Finding nothing after his redundancy, he had returned to his first love: music. A year of playing at weddings and social clubs, scrambling to make ends meet, up till all hours, had caused dissension within his marriage. Then, quite by chance, he had spotted an advertisement in the Lady, a posh magazine he’d picked up in the doctor’s surgery where he’d been waiting for a prescription for antidepressants.
Back at home, he’d answered the advert.
His handwritten application had received a favourable response:
The United Kingdom is a growing wine market, promising but not yet sophisticated. My sister-in-law and I are looking for the right representative. Please come and meet us at our estate. Cordialement, Clarisse Cambon
‘Right, here we go. Deep breath, Jane, and remember, keep smiling.’
The heat beat down upon Jane’s back, now glued to the plastic seat. She pushed open the old car’s door, slammed it and trod the gravelled courtyard towards steps that led them to a porte-cochère and double-fronted main doors.
‘It is a castle. It’s as big as Buckingham Palace,’ she whispered, as her father tugged on the old-fashioned bell-pull. ‘I wish Mummy could see it.’
‘If all goes well, she will,’ was his response. ‘Fingers crossed.’
A dog somewhere deep within the bowels of the mansion began to bark. A female voice called sharply in French. The dog fell silent.
Footsteps were approaching. Peter cleared his throat, fiddled with his shirt collar. In his letter to Madame Cambon, he had claimed that he could visualize the future of mass-market wine sales in Britain:
We need to get the bottles into the pubs and the local stores, out to the ordinary people. The message needs to be ‘wine to accompany meals and wine as a social drink in place of beer for the blokes and Dubonnet with ice and lemonade for the ladies’. Wine is a new concept in early seventies Britain but it is set to become the fashion. As your representative, I would guarantee to offload whatever quantity you and I agree upon.
Clarisse Cambon had an avaricious eye to this new market. She was keen to win over the British. ‘Les Anglais who drink warm beer and call Bordeaux wines “claret’’. They lack sophistication,’ she had remarked to her sister-in-law, ‘but we can teach them better and make money into the bargain. This man, his letter, he seems to know his business.’
So, here he was, at the front door of this astonishingly swish property, apprehensive and praying for the opportunity to build a new future for himself and his family.
It was Clarisse who opened the door. ‘Bonjour, bonjour. Such long journeys are exhausting, but you are on time. Très bien. Entrez.’
Jane was open-mouthed at the lady’s appearance, the slenderness of her wrists, one sporting a gold watch that slid and twirled with her every gesture. She had never set eyes on anyone quite so curvaceous yet trim, quite so resplendent. With her curly auburn hair, the lady was as glamorous and self-assured as a film star, not skinny like Twiggy.
Madame Cambon beckoned Jane’s father into the hall in a rather flirtatious manner. Jane followed on tiptoe at his heels. She was repeating to herself the words spoken to them at the door, rolling them around her tongue: trrray bien, entrray. Sing-songy words with lots of rrrs. What did they mean? The interior was cool and dark, hung with gilt-framed oil paintings. It was as grand as a palace. From here, the trio crossed into a burgundy-walled sitting room with high ceilings, a table lamp hanging low, like a wilting tulip, and a slow breeze emanating from a ceiling fan. It was dimly lit, lacking any sunlight, barred behind slatted shutters. It took a moment for Jane to spot the second Madame Cambon, who was in loose beige slacks and a silk shirt and was seated on a high-backed chair, smoking a cigarette. Without rising, she introduced herself as Isabelle Cambon, the older of the two soeurs. (More rrrs, thought Jane.) She was sipping something fizzy from a tall glass that clinked with ice and lemon.
On a sideboard across the room a record played on a turntable. The Beatles’ ‘Hey Jude’. Jane was amazed. ‘I love this song,’ she cried brightly. ‘Dad’s often singing it, aren’t you, Dad? Dad’s a musician, bass and guitar, but he gave it up to become a salesman, didn’t you, Dad? Mum said we needed a steady income.’
Her father made no response except to clear his throat. There was a moment’s awkward silence.
Jane was suddenly conscious of her gaff – ‘speaking without being spoken to’ – of her untidiness, of how thirsty she was (she’d love a sip of the lady’s lemonade), of her sweat-caked dull clothes and her uncombed honey-blonde fringe. These women looked like they lived in a magazine.
Clarisse Cambon smiled down at her with glossy red lips and asked, ‘While your father and I talk bizness, I think you would like a deep, dear, wouldn’t you? It will refresh you.’
Jane stared in panic at the lady with her wide coral smile and matching nails, dressed in a neatly ironed frock, big fat pearls and high, strappy shoes. She wished she could understand what was being said to her. If only she could speak French or could decipher the accented English. She glanced uncertainly at her father, who was smiling, clearly beguiled by the company in which he found himself.
A deep? Jane’s expression begged him to translate.
‘Mrs Cambon is offering to let you swim in her pool, Janey. To take a dip. Isn’t that generous?’
‘She’s got her own pool?’ Jane gazed with wide eyes back at the owner of the castle who, in her green and yellow frock, reminded her of a daffodil, upright and radiant. Daffodil Lady even smelt of flowers, a much heavier, muskier scent than her mother’s Yardley’s Lavender Water.
Dare she accept? Would it be polite to enjoy herself when they were here on important business?
‘Allez, ma petite, off you go. Afterwards, our cook will serve us all a delicious déjeuner.’
Her father nodded his approval with a blue-eyed wink and Jane rushed off to grab her towel and swimsuit from the black bag in her father’s Cortina, waiting out at the front.
Jane was chuffed to pieces with this unexpected opportunity. Poolside, in the shadow of a big-trunked tree, she peeled off her clothes, checking first that no one was about. Even so, before removing any outer garments, she slipped her knickers off first from under her skirt, then hastily pulled on her bathing costume, wriggling the lower half of it into place. Once changed, clothes rolled into a bundle, she slid on her armbands, scrunched her dark-blonde plaits into an elastic band secured in a knot on top of her head, then gingerly picked her way across burning tiles to the water’s edge and descended the first two steps. She paused there, before sinking into the first private swimming-pool she had ever set eyes on.
The water was clear and glistening. It tickled and licked her ankles as it rippled. It was azure from the sky’s reflection and reminded her of a giant, veined marble that had been rolled flat. The only sounds came from the racket the crickets were making, several fat bees buzzing about a pot of flowers and the splashing of her bare feet against the tiles. The heat wrapped itself about her, like a blanket. Two tall palm trees, one at each corner of the pool’s deep end, stood sentry. Beyond them, a pinafore of lawn and then a high stone wall, which, although Jane hadn’t known it then, surrounded a fertile vegetable garden. Beyond, the outline of a range of low mauve mountains.
She lifted her head, screwing up her eyes, watching a big black bird flapping overhead, crossing the sky, cawing loudly.
She waded in up to her knees. The water was cool, refreshing. It caressed her while the sun beat down unforgivingly upon her head, reddening her flesh.
‘Bonjour.’
Jane swung round guiltily and caught sight of a black-haired boy in shorts and bare feet standing in the shadows some distance behind her.
‘What are those blue things you’re wearing?’ Luc stepped from out of the darkness of a deserted dining area to which Jane had paid no attention earlier. She would never have dared change in public and venture into the daylight in her bathing togs if she’d known he was there. The boy seemed very gr
own-up, much older than she, perhaps twelve or thirteen.
She hadn’t known that Luc, secreted behind one of the pillars of the pool’s summer kitchen and barbecue area, where he had been reading in the shade, had clocked her arrival and had sat, one eye pressed against a wooden pillar, the other watching her, fascinated by her coconut-milk complexion and puzzled by her plastic water wings.
‘I thought everyone could swim,’ he mocked, though not unkindly, when she explained the purpose of the ‘blue things’ wrapped around her upper arms.
‘I was born by the sea,’ he swaggered. ‘I don’t ever remember not being able to swim. I can teach you, if you like. Snorkelling too. You are with the English visitor who has come to meet Maman, n’est-ce pas? Why are you in my pool?’
Now she grew afraid. This strapping boy, with skin as tanned as a leather satchel, clutching a paperback book, was moving closer, hovering over her on the steps, she half in, half out of the water. How she feared his scorn. Or, worse, that he might sink her head beneath the surface just for the fun of it.
‘My name’s Luc, by the way. What’s yours?’
‘Jane Sanderson,’ she croaked.
‘Bonjour, Jane. I’ll get my trunks and join you.’
‘Bonjourrr,’ she repeated shyly. It was the first word she had ever uttered in French and she was thrilled to bits with herself.
Luc spoke more than adequate English and, on that day and the sun-drenched days to come, proved himself to be a treasure chest of fascinating curiosities. Barefoot on the beach, agile and swift, camera swinging from his naked torso, he was always delving, scavenging, photographing his finds. Clues, land knowledge, the sea, marine and rock plants, geography … questioning, penetrating, examining. She watched him in wonder and admiration. She trailed after him, carving out her own more ponderous path of discovery, or dared to skip along at his side on his constant hunt for sea drift, magical shells, quizzing him with questions.
Sitting side by side, wrapped in towels after their swim on that first morning, he began to feed her the French names for whatever article or subject he was talking to her about. ‘Swimming-pool. La piscine. We met in la piscine.’
‘No, we didn’t. I was in the pool, not you. Do you live here alone?’ she asked him.
‘With my mother and aunt. Avec ma mere et ma tante.’
‘Brothers and sisters?’
‘Non.’
‘Me neither. What about your father?’
Luc took a beat, withdrawing like a snail. She’d touched a tender spot, prodded accidentally. She sensed that, even at her young age. ‘He stayed back in Algeria,’ he replied cautiously, ‘where I was born. My grandparents stayed on too.’
‘Where’s Algeria?’
‘North Africa.’
‘You were born in Africa?!’
‘And some day I’ll go back. I’ll build a boat and sail. Just me on the open sea in my boat. And I’ll find our farm and my father again.’
Africa! Her new friend was so exotic, unlike anyone else she had ever met, and he swam like a porpoise.
Jane, the bashful English girl, with plaits and canvas sandals, had been utterly bewitched by everything and everyone at Les Cigales – the big house and its vineyard estate, its mistresses in their snazzy clothes, especially Madame Clarisse, gushing yet forbidding. A curious eye-catching bird, she was, clucking and foraging and chivvying.
Back at the auberge that evening, father and daughter had dined in the restaurant. The other guests were all northern European tourists, passing through. Jane felt curiously at odds with them, as though she, and perhaps her father also, had been enchanted. She had entered a universe that was magical and fabulous, and would change her for ever. So overwhelmed by wonder was she, by sights beyond her imaginings and most of all by the company of her new friend, Luc, that it left her giddy, and she could barely swallow her fancy food.
‘His name is Luc and he’s promised to teach me to swim without my water wings.’
‘Good girl.’
‘I wish Mummy was here to see all this, all those blossoms hanging like jewels in the bushes, the pots of fat flowers and the tall straight trees,’ Jane had whispered to her father, ‘and to hear me speak the French words Luc’s been teaching me. Will we visit the castle again?’
‘It seemed to go well,’ had been her father’s response. ‘I understand what they’re after and I’m sure I could do it.’
‘Fingers crossed, Dad.’
‘We’ll know tomorrow.’
One of the two proprietors at Les Amis du Château served dinner while the other cooked. Whenever possible, they fussed at the Sandersons’ table, greedy, full-breasted, grey-haired scavengers, hungry to peck at the gossip from the great estate. ‘How did you get on up there?’ The pair of waitresses tittle-tattled about the Cambons, destroying their reputations in salacious tones, as though nothing gave them greater satisfaction.
‘The most unpopular females in the vicinity. Pieds-Noirs is what they are. Born in Africa. African habits.’
‘The younger one is a nettled-eyed sorceress.’
‘We never see them at mass.’
‘Good luck to you.’
Peter was amused, Jane a little frightened but she couldn’t have said whether her fears had been sown by the two at the hotel or the two at the big house.
During their return visit to Les Cigales the following morning, Peter was offered the job. Clarisse, striking in a loose magenta shirt, high gold mules and white linen skirt, had led him to the table in the dining room, poured two glasses of chilled white wine and together, watched by Jane, they had signed a one-year contract. ‘Next year, we’ll take another look.’ Clarisse had smiled, her green eyes narrowed, cat-like.
And so began a series of adventures, to and from Les Cigales during long, untroubled summers. Memorable, joyous were those return journeys to England in her father’s Cortina shooting brake, packed to the gunwales with cartons of wine to be stored in their garage at home until they were sold, until Peter could afford to open his own off-licence, singing together in perfect harmony, happy as a pair of drunken sailors.
‘The bells are ringin’ for me and my gal. Come on, Janey, sing up.’
‘I don’t know that one, Dad.’
‘Well, what shall we sing, then? You choose the next one.’
‘Let’s sing one you wrote, Dad.’
Hot, everlasting days.
Peter shared those expeditions with his growing daughter who, in turn, shared her days at ‘the castle’ with Luc, while Vivienne stayed behind in England.
Until the day she drew her last breath, Vivienne had obstinately preferred England. After much badgering, she had once agreed to spend a few weeks on the Cambon estate. Jane had been nine or ten. By that stage, the Cambon sisters had designated one of their cottages for the Sandersons.
‘It is preferable to that local auberge,’ claimed Clarisse, who described Les Amis du Château as ‘down-at-’eel and shady’ and the inhabitants of the village ‘full of jealousies, with begrudging faces’. However, Vivienne was not comfortable. She could not acclimatize to the hot southern other-land with its mosquitoes and foreigners, or to the grand surroundings and the company of Clarisse and Isabelle who, she was convinced, were sneering at her. She found the atmosphere ‘sticky and unpleasant’. She found her husband’s two female employers formidable and snobby. She went home and never returned.
The delights and discoveries had belonged exclusively to Jane in the company of Luc or on the road with her father; father and daughter side by side.
Until the night of that awful scene with Clarisse, the summer Jane was fourteen …
Peter’s business was growing well. The customers were biting. He had his eye on a little shop in Kent. Jane had mistakenly read all this as the reasons for his new-found lightheartedness. She had been too much of a child, too naive or too consumed by her own girlish passions, her developing infatuation for Luc, to read between the lines, to understand the extent, the resu
lts of her father’s charm, the reason why when they visited they were now welcomed warmly as guests at the manor house, no longer the cottage. Her father, who had dreamed of building himself a modest enterprise, a little something to keep his family secure, to keep himself out of the dole queue, had been seduced.
The voices filtering through the ceiling awakened her. Jane opened her eyes to listen harder. There were bumping and scuffing sounds coming from the level above her room. In earlier centuries, the top storey had been the servants’ quarters but, these days, the rooms were ordinarily kept locked. Jane knew this because she had occasionally accompanied Matty when the housekeeper went up to the third floor to give it an airing.
Alone that night, fourteen-year-old Jane, bereft because Luc had returned to Paris to university, crept up the stairs in the darkness, inching her way along the narrow corridor, following the muted voices and laughter coming from behind the closed door of one of the locked rooms. She slid stealthily from door to door, hoping to detect from behind which the sounds were emanating. Ear against the wood, she had located the animation and had listened. Eavesdropping, intrigued, disturbed, flushed with trepidation. With prescience? Her hand reached for the doorknob. Her palm and fingers gripped tightly the cold brass. She turned and paused, heart jumping like a jack-in-the-box, before shoving the sticking door open. There, directly ahead of her, on a single bed, starkly illuminated by an opalescent shaft of moonlight beaming in through an attic window, the bestial vision. Jane had let out a cry, a hard shriek of disgust. One figure instantly disentangled himself, dragging a white sheet with him, hopping across the small room. Nettle-green eyes, those witch’s eyes, locked on Jane as she pelted towards the mistress of the house. She grabbed at Clarisse whose hair was a bird’s nest, hanging in messy whorls, pulling, tearing at her. Jane’s rage was white, blind, as she beat her balled fists against Clarisse’s breast. Peter, who had hastily wrapped the sheet about his lower torso, was now disentangling Jane from her.
The Forgotten Summer Page 13