House of Peine (9 page)

The Peine berries grew fat and sweet as the summer lived up to its early promise, each sunny day sliding lazily into a balmy evening and returning with another clear pink sunrise. The smell of ripening fruit hovered in the air every bit as thick and obvious as the famous winter mists but bringing none of that dreary claustrophobic gloom, just the pure certainty of great possibility.

By August, the vines had a more luxurious look about them too, a deeper palette was creeping across the hills.
Veraison
was underway; the grapes, all born the same shade of green, had started to change colour, the pinots taking on a dark red tinge, the chardonnay tending towards a paler yellow.

The grapes weren’t the only things growing fat and sweet and changing colour either. Sophie, thanks to the consistent advantage of having a roof over her head and food at every meal time, had started to lose her urchin look and take on a healthy country glow. Her jet black hair had faded under the northern sun, her translucent skin had turned a honeyed gold. Gone were the purple lips and the heavy black kohl. That disguise
for the moment discarded, the violet eyes radiated only contentment.

Patric Didier was partly to thank — Sophie had soaked up the warmth between the cooper’s sheets as often as she could before being supplanted by a shapely blonde from Cramant — but full responsibility for her improved demeanour was remarkably down to Clementine.

Something had changed between the two sisters after the night in the winery when Clementine had released her secret into the yeasty blackness. It wasn’t momentous nor
earth-shattering
, the change: they weren’t suddenly the best of friends sharing every little thought and spending cosy nights gossiping in each other’s rooms as they painted their nails. But there had been progress, of sorts. One small step for most other families, one giant leap for the Peines.

It felt to Sophie a little as though the most delicate thread had been spun between her and Clementine as they had huddled there in the dark behind the reserve pinot noir. It was fragile, an almost invisible strand, but it was still a bond where before there had been none. And Sophie clutched it with delicate fingers. She wound it daintily around her slender wrist until she felt the faintest tug and then let it pull her in Clementine’s footsteps as she did her rounds of the vineyards and the winery.

The older woman while not, at first, going so far as to acknowledge her exactly, at least never chased her away nor scuttled into the foliage at the sight of her. Before long, she had actually grown used to her little shadow, expected it to be there as a matter of fact, and eventually found herself gruffly explaining what she was doing with words that had up till then lain uselessly inside her. As long as the conversation did not stray outside the subject of her champagne, she felt quite comfortable. Incredibly, after a while she came to realise that
the feeling she got while nattering — yes, nattering — to Sophie about her work was something akin to pleasure. Gradually even the gruffness disappeared, leaving nothing but her enthusiasm for her work peppered with just a little of her trademark grousing.

“See, these little berries here are growing in a tight bunch, just the way I want them to,” she might explain one day, “because this row, Dorothée, got extra attention from my pruning shears this year. Like I had the time! But Dorothée has always been needy.”

Or, “Pasqualine has too much leaf coverage, can you tell? We’ll leave her be for the moment, it’ll keep the berries from getting burned, but later in the summer before the vendange she’ll need plucking. It’s the sort of thing I might actually have trusted those useless twin oafs with but no chance of that now, hm? Typical!”

And, “Look at the fruit on greedy Antoinette! Those poor canes must be working overtime trying to feed all her berries. It’s bunch-thinning for you, Antoinette, and I know how much you like that. Didn’t you listen to a word I said last year?”

As time went on, it became clear that Clementine, too, was flourishing. She was standing straighter and the misery that usually upholstered her face was, if not gone altogether, at least substantially remodelled. The edges of those lips were not headed quite so far south and there was a light in her
often-distrustful
eyes that had not been there before. So taken was she with her little sister’s company that she decided to allow her to help with the riddling: a huge chore she treasured but could not tackle alone. Yet just looking at all the inverted oak Vs full of holes into which the bottles were inserted and twisted seemed to cause Sophie to lose concentration and become a-twitter with nerves.

“There are three steps to remuage,” Clementine instructed
her. “You twist the bottle about an eighth of a turn to the right like so, give it a quick shake to stir up the sediment and then tilt it slightly as you replace it in the slot. We’ll turn every bottle every second day — once to the right and once to the left — and when the bottles are all directly upside down the sludge will be gathered in the neck and then, voilà,
dégorgement
! Once we’ve got rid of the sludge the cork goes in and the champagne is ready to sell. Come on, Sophie, now you try. Shoulder width apart. No, shoulder width, same row. Same row! And twist. To the right. Oh, for pity’s sake! We’ll be here for months, if you carry on like this. The old
remueurs
turned 50,000 bottles a day but you won’t get to 50!”

Mind you, having even 50 turned by wrists other than her own would be a help so Clementine eventually left Sophie to it and made her way along a different row of pupitres, both hands flying, the musical rattling of glass against timber soothing her the way it always did.

If the eldest and youngest Peines were blooming in the sun, however, Mathilde was shrivelling in the shadows. She’d been doing her best to medicate away that itch of hers but still it nagged. Whenever she closed her eyes nowadays she saw her Upper Westside apartment: the Tiffany lamp in the dining room, the tangerine sofa in the den, the stand in the hall holding her coordinated collection of caramel and chocolate coloured umbrellas and the one annoying pink one with little love hearts on it.

Had she done the right thing?

There. That was it. Doubt, a thousand times worse than guilt. Guilt she could choose not to feel. With doubt she was struggling.

The thing was, she admitted to herself in a lucid moment one sleepless morning when the pastis had worn off but the Xanax not yet kicked in, she was the one who had left. It had
been her choice, her wish, her blessed relief — so why was it that she felt so abandoned? She hated that word, it stank of weakness and she could not abhor weakness. Besides, to be abandoned you had to be in need of whoever had abandoned you and this was not the case in her situation. She didn’t need anyone. She wasn’t forsaken in any way. She was the one who had gone. But the truth was, she could have tracked herself down in a nano-second, so why the hell couldn’t they? Couldn’t he? Or, more to the point, why hadn’t he? All this time and not so much as an angry letter, an accusatory phone call, a desperate plea for her to return to the States.

George. She rolled her husband’s name around in her head, the American way, seeing him standing in their bedroom wearing any one of his pastel-coloured cashmere sweaters, staring at her the way she so often caught him doing, a look on his face that made her want to slap him so hard his teeth rattled.

They’d hardly enjoyed the romance of the centuries but the arrangement had suited them both extremely well. She’d been very happy to marry someone wealthy and successful and he had certainly never complained about her looks, her style, her great ability to get the right people together in the right room. It was an equal marriage, reasonable in many respects, most definitely better than any of the unions her poor deluded mother had attempted. Even so, Mathilde had spent the past however-many years wishing he was dead or she was dead or that one of them was on the other side of the world. And now she was. So why, why, why, she asked herself, was she spending so much time wondering why he hadn’t chased her there?

For a while, she’d escaped these irritating notions by flirting with Benoît Geoffroy again. It was a relief to let her hormones lead her for a bit but she had lost interest when he’d resisted her charms, first out among the vines and then again,
more robustly, when she had turned up at his house wearing a low-cut top and bearing a bottle of single malt.

Then she set her sights on straightening up the Peine château but without going to Paris and spending a fortune it was a fruitless task. And as no one but herself had the slightest inkling of style, what was the point? Clementine trailed mud across the rugs like an old plough horse and Sophie’s idea of interior design was plonking a pile of matching pebbles next to a jar of dried twigs.

The Peine family finances were another matter.

This was a project into which Mathilde could truly sink her teeth and so did. The paperwork was nonsensical, true; all she knew for sure was that once the taxes were paid, the House of Peine would be so in the red that she and those two fools to whom she was allegedly related would to all intents and purposes be the joint owners of nothing but an enormously painful headache that would require decapitation — unless they could turn the business around.

Still. Still, still, still. Turning it around was not
impossible
. For all Clementine’s nutty eccentricity and infuriating social incompetence, the dullard had clearly done a capable job of taking care of her precious grapes and the land, after all, was the family’s major asset. If Mathilde could just rescue the finances, stave off payment of the monies owed until the House was in better shape, then there was a chance to make some cash.

All she needed in the absence of a secretary, a financial controller and the slew of dewy-eyed males she was used to charming into doing the dirty work, was an assistant.

“Sophie, I need you today,” she said briskly as she walked into the kitchen one morning, filling up a cup of coffee from the pot on the stove and lighting a breakfast cigarette. No one here to tell her what a disgusting habit it was and how passive
smoke could kill. This was France! “There’s office work to do and I can’t do it on my own.”

Clementine and Sophie both froze, chunks of baguette spread lavishly with Mirabella plum jelly halfway to each mouth. Cochon, upon hearing Mathilde’s shoes clicking across the stone floor jumped to his feet with such speed he banged his little head on the seat of a chair.

“What do you mean office work?” Clementine finally said, just as Sophie stammered, “But I’m riddling.”

“Yes, well it comes as no surprise to me that you are not familiar with the accounts, Clementine, or we wouldn’t be in this state. But someone around this festering heap has to pull their finger out and confront the mess we are in and I’ve decided it’s going to be me. So I need a filing clerk to sort out the books and Sophie will do nicely.”

“But I don’t know about filing,” Sophie cried and even Clementine was surprised by the panic in her voice. “I don’t know about accounts.”

“You can learn to twist stupid bottles, you can learn to file,” Mathilde said impatiently.

“She still hasn’t learned to twist the bottles,” Clementine argued, meaning that she needed more time to teach her, but Mathilde pounced on this logical flaw straight away.

“Well, if she hasn’t picked it up by now she’s hardly going to. Come on you,” she said to Sophie, pulling out her chair, but Sophie clung to the table, white knuckles shining, like a toddler being sent to bed for not eating her dinner.

“I don’t want to,” she cried, “I want to riddle with Clementine.”

“Oh, don’t be such a sap,” Mathilde snapped. “It’s only filing for Christ’s sake. It’s as easy as ABC.” She saw the terror then in Sophie’s eyes and her clever mind clicked instantly, an incredulous laugh flying straight out of her.

“I don’t believe it,” she said, letting Sophie go. “I’ve read about people like you but I never thought I would have one in the family.” She ignored the tug in her smooth flat stomach at that thought, felt a further hardening in the calloused muscle of her heart.

“She still hasn’t learned to twist the bottles?” she asked Clementine. “Let me guess, she gets confused between left and right? Has trouble following your directions? Can’t do it with both hands?”

Clementine nodded dumbly, clueless as to where this was leading.

Mathilde picked up one of her fashion magazines and tossed it in front of Sophie. “Read it,” she commanded.

“I can’t,” whispered Sophie, barely glancing at it. “It’s in English.”

Mathilde laughed, humourlessly. “It’s in Italian, you stupid girl.”

“Well, maybe she can’t read Italian,” Clementine interjected. “We didn’t all go to fancy schools like you, Miss America.”

“Can’t read Italian? She can’t read, period, Clementine. The little tramp has obviously never been to school at all. Just my luck, not one idiot sister but two.”

With an anguished cry, a scraping of her chair, the spin of her coffee bowl on the table, Sophie leaped to her feet and ran from the room in much the same way Clementine had done the first night they met. The eldest Peine half-stood to follow her but was out of her depth. Sophie couldn’t read? Her mind was a muddle. It was unusual in this day and age, certainly, but what was the big deal?

She turned to look at Mathilde, who wore a proud smirk as though she’d just won the
grand prix
at the Champagne Awards. At this her elusive eloquence calmly slipped into
place. “You are too thin,” she told her sister. “You are a soak like your father. You haven’t a drop of kindness in your dry old body and I thank God you don’t have a family of your own because they would feel about you the way you obviously feel about us.”

Mathilde stood there and let the insults penetrate, ignoring the clenching in her entrails, concentrating on the adrenaline pumping through her body as she felt the straightforward passion of hatred blending in her veins.

“You know,” she drawled slyly, picking imaginary tobacco off her perfectly made-up lips, “you could have told me Benoît was married.”