The Forgotten Summer

by Carol Drinkwater

  Luc nodded, politely offering the local physician another dram of whisky, then escorting the loquacious fellow to his car. Beauchene was known to enjoy a tipple or two and, in return, usually came armed with an hour’s worth of country gossip. Luc’s grandfather’s Comtoise clock in the hall read twenty past seven when he closed the front door, listening to the engine of Beauchene’s Peugeot fire up. He was whacked. The pickers’ meal commenced at seven thirty sharp. Matty was punctual with the courses. The harvesting days began at dawn. Early to bed was the example to set.

  Showered, perfumed, groomed, Jane was looking forward to a stiff drink before facing the team. Where was Luc? It was his habit to freshen up before the meal. He must still be trapped with that doctor, who never stopped talking. He’d probably join her shortly in the library where the family had, over the years, enjoyed their early-evening aperitifs. After, she’d lend Matty a hand. The dear woman worked her fingers to the bone. Jane made her way back down the stairs to the library. No Luc. She poured herself a generous gin and tonic and was settling down to it in an armchair by the fireside when she noticed Clarisse, still in her work clothes, standing by the window, her back to the room, facing out towards the lawns that flanked the western side of the house. Jane was uncertain whether her mother-in-law had heard her come in or not.

  ‘Clarisse?’ she ventured. No response. She spoke a little louder. ‘Clarisse, I’m really sorry about the grapes. Clarisse?’

  Clarisse spun round with a movement that belied her seventy-eight years, causing Jane almost to drop her drink. Decades of buttoned-up rancour were about to be unleashed upon the younger woman.

  Once the doctor had been waved away, Luc had descended the narrow stone stairs to his studio to shut down the computers. Dan and he had been working there when he’d received Jane’s call about the accident. It was from there he now heard the cries of his mother’s rage. Few could have mistaken it. He shot up from the cellars and found both women in the library. There stood Clarisse, arm raised, brandishing her knobbed cane as though about to club Jane, who was near the fireplace, shocked, a hand in front of her face to stave off an impending blow.

  ‘What, in God’s name – Jane, Maman, what’s going on?’ Luc closed the door firmly behind him and stepped between them.

  Jane retreated deep into a leather armchair. She was clasping her glass, gulping from it as it knocked against her teeth.

  ‘Look at her! Irresponsible and pathetic. Whatever possessed you to think she could lead the team today? She’s incapable of decision-making and, besides, when has she ever expressed any commitment to this place?’

  ‘Stop it, Mother. Arrêtes! The she you are referring to is Jane, my wife, your daughter-in-law, and she is here, right in front of you. I don’t know what’s got into you.’

  ‘We have lost the entire day’s crop, that’s what has got into me. And I have to pay that good-for-nothing lot. Out of what? And for what? For nothing! It could have been avoided. She was negligent. All the burden rests on my shoulders. It always has. I bleed for this place. You could help –’

  ‘We do help!’

  ‘You could do more. You could both do more! You should be living here but she keeps you away.’

  ‘Maman, stop this now, do you hear me?’ Luc was directly in front of his mother. He took her gently by the shoulders.

  ‘She doesn’t want –’

  ‘I said, silence, Maman.’

  ‘We were two women and you, a small boy, who built this place. Two women. After your grandparents stayed in Algeria, we had no one. Your father gone. Two women left to fend for ourselves. Have you forgotten?’

  ‘Maman, arrêtes.’

  Mother and son glared at one another. The air was full of dampened outrage. Betrayal. The old woman was temporarily hushed, belittled by her son’s unwillingness to take her side.

  Jane grabbed the opportunity to escape. ‘I’m going upstairs,’ she muttered to Luc.

  ‘Why must you dig up our past, Luc, with this wretched film? Let it be, I beg you,’ Clarisse was pleading, as Jane drew the door shut.

  Upstairs on the bed, Jane finished her gin, then lay back, closing her eyes, the glass slipping from between her fingers. She had a thumping headache and she was in shock, although such displays of Clarisse’s antagonism were not unusual.

  Soon after the death of Luc’s aunt Isabelle, Clarisse had moved into one of the estate’s smaller properties, Le Cottage du Cerisier or Cherry Tree Lodge, offering this manor house, the estate’s principal residence, to her son and daughter-in-law. Jane had mistrusted the gift, perceiving it not as a gesture of generosity towards them but as an enticement, a snare. Clarisse was now alone and she wanted her son back at Les Cigales on a permanent basis.

  Jane had put her foot down, determined they hang on to their London home. ‘We can visit as often as we want, but we have our own lives,’ she’d said to Luc. What she didn’t voice was the certainty that if they upped sticks and settled at Les Cigales, they would lose their independence entirely. Their universe would be dominated by Clarisse.

  Jane and Luc had built their married life in London. They went to the movies two or three times a week, strolled on Hampstead Heath, ate Sunday lunch in one of their local north London pubs. Occasionally, when he wasn’t deep in writing a film, he cooked. Tricks he’d learned from Matty, he’d grin. Luc was passionate about music, particularly live performance, and they regularly visited venues such as the 606 Club or the Jazz Café. Theirs was a good life but Clarisse was hell-bent on putting an end to it and she was furious with Jane for resisting her.

  Jane loved London. When Luc was away on location, she drove to see her father more frequently and went to the gym. In good weather, she met friends for a cycle or a swim on the Heath, and sometimes a picnic. She had recently taken up Russian evening classes and was thoroughly enjoying the challenge; also, it would add to her linguistic portfolio. At Les Cigales, Clarisse was the mistress, and their lives, hers and Luc’s, were never their own. Even the bed upon which Jane was now holed up had belonged to her mother-in-law.

  When Luc pushed open the door, sliding stealthily into the shuttered room, Jane was dozing, still fully clothed, sedated by alcohol, tiredness and misery. Tears stained her cheeks. An empty suitcase lay open on the floor. Luc stepped over it, perched beside his wife and stroked her face.

  ‘Hey, my sweet lady, are you all right?’

  She opened her eyes, shielded them from the slant of light coming in from the corridor, and stared at him. ‘Just about. You look shattered,’ she murmured.

  He frowned. ‘Professional challenges, difficulties. What happened down there?’

  ‘You never share them with me.’

  ‘I don’t want to burden you. Tell me what happened.’

  ‘I’m going back to London,’ she whispered.

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘I am. I have a new contract. I want to get on with it.’

  ‘You can do it here.’

  She shook her head. ‘I prefer to go home.’

  ‘Please, Jane. I know she’s being crotchety and ghastly, but tomorrow she’ll apologize. I will insist. She’s old, she’s lost and lonely, please forgive her.’

  Jane let her eyelids fall shut again. ‘I can’t go through this another time, Luc. The perpetual insinuation that I’m not good enough for you.’

  Luc sighed and ran his fingers through her blonde hair. ‘Jane, listen …’ The sentence died on his lips.

  ‘What?’

  He watched her in silence, deliberating. Beyond the room, footsteps crossed the hall downstairs where the clock was chiming eight. He was running late. He should be presiding at the pickers’ dinner.

  ‘What?’ Jane waited, but he said no more. ‘Luc?’

  He glanced at his watch.

  She thought he looked more troubled than she had ever seen him.

  ‘I wish you’d tell me about your film. Clarisse knows more about it than I do. Sometimes I feel like I’m just an
outsider, an appendage.’

  ‘Chérie, Clarisse knows about this one because she’s part of that history.’

  ‘Is it about your father?’

  He sighed. ‘I told you, he was the seed, the germination.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Ssh, no more questions tonight, please.’ He leaned forward, laid his lips against her cheek, then kissed her on the nose. ‘Matty is already serving the main course. I’d better get down there.’

  ‘How’s Merel?’

  ‘The swelling’s subsiding and she’s sleeping. Meanwhile, Olaf is hitting our finest whisky.’ Luc smiled, stroking his wife’s hair. ‘Sometimes I think my mother hasn’t got a clue.’

  Jane nodded, eyes still closed, her arm resting across Luc’s thigh, a hand holding his. ‘Sorry about the grapes. I really wanted to do my best for you.’

  ‘Sour grapes,’ he jested. ‘It wasn’t your fault. I shouldn’t have thrust the responsibility on you like that at a minute’s notice. I sometimes wish though …’ Luc’s thought drifted to silence.

  ‘What do you wish?’ Her eyes opened, scanning his.

  ‘We’ll talk about it another time. I have to go. You staying or coming?’

  ‘Staying, if you don’t mind.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Don’t be too long.’

  Luc stroked her cheek, deep in thought, observing her. ‘Get some sleep. It wasn’t your fault, and stop hatching plans to leave. Tomorrow, laptop in the breakfast room, do you hear? Skype your clients, attack your translations. No one will disturb you, and congratulations on the new contract.’ He rose from the bed and let go of her hand.

  ‘Je t’aime,’ she whispered, as he left the room.

  The following morning, Luc was up before the birds, as was his habit, harvest time or not. Jane, tangled hair, puffy-eyed, crawled from the bed moments after him, determined that today she would not be the last and she would not be late. She had resolved during her sleepless night to stick it out, but as a menial, an extra hand only. Nothing more. From that morning on, when Luc was ensconced with Dan in his studio, Claude, Jean and Arnaud could take control of the harvest and Jane would obey orders.

  When Merel was rested and had been given the all-clear by Dr Beauchene, she and Olaf stayed on to recuperate for two more days and then, at Luc’s request, they set off in their Skoda for the Netherlands. No one was too sorry to see them go.

  The intense weather eased off and levelled out. Picking became agreeable once more. The team, although depleted, gelled, and the days passed amicably, without further mishaps. Even the dinners proved to be fun. A patched-up harmony prevailed and Jane slogged it out for the duration of the harvest. Claude, with Jean Dupont at his side, aided by Arnaud, delivered the day’s yields safely to the vinification plant where they were loaded onto a sorting table, into the destemmer and fed to the crusher. There, they were separated from their skins and seeds ready for the settling process. Les Deux Soeurs’ annual vintage was under way. Clarisse had nothing further to gripe about.

  Discreetly, Jane negotiated ways to maintain a safe distance from her unforgiving mother-in-law. When they were obliged to engage with one another, the exchanges on both sides were awkward, icy.

  Part of Jane, the bruised, humiliated part, would have preferred to pack her bags and flee, but she hung on, for Luc’s sake. If she had run, Luc reminded her, the rift between his wife and her mother-in-law would have deepened, never to be healed. If the two women in his life couldn’t reach an understanding about the grievances in their past, how were they ever to accept the realities of the present and the future?

  ‘What will it take?’ he asked Jane one evening, when they were alone, sipping a nightcap on their bedroom terrace, Walnut snoring alongside them.

  Jane, her bare feet resting on Luc’s knees, looked out across the valley beyond the olive groves, oyster-lit by a three-quarter moon, to the shadowed outlines of the mauve mountains, the wild hills of the massif, and a deep sky pitted with stars. ‘To do what?’

  ‘To put this all to rights.’

  ‘It’s too late, Luc,’ was Jane’s response. ‘She’s set in her ways and she made up her mind about me long ago.’

  ‘And you don’t think you’ve also made up your mind?’

  ‘I said I was sorry for losing the bloody grapes. It was an accident, not even caused by me.’

  ‘Won’t you try to make peace with her once more before we leave?’

  ‘As though one day’s wreckage could have brought all this about! Luc, I have apologized. It suits your mother to vent her frustrations elsewhere and I have always been her target.’

  He was at a loss.

  After the vendange had been completed and the hired hands had gone their separate ways, the preparations for the fermentation of the grapes began in earnest. Whatever Clarisse believed to the contrary, she had no talent for this process. Her role had traditionally been on the commercial side: sales and marketing. Isabelle and, later, Luc had captained the winemaking, but this year Luc was splitting his time. Up at dawn, he and Claude took charge of the removal of the white grape juice from the settling tanks ready for racking. The pressed red grapes, still with their skins, had already begun to ferment, but the vats still required skilled nursing. By late morning, he was in his car en route to Marseille, where Dan was filming interviews. He returned for dinner. Jane spent her days translating a French guide book for a small independent UK publisher. It was her new contract and she was keen to deliver her best. It was an intense period, each lost in their own worlds, and Jane saw little of Luc.

  The Cambons were seated together for a cold supper because Luc had arrived back late from Marseille. Little conversation had passed between them when Clarisse announced, with an air of theatrical gloom, that due to the ‘missing or damaged’ tons of her Mourvèdre variety, there was insufficient fruit to produce more than a quarter of their usual output of the estate’s finest and most commercially successful wine.

  Jane recognized this as the opening gambit in yet more recrimination. Sensing that Luc was too tired to deal with it, she stepped directly in. ‘Clarisse, it’s not possible that the spoil of one day’s fruit can cause the loss of three-quarters of the estate’s potential output.’

  Her mother-in-law grudgingly admitted that this particular variety, their best grape, had also suffered from a smaller yield. The wine would be in short supply for this vintage. Her major concern was that previously loyal customers would place their orders elsewhere. ‘All my customers will start buying in the Bandol region. They’ll order from Domaine Ott, the Château Minuty vineyards or the Sainte Victoire choices.’

  Respectfully, Luc reminded his mother that the wines of Les Deux Soeurs were not comparable to those of the grand Provençal estates. ‘If those are the châteaux the buyers are after, they would never have been shopping with us in the first place. We’re not in the same league. We don’t perform at such a level.’

  ‘Well, we ought to!’ Clarisse slapped the palm of her hand against the table. Rings and bracelets jangled and Jane was taken aback by the force of the outburst. ‘And we damn well could be in that league if you were here permanently to lead the way! Luc, think about it. We hand pick. Our varieties are first class and we use no chemicals. Competing with those Provençal châteaux should be our goal. It was what Isa envisaged. But we have no wine to sell!’

  Luc replenished his mother’s glass and poured himself and Jane some sparkling water. ‘Please don’t get so het up. Les Cigales will still be producing eight hundred or more cases of the cru classé rosé and there remains stock in the cellar from last year. None of your regulars will go away empty-handed.’

  ‘Cellar’s empty. Nothing left. One case only!’ Clarisse retaliated and downed her wine. ‘I sold a few dozen bottles to a restaurant in Menton, so that’s it. All cancelled or undelivered orders will result in a financial shortfall that this domain, my domain, cannot sustain. We are broke. End of story.’ She served herself anot
her glass of red.

  ‘I’ll go through the accounts when I get back from Paris. I doubt we’re broke. Which restaurant?’

  Clarisse shrugged.

  ‘Try to remember. The stock book clearly states that thirty-three cases are in the cellar.’

  ‘Well, they’re not! And the estate taxes are overdue.’

  Luc rubbed a hand across his face. He looked shattered, beleaguered, gripped by his internal world, and with every serving of wine Clarisse grew more belligerent.

  Silently, Jane counted the days till their return to London.

  The following evening, while she and Luc were changing for dinner, Jane asked, ‘We wouldn’t be responsible for bailing her out, would we?’

  ‘Of course not! Please don’t build this into more than it is! I’ve got enough on my plate. She’s probably exaggerating.’

  ‘So what’s it all about? A ploy to get you to take over the business?’

  Luc picked up his phone, scrolling through messages. ‘She’s upset with me. Listen, I need to make a call.’

  ‘Why would she be?’

  Luc pulled a shirt from the wardrobe and tapped out a number while shrugging it on. ‘She says she fought to build our reputation and she’ll be afraid to live here on her own when the film’s released. Engaged, damn it.’ He tossed the phone onto the bed.

  ‘So, is it about wheedling a promise out of you to move back? She’s so crafty – she won’t drop it till she gets her way.’

  ‘Jane, please, be more flexible and less judgemental than she is. The estate is too much for her. Stock figures don’t match the quantities in the storerooms. It’s a mess. I’ll have to meet the accountant and go through the paperwork myself.’ Luc sat back on the bed and ran his fingers through his damp hair. A text came in: he drew the phone towards him.

  ‘Do you think her mind’s going?’

  He shook his head, impatient at the suggestion, tapping out a response to the message. ‘She’s always been disorganized.’

  ‘What this place needs is another manager.’

  ‘She says we can’t afford one.’

  ‘There’s always been someone. Even when Dad and I first came here years ago. Antoine Pesaro, remember him? After Isabelle died he walked out, prompted by a row with Clarisse.’