‘I shall probably shed a tear or two but if you wouldn’t mind – that would be a great help. Good to have something concrete to go on in this shifting affair,’ said Joe. ‘No hurry.’
‘Well, the last date of interest you’ll find is in the summer of ’17. My father came home for a couple of days. And after that, nothing. No letters. No news. No sightings.’ The words were coming from him in uncontrolled staccato bursts. ‘It was said he’d been killed – disappeared anyway – during the battle of the Chemin des Dames. His body was never found. For good reason. He’s still here. He never left the château again. He was killed here. Buried here. My mother killed him.’
Chapter Eighteen
Joe fought down his instinctive Englishman’s outburst of incredulity. ‘I say, old chap, hold on . . . let’s not be fantastical now . . .’ would have been the wrong response. But what could possibly be the right one?
While he hesitated, Dorcas asked in an interested voice: ‘Can you show us where you think all this happened, Georges? You say it happened here. “Here” would seem to be about a hundred acres of house and grounds. If we could go with you to the scene, it might help.’
The practical suggestion seemed to stir him from his paralysis.
‘It’s not far,’ said Georges. ‘In fact, I’ve been detailed to take you there this morning. It’s on the tour we give every guest.’ His hands began to shake again and he bent to hide them, pushing them deep into Bruno’s fur. ‘Every day for nearly ten years I’ve passed within a foot or two of my father’s body and I’ve never been able to acknowledge him.’ His chin went up in defiance. ‘But today I will.’
They followed him from the house and across a cobbled courtyard. A single-storey wing in the same classical style to their left Joe guessed to be a run of stables ending in a charming dovecote and, on the right, balancing, but of a later age and of a more simple and workaday appearance, was the cellar. Georges, relieved to be active again, had fallen into his accustomed role of guide around the family winery. His talk rolled on smoothly: ‘Natural caves in the chalk dug out and enlarged, possibly by the Romans . . . storage for more than a million bottles . . . steady temperature . . . ten miles of corridor . . . if you get lost, just follow the arrows . . .’
They paused at the oak door at the entrance to the galleries and Georges took a sweater from around his neck and helped Dorcas to pull it on over her head. ‘It’s warm enough out here but down there don’t forget it’s at a constant 11 degrees Centigrade. The wine enjoys it – you won’t.’ He clicked on the electric lighting system, closed the door behind them and led the way down a twisting staircase.
They started on the tour, Georges full of information and well-rehearsed jokes, and Joe began to wonder if he’d imagined the scene in the kitchen. All was normal if not even slightly boring. The chalk walls hewn out over the centuries were whitewashed. The smell was pleasantly musty and made Joe think of mushrooms, forests and ferns. The storage corridors were lined with wooden triangular racks, double-sided, containing champagne bottles tilted at an angle, dimpled bases outwards. Georges set to, working along the rows, deftly demonstrating with flicks of the wrist the technique used to give the bottles a quarter of a turn each day, a movement which kept the deposit in the bottles on the move down towards the neck of the bottle.
‘But why do you want the filthy bit at the top?’ Dorcas asked. ‘In red wine the dregs are always at the bottom and you can easily decant the wine and leave the nasty bits behind.’
‘Ah – we do it this way to achieve absolute purity,’ said Georges. ‘At the very end of the maturing process we have skilled workers who release the temporary cork . . .’ He took a bottle from a rack and, holding it between his knees, carefully pointing it away from his guests, eased out the cork with two strong thumbs. Joe was prepared for the explosion but the effect was so shattering in that narrow space as to make him jump and thrust his hands into his pockets. Out shot a spray of gas, champagne and a smear of detritus. A split second later, Georges had clamped it shut again.
‘A la volée! With an explosion! That’s how they do it. And what you’ve just seen is called dégorgement. Clearing the neck. All the nastiness gone in a second and we’re left with the purest wine.’
‘But what is that black stuff?’ Dorcas wanted to know. ‘How did it get in there in the first place?’
‘It’s the remains of the dried yeast. Actually it’s been doing a valuable job in the bottle. It plays its part in developing the character of the finished wine. There’d be little aroma or flavour without it. Then after release, we recork, label and sell it!’
‘But there’s a space in the bottle now,’ Dorcas said. ‘Look, the bottle’s not full. I don’t know much about wine but I know Granny’s butler would never accept a bottle with a space between the wine and the cork.’
Georges was pleased with his pupil. ‘Well noticed, Dorcas. We top it up with liqueur de dosage – vintage champagne containing sugar – and this allows us to control the degree of sweetness. Uncle Charles has a good deal of fun with this – he’s discovered that some countries like it sweet, others, like England, prefer it very dry. He always gets it right. And he has sensitive antennae when it comes to tuning in to changing tastes and trends.’ Georges grinned. ‘Sometimes I think it’s Uncle Charles who sets the trends. A word in the right, influential ear, a well-placed advertisement . . .’
They strolled on, ready for the next sensation. With some excitement, Georges paused by a section of wall and held up a torch, directing the beam sideways to reveal a slight roughness in texture compared with the wall on either side. On it was tacked a blackboard with chalked words announcing that the bottles stored below were of the best vintage and not to be touched without the express authority of the cellar-master.
‘And are they?’ asked Joe, kneeling to examine the bottles more closely. ‘No labels yet, I see.’
‘As a matter of fact these bottles are!’ said Georges. ‘It was Maman’s idea. In the war she had these signs made and put them over our poorest vintages so when the Germans came they would make off with those bottles first. The best bottles were hidden behind the partitions. There – look – do you see where I’m pointing?’
‘Only because you show us with the torch beam,’ said Joe being a good audience. ‘I would have missed it. What’s behind there?’
‘Nothing now, an empty space, but before the war it was an open corridor. The best bottles were moved into it and Maman got the estate workers to build a partition and paint it over with several coats of whitewash until it looked just like the chalk wall. There were about six of those false walls blocking off corridors and alcoves and after the war we managed to remember which ones they were and tore them down to release the stock. Except for this one. Maman had it put back and preserved. I told you she was a great one for history. She keeps it there as a reminder. Did you notice the pictures of the Virgin Mary and one or two other saints as we came along? Those were the markers of the false walls. Maman thought they looked very natural – like shrines. Wine makers are thought to be rather superstitious in that way. Dependent on the weather and other quirks of fate, as we are, it makes sense. And the hidden wine, when the saints delivered it up to us again, at the end of the war, made quite a lot of money for us. Enough to keep afloat at any rate. Anyone who could afford it wanted to drink champagne to celebrate. We began to sell huge quantities to London.’
They walked on, mesmerized by the serried ranks of bottles, Dorcas asking the expected questions: ‘How many grapes does it take to make one bottle of champagne? . . . If you use red grapes why is the wine pale yellow? . . . How do the bubbles get into the wine?’ and Georges replying patiently and accurately.
‘And here we are at the Piccadilly Circus or the Place de la Concorde of the underworld,’ he announced as they entered an area where the gallery widened and other tunnels radiated from it.
‘Ah, there’s another saint, on another of those walls,’ said Dorcas. Darting ahe
ad, she shot across for a closer look, drawn to the brightly painted image, glinting with gold in the beam of the torch. ‘I don’t recognize this man,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t look very saintly! You’re going to have to identify him.’
‘See if you can work it out,’ Georges challenged them. ‘The two of you ought to be up to it.’
‘Well, he’s clearly a saint,’ said Joe. ‘He has a halo round his head, look. But he does look much more like a soldier. In fact, he looks like a Roman soldier to me. Cavalryman?’
‘Mounted on a horse at any rate. Crested helmet,’ said Dorcas. ‘He’s drawn his sword and he’s sliced his red military cloak in two and he’s offering half to the naked beggar sitting on the ground at his horse’s feet. Haven’t a clue.’
‘Yes, you have,’ said Georges, choosing to take her literally. ‘You’ve come up with all the evidence you need.’
‘I’ve got it!’ said Joe. ‘It’s St Martin of Tours! But I’ve still no idea what he’s doing here in a wine cellar. Friend of beggars and the poor. Hardly a qualification for presiding over choice bottles of champagne?’
‘Where else would he be? Very appropriate! St Martin is the patron saint of wine growers and wine makers. And he’s a local boy. Born in 316 AD, in Roman Gaul, he was in the army up in Amiens. His saint’s day is 11th November. Remembrance Day. And, yes, he was a cavalry officer.’
There was a pride and a sadness in the boy’s tone that prompted Dorcas to ask: ‘Did you put him here, Georges?’
He nodded.
‘And the flowers?’ Joe said quietly. He had noticed, on the ground underneath the icon, a jam jar containing three wilting white roses.
‘I put fresh ones in every week,’ said George with a touch of defiance.
Dorcas had begun to shiver in spite of the thick jersey which reached down to her knees. She turned a desperate pale face to Georges and came slowly back to join them. She took both Georges’s hands in hers and asked a silent question.
‘Yes, it was here,’ he said simply. ‘It happened here. I put up a cavalry officer to mark a fellow officer’s grave. I believe my father, whatever remains of him, lies behind that wall.’
‘Would it distress you, Georges, to tell us what you remember happening down here?’ asked Joe with a quick look to left and right.
‘It’s all right. Don’t worry – Maman never comes down here. She hasn’t been in the cellars, as far as I know, from that day to this.’ He pointed to St Martin. ‘There was just a deep alcove there ten years ago with bits and pieces of cellar equipment in it. It was a summer evening in 1917. I’d been out in the fields with Felix, working. I was angry with my mother for sending me out because my father had come home. He’d been with us for two days and I wanted to be with him every possible moment. Now, I can see that I must have been the most awful little nuisance,’ he said sorrowfully, ‘shadowing my father everywhere. I finished my work and ran back to the house but my parents had both disappeared. I went to the kitchen and asked the housekeeper where my father was. She said she’d last seen him come clattering downstairs in his uniform and call for his horse to be saddled and then he’d gone off across the courtyard and into the cellars. But that was about an hour earlier.
‘I was distraught! This meant he was leaving again. So soon. And apparently without intending to say goodbye to me. I was furious with my mother. I blamed her. She’d been quarrelling with him. I’d heard them shouting at each other and she’d been crying on and off for a whole day. I wanted to find him, tell him that whatever was wrong it had nothing to do with me.
‘I ran to the cellar. I wasn’t allowed to come down here by myself but I knew my way. Could have found my way blindfold, I think. The lighting wasn’t so wonderful in those days – oil lamps and home-made candles – but it was adequate. I raced along until I got to that turning there.’ Georges pointed down the way they had come. ‘And I stopped. I could hear the most awful noise.’ He shuddered at the memory. ‘It was a wailing and then a scrunching, dragging sound, repeated rhythmically every few seconds. I was terrified. I shouldn’t be there. I would get a spanking if I were caught. And there was something frightful going on in the corridor ahead, I knew it. I peered round the corner and . . . and . . . I saw the hunched shadow on the wall first.’
He paused, lost in his nightmare.
‘One shadow?’ Joe prompted gently.
‘Yes. My mother. She had long hair in those days – all the women had – and long skirts. She was sobbing and tugging at something on the ground. I thought at first it was a sack of some kind. But it wasn’t. She was dragging my father’s body over into the alcove. It was leaving a dark trail on the floor as she pulled it along. I don’t know how long I stood there frozen but I couldn’t move forward. I couldn’t go to my mother. I turned around and began to creep back along the gallery. But I had only gone about twenty yards when I caught a metal pail with my foot. Maman called out at once. “Who’s that? Is that you, Felix?”
‘I turned around and called back. “No, it’s me, Maman. I’m frightened. I didn’t know where you were.”
‘“Stay where you are!” she shouted. “Stand still!”
‘She came towards me round the corner and I nearly fled. She looked like the Greek women in my books – you know, the Furies or Medea or the Gorgon even. Her hair was hanging over her face, in damp strands, she’d been weeping and her eyes were dilated. She was panting and I could smell her terror. I would have run away but she knelt and seized me by the arms. “Georges, you are to go and find Felix,” she said. “Tell him he’s to come to me here. At once. And then I want you to go straight to your room. Speak to no one else.”
‘I was only too pleased to be sent away and I ran back and found him and delivered the message. When I got upstairs I went to the bathroom as I always did to get ready for bed. I saw myself in the mirror. My old white linen shirt was stained with blood where my mother’s hands had held me. I was daubed with my father’s blood. She’d stabbed him to death.’
Dorcas asked quietly: ‘You were only seven, Georges. Did you understand about death and bodies at that age?’
He looked at her wonderingly for a moment. ‘I knew about death. I killed things every day. Vermin. Birds. It was my job to keep the vineyards clear. I snared rabbits for the pot. Food was always short. And we were living in the middle of a battlefield. We were always coming across corpses . . . dead soldiers in the fields. Runaways hiding in ditches. One winter we found two deserters, wounded, starving, who’d crept into the cellars for shelter. They hadn’t dared to ask for help in case someone turned them in, I suppose. They were dead when Felix and I came across them. Dead for several days. We buried them in the churchyard in the village and sent their name tags in. I saw sights no child should see. Yes, I know it was a lifeless corpse my mother was hauling across the floor.’
Dorcas’s next question was inspired by a quick glance up at the icon of St Martin in his cloak and helmet. ‘The housekeeper told you he’d left in his uniform. Was the body you saw in uniform?’
‘Well, you know, it’s odd but it didn’t occur to me for years but – he wasn’t in uniform. She’d stripped the body down to his underwear. I suppose she burned the uniform later or got Felix to do it – just as the stained shirt that I’d hidden under my bed was never seen again. Felix knew how to put up the partitions and all the materials were to hand in the cellar. If he worked all night he could have sealed off the alcove. And then, in the future, long after her own death, if someone were to pull it down they would find a body not so easily identifiable.’
‘What are the chances of hearing from Felix . . .?’ Joe began.
‘He died three years ago,’ said Georges, subdued. ‘But he would never have spoken of it. Not to anyone. He was devoted to my mother.’
He slumped suddenly, like a string puppet at the end of his act. ‘This is as far as it goes. I’ve given you all I have.’
Joe put a comforting arm around Georges’s shoulder and hugged him, feelin
g his dejection. He recognized that the boy’s desperate courage in sharing his hideous memory deserved an acknowledgement rather deeper than the ‘Well done, old chap . . . better out than in – what!’ which came instinctively to him. ‘That took some determination, Georges,’ he murmured. ‘I can understand how difficult it must be to speak of such horrors. But equally – how difficult to remain silent! In your present situation, which gets daily more tricky, you will want to do justice to your father or his memory as well as show loyalty to your mother. And perhaps there is a way through . . . If there is I’ll find it,’ he finished encouragingly. ‘We will find it. And you can count on our discretion.’ He wondered whether to add a few words about lancing the boil of suspicion with the scalpel of truth and decided he’d said enough.
‘But this is all fascinating, Georges! Aren’t you fascinated, Joe? I am!’ Dorcas’s voice rang out suddenly, gushing with excitement, as her eyes flashed a warning. ‘Do you know – in all the years I’ve been coming to France this is my first visit to a cellar. But you must be getting cold, Georges? I feel quite guilty, hogging your nice warm jumper. Why don’t we all go to the stables next and show Joe the horses? I warn you though – he’s quite an expert!’
‘Dorcas, really you exaggerate . . .’ Joe spun on his heel, hearing a slight sound behind them. ‘Ah! Madame Houdart! There you are! You discover us halfway round the tour. We are offered the horses next. Will you join us?’
Chapter Nineteen
Aline Houdart came towards them, smiling her pleasure at tracking them down. She looked fresh and charming in riding trousers and yellow blouse, a tweed jacket thrown over her shoulders. She showed no sign that her appearance down here in the cellar involved anything but her regular stroll around the property. She greeted Joe and Dorcas and, taking her son by the arms, reached up and kissed him on each cheek. ‘They told me I’d find you down here. What it is to have a son who wakes with the lark! Such energy! It makes me feel old and sluggish! But I’ll do my bit now. Better late than never. Georges, darling, you may stand down – I’ll show our guests around the stables.’
Tug of War Page 16
