House of Peine Read online

  By six in the morning she had moved from thanking God to cursing him and every last one of his pointless creations. Every bone in her body ached, the skin on her face felt rubbed raw by the cold, and her throat was hoarse from breathing in the harsh smoke that now clung to the rows of vines, drifting moodily across the valley like a low slung mist, making eerie spectres of the neighbours’ criss-crossing tractor beams and the burning amber flames of the chaufferette smoke pots.

  The frost was there, all around her, twinkling like fancy frosting on an ostentatious wedding cake. She had done all she could. Only time would tell if it had been a killer or not. Her instinct (and her hair) told her it wasn’t the worst they had suffered but who knew how much those unborn buds could withstand?

  Exhausted, Clementine turned the grouchy tractor for its final run towards the house. Heading down from the wooded hilltop towards the château, her trailer empty now of frost pots and bouncing on the rough ground, she wished she had left the lights on inside, despite the cost. The château loomed dark and sulky behind the screens of smoke that wafted in layers like sheets of finest oyster-coloured silk. It had once been a beautiful home, greatly admired by centuries of valley vignerons, but those days were long gone and in this light it looked threatening, abandoned, haunted. Clementine shivered in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature then, suddenly, from out of the midst of those eerie silks, emerged a gigantic alien figure growing taller and spookier with every ghoulish step it took towards her.

  Terrified, Clementine took her foot off the accelerator and the tractor shuddered violently to a halt. “Stop!” she implored the ghost, so frightened she could do little more than whisper. “Stop!”

  The creature moved closer still, slowing, finally, in the tractor’s watery headlights and flapping its huge spindly arms up towards its elongated head.

  Clementine’s hands flew to her mouth to stifle a scream but just as she was about to lose that battle, the alien took one step closer. Without the smoke and ghostly lights, it morphed into the sharp and somewhat less threatening form of Marc Debasque, the local gendarme. She happened to know he’d wet his bed till he was 14 and wasn’t scary at all.

  Relief flooded through her as her blood, frozen like sap with fear, started to flow again. “You just about scared me to death, you fool,” she chided him. “What the hell do you want?”

  “I’m terribly sorry, Clementine,” he said, taking off his cap. “But there’s been an accident.”

  Un enterrement

  “Typical,” she thought bitterly three days later as a solid clod hit her father’s coffin with the most unfriendly of thwacks. Above ground the seasons had taunted Olivier with their fickleness. Below ground, nothing had changed. Winter had clung to spring just to kick him in the seat of the pants one last time; to aggravate Gaston the gravedigger’s tendonitis; to prompt a late run of the priest’s hooked nose.

  There’d been no more frost, not since the night Olivier had met his maker. But there’d been no more sign of spring either. The ground was still hard, the air sharp with chill.

  “Take that,” she clearly heard Gaston mutter as he hurled a second spadeful of black graveyard dirt at her father’s plain pine casket, “you miserable piece of shit.”

  The priest coughed and surreptitiously wiped his dripping nose on the sleeve of his cassock, smiling apologetically at Clementine as he caught her eye.

  “You can spare me your sympathy,” Clementine ordered him sharply. “He was no saint. We all know that.”

  The priest opened his mouth to protest but all that emerged was a puff of warm air. The two of them watched in silence as it spread out in a pale cloud between them, stretching itself thinner and thinner before finally disappearing altogether.

  “He was a complicated man,” Father Philippe said eventually in a kind voice. “It can’t have been easy for you. All these years …” Awkwardly he patted Clementine’s coat sleeve with the arm that still bore the results of his running nose.

  “Get your hands off me, Philippe, I’m not Cochon,” Clementine snapped, pulling her arm away. Cochon, waiting impatiently outside the churchyard gates, whinnied and stamped his feet at either the sound of his name or the ridiculous notion of being petted by Philippe. He had been banned from the churchyard some time ago after repeatedly breaking in and eating the priest’s carefully manicured hedge rows then rather violently splattering the graves of some of the village’s most respected dead and buried. Philippe eyed the horse suspiciously through the churchyard gates, which served only to further irritate Clementine. He might have done the training and be wearing the coat-dress but he was still the same splotchy twit who’d started annoying her at kindergarten 40 years ago and hadn’t stopped since. “Don’t go all ‘love and understanding’ on me now just because Papa has finally done the decent thing and left us in peace,” Clementine said. “Yes, it hasn’t been easy for me.” All she’d ever wanted was a little warmth from her father but that had seemed beyond him: never more so, she supposed, than now. “For once we should be able to tell him exactly what we think without getting an earful in response.”

  “There is such a thing as charity, you know, ’Mentine,” Philippe reminded her but nervousness cost him his conviction. “Not that your father was a great believer in that himself, I suppose.”

  “Not unless it was someone else buying the pastis,” Gaston piped up, his face puce with a combination of hard labour and hangover. “He believed in it then, all right.” He stopped digging, wiped his sweating brow and looked balefully at the not-insubstantial pile of earth still to be returned to the ground. “But try getting a bottle of his precious champagne out of him and charity made itself scarce, let me tell you, no matter how much you’d invested down the old fish’s throat.”

  Clementine took one step closer to the grave and jabbed a gloved finger in the direction of Gaston’s mouth. “If you don’t shut that hole,” she warned through clenched teeth, “and fill the other one, I’ll hit you so hard with your own shovel you’ll hear the church bells ringing for the rest of your life.” It was one thing for her to suggest ill of the dead, but she wouldn’t take it from a clot like Gaston. His own throat would have given Olivier’s a run for its money most nights of the week. He had no right.

  “Please, ’Mentine,” Father Philippe implored softly. He knew the voice he used especially for bereaved family members would be wasted on such a brittle piece of work as Clementine but he couldn’t help himself. Besides, it was more than grief that was fuelling her anger — he understood that, even if she didn’t. Olivier Peine might not have believed in charity but he believed in confession so Philippe understood more than she would ever know, certainly more than he wanted to. The old Champenois had not done well by Clementine, Philippe knew that, but better the devil you knew or so the saying went (although not particularly in religious circles). Clementine would not be human if she wasn’t fearful of what lay around the corner, if she wasn’t feeling pain. And she was human. Despite what everyone said. She was. He felt a moment’s tenderness for her, standing there in her ill-fitting coat, her good Sunday shoes worn away at the heels. They were good ankles, the priest found himself noticing with a flash of surprise, followed by the requisite guilt. And a shapely set of calves too. In fact, without the upholstery of her obvious unhappiness and those few extra pounds around her middle, Clementine was altogether a fine-looking woman. Yet here she stood, her faded red hair radiating around her head like a swarm of pale angry hornets, no husband to hold her hand, no friend to offer her a handkerchief, no loving memories of the recently deceased to warm her against the chill of loss.

  “Please,” he said again, tenderness prevailing as he turned up the little grassy alley between the graves and headed towards the churchyard gates. “Shall I take you home, ’Mentine? We could have coffee.” Or a glass of the latest Peine brut, perhaps, he silently suggested. He knew Olivier had disgorged and labelled the new release before his departure and was most keen to taste it. T
he villagers thought the old man had lost it in recent years but Philippe happened to think his champagne was still one of the best, if not the best, in Saint-Vincent-sur-Marne, and Gaston was right, he had been mean with it. “You can tell me about your meeting with Christophe,” he said, licking his lips in anticipation. “It’s good to talk about these things.”

  “Christophe? The lawyer Christophe?” Clementine snorted as she crunched up the path, elbowing him out of the way and taking the lead. “What meeting? What things?”

  Through her coat she hitched at the sagging crotch of her laddered tights. They were thick and navy blue. To others it was the drab colour of a conservative woman much older than she, but to Clementine it was the perfect hue of the skin on a pinot noir grape, her favourite of the three Champagne treasures. She plucked at the restrictive waistband and thought of the rhubarb tart that Bernadette, the pâtissière who owned the town pâtisserie, had sent before the funeral in case anyone dropped in to mourn the old man. She hadn’t brought it herself, of course, just sent her spotty scaredy-cat of a son on his bike. Clementine snorted again at the unlikelihood of anyone arriving to mourn her father and turned to speak to the priest. He would have to help her with the tart or she would feel obliged to eat the whole thing. But Philippe was not with her. He had stopped next to the oddly angelic shrine the widow Gillet had commissioned for her dearly departed husband and was fidgeting nervously with his priest’s collar.

  “Yes, yes, I’ll open a bottle,” she said impatiently. “Actually, I’m keen to try it again myself, I’ve had only the barest of tastes. Olivier played his cards close to his chest on that one, as usual.” But the priest remained frozen where he was. “Don’t be ridiculous,” snapped Clementine, with a dismissive wave at the monument. “If he was expecting one of those, he is stiff out of luck.” Well, perhaps stiff wasn’t the best choice of words, in the circumstances. She allowed herself a smile. “Although a giant pastis bottle might not be inappropriate.” How Olivier had hated the outsized champagne bottle that poured endless faux bubbles above the vineyards of Avize. He would turn in his grave if she erected him a great big bottle of his own — if Gaston ever filled it.

  Still the priest stayed where he was, nodding foolishly, a glazed look in his eyes, cold fingers fumbling at his Adam’s apple, more warm puffs blowing into the air where the words he couldn’t quite manage were absent.

  “Oh, don’t give me that,” Clementine grumbled, her smile a departing guest. “The widow Gillet has family money, which is just as well because her husband, God rest his soul — although at least he had one — made the world’s worst champagne. But Olivier? Come on, Philippe, you know as well as I do he did nothing to deserve his own angel.” It was true. She could not remember a time when her father had not been fuelled by a compote of anger and petty hatreds. Over the years he had turned on all his friends, invented feuds with all their neighbours and mocked every innocent act of kindness ever visited upon anyone, his daughter included, until she too was caught up in his exhausting cycle of loathing and being loathed. Everything he touched was laced with his bitterness. Everything, that was, except his champagne. That something so sweet, so delicious, so delightful, could dance to the tune of such a hard-boiled old sourpuss was nothing short of a miracle. But still, it was not going to get him a monument. “Come on,” Clementine scolded him. “We can’t drag this thing out all day, you know. I have work to do.”

  Despite her obvious agitation, Philippe remained in a state of near paralysis at the shoulder of the statue. The widow Gillet had insisted the stonemason give the monument a likeness of her husband’s long angular face, which he had attempted to do atop the body of a stock standard cherub, ripe and plump and all of four years of age. The result was unnerving to say the least. Also, he’d got the facial alterations wrong with his first few attempts, so the head had ended up much smaller than it should have been. The overall effect was one of a wizened midget colliding with a giant infant to form one completely out-of-proportion circus creature. That the wings were off a life-sized horse, the legs of which had not survived the trip from Lyons, did not help. Although at that precise moment they were being considered as something of a saving grace by the petrified Philippe.

  If he could just shuffle behind them, he thought, then drop to his hands and knees, he might have a chance at crawling out of Clementine’s line of fire. He had seen her foul temper on many an occasion (like the tractor, she had inherited it from her father) and he had no desire to witness it again. But if she had not yet talked to the lawyer then she did not yet know what lay around the corner. The grumpiness he had mistaken for her fear and pain was in fact just her usual grumpiness; the fear and pain was still to come.

  “Philippe, what’s gotten into you?” Clementine’s eyes had narrowed. Her clever vigneron’s nose was smelling a rat. “What’s going on?”

  That suspicious look, the sudden hunch of those shoulders, the fists that formed twitchy balls at her sides. It was too much for Philippe. He was a good man but not a brave one.

  “I’ve just remembered, Clementine,” he stuttered, “notes I must write for a christening on Sunday. Some other time for the champagne, maybe, and, erm, yes, please forgive me and God bless you. I’m so sorry for your loss.” And with that he scuttled away like the frightened little beetle he knew he was.

  Like Yves’ angel’s head, Clementine’s expectations of the human race had been whittled down to next to nothing. They were distinctly out of proportion to the rest of her. But blood still flowed in and out of her heart, she was not yet completely frozen like her father had been three nights earlier, and she felt a tug at her innards over Philippe’s desertion. It had been difficult living with Olivier in the Peine château all those years, the priest knew that. And while she wouldn’t win any prizes for mourning her father’s death — it definitely fell into the “happy release” category as far as she was concerned — it was nonetheless an adjustment, a challenging one, to be officially left all on her own in the world. What is it about me, she thought silently, a streak of her father’s bitterness swirling through her like cream in a chocolat chaud, that sucks the sympathy out of even the softest heart?

  “Yes, well, you can stick my loss up your cassock,” she shouted after the priest, anger as usual being the first port of call to which her shrivelled emotions paid a visit. “And I hope it tickles your fetid adenoids while it’s there!”

  Whether he heard her or not, she couldn’t tell. Gaston, still easily in earshot, gave no sign either, suddenly concentrating very steadily on his work. He’d rather have blisters the size of dinner plates on his grave-digging hands than wear a tongue lashing from Clementine. She could make grown men cry, that chip off the old block, and he did not want to be one of them. Again. Many was the time she had berated the poor unfortunate who’d helped her father home from Le Bois. It was perhaps why Olivier had met his end unaided.

  Clementine pushed open the churchyard gate, Cochon prancing excitedly around her as she snatched her bicycle from its position against the hedge. With an unexpected grace, she threw a leg over the saddle — cursing at her sagging tights as they caught on the seat. She cycled angrily, choosing a circuitous route that did not take her past the pâtisserie and Bernadette with her gossiping tongue, the butcher with his ogling eyes nor the video store that had been the scene of her father’s demise. She did not want to see or hear anyone. She would slap their faces rather than hear one word regarding the passing of her friendless father. He had done nothing to deserve their goodwill in life and they had accordingly not shown him any. That was the way it had been and no one had any right to pretend otherwise now that he was dead and gone. Olivier didn’t deserve their stupid false sympathy. He didn’t deserve anything. If she heard so much as one single syllable of condolence she would scream.

  Fury kept Clementine cycling swiftly, head down, the little horse stretching his tiny legs into a gallop behind her. Past the town square with its tattered tulips she pedalled, around th
e mairie, behind Le Bois, and on through the village until she rounded the bend past the last house, home of Laure Laborde. Now there was a face she was itching to slap, she thought, eyeing the chirpy daffodils in the wretched woman’s window boxes. The clothes of Laure’s never-ending horde of ill-mannered children flapped in the sharp breeze. The woman’s eldest was 19 and at university in Paris yet the youngest was barely out of nappies. It was disgraceful, her infernal breeding, thought Clementine, her stomach churning at the thought. Disgraceful. All those children. “La-a-a-a!” she trilled involuntarily into the wind. “La-a-a-a!”

  Once upon a time this trilling had been a silent barrier in Clementine’s head to deflect particularly painful thoughts. Somewhere along the line, though, the previously noiseless notes had slipped out through her plump ruby lips into the world of sound and, sadly for her, there had been no one there to tell her to shove them back in again. Now, they were like a tic over which she had little control — if in fact she even noticed them.

  “La-a-a-a!” her sweet voice tickled the breeze again as Laure’s youngest tumbled out the front door and fell onto her chubby toddler knees, golden curls tumbling down baby shoulders. “La-a-a-a!”

  There were so many things about which Clementine simply could not bear to think.

  Débourrement

  Around the corner from the house full of children, the road straightened and midway along it stood Saint Vincent, patron saint of winemakers. His stonily compassionate smile loomed 60 feet above her as Clementine cycled by, his arms benevolently outstretched above the valley. She had no particular fondness for him personally but nonetheless as she passed him those motionless arms seemed to swing down and somehow snatch away the Marne Valley mist she carried unwittingly on her shoulders, sweeping it from her like a matador’s cape.