Virgile's Vineyard (15 page)

‘Twenty-eight degrees,' he reports, having checked on the thermometer that he left outside in a shady corner of the square.

Then, just as the electrician announces to Virgile's dismay that he has put all the wiring back where it originally belonged, thus obliging us to revert to the suspect pump on the machine itself, Pius pops a mischievous head round the door.

‘Fifty francs a case,' he says, with the straightest of faces. ‘My final offer.'

‘That wouldn't even pay for the corks!' Virgile manages to laugh.

Pius has, however, already disappeared, leaving the two of us to discover slowly and depressingly that the electrician's long and complicated efforts have been entirely in vain. The original pump doesn't work. It was the one part of the apparatus that Virgile never tested because he never intended to use it.

‘And before you ask, yes, it was part of what you call my bric-à-brac.'

His good humour is starting to crack.

Unperturbed, the electrician launches himself into another jaunty round of whistling, as he contemplates a possible ‘Plan C'. Virgile looks more and more tense, his black eyebrows somehow blacker, the birthmark above them more brooding, as he registers an even more depressing external temperature of thirty. Finally, many popular
chansons
later, the electrician finds a way of reconnecting to the superior pump, whilst bypassing the circuitry that was fusing the bottling machine.

‘It will be safe, won't it?' asks Virgile cautiously. He is only prepared to suffer so far for his product.

‘No problem,' says the electrician, as he waves goodbye, but sadly his words prove over-optimistic. The pump works well enough: no more fuses blowing or anything of that sort. There is a subtler difficulty hidden behind all these pump-related obstacles. The twelve different nozzles on the bottling machine have a regrettable tendency to fill the bottles at twelve different levels. And as Virgile says, customers typically expect each bottle to contain an
exact
seventy-five centilitres, not just an average of that volume, spread across a case.

Half an hour later, the problem is still defeating us. Virgile says he will try again, when it is cooler after dinner, but he is more or less resigning himself to yet another deferral of tomorrow's projected labours, when Marie-Anne appears at the door.

‘Are you sure you wouldn't like an evening's waiting work?' she teases. ‘Given that you haven't achieved anything else today.'

*

There is nothing else for it. I shall have to clean the pool. It is too slimy and slippery to be safe, let alone pleasant, yet the weather is now too hot to remain sane for long without it.

However, before I can clean the pool, I need to empty it. I have concluded that this will mean some sort of siphoning arrangement with a hose. But it seems a criminal waste just to pour the water down the hill when I am surrounded by so much thirsty vegetation, clamouring for a passing can. Yet I can think of no other way and am just at the undignified moment of putting the end of the bright green hosepipe to my lips to suck up enough water to get the process working, when Manu appears again.

‘I'm not sure you ought to drink that,' he says, with his usual lack of surprise at the eccentricities of the English.

‘It's a siphon,' I bristle defensively. ‘I'm emptying the pool.'

‘Isn't the pump eco-friendly enough?' he laughs.

‘What pump?' I ask, after another more determined suck.

‘Dear, oh dear,' he sighs and he leads me patiently to a conical fir tree on the far side of the pool, behind which is a little stone enclosure with a little stone roof and under that a pump. ‘It pumps the water out of your pool and into your watering system,' says Manu. ‘ I thought you knew that.'

He remembers that the power switch is handily placed a hundred metres away in the submarine control room (where else?) but sadly he has no clear recollection as to which of several possibilities it might be. So as I run to and fro to monitor the pump's continuing failure to respond, Manu fiddles randomly with switches and levers, leaving me wondering how many of the house's vital functions will have been immobilized in the process. Then at last there is a dull, grinding rumble from the pump, accompanied by a volley of constipated gurglings in all directions, as multiple airlocks are cleared and miscellaneous sprinklers splutter into hesitant life.

Despite prolonged disuse, the system seems to work remarkably well. I shall no doubt be able to target it much more effectively when I have mastered all its various taps and valves. I also suspect that a few hours with a bicycle repair kit will be needed to tackle some of the unintended sprays that must have been caused by winter frosts. But all in all, Uncle Milo seems to have done a remarkably good job.

Except, that is, for one detail.

Well, to be fair, I can hardly hold my ancestor responsible. A man can only foresee so much. And he doubtless had his reasons for installing one of the more vigorous
jets d'eau
immediately beside the principal flowerbed. It is just exceptionally unlucky that Mme Gros should have chosen this particular moment – while Manu and I were otherwise distracted – to set about filling her trug with my lavender crop. There really is no way that Uncle Milo could have predicted just how thoroughly soaked she would appear, as she bears down on me.

But I fear it may be some time before I am forgiven.

*

I didn't think I had ever seen Virgile looking so happy. He danced a quick, involuntary dance of joy. ‘
C'est fini! C'est mis en bouteille!
' he whooped ecstatically.

It had been three days' work to produce two thousand bottles of Coteaux du Languedoc, a thousand of Vin de Pays de l'Hérault, and precisely 564 (I had had the job of counting them) of Carthagène. Each bottle was distinctively printed with his flourishing signature, each cork distinctively stamped down its side and all of them had been lovingly fork-lifted to the security of his lock-up garage around the corner.

‘But what's happened to the tractor and all the spraying machines?' I had asked when Virgile first opened the unexpectedly empty garage.

‘I've moved them. I've managed to borrow a sheep-shed on the edge of the village, from the Poujols brothers. Do you remember? The eighty-year-olds I told you about who made their own wine in bulk for a wholesaler? Well, they own half the village. Far more than they need for their own operation.'

But for all this expansion of Virgile's territory, the bottling process had been resolutely rudimentary, the continuing recalcitrance of last week's machinery necessitating simpler equipment and a hastily assembled chain gang of five.

Virgile himself had been pumping the wine into a funnel at the top of a manually operated bottle-filler, borrowed from his friend Laurent. Arnaud, a lanky young apprentice electrician, filling time before a ‘real job', had been energetically unpacking the bottles and loading them on to a ledge located lower down the machine. Régine, a boisterous, belly-laughing amazon from the village, had been squirting the required amounts of wine from the machine's four udder-like nozzles, then passing the bottles down the line to Sandrine, a sylph-like would-be actress, reluctantly ‘resting' in Saint Saturnin. Sandrine in turn had been sweeping up the bottles with one outstretched, actressy hand, feeding corks into a separate machine with the other and somehow – through mysterious sleight of hand – finding a third to pass the rapidly finished results back to me. And then I had been grappling with the subtler challenges of juggling them back inside the polythene and cardboard packaging that Arnaud had over-zealously ripped open at the start of the chain.

Whenever the pumping permitted, Virgile had darted across to check the levels in the bottlenecks with a millilitre-accurate measure.

‘I don't want to rob my customers,' he laughed, ‘but with my cash flow, I can't afford to be generous either!'

But generous is exactly what he seems to be feeling, now that we have scrubbed everything clean.

‘Lunchtime,' he announces. ‘We're going to a new place in Montpeyroux. L'Horloge, it's called. Jean-Marc, the owner, is going to sell my wine, so he must be good!'

A few minutes later, on a doorstep just across from the Montpeyroux clock tower, after which his establishment is named, the new restaurateur wipes his hands on the food-stained apron that covers his sweat-stained T-shirt and baggy shorts before greeting us one by one. The stresses of restaurant-opening have clearly left no time for shaving for a day or two, but the warmest of smiles shines from his face.

‘Just as well we didn't dress up,' whispers Sandrine with a nudge towards the
patron
.

‘We're not yet officially open,' Jean-Marc explains as he leads us inside. ‘A little technical problem with the safety certificates unfortunately. So I told Virgile he could have either the chef or the waitress.'

Virgile's choice becomes immediately apparent, as an exceptionally glamorous young woman glides mannequin-like down a spiral staircase from the floor above.

‘Céline's laid a table for you all upstairs in our little private dining room,' says Jean-Marc. ‘It's more discreet,' he emphasizes, with an almost furtive glance towards the street.

The intimate private room is decorated in the same warm ochres and oranges as the larger space downstairs, while here and there some patches of antique blue-and-white wall-tiles appear to be pushing their way out from underneath the painted plaster. The whole effect looks expensively half-finished. It also feels enormously welcoming. The only problem is the heat. Jean-Marc is so concerned that our lunch should go undetected by passing safety inspectors that he insists on closing both the windows and the shutters overlooking the square below.

Jean-Marc is himself, I suspect, the principal sufferer from the heat. With only minimal advance preparation from the absent chef, he is in charge of the kitchen today. He is constantly dashing from there to the table and from the table to the wine cellar, while Céline shimmers round us, as cool as if she were on a catwalk.

‘A little ginger-marinated tuna, I thought, to start with,' says Jean-Marc.

As Céline glides sinuously amongst us, distributing plates of glistening raw fish and crisp green salad leaves, our host smiles the beaming smile of a man who has already enjoyed a precautionary portion in the kitchen.

‘
Et comme vin?
' Virgile interrupts his contentment.

‘
T'as raison. J'arrive
,' says Jean-Marc, as he hurries off down the stairs, leaving Céline to strike a selection of decorative attitudes, while we wait for him to re-ascend with a bottle labelled ‘Roucaillat'.

‘I thought maybe this rather unusual white? It's a blend of Roussanne and Rolle,' he adds, wiping perspiration from behind his spectacles with the grubby-looking tea-towel permanently draped over one shoulder.

These would certainly be new
cépages
for me but Virgile spotted something that he thinks might be even more interesting on the way in. He is – happily for all of us – apparently incapable of leaving his perfectionism behind in the
cave
and treats us all to four magnificent courses, accompanied by four magnificent wines, each discussed in earnest detail with Jean-Marc before a final decision is taken. The more important the wine the more active Jean-Marc's tea-towel becomes. We can only hope that Céline will be drying the dishes.

Dish-drying would be one explanation of the waitress's periodic lengthy absences from the dining room but another occurs to me, when I notice that most of these disappearances coincide with Virgile's own absences from the table. Céline must be at least a foot taller than him but the last time that he excused himself I'm sure there was a particularly determined twinkle in his eye. And he can't be spending
all
this time negotiating increased overdraft facilities with his bank.

Jean-Marc happily takes over Virgile's place and glass, whenever they are unattended, so there is a considerable pause between our veal with its roasted Mediterranean vegetables and our goat's cheeses with their home-made fig
compôte
. And likewise between those and our
tarte aux abricots
with almond ice-cream.

With each new bottle, the repartee seems to get faster and the local accents more impenetrable, with even Virgile's normally negligible southern intonation starting to defeat me. I have been coping well enough with Arnaud's ‘
Tum'passesl'ping?
' when he needed some bread and Régine's ‘
N'yaplusd'ving!
' whenever a wine bottle was empty. But the final hour, over Jean-Marc's on-the-house
digestifs
, must be the severest test for my French since my encounter with Monsieur Mas.

‘
N'as pigé ri'ing
,' laughs Régine, with a bruisingly matey punch to my ribs, as Virgile sketches me a map of a ‘secret' route home by minor roads – unknown, he promises, even to the local traffic police.

*

Returning to the house in the late but still very hot afternoon, I can hardly wait to jump into my newly pristine pool. Without even going round to the courtyard to unlock, I run straight down the steps to the water, undressing as I go, and have already stripped to my underwear when I notice that I am being watched. There is a tall, sinister-looking figure looming behind the bank of blood-red roses that runs along the front of the courtyard.

‘
Bonsoir
,' booms the unmistakable voice of Mme Gros.

Before I can recreate any semblance of decency, she is striding down through the terraces of lavender and rosemary towards the pool to regale me with the news that I have a problem.

‘Listen,' she urges, with thinly concealed satisfaction, as I hastily tie my shirt into a makeshift sarong. ‘Can't you hear them?'