House of Peine Read online

  “You can learn to twist stupid bottles, you can learn to file,” Mathilde said impatiently.

  “She still hasn’t learned to twist the bottles,” Clementine argued, meaning that she needed more time to teach her, but Mathilde pounced on this logical flaw straight away.

  “Well, if she hasn’t picked it up by now she’s hardly going to. Come on you,” she said to Sophie, pulling out her chair, but Sophie clung to the table, white knuckles shining, like a toddler being sent to bed for not eating her dinner.

  “I don’t want to,” she cried, “I want to riddle with Clementine.”

  “Oh, don’t be such a sap,” Mathilde snapped. “It’s only filing for Christ’s sake. It’s as easy as ABC.” She saw the terror then in Sophie’s eyes and her clever mind clicked instantly, an incredulous laugh flying straight out of her.

  “I don’t believe it,” she said, letting Sophie go. “I’ve read about people like you but I never thought I would have one in the family.” She ignored the tug in her smooth flat stomach at that thought, felt a further hardening in the calloused muscle of her heart.

  “She still hasn’t learned to twist the bottles?” she asked Clementine. “Let me guess, she gets confused between left and right? Has trouble following your directions? Can’t do it with both hands?”

  Clementine nodded dumbly, clueless as to where this was leading.

  Mathilde picked up one of her fashion magazines and tossed it in front of Sophie. “Read it,” she commanded.

  “I can’t,” whispered Sophie, barely glancing at it. “It’s in English.”

  Mathilde laughed, humourlessly. “It’s in Italian, you stupid girl.”

  “Well, maybe she can’t read Italian,” Clementine interjected. “We didn’t all go to fancy schools like you, Miss America.”

  “Can’t read Italian? She can’t read, period, Clementine. The little tramp has obviously never been to school at all. Just my luck, not one idiot sister but two.”

  With an anguished cry, a scraping of her chair, the spin of her coffee bowl on the table, Sophie leaped to her feet and ran from the room in much the same way Clementine had done the first night they met. The eldest Peine half-stood to follow her but was out of her depth. Sophie couldn’t read? Her mind was a muddle. It was unusual in this day and age, certainly, but what was the big deal?

  She turned to look at Mathilde, who wore a proud smirk as though she’d just won the grand prix at the Champagne Awards. At this her elusive eloquence calmly slipped into place. “You are too thin,” she told her sister. “You are a soak like your father. You haven’t a drop of kindness in your dry old body and I thank God you don’t have a family of your own because they would feel about you the way you obviously feel about us.”

  Mathilde stood there and let the insults penetrate, ignoring the clenching in her entrails, concentrating on the adrenaline pumping through her body as she felt the straightforward passion of hatred blending in her veins.

  “You know,” she drawled slyly, picking imaginary tobacco off her perfectly made-up lips, “you could have told me Benoît was married.”

  Clementine’s chest collapsed as the wind was sucked out of her lungs but she fought to regain her composure. “You didn’t think he was waiting for you all these years, did you?” she demanded, but there was a fear in her voice no one could miss. “Like everybody else in the world, he had better things to do with his time.”

  Again Mathilde laughed her joyless, brittle laugh. “It’s just that if he was going to settle for a rotten sow like the one he’s with now, Clementine, he may as well have married you.”

  Mathilde flung her words with the casual skill of an Olympic archer and hit, as she knew she would, the bull’s eye.

  Clementine’s already crumbling world had shattered completely years before when she had heard the rumour that Benoît was seeing another vigneron’s daughter. But that devastation was nothing compared to how she felt when she found out that it was Odile Joliet, daughter of Old Man Joliet, a plain-looking woman a few years older than her with a harsh face, brassy blonde hair and what was generally described as an “unfortunate” manner. Of course the union made sense, in a way, because the Geoffroys didn’t have enough pinot noir and the Joliets didn’t have enough chardonnay so together they were both better off. But for Benoît to marry the odious Odile?

  “Why not me?” Clementine had indeed cried into her pillow. “Why not me?”

  The memory of those tears, of waking up to the smell of goose feathers soaked in the sadness that leached out of her as she slept, of what came afterwards, graunched the gears of Clementine’s confidence as she stood across the kitchen from Mathilde all those years later.

  “I hope you — you get that disease — the one that makes your nose fall off and — you go bald — and you just DIE!” she stuttered. It was the best she could come up with and then she too fled the room.

  Peine

  Sophie was behind the reserve pinot noir, which was exactly where Clementine headed. She crawled in next to her, not even bothering to stop and feel resentment at finding her there. In fact, she surprised herself by being mildly pleased. Sophie’s face was still wet with tears but she managed a feeble smile at the sight of her sister.

  “I just couldn’t learn,” she said. “No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t learn.”

  Clementine wanted to comfort her but didn’t know how, so she just shimmied as close as she could until her round hips were settled flush up against Sophie’s bony ones.

  “The teachers always called me stupid, and so did my foster parents. They thought I was doing it on purpose, not trying, not understanding, but I didn’t understand! Something was always wrong. I felt like I had missed the very first bit that everyone else was told, the bit that you absolutely had to know to be able to do it. I could pretend for a while but then the pretending got too hard. The letters just danced in front of my eyes, ’Mentine, they still do, they don’t settle into words or the words into sentences. They are always juggling themselves, juggling, juggling, juggling.”

  She sniffed and wiped her cheeks with a ratty sleeve. “Mathilde is right. I hardly went to school at all. I’m stupid now and I’ll be stupid forever.”

  “A lot of stupid people can read perfectly well,” Clementine pointed out meaningfully. “It doesn’t count for anything. Look at Mathilde.”

  Sophie laughed, or tried to, and the sound heated the chalky cellar. “She’s not stupid, though, she’s clever,” she said. “But mean. She’s so mean! Why is that, do you think?”

  Clementine shrugged. “I don’t know why,” she said. “She was like it when she came here last time and ruined everything.”

  “What happened then, ’Mentine?” Sophie asked, her low moment gone and on its way to being forgotten. “Between you?”

  “La-a-a-a!” her sister trilled. “La-a-a-a!”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Sophie got a fright. It was such odd behaviour, that singing. “I didn’t mean to …”

  “La-a-a-a!” sang Clementine again, but she shook her head at the same time, her eyes bulging, then clapped both hands over her mouth, so that the next “La-a-a-a,” was half muffled and the following one just a strangled hum. And then there was silence.

  Sophie sat still against the wall, hugging her knees, waiting to see what would come next.

  “All my life,” Clementine said eventually into the blackness, “I thought I was going to marry Benoît Geoffroy.”

  There it was: her broken dream, just thrown out there and left hanging in the air. What was it about this spot behind the six-year-old reserve that turned it into a confessional?

  “I hadn’t done anything about it,” she soon continued, shrugging as though with the wonder of her own foolishness, “just thought it. Like you might think, ‘One day I will paint the kitchen’ or ‘One day I will replant those woody geraniums’. It just felt like it didn’t need attention right away but that it was going to happen. We lived next to each other, we did the
same job, we both loved our vines, our grapes, our champagne. The House of Geoffroy made a good drop, too — not as good as ours, we have a little more sunshine, more pinot noir, a bigger mix of soils. But together? Who knows what we could have done. We seemed like a natural combination, anyway that’s what I thought. It was just taking time. We were resting on our lees, waiting until we were ready.”

  It was amazing to Clementine herself that she could suddenly speak at such length on the subject which for so long she could not bear even to think about. More startling still, the admission felt good, as if the pressure within the overfilled balloon of her heart was finally, mercifully, being released.

  “Then Mathilde showed up,” her voice dropped and became flat. The balloon filled up again. “Her mother sent her over here when she became troublesome at home but she was horrible even then. And when she realised I felt something for Benoît …” a single fat berry of a tear sprung out of her eye and rolled down her cheek, “she just took him. One afternoon, when we were close, Sophie, I am so sure we were close to being together, Benoît and I, she just saw him out there among the grapes and she went right over and took him.”

  She felt Sophie’s thin fingers scrabbling in her lap and let her take one of her hands, felt the squeeze she gave it.

  “I got a bottle of Bollinger Vieilles Vignes Françaises, the 1975, such a good year, I had been saving it for … well, anyway I brought it down here,” she continued bleakly, “and I drank it. It tasted like gold, I remember that, but I still thought I was going to die. Then I drank more. A bottle of our own vintage ’75, which was foolish. Such a magnificent wine usually but compared to the blanc de noirs of those old Bollinger vines … silly of me. A waste.”

  Sophie let the silence swirl around them again.

  “Then, when it was dark,” Clementine whispered finally. “I went and found him.”

  “Benoît?”

  “La-a-a-a! Yes! La-a-a-a!”

  Sophie jumped again, but instead of pulling away from her sister she squeezed her hand even tighter, as though pulling her closer to the ground, anchoring her to sanity. “It’s okay, Clementine,” she soothed. “It’s okay.”

  “It’s not okay,” Clementine cried, a string of berries now trailing her smooth pink cheeks. “It was never okay.”

  “What happened?”

  “Benoît! I went and found Benoît in the winery over at the Geoffroys. He was disgorging their ’83, not a good year but certainly not their worst.”

  “And what did you do?”

  “I shouted at him, Sophie. Me, who had barely ever had the courage to talk to him in a whisper! I screamed at him. I swore, I was so angry that he had fallen for Mathilde’s trickery like that. She was so obvious. So common. So young. So beautiful! It all seemed so … unfair.”

  “And then?”

  “And then …” Oh, how the memory hurt now she had dredged it up. How it battered in her chest like the pummelling of an angry fist. And her mind, so unsympathetic to her all these years, had another cruel trick still to play on her. For when she recalled it, that terrible night, it was not the innocent, angry 26-year-old Clementine who let her clothes fall to the ground and who threw herself at him, it was the 44-year-old she was today, her body loose and folded like an old sack, her face painted with her heartbreak as she stepped towards him, weeping, holding out her arms and begging him to do to her what he had done to her sister.

  “And he did?” Sophie asked gently.

  “La-a-a-a!” trilled Clementine, but she was nodding, was trying to keep control of herself. “La-a-a-a …”

  “And afterwards?” Sophie wanted to know. “The next time?”

  “There was no next time.” Clementine shook her head so violently that the tears flew off her face in slow-motion arcs. “I never spoke to him again,” she cried, saliva gathering in the corners of her mouth, thickening her voice. “I was so ashamed. It was so awful. I was so awful. And then … the next day …”

  “What happened the next day?”

  “Over and over again I have asked myself but really there was no other way. Look at me!” she cried, clawing pitifully at her breasts. “Just look at me! It would never have been me if Mathilde had stayed here. Never!”

  Sophie held her hand even tighter then, trying to quell her anguish, to still her.

  “There’s nothing wrong with you, Clementine,” she said. “Nothing at all. You are 10 times the woman Mathilde is.”

  “I told Olivier,” Clementine wept.

  “About you and Benoît?”

  “No. About Mathilde and Benoît. She was only 17, remember. That’s probably nothing in this day and age but then for a man of his age to be with a teenage girl, especially in a small town like this, it was a disgrace, a scandal. She was sent home straight away. And I hid from Benoît because I was ashamed of everything I had done, but still I somehow thought it would be all right, that in the end we would be together, the kitchen would be painted, there’d be fresh geraniums. And while I was thinking that, he married Odile Joliet. His father insisted. That’s what they said, but what did it matter? It wasn’t me in the end, anyway, you see. After all that. It wasn’t me. It was never going to be me.”

  “And Amélie?” Sophie prodded softly. “The baby?”

  Clementine was quiet for a long, long time. For once she let the memory of that little pink squirming creature wriggle into her mind and settle there.

  “I didn’t even know myself until she was nearly here,” she said finally. “And by then it was too late to tell Benoît, he and Odile were already … besides, how could I tell him? What words would I use? Why would he listen? In the end, it was Olivier who helped me,” her voice cracked, “the night she arrived. And who arranged for her to be taken away. Some family in Bordeaux, I think. Winemakers. We never spoke of it.”

  “Oh, Clementine,” Sophie said, tears in her own eyes, her full heart bursting, “I am so sorry.”

  It was the first time Clementine had ever considered that someone other than herself might indeed be sorry. As she realised this, she also felt a glimmer of the pain Sophie must have suffered over her own dark and torturous secret and this hurt even more. Racked with anguish, her body began to shake uncontrollably. Sophie twisted around so she was kneeling, then took her big heartbroken sister in her two small arms and held on with all her might. She squeezed her eyes shut tight and hoped against hope that somehow Clementine would learn the way she herself had, that this awful time would pass, that there was light after dark, that things could only get better.

  Une invitée

  As the warm sunny days continued the vines grew more and more lush, their obedient rows hugging the hills of the Marne like a rich green corduroy suit. The grapes were as fat and sweet and juicy as anyone could remember, prompting much wistful talk of the bumper crop of ’76. Given this splendid state of affairs, the vignerons of Champagne were in good spirits. Save a freak storm or — not that the word was so much as whispered — hail, the vendange would be a good one.

  All of this was of little interest to Mathilde, of course. The grapes could have turned pink and started whistling Dixie as far as she was concerned. But while she cared not a jot for berries nor bubbles, she was definitely making headway with the House of Peine accounts. Collecting what few documents there were and collating the figures had been a crushing bore, true, but it was a challenge nonetheless and one that kept her mind off whatever ailed her.

  She’d also had early success at the bank in Epernay, instantly relieving the worst of the family’s financial pressures and securing an overdraft extension by way of charming the pants (almost literally) off the bank manager. He was desperate to take her to Paris to a discreet little hotel he knew in Montmartre and she had indicated that there was every chance he would indeed be able to. The foolish man did not suspect that the exact moment she would be in a position to go with him would be the same moment she no longer had the slightest bit of use for him so would not be inclined to oblige. He might o
ne day indeed be rummaging between crisp white sheets, the bells of Sacré-Coeur ringing in his ears, but it would be with a far less crafty soul than Mathilde.

  It was a balmy afternoon and she had just come back from a surprisingly successful trip to Reims where she had secured agreements from five different restaurants and three wine stores to start selling the Peine backlog of vintages and the traditional brut.

  She had expected it to be a hard sell and had dressed with extreme care: a skirt that was short but not too short, that same silk blouse that had failed to wow Benoît but nevertheless did great things for her bust, and a pair of spiky heels that she knew made her ankles irresistible to the average red-blooded male. She’d spent two hours doing her make-up so that she looked beautiful but not intimidating and had taken great care in employing a few drops of her cherished Clive Christian perfume.

  She’d even gone to Paris on the train earlier in the week to have her hair styled and coloured, and had been to the library to research what had been written about Peine champagne in its heyday. She’d prepared a spiel about family traditions and the renaissance in artisan produce and had spent a fortune getting a laminated portfolio made up that tracked the company’s rather romanticised-for-this-purpose history over the generations, with pull-out quotes (minus dates) from the wine magazines she had found. Olivier had actually kept tasting notes for each of his vintage blends. Strange, considering that the rest of his record keeping was so haphazard, but Mathilde had found the notes in an old tin trunk lying underneath what looked like a horse blanket in his tiny cluttered office. This was greatly appreciated as it meant she did not have to speak to Clementine on the subject, other than to request that she put out a few bottles of whichever champagne best reflected the house style for Mathilde to take to the buyers.

  She had seen Clementine struggle with this demand, her lips wriggling like worms with the effort of not telling her to climb to the top of the house and jump off the roof. They had barely spoken since Mathilde had taunted her about Odile, but Peine champagne always came first for Clementine. Always. Mathilde knew this so had not been at all surprised to find two dozen bottles of carefully selected champagne stacked at the bottom of the stairs when she was ready to leave for Reims.