House of Peine Read online

  Clementine could not speak but Mathilde, who was still not looking at her, did not notice.

  “Well, there’s only one way to get to the bottom of this.” Once again those narrow hips just sashayed right past Clementine’s round ones, taking Mathilde’s long lean legs in the direction of Benoît Geoffroy.

  This time, Clementine did not stay to watch. She would rather take her secateurs and slit her wrists. Instead, she apologised brusquely to Cecile, jumped on her bicycle and, with one hand stuffed in her mouth to stifle the wail that was trying to escape, she pedalled home as fast as she could, her sofa dress billowing in the wind, her face unrecognisable as she battled tears that felt they would flow forever.

  It was happening again. The worst day of her miserable life was being repeated with the exact same cast of characters. Of all the possibilities she had imagined in the past years, she had not even considered one as unbearable as this. And she had spent many long, lonely nights considering.

  It was Sophie who found her several hours later lying in the cave behind the oak barrels of Olivier’s 1999 reserve pinot noir which was used in his champagne blend and was a particularly good drop. She was sobbing still, teetering on the brink of a hysteria that comes only when a well-preserved stew of suffering is stirred up with a pinch of fresh pain.

  When her eldest sister missed lunch Sophie thought it odd. When supper time came and went and still there was no shuffling of old scuffed boots, no clinking of the cutlery drawer, she became concerned and went looking for her. Once she had found the discarded bicycle lying by the vegetable patch, clippers and a half-eaten pastry spilled from its basket, it didn’t take long. She heard the sobs from the open hatch in the winery floor, where Cochon lay slumped and sad, then followed the wretched noise until she found Clementine in a crumpled floral heap in a cramped dark space behind the ’99.

  In her short but colourful life Sophie had been witness to many a heart in the process of breaking. She could recognise the signs from a hundred paces. And she could tell that this was not the sound of a fresh break. Far from it. Whatever horror lay at the bottom of Clementine’s pit of despair had been there for quite some time she was sure.

  Far from launching a dramatic rescue, Sophie simply crawled in beside her sister, just a hair’s breadth from touching her. Sitting squashed up against the cellar wall, she pulled her knees to her chest and hugged them. She said nothing, just watched that desolate body heave with misery, waiting for the right moment, if it came, to do anything more. She wasn’t sure at first if Clementine even knew she was there but eventually the heaving receded to more of a hiccup and the hoarse weeping to a staccato moaning, the sound of which echoed eerily around the chalk walls of the cave.

  This took maybe half an hour, but Sophie was a patient soul. She filled in the time observing the way the colours in the flora on Clementine’s dress changed with the rise and fall of her sobs, the pink turning to mauve, the lavender to indigo, the purple to black as it caught and lost the dim light at different angles. They were hydrangeas, the flowers, Sophie thought. Full and lush and beautiful like the ones she had so often seen at the market on Boulevard Edgar Quinet in the sixth arrondissement. She imagined choosing a scarf from her friend Enrique’s stall, a green one perhaps, to pick up on the little bits of foliage scattered over Clementine’s crumpled form. Or a lilac one to bring out the flowers’ prettiest colour. She would wrap it up in tissue paper the colour of clotted cream, tie a soft pink ribbon around it and thread a bouquet of dried lavender through the bow. She would give it to Clementine.

  At this she realised the moaning had drifted into a lull of sorts, the hydrangeas were not moving as far or as fast. She wriggled ever so slightly closer, sat there for a few silent moments, then reached her small hand over to Clementine’s rounded shoulder and gently, gently, gently, lay it there, as soft as a feather. Clementine’s body resumed its shuddering under Sophie’s caress but she did not shake her sister off, nor shout at her to leave. Whatever unhappiness lurked deep inside her was so desperate to escape Sophie could all but feel it frantically clawing under those hydrangeas. She just kept soothing, her strokes getting longer, her palm pressing gently but firmly on that unhappy garden, until she managed to draw out each of her sister’s anguished breaths for a moment longer than the last.

  Soon, Clementine was calm, the cave almost noiseless, so black, so still, so dense, it felt almost to Sophie — who had spent many cold winter afternoons huddled in the chapels of Saint Sulpice — like a confessional.

  “I had a baby,” Clementine whispered into the pool of darkness still occupied by that thought. “Amélie.” She murmured the name so softly it was like rain falling in the sunlight, you could only be certain it was there if you caught it at the right angle. Even then, despite it being only a fraction louder than silence, it was the loudest she had ever said it. Amélie. The word bounced around the great empty cavern of her heart, chasing away any hope for the usual operatic “La-aa-a!” to drown it out.

  Then came the memory of delivering that perfect squealing little body all those years ago. She had blocked it out for so long, she’d started to believe it had all been a dream, a misty half-remembrance of somebody else’s tragedy, but in uttering that one little pink fleshy word, she brought that baby, her baby, back into her life. In that clear, honest moment Clementine felt the loss like a wound, recognised the sore that festered inside her, poisoning everything, saw her womb empty, weeping, useless. She started to howl again.

  Sophie moved closer so she was pressed firmly against Clementine’s back. She smoothed her sister’s crinkled red hair, tucking it behind her ear, and kept her silence. A baby? Clementine? She couldn’t begin to imagine what had happened to her, where the baby was now, how old she was, who the father was. They were questions that Clementine would not want asked, Sophie was pretty sure of that. And who else knew about it? Clearly not Mathilde, with her constant arsenal of nasty virgin jokes. What a dreadful, harmful, hurtful secret for her eldest sister to keep and to have kept. And what a price she had paid. This was the misery that reeked from every pore, which pulled her mouth down at the edges and kept her eyes swivelling from side to side, afraid to rest on anything pleasant or peaceful other than her grapes, her children, thought Sophie, and her gentle heart swelled. It was such a good heart. And perhaps Clementine, in her despair, felt it beating with extra vigour on her behalf because her howling started to subside into a less tortured form of grief and eventually evaporated into a mere whimper. Soon after, her breath started coming deep and even. She was asleep.

  Sophie stayed for a while before slowly extricating herself. There was nothing more she could do, she knew that, and she also knew that Clementine would probably not want her there when she woke up.

  Out in the courtyard the sky was dark, the odd misshapen cloud moving half-heartedly in front of the stars, the moon not yet high in the sky. Sophie took her sister’s despair and tucked it away deep inside where she treasured such confidences. Then she hugged herself, a smile forming. Unless she was mistaken, Patric would still be waiting for her at the café. With a skip in her step, she hurried to meet him.

  Veraison

  The Peine berries grew fat and sweet as the summer lived up to its early promise, each sunny day sliding lazily into a balmy evening and returning with another clear pink sunrise. The smell of ripening fruit hovered in the air every bit as thick and obvious as the famous winter mists but bringing none of that dreary claustrophobic gloom, just the pure certainty of great possibility.

  By August, the vines had a more luxurious look about them too, a deeper palette was creeping across the hills. Veraison was underway; the grapes, all born the same shade of green, had started to change colour, the pinots taking on a dark red tinge, the chardonnay tending towards a paler yellow.

  The grapes weren’t the only things growing fat and sweet and changing colour either. Sophie, thanks to the consistent advantage of having a roof over her head and food at every meal time, had s
tarted to lose her urchin look and take on a healthy country glow. Her jet black hair had faded under the northern sun, her translucent skin had turned a honeyed gold. Gone were the purple lips and the heavy black kohl. That disguise for the moment discarded, the violet eyes radiated only contentment.

  Patric Didier was partly to thank — Sophie had soaked up the warmth between the cooper’s sheets as often as she could before being supplanted by a shapely blonde from Cramant — but full responsibility for her improved demeanour was remarkably down to Clementine.

  Something had changed between the two sisters after the night in the winery when Clementine had released her secret into the yeasty blackness. It wasn’t momentous nor earth-shattering, the change: they weren’t suddenly the best of friends sharing every little thought and spending cosy nights gossiping in each other’s rooms as they painted their nails. But there had been progress, of sorts. One small step for most other families, one giant leap for the Peines.

  It felt to Sophie a little as though the most delicate thread had been spun between her and Clementine as they had huddled there in the dark behind the reserve pinot noir. It was fragile, an almost invisible strand, but it was still a bond where before there had been none. And Sophie clutched it with delicate fingers. She wound it daintily around her slender wrist until she felt the faintest tug and then let it pull her in Clementine’s footsteps as she did her rounds of the vineyards and the winery.

  The older woman while not, at first, going so far as to acknowledge her exactly, at least never chased her away nor scuttled into the foliage at the sight of her. Before long, she had actually grown used to her little shadow, expected it to be there as a matter of fact, and eventually found herself gruffly explaining what she was doing with words that had up till then lain uselessly inside her. As long as the conversation did not stray outside the subject of her champagne, she felt quite comfortable. Incredibly, after a while she came to realise that the feeling she got while nattering — yes, nattering — to Sophie about her work was something akin to pleasure. Gradually even the gruffness disappeared, leaving nothing but her enthusiasm for her work peppered with just a little of her trademark grousing.

  “See, these little berries here are growing in a tight bunch, just the way I want them to,” she might explain one day, “because this row, Dorothée, got extra attention from my pruning shears this year. Like I had the time! But Dorothée has always been needy.”

  Or, “Pasqualine has too much leaf coverage, can you tell? We’ll leave her be for the moment, it’ll keep the berries from getting burned, but later in the summer before the vendange she’ll need plucking. It’s the sort of thing I might actually have trusted those useless twin oafs with but no chance of that now, hm? Typical!”

  And, “Look at the fruit on greedy Antoinette! Those poor canes must be working overtime trying to feed all her berries. It’s bunch-thinning for you, Antoinette, and I know how much you like that. Didn’t you listen to a word I said last year?”

  As time went on, it became clear that Clementine, too, was flourishing. She was standing straighter and the misery that usually upholstered her face was, if not gone altogether, at least substantially remodelled. The edges of those lips were not headed quite so far south and there was a light in her often-distrustful eyes that had not been there before. So taken was she with her little sister’s company that she decided to allow her to help with the riddling: a huge chore she treasured but could not tackle alone. Yet just looking at all the inverted oak Vs full of holes into which the bottles were inserted and twisted seemed to cause Sophie to lose concentration and become a-twitter with nerves.

  “There are three steps to remuage,” Clementine instructed her. “You twist the bottle about an eighth of a turn to the right like so, give it a quick shake to stir up the sediment and then tilt it slightly as you replace it in the slot. We’ll turn every bottle every second day — once to the right and once to the left — and when the bottles are all directly upside down the sludge will be gathered in the neck and then, voilà, dégorgement! Once we’ve got rid of the sludge the cork goes in and the champagne is ready to sell. Come on, Sophie, now you try. Shoulder width apart. No, shoulder width, same row. Same row! And twist. To the right. Oh, for pity’s sake! We’ll be here for months, if you carry on like this. The old remueurs turned 50,000 bottles a day but you won’t get to 50!”

  Mind you, having even 50 turned by wrists other than her own would be a help so Clementine eventually left Sophie to it and made her way along a different row of pupitres, both hands flying, the musical rattling of glass against timber soothing her the way it always did.

  If the eldest and youngest Peines were blooming in the sun, however, Mathilde was shrivelling in the shadows. She’d been doing her best to medicate away that itch of hers but still it nagged. Whenever she closed her eyes nowadays she saw her Upper Westside apartment: the Tiffany lamp in the dining room, the tangerine sofa in the den, the stand in the hall holding her coordinated collection of caramel and chocolate coloured umbrellas and the one annoying pink one with little love hearts on it.

  Had she done the right thing?

  There. That was it. Doubt, a thousand times worse than guilt. Guilt she could choose not to feel. With doubt she was struggling.

  The thing was, she admitted to herself in a lucid moment one sleepless morning when the pastis had worn off but the Xanax not yet kicked in, she was the one who had left. It had been her choice, her wish, her blessed relief — so why was it that she felt so abandoned? She hated that word, it stank of weakness and she could not abhor weakness. Besides, to be abandoned you had to be in need of whoever had abandoned you and this was not the case in her situation. She didn’t need anyone. She wasn’t forsaken in any way. She was the one who had gone. But the truth was, she could have tracked herself down in a nano-second, so why the hell couldn’t they? Couldn’t he? Or, more to the point, why hadn’t he? All this time and not so much as an angry letter, an accusatory phone call, a desperate plea for her to return to the States.

  George. She rolled her husband’s name around in her head, the American way, seeing him standing in their bedroom wearing any one of his pastel-coloured cashmere sweaters, staring at her the way she so often caught him doing, a look on his face that made her want to slap him so hard his teeth rattled.

  They’d hardly enjoyed the romance of the centuries but the arrangement had suited them both extremely well. She’d been very happy to marry someone wealthy and successful and he had certainly never complained about her looks, her style, her great ability to get the right people together in the right room. It was an equal marriage, reasonable in many respects, most definitely better than any of the unions her poor deluded mother had attempted. Even so, Mathilde had spent the past however-many years wishing he was dead or she was dead or that one of them was on the other side of the world. And now she was. So why, why, why, she asked herself, was she spending so much time wondering why he hadn’t chased her there?

  For a while, she’d escaped these irritating notions by flirting with Benoît Geoffroy again. It was a relief to let her hormones lead her for a bit but she had lost interest when he’d resisted her charms, first out among the vines and then again, more robustly, when she had turned up at his house wearing a low-cut top and bearing a bottle of single malt.

  Then she set her sights on straightening up the Peine château but without going to Paris and spending a fortune it was a fruitless task. And as no one but herself had the slightest inkling of style, what was the point? Clementine trailed mud across the rugs like an old plough horse and Sophie’s idea of interior design was plonking a pile of matching pebbles next to a jar of dried twigs.

  The Peine family finances were another matter.

  This was a project into which Mathilde could truly sink her teeth and so did. The paperwork was nonsensical, true; all she knew for sure was that once the taxes were paid, the House of Peine would be so in the red that she and those two fools to whom she was allegedly re
lated would to all intents and purposes be the joint owners of nothing but an enormously painful headache that would require decapitation — unless they could turn the business around.

  Still. Still, still, still. Turning it around was not impossible. For all Clementine’s nutty eccentricity and infuriating social incompetence, the dullard had clearly done a capable job of taking care of her precious grapes and the land, after all, was the family’s major asset. If Mathilde could just rescue the finances, stave off payment of the monies owed until the House was in better shape, then there was a chance to make some cash.

  All she needed in the absence of a secretary, a financial controller and the slew of dewy-eyed males she was used to charming into doing the dirty work, was an assistant.

  “Sophie, I need you today,” she said briskly as she walked into the kitchen one morning, filling up a cup of coffee from the pot on the stove and lighting a breakfast cigarette. No one here to tell her what a disgusting habit it was and how passive smoke could kill. This was France! “There’s office work to do and I can’t do it on my own.”

  Clementine and Sophie both froze, chunks of baguette spread lavishly with Mirabella plum jelly halfway to each mouth. Cochon, upon hearing Mathilde’s shoes clicking across the stone floor jumped to his feet with such speed he banged his little head on the seat of a chair.

  “What do you mean office work?” Clementine finally said, just as Sophie stammered, “But I’m riddling.”

  “Yes, well it comes as no surprise to me that you are not familiar with the accounts, Clementine, or we wouldn’t be in this state. But someone around this festering heap has to pull their finger out and confront the mess we are in and I’ve decided it’s going to be me. So I need a filing clerk to sort out the books and Sophie will do nicely.”

  “But I don’t know about filing,” Sophie cried and even Clementine was surprised by the panic in her voice. “I don’t know about accounts.”