Jane stared at her husband. Protesting would get her nowhere. Luc had organized his day and, evidently, it included leaving her with this unforeseen responsibility. ‘Of course.’ She smiled. ‘Sneaky of you not to have mentioned it before, though.’
He leaned forward, pecked her on the cheek and signalled for Claude to return him and Dan, with camera, to the main house, the bastide, on the tractor. ‘See you for dinner. Don’t let them slack, and do remember, darling, it is up to you and Claude to make sure the fruit is out of the fields and at the winery in perfect condition well before sunset. And keep an eye on that Dutch pair.’
With these instructions, Luc and Dan were on their way, deep in animated conversation as they went, leaving Jane feeling that she had just been manoeuvred into a corner.
3
The scorching sun beat down upon the wide-open patchwork of vineyards, shimmering in the heat. Heat poured like molten liquid into the rows of plants, baking the earth, intensifying thirst. By noon, when Matty returned with more provisions, the team was running low on energy.
‘Well timed, Matty,’ shouted someone.
‘And some say there’s no such thing as climate change. I never heard of wine-picking being this bloody tiring,’ quipped Sandy, but no one was listening. They were sweltering in a late-summer heatwave, but not unhappily so. For most of them this remained an adventure and they allowed themselves to get baked, sweaty and soiled, to wallow in the diversions and attractions of La France à la campagne.
Those who drank the house wine crashed out under the trees, snoring away the rest of their lunch break, heads heavy, hats covering faces, mosquitoes zizzing and bombing, flies circling lazily. The others dozed in the shade, read lethargically, swatted at the midges and cradled bottles of mineral water. Walnut, who had stayed with Jane, lay on his back, mottled pink belly exposed, like an upturned beetle.
Where had this day come from?
Claude and his fellow countrymen shook their heads. They rarely exchanged a word: they knew to conserve their energy. They watched the sky, staring into the ball of incandescent fire, as though it were an evil eye.
It was close to four in the afternoon when a light wind began to play up, to menace the trees. Leaves, branches, vine stock began gently to quiver. All who knew the southern terrain were aware that it could be the progenitor of fiercer winds, of angry weather, the precursor of a Var mistral. Jane paused, slipped her secateurs into a trouser pocket and stared about her, taking stock. With the unexpected wind came ominous dark clouds, rising above the horizon, from beyond a distant windbreak of tall cypresses, taking form, gathering force, like a fleet of black sailing ships. An armada inching towards enemy shores, ready to open fire.
Jane lifted her eyes skywards, shielding them with her hand against the rays, rubbing the back of her wrist across her brow, sticky with perspiration and dust. No storm or temperamental atmospheric conditions had been forecast. Luc and Clarisse would have postponed the launch of the vendange until it had blown itself out, if it had been reported on the méteo. They would have been checking for this and checking again.
Several of the foreign pickers were giggling. They were losing concentration. Wine and fatigue. A weather drama promised a bit of excitement to break up the punishing drudge of the day. The villagers looked heavenwards with sombre eyes, lifting off their hats, unfurling their cotton scarves, dabbing at their foreheads. This did not bode well, the wind swirling, like rushing water, in the crowns of the high trees bordering the vineyards. The harvest could be at risk, fruit damaged, if the signs in the sky delivered on their louring threat. And a ruined harvest meant trouble for the estate’s already struggling economy, for its profile, for the contracted wine deliveries. Les Cigales, the largest, most powerful domain in the neighbourhood. Not good for the region’s terroir. Its reputation. It was already a challenge to pick when the days had grown so hot, temperatures soaring: 30ºC to 32ºC in the fields, meant 35ºC on the vines. It shocked the grapes when they arrived at the winery to be crushed and their juice was plunged into vats regulated at 14ºC.
Clarisse should have ordered the picking to be done at night, as these hired men on their own smallholdings might have done in the old days. But Clarisse Cambon was not a Provençal. She was a different breed. A woman with a face full of make-up living on the periphery of their lives. Not God-fearing, like their own tidy wives. Full of self-importance. And loose morals, it used to be whispered in the villages. Madame didn’t have their feel for the land. Her sister-in-law, though, the spinster, Isabelle, God rest her soul, she had known better. She had learned the business the hard way: out on the land, digging with her own hands.
Luc needed to step in, to be there full-time, take over the show. A man at the helm: that was what was required. It was the only solution if the domain was to survive, and they were to be paid better.
Jane saw their faces, read their unspoken derision. Whatever their silent opinion, she was the boss today. She was Luc’s representative. And she would do right by him, make him proud.
‘Claude,’ she hollered, but couldn’t see him. She scanned the long fields, the acres of greenery, flapping at an insect buzzing near her face. She hollered again. She felt disappointed for Claude. He had been working hard for weeks to get the vineyards cleaned up and clear of late-growth weeds. Like every other year, he had removed the bird netting where it had been installed, ready for folk to tramp the dusty tracks between the long rows of wine stock.
‘Claude!’ And then she spotted him. Large stick in hand, as though he were a shepherd with a crook, he was signalling to her, beckoning her over. She shifted to one side, her close-to-full pannier dripping with black Mourvèdre grapes – a variety used in the mix to enhance the finest of the domain’s three rosés – and beat a path between the vines to meet him. Her back was breaking. When this was done and the fruit was at the winery later, she’d drive to the sea for an evening swim and a stroll along the beach. She’d take Walnut. He loved the sea, loved to jump in and out of the gently unfurling waves.
‘What do you think?’ she called. Jane had never before been handed the responsibility for any decision-making at Les Cigales. Aunt Isabelle had filled that role fearsomely, but she had been dead for five years now. Ever since, Luc had more or less run the show, and Jane was determined not to let him down today. Surprising, though, that he would cede his role in the fields, even for his film.
‘It’s threatening, but a dog that barks won’t necessarily bite. No storm has been forecast.’
‘Still, I don’t like the feel of it, Claude, do you?’
‘Fine. To be on the safe side, we’ll load all the full comportes onto the trailer and I’ll drive them to the vinification plant. Let’s get the beauties safely home. Michel, Jean and I will take charge of that. You keep the pickers at the bushes for as long as possible or Madame Clarisse will hit the roof, screaming about having to shell out full whack for short days. Arnaud will stay with you, just in case.’
Jane nodded her agreement. They began to call in the baskets, sending fellow workers as messengers down the rows, calling ‘la hutte’, emptying the loads, one semi-packed basket poured into another, rumbling fruit, moving the clipped stock back towards the trailer, ready to shift the hundreds of kilos of black grapes off the land and out of the threat of any wet weather. Jane felt dizzy. Lifting, bending, driving the energy, directing the crew, heaving weights, almost falling over the dog, who stuck at her heels. She felt herself slip from clear thinking almost to a faint, then drag herself back. The wind swooped into the vine bushes, which swayed and gusted around her. Above, the sky was patches of spilled, seeping ink.
‘Let’s keep the fruit moving,’ she yelled. Few if anyone could hear her in the wind. They were at work fulfilling the order, concentrating hard, backs to it, even if they didn’t grasp the technical reasons for the sudden change of order, the urgency. Arnaud, heaving crates, knew, though, and he was watching Jane. Mute in his appraisal of her. The English woman. Bett
er if Luc had married locally.
It was in the midst of this bustling activity that the screaming broke out. At first, Jane couldn’t locate the source. Everyone was moving fast, calling, lining up baskets, shunting them in a chain towards the grass verge, ready for the trailer where Claude was hauling them aboard. And then the scream, followed by another, piercing into the pewter light. The Australian girl, Sandy, gave a yell to her boyfriend, who was way back up the track working with Claude. ‘Jake! Jake! Over here!’
The screams had now transformed themselves into a hysterical yelping. Panic was whipping the team. What had happened? Jane was slow in picking up on the cause of the commotion, which seemed to be coming from the distant border of a neighbouring field, until she spotted Merel. Merel, way down the line, who had been hardly visible among the vast green expanse where she had been working, was hurtling towards the stacked baskets, turning in circles as though she were on fire, waving her arms, knocking the panniers onto their sides, flattening, squashing the fruit as she spilled it beneath her lumpen shoes.
Was she having a fit, some kind of seizure?
‘Jesus!’ Jane began to run, yelling to Claude and Arnaud as she did so. Fruit and baskets were going over like ninepins. Olaf, now at his wife’s side, was attempting to calm her, shaking her, yelling at her in Limburgish. Merel screamed something back at him. Directly afterwards he twisted away from her and began beating at the vines with his fists, punishing the plants, causing them to break and buckle, surrendering their unpicked black bunches to the ground.
‘What the hell?’ Jane kept running, hurtling over fruit and broken baskets.
Jake was on the spot. Sandy, dusty-legged in shorts, was bouncing like a ball, agitated. It was a chaos of bodies shoving and squelching the wasting fruit.
‘Merel’s been bitten by a snake!’ bellowed Jake. ‘A fucking great blighter. Got her in the leg. Rose up like a cobra and began hissing at her, then sank its fangs into her calf. There’s a couple of them over there. Possibly a nest.’
‘Jake, stop yakking and get the anti-poison gel!’ cried Sandy, tears and perspiration dampening her cheeks.
Jean Dupont, a local man, along with Arnaud, was now bearing Merel out of the damaged vine rows towards the edge of the field, near the track. Olaf was hopping alongside them, trying to smother his wife’s yelling, his great hand, like a sullied cricket glove, over her mouth. Jane brought up the rear, waving to Claude, who was approaching from another direction. A crack of thunder sounded overhead. The crates were everywhere, a few in the trailer but the rest chaotically scattered across the land or upturned, bleeding their juice back into the rust-red soil.
Jane guessed at the species of snake, a Couleuvre Maillée. Scales of brown to olive green, with glassy malevolent eyes and a clubbed head like that of a golf driver; a terrifying presence. They grew to two metres, but they usually kept their distance. It was rare to chance upon one and rarer still that it would attack or bite. Only if aggravated, or woken abruptly from its sleep in the sun. Their bite, though, sunk deep, was venomous.
Merel had been laid flat on the tufted ground alongside the trailer. Her face was blotched red and puffy from crying, as well as the sweltering conditions and exertion. Her expression was frozen in terror as she fought for breath. Her right leg was swelling to an alarming size, white flesh expanding as though it were being inflated. Jake was attempting to administer a gel from his medical kit but every time he touched the perforation, Merel screamed, kicked and yelled. The English couple were standing back, horrified. ‘In all our years of grape-picking, we’ve never seen this before,’ remarked mild-mannered Clive, but no one was listening to him.
Fat drops of rain were beginning to splat onto the earth. The sky was tar, a black curtain drawn closed, about to be thrown open.
‘We need to get her to a doctor immediately,’ said Claude calmly to Jane. ‘She could be having an allergic reaction, and she might be asthmatic, which won’t help her deal with the venom. She must have trodden right on the snake while it was basking in the shade of the vines, or protecting its young.’
‘Better get medical assistance. It looks nasty,’ echoed Tomas, one of the villagers.
Jean Dupont was at Merel’s side, having gently eased Olaf out of the way. Jean knew every creature that inhabited these hillsides, those that slithered, stung and nested in the verdant plains, buried beneath the maquis, hibernating in the arid slopes, and he knew how to live with them. He was, like his compatriots but perhaps more so, in harmony with and born of that soil. ‘It’s decades since anyone’s died of a snake bite in these parts. She’ll be right as rain,’ he said.
‘I’m not risking it. Let’s get this vehicle moving. Claude, we’ll lay her flat in the trailer and transport her to the main house where she can be cleaned up. Somebody needs to travel with her. Who should I ask?’ Jane was looking to Claude for advice.
‘Jean Dupont,’ Claude responded, without hesitation.
‘I’m happy to accompany her, but you need to ring ahead for the doctor.’ This was Dupont.
The Provençaux and Jane were conversing with one another in French and occasional phrases of the local vernacular. Fortunately the six foreigners couldn’t follow. Even the British who claimed a certain mastery of French were out of their depth.
‘My wife is going to be fine, isn’t she?’ begged Olaf, hovering behind Jane, shaking his big hands nervously as though trying to unhook them.
Jane was nodding reassurance, patting his arm, opening her phone, ringing Luc. She turned her back on the group to talk with him privately. ‘… By the time Claude gets her to the house, the doctor can be there if you call him now.’ She was mumbling, softening her tone, eager not to create any further alarm. ‘And then we’ll need the trailer back here pretty damn fast if we’re to save the grapes.’
The greater portion of the day’s crop had been lost, damaged beyond repair, Mourvèdre bunches all, the dominant variety in Clarisse’s AOC rosé; all that remained would be jettisoned, left to rot back into the soil. A flash downpour of hailstones, not uncommon in that part of France in early autumn and always a threat to the harvests of both grapes and olives, had accompanied the party’s return to the house. Jane, on her bicycle, was barraged, as was the poor bedraggled spaniel, who trotted gamely along by her muddied wheels. The others, when the trailer returned for them, accompanying the few salvaged receptacles of fruits, were also pelted by the hail. What remained of the day’s yield was a pitiful offering.
Clarisse, working in her office at the winery and waiting to receive the day’s take, watched as her precious vintage was unloaded, her red lips taut as wire.
4
By the time Jane cycled into the courtyard at Les Cigales, the light was fading. The hired labourers were in their various dormitories in the converted stable blocks, showering, towelling off, resting aching limbs, pouring beer. The locals, those who weren’t staying over, had returned to their villages either on foot or by bicycle. On a normal day, Claude would have given them a lift, but these exceptional circumstances meant the exhausted men had to make their own way home or stay over in one of the barns.
As Jane wheeled the bike back to the shed, voices drifted through open windows. Shrieks of laughter, yells for the shower or booze refills, nonchalance carried on the wind. Quite in contrast to her own heavy heart.
It was too late for a swim, too late to cycle to the beach, too late even if she took the car. There was no time to hurry down the stone steps and dunk herself in the estate’s lovely pool, situated two terraces below the main house. The light was fading fast and she was shattered, soaked to the skin, craved soap, scalding water, oblivion. The day could not have been a greater disaster. She parked the bicycle outside the shed and entered the house by the kitchen where she grabbed a towel and rubbed a sad-faced Walnut dry before feeding him and settling him in his basket. No evidence of life, only a casserole bubbling on the range and six freshly baked baguettes on a board on the solid wooden table, al
ongside a round marble plate settled with a variety of cheeses. Six cloves of rose garlic sat in a saucer ready to spice up one dish or another. Highlights of the evening meal to be served in the stable block. A tradition. Jane lifted the black iron lid with an oven glove. Condensation dribbled, vapour rose. She pushed her face close, felt the damp heat on her flushed cheeks and inhaled. Her stomach rumbled. The mere smell was comforting.
‘Pork loin in tawny port with shallots and figs,’ announced Matty, stepping in through the back door, wiping her full round face. Perspiration pearls from her exertions and the raised temperature in the kitchen speckled her forehead. A tea-towel was slung over her right shoulder, and she was clutching an oval dish containing sprigs of rosemary. ‘And these go in now.’
‘You’re a genius, Matty. I’m ravenous.’
‘Arnaud said you had a rotten day?’
Jane nodded. ‘That’s an understatement. See you in fifteen minutes.’
‘Anything we can do?’
‘Replenish the ice cubes in the library, please. I need a drink.’
Jane heard Luc and the doctor’s voices as she dragged herself up the stairs in her socks, boots in hand. No mud on Matty’s polished woodwork. She longed to call out to Luc but couldn’t face the doctor, or being drawn into the conversation.
Luc was in one of the front drawing rooms, the red room, with the village doctor, Monsieur Beauchene. Merel had been administered a sedative and antihistamine, sent to bed and ordered to rest. The ginger-haired medic was promising to call again in the morning.
‘Second this week,’ Beauchene was confirming. ‘She’ll be fine. More scared than injured. When she’s fit and ready, if I were you I’d tactfully send them on their way. This territory is not for them. You don’t want another accident and the region doesn’t want bad press.’
The Forgotten Summer Page 3