The Champagne Girls

by Tessa Barclay

  Then there had been the bewilderment of being alone on the great highway. Sometimes in dreams she felt again the shuddering sobs that had engulfed her then. She’d wake up, threshing about in bed, terrified, shaking. Then relief would flood through her as the nightmare faded. That was all in the past. Mama was gone, but she had the relatives.

  The kindness of a small family heading for the south had saved her from being lost without trace in the retreat from the Marne. They had taken her aboard their laden farm cart, tried to get her to eat a morsel of food, tried to find out through the barrier of her stricken bewilderment who she was, where her parents were. ‘Clearly well-brought-up,’ the wife had murmured. ‘Look at her clothes, that’s real silk, Pierre.’

  Weeks went by, she was told ‒ to her it had seemed like an eternity. Then she was traced through the protracted routines of the Red Cross and sent to a distant connection of her dead Papa’s, in Touraine. The well-meaning officials had nodded their heads over her. ‘Tours is safe, surely it’ll remain safe, the Boches will never get that far …’ Safety, that was what they wanted to give her. But it wasn’t what she wanted, what she needed.

  She’d asked ‒ begged ‒ to be allowed to go back to Mama or Grandmama, but was always put off. ‘It’s not a good time, dear. There’s a war on.’ At last, one dreadful day, the truth came out. Cousin Cecile, unaccustomed to handling a little girl, had thought she would get peace and quiet if she told her the facts. Mama and Grandmama were dead. The great house near Rheims had been in the hands of the enemy for a time. Great-Uncle Robert was back there now, however, struggling to make champagne under the very guns of the German front line.

  ‘So you see you must be a good child, Nora, because France is at war, and we must all do our duty.’

  News of the family was sparse. Only later did Nora understand that things had been kept from her, ‘for her own good’. She lived for a long time in secret fear and confusion but trying to ‘do her duty’ as it was laid out for her by her aged guardian ‒ be quiet and obedient, do her school work and the household tasks thought suitable, never understanding how her life could be so changed without warning.

  It dawned on her that she was expected to wait ‒ to do nothing, simply endure and wait. That was her duty in the long war that was draining away the life-blood of France.

  Birthday presents came, and occasional short letters. Uncle Robert sent his love and hoped she was being a good girl. Cousin Gaby made her a present of a pretty party dress, but it was a size too big. In her round schoolgirl hand, Nora wrote back to these strangers, these voices speaking from so far away of home and family and the precious things that were gone.

  One day, one day, someone would reclaim her. Oh, Cousin Cecile wasn’t unkind, but she was old, she liked tranquillity and order in her little house, she had no point of contact with a six-year-old child. Nora learned to be quiet and tidy, to play games with her doll in a far corner of the little garden, not to invite noisy schoolfellows to tea. She went to the local school, worked hard at her lessons, wore the dowdy little frocks that the old lady chose for her, and waited.

  One day her patience was rewarded. A gentleman and a lady came to Tours. They said they were her cousins, her relatives, all that remained of the great family of the Tramonts, and one of the pair, as he smilingly pointed out, was only a Tramont by adoption.

  Nora loved them with a fierce but concealed love. It wasn’t that she wanted to seem cool towards them ‒ it was simply that she didn’t know how to express her feelings. With Mama and the grandparents, she seemed to remember, there had been kisses and hugs and little endearments. But they had disappeared, those people to whom she’d been so open and trusting. And then there had been old Cousin Cecile, who seemed not to know any warmer term than ‘my dear’, a phrase she used to her elderly friends and the maidservant. So something in Nora had dried up, and that was good, because it kept her safe from the hazard, the mistake, of showing her feelings too much. People you loved went away, and left you lonely.

  The housekeeper, looking now at that quietly perplexed face, was debating with herself what to tell Mademoiselle. The master had said the child wasn’t to be upset, which was understandable, for she was so quiet and self-controlled that you felt the slightest knock might break her in pieces.

  ‘Madame isn’t quite well this morning,’ she said after a hesitation. ‘Monsieur feels ‒’

  ‘Is the doctor here?’

  ‘He’s been.’ My God, yes. Two in the morning, while the child was as deeply asleep as only children can be. Servants flying up and downstairs in an attempt to save Madame’s baby, the ambulance creeping in under the porte-cochère, the attendants carrying her with infinite care down the wide staircase.

  ‘Don’t make a noise, we mustn’t wake Nora,’ Madame had muttered through teeth clenched against the pain of the baby’s desperate attempt to come too early into the world. Typical, that was, thought Madame Presle. Madame would do anything to save the little girl from anxiety.

  Mademoiselle Nora was so wrapped up in the thought of having a ‘little brother’ to play with. It was one of the few things that would bring a bright smile to that pale face.

  ‘It’s nothing. Mademoiselle,’ lied Madame Presle. ‘You know, when ladies are expecting babies, they have days when they don’t feel well.’

  ‘Oh yes, Cousin Gaby explained that. But I still don’t see why I have to ‒’

  ‘It’s just for a day or two,’ said Madame Presle. ‘Just to let Madame have a good rest.’ Just to hide from you, in fact, that she’s been rushed to hospital and is fighting for her life.

  ‘But I wouldn’t be a nuisance to her,’ begged Nora, putting her coffee cup down with unusual carelessness. She almost put her hands together to plead her case. She didn’t want to go as a boarder, not now, when something serious seemed to be wrong. Normally, to be allowed to stay overnight at school with her fellow-pupils would have pleased her, but Cousin Gaby had always refused. And now suddenly it was all right for her to stay at school, and she felt, she knew it meant crisis in the Tramont household.

  ‘Of course you’re not, Mademoiselle,’ agreed the housekeeper. ‘You’re never a nuisance.’ No, on the contrary. Unnaturally quiet and obedient ‒ quite unlike the two rascals Madame Presle had raised and launched into the world. ‘But it’s nothing to do with you,’ she went on. ‘It’s just that Monsieur feels … He thought that … Well, Monsieur’s decided you’d be better off at school for a day or two, while Madame has a really good rest.’

  Impossible to argue against the wishes of Cousin Marc. Whatever he commanded must be right. Nora sat back in her chair and nodded. She didn’t even sigh in protest. Madame Presle, hurrying out to pack her night-dress and toothbrush, sighed for her. Poor little chick, poor motherless child … Madame Tramont loved her like her own daughter, more, perhaps. And Monsieur worshipped the ground the child trod upon. But who understood her?

  When Nora went out to the courtyard, the old Delage was waiting under the patched-up porte-cochère. The door to the passenger seat besides Jacques was open ‒ she and Jacques had an agreement that he would always let her ride beside him when they were alone together.

  Usually he was full of quips and absurd riddles that he made up himself. ‘Whose socks have the largest holes in them?’

  ‘I don’t know, whose socks have the largest holes?’

  ‘The man whose wife hates him most.’ Ha ha. ‘What’s the differences between champagne and licorice?’

  ‘I don’t know, Jacques.’

  ‘Good heavens, if you don’t know that, what good are you to one of the greatest champagne families in France?’ Ha ha.

  Today there were no jokes. ‘All right, eh, minnow?’

  She shrugged. ‘I’m to stay over at school, Jacques. They won’t tell me why.’

  ‘Nothing much, I shouldn’t think.’ He had been warned to say nothing. Mademoiselle mustn’t be upset.

  But it was something serious. She could feel it i
n her bones. Why wouldn’t they tell her? It was as she thought ‒ you couldn’t be too careful over people you loved. Something was sure to go wrong.

  The school was in Rheims, about fifteen minutes’ drive away. Jacques had told her that his grandmother remembered the day when it took four hours for common people to get to market in the city, on the great lumbering carrier’s wagon, and that was on good days. On bad days, when the weather had wrecked the country roads yet again, it might take twice as long if the wagon got bogged down in the heavy chalk.

  But since the end of the Great War, money had been poured out by the government to restore the devastation in this front line region. Two years of work had done much to give the population the means to earn its living again. Of course there was still a huge task ahead. The vines of Champagne had been blasted by the howitzers, ground into the soil by army lorries and later by tanks, uprooted by trench-digging, and as if that weren’t enough, ravaged by that old and dreaded enemy phylloxera. Houses, whole villages, wine bottling plant, presses, everything ‒ all wrecked, and the country folk either forced to shelter in the great old chalk cellars or evacuated so that the army could manoeuvre.

  Now the roads had been not only repaired but greatly improved. The railway lines had been restored, riverbank quays had been rebuilt, money had been made available for house building.

  When Gaby and Marc Auduron-Tramont first brought Nora to Calmady, the Villa Tramont had been almost a ruin. Only one wing still had a roof but even in that, all the windows were gone and the rooms had been used for temporary billets in the lulls between attacks, for snipers’ posts and lookouts. The lawns and flowerbeds were a sea of chalky mud, the buildings in which the business of making champagne were carried on were a shambles.

  Money poured in from the government but Monsieur and Madame Tramont had preferred to use it for rebuilding the works. The house took second place. Even now, two years after the end of hostilities, only that one wing was liveable.

  At first Nora had been frightened by it ‒ the grey shards of what had once been a great house in the midst of the wreckage of a great industry. The vines here lay about untended, quite unlike those she’d seen in Touraine. The contrast was terrifying.

  She had clutched Marc’s hand. ‘Oh … Cousin Marc … When you said we had to rebuild, I thought … I thought …’

  She’d seen it in something like the terms of a child using building blocks to erect a series of houses, a village, placing little wooden animals to make a farm, toy bushes to make a garden. This was something quite different. The task of clearing up before they could even start again was enormous ‒ it had seemed to her, insuperable.

  Yet after two years the Delage was rolling smoothly along well-made roads. On either side, the vines were once more in tidy rows. The tiny grapes hung on the horizontally-wired branches, with the glow of the June sun upon them, making their skins look almost white because of the waxy coating they were developing. Workers were moving gently between the rows tying up the shoots so that they would bear the weight when the bunches grew heavy in August. There were about a score of shoots on each plant. The work was back-breaking, but the grapes shone among the carefully-trained leaves, pale yet somehow strong and vibrant.

  ‘Looks pretty good, eh?’ remarked Jacques, seeing her eyes rest on the vines. ‘The pest doesn’t seem to have done too much damage.’

  ‘The pest’ was phylloxera, that wickedly damaging disease brought by the aphid which ate the roots of the vines. Slowly it had spread all over Europe, and slowly the wine-makers had learned how to combat it. There was only one way ‒ the precious grape must be grafted on to rough, wild stock which was immune to the predations of the insect.

  Just before 1914 the great wine-makers had begun to replace native stock with grafted vines. They had done all they could to make the grafted plants available to the small growers too. But the process was slow and the cost was high.

  Then came four years of war, when the vineyards had had to be neglected as the male workers were called to the colours. The women and old men had done their best, and to their eternal credit some wine at least was made every year in the face of enormous difficulties. Even in Champagne, with the front line ranging through the actual vineyards, with shells going overhead and snipers ready to take aim from clock towers and belfries, the workers had crept out to tend the grapes.

  But phylloxera had gained a hold again. This was an added expense. Conferences had had to be held to decide in what order to begin on the restoration of the winemaking, and the replacing of the European roots had taken precedence. Now, at last, for this first time, the vineyards belonging to the House of Tramont were completely replanted. This was the first full harvest from undamaged vines, and all looked well ‒ the fragrant Pinot grapes growing well on the American roots. It might be a good vintage, one of those that would help to put money back into the coffers but, more important, would give prestige to the name of Tramont.

  To be known to be at work again, and making good champagne ‒ that was the prime target of Cousin Gaby. In her hands lay the fortunes of the House of Tramont. Or at least, in hers and in Nora’s. It always made Nora shiver a little when Cousin Gaby reminded her of that. She and Gaby … They were all that remained of the family. To Nora would come all the shares in the firm that had belonged to Mama and Grandmama and Uncle Robert and Pierre and David …

  For they were all gone, all swept away in the tide of the Great War, lost even more completely than the house and the winefields. For the house could be rebuilt, the winefields replanted and reanimated, but the dead were gone for ever.

  ‘Here, what’s this?’ cried Jacques. ‘Tears? What’s wrong, minnow?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she whispered, her throat closing up under the emotion that was overwhelming her. ‘I just feel … sad.’

  ‘Nothing to be sad about,’ Jacques insisted, though he knew it wasn’t true. ‘What? With a lovely little holiday ahead of you, a few days with all your school-friends, little confabs after lights out, all that sort of stuff? You’ll enjoy yourself a treat.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ She blinked back the tears, sat up straighter in the seat. They were approaching the outskirts of Rheims. Jacques slowed for the policeman directing traffic, for people were coming away from market with produce for the outlying villages and there was a muddle of lorries and trucks and horsedrawn vans. ‘Jacques,’ she ventured.

  ‘Yes?’ He frowned. His attention was on the traffic.

  ‘Cousin Gaby isn’t going to die, is she?’

  He was startled. He turned his head, his eyes shadowed by his chauffeur’s cap but his mouth parted in a gasp of dismay.

  ‘Of course not! What put such a thing in your mind?’

  ‘Then why are they sending me away?’

  He gave a little jerk of the head, to tell her he had to attend to the policeman and his waving baton. While he manoeuvred past the intersection, while his main attention was on his driving, the secondary thread was what to say to the little ’un. He could see she was scared to the roots of her boots. Damn nonsense, keeping her in the dark. She was no fool, she knew things were bad.

  By the time he had been waved past into the avenue, he had made up his mind. ‘Listen, sparrow, I’ll tell you, but you’ve got to promise not to say I told you.’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘Cross your heart?’

  ‘Cross my heart with a silver dagger.’ She made the motions of crossing her heart over the fine grey cotton of her summer school dress.

  ‘Well, then, what I hear is, the baby’s in danger.’

  ‘Oh, no!’

  ‘They don’t say much to me ‒ a mere man, you know.’ He brushed his knuckles against his thick moustache to draw attention to his maleness. ‘But Louise said Madame woke in the early morning in pain, and there was some trouble, and they sent for the doctor to put things right but it’s a bit tricky, so she’s had to go into hospital.’

  He couldn’t say more. There had been b
rief, vivid hints about bleeding and miscarriage, but those weren’t suitable to tell an eleven year old who knew nothing of the facts of life.

  Hospital … That was bad. It meant everything was very serious. Yet it was good too, because the hospital had mended Lucie Duchene’s broken leg. ‘He’ll be all right?’ she begged.

  It always amused him to hear the little ’un talk about the coming baby. She took it for granted it would be a boy. ‘My little brother,’ she would say, although of course the kid would be second cousin to her really. Please God they’d be able to save the poor little blighter. Still, these dramas did tend to crop up in anything to do with childbirth, he supposed, especially when the expectant mother wasn’t young any longer. ‘He’ll be fine,’ he promised.

  They drove in through the gates of the house which contained the Private Modern School run by Mademoiselle Hermilot. The directrice was on the look-out, came out of the door before he’d put the brakes on. ‘Nora! What a pleasure to have you come as a boarder for a change!’

  Nora gave the little curtsey which was obligatory during school hours. Jacques handed her overnight bag to the maid who came out behind the headmistress. ‘Look after her,’ he said in a low voice. ‘She’s all shaken up.’

  Elvire Hermilot heard the whisper. She didn’t need to be told the child was upset. She knew Nora well ‒ or as well as anyone could. She was a reticent little girl with her emotions seldom on display.

  ‘Come along, you’re a little early for classes. Armandine shall show you where to put your things.’

  The little girls of the school were grouped about in the entrance hall. Mademoiselle Hermilot beckoned to one of them, a boarder whom she knew to be a friend of Nora’s. She commanded the child to show Nora upstairs, explaining that she’d be staying a day or two.

  ‘I say!’ Armandine exclaimed. ‘Are you in disgrace then?’

  ‘Disgrace? No, why?’

  ‘Well, that’s why I got sent as a boarder.’ She was a step or two ahead on the stairs, glancing back impatiently. ‘Do hurry, Nora, or we’ll be late for class.’