House of Peine (15 page)

For two hours George combed the busy highways and narrow back lanes of the Marne from Chierry to Boursault, looking for Mathilde, but to no avail. Of course, being a male he didn't like asking strangers for help, especially in a foreign language, but he'd done his best, even if his inquiries had met with nothing but head shakes and looks of great pity. When he arrived back, his face grey with worry and fatigue, and she saw how distraught he was, Sophie offered to search with him, an offer he gladly accepted.

“What about Edie?” he whispered in the hallway. “I don't think she should come, I don't want her to see her mother …”

“I'll get Clementine to mind her,” Sophie said with a
confidence
she did not entirely feel. She had heard Clementine's opinions of nearly every child in the village and none of them were flattering. Still, she knew her sister well enough by now to suspect that her animosity just disguised her vulnerability on the subject of offspring. So while George waited in the car, she took Edie over to the winery. Cochon refused as usual to entertain the spiral stairs, and after weaving their way around
the vats in the cave, they finally found her eldest sister.

“Look at her hair,” cried Edie, when she first saw Clementine. “It's just like mine!”

As for Clementine, her eyes nearly popped out of her head when she looked up from what she was doing and saw the pint-sized version of herself.

“This is Edie,” Sophie said quickly, “Mathilde's daughter. Could she stay here with you while her father and I …?”

“Edie?” Clementine, as usual, was clueless. “Her father and you? Stay here while you what?”

“It's hard to explain, Clementine,” Sophie was flustered, “but George and I need to go and find Mathilde. She's … taken off. She's missing.”

“What's that smell?” Edie asked. Clementine had been filtering the wine from the vats where it had been fermenting into oak barrels where it would age until it was time for the blend.

“La-a-a-a!” Clementine trilled. “La-a-a-a!” The outbursts had increased again since Hector's departure.

“Please, Clementine,” Sophie urged. “Not now. You'll frighten her.”

“Nah,” said Edie, who actually looked quite impressed. “There's a kid at my school with Tourette's and he says much worse things than that.”

On that note Sophie said her goodbyes, leaving Edie and Clementine staring openly at each other in the dim light of the cave.

Clementine could not help it. She reached out and pulled at one of Edie's ringlets, stretching it out straight then watching it ping back into shape.

“Same, same, see?” Edie said, shrugging her plump little shoulders then reaching up and doing the same thing to one of Clementine's ringlets. “What else? I'm a good swimmer but I
can't run very fast. I broke my arm the only time we went skiing. I'm no good at basketball. I never get picked for volleyball. I'm probably going to be a shepherd in the nativity play again this year so I won't get to say anything. Oh! I can do this though!” She held her up her two thumbs and, unaided, bent them backwards until they all but met her wrists.

Clementine, somewhat overwhelmed by the child's litany of sporting ineptitude, held up her own thumbs and bent them back almost as far.

“Cool,” cried Edie, meaning it. “Twins! Hey, I know what that smell is. It's blackberries. My favourite. Is it blackberry season in France?”

“Blackberries?” The wine Clementine had been in the process of decanting when Edie arrived was the lower valley pinot noir. Its blackberryness was more powerful than usual this year, she had tasted it in the grapes themselves and had remarked to Hector about it. Slightly stunned, she poured a little bit of the fresh pinot noir wine into a glass and handed it to Edie.

“You're giving me wine?” she asked, amazed. “But I'm only 10.”

“You're a Peine,” Clementine told her, “there's no doubt about it. You should have been tasting since you were five. Just drink it. No don't gulp, sip it. That's right, swill it around in your mouth. Feel it on your tongue and at the back of your throat. Now, spit it out and tell me what you think.”

Edie spat it out. “I think Diet Coke has better bubbles,” she said. “Dad told me champagne had bubbles.”

“They haven't been born yet,” Clementine told her. “That happens later. We will blend these still wines together. Then we will bottle that wine and the bubbles come as it rests, which takes a few years — unlike Diet Coke which probably takes four seconds. Anyway, I don't care about Diet Coke, I care
about what you think of the pinot noir.”

“Okay, okay, keep your hair on.” Edie took another sip, swilled it around in her mouth, felt it on her tongue and the back of her throat, then spat it out again. “I can definitely taste blackberries,” she said. “Only it's not like actual blackberry juice. I've never tasted blackberry juice, but I think it would be sort of thinner and this is kind of thick, more like milk, only it catches when you swallow. You know what? It reminds me a little bit of cough mixture,” she said, holding out the glass for a refill, “only it's good.”

Now Clementine was truly staggered. For the child to pick blackberries in the first place showed a level of skill most adults couldn't muster but to pinpoint the texture? To appreciate the taste? At 10?

“I like you,” she told Edie. “I like you a lot.”

“Good,” Edie replied pragmatically, “because I need all the friends I can get.”

By the time Sophie and George got back — still without Mathilde — Clementine and Edie had tasted seven more wines. Edie had identified jasmine and nuts in the chardonnay, apricots and mangoes in the meunier. Clementine, who had never tasted a mango in her life, had been flabbergasted,
especially
when Edie went on to describe the fruit as “sort of like summery bubble gum but not stretchy, more canned-peaches slippery”. Clementine knew exactly what she meant.

But the child's confidence slid away when her father returned minus her mother. “You didn't find her?” she asked anxiously, plucking at her sleeve, as George and Sophie sought them out in the kitchen. They were sitting on either side of the remains of the Black Forest chocolate cake for which Bernadette with her Alsatian roots was justifiably famous.

“Good grief,” George said, looking at Clementine sitting beside his daughter. The two were identically covered in
chocolate in a way only true Black Forest aficionados can be. “You must be the other sister.”

“Oh, I'm sorry,” Sophie said. “George, this is Clementine.”

“The resemblance is remarkable,” George said. “You could be —” he didn't actually say “Edie's mother” but everyone heard it anyway. Clementine and Edie looked at each other, licking their lips. Neither found the prospect repellent. Well, one of them needed a daughter and the other a mother so it was hardly surprising.

“We couldn't find her,” Sophie spoke gently, “and we looked everywhere, 'Mentine. We've been all the way to Epernay. We searched the town, we checked the station in case she'd caught a train somewhere but there's no sign of the car and anyway, she wasn't dressed for it. I went to Christophe's office but he hadn't seen or heard of her. We've been to Le Bois too, on the way back, but she hasn't been there either.”

“Should we call the police?” George asked no one in particular. “I'm really not sure what to do.”

Just then they heard the sound of a car approaching, its horn being lent on in a forceful fashion as it spun to a halt in the courtyard. George and Sophie rushed to the front door, hauling it open just in time to see a furious Odile Geoffroy emerging from her Peugeot, Mathilde slumped precariously in the passenger seat beside her.

Quickly Sophie turned and stopped Clementine and Edie from coming any further, seeing any more. “It's okay,” she said calmly. “George and I will deal with this. Clementine, maybe you'd like to take Cochon for a walk down to the river? I'm sure Edie would love to see him swim.”

“He can swim?” Edie's little face lit up so enchantingly that Clementine, although suspicious of what was happening in the courtyard, whistled for the horse who again obligingly abandoned La Petite for his new friend as they headed out
through the kitchen.

In the courtyard, Odile was fuming as she stalked around the car in ridiculously impractical heels and pulled open Mathilde's door. “You're all the same, you pathetic Peines. Not worth a tin of fish, the lot of you. Why don't you just do
yourselves
a favour? Sell up and get lost! Go drink yourselves to death somewhere where the land isn't more precious than gold. The things we could do with your pinot noir.”

“You shut up about our pinot noir,” Sophie surprised herself by saying. “You'll be laughing on the other side of your face when you see what Clementine does with this year's Peine. It's our best ever!”

Odile spun around to eyeball her. “Who do you think you are kidding? Without Olivier, there is no Peine,” she said nastily. “Even with him, it was starting to taste like rat poison. He knew it, we knew it, the whole of Saint-Vincent-sur-Marne knew it. Your days here are numbered, little Miss Fifi's bastard. Why don't you just go back to wherever you came from?”

George pushed past Sophie until he was facing Odile, so close he could have spat right in her eye.

“Get off this property or I will have you arrested for kidnapping,” he said. It took a moment or two for Odile to work this out. When she did, her already sour visage spoiled further.

“Kidnapping? You must be joking, whoever you are. This stupid drunken slut,” she leaned into the car and started slapping at Mathilde's face, “came to my house and was —”

“Lay another finger on my wife,” George said his voice chilly with an authority that had up until then been missing as he took Odile's slapping arm in a vice-like grip, “and I will have you charged with assault as well as kidnapping. You are on our property and we have asked you to leave.”

“Your wife?” Odile's nasty eyes narrowed even further as
she shook him off. She stood back and crossed her arms across the powder-blue sweater that was bursting with the effort of keeping her enormous bosom under wraps. “How about you keep your wife away from my husband, monsieur, or never mind your ridiculous charges I will make you all sorry you were ever born.”

“Did you hear that, Sophie? That's a threat. We need to document it.”

Sophie felt severely out of her depth at this point, all she knew was that she did not want the subject of Mathilde and Benoît to be plundered further. Without knowing Clementine's exact coordinates it was asking for trouble.

“She doesn't look as though she weighs much,” she said to George, looking at the prone and oblivious Mathilde. “Let's just carry her inside.”

George agreed and managed to extract his unconscious wife out of the front seat, taking her in his arms and turning towards the house. Sophie was right, she didn't weigh much at all.

Odile wasted no time in climbing into the driver's seat as quickly as her too-tight black mini skirt would let her.

“Just make sure you keep that bitch away from my Benoît,” she growled through the open car window. And off she drove, spitting gravel and covering them all in dust as she did so.

When Mathilde woke up in the middle of the night with a gasp and the raging dry horrors, a horror film of
half-remembered
images flickering in her mind, George was lying beside her, gazing at her with that look, that infernal look. Before she could even think of what to say or do or how to extricate herself from the horror of how she felt, she began to weep. Almost a week later she was weeping still.

If George had thought his troubles would end with finding Mathilde and sobering her up, he was wrong. She was back, and safe, but her histrionics were more than he could handle.

For the first week, he left her to it but by the second — at Sophie’s insistence — he sought out the advice of someone much older and much wiser than himself: La Petite, of course.

What he wanted to hear was how to get his wife to return to the US with him. Unfortunately, this was not what she wanted to tell him.

“Edie thinks Mathilde has been disappointed by motherhood,” she said as he sat next to Sophie on one of the rickety chairs that now dotted the old woman’s boudoir. “Do you think that’s true?”

George reddened. “I’m not really comfortable talking about …” he began.

“Well, get comfortable,” snapped La Petite. “Do you think what Edie says is true?”

“I’m not sure how I would know that,” George responded somewhat sulkily, before Sophie shot him a warning look. He
tried to relax his shoulders, let go of his discomfort. He needed help after all. “Being a parent is hard,” he said finally, trying not to sound too defensive. “It’s a difficult job and nobody really prepares you for it. Sure, Mathilde may have made mistakes, we both have, but who hasn’t? She and Edie just don’t see eye to eye on a lot of things. But it’s not her fault. It’s not our fault. We did our best.”

“George,” La Petite said, although she pronounced it Yorg, which never failed to make him flinch just a little. “I am not judging Mathilde and I am not judging you. I am just asking if you agree with your daughter’s observation about her mother.”

“Being disappointed?” George asked tiredly. “Yes, I suppose it’s possible but …”

“But what?”

He hesitated. “I don’t want to be disloyal especially when she is clearly unwell but Mathilde can be an easy woman to disappoint, period. I know I certainly manage it.”

“Well, you are a grown man, Yorg,” La Petite said, “and you may well have done things to deserve Mathilde’s
disappointment
. But your daughter is 10 years old and she has not.”

George squirmed in his chair, his neck hot and prickly under his collar.

“It is uncomfortable to think about these things, heh?” La Petite agreed. “For you, for your wife, for any of us, but there’s a little girl with her whole life ahead of her who needs us to think about these things. So her life can be a good one, heh?”

“She needs her mother,” Sophie said sadly, staring out the window, remembering herself as a little girl needing just the same thing.

“I know,” George agreed, “I know. But Mathilde’s just so — wretched. The last time this happened it was different. She was not emotional, she never cried at all, just stayed in her
room, wouldn’t get up, wouldn’t speak to anyone, wouldn’t hold the …” His voice trailed off.

“Baby?” La Petite finished for him. “Wouldn’t hold the baby?”

George nodded, did not look up.

“You mean Mathilde had postnatal depression?” Sophie asked. She had seen enough of that in her time to know how ruinous it could be, how far-reaching its effects, but it had not occurred to her that Mathilde could suffer from such a thing.

“Yes,” George said, “although she refused to see anyone about it other than to get medication. And anyway that was a long time ago. You can hardly blame postnatal depression now.”

“It might have started out as that, though, and turned into something else,” Sophie surmised. “That can happen, can’t it, La Petite?”

“It most certainly can and does,” the old woman answered. “Where I come from we call it
le nuage
, the cloud. It can happen to anyone at any time, but falls often on young mothers, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days, sometimes for years. Of course the difference with our way and yours is that we don’t hand out pills to lift it, we encourage it.”

“You encourage it?” George found this hard to swallow. “Depression?”

“We see it as part of life,” La Petite said with a shrug. “For good health, le nuage needs to be dealt with, that’s all. If the grapeworm attacks the vine you don’t fix the damage by ignoring it, do you? No. You chase it, you catch it, you crush it. Well, that was the old way, anyway. Of course, now it has all changed — although you still deal with the problem, you don’t pretend it’s not there. That’s the same. That’s my point. So what if you are using the sexual confusion with the little plastic things, oh, Sophie, what are they called?”

“Pheremones?”

“Yes, pheremones, that’s them.” La Petite fell silent.

“Erm, le nuage?” Sophie prompted.

“We humans are not so different from vines, you know,” La Petite said quickly, as though she hadn’t forgotten at all what she had been talking about. “One has blood, the other has sap, but all wounds need tending, heh? Do you see what I am getting at?”

“To be perfectly honest, Mrs Petite,” George could not help calling her that even though it wasn’t her name. “No.”

“Then let me make it plain for you, Yorg. Mathilde strikes me as a woman who is not dealing with her grapeworms. Do you understand that much?”

“Mathilde is not a vine, Mrs Petite,” George was getting impatient. “She does not have grapeworms. Jesus, I don’t even know what a grapeworm is. This is ridiculous.”

“Trust me, Yorg,” La Petite’s voice was sharp with warning, “a woman who cannot look her own daughter in the eye has grapeworms. Big ones.”

Up until finding himself at the House of Peine with his runaway wife and this crinkled-up gypsy, George had led a straightforward life that required, in his opinion, little
introspection
. It was uncomfortable to think about these things and he no longer wanted to do so. One leg jiggled involuntarily as he struggled to hide his exasperation. “Listen, I appreciate what you’re saying but I really think the most important thing now is somehow to stop Mathilde from crying.”

“Come here, Yorg,” La Petite leaned back weakly on her pillows and beckoned to him. “Come. No, closer. Closer than that. Closer still. Lean in. Yes, that’s right. Closer. Closer. Closer. Now, take that, you fool!”

One whippet-thin arm flew through the air and clipped him around the side of the head, then she let out a string of
what were clearly expletives in an enthusiastic language George didn’t need to understand to get the gist of.

“What did I do?” he moaned, leaping back and rubbing the ear she had belted. “What?”

“You did not appreciate what I was saying,” La Petite snapped, little raisin eyes blazing, “because you didn’t even hear it. Mathilde needs to cry. You shouldn’t be stopping her, you should be finding out why she needs to cry so much in the first place.”

“La Petite,” Sophie interrupted, worried for George’s sake, “don’t you think you’re being a little harsh? He’s only trying to help.”

“That heart of yours,” La Petite said looking at her fondly. “Always in the right place. Just sometimes at the wrong time. No!” Like that, the fondness was gone. “The wrong help is worse than no help at all. Mathilde needs rescuing for Edie’s sake as well as her own and Yorg just may not have the balls to do it because it’s not going to be an easy job. She’s had 35 years to become like this. There is a lot of damage to be undone. You think Mathilde was born bitter and hard? You think she came out of the womb like that? Do you know how many helpless little babies arrive in this world cold and unlovable like Mathilde? No? Well I do. None. That’s how many. Not a single one. We all arrive with the same capacity to bear fruit but somebody somewhere along the line needs to tend us.”

“I think it would be great if it were that simple,” George said, still rubbing his throbbing ear. “But it’s not. And by the way, I have done my share of tending, Mrs Petite.”

“Well, your own vines could have done with a bit more attention,
monsieur
, but that’s another matter.”

“Oh, shit!” The sight of Mathilde quivering wanly in the doorway drove the breath from Sophie’s lungs. For a split second the room was silent.

“She never chose me,” Mathilde whispered, as she collapsed against the doorjamb, a torrent of fresh tears exploding. “She never once chose me.”

La Petite opened her withered arms and with an anguished cry, the middle Peine plunged across the room and fell into them.

Obviously this was progress of a momentous nature. Whoever would have thought Mathilde capable of displaying herself as weak and vulnerable? Junior psychology students the world over — even ones who were too busy smoking pot to go to class — would have picked that this was the ripping off of the Band-Aid that would finally allow the wounds of Mathilde’s flawed childhood to heal.

Yet the reversal of Mathilde’s cold and unlovable status was not to be an overnight affair. She did not become sweet and adorable straight away. Far from it. In fact, for the first few days after she climbed into bed with La Petite she refused to get out again, hissing and spitting at anyone else who came into the room. Now that she had let the old woman in on her secrets, she did not want to share her and so she told her sisters, her husband, her daughter, and, of course, Cochon, to go away and leave them alone. Although not so politely.

Eventually, the long-suffering La Petite, whose health continued to fade, whispered enough sweet somethings into Mathilde’s ear to get her to return to her husband in the room down the hall. It then became clear that Yorg’s balls were, as suspected, perhaps not quite up to it. If he had thought that living with Mathilde’s aggressive buttoned-up perfection was challenging, living with her self-obsessed soul-searching was torture. One minute she was screaming at him to get out of her sight and never come back; the next she was sobbing and pleading with him to take her in his arms and hold her forever.

After a few days, to his secret shame, he found himself
preferring the first option. The truth was, George wanted to get back to New York. The longer he spent in the House of Peine, the smaller his balls felt (even to him).

Sure, he had not expected Mathilde to be the sort of woman who would abandon her family for months with little more than a message on the answering machine by way of explanation. But then neither had he expected her to be the needing-to-be-taken-in-his-arms type. Somewhere between these two women he felt sure the real Mathilde lay but until such time as she discovered herself, his arms felt like doing nothing other than driving him to Charles de Gaulle and throwing enough valium down his throat to get him on the plane and back to the States.

“I need to go home,” he told Edie as the month drew to a close. “But I’m not sure your Mom is ready to come with me.”

They were in the 2CV on their way back from Epernay where George had assuaged his guilt by buying enough groceries to see the Peines into the next decade.

“What do you mean?” Edie asked, her bottom lip immediately wobbling, tears gathering in her eyes. “What about me?”

“If we leave tomorrow, you’ll make the rehearsals for the school nativity play,” George answered at which that lip instantly stopped its quivering.

“I won’t even get to say anything,” Edie said, looking out the car window at the white chalky tracks leading over the hills like snail trails. She thought of her dear little furry friend Cochon and of La Petite, whose kindness shone through her dull crinkled skin. She thought of Sophie, the little aunt who seemed to know how to hold them all together, and Clementine, the big aunt who Edie couldn’t have dreamt up any better if she’d tried. Then she thought of Mercedes McLaren, the itty-bitty blonde who would no doubt be playing
the Virgin Mary for the third year in the row and got to say more than the rest of the class put together.

She did not think of Mathilde, not at all, but nevertheless she turned to her father. “Do I have to go too?” she asked. “Can’t I stay?”