The Vintners Luck

by Elizabeth Knox

  Sobran began to unwrap the two glasses he had brought, set them on the ground, uncorked his own bottle and poured. ‘This is our nuptial wine, a gift from the château, who take our own Jodeau South as table wine. We have the same pinot noir grapes, of course, and this slope is better, but their cellars are old and large.’ He offered a glass to the angel. The red was robbed of its colour in the moonlight, the wine dark, semi-opaque, with a white shield, it seemed, laid on its surface. The angel took his glass and made his toast – ‘To you’ not ‘May God bless you.’

  Sobran said that, after the angel had counselled him, his love for Céleste had pained him less. ‘Your talk drew its poison – taught me faith and patience and constancy.’ He nearly said ‘continence’, but that was all part of thoughts he had to conceal, modestly, as a woman must cover her head in church. Besides, it wasn’t entirely true. It was Sobran’s incontinence that had finally decided his suit. When, in the first rain of late summer he had walked Céleste just yards off their path – they were walking home from his sister’s – he had bent her against a forked sapling, raised her skirts and penetrated her petticoats. She skipped a month, and he married her.

  ‘We are drinking to my daughter as well – to Sabine – to a wedding and a christening,’ Sobran said, then blushed. ‘Yes, quick work.’

  ‘Conclusive.’

  ‘No. Maybe next year a son.’

  They were quiet for a time, then Sobran began to talk about Clos Jodeau, his future share in his father’s vineyard, and how he was in charge of Baptiste Kalmann’s vines too, while his friend was away with the army. ‘And that is my excuse for tonight – seeing after some of Baptiste’s business. The vines of Clos Kalmann are in a pretty poor state, and have had me up at all hours.’ Sobran looked at the middle window on the upper floor of the house. ‘When I can be sure Céleste will sleep soundly in my absence, I’ll bring a lamp,’ he said.

  ‘Next year, you mean?’ The angel smiled.

  Sobran blushed. He felt the blush move into his hair and sweat start. He swallowed, then asked, ‘Will you come?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Though,’ Sobran said, ‘reading Baptiste’s letters I have thought I might follow the Emperor too.’

  ‘So you’re not promising to be here next year. But I must promise.’

  ‘These are times of great change,’ Sobran said – but how could he explain to an unearthly being this local momentousness? He added, ‘For all France.’

  ‘I didn’t know you thought of France,’ the angel said. ‘That’s unusual in a Burgundian.’

  ‘All right – I’ll be here,’ Sobran promised.

  ‘One night each year, for the rest of your life,’ the angel said. ‘Or is that inconvenient?’

  Sobran was flattered, but could immediately see problems. ‘I might travel.’

  The angel shrugged.

  ‘A lifetime – so much to promise.’

  ‘You’ve already promised your lifetime.’

  It was like speaking to a tricky priest. And vows made in marriage were unexceptional – tenderness, vigilance, fidelity, hard work, all seemed easier to pledge than the same night every year. ‘Is it bad luck to fail you?’ Sobran asked.

  ‘I’m not trying to sell you a sick pig, Sobran.’

  Sobran was offended. ‘If I bargain like a peasant, it’s because I am one.’

  The angel considered and, like a young girl, picked up a lock of his own hair and bit its end – Sobran heard it rustle between his teeth. After a moment the angel spat the hair out and said, ‘I know nothing about luck. I’m not offering rewards or punishments, so don’t promise. Just come.’

  Sobran said he would. He forgot to be cautious or courteous and was simply moved.

  The angel held out his glass and Sobran refilled it. ‘Tell me about Céleste, and Sabine, and Léon, your brother who is with the priests, and Baptiste Kalmann, and what you think of this Emperor,’ the angel said.

  1810 Vigneron (a vine-grower who may, or may not, be working for himself)

  Sobran brought the angel his discontent, a savour to their talk, a refinement, like a paper screw of salt for a lunch to be eaten out-of-doors, at the edge of a half-harvested meadow. The angel could solve this or salve that – Sobran’s quarrels with his father, or his brother Léon, Céleste’s odd moods, or the likelihood of a less promising harvest. Sobran felt that he was being kind, and thinking of the future – the blessing of this bond, that would last, surely, if the angel felt Sobran required his advice.

  Sobran had, till then, only one friend he drank with. Try as he might, his inexperience, or his previous experience, caused some awkwardness in his handling of the angel. The procedures of their acquaintance were so different from those of his friendship with Baptiste Kalmann. His meetings with the angel were formal, respectful, as tamely satisfying as a pantry full of fresh preserves. The angel’s attention was gratifying. But when Sobran listened to himself talking he was reminded of his father speaking to the Comte de Valday. Some weathervane in his father’s talk always twitching a little to keep pointing true to the Comte’s interest. Sobran heard a similar attentiveness in his own voice, and found himself a little resentful of the angel.

  Céleste shook Sobran and he found his eyes had opened to follow a meteor of lamplight under the door. He heard footsteps on the stairs.

  ‘It’s your father. He knocked,’ Céleste said.

  Little Sabine heaved over in her sleep. Her feet came free of the covers and banged against the bars of the crib. Sobran got up, felt for her – yes, he’d heard right – tucked the covers around her and began to dress.

  Outside a horse stamped and harness clinked.

  Céleste climbed out of bed, pulled on her bedsocks and a shawl. She said she’d cut some bread and cheese.

  Downstairs Léon sat on his palliasse by the stove and rubbed his head – the cropped cut the holy brothers favoured. Léon had left the monastery following some disgrace that embarrassed his mother but only made his father laugh (not at the priests, but at his wife’s and son’s humiliation). When Léon came home he slept for several months in the attic, under the tiles – till the weather began to turn. He and Sobran had once shared the room Sobran and Céleste now occupied, while Sophie, their older sister, had slept in a back room now full of cellared bottles. In the year Sophie wed, Léon entered the seminary. At that time Léon was a studious boy, who was always setting himself little tests, of patience or continence – nothing remotely worldly. Perhaps, liking apples, he would deny himself apples for half a year (for the months when they were sweetest; he was no cheat). Or perhaps he’d forgo salt on his food, or wearing a wrap about his ears in the cold weather.

  Sobran considered his brother a fool, and was scarcely civil to him. Léon would delight in carrying their father’s messages, displeasure, nagging reminders. Before Sobran married, Léon was often sent to chase him up, loafing in the dirty, dog-crowded kitchen of Baptiste Kalmann, drinking brandy; or at the little house on the road to Aluze, which had red potted geraniums by its door, and the wood always stacked high in the lean-to by the chimney. Here Sobran kept company with the young widow Rueleau, who wore black, but had coloured ribbons braided into her hair. Léon had even, once, found his brother semi-naked and washing by the fire. Baptiste Kalmann had grinned at Léon through a gap in the curtains drawn around the widow’s bed. The room smelled of brandy, soap, sweat. Sobran was completely unashamed, and took his leisure dressing. But on the way home, when Léon began to say stiffly that their father had not ‘worked to build up his house, vineyard, name, to have them slowly bled of substance and honour –’ Sobran pushed him down into a ditch at the roadside, then stooped above him and shook him by the throat. Sobran said that since he didn’t pay he wasn’t robbing anyone. And Léon, slighter than his brother and half-choked, said, ‘If Kalmann pays then you’re as much a whore as Anne Rueleau.’ Sobran called him a tick, a holy little turd, shook him some more, threw him down and walked on ahead.

&nb
sp; Léon had never reported his brother’s misdemeanours, seemed to keep quiet not in order to dominate his brother with a reserve of secrets, but because he wanted no part of his brother’s cupidity, as he called it, those contaminating acts he, Léon, preferred not to live with.

  At Sobran’s wedding feast Céleste whispered to him: ‘When your brother kissed me he looked at me as if he pitied me. Why is that?’

  Baptiste, behind them, listening, his gunner’s uniform reflecting rosily on Céleste’s white gown, said, ‘Léon thinks that every fart proves the world is fallen.’ He raised his eyebrows, then his glass to toast them.

  Léon rolled up the palliasse, tucked it by the wood box. As he bent to pull his shirt over his head his brother saw that his neck was smudged dark with dirt. Uncleanliness was so out of Léon’s character that at the sight Sobran experienced a spark of shock that atomised instantly and was gone. Sobran turned away.

  Their father was out by the pump, talking to Christophe Lizet, whose sister Geneviève was missing. The Jodeau men were asked to help Christophe and his cousin Jules search the far bank of the river.

  They went in the Lizets’ cart, the only horse the Jodeaus owned tied on behind. It was an hour after dawn when they crossed the river on the ferry that linked the road which ran past the château. There the party split. Jodeau senior went with Christophe, following the river north. Jules, Léon and Sobran went on foot, south along the riverbank. There was nothing left to ask – who saw Geneviève Lizet last, what she was wearing. But Jules spoke about Geneviève’s character; she was sunny and quiet, and this disappearance was no mischief of her own making.

  Léon said he knew Geneviève, they had taken their first communion together. They had been in the same class, learning their catechism with Father Lesy. ‘We were children then, under ten.’

  Sobran remembered Geneviève among the harvesters at the château, pressing grapes. She lost her headscarf in the vat. All the Lizet women had fine sleek hair that shucked any covering, their buns or plaits burst apart releasing slippery hair of a glossy blond. Sobran couldn’t think of the Lizet girls’ faces, just this hair, and the back of a head, as radiant as the moon, moving to eclipse his friend’s face. In Sobran’s memory Baptiste was straddling the tilted yoke pole of an unharnessed cart. He had the water bucket before him, and a dipper in one hand, his other elbow propped on his own thigh and his face rested on his fist. One finger was pressed into the corner of his mouth, like a pin on a map. He was smiling at Sobran, then the fair head of a Lizet girl eclipsed Baptiste’s face as she kissed him.

  It was Geneviève, Sobran remembered. He stopped to watch the willows across the river, their wands bent from the prevailing wind. The river was ropy over stones near Sobran’s feet, but deep under the willows.

  Jules said the château would send a boat to look closely at the willow roots. He spoke as though he knew she was dead, had settled it in his mind already, knew they were looking not for a girl but a corpse.

  They went on. The sun, still low, lit the rolling hills, the vines across the river were nearly bare. The land behind the vineyard was in grazing, green grass coming up between dry stalks of after-grass. Thick clouds moved to cover the sky, they palmed darkness, kept the black close beneath them – the land was still sunlit. Then it wasn’t, and small split-tailed birds, a kind of swallow, began to fly low over the river where insects were rising to the coming rain.

  It became darker as they walked. The grass loudly scrubbed their clogs. They saw something pale on the beach of boulders where the river curved. Jules ran – Sobran followed, hurrying yet hesitant. He stopped short at the sight of the girl’s bared legs and belly, puffy, bleached and bruised. Her skirts were over her head. Jules pulled them down: he was sobbing, stooped, abruptly soft in the middle, as though someone had gutted him so that his chest sagged into the gap of his gutlessness.

  One side of the girl’s head was black with blood, which dyed her fair hair pink to its ends. Her skull had a dent in it, and her forearms were battered and misshapen. Her jaw was askew as if she’d been caught pulling a face to frighten a child and the wind had changed as her mother warned.

  Léon arrived behind them, limped up as though he had a stone in his shoe. He looked, didn’t pause but came forward, took off his jacket and draped it over her face. Then he knelt beside her and began to say a rosary. Jules collapsed on the other side of the corpse, put his head between his knees, sobbed and swayed.

  Sobran said he would go to the château. There was an arrangement about a gunshot to recall all the searchers.

  He ran, and as he ran the heat peeled away from the land. Rain came across the surface of the river like the bristles of a broom. Sobran stopped, squatted and vomited neatly between his feet, then got up and jogged on.

  Later he stood, shawled in a blanket, by the fire in the main hall of the château, the old, stone-floored, thirteenth-century hall. It was unused since midsummer and the feast of wildfowl. Sobran watched soot bloom at the back of the white-washed flue.

  A crowd of men with muddy feet stood about, waiting for the return of the party sent out to fetch the body in. The Comte had given orders, was now speaking quietly to Sobran’s father and the weeping Christophe Lizet. They moved Sobran’s way – then he was looking down at the Comte’s brown face, into his red-rimmed blue eyes. The Comte asked, ‘How was it you came to find her?’

  ‘We looked where we were told to look.’ Then, ‘That’s a stupid question.’

  The older Jodeau lunged forward and struck the side of his son’s head, told him not to be insolent.

  Sobran looked at the floor. He listened to his father tell the Comte that they could put something else in the river, this side, he thought he knew where, to find it on that beach.

  ‘Of course, you know its currents,’ the Comte said.

  Sobran said, ‘The rain is changing the river.’ He glanced up, saw his father’s scowl.

  ‘Did you know Geneviève Lizet?’ the Comte asked.

  A little, Sobran said. He remembered her from several harvests at the château. She kissed Baptiste Kalmann.

  The Comte waited.

  ‘Baptiste is in Tyrol.’ Sobran stared at the old man, trying to convey how futile he thought questions were.

  ‘What happened when you found the body?’

  ‘Jules wept, Léon prayed, I ran for help. We were just the right number so none of us had the same thing to do.’

  The Comte put his hand around the back of Sobran’s neck and held him still a moment, then nodded to his valet who brought the brandy decanter and poured Sobran a generous measure. The Comte directed Sobran to a chair. ‘Sit down, and you’ll be fetched something to eat.’ As he turned away Sobran heard the Comte say to his father, ‘He’s only angry at what he’s seen.’

  1811 Vin tourné (turned wine)

  Sobran missed his friend Baptiste. Céleste gave birth to a second daughter. His father was a heavy-handed manager. Sobran was married, twenty-one, and still not a man. He’d seen nothing of the world, couldn’t choose his own way, had no heir and no clear future. Yet he knew what the next years held – work, with seasonal variations; the vintages, at best bottled triumph; a life of mild, undemeaning struggle and qualified happiness. Aluze, village, farms, vineyards, all seemed dreary. And there were days when it all seemed bad.

  Sobran was unsettled. So, despite Céleste’s protests, he made a pensioner’s provision, arranged to send her half his soldier’s pay, and went off to look at different landscapes and faces beyond his pays, people he couldn’t put name to.

  So it was that, in high summer, in Westphalia, he stood with Baptiste in the loggia of a whorehouse, watching the privates in line outside a lamplit crib, for a whore to be had for copper coins. The woman he and his friend meant to share was washing in the room behind them, straddling a bowl, her skirt knotted around her waist. A leather curtain on the crib door was open a little, the next in line looking in. Sobran could see shiny-bottomed breeches and an arse, thin
, fair-skinned, in motion. Baptiste passed him the third bottle of stolen Seewein, a dry, easy white the gunners had won from some cavalry officers at cards. They wouldn’t have spoken, but that the towline on a river barge broke as the cavalry men, a smith, Baptiste and Sobran – artillery men with two light guns – waited to cross. As they waited they played. Baptiste for his hoard of tobacco, Sobran for a miniature in a silver case that he’d taken from a corpse after a skirmish.

  In the room behind them the whore called, ‘All right?’ Then in her own tongue, ‘One at a time, or together?’ She smiled, inviting with her hands.

  Thirty minutes later, spent, Sobran waited for his friend to finish. For him the whore had murmured, for Baptiste she cried out. Sobran wondered why she was tender with him, or pretended tenderness. He thought about Céleste, how she liked to nurse his head against her breasts.

  Sobran was abruptly sick. He leaned over the rail and regurgitated wine and bile, clung to the rail for a moment, then staggered away to the stairs, into the yard, across the straw-cushioned flagstones to the gates. He placed his hands against the gate and was sick again. It wasn’t that he’d remembered Céleste – with the whore’s salt, cut with soap, still in his mouth – it was the moon, a cool witness, a memory of being held, and the realisation, like an assault, that tonight an angel would wait, for however long a patient angel waited, for an appointment Sobran couldn’t keep, since he was six hundred miles removed, drunk and whoring. Sobran stood with his forehead pressed against the gate.

  Baptiste found Sobran, dried his eyes on a hairy forearm and gave him more wine. Later Sobran woke when the sun came in and coloured the walls of the room in which he lay, with a light as cold as aired wine full of yellow flor. The whore was beside him, and beside her Baptiste; all three lay pickled in sweat. Sobran listened for the sound he’d heard on waking to be repeated – neither cockcrow, nor a dawn enfilade, but the sound of soft multiple impacts, like a spade full of dry earth tossed on top of a coffin, or of a single downbeat of great wings. But it wasn’t repeated, he’d dreamed it, and it was his dream leaving.