House of Peine (6 page)

Mathilde stubbed her cigarette out in the grass with her foot, threw her Walkman into her shoulder bag, then swinging her narrow hips with exaggerated grace she sauntered slowly past her older sister and down through the grapes, crossing the hillside and stopping on the opposite side of the row Benoît was pruning.

Clementine kept pulling at her own bunches, trying to be gentle, trying to pretend she hadn’t noticed, which was quite ridiculous. How could she not notice? So many times she had wanted to saunter up to Benoît herself but had never had the courage. Trust that precocious little madam to make it look so easy! But surely Benoît had more sense than to be sucked in by a bony young shoulder and too much eye shadow.
Please God
, prayed Clementine,
let him have more sense.

She tried to keep her attention focussed on her chardonnay grapes but could not, looking up just in time to see Mathilde fling her long skein of strawberry blonde hair in a single sweep from one side of her back to the other. Then a peel of her flirtatious laughter wafted across the hillside like tiny autumn leaves being scattered in the cool north winds. She was swivelling in a girlish fashion, both hands clasped
innocently
behind her back, and Benoît had stopped what he was doing, was standing up, wiping his brow, grinning foolishly.

“Ouch!” In her anguish, Clementine had nicked herself with the secateurs. A bright red blob of blood dropped from
her finger and wobbled on a quivering leaf before sliding lazily to the ground. Mathilde’s laughter rang out over the vines again. The tiny autumn leaves turned to crystal and fell, shattering at Clementine’s feet. Then the wind carried another harsher sound, a hearty boom, across the vines towards her. She dragged her eyes away from her bleeding finger and looked across at Benoît. His head was thrown back in obvious delight and he was laughing as though he’d never laughed before. Which for all Clementine knew, he had not. It was certainly not a sight she had yet seen nor a sound she had ever heard.

The clouds that until then had been scuttering
energetically
across the blue sky seemed to freeze, the temperature plummeted and the sound of her unrequited lover’s
amusement
faded to an almost inaudible whisper. The words, the feelings, the dreams and desires that Clementine had for so long secretly harboured swirled out of her heart in one swift gurgle and were sucked down a deep, black drain. It was unbearable. She bobbed down into a crouch, shame and rage burning her cheeks, tears of humiliation springing to her eyes. There was a rip in her now-bloodied skirt that she hadn’t noticed before; beneath it her pale leg was freckled, a patch of wiry golden hairs catching the sun. In that moment, she hated herself almost as much as she hated Mathilde.

It was a monumental moment.

Nobody would argue that Clementine had led a grim life but up until then she had not been a hateful person. She’d felt sorry for herself, of course she had. No mother, a difficult father, few friends, and a lot of hard work to do. Yet despite this, her feelings had been turned inwards. She felt unlucky, definitely; lonely, always. But it was a private matter, as far as she was concerned, plus she had champagne! Champagne that had flowed through Peine veins for centuries. And she had hope. Until the afternoon that Mathilde Peine-Myer-
Stephenson-Burroughs sauntered past her with a wiggle in her walk and a glint in her eye and made Benoît Geoffroy laugh like a carefree schoolboy, she had hope.

She stayed crouched between the vines until her leg cramped and all she could hear was silence, although that torturous laughter would ring in her ears for years. When she stood up again, they were gone and nothing would ever be the same.

Weeks after one poisonous Peine had been delivered to the other, the two of them were still weighing heavily on Christophe Paillard’s mind — and ringing in his ears. The sisters had undertaken separate and random programmes of making extremely lengthy and unpleasant phone calls to his office in Epernay.

“Yes, yes, I’m terribly sorry but there’s nothing I can do. Please listen to me, Clementine. Please.” He was currently attempting to extricate himself from one such barrage but it was proving difficult. “Yes, well,” he finally said over the top of her acrid combination of pleas and threats, “thank you and the same to you. Goodbye.” And he hung up, which only made him feel more of a toad than he already did.

The worst thing was he could not honestly begrudge her such anger. He didn’t like it, of course he didn’t, who did like being called a stunted hairball with the scruples of a gutter rat? But he understood it. Deep down, he truly understood it. She had laboured over those eight hectares of grapes her whole life: probably knew the composition of every square centimetre of
soil, could tell you how much rain had fallen during each of her 44 years, possibly counted the bubbles in every bottle, knowing her. The House of Peine was not just her home, it was her life. While having to share it with one sister should not have derailed her quite so monumentally, divvying up with a third, well, the shock of it all, the disappointment, he could imagine how much that would hurt. Her frustration had to come out somewhere, Christophe supposed, and down the line to his ear was as good a place to off-load as any (although he cursed the phone company for reconnecting the Peine line).

Mathilde’s rage was a different matter, much harder to put a finger on — not that he wanted to put a finger, nor anything else for that matter, anywhere near her. He’d learned his lesson there. No, what puzzled him about Mathilde was that she already had a home, a career, a life — a successful one by all accounts — in New York. What did she care if her share in the House of Peine was smaller than she’d anticipated? It was still a bonus to her, surely, whether it was a half or a third or a quarter. If he’d known she was going to react so violently to the news of Sophie he definitely would have told her sooner but he’d wanted to tell Mathilde and Clementine together. In fact, he’d assumed they would be pleased to find out there was another sibling. An only child himself, he’d imagined how happy he would be to find out there was a secret sister for him out there somewhere. As long as she wasn’t like either of the Peines, of course. Christophe felt a shiver run up his spine. What if Sophie was cut from the same cloth as those two? It didn’t bear thinking about. The witches of Macbeth would have nothing on such a trio of harridans.

He looked out the window of his tidy little office at the bright spring sky and sighed. He had been trying to
concentrate
on conveyancing documents for an English couple in Montvoisin when Clementine had rung but the truth was he
had been thinking of her anyway, could not get the whole sorry Peine business off his mind. It wasn’t just the calls, the matter had been haunting him ever since he drove his Renault down their dusty drive as though being chased by the ghost of Olivier himself. And in a way, he felt, he was. That was the problem. It wasn’t just the sour-as-boils sisters that irked him. They were only in this situation because of their miserable father. And it was thinking about that disagreeable old man that left Christophe with the nastiest flicker of … he coughed with embarrassment even though he was alone in his office. Yes, there was no doubt about it. Guilt. That was why he could not shake off this dismal affair quite as easily as he might have wished.

It was not a lawyer’s job to question a client in these sorts of cases, he knew that, especially when the client was an old, cantankerous soak like Olivier. Why, you couldn’t bid the man a simple
ça va
without getting an earful about the unsavoury weather conditions and the beleaguered state of this and every other nation. But now Christophe wished he’d perhaps paid more attention to what Olivier was doing with his will, offered some advice to the old curmudgeon. He should have made more of an effort, maybe, to warn Clementine what lay around the corner, to alert her to the existence of young Sophie. It wasn’t his job, it wasn’t his business, but if her own father wasn’t going to tell her that she was being sidelined, who was?

Plus, now there was absolutely no chance of being able to do so, Christophe found himself wanting to ask the old man what good could possibly come of bringing together his three alienated daughters around his crumbling near-ruin of a house and once-grand winery on the brink of collapse. It went against the laws of nature to wish that kind of disaster on your progeny. And the old barnacle had not only wished it, he’d
orchestrated it, tying the tortured troika together for yet another generation. It was monstrous, really.

Christophe was jostled out of this depressing reverie by a timid knock at his office door. His so-called secretary was not in for the week, thanks to some family drama, of which she had a seemingly endless supply.

“Come in,” he called tiredly, pulling at his collar. A scruffy boy in tartan trousers, carrying a weathered rucksack, slipped through the doorway and stood nervously against the wall.

“Monsieur Paillard?” He realised then it was not a boy at all but a girl, a young woman. “I have your business card,” she said, holding it shyly in the air. She had jet black hair which was cut short and stuck straight up from her head in chunky spikes. She was very thin with wide violet eyes circled in thick black kohl and translucent skin that gave her an innocent look despite her dark purple lipstick and a cluttered collection of rings in one ear. The punkish camouflage did not toughen her at all, Christophe thought. Quite the opposite. She seemed to him as delicate as a pearl.

“How can I help you?” he asked, intrigued. “Is it a police matter?” She was wearing a tattered leather jacket and biker boots in a tiny size. People who dressed like her rarely landed in his office without it being a police matter.

“No,” she said, “I’m not in any trouble. I’m Sophie Laroche. Or Peine, I suppose. The lawyer in Paris told me about …” she faltered. “It’s about the champagne house, you know? He said I should come to you.”

Christophe’s heart sank. The House of Peine was truly haunting him today. This strange little chick was Sophie? Those gargoyles over in Saint-Vincent-sur-Marne would chew her up and spit her out in no time at all. She was no match for them, despite her tough-nut visage, not by a long shot, he could tell that just by looking at her.

“Of course. I have been expecting you,” he said kindly, standing up and beckoning her. “For some time, yes. Although I thought you would call, but still it’s a pleasure to meet you. Please, please, come in.” She slunk across the floor and settled herself in a leather chair facing him. She took up hardly any space in it at all.

“So what can I tell you?” he asked.

“Everything,” she replied earnestly. “I want to know everything.”

He smiled. “All right, let me see, where should I start … Well, you’ve spoken to my colleague in Paris so you know that you have inherited one quarter of the House of Peine, your two sisters between them one half?”

She nodded. “Clementine and Mathilde,” she enunciated clearly, as though she had been practising their names. Christophe shuffled the Montvoisin conveyancing documents, did not meet her gaze.

“Yes indeed. And you know that the House of Peine comprises eight hectares of grapes planted in chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier; the winery where the grapes are pressed and the wine is made; the cellars where the bottles are stored as they age; and the family home?” She nodded again, solemnly.

“Then you know all there is to know, really,” Christophe spoke with a chirpiness that was not entirely authentic. “There’s not much more to say. Unless there is anything in particular …”

“You must have known him,” she said quickly. “My father. Olivier. I would like to know, well, it seems a strange question to ask, but … what was he like?”

This took Christophe by surprise. He cursed himself for being so crass as to forget to offer commiserations. “Please accept my condolences, I’m so very sorry for your loss,” he said,
trying desperately to think of something nice to say. “Your father was, um, let me see …” His mind drew blank after blank until he recalled that his mother, rather oddly he felt, had always thought kindly of crusty Olivier.

“He had a lovely head of hair,” he grasped from the recesses of his memory. Sophie waited for more, but all that followed was an uneasy silence. Christophe pulled again at his collar, feeling a sweat break out on his forehead. His summer vacation in Normandy suddenly seemed a long way away and never had he felt more in need of it.

“Monsieur Paillard?” The quiver in Sophie’s voice was enough to snap him back into business mode.

“Yes, yes,” he said, sitting up and trying to act more professionally. “I’m sorry. I was just remembering the excellent champagne your father made, Sophie. Delicious always. He was a master blender, you know, could get those three
champagne
grapes singing and dancing in perfect harmony, even after a disappointing harvest. In vintage years, well, many believe there was none better. His ’88? I only had the pleasure of tasting it once, a business lunch at Les Crayères —” (a divorce settlement in Reims that had gone particularly well) “— but I remember the taste of it to this day, the way the pinot noir lingered on the tongue. Ah. Perfect with the beef.”

Sophie was sitting forward, hanging on to his every word, and he desperately wanted to keep telling her things that would keep that glimmer in her beautiful eyes. But he remembered the scorching regret he had felt at waiting too long to deliver bad news to her sisters. Better to get it out of the way at once.

“Listen,” he started briskly, “obviously I’ve already been to Saint-Vincent-sur-Marne and had a talk with Clementine and Mathilde about the contents of your father’s will.” Could she have even the vaguest clue what lay ahead, he wondered? “Sophie, I must be honest and tell you that your sisters did not
take the news very well. Clementine worked with your father all her life, you see, and is having trouble adjusting to the thought of sharing the House of Peine with anyone else. As for Mathilde, well, perhaps she is not quite so emotionally attached but she is, um, how would you say, firmly attached nonetheless.” He saw he was losing her. She was looking bewildered, so he stopped and took a deep breath. “They did not know about you, you see, so it’s been something of a shock to learn they must split their inheritance with you. In fact, if I may speak frankly, Sophie, you should probably be prepared for some hostility. I don’t want to be disrespectful in any way but the truth is that your father, despite his lovely head of hair and magnificent skill as a vigneron, was towards the end of his life and even,
truthfully
, in the middle of it and perhaps also at the beginning — although I didn’t personally know him then — something of a difficult man and I think his daughters have inherited some of that. His other daughters, I mean. Your sisters.”

Sophie flinched and Christophe berated himself again for not treading more carefully. “Well, not so much difficult perhaps as complicated,” he added quickly. It was the obvious one-size-fits-all choice of word when it came to describing any one of the Peines. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to distress you.”

“Oh, it’s not that,” Sophie assured him. “It’s just that I didn’t know about them either. I’ve never had sisters
before
. The word seems …” She searched for a way to put it. “Funny. Not related to me.” She failed to get her own pun. “I mean for all I know, all the sisters in the world are hostile and difficult and complicated. And all the fathers.” She allowed herself a sigh. “It’s just so strange to think that the first I ever see of him he’ll be in a hole in the ground covered with dirt.”

You don’t know how lucky you are, Christophe thought. And before the day is out you’re probably going to wish your sisters were in there with him.

“I suppose you’re on your way there now,” he said brightly. “To Saint-Vincent? Do you have a car?”

Sophie laughed. “No, but I have a thumb.” She held it out in a hitchhiking gesture and Christophe looked shocked. What harm would come to this little poppet before she even got to her sisters?

“I won’t hear of it,” he said. “Wait till four and I will give you a ride there myself.” He was expecting a call from the Montvoisin husband, otherwise he would have taken her straight away. “A young girl like yourself out there on the roads, even here in Champagne, it’s just not safe.”

Sophie stood up and smiled at him. “Thank you all the same but I think I’ll go now,” she said. “You don’t need to worry about me, you know, Monsieur Paillard, I’m not a young girl and I can look after myself. I’ve been doing it for a long time and I’m really quite good at it.” There was not the slightest suggestion that he should feel sorry for her. In fact, her tone was quite upbeat and optimistic. But he remembered the breadboard fast approaching Mathilde’s head and wondered just how long she would stay that way.

“If you’re sure,” he said, “but please promise me that you’ll be careful. And if there’s ever anything I can do for you, well, you have my card. Will you call me?” She nodded.

“There is one thing,” she said, awkwardly. “I don’t have a map and there doesn’t seem much point in buying one since I only need to know the way to Saint-Vincent-sur-Marne once.”

“Oh, there are plenty of road signs,” Christophe told her. “Just head for Oeuilly and once you’re past it you will see the statue of Saint Vincent up on the hill to your left. Take that turn and the House of Peine is on the main road just before you reach the town. Very grand blue gates, although a little past their prime.”

“So that’s west?” she asked.

“Yes, yes, take the N3.”

“Off the roundabout with the wickerwork sculpture?”

“The N3, yes, like I say, but please, be careful, Sophie. It’s been a pleasure to meet you. Take care and good luck. Yes, indeed. The best of luck.”