The Champagne Girls

by Tessa Barclay

  ‘We’ve been through all this before,’ she remarked to Monsieur Auduron as they began on the soup course. ‘And we ended up by holding on to most of what we own.’

  ‘Yes, but you had to buy back what you’d sold in the end ‒ that’s a wasteful process. If you decide not to sell this time, you must make a long-term plan, and be prepared for hard times for perhaps three years.’

  ‘If you ask me,’ Charles interposed, ‘there’s nothing but hard times in the wine industry!’

  ‘No, no.’ Auduron frowned and smiled. ‘In the past, great fortunes have been founded on wine. It’s unfortunate that we’ve had pests that we don’t know how to deal with in the last twenty years or so.’

  ‘I’d call twenty years of trouble “hard times”,’ Charles said. ‘It comes of being in a dying industry. Now aviation ‒’

  ‘Is just at its beginning ‒ I quite see your point. But there has always been wine and there always will be. And modern science will show us how to conquer the new pests, just as it’s shown you how to fly a heavier-than-air machine.’

  ‘There’s a difference, though,’ Charles insisted. ‘Wine isn’t essential. Champagne especially is a luxury product.’

  ‘But so is an Old Master, or a performance at the opera ‒’

  ‘Oh, come on, Gaby,’ said Charles with a laugh. ‘Any ordinary man in the street can gain access to Old Masters or the Opera by a few centimes entrance fee. When was the first time you saw a poor man drinking champagne?’

  ‘That may be true,’ Auduron agreed. ‘But special products must be made for special people.’

  ‘Special people? You mean for fat old kings like Edward of England to give to his expensive tarts?’

  Monsieur Auduron started. Gaby blushed, and luckily the waiter came to remove their soup plates and serve the fish. After that interruption the lawyer resumed tactfully on a different angle.

  ‘You have to appreciate that the land along the Marne isn’t much good for anything else except vines. The Champagne pouilleuse now … I’ve always thought that with modern farming methods it might be possible to grow grain there. But the hillsides are ‒’

  ‘If you fly over the country,’ Charles said, ‘you can see acres and acres of vine-rows. It’s a one-industry area. And that’s dangerous.’

  ‘Oh, certainly. That’s why,’ Auduron said, ‘we’ve advised the House of Tramont to diversify. And I daresay Mademoiselle Tramont won’t mind if I say we’ve been relatively successful.’

  ‘But that’s a totally different thing from selling out entirely,’ Gaby said, looking anxiously at the lawyer. It was strange that at this moment she felt closer to him than to her lover. He was a Champenois, he understood the awfulness of the idea of giving up the land.

  Auduron had a thoughtful, narrow face with long narrow eyes that made him look sleepy. Gaby had seen features like his here and there in the champagne region: it was said they came from conquerors just after the Romans left, barbarians led by Attila. But there was nothing barbarian about his shrewd lawyer’s brain.

  ‘Prices are low, of course. You’d lose a lot of money on a sale. Then there’s the problem of what your father and uncle would do ‒ they’ve been in wine all their lives, there’s a human problem involved in taking their careers from them.’

  ‘Well, they could retire,’ suggested Charles. ‘After all, your father must be ‒ what, Gaby?’

  ‘He’s fifty-four ‒ that’s too young to retire.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem very young to me,’ Charles insisted. He’d found that in trying to promote the idea of air transport, most of the opposition came from middle-aged men who’d become set in their ways.

  Monsieur Auduron left with Gaby a set of figures he’d drawn up. They showed various alternatives and the financial results. ‘I hope you find them helpful,’ he said as he bowed over her hand at the end of the evening. ‘Thank you for a most delightful meal, mademoiselle.’

  ‘Thank you for giving me your time, monsieur.’

  ‘A pleasure.’

  When he had gone, Gaby went to her suite with Charles. The moment the door had closed behind them, she turned on him. ‘How could you! How could you say things like that!’

  ‘Like what?’ Charles was taken aback.

  ‘About champagne being what expensive tarts drink.’

  ‘Oh …’ He had almost forgotten his own words. ‘Oh, well, everybody’s always said that champagne is a woman’s drink.’

  ‘That just shows how little you know about it! Vintage champagne is a great endeavour, appreciated by people of taste ‒’

  ‘If you say so, darling. I don’t really know much about it, you know I don’t care for wine.’

  ‘No, and that’s just the point! You talk to me by the hour about your wretched flying machines, but if I want to talk about wine you get bored! Let me tell you, wine has made a lot more money for this country than aeroplanes!’

  ‘Don’t get in a tizz about it, Gaby.’

  ‘Don’t humour me! I’m trying to decide whether to vote in favour of annihilating something that’s taken three generations to build up.’

  ‘Look, I know you’re anxious. I know it’s a big decision. But if you’re dispassionate you can see ‒’

  ‘I can’t be dispassionate about it. It’s been our whole life at Calmady. And it doesn’t just affect us, the Tramonts. It affects every grower in the region.’

  ‘But you can’t make your decisions on the basis of what’s good for someone else. You have to decide what’s best for the Tramonts. And I can tell you. Gaby, if your family were to realise their assets and invest the money in aeroplanes ‒’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said bitterly. ‘Papa said at the outset that you were looking for money to put into your silly schemes.’

  ‘Silly? You know it’s going to work. Gaby. You invested money yourself.’

  ‘Only because … because … Well, that was my own money. Don’t imagine for a minute I’d advise my family to invest in air transport!’

  ‘You don’t believe in it?’

  She hesitated. They were having their first real quarrel. If she said what she felt, which was that she’d defend the vine rows to the death before she ever put a centime into flying machines, they might not be able to patch it up.

  ‘Of course I believe in it,’ she said after a hesitation. ‘But don’t let’s pit one idea against the other, Charles. Help me! I’ve got to make up my mind how to vote.’

  At the end of the week the family met once more and the vote was taken. Gavin and Alys voted to sell up. Their daughter and son-in-law voted to hold on. ‘It’s for Pierre and Elinore,’ Frederic explained as he gave his decision. ‘We feel they ought to inherit.’ Robert voted to stay with the business. He looked earnestly at Gaby as he did so, but the next to speak was his son David.

  ‘I vote to give up,’ he said. ‘It’s not that I want to, but the bankers agree that it will be hard going for at least the next five years ‒ and I wonder if we can survive?’

  That made three in favour of selling, and three in favour of holding on. Gaby’s vote would settle the matter.

  She’d come to Calmady half-decided to vote for selling. As if to reinforce her decision, Calmady was looking its worst in a grey day of heavy cloud and drizzle. The sick vines hung on the wires like men under torture. Among them moved the estate workers in their blue smocks and heavy clogs, sacking draped on their shoulders to protect them from the damp.

  Who would want to hold on to a place like this? What did it have to offer except hardship and anxiety? It wasn’t even as if the people cared about the Tramonts. They seemed to think the family were in some plot to do them down over grape-juice prices and the definition of the champagne area. Suspicious, stubborn, strait-laced …

  Yet she loved them. They were her own kind. The land too ‒ for all its tricks, for all the difficulties it caused, it was the home of the great wine that had given her family fame.

  ‘I vote that we hold on,’ Gaby
said.

  Later her father came to her and gave her one of his rare embraces, with a fervour that touched her. ‘I was afraid you’d say no,’ he muttered. ‘That man of yours … He thinks wine-making is an old-fashioned nonsense.’

  ‘I’m afraid he does. But that couldn’t alter the fact that our roots are as deep as those of the vines, Papa.’

  It almost seemed that the others were relieved to have been outvoted. The whole family sat down again to plan retrenchment. They discussed the plan David had concocted with his fellow-lawyers. The only way to keep going on a long-term basis was to mortgage the estate.

  ‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of,’ Marc Auduron argued as they sat glum and unwilling. ‘Land after all is only an asset ‒’

  ‘What!’

  ‘I mean, Monsieur Robert, viewed from a financial viewpoint. It makes more sense to mortgage the land and use the money when you need it, than to sell off little pieces or buildings or whatever.’

  ‘We’ve never had a mortgage on any of our land.’

  ‘But that doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea. Monsieur Gavin.’

  Coaxing, arguing, the lawyers got what they wanted. A long-term plan was laid down. If the plant biologists could come up with a cure for the new mildew and everything else went well, by 1915 the House of Tramont should be enjoying prosperity again.

  The villagers of course got wind of the negotiations and mule-headedly decided that the Tramonts were about to sell them down the river somehow.

  ‘They glower at me so,’ Alys said in a voice quite unlike her usual firm tones. ‘It’s almost as if they know Gavin and I voted to sell up and leave. But they couldn’t possibly know that.’

  ‘I don’t know so much, Aunt Alys,’ said David, with all the insouciance of youth. ‘The servants probably passed on the news ‒ you know how they eavesdrop.’

  ‘David! Don’t say such things to Aunt Alys!’ Gaby reproved.

  ‘In any case, the locals feel like that towards all the negociants, not just us. They see their world going to pieces and they have to blame someone.’ This was Robert, looking suddenly older than his fifty-four years. Grey had appeared in his dark hair. Although he’d always made a great effort to bear himself erect despite his lame leg, his shoulders had stoop now.

  ‘Another thing you have to take account of is the fact that they feel we have no right to mortgage the estate.’

  ‘No right?’ cried David.

  ‘No, not without consulting them,’ Gavin explained. ‘Old Madame bought their vine-rows from them years ago and we have the deeds to prove it, but they still feel those rows really belong to them.’

  ‘But that’s not logical, Uncle Gavin,’ David protested.

  ‘What’s logic got to do with it? It’s a gut feeling they have. No one could argue them out of it.’

  David looked as if he thought he could. With his new law degree in his pocket he was of the opinion he could win almost any argument he was put to.

  ‘If they feel hard done by now,’ muttered Robert, ‘wait until our economy measures start to bite …’

  Among those measures was a withdrawal from even rented living quarters in Paris. There had for years been a little pied-a-terre for the men, used mostly by David. There was also the little suite in the Hotel des Chataigniers where Gaby lived. A small apartment had been made of the attics at the office building in Rue Lelong where David could now take up residence, but it was thought unsuitable for Gaby to live above the business. She had to face the choice of removing back to Calmady or making some other arrangement.

  When she told Charles of it, she expected him to say at once, ‘You’d better move in with me.’ She wanted him to say it. It was a good time to make their relationship more permanent, to make her family aware of it and accept it. When so much was changing, this final change would not shock them so much.

  But Charles looked doubtful. ‘I’d ask you to share my flat,’ he said, ‘but the fact is, I’m thinking of moving out of Paris quite soon.’

  She stared at him. ‘You never mentioned that?’

  ‘No, it’s a decision I’d been putting off. But it makes sense for me to move down to Calais where the airfield is likely to be.’

  ‘I see.’

  He came to sit next to her on the elegant little sofa in the drawing room of her suite. ‘We can see each other often just the same.’

  ‘Oh yes! It’s so handy, isn’t it ‒ Calais to Rheims or Épernay!’

  ‘It’s only about a hundred and eighty miles. Distance doesn’t mean so much now we have good train services. Besides, I’m thinking of investing in an automotive carriage.’

  All at once she saw it from Charles’s point of view. How much more romantic to come swooping east along the dark straight national routes in his wonderful machine, than to live prosaically together in a Paris apartment.

  She began to laugh. ‘All right, Charles. I can see it would be possible to keep in touch by means of modern inventions! I’ll find something quiet and respectable in Épernay ‒ in any case, it’s a good spot to choose from the point of view of the wine industry. Most of the negociants have houses there.’

  ‘I still think you should have persuaded them to sell up and get out.’ But he turned away from the reproach in her great dark eyes.

  It was all very well to talk about Épernay as quiet and respectable, but things had changed. During the following year the festering anger among the small growers began to erupt in sores that wounded the countryside. For some strange reason, they believed the big wine houses were importing cheap wine from North Africa to put into their champagne, instead of using the small crops, produced with such effort in the midst of the mildew attacks.

  Riots broke out in the towns. Mobs began to march about at night in the countryside. The police were too few to deal with them, though they did their best.

  ‘I was stopped on the way here,’ Charles told Gaby as they sat down to dinner in the little restaurant attached to the Auberge du Marché in Épernay. ‘They wanted to know who I was and where I was going.’

  ‘I suppose they thought you might be one of the trouble-makers.’

  ‘It’s hardly likely any of the little vineyardists would have a Benz tourer, my love!’

  ‘You don’t know! They’ve stolen motorised lorries and trucks before now. You must surely know that there are political activists from Paris stirring things up here ‒ they know how to run a revolution.’

  ‘Oh, revolution …’ Charles sipped some beer. ‘A few fights and a few windows broken.’

  ‘It’s easy for you to take it lightly,’ she replied, annoyed. ‘You’re not living here in the midst of it.’

  From the bar next door came the sound of raised voices. The owner could be heard shouting, ‘Out! Out! I want no troublemakers here!’

  Charles half-rose. Gaby put a hand on his sleeve. ‘No, stay out of it.’

  But the door to the restaurant burst open. The owner and the waiter, struggling with a sturdy man, flailed in the doorway.

  ‘Come on, Jules,’ the waiter commanded. ‘You know you’re talking wildly. You’ve had too much to drink.’

  ‘No, not ’nough! If I’d had ’nough, I’d be with the boys … Still trying to get me courage up! Lemme go! I want another brandy ‒’

  ‘You’re going out of here, my lad,’ said Monsieur Deneuf. ‘I don’t want your kind of talk in my bar.’

  ‘Talk, talk ‒ what’s the use of that? Action, that’s what we need, that’s what the Reds tell us! You wait!’ Jules kicked out at the waiter, who released his grasp to hop about holding his shin. ‘I’m off, see ‒ I’m going to help the boys make a lovely fire!’

  ‘No, you’re not!’ Deneuf had held on grimly, and now Charles and one of the other male diners came to his aid.

  The drunk stopped fighting. He stared owlishly at Charles. ‘Ah, you’re the fancy man that goes with the little dark Tramont! Ah, friend, what a sight you’re missing! Great doings tonight at the Tramont house!’
/>
  Gaby heard it, and a frisson of fear went down her spine. ‘What d’you mean?’ she cried, running to grab his arm and shake him.

  ‘Nah, nah, I’m not saying no more! But you’ll see, you’ll see ‒ tomorrow when your boy friend’s gone and you telephone Mama ‒ no answer, heh? Nothing but the sound of sizzling, heh?’

  ‘Charles!’ she gasped. ‘They’ve gone to burn down Tramont.’

  He let go the drunk and half turned to her. ‘I don’t think so, Gaby ‒ I just drove in, the police are all along the roads.’

  ‘But if they go cross-country? They know the area like the back of their hand. Charles! We must get there, warn them!’

  ‘Come on!’ He ran out. His tourer was parked in the stabling behind the auberge. He cranked the handle while Gaby climbed in. The big motor sparked, the car began to shudder with life. Charles leapt in beside her and took the high steering wheel in one hand while with the other he manipulated gear levers. They backed and turned, backed and turned.

  ‘Hurry, hurry!’ she urged, grabbing his arm.

  ‘Let go, Gaby ‒ I need both hands!’

  Although it seemed an age to her, only a few minutes passed before they were speeding out of Épernay at thirty miles an hour. The night wind rushed into their faces, the headlamps picked up the metalled surface of the road and the boles of the cypress trees.

  ‘Can’t you go any faster?’

  ‘We’re topping thirty now ‒ and I’m still running her in, she’s not due to do anything like this,’ he shouted back.

  About an hour later Calmady came into sight against the starlit sky. A few cottage windows had lights: it was perhaps half past ten on a fine October night.

  As they sped out and into the shallow vale between the village and the Villa Tramont, all seemed quiet.

  But then, as they crested the rise, a glow in the sky.

  Netta had woken from her first sleep to the smell of burning. She sat up.

  ‘Freddi! Freddi!’

  ‘Ah?’ he grunted, rolling over on his back.

  ‘Something’s on fire.’

  ‘Eh?’ He pushed himself up on his elbows, sniffed the air. ‘By God, you’re right!’ He leapt out of bed. ‘Get Elinore!’