The Wine Widow

by Tessa Barclay

  Clothilde couldn’t contain herself the night she became absolutely certain. She went to Nicole’s room, there to await her surreptitious return about three in the morning. Despite her resolve to stay awake and on guard, she was asleep when Nicole at last tiptoed mouse-like into the bedroom.

  ‘So!’ Clothilde cried, starting awake, confused and flustered and all the more angry because of that. ‘There you are!’

  ‘Madame! What are you doing here?’ Nicole was astounded at the sight of her mother-in-law in her great woollen dressing gown and nightcap of cambric.

  ‘I’m waiting for you!’ cried Madame de Tramont, collecting her wits. ‘I’m waiting to tell you you should be ashamed of yourself!’

  ‘Ssh,’ warned Nicole. ‘You’ll wake the household ‒’

  ‘Oh, they sleep soundly, I daresay, or they’d have heard you go out night after night to meet your lover! What are you thinking of, girl? A man like that!’

  ‘A man like what?’ said Nicole, stiffening.

  ‘He’s old enough to be your father ‒’

  ‘Who are you speaking of?’

  ‘Labaud, of course ‒ who else? A common workman!’

  ‘There’s nothing common about Jean-Baptiste,’ Nicole replied, ‘and as to his being old enough to be my father, that shows how little you’ve troubled to know him. He’s only thirty-four.’

  ‘Well, that’s twelve years between you ‒ and at any rate, that’s not the point! Your behaviour is scandalous!’

  Nicole took off the cloak in which she had wrapped herself against the bitter March night. She was revealed in a fine silk nightgown trimmed with layers of soft cream lace. Clothilde was shocked. The gown had been bought to please her lover, that she was sure of.

  ‘Well, what have you to say for yourself?’ she demanded.

  ‘Nothing.’ Nicole sat down on her dressing stool to take off her little slippers. ‘I’m going to bed. I advise you to do the same.’

  ‘To catch up on the sleep you lost while you were in that man’s arms? Aren’t you ashamed? Creeping out like an alleycat ‒’

  ‘Madame,’ said Nicole carefully, ‘please go to bed. If you stay here you will say things we shall both regret.’

  ‘I shan’t budge until you give me your solemn promise that this affair ends now ‒ tonight!’

  ‘I haven’t admitted there is any affair.’

  ‘Oh, come, don’t let’s be absurd! You don’t slip out of the house night after night in a Paris nightgown and embroidered slippers to inspect the vines! I want your solemn vow to put an end to it at once, and get rid of that man ‒’

  ‘Get rid of Jeannot? Are you out of your mind?’

  ‘He’s to leave this estate within the week or ‒’

  ‘Or what? What?’ Nicole stood up suddenly, pulling herself to her full height. She was not very tall yet she was formidable, eyes sparkling with anger, young breasts heaving under the soft silk. ‘Nothing would make me send Jean-Baptiste away ‒ not unless he had committed some terrible crime ‒’

  ‘Sleeping with the mistress of the house ‒ that may not be a crime but it’s a sin! Have you no morals, girl? No finer feelings? Good God, if you had to take a lover, couldn’t you find someone other than a common peasant?’

  ‘You forget, madame,’ said Nicole with a thin smile, ‘that I am a common peasant, as you so delicately put it.’

  ‘Yes, and that’s what it is, isn’t it? The need for someone earthy, gross ‒’

  Nicole went to the door and opened it. ‘Please go, madame.’

  ‘Not until you tell me ‒’

  ‘I tell you nothing. What I do is my own business. Get out of my room!’

  ‘When I think that this was the room you shared with my own dear son ‒’

  ‘Go, go! Before I take my fists to you! You stupid, interfering old woman ‒ get out!’

  Clothilde didn’t flinch. She was tall, heavy, well-able to have defended herself against an attack by Nicole if it had really come. She came to the door, however. ‘You refuse to promise this matter is over?’

  ‘I refuse even to discuss it with you.’

  ‘Very well. If you will not, then I shall take further steps.’

  ‘You will do nothing. You will pack up and leave, first thing tomorrow morning.’

  ‘I certainly shall not! This is my house, though you seem to have forgotten it. I shall stay here until I have made you see sense ‒’

  ‘I will ask my maid to pack your things and have the carriage got ready. If you don’t go with your trunk when it leaves, you will have to wear the same gown for the rest of your stay, madame.’

  Clothilde stared at her. There was a cold anger in her daughter-in-law’s face such as she had never seen before. All at once she felt old and insecure. Nevertheless, she held on to some shreds of her dignity as she went out. ‘I shall speak to you in the morning, when I hope you will be less undaughterly ‒’

  ‘Undaughterly! My God, you intrude in my personal affairs, unasked, and tell me the man I love is brutish and common! You don’t even know him! How dare you sit here on watch against me in my own room? If I’m undaughterly it’s because you’ve taken up an attitude that forces me to fight you. Don’t you understand?’ Nicole cried, clasping her hands together and holding them out towards Clothilde. ‘I need Jean-Baptiste! I need someone to love me ‒ I need to give myself, to belong to someone ‒’

  ‘You have your children ‒ Philippe’s children! You should give your love to them.’

  ‘I do, you know I do! But … surely you understand? That’s different. I … I’m lonely, the nights are long now that Philippe is gone …’

  Clothilde steeled herself against the tears that trembled in the other woman’s voice. ‘I find all that disgusting,’ she said. ‘You are a widow now. You must do without all that.’

  ‘But I can’t!’

  ‘I order you to remember who you are now and what is expected of you. I shall never allow you to demean yourself by carrying on this affair with an employee.’

  Nicole pulled herself back from the verge of a storm of tears. ‘Goodnight, madame. Be ready to leave first thing in the morning.’

  But though she meant it, she was unable to carry out the threat. When her elder daughter saw the valises being put out on the landing for taking to the hall, she inquired artlessly, ‘Why’s Grandmama going so soon? You said she was here on a long visit and she’s only been here a little while.’

  Looking down into the child’s troubled eyes, Nicole’s resolve cracked. She climbed the stairs wearily. She knocked as she had always done and waited for a reply before going into Clothilde’s room. Her mother-in-law was standing at the bureau, putting books into a leather satchel.

  ‘Madame de Tramont.’

  ‘Yes?’ Clothilde said, turning to give her a frosty stare.

  ‘I am sorry for threatening to turn you out of your own house. I ask you to remain.’

  ‘What?’ Clothilde said, faintly, in surprise. She had been ready for renewed battle.

  ‘You are after all grandmother to my little girls. You are Philippe’s mother. I can’t turn you out. I apologise.’

  ‘Oh … Then … Well, I accept your apology.’

  ‘As to what we discussed ‒’

  ‘Discussed!’

  ‘I must insist that you hold your tongue on that point.’

  ‘I shall not speak to you about it again, if that is what you wish.’

  Nicole nodded in relief. ‘Thank you. Now please come down and take breakfast as usual.’

  Clothilde stuck rigidly to her promise. She didn’t mention the love affair to her daughter-in-law again. But she was incapable of letting well alone. She felt the relationship to be shameful. It must be ended.

  The following Sunday brought her the perfect opportunity. The younger child, Delphine, had a slight cough. Nicole decided not to go to church, but to stay at home and read to the little girl. Clothilde, as usual, went in the carriage but when the service was over
directed the coachman to find Jean-Baptiste’s house.

  Yvonne Labaud was flustered when she opened the door to the great lady from the manor house. ‘Oh … Madame de Tramont … oh … what an honour … I don’t …’

  ‘I wish to speak to your husband,’ Clothilde said in her most lofty tone. ‘Pray tell him I am here.’

  ‘No need,’ Jean-Baptiste said, appearing from the room that opened off the back of the little vestibule. ‘Madame de Tramont, please come in.’

  She swept in, her crinoline barely able to get through the doorway. Yvonne, clearly surprised in the midst of preparations for lunch, shrank back out of her way. Jean-Baptiste, unimpressed yet puzzled, showed her into what was clearly the best room, small but furnished with more comfort than Clothilde had expected. It even housed, for God’s sake, a piano! She was surprised. She hadn’t thought villagers went in for such refinements.

  She stared at the piano. ‘Someone in your family plays music?’

  ‘My elder boy shows some talent. Please sit down, madame. Can I offer a glass of wine?’

  ‘No thank you. I shall not be staying long.’ She let a little pause ensue, first to impress the chief cellarman with the importance of what she was about to say, and secondly to ensure that Yvonne Labaud had gone back to her kitchen.

  ‘Labaud, I’ve come to address you on a very personal and serious score. The relationship between you and my daughter-in-law must end at once.’

  Whatever Jean-Baptiste had expected, it wasn’t this. A startled frown appeared between his black brows. He stared at his visitor.

  ‘What relationship? The young Madame de Tramont is my employer.’

  ‘Come, come, I know she’s more than that. I faced her out the other night when she came creeping home from your office, as she’s done many a time before. I told her then, she must stop lowering herself in this degrading fashion and dismiss you from the estate at once.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Jean-Baptiste. ‘Really?’ An angry smile curved his thin lips. ‘From the fact that she has not said a word to me and that several days appear to have gone by, I gather Madame de Tramont is not paying much heed to your advice.’

  ‘She is a young and silly girl,’ Clothilde burst out. ‘She is allowing emotion to rule her head! No good can come from a liaison of this sort ‒ it’s beneath her in every way and it must stop!’

  ‘That is not for you to say, madame.’

  ‘Indeed it is!’ cried Clothilde in indignation. ‘I am the guardian of the family name! It has always been my first consideration! Is the honour of the Tramonts to be polluted by ‒’

  ‘Madame, lower your voice, please,’ said Jean- Baptiste, going close to her and towering over her so that she drew back in alarm.

  ‘What? What do you ‒’

  ‘My wife will hear you. This house isn’t on the scale of the manor. Have the decency to keep this matter between the two of us ‒ though why you should think you have any right to interfere I don’t know!’

  ‘Very well, let us be discreet,’ she agreed, realising that she had perhaps gone too far already for discretion. The coachman was outside with the de Tramont carriage ‒ the whole village must by now be agog with the news that Madame de Tramont had called on the estate’s chief of cellar.

  ‘I must tell you that I refuse to allow you to dictate my actions,’ Jean-Baptiste went on. ‘You are nothing to me ‒’

  ‘Nothing? I am head of the house of ‒’

  ‘Madame, the head of the house of Tramont is Nicole. She restored its fortunes, she made it famous for its wine. I take orders only from Nicole where business is concerned. Where personal matters are involved, I am my own master.’

  ‘I’ll have you know that you are a mere nobody, and your very extraordinary reply to my demands only shows me how wrong it is for a lady to … to …’

  ‘Go to bed with a man she pays wages to?’ he ended for her. ‘Yes, well, it has its problems. I’d like to be Nicole’s equal in money and position ‒ it would make things a lot easier. But it doesn’t seem to matter to her so why should I let it bother me?’

  ‘Oh, I understand you only too well!’ Clothilde cried, quite forgetting her agreement to be discreet. ‘You can gain great influence in Champagne Tramont while you share my daughter-in-law’s bed ‒’

  ‘Will you lower your voice?’ growled Jean-Baptiste. He seized her by one wrist, dragging her towards the door. ‘And go! I don’t need to listen to nonsense like that in my own house.’

  ‘I shall go only when I have said what I have to say! Have you no shame? No decency? After the way my husband singled you out to make you his chief of cellar ‒ after the way I confided in you when he died ‒ is this your loyalty?’

  ‘As you just pointed out, I’m a mere nobody. I have no particular loyalty ‒’

  ‘No, not to the Tramonts nor to your own wife!’

  ‘That’s enough, madame ‒’

  The door opened. Yvonne Labaud came in. ‘Please make less noise, Madame de Tramont. You’re scaring my children.’

  Clothilde gaped at her. She was totally devoid of breath at the emergence of Labaud’s wife looking so calm and controlled.

  ‘You needn’t think you can cause trouble, madame, by accusing my husband of being disloyal to me. Oh, I heard you ‒ it’s difficult not to hear you, you seem accustomed to giving orders at the top of your voice.’

  ‘Madame Labaud ‒’

  ‘Do you think I don’t know all about Nicci and Jean-Baptiste? Do you think I’m deaf and blind?’

  ‘Yvonne,’ groaned Jean-Baptiste, sitting down on one of the hard horse-hair chairs of the sitting- room.

  ‘I’m sorry, Jeannot. I never meant to let it be said between us, but now she comes here, causing a fuss ‒’

  ‘A fuss?’ gasped Clothilde at last. ‘Is that all you call it? Your husband is being flagrantly unfaithful and when I rebuke him, you call it “a fuss”?’

  ‘Why did you interfere?’ Yvonne cried, tears trickling onto her plump cheeks. ‘Everything was all right until you began to meddle!’

  ‘Madame Labaud, you astound me! Do you mean you accepted your husband’s unfaithfulness?’

  Yvonne took up a corner of her apron to dry her cheek impatiently. ‘You have a very short memory, madame. When old Monsieur de Tramont took little Isabelle Guerdon to bed, I don’t remember that you did anything about it. Nor when he made a fool of himself over Marie Sobitte in Epernay, the one who served in the café.’

  Clothilde went white, and then red. Her gloved hand went up to her lips to hide their trembling.

  ‘Us married women,’ said Yvonne, her voice weary, ‘we have to learn to be sensible over things like that. I’ve had less to complain of than some, and I’m thankful for that. But I always knew my Jeannot loved Nicci ‒’

  ‘Yvonne!’ protested Jean-Baptiste.

  ‘It’s true, you know it is. From the minute her figure filled out and she stopped being a little girl, she’s been the apple of your eye. I don’t blame her ‒ she’s a pretty little thing and clever, too ‒ educated, quick on the uptake. I always knew I wasn’t the right wife for you, Jeannot. You needed somebody with the spirit to match your own.’

  ‘Madame Labaud,’ interrupted Clothilde, rallying, ‘surely you must agree with me that this unsuitable affair must end at once!’

  ‘Well, you see, madame, there’s where we differ. I don’t think it’s unsuitable. I think that, if everything was equal, Nicci and Jeannot would be a good match. She’s as full of character as an egg is full of meat, but she needs a man to help her with that great big business firm ‒ and my Jeannot’s just the man, really ‒ now isn’t he? But it can’t be, because first of all she’s a lady now and he’s just a worker, and besides, he’s married to me.’

  ‘Yvonne, I never heard you talk like this before, never in my life,’ Jean-Baptiste said in dismay. ‘What’s got into you?’

  ‘It’s her fault,’ Yvonne said, pointing a hand reddened with housework at Clothilde. ‘Si
lly, self-opinionated old fool! She can’t see what everybody else in Calmady sees ‒ that by rights you ought to be master of the House of Tramont because you’re the one that gave it its champagne ‒’

  ‘Everybody else in Calmady?’ Clothilde said, catching at the words. ‘You mean it’s well-known that my daughter-in-law and your husband are ‒ are ‒’

  ‘Of course it’s known,’ Yvonne said scornfully. ‘Oh, you and your blinkered life! You go off to Paris and London and don’t even know how the village lives! We know everything that goes on in the manor house almost as soon as it’s happened ‒’

  ‘And you sneer about it behind my back!’

  ‘Sneer? No … I don’t know that we even talk about it much,’ said Yvonne. ‘And of course nobody’s said a word to me about Nicci. But I know. I knew from the outset.’

  ‘Then … Then I rely on you to bring your husband back into line,’ said Clothilde. ‘It’s your moral duty! I insist you make Jean-Baptiste ‒’

  Yvonne laughed, a laugh of genuine amusement. ‘Look at him,’ she said. ‘D’you really think he’s henpecked? I can’t “make” Jeannot do anything. Nor can you, and if you knew the first thing about the man you’ve been employing for the past fourteen years, you’d know that.’

  ‘I think you’d better leave, Madame de Tramont,’ Jean-Baptiste said, taking her by the elbow and ushering her to the door. ‘You’ve wreaked enough havoc for one day.’

  ‘But … But … I must know what you intend to do ‒’

  ‘How the hell do I know what I’m going to do?’ he cried in a voice that made her tremble, it was so full of suppressed fury. ‘You’ve brought my whole world down about my ears! Get out before I strangle you, you old busybody!’

  She almost ran out to the carriage. The coachman, who had been standing close to the cottage entrance so as to hear as much as possible, scarcely had time to open the carriage door for her.

  She tumbled in. ‘Take me home,’ she begged, tears streaming down her pink cheeks, ‘take me home!’