Vintage (3 page)

They were just drifting off to sleep with the matter unresolved when Jamie said, ‘You haven’t answered the question.’

‘What question?’

‘How would you feel about spending the rest of your life with me?’

‘I’d like that more than anything else in the world.’

Still on cloud nine – Nicola, who made no secret of the fact that she thought weddings a bit naff and marriage bonds an outmoded symbol of patriarchal ownership, had nonetheless been delighted with the news and had cracked
open a bottle of champagne for breakfast – Clare hurled herself at the glass door of Hermès. She almost fell flat on her face, on to the thick carpet of the emporium, as it was swung open for her by the bemedalled commissionaire.

A neat navy-blue salesperson with large gold earrings registered Clare’s ankle-length skirt and sneakers. Knowing a time-waster when she saw one, she disdainfully displayed a selection of traditionally patterned scarves to do with the signs of the zodiac and horseshoes. Clare rejected the almond greens and sugary pinks, which were reluctantly opened up like multicoloured flags to subside with a silken whoosh on to the counter.

‘My grandmother likes blue.’

Cautioning her colleagues, in rapid French, to keep an eye on her dubious customer, the woman disappeared in the direction of the stockroom, from which she eventually returned with a blue scarf garlanded with roses.

‘That will do admirably.’

Resorting to her native French, Clare demanded that the box be gift-wrapped. Pulling herself up to her full height, she made out a cheque (hoping it wouldn’t bounce). She had no trouble with the particule.

Baronne Gertrude de Cluzac, patrician and upright, tinted her hair, wore high-heeled shoes and had the figure of a young girl, despite the fact that she had reached the age of eighty-five.

She had been brought up by a series of governesses to put duty before pleasure in accordance with the family motto, Ad Augusta per Agusta (to honours through difficulties); but after so many years the line between the two had become blurred and now, more often than not, the duty had become the pleasure.

Since leaving Château de Cluzac over twenty-five years ago she had not been back to the Médoc. To say that she had ‘left’ the Médoc, was to imply that she had departed from her home voluntarily. After the tragic and premature death of his father, Baron Thibault, the indolent Charles-Louis – who three years previously had come down from Oxford having gambled away his allowance and failed to get a degree – had virtually kicked her out.

Baron Thibault had not only been the ‘great man of the Médoc’ in the heyday of the great wine-producing estates, but a great man. In every respect. Energetic and aristocratic, he excelled at sport, had a keen eye for business, was respected by his employees in whose affairs he took a personal interest, and was passionate about his vines.

On a personal level, Thibault had been a good husband and a good father. A bon viveur and full of charm, with a courtesy and generosity that endeared him to everyone, and a prodigious appetite both for life and for food,
Thibault liked nothing better than to head the long oak table capable of seating twenty-two, to which he brought a spirit of social brilliance and conviviality. Gertrude, herself the daughter of a château owner, this time in Sauternes, had adored him. The feeling had been mutual.

A wise woman, she had learned early on in the marriage, which had taken place when she was eighteen – not unusual in those days – that a man of such prodigious appetite must be free to indulge it. Unwilling to restrain him, to bridle him as she did her horse (she was a fearless horsewoman), she let him take the bit between his teeth and did not question him too closely when he returned from the trips abroad taken without her, or from his frequent and regular visits to Bordeaux.

From the moment they had met, at a Christmas party at Cluzac, to the moment when an ashen-faced chef de culture had knocked on the door of her boudoir to bring the news of Thibault’s death while out hunting, they had loved each other dearly. Gertrude was not stupid enough to imagine that among the peaks of married life – it was after all an arcane and impossible institution – there would not be troughs of despair and despondency (no longer tolerated by the young), moments when she would wonder what she was doing in the larger-than-life Thibault’s bed at all. These were soon dissipated by his overwhelming generosity (both of body and of spirit), his innate decency and his genuine love for her.

Charles-Louis, although similar in build, immaculately turned out, and with Thibault’s impeccable manners, was a far cry from his father. Out of touch with his own feelings and impervious to those of others, he had a temper verging on the sadistic and humiliated those who crossed him, in the case of women often reducing them to tears. Gertrude was at a loss to know where her son got all his unpleasantness from. It
was neither his egotistical behaviour, his arrogance, nor his frank womanising that now bothered her, however, but the fact that, after 300 years, he was not husbanding Cluzac.

In touch with the old Comtesse de Ribagnac, her contemporary on a nearby estate with whom she exchanged discursive letters, Gertrude was kept informed on a monthly basis of Charles-Louis’ conduct. Despite the boomtime of the eighties, when an incredible run of great and bountiful years had driven prices through the roof and Médocain growers had ploughed back their profits, her son had apparently made no investment in the cellars, had not bothered to repair the dilapidated roofs of the château, and although his vineyards, under the expert eye of Albert Rochas, were impeccably kept, there had been little or no replanting. Making no secret of the fact that, as one of the last true landowning aristocrats, he was above the commercial fray, that he did not trust – and strongly objected to paying taxes to – a socialist government (a sentiment with which Baronne Gertrude for once concurred), Charles-Louis seemed to turn a blind eye to the viability of Château de Cluzac, the gates of which he kept firmly closed.

It was not only their inability to get on with one another that made Baronne Gertrude exasperated each time she thought of Charles-Louis, but also the fact that, unlike his father – who had taken his responsibilities seriously and devoted himself to Cluzac – her son preferred whisky to claret and had not the least dedication to wine, the making of which he supervised as necessary but did not love.

On her enforced departure from the Médoc as a
reasonably
young widow, Baronne Gertrude had made her home in the Pas-de-Calais, in the Château de
Charleville, which belonged to her family, and in Paris where she had a great many friends.

It was there, at the British Embassy, that she had met, and ultimately married, Selwyn Donaldson, the United Kingdom Ambassador to Sweden. After Thibault’s death she had not thought that she would marry again. It was too much trouble. But Selwyn, a widower, had wooed her with an English courtesy which had eventually captured her heart. The wedding had been a quiet one in the church of la Madeleine in the eighth arrondissement, and she had spent the next ten years as Lady Donaldson in the embassies and salons of Warsaw, Bonn, Washington and Rome, where she brought a Gallic style and grace to the diplomatic carousel.

They had been back at their London base, a crepuscular mansion flat facing Rotten Row, when Selwyn’s pancreatic cancer had been diagnosed. It was all over within three weeks. Missing the gentle man terribly, Gertrude had considerable difficulty in coming to terms with the loss of her second husband. It was several years before, pulling herself together, she reverted to her previous title, gathered about her a coterie of friends – largely bridge-playing – and made a new life for herself in the Hyde Park flat where her existence was enlivened by the intermittent visits of her granddaughter, Clare.

The two Cluzac women had more in common than their disparate ages would suggest.

Although Gertrude had had as little as possible to do with her son since leaving Cluzac, his wife, Viola, had kept in touch with her when she had walked out on Charles-Louis and returned to Ireland with the
eight-year
-old Clare. Glad of something to do to mitigate her loneliness, Baronne Gertrude had devoted herself to the upbringing of her granddaughter, leaving Viola free to attend to her horses.

During Clare’s schooldays at St Mary’s Ascot, her summer holidays, until she was old enough to opt out, had been spent at Cluzac with her father. At Christmas and Easter, when she did not go back to her mother in Ireland, on which she was not at all that keen – they had little in common and Clare was frightened of horses – she stayed with her grandmother, from whom she learned the principles of duty and responsibility, as well as everything there was to know about sex, about which Baronne Gertrude was surprisingly relaxed.

Although the Baronne had a deep-seated and
unshakeable
belief that everyone was looking for one person to love, she tolerated the open-ended relationships which, like the new multiplex cinemas, had replaced the monoliths of the past, but was absolutely convinced that those who indulged in them were destined to get hurt.

Baronne Gertrude talked openly to her granddaughter about sex from the age of puberty onwards. She explained that it was a joyous experience and as crucial to life as breathing. Clare thought that she must be the only girl in London to debate with her grandmother the wisdom of losing her virginity to the first man (married and with two children) into whose arms she had fallen after leaving her convent school.

A great many men had bitten the dust since then, but although, like Napoleon in War and Peace, her grandmother had little time for the medical profession and did not mind saying so, the Baronne’s favourite, among Clare’s many admirers, was Jamie.

The fact that Jamie – who was wont to recite chunks of Shakespeare over his anaesthetised patients in the operating theatre – immediately recognised the sentiments as Tolstoy’s endeared him at once to the Baronne.

After a shaky start – Jamie had failed to hold the Baronne’s chair for her at dinner and had committed the solecism of cutting the ‘nose’ off the Brie – the two of them had got on famously. While the Baronne often entertained Jamie with tales of her girlhood in Sauternes and stories about her life at Cluzac, their shared interest was literature and they enjoyed attributing each other’s quotations.

Clare and Jamie had been invited to dinner to celebrate the Baronne’s birthday, for which she had given the menu a great deal of thought and her current au pair, who attended English classes in South Kensington, a hard time. Baronne Gertrude did not cook and rarely entered the kitchen, which had not been renovated since the death of the first Lady Donaldson.

Born, bred and having lived for the greater part of her life in a château, the Baronne, although perfectly capable of giving instructions to others, had very little practical knowledge of running a home. In the eighteenth century, according to her wide reading on the subject, before domestic space had misguidedly become the female prerogative, the women’s quarters in the great French houses were as distant from the kitchens as the men’s, an indicator that they did not have even a supervisory role over the domestic arrangements. As far as she was concerned ‘home’ was not by any means synonymous with ‘woman’ and she considered the class divide to be far more significant than that of gender.

Her formative years had been spent in a country house of which, despite the passage of time, her recollections were extraordinarily clear. They were defined by favourite and specific places. The chapel, the billiard room, the dining-room, the drawing-rooms, the library, her parents’ apartments, the guest rooms and the nursery quarters, the vast, seemingly endless and
sometimes terrifying corridors, the many staircases. Once Jamie had asked her how many rooms there were and Gertrude, astonished by the question, had replied that to the best of her knowledge no one had ever counted them, and that she had absolutely no idea.

All she remembered was that her childhood (from which by now the disagreeables had been filtered out) had been an unmitigated delight. Rides in the
early-morning
mists, homework in the nursery, games of croquet, tennis, pingpong, fishing, bicycle rides and bathing in opaque muddy waters, spring hunting when the children – she was one of six – were left to their own devices, parties and summer weddings, and picnics by the lake.

With her needs now attended to by a single and frequently changing au pair (Louise, Chantal, Christiane, Monique), the days of butlers with their armies of footmen, valets, chefs, housemaids, gardeners (head and under), coachmen (who taught them to sit on a horse properly), gamekeepers, park-keepers,
mole-catchers
, laundry women, ironing women, and the man who came once a week to wind the château clocks, seemed far off. It was a world to set people dreaming, which, even in the great châteaux, where the hard-pressed owners now worked extremely hard to ensure that everything ran smoothly, would not return.

Her childhood home with its marble entrance hall, its colonnades and rotunda, its mysterious attic crammed with discarded fancy-dress costumes, ball slippers,
musical boxes and trunks of old papers, the smells of the waxed floors, the coolness of the hallways, the park full of dark pines and lime trees, the walks to the kitchen garden, the races to the farmhouse to fetch the eggs: her memories were written in these images. They belonged to the past.

Now she subsisted, in her Hyde Park flat, on a very small income from the estate of the late Selwyn Donaldson, augmented by her pension, which was paid directly to her bank. From it, august and austere, with her head held high and her back still remarkably straight, accompanied by the current Louise, Chantal or Monique, she made her way to Harrods’ Food Hall.

This morning, expecting and receiving the same deference from the white-coated assistant behind the fresh-meat counter as she had from her bygone cooks, she had purchased a gigot. Carrying the leg of lamb home (a figure of speech: it was Louise who actually carried it), together with some petit pois and carrots and a horrendously expensive slice of Brie de Meaux (le roi des fromages, which, as she was fond of explaining to the au pairs, had originated in the court of Charlemagne), she gave specific instructions as to its preparation before settling down to a day spent as any other.

The Baronne was a prodigious reader and the flat was filled with an eclectic collection of books, which extended in range from the latest Muriel Spark to the essays of Montaigne. In addition to being extremely well read and a not inconsiderable historian, she was an accomplished water-colourist (the spare bedroom was stacked with her paintings of trees and flowers), and with the help of National Health spectacles, which she kept hidden on occasions when she was not alone, an adept at petit point.

By the time Clare arrived with Jamie, the Baronne, assisted by Louise, had changed into a black crepe dress
on to which she pinned a diamond brooch in the shape of a butterfly given to her by Thibault on the occasion of Charles-Louis’ birth – and rouged her cheeks. An appetising smell of roast lamb, seasoned with garlic and a little rosemary, pervaded the high-ceilinged flat.