House of Peine (18 page)

As it happened, the pitchfork stayed where it was. In fact, Clementine woke up the next morning and burned the corduroy skirt. What’s more, the day after that, suppressing a panic attack that threatened to leave her once more weeping and shaking uncontrollably over the reserve chardonnay, she sought out Sophie and Edie.

She came upon them lying upside down on a lumpy sofa by the window in the hardly-ever-used sitting room. Cochon was nestled on a musty cushion on the floor, his legs tucked up underneath him looking more like a pig than ever.

“So, look up at the sky,” Sophie was saying to Edie. “Now start with the clouds. See the one that looks like a giant panda bear? With the grey spots like eyes, and a dark patch on the side above the leg? Well come down from that and there’s a big stretch of blue sky, not bright blue and not pale blue, but special winter Marne Valley blue, like milky cornflowers. See that? Okay, now move your eye very slowly further towards the ground and see how the sky changes colour? How it switches without you even noticing from
milky cornflower to cornflowery milk and then to just milk and all of a sudden you’re not looking at the sky at all you’re looking at the snow? It’s the same if you’re the right way up but you just see it more clearly this way. That’s how you learn to blend.”

“What are you talking about?” Clementine’s voice made the two of them jump. They turned over so they were sitting the right way up, both faces red and puffy with the effort of having been so recently inverted.

“I was just telling Edie how I did my eyes at Guerlain,” Sophie explained, but because Clementine did not know she had worked there, or what Guerlain was, this sounded like gibberish.

“Never mind that,” she said. “What do you mean when you say that’s how you learn to blend?”

“The colours, ’Mentine, on the eyes, with eye shadow. That was my specialty when I worked at the Guerlain counter at Le Bon Marché. Even my boss, the one who … well anyway, even my boss had to agree. I’m very good with colour.” She turned to Edie. “Lots of people who can’t spell or read very well are,” she explained.

Clementine opened her mouth to say something but suddenly overwhelmed by her struggle with her own hideous limitations, she instead burst into the very loud wet tears she had been trying to avoid. Sophie and Edie were off the sofa in a flash, drawing her back down between them and doing their best to cuddle her awkward body from either side.

“I can’t do it without Olivier,” Clementine sobbed. “I can do all the rest but the blend is different. It was his. The
champagne
was his. He chose how to make it taste like that. He knew what to do. He just knew it. He had it in his blood. Whatever he passed on to me, that wasn’t included and I can’t do it, Sophie, I can’t. I’m all at sea, on my own, bobbing
around and I’m frightened because if we don’t get it right this year it will be the end of us and the Peine ancestors will haunt me into an early grave which I probably won’t even mind because I’ll be in hell up here anyway. I can’t make poisonous pig swill like Rimochin. I can’t. But I’m not sure I can make anything better.”

“What’s she talking about?” Edie asked, distressed at the sight of her aunt in such a state.

Sophie shushed Clementine, pulled her as close as she could, then said over her head: “Assemblage. It’s when all the different wines are mixed together to make the perfect recipe for champagne before we start the bubbles. It’s a special art and our father used to do it on his own but now …”

“Now he’s gone and I’m blind, blind, blind!” Clementine wailed.

“You’re not blind, ’Mentine,” Sophie said soothingly. “You just think you are. It’s not the same.”

“And anyway,” Edie said hesitantly, “Sophie can see. And I can taste, ’Mentine, you told me I could. And you know the other stuff about the bubbles and all of that … so couldn’t we do it together?”

It was more or less what Mathilde had suggested but coming from her it had sounded deeply suspect. Coming from Edie with Sophie agreeing, it sounded better. Much better.

Sitting there between them on the lumpy sofa Clementine stopped crying, sat up straight, felt the first
soupçon
of faith in herself, in themselves. It was a little bit ridiculous, of course it was. Sophie had spent much of her life eating out of rubbish bins so had the most unsophisticated of tastebuds and Edie, well, she was only 10. In fact, it was more than a little bit ridiculous, it was a joke. And yet the soupçon refused to be quelled. Sophie with her artist’s eye at least understood the art of blending, the concept of a smooth transition from one point
on the spectrum to another, and Edie could pick the slightest hint of star anise from more than 20 paces. It wasn’t perfect — but it was worth a try.

The following day the three of them assembled in the kitchen where Clementine had prepared the accoutrements for the family’s first joint attempt at assemblage. There were 19 samples from the different Peine plots, plus another 12 from the past six years of reserve pinot noir and chardonnay. This made 31 bottles all clearly marked and lined up along the weathered oak table. Olivier’s notebook sat open on a blank page with their three names written across the top in big bold letters. There were buckets on the floor for spitting, there was bread for cleansing the palate and on the sideboard stood a warm prune tart, which served no practical use whatsoever but would help get them through to lunch time.

They started with the oldest of the reserve chardonnays. Clementine poured them each a couple of inches and they held it up to the same light, comparing the colour.

“What colour would you call this?” Clementine asked.

“I call it wine colour,” Edie answered doubtfully.

“I call it sort of an old-fashioned gold,” Sophie said with far greater confidence, “with a touch of straw.”

Clementine swirled the wine around, the winter light catching it as it hit the side of her glass. Old-fashioned gold is what Olivier would have called it too, she was sure, with a touch of straw.

“A more yellow gold,” Sophie said of the next wine. “With perhaps still a hint of old-fashioned.

“Pure straw,” she said of the next. “Well, pure pale straw.”

“Green-gold with silver-grey,” she announced of the 2002.

Any doubts Clementine might have had about what assistance Sophie could offer immediately disappeared. She agreed with every one of her sister’s calls, noting each comment
dutifully down in the notebook. (“Look at her writing,” marvelled Edie wistfully as she did so. “It’s all going the same way.”) The soupçon of faith had grown into a thick slice. Olivier himself had always said that colour could tell a person almost as much about the personality of the wine as the taste. Clementine mulled this thought over in her mind as she watched Sophie examining a glass of the 2003. She saw, just for a moment, a glimmer of that crusty old man in her sweet young sister, as her eyes scrunched up for a different
perspective
just as Olivier’s had once done.

Better still, it turned out that despite her time spent delving through the trash cans of Paris — or perhaps because of it — Sophie had a good nose as well as a good eye. “I can smell creamy honey,” she exclaimed at one point. “And fresh figs,” at another. “This one actually smells green. Is that possible? There’s Granny Smith apple in here,” she said assuredly. “And there’s orange in this meunier, or citrus of some sort. Actually, maybe it’s mandarin.”

“Okay, Edie,” Clementine said, once she’d completed her smelling notes. “Time for tasting. This is where we need your help. Now, I want to know your first impressions and then your second impressions, do you know what I mean by that?”

Edie shook her head.

“The first impression is what it feels like on the tongue, the teeth, the roof of the mouth. It’s a close inspection of the real taste. The second impression is what it reminds you of, how it makes you feel. If it sounds a little airy-fairy, I used to think so too but I know that’s how Olivier did it and it’s how the Geoffroys do it, too, and the Tarlants. How much easier it would be if it was all about science, hm? But no such luck.”

“No such bad luck,” Edie said dolefully. “I suck at science.”

“Let’s start on the ’99,” Clementine instructed, slowly swirling the golden wine around in the glass, breathing in its
aroma then taking a mouthful. Sophie did the same, as did Edie.

They sucked it through their teeth, let it roll around on their tongues, felt it splash against their palates. Then they spat.

“Well, it tastes like bananas but it reminds me of honey,” Edie said definitely.

“I agree,” Sophie said, taking another taste. “Although I’m not sure if I thought that until you said it.”

“It is fruity,” agreed Clementine. “Tropical fruity. I think there is some of your mango there, Edie, would you say?”

“Uh-huh,” Edie nodded. “And something else. It sort of reminds me of the coconut cream pie my grandma used to bake when I went to visit.”

They all took another taste.

“Coconut,” Clementine agreed. “It really is coconut.” The other two nodded enthusiastically, sharing a look of great delight. Then Clementine couldn’t stop herself, she tipped back her head and released a clear sweet laugh that any other day of her life might have been a “La-a-a-a!”

That first day, she got detailed notes of all the reserve wines. The following day they tasted the latest meunier; the day after that, the pinot noir; the fourth day, the chardonnay. All the chardonnay from the recent harvest was better than usual but the grapes that grew up behind the château, closest to the woods, which Clementine worried had not ripened enough, had grown into the most intense wine she had ever tasted.

“It tastes like cream cheese and apricots to me,” Edie said with great certainty. She was truly an expert by now. “But it reminds me of Bernadette’s
pain au chocolat amande.”

Bernadette’s pain au chocolat amande was a treat she made every other Saturday. It was her ordinary croissant dough
spread with almond custard and infused with Valrhona chocolate before being rolled, baked, then sprinkled liberally with slivered almonds and icing sugar. Clementine and Edie could spend hours just talking about it and even Mathilde had been known to wake up with a quiver of extra excitement on the days when she knew there was such a pastry waiting for her downstairs.

“You’re so good,” cried Sophie. “It reminds me of Bernadette’s pain au chocolat amande too but I couldn’t pinpoint it until you said it. You’re a genius, Edie.”

“She is,” agreed her other aunt. “It is pain au chocolat amande all over. It’s the buttery quality, I think, from the oak, and the sharpness of the Valrhona. But the almond I missed. You are right though, Edie, it’s there, as plain as the nose on your face. I got the apricots, too, and perhaps there’s a hint of mint as well.”

The
pain au chocolat
chardonnay, as it came to be known, stood head and shoulders above the rest. With its creamy stone-fruit notes they all agreed it had almost as much going for it as the earlier reserve chardonnay, which had the benefit of four or five years’ ageing in barrels. That a new wine showed such character was a rare and thoroughly heartening sign at a blending.

Once they had characterised all the recent wines, they separated them, regardless of their variety, into those that were straightforward, unusual, robust, acidic or sweet; those that danced on the tongue, those that sank, those with a long lingering finish and those with little. Then they divided all of those into three groups: harsh, smooth and special.

Finally, after they had decided among themselves that this new blend needed to perhaps be a tiny fraction softer than the previous year, Clementine took a glass measuring flask from the centre of the table. She poured in equal measures of the
wines from the smooth category until the flask was just over a third full.

“And we want the blackberries, don’t we?” Edie asked.

“Not in the brut, but in our vintage,” Clementine decided, knowing with all her previously missing certainty that there would be one. And that it would be special. “The vintage will also have the
pain au chocolat
chardonnay. It will be a truly stunning blend.”

“So we’ll save those two then?” Edie asked. “We won’t go using them up in the regular non-vintage stuff?”

Edie was a Peine, all right.

With the two Peine sisters and their niece working at it for the best part of two weeks, the exact blend for the brut was finalised on the 21st of the month, the eve of Saint Vincent's Day. It was heavier on the chardonnay than it had been in previous years but then their chardonnay harvest had been so good. It drew generously too from the reserve pinot, the '99 in fact, to which there was a certain resonance (that wine having played such a role in combining Sophie with Clementine all those months ago). After much tinkering they all felt they had managed to balance the sharp with the smooth, adding just enough of the special so that it was reminiscent of what Peine had always been, but with a touch of something extra, something new.

“With bubbles,” Edie announced happily after a final taste, “it will be perfect.”

“And now,” Clementine added solemnly, “for the vintage.”

As it turned out, this brew needed hardly any
consideration
at all. They simply mixed the blackberry pinot noir with the
pain au chocolat
chardonnay in almost equal measures then added just a suggestion of the sprightliest pinot meunier that
grew at the feet of Saint Vincent.

“It's all fluffy like clouds but sweet too, like candy,” Edie cried.

“You'd expect the mintiness to be too tart with the blackberry but it's not,” Sophie added. “The chardonnay somehow irons out the wrinkles. It's quite amazing.”

It was indeed a wine of uncompromising power and complexity. Although she felt in her bones that it was the right blend, Clementine was nonetheless worried. This vintage wine would be like no other champagne Peine had ever produced, nor any other house for that matter.

“But isn't that good?” wondered Edie. “We don't want to make the same as everyone else anyway.”

“The problem is that if we make it too different,” Clementine told her, “it might look as though we don't know what we're doing.”

“But you do know what you're doing, 'Mentine,” Sophie insisted. “It's all there inside you, like it was with Papa.”

Half of Clementine (the old half) wanted to snap back that what exactly would Sophie know about “Papa”, but the other half (the new one) wanted to believe her. How good could Olivier's choices have been in recent years with his dependency on pastis to make it past breakfast time? Who was to say she didn't know as much as he? More, even?

“I'm just not sure,” said the old and new halves together. Clementine had come along in leaps and bounds recently yet some doubts still lingered. “I just don't know.”

“Is there someone who does know?” Edie asked suddenly. “You know, someone we could ask?”

Sophie looked expectantly at Clementine. It really wasn't such a stupid idea.

“Who?” the eldest Peine countered. Who else was in a similar situation to them and might be happy to share? A
shadow fell across her face. Benoît, of course, was in the same situation and in an ideal world she would have asked him. But in an ideal world they would be standing there together now anyway, Amélie and an assortment of other little Geoffroy-Peines buzzing around them. This impossible image pulled at her insides; any chance of living in an ideal world had been shattered 18 years before. She tried to curse Mathilde, the way she had done ever since, the way that usually gurgled up unbidden through her spleen. But to her own surprise there was nothing there, not a trace of venom where once there had been nothing else. Amélie, she thought again to herself, keeping that picture in her head, seeing the young woman her daughter might have become standing there in the space between her sister and her niece.

“What's the matter?” Sophie asked. “Are you all right? You look like you've seen a ghost.”

A ghost, Clementine thought? In her mind, Amélie had dark curly hair and was on the plump side but so pretty, with Benoît's cupid lips and a breezy smile that came from neither of them.

“'Mentine,” Edie tugged at her. “Are you all right?”

Clementine blinked. Her daughter might not really be there but she was somewhere: she was not a ghost.

“I have never been better,” she said calmly.

It was true. Her life was so much more worth living now than it had been before, had been changed immeasurably by these people who had come into it and could change still.

“Well, since you're in such a good mood,” Sophie suggested tentatively, “do you think we could go to the Saint Vincent's Day parade tomorrow? Edie is dying for it and you must admit we've hardly left the house since Christmas.”

“Does she realise it means going to church again?” Clementine said gruffly, but she was not really thinking about
church. She was thinking about another Saint Vincent's Day parade many years before.

“Yes, but there's a party afterwards, isn't there?” Edie was jiggling with excitement. “Laurent Laborde told me.”

“A party?” harrumphed Clementine. “Well, I'd hardly call it a party. More like a bunch of old gas-bags sitting around moaning about the weather.”

“Oh come on, 'Mentine,” Sophie coaxed with a twinkle in her eye. “We'll go together, all of us. It will be a family outing. It might even be fun.”

Again, the concoction of bitterness and regret on which Clementine had come to depend did not rise up and stick in her throat with its usual conviction. Even had she wanted to attend the parade any January in the past 18 years Olivier had long since been excluded, following a rousing bout of fisticuffs with a dozen or so other vignerons. In previous years she had sat in her cold house with her silent father, cursing the wretched saint for not taking better care of them. It wasn't as though he warded off the frosts or warmed the temperatures when the berries were ripening, after all.

This year, though, she found herself begrudgingly joining her sisters and niece for Mass and the procession afterwards, to leave gifts at the foot of the statue. Clementine personally thought the notion of dressing up like olden-day grape-pickers was at best misguided but it was something of a thrill to see Edie, who herself drew the line at dressing up, in a cloth hat and apron, skipping through the crowds with Cochon in tow, other children her own age dancing around her. She looked so normal, so happy, so part of it all. This gave Clementine great pleasure because she knew that for Edie, as it had been for her, this was rarely the case.

It was the most beautiful of crisp clear days, the white snow still thick and crunchy on the ground. The Marne looked
so clean, Clementine could not help but notice. And the villagers were all smiling, sometimes even at her. Mathilde was deep in conversation with the mayor; Sophie was chatting to a good-looking young man wearing clogs; and Edie was laughing and showing the children how she had trained Cochon to stand on his back legs and beg, like a dog.

So busy was Clementine marvelling at this unfamiliar new family of hers as she trudged away from the statue that she failed to notice old Madame Monet, the hunchback who lived in the town's narrowest house, stop suddenly in front of her, causing Clementine to lose her balance. She reeled backwards to keep from falling on the old crone, then felt the crunch of someone else's toes beneath her heels. Spinning awkwardly around she found herself in the arms of Benoît Geoffroy.

He held her by both elbows, steadying her, looking straight into her eyes, his weathered brown ones clouded with their own dark secrets.

The village, the crowd, the gifts, the noise, the cold, it all seemed to gather up in some silent tornado and start spinning around the two of them as they stood there frozen still.

How did this happen to us? Clementine yowled silently yet again. How can all these years have passed by with nothing between us but a few stolen glances? She held her breath expecting at any moment to feel the release of pressure on her arms as he let go, but he didn't.

He held on. Tightly, he held on.

Amélie, Clementine imagined saying. The effort of not telling him about their daughter was like a physical pain in her chest, a terrible clawing at her heart. I don't know for sure what she looks like, she could picture herself mouthing the words, but I think she has your lips.

“Clementine,” Benoît said, as awkward as she, but still he held on.

“I need to know,” she whispered, trying to bite back the words as they escaped her. “I need to know.”

“You need to know what?”

She was making the most terrible fool of herself, she knew that. She could rescue her dignity by asking him about the blend, the vendange, his father, anything, yet her heart would not allow it.

“If you wanted me to come to the parade with you. Back then. Before …” Tears, she found, were streaming down her face. How easy it was to speak to him! What a waste of all these years worrying that it was impossible!

Up close, his hair was flecked with grey and the skin around his eyes was etched with wrinkles. Just like her he looked gnawed at by the wind, grizzled by life among the vines. And even though she had seen him this close on only a handful of occasions, every inch of him looked utterly familiar to her, the way a famous painting does when you finally see the real thing after years of looking at a postcard.

“Of course,” he answered, gripping her elbows even tighter. “Yes.”

“I shouldn't have … if only …”

“No, it's my fault,” Benoît said hoarsely. “I'm so —”

“Don't say sorry,” Clementine simply could not bear it. “Please, please, don't say sorry.”

“But I am,” Benoît told her but just as he was about to go on he dropped his hands from her arms so smartly it was as though she had scalded him. A hardness that had not been there before crept into his eyes as he looked behind her. She soon knew why: the sharp claws of a well-manicured woman dug into her shoulder.

“What is the matter with you Peine women?” Odile Geoffroy growled, spinning Clementine around to face her. “Get your hands off my husband, do you hear me? I've already
told your stupid slut of a sister and now I'm telling you. Get your own husbands. Leave mine alone!”

“Calm down, Odile,” Benoît tried to reason with her, although he was clearly flustered. “There's no need to speak like that.”

“My sister?” Clementine stuttered. “I don't understand. We were just talking. I was just asking.”

“I know exactly what you were asking for too, you trollop,” Odile hissed. “Same thing your trashy sister was asking for when she turned up on my doorstep wearing next to nothing. A piece of my husband. Well, he's not up for grabs so take some advice: back off and leave us alone or you'll be sorry. You'll all be sorry!”

“Odile, you're being ridiculous,” Benoît said. “We are neighbours. We should be able to —”

“Ridiculous, am I? How dare you embarrass me like this. It's an outrage.” Odile's voice was indeed outraged, her double chin quivering furiously. “And as for you,” she turned on Clementine again, “you lumpy slattern, you keep your hands to yourself and tell that drunken American sister of yours to keep doing the same. He's my husband, do you hear? Mine.”

At this, Benoît, suffused by embarrassment, took his wife roughly by the elbow and with some force turned her away, pushing her through the crowd, leaving Clementine standing there, humiliated.

“Come on, 'Mentine,” laughed Sophie, who had seen none of this, as she came up behind her. “The banquet's in the town hall. Goose, I believe. Your favourite. And I hear Bernadette has excelled herself with kirsch soufflé and Chantilly meringues. Mathilde says the mayor —”

“Leave me alone,” Clementine cried and turning on her heels she ran home, the trampled snow now dirty and slushy beneath her feet, the villagers no longer smiling at her.

She had thought it would change her life knowing that Benoît had meant it all those years ago about the parade, that she hadn't imagined the sparkle of promise between them. But it hadn't changed her life at all. He was still married to Odile.

Once back at the château, Clementine crawled into her bed with a box of nougat and wept into her goose feathers for what had been lost and could never be regained.

Wept for Benoît and Amélie.

And herself.

It was a long, sleepless night.