Vintage (25 page)

Guy had a very vivid flashback to the
Vinifera
vomit debacle.

Perhaps not.

When Guy came in from the vineyards, he found Kelly sitting on the step outside the farmhouse. Though it was almost four in the afternoon, she was wearing a dressing gown and fluffy slippers. She had a fag in one hand and her mobile phone in the other.

“Better signal out here,” she said.

Guy’s attempt at reestablishing friendly relations started badly.

“Got over your hangover?” he asked.

“Don’t start,” Kelly snapped. “I’m sorry, OK, I let you down, I let Froggy Bottom down, but most of all I let myself
down,” she paraphrased the traditional teacher’s lament. “I’m a waste of space. I know.”

She got up and turned as if to go back into the house.

“Hang on,” said Guy. “Come out into the garden with me. It’s a nice afternoon. Just right for drinking rosé.”

Kelly frowned.

“You want to have a drink with me?”

“Yes. Toast the start of the weekend.”

“I’ll put my jeans on,” she said.

Kelly’s suspicion only increased when she joined Guy in the garden. He really was making an effort. Kelly discovered that he had got out the picnic table and laid it with a white cloth. A bottle of rosé—Froggy Bottom’s own—was already chilling in the ice bucket. He even pulled out Kelly’s chair.

“What are you up to?” Kelly asked him.

“Why do I have to be up to anything? I just thought it would be nice to share a bottle of wine with my nearest neighbor on this most beautiful of evenings.”

It was indeed a beautiful evening. It was approaching what is sometimes known as the “magic hour” when the setting sun casts a gentle pink glow over everything and smoothes out any flaws like a soft-focus lens. There was hardly a breath of wind, so the sound of the swallows could be heard overhead though they were almost too high in the sky to be seen.

For a little while Guy and Kelly didn’t talk and the silence seemed almost companionable, but pretty soon both of them realized that the silence wasn’t companionable at all; it was awkward. Kelly had hardly touched her glass of wine.

“Don’t you like it?” Guy asked.

“I don’t feel like I can drink in front of you. What was it you called me at the wine fair? A drunken slut?”

Guy shifted awkwardly in his chair. He had indeed called Kelly a drunken slut and much worse too. He had been raised by a mother who had instilled great respect for women in her son and being reminded that he had used such a gender-specific slur didn’t sit well with him at all.

“Well … ” he hummed. It was on his lips to ask her if she didn’t think he had a point. Thankfully he managed to keep it in. “I’m sorry,” he said. “That wasn’t what I wanted to talk about tonight. I really just wanted to have a friendly drink. Look”—he took a big gulp from his glass—“I’m not so uptight that I don’t occasionally go over my weekly units myself.”

Kelly managed a little smile. She picked up her glass and took a swig of her own.

“Do you like it?” Guy asked.

“It’s OK. Tastes like strawberries,” she added.

“That’s what I was aiming for. Listen, we’ve started off badly,” Guy admitted then. “You said that these vines were like my babies. Truth is, they are. Your father planted the first vineyard in the seventies but they were getting a bit tired. I saw my chance to put my mark on this place.”

Kelly nodded. And helped herself to some more rosé. She noticed Guy watching her closely. Too closely, she thought. He threw up his hands when he noticed her reaction. “No, no. I mean, help yourself. I’m glad you like it.”

“Thanks. What were you going on about?”

“I’ve wanted to be a winemaker for so long, Kelly. It’s not the kind of ambition you’d expect the average kid from Jo’Burg to have. But my parents took me to Stellenbosch when I was about twelve and we visited the vineyards there. It was so beautiful. I decided there and then that I was going to study at the university of Stellenbosch and one day I would have a vineyard of my own. Well, I’m still a long way off owning a vineyard, but
your father gave me the chance to be pretty much my own boss at Froggy Bottom.”

“That’s great,” said Kelly.

“So, you can understand why I get so precious about it.”

“I suppose.”

“But I do realize that makes me blinkered. I mean, before your father died, you’d probably never even thought about where wine comes from.”

“I knew where wine comes from,” said Kelly. “I’m not that thick.”

“That’s not how I meant that comment to come out.” Guy tried again. “What I meant was, while I went out to the vines this morning, I was feeling pretty angry, but as I worked it came to me that maybe I was being a little judgmental.”

Kelly nodded. “Er, yeah.”

“Wine isn’t your passion. It’s perfectly understandable that you don’t want to get up at the crack of dawn and work outside all day.”

Kelly nodded again.

“But that doesn’t mean that you can’t have anything to do with the future of Froggy Bottom. There are all sorts of aspects to the wine business.”

“I’m not interested in anything about wine except drinking it,” said Kelly flatly.

“But you’re wasting an enormous opportunity here. There are people who would give their right arm to have the chance to make something of a place like this. It’s a glamorous world. I could make the wine and you could be involved in marketing it. You could go round the wine merchants and restaurants and sell Froggy Bottom.”

“I don’t want to do marketing,” said Kelly.

“But it’s a glamorous career. Lots of girls want to do it.”

“You think I should want to do marketing because I’m
a girl? I’d heard South Africans were racist. I didn’t know they were sexist too.”

“I’m sorry.” Guy didn’t know how to come back from that. “It was just a suggestion.”

“I don’t need you to suggest anything to me.”

“Then what do you want to do, eh? Sit in the dark for the whole bloody summer?” Guy was finding it increasingly difficult to rein in his exasperation.

“What are you getting at?”

“I’m getting at the fact that you seem incapable of getting off your backside. Don’t you want to do anything with your life? Are you happy to achieve absolutely nothing at all?”

Kelly bristled. “For your information,” she said, sticking out her chin. “I am doing something. I’m organizing an all-nighter.”

“A what?”

“I’m going to hold a rave here. I’ve already got a couple of DJs ready to do sets. I just have to set the date.”

“You can’t do that.”

“We’re going to set up decks in the barn and—”

“No way. The barn is full of winemaking equipment.”

“We can party around it.”

“Kelly, you’re not holding a party on this farm.”

“I don’t seem to remember
your
name appearing in my father’s will, Guy. I’m going to get some flyers done. Gina’s brother will hand them out when he does his set at the Fridge next week. Gina reckons he might even be able to get a new band to do a set here. Five hundred people at fifty quid a head. I reckon we can charge at least that. Maybe more.”

Guy didn’t care how much they were willing to pay. Five hundred people? He had a horrifying image of all his hard work trampled underfoot as a bunch of kids, high on
drugs, marauded through his vineyard. “You can’t do this,” he echoed hopelessly.

Kelly stood up. “It’s already done. Second weekend in September,” she announced.

Even worse. With the summer shaping up to be a hot one, there was a very real chance that Kelly’s stupid rave would take place right in the middle of the harvest.

“Please don’t do this to me,” said Guy.

“Too late,” said Kelly. “I am. Thanks for the drink.”

As Guy slammed the empty wine bottle into the rubbish, Kelly strutted back across the farmyard puffed up with the knowledge that she had won that argument. Then she demonstrated the first bit of initiative in months. Back inside the farmhouse, she pulled out a pad of paper and began to design the flyer she would give to Gina’s brother. Gazing around the kitchen while she hoped for inspiration, Kelly’s eyes alighted on one of the empty champagne bottles that were lined up along the top of the Welsh dresser. She fetched it down.

The bottle, which had once contained Perrier-Jouët, was decorated with a beautiful hand-painted pattern of flowers that wound all the way up around the bottleneck. Kelly began to sketch a design that would incorporate this art deco-style motif. In the center, she drew a woman’s face, looking off into the distance.

On the other side of the courtyard, Guy lay awake, racking his brains for some way to put a stop to Kelly’s ridiculous plans for Froggy Bottom. How could he get her to leave? How could he persuade her to go back to the city? What would put her off staying in the farmhouse? He remembered one summer when the neighboring farmer had spread his fields with muck during one of the hottest
weekends of the year, causing the local campsite to lose almost one hundred percent of its custom as previously happy campers succumbed to the smell and were pestered away by the flies. Guy didn’t even have that option. He dare not risk putting anything on the soil that might taint the eventual flavor of his wine.

But there was no need to panic. September was a couple of months away. He’d get Hilarian and the trustees to talk to her. Or maybe he’d just call the police. Hadn’t all that legislation in the nineties made it illegal to throw raves anyway?

Bloody Kelly. He punched the pillow.

T
here were definitely moments over the first few weeks that followed the wine fair when Madeleine wondered whether she should have taken up Mathieu Randon’s offer after all. Though the maison seemed to have made pretty much zero money for the last five years, somehow Champagne Arsenault still owed a vast amount of taxes. Even for a woman used to dealing in seven-figure sums in her career as a banker, the figure was frightening.

“Can this really be right?” she asked Champagne Arsenault’s new accountant, Laurent Parisot.

Laurent promised to look into it but he warned her that her father had not paid taxes for several years and, in all probability, the horrifying figure he had come up with
was conservative. Madeleine closed her eyes as she allowed the news to sink in.

Madeleine had used all her banking experience to draw up a new business plan for Champagne Arsenault. Of course she had built in contingencies for late payment of the outstanding debts of her father’s customers, but for some reason it hadn’t even crossed her mind that there might be an outstanding tax bill. Certainly not such a big one. She’d simply assumed that no income meant no taxes. The amount her accountant had whispered into the phone was five times Madeleine’s emergency margin. There were other big costs coming up too. Picking was the most pressing but far from the least of them.

“Can you cover it?” her accountant asked.

“Yes,” Madeleine murmured. “I think so.”

But she was far from certain.

Madeleine called Geoff in London. He had promised when they last spoke that he would do anything he could to help Madeleine keep Champagne Arsenault afloat, but though he took her call, he didn’t seem quite so sure anymore that he could help her. Somehow Geoff had found himself back at Ingerlander Bank and under Adam Freeman. And when Madeleine asked outright for a fast, low-interest loan, Geoff cleared his throat and said, “I’m not going to get this past him, Mads. I don’t know what you did to him … ”

Nothing, thought Madeleine ruefully. Absolutely nothing.

She didn’t bother to press Geoff on the subject. There was no point. There may be loyalty among thieves but bankers … 

Ironically, while the financial affairs of Champagne Arsenault seemed to worsen daily, the vines were doing
well. Henri Mason kept Madeleine up-to-date on progress. The vineyards on the hill were flourishing. But there was still better news.

“I think we may be able to make a Clos Des Larmes this year,” said Henri as they stood in the walled vineyard a couple of hours after Madeleine’s conversation with Laurent Parisot.

“Really?” Madeleine asked.

He nodded. “Look at this,” said Henri, cradling a bunch of pinot noir grapes in the palm of his hand. They were flawless. Each one looked as though it had been blown in glass. “Beautiful. This year is going to be vintage, Madeleine.
Your
first vintage.”

Madeleine wrapped her arms around Henri and pressed her soft face against his stubbled cheek just as she had when she was a little girl. It had comforted her then but it didn’t comfort her now. In fact, she held him closely so that he wouldn’t see her tears of anxiety, Still, he must have sensed that something was wrong from her ragged breathing or the tightness of her embrace.

“Is everything OK?” he asked.

Madeleine nodded into his shoulder. He was so proud of the grapes. She didn’t have the heart to tell him right then that he was wasting his time. If Madeleine were able to afford to pick Champagne Arsenault’s grapes, she wouldn’t be able to afford to press them. If she found the money to press the grapes, she wouldn’t be able to keep the wine in Champagne Arsenault’s caves until the time came to sell it.