House of Peine Read online

  As it turned out, there was a very good reason.

  “Hector,” La Petite rasped from her bed one evening about a week into the vendange, “what are you doing to these women?”

  Hector had come in to read her the latest celebrity gossip from Paris Match, which was usually a great treat for La Petite. But on this occasion she was impatient to discuss matters of a more pressing nature.

  “Don’t worry, Petite,” he assured her with great confidence. “I know what I’m doing.”

  “It’s who you are doing that worries me,” said La Petite, with a cough. She was fading, that was certain, but not as quickly as she had anticipated. Her spirit and flesh were colluding to keep her in good shape for the task ahead, there was no doubt about it. She couldn’t go yet, even if she wanted to.

  Hector laughed and leaned over to place a tender kiss on her withered brow. “I don’t much care for the middle one,” he told her. “But that’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, of course. But both the others?”

  Hector shrugged and shook open the magazine.

  “It’s all going according to plan,” he said unapologetically. “My plan.”

  La Petite eyed him critically through her lizard-like lids. In this instance, she could see that his sweet and obliging nature was perhaps being overruled by his strength. Ordinarily, she would have been angry but just at that point she could not truthfully summon the energy. Besides, she trusted Hector. She had to. He was her successor, after all. Her kinky blend of genetics had been copied and passed down the line specifically to him and she believed that he would do a great job of leading the family into the next century, as long as he didn’t eat too much red meat or smoke tailor-made cigarettes. She should expect him to flex his own muscle, she reasoned, it was good, it was a start, and she was not going to be there for much longer to tell him what to do anyway so he might as well stand on his own two feet.

  La Petite laid back on her pillows with a sigh, scratched one itchy armpit like a little monkey, and remembered the first time she had exercised her own will with her own great-grandfather (or something like it). He was bedridden at the time, just the way she was now, and preparing to pass the family mantle down to her.

  It was so long ago she could only recall it in scratchy black and white as though her memory was a war-time newsreel. Horses were pulling carts of wine barrels, she could recall that much clearly, and a woman’s ankles were a rare sight, her own included. But she had enjoyed displaying them for the first time ever to a lonely, pock-marked riddler by the name of Claude whom she had loved out of a dangerous depression, and whose life she had saved, just one of many. Claude! She gave a dreamy little chuckle. Oh, how he had soaked up her touch, that man, how his heavy heart had lightened, how his hands had flown over bottles that before she worked her magic had been stiff and heavy beneath his fingers.

  Of course, it wasn’t really magic, not in the miraculous sense. Her great-grandfather had always been perfectly clear about that and she hoped she had made it plain to Hector as well. The vignerons might have whispered that she had some sort of mystical power but while she never quashed these rumours — in fact, she liked them, they never failed to give her a good cackle — they were not true.

  She was no more than one of life’s ordinary citizens: just a bit more clued up when it came to the power of amour.

  Where La Petite and her ancestors came from (not that anyone could recall quite where that was), money had little currency, happiness counted for everything. This understanding was God’s gift to their family and the world, particularly the champagne world, or so she had been led to believe. “Never mind Saint Vincent,” her great-grandfather had told her, “we are the patron saints of champagne. A heavy heart cannot make a bubble dance so do what you can, Eulalie. Do what you can.” That’s how long ago it was that she’d heard those words: she still had a name.

  “Do what you can, Hector,” she told the new patron saint and he smiled, reminding her again why it was so easy for him to melt hearts hardened by even the most awful gloom.

  “You’ll see, La Petite,” he said. “I’m doing what you told me, just in my own way. It will work out. It always does.”

  Déception

  That evening Clementine made her first round of the vats to taste the freshly pressed grape juice. Despite her generally uplifted spirits, she had been putting this off, her heart fluttering in her chest, the “la-a-a-as” stacking up inside her throat like aeroplanes in a holding pattern at a busy airport. It was the very first step in the art of blending, after all, this first tart taste of what the berries had to offer.

  She poured herself a splash of the pinot noir that grew down in the valley where she had fallen off her bike, and took a sip. It tasted peppery and raw on her tongue but as it warmed her blood, it brought in its wake the doubt that all the near-happiness in the world could not keep at bay.

  Everybody knew the secret of champagne was in the blend. It was what made sense of growing grapes in the precarious climate of the Marne — the ability to mix each year’s wine from all the different plots with the precious reserve wines from previous years.

  It was how the Champenois managed to make their house champagne tingle on the tongue in the exact same way year after year despite the fact every vintage produced an entirely different-tasting assortment of grapes.

  Some years, the pinot noir lacked complexity while the chardonnay lacked delicacy; yet others, the pinot meunier was too fruity and the pinot noir not fruity enough. When the crop yield was low because of frost or heat, it did not matter that there was less of the latest wine because there was always the reserve wine from earlier more bountiful harvests (the ’99 pinot noir, for example).

  It was a delicate balancing act performed nowhere else in the wine-making world, this mixing of the wines from the past and present. It was the point of champagne, the beauty.

  It was also a skill Clementine did not believe she possessed.

  Her palate, as her father had told her years before, was as blunt as a stone. She knew in her head all the requirements of the house style cuvée, and she could pick their own finished product out of an unlabelled tasting of a million bottles. Yet when it came to sampling those raw young wines and selecting which ones should go into the blend and in what quantity, her good sense eluded her.

  “You are blind,” her father had roared at her the last time she had joined him, before, unable to tolerate her incompetence, he banned her from the blending process altogether. “Blind, blind, blind!”

  In other champagne houses, assemblage was a vital period not just for the champagne but for the Champenois. At Krug, three generations still gathered in the same room to settle on the blend; at Tarlant in Oeuilly, it was four; each winemaker passing down his knowledge, his memory to the generation below so that it was never lost, so that the taste of the house style was imprinted in the blood like DNA, moving invisibly from one century’s vignerons to the next.

  Olivier, who had lost the ability to share in such a way, had not been able to do this. In the early days, he had wanted to talk to his daughter, to pass on his secrets, but his festering grief eventually robbed him of the necessary skills. Then in latter days, his misery curdled completely and his earlier truly good intentions were lost to him and as a result lost also to Clementine. Words that might once have expressed kindness and encouragement were replaced with grunts and, more often than not, insults.

  I am blind, Clementine thought sadly, pouring the pinot down the drain. Blind, blind, blind. She could do nothing but hope that when it came time for the blend, she would be able to pull a rabbit out of the hat. Still, it was something of a magic trick for Clementine to even factor in hope. It had been in short supply for so long yet here she was considering her blindness and at the same time feeling a flutter of something that was not panic. For once, fear was not holding her hostage. She had a secret, nothing to do with her deficient taste buds, that was setting her free, reddening her cheeks
, sending shivers down her spine.

  “’Mentine, here you are!” Sophie’s voice jolted her out of her daydream and she felt another rush of pleasure at seeing her little sister. Feeling an urge to bond behind the ’99, she turned, smiling. “Sophie, what good timing.” She pointed in the direction of the reserve barrels. “It’s been so busy. I’ve been looking out for you but somehow … anyway, come, I have something I want to tell you.”

  “Oh, goody, ’Mentine, because I have something I want to tell you, too.”

  Clementine felt the thrill of anticipation. This was the sister she had once dreamed of, here was the nest of confidence and camaraderie she had lacked her whole childhood. She whipped down quickly to the ’88 and pulled out a bottle and two glasses, then darted back to their spot and nestled in next to Sophie.

  “So,” her youngest sister prompted. “What is it?”

  “You’re not going to believe it. Well, I can hardly believe it myself. I wanted to tell you sooner but I have hardly had a chance, the vendange, you know. Anyway,” the cork popped out with a sly hiss, the bubbles poured delightedly into the glasses, “finally, Sophie, finally something truly wonderful has happened to me.”

  “Oh, Clementine, don’t keep me in suspense. What is it? You look so …” Sophie couldn’t think of the word but felt better just seeing the joy in Clementine’s face.

  For about a second.

  “Hector.” His name tripped across Clementine’s lips so effervescently that for the first time in her life she felt bubbly, truly bubbly. She fizzed and gurgled and popped with the sheer bliss of loving and being loved by the perfect specimen that had entered their lives so unexpectedly.

  It seriously was difficult for her to believe what had happened but that very first night Hector had arrived, the night Clementine herself had so bitterly jumped to the conclusion he would not even notice she was breathing, let alone feel her breath on his naked skin, he had slid silently into her room and slipped beneath the covers of her creaky bed.

  Clementine, feeling the springs bounce, the warmth of another body so close to hers, had assumed she was dreaming and sighed into her pillow, wriggling backwards so that her smooth bottom inside its white linen nightgown fitted neatly into the lap of the man she was imagining lay behind her.

  The man’s lap sprang to attention and upon feeling this, the sleepy smile disappeared from Clementine’s face and her eyes opened wide in the darkness. She felt him move even closer, heard the rhythm of his heart beating against her back, smelled his salty skin, a hint of rosemary from the duck they’d had for dinner. She knew she should repel him, that he had no right, that it was a crime to sneak into a woman’s bed unbidden. But she had dreamed of someone just like him doing something just like this for so long that her heart felt no fury, only the pleasure of finally having some real warmth blast into its cold lonely chambers.

  She turned over and found that her body too had intentions all of its own and, far from shrinking away, was calling out for whatever Hector had to offer. In the end there was nothing unbidden about it. He helped himself to the parts of her that had lain abandoned for so long and she welcomed him as he’d never been welcomed before. It was an extremely inspiring experience for both of them.

  “Why?” she had whispered when they lay curled together afterwards, his fingers tracing circles in the soft flesh of her white belly. “Why?”

  It had been so unlike her one night with Benoît. (So flushed was she in the aftermath of having been Hector-ed, she forgot her normal trilling.) She remembered little but tears and anger and regret from the night Amélie had been conceived, yet this night with Hector there had been only ecstasy. Sweet, delirious, hot, sweaty, salty, naked ecstasy. With a hint of rosemary.

  “I should go,” Hector whispered back, instead of answering Clementine’s question. He was nothing if not honest and didn’t particularly want to mention La Petite’s role in what had just occurred. Instead, he slid out from beneath Clementine’s sheets, kissed her bruised and happy lips, and disappeared into the darkness.

  She floated through the next week of riddling and preparing for the vendange, working her fingers to the bone, her focus on her grapes, her vines, as always, but still an uncustomary smile never far from her lips. At night, exhausted but exhilarated, she bathed, then crawled into bed and waited for Hector.

  She had been so busy revelling in this happiness, this longawaited delivery from misery, and of course the wonderful, bountiful harvest, that she had quite failed to notice the exact same symptoms in Sophie.

  “Me too,” was all Sophie said in a small voice as Clementine finished telling her about the secret trysts she had been sharing with their extraordinary visitor. “Me too.”

  It took a while for Clementine to register this … she was concentrating on the ’88, feeling the finish linger on her tongue, the faint trace of apples catching at the back of her throat.

  A sourness crept into her saliva. “What do you mean, ‘Me too’?”

  “I mean, ‘Me too’,” Sophie repeated, her face white, her eyes huge and disbelieving. “With Hector. He wasn’t disappearing into the darkness, Clementine. He was coming to me.”

  “You?”

  Sophie nodded miserably. He’d been a busy boy the first night he’d arrived, sliding into her bed too, the difference being that it was later and she was there waiting for him with open arms. They hadn’t spoken at all, just loved each other, three or four times in a row, the way she knew they would, the way she expected. And he’d been back for more, and she willing to give it, every night since then. It hadn’t even occurred to her to wonder what he was doing before he came to her. She’d assumed he was spending time with La Petite.

  Sophie watched the happiness leach out of Clementine before her very eyes, the sourness spreading around her sister’s body like morphine.

  Of course, Clementine snickered cynically to herself, happiness like that didn’t belong to her. She had been a fool to relax for even a moment and think that it could. Happiness never belonged to fat, plain almost-virgins who couldn’t even bear to think of their lost babies. “La-a-a-a!” she trilled in her sharp voice. Happiness belonged to skinny little strumpets like Sophie. Sweet Sophie. Kind Sophie. Her Sophie! “La-a-a-a!” How that betrayal hurt. And she had been hurt so many times before she thought she couldn’t feel another pain and yet there it was, that feeling of being left in an ice storm without her skin.

  She stood up and with a grunt that could have belonged to her miserable father, disappeared up the spiral stairs.

  Sophie was about to chase after her but found her heart just a bit too broken to manage it right then so she just sat behind the pinot and wept until the moment passed. She’d seen this coming after all, had long acknowledged her expertise at happy beginnings, not endings, but she hadn’t quite counted on Clementine being a factor. She would stand back and let her sister have Hector, of course she would, she would have been standing back to let him have someone anyway, but in the meantime she was allowed her little bit of heartache.

  Partager

  “What have you been snivelling about?” Mathilde accosted Sophie as she sneaked back into the house some time later. “Don’t tell me the little mouse and the big ox have fallen out. I heard Clementine blubbering her way up the stairs just before. What’s going on?”

  “Sophie!” La Petite’s voice was not strong but it had a strange way of carrying itself, sort of in a waft, like smoke. Sophie and Mathilde both looked up the stairs as if they could see it snaking its way towards them. “Sophie!” the old woman called again. Mathilde physically recoiled.

  “Now you’ve gone and woken Yoda,” she hissed. “So get up there and see what she wants before she starts making a nuisance of herself.”

  Actually, La Petite had hardly made a nuisance of herself at all since the vendange began, although it was true that before that she had appeared a little on the demanding side, sending Sophie to the butcher for a particular slice of charcuterie or asking Cle
mentine to mend a tear in her ancient bloomers, for example. Mathilde’s sisters had been most obliging, they were women starved of their mothers, after all, so they were lured in by La Petite’s matriarchal leanings. Mathilde, however, avoided her like the plague. So desperate was she to avoid detection by the old woman she even slipped her heels off and tip-toed past her room. She never did hear that scratchy old voice call her name, but she could feel her pull nonetheless. Instead of letting it reel her in the way her sisters did, though, she pulled against it, leaned further and further away, still furious that La Petite had exposed her one real weakness, Edie.

  The subject of her 10-year-old daughter had been robbing Mathilde of sleep ever since the child’s existence had been revealed in that smelly little room. She had her reasons for leaving Edie behind, she just didn’t want to have to justify them to anyone, especially her two dim-witted sisters and some half-deranged, wizened-up old raisin. She knew how it looked to them, how it would look to everybody — she was in PR after all — but it was nobody’s business but her own; her own and George’s and perhaps that of the highly strung little madam they had brought into the world all those years ago and who had spent every minute of her life screwing up Mathilde’s.

  She’d been cursing La Petite for exhuming her buried family, so invasive was she finding her thoughts of them. In fact, her entire body had revolted, breaking out in an unsightly rash that she had kept hidden for the first few days but which was now spreading up her neck towards her face. She could read the questions in her sisters’ eyes every time they looked at her, felt her skin crawl with every obvious thought. “You’ve been here all this time and you have a 10-year old daughter at home?” She kept hearing that sow Clementine’s disbelieving voice ringing in her ears. So strong were the images of Edie, her impossible child, crowding her head she had barely given a thought to that other daughter La Petite had unveiled.