House of Peine (21 page)

“How could you do that, Mathilde?” Clementine hissed
furiously
as they huddled together, away from Gaston's prying ears, the lamp throwing light across a collection of lumpy stacks covered with an old oilcloth at the dead end of the tunnel. “How could you tell Benoît? And now, on top of our livelihood being snatched away from us by his wife — oh my Lord, Odile! — that idiot Gaston knows my secret, so by the end of the day, everybody else will know it too. After nearly 20 years. I can't bear it, Mathilde. I thought my life was bad before but it's only going to get worse. Who would have believed that was possible? Nobody, that's who. I can't breathe. Sophie, I can't breathe. I think I'm going to faint.”

“Calm down, 'Mentine,” urged Sophie. “Take a deep breath.”

“I know you won't be able to forgive me,” Mathilde
whispered
. “Forgiveness does not seem to come naturally to the Peines. But you have to believe me when I tell you I thought I was doing a good thing, a kind thing.”

“Well, next time you want to do a kind thing,”
Clementine's voice was rising, “just disembowel me with a blunt knife or shoot me and leave me to bleed slowly to death and be eaten by rats.”

“Oh, for God's sake, stick a sock in the melodramatics, Clementine. Yes, I've made a mistake, a big one, and it's led to a few more but let's not forget the bottom line, we are all in this together.”

“You can shove your bottom line where the sun doesn't shine,” Clementine hissed. “We never even had a bottom line till you turned up.”

“Please, it's so musty and cold back here,” broke in Sophie, trying as usual to appease her sisters. “Let's find what we are looking for and get on with it. Are we going to give Gaston some of this wine here, Clementine?”

“No, we're not going to give that larrikin real Peine
champagne
. What a waste! Olivier kept some champagne down here specially for the likes of him. We'll have to force feed that
blabbermouth
every last drop of it if I'm to survive this day with even a shred of dignity. Oh, Mathilde, why would you do this to me? Why has this happened? I curse that randy old father of ours, lumping me with you like this. How he must have despised me!”

“Oh, please don't be like this, 'Mentine,” begged Sophie. She hated to see her sister seek refuge in her old angry armour. “It's not Olivier's fault.”

“Yes it is,” insisted Clementine. “He fathered us and
abandoned
us, each one of us, whichever way you look at it. I might have lived with him but he wasn't here, not for me, anyway. I felt his absence more than either of you, I bet I did, because I sat across the table from it. But he never saw me, Sophie, he never once saw me, who I was or what I might have become. He gave me nothing! And he gave you nothing either.”

“You think you had it so bad, you selfish cow,” Mathilde
interrupted. “He ignored me for the first 17 years of my life, then brought me here to ignore me again then sent me away only to ignore me some more. And in the meantime, I've been ignored by four other so-called fathers.”

“At least you know the meaning of the word,” cried Sophie in an uncustomarily raised voice. “I don't even know what he looked like, what he sounded like, what made him the way he was.”

“That's pathetic,” said Mathilde. “You should count yourself lucky.”

“Don't you call her pathetic,” shouted Clementine. She was hunched over in the tight space, comical in her anger in such a position. “You've no right, absolutely no right.” She was pointing at Mathilde, waggling an accusing finger which forced her sister to step back further, upon which she banged her head on the low curved ceiling, then lost her footing and fell on the oilskin-covered pile. An old chair cracked and fell apart beneath her, a rotten wooden box spewed out old
pétanque
balls, a collection of bottles clinked and fell noisily to the ground, breaking and leaking on the cold stone floor.

“You vile wretch,” Mathilde cawed, trying to stand up, turning to see what mess she had landed on. But as soon as she faced the wall, her hand dropped away from the bump that was forming on her crown. “A white cross,” she said in quiet amazement. “Look, you two, look! It's a white cross.”

“In the middle of my darkest hour she talks crosses,” cried Clementine. “Oh, just like you to find religion at a time like this. How convenient. You will be the end of me, Mathilde. The very end.”

“No, you don't understand,” answered Mathilde, the anger gone now from her voice, her fingers scrabbling at the wall behind the deconstructed pile. “It's a white cross. Like the red cross and the blue. Remember?”

Sophie moved to her side, holding up the lamp to illuminate the cross. “'A red cross for the nursing station, a blue cross for the soup line, a white cross for a hidey-hole.'” She turned to Clementine. “That's what La Petite said about les crayères at Moët, 'Mentine. Remember? That a white cross marked a hiding place. This is definitely a white cross. What on earth can it mean? Do you think she was trying to tell us something?”

“Yes, she was our fairy godmother and she has left us a trunk of pirate's gold,” scoffed Clementine, but she shuffled closer nonetheless.

“Look! I don't think this wall is chalk, 'Mentine, can you see?” Sophie was rubbing furiously at the cross with her sleeve. “It's a different colour. And these ridges, they could be bricks.”

“Don't be so ridiculous,” Clementine harrumphed, but she peered closer to the wall. Sophie was right. The wall on which the white cross had been painted was a different colour and as her sister rubbed, an outline of stacked bricks was indeed emerging. Clementine shuffled back and got another lamp, then joined Sophie and Mathilde in clearing a wider arc around the cross until they came to the places where the brickwork met the chalk. After five minutes of somewhat frenzied attack, their movements sweeping across a bigger and bigger area, they stood back. They had exposed an archway that was clearly the closed-up opening to another smaller finger of the cave.

“‘Brick by brick',” Sophie breathed. “That's what La Petite said. They were her last words. Mathilde, you remember? She said some secrets need to be uncovered brick by brick.”

Mathilde shuddered. “I'm with Clementine on the fairy godmother front,” she said. “I don't think those things happen in real life. In my experience, secrets usually mean bad news not good news.”

“Mine too,” Clementine said, adding somewhat spitefully: “Knowing Olivier, he's probably got a dozen other wives buried in there.”

“Oh, don't be so grumpy,” cried Sophie. “Please, let's just find out. Clementine, how do we take down the bricks?”

“How would I know? This is the first bricked-up
hiding-place
full of pirate's gold I've ever come across, if you must know. I'm a little at a loss as how best to plunder it.”

Mathilde, her curiosity piqued and her pragmatism in full working order, took the lead. “We need to find the Cuvée Supérieure,” she said, “and start feeding it to Gaston. He already knows too much and we don't want him knowing this as well. Then we need to get a pickaxe and a sledgehammer from his fire truck and start smashing down these bricks.”

“Obviously not the first bricked-up hiding-place she has ever come across,” Clementine grumbled as she located a box of the dusty pissed-in bubbly and dragged it out from behind a broken wine barrel. “I should have known.”

Within the hour Gaston had polished off his first bottle (“a delicate drop, quite
piquant
— I can see why Olivier kept it to himself”) and was starting on his second. Edie had been employed to lure him into a game of pétanque in the courtyard while the three sisters plundered his truck for tools and scurried back to the cave.

Sophie attempted the first swing of the pickaxe but just about fell over backwards such was the weight of it. Her sisters watched on sceptically as she had a second go and a third. Then Clementine snatched the heavy tool away from her and took out the best part of a whole brick with one single swipe. Mathilde then instructed Sophie to find a wheelbarrow and a shovel and while Clementine hacked at the bricked-up entrance, the other two cleared away the debris. After an hour, a small hole had formed in the middle of the archway, enough
to make it clear that there was an empty space behind the bricks, that a secret was indeed being uncovered. They fought over the right to peer through the small gap, but could see nothing but darkness so Clementine kept going until it was big enough for Sophie to stick her head through. Still, she could see very little. It smelled musty, she said, and sad,
whatever
that meant, but was still too dark. Again Clementine, tired now, smashed at the wall until the hole was bigger still, then Mathilde was despatched up to Gaston's truck to filch a torch as the lamps were not shining any light on the contents of the secret cave.

When she returned, their three heads gathered to shine the beam through into the hiding place. It was another alcove, similar in shape to the tunnel in which they were standing but on an even smaller scale. And on each side lay row upon row of champagne.

“What the …?” Clementine could barely believe her eyes. She knew that many Champenois had bricked up secret supplies of champagne during the Occupation but those hiding places had been pretty smartly revealed the moment the German threat was gone. Why would Olivier still have
champagne
hidden? It didn't make sense.

With renewed vigour, she attacked the bricks again until the hole was big enough for Sophie to squeeze through.

“Get in,” Clementine insisted, giving the littlest Peine sister a push.

“Yes, hop to it,” added Mathilde. She was as intrigued by the mystery as anyone in their right mind would be but also by the possibility that a secret stash of champagne could indeed turn out to be their miracle.

And it was. But in more ways than any of them could ever have imagined.

“Well, come on,” Clementine urged through the hole as
Sophie, crouched in the darkness, gingerly pulled out a dusty bottle from the rack nearest her. “What is it?”

“Oh my,” Sophie cried, shining the torch on the label and promptly bursting into tears. “Oh my, Clementine. I'm not sure but I think ….Oh my!”

“Pull yourself together, girl,” Mathilde barked. “What is it? Hand it here.”

Sophie, the torch beam shining on her as tears streamed spookily down her face, passed the bottle through the hole to Mathilde, who blew the dust off the label, her jaw dropping to her chest as she saw what it read.

“Oh my,” she echoed and looked up at Clementine. “It's for you.”

Clementine took the bottle from her and turned it up to the light so she could see it too.

It was a bottle of 1961 vintage. And it was called
Cuvée Clementine.

Stunned, she turned the bottle around.

“A magnificent, sensual wine of uncompromising strength,” read the tasting note on the back label. “Dominated by the pinot noir grape, this is a plump, generous champagne that may prove too powerful for some but will reward those who persevere through the sharp notes with the warmth of what lies beneath. Made with love by Olivier Peine.”

“There are hundreds of bottles of it,” Sophie said, from the hole. “Hundreds. And — oh my!”

She handed a bottle of
Cuvée Mathilde
, 1970, out through the hole.

“A wine with the utmost finesse,” Mathilde read, her bottom lip wobbling, “and a lingering elegance. Mostly chardonnay, this champagne will age with grace and beauty, revealing a rare softness and maturity that will pave the way for future vintages. Made with love by Olivier Peine.”

She looked at Clementine, her eyes glistening, unable to speak.

“Is there one there for you, Sophie?” Clementine asked, her voice distorted with emotion, through the hole. “Is there a '79?”

All they heard was a wail and a sniffle. Then another bottle was handed through. “Read it to me, will you?” the littlest Peine asked in a tiny voice.

“A clever champagne of hidden depth,” Mathilde read out in a shaky voice. “Pinot meunier is often underrated but in this blend, the fresh fruity spirit of this delightful grape emerges strong and triumphant for all to adore. A truly rare gem. Made with love by Oliver Peine.”

Sophie stuck her face through the hole in the bricks. She had cobwebs in her hair and dust on her face but she had never looked more beautiful.

“Don't you see?” she wept, looking from one sister to the other. “He did see you, Clementine, what you were and what you would become. And he saw Mathilde and me as well. He did give us something. He really did.”

There was no other sound then but for the weeping of three children, all grown up now, but desperate just the same for proof that the father they never knew had in his own peculiar way truly, madly, deeply cared for them.