Vintage

by Rosemary Friedman

  Although, as an Irishwoman, Viola seemed to possess a certain insight into the character of a horse, she was not a natural mother, and her ideas about child-rearing had been gleaned from the stables.

  She believed that early training was as important as a good education, and that if children were started early enough, and dealt with intelligently enough, they would become good children. In England, where the custom was to treat foals gently when first handled and ridden, they behaved like spoiled brats. They needed to feel the hand of the trainer to control and guide them, although punishment should be administered at the moment of misbehaviour and should never be too severe. They should be taught early on the habit of obedience, so that it became a second instinct, and to do what was required of them should seem as natural as to eat when they were hungry and to lie down when they wanted to go to sleep.

  It was a question of the more you spare the rod the less you spoil the child. As you bend the twig so grows the tree, and education should be as gradual as moonrise, and perceptible not in progress but in result.

  The result of this upbringing had been to ensure that Clare was in awe of her mother, striving to be obedient, to anticipate her wishes and trotting to her side when called. For love and affection she had been dependent, as a baby, on the presence of Baronne Gertrude, who was besotted with her granddaughter. Following Baron Thibault’s tragic death and her grandmother’s summary departure – having been deprived of the attentions of nannies Forbes and McKay almost as soon as she had grown fond of them – she had relied on the comforting presence of Sidonie and the warmth of her kitchen.

  Now, watching Jamie as he expertly ground spices in the cramped Waterperry kitchen – she found watching the six-foot-two winger cook incredibly sexy – Clare allowed her thoughts to turn to Viola, with whom her relationship was civil but constrained. She knew that her mother, according to her lights, was fond of her and concerned about her welfare, but, as far as feelings were concerned, none, as far as she could remember, had ever been displayed.

  ‘How does coming to Ireland with me next weekend grab you?’

  ‘Kindly do not distract the cook.’

  ‘Don’t you want to meet my mother?’

  Jamie added the spices to the onions, which were sweating in a pan on the ancient Parkinson Cowan gas cooker, which had come with the cottage.

  ‘On the contrary. I think it’s about time I met my future mother-in-law.’

  Clare laid her head against Jamie’s broad back, feeling his muscles contract as he concentrated on the onions, and wrapped her arms around his waist.

  ‘If my father really is selling Cluzac we’ll be able to go to town on this cottage. We could build a mega extension…’

  ‘For the two of us?’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking about the two of us…’ Clare untied the strings of Jamie’s apron, which were fastened over his middle, and ran her hands provocatively down his body.

  ‘Cut it out, will you! I…am trying…to make a curry…’

  ‘I rather thought you might fancy making some little Spence-Joneses.’

  There was a loud ‘plop’ as Jamie turned off the gas. Hurling his apron enthusiastically through the open window, he took Clare in his arms in a bone-crunching embrace.

  Six

  Since leaving the cocoon of her boarding school, where she had been mothered by the nuns and comforted by the ritual, Clare had had a great many short-lived affairs. The men to whom she found herself attracted were often a great deal older than herself, and until she met Jamie she had been unable to form a long-term relationship.

  Listening to Hannah complaining about Seth, who thought that his socks washed themselves and jumped back into the drawer while he lay on the sofa reading his interminable scripts, and to Francesca, who because she cooked on camera was expected by every wally she dated to knock up a soufflé every time she brought them home, and Zoffany, who was such a militant feminist that any half-way decent man ran a mile at her approach, she knew that marriage to Jamie, ten years her senior and as solid as a listed building, would be like getting into a hot bath. She would, in addition, get her back scrubbed.

  A year ago Clare had been sitting in Francesca’s kitchen, while the TV cook experimented with ‘foolproof pastry’, which was sticking doggedly both to the table and the rolling-pin. She was moaning to Francesca that she was never going to meet anyone, all the men she knew were either married or gay or in meaningful relationships.

  ‘“If you haven’t got a rolling-pin use a milk bottle.”’ Francesca, who was only partly listening to her, addressed an imaginary audience.

  ‘Who the fuck has milk bottles?’ Clare said.

  It was shortly afterwards that Jamie, who had at the time been going out with Miranda Pugh, an old friend of Nicola’s and the hard-hitting editor of Amazon, a magazine dedicated to career women, had walked into the Nicola Wade Gallery where he had mistaken her for a waitress.

  In the interests of the profit margins the gallery was run on a shoestring and the overheads pared to the barest minimum. Clare had no intention of letting it operate in any other way. On Private View days, Nicola, dishing out price sheets like confetti, dealt with the press (if any), chatted up the clients, and massaged the ego of the artist, to whom the act of exposure was usually purgatory. The catering was in the capable hands of Francesca, who could be relied upon to do it economically, which left Clare to dispense the hospitality.

  The first words Jamie, who was wearing dun-coloured cords and a scarlet waistcoat, had spoken to her, as she stood by the door with her tray of Francesca’s mini vol-au-vents, were, ‘I’m allergic to mushrooms.’

  ‘I only have to look at a tomato and I get spots on my bottom,’ Clare said affably, intending to put him at his ease.

  As he shied away empty-handed, she heard his shocked voice addressing Miranda:

  ‘Funny sort of waitresses they get these days…’

  Later, when the Private View was at its height, the perspiring punters shoulder to shoulder, the noise level in the cellar intolerable, and the oxygen level low, Clare, busy making out invoices, felt a hand on her shoulder.

  ‘What sort of spots?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘On your backside. I came to apologise. I thought you were the caterer. Jamie Spence-Jones. I came with Miranda. I don’t suppose you happen to have a name?’

  ‘Clare…’

  ‘Clare. I like it.’

  ‘Clare Gertrude Sophie Elinore de Cluzac…’

  ‘We all have our problems,’ he said, making her laugh.

  She had got as far as telling him that she was Nicola’s partner and about her Saturday stall in Portobello market, when Miranda, an anorexic redhead dressed, according to the current trend, entirely in black and carrying an outsize black Hervé Chapelier bag, rudely interrupted them to say that she’d absolutely had enough and that if she had to stand the heat another moment she’d die. Ignoring Clare, and taking Jamie, who was at least a foot taller than she, proprietorially by the hand, she pulled him away.

  Watching their feet through the railings – Miranda’s Manolo Blahnik black ankle-boots and Jamie’s Timberlands – disappear in unison down the road at street level, Clare thought that she hadn’t met a man with a tingle quotient as high as that of Jamie Spence-Jones in months.

  ‘Tell me about Jamie Spence-Jones,’ she said casually to Nicola, when everyone had gone and they were counting up the red dots in the right-hand corners of the paintings.

  ‘He’s a surgeon. At the John Radcliffe.’

  ‘I mean him and Miranda.’

  ‘Forget it.’

  ‘How serious is it?’

  ‘Serious. They’ve been an item for years.’

  ‘Maybe…?’

  ‘Don’t even think about it! You know, it never ceases to amaze me how the paintings which one is convinced won’t sell jump off the wall, and the dead certs hang about. I don’t know about you, but I’m starving. I booked a table at Zen.’

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nbsp; A month later, Clare had been standing behind her stall in Portobello Road when she heard a voice say, ‘How are the spots?’ and looked up to see Jamie, a clumsily wrapped package beneath his arm, appraising her wares.

  ‘How’s Miranda?’ Her normally well-modulated voice erupted in a cross between a simper and a squeak.

  ‘Miranda and I split up. She’s going out with Barnaby Muirhead, the Formula One man.’

  ‘I suppose you couldn’t compete.’

  He ignored her witticism – she always joked when she was nervous – and indicated the bundle beneath his arm.

  ‘A pewter tankard. One of the theatre sisters is emigrating to Australia. I probably paid too much for it. Will you have dinner with me?’

  The seriousness of his voice made her pack up her wares and drive with Jamie to his cottage in Waterperry. Expecting to be taken to a restaurant, she was surprised when he went into the cramped kitchen and, preparing his batterie de cuisine as if he were laying out instruments in the operating theatre, set about making dinner. It became a standing joke between them that, despite Jamie’s best efforts, Clare couldn’t remember what they ate.

  ‘I once went out with a man,’ Clare said afterwards, ‘who told me, “I’ve cooked the dinner now you can do the washing-up.” On our first date!’

  ‘I would never do that.’

  Clare believed him. Later she discovered that Jamie didn’t play games. What you saw was what you got. Leaving the dirty dishes on the table, they were drawn, like metal and magnet, towards each other and had divested themselves of every fragment of clothing before they climbed the narrow stairs.

  ‘Lucky for me you came to Portobello for your pewter tankard,’ Clare said later in his arms.

  ‘Luck didn’t come into it.’ Jamie kissed her passionately. ‘Nicola told me where to find you.’

  Clare became a frequent visitor to the cottage and to the John Radcliffe, where her face became familiar in the hospital mess. In all her twenty-seven years she had never been so happy. For the first time in her life she felt loved.

  They had been going out for six months when Jamie had taken her to Aberdeen to meet his parents, who still lived in the mock-Tudor house where Jamie and his two younger brothers had been born. His mother, a consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist at the Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, a strong-looking woman with short grey hair, the same height and build as Jamie, had to Clare’s surprise been hanging out the weekly wash in the garden – Jamie explained later that she regarded it as therapy – while his father (a general practitioner who had gone into medicine for the wrong reasons and from whom Jamie had inherited his love of literature), formally dressed for a Sunday in a tweed suit and waistcoat, set the table for lunch.

  Watching Jamie’s mother dismember the crisply roasted capon with frightening dexterity, listening to Jamie’s easy discussion with his father about the various consultant posts for which he was applying, as though they were resuming a conversation that had taken place only yesterday, Clare basked in the warmth which, despite the lack of adequate central heating, suffused the oak-panelled dining-room with its bow-fronted sideboard and inherited silver.

  ‘I think Clare would like another potato.’ Rodney Spence-Jones addressed his wife, as Clare put down her knife and fork.

  ‘Why don’t you ask her?’ Muriel Spence-Jones lobbed back the ball.

  Listening to the laughter provoked by what was obviously a family joke, Clare realised where Jamie got both his equable nature and his sense of humour. Although she was unaware of time passing, she was surprised to find that lunch, which had been accompanied, in Jamie’s honour, by a Gevrey-Chambertin with which she could find no fault, had gone on until four o’clock, by which time the tablecloth was liberally littered with shards of walnut shell which had escaped from the nut-crackers, and the plum-patterned fruit plates were overflowing with tangerine peel.

  Taking Clare into his book-lined study, on the pretext of showing her the family album, Rodney Spence-Jones looked at her with kindly brown eyes reminiscent of Jamie’s.

  ‘I never did take to that Miranda.’

  Recognising it as his acceptance of her, Clare, in a spontaneous gesture, kissed Jamie’s father, to his delight and embarrassment – he was unused to such gestures – on both cheeks.

  Afterwards, Jamie said that according to his brothers, who had had a full telephone report, his parents had not stopped talking about her.

  Now it was Clare’s turn, and she was taking Jamie to meet Viola in County Kerry, where she kept a stable of seventy-odd horses. She taught them to trot and canter correctly before instructing them in elementary dressage. Finally she trained them as show-jumpers which she sold the world over.

  When Viola had left Cluzac twenty years ago, taking Clare with her, there was no question of dissolving the marriage in the eyes of the Catholic church. She had not even gone through the motions of a civil divorce. Charles-Louis had not pursued the matter, and, having been trapped into her first wedding by her unplanned pregnancy, she had no intention of getting married again.

  Her relationship with Charles-Louis, since her discovery of his infidelity during their nuptials, had been tempestuous. After the death of Baron Thibault and the departure of Baronne Gertrude, her role as chatelaine of Cluzac had been made easy by the fact that the new Baron de Cluzac, unlike his father, disliked entertaining and only rarely deigned to socialise with his neighbours. Under the eagle eye of Sidonie, the Château – staffed by an army of village women who crept around like ciphers with mops and bundles of linen – more or less ran itself.

  At the time of their nuptials, Charles-Louis had apologised profusely for his aberration with the wedding guest, and Viola, in her naivety, had put his behaviour down to an excess of male hormone (which she knew all about from her father’s stallions), coupled with the fact that over the past three days he had had a very great deal to drink. The second episode, when she had found him in the Orangery astride one of the stable girls, had found her less forgiving.

  Accepting a chestnut mare by way of compensation, Viola had once again drawn a veil over the incident, which was to be repeated, over the years, with Charles-Louis’ secretaries, with the wife of one the estate managers, with a housemaid whom she had immediately dismissed, and with Beatrice Biancarelli, a young Corsican beauty who was currently the toast of Bordeaux.

  Viola was disgusted not only by Charles-Louis’ behaviour, but by his inability to communicate on anything but the most basic level with anyone but Desirée, the red setter bitch who accompanied him to the garages, the vineyards and the chais, and who never left his side. She occupied herself with her husband’s stables, the running of which she assumed; she took an interest in show-jumpers, which she gradually learned to train; and she kept a watchful eye, when she remembered, on Clare.

  It was when her seventeen-year-old sister, Rose, was visiting Cluzac one September to help with the vendange – between leaving her convent school and going to university in Dublin where she had won a music scholarship to Trinity College – that the crunch had finally come.

  Knowing Charles-Louis as she did, and recognising the fact that Rose, with her wild auburn hair and her eyes the colour of vintage marmalade, was as full and juicy as the ripe peaches suspended from the wall of the courtyard, Viola had cautioned him.

  ‘Keep away from my little sister, now,’ she had told him. ‘You so much as go near Rose, Charles-Louis Eugène Bertrand de Cluzac, and you’ll wish you’d never been born.’

  All had gone well until the night of the party held in the great barn to celebrate the end of the vintage. Sitting among the exhausted army of grape-pickers who came yearly to Cluzac from Spain and Portugal, Baronne Viola de Cluzac had graciously accepted the gerbaude, the annual bouquet of flowers, from their spokesperson and recited her statutory few words of thanks, when it dawned on her that both her husband and Rose were missing from the table.

  Stopping by the stables to pick up her riding-crop, and following her intu
ition, she combed the shadowy grounds. She found them in the gazebo where Rose, who had partaken too generously of the carafes of château wine, was standing naked as a moonlit statue while Charles-Louis worshipped at her auburn shrine.

  Yelling to Rose to get her clothes on at once and return to her tower bedroom, Viola, screaming like a Dublin fishwife, had set about her husband with the riding-crop. In an angry torrent of cliché and somewhat mixed metaphor, she had told him that this time he had not only widely overstepped the mark but had finally cooked his goose.

  The following morning she had packed her bags. Accompanied by a bewildered Clare, and the hung-over and shamefaced Rose, who was unaccustomed to drinking, she had left Château de Cluzac, and returned to Ireland.

  She had no hatred for Charles-Louis. During their eight years together there had been times when she had found him both engaging and amusing. He was not an ungenerous man and had left her pretty much to her own devices in the stables, which was what she enjoyed most of all; but she could no longer tolerate his philandering, which she considered, to say the least of it, immature. They communicated whenever it was necessary, usually over matters to do with the child, but there was never any talk of divorce.

  Having had her fill of life in a castle and an unsatisfactory marriage, Viola Fitzpatrick (she felt more comfortable in the old shoes of her Irish name) bought a derelict property in County Kerry, which she had since made a premier centre for the training of show-jumpers. At the Fitzpatrick Equine Centre she took in the odd paying guest who wanted to learn to jump. To say that it was a hotel would have been painting the lily. Rooms were made available and let to riders by word of mouth. Apart from breakfast, which was provided, they were expected to fend for themselves. They were invited to leave the washing-up, if they could find a place for it, in the kitchen sink.