‘You haven’t finished your story,’ Sobran said to Xas. Was the angel too proud to try for his pity? He hadn’t talked about the beating. Xas flicked his wings and a glow shone forth, where the simple (the red, Sobran remembered) signature burned. To Sobran it looked grey-white, like phosphorescence in a breaking wave.
‘Tell me about the beating.’ Sobran’s voice was rough, insubstantial – and if he’d had eyes to see he would have seen the rosiness return to Xas’s mouth.
The angel said that when he came up out of the volcano, armoured in acid ice, he looked down and saw two smoother patches in the surface of the crater lake, and two wakes in the steam, two tubes where vapour eddied upward – his own and those of the archangel above him. The archangel had come through behind Xas, but was swifter and stronger. The archangel stooped on Xas as an eagle does; knocked the angel out of the air and down on to the permafrost. ‘My side caved in where I hit the ground, and I had bloody icicles in my nose. He lay on me and whispered in my ear, told me to stay out of Heaven, he’d tolerate no more trespasses. I said he was striking God. And he said – while banging my head on the ice – that we were on earth now, as though earth was outside God’s jurisdiction, and if I crossed his path again he would break my head and eat anything he found inside it.’
‘Did he disbelieve the pact?’
‘He thought it was a bad thing – I suppose – and that he was bound to ignore it. Or lodge a protest.’
‘You’re saying that an angel of God disagrees with and disobeys God’s policy.’
‘Well, if it were impossible for angels to disagree with God then there wouldn’t have been a war.’
‘Why did you quarrel with God?’
‘Is that your third question?’
Sobran crossed himself and shook his head. ‘I trust the Lord. And I’m no magistrate.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ Xas said, then, ‘Is there anything else?’
‘One thing.’ Sobran shuddered, wrapped his arms around himself and stooped slightly. ‘Because you are like a bloody murderer – one who goes from corpse to corpse – causing terror in pieces because no one can be sure the murders are the work of one hand – because I think that about you, and you have held my body, been in my house, and in my thoughts and life for all these years, I have to know: Do you torture souls in Hell? Human souls?’
Xas stared.
‘Tell me,’ Sobran said.
‘Why won’t you believe what you’ve learned about me yourself? Do you think I’ve been tender to you to win your damnation and the devil’s approval like a bounty for your soul?’
Hell was horrible and scarcely habitable when fallen angels first came to it, Xas told Sobran. They were its first inmates. Since damned humans were damnable Sobran must imagine they found plenty of scope to torment each other. Sobran was a vintner, so he should imagine the angels sealed sinners in dark barrels and let them work. Hell wasn’t crowded – half the dead of history were in purgatory, which was like the world, but without gardens or wildernesses or tools or ideas – or substance, so angels couldn’t go there. ‘Most souls in purgatory are there not for sins, as such, but blindnesses – I say, but I’m lenient. I grow roses and go freely – that’s what I do.’
Sobran said, ‘You’ve caused me more pain than anyone. Go away.’ The tears got out and ran down his face.
‘Yes. But I’ll come back.’
‘No.’
‘I’m still your angel, your luck. You still know there’s a Heaven, after all.’
‘My torment is that I know that the ones I love are there, or will go there, while I’m damned.’
‘God is merciful, Sobran. He loves us both.’ Xas opened his wings and went into the sky with the competent animal effort of a leopard springing from the forest floor to a branch, or a salmon leaping up a white fall in a full river.
When Sobran was at his most pious, attending Mass often on the Angelus, the six-hourly bells, Aurora de Valday told him that she didn’t believe in God. She had hesitated over this confidence, but although Sobran had changed his habits, he hadn’t his manners – whatever his sorrow, he had kept the good-natured canniness that had earned him her friendship despite their different stations.
When her husband was newly dead, and her uncle the Comte was ailing, Aurora looked about her at the estate, perplexed and fearful. She sought her uncle’s advice and he gave her a short list of those she could depend on. The family of Château Vully, irregular in their religion, sluggish in their loyalties, but decent to their tenants, had preserved their fortunes when heads rolled, houses burned and land changed hands. A daughter had been sent, like a tithe, to Bonaparte’s court; cottages were kept mended; cautious, but not fruitful, marriages were made.
‘Whom can you trust?’ Aurora’s uncle said, then named men in Paris and Beaune, a holy mother at Autun, old Father Lesy in Aluze, ‘and Jodeau, whose family is cru – the soil the vine stands in – who knows wine from his grandfather, who raised half of our vines from the dead after the fire in ’72. Jodeau’s mother’s family had a knack for getting money, and making money make money, though none of them were lettered. Her father had two boats on the canal. Baptiste Kalmann – you wouldn’t remember him, an insolent wolf – could have ruined that vineyard of his. His father was a threadbare lawyer who made himself great by conspiring to divide the monks’ land. He drew up the thieving contract for the Paris timber merchant who bought Clos Vougeot – for the people, of course. Kalmann’s fee was that little vineyard, till then also the monks’. A bad family – those hills were better off shot of Baptiste Kalmann. Sobran Jodeau has grown into a careful, clever, decent man, which is why I upheld Kalmann’s will. Jodeau will do well by that land. And you should employ him.’
Aurora nodded, and the Comte took her hand and added, ‘But don’t fall in love with him.’
‘Uncle, he’s hardly a charmer.’
‘No, dear, but despite the decency he’s a bit of a free-thinker, and I know how you thirst after the company of “free-thinkers”.’
It was after this, and in her new widowhood, that Aurora took to watching Jodeau. That was 1823. She didn’t employ him – her uncle was often confined to bed, but still able to administer the vineyard. Besides, only a fool would seek the company of a married man if the sight of that man’s face (oh, and his hands, coarse-grained, great-knuckled, disproportionately long) made the hidden saddle of her groin grow heavy and pulse in time with her breasts and her mouth and her heart. But Aurora grew tired of her desire, couldn’t talk it away, because it was worthy, but wore it out, laughed it off. In 1828 the Comte died and she employed Jodeau. And while they planned, or reckoned books, or turned the tap on a barrel to taste together, they talked. They enjoyed each other’s company. When Aurora heard that Sobran had fallen ill (or gone mad) she was terrified – for her who else was there in the world like-minded, forthright, easy? She had a son, servants, and dear old friends whose households she visited and who sent her monthly letters from as far away as Piedmont, but Jodeau was her kind, and losing him would mean excommunication for her mind. When she appeared at his house she was rebuffed by his sister. His wife stood at the top of the stairs glaring – shameless and strange. Aurora had to go away, get only news of him. Wait. He sent her a letter, remote, formal, just blackened paper. He was sorry for his indisposition – would so-and-so see her through this harvest after which, God willing, he’d be able to serve her again.
Sobran reappeared one frosty morning in October, was waiting for her after her walk, standing hat in hand by the fireplace in her morning room. He had aged, his hair white, his face lined and dry and his eyes faded but, she saw, as she walked forward to take his hands, clear, and as warm as the russet stain in the coat of an ageing black cat. Her hand trembled. ‘My friend,’ she said.
She got used to him, his sobriety, dryness, diligence – maybe mourned the change less than many, because they had never been vulgar familiars, like the cronies with whom he had drunk brandy and goss
iped under the plane trees in the square at Aluze. And she never saw him frightened, as his sons did, caught abroad in the stealthy midsummer twilight. Their conversation had never been personal. She never spoke about her husband and he spoke only with reserved respect of his wife and elder daughter – was more open about his sons, their scrapes and triumphs, their characters. And, although Sobran had become a pious man whose life was as ruled by routines as any timorously God-fearing old woman, they still talked about ideas, what was happening in the pays, in Paris, in the greater world. They talked about books, compared notes on the behaviour of their neighbours, what the mayor of Chalon-sur-Saône had said to the magistrate, or the priest to the seducer of young girls.
So it was that, three years after his illness, on a winter evening when they sat over letters and orders for payment in the Bailiff’s room at Vully, sipping a sweet wine – not theirs, a golden Savoyard – Sobran told her about the dancing at the funeral of the ancient Wateau widow, how the combination of an enthusiastic reel and spilled beer had the widow knocked out of her coffin and draped over a chairback as if she’d been over-indulging and was ill. Aurora took in his glee, how free his tone was from tongue-clicking. The glee gave her licence to talk to him about his piety. She asked Sobran whether he knew that she didn’t believe in God. He said he’d noticed she only went to church on high holy days and had assumed she wasn’t a very religious woman.
She told him about the atheists, the Rationalists she’d met at her aunt’s place in Paris, before she married, when she was a girl. She had talked to and admired them, and she gave up God. ‘Lazily and easily, like changing costumes. I was very young then, and untouched. I hadn’t liked my convent education and was ready for another set of ideas. But I didn’t believe what the Rationalists believed as an article of faith – the non-existence of God – until many years later. After my husband died I found myself running a gauntlet of consolation, “our hope in Heaven” and so on. Everybody was being kind, and I hope I wasn’t ungracious. But I did have to bite my lip. Then one morning I was walking in the allée, alone, and still biting my lip I suppose, when suddenly it was as if the sky lifted off me – the horrible weight of my hope in Heaven. And I was filled with a feeling of reverence – oh, it was easy and ordinary, like motherliness – and I knew that this is all there is. It was a wonderful innocent clarity, and I’ve felt it ever since.’
Sobran moved some papers. The fire was behind him. He didn’t look angry, and he didn’t offer any argument. He just asked her what was to be done with sinners, without damnation?
‘I know that I have to imagine a different world from the one I learned as a child, a world without ledgers.’ She lifted the heavy leatherbound book that lay between them. ‘Ledgers in the hands of a mighty judge. I think we must see to it that sinners have their recompense – or forgiveness – from us.’
Sobran nodded, then asked, ‘And what of those losses that seem unbearable? Separations from people we feel we can’t live without?’
‘Perhaps our ruin honours the strength of our love.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘I suppose you see my atheism as a risky exercise of my free will – the Lord letting me have my head and run at His world.’ She smiled as she said this, self-mocking and affectionate, and was rather startled by the vehemence of his reply.
‘I think our freedom is a freedom to hear lies, and to run to the end of our leads until they throttle us. I make a point of believing only what I learned before my beard came in.’
‘Why before then?’ Now she was prying – now she really cared whether he answered her. Was it Céleste, then, the troubled wife he’d kept and cared for all these years, mixed his blood with again and again. Would he, finally, complain about his wife?
‘Someone betrayed me,’ Sobran said.
‘And you took over twenty years to sicken of it?’
‘Poisoned friendships are slow poison.’
The newest barrel room at Vully was as cool as a cave, and accessible by steps leading down from two great angled doors like storm shutters. Beyond the doors lay a closed courtyard, in the centre of which was a pool filled with waterlilies. Eleven-year-old Agnès Jodeau and thirteen-year-old Paul de Valday were squatting on the rim of the pool, hands in the water, trying to catch the carp. Paul lunged, the water flashed, splashed, darkening the stone. Both children got up, laughing – then Paul coughed. Coughing and laughing, the two walked around the pool to squat on the other side and recommence fishing. Aurora crossed herself. Sobran caught her hand before the cross was complete. She was shocked to be touched, and surprised he’d play accomplice to her convictions. He let go, but her hand caught his as it withdrew.
He squeezed her hand. ‘Aurora, Paul only coughs when he’s excited. When he and Martin saw the balloons crossing the river last month and ran to tell me, Paul coughed after every third word, but didn’t seem conscious of it. He never holds his side.’
‘I think of his father in a sedan chair, drinking ox blood in the shambles at Corbigny,’ Aurora said.
‘Is Paul’s colour good?’ Sobran said.
Aurora looked into her friend’s face, puzzled by the tone and phrasing of his question.
He took his hand from hers and turned back to the table and the tall measuring glass full of wine he had just drawn from one of the barrels. He held it to the light. ‘Why do you think I say “clear”, then pass it to you to ask how the colour seems?’
‘I thought you were inviting me to make fanciful comparisons: “It’s the colour of a bishop’s robe whenever he covets the cardinal’s hat.”’
‘Since my illness I no longer see colours. That’s why I ask about Paul’s colour – he’s stout enough.’
‘Yes, you’re right, he only coughs when he’s excited.’
Sobran said, ‘I was surprised to see you cross yourself.’
‘Why? I make my curtsey at Christmas, Easter, weddings and funerals.’
‘I predict that you’ll call for a priest on your deathbed.’
‘Since I’ll outlive you, Sobran, you won’t have the satisfaction.’ Aurora asked, ‘Is your friend aware how she authored your illness and losses?’
‘My friend isn’t a woman.’ He looked stern.
Aurora bowed slightly. ‘Forgive my presumption. I think, because I spent a year in the salons of Paris, and because I read both novels and philosophy, that I’m a woman of the world. But my life is really rather quiet and confined.’ She looked at her friend, hoping he was mollified (or moved) by this apology. She waited for a sign from him, a nod or smile – waited without anger, though what was she to think? She too had seen him glow for a year – ten years ago – glow like a man in love. Later she had loved him. And after her husband died Aurora saw that Sobran was suffering – that it was love he suffered, sullen, troubled, stuffed with spoiled blood. But he was in his thirties then, and married for fourteen years. Aurora had noticed this – it was observable, memorable, as fixed in her calendar as an astronomical event. But she wouldn’t call a friend a liar.
‘Perhaps you should marry again,’ Sobran said. ‘You’re still young.’
‘I’m the age you were when we first met,’ she said, perhaps to remind him of that time, remind him that she knew.
Outside there was a shriek and a splash. Sobran and Aurora ran out into the light. Sobran fished his daughter out of the pool with one hand while preventing Paul, who was intent on rescue, from joining her. Agnès spluttered. She was drenched and her white apron was green with pond weed.
‘What will your mother say?’ Sobran scolded his daughter and shook her once, sharply.
She had been crying a little, from surprise, but began now to weep hard, as if in dread. Sobran seemed dismayed at the effect his words had on her and let her go.
Aurora put an arm around the girl, told her it was all soon mended, there were plenty of clean clothes and they would hand hers over to the laundress. She walked Agnès away towards the château proper, calling for her servants
as she went. Paul went with them, coughing and explaining – weak sticks, taunting carp, small girls with bad balance. Aurora glanced back at Sobran. Her look challenged him to explain a child this afraid of her mother’s anger. Sobran followed, frowning.
1832 Clairet (clear, bright, light)
There was moonlit mist below them so that all the hilltops were islands. It was cold, and Sobran wore a greatcoat. He’d brought nothing with him but his clothes, crucifix, holy medals.
Xas had wine – white still, Sobran noticed, although he was now forty-two. ‘Are there too many churches in Spain?’ he asked.
‘Fool.’ Xas uncorked the bottle, by his magic attracting the cork into his hand. ‘Blow the fog out of your sinuses and taste this.’ The angel passed the bottle – they were back to that, sitting in the dirt and passing a bottle between them. The bottle’s label was handwritten. Its base was chipped, so that it couldn’t be stood upright.Sobran read, understanding only the date – 1828, the year of his madness.
‘Go on, drink, then tell me what you taste.’
The reborn Sobran qualified everything by its lacks – so the wine wasn’t great, but good, it lacked something, perhaps in its cradle, in the oak. A chablis, but not quite right, the Chardonnay grapes themselves altered. He tasted flint, then as he swallowed, woodsmoke – smoke, was it? – but no wood he knew. ‘What am I tasting?’ he said, as people say‘Good God!’
Xas laughed, put out his hand for the bottle. He took a mouthful, swallowed and said, ‘You’re tasting great heat, and strange soil.’
‘That wine is a bastard,’ Sobran said, disapproving.
‘It comes from a valley near Botany Bay.’
Sobran didn’t know where Botany Bay was. He took the bottle back when Xas held it out, but put his thumb in its neck and stood it between his crossed legs. ‘I’ll be stiff for days if I sit like this for more than half an hour. I’m an old man.’
‘Not yet. But if you’ll let me sit by you, you can lean against my wing.’
The Vintners Luck Page 10