House of Peine Read online

  As it turned out, she need not have troubled so much with her hair, her clothes, the world’s most expensive perfume, even the laminated portfolio, because without exception the buyers licked their lips and started salivating — not at the sight of those long slim legs of hers, that buxom cleavage, but at the label on the bottles bearing the gold family name and the château in its glory days.

  “At last!” the sommelier at Le Millénaire had cried. “The Peine is back! Oh, you have the ’99? Please, madame. I’ll get the glasses.”

  It had been the same at each of her appointments. She had barely needed to open her mouth. The champagne had spoken for her. Mathilde had worked with many prestigious clients during her career, but rarely had any one product required so little PR. It was encouraging, to say the least.

  Flushed with this success, she was in a good mood when she got back to the house. She was also hot and sticky — the sun roof being the Deux Chevaux’s idea of air conditioning — and desperate for a long bath and a glass of something with a lot of ice in it. However, her plans fell apart when she opened the door to her room and found a small, dark, extremely wrinkled old woman lying in her bed. She was feeding chocolates to Cochon who was curled up, rather contemptuously Mathilde could not help but think, on the floor atop her La Perla negligée.

  “What the hell is going on?” she demanded, sweeping into the room and registering that someone had been through her suitcase and, by the looks of it, the armoire as well. “Who the hell are you?”

  The woman was ancient. Her skin was so crumpled and dry it looked cracked, as though she were the subject of an old master’s oil painting. She was slight, from the size of her wizened face, yet wore so many layers of clothing it was impossible to tell how big or small the rest of her was. She had long grey hair that was coiled up behind her head in an extravagant plaited arrangement. It looked thick with grease, like some sort of industrial rope. And while Mathilde was thoroughly aghast at the sight of her, she was not at all perturbed by the sight of Mathilde, barely taking her eyes off the little horse, in fact, as she continued to feed him, chocolate by chocolate, over the side of the bed.

  “Did you hear me? I said, what the hell is going on?” Despite her anger, something kept Mathilde from going too close. While the old woman did not smell as fresh as she could have, the little horse had a confidence that Mathilde could usually suck out of him with just one glance. She felt hotter than ever, unusually flustered, as she stood with arms crossed in front of her chest at the foot of the bed.

  “Mathilde, heh?” The old woman said, although her singsong accent was spiced with the history of some far away place and it took a few moments for Mathilde to decode her own name. “You didn’t bring them with you?” the old woman asked her.

  “What?” Mathilde seethed. “You are in my bed, old woman, and I would like you to get out of it.”

  “It’s my bed now,” the old woman cackled, grinning to reveal a mouth only half full of teeth. “You should find another one. I’m in no hurry to move, having just got here. And you should have brought them with you.”

  “I’m not finding another anything,” Mathilde retorted. “This is my bed, this is my house.”

  “But you have another house,” the wrinkled gargoyle chortled from the bed. “And in it are two people who should be here.”

  Mathilde froze. Who had sent this old harridan? “Did that fat cow put you up to this?” she demanded. It must be Clementine’s work. Surely it couldn’t be George. He didn’t have the imagination and anyway, why would he? “Who the hell are you?” she asked the old woman again.

  “No, Mathilde,” the object of her disdain shot straight back, “the question is who the hell are you?”

  Mathilde opened her mouth to say something but nothing came out. That nagging feeling that had been repeatedly scratching at her empty belly erupted then with such violence that her knees started to shake and she had to sit down on the rickety chair, her thin arm holding on to the wall for support, her world spinning around her.

  “If she’s anything like you were when you were young, I’m not surprised you’ve run away,” the old woman said, gnawing at one of the chocolates before handing it on to Cochon to finish. “But it’s not the answer. It’s not the right thing to do. A smart girl like you must know that, heh? That you have to fight for anything worth having, it never comes free — good little pony, here try this one — and in my experience it never comes cheap either. Is this strawberry flavour, do you think?” She held up another half-chewed chocolate, this one with a bright pink centre, but Mathilde was still speechless. “I don’t care for strawberry flavour,” the old woman said, wiping her nose on the duvet cover. “Strawberries themselves, now that’s another matter.”

  Mathilde stood abruptly and bolted out of the room and down the stairs. Who was the old witch? And how did she know so much? She fumbled in the kitchen for the pastis, poured herself a stiff drink and slugged it back, feeling the alcohol warm her chest and calm her panic. Or did she know anything? She poured another drink and took a gulp. It could all be some horrible coincidence. The shrivelled old prune could be quite mad. Yes, that was it. Why else would she turn up in a stranger’s bed and start feeding that spotty little pig with finest Fauchon? She was deranged. Someone’s nutty granny escaped from the retirement home or, worse, a local loony bin. She was talking utter nonsense, Mathilde decided, there was nothing in it. It was breaking and entering and theft and so out of order and annoying that her hands continued to shake after she drained her drink.

  She jumped at the sound of a distant cackle and the skittering of Cochon’s hooves on the upstairs floorboards, then slammed her empty glass down on the counter so hard it cracked and fell apart in two even halves. She stared at this, her mind racing, then spun around and stalked outside, climbed back into Olivier’s overheated rusty car and drove angrily down the dusty driveway.

  La Petite

  The eldest and youngest Peines were working in the vines on a steep slope behind Saint Vincent. Clementine was checking the grapes’ sugar content by tasting them — pinot meunier just at that moment, and delicious those berries were too — and teaching Sophie how to green-prune, or throw away the stunted unripened grapes so the healthy plump ones could continue to prosper. They stopped what they were doing when the Deux Chevaux skidded to a halt, disgorged an irate Mathilde into the long grass and scattered violets at Saint Vincent’s feet.

  “You need to come home at once!” she shouted up to Clementine. “There’s a wrinkled old hag in my bed and you must get rid of her.”

  “The old soak has been into the pastis again,” Clementine grumbled to Sophie. “Tracking us down just so she can yell her vile nonsense at us.

  “Come back when you’ve sobered up,” she shouted down the hill.

  She couldn’t quite make out the particular swear words with which this was greeted, just shrugged and kept moving along the row, tasting a big juicy grape here, plucking at a shrivelled little bunch of them there, waiting all the while to hear the rattle of the 2CV starting up again.

  “Look,” said Sophie, pointing with her clippers. “She’s coming up.” They both stopped again to watch Mathilde negotiate the steep incline in her heels. It was quite a sight, that short skirt and those skinny legs manoeuvring their way over the steep uneven ground. If Clementine’s eyes were not deceiving her, there were dark patches under her arms and down the front of her shirt, too. Who would have guessed that Mathilde sweated?

  “For Christ’s sake, it’s your house too,” the perspiring Peine panted when she got to the top, quite dishevelled. “I thought you would care about that, if nothing else, you useless heffalump.”

  “You obviously want something from me to have come all this way, Mathilde, so I can’t be that useless, can I? But regardless of that, whatever it is, the answer is no. That’s what you get for calling me a heffalump.”

  Something about being out there among her chosen vines with Sophie was giving Clementine a lit
tle extra va-voom. She could feel it and she liked it.

  “For God’s sake, this is not about you being a heffalump,” Mathilde protested, “it’s about —”

  But Clementine turned away. “Come on, Sophie, we don’t need to listen to this. There’s work to be done. The mannequin can come back when it has a civil tongue in its head.”

  The mannequin did not appreciate this — her head looked angry and her tongue ripe for distributing a decent lashing.

  “Well, you may not care about some smelly old witch taking up residence in my bed but I do and what’s worse she is feeding your great fat roundabout reject my precious Parisian chocolates!”

  Sophie hunched her shoulders and prepared herself for the situation to explode. Mathilde never tired of baiting her sister about her pet, probably because she never failed to get a rise out of her.

  “Would you mind telling me what it is that Cochon has ever done to you?” Clementine predictably combusted, miffed that her little friend had slipped off without her even noticing. He’d been there just minutes before, hadn’t he?

  “Apart from choke on my underwear, crap wherever I seem to want to step in the outside world and offend me with his far-too-small and extremely pointless existence, nothing!”

  “You are truly despicable,” Clementine said, her lips white and narrow. “Come on, Sophie. Let’s go down to the river. The pinot noir could do with some attention.”

  But Mathilde stood in her way. “Screw the pinot noir,” she said. “Screw your stupid horse. There’s an old woman in my bed and you need to come and get rid of her.”

  “What sort of an old woman?” Sophie dared to inquire, her interest piqued.

  “You should really wait until at least three before you start tippling, Mathilde,” Clementine said as she moved to push past her. “You’re seeing things. There’s no old woman that I know of …” Her voice trailed off. “Yes, what sort of an old woman?”

  “How many sorts are there?” fumed Mathilde. “She’s a thousand years old and smells like compost.”

  “Does she have long grey hair all piled up on top of her head?”

  “Yes. God knows what’s nesting in there. And she’s in my bed. I think she might even be wearing my clothes. Who the hell is she?”

  Clementine did know someone who answered this description. “La Petite,” she murmured. But La Petite usually arrived the day before the vendange began, never ever any sooner. And Clementine had just tasted the chardonnay; it was the first to be picked and was at least a week away. “How strange.”

  “Who is La Petite?” Sophie wanted to know, further intrigued. “What’s strange?”

  “Apart from the old trout festering in my bed, which by the way has my own personal Frette linen on it?” Mathilde complained.

  Clementine ignored her. “La Petite Noix,” she told Sophie. The Little Walnut. It was a good name, even Mathilde could see that, for the old woman did indeed look like a wrinkled nut, but the moniker had long ago been shortened to just La Petite. “She’s a grape-picker,” Clementine continued, but she was more than that. Much more. For as long as Clementine could remember, La Petite and her extended family of Romanian gypsies (or were they Lithuanian? No one was sure, not even the gypsies) had descended on the House of Peine for the harvest.

  They would turn up — she could not fathom how they knew when to arrive — just in time for the grapes to be picked; would work like navvies for the week or 10 days the harvest took; then would disappear again. The next year, they would swarm back, never exactly the same bunch but always exactly the same number. Sometimes a husband would be missing but a cousin would be there instead, or a mother would be nursing an infant but her eldest daughter would be picking for the first time. The only person who remained constant was La Petite, the matriarch of the family, a tiny crumpled bundle of burning energy and intuition.

  Where they were before Champagne (Bordeaux, someone had once suggested) or where they went after (Alsace?), Clementine did not have a clue. She’d known La Petite all her life but could barely remember a single conversation with her. This was not really as strange as it seemed, as the world was full of people with whom Clementine could barely remember a conversation — and that was the world right at her doorstep, too, not the big wide one. Until Sophie came along, she just didn’t converse. Olivier, on the other hand, had always had a soft spot for La Petite, whispering away to her late into the night in the days before he spent all his time at Le Bois. And in recent years Clementine was pretty sure La Petite had joined him there. Her father had a lot to say to the old woman, it seemed, though she could not imagine what.

  For her to turn up in Mathilde’s bed, though, was most odd. She had certainly never stayed in the house before. She usually had one of her brood build her a little shack just below them in the hawthorn bushes beneath Saint Vincent. A nephew or a cousin of a nephew had once told Clementine that La Petite liked being downwind of such a great big holy person.

  “She is foul!” Mathilde was saying. “And she’s mad. Insane! Talking all sorts of drivel. And she’s feeding your stupid pig all my chocolates and he’s dribbling on my peignoir.”

  “What is she saying?”

  “Who cares?” Mathilde snapped. “I just want the haggle-toothed old crone out of there, now, so go and do something about it.”

  Clementine put her finger to her chin and looked up at the sky as though seriously deliberating this possibility. “No,” she finally said. “Do it yourself. It has nothing to do with me. Besides I don’t care if she is in your room — she can stay there forever as far as I am concerned.”

  Actually, Clementine was if not frightened of La Petite at least wary. There were lots of rumours about her and even the other gypsies spoke in hushed tones about her “evil eye”. She knew things that no one else could possibly know, so they said, and whether or not this was true Clementine had on many a previous occasion felt the heat of those little black raisin eyes boring into her flesh. Whatever her skill or power, there was definitely a patina of mystery smothering the old bird, always had been. And hers were not feathers that begged to be ruffled. Clementine meant it — if La Petite wanted Mathilde’s room, she was welcome to it.

  “Oh, ’Mentine, please, can’t you help?” Mathilde’s voice was so sweet and delightful and the change so abrupt that Sophie nearly choked stifling a laugh. “I’ve been in Reims and got so many orders for your champagne that I’m really quite exhausted. I had no idea you were so talented. The restaurateurs, the wine sellers, they just could not get enough of your champagne, you really are such a clever thing.”

  “Do it yourself,” Clementine told her again, not falling for this at all. “I’ve already told you. It has nothing to do with me.”

  “You useless fat cow!” Mathilde cried, whipping around to start the perilous walk back to the car. “I hope your stupid stunted pony gets diabetes. And why are you throwing those grapes on the ground? That’s money in the bank, you know. I’m not playing footsie with the bank manager just so you two useless sluts can throw it all away.”

  Clementine’s jaw dropped to her chest in amazement. It was a well-known lament of the winemaker that the grape grower was reluctant to throw away the green berries to help plump up the ripe ones. It was the age-old battle of quality versus quantity and it raged in plots like this one all over the globe. She just never in a million years would have expected Mathilde to give a damn.

  Ooh là là!

  When Clementine and Sophie got back to the house in the early evening, Mathilde was sitting at the bottom of the stairs with an empty drink in her hand and a murderous expression on her face.

  “That old sow won’t even let me in now,” she said. “For God’s sake, Clementine, do something!”

  Clementine looked half-heartedly up the stairs. Sophie too.

  “Or if you won’t, get your forlorn little shadow here to do it. Isn’t it time she made herself useful?”

  Clementine looked at her forlorn little shadow an
d felt such a pleasant rush of something delicious that she could not help herself. She smiled, a great huge grin that smoothed out her creases and took 10 years off her age.

  Sophie, seeing this, basking in it, grinned right back.

  “Okay,” she said, quite happily. “I’ll do it.” And she leapt up the stairs, light as a feather, taking them two at a time.

  In the hall outside Mathilde’s room she knocked gently at the door which swung open to reveal La Petite sitting up in bed applying the last drops of Mathilde’s Clive Christian to the insides of her elbows. Cochon was curled up on top of the covers, his head on a pillow.

  “Ah, the Little One,” La Petite cackled, clearly delighted. “Come in, come in, sit down. I’ve always wanted to meet you.”

  Sophie was bewildered. “Me?” she asked, looking behind to see if either of her sisters had followed her up.

  “Of course, you,” La Petite said, patting the bed beside her with a tiny crooked claw of a hand.

  “You know about me?” Sophie asked, going straightaway to where the hand had patted and sitting down in that spot. On the other side of the bed Cochon lifted his head off the pillow for just a moment before flopping back down with a miniature sigh. He had chocolate on his chin and looked extremely pleased with the way his afternoon was turning out.

  “Of course,” La Petite said, and she lifted that curled claw toward Sophie and stroked her cheek. Her wizened hand felt much softer than it looked and her black eyes twinkled as she gazed deep into Sophie’s. “You remind me of your grandmother,” she said softly. “She had a heart just like yours.”