House of Peine (16 page)

The promise of snow hovered threateningly on the horizon the whole first week of December, the landscape pulling a grim grey outfit from its winter closet and hugging it close.

For the most part Clementine kept busy out among the vines pruning the canes, her fingers red and raw with cold but her cheeks glowing if Edie was there, bouncing along behind her. Edie had started at the local school and had taken something of a shine to her teacher, which meant she was as happy as any little girl who’d never liked lessons before could be.

Mathilde, her decorum more or less restored, was quietly revelling in what could optimistically be called her rehabilitation, although it was definitely a work in progress. She struggled still to show warmth towards her sisters and daughter but found comfort in the continuing challenge of correcting the family finances.

Sophie, meanwhile, was busy perfecting a recipe for
pain d’épice
to La Petite’s exact specifications and spent much of her time with the old woman, whose breaths grew shorter with every winter day.

Such was the equilibrium reached in the household that by the second Thursday in the month, the Peine sisters were able to sit around the kitchen table drinking coffee together. It was more an uneasy ceasefire than out-and-out peace but still, it was a start.

Sophie, however, was fretting because La Petite had not eaten her breakfast.

The old woman never stopped reminding them that she was on her last legs, that the end was nigh, that a distant voice was calling her towards a bright light, but never once, until today, had she let a tray of food go untouched.

Sophie was contemplating the
croque monsieur
in question as it sat cold and congealing next to the sink when the back door burst open and in clattered Edie and Cochon, both looking as though they had just been lightly iced, like lemon cake.

“It’s snowing!” Edie cried delightedly, pulling out the chair next to Clementine and flopping into it, Cochon’s little head resting on her lap, his mane spotted with snowflakes. “And it’s better than New York snow, too. It’s all French!”

She spotted the
croque monsieur
, her eyes lighting up further. “Want to split that with me, ’Mentine?”

“Really, Edie, must you?” Mathilde asked. Clementine was just about to launch into a robust defence when there was a loud knock at the front door, still a rare enough occurrence to surprise them all.

“Oh, I forgot,” said Edie. “There was a man coming up the drive.”

“A man?” The sisters’ ears all pricked up.

“What sort of a man?” asked Mathilde.

“Um, tall,” answered Edie. “Older than me but younger than Dad. From a long way away he looked a bit like Johnny Depp.”

Who is Johnny Depp, wondered Clementine?

Hector, wondered Sophie? And just as she was thinking his name and remembering the exact salt quotient in his sweat, he appeared in the kitchen. He knew about the screwdriver and the flowerpot, after all, and had only knocked to be polite. Besides, no one had even moved to answer the door.

“Ladies,” he said to the Peines, “and young lady. It is a pleasure to see you again.” Up close, he too had been lightly iced like lemon cake and didn’t look quite so much like Johnny Depp, but even at 10 Edie recognised his deliciousness.

The sisters said nothing. Mathilde, because she was still smarting over what hadn’t transpired between them; Clementine because she found herself feeling a sudden unexpected pang for Benoît; and Sophie because the look on Hector’s face made her think she was right to worry about the uneaten
croque monsieur
. Why else would he have come back?

“No, no, no,” she moaned, getting to her feet. “Please, not yet.”

“No, not yet,” Hector agreed gently, coming to give her a little squeeze, “but not much longer. We should go up. I know she will want to talk to us. All of us. Yes, you too,” he added to Edie.

“Oh, please,” grumbled Mathilde. Sometimes she did not seem very rehabilitated. But still she joined the sombre
procession
up the stairs, Edie and Cochon bringing up the rear.

They trailed quietly into La Petite’s room. At first Sophie thought perhaps Hector had been wrong, that he was too late. La Petite lay as still as a stone, her eyes closed, her face grey and already half-disappeared.

But Hector was not at all perturbed, sitting quietly on the bed as the others found their favourite chairs, the ones their bottoms had automatically started to lead them to in the weeks since La Petite had infiltrated their lives and they’d sought out her company.

Cochon trotted around the far side of the bed and rested his chin on the pillow next to the old woman’s crinkled face. A hotchpotch of drool stains on Mathilde’s Frette indicated it was not the first time he had done so. Mathilde hissed at him and flapped her hand uselessly in his direction.

“Leave him alone,” Clementine whispered furiously.

“Mind your own business,” Mathilde hissed back. “Edie, get that thing away from there.”

“No, she’s right, leave him alone,” Edie whispered back fiercely, moving her chair closer to Clementine.

“You do as I say,” Mathilde demanded, barely containing herself.

“You say something different,” Edie replied.

“How dare you!” The whispering was gone now.

“How dare you!” Clementine was back in the fray. “Let the poor child be.”

“What’s it got do to with you?” Mathilde was furious. “She’s not your daughter. Although where on earth that poor creature is —”

“Stop it!” Sophie cried. “All of you. Just stop it!”

“For the love of Saint Vincent,” La Petite announced tiredly from her bed. “Thank you, Sophie.” She opened her eyes and smiled at Hector. “Oh, it’s you. I thought it might be today,” she said. “I’ve never turned my nose up at Emmenthal before.”

“La Petite,” her great-grandson (or something like it) said fondly, leaning in to give her a gentle kiss.

The sisters fell silent.

La Petite coughed dramatically, rising out of the bed with each hack perhaps a little more than was strictly necessary. “I’m not well, you know,” she reminded them, adding a tremble for good measure. “And this time I mean it. I’m going. I am
definitely
going. But before I go, I need to lend you poor Peines a
helping hand.”

“Poor Peines? A helping hand? Oh, please,” Mathilde started.

“That will be all from you, madame,” La Petite shut her down with a voice that showed no particular sign of pending departure. “I’m lending you a helping hand and you will do me the honour of accepting it. Quietly. Because I’m doing it as a favour to your father who loved you.”

Sophie clasped her hands to her chest, her eyes shining, while Clementine shifted uncomfortably in her chair. Mathilde, however, could not hide her derision. “You mean our father who has been dead for nine months and spent the 40 years before that not giving a shit?”

“Oh, he most certainly did give a shit,” La Petite
disagreed
. “And he didn’t come back from the grave and ask me for the favour, if that’s what you’re thinking. I don’t deal with the here-afters, despite what you might have heard. No, he asked me before he died. Well before, when he first realised he wasn’t going to be a very good father.”

“He realised it in advance?” Mathilde was incredulous.

“Better than not realising it at all, don’t you think? You especially, Mathilde?”

Edie’s eyes nearly popped out of her head but she didn’t say a word in case she was asked to leave. It seemed to her that the conversation was not the sort to which children were usually privy and although she didn’t completely understand what was going on, she felt a desperate need to be privy to it.

“But what made him think he wasn’t going to be a good father?” asked Sophie.

“That’s a good question and I have just the answer,” La Petite said, although she could feel herself starting to drift towards a faraway place where
chocolat chaud
was served every hour of the day and the air smelled only of daphne. “Some
people just don’t have it in them to love or nurture others, did you know that? They should be neutered, in fact, or spayed like stray dogs. That’s what we do where I come from. It keeps the bad blood out of the family. My third cousin Tomasina, now there was a —”

“La Petite,” Hector interrupted gently. He was stretched out on the bed next to her now, dwarfing her, his legs crossed at the ankle, his boots further dirtying Mathilde’s precious linen. “Some people are not capable of being loving or nurturing …”

“But the good news is that Olivier was not one of them,” she picked up seamlessly. “He had everything he needed to be the most devoted of fathers but his heart was broken when you had only just arrived, Clementine, well before you were born Mathilde, let alone you Sophie. Sadly, he chose the numbness of the bottle over the pain of mending his heartbreak. I can’t imagine what that must feel like, can anyone else in the room? Anyone?”

They all looked at Mathilde who gazed out the window, her jaw set firmly.

“But Olivier was a farmer. First and foremost he was a farmer. And like all good vignerons he knew that starving you would stunt your growth. Yet still, he starved you.
Unfortunate
, yes, irreversible, no. He was not so callous a man as to ignore the consequences of his actions. Vignerons rarely do. And so he took steps to make sure you wouldn’t be shrivelled up forever. He asked me to tell you, one day when the time was right, when you were all together, what he had never been able to tell you himself.”

“Oh, this is just plain ridiculous!” complained Mathilde.

“No, it’s not — it’s lovely,” cried Sophie.

“What are you talking about?” Clementine was back in the dark.

La Petite coughed a huge gob of phlegm up from her lungs and hoicked it with perfect precision out through the small open gap in the bedroom window. This certainly got their attention. Edie nearly exploded. No one ever hoicked out the window in Manhattan.

“Listen to me carefully,” La Petite said, pulling herself up more and employing as official a look as a very old, nearly passed-on person could manage. “I know you think your father was a mean old misery-guts and I have to say in recent years he certainly did himself few favours and those around him even fewer but …” she coughed another long and phlegmy cough whose sole purpose was to remind them that the bright light was still beckoning, “… he wasn’t always that way. You need to know that. As a young boy your father had so much heart, so much hope, I can see him as though it were yesterday, that lovely head of copper-coloured hair, those twinkling blue eyes, that smile …”

Sophie was alone in being entranced, she could see it like it was yesterday herself, this handsome fairy-tale version of her unknown father. Clementine merely sneaked a sceptical peek at Mathilde, whose eyebrow had shot up to a record level. Neither of them could remember his copper-coloured hair, his twinkling blue eyes nor certainly his smile.

“You know, the vignerons of Champagne were not having the good time they’re having today when your father was born,” La Petite pointed out.

“We’re going back to when he was born?” Mathilde was aghast. “How long is this going to take? I have calls to make, you know.”

“These are my last few breaths,” La Petite said witheringly, “and I do not intend wasting them on any self-centred struggling anorexics, so if you answer that description, please remove yourself.”

To think that La Petite knew what an anorexic was and to think that this actually shut Mathilde up. Sophie was astonished, Clementine confused and Edie in absolute awe.

“Now where was I?” La Petite tried once again to regain her thread, during which time Mathilde cleared her throat and made a meal out of checking her watch.

This was not lost on the old woman. She turned one beady eye towards the middle Peine, raised one tiny hand from the bed covers and pointed dramatically in her direction. “You,” she whispered, then after one long terrifying intake of wheezy breath her eyes closed and she receded back into the pillows.

“Oh, please, no!” cried Sophie, jumping to her feet and rushing to the old lady’s side, a small hand on her still warm forehead as Clementine hovered behind her. “Oh, Clementine, you don’t think she’s …?”

La Petite opened one eye and winked at the worried faces hovering above her. Hector, who had not moved a muscle, just shook his head and sighed.

“I think we’ve lost her,” Clementine said woodenly, attempting to play along, “and on Mathilde’s Frette linen. It will never be the same.”

“’Mentine?” Edie’s face had crumpled and she was getting ready to cry.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” snapped Mathilde, getting to her feet and coming over to the bed. “Have you nitwits never seen
ER?”
She tugged on La Petite’s big toe beneath the quilt. “She’s acting.”

The old woman opened both eyes and smiled her toothless smile. “You have a lot of spirit for a mean person,” she told Mathilde. “I almost like you.”

“Whatever,” Mathilde rolled her eyes in exasperation but returned to her seat, crossing one long thin leg over the other. “Just get on with it, will you?”