‘All moving parts in working order.’
‘Don’t go back to Bordeaux.’
‘I thought you were behind me.’
‘I need you.’
‘I need you too. You want me to let myself be ripped off?’
‘Does it really matter?’
‘Not in the grand order of things.’
‘You’ve made your point. Why don’t you call it a day?’
Clare thought about it.
‘I have to show Papa.’
Taking the floor with Barnaby, as exhibitionistic on the dance floor as he was on the racing circuit, Clare kept a jealous eye on Jamie who, entwined in Miranda’s freckled arms, was dancing with his ex-flame.
Egged on by an inebriated Barnaby, Clare was stamping her feet, clicking her fingers and gyrating uninhibitedly in time to the Lambada music, when she happened to glance up. In place of Jamie and Miranda, who had returned to the table where they were engaged in conversation, she saw her father, stiff and upright, in a midnight-blue dinner jacket, shuffling his feet disdainfully, while an exotic Latin American, wearing an exquisite emerald necklace, moved her hips provocatively by his side.
‘Someone you know?’ Barnaby followed her glance.
‘You could say that. Will you excuse me for a moment?’
Clare edged her way across the tiny floor.
‘Bonsoir Papa!’ The hooded eyes regarded her without surprise. ‘Je t’avais bien vu.’ Clare indicated his partner who was gazing at the Baron adoringly. ‘Tu me présentes à ton amie?’ she asked.
Her father stared at her. He had no intention of making any introductions.
‘How’s Laura?’ Clare said.
The Baron’s lips tightened in a familiar gesture of annoyance.
‘She’s well.’
‘Perhaps you and your…friend would like to join us?’ It was the champagne speaking.
‘Thank you.’ Charles-Louis’ manners were impeccable as usual. ‘Some other time.’
The next thing Clare remembered was waking up in her old bed in Nicola’s flat in Notting Hill, with Jamie bending over her.
‘How did I get here?’
‘I carried you. Over my shoulder. You were obscenely drunk.’
‘Rubbish.’ She noticed that Jamie was fully dressed. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’
‘I’m going to work.’
‘To work! What’s the time?’
‘Six-thirty.’
‘Aren’t you coming to bed.’
‘I’ve been in bed all night.’
‘You could have fooled me.’
‘I certainly could. You took one look at your father and polished off the entire bottle of Bolly.’
‘My father makes me puke.’
‘Give him a break.’
‘Are you telling me I should feel sorry for him?’
‘I’m telling you I have to go.’
Clare recognised the expression on his face as he slid a hand beneath the duvet.
‘Come back to bed.’
‘Tempting as it is I have a heavy operating list this morning.’
Jamie had his working face on. He was already at the John Radcliffe. It was not surprising that he couldn’t summon up much enthusiasm for her father’s peccadilloes or the problems of the Château de Cluzac vines.
‘See you tonight. At Grandmaman’s.’
‘Love you.’
‘Love you too.’
Calling on Hannah, who lived above her shop in the King’s Road, to collect her first batch of Château de Cluzac tee-shirts, Clare found her fat friend taking a lentil-and-saffron bath and massaging her head with unguents made from chillies and hot oil.
When she’d finished her beauty treatment, Hannah held up an outsize tee-shirt. Across the front in leaf-green lettering was ‘Au commencement était la vigne…’ (In the beginning was the vine…), above a facsimile of a gnarled and twisted vine and the de Cluzac coat of arms.
‘I think they’ve turned out rather nicely.’
‘Hannah, it’s gi-normous!’
‘I see no reason why the well-endowed should be marginalised. Most of them are medium and large. You can flog the extra-large to the Germans.’
Before her meeting with David Markham to arrange for the sale of some of her father’s bottle stock, Clare went to Neal Street to make her peace with Nicola, who had already left for the gallery by the time she had finally woken up.
Nicola purported to be more interested in hanging an exhibition of paintings by a young man who lived among the communities on the shores of Lake Atitlan, than in Clare’s problems at Château de Cluzac.
She pointed to a canvas of thickly daubed oranges and reds, and explained how the artist, assaulted by the impact of colour, had explored it in an intense sequence of abstract compositions, while Clare spoke of the hostility she was encountering at the château and recounted in detail the episode of the vandalised sign.
‘He also produces miniature paintings, scaled down from his larger work,’ Nicola said, ‘to make pendants and bracelets, which he frames in cast silver, in homage to the people of Guatemala.’
‘Fuck Guatemala. Aren’t you interested in Château de Cluzac?’
Nicola picked up a cobalt-blue canvas and held it tentatively against the wall.
‘Not particularly.’
‘Is Zoffany coping all right?’
‘She’s OK.’
‘Look, I’m really sorry I left you in the lurch. Getting Château de Cluzac on its feet is something I have to do.’
‘Did you hear me complain?’
‘Nicky…’
‘For God’s sake don’t call me Nicky.’
‘I want to ask you a favour.’
‘Go ahead. I’m listening.’
‘I want you to mount an exhibition for me at Château de Cluzac. Find me some artist who’s done paintings of vineyards – France, Spain, it doesn’t have to be Bordeaux – anything to do with the grape. With the coachloads of tourists I’m expecting, paintings, and posters, should sell like a bomb. I’m also going to flog objects de vin: old labels, funnels, tasters, corkscrews…’
‘Talking of corkscrews,’ Nicola said.
Opening a drawer in the desk, she took out a brass-and-ivory corkscrew and held it out to Clare.
‘Victorian. I picked it up in Portobello.’
Recognising it as a peace offering, Clare put her arms round her friend.
‘It’s been shit miserable without you,’ Nicola said. ‘Not to mention the fact that that odious Oleg has shacked up with an Estonian poet.’
‘Why don’t you come to Bordeaux…?’ Clare thought of Halliday Baines, deserted by his wife. ‘I could introduce you to a nice young man?’
Nicola was not displeased with the idea. Her words belied her expression.
‘I have a gallery to run, remember?’
Twenty-nine
Although Clare was at home in two languages, she was ambivalent about which culture she owed allegiance to. When she was in England she thought and dreamed in English, but no sooner had she set foot in France than her unconscious switched, unbidden, into French.
Suspended, or so it seemed, on a sunlit pillow of cloud, at an altitude of 33,000 feet, between the two countries, she was uncertain where she belonged.
While the mantle of Château de Cluzac, with its moat and turrets, where she had spent her formative years, sat easily on her shoulders, across the Channel, where she had her friends and Jamie, was home.
Pondering the question, she wondered if the answer was that, because she belonged everywhere, she really belonged nowhere (on the grounds that, when ‘everybody is somebody, nobody is anybody’); and, as she stared at the tray of food that had been set in front of her, the voice of the stewardess asking what she would like to drink made her dismiss her metaphysical thoughts and prick up her ears.
‘Du vin, s’il vous plait.’
Clare surveyed the quarter bottles of wine ranged like miniature soldiers
on the loaded trolley.
‘Du rouge ou du blanc?’
‘What is the red?’
Picking up a screw-capped bottle, the girl peered at the label.
‘La Balardine.’
One of Claude Balard’s concoctions. Filling her plastic glass with the thin purplish liquid, Clare held it to her nose in a futile attempt to detect the floral scents of rose, of violet, of broom; the fruity aroma of raspberry, cherry or peach; or the pungent perfumes of spice. Putting the glass to her lips, and letting the wine run over her palate and the sides of her tongue, which reacted to its acidity as if it had been stung by a thousand needles, she shuddered.
According to Halliday Baines, it was a mistake to believe that all French wine originated in the ancient cellars of some distinguished château. Over half of it was primitive stuff, produced in communal wineries where the quality of the end product was equal to the lowest common denominator of the grapes that were tipped into the press. While some local vignerons took pride in their smallholdings, others were less meticulous, and many co-operatives were not very good at making wine.
With the decrease in wine drinking in France (together with the rest of Europe), and the fact that there was absolutely no international market for vin ordinaire, many of the small growers were now being paid by the government to rip up their vineyards, which they were doing to the tune of 100,000 acres per year. Already there were 19 billion bottles of plonk in the European wine lake. Stored as industrial alcohol, it would end up in perfume bottles or be used to make subsidised car fuel. By the year 2000, according to Hallliday, over a quarter of French vineyards would, literally, have gone up in smoke.
Taking out her pocket calculator, Clare estimated the number of seats on the plane, multiplied it by the number of flights per day, then, with the help of the in-flight magazine, attempted to work out the number of journeys made by the airline to its various destinations in the course of a single year. The results were astronomical.
When Halliday Baines had suggested that she declassify part of her ’93 vintage and sell it cheaply to an airline, she had been secretly affronted by his suggestion. The unequivocal figures on the tiny liquid crystal display in front of her prompted her to revise her opinion of the oenologue, and take the idea of Petite Clare more seriously.
It was perfectly true, as Halliday had pointed out, that there were two markets for wine as well as two distinctive consumers: the cognoscenti who wanted a high-quality wine – which they were willing to pay for – and the majority, who now regarded wine as an everyday beverage and were perfectly happy with a bottle of Château Catesbury’s to accompany their evening meal. Most supermarket wine was purchased by women and was consumed on the same day it was bought.
Petite Clare would bring an affordable second-growth wine to the shelves. Properly marketed, and at the right price, it would be a welcome replacement for the vinegar she had just tasted, which was deemed fit to accompany the airline food. She was not bothered by the fact that the quarter-bottles would have screw caps, rather than the traditional corks without which the consumers would feel short-changed; they had little more than snobbery to commend them.
Sniffing a cork, as sommeliers in the more upmarket restaurants tended to do, told them little about the condition of either the cork or the wine. A good look at the cork, on the other hand, would reveal whether it was wet and crumbly and likely to have imparted the unforgettable ‘corked’ odour capable of snapping one’s head off. The fact that the corks were punched from the bark of the cork oak, which was often left lying around in pretty basic agricultural conditions, in contact with the soil and other undesirable substances, had prompted the New World pragmatists to make use of the unromantic screw-caps for their bottom of the range wines.
* * *
Halliday Baines notwithstanding, Clare could not imagine screw-topped bottles being allowed anywhere near the King Street auction rooms where she had met the senior director to discuss the proposed sale of a quantity of prestige claret, destined to appeal to the discriminating end of the market.
David Markham had greeted her with open arms.
‘You could not have come at a better time, Mademoiselle de Cluzac. Six months ago the market was positively awash with mature Bordeaux. Suddenly, what we call “collectable claret”, for which people are willing to pay quite grotesque prices – thirteen thousand pounds for a dozen Château Latour 1929; ten thousand pounds for a rare bottle of Yquem – has virtually disappeared. Disappeared!’ He put his elbows, in their navy-blue chalk stripes, on the mahogany desk (which Clare, casting a practised eye over it, recognised as George III) and his manicured fingers together.
‘All that I have left today are some undistinguished wines from the better recent years, one or two big names from the frankly uninspiring eighty-seven vintage, plus an exceedingly large number of eighty-sixes and eighty-eights, about which I have my suspicions. I would be far more tempted to gamble on them if they were cheaper, and if I did not have the nagging feeling that a lot of far more attractive bottles were eventually going to emerge from the woodwork.
‘To be perfectly frank, I am so short of claret that I have transferred all this month’s lots to a subsequent auction, which could fit in very nicely with what you have to offer. Tell me Mademoiselle de Cluzac…’ A gold pen, with a gold nib, was removed from an inside pocket and a pristine sheet of the firm’s letterhead laid in eager anticipation on the pristine blotter. ‘What exactly is it you wish to sell?’
‘I haven’t a clue,’ Clare said. She would have to enlist the help of Big Mick or Alain Lamotte to help her make her selection. ‘I’ll let you know.’
Hiding his disappointment that she had not come armed with her cellar list, David Markham re-capped his fountain pen. Sliding a previous sale catalogue across the desk, he ran through the terms under which private stocks of top-quality claret – preferably in the original wooden cases, and excluding large formats, such as imperials and jeroboams – were accepted for sale.
Bidding was per dozen bottles (irrespective of how many bottles there were in the lot), lots consisted of multiples of a dozen, and incomplete dozens were invoiced pro-rata. Commission was charged to sellers, at from ten to fifteen per cent of the hammer price, and purchases could be shipped, by Christie’s contract shippers, to destinations anywhere in the world.
Shaking hands with David Markham, who eagerly awaited her instructions, and promising to get in touch with him as soon as possible, more for her own sake than for his, Clare left the auction rooms and made her thoughtful way up Duke Street to Fortnum and Mason to buy an extravagant cashmere twin-set for Sidonie.
True to his word, Alain Lamotte had advanced her the five million francs he had promised. Out of this she had paid for the inox, which the suppliers had promised to work day and night to install. The rest of the Assurance Mondiale loan had been eaten up by wages, by day-to-day running costs, by incidentals, and by the renovations to the Bureau d’Acceuil and the Orangery.
The purchase of new casks – be it the sixty per cent stipulated by Big Mick (which represented 480 barrels) or the twenty-five per cent (200 barrels) advocated by Halliday Baines – was out of the question. Even if her innovations at the Château proved to be financially successful, there was no way she was going to raise the capital sum of around 600,000 francs, which both Big Mick and Halliday agreed was indispensable for a vintage that would restore Château de Cluzac to its former glory.
Outlining the changes she was instigating at Château de Cluzac to Grandmaman, she had surprisingly encountered the same wall of suspicion and resentment that had greeted her efforts in the Médoc.
‘A “bouncy castle!”,’ Baronne Gertrude had said. ‘A “bouncy castle”. Qu’est ce que c’est que ce “bouncy castle”?’
When Clare explained that beneath the ancient cedars of the park, where she had installed her picnic chairs and tables, an inflated plastic fortress, complete with towers and turrets, had been erected, which would hopefully ke
ep the children amused while their parents spent their money in the shop or in the cellars, she thought that her grandmother was about to have a fit.
‘Vraiment, Clare! I am beginning to think that we might have been better off with the South African. I thought that you were serious. I thought that you were going to run the château as it should be run. What is the point of all this…this bouncy castle nonsense?’
‘To make money.’
At the Baronne’s table – which was where Clare and Jamie were sitting over their tournedos, cooked, in accordance with the Baronne’s wishes, to a rare blueness – although no subject, including that of sex, was taboo, any discussion of money was considered the mark of the parvenu.
‘Let’s be realistic, Grandmaman…’ Clare ignored the Baronne’s warning glance towards Louise, who was not the least interested in the conversation, and was circumventing the table with the gratin dauphinois. ‘If Château de Cluzac is to be rehabilitated, if I am to get its name known, and respected, throughout the world, I am going to need money. I’m going to need pots of it. And I’m going to get some of it, I can’t help it Grandmaman – in the form of liquide…’
Baronne Gertrude shuddered at the mention of cash.
‘Hopefully from passing trade.’
As Clare outlined her plans to run the estate on a strictly commercial basis, the Baronne’s eyes grew misty. She saw the wrought-iron gates of the château outlined against the Médoc sky, the vista of the great lawn on which the pagoda seemed to float, heard the ringing of the chapel bells at Christmas time summoning the family to Midnight Mass.
‘Tout passe, tout lasse, tout casse.’ She waved Louise, with her dish, away. ‘Crowds tramping round the de Cluzac cellars. Your grandfather took such pride in them. Trout-fishing in the moat! Bouncy castles on the lawn! Let us discuss the wedding.’
‘I was reading a magazine on the plane,’ Clare said. ‘There was this amazing gold dress, with an embroidered Nehru suit for Jamie…’
‘I’ll choose my own suit!’ Jamie snapped. He had had a heavy day.
The Baronne looked from one to the other.
Vintage Page 23
