Vintage

by Rosemary Friedman

  From the moment they had met, at a Christmas party at Cluzac, to the moment when an ashen-faced chef de culture had knocked on the door of her boudoir to bring the news of Thibault’s death while out hunting, they had loved each other dearly. Gertrude was not stupid enough to imagine that among the peaks of married life – it was after all an arcane and impossible institution – there would not be troughs of despair and despondency (no longer tolerated by the young), moments when she would wonder what she was doing in the larger-than-life Thibault’s bed at all. These were soon dissipated by his overwhelming generosity (both of body and of spirit), his innate decency and his genuine love for her.

  Charles-Louis, although similar in build, immaculately turned out, and with Thibault’s impeccable manners, was a far cry from his father. Out of touch with his own feelings and impervious to those of others, he had a temper verging on the sadistic and humiliated those who crossed him, in the case of women often reducing them to tears. Gertrude was at a loss to know where her son got all his unpleasantness from. It was neither his egotistical behaviour, his arrogance, nor his frank womanising that now bothered her, however, but the fact that, after 300 years, he was not husbanding Cluzac.

  In touch with the old Comtesse de Ribagnac, her contemporary on a nearby estate with whom she exchanged discursive letters, Gertrude was kept informed on a monthly basis of Charles-Louis’ conduct. Despite the boomtime of the eighties, when an incredible run of great and bountiful years had driven prices through the roof and Médocain growers had ploughed back their profits, her son had apparently made no investment in the cellars, had not bothered to repair the dilapidated roofs of the château, and although his vineyards, under the expert eye of Albert Rochas, were impeccably kept, there had been little or no replanting. Making no secret of the fact that, as one of the last true landowning aristocrats, he was above the commercial fray, that he did not trust – and strongly objected to paying taxes to – a socialist government (a sentiment with which Baronne Gertrude for once concurred), Charles-Louis seemed to turn a blind eye to the viability of Château de Cluzac, the gates of which he kept firmly closed.

  It was not only their inability to get on with one another that made Baronne Gertrude exasperated each time she thought of Charles-Louis, but also the fact that, unlike his father – who had taken his responsibilities seriously and devoted himself to Cluzac – her son preferred whisky to claret and had not the least dedication to wine, the making of which he supervised as necessary but did not love.

  On her enforced departure from the Médoc as a reasonably young widow, Baronne Gertrude had made her home in the Pas-de-Calais, in the Château de Charleville, which belonged to her family, and in Paris where she had a great many friends.

  It was there, at the British Embassy, that she had met, and ultimately married, Selwyn Donaldson, the United Kingdom Ambassador to Sweden. After Thibault’s death she had not thought that she would marry again. It was too much trouble. But Selwyn, a widower, had wooed her with an English courtesy which had eventually captured her heart. The wedding had been a quiet one in the church of la Madeleine in the eighth arrondissement, and she had spent the next ten years as Lady Donaldson in the embassies and salons of Warsaw, Bonn, Washington and Rome, where she brought a Gallic style and grace to the diplomatic carousel.

  They had been back at their London base, a crepuscular mansion flat facing Rotten Row, when Selwyn’s pancreatic cancer had been diagnosed. It was all over within three weeks. Missing the gentle man terribly, Gertrude had considerable difficulty in coming to terms with the loss of her second husband. It was several years before, pulling herself together, she reverted to her previous title, gathered about her a coterie of friends – largely bridge-playing – and made a new life for herself in the Hyde Park flat where her existence was enlivened by the intermittent visits of her granddaughter, Clare.

  The two Cluzac women had more in common than their disparate ages would suggest.

  Although Gertrude had had as little as possible to do with her son since leaving Cluzac, his wife, Viola, had kept in touch with her when she had walked out on Charles-Louis and returned to Ireland with the eight-year-old Clare. Glad of something to do to mitigate her loneliness, Baronne Gertrude had devoted herself to the upbringing of her granddaughter, leaving Viola free to attend to her horses.

  During Clare’s schooldays at St Mary’s Ascot, her summer holidays, until she was old enough to opt out, had been spent at Cluzac with her father. At Christmas and Easter, when she did not go back to her mother in Ireland, on which she was not at all that keen – they had little in common and Clare was frightened of horses – she stayed with her grandmother, from whom she learned the principles of duty and responsibility, as well as everything there was to know about sex, about which Baronne Gertrude was surprisingly relaxed.

  Although the Baronne had a deep-seated and unshakeable belief that everyone was looking for one person to love, she tolerated the open-ended relationships which, like the new multiplex cinemas, had replaced the monoliths of the past, but was absolutely convinced that those who indulged in them were destined to get hurt.

  Baronne Gertrude talked openly to her granddaughter about sex from the age of puberty onwards. She explained that it was a joyous experience and as crucial to life as breathing. Clare thought that she must be the only girl in London to debate with her grandmother the wisdom of losing her virginity to the first man (married and with two children) into whose arms she had fallen after leaving her convent school.

  A great many men had bitten the dust since then, but although, like Napoleon in War and Peace, her grandmother had little time for the medical profession and did not mind saying so, the Baronne’s favourite, among Clare’s many admirers, was Jamie.

  The fact that Jamie – who was wont to recite chunks of Shakespeare over his anaesthetised patients in the operating theatre – immediately recognised the sentiments as Tolstoy’s endeared him at once to the Baronne.

  After a shaky start – Jamie had failed to hold the Baronne’s chair for her at dinner and had committed the solecism of cutting the ‘nose’ off the Brie – the two of them had got on famously. While the Baronne often entertained Jamie with tales of her girlhood in Sauternes and stories about her life at Cluzac, their shared interest was literature and they enjoyed attributing each other’s quotations.

  Clare and Jamie had been invited to dinner to celebrate the Baronne’s birthday, for which she had given the menu a great deal of thought and her current au pair, who attended English classes in South Kensington, a hard time. Baronne Gertrude did not cook and rarely entered the kitchen, which had not been renovated since the death of the first Lady Donaldson.

  Born, bred and having lived for the greater part of her life in a château, the Baronne, although perfectly capable of giving instructions to others, had very little practical knowledge of running a home. In the eighteenth century, according to her wide reading on the subject, before domestic space had misguidedly become the female prerogative, the women’s quarters in the great French houses were as distant from the kitchens as the men’s, an indicator that they did not have even a supervisory role over the domestic arrangements. As far as she was concerned ‘home’ was not by any means synonymous with ‘woman’ and she considered the class divide to be far more significant than that of gender.

  Her formative years had been spent in a country house of which, despite the passage of time, her recollections were extraordinarily clear. They were defined by favourite and specific places. The chapel, the billiard room, the dining-room, the drawing-rooms, the library, her parents’ apartments, the guest rooms and the nursery quarters, the vast, seemingly endless and sometimes terrifying corridors, the many staircases. Once Jamie had asked her how many rooms there were and Gertrude, astonished by the question, had replied that to the best of her knowledge no one had ever counted them, and that she had absolutely no idea.

  All she remembered was that her childhood (from which by now the disagreeables ha
d been filtered out) had been an unmitigated delight. Rides in the early-morning mists, homework in the nursery, games of croquet, tennis, pingpong, fishing, bicycle rides and bathing in opaque muddy waters, spring hunting when the children – she was one of six – were left to their own devices, parties and summer weddings, and picnics by the lake.

  With her needs now attended to by a single and frequently changing au pair (Louise, Chantal, Christiane, Monique), the days of butlers with their armies of footmen, valets, chefs, housemaids, gardeners (head and under), coachmen (who taught them to sit on a horse properly), gamekeepers, park-keepers, mole-catchers, laundry women, ironing women, and the man who came once a week to wind the château clocks, seemed far off. It was a world to set people dreaming, which, even in the great châteaux, where the hard-pressed owners now worked extremely hard to ensure that everything ran smoothly, would not return.

  Her childhood home with its marble entrance hall, its colonnades and rotunda, its mysterious attic crammed with discarded fancy-dress costumes, ball slippers, musical boxes and trunks of old papers, the smells of the waxed floors, the coolness of the hallways, the park full of dark pines and lime trees, the walks to the kitchen garden, the races to the farmhouse to fetch the eggs: her memories were written in these images. They belonged to the past.

  Now she subsisted, in her Hyde Park flat, on a very small income from the estate of the late Selwyn Donaldson, augmented by her pension, which was paid directly to her bank. From it, august and austere, with her head held high and her back still remarkably straight, accompanied by the current Louise, Chantal or Monique, she made her way to Harrods’ Food Hall.

  This morning, expecting and receiving the same deference from the white-coated assistant behind the fresh-meat counter as she had from her bygone cooks, she had purchased a gigot. Carrying the leg of lamb home (a figure of speech: it was Louise who actually carried it), together with some petit pois and carrots and a horrendously expensive slice of Brie de Meaux (le roi des fromages, which, as she was fond of explaining to the au pairs, had originated in the court of Charlemagne), she gave specific instructions as to its preparation before settling down to a day spent as any other.

  The Baronne was a prodigious reader and the flat was filled with an eclectic collection of books, which extended in range from the latest Muriel Spark to the essays of Montaigne. In addition to being extremely well read and a not inconsiderable historian, she was an accomplished water-colourist (the spare bedroom was stacked with her paintings of trees and flowers), and with the help of National Health spectacles, which she kept hidden on occasions when she was not alone, an adept at petit point.

  By the time Clare arrived with Jamie, the Baronne, assisted by Louise, had changed into a black crepe dress on to which she pinned a diamond brooch in the shape of a butterfly given to her by Thibault on the occasion of Charles-Louis’ birth – and rouged her cheeks. An appetising smell of roast lamb, seasoned with garlic and a little rosemary, pervaded the high-ceilinged flat.

  Four

  Retracing her steps along Bond Street in search of a birthday card for the Baronne, Clare had caught sight of a book in Sotheby’s window called Caring for Antiques: A Guide to Handling, Cleaning, Display and Restoration, which she thought might come in useful in tarting up her Saturday-morning stock.

  She had been pressing her nose to the shop window, shielding her eyes from the reflection, and trying to make out the name of the author, when she felt a tap on her shoulder and heard the surprised sound of a Mid-Western voice which belonged to her past.

  ‘Excuse me. Isn’t this little Clare de Cluzac?’

  Turning round, Clare looked up into the eyes of Big Mick (‘the nose’) Bly. At the same time she observed, from the gilt-lettered placard that stood on the pavement, that this morning there had been a sale of Fine and Rare Wines, Spirits and Vintage Ports in the auction rooms.

  It was at Château Kilmartin, more than fourteen years ago, after playing tennis with her ‘cousins’ Pierre and Chantal (distant relatives on her mother’s side), during her final summer in Bordeaux, that she had been introduced to the larger-than-life American wine writer, once seen, never forgotten.

  Big Mick, founder of Wine Watch, a US magazine sold on subscription, was reputedly the most influential wine critic in the business (‘If Bly gives it a ninety you can’t buy it, and if Bly gives it less than ninety you can’t sell it’). A seriously heavy man with a penchant for seriously heavy wines, he was feared throughout Bordeaux, where obsequious cellarmasters were said to keep a ‘barrique Bly’, a hogshead of especially potent claret, in readiness for his unannounced visits. Bly’s talent was for tasting undrinkable stuff straight from the vat and predicting whether, given time, it would become a great wine. Since his numerical ratings and tasting notes were read, and slavishly followed, by readers throughout the world, Bly could make or break a grower. He had never set foot inside Château de Cluzac. No journalist ever had.

  Clare took in the meticulously distressed denims, the luridly checked workshirt and the crumpled linen jacket which had most likely cost more than a bespoke suit.

  ‘Clare de Cluzac! Just wait till I tell Toni!’

  Toni, Big Mick’s diminutive, polyglot wife and éminence grise, travelled everywhere with him, looked after his diary and set up his European meetings.

  ‘You’re not going to believe this, but Toni and I were only talking about you yesterday at the Reform Club. Stephan von Neipperg, the Tesserons from Pontet Canet, Daniel and Florence Cathiard, everyone was there…’

  ‘Why on earth would you be talking about me?’

  ‘Well strictly speaking, it wasn’t exactly about you. It was about your father.’

  ‘What’s he been up to?’ The enquiry was polite. Clare was not all that interested.

  ‘Didn’t you hear the news…?’

  Clare imagined a peccadillo involving her father, some woman or another, on the front page of Sud-Ouest, although, unlike the English whose appetite for prurient gossip, particularly among politicians, was insatiable, the French were generally not exercised about such matters.

  ‘Château de Cluzac is on the market,’ Big Mick said.

  ‘On the market!’

  It was as if Bly had told her that the Howard family had put their ancestral home in a Yorkshire estate agent’s window, or that the Marquess of Bath was getting rid of Longleat after four hundred years of unbroken occupation.

  Taking her for coffee in South Molton Street, where they sat at a pavement table, Big Mick filled Clare in with what was happening in the backwaters of the Médoc, which hadn’t known such excitement in years. There was no longer anything to be said about the quality of her father’s wine, which had been steadily deteriorating and was now near the bottom of the league table in Wine Watch (‘a below average wine containing noticeable flaws’). However, the unique position of Château de Cluzac, with its eastern slopes, well-drained soil, and sans-pareil vineyards, in the patch of agricultural land alongside the Gironde river which ranked among the most expensive in Europe, had attracted a great many private and institutional buyers, including wealthy Japanese businessmen and Parisian bankers.

  Bordeaux had always attracted corporate money and outside investors. Very few vineyards were still family owned and two or three of these changed hands each year, depending on how well the market was doing. Among those who were anxious to get their hands on the Cluzac estate were a German financier who wanted to convert it into a luxury hotel and conference centre, a Swiss consortium which had plans for adding it to its chain of exclusive health resorts, and a wealthy Californian who aimed to create a Napa-Valley-style theme park in the Médoc. According to Big Mick, who had his ear to the grapevine, the Baron had seen off the more bizarre contenders, and three prospective purchasers had made the final running.

  Alain Lamotte, on behalf of Assurance Mondiale, one of the first major investors to run a group of vineyards as a business, was anxious to earn brownie points for himself as well as a
cquiring another French château for his insurance company; Claude Balard, the sole distributor of the Baron’s wines who, like other Bordeaux wine merchants since the nineteenth century, was desperate to become a ‘cru classé’ owner; and Philip Van Gelder, a shadowy industrialist and absentee vineyard proprietor from the Franschhoek Valley, who was persona non grata in South Africa.

  Courteously sending her regards to Toni Bly, Clare, who was now running late for her appointment with Michael Millington, headed for Albemarle Street. She gave no further thought to Big Mick’s revelation until later that evening when she and Jamie were dining with the Baronne.

  Baronne Gertrude had been waiting for them in the elegant but shabby drawing-room with a decanter of dry sherry, which was all she permitted by way of an aperitif. Clare’s visits, bringing with them as they did an aura of youth and vitality and brightening up the high-ceilinged rooms, in much the same state of desuetude as she was herself, were always eagerly anticipated.

  Graciously accepting the Hermès box, the Baronne greeted her granddaughter warmly but formally.

  Acknowledging the roses that Jamie had brought her, she allowed him to kiss her hand.

  ‘A house without flowers is like a day without sunshine.’ She tinkled the little bell that lived permanently on the table beside her chair together with her silver rosary and the book she was currently reading.

  When Jamie had first been introduced to the flat in Hyde Park, he had regarded the bell – which was rung when the Baronne needed a handkerchief from the bedroom or had inadvertently spilled a drop of water on a polished table – with horror.

  ‘Never feel sorry for a servant Jamie,’ Baronne Gertrude had told him. ‘He is thinking, One day, when I have saved enough money, I shall be able to imitate that man.’

  Indicating to Louise, who had come in response to her summons, that she should relieve Jamie of the flowers, the Baronne opened the Hermès box. With a practised movement she draped the scarf, the colour of the silk complementing the agapanthus blue of her still piercing eyes expertly round the neck of her dress. Chastising Clare for her extravagance (for which the Baronne, who was extremely acquisitive, was secretly glad), she dispensed the sherry and invited her guests to sit down. Precisely thirty minutes later, she led Clare and Jamie into the dining-room, where the table, with the Victorian silver candelabrum – which had belonged to the first Lady Donaldson, and was lit even when the Baronne dined alone – was set for dinner.