House of Peine (7 page)

A house painter from St Thierry dropped Sophie at the gates of the Peine property some time later that afternoon and she stood on the roadside marvelling at them. She didn’t notice the rust or the threadbare hedge, just the beautifully ornate ironwork and the neat rows of lush vines that grew on the gradual slope leading up to the château.

With a quickening heart she slipped through the gates (not recalcitrant for her at all, quite welcoming in fact) and tramped up the drive, stopping in front of the badly patched front door to catch her breath and collect her thoughts.

Eventually, she rapped timidly on the boards. When no one answered, she applied herself more robustly, again and again, until finally she heard high heels clicking their way towards her.

“What do you want?” Mathilde demanded upon wrenching open the stubborn door, looking her up and down and clearly finding her lacking. “We have enough problems here without the village urchin showing up to scrounge for cash. Shoo. Get lost.” And she slammed the door in Sophie’s face.

But it was not the first door that had shut swiftly within an inch of her nose and Sophie had more reason than most to want it to open again. Once more, she knocked. And once more. And once more.

“I’ve already told you,” Mathilde said angrily when she finally jerked it open a second time. “Go away or I’ll call the
gendarmes
.” She was about to slam the door again when Sophie stepped forward and put one small booted foot in the way.

“But I’m Sophie,” she said. “The other sister.”

Had she been expecting a warm welcome, a joyful embrace, an instant clasping into the family bosom, she would have been stiff out of luck, as Clementine might say. Luckily for her, she arrived on that doorstep armed not only with Christophe’s recent warning but, thanks to her experience in life so far, fairly low expectations.

Of course she felt nervous, who wouldn’t? Barging into a totally foreign world belonging quite rightfully to someone else would churn up even the sturdiest of innards and hers were no exception. However Sophie was somewhat practised in the art of being on the back foot and approached this threat of danger as she did all others: with expert watchfulness.

Mathilde, she saw instantly, was one of those spoiled wealthy women who had everything but happiness. She’d met many such matrons in Paris and they all had that same expression on their faces, one of smoothed surgical satisfaction — yet there was a hunted expression in the eyes that suggested all was not as it should be nor probably ever could be. Mathilde was very thin, very beautiful, spent a lot of money on her hair, and was used to being loved but didn’t feel the need to return it. There would be a rich husband somewhere, Sophie picked, who adored her but most likely sought affection elsewhere.

In some ways Clementine was harder to categorise. After following Mathilde down the imposing hallway of the big
house to the kitchen, Sophie came upon her eldest sister sitting hunched at the table feasting on a thick
mille-feuille
while a strange dog sat at her feet waiting for pastry flakes.

“Sophie,” Mathilde said rudely by way of an introduction, with a disdainful raise of her perfectly plucked eyebrows. “The other sister. You know, the one we have been wanting so desperately to meet.”

Clementine looked at the newcomer, eyes dark and distrustful, as she stuffed another bite of the custard slice into her mouth with weathered hands. The dog scrabbled out from under the table and turned out to be a tiny horse. Sophie laughed delightedly and the horse trit-trotted straight over to her and rubbed the flat space between its eyes on her leg in welcome.

“Cochon!” scolded Clementine, but the horse kept rubbing. “Cochon!” A horse the size of a dog that was named for a pig? Sophie could not help her amusement but it was clearly not infectious. Clementine did not look amused, she looked positively terrified. But of what? Of whom? And she was unhappy, too, but her unhappiness lay deeper. Much deeper. She didn’t wear it like a prickly shield the way Mathilde did. What she did wear, though, was not much of an improvement. She dressed like a person much older and larger than she was, layers of lumpy loud patterns doing nothing for a passable figure; untamed curls and no make-up turning a pretty face into a bland canvas decorated only with discontent. Clementine was not used to being loved. She had no husband, knew nothing of affection. Sophie could see that in her straight away. Such misery!

Of course, she had every right to be miserable; so did Mathilde — their father had died after all. Sophie felt unhappy about this herself and she had never even met him.

“I know this must be a terrible time for you both,” she
said, pushing the little horse away gently and sitting herself on a wobbly chair at the end of the kitchen table.

“You’re not kidding,” said Mathilde, who was making her way through a bottle of pastis. “How did you get to be so small — what was your mother, a circus freak?”

Clementine snorted involuntarily and helped herself to another custard slice from some bakery paper on the table. She did not consider for a moment offering any to anyone else.

“She was a barmaid,” Sophie answered pleasantly. “Medium-sized, pretty much.”

Clementine snorted again and kept eating. An awkward silence mushroomed. Cochon retreated under the table again.

“This is a tricky situation, I realise that,” Sophie said eventually. “You not knowing about me, that I was even born, let alone … well, anyway, I don’t know anything, either. I mean absolutely nothing. Could you tell me, do you think …?” It was like speaking into an empty well but she had nothing to lose so she kept on going. “I forgot to ask the lawyer in Paris, it all came as such a shock, and then today with Monsieur Paillard … So, I don’t even know. What happened to him? Olivier, our father. What happened?”

Clementine stopped chewing and stared rigidly at a spot on the opposite wall. Mathilde sensed her distress and moved instantly to exploit it. “He was trying to mount a life-sized cardboard cut-out of Juliette Binoche down at the local video store,” she informed Sophie. “Although they were on different sides of a pane of glass at the time; an important factor your father failed to take into account when he launched himself at the poor woman.”

Sophie was stunned by the delight with which Mathilde was telling this woeful tale. “My father?” she asked timorously. “Yes, of course. You mean our father. But … Juliette Binoche? The actress? I don’t understand.”

“It’s always about sex!” Clementine was on her feet, pastry flakes cascading down her worn checked shirt. “With you,” she shouted at Mathilde, “it is always about sex!”

“No, Clementine, that is not the problem,” Mathilde answered unfazed. “The problem is that with you it is never about sex. It never has been. And it probably never will be.”

“Bitch!”

“Virgin!”

“Slut!”

“Virgin!”

“I hate you,” shrieked Clementine, quite unhinged. “I hate you. How could he do this to me? That wicked old man. You can have him! You can both have him!” And with those shrill words she ran from the room, down the dark hallway, out into the courtyard and into the rows of chardonnay that grew around the house, tears streaming down her cheeks, a roll of pale flesh popping out above her skirt as yet another reminder of how her awful life only ever got more awful. What’s more, the traitorous Cochon stayed behind with the new sister, although it could have been the remaining
mille-feuille
that kept him glued to the kitchen. Still, to be abandoned by the only thing that ever showed her any fondness? It was too cruel. Clementine wailed a great gutsy sob, inhaling a huge gob of air in preparation for another one.

And then, it hit her.

She stopped in her tracks and took in another deep breath through her nose. Yes, yes, yes! A thousand times yes. There was absolutely no doubt about it: the air out among the vines was ever-so-slightly greener, sweeter, than it had been before. Clementine swallowed her sobs, wiped at her wet cheeks and moved towards the closest vine, Valentina. At such close inspection her hopes were confirmed. Her tears dried, her paunch tightened and her heavy heart lightened and fluttered.
The vines had started flowering. Their journey from shoot to fruit was beginning!

This was a magical moment for a vigneron because
floraison
determined everything about the harvest. A poor flowering and it would be
bonjour
Joliet; a healthy flowering and the House of Peine had a shot at a future.

She had been expecting it, of course, the sooner the better, but she had been so bogged down with hard labour in the winery that this monumental leap forward had all but escaped her. The flowering of a grape vine was not the most sensational thing to see, after all. In fact it was all but invisible to the casual observer and so unspectacular as to escape even the notice of the local bird life. The only truly sensual aspect of flowering was that smell: a sweet, pungent odour that Clementine could always detect ahead of anyone else in the vineyard. She breathed it in again, the hysterics of just minutes before forgotten as she scuttled up the rows inspecting her canes, congratulating them on their itty-bitty bunches,
savouring
the promise that now danced in the air.

Sophie, stuck in the kitchen with the moody Mathilde, knew nothing of the change in temperament occurring outdoors. Clementine's hysterics had shaken her — and she'd seen plenty in her time. She had stood as her eldest sister fled, uncertain as to what she should do. “Should I go after her?” she asked Mathilde. “She seems so upset.”

“She is upset, you idiot,” snapped her sister. “But it's nothing to do with ‘our father' and his tragic passing, if that's what you think. It's because she thought she was going to end up with this whole dump all to herself and now she has to share it not just with me but with you. Whoever you are.”

Sophie sat down again. She felt hopelessly out of her depth. And sorry for these two sad cases into whose lives she had parachuted. On the bright side, at least there were no knives involved. She'd found herself in the middle of a fight or two in the past, even had a 10cm scar down one thigh to prove it. She may as well plough on.

“So did he cut himself?” she asked, returning to the subject of her unknown father. “After hitting the pane of
glass? Is that what happened?”

“No, he didn't cut himself,” Mathilde answered in a bored voice. “He fell then was too drunk to get back up again and no matter how loudly he called for Juliette Binoche, she refused to come and help him. Those screen goddesses can be very selfish like that, you know, especially the cardboard
cut-out
ones. Instead, it was the frost that came and got him. Yes, it was the frost that killed Olivier Peine.” She started to laugh, which further bewildered Sophie.

“You think it's funny?”

“I think it's hilarious! Frost is the enemy of champagne,” Mathilde answered, “even I know that. I just didn't realise it was the enemy of the Champenois as well.”

Sophie didn't know how to respond. She found Mathilde frightening, thought she preferred the hysterical Clementine. But weren't you supposed to like all your sisters equally? Not pick favourites? Or was that just mothers and children? She felt wretchedly undereducated in the business of being part of a family.

“You have a strange accent,” she said to Mathilde, by way of changing the subject. “Where are you from?”

“Mind your own business. I'm from here now.”

“I'm sorry, I didn't mean to —”

“And I suppose you're from here now too? Well, no surprises there. It would be too much to hope that the daughter of a drunken vigneron and a slut of a barmaid would ever amount to anything. You certainly don't strike me as someone with a lot of other places to go.”

Sophie blushed more with shame than anger. Mathilde was right. She had not amounted to anything and had nowhere else to go.

“Well, I'm sorry …” she started to say.

“Don't apologise to me,” Mathilde cut her off, throwing
back what was left in her glass and standing to leave.

Cochon scrambled to his feet again and warily eyed her stiletto, causing Sophie to wonder if, in the past, he had perhaps felt the point of that shoe in the spongy pad of his rump. “I didn't mean to …”

“I said, save your breath,” snapped Mathilde. “Really, I don't give a shit. You can do what you want, whoever you are, wherever you're from. You are of no interest to me. None at all. I could not care less.” She turned on her heels, snatched the bottle off the table and teetered out of the room.

Sophie had been made to feel small before, many times, and she felt small to begin with, so she needed whatever size she could lay her hands on. But to have Mathilde belittle her like that, dismiss her like that, well, it hurt. She had no
expectations
of her sisters in particular but she had expectations of people in general, even if they were low, and while cruelty certainly figured, it was usually delivered by someone of no fixed abode in response to an act of drug-induced treachery. From a sophisticated beauty who was actually flesh and blood it cut deeper than any knife ever could. Had Mathilde guessed that Sophie's biggest fear was that she was of no interest to anyone? Not another living soul? That she lay awake at night trying desperately to gather together in her head a collection of people who cared whether she lived or died?

Sophie slumped forward, her head on the table, and turned so her cheek lay flush against the cool wooden surface. Then with her hands lying flaccidly in her tartan lap she cried.

What an idiot she had been to come on her own! She didn't know what to do, how to handle such a situation. She should have brought her friend Francesca with her or Xavier, her
ex-boyfriend
, or even Rico, the boyfriend before that. They'd all had families, even if they'd chosen to leave them. She on the other hand, had not even been able to hang on to her mother,
a soft-hearted catastrophe who had hurtled from one
misfortune
to the next, be it a boss, a boyfriend or a bent slum landlord, until finally disappearing off the scene altogether when Sophie was 12.

Since then, Sophie and families had not worked out that well. She had been farmed out to a succession of foster parents, but the story was always the same. First there'd be trouble in the classroom; then in the playground; before long, there'd be trouble at home too. At 15 it just seemed easier to melt into the backstreets of Paris — go her own way. The friends she made there were more like her; there were fewer expectations, fewer disappointments. Life was just a matter of day-to-day hand-to-mouth existence. Hunger, foraging, food. Cold, foraging, warmth. It wasn't complicated. And if she was
sometimes
hungrier or colder than she wanted to be, at least she was never hungry or cold on her own.

For a while there she'd even had a job, at the Guerlain counter in Le Bon Marché department store. Francesca worked there and had managed to get her a few hours a week
restocking
the shelves. Then one day when Francesca was out having a long lunch, Sophie had stepped in to do a make-up job for a particularly pernickety client who had been quite enamoured of the results. The Guerlain manager, a frosty 50-something who'd earlier hissed at Sophie to stay hidden so her gothic ragamuffin look didn't scare the customers, had changed her tune when other pernickety clients started asking for her by name. Sophie was promoted from part time in the basement to full time on the shop floor.

She had loved that job with all her heart and soul, had loved getting up every morning and having somewhere to go, somewhere like Le Bon Marché where just eyeing the tiny pastries in the chic customer café gave her the greatest of thrills. As for the Guerlain counter: all those colours, all that
bronze and gold and scarlet and primrose and purple, those shimmering eye shadows and lip-licking glosses. A hundred different shades of flesh! Fourteen different blacks! Surrounded by such a living kaleidoscope of blushes and hues, she was in her element. In fact, she discovered what her element was.

After her first few pay cheques, she had even moved into a proper apartment, a tiny overcrowded five-storey walk-up in Montparnasse. She had actually started to think maybe she could live a normal life like the customers on whom she applied her exquisite make-up. Daring to even dream this was a big step for Sophie, because up until then she had assumed that her lot in life had already been carved out for her and that it did not involve a comfortable bed, dry walls, regular meals, or belonging.

It was the belonging that thrilled her the most. Belonging to the working crowd. Before, when she had walked the passageways of the
métro
in her old uniform of ripped clothes, worn boot soles flapping, passers-by would avoid her eye. It was clear from the way they stepped away from her or pulled their clothes closer to their bodies what they thought: filthy vermin, homeless orphan, beggar, thief. But when she took the very same subways in her black jacket bearing her gold name badge, her fellow Parisians looked at her and smiled, thinking, “Oh, she's from the Guerlain counter at Le Bon Marché.” It was a marvel for Sophie. Too good to be true, she often suspected. And she was right.

One afternoon the frosty 50-something discovered money missing from the till. Sophie, with her vagabond's police record, had seemed the ideal candidate to blame and her
employer
did not recognise her talent enough to believe her pleas of innocence. The job was history. So was the apartment. So was her dream of a normal life.

Since then she'd been back on the streets almost a year, had
felt the rush of air in front of many a door being slammed in her face, had been just about to give up hope for the first time ever, when a man in a suit, a lawyer, appeared out of nowhere and told her she had inherited part of a champagne house and two sisters. Naturally she had assumed he was joking. But he had a fistful of official documents and had been most
persistent
. He'd bought her three hot chocolates, one after the other, at Angelina's on the Rue de Rivoli, insisting: “It's true. Trust me, it's true.”

So Sophie had headed for Epernay and the office of Christophe Paillard and now here she was in a home, yes a home, that was partly hers, yet she was more clueless and lonely and afraid than she had ever been before.

She watched an oversized tear drip onto the ancient oak table and slide woozily between two worn beams. She felt so small she was certain she could slip in there with it, as temporary as a teardrop, as insignificant as a microbe of dirt.

But the wonderful thing about having a history filled with low moments was that Sophie knew this one, like the others, would pass. There was simply nothing to be gained from clinging on to them. If she had learned that great expectations were never worth having, she had also learned that just when life seemed at its most appallingly grim, it got better.

“That's bullshit,” Francesca had once told her, “you just get used to how much it sucks so it seems better.” Which in Sophie's eyes was exactly the same thing. She'd been crying on the Peine kitchen table for less than two minutes when she felt the warmth of Cochon's flanks on her leg as he slumped beside her chair. Straight away she started to feel a germ of optimism working its way up from her belly. A heartbeat later her tears ran out. She dried her eyes and helped herself to the rest of Clementine's
mille-feuille
. It was delicious.