a member of the moderate Right, the Fédération républicaine. His party had eventually formed a merger with the Catholics and then united with the centrists of the Alliance démocratique to create the immense Bloc National, a front of unbeatable conservatives. At that point Alexandre had felt certain that he'd made the correct political decision.

He would sit in his study and wonder, sometimes, about the structure of French politics. There had been many governments since the inception of the Third Republic in 1870. He had spoken to his father-in-law for hours about the American system of elections. When a senator was elected, his term was definite—six years—and no one could oust him except in the rarest cases of extreme misconduct; a President stayed in office four years and chose the cabinet that he wanted. No war, no inflation impeded this system from functioning. Checks and balances existed, but they were all more or less predictable: When there was a Democratic President and a Republican Congress, vetoes and overriding might occur. But no one lost his seat because of this, as one could and did in France.

He, Alexandre, had, like his colleagues, just been elected for a term of five years. The President of the Republic was more a figurehead than the true power of the nation. The Premier, who founded a cabinet, was the crucial person in government. During the war the nation had turned to Georges Clemenceau, “the Tiger,” who had started his political life on the extreme Left and had moved to the Right. They had called him
Père la Victoire,
Father Victory, because he had made winning the war the passion of his life, going into the trenches to encourage the pettiest soldier to vanquish the Hun, kill the
Boche.
He had been a great statesman, but he had become Premier too late, in 1917, at the age of seventy-six. Some, such as the socialist Leon Blum, claimed that he had grown senile. He had never been popular. The big question now was: When the presidency opened up in January of 1920, would the Tiger be elected? Alexandre was hoping for a less controversial, more moderate candidate to win. For France was in desperate need of stability.

He looked across the great reception room filled with wedding guests, where crystal and old silver gleamed and rainbow lights bounced off tiaras perched on famous heads; he was searching for his bride. Billowing in tulles and Brussels lace, Lesley— “Lezlay,” as his French cohorts called her—was seated in an alcove with her father, sharing a private moment with him. Alex liked Ned Richardson. He knew that Lesley's feelings for her father were a mixture of adoration and genuine friendship. They were the two originals in the family. A vague

stir of uneasiness passed over him, however. Lesley had rebelled against her parents, had expressed to him various times her fear of being engulfed by the power that their wealth and position represented in New York. Now, because of the election and her dowry, they would be in a similar position in Paris. There would be a role for her to play as his wife. He'd fallen in love with her intensity, with her creative spirit—yet at the same time sometimes this spirit took odd forms of expression. For example, she would not even broach the subject of children. She wanted, she said, to be her own woman. He sipped his champagne and smiled at the Marquise Casati with her kohl-rimmed eyes, pretending to listen to her conversation about the Russian Ballet, but he was perturbed. He didn't want to squelch his wife. So Lesley would have to be given room to breathe. But the question was, How much room? And would she still be able to stand by his side, seconding him as Hélène so cleverly seconded Philippe Berthelot?

She may not realize it, he thought, but I need her. I need the strength of her support. All these years, alone, no one gave me reinforcement. And in this new game of politics, I shall need to know that at all times she is with me.

“Lesley,” Ned was saying, caressing his daughter's hand, “things will be different for you, married to a member of the Chambre Bleu-Horizon. You know this, don't you, sweetheart? The suffragette in you will have to be tamped down.”

She looked down at his large, well-formed fingers and felt the nausea of too much champagne suddenly float over her. But she replied: “I know. The French are a scared nation today. I don't agree with many of Alex's ideas about government—but this is his country, not mine. I'll try not to get in his way. If I disagree, I'll have to learn to speak for myself, so no one will think I'm his figurehead.”

Her father looked doubtful. “Alex is…needy. At least, in the beginning, politicians are in the most delicate position. They are exactly like advertising men, forever dependent on the good graces of their clients. Only with a deputy, it is on the good graces of his constituency.” He motioned with his chin at the entire room, and she saw the lawyers and the bankers and the cabinet members to whom he was referring. She was frightened, goosebumps rising beneath the silk of her sleeves— frightened at the anonymity of those faces, of their implacable conservatism that brooked no discussion.

But Alex wasn't that way. He believed in good common sense, and he would do what was right for his country. He would not follow as a sheep but lead as a shepherd. She hoped he would, and gazed through the champagne bubbles at the laughing figure of the scarlet-clad Marquise Casati, engaged in animated talk with Alex in the center of the room. Did this bright flamboyant woman who loved the arts as much as Lesley communicate with Alex on a common ground? Lesley's own world of interests lay closer to that of the Marquise than to her new husband's. During their months of courtship, not much had been discussed concerning her desire to break through as an artist. It was my fault, she thought. I didn't press the point, because of my own insecurities. If I had, he would have understood. She gazed up at Ned and smiled, to reassure him.

“Not so serious, my darling,” Ned said to her. “This is your wedding day. And you are the most beautiful bride since your mother.”

She smiled, her eyes filling with tears. He was a good, strong man. He was her father. She looked again at Jamie, in her vaporous blue gown of crêpe de chine, and at the brown-haired young man approaching her, in his morning suit, identical to Alex's. But this was where the similarity stopped between her husband and Paul. A shiver of revulsion passed through her. How could Jamie love this man? He had stood up for his brother at the wedding, and she had wondered, after all he had done in Beauce, how Alexandre could have allowed him to act as best man. For form. For the family. I
hate
Paul, Lesley thought, amazed at the strength of her disgust. But
no one
knew what Paul had done to her, and no one ever would. She turned away and stood up. The
chef d'orchestre
had signaled to her. “Come,” she murmured. “Mustn't we open the dance?”

Ned laughed. “No. I believe it's up to you and Alexandre.”

He watched her leave his side and reappear at Alexandre's elbow, linking her arm through his. Ned Richardson saw the small, upturned face and Alex's own face bending down. There was trust in those two pairs of eyes, linked, gentle, wanting. The orchestra was preparing itself, and he scanned the room for Priscilla. She was speaking to a striking woman in purple velvet, her black hair streaming down her back, alexandrites hanging from her ears. She had come with someone infamous—Prince Felix Yussupov, who had murdered the decadent, all-powerful monk Rasputin and been exiled from Russia by the tsar?—and Lesley had told him that she earned her living as a painter's model and had acquired somewhat of a scandalous reputation. She looked Slavic, like her escort.

Suddenly the music started, his daughter was swept onto the dance floor by her elegant husband, and he saw Priscilla sailing toward him, cool and proud. In the moments it took for his wife to reach him, he saw the Chevalier de la Paume, who had escorted Alex's mother, draw the old Marquise into his arms gallantly. He was a fine man, thought Ned. But Alex didn't like him. Alex didn't like his own mother either—an opportunistic, cold woman.

Priscilla glided into his arms, and he began to dance. Other couples were joining them. Lesley's face still mirrored the joy of being with her husband, her green eyes incandescent, screening out everyone but Alex. Ned felt a tightening in his chest, and Priscilla whispered: “It's for the best, darling. She's happy again.”

“Again?”
Lady Priscilla's light-blue eyes remained upon him. She said insistently: “You must let her grow up, Ned.” There was something else that she was trying not to tell him. Something had happened that Priscilla knew, or thought she knew, something she had never shared with him. Were men supposed to stay out of their daughters' problems? Did mothers think that only they could decipher what lay behind a woman-child's private life? He looked at his wife, but she held his stare, unblinking. Lesley and she had never been close—yet Priscilla knew something he didn't. Then she squeezed his hand. “They're very happy,” she stated.