House of Peine (19 page)

In the morning, sick from too much sugar and too little sleep, Clementine appeared at the breakfast table, red-eyed and
trembling
.

The other three were already there, enjoying what looked like the remains of the soufflé.

“’Mentine, look what we —” Sophie started but Clementine cut her off.

“Just when I was beginning to get used to having you here,” she said to Mathilde, “to think you really cared for us. You had me thinking it could all work out. You really did. But how stupid could I be? It wasn’t enough the first time, was it? You had to come back and take him from me all over again.”

Mathilde was bewildered. “What on earth are you talking about? I haven’t taken anyone anywhere.”

“Benoît,” Clementine said bluntly. “Yes, Benoît. I know you’ve been over there again wearing next to nothing and trying to seduce him in front of his own wife. Odile told me all about it yesterday at the parade. She thought I was trying to do
the same thing. She called me a slattern, a trollop. What have I done to deserve this, Mathilde? Tell me, will you — what?”

Mathilde coughed politely and wiped at the corner of her mouth with a napkin. “Edie, darling, why don’t you run outside and play with your little mule,” she suggested in an almost motherly voice.

Edie looked from her to Clementine, eyes wide with understanding that trouble was afoot, then she dropped her baguette and skedaddled out the door.

“Clementine, I think you should sit down,” Sophie suggested nervously. This was not the warm friendly Clementine that had been emerging in recent months, but the bitter unhinged one of days gone by.

Clementine ignored her. “Why do you get such pleasure out of torturing me?” she asked Mathilde.

“You’ve got it all wrong, as usual,” Mathilde answered impatiently. “I may have gone over there to talk to him a few times but it was in a casual neighbourly fashion. Can I help it if that hatchet-faced wife of his jumped straight to the wrong conclusion?”

“Yes, Mathilde, you can! Why don’t you just leave him alone? He doesn’t mean a thing to you. You can have whoever you want, whenever you want, but I have wanted Benoît all my life. All my life! And I will never have him. Never.”

“So that’s what’s got your knickers in a twist,” Mathilde said. “Well, for a start, that’s nonsense. And for a finish you could snatch him away from that old witch at the drop of a hat if you put your back into it.”

“I couldn’t,” Clementine cried. “I couldn’t. You see? You just don’t understand. You can’t see that others don’t have what you have. That it’s not as easy for everybody as it is for you. That some of us live in agony, full of doubt and regret. Regret — do you know what that feels like, Mathilde, sitting there
with your skinny little legs and that, that cleavage and all your vile revolting sex appeal?”

“Frankly, no, I don’t,” Mathilde said coolly, “but then I don’t spend all day wallowing around like a hippopotamus in the mud feeling sorry for myself either. Don’t blame me if you let Benoît slip through your fingers or your hoofs or whatever they are, Clementine. You’re big enough and certainly ugly enough to take that one on the chin yourself.”

Clementine lunged across the room. She would have had Mathilde’s throat between her hands and strangled the very life out of her had Sophie not jumped in between them.

“Stop it, ’Mentine,” she begged, ducking and weaving.

“Yes, pick on someone your own size, if you can find anyone barn-shaped,” Mathilde retorted rudely, holding Sophie’s hips from behind and using her like a shield. At this, Sophie pulled away, furious. “Why do you always have to make it worse?” she demanded. “Can’t you see that this is a sensitive subject? Don’t you care how much you’ve upset her?”

“By doing what?” Mathilde asked. “By having a bit of slap and tickle with the boy next door a hundred years ago? By taking him a bottle of single malt when I was desperate for a bit of stimulating company? It’s hardly a crime. I really don’t see why you’re making such a big deal out of it.”

Sophie stepped away, placed a wiry little arm around Clementine’s middle and guided her back to a chair. She forced her to sit, then crouched next to her on the floor, reaching to smooth her angry ginger curls.

“She actually doesn’t know what it feels like, ’Mentine,” she said soothingly. “That’s why she can keep doing it. It’s not her fault but that’s why she can hurt you, why she can hurt Edie. She doesn’t know what it feels like.”

“Oh for God’s sake, stop talking such nonsense,” Mathilde snapped. “Hurting Clementine? Hurting Edie? I’m not
hurting anybody. I don’t know what the hell you are on about.”

Sophie stopped her stroking. “You have hurt Clementine and you have hurt Edie, Mathilde.” The power in her voice was unmistakable. “Trust me. My mother left me too so I know exactly how it feels. It hurts.”

“Well, boo hoo,” Mathilde replied. “Time to get over it.”

“Just like you got over how your mother treated you?” Slowly Sophie got to her feet and looked her sister straight in the eyes. “And how have you done that exactly, Mathilde? Because you may not be the same unhappy runaway you were when you first got here but it seems to me you’re still a runaway.”

“How dare you, you little pipsqueak,” seethed Mathilde. “When you’ve lived my life then you can have an opinion on how well I’ve managed it, but until then keep your half-baked psycho-babble to yourself. My mother dumped me on whoever was nearest every time she sniffed out a new husband, once for a whole year, which means I know exactly what it feels like too, I’m just not so weak and pathetic that I show it.”

“But it’s not weak and pathetic to show it.” Sophie thrust her hands defiantly on her hips, which made her look a little like a ruffled Peter Pan. “It’s human. It’s brave. In fact, the bravest thing you could do for Edie is show her how you feel about her, Mathilde, instead of ignoring her or avoiding her the way your own mother ignored or avoided you. Can’t you see that? It’s what La Petite was trying to tell us.”

“That old crow!” cried Mathilde, but her voice showed none of Sophie’s power or control. “It’s all such drivel. I do not avoid …” She was starting to lose her composure. “She doesn’t know. It’s just that I …” Each breath was more shallow than the last, her face was crumpling, her body folding, she was coming undone right in front of them. “When I think about Edie, what I feel … oh, I don’t even … but I know that it’s
just … You two idiots wouldn’t understand, but for me it’s different. I just find the whole thing totally …” Suddenly she was crying real fat heavy tears. “Unbearable. Sometimes when I look at her I just feel physically sick I’m so, so, so …” Her words dissolved into wretched sobs.

“So what?” Sophie asked softly, dropping her hands from her hips.

“Scared,” wept Mathilde. “So scared.”

“Scared of what?”

“I don’t know. Just scared, all right? Scared down to the marrow of my bones.”

“But Mathilde,” Sophie said in the gentlest of voices, “that’s love.”

“That’s bullshit!” bellowed Mathilde. “Love doesn’t make you want to hide and never be found, or pull your heart out of your chest and stomp on it. It’s not frightening. It’s not
uncontrollable
. It’s not bitterly fucking disappointing.”

“It does,” Clementine said almost to herself, thinking of Benoît, of Amélie. “It is.”

“It’s painful, Mathilde, because the moment you care that much about someone, you have a lot to lose and that is what hurts,” added Sophie.

“But why?” Mathilde wept. “How does it? Who would?” She was hiccuping great gulps of air, her body shaking with the pressure of trying to regain control. “What the hell’s the matter with me?” she sobbed. “What’s wrong?”

Watching such misery, Clementine found herself surprisingly overwhelmed with pity. She knew exactly what it felt like to be a prisoner to that confused jumble of feelings. Whoever would have thought she shared this, of all things, with Mathilde? She turned to Sophie and held up her hands in a gesture of helplessness.

Sophie went to Mathilde’s side then, indicating
Clementine should come too. “There’s nothing the matter with you,” she said, laying an arm around her shoulders. “You just have to realise that you are better off feeling what you’re feeling than not feeling anything at all.”

In her patient embrace, Mathilde soon calmed down.

“How do you know all this?” she asked Sophie. “You’re nobody.”

“She’s not nobody,” Clementine rebuked gruffly, approaching Mathilde from the other side and laying a weathered hand on top of where Sophie’s sat on their sister’s shoulder. “She’s one of us.”

Sophie’s smile said it all, as she nestled in closer to her sister. “And you are too, you stupid woman,” Clementine added to Mathilde. “So stop your snivelling.”

Mathilde lifted her own trembling hands and laid them on top of her sisters’. The three of them stayed just like that for a while, soaking each other up amid a strangely comfortable silence.

Anybody who knew anything about the Peines would have fainted with disbelief had they peered through the kitchen window and witnessed this scene. Nobody did though. Edie and Cochon were happily playing outside and missed the whole thing, although strangely Cochon never flattened his ears and bared his teeth at Mathilde ever again.

The following morning she came down late to breakfast, receiving an exuberant “good morning” from Sophie and a sheepish smile from Clementine.

“Coffee anyone?” Mathilde asked. It was not a question she had ever asked before and was not in itself important but it gave rise to one of those moments when everyone realises that something significant has changed. A layer had been peeled away that could not be replaced. It was embarrassing, slightly, because the two older Peines were not used to such exposure
and felt a little naked. But it was also rather wonderful.

Mathilde poured herself a coffee and on her way to the table gave Clementine’s shoulder a squeeze.

Clementine looked up at her in surprise but said nothing.

“I’ve been thinking,” Mathilde said quietly as she sat, “about what you said yesterday about regret and everything.” She was uncharacteristically awkward but determined to proceed. “I’ve been thinking about Benoît and what he means to you, Clementine. And it occurs to me that perhaps he was more than the boy next door.”

Sophie reached across and clutched Clementine’s arm, which had frozen on the table. “Don’t be afraid, ’Mentine. Maybe you should tell her why he means so much to you. Maybe it’s a secret you’ve kept too long already.”

“Your daughter,” Mathilde said. “I should have asked you about her before.”

“Amélie,” Clementine said, staring straight ahead and nodding. “Her name is Amélie.”

“And Benoît is the father?”

Clementine kept nodding.

“But he doesn’t know?”

The nodding stopped.

“Why haven’t you told him?”

“I hadn’t even spoken to him since that day you and he …”

“There is no he and I, Clementine.”

“But there was. Back then. I went over there. Just the once. After you and he … You knew I wanted him, Mathilde, and yet you went over there and took him from me.”

“You haven’t spoken to him since then?” Mathilde was aghast. “But that’s ludicrous, Clementine. That was so long ago and I was just a horny 17-year-old doing what horny 17-year-olds do. I didn’t know what he meant to you or if I did, I probably didn’t care. But I do now. I know, that is, and I care.
And I’m sorry. I’m truly sorry.”

For a single heartbeat Clementine saw that this could be true, that the whole miserable tragedy could have been caused by nothing more than raging adolescent hormones. And that Mathilde could be truly sorry. She had to decide then whether to cling to her bitterness or let it go. For a moment, she chose to treasure it. It had been part of her life for so long she was almost afraid to be without it. But the weightlessness of compassion, a rare commodity in her life until recently, for once was so easily within her reach that it was a temptation she couldn’t resist. Like chocolate éclairs.

“Apology accepted?” Mathilde asked, gingerly.

“Apology accepted,” Clementine replied begrudgingly and her misery floated off like a hot-air balloon.

The harsh cold weather continued into the next month, the vines staying safe and sleeping beneath their freezing blanket. Inside the House of Peine on the other hand, the thaw was well underway. Certainly the walls remained cold to the touch and the windows a little icy, but the atmosphere itself was anything but frosty. In fact, had that imaginary passerby who'd looked in and fainted the previous month peered once more through the kitchen window of a chilly evening, he or she might even have dreamed wistfully of belonging to such a crowd.

Whoever would have guessed that the poisonous Peines might one day conjure up such envy?

Edie was enjoying the winter holidays, further impressed with the exuberance with which the French embraced the notion of the vacation. School forgotten for the time being, Sophie had been teaching her to paint and bake, two skills at which she showed some aptitude, adding to her growing confidence.

Her daughter soaked up by the extended family, Mathilde was relatively content working on her campaign to get the next
release of Peine champagne into as many restaurants and wine shops as possible. As she worked the phone scaring up orders, Clementine beavered beside her in the winery. In her usual slow and steady way, she had completed the blend. The new wine was all now safely mixed in its barrels where it would stay until bottling.

Nothing ever stayed still for long in a Champagne winery, however, and the next big job at hand was disgorging the champagne that Mathilde was doing such a good job of selling. Clementine had been dragging the chain on the disgorging as it was a mammoth task requiring all hands on deck and some of those hands, she feared, were a little too likely to drop and waste her precious bubbles. In the end, a couple of weeks into February, it was Mathilde who tugged the chain.

“Our bank manager has a little problem,” she announced one afternoon following a visit to Epernay. She didn't mention that the little problem he had was that he'd finally worked out that his stubby fingers were never going to tickle her slender thighs and this had catapulted him into a most unpleasant frame of mind. “He is becoming slightly disagreeable,” she said instead, “over the matter of our overdraft and we need to address our cash flow. Clementine, how soon do you think we can start se lling the new release?”

“Well, it's all riddled but it will take a week to disgorge — if we all work very carefully, paying particular mind to what we are doing and keeping tragic slip-ups to a minimum.”

“Yes, yes, and then?”

“And then we need to let it rest for about another six weeks.”

“Another six weeks!” Mathilde rolled her eyes in exasperation. “Are you joking? The infernal stuff has been resting for four years already.”

“It's for exactly that reason we need to let it rest some
more.” Clementine stood firm. “Remember, Mathilde, our bottles lie quietly in the cave for all that time giving birth to their bubbles and then we turn them upside down, freeze the neck, whip off the lid, pop out the sediment, top them up and then wedge in a cork. Imagine if all that happened to you in one day! Trust me, they need more rest. Anything else would be downright cruel.”

Mathilde pondered momentarily the possibility of having someone whip off her lid and top her up, so to speak. It had been a while, a long while. Her cork was firmly wedged and imagining anything otherwise was something of a distraction. She banned such thoughts. “So, we disgorge now and release at the end of March?” she asked Clementine.

“The beginning of April, perhaps. And then we can bottle the new wine because there'll be room in the cave.”
Wine-making
was a constant juggling act. Every minute could be used some way or other, every centimetre of space too.

“Okay,” Mathilde said authoritatively. “We need to start disgorging as soon as possible so we can get the champagne out into the market. Leave the bank manager to me, I think I can keep him at bay for a while longer.” Leastways, she had the phone number for his superior in Paris and had threatened to ring it should the manager not accommodate her for another month or so. “But it's imperative we have some dates firmly in place and we need to meet all the deadlines. If we are
delivering
early April, we can expect payment early May. I'll have to make sure that happens but I've done that before. Prompt payment is essential if we are going to …” She petered out, not meaning to alarm her sisters but she was too late. High finance was well above Sophie's head but she could sense pending penury when she sniffed it.

“Are we in trouble?” she asked.

“We are sailing close to the wind,” Mathilde admitted.
“But people have sailed closer. Generally it is just a matter of keeping everyone informed and knowing when they can expect product and when we can expect payment.”

“At least it's the 2002 we are releasing,” Clementine told her. It had been a good year and there was plenty of it. The House of Peine aged its champagne longer than other houses, Olivier had insisted on it, but some were about to release their 2003. Thanks to the frost and heat that dreadful year, those houses would be lucky to have half their normal stock heading for the stores and restaurants. “Although I suppose that means we'll have cash-flow problems again next year,” she added miserably.

“Never mind next year,” Mathilde said crisply. “We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. We need to get through this year first.”

That very evening Clementine got the rusty forklift out of the barn and drove it around the side of the winery. One of the good things about the cave her ancestors had dug into the chalky earth was that because it was underground it remained at a constant cool temperature. One of the bad things was getting anything in or out of it. During the vendange, the wine travelled from the top floor to the cave via hoses. But to get the barrels and bottles and vats and anything of a decent size in or out, there was a steep driveway dug into the earth down which bigger machines could make deliveries to a set of heavy steel doors (close relations to the Peine château gates it would seem, if their reluctance to open when you needed them to was anything to go by).

For the next couple of days Clementine negotiated the steep driveway and sticky doors time and time again. With much graunching of gears, burping of fumes and unleashing of ripe expletives, she picked up the pallets of riddled bottles and delivered them around the outside of the winery to the top
floor for disgorging. Once all the bottles were there, she enlisted the help of her family.

They were reminded on a half-hourly basis to pay particular mind to what they were doing and so managed to keep tragic slip-ups to a minimum. For a week the four of them worked on the production line, freezing the bottle necks, removing the plugs of sediment, adding the final dosage, putting in the corks, fitting the muzzles, adding the foils, and packing the bottles right-side up back onto the pallets. It was exhausting work — and noisy — and they were dog-tired by the end of each day.

But it was with great satisfaction that Clementine stood back the afternoon they finished and admired those 50,000 bottles, now one step closer to improving a perfect stranger's day by providing their delightful effervescence at some as-yet-unknown special occasion.

She hitched up her skirt (not exactly Chanel but a vast improvement on the corduroy) and was about to jump on the forklift again when Sophie stopped her.

“What are you doing, 'Mentine?”

“I may as well start delivering the pallets back downstairs,” Clementine said, albeit wearily. “What I don't do now I'll only have to do tomorrow.”

“Oh, come on,” Mathilde interrupted. “We've worked our fingers to the bone here. Surely, this calls for a celebration.”

“Yes, 'Mentine, what about a bottle of the '88? You deserve it.” Sophie had tasted it only a couple of times but it was a drop that needed as much revisiting as possible.

Clementine paused, thinking about Olivier and his unwillingness to share his best work, his difficulty in appreciating the very thing he worked so hard to produce. She decided the forklift could wait until tomorrow. “You're right,” she said. “I'll go and get the '88 if you go in and light the fire.”

Some time later they sprawled, relaxed, around the now often-used sitting room. The burning coals in the fireplace threw out a gentle amber glow, illuminating Clementine who sat on the floor, her back against the lumpy sofa, with a sleeping Edie in her arms.

The child had enjoyed a whole glass of champagne, picking up some of the most subtle herbaceous notes, before falling into a weary slumber from which her aunt was reluctant to wake her. School started again in the morning. And although she found lessons easier in Saint-Vincent-sur-Marne than she had in Manhattan, it was still enough of an ordeal for sleep to provide a welcome refuge.

“You'd make a good mother, Clementine,” Mathilde said thoughtfully.

The fire popped, a floorboard creaked upstairs.

“Have you ever thought about finding her? Finding Amélie?”

Sophie's stomach gurgled. She'd been having trouble with indigestion and fear at how Clementine would take this
intrusion
further curdled the contents of her stomach. She watched carefully to see how her eldest sister would respond.

Clementine stared into the coals, seeing tiny flickering images of her dark-haired daughter dancing and weaving between the oranges and yellows pulsating in the fireplace. “Not really,” she said eventually in a surprisingly relaxed voice. She'd barely dared think of her daughter at all until recently.

“Would you think about it now?” Sophie asked.

Clementine bent forward and smelled Edie's hair. It had the yeasty fruit of the winery in it still but also the undertones of some lollipop-flavoured little-girl shampoo.

“What would I do if I found her?” she wondered. “Just say that I did, and just say she wanted to meet me. I could hardly bring her here, with her father next door not even
knowing she exists. What if she looks just like him? What if he sees her?”

“What if you tell him?” Mathilde suggested carefully. “What could happen?”

“Odile could throttle me,” Clementine pointed out. “Look what happened when I tried to speak to him at the parade. Can you imagine what she would do if I turned up with our daughter?”

“They don't have children of their own,” Mathilde said. “You may well surprise Benoît but then he may surprise you.”

“I surprised him once before and it wasn't a beautiful experience,” Clementine said shortly. “I doubt very much he would want to relive it. I know I don't.”

“Yes, but keep in mind that he shares his bed with odious Odile,” Mathilde said with a glimmer of her old vicious wit. “The poor man must be desperate for something halfway appealing to wake up to. I'd rather have you any day.”

Sophie laughed and a smile even occurred to Clementine: it was a compliment after all. Her mind turned then to the subject of bed-sharing. If she could use what she'd learned from Hector with Benoît …

“You're blushing, Clementine,” Mathilde said.

“It's too hot in here.” Clementine extricated herself from Edie. “Help me get her up to bed, will you? I'm going to have an early night. Sophie, you should too. You look exhausted.”

The three of them carried the slumbering 10-year-old up the stairs and put her to bed where the moon threw a slice of light over her face as she lay there, illuminating a corrugated skein of Clementine-like hair.

They all stood there looking at her for a few moments, thinking their different thoughts. Then they bid each other good night and headed to their rooms and to deep dreamless sleep. Apart from Mathilde, that is. She had a change of
heart at her bedroom door and after waiting until she could hear that her sisters had turned in, she slipped back down the stairs.