“There is no he and I, Clementine.”
“But there was. Back then. I went over there. Just the once. After you and he … You knew I wanted him, Mathilde, and yet you went over there and took him from me.”
“You haven’t spoken to him since then?” Mathilde was aghast. “But that’s ludicrous, Clementine. That was so long ago and I was just a horny 17-year-old doing what horny 17-year-olds do. I didn’t know what he meant to you or if I did, I probably didn’t care. But I do now. I know, that is, and I care. And I’m sorry. I’m truly sorry.”
For a single heartbeat Clementine saw that this could be true, that the whole miserable tragedy could have been caused by nothing more than raging adolescent hormones. And that Mathilde could be truly sorry. She had to decide then whether to cling to her bitterness or let it go. For a moment, she chose to treasure it. It had been part of her life for so long she was almost afraid to be without it. But the weightlessness of compassion, a rare commodity in her life until recently, for once was so easily within her reach that it was a temptation she couldn’t resist. Like chocolate éclairs.
“Apology accepted?” Mathilde asked, gingerly.
“Apology accepted,” Clementine replied begrudgingly and her misery floated off like a hot-air balloon.
Fraternité
The harsh cold weather continued into the next month, the vines staying safe and sleeping beneath their freezing blanket. Inside the House of Peine on the other hand, the thaw was well underway. Certainly the walls remained cold to the touch and the windows a little icy, but the atmosphere itself was anything but frosty. In fact, had that imaginary passerby who’d looked in and fainted the previous month peered once more through the kitchen window of a chilly evening, he or she might even have dreamed wistfully of belonging to such a crowd.
Whoever would have guessed that the poisonous Peines might one day conjure up such envy?
Edie was enjoying the winter holidays, further impressed with the exuberance with which the French embraced the notion of the vacation. School forgotten for the time being, Sophie had been teaching her to paint and bake, two skills at which she showed some aptitude, adding to her growing confidence.
Her daughter soaked up by the extended family, Mathilde was relatively content working on her campaign to get the next release of Peine champagne into as many restaurants and wine shops as possible. As she worked the phone scaring up orders, Clementine beavered beside her in the winery. In her usual slow and steady way, she had completed the blend. The new wine was all now safely mixed in its barrels where it would stay until bottling.
Nothing ever stayed still for long in a Champagne winery, however, and the next big job at hand was disgorging the champagne that Mathilde was doing such a good job of selling. Clementine had been dragging the chain on the disgorging as it was a mammoth task requiring all hands on deck and some of those hands, she feared, were a little too likely to drop and waste her precious bubbles. In the end, a couple of weeks into February, it was Mathilde who tugged the chain.
“Our bank manager has a little problem,” she announced one afternoon following a visit to Epernay. She didn’t mention that the little problem he had was that he’d finally worked out that his stubby fingers were never going to tickle her slender thighs and this had catapulted him into a most unpleasant frame of mind. “He is becoming slightly disagreeable,” she said instead, “over the matter of our overdraft and we need to address our cash flow. Clementine, how soon do you think we can start se lling the new release?”
“Well, it’s all riddled but it will take a week to disgorge — if we all work very carefully, paying particular mind to what we are doing and keeping tragic slip-ups to a minimum.”
“Yes, yes, and then?”
“And then we need to let it rest for about another six weeks.”
“Another six weeks!” Mathilde rolled her eyes in exasperation. “Are you joking? The infernal stuff has been resting for four years already.”
“It’s for exactly that reason we need to let it rest some more.” Clementine stood firm. “Remember, Mathilde, our bottles lie quietly in the cave for all that time giving birth to their bubbles and then we turn them upside down, freeze the neck, whip off the lid, pop out the sediment, top them up and then wedge in a cork. Imagine if all that happened to you in one day! Trust me, they need more rest. Anything else would be downright cruel.”
Mathilde pondered momentarily the possibility of having someone whip off her lid and top her up, so to speak. It had been a while, a long while. Her cork was firmly wedged and imagining anything otherwise was something of a distraction. She banned such thoughts. “So, we disgorge now and release at the end of March?” she asked Clementine.
“The beginning of April, perhaps. And then we can bottle the new wine because there’ll be room in the cave.” Wine-making was a constant juggling act. Every minute could be used some way or other, every centimetre of space too.
“Okay,” Mathilde said authoritatively. “We need to start disgorging as soon as possible so we can get the champagne out into the market. Leave the bank manager to me, I think I can keep him at bay for a while longer.” Leastways, she had the phone number for his superior in Paris and had threatened to ring it should the manager not accommodate her for another month or so. “But it’s imperative we have some dates firmly in place and we need to meet all the deadlines. If we are delivering early April, we can expect payment early May. I’ll have to make sure that happens but I’ve done that before. Prompt payment is essential if we are going to …” She petered out, not meaning to alarm her sisters but she was too late. High finance was well above Sophie’s head but she could sense pending penury when she sniffed it.
“Are we in trouble?” she asked.
“We are sailing close to the wind,” Mathilde admitted. “But people have sailed closer. Generally it is just a matter of keeping everyone informed and knowing when they can expect product and when we can expect payment.”
“At least it’s the 2002 we are releasing,” Clementine told her. It had been a good year and there was plenty of it. The House of Peine aged its champagne longer than other houses, Olivier had insisted on it, but some were about to release their 2003. Thanks to the frost and heat that dreadful year, those houses would be lucky to have half their normal stock heading for the stores and restaurants. “Although I suppose that means we’ll have cash-flow problems again next year,” she added miserably.
“Never mind next year,” Mathilde said crisply. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. We need to get through this year first.”
That very evening Clementine got the rusty forklift out of the barn and drove it around the side of the winery. One of the good things about the cave her ancestors had dug into the chalky earth was that because it was underground it remained at a constant cool temperature. One of the bad things was getting anything in or out of it. During the vendange, the wine travelled from the top floor to the cave via hoses. But to get the barrels and bottles and vats and anything of a decent size in or out, there was a steep driveway dug into the earth down which bigger machines could make deliveries to a set of heavy steel doors (close relations to the Peine château gates it would seem, if their reluctance to open when you needed them to was anything to go by).
For the next couple of days Clementine negotiated the steep driveway and sticky doors time and time again. With much graunching of gears, burping of fumes and unleashing of ripe expletives, she picked up the pallets of riddled bottles and delivered them around the outside of the winery to the top floor for disgorging. Once all the bottles were there, she enlisted the help of her family.
They were reminded on a half-hourly basis to pay particular mind to what they were doing and so managed to keep tragic slip-ups to a minimum. For a week the four of them worked on the production line, freezing the bottle necks, removing the plugs of sediment, adding the final dosage, putting in the corks, fitting the muzzles, adding the foils, and packing the bottles right-s
ide up back onto the pallets. It was exhausting work — and noisy — and they were dog-tired by the end of each day.
But it was with great satisfaction that Clementine stood back the afternoon they finished and admired those 50,000 bottles, now one step closer to improving a perfect stranger’s day by providing their delightful effervescence at some as-yet-unknown special occasion.
She hitched up her skirt (not exactly Chanel but a vast improvement on the corduroy) and was about to jump on the forklift again when Sophie stopped her.
“What are you doing, ’Mentine?”
“I may as well start delivering the pallets back downstairs,” Clementine said, albeit wearily. “What I don’t do now I’ll only have to do tomorrow.”
“Oh, come on,” Mathilde interrupted. “We’ve worked our fingers to the bone here. Surely, this calls for a celebration.”
“Yes, ’Mentine, what about a bottle of the ’88? You deserve it.” Sophie had tasted it only a couple of times but it was a drop that needed as much revisiting as possible.
Clementine paused, thinking about Olivier and his unwillingness to share his best work, his difficulty in appreciating the very thing he worked so hard to produce. She decided the forklift could wait until tomorrow. “You’re right,” she said. “I’ll go and get the ’88 if you go in and light the fire.”
Some time later they sprawled, relaxed, around the now often-used sitting room. The burning coals in the fireplace threw out a gentle amber glow, illuminating Clementine who sat on the floor, her back against the lumpy sofa, with a sleeping Edie in her arms.
The child had enjoyed a whole glass of champagne, picking up some of the most subtle herbaceous notes, before falling into a weary slumber from which her aunt was reluctant to wake her. School started again in the morning. And although she found lessons easier in Saint-Vincent-sur-Marne than she had in Manhattan, it was still enough of an ordeal for sleep to provide a welcome refuge.
“You’d make a good mother, Clementine,” Mathilde said thoughtfully.
The fire popped, a floorboard creaked upstairs.
“Have you ever thought about finding her? Finding Amélie?”
Sophie’s stomach gurgled. She’d been having trouble with indigestion and fear at how Clementine would take this intrusion further curdled the contents of her stomach. She watched carefully to see how her eldest sister would respond.
Clementine stared into the coals, seeing tiny flickering images of her dark-haired daughter dancing and weaving between the oranges and yellows pulsating in the fireplace. “Not really,” she said eventually in a surprisingly relaxed voice. She’d barely dared think of her daughter at all until recently.
“Would you think about it now?” Sophie asked.
Clementine bent forward and smelled Edie’s hair. It had the yeasty fruit of the winery in it still but also the undertones of some lollipop-flavoured little-girl shampoo.
“What would I do if I found her?” she wondered. “Just say that I did, and just say she wanted to meet me. I could hardly bring her here, with her father next door not even knowing she exists. What if she looks just like him? What if he sees her?”
“What if you tell him?” Mathilde suggested carefully. “What could happen?”
“Odile could throttle me,” Clementine pointed out. “Look what happened when I tried to speak to him at the parade. Can you imagine what she would do if I turned up with our daughter?”
“They don’t have children of their own,” Mathilde said. “You may well surprise Benoît but then he may surprise you.”
“I surprised him once before and it wasn’t a beautiful experience,” Clementine said shortly. “I doubt very much he would want to relive it. I know I don’t.”
“Yes, but keep in mind that he shares his bed with odious Odile,” Mathilde said with a glimmer of her old vicious wit. “The poor man must be desperate for something halfway appealing to wake up to. I’d rather have you any day.”
Sophie laughed and a smile even occurred to Clementine: it was a compliment after all. Her mind turned then to the subject of bed-sharing. If she could use what she’d learned from Hector with Benoît …
“You’re blushing, Clementine,” Mathilde said.
“It’s too hot in here.” Clementine extricated herself from Edie. “Help me get her up to bed, will you? I’m going to have an early night. Sophie, you should too. You look exhausted.”
The three of them carried the slumbering 10-year-old up the stairs and put her to bed where the moon threw a slice of light over her face as she lay there, illuminating a corrugated skein of Clementine-like hair.
They all stood there looking at her for a few moments, thinking their different thoughts. Then they bid each other good night and headed to their rooms and to deep dreamless sleep. Apart from Mathilde, that is. She had a change of heart at her bedroom door and after waiting until she could hear that her sisters had turned in, she slipped back down the stairs.
Catastrophe
It was two in the morning when Cochon jumped on top of Edie. He was only small and unshod but still, he was a horse. Having his hooves on her chest woke her up in an instant. He was snorting and shaking his mane in a most frenzied fashion, plus he smelt strongly to her sharp young nose of smoke.
Edie sat bolt upright, feeling a jolt of fright, then she noticed a faint glow through the curtains in her room. She jumped out of bed and flung them open. Across the courtyard, an orange flame shot out the door of the winery and licked the wall like an illuminated tongue.
“Mommy!” she screamed, running into the chilly hall. “’Mentine! The winery’s on fire! Wake up!”
For a split second there was no sound at all. Then there was the thud of heels on floorboards, an anguished cry from Sophie, and a strangled moan of panic from Clementine who burst into the hallway in her nightgown, her hair wild, her eyes terrified.
Mathilde alone was calm, yet white-faced. “Call the fire brigade,” she told Clementine. “Don’t panic, ’Mentine. Just do it.”
Then she and Sophie, who clutched her father’s old wool jacket around her, grasped the whimpering Edie and ran down the stairs and out into the courtyard.
At first Mathilde thought that perhaps they could contain the fire themselves. Flames no longer shot out the door nor any of the small windows on the courtyard side, there was just a lot of thick black smoke. The winery was made of stone, after all, she reasoned. But what she could not see was that the flames inside the building did not need to exit the doors and windows now, they had found their escape upward and were jumping to lick the heavy exposed wooden beams that ran the length of the ceiling.
Just as Clementine emerged from the house, the roof with its tantalising wooden shingles caught alight with a single “pouf”. It was all the more frightening because the noise was barely more than a whisper yet the ensuing flames lit up the surrounding countryside with a violent glow that illuminated every grape vine from the snaking Marne River below them to the church spire peaking on a distant horizon.
Sophie had clumsily hauled the hose from the vegetable patch around to the courtyard and was calling for Edie to find the faucet and turn it on but it was useless. They could all see then that it was useless.
The sound of the first bottle exploding was like a splinter in Clementine’s heart. She fell to her knees on the gravel, both hands stuffed in her mouth, the heat from the flames burning her face, that crinkly hair crackling and shrinking in sympathy. Through the hiss and roar of the blaze she heard another bottle explode, then another and another and another, until the cold night air rang with the almost musical notes of some terrible, twisted symphony.
Imagine how this cacophony would sound to a woman who battled tears when a single bottle of Peine was dropped and wasted? Each note was like the clash of giant cymbals crushing the breath from her lungs, the hope from her heart. This was not only her past but her future going up in smoke. And all in front of her very eyes.
The fire brigade arrived quickly co
nsidering Gaston, the gravedigger, was in charge of coordinating the volunteers. Yet despite his relative speed and efficiency, 50,000 freshly disgorged bottles of champagne were history by the time the fire fighters got there. Clementine was in some sort of a stupor then, from which neither her sisters nor her niece could snap her out. She was collapsed on the gravel, her eyes wide open and black with the horror of what she had seen, her skin raw from the cruel combination of intense heat and night-time winter chill.
Sophie and Mathilde tried to drag her further back from the burning winery, closer to the house, but she would not be moved, could not keep her eyes off the flames that were gobbling up four years’ hard labour and who knew what else. In the end, the four of them, five including the shuddering Cochon, sat huddled helplessly together in the courtyard, clutching each other beneath a blanket, strangely transfixed by the terrible sight.
“It’s the noise,” Edie said wondrously at one point as though she were watching a documentary on the Discovery Channel. “I never knew fires were so loud.”
It took little more than half an hour for Gaston and his crew to battle for control of the flames. It seemed an insult, almost, that their lives could be ruined quite so quickly. There was not that much to burn, Gaston told them, once the wine had gone and taken the roof with it.
His boss, the fire chief Xavier Martinot, a big man with a walrus moustache, ordered most of the fire fighters home an hour or so later, then gruffly explained to Mathilde that the fire seemed suspicious. It had started, he said, among the stack of new oak barrels that Patric Didier had delivered earlier in the week. The oak was dense, he explained, and needed quite some provocation to burn but once it got going: “Kaboom!”
“But who would do that to us?” Sophie asked quietly.
“Who indeed,” Martinot agreed. “Usually it’s a family member,” he passed a black eye across the startled group in front of him, “or an enemy or a totally unrelated random arsonist. They’re the worst.”
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