House of Peine (20 page)

It was two in the morning when Cochon jumped on top of Edie. He was only small and unshod but still, he was a horse. Having his hooves on her chest woke her up in an instant. He was snorting and shaking his mane in a most frenzied fashion, plus he smelt strongly to her sharp young nose of smoke.

Edie sat bolt upright, feeling a jolt of fright, then she noticed a faint glow through the curtains in her room. She jumped out of bed and flung them open. Across the courtyard, an orange flame shot out the door of the winery and licked the wall like an illuminated tongue.

“Mommy!” she screamed, running into the chilly hall. “’Mentine! The winery’s on fire! Wake up!”

For a split second there was no sound at all. Then there was the thud of heels on floorboards, an anguished cry from Sophie, and a strangled moan of panic from Clementine who burst into the hallway in her nightgown, her hair wild, her eyes terrified.

Mathilde alone was calm, yet white-faced. “Call the fire brigade,” she told Clementine. “Don’t panic, ’Mentine. Just do it.”

Then she and Sophie, who clutched her father’s old wool jacket around her, grasped the whimpering Edie and ran down the stairs and out into the courtyard.

At first Mathilde thought that perhaps they could contain the fire themselves. Flames no longer shot out the door nor any of the small windows on the courtyard side, there was just a lot of thick black smoke. The winery was made of stone, after all, she reasoned. But what she could not see was that the flames inside the building did not need to exit the doors and windows now, they had found their escape upward and were jumping to lick the heavy exposed wooden beams that ran the length of the ceiling.

Just as Clementine emerged from the house, the roof with its tantalising wooden shingles caught alight with a single “pouf”. It was all the more frightening because the noise was barely more than a whisper yet the ensuing flames lit up the surrounding countryside with a violent glow that illuminated every grape vine from the snaking Marne River below them to the church spire peaking on a distant horizon.

Sophie had clumsily hauled the hose from the vegetable patch around to the courtyard and was calling for Edie to find the faucet and turn it on but it was useless. They could all see then that it was useless.

The sound of the first bottle exploding was like a splinter in Clementine’s heart. She fell to her knees on the gravel, both hands stuffed in her mouth, the heat from the flames burning her face, that crinkly hair crackling and shrinking in sympathy. Through the hiss and roar of the blaze she heard another bottle explode, then another and another and another, until the cold night air rang with the almost musical notes of some terrible, twisted symphony.

Imagine how this cacophony would sound to a woman who battled tears when a single bottle of Peine was dropped and
wasted? Each note was like the clash of giant cymbals crushing the breath from her lungs, the hope from her heart. This was not only her past but her future going up in smoke. And all in front of her very eyes.

The fire brigade arrived quickly considering Gaston, the gravedigger, was in charge of coordinating the volunteers. Yet despite his relative speed and efficiency, 50,000 freshly disgorged bottles of champagne were history by the time the fire fighters got there. Clementine was in some sort of a stupor then, from which neither her sisters nor her niece could snap her out. She was collapsed on the gravel, her eyes wide open and black with the horror of what she had seen, her skin raw from the cruel combination of intense heat and night-time winter chill.

Sophie and Mathilde tried to drag her further back from the burning winery, closer to the house, but she would not be moved, could not keep her eyes off the flames that were gobbling up four years’ hard labour and who knew what else. In the end, the four of them, five including the shuddering Cochon, sat huddled helplessly together in the courtyard, clutching each other beneath a blanket, strangely transfixed by the terrible sight.

“It’s the noise,” Edie said wondrously at one point as though she were watching a documentary on the Discovery Channel. “I never knew fires were so loud.”

It took little more than half an hour for Gaston and his crew to battle for control of the flames. It seemed an insult, almost, that their lives could be ruined quite so quickly. There was not that much to burn, Gaston told them, once the wine had gone and taken the roof with it.

His boss, the fire chief Xavier Martinot, a big man with a walrus moustache, ordered most of the fire fighters home an hour or so later, then gruffly explained to Mathilde that the fire
seemed suspicious. It had started, he said, among the stack of new oak barrels that Patric Didier had delivered earlier in the week. The oak was dense, he explained, and needed quite some provocation to burn but once it got going: “Kaboom!”

“But who would do that to us?” Sophie asked quietly.

“Who indeed,” Martinot agreed. “Usually it’s a family member,” he passed a black eye across the startled group in front of him, “or an enemy or a totally unrelated random arsonist. They’re the worst.”

“Oh well, that gives us something to be getting on with then, doesn’t it?” Mathilde said, although her sarcasm was lost on him.

“Indeed,” he said again. “I’ll be checking the surrounding area in the morning. Don’t worry, I’ll find your fire bug. They always leave a clue.”

After he left, Mathilde attempted to get closer to have a look at the damage but was hustled back to her sisters by Gaston. Even from where they sat they could see what little had survived. The champagne was no more, the press was no more, only the bones of the rusty forklift smouldered darkly where Clementine had left it.

They were all devastated, of course they were, but none more so than she. That building held a lot of dismal memories but it also held nearly every good one. She could not speak. Not even Edie could break her trance, nor Cochon climbing into her lap, quite wretched. When the departing ambulance officer suggested Clementine be given a sedative, Sophie assumed she would object. But Clementine took the pill wordlessly and eventually let herself be led up to her bed where she slept the sleep of a woman who might as well be dead.

When she awoke, Edie was in bed next to her, clinging to her, Cochon nestled on the floor as close to the bed as he could possibly get. Clementine wondered for a glorious innocent
moment if it had all been a horrible nightmare but the insides of her nostrils were burned and sooty, the room stank of smoke: an instant bitter reminder that she had not been dreaming, that they had truly lost everything in a fire. She freed herself from Edie, stepped over Cochon and pulled back the curtain. The stone walls of the winery were blackened with soot and wafts of smoke curled almost cheerfully out through the open top of the building. Gaston, to his credit, was there still. Asleep admittedly in a portable chair in the courtyard but there nonetheless beside the fire truck, hoses at the ready should any hot spots appear. Although how he’d know she wasn’t sure.

She pulled on her robe and, too sickened to open the window and shout at him for his incompetence, headed for the kitchen. Sophie sat at the table as pale as a ghost while Mathilde smoked by the kitchen counter, her eyes focussed out the window on the burnt remains.

“I always thought it would be the cold that ruined us,” Clementine said sitting down, her chair scraping harshly across the stone floor. “The frost. Not the heat.”

“Are we ruined?” Sophie asked, looking at Mathilde.

Her question went unanswered.

“Is there insurance?” Sophie tried again.

Once more, no reply. Insurance was a swizz in which Olivier did not believe, a view that Mathilde did not necessarily share but nonetheless the financial state he had left them in had not allowed for it.

“I can ask George to help,” Mathilde said, “to tide us over for a month or so but …”

The silence that ensued fostered a trickle of dismal
possibilities
in each of them but was followed by a pert knocking on the front door. The sisters looked at each other, then Clementine got up, shuffled down the hall, and pulled it open.

It was Bernadette herself, bearing two
pâtisserie
boxes and a delectable-smelling bag.

“You’re answering the door!” she exclaimed.

“You’re knocking on it,” Clementine replied.

They stood there staring at each other.

“Do you want to come in?” Clementine finally asked.

“No, I don’t,” Bernadette replied. “But I’m impressed you asked. These are for Sophie,” she added, thrusting the goodies forward, “and the little one, Edie, and for her mother, you know, the thin one, and for you, too, Clementine. Yes, for you.”

A belch of something black and sooty escaped through the open roof of the smouldering winery and they both looked around and surveyed the wreckage.

“I’m sorry,” Bernadette said, wiping at her eyes. “I truly am. We’ve never been — well, you know what I mean. Friends. You’ve been a reliable customer though. One of my best. And you’ve worked hard. All your life. I know that much. And it can’t have been easy.” She gave a clipped little nod then turned around and climbed (without Clementine’s grace, it must be said) onto the bike she usually got her spotty scaredy-cat son to ride. Then with a shake of her head at Gaston, snoring rudely in his chair, she departed.

Clementine carried her bounty into the kitchen and opened the first box.

It was full of pain au chocolat amande. She should have been repulsed, she knew that, she should not have been able to stomach the thought. Yet her mouth watered and she licked her lips. She looked hopefully at Sophie, who promptly vomited on the floor beside her chair.

“But it’s not even Saturday,” said Clementine sadly, contemplating the unscheduled pain au chocolat amande, and to her surprise Mathilde laughed: a pretty, feminine sound that she wasn’t sure she’d heard before.

Sophie, appalled, wiped at her mouth, her huge violet eyes saucers in her little white face. Then she guffawed, which turned into a giggle, which then developed into a laugh of her own. Before they knew it, the three of them were sitting there around that faithful oak table roaring as though they had not a care in the world. They were unhinged, all three of them, completely.

Edie came in then, with a subdued Cochon close at her heels. “What’s so funny?” she asked blearily. “Didn’t the winery burn down? It smells so smoky.”

Her childish gloom halted their laughter. Like Mary Poppins and her charges, glum thoughts brought them back down to earth with a bump. Clementine swept into action, helping Sophie clear up her mess. The smoke inhalation, they decided, had been too much for lungs used only to the smog of Paris. Settling down again as Mathilde made more coffee, the smell of the fire infiltrated their thinking. Edie was right, the kitchen stank of smoke. The disaster filled up every nook and cranny in the house. They had been mad to laugh. This was no laughing matter.

“There’s no point asking George,” Clementine said flatly. “For money. Tiding us over is not going to be enough, Mathilde.” There was no quick fix for this crisis. After
everything
she had been through these past few months, these past few years, after all the worry and fear and anguish, it was
something
quite out of the blue that had taken her down for good. “It’s finished,” she said in that old flat tone. “We are finished.”

“But there are the vines,” Sophie insisted. “We still have those. They’re not even touched, ’Mentine. Please don’t give up hope now. We can get through somehow.”

Clementine looked at her, then at Mathilde.

“How?”

Mathilde wished she had a better answer but there was
none. “I don’t know, ’Mentine. Sophie is right, we still have the vines. But if we continue to make our own champagne it will be four years before we see a cent out of those and we don’t have four months, let alone four years.”

“If we continue?” Sophie asked. “What do you mean?”

Clementine closed her eyes. “We can sell our grapes to Moët or Veuve Clicquot,” she said. “For cash flow. Next vendange. But we wouldn’t be able to afford to make any wine ourselves. And we still have to find a way to live between now and then.”

“And don’t forget Old Man Joliet,” Mathilde reminded her. “He’ll be sniffing around in no time at all, the old mec, but I’d kill the vines with my own bare hands rather than sell our land to him.”

Clementine looked at her sister in amazement. “You would?”

“Of course I would,” Mathilde said. “I can be ‘mean’ and at times a little insensitive but I am not brainless. If we sell the land we really do have nothing.”

“But you could get the money and go home,” Clementine replied.

Mathilde lit another cigarette and looked out the window, chewing her lip.

“She is home,” Sophie said softly. “We all are.”

And so at the very time when Clementine thought that all was lost, she instead discovered that all was found. That her future did not depend on the champagne she had nurtured ready for its journey out into the world. That a bubbly tipple really had nothing to do with it. Her future lay with these women, with this family.

It wasn’t quite the family she had dreamed of as a little girl, perhaps, but then who in their right mind would dream that a stroppy businesswoman, a shrewd urchin and a lonely
vigneron would one day combine to form a balanced
household
? Along with a troubled red-haired dyslexic and a dwarfed pig-like horse?

The three sisters looked at each other around the table and felt Peine blood coursing through their veins as sure as if it were the lost champagne pouring into crystal flutes. Then, they had a pain au chocolat amande. Even Mathilde. “No point starving to death just yet,” Clementine said, nibbling the almonds off her pastry. “Well done, Edie, you’ve gotten Cochon to eat a croissant. And here was me thinking he was just a chocolate horse.”

Once they’d polished off their pastries Mathilde created
something
of a stir by washing the dishes, which no one had ever seen her do before. After putting the last plate away she turned, her jaw firmly set, and suggested they go to have a closer look at the damage to the winery.

“Come on,” she urged them. “We have to face it some time. Maybe there’s something we can salvage.”

“Or maybe we can find a clue as to who would do this to us,” added Sophie. “Do you really think it was deliberate?”

“I don’t see how the fire could have started itself,” Clementine said. “But I don’t see who would want to hurt us this badly.”

“You don’t think Old Man Joliet …?” Sophie suggested.

“Centuries those Joliets have been after Peine land,” Clementine told her, “and never before have they resorted to arson.”

“Yes, well there’s a first time for everything,” Mathilde interjected as they approached Gaston, still snoozing in the courtyard, a waterfall of drool pooling on the shoulder of his
tatty volunteer’s uniform. “Is it safe to go in?” she asked him, after kicking his chair all but out from underneath him to wake him up.

“Why would you want to?” he replied grumpily, blinking in the watery winter sunshine. “Even if every last bottle hadn’t exploded it wouldn’t taste very good. Clementine should know that.”

Mathilde kicked his chair again, harder this time, even though he was clearly already awake.

“What was that for?” he asked.

“Show some respect,” snapped Mathilde. “We’ve just lost everything we have in a suspicious fire and the last thing we need are smart-arse comments from a bum like you.”

“You father would be so proud,” grumbled Gaston as they walked away from him. “Just what Saint-Vincent-sur-Marne needs. Another chip off the old block! Although I’ll say one thing for Olivier Peine, you never found him exaggerating. He was a crusty old goat but he never painted a picture blacker than it already was.”

Clementine and Mathilde kept heading towards the winery door but Gaston’s comment stopped Sophie in her tracks.

“What do you mean,” she asked, turning back, “exaggerating? Who is exaggerating?”

“The skinny one,” he said spitting at the ground. “You haven’t lost everything, have you? There’s the cave.”

They all stopped at that, even Cochon, and turned to look at him.

“The cave?” Clementine repeated stupidly.

“Of course,” Gaston answered. “The hatch was down. The drains were plugged. The floor is two feet thick. Fire goes up. They knew what they were doing, your Peine ancestors. I’ll bet you a week’s worth of pastis at Le Bois that the temperature in
the cave is still 10 degrees and that there’s not a drop of water down there.”

Clementine broke into a trot, swerving away from the gaping hole that was once the entrance to the burnt winery and running instead around the outside and down the difficult driveway to the heavy steel doors built into the ground. Mathilde and Sophie flew to opposite sides and together they pulled and jiggled and pushed and cajoled. As soon as the doors finally agreed to shudder apart, the sweetest air spiralled out of the opening between them. Clementine smelled it straight away. She didn’t even need to step inside to know that Gaston was right: the contents of the cave were unharmed.

Heart pounding, head reeling, she slipped inside and went straight to the reserve barrels, pouring herself a glass of the ’99 pinot. It was perfect. Absolutely perfect.

“Thank God!” she breathed. “Oh, thank God.” She ran next to a barrel of the newly blended vintage and poured herself a splash of that as well. Blackberries strong as ever and buttery croissant too. This was not the Peine bad luck she was used to.

“I can’t believe it,” Sophie was ecstatic. “That upstairs should be gone, pouf, and down here it’s as though nothing ever happened. We’re going to be all right, then, aren’t we? We’re saved! Doesn’t this mean we are saved?”

The smile slid off Clementine’s lips, the bloom of relief faded from her cheeks as she looked at Mathilde. “Oh,” she said as her thoughts fell into place. “Oh.”

“I don’t understand,” Sophie looked from one sister to the other. “Isn’t this the best thing that could happen?”

“Next to not having a fire burn up any chance of pulling us out of the shit?” Mathilde asked her. “Yes. But we are still in the shit.”

Sophie’s mind was whirring. Cash flow. She looked down
the arched alcove that housed the resting 2003 that had yet to be riddled or disgorged. “What about that?” she pointed. “Couldn’t we sell that?”

In theory, it wasn’t a bad idea. In practice, there were fatal flaws.

“Well, correct me if I am wrong,” Mathilde said, looking at Clementine for assurance, “but even if we were not to leave it on the lees as long as we usually would, we would need to riddle it, yes? That’s eight weeks, which would take us to April. Then we would need to disgorge, fine. But to disgorge, we would have to rebuild upstairs. Now, that would probably take about eight weeks too so theoretically that could work out all right. There’s just one problem. To get the money we need to pay for the rebuilding, we need the profit from selling the very wine that needs to be disgorged.”

Clementine groaned. Of all the years to be relying on! The very wine they couldn’t afford to release was the 2003 of which there was so little in the first place.

“But still we are more saved than we were before,” Sophie said with her trademark optimism. “We must be!”

“Just not saved enough,” Clementine told her.

“We are still looking at Moët or Old Man Joliet,” Mathilde agreed glumly. “Or a miracle.”

Clementine slumped to the floor. “If only I had started bringing the bottles down yesterday afternoon,” she said, her head falling into her hands, “we might have been all right. We might have been able to sell enough to get us some cash while we sorted everything out.”

“Then it’s my fault,” Sophie said, with a heartbroken gasp. “You wanted to keep working but I wanted to celebrate. I’m so sorry, ’Mentine. I should have let you be. It’s my fault!”

“It wouldn’t have made enough of a difference,” Mathilde told them. “How many bottles could you have moved in two
or three hours? This disaster is bigger than that, I’m afraid.”

Gaston appeared then, with Cochon prancing around him in circles and Edie bringing up the rear. In one hand he held up an empty petrol container. Then he turned to Edie who produced the charred remains of a high-heeled pump.

Gaston rattled the can at the three grim-faced women. “Xavier found this on his way back here this morning,” he said. “It was in the grass at the bottom of the drive. And your dog found this shoe in the remains near the forklift. It would seem that the boss was right: the fire was not an accident and was most likely lit by the wearer of this shoe.”

“He’s not a dog,” Clementine and Edie said at the same time, but Sophie was looking at Mathilde. She was the only one among them who wore high-heeled shoes, after all.

“Oh, my God,” Mathilde whispered, also looking at the shoe, the colour dropping out of her face. “I don’t believe it.”

“Don’t believe what?” Clementine wanted to know.

“The shoe, ’Mentine,” Sophie whispered, pointing at Mathilde. “The shoe.”

“What about it?” Clementine looked at the burnt heel again and then at Mathilde, finally registering with a stomach-churning thunk what it all meant.

Of course, she thought, her heart shrivelling instantly in her chest: there was no hope for someone like her. She had been a fool to think she would ever be part of a family that cared enough about her not to burn her livelihood to a crisp, leaving her penniless, homeless and alone in the world, without even her little horse for company.

“Oh, Mathilde,” she whispered. “We were so close to being … How could you do this? Burn down our wine and ruin us like this. Ruin me and Sophie?”

“And me,” piped up Edie.

“Oh, ye of little faith,” complained the resilient Mathilde
without a shred of worry. “Can you imagine the size of the hoof that would fit into that shoe?”

They looked again at the charred pump then back at Mathilde’s slender ankles. The burnt shoe was at least three sizes too big for her.

“Then whose is it?” Sophie asked.

“Yes,” agreed Gaston. “Whose?”

“I would put money, if we had any, on the person who lit the fire being Odile Geoffroy,” Mathilde said. “Nobody else around here has bad enough taste to be teetering around the countryside in those things and that’s saying something. Get over there right now, Gaston, put the shoe on her, then arrest her, put her in jail, throw away the key, and give her a good kick in her fat despicable rump.”

Gaston had a soft spot for Odile’s rump and was
momentarily
enthused by the idea of making contact with it.

“Odile?” Sophie was confused. “What are you on about?”

“Clementine, you are going to hate me all over again,” Mathilde took a deep breath and looked at her as pleadingly as she ever had at anyone, “but you must believe me when I say I never thought for an instant I was doing anything other than trying to help you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Last night after you all went to bed,” Mathilde said quickly, as if getting it over as soon as possible would somehow lessen the blow, “I went over to talk to Benoît. Odile must have seen me.”

Both sisters paled and gasped. “You did what?” Clementine cried. “Again? After everything?” This was really too much for that over-worked organ in her chest. There really was no such thing as good luck, nor happy families, nor …

“No, not like that,” Mathilde interrupted her hysteria. “Listen to me. I didn’t go over for anything like that, ’Mentine.
I went for you. I went to help you. I went to tell him about Amélie.”

Clementine and Sophie gasped again, twin shoulders rising towards twin ears in horror.

“Amélie?” Gaston repeated. They had forgotten he was still there. “Who’s Amélie?”

“She’s Clementine’s baby that she had with Benoît next door,” Edie informed him.

This time the gasp was tripled. They had forgotten Edie was still there.

“Jesus!” cried Clementine. “How much worse is this day going to get?”

“Benoît?” Gaston leaned against a barrel. “A baby?” He looked at Clementine as though for the first time ever. “You?”

“What, you’ve never seen a woman who’s had sex before?” Clementine snapped. “Not up this close, no, I can well imagine that.”

Gaston’s eyes, too close together as it was, were swivelling in his head with these new revelations. What a treat he would have for his pals at Le Bois tonight.

“’Mentine, perhaps Gaston would like a drink,” Mathilde suggested cleverly as she watched him. Unless they wanted their private business to be broadcast around the
neighbourhood
by lunchtime, they needed to get the grave-digging fireman drunk enough to raddle his brains. She was a quick thinker, Mathilde. And on this occasion, the shell-shocked Clementine, usually so slow on the uptake, was only one step behind her.

“Yes, yes,” she agreed, albeit slightly dazed. “I know Olivier kept some of his famous
Cuvée Supérieure
down here somewhere for special occasions just like this one.” There was indeed a case or two of Supérieure in the cave but it was special only in the same way as the bottles Olivier’s mother had fobbed
off on the Germans all those years earlier. Some time ago Olivier had caught a disgruntled worker drinking out of each bottle before disgorging and topping them up with the contents of his bladder. The normal thing, of course, would have been to empty those bottles down the drain but instead Olivier had corked them and kept them especially for the likes of greedy Gaston, who licked his lips and rubbed his blackened hands together at the prospect.

“Give me a hand to find it, will you?” Clementine commanded her sisters, then led them down to the recesses of the far alcove. It was an unpopular vein of the underground winery, that particular one, being darker and smaller at the far end than the others as though the Peine ancestors excavating it had grown shorter as they dug. Clementine fetched a lamp off the wall and held it up as they moved further into the darkness.