House of Peine (3 page)

Once upon a time this trilling had been a silent barrier in Clementine’s head to deflect particularly painful thoughts. Somewhere along the line, though, the previously noiseless notes had slipped out through her plump ruby lips into the world of sound and, sadly for her, there had been no one there to tell her to shove them back in again. Now, they were like a tic over which she had little control — if in fact she even noticed them.

“La-a-a-a!” her sweet voice tickled the breeze again as Laure’s youngest tumbled out the front door and fell onto her chubby toddler knees, golden curls tumbling down baby shoulders. “La-a-a-a!”

There were so many things about which Clementine simply could not bear to think.

Around the corner from the house full of children, the road straightened and midway along it stood Saint Vincent, patron saint of winemakers. His stonily compassionate smile loomed 60 feet above her as Clementine cycled by, his arms
benevolently
outstretched above the valley. She had no particular fondness for him personally but nonetheless as she passed him those motionless arms seemed to swing down and somehow snatch away the Marne Valley mist she carried unwittingly on her shoulders, sweeping it from her like a matador's cape.

Her vile mood instantly evaporated but this was hardly a religious experience; to her Saint Vincent was just a
punctuation
mark on the road from the village. On one side of him lay the close-knit community of which Clementine was not a part, full of the friends she did not have, the good times she had never enjoyed. But beyond him, to her right, marching neatly up the hillside like long lines of obedient brown soldiers, lay her true and faithful
amies
. Her grapevines. In this case, the robust and fruity
pinot meunier.
Whether bare or snow-covered as they stood in the winter, woody and hopeful
as they were now, or green and heaving with late summer fruit, the first sight of the family vines always gave her the same pleasant burr of satisfaction.

Actually, other vignerons, especially in Champagne, might have gone so far as to feel joy at such a sight; after all they were in the business of making the world's famously effervescent celebratory drink. But while Clementine had spent her whole life living, breathing, making, and, yes, drinking the glorious sparkling elixir that imbued the rest of the human race with gaiety and exuberance, and while she undeniably loved those grapes more than she loved anything else, she herself could not claim so much as a single bubbly bone in her body. Not a bubble of any kind in any part of her, for that matter. For reasons that stretched far into the past, Clementine was as flat as a glass of Marne River water. A pleasant burr of satisfaction was as good as it got. She simply knew nothing more.

She slowed the pump of those shapely legs on the pedals and let her bicycle cruise as her eyes lingered over the fruits of her labours. These vines up on the hill had been barely touched by the frost and anyway pinot meunier was tough, it could take it. She wasn't worried about them. But in her other parcels of land at the bottom of the valley? Fear nipped at her
satisfaction
. Her pinot noir grapes did not have the resilience of their meunier cousins. They were not at all thick-skinned, they were sensitive and precious. You could taste it in the finished product, that's why the extra effort in mollycoddling them through to harvest was worth it, more than worth it. Still, thought Clementine, guiding those grapes through the
minefield
of seasonal aberrations was not a job for the faint-hearted. She had no time to dilly-dally and feel a burr of anything. What was she thinking? Winemakers, when it came down to it, were farmers, working always against the whims of nature, especially here in the north. There was a good reason why no
one else on the globe (except a small handful of Germans, some ninnies in England and a group of upstarts in Denmark) attempted grape growing at this latitude. Unless you knew exactly what you were doing it was a fool's game. Even when you did know what you were doing you needed good luck in large quantities. And it could not be said that Olivier Peine had been known for his luck. Well, he was hardly having a good month.

Clementine sped up again, her muscles singing, and looked down the hill to another Peine plot, near the river.

To a casual passer-by, this part of the Saint-Vincent-sur-Marne hillside may have looked like one solid brown undulating blanket of grapevines separated only by the odd chalky pathway but in fact it was no such thing. It was instead a monochrome mosaic of different villagers' grapes. If that same passer-by looked closely enough, he might notice that the colour, size or material of the posts varied from plot to plot, that grass grew between some vines, tangled weeds between others, pruning clippings lay between the grapes over there, but the ground was bare between those ones there. So it was in Champagne. One vigneron might tend his 20 rows a certain way while his neighbour, not spitting distance away, might do it completely differently and his neighbour, not half spitting distance away, might do it differently again.

The Peines had their 19 separate parcels of grapes dotted along the hillside and down in the valley. They used metal posts and grew grass in the rows, which Olivier believed helped the vines grow deeper in the ground for extra
nourishment
. The Labordes had a dozen plots, as did the Feneuils; the Geoffroys (the name flitted through her mind like a moth — would she ever not feel a lurch at the thought of it?) had 17; and there were many more village vignerons who didn't make their own wine but sold their grapes to Moët and Veuve
Clicquot or, Clementine's heart skipped a beat, to Krug, the king of champagnes.

Oh, how she dreamed of producing just once in her life a vintage wine to rival Krug's Clos du Mesnil, probably the most talked about, least-tasted champagne in the world. She had sampled it just once, at a tasting in Epernay many years before when she and Olivier were still included in such events. Sometimes to this day she woke up with the taste of those
chardonnay
bubbles on her tongue. And then there was the Vieilles Vignes Françaises, Bollinger's ode to champagne the way it was before the phylloxera louse got to most of France's native vines. She had tasted that Bollinger
blanc de noirs
only once too. “Laa-a-a!”

The thing was, Clementine considered, returning to the safe subject of her one true reliable passion, Peine champagne was good, she knew that. She knew it in the same way François Peine had known it when he first grew his grapes and bottled their juice back in 1697 when bubbles were still considered a mistake. She knew the modern Peine champagne was every bit as good if not better than that of most
grandes marques
. Saint-Vincent-sur-Marne was a
cru
village after all — every single grape rated near perfect on the official scale of quality.

They would never have the kudos of Krug or Bollinger, of course they wouldn't, but both those houses made their
champagne
using grapes bought in from independent growers. No big champagne house owned enough land to grow all its own grapes. Why, some big champagne houses owned no land at all! Bought every last berry from someone else! At the House of Peine, on the other hand, every last drop in every last bottle came from a vine tended by no other hand than Clementine's. She knew each row of vines by name and nearly every plant by character. She helped pick them, she pressed them, she coaxed their juice into barrels and their wine into bottles. She choreographed
almost every last bubble. She might never have the kudos of her famous rivals, but she truly believed she had a champagne that was every bit as good — if not better.

Of course, her famous rivals had been busy pouring their resources into making sure the world knew about their product, which the House of Peine had not. Instead, Olivier had stayed in his underground cave chiselled out of the chalky earth where, never mind the world, there wasn't even a window. The rest of the universe could go to hell in a hand basket as far as he had been concerned. It certainly wasn't going to find out about the deliciously nutty notes of the '98 nor taste the strawberry highlights of the last rosé. Not with Olivier at the helm. The Krugs and Bollingers had left the House of Peine far behind in this regard and Clementine knew she could never catch up. But she could at least start trying now that the House of Peine was hers.

Her confidence in this matter had grown, as it happened, since the night of the frost, when her loneliness had closed in on her like a fog. In the few short days since Olivier's demise, Clementine had come to realise that without him, the House of Peine actually had more of a future than she could ever remember. Her mornings were no longer hampered by her father's hungover mumblings, his brusque instructions; her afternoons no longer pockmarked with worry about him humiliating her in the street or being squashed by a falling barrel.

It had slowly dawned on her that without the
curmudgeonly
obstacle of her complicated father she could do whatever she wanted. And what she wanted was to see the House of Peine return to the glory days of previous centuries, when Russian tsars had begged for it, English kings had toasted with it, and her Peine ancestors had walked the streets of Champagne with their heads held high.

In fact, it was what she had been waiting for her whole long lonely life; it was why her time on this particular square of often bleak and battle-scarred earth was not a waste; it was the reason she got up in the morning.

“Good-bye, Papa,” she shouted into the crisp quiet air, tears drying on her cheeks before she could even feel them. “And good riddance!” The dark prince of Peine was dead, long live the queen!

At this she felt an infinitesimal pull on her handlebars, which seemed to point her in the direction of her little unborn berry babies down near the river. Clementine let the bike take her where it wanted to go, crossing the road and squinting down the hill towards her nearest plot of pinot noir. Could it be? Her heart skipped a beat. Was she imagining it or was there an almost invisible green tinge to the dull woody
brownness
of her naked vines?

Her heart sped up again as she veered off the tarmac and into the vines, Cochon bringing up the rear, her bicycle flying faster and faster down between two rows of Feneuil pinot, her body bumping and jiggling over the rough ground, her pinched waistband forgotten, her eyes fixed on her own canes. The gentle breeze colluded with her downhill speed and picked up her orange curls, unfurling them behind her like a cartoon character as she bounced through the vines, her open coat flapping noisily, flirting dangerously with the greasy chain of her bike.

In her haste, however, she forgot about the stones that Olivier had recently moved after an entirely unnecessary argument with Henri Feneuil, to mark where their grapes stopped and the Peine ones started. Her front wheel, its tyre long due for more air, hit one such rock at just the right angle for the bike to come instantly to a standstill. Clementine was not so lucky. She flew through the air like a giant navy-blue
juggling ball, landing flat on her back quite some distance from her bicycle with a noise not unlike a hot-air balloon in an emergency deflation.

She lay there for a moment, wondering if she was dead. But everything hurt and she was pretty sure that the whole point of being dead was that nothing hurt at all. Slowly, still winded, she attempted to sit up, in so doing turning around to face her pinot noir canes at eye level. At this, the breath disappeared from her lungs once more, but her pain vanished and a smile launched itself across her face, completely changing the nature of her looks.

To her pinot noir, she looked beautiful.

And to her, so did they. Her eyes had not been deceiving her from the road. There had been the vaguest tinge of green.
Débourrement
! Bud burst! Each little knot on every single cane had broken into the tiniest of songs. All was not lost. The frost had killed nothing but Olivier. And now, on the very day his body had been committed to the ground, new life had been breathed into her vines.

Clementine collapsed back on the grass and laughed. How she laughed!

It was a sound the vines hardly ever got to hear. And it warmed them as much as the glorious spring sunshine, which chose that exact moment to make its first truly serious appearance.

Once spring had wriggled out beyond the clutches of winter, everything about the valley changed.

It could be a bleak place in the cooler months, prompting many a thin-lipped tourist who hadn’t done his or her homework to murmur bitter asides to the effect that they didn’t care how delicious champagne tasted, Provence was much nicer this time of year.

But come mid-May, the Marne Valley bloomed with hope. Those dry dark vines, having slept through the snow, survived the first frosts and gone on to give birth to millions of tiny buds, now sent supple green shoots out into the world, turning the landscape from dull brown and off-white to a kaleidoscope of brilliant jades and emeralds.

Clementine was down in the cellar riddling; twisting and turning the resting champagne bottles to dislodge their yeasty sediment from the bottom of the bottle into the neck from whence it would eventually be disgorged. Once upon a time, riddling — or
remuage
as it was known — had been a revered profession, passed down from father to son, but as with many
of the old ways, those days were long gone. Now most of the fathers were dead or arthritic and the sons worked in IT in Paris.

There was still old Nicolas Bateau in Hautvillers if anyone looked hard enough, but it was common knowledge his hands were so crippled he was merely wheeled out to rattle the bottles for goggle-eyed visitors. The Bateau champagne, like most, was actually riddled in a jointly owned mechanical
gyropalette
, which did in eight days what took human hands eight weeks.

As one might imagine, Clementine would not cross the street to spit on a gyropalette. Always a stickler for tradition, she riddled the bottles herself and unlike other vignerons who could not afford any alternative, she liked it. It gave her a chance to reacquaint herself with her grape juice, she felt. It had been pretty much ignored for the years it had lain in the cave inventing its own bubbles, after all, and deserved a bit of one-on-one attention.

Standing in front of the wooden racks or
pupitres
full of bottles, arms outstretched as her hands moved back and forth, up and down, wrists flicking in perfect harmony, she often felt like a passionate conductor leading her favourite orchestra in a movement of enormous importance and beauty.

More than three hours on the trot, however, and all she could hear were bum notes and out-of-tune instruments, which was why on this particular perfect spring day she decided a little something custardy was required to help her through to lunch. The off-key music of her bottles still ringing in her ears as she emerged into the courtyard, she stopped for a moment just to feel the sun on her face, to breathe in the fresh air. Then she jumped on her bike to head for the pâtisserie and whatever Bernadette had on offer. Cochon, hearing the bicycle start its noisy trip across the courtyard potholes, shook himself awake
from his position under the kitchen table and started after her.

At the bottom of the drive, however, they struck a snag. The once magnificent gates to the House of Peine refused to open. Clementine had to get off her bicycle and clatter and jangle them for quite some time, employing a smorgasbord of different expletives as she did so. This excited Cochon beyond belief — he so enjoyed a temper tantrum — but just when she was thinking she’d have to go back to the kitchen and settle for a stale baguette with a dollop of thyme honey, the gates begrudgingly creaked open and let them out.

Once on the other side, having heaved them shut again, she dropped her bike and stood back with a critical eye. Cochon, who was in the mood for a little pastry something himself, flopped huffily onto the ground at her feet, one black eye rolling upwards as it followed her line of vision. Same old gates, as far as he could tell, but for Clementine it seemed that now there was the possibility, no, the promise of change in the wind, she was seeing all the same old things in an entirely different light.

The entrance to a home was like the cover of a book, she decided, standing there, sweaty hands on sturdy hips: no matter what anyone said, it told you all you needed to know about what lay inside. And looking at the entrance to the House of Peine, well, truthfully, the story was a sad one, most likely titled “Has Seen Better Days”. The ridiculously ornate gates stood five metres tall, delicate curlicues fanning
extravagantly
far above her. Once they had been a particularly becoming sky blue but rust was now the predominant shade, the paint long since bubbled and flaked off into the ether. What’s more, the artisan ironwork stretched for five metres either side of the gates but then ran out to be replaced by an anaemic hedge that had once been tall and lush but was now crippled and spare with big bald patches where whole herds of
animals — or people — could step through if they wanted to, which of course they didn’t.

The château, half a kilometre back up the bumpy gravel drive, was another picture that painted a thousand words and told a barely happier story. Clementine squinted through the gates at her home for the past 44 years. It was golden brick and stood three storeys high (if you counted the attic floor with its cheerful collection of chimney stacks and dormer windows). From a distance, the bones of the house were as good as they had ever been but close up the impression was far less
flattering
. Nearly half the upstairs windows were boarded, the glass long since broken with no hope of being repaired. Many of the shutters hung crookedly off their hinges and grassy weeds grew enthusiastically out of the blocked guttering. The original front door had been in disrepair for decades, old slats from wooden packing crates nailed haphazardly across it to stop cracks from getting bigger and to keep draughts at bay — a losing battle as far as Clementine could fathom. Up closer still there was not even a door handle, just an old screwdriver in an empty geranium pot that one poked in the hole and wriggled to gain entry. There was no bell, no door knocker either, though Olivier had long ago scared away anyone who might come to visit and Clementine did not have the skill nor the inclination to get them back.

Should that thin-lipped tourist happen to pass by, all this would be lost on him or her, it must be said. Why, in many ways, from a distance, the House of Peine looked like the perfect French fairytale castle. A grand dame of a château draped in the rich green cloth of her vines. That tourist might even forget disappointment about the general lack of charm in this part of the country and pull over to the side of the road, commenting that they saw something just like this house in the
New York Times
magazine. Or they might take a photo
through the gates to catch the colour of the shutters so they could go home to their London flat and paint the outdoor furniture that exact shade.

From where Clementine stood, having lived there all her life and planning on staying, it looked more like an abandoned ship that had been looted by pirates and left, full of nothing but ghosts, forlorn and becalmed on a luscious green sea.

Still, it was afloat, wasn’t it, she thought, the promise of her future bringing a smile to her face as she reached down and grabbed the handlebars of her bike, Cochon jumping daintily to attention. And it would sail once again. She might even get a sign put up, a notice to the world that she was seriously back in the business. She had to cellar the recently bottled
champagne
first, of course, keep riddling the previous year’s, disgorge it when she had time, cellar that, take stock of Olivier’s reserves, look at the accounts — about which she knew absolutely nothing — and sort out some help to replace those useless twins. Actually, the sign would have to wait. She had a lot of work to do before the end of September and the
vendange
, the harvest.

No wonder I am starving, she thought happily, licking her lips. But before she could throw that strangely graceful leg over her saddle and head towards Bernadette’s
financiers
, Christophe Paillard’s bright red Renault careened around the corner, veering wildly into the loose gravel beside her as he threw on the brakes, a cloud of dust enveloping her and her little horse.

“Mind what you are doing, you stupid oaf,” she growled as he cut the motor. She’d met him many times before; he had too much chest hair for her liking (it poked up above his shirt collar like an unmown lawn), but worse than that he was a lackey of Old Man Joliet, who sent him around periodically to sniff out the chance of a land sale. “And for the last time the
answer is no.” She slapped furiously at the grime on her clothes, coughing and half blinded as she heard him open and close his car door. “No, no, a thousand times no. How many times do I have to say it before you get it through your thick skull?”

Another door opened and shut, this time with a sharp slam. “Well, well, well,” purred a velvety feminine voice, “will you look what we have here? All these years, Clementine, and you still look like something the cat dragged in.”

Clementine’s blood ran cold. She stopped brushing away the dirt, her hands falling uselessly to her sides. Surely, it couldn’t be …? No. It was impossible. She was dreaming. But that voice, that tone, the tension that tingled in the air between them. She peered through the falling dust, blinking stupidly at the vision of sophistication that had stepped away from the car and was standing still beside it, a tall, rail-thin blonde in caramel stilettos, a cream trench belted tightly around her tiny waist, arms crossed in front of her, red nails gleaming, red lips gathered in a perfect contemptuous smirk.

There was no doubt about it. “Mathilde,” Clementine gasped. She had not seen Mathilde for 18 years, not since the evil wench had ruined her life in more ways than she would ever, could ever know. And while the skin may have grown over those wounds and hardened into scars, it felt to Clementine that she was simply splitting open in all the same old places, as though no time whatsoever had passed, let alone almost two decades. “Whatever you want,” she cried, “you’re not having it. Go away!”

“Jesus, what the hell is that thing?” Mathilde, ignoring her, pointed an elegant finger at Cochon, who was pig-rooting in the dust beside his owner. “Monsieur Paillard, you didn’t mention she’d spawned.”

Christophe started to object but was interrupted by
Clementine. “La-a-a-a!” she cried in her sing-song falsetto. “La-a-a-a!”

“Do you mind?” Mathilde grimaced. “Some of us are fond of our eardrums, you know.”

“Leave,” cried Clementine. “Go away. Go on. Get out of my sight before I call the police and have you arrested for, for …”

“Ladies, please,” implored Christophe. “Is this really necessary?”

“Have me arrested for what, exactly?” Mathilde smiled languidly as she patiently inspected a large diamond ring on her slender wedding finger.

“For being a filthy tramp and a thief and a trespasser, that’s what!” Clementine exclaimed. “You’re nothing but a —”

“Now, now, Clementine,” Christophe said, more forcefully this time. He stepped towards her and waved a podgy hand in the air as if attempting to slow traffic but Mathilde, unconcerned, just laughed her old tinkly laugh.

“Don’t worry, Monsieur,” she said soothingly. “If I remember rightly she just needs to let off steam every five or six minutes. You know, like a big, fat, old black kettle.”

Eighteen years and like that she could bring tears to Clementine’s eyes. Tears that usually were tucked down neat inside her, buried beneath the tune of turning bottles, the click of pruning shears, the chatter of dancing bubbles.

“Tramp,” she mumbled, turning around, refusing to give Mathilde the satisfaction of seeing what effect she had had. “Thief.” Like a vampire, if Mathilde knew what blood she had already drawn she would not stop until the last drop was sucked out. Abandoning her trip to the pâtisserie Clementine dragged her bike clumsily over to the gates and attempted to open them, Cochon bringing up the rear so closely she could feel his enthusiastic nose against the back of her knee. “I don’t want to see you,” she said, her hands shaking as she fumbled with
the rusty gate. “I don’t know what you’re doing here but you’re not welcome in my home. You had your chance, Mathilde, and you didn’t want it. You threw it away. All those years ago, you threw it away and nothing has changed since then. Nothing will ever change. Just go away and leave me alone!”

But the gates would not allow her a dignified escape. Instead, they remained stubbornly closed as she desperately rattled them, her bike sliding off her hip to the ground, Cochon rearing up and nudging her bottom just to add to her humiliation.

Christophe slipped in beside her, using his squat hairy bulk to assist her with the recalcitrant ironwork.

“It’s not quite that simple, I’m afraid, Clementine,” he said gently. “It’s not a matter of taking chances or throwing things away, as you must well know. Your sister and I —”

“Half-sister!” Clementine corrected, twisting around and ending up with her face pressed very nearly in his sweating armpit. “Half-sister!”

“Very well,” Christophe agreed patiently as the gate finally relented and allowed itself to be pushed open, “your half-sister and I need to come inside and talk to you. That is, I need to come inside and talk to you both. I’m sorry, Clementine, really I am. I thought perhaps Father Philippe might have prepared you for this. I spoke to him as soon as I made contact with Mathilde but —”

“What do you mean?” Clementine demanded, her teeth starting to chatter, her fear out in the open, naked and undisguised. “Prepared me? Prepared me for what?”

“I’m sorry,” Christophe repeated, “but I’ve been trying to reach you. I’ve called, I’ve sent letters.” He noticed, at that moment, the soggy pile of unopened envelopes lying on the grass inside the rusty gates. “Really, Clementine, this need not have come as such a shock.”