‘The war happened,’ her father says. ‘And we are not going to talk about the war.’
This is the way it goes. Depending on the season and on the budget provided by la comtesse – Cap visualises this absent mythical person as the Virgin Mary, queen of heaven, powerful but invisible, enthroned in stained glass above the altar in the village church – the gardener hires labourers from the village for the vines and the orchard and the potager. He hires Marie-Claire as housekeeper for the empty chateau and also, part-time, for his own cottage. She cooks and cleans and does laundry.
From the time she can crawl, Cap has a sense of herself as part of the earth. On hands and knees, she makes her way between the tomato towers and bean trellises. Her wrists smell of lavender, her ankles of sage. She fancies she began as a seedling, like lettuce, like radishes, and that she reached for the sun and grew taller, smelling of compost and rosemary and thyme. She is tolerated by her father, her brother and the farmhands, much as an earthworm is tolerated: a benign thing to be placed gently to one side of spade or hoe. As soon as she can walk, she joins her brother and the labourers to pick beans and tomatoes or to hunt for mushrooms in the woods, or she helps her father on the stony terraces where the vines spread their wide woody arms along wires.
‘Everyone thinks making wine is about the grapes,’ Christophe le Jardinier explains solemnly to his five-year-old daughter. ‘It is only partly about the grapes. Much more important is the drainage. Vines do best on the slopes, but only if the channels are kept clear.’
Her father works with a shovel, Capucine follows with her trowel. They expose the channels, row upon row of clay tiles. They pull out, with bare hands, clotted hairballs of roots and of silt. The soil is poor and stony and sandy.
‘The soil doesn’t matter,’ Capucine’s father tells her. ‘Rich soil is not the issue. The vines must be made to suffer to make the best wines. The deep-rooted vines, the ones that have to reach down and down and down to touch the wet, they survive when no rain comes and when the sun burns.’
When rain does not come, which is often, Capucine and her father lug buckets of well-water up the slopes and anoint the root of each plant.
Capucine learns the art of digging and footing the posts, of threading the wire so that the grapes grow like a green fence, arms crucified, stretched and strained sideways like Christ on the cross. Guiding the new tendrils along the wires, fixing the thickening vines to the posts, Capucine begins to feel unable to drive a nail through the woody wrist of a runner.
‘I can’t do it, Papa.’
‘The vines that suffer,’ her father reminds her, ‘make the best wines.’
‘Just the same, Papa, I can’t do it.’
‘I’ll do it then,’ he says. ‘You do the weeding and the watering.’
Capucine learns that it takes three years before a vine can yield grapes, four years before the fruit is legal for making wine. She learns that a vine can live for a century, but that its best years come after it turns fifteen and before it turns forty years old.
‘Same for women,’ her father tells her. ‘Best child-bearing years. Your maman was only twenty when you were born.’
Capucine holds her breath. She counts to twenty, thirty, sixty. ‘Yes?’ she prompts.
‘When you have your fifteenth birthday, Capucine, I’ll find a husband for you. We’ll have a wedding and the whole village will come.’
‘Papa, I will find my own husband. I want one like you.’
‘I’m not a good example, Capucine. I never had me a legal wife.’ He turns away and looks down the terraces towards his cottage.
‘Papa?’
‘I’m a lucky man, Capucine,’ Christophe le Jardinier says. ‘I’m a lucky man.’
‘My maman?’ Capucine prompts.
‘I have loved two women, beautiful women, brave as she-lions. And they gave me Petit Christophe and you.’
‘Papa?’ Cap lays down her shovel and nuzzles up against her father.
‘Ours are old vines,’ her father says. ‘Thirty years old. Which is why our wines are so fine, and why the Appellation Contrôlée du Château de Boissy de St Gilles was so appealing to that fat cat from America. People say he was bewitched by la comtesse. I say he was bewitched by our wine.’
2.
The ducks converge on Capucine’s bench in the Ramble, but what she sees are the old men reeling in their lines at the village pond in St Gilles and the little funnels made in the water by the silvery fish fighting for their lives. No fish survives the hook. Not one lives long enough to pass on the warning – Beware the dangling worm! – to the next generation. All the infant fishlings see is the parent ascending into heaven like lightning.
Capucine takes the white envelope from the pocket of her jacket and looks at it again. It was slipped under her door along with the invoice for the room which is marked: PAID. COMPLIMENTS OF THE GRAND HYATT. The white envelope is addressed to Lilith Jardine and inside is a printed note in a hand-script font and turquoise ink. She reads it again.
Negotiations necessary. You are being watched and monitored. Be at the Loeb Boathouse in Central Park, in the outdoor bar, at 1 p.m.
The note is unsigned.
Capucine now feels certain that the airfares, the hotel reservation and the note did not come from Lucifer, though she knows well enough that watching and monitoring the lives of others is his business. She has never been afraid of him. She has been afraid of certain professional watchers, border guards, foreign military personnel, to whom Lucifer may or may not have passed on information, but she also believes she is under the protective umbrella of the powerful rulers and bureaucrats who buy and sell art. They need her appraisals. They value her knowledge of the artifacts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and of the global art market in paintings and antiques. She is the seal of approval on their million-dollar tastes and cultural standing. What she offers is proof of the perks of power. Thus an unspoken deal is being made, admittedly without the knowledge of the art collectors.
Cap often feels anxious, but if things go wrong (and she knows they frequently do and always could), she is placing herself on the line for something that matters. She is lighting candles for her mother, for Petit Christophe’s mother, for her father, for Marie-Claire’s husband. Some risks are worth the cost, though the costs can be terrifyingly high.
You are being watched and monitored.
So what’s new?
A night spent in a cell on the Slovak side of the Czech border suddenly comes back to her with acute sensory detail: the cement floor, the stink from the latrine in the corner, the vomit in the sink, the hunched form of the only other person in the cell, the leering guard on the other side of the bars, patting his crotch and licking her confiscated passport.
‘I’d advise you not to try,’ Cap said in English, looking him in the eye. The guard laughed, staring back at her, making slurping sounds with his tongue. Cap met his eyes intensely until he dropped his gaze and turned away. He made a parting gesture, an obscene one, over his shoulder. ‘Try anything rough,’ Cap said, ‘and there’ll be reprisals you are going to regret.’
‘Lucky for you he doesn’t understand a word.’ The cellmate was young, perhaps eighteen. Her English was thickly Slavic. ‘What are you?’ she demanded derisively. ‘One of the Holy Innocents or a stupid American?’
‘I’m French.’
‘Don’t believe you.’ The guard had moved on and could be heard guffawing with fellow armed border officers from an adjacent room. The cellmate gestured with her thumb towards the sound. ‘Get it? Either you’re retarded or you’re not from Europe. No way you are French.’
‘I was born and grew up in France, but I lived in the States for a long time, and now I live in Australia.’
‘That explains it.’ Cap’s cellmate thumped the cement wall with her fist. ‘You think American, you act Australian. You people. You’re so naive, you’re rat poison for the rest of us.’
Cap was shocked and distress
ed. ‘But we can’t let that thug think he’s omnipotent.’
‘Right now, he is. There’s only one way out of here and that’s bribery, cash or sex, same difference to them.’
‘There’s not only one way out,’ Cap insisted. ‘There’s never only one way out.’
‘Well, I forgot to mention death,’ her cellmate said. ‘Sorry.’
‘You can’t be serious,’ Cap said. ‘They wouldn’t dare. They want to join NATO. The bad international PR would destroy their chances.’
‘And I bet you believe in elves.’
‘I believe in resistance.’
‘Piss off that guard, and you’ve got both of us a one-way ticket to gang rape and a beating that I promise will have you begging to trade your resistance for your life. It will make both of us want to die. I’ve been there. Just my fucking bad luck to be put in a cell with you.’
‘I have embassy contacts. They’ll notice if I’m missing or delayed. There’ll be diplomatic intervention.’
The girl smacked her forehead with the palms of her hands. ‘Mother of God! Do you have any idea how easy it is for them to put you out of diplomatic reach? They can do it in five minutes. They’ll find heroin in your backpack, abracadabra, and then what embassy will touch you?’
‘Where are you from?’
‘Ukraine.’
‘Why are you here?’
‘No visa. Third try to get to France where my sister is. Got caught and sent back twice.’
‘What happened?’
‘Detention centre. Ukraine border. Broke out last week. I won’t forgive you if you fuck up my third try. For God’s sake, make nice.’
‘I won’t be intimidated,’ Cap said.
‘Oh yeah? Want to bet on that?’ The girl pulled up her top. The skin above her ribs was purple and black. She pulled her jeans down to her knees. Her inner thighs were the colour of carbon. ‘You’ll find offering sex is simpler,’ she said. ‘And less painful.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Natasha.’
Cap and Natasha, between them, paid a fine and signed a document in which they admitted to being wrongfully in Slovakia. Cap paid in American dollars. She did not ask how Natasha paid. Their passports were stamped Persona non grata, or at least that was the gist of the translation which Natasha provided. No subsequent entry into Slovakia permitted. Ever. ‘Is that a promise?’ Cap asked in English.
‘Mother of God!’ Natasha said. ‘Can’t you keep your mouth shut? Lucky for us they don’t understand.’
The women were escorted to the railway station and put on a train to Prague. Cap paid for both tickets. At the train station in Prague, they parted company. ‘Can I buy your ticket to Paris?’ Cap asked. ‘In return for the survival advice?’
‘No thanks. I have my own ways and means.’
‘Good luck,’ Cap said.
‘Fuck luck. What counts is what’s decided in here.’ Natasha tapped her forehead. ‘Nothing will stop me.’
The blur of Czech woods as seen from the window of the train smudges into the Ramble. Cap shuts her eyes tight and opens them again. The signals have changed, someone has flipped a switch, the train brakes, a child’s voice shrieks, ‘He ate it, Mama. The duck ate my bagel!’
Cap, startled, presses a hand to her heart and lurches forward.
‘I’m so sorry,’ a woman says. ‘Didn’t mean to frighten you. He’s only three.’
‘Uh, no problem. I was miles away.’
‘That’s a mallard, Richie,’ the woman says. ‘See the green on its head?’ To Cap she says, ‘I wonder if you’d mind?’ She proffers a camera. ‘Of me and Richie and the ducks.’
‘With pleasure,’ Cap says. She focuses. She clicks the shutter. ‘There,’ she says. ‘You and Richie and the mallards. You all look wonderful.’
‘Thank you so much,’ the woman says. ‘You live here?’
‘Oh no. I used to. Now I’m just visiting.’
‘So are we,’ the woman says. ‘We’re from Texas. We’re staying at the Grand Hyatt.’
‘I was staying there too,’ Cap says. ‘I’ve just checked out.’
She has checked out of the Grand Hyatt. She has left her one small suitcase with the concierge but has put everything essential – passport, air tickets, change of underwear – into her very large shoulder bag. Should this become necessary, she can abandon the suitcase. She has not quite made up her mind as to whether or not she will show up at the Loeb Boathouse bar. She is not sure why, but she feels like a fish watching the slick slithering temptation of a worm. Somewhere there must be a hidden hook. Why was the date of her return ticket left open? Who is expecting to detain her – and for how long – after her checkout date? What kind of detour might she be taken on before she gets a flight back to Australia?
Will the mistress of an African dictator arrange her visit to Zimbabwe? (Under certain conditions, of course.) Is the Chinese defector – corrupt, it goes without saying – seeking to buy silence or to get the highest price for his paintings? Curiosity may have killed the cat but it has led Capucine through at least nine interesting lives.
The hunted is curious about the hunter.
Capucine has genetic ties to the hunted: to her mother, her father, the mother of Petit Christophe, to Marie-Claire, to Marie-Claire’s husband.
The walls of the gardener’s cottage at the Château de Boissy in St Gilles are of stone so thick that the width of the doorframe is as long as a man’s arm from shoulder to wrist. Even in mid-summer the place feels chilled. In all seasons, the kitchen is the best place to be. Marie-Claire arrives at sunrise. She has been doing this every morning since the miraculous arrival of Capucine. Back then, Marie-Claire made coffee, cooked breakfast for Christophe le père and Petit Christophe, fed the baby. With one hand she waved father and son out the door.
She sang as she tended the baby and the house. Her song was without words but expressive, a narrative chant full of mourning. The lamentations of Marie-Claire were set always in the minor key of the Renaissance mass and that music was imprinted in Cap’s brain. She thinks of Marie-Claire whenever she hears Palestrina or Tallis or Couperin.
Marie-Claire sang of sorrow, of loss, of fear, of her husband living like a wild animal in the woods, of her belief that somehow there was meaning behind the chaos. Her husband visited by night when he could. The Resistance was their beacon in the dark, their only hope, it was an article of faith. Her husband left before the first light of dawn. There were fifty acres of woods on the chateau grounds and within them was an underground room, a sealed-off wing of the wine cellars, long forgotten, that served as a safe house. It was a stone’s throw from the German officers bivouacked in the chateau.
‘I’ll stay in the safe house till dusk,’ her husband told her the last time he kissed her goodbye. ‘Someone’s going to meet me with a cart at the edge of the woods. We’ll take back roads to Orléans. We’re going to blow up the railway line to Paris.’
But the next evening it was Christophe le Jardinier who knocked on her door. ‘I have bad news, Marie-Claire. They have taken him. Someone informed.’
‘Who informed?’
‘We don’t know.’
‘Same person who informed on you last year.’ This was not a question. ‘So they know about the safe house.’
‘They know we have one. They don’t know where it is.’
‘Christophe, when will this end?’
‘Soon,’ the chateau gardener promised.
‘Soon enough for my husband?’
‘They won’t kill him because they need information. They know the tide’s turning. They know the end’s near.’
‘We’ve been saying that for four years.’
‘This is different. The Americans have landed in Normandy.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Short-wave radio.’
‘Normandy’s a long way from Paris.’
‘But they’ll get there. And we have to hang on until then. It won’t be long.
’
‘Yes it will. And until then nowhere is safe. He’ll be tortured.’ Christophe holds her. There is no other comfort he can offer. ‘And you were tortured for nothing,’ she said.
‘It wasn’t for nothing. They didn’t find the safe house. Your husband was taken on the road to Orléans, not in our woods. But they’re watching. We’ll have to stop using the old cellar.’
‘Do you think la comtesse …?’
‘No. Not that she wouldn’t, perhaps, if it came to arrest, but she hasn’t the faintest idea.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I’m sure. She’s never even set foot in the cellars. She’s never been down to the crypt. When I wanted to show her the pre-war vintages, she wouldn’t go. “It’s like stepping into a grave,” she said. So she doesn’t even know that the tunnel got blocked off from her side.’
‘I wouldn’t count on that,’ Marie-Claire said. ‘I’ve done her laundry, remember, and the laundry of the SS in the chateau. She’s not as naive as she seems. She gets along very well with the Boche.’
‘It’s an act.’
‘I think the naivety is an act.’
‘Maybe. But she’s good at being naive. Her naivety saved my life.’
‘How?’
‘She intervened. She went to the commandant. That’s why the Boche let me go.’
‘You didn’t tell me that when I was putting you back together and patching you up.’
‘No. Well. The less we all say the safer, right?’
‘Why did she go to the commandant?’
‘I don’t know. Courage? French patriotism?’
‘How did she even know you were taken?’
‘Who knows? Servants whispering. Village rumour. Or maybe she noticed the vines. Maybe she was worried about neglect. She speaks German. She told them one of her mother’s lovers – perhaps her own father – was German.’
‘I should have guessed. Is that supposed to make me trust her? She speaks German.’
‘She did what worked.’
‘She sucked up to them. She gave them a whole wing of the chateau.’
The Claimant Page 14
