Late morning, market day, Sobran took a cab to the street of the Funambules and strolled among the crowds. He stood before stages decorated with flags of cotton bunting, their cut edges starched so they wouldn’t fray – makeshift, grimy decorations. The costumes were better, their removable collars washed every night of greasepaint, in the sunlight sewn spangles glittered like armour. Sobran watched the tumblers till they were still. Any who were lithe and of his height he peered at – falsely identified their fluent movements for half a minute at the most – but the feet always came down too hard and the stage would shake. There was one Pierrot, his limbs covered with white silk and face in a sad fugue. But no.
Sobran went into tents to look at novelties, freaks, or fair girls posed emblematically as Beauty or Truth or Beauteous Truth. He collected handbills for all the shows. He went back to his peaceful room at Paul and Agnès’s townhouse and lay on his bed with a wet cloth over his eyes. He slept a while, woke with the impression there was someone in the room – but it was only Iris’s nurse tapping at the door because her charge insisted on seeing Grandpapa. Sobran sat in the big nursery at the top of the house and talked to Iris about all her dolls. Agnès arrived, then half an hour later Paul – all the adults filling the furniture by the nursery fire, Iris leaning between the knees of father or grandfather then against her mother’s side.
In the morning Sobran and Agnès went to watch the couples and children at the skating rink glide about while they sat in an iron pavilion and fed Iris ice-cream.
Sobran went by himself to the afternoon matinées. He claimed to be walking to this or that famous church. And Agnès said to Paul, ‘This interest in architecture is a little suspicious.’
‘You Jodeaus always suspect your father of God-knows-what kind of errors or double-dealing. Baptiste used to –’
‘Oh – Baptiste! Baptiste is a sourpuss.’
‘Your father was never temperamentally a peasant. Why shouldn’t he take an interest in the finer points of the Chapelle de l’Hôtel-Dieu?’
‘He reads books, Paul, that’s his only cultivation. He made his Grand Tour with an artillery piece, remember. Besides, what makes a “peasant temperament”? A degree of tolerance to having wet feet?’
Paul, exasperated, would say, ‘You are so like him.’
Sobran watched the streets outside the shows – the gypsy jugglers and comic singers. He took a seat in the gallery and watched the influx of bodies when the seats were reduced to half-price, the workers, shabby students, shop girls. At evening the streets filled with the city’s poor. In the Chalonnais the poor wore peasant clothes, clogs, smocks – their own clothes. These people wore cast-offs, fashionable coats, dresses, bonnets of ten years back, their decorations bedraggled, filthy flattened silk flowers.
Sobran walked the streets. Ragged boys offered to black his boots. Open doorways breathed the stink of shit, spoiled meat, candle smoke. He haunted the low theatres, saw mime, tumblers, farce. There was commerce of every kind in the hallways that backed on to the galleries. Hard-faced dirty men with their wares, whores, women with their bare breasts bound by only a little gauze. Sobran walked into palatial ‘finishes’ dazzled by gas lamps where rich men drank themselves into bestiality and watched the high whores, the whores in finery, parade enticingly along elevated tables. Sobran looked at each of them: the men sprawled on sofas; the parade of women; the servants in rich liveries, bustling and obsequious. No one he knew.
Sobran had a week of this, then saw a handbill for the man who walked on the points of swords and recognised Xas balanced with smug nonchalance on a fence of old-fashioned flat blades.
He went to the show.
Xas’s hair was shorter, thick and ragged, with a slight wave that made it curl into flat hooks along his jaw as he bent his head to watch his feet. He was stitched into clothes, the front panel of his shirt was the finest grade of pale blue silk through which showed the rose of his nipples. He stepped along the ranks of polished sword blades, some on edge, some braced point up. Stepped from level to level with his arms out, careful as a child climbing on slippery rocks near the edge of the sea. The audience was hushed. In the pit before the stage the musicians played a flute, a drum, and chanter – something vaguely eastern. Xas acted as though there were an art to it. Once he paused on one foot and waited as someone passed a powder puff on a stick with which he thickly dusted first one sole then the other. At the end he made a turn before he started back – just after the dusting this was, so it must have been then he applied the little skinful of bogus blood that ran down the sword blade as he made his turn. His lips parted, his shoulders dropped, not sagged, but back so that his neck arched, just a little, and his chin tilted back, just a little, all signs of pain – like pleasure – and a woman in the audience fainted. Xas walked back with his bloodied foot to where he had begun, stepped on to a platform, bowed from the waist, sprang upright with the hooks of hair clinging to the sweat on his throat. The audience roared and stamped and Xas bounded offstage favouring the bloodied foot in a way that made his gait –
‘Why am I looking for this devil?’ Sobran muttered. He was amused and moved, although he felt weary, as if he had spent the last hour arguing with one of his sons (Baptiste – it was always Baptiste who argued with him).
He bribed the man at the stage door, went through into the cramped corridors backstage – and false corridors formed by stored scenery, thunder machines, racks of costumes. He asked for ‘Sobran the sword walker’. A girl of perhaps thirteen – a tumbler – took it on herself to go before him and announce at the door to a room stuffed to bursting with bright costumes, candles, powdered bodies, most of whom were hurrying out on their way to the stage, ‘There’s a gentleman here to see you, Sobran.’
‘No! Tell him to clear off!’ ordered Xas. Sobran couldn’t see him. As the room emptied Sobran could only see a mirror and candelabrum coated in melted wax, flames that seemed to float between the candles and the surface of the mirror. The girl began to close the door, saying to Sobran, ‘He cut his foot.’
‘Nonsense. He faked cutting his foot in order to swoon prettily.’ He stopped, remembering the girl’s youth. Her eyes were wide with delight and she was laughing at him, liked either his show of temper or the indelicacy.
‘Pardon,’ he said, then, as she danced away from him laughing, ‘You know too much.’
He pushed the door open, went in, shut it and leaned against it. He said, ‘Sobran the sword walker.’
‘Oh – Sobran the vintner.’ Xas had his feet up on another chair, one sole pinker than the other, with blood dried between the powdered toes. He had removed his shirt and was shaking it from his arm. It floated to the floor like a cast snakeskin. His face was whiter than his chest and coated with a cracked paste of rice powder.
‘I’m surprised to find you alone,’ Sobran said. ‘Sobran the sword walker, scientist, slut –’
‘I’m not alone. Here you are.’ Xas got up and came to Sobran. He took the man’s hat off and put a hand on his hair, stroking it back from his brow. This close Sobran could see the disguise of powder flaking away on one cheek; the skin that showed through was firm and radiant. Sobran could also see that Xas was assessing the ground his looks had lost to age over the seven years. Sobran must have said that, to himself: ‘Seven years.’ Because Xas said, quietly, ‘Is it that long?’
Sobran caught the angel’s hands and held them. ‘I’ve found you,’ he said, then, ‘I have an idea. Listen.’
1844 Délicat (delicate)
Of the six who replied to his advertisement for a tutor, only one was suitable, Sobran told his family at the Sunday lunch table. He asked Céleste if she’d like to see the tutor’s references.
‘I’ll leave the whole business in your capable hands,’ Céleste said.
‘What about us? Are we invited to look over this fellow’s references?’ Bernard said. ‘After all, Antoine and I are to be his pupils.’
‘I liked Father André. And enough is enou
gh,’ Antoine said.
‘I need you to know German and English.’
‘I’ve had enough of books.’
‘Antoine, I don’t want to argue this again. Paul has employment for someone with English.’
Antoine subsided. He liked Paul de Valday and didn’t like having no real employment. Martin was with Sobran in the winery at Vully, and Baptiste – in charge at Jodeau-Kalmann – was not easy to work with. Sobran had expected this slight resistance: Antoine thought education unmanly, and teased his ‘finished’ sisters – though Aline was scarcely ever home to be teased, busy being seen chaperoned by Sabine in Chalon-sur-Saône, or by her mother and aunt at various fashionable spas, the desired result of all this exposure being some advantageous match. All this was none of Sobran’s business, and it suited him to let Céleste and Sophie manage marriages for his unmarried daughters.
‘Has the tutor any science? Botany or Chemistry?’ Bernard asked.
‘Yes. And Astronomy, Anatomy, Physiology, Physics – quite a list.’
‘And languages!’ Bernard blushed. Sobran could see that his youngest son was already anxious to please this prodigious tutor.
‘We’ve only just made enough room for everybody,’ Céleste said. ‘Don’t tell me we’ll have to build on again this summer?’
‘Anne wrote to me to say that her sister has been told to keep to her bed for eight weeks. The fever weakened her,’ Baptiste said.
No one knew he’d had a letter. Anne had departed two weeks back – her sister had puerperal fever after the birth of her third child. Anne went not knowing whether it was to nurse her sister and the child, or to bury either one or both of them.
‘Was this Anne’s first letter?’ Céleste didn’t like her daughter-in-law, regarded her as a bit of a failure where it mattered, the production of children (a second child had died, thirsty and dark-skinned, in its first year of life).
Baptiste didn’t respond to his mother, didn’t even look at her. He refilled his wineglass – for the fourth time. ‘So,’ he said, ‘our room is free for any necessary juggling of sleeping arrangements. I’ll make my bed in the cellar at harvest. But first I’m off to Paris to see my wife. I’ll stay with Paul and Agnès.’
‘Lucky Paul and Agnès,’ Antoine muttered.
‘Well, that’s convenient, at least,’ Céleste said.
Bernard asked, ‘What’s his name?’
‘The tutor? Niall Cayley. He’s Irish.’
‘A foreigner?’ Antoine the stonemason blinked in amazement. All the family were staring at Sobran.
‘Admiral Lord Nelson was Irish too, wasn’t he?’ Baptiste added, idly, looking out from under his brows at his father who said, ‘Don’t stir them up.’
Antoine the stonemason asked, ‘Do we know any foreigners?’
They thought about it. Finally remembered Jean Wateau’s Spanish wife.
‘I have dealings with two English wine brokers,’ Sobran said.
‘You do not,’ Martin interrupted. ‘I do all the dealing. You refuse to speak to anyone English. The Emperor’s downfall – all that.’
Sobran scowled. ‘Besides, Bernard was quite specific about his requirements. I required a teacher of German and English, Bernard wanted a man of science – and that’s what we have.’
‘When does he come?’ Bernard seemed eager.
Sobran said the tutor was expected on the first of the month.
‘So you have three weeks to get your grammar up to scratch,’ Baptiste told his younger brother, ‘for that essay on pond life Monsieur Cayley is bound to have you write.’
1845 Équilibré (harmonious, well-balanced)
The village of Aluze named the Jodeaus’ new tutor Le Beau Cayley, and took him to its heart. Sobran was rather startled by this, and offended, which amused Aurora. ‘All these years you’ve been thinking you chose him – but he chose you. He’d be anyone’s choice.’
M. Cayley was a sunny, hard-working, astute young man, who always looked people in the eye, remembered everyone’s names from one meeting to the next, would always recall a person’s preoccupations and ask for an update. Despite his beauty and good diction the tutor never put on airs. He’d roll up his sleeves to help raise the mired cart with a broken wheel which he met on the road; would collar the runaway toddler at the fair; or he would walk out of his way to carry an old woman’s kindling. The men drinking brandy or cassis under the plane trees by the inn at Aluze would never simply let him pass them by – even when he was with his pupils. They’d call out and wave him over, and often enough he’d sit a while, take a glass, set his timepiece open on the table so as not to always be fishing impolitely in his waistcoat. The Jodeau women (or their female servants if their mistresses weren’t about), when Niall was on hand, would ask his opinion on this sash or that bit of bonnet trim, regardless of the fact his stock was in a snarl and he had his hair tucked behind his ears again. He gave the same careful consideration to any question above the class of, ‘Do you want some more potato?’ – but was bad with those questions and ate like a bird. The only exception he made was for questions about himself. ‘There’s not much to tell,’ he’d say, and relate the same sparse facts. He was the youngest of nineteen. His parents were dead and his brothers and sisters scattered now between Ireland and the port of Sydney. Because he’d shown promise his way was paid through school by a maiden lady of the county. He had given the Church some serious thought, but it wasn’t for him.
A group of old women gathered around the trestle tables on which a meal was spread, at Vully during the pressing at the end of the harvest, wanted to know if Niall had ever been in love. Their age entitled them to ask anything – their age and the singing, Niall’s loose hair, his white shirt wringing wet with grape juice.
‘Yes, but I had nothing to offer.’
‘No money he means!’ They laughed. Then, among themselves, ‘And he spends his pay on books which he then lends to his employer or the Baroness.’ The women were in fits, then the one who had spoken last suddenly threw her apron over her head because she’d seen that the Baroness had walked up behind them.
‘Monsieur Cayley?’ Aurora touched his arm and he followed her.
‘They’re the women who say you’re Baptiste Kalmann’s son for whom Sobran has found a place in his house. They argue that you are quite a lot older than you look and cite your learning as proof,’ Aurora told him. ‘Others say you are mine and Sobran’s, and are younger than you claim to be.’
‘I have another book for you, Aurora. But it’s in my jacket pocket.’
‘You’re not telling me that you’ve mislaid your jacket?’
‘No. It’s just a way over there. Did you like the Esquirol?’ Xas had given her Des Maladies mentales.
‘It was interesting – quite revolutionary. I think I take your point. You were making a point, weren’t you?’
‘You said to me –’
Aurora braced herself for a perfect portrait. Xas would quote her word for word and reproduce the tone in which she’d spoken.
‘– that I feel pity without effort, that it’s in my nature. But, Aurora, I’d read Des Maladies, and I don’t think it is pity I feel for Céleste. I hope it’s understanding.’
Xas hoped Esquirol’s book would give his behaviour some authority. Esquirol argued that insanity involved not only disordered understanding, but a disturbance of the feelings, the passions. Aurora told Xas that she shouldn’t have accused him of never having to make an effort. ‘What I want to make you see is that others don’t find it as easy as you do to be kind and patient. But I did notice that you had folded the page corner where that term first appears, lypemania, from the Greek lupo: “I grieve or make sad”. I think that when you look at Céleste you see extreme sadness – you see your own sadness. Whereas I see robust, hard-hearted madness.’
‘Are you right, then? Am I wrong?’ Xas asked, turning to peer into her face as they walked. It looked a little odd, anyone else would stumble, but Xas had an extra te
n degrees of peripheral vision and could watch her and watch his step.
‘Are you serious?’ Aurora hated that kind of question.
‘Why have you fetched me?’
‘I rescued you, Niall, from that interrogation. And I hope you’ll rescue Paul.’
For here was Paul, with Bernard and Antoine, who were both bending his ears, Bernard about birds’ eggs and Antoine practising his German.
‘I’m sure Monsieur le Comte has business to be about,’ Xas said. Then he pointed. ‘Yes. Here is Monsieur Jodeau and Messieurs Baptiste and Martin with the grapes from Jodeau South. I’m sure you’ll both be expected in the vat with your sisters.’ And he offered to hold their shoes.
Paul hurried to meet his vintner. It was his greatest coup, that Clos Jodeau sold Vully its best grapes for pressing – and one for which he hadn’t to work. Sobran and Aurora had built the two new barrels and – of course – they had to make a new wine. Château Vully l’Ange du Cru Jodeau. Its eighth vintage. The wine was a triumph. The 1838 had already made eyebrows fly up the foreheads of the vintners at a gathering of the commune of Gevrey-Chambertin. Though these gentlemen said to themselves out of the hearing of the Comte, his mother and vintner, ‘It won’t last though, it can’t last.’ There could be no Grand Cru in the Chalonnais, no process, no secret use of the wood, could supply the greatness the soil lacked.
The Vintners Luck Page 23