The Vintners Luck

by Elizabeth Knox

  The cart was tilted and the grapes raked in armloads into the vat. The family encircled it and all the workers hushed for the vintner’s prayer to Saint Vincent. Then all the light and tender-footed youths and maidens of the pays climbed into the vat and began to tread the grapes.

  The only opinion Céleste Jodeau ever volunteered about the tutor was that she liked his manners. From his arrival Niall Cayley was demure and pacifying towards the lady of the house. When she was bad in company, the rest of the family would walk out of the room, or squirm, or stare at their feet – all but Sophie whose place it was to take Céleste’s hand and say something soothing, or to distract as one did a fractious infant. But the tutor would meet Céleste’s eyes, mild, attentive, and she would begin explaining to him, steering herself slowly into the kind of pretence that sounded like everyone else’s ‘reason’. Céleste would hear herself sounding unlike herself and be reassured. Like Baron Lettelier, M. Cayley was a gentleman. There were days when the tutor was the only one who didn’t irritate her.

  Bernard and M. Cayley made a garden for their experiments in propagation. They read Lamarck. Bernard struggled through the English of Erasmus Darwin, then they both read its neighbouring title in their bookseller’s catalogue, Charles Darwin’s journal of his voyage on the HMS Beagle. Whatever they studied, the tutor would interrupt the lesson with ‘by the way’ and spread the net of relevance to catch other facts, theories, stories or, as he referred to them, ‘ancient rumours’. When Bernard would set off into a meadow of waist-high grass with his butterfly net, Cayley would talk to Antoine, teaching German by conversation, not the endless conjugation of verbs. Cayley might say, ‘Those butterflies are going about the world’s real business. Bernard is not. He wants to know about them. The nature of grammar, all those conjugations, those couplings, that is real business too, but conversation is wanting to know.’ Then he would ask, in German, ‘What interests you?’

  ‘Another nice little conceit,’ said Baptiste, on hearing Antoine enthuse about his tutor’s methods, ‘from the whimsical Monsieur Cayley.’

  Antoine said, ‘Well – I know now that I was never right to be impatient with books. Books can be the people we never get to meet, ancestors or far neighbours.’

  ‘Far neighbours?’ Baptiste mocked. ‘That’s a very poetical way of saying “foreigners”.’

  Baptiste made no effort to hide his dislike of the new tutor. He spoke as though the four moves of room that the family made to accommodate a servant they couldn’t just house in the attic had discouraged his wife Anne’s return. For Anne never came back from Paris – not even when Baptiste went to fetch her. There was no one to blame but the blameless, yet Baptiste always averted his face from those two graves when he rode past the churchyard. He couldn’t even speak about his dead sons, let alone acknowledge that their deaths had wrecked his marriage. Sobran suggested that Baptiste divorce Anne and marry again – start another family. The weakness that darkened each child’s skin and made them die of thirst was new to the Jodeau line, after all. Iris, and Sabine’s five children, were thriving.

  ‘No,’ Baptiste said, ‘I should have cut off my hair and put it in their little hands before they were buried, as widows still do in the pays. I’d promise them never to marry again.’

  ‘I did that,’ said Aurora, who had only listened to this conversation till now. They were in her carriage. She and Sobran had found Baptiste sitting on a milestone between Chalon-sur-Saône and Aluze, thrown by his horse and still drunk. ‘When my first husband was laid out beside his coffin I asked for scissors to cut my hair off. My uncle stopped me. He said that you never know what will happen to change your mind. And that’s true.’

  ‘Henri Lettelier,’ Baptiste said, with profound scorn. He heard his father’s little snort of laughter and doubled back to his original complaint. ‘If it hadn’t been so convenient that Anne went –’

  ‘You can’t blame your mother –’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because that’s just the sort of self-righteous thinking that she practises.’

  Aurora touched Sobran’s arm, said, warning, ‘Sobran.’

  ‘Besides, I’m not blaming Mother. Anne obviously just wasn’t fine enough for a family connected to a comte. A family that is bettering itself from the bottom up.’

  ‘Father Lesy taught you,’ Sobran said, hurt. ‘You couldn’t have had a finer teacher.’

  ‘Till I was twelve. There was no refining me. Now all my sisters are ladies, and my younger brothers are being transformed into gentlemen by a scholar with his suit out at the elbows.’

  This was such an odd mixture of resentment and snobbery that Aurora simply stared at Baptiste in admiration.

  ‘Is it already?’ Sobran said, side-stepping everything. ‘Out at the elbows. Can’t have that.’

  ‘You’ll have to advance him the price of another suit,’ Aurora said. They smiled at each other. The angel, his oddities, his needs, something sweet they passed between them.

  They were still lovers. Aurora and Sobran. Sobran and Xas. There were dawns when Aurora got out of Sobran’s bed to creep through the château’s grounds and corridors to her own room. Sobran would wake up enough to feel her kiss his brow. Then the warmth she had moved out of would be invaded by a hotter body, Xas – the rain-on-dust scent of angel sweat – pleased because he’d timed it so he didn’t have to wait. He had even spoken to Aurora on the stairs and she’d said, ‘Have pity on him, Xas, for heaven’s sake.’ And Xas would arch over him asking, ‘Do you want me to, you know, go easy on you?’

  He would leave when the sun was up, with only forty minutes to spare before breakfast. ‘I run fast,’ he’d say. Sobran watched the angel, in his haste, mismatch button to buttonhole so he was left puzzling for a moment over a hole spare at the tail of his shirt. ‘I go across country and I don’t slow down on the hills.’

  ‘Yes, yes, you’re the salmon and the river both,’ Sobran said, his eyes closed already so he didn’t see Xas look back from the double doors, then step out and drop.

  When Baron Lettelier came down to the country, Niall Cayley was always very pleased to see him. ‘Delighted to see you again, Baron,’ he’d say, utterly sincere, so warm that even the Baron would smile. Then, as an excuse for his pleasure he’d pick the Baron’s brain about politics – for instance, what would this Louis Napoléon do next?

  Aurora hung back as she and the Baron were seen to their carriage. ‘You are like a dog,’ she said to Xas, sidelong, ‘you are corrupt and writhing.’

  ‘Say that with your teeth clenched and you’ll sound like Sobran,’ Xas whispered.

  ‘I’m not saying it appreciatively,’ she hissed. Then Céleste was there and took her hand, gloating too. ‘Well, Baroness, I expect we won’t see you for a while.’ Céleste looked up coquettishly at the Baron, who was sitting inside the carriage already.

  ‘I’m afraid not. I hope you continue well, Madame.’ Aurora got into the carriage beside the Baron, glancing once at Sobran, who looked calmly sympathetic. Then Xas, the rat, behind all of them now, playing commedia, a sentimental Pantaloon, supporting one hand with the other to make her a small fatigued wave.

  1846 La tête de cuvée (the best growth)

  The schoolroom was quiet, the late afternoon sun muted through its closed windows. Xas was washing the blackboard. Sobran sat turning a piece of chalk in his fingers, its fine tractive dust made his fingertips sticky. They had been discussing Antoine and Bernard, their progress. Xas was still talking, offering further reasons why Bernard should be encouraged to try for the Sorbonne. He was interested in the boy’s future. More interested than Sobran – and, at that moment, than he was in Sobran. Xas finished washing the board and began to fold maps. He was quiet now and Sobran supposed he was waiting for a response.

  The angel hadn’t buttoned his shirtsleeves, as an employee should in the presence of his master, hadn’t brushed the chalk dust off his waistcoast, but he was waiting deferentially – Sobran thought
– till he thought again. Xas was making his thoughts known, then, not forcing his hand, but managing Sobran in exactly the same manner all those reasonable women could – Aurora and Sophie, Sabine and Agnès – and Sobran supposed that the angel had been watching them. Or perhaps – Sobran noticed the angel’s patient, diligent map-folding and the hair lifted on the back of his neck – perhaps Xas’s mind was somewhere else, on other places he had lived, that he had once asked Sobran to imagine lay in hidden folds in the maps Sobran knew.

  Sobran went to open the window, watched two sparrows pursue a small white moth over the roof of the dormer window below them. ‘I suppose I can spare one son to science, since I have none in the army.’

  A cloud covered the sun, but Sobran could still feel warmth radiating up from the roof tiles. ‘It’s this time I’ll forget,’ he said.

  Xas came and leaned on the windowsill, his ankles crossed.

  ‘Your visits are like stepping stones back into my past. I remember each of them. This time, when you’re living under my roof and I see you every day, this I won’t remember so well. When I was ill – mad – my behaviour was so cold and impassable that my doctor diagnosed “nostalgia”. His recommended treatment was this: I had to learn to forget the past.’

  ‘And you said – I am guessing – “Please see the Doctor out and fetch Father Lesy.”’

  ‘More or less. I was thinking of my salvation, my future. It is now I’m nostalgic.’

  Xas said, ‘Aurora said to me the other day how surprised she was to find herself spending more time looking back than forward. She clearly remembers lying in the grass in Vully’s orchard when she was thirteen, full of self-satisfied wonder, mostly wonder at herself. “In no time at all it’s over,” she said. “That sense of endless possibility. Or perhaps it’s all the time in the world, but because you remember it so well it seems very immediate. But the power is gone.” That’s what she said. The power and the possibility she thought were her birthright.’

  ‘She speaks to you like that?’

  ‘Aurora doesn’t feel responsible for what happened to me. There are things I can say to her I can’t to you. Not that I do. But she speaks to me like that to show me that the invitation is always open.’

  Sobran picked up the angel’s hand and kissed his knuckles. ‘Thank you for your patience.’

  ‘I’m not, Sobran. Patient. When I feel your time passing me it makes my palms itch.’

  ‘I’m fifty-six.’

  ‘You’re always counting.’

  ‘I’m a vain man.’

  The only thing that troubled Aurora and Sobran that summer was his expectation that his happiness would end. He could contemplate, in a sentimental way, the idea of his wife, children and grandchildren arranged, well-dressed and weeping decorously, around his grave. His lovers, she ten years his junior and a handsome woman, and the lovely immortal, he imagined them disentangling their feet from his ribcage and walking on.

  It was the region’s best summer, its finest vintage. Vully and Jodeau-Kalmann were paradise. The vineyards kept them all busy every day but Sunday, and on Sundays they entertained themselves like pagans – as Father André complained to the Bishop at Beaune.

  One Sunday they picnicked on the bank of the Saône, by the château’s boathouse. Martin and his sweetheart lay in a moored boat, the oars pulled up through its jug-eared rowlocks. The inflexible elders and corseted young women were in chairs while the rest of the family sprawled on rugs, all the children in white, the women wearing striped silks and holding ruffled parasols. Baptiste and Paul lay a little further off – with a bottle apiece and, in Baptiste’s case, drinking from the bottle. Both were laughing. Aurora watched Sobran watching Antoine and Bernard trying to entice their tutor into the water – it was so hot, why wouldn’t he? He shook his head, threw his jacket down on the grass and lay on it looking up at the sky. And Aurora and Sobran said simultaneously, like parents, ‘I think he’s happy.’

  They had both seen that he could hold his own with the only person he hadn’t conquered. Over lunch, Baptiste, trying to discomfort the tutor, told him how one of his father’s protests against what the English had done to Napoléon was to pay the pensions of the four other local veterans. The rest of the family looked embarrassed. Céleste said, ‘We don’t talk about that, Baptiste.’ And Niall Cayley said, ‘The Irish are not the English, Monsieur Baptiste.’ Very mild. Antoine, amused at his older brother’s humiliation, reported to Sobran that when Baptiste, he and M. Cayley were helping Martin launch the boat Baptiste said something insulting about tutors as servants with pretensions, to which M. Cayley replied, ‘Our citizen king was a tutor in Switzerland, did you know that? It is a gentlemanly profession.’

  ‘I laughed,’ Antoine said. ‘Then Baptiste made a sneer and said did Monsieur Cayley hope his fortunes would change as dramatically as Louis-Philippe’s? And Monsieur Cayley said, “God forbid. I’ve had enough of that.”’

  ‘He’s happy because his needs are simple,’ Aurora said. ‘He likes people and to be busy. If only he’d put his mind to some plan to disarm Baptiste. I don’t have any ideas. Do you?’

  ‘Don’t argue with Baptiste,’ Sobran told Xas when they were next alone. ‘Please.’

  Xas stopped feigning sleep and made a noise of irritation.

  ‘You could just nod your head, coldly, as women do when they don’t like what a man says but don’t want to do anything as ill-bred and fatiguing as contradict him. A few signs of dignified concession would be better than this sparring. Besides, he’s drunk too often. I wish I knew what to do about his drinking. He’s a good worker. I can’t pack him off like I did Léon.’

  ‘No,’ Xas said.

  ‘He’s very unhappy.’

  ‘Yes,’ Xas said.

  ‘And you’re not.’

  ‘No,’ Xas said.

  1847 Cellier (cellar)

  The family came out of La Madeleine in Vézelay, where they had gone among tourists to admire the beautiful capitals, and to visit Antoine the stonemason’s sons, who were all employed on the restoration. When they came out only Bernard was talking. Sobran stopped to draw on his gloves. Céleste looked down the long straight street and sighed languidly at the distance she had to walk back to the hotel. Sobran took her arm.

  Bernard was saying to his tutor how he liked best the giants and pygmies and men with pigs’ snouts.

  From the street a man called out Sobran’s name. He turned to see a gentleman he didn’t recognise walking towards him with the sideways walk of one whose feet are always too long for steps. But at a second glance Sobran saw the man wasn’t moving towards him, but at an angle up the steps to where Bernard and his tutor stood. Sobran called to his daughter Aline, ‘Take your mother down to that café.’ Then said to the rest of the party, ‘Go on. I’ll follow you.’

  He wasn’t able to intercept the man, but arrived a moment later and put out an arm between the man, and Bernard and his tutor. ‘Yes?’ he said, ‘I’m Sobran Jodeau. Do I know you?’

  ‘Did I address you, sir?’ The man spoke in accented French. He was taller than Sobran, and heavier, younger, wealthier – judging by his beringed hands. ‘Sobran,’ he said again, and proceeded to speak to Xas in English. Sobran couldn’t understand what he said, but he saw Bernard’s eyes widen and jaw drop. He looked down the street to see most of his family receding towards the café – but Antoine had turned back. Only the women would be spared, Sobran thought. He knew what was happening, and that he wouldn’t be able to explain. He didn’t know how to save himself. He said, ‘Xas,’ once, meaning, ‘Do something.’

  Xas didn’t speak. He moved his friend and his pupil aside and then took the Englishman by the wrist in a grip so hard the man lost all his colour. The angel walked the man backwards, his arm straight and adamant between them. The Englishman staggered back one step at a time till they were on the street.

  Antoine went to help. It was all clear to him: this fellow had attacked his father, and M. Cayley was se
eing him off.

  Sobran called Antoine to heel. The young man paused, quivering like a dog, then came reluctantly up the steps. ‘Are you all right, Father?’

  ‘Yes.’ Sobran put an arm around each son. ‘Let’s join the family.’

  Antoine objected. ‘We can’t abandon Monsieur Cayley!’

  ‘Monsieur Cayley can look after himself.’

  Antoine shook off Sobran’s hand and Sobran had to recapture him, shake him, hold him hard.

  Bernard said, ‘I don’t understand. Did Monsieur Cayley give that man your name as his own?’

  Sobran deflected Bernard’s good guess with exasperation. ‘How should I know?’

  ‘Then it wasn’t you the fellow assaulted?’ Antoine asked, and began to comply, letting himself be led along, led away.

  ‘But,’ said Bernard, ‘the Englishman said, “I’ve been looking for you for ten years.”’

  ‘You can’t have heard him right.’

  Antoine stalled again. ‘I can’t just leave him. It’s all very improper.’

  ‘Do you think I care about propriety? I’ll begin to think Baptiste is right and your education has unmanned you.’ Sobran was furious. ‘Who are we to worry about a scene on the steps of a church in a town where nobody knows us?’

  ‘You’re wrong, Father. You’re beside the point, and just wrong.’ Antoine turned back in time to greet Monsieur Cayley who hurried up to them.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Xas said.

  ‘Are you hurt?’ Antoine was concerned, then indignant. ‘What was all that?’

  ‘I have to make my explanation to your father,’ Xas said. ‘I’m well.

  Go on.’ He made shooing motions at Antoine and Bernard who both looked at Sobran to convey their opinion that the matter wasn’t settled with them, then they walked away down the street.