House of Peine (5 page)

Mathilde, who had been so confident of holding the upper hand, was visibly rocked by this news of a wild-card sibling. The opportunity to come back to Saint-Vincent-sur-Marne had provided her with an escape hatch precisely when she needed one but the added complication of a surprise Peine she did not require. As for the subject of children? She could almost let loose a few “La-a-a-as” of her own.

“Oh, shut up,” she snapped instead, getting up and going to the kitchen cupboards. “What do you have to drink around here?” Cochon slunk around the outside of the room to get away from her, his dark eyes radiating suspicion.

Clementine ignored them both. The appetite that had abandoned her upon finding out her birthright had been carved into pieces returned most enthusiastically when she learned that her particular piece was little more than a sliver. Overwhelmed by hunger she went to the ancient refrigerator and pulled out a lump of mouldy goat cheese and the
crumbling
remains of the
citron
tart she had been on her way to replace when her life had turned to ruin. Mathilde, meanwhile, found a bottle of Olivier’s pastis and poured herself a healthy
slug. She knocked it back in a single mouthful and poured another.

“How can you eat at a time like this?” she asked, grimacing, as she watched Clementine combine the cheese and tart and head it towards her mouth.

“I told you not to speak to me,” Clementine replied. “But since you mention the time,” she indicated the clock (it was not yet midday), “only wastrels and whores drink before lunch.”

“Aren’t you forgetting your father?”

“
Your
father,” Clementine shot back.

Mathilde knocked back another swig. “Yes,” she said sourly. “Our father. Who art in heaven.”

Olivier Peine, when it came down to it, was all that Clementine and Mathilde had in common and it wasn’t much to be getting on with for many reasons, not the least being that their separate experiences of the same person had been a million miles apart.

Mathilde had spent just four weeks out of her 35 years with the man, whereas Clementine had been stuck with him ever since her mother’s death when she was a baby. The circumstances of this tragic passing were never discussed, in fact Olivier would not allow any mention of her name (Marie-France) nor did he possess a single picture of her. To Clementine she was little more than a secret rarely whispered word:
Maman
, a blurry hummingbird of a presence that
fluttered
vaguely in the darkest recesses of her memory.

She could dimly recall other bustling shadows from her early years in the world: a grandmother who smelled of lavender and wet socks and whose sudden demise plunged the House of Peine even deeper into gloom; a whiskery old priest who never spoke at more than a murmur; a kindly neighbour
in whose doughy bosom Clementine’s toddler cheek had nestled.

Mostly though she remembered being on her own, the frightening sounds that came from her father’s bedroom at night, the cold, the darkness, the loneliness.

But when she was seven, Olivier, much to her surprise and no doubt everyone else’s, had married again, this time a young American college graduate who had come to Champagne to work the vendange. Clementine remembered Ann MacIntyre as a pretty, gangly, vivacious blonde. She had been in awe of her, this sudden intruder into her sheltered life, but had welcomed her. For a while it seemed some light had filtered back into the House of Peine and what a pretty place it was when that happened. Drapes were hung, quilts were patched, floral posies appeared on clean dusted surfaces. It was a sweet relief for such a serious, silent little girl but still Clementine worried what Ann — sweet, foreign, happy Ann — could possibly see in the dry, moody, dark Olivier. And she was right to worry because whatever it was, it didn’t take long for Ann to stop seeing it. Over two wet, misty Saint-Vincent-sur-Marne winters, Ann’s vivaciousness leached into the chalky soil where depression readily took hold and blossomed in the ideal conditions of bone-chilling damp and seemingly eternal darkness.

For Clementine there was an unexpected upside, for in her wretchedness Ann sought the warmth she was no doubt being denied by Olivier. She would spend hours holding Clementine, hugging her close, rocking and weeping into that head of bright-red untamed curls. Clementine, such a stranger to
affection
, misguided or not, soaked it up silently. Such was her own happiness that never in those last few months did she notice the bump that grew under Ann’s sweater in direct proportion to the flow of her tears. Then one day, a grey-haired American couple turned up at the house and took their miserably
pregnant daughter back to New York. That was the last they ever saw of Ann MacIntyre-Peine.

Clementine had been inconsolable, but Olivier merely shrugged and disappeared into the vineyard. Ann became just another name never to be mentioned again.

Not six months after she disappeared off the scene, though, a photo came, a photo of a fat, smiling, red-headed baby girl. Mathilde. Clementine found the picture under a bottle lying next to the garbage can outside the kitchen and squirrelled it away in her underwear drawer. For a long time afterwards, during her bleaker moments she would take that picture out and stare at it, imagining how much happier her life would be if only her little sister was there to share it.

As it was, happiness eluded her through her school years and past her teens. A trifle plump but pretty, with eyes the colour of chardonnay grapes, she was hindered by a shy disposition that disguised itself in the gruff family armour. Friends were a luxury she could not seem to afford. The closest she ever came to anything remotely resembling joy was on her own out among the vines: feeling the heat of a ray of spring sunshine, smelling the balmy summer fragrance of flowers turning into fruit, shading her chardonnay eyes from the glare of the naked plants covered in a twinkling blanket of January snow.

Then one summer morning, not long after her 26th birthday, Olivier, more foul-tempered than usual, announced that the little sister he had never mentioned was coming to stay with them. Clementine, although taken aback, allowed herself a tingle of excitement. Could it be that at last the little Mathilde she had spent 17 years dreaming of, that chubby smiling baby, was about to come to life, to her life?

The creature that subsequently stepped out of Olivier’s rust and apricot-coloured
Deux Chevaux
was far from chubby and certainly not smiling. She was thin and exceptionally
sulky. In fact, she took one look at the House of Peine, said, “What a fucking shit hole,” in loud American, then flounced inside, leaving Clementine to lug her bags upstairs to her room while Olivier melted into the winery. It became apparent soon after that she had been schooled perfectly in French and was just as colourful in that language.

It also turned out that Mathilde had been expelled from her smart Manhattan school for lewd behaviour and her mother Ann, in desperation and to appease her most recent husband, had packed her off to France to make her someone else’s problem for a while. There is no way the sisters could have known that they both battled the same stifling insecurities; that what had turned Clementine shy and clumsy had turned Mathilde caustic and hard. Clementine thought Mathilde unspeakably ungrateful for shunning the warm, comforting arms of her mother; Mathilde thought Clementine a dowdy spinster-in-the-making who had turned their no-doubt
potential
Prince Charming of a father into the dark, uninterested force he appeared to be.

Worse, upon her arrival in Saint-Vincent-sur-Marne, Mathilde made it perfectly clear that she had no interest in grapes, wine, champagne nor, certainly, in Clementine, of whose existence, she claimed, she had been totally unaware until seeing her standing “all fat and sweaty” outside the crumbling house when she arrived.

A more robust adult might have recognised the psychology of a resentful teenager and ignored it, but the thin-skinned Clementine was cut to the quick. On cold nights she could still feel the warmth of Ann’s arms, yet the woman had failed to mention so much as her name to Mathilde? Oh yes, Mathilde assured her. Her mother loved and left stepchildren all the time. It was really no big deal in the United States.

For the first week or two, Clementine fought to find
common ground but Mathilde made sure there was none. The only thing she was truly interested in was sex and this was a problem because sex was in short supply in Saint-Vincent-sur-Marne. Clementine of all people knew that. She’d never had it. And she wanted it. Desperately and secretly.

With Benoît Geoffroy, the boy next door.

The only child of another sixth-generation vigneron, Benoît was two years her senior. A dark-haired, dark-eyed, solid young man of a serious nature, he loved the grapes and bubbles of Champagne every bit as much as Clementine. Day after day, the two worked at identical tasks in their
neighbouring
wineries and on their adjoining plots of grapes dotted about the hills and valley, but both were so crippled with reserve that little more than embarrassed looks and the odd “more rain” or “another frost” had ever passed between them. This didn’t stop Clementine from dreaming of more. She dreamed of it often, in her creaking oak bed with the window open and nothing but fresh air and fantasies between herself and the object of her desires.

And she had dreamed of it more often than usual just prior to Mathilde’s arrival because she’d come the closest she’d ever been to having her love for Benoît requited. She’d sat five rows behind him at church one Sunday totally transfixed by the back of his neck: the way his shirt was caught in the collar of his jacket, the downy confusion of his hairline. Afterwards, outside on the steps as she shuffled into the sun with the rest of the congregation, she had felt a strange heat radiating from behind her and turning towards the source had found it to be the man of her dreams.

His cheeks had burned instantly and while he held her gaze for only a second he had asked, well it was more of a mumble really, if she was going to the Saint Vincent’s Day parade that year.

Now, this might seem an insignificant inquiry to a regular person but remember Clementine was far from regular. She had never been asked anywhere by anyone, let alone the man of her dreams, so although all she could do at the time was nod
vigorously
and scuttle away, the memory of his smell, his voice, the soft little clutch of hairs he had missed shaving on his cheek, kept her warm night after night after night.

Sophisticated Mathilde, used to leaving a trail of
broken-hearted
Manhattan boys in her wake, picked up on Clementine’s weakness for Benoît straight away but to begin with did nothing more than file it for future reference. In the end, it was nothing more than boredom, sheer and simple, that one sunny afternoon prompted the taunt that would set in motion a devastating sequence of events, the aftershocks of which would resonate for years — were resonating still.

“I’d have him licking my toes in a minute,” Mathilde had drawled upon catching Clementine gazing longingly at Benoît across a dozen rows of chardonnay. She had been idly watching her sister thin out the unripened bunches, leaving the vine to better nourish the ripening ones. It was mind-numbing work for most, but for Clementine it was a chance to further mother her canes, to encourage them to look after their healthy, fat, sweetening grapes, never mind the ones that stayed small and hard and green on shoots that had come too late to the party.

Mathilde was supposed to be helping but instead had been lying in the grass between the rows, smoking cigarettes and listening to a tape on her Walkman. It was only curiosity at what was so clearly distracting Clementine that got her to her feet, where she followed her sister’s adoring gaze and saw Benoît mirroring her bunch-thinning activities just a stone’s throw away on his own plot.

Clementine ignored what her sister had said about Benoît’s toe-licking, her fingers continuing to move smoothly through
the velvety leaves of row Charlotte, but her heart hardened against her sister.

Mathilde was not the first setback of Clementine’s life, far from it. But the chasm between what she had dreamed of in a sister and the reality of it was so vast it took disenchantment to a whole new level. Mathilde, for no apparent reason, loathed her and possessed that lethal combination of a sharp eye, an acid tongue and a cruel streak, which made it almost laughably easy to make another life a misery. The life she had chosen in this instance was Clementine’s. Clementine knew it but seemed powerless to fight it.

“Don’t just stand there,” she snapped nervously at her younger sister that day as she plucked one innocent stunted bunch off the vine a tad too viciously.

“Oh, I’m not just standing,” Mathilde answered her, still looking over at Benoît, her head coquettishly tilted to one side, the tip of her moist pink tongue running itself around her practised pout.

Clementine was hardly an expert in matters of seduction but she recognised a fully fledged flirtation when she saw one. “He wouldn’t be interested in you,” she said, trying to sound casual and assured. But her panic was obvious, even to her. “You’re too young.”

Mathilde stood in front of her, hand on hip, one slender shoulder exposed, the curve of her breast rising and falling under her thin top, a sinful smile on her glossy lips.

Clementine had felt inadequate before but never more so than at that moment. She’d always known she wasn’t exactly a beauty queen but until Mathilde showed up hadn’t really noticed just how frumpy, how uninviting she was in
comparison
. Mathilde would not leave the house without spending an hour applying perfect make-up to her flawless features. Clementine had one single lipstick that after nearly a decade of
sporadic application had not even worn itself to a point. Mathilde blow-dried her hair every morning; Clementine only washed hers once a week and even then couldn’t always get a comb through it. Mathilde threw outfits together and looked like a fashion model; Clementine threw outfits together and looked like someone else had been doing the throwing.

She glanced down at her baggy brown skirt and over-sized man’s shirt, the vines forgotten for a moment. Was that why Benoît had done little but glance and mumble at her all these years, she thought, the inadequacy rumbling inside her? Had she been deluding herself that one day those mumbles would turn into conversations, the conversations into feelings, the feelings into marriage and motherhood and a whole new blend of champagne? Had he truly been asking her to the Saint Vincent’s Day parade or just politely inquiring if she was going? She had been so certain there was something between them but now, suddenly … Was it her in whom he would never be interested?

Mathilde exhaled her Gauloise smoke and watched all these doubts unfold across the landscape of her sister’s face. Clementine was very badly practised at hiding her emotions whereas Mathilde was an expert. She had seen three stepfathers come and go and watched her mother’s roller-coaster
self-esteem
rise and fall with each one — and paid the price. There’d been countless stepbrothers and stepsisters (she hadn’t been exaggerating about that, although her mother always grew far too fond of them); there’d been more bedrooms than she could remember; a change of school most years; a change of friends most months. There was no point letting anyone get close, Mathilde had learned, because the moment you had everything you wanted, it could all be whisked away from you in the blink of an eye, the drop of a tear, the whistle of a coffee cup flying past an ear. Better not to give anything away, to
keep the world at arm’s length, show it a little of what you had but not let it get close. It was better that way. Her real father, Olivier, was plainly an expert at this and she liked that — if nothing much else — about him. But Clementine, thought Mathilde, as she watched her standing among the vines with her big moony eyes and her sad-sack body, wore her heart on her sleeve, which was no place for it. In her opinion, the big lump needed toughening up.