House of Peine (17 page)

“The vignerons of Champagne were not having the good time they are today, remember?” Sophie prompted La Petite when they had all settled back into their chairs.

“Ah, my Little One, so like your grandmother,” sighed the old woman, causing a tug of envy in Clementine’s breast. “Although of course she looked more like Clementine. Such a fine woman. And so strong. Elegant, though, in her own way and clever, too, of course, like you, Mathilde, although not nasty, not ever, that I know of. The things that woman lived through: hunger, poverty, widowhood, Hitler.”

The room grew cold and Clementine pulled her
moth-eaten
cardigan closer to her body.

“Your grandfather died at the beginning of the second war,” La Petite continued, “and we arrived for the vendange not long after he had passed. Tsk tsk. Poor Micheline. Newly widowed with a young son. And I tell you I’ve seen some terrible vintages in my time but I barely remember a single ripe grape in ’39, once again no men to do the picking or pressing. Just women and children. Your father, Olivier, only
10 years old — your age Edie — and working a full day alongside his mother.”

Edie grimaced at such a prospect.

“Those were terrible times,” recalled La Petite with a faint shake of her head. “It must have been Hitler himself who worked out that if you want to ruin a Frenchman’s day, there’s no better way to do it than drink his wine. A sword through the heart would hurt less. I remember being over at Le-Mesnil-sur-Oger the day the Germans came in on their shiny motorbikes and cleared out all Salon’s ’28. The ’28! The shame of it! They didn’t go for the poisonous pig swill old Rimochin across the road made … oh no. Only the best for Hitler’s mob.”

Sophie’s eyes were as big as saucers. “Did they clear out our champagne?”

“They tried. Peine had a good name back then remember and the soldiers heard about it from someone down the road, no doubt trying to save his own hide. Anyway, they arrived one morning and your father, who was 11 or 12 by then, held them at bay long enough for your grandmother to do some quick
restocking
in the winery. They didn’t take anything she didn’t want them to have, that I can tell you. You’d be surprised just what that grandmother of yours managed to hang on to. A magnificent woman. She taught Olivier a lot.”

“A lot of what?” Mathilde asked. “Do tell. The suspense is killing me.”

“Well, I am the one dying so mind your manners,” snapped La Petite. “Besides, there are some things you need to find out for yourself, smarty-pants. The Peines have always been good at hiding things and just as good at revealing them, when the time is right, brick by brick, if need be. You should try it, Mathilde, you’d be a better person for doing so, let me tell you.”

“I’m better enough as it is,” answered Mathilde.

“Well, that’s a matter of opinion,” La Petite retorted. “I wouldn’t go asking for a show of hands if I were you.”

Edie giggled, Clementine looked at her shoes and Sophie squirmed some more but broke the awkward silence by asking: “What else? About the war? About Papa?”

“He met Clementine’s mother,” La Petite said proudly. “His finest hour.”

Clementine felt an unfamiliar shudder and looked up to find La Petite staring straight at her through crinkled lids. “It’s a great shame he could never talk to you about her,” she said, “because she was a wonderful woman and they were a wonderful pair. She was kind and honest and clever. To him, she looked just like the Mona Lisa.”

“That’s what people used to say about my mother, too,” Sophie said, wondrously. “The Mona Lisa bit, that is.”

“Mine too,” yawned Mathilde. “Big deal.”

“I suppose you could say that Juliette Binoche has a touch of the Mona Lisa about her, do you think?” Sophie was suddenly excited. “That secretive smile of hers. That night at the video store perhaps …?”

“Never mind Juliette Binoche,” Clementine interrupted. “What about —” she couldn’t bring herself to say maman. “What about Marie-France?”

“She arrived here during the vendange of ’43, a better year than ’39 but still hardly worth picking. Anyway, your
grandmother
had never forgiven France for rolling over for the Germans the way they did. So every now and then she helped a little with the Resistance, hiding people mostly, in the cave. And she wasn’t the only one — cellars all over France were hiding resistance fighters by then. At Moët in Epernay they had a whole city just about in the underground
crayères
. A hospital even. You can still see the markings on some of the
walls in the cellars if you visit. A red cross for the nursing station, a blue cross for the soup line, a white cross for a
hidey-hole
. Oh indeed, such terrible times …”

“Marie-France,” murmured Hector, who was still lying back, hands behind his head, eyes closed.

“Yes, yes, Marie-France,” La Petite snapped back to
attention
. “She was just 14 when she arrived here. Her parents had been taken in Paris, I think, and the Resistance was trying to get her to England. I was here when she came to the door and you could see it straight away, with her and your father, I mean, Clementine: there was something in the air. Something everyone could feel and it reminded us all that there was still room for joy in the world, room for the future.”

“Oh, Clementine,” Sophie cried, looking at her sister with tears in her eyes. “Can you believe it?”

With all her heart, Clementine wanted to.

“I can see them now,” La Petite continued dreamily, “huddled down behind the reserve wines whispering to each other. Young love! There’s nothing like it. But after a week she had to be moved — it was risky to stay too long in any one place — but there was some problem with the usual transport. The rail line, I think, was no longer safe. Anyway, it was your father who had the idea for how best to smuggle her to safety. He saved her life, saved many lives, in fact.”

“He was a hero,” breathed Sophie.

“I think so,” agreed La Petite, “although he would say he was just doing what needed to be done. He was the son of vignerons, after all, plus he was in love, so what do you think he did? He worked out that a girl the size of his wife-to-be would fit in a wine barrel so that’s just where he put her. Then he drove her across the demarcation line in a horse-drawn cart, right through the German checkpoints, to where she was picked up and taken across the channel.”

“In a wine barrel?” Mathilde was scathing. “Are you kidding me?

“How did they get her in the barrel?” Sophie asked. “There’s just a tiny hole.”

“Yes, how did they get her into a wine barrel?” Clementine had been wondering the same thing.

“It wasn’t so much that she went into the barrel,” explained La Petite, “as the barrel went around her, stave by stave. It took two hours to build the cask around her and another two to get her out at the other end. Oh, I remember your father’s little pinched face the day he drove off with his future wife rattling in the back of the old wooden cart. If he was scared, you would never have known. He was willing to do whatever it took to save her. At 14, hm?”

“But why did they send him?” Sophie wanted to know. “He was only a boy.”

“You wouldn’t have done the same at 14, Sophie? I think you would have. Your grandmother wanted to go but Olivier insisted. And it probably did make more sense for a young boy to be delivering barrels of wine than for the woman of the house. It was a journey he made many times after that. He saved a lot of lives, Olivier Peine. Without him, the world would be a much emptier place.”

Clementine could not help but feel a little doubt, as the world had been a pretty empty place with him, in her opinion. “So then what happened?” she asked.

“He waited,” La Petite said. “And waited and waited. And many, many years later, well after the war was over, Marie-France came back, just as she said she would.”

“Oh, that’s so romantic,” Sophie cried. “Don’t you think? He waited for her and she came back.”

“Well, what took her so long?” Mathilde demanded.

“That I can’t say for sure,” La Petite said. “She lost both her
parents to the camps, as it turned out, and was sent to live in Canada or somewhere cold, I don’t know the details. Just that she came back. And he was waiting for her. And if he’d become a little icy since the war, he thawed right out the instant he clapped eyes on her,” La Petite allowed a tear to spring from an already watery eye. “And that was that. They got married, lived here as happy as the angels, and tried and tried and tried for a baby, which was you, Clementine, you.”

Clementine could feel some foreign emotion vibrating inside her. It was such a romantic story, even for someone who barely believed in romance. Yet how could it have gone so wrong?

“It was the usual disease, of course,” La Petite answered her silent question, “the one that’s killing everybody these days. She’d probably had it for some time. It was a miracle that you were even born, ’Mentine, everyone said so.”

“Everyone except Olivier,” Clementine barked more harshly than she intended.

“Oh, no, it was him that said it first,” La Petite assured her. “I know you think he didn’t love you but I am telling you now I have never seen a father look at his child with such adoration. He felt blessed, Clementine, truly blessed. You were the twinkle in his eye, the spring in his step, he was utterly devoted to you. But when Marie-France went, well, your grandmother was in poor health by then herself, a little forgetful, shall we say. Tried to cook her shoes and wear the bread. Truly, when she passed, Olivier was bereft, that was all. He was not up to it.”

“Well what a weak link he turned out to be, for all his supposed bravery,” Mathilde said, her frostiness hiding any emotion she might otherwise be feeling.

“Well, I wouldn’t expect you to know what it feels like to lose the love of your life, Mathilde, because you’ve never had one,” La Petite said sharply. “Clementine here, now she knows.
It was a long time ago and she didn’t trust it at the time and might no longer believe in it, but she still knows and she’s stronger than your father because she’s survived. The Little One, yes, Sophie, my Little One, she’s had more loves of her life than all of us put together — just look at her — and not only has she lived to tell the tale, she’s loved living to tell the tale. But you, Mathilde, you! You wouldn’t recognise the love of your life if it slapped you in the face, you’d be too busy driving in the opposite direction in a fancy car, drinking white spirits and smoking tobacco.”

“La Petite,” Hector’s eyes were open now. “Calm down. It’s all right.”

Mathilde was speechless.

“It’s not just about you, Mathilde,” La Petite was addressing her directly. “It’s about your daughter. It’s about all your daughters.” She looked from Mathilde to Sophie to Clementine. “The House of Peine is theirs, too, remember. You need to know how much you were loved so that you in turn can love. That’s how it works, how we all keep going. And you were all loved,” she said. “So you all can.”

Sophie started to sob; Clementine too wept quietly; even Edie had tears in her eyes even though she was only 10 and didn’t have a daughter. Only Mathilde remained stony-faced as she resisted believing what La Petite was telling her. She wanted proof she had been loved. And it was too late for that.

“That’s it?” she asked coldly. “That’s your helping hand?”

La Petite coughed, undramatically, and closed her eyes.

“Next time perhaps I’ll try a helping foot,” she murmured tiredly. “And I know just where to put it.” She breathed a long deep sigh and sank further back into her pillows. “Brick by brick,” she muttered. “Don’t forget that.”

In the early hours of the following morning, La Petite slipped away to her hot chocolate and daphne paradise. Cochon
was nestled on one side of her, Hector on the other, Sophie across the bottom of the bed. The old gypsy grape-picker left without a fight. In fact, the vaguest of smiles was still playing across her lips long after the last breath had left her lungs. And although Sophie cried when she was gone, she didn’t feel sad for the old woman, just sorry she herself could no longer have her.

Hector held his great-grandmother for a long while, singing some foreign lullaby and weeping gracefully. When his tears had dried, he laid her back on her pillow, kissed his own fingers and placed them on her left-over smile. Then he took Sophie by the hand and led her down the hall to her bedroom, where he made love to her with a delicacy she could not recall from any previous encounter.

Clementine was woken by the soft strains of Hector’s lullaby, by Sophie’s quiet sobs. Eventually she heard the two of them shuffle past her door. She lay there wondering why she didn’t feel more aggrieved, then realised that what Hector did best was provide comfort and on this occasion Sophie needed it the most. She pulled her bedclothes closer and returned to her dreams.

As dawn broke, Hector slipped out of Sophie’s bed and started to dress.

“I have to take her with me,” he said. “To our people. She wouldn’t want to be in the ground near a church.”

Sophie just nodded, her eyes filling with tears.

“It’s not a sad day for us,” he said, although she wasn’t sure which “us” he meant. “It’s a joyful one. Explain to the others, will you?” He came back to the bed and kissed her on each cheek. “I’ll be back next year, Little One,” he said. “I’ll see you then.”

And just like that, the gypsies were gone.

The New Year brought snow by the bucketload, transforming the acres and acres of bleak brown vines into a far more
glamorous
landscape — the snow doing for them what a mink coat can do for a plain woman of a certain vintage.

Its dull stumps thus disguised, the valley sparkled.

Inside the House of Peine, however, the feeling was one of gloom. La Petite's departure had left something of a hole in their Christmas spirit, which lingered still. Sophie and Clementine felt it especially, but even Mathilde had been subdued since the old woman's death. For days those wheezy words about fancy cars and tobacco had rung in her ears, ears that were usually deaf to such harsh criticism. Without the numbing effects of alcohol and tranquillisers, Mathilde was confronting more than she had in a while, and some of what La Petite had said had slipped in through the cracks in her veneer. Mathilde was selfish and proud, there was no doubt about that, but she was not stupid. At some previously untapped level she truly did not want Edie to feel about her the way she felt about her own mother and Edie was reaping the benefit of this dabble
in self-discovery. Well, reaping might be too enthusiastic a word but Mathilde was undeniably making more of an effort with her daughter, who was the only one among them to show much enthusiasm at all for Christmas.

She'd insisted they all go to midnight Mass, for example, somewhat horrifying Father Philippe because Cochon accompanied them. The little horse was on his best behaviour though and very kindly refrained from defecating inappropriately, instead trotting over to snort at the baby Jesus in the sacristy then lying down next to a chipped plaster donkey twice his size and going to sleep.

Sophie had rather half-heartedly suggested they stick with tradition and come home for
réveillon
, the customary post-midnight-Mass supper, having never celebrated
Noël
this way herself — but Clementine could not be convinced. Christmas Eve to her was the very proud full-stop at the end of the long rambling sentence of pruning. She had been working 14-hour days all December, trying to get the job done while the snow was playing with the land, not laying on it. Her vines were all safely nipped and tucked now and could come to no harm as they slept through the winter. But it was all Clementine could do to pull on her church clothes with hands that were calloused and swollen with chilblains. She too wanted to sleep through the winter and made quite a good start by snoring gently through Philippe's rather insipid sermon on goodwill to all men.

Once home again, she perked up enough to manage a couple of slices of the outsized
bûche de Noël
Sophie had made, then almost too tired to lick the cream from the corners of her mouth she dragged herself up to her room, bidding a weary goodnight to her sisters and promising Edie that there would be gifts for her in the morning. She slept deeply, dreaming of a dark-haired man on a gently purring tractor, and woke up feeling strangely content, especially when she remembered
there was still a good deal of the
bûche de Noël
left. By the time she got down to the kitchen, her sisters and niece were already feeding on it and Edie was jiggling with excitement at the prospect of presents.

Her father had sent her a cell phone, in which she showed very little interest, and Mathilde presented her with clothes that she'd had George send over from Barneys. They were one size too small, causing Clementine and Sophie to swap a worried look. But Edie herself was quite delighted as the previous Christmas her presents had been three sizes too small and were still lying in the bottom of her closet in Manhattan, never worn. One size too small she could manage.

Nevertheless, the colourful pile of clothing was tossed aside when Sophie surprised everybody by presenting her with a watercolour she had painted of the view from Edie's attic room. Even Mathilde's jaw dropped to her chest as the picture was unfurled. Sophie may have struggled with reading and writing but her raw talent shone when it came to painting. The view she had captured showed the vines rolling down from the house, the curlicue gates in the distance and a ray of winter sunshine pointing like a silver torch beam at an abandoned
jardinière
overgrown with red geraniums, which sat halfway down the drive.

“I didn't know you were artistic,” Mathilde said, her
trademark
sarcasm absent.

“You whip Andy fricking Warhol's butt!” exclaimed Edie excitedly. “I could sell this for a million bucks on eBay but I'm not going to.”

“The colours are so real,” added Clementine, who had never heard of Andy Warhol or eBay, looking over Edie's shoulder. “I've never seen those colours in a paintbox.”

“Oh, I've always been good at colours,” Sophie said shyly but she was clearly chuffed.
No amount of ever-so-tight hipster flares nor dreamy watercolours, however, could compare with Clementine's gift to Edie.

It was Cochon.

While Clementine had thought long and hard about what she could give the child that would really mean something to her, from the very first instant she had known it was probably her little horse. But Cochon meant a lot to Clementine too. She would have died of loneliness the past few years had it not been for him. He had been her only friend for such a long time. Yet in the end, it was because of this, not in spite of it (
self-discovery
was catching on among the Peines), that she wrapped a ribbon around his furry little neck and presented him to her niece. The look on Edie's face was worth it — and a thousand more dwarf miniature horses for that matter. Her eyes filled with tears and she fell on Cochon, throwing her arms around him and hugging him as hard as she could. Cochon rested his chin on her shoulder and looked for all the world as though he too was crying with happiness — although it could have been conjunctivitis, to which he was prone.

Seeing this, Clementine felt even more certain that she had done the right thing by giving him away. He had not been himself since La Petite's demise, as had none of them. But only he had gone missing for two days after her departure, returning to the house looking dreadfully woebegone, the distinctive smell of burnt heather wafting about him. This made Clementine wonder if he had followed Hector, even attended the old woman's passing ceremony, however that was managed where she came from. They would never know, of course, and wherever it had been it had not cheered him up in the slightest. Upon his return, he had spent much of his time slumped dejectedly at the foot of the stairs. Yet upon being wrapped up and gifted to his freckle-faced 10-year-old friend,
he quite literally got the spring back in his step. Even Mathilde, despite being quite pinched about the lips originally, did not confiscate the horse nor poison him nor Clementine.

They'd rolled over into January without much hoopla and had spent the first week of the month doing very little, which was quite common for the Champenois. Like the vines, they traditionally spent much of January being dormant, in most cases the blend having already been chosen. “La-a-a-a!”

The blend in the Peines' case was still causing many operatics down in the winery and by the middle of the month it was driving Mathilde to distraction.

“It's like living with Pavarotti,” she roared at Clementine in the winery one afternoon, her nerves well frayed. “Do you mind?”

Part of the problem was that Mathilde had taken up daytime residence in the winery herself now and was working out of Olivier's old broom closet of an office where she was trying to set up a spreadsheet on a new laptop. She was computerising the contents of the cave, the accounts and the slowly increasing orders, which was a complicated business especially without a secretary or an accountant or a chair that didn't catch on all her skirts. She had initially worked in the relative peace and quiet of the house but it was Peine blood that ran through Mathilde's veins. If she was honest with herself, which only happened in short bursts on occasional Tuesdays, she liked the yeasty fruity smell in the winery almost as much as Clementine did, enjoyed looking out at the barrels of what would become her product as she sweet-talked people into buying it over the phone. She would not admit this though, told her sisters she chose the winery to work in because it was the one place where the stupid little horse-pig that goddamn Clementine had goddamn given her goddamn daughter could not goddamn
irritate her. (Her rehabilitation was still a work in progress.)

On this particularly icy-cold January day, Clementine's rising panic at the impending torture of the blend rendered her incapable of ignoring Mathilde's Pavarotti jibe the way she knew it was best to do.

“Yes, I mind! I mind! I mind!” she bellowed back at Mathilde after tasting the same pinot meunier a dozen times and getting 12 different impressions. “I mind that I'm not certain we can declare a vintage this year. I mind that I don't know if the pinot noir is too powerful. I mind that we have so much beautiful chardonnay but no history of making a
blanc de blancs
. I mind that I might have all the makings of the best champagne ever but no idea if I can put it together the right way. I mind that I am doing this all on my own, you stupid thin, heartless, horrible woman. I mind! Yes, I mind!”

Mathilde walked out of her broom-closet office and across to where Clementine was crumpled against the barrels of offending meunier, sobbing.

She took off her Gucci spectacles and tapped them thoughtfully against her chin as she regarded her older sister.

“If you can postpone the hysterics for just a minute,” she said coolly, “you might consider that you are not, in fact, on your own.”

Clementine, quite beside herself, looked up. “Oh, is that right, is it? And who is going to help me — you?” Her voice was gluey with tears. “You will taste the reserve wines and tell me what proportions to add to which amounts of the latest harvest? You will decide how much meunier, how much pinot noir, how much chardonnay I should put in the brut? How much reserve wine I should use? How much I should keep? You will help me with all this?”

“Don't be stupid,” Mathilde answered witheringly. “Wine gives me a headache, how many times do I have to tell you? I'm
in charge of selling the stuff, Clementine. You are in charge of making it. And you've already grown the grapes, which I understand you know personally by name. You've hand-picked them, you've pressed them, you've babied them into barrels, and now you have all this precious still wine just sitting here patiently waiting for you to do something with it. So here's an idea: why don't you just pull your finger out and get on with putting the stuff in bottles so we can get the bubbles going and sell it? Our overdraft is not going to last forever, Clementine. We can't afford delays. It's already going to be three years before we see a cent out of this wine and trust me, we need cents.”

“But the blend!” Clementine cried. “You don't understand. It's all about the blend and I've never done it on my own.”

“On your own? Are you drunk?” Mathilde snapped impatiently, putting her glasses back on. “Take a look around this place: there are more Peines here now than there have been for centuries. We're like grapes, we come in a bunch, for God's sake. So why not make the most of it? Stop whingeing about being on your own and get Sophie or Edie to help you. And stop wearing that corduroy skirt, it makes me feel ill just looking at it.”

She turned on her heels and click-clacked across the floor back to her office.

Clementine sat there, feeling the spilled meunier on the floor beneath her soaking through the corduroy skirt. She hated Mathilde all over again then, wished those thin ankles would snap and she would tumble to the ground where she could be poked at with a pitchfork.

She knew where there was a pitchfork, too.