Invitation to Provence (8 page)

A
S RAFAELLA WALKED ALONG
the path beneath the chestnut trees, with the dogs romping ahead, she imagined life as it used to be on hot summer days like this. In the old days there were always house parties, and she would gather friends around her and they’d ride their horses out to the vineyard for picnics or have long lunches at Café des Colombes. They would take up all the terrace tables, making a racket, capping one another’s jokes and tall tales, laughing and drinking Pernod.

Then, there always seemed to be laughter and food and wine and glamorous clothes, because Rafaella had been a clotheshorse right from the age of three, when her notorious aunt, Marguerite (her mother’s sister who was always said to be “no good”), brought her a winter outfit from Paris. It was a red velvet coat with a matching little hat trimmed in snow-white ermine, and for the first time she had seen herself reflected in those same hall mirrors as glamorous and gorgeous and feminine all at once. Of course her mother had said she looked like a cheap little Santa Claus, but her mother was like that. Maritée Marten could never have been called a free
spirit the way her sister was, and besides, she never liked her daughter.

When Rafaella finally hit her stride in her teens, tall and too thin with a neck like a swan that looked so fragile it might bend under the weight of all that piled-up dark hair, she embarked on a lifelong love affair with clothes, buying from Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, Givenchy, and Valentino. She still had most of them stashed away in the cedar-lined attics set aside for just that purpose because she couldn’t bear to give her beloveds away.

The young men in her crowd were all in love with her. They met her eyes with a sexy question, which of course she’d laughed at, thrilled with their attention and a little afraid of it at the same time. They told her she was a beauty, which she knew not to be true, but she liked it anyway and became an expert flirt, enjoying herself, enjoying being young, enjoying life.

Then she’d married Henri de Roquebrune, who had taken her name because of the inheritance clause in the Marten family trust. The Marten line had gone on unhindered by change from the time the first known one, a wealthy seventeenth-century burgher from Bordeaux, had purchased the bishopric and much of the land here—a common occurrence at that time, when rich men could buy their way into the clergy and own entire villages and even towns. It was he who had built the beginnings of the château and founded the Domaine Marten winery.

Rafaella never knew if she was in love with Henri or whether she’d just been dazzled by his older-man glamour. He’d seemed so much more mature than the young men she knew.

Henri had wined her and dined her and romanced her. He’d also taken her, with friends to chaperone—not too successfully as it turned out—on a summer yacht trip to the Aegean islands, where he also took her virginity on a white beach with the sound of the sea lapping in her ears and sharp pebbles sticking into her naked behind, and with the shrill night sounds of crickets in her ears, which from then on she would always associate with making love.

Her son Felix had been the result of that night, though knowing what she knew now, Henri should certainly have been more careful. After all, she was only nineteen years old and an innocent for all her big talk. It meant she’d had to walk down the aisle of the Saint-Marten village church draped in shimmering white satin with a long, heavy train that slid
plop, plop, plop
down the stairs as she descended, with an extra large bouquet of lilies to cover her bump.

She smiled now, thinking about what a little idiot she’d been. Henri had turned out to be a cold man and boring, something she’d never realized, enthralled as she was by his older-man experienced attentions, by the waiters at the smart restaurants who bowed to him, the doormen who saluted him, the elegant men and women he knew, and the Paris society he moved in, while she was barely out of the schoolroom and like a filly at the gate raring to go.

Of course Henri hadn’t given her the Marten name back when she’d left him, but now he was gone, buried with her parents and the other Martens in the flowery little graveyard just outside the village.

When she’d realized that she did not love Henri and that he certainly had never loved her and had married her only for her money, she’d proceeded to live her own life, keeping the
château filled with friends. She’d become something of a fixture in café society in Paris and on the Côte d’Azur, where the Martens owned a
pieds dans l’eau
villa, which meant it was right on the sea. You could step out from your bedroom onto the hot summer tiles of the terrace and run down the steps, through the gardens and directly into the cool blue sea that slid around your body like a thin silken nightdress.

She’d flirted, and there’d been a few
liaisons
of course, but nothing serious—until she met Lucas Bronson, that is. Then nothing she could have done would have stopped that tumultuous fall into love’s darkest entanglement.

Rafaella thought what fun life had been then, how glorious those years. Did she regret any of it? Not a bit. Not even Lucas. Except now maybe, she regretted how careless she had been with time, all those wasted hours and frittered days, the long lazy weeks that led to irretrievable years. She had been a foolish woman with time, and now it had caught up to her.

And, at the heart of it all, had always been the château.

T
HE CHÂTEAU WAS HOME,
the place where Rafaella’s heart was, but it was the vineyards that were her true passion. By the time she was twenty-five, Rafaella’s knowledge of wine making equaled that of the most prestigious male vintners—and
this was in an era when few women were in “the business” of producing and selling wine.

Taught by her father, she had worked at the winery dressed like the workers in men’s big bright blue overalls, though she’d had to roll them at the wrists and ankles and hitch them tight around her thin waist with a piece of string. Her dark hair was bound in a red kerchief, her pretty hands were stained purple with grape must, and her head swam drunkenly from the fumes as the grapes fermented in the great vats.

On cold, dark early-spring mornings she’d prowled the rows of vines with her father, drinking great gasps of air so cold and clean it was like the wine itself. The light of the moon illuminated the threads of a rare frost that her father told her could ruin the precious crop in mere hours, and she’d helped spray the young grapes to stop them from freezing.

It was Rafaella who had replanted the wild white roses that gave the château its name, at the end of each row of vines. The roses were important because they would be first to be attacked by pests, thus giving the Martens warning to protect the grapes. And she’d spent many long nights poring over orders and accounts with her father, who also taught her how to make a good deal with the bottlers, and had taken her with him to Portugal in search of a new source of cork.

Now, they said, there was nothing Rafaella Marten didn’t know about wine. Personally, she thought it was a good thing she still enjoyed drinking it because her apprenticeship had been long and hard. She was the only Marten heir, and when her father died, the full responsibility for the business—and its workers, who were the village people she had known all her life—had fallen on her shoulders.

Though on the surface she seemed frivolous and carefree, Rafaella ran her winery in a most professional and creative manner. She opened up new markets in Asia and the United States, finding acclaim for her “supple, sensual red wine with a hint of flowers in the bouquet and a velvet heft to it that tingles on the palette like the scent of fresh pine on a winter mountain day.” That’s the way the reviewer in the
New York Times
acclaimed it on its first launch. Not bad, Rafaella had thought with a satisfied smile, for what was essentially a jumped-up Côtes-du-Rhône. Admittedly, it was of the first order, but it was still no smart Bordeaux.

Rafaella also took good care of her workers and her village, always there in times of crisis and of celebration. As a girl, she had gone to school with the villagers’children and was known to them as Rafaella. She knew every family by name, always knew who was sick or who was leaving the village to work in the city and who had come back, tail between their legs, because after all, the allure of home was too strong.

In fact, it was the château and her love for it that had come between her and the man known to everyone as “the Lover.” Lucas Bronson was an arrogant, handsome nomad, a champion polo player, a world wanderer, always restless, eternally on the move in search of the next “main event” in life. Following the polo matches, Lucas switched countries and continents with as little thought as Rafaella put into planning a picnic. Of course she did not go with him because she had her work and her home to look after. Even love had not been able to tie down Lucas Bronson. And even after she left him, Rafaella believed—she still had to believe, otherwise she couldn’t bear it—that Lucas had really loved her.

Ten years ago Rafaella had officially “retired,” and Scott
Harris had come to run her vineyards, though she still couldn’t resist keeping a finger in the pie, stirring the mix every now and again, just to see what would happen.

Scott was Australian. He’d grown up in the Barossa Valley and, like herself, he’d been in the wine business since he was a boy. Now she looked forward immensely to their weekly “business lunches” at the Café des Colombes. In fact, they were the highlight of her week—until the idea of the family reunion had taken over, that is. Now all she could think about, all she longed for, was that there might be a family again at the Château des Roses Sauvages. And that her sons would return to her.

J
ULIETTE LABOURDE
had just spent an entirely satisfactory day shopping and lunching when she returned home to find the invitation in her mail.

Juliette lived alone on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, in a large, colorful apartment crammed with old family bibelots and a flurry of blond Pomeranians. She was the kind of large woman who was built to last, and though she was Rafaella’s age, time had not been so kind, although admittedly she had not started out gorgeous. But, oh, she’d been popular. All the men had adored her. Like Rafaella, she had that sparkle that brought life and excitement with her, and that she definitely
had not lost. Her hair was still a flaming red, her eye shadow blue, and her mouth a glossy pink. With a flowery caftan hiding her bulk, she looked like a grandmother from hell en route to a Hawaiian vacation, but her smile and her warmth made you forget about all that in the space of a minute and just want to be with her.

When Juliette saw the large, square cream envelope with the French stamps and Rafaella’s familiar writing, she gave a little cry of recognition, dropped her bags, and ripped it open immediately. She scanned the invitation, her head to one side, one hand clutched excitedly to her throat.
“Ma chère amie,”
it began.

Too many years have passed since we saw each other, too many lifetimes have disappeared into the past, too much water has flowed under too many bridges. We, who were once so close, lost touch, I retreating to my solitude here at the château, and you flitting around the world with your darling army officer husband, God rest his soula more decent man never lived. (Of course I’m referring to Rufus, not to husband number one who, like my own, is better off nameless!)

You lived in so many places while I just stayed here, running my winery efficiently because, as you remember, it was always my passion (or one of them, the other being the Lover of course), and drowning my sorrows in a nightly glass of champagne with Haigh. (You’ll be glad, no doubt, to know he is still here, still interfering in my life, still my friendperhaps my only friend now unless I can still count you in that number? Ah, but I forget, there are two others. You remember Jake, the Lover’s
son? He spent a year here at the château in happier times. I love him stillcertainly more than I do my own two sons who departed years ago. You will recall that story of coursehow could you forget? Felix under a cloud of suspicion for murder, and Alain after having been caught robbing the winery until he almost bankrupted us. Just so you know, I have never heard from either one since Felix walked out and Alain was thrown out. I often wonder, Juliette, Was I wrong in the way I brought them up? Too indulgent? Too loving? Was I wrong not to believe either of themthough I tried hardwhen they pleaded innocent? Perhaps I will never know the answer to that. Or maybe I will, since I am asking them to put the past behind us and inviting them here to the reunion in the hope that we can forgive each other and begin all over again.

Who else have I invited to this grand reunion? you must be asking yourself. Alas, there are not many left. There’s a young American woman, descended from my father’s brother, Paul, who ran off to America after a great falling out. The row was over who would marry Maritéemy father got her and so she became my mother, but it was really about who got control of the winery. Again my father won. Paul never returned. He married someone else, had a son, and that son had a daughter named Franny Marten. Then there’s Jake, of course, because in my heart he’s always been like a son to me. And then there’s you, my dearest Juliette, because after all these years, you too remain in my heart.

Call me a sentimental old woman (and much as I hate to admit it, we are getting old), but I want to make
peace with what is left of my family, and I want to see my friends again.

“Do not disappoint me, Juliette,” she finished in her old commanding style, making Juliette laugh. And she signed it firmly, “Love, Rafaella.”

Juliette sank onto a yellow damask sofa, arranging her flowery caftan around her ample body, gold bracelets clanking, Pomeranians clambering up, tiny paws plucking at her for attention. “Oh, sit down, you sillies,” she said, giving them an affectionate shove, and they settled with disgruntled expressions next to her.