‘Stay at home for a year,’ Aurora said to him. ‘You are Burgundian. You can leave Paris alone. We don’t need Paris.’ She thought to herself how like her uncle she sounded.
There was nothing much in the papers about the coup, then the Bishop at Autun had, in his New Year Sermon, some words of praise for the Emperor. Aurora came home from the service saying, ‘This ruler of ours knows whom to seduce – the Church, for instance. A murderer who knows how to be moderate. I think we had better get used to him.’
1852 Liqueur d’expédition (sweetened liquor used to dose champagne)
‘How did you go unseen in Aluze?’
‘I came by the canal.’
1853 Vin de garde (the good vintages, for laying down)
Xas sent a photograph from Glasgow. It was taken in a studio – he was leaning on a marble plinth against a backdrop of misty crags. He’d kept still, was wholly in focus, even the saturated blacks of his eyes. But his feet weren’t quite flat to the floor and he seemed about to step out of his boots and ascend something he could see before him, a stairway of air.
In the letter that came with the photo he wrote, ‘I’m impressed by this city’s necropolis. I’ve never seen a burial ground so clearly imagined as a silent and civil community – the plinth tombs like chimney stacks without houses, for the houses are underground. When did you all begin to think this way about death? What happened to the solemnity and the horror?
‘I went to visit George Cayley, whose name I stole from his treatise on flight. I saw his famous glider, which was larger, heavier and less responsive than my count’s. I mentioned the count’s name but Cayley had never heard of him or his experiments, which leaves me to suppose that my “death” discouraged him from further experimentation.’
1854 Dosage (the dosing of champagne with sweetened liquor to make up the volume after the degorgement of sediments)
‘I came by train.’
1855 Plein (frank, forward, full-bodied)
Baptiste went to Dijon for a year, and when he returned to his forewarned family he brought his second wife, a widow, and her seven-year-old daughter. He also brought for his father a white clay pipe, whose bowl bore a likeness, a human head, most would say, a fair serene face with flat hooks of hair, like wings, against either cheek.
1856 Journal (a land measure used in Burgundy: earth that can be worked in a day)
Sobran told Aurora that, on that night every year, he waited alone. Sometimes it was simply a vigil he kept with his past.
Then he changed the subject. He asked about the broker who’d been to Vully while he was in bed with a cold. Martin hadn’t reported what the broker had said about the Vin de l’Ange. Aurora repeated the price offered for the 1850 vintage.
‘I said no,’ Aurora told him. ‘I said it’s a sacrament. He said the sacraments have had two thousand years of advertisement.’
‘And Paul? Martin?’
‘They were with me.’
‘Good. Even a doubting Thomas could believe the evidence of his senses – these people, all they can believe is the soil.’
Sobran had taken laudanum because his legs pained him. He was disgorged by sleep in the late morning, his pain gone but his body fizzing with drowsiness, a slow aspiration of unconsciousness. He found Xas beside him, asleep too.
Sobran reached for the angel. Against that lustrous shoulder he saw his own arm – thin, its tan fogged by white hair, his elbow a dry knot. Fine feathers overlapped the red and white gathers of scar tissue on Xas’s back, filling them in as moss fills the cracks between paving stones. Sobran touched the angel, whispered, ‘Are you really asleep?’
Xas rolled over, stretched, breathed deeply then opened his eyes. He had learned how to sleep, he said, and sometimes dreamed. He had dreams about flying, still felt the shame of not having wings, even among the wingless. And when he was sad he still sat with his back to a wall. ‘But you, you’re happy now aren’t you, most of the time?’ Xas asked, and touched the wedge of hair on Sobran’s high, bare forehead.
‘I’m never fully at ease in my mind till I see you. Fortunately, at least in this matter, the years pass very quickly now. Do they for you?’
‘I’m patient, so they pass. But I’m not waiting for anything, and so much happens to me.’
‘You’re young.’
Xas laughed.
‘I mean, you’re alive to everything. Whereas I’m becoming a little like your friend the monk.’
‘Niall.’
‘Oh, it was his name you used. Niall, the beekeeping Irish monk, your friend, whom I recall you described as shrinking away from the world like a kernel dried in a peach pit. I’m beginning to feel like that.’
‘How? How does it feel?’
Sobran wondered whether the angel was trying to follow his feelings about age or those of humans in general. He felt that he had to get his answer right so thought for a time before he told Xas, ‘It’s as if I can no longer fit the space I’ve made for myself in the world. Yes – I’ve shrunk inside the space I’ve made.’
1857 Domaine (privately owned vineyard, estate, field)
Mid-morning, early autumn before the harvest. Sobran brought in the breakfast that a servant had left for him, as usual, on a tray by the door. As he paused with the tray in his hands and back against the door he saw Aurora coming up the coach house stairs. He wished her a good morning.
‘How did you sleep, dear?’
‘Brokenly,’ Sobran smiled. He kept the door open and she edged past. She stopped at the sight of Xas, who was sitting on the floor laughing over Bernard’s letters. He looked up, jumped to his feet and came to embrace her.
Aurora pushed him away to study him. ‘You,’ she said, ‘have given me a great deal of trouble. Both the Baron and Paul want to know who this perpetual traveller is who sends me all the views. Sir Walter Scott’s memorial, a steamer on the Côte d’Azur, the Vendôme column, the Piazza della Signoria in Florence. Men in canvas trousers sitting on stone benches …’
‘I have considered getting my own camera. But then I’m discouraged because I see things no photograph can reproduce – like the way the sky looked to me one day over the flat land at Amiens, like fair impermeable skin, as if it was asleep and about to be rudely awakened. Signs. How can I photograph signs?’
‘If you do get a camera, Xas, all I ask is you send the photos in packets. All this mail! And no return addresses. I tell the Baron that I’ve met a lot of people on my pilgrimages and he says, “Enthusiasts, no doubt.” Fortunately, some of the nonsensical things you send confirm this opinion. Like the playbills: Christ heads the Praetorians. Frankly I’m puzzled. And postage is so costly.’
‘I don’t eat.’
‘You don’t earn.’
‘Yes I do. I worked as a stoker some of this year. For the passage. And I’m making maps in my head, the kind that consist of sentences, descriptions of what I see at the end of streets, of shrines, milestones, old trees. Cartographers are like angels, they imagine everything from the air. I enjoy learning how to get around, it’s an inexhaustible project.’ Xas sat on the floor again among the letters; he picked up another page as he spoke to Aurora, as though he was reading Bernard’s words by touch.
Aurora told him that, while nothing much changed at Vully, the railway was a boon, and their wine travelled well.
‘I told you so,’ Xas said to Sobran. ‘I had a feeling about those pumps that drained the mines in Mülheim. I first heard them as something huge hammering to get into the world.’ The angel reached out and encircled the ankle of the old man who stood beside him in his nightshirt.
Aurora and Sobran exchanged looks, in the sorry warning way of parents who have to tackle telling their child some bad news.
‘Xas,’ Aurora said, ‘I imagine you’ve noticed that Sobran is – isn’t the man he once was.’
The angel got up, fast and fluid, and moved away from them. ‘Do you think I pretend not to notice he’s old? I notice. But Sobran is so familiar t
o me that his age isn’t an otherness, a mist gradually obscuring the body I know, or something that stands in opposition to my “youth” like some vulgar emblem. His age is as much himself as his youth.’
Aurora sighed.
‘Thank you,’ Sobran said. ‘You’re very gallant, but not quite right in your thinking. You’ve adapted to my ageing in the same way as you’ve learned to find your way around on foot. I think you were more yourself when you would fly off leaving me blinking the dust out of my eyes, and I was more myself in my prime. Nothing matters to me as much as it once did. My feelings are not tenacious or energetic.’
‘Do you mean you don’t love me,’ Xas said.
Sobran said, ‘Now you sound like a young man.’
Xas crouched to gather the scattered pages of Bernard’s letters. He said to Aurora without looking at her, ‘Why did you start this? Are you hoping to have him to yourself in his declining years?’
‘I do have him. And his family has him. You come and go, Xas.’
‘And you are saying I should just go.’
Aurora was unhappy. She told Xas that she would never suggest that. They were speaking at cross-purposes. Did Xas think she was trying to tell him that it was unseemly for him sometimes to climb into bed with the old man? They both did that.
Sobran protested that the ten years Aurora had on him didn’t entitle her to keep calling him old.
‘You be quiet. Xas – what Sobran and I are trying to do is prepare you somehow, as good parents do. When Sobran is gone and you are grieving for him, he won’t be able to comfort you.’
Xas approached Sobran to give him the letters, but Sobran took the angel’s other hand and drew him against him. For a moment Xas pressed his forehead against Sobran’s shoulder, then looked him in the face. ‘We still see eye-to-eye. You haven’t lost any height. Don’t send me away, Sobran. Don’t do me any fatherly services. I have all the time in the world to live with your absence. I’d be with you more often except everyone in the province remembers me too well.’
‘And you’re restless.’
‘Yes. I find places I want to stay because of the people I meet. But I shouldn’t stay anywhere till I learn how to – not trouble anyone.’
1858 Le Parfum (the fragrance of a wine)
The pearls were in a box that stood between Sobran’s brushes and cologne on the dresser in his room at Clos Jodeau. Aurora had given him the pearls, saying, ‘I’ve never worn these, of course. But Iris saw them the other day and asked if she could wear them. I don’t want her wearing them. Give them to Xas when next you see him.’ Sobran forgot to bring them to the coach house and, when he did next see Xas, he had to ask him to stay put for a while, not to go quite yet, till he fetched the Archangel’s pearls.
Sobran was delayed at Clos Jodeau by his youngest daughter who didn’t see why he hadn’t sent someone else – he shouldn’t be running errands, riding to the château and back in one day. Why didn’t he take a carriage? What would Mother say!
He came away again at evening with the pearls in his coat pocket. Véronique wouldn’t let him turn around without a meal, and Antoine said he should stay put because Baptiste had said this morning that he wanted to speak to Sobran about something – Baptiste was over at Kalmann – if Sobran would just stay put Antoine would walk over and get him.
Sobran said he would see Baptiste on his way, and left them.
It was twilight when he handed his horse to a Vully groom and walked around to the coach house, squaring his shoulders and smoothing his hair.
He saw Baptiste at the coach house door. Yes, it was his eldest son – in work clothes, and carrying a soft-brimmed hat – who vanished into the black square of the coach house doorway.
Sobran quickened his step. At the foot of the stairs he looked up to see the light grow on the landing as someone opened the door above, the door to the lit room, the soldiers’ gallery. He was short of breath but called out ‘Baptiste’ and saw the light steady, not increase. Sobran hurried up the flight, stopped on the landing, saw his son looking back at him, Baptiste’s hand flat on the door to the soldiers’ gallery and that door half open.
Sobran began up the second flight, talking as he went: ‘You wanted to see me?’ Then, ‘Wait.’ He could hear the tense conniving note in his own voice. Baptiste tilted his head, frowned, then his face cleared into a look of triumph and, just as Sobran reached him breathing hard, his hand grappling at his son’s sleeve, Baptiste pushed the door wide and stepped into the room.
Where Xas stood in the lamplight, bare of chest but for the black straps of his trouser braces, barefoot, and apparently calm.
Sobran rested against the doorframe.
‘You,’ Baptiste said.
‘Me,’ Xas answered. Then to Sobran, ‘Are you all right?’
‘Just catching my breath,’ Sobran said, catching his breath.
‘Cayley,’ Baptiste said.
Xas made a polite, non-committal sound, then held out his hand to Sobran.
Baptiste moved aside and looked at his father. The look was wary but not hostile.
Sobran came forward, took the pearls out of his pocket and coiled them into Xas’s cupped palm. ‘Aurora stored them in a bank vault in Paris for twenty years. She was afraid they would bring Vully bad luck. She’s still afraid.’
Xas looped the pearls over his head. Greenish black, their colour in deep, oily layers of lustre, the pearls made the angel’s beauty more lordly. Or perhaps it was his expression. ‘I suppose you kept my belt?’
‘The belt with the topaz, tiger’s-eyes, lapis lazuli? I recall I took it off to wash you. I didn’t see it after that. It’s all so long ago now. I suppose he removed it. Aurora followed him to the window and he tossed her those pearls. She didn’t tell me he carried anything away with him.’
‘He must have. As a souvenir.’
‘Or it was buried.’
Xas put the pearls to his mouth and rolled them against his lips. He glanced briefly at Baptiste. ‘It seems we are tying up loose ends. As if I’m collecting what’s mine. Perhaps I shouldn’t come back. Sobran?’ The last rather plaintive.
‘Why shouldn’t you come back?’
‘He looks like you –’ Xas said, without looking again at Baptiste, who was quite still, listening carefully – ‘at forty. When you came back up to the boundary stone after the three years we didn’t speak, and you were decorated with all your sorrows and reverses, frostbite, white hair, the walking stick – a bit of an affectation, that – your white collar and crucifix. All that icy indignation. You said, “I have some questions for you. You can answer them, then go and never come back.”’
‘What did you say to me, Xas?’ Sobran asked. He didn’t remember, scarcely remembered his anger. He did recall how Xas had looked, perched on the boundary stone and cloaked by his wings.
‘I asked you whether you had thought it through.’
‘How could I?’ Sobran took another step and put his hand on Xas’s cheek. ‘You’re not going to leave me and not come back, are you? Just because Baptiste looks like me. I doubt you’ll encounter him again. He can’t stand watch over me. I’m not yet an invalid or an imbecile.’
‘I think I must,’ Xas said, and Sobran was surprised by the hot streak of a tear on the back of his hand. ‘Why does he have to look like you? I’d be still in one piece if I hadn’t resembled someone else. Likeness is a sin. It’s a sin.’
Xas broke away from Sobran, turned his back to search for his shirt, coat, boots. Sobran saw Baptiste’s jaw drop at the sight of the white down, flush to the contours of the angel’s back.
Xas found his shirt and coat. He put them on. He picked up his boots, said to Sobran, ‘Don’t tell him anything. It’s my history too and I don’t want him to share it.’
This, and the former speech, were so wounded and irrational that Sobran felt a kind of tender terror for the angel that he didn’t know how to act on. He said, as calmly as he could, ‘I’ll see you again.’ Watched Xas str
ide to the open double doors, called out, ‘I’ll see you again!’
‘Yes,’ Xas said. And jumped.
Baptiste was reeling. Sobran took his son by the arm and led him to a chair near the fireplace, sat him down.
‘He has feathers,’ Baptiste said, his teeth chattering.
‘If you had seen the wings you would have fainted,’ Sobran told him, soothing and conversational. ‘Aurora only saw them in action once – like two mirrors facing each other, she said. God’s fearful symmetry.’
1859 Servir frais (serve chilled)
… This winter I went to the salt dome in Turkey. In the last twenty-five years they’ve increased production by several thousand tons a year. The evaporation ponds cover acres and are marked out at night by lights at each huge, clawed-together heap of dirty salt. I went to the place where I always hid my copper water vessels and found a pipe that vanished into the salt. I followed it back to the lake and asked some of the workers what it was for. A foreman told me that the Bey who owns the land employed an English engineer to build the pipe to siphon off the lake near the spring. Yes, this had exposed more salt pans. No, he didn’t have any idea where the water went. Somewhere underground …
1860 Sleepiness (grapes attacked by Botrytis cinerea)
In May, Sobran was at Chalon-sur-Saône for the christening of his third great-grandchild and first great-grandson. He felt ill and took to his bed in Sabine’s house. Céleste, Sabine, and Sabine’s last unmarried daughter all nursed him. He was never alone – from this he divined how ill he was. When the worst of the pain passed, he drifted, was between times disturbed by females plumping pillows or sliding bedpans under his bony backside, or sitting him up to the tiresome task of swallowing soup. In his periods of consciousness he’d forget anyone who wasn’t in the room – but never lost sight of that triumvirate of wife, eldest daughter, granddaughter. His sons seemed to appear in a parade. Martin – of all people – knelt by his bed and wept. Baptiste came and poured out a glass of Château Vully l’Ange du Cru Jodeau. He held it to his father’s lips and Sobran tasted the wintry richness behind the grape, before the wood. Then he sensed a change, as though of air pressure; he was pulled out of himself and saw curtains drawn around his sight, then the blackness turned turquoise and he surfaced from a lake to look for a minute at mountains, snow veined by wet black rock, and glassy green ice with light shining through it. But it wasn’t him this landscape wanted and he sank back into his own substance, not just his sick body, but his memories, preferences, hard-held loves.
The Vintners Luck Page 26