House of Peine (12 page)

By the first day of October the vendange was in full swing. La Petite’s flock had descended, as promised, and the whole of the Marne Valley rattled and hummed with the happy sounds of a bumper crop about to start its magical transformation into the sparkling drink of kings and queens and anyone else with a lick of taste.

In the vineyard, the pickers, sun-ripened like berries themselves, deftly snipped off the bunches and put them in their hand baskets, while the carriers collected the baskets and emptied them into bigger
stampes
or crates at the end of the rows.

Clementine then drove the stampes to the winery in the cranky old tractor and watched with a careful eye as the berries were tipped into the wooden press. Every stage in the champagne journey was a crucial one but arguably none more so than this: the pressing of the
must
, the juice that would go on to be wine. There were many strict regulations to satisfy before the berries even got to that point, of course. These prompted many a vigneron to complain until their ears bled, which had
once been the case with Renaud de Vallois over in
Fontaine-sur
-Aÿ, but the regulations were also what protected the reputation of champagne — what stopped any other bubbly wine from being able to call itself that.

For a start, La Petite’s bevy of dark-skinned chatterboxes could not just go out there among the vines and pick as much as they wanted: there was a limit to how many grapes could be harvested per hectare. This quantity was decided every year by the Champagne authorities and woe betide anyone who tried to pick more. They would be tattled on by a worker or a
neighbour
— remember, the plots were all out there right next to each other, it didn’t take a mathematical genius to work out who was cheating — and there would be trouble for sure.

Once this preordained quantity of grapes had been picked, there was no chance for the pickers to sit down and enjoy a baguette stuffed full of spicy sausage or a glass of non-vintage brut either. If the fruits of their labours didn’t make it to the winery within a few short hours, the grapes were deemed unusable and dumped, something no grape grower ever wanted to see. Arnaud d’Ablois in Champillon had seen it twice in one harvest a few years back when half his pickers had come down with a stomach bug. After witnessing such traumatic waste, the poor vigneron quite lost his senses, disappeared for three days, then came back wearing a purple suit three sizes too small for him and smelling strongly of aviation gas. He had not been quite the same ever since and it had been a lesson to all
Champenois
to steer clear of Madame d’Ablois’s fish soup.

Once the grapes were deposited safely in the press, the regulations still did not ease up. The berries were squeezed just twice, with only the clear juice of the first delicate pressure actually being used for wine as it was highest in sugar and acidity (the two ingredients most prized in champagne). This
pressing had to be done very gently in order to extract a clear juice from the two dark-skinned pinot grapes. No winemaker wanted to see the slightest suggestion of pink, unless it was some months later and she was tinkering with a rosé!

At the House of Peine the juice, once pressed, gurgled down through a pipe in the floor to the cellar below and straight into a vat that was marked with the name of the plot from whence those particular berries had come. All plots were pressed separately, all musts kept in different vats to protect their characters — that was essential for the blending process. “La-a-a-a!” trilled Clementine when she thought of the blend. “La-a-a-a!”

She had little time for eccentricity, mind you, because the juice was only a day in the vat before it was racked off, clear now of any unwanted debris. Then she added her special yeast and sugar concoction to hurry along the juice’s transformation into alcohol — its first fermentation. Yet another crucial stage.

Actually, anyone who knew Clementine well (so small a group as to barely exist) might have picked up something of a transformation in her.

The vendange was always an exciting time for a committed winemaker such as Clementine: there was always the hint of a glint in her otherwise dim demeanour during the harvest, but this year she almost sparkled. Those mad wiry ringlets looked positively glossy and had loosened into an almost relaxed curl, the faded red tones revived to a glorious copper. Her skin, too, seemed more lively somehow: it shone with a glow she didn’t usually possess and she had on several occasions been heard whistling as she worked. In a
light-hearted
fashion. She looked for all the world like someone who was in the advanced stages of, if not happiness, then something mightily close.

Unfortunately, the only person who might have noticed
this, the chairperson of that almost non-existent group of people who knew Clementine well, was too preoccupied to give it much thought. Sophie too was revelling in what the vendange had delivered. It turned out she had an indispensable part to play in the process. And she was unfamiliar enough with being indispensable to feel highly impressed with this state of affairs. She was not such a good picker, the movements up and down and along the vines being a little too focussed for her, but she was an excellent carrier and the grape-pickers warmed to her as their leader in a way they might have once to Olivier but, sadly, never could to Clementine. This had a remarkable knock-on effect because dealing with the pickers could be time consuming if they were in a churlish state of mind and the clock was ticking.

With Sophie in charge, though, the valley rang with the sound of their laughter, the click of their cutters and the tumble of grapes from their baskets. They picked quickly and happily and the whole operation ran more smoothly as a result. There would be no skintight purple suit and aviation gas for the Peines this vendange.

Under such conditions Sophie, too, continued to thrive. Her hair had grown longer and was curling prettily around her slender neck, the harsh jet black faded, a rich burgundy emerging at the roots. There was a happy flush to her honeyed cheeks and her violet eyes sparkled. Certainly the hours were long and the work exhausting, but still she flourished. The Guerlain counter at Le Bon Marché seemed a long, long way away. This was truly belonging.

Mathilde had not once been sighted in the vineyard — she just didn’t have the clothes for that sort of work — but to everyone’s astonishment she had appeared in the cave on the first day of the vendange, holding a clipboard and a Montblanc pen, and proved to be extremely organised in the recording of
what was going where and for how long.

Clementine, distracted by everything else that was going on, had ignored her at first — their relationship worked better that way — but after a couple of days had to admit (although never out loud) that Mathilde was actually helping: quite a lot. Not only was she recording which musts were where but she had reorganised the cave in a more logical fashion so that the bottled wine still resting on its lees was well out of the way, the oak barrels for the new wine were close at hand and the riddled stock ready for dégorgement was somewhere in the middle where it would be easy to get to once the harvest was over.

If Mathilde was enjoying this work, however, it did not show. In contrast to her blossoming sisters, she looked as though every bit of enjoyment had been thoroughly wrung out of her on some earlier occasion, leaving her a desiccated shell of her former self. Her hair was limp, there were bruised bags beneath her eyes, her dull skin was drawn tight over her sharp cheekbones. If Clementine and Sophie appeared full of the joys of life, Mathilde looked like she had been emptied.

As it turned out, there was a very good reason.

“Hector,” La Petite rasped from her bed one evening about a week into the vendange, “what are you doing to these women?”

Hector had come in to read her the latest celebrity gossip from
Paris Match
, which was usually a great treat for La Petite. But on this occasion she was impatient to discuss matters of a more pressing nature.

“Don’t worry, Petite,” he assured her with great confidence. “I know what I’m doing.”

“It’s who you are doing that worries me,” said La Petite, with a cough. She was fading, that was certain, but not as quickly as she had anticipated. Her spirit and flesh were
colluding to keep her in good shape for the task ahead, there was no doubt about it. She couldn’t go yet, even if she wanted to.

Hector laughed and leaned over to place a tender kiss on her withered brow. “I don’t much care for the middle one,” he told her. “But that’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

“Yes, of course. But both the others?”

Hector shrugged and shook open the magazine.

“It’s all going according to plan,” he said unapologetically. “My plan.”

La Petite eyed him critically through her lizard-like lids. In this instance, she could see that his sweet and obliging nature was perhaps being overruled by his strength. Ordinarily, she would have been angry but just at that point she could not truthfully summon the energy. Besides, she trusted Hector. She had to. He was her successor, after all. Her kinky blend of genetics had been copied and passed down the line specifically to him and she believed that he would do a great job of leading the family into the next century, as long as he didn’t eat too much red meat or smoke tailor-made
cigarettes
. She should expect him to flex his own muscle, she reasoned, it was good, it was a start, and she was not going to be there for much longer to tell him what to do anyway so he might as well stand on his own two feet.

La Petite laid back on her pillows with a sigh, scratched one itchy armpit like a little monkey, and remembered the first time she had exercised her own will with her own great-
grandfather
(or something like it). He was bedridden at the time, just the way she was now, and preparing to pass the family mantle down to her.

It was so long ago she could only recall it in scratchy black and white as though her memory was a war-time newsreel. Horses were pulling carts of wine barrels, she could recall that much clearly, and a woman’s ankles were a rare sight, her own
included. But she had enjoyed displaying them for the first time ever to a lonely, pock-marked riddler by the name of Claude whom she had loved out of a dangerous depression, and whose life she had saved, just one of many. Claude! She gave a dreamy little chuckle. Oh, how he had soaked up her touch, that man, how his heavy heart had lightened, how his hands had flown over bottles that before she worked her magic had been stiff and heavy beneath his fingers.

Of course, it wasn’t really magic, not in the miraculous sense. Her great-grandfather had always been perfectly clear about that and she hoped she had made it plain to Hector as well. The vignerons might have whispered that she had some sort of mystical power but while she never quashed these rumours — in fact, she liked them, they never failed to give her a good cackle — they were not true.

She was no more than one of life’s ordinary citizens: just a bit more clued up when it came to the power of
amour
.

Where La Petite and her ancestors came from (not that anyone could recall quite where that was), money had little currency, happiness counted for everything. This
understanding
was God’s gift to their family and the world, particularly the champagne world, or so she had been led to believe. “Never mind Saint Vincent,” her great-grandfather had told her, “we are the patron saints of champagne. A heavy heart cannot make a bubble dance so do what you can, Eulalie. Do what you can.” That’s how long ago it was that she’d heard those words: she still had a name.

“Do what you can, Hector,” she told the new patron saint and he smiled, reminding her again why it was so easy for him to melt hearts hardened by even the most awful gloom.

“You’ll see, La Petite,” he said. “I’m doing what you told me, just in my own way. It will work out. It always does.”

That evening Clementine made her first round of the vats to taste the freshly pressed grape juice. Despite her generally uplifted spirits, she had been putting this off, her heart
fluttering
in her chest, the “la-a-a-as” stacking up inside her throat like aeroplanes in a holding pattern at a busy airport. It was the very first step in the art of blending, after all, this first tart taste of what the berries had to offer.

She poured herself a splash of the pinot noir that grew down in the valley where she had fallen off her bike, and took a sip. It tasted peppery and raw on her tongue but as it warmed her blood, it brought in its wake the doubt that all the near-happiness in the world could not keep at bay.

Everybody knew the secret of champagne was in the blend. It was what made sense of growing grapes in the
precarious
climate of the Marne — the ability to mix each year's wine from all the different plots with the precious reserve wines from previous years.

It was how the Champenois managed to make their house champagne tingle on the tongue in the exact same way year
after year despite the fact every vintage produced an entirely different-tasting assortment of grapes.

Some years, the pinot noir lacked complexity while the chardonnay lacked delicacy; yet others, the pinot meunier was too fruity and the pinot noir not fruity enough. When the crop yield was low because of frost or heat, it did not matter that there was less of the latest wine because there was always the reserve wine from earlier more bountiful harvests (the '99 pinot noir, for example).

It was a delicate balancing act performed nowhere else in the wine-making world, this mixing of the wines from the past and present. It was the point of champagne, the beauty.

It was also a skill Clementine did not believe she possessed.

Her palate, as her father had told her years before, was as blunt as a stone. She knew in her head all the requirements of the house style
cuvée
, and she could pick their own finished product out of an unlabelled tasting of a million bottles. Yet when it came to sampling those raw young wines and selecting which ones should go into the blend and in what quantity, her good sense eluded her.

“You are blind,” her father had roared at her the last time she had joined him, before, unable to tolerate her incompetence, he banned her from the blending process altogether. “Blind, blind, blind!”

In other champagne houses,
assemblage
was a vital period not just for the champagne but for the Champenois. At Krug, three generations still gathered in the same room to settle on the blend; at Tarlant in Oeuilly, it was four; each winemaker passing down his knowledge, his memory to the generation below so that it was never lost, so that the taste of the house style was imprinted in the blood like DNA, moving invisibly from one century's vignerons to the next.

Olivier, who had lost the ability to share in such a way, had not been able to do this. In the early days, he had wanted to talk to his daughter, to pass on his secrets, but his festering grief eventually robbed him of the necessary skills. Then in latter days, his misery curdled completely and his earlier truly good intentions were lost to him and as a result lost also to Clementine. Words that might once have expressed kindness and encouragement were replaced with grunts and, more often than not, insults.

I am blind, Clementine thought sadly, pouring the pinot down the drain. Blind, blind, blind. She could do nothing but hope that when it came time for the blend, she would be able to pull a rabbit out of the hat. Still, it was something of a magic trick for Clementine to even factor in hope. It had been in short supply for so long yet here she was considering her blindness and at the same time feeling a flutter of something that was not panic. For once, fear was not holding her hostage. She had a secret, nothing to do with her deficient taste buds, that was setting her free, reddening her cheeks, sending shivers down her spine.

“'Mentine, here you are!” Sophie's voice jolted her out of her daydream and she felt another rush of pleasure at seeing her little sister. Feeling an urge to bond behind the '99, she turned, smiling. “Sophie, what good timing.” She pointed in the
direction
of the reserve barrels. “It's been so busy. I've been looking out for you but somehow … anyway, come, I have something I want to tell you.”

“Oh, goody, 'Mentine, because I have something I want to tell you, too.”

Clementine felt the thrill of anticipation. This was the sister she had once dreamed of, here was the nest of confidence and camaraderie she had lacked her whole childhood. She whipped down quickly to the '88 and pulled out a bottle and
two glasses, then darted back to their spot and nestled in next to Sophie.

“So,” her youngest sister prompted. “What is it?”

“You're not going to believe it. Well, I can hardly believe it myself. I wanted to tell you sooner but I have hardly had a chance, the vendange, you know. Anyway,” the cork popped out with a sly hiss, the bubbles poured delightedly into the glasses, “finally, Sophie, finally something truly wonderful has happened to me.”

“Oh, Clementine, don't keep me in suspense. What is it? You look so …” Sophie couldn't think of the word but felt better just seeing the joy in Clementine's face.

For about a second.

“Hector.” His name tripped across Clementine's lips so effervescently that for the first time in her life she felt bubbly, truly bubbly. She fizzed and gurgled and popped with the sheer bliss of loving and being loved by the perfect specimen that had entered their lives so unexpectedly.

It seriously was difficult for her to believe what had happened but that very first night Hector had arrived, the night Clementine herself had so bitterly jumped to the conclusion he would not even notice she was breathing, let alone feel her breath on his naked skin, he had slid silently into her room and slipped beneath the covers of her creaky bed.

Clementine, feeling the springs bounce, the warmth of another body so close to hers, had assumed she was dreaming and sighed into her pillow, wriggling backwards so that her smooth bottom inside its white linen nightgown fitted neatly into the lap of the man she was imagining lay behind her.

The man's lap sprang to attention and upon feeling this, the sleepy smile disappeared from Clementine's face and her eyes opened wide in the darkness. She felt him move even closer, heard the rhythm of his heart beating against her back,
smelled his salty skin, a hint of rosemary from the duck they'd had for dinner. She knew she should repel him, that he had no right, that it was a crime to sneak into a woman's bed unbidden. But she had dreamed of someone just like him doing something just like this for so long that her heart felt no fury, only the pleasure of finally having some real warmth blast into its cold lonely chambers.

She turned over and found that her body too had intentions all of its own and, far from shrinking away, was calling out for whatever Hector had to offer. In the end there was nothing unbidden about it. He helped himself to the parts of her that had lain abandoned for so long and she welcomed him as he'd never been welcomed before. It was an extremely inspiring experience for both of them.

“Why?” she had whispered when they lay curled together afterwards, his fingers tracing circles in the soft flesh of her white belly. “Why?”

It had been so unlike her one night with Benoît. (So flushed was she in the aftermath of having been Hector-ed, she forgot her normal trilling.) She remembered little but tears and anger and regret from the night Amélie had been conceived, yet this night with Hector there had been only ecstasy. Sweet, delirious, hot, sweaty, salty, naked ecstasy. With a hint of rosemary.

“I should go,” Hector whispered back, instead of answering Clementine's question. He was nothing if not honest and didn't particularly want to mention La Petite's role in what had just occurred. Instead, he slid out from beneath Clementine's sheets, kissed her bruised and happy lips, and disappeared into the darkness.

She floated through the next week of riddling and preparing for the vendange, working her fingers to the bone, her focus on her grapes, her vines, as always, but still an
uncustomary smile never far from her lips. At night, exhausted but exhilarated, she bathed, then crawled into bed and waited for Hector.

She had been so busy revelling in this happiness, this longawaited delivery from misery, and of course the wonderful, bountiful harvest, that she had quite failed to notice the exact same symptoms in Sophie.

“Me too,” was all Sophie said in a small voice as Clementine finished telling her about the secret trysts she had been sharing with their extraordinary visitor. “Me too.”

It took a while for Clementine to register this … she was concentrating on the '88, feeling the finish linger on her tongue, the faint trace of apples catching at the back of her throat.

A sourness crept into her saliva. “What do you mean, ‘Me too'?”

“I mean, ‘Me too',” Sophie repeated, her face white, her eyes huge and disbelieving. “With Hector. He wasn't
disappearing
into the darkness, Clementine. He was coming to me.”

“You?”

Sophie nodded miserably. He'd been a busy boy the first night he'd arrived, sliding into her bed too, the difference being that it was later and she was there waiting for him with open arms. They hadn't spoken at all, just loved each other, three or four times in a row, the way she knew they would, the way she expected. And he'd been back for more, and she willing to give it, every night since then. It hadn't even occurred to her to wonder what he was doing before he came to her. She'd assumed he was spending time with La Petite.

Sophie watched the happiness leach out of Clementine before her very eyes, the sourness spreading around her sister's body like morphine.

Of course, Clementine snickered cynically to herself,
happiness like that didn't belong to her. She had been a fool to relax for even a moment and think that it could. Happiness never belonged to fat, plain almost-virgins who couldn't even bear to think of their lost babies. “La-a-a-a!” she trilled in her sharp voice. Happiness belonged to skinny little strumpets like Sophie. Sweet Sophie. Kind Sophie. Her Sophie! “La-a-a-a!” How that betrayal hurt. And she had been hurt so many times before she thought she couldn't feel another pain and yet there it was, that feeling of being left in an ice storm without her skin.

She stood up and with a grunt that could have belonged to her miserable father, disappeared up the spiral stairs.

Sophie was about to chase after her but found her heart just a bit too broken to manage it right then so she just sat behind the pinot and wept until the moment passed. She'd seen this coming after all, had long acknowledged her expertise at happy beginnings, not endings, but she hadn't quite counted on Clementine being a factor. She would stand back and let her sister have Hector, of course she would, she would have been standing back to let him have someone anyway, but in the meantime she was allowed her little bit of heartache.