Vintage

by Rosemary Friedman

  In honour of her birthday, Baronne Gertrude had opened a Château de Cluzac 1945, made by Baron Thibault, which she had decanted half an hour earlier.

  Putting down her spoon on the consommé, which had taken Louise three days to prepare from specially selected marrow bones – simmering and clearing the broth with egg whites then simmering it again, according to her employer’s precise instructions – she signalled to Jamie to serve the wine.

  She watched, with a sharp eye, as he poured a small quantity into her glass, which was engraved with the Cluzac coat of arms.

  ‘Wine is the most civilised thing in the world, and drinking almost the last pleasure that the years steal from us…’

  ‘Jamie and I are getting married,’ Clare said, as Jamie replaced the heavy three-ringed decanter, which added a sense of occasion to the table.

  ‘How very sensible of you. I couldn’t be more delighted.’ Holding up her rouged and papery cheek to be kissed by both of them, the Baronne, who had tears of genuine happiness in her eyes at the thought of a wedding, exchanged her glass, with its inch of crimson claret, for Clare’s empty one.

  ‘Tonight, Jamie, Clare will taste the wine.’

  Over the years Clare had learned from her grandmother that what made the difference between a great wine and an average one was its length on the palate. Picking up the glass, and taking her time, she examined the claret in the light of the candelabrum then sniffed it appreciatively before taking tiny sips and finally swallowing it. Baronne Gertrude would have nothing to do with such value judgements as ‘blackcurrants’ or ‘raspberries’ or ‘audacious bouquet’, which she considered an affectation. One did not, after all, as she was fond of saying, attempt to put into words the flavour of roast chicken or the taste of tarte tatin. Every wine tasted of itself and nothing else, and the only thing that was important was whether or not you liked it. This one, elegant and complex, had a softness and sweetness in which neither fruit nor oak was dominant. Baronne Gertrude was anxiously awaiting her verdict.

  ‘Superbe!’

  ‘Not like that rubbish your father makes. It’s not fit for a carafe in a bistro.’

  When Jamie had filled the three glasses, he followed the Baronne’s gaze to Clare’s left hand.

  ‘Clare’s ring won’t be ready until next week. I’m having it made for her in Butler’s Wharf.’

  ‘Butler’s Wharf? Nonsense!’ Baronne Gertrude indicated to Louise, who was standing patiently by the door, that she might serve the gigot. ‘Clare will wear the de Cluzac sapphire.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you Madame, but…’

  ‘She will accompany me to the safe deposit. You can’t be too careful. Lady Folgate – we play bridge together – had her bag snatched outside the Army and Navy Stores. In broad daylight.’

  ‘…I have already ordered the ring.’

  ‘There is far too much violence on the streets…’ Baronne Gertrude’s voice tailed off. She exchanged glances with Clare, who would have liked to have a say in her engagement ring but did not want to upset Jamie, who said:

  ‘It was to have been a surprise.’

  ‘Now that you are to be married, Jamie,’ Baronne Gertrude said, changing the subject, ‘you must call me Grandmaman. Where is the wedding to take place?’

  ‘Farm Street…’ Clare said.

  ‘Soho.’

  ‘Jamie! I refuse to get married next to the wind-dried ducks!’

  ‘A good woman would lay down her life several times for her lover,’ the Baronne sighed. ‘Yet she will break with him for ever on a trivial point such as whether a door should be left open or shut.’

  Picking up her knife and fork, she addressed the extremely small portion of food (these days she had little appetite), which looked lost on the Sèvres plate. When the gigot was finished – in the interest of her supper the following day, second helpings were not offered – she tinkled the bell for Louise.

  ‘You will find a bottle of Cristal in the pantry, Louise. And we shall need an ice-bucket.’ She turned to Clare and Jamie. ‘Weddings, not to mention eighty-fifth birthdays, are few and far between these days.’

  ‘How does it feel to be eighty-five?’ Clare asked curiously.

  ‘“Old age is a shipwreck.”’

  ‘Tolstoy?’ Jamie said.

  ‘General de Gaulle.’

  ‘It’s better than what comes next,’ Clare said.

  The Baronne eyed Jamie.

  ‘“There’s not much in dying. I shall go to sleep and it will all be over”’

  ‘Emma Bovary.’

  The Baronne nodded in approval.

  It was over coffee in the drawing-room, served by the long-suffering Louise, that Clare, who was perched next to her grandmother on the uncomfortable mahogany sofa, dropped her second bombshell.

  ‘Did you know that Papa is selling Cluzac?’

  ‘Qu’est ce que tu as dis?’

  ‘Papa va abandonner le Château.’

  The Baronne had gone quite pale. Clare hadn’t realised the effect that the news would have on her grandmother and hoped that she wasn’t about to have a heart attack.

  ‘Perhaps you would be good enough to explain.’

  Repeating her conversation with Big Mick, trying to remember all the details, she attempted to comfort the Baronne.

  ‘To tell you the truth I’m rather pleased. Nicola and I have our eye on a gallery on Albemarle Street…’

  ‘You are speaking about your patrimoine!’ the Baronne said sharply. ‘You should have been informed.’

  Clare knew that by her patrimoine her grandmother meant not only her inheritance but the defeat of the Vikings, the unbroken line of ancestors whose portraits hung on the walls of the château, the culture and customs of France. At the risk of offending the Baronne, she said, ‘It’s only an old house, Grandmaman…’

  ‘I thought you said it was a castle.’ Jamie helped himself to sugar.

  ‘Anywhere that produces wine can call itself a château, Jamie. There are more castles in Bordeaux than there are in Spain…’

  A distant look came into the Baronne’s eyes.

  ‘Your grandfather took me to Cluzac as a young bride. Our honeymoon was spent in Paris. We bought a complete set of directoire furniture for the ground-floor salons and refurbished the château from top to bottom. We devoted all our time to it. It was young Pierre-Giles de Monfort who really encouraged Thibault to take the house in hand. He was a writer and politician quite famous in his day…’ The Baronne looked at Jamie. ‘I don’t suppose you remember Pierre-Giles? No of course you don’t. That was extremely stupid of me. One gets confused. We entertained a great many writers and politicians. Pierre-Giles joined the Free French in London. After the war he was mayor and deputy for the department. We used to hold the French carriage-driving competitions in the park. The de Cluzac coach had yellow-and-blue coachwork and yellow wheels. At the end of the championships we gave a dinner for a hundred and fifty guests. The preparations started weeks before – it was the preparations that I loved best. Choosing the menu. Trial runs. Veal Marengo served in the copper cooking pots. We used to get them out for the hunting parties. From the old kitchens. Cakes, creams, sorbets, fruit. Tables for ten covered with damask tablecloths. A hundred and fifty napkins folded by Maurice. Maurice was the butler. Fresh flowers. Asters, roses, marguerites, ivy, asparagus fronds. Great floral arrangements for the hall, and little compotiers on each table. Then there were the placements. Decisions, decisions. And the last-minute changes! After dinner musicians played in the Louis XVI salon and the real party began…’

  Breaking off from her reminiscences and realising suddenly where she was, the Baronne looked at Clare.

  ‘Twenty-four per cent of Cluzac is yours, Clare. Have you nothing to say?’

  ‘No doubt Papa will get in touch with me…’

  ‘Get in touch with you! Mon Dieu! You should have been consulted.’

  ‘He can hardly sell the estate without me.’

  ‘I
do not understand your attitude. Cluzac is one of only three remaining châteaux to have remained for so long in the same family. To abandon it is unthinkable. Have you discussed this with your mother?’

  ‘I haven’t spoken to Viola for months…’

  ‘Then I suggest it is time you did so. Your father is up to something. He is not to be trusted.’

  ‘I’m not all that bothered, Grandmaman. I’ll be perfectly happy if I get a chunk out of the château.’

  ‘You have de Cluzac roots, Clare,’ the Baronne said. ‘Like the roots of the vines, they are planted deep.’

  Five

  Clare had never had a hands-on relationship with her mother. As she told Jamie, who had as yet met neither of her parents, she would probably have merited more attention from her had she been born a horse. She was only marginally joking.

  When Viola Fitzpatrick stated that the perceptions of a helpless new-born must be raised to the highest standard, that her intellect must be cultivated, that from the day of her birth she should be encouraged to look to one for all her little wants and needs, that she should be stroked and petted and respond to the sound of one’s voice and follow one around certain that one has her best interests at heart, she was talking not about her daughter Clare, but about a filly.

  Raised on a stud farm, by the time the twenty-two-year-old Viola, the eldest of the four Fitzpatrick daughters, left her native Galway to spend the summer in Bordeaux, she had had no sex education at school and none whatsoever from her parents. Although she was intimately acquainted with the covering of a mare by a stallion, she was still virgo intacta and she did not equate such equine couplings with herself.

  Although it was her father who mainly concerned himself with the breeding, Viola could not remember a time when she had been thought too young to witness the apparently violent and mechanical process to which the mares were submitted, usually more than once, during their summer heat.

  Standing at the door of the breeding shed, she would watch as the mare in her covering boots, twitching and irritable, her plaited tail held high in anticipation, was held by one stable lad while her private parts were washed down by another. At a nod from her father, the aroused stallion was brought in and the copulation, violent and thrusting, and sometimes not without what Viola mistook for tenderness (a bite on the neck which her father said was merely to keep the stallion in position), took place. There were always four or five stallions, and in the season – Sundays included – there were seven or eight matings daily, each one hopefully representing several thousands of pounds in the Fitzpatrick coffers.

  Despite the fact that at home in Ireland she had been surrounded by so much rampaging fertility, Viola’s own deflowering by Charles-Louis Eugène Bertrand, Baron de Cluzac, the consequence of which was to keep her in France for the next nine years, had turned out to be not what she had expected.

  The young Viola, dark and feisty, was not the first of her kinsmen to settle in Bordeaux. When the English had put paid to the wool trade in the early eighteenth century, the Irish had come up with the ingenious idea of supplying Bordeaux with home-produced salt beef, in return for which the Bordelais had satisfied the Irish thirst for claret.

  The fortunes made by the Irish in Bordeaux were typified by ‘French Tom’ Barton, originally from Tipperary, who bought valuable estates in the Médoc (where his descendants are still to be found), and became the biggest single purchaser of claret in the second half of the century.

  Of all this Viola Fitzpatrick had only the haziest idea when she was sent by her father, George Michael Fitzpatrick – who thought it would do her good to get away from Ireland – to spend the long summer at château Kilmartin with her second cousins once removed. The Kilmartin estate occupied a prime position overlooking the wide estuary of the Gironde, and was one of the few châteaux in the Médoc to produce white wine.

  It was when her ‘uncle’ had asked her to take a temperamental gelding and deliver it to the head groom at Cluzac, that Viola had made the acquaintance of Charles-Louis Eugène Bertrand de Cluzac, who happened to be crossing the courtyard of his father’s medieval château, as she trotted confidently in over the cobbles and enquired the way to the stables.

  Flattered by the admiration in the young man’s eyes – he had silently appraised her wild Irish looks while ostensibly admiring the gelding and her mastery over it – Viola had not been displeased when she ran into Charles-Louis again the following morning in the course of her morning ride.

  When he asked if he might join her, Viola readily agreed. The early-morning trysts, during which they often dismounted and walked along the river bank, became a regular habit to which Viola looked forward with anticipation.

  Flattered by his attentions, she was not surprised when, on one blistering morning when the sun had already burned away the early mists, he pulled her down on to the grass and started to remove her clothes.

  That her objections were only perfunctory was due to the fact that not only did she find Charles-Louis extremely personable – he was quite capable, when the occasion demanded it, of turning on the charm – but, mortal sin or no, it was high time she experienced for herself the pleasures so eagerly awaited by the mares on her father’s stud farm.

  As in the breeding shed, the business, owing to Charles-Louis’ high state of arousal and his impetuosity, was quickly over. Sore and bleeding, with pine-needles stuck to the back of her shirt, and summarily deprived of her virginity, Viola allowed him to help her mount her horse for the ride back to Kilmartin, before, looking extremely pleased with himself, and without a backward glance, he cantered back to Cluzac for breakfast.

  The fact that she had let down the Blessed Virgin did not faze Viola, who was too strong-willed to give credence to everything she was told by the Church. What bothered her slightly was the lack of communication between herself and her seducer. While this deficiency of form might be expected between the sexes in Ireland, she had not anticipated it in France, where, informed by the great love scenes she had witnessed in the cinema (even in their censored form), she had imagined that things would be done differently.

  This did not prevent her repeating the experience, on subsequent morning rides, when Charles-Louis introduced her to a number of permutations on the sex act which were altogether outside the remit of her stallions.

  When, at the end of the summer, she discovered that she was pregnant, and Charles-Louis, panic-stricken, suggested that she take the next boat home, their first real dialogue was opened up.

  ‘Can you see me, Charlie, living in a home for unmarried mothers run by the nuns?’

  Looking at her with her mane of dark hair and her milk-white body, of which he never seemed to tire, as they lay in the long grass, while the horses grazed nearby, Charles-Louis could not, in all honesty, say yes.

  He was about to open his mouth with a further suggestion when Viola said:

  ‘Anything else is out of the question as you know very well.’

  ‘Qu’est ce que tu comptes faire?’

  ‘What am I going to do? Do you think you’re in Ireland Charlie, a few jars, take a girl to bed, then run like hell? It was you gave me this baby, Charlie; what are you going to do?’

  It was not because he was in love with Viola that Charles-Louis agreed to marry her. Having, as he perceived it, been denied love not only by his mother, Baronne Gertrude, who had left his upbringing to surrogates, but also by his father, Baron Thibault, who was more concerned with the nurturing of his vines, Charles-Louis did not know the meaning of the word love. The reason that he invited Viola to become his bride was because, as his parents never tired of reminding him, it was his responsibility to produce the son and heir who would perpetuate the unbroken line of Barons de Cluzac. The injection of good Irish blood into the attenuated French stock seemed, to all concerned, not such a bad proposition.

  The marriage between Charles-Louis Eugène Bertrand de Cluzac and Viola Katherine Mairead Fitzpatrick was solemnised in the chapel at Cluzac on
a beautiful spring day, which had brought out the carpet of bluebells beneath the great trees of the drive. The bride wore a dress of Indian muslin, with a high neck and long sleeves, and an embroidered white cap from which fell a waterfall of Brussels lace which successfully concealed her thickening waistline. She was attended by her sisters, Lucy, Annabel, Shiobhan and Rose. The wedding-breakfast, masterminded by Baronne Gertrude, who was not displeased with her new daughter-in-law, took place in a marquee which was hung on three sides, in the style of Bérain, with black and white lengths of cloth, which represented wrought-iron work. One side of the marquee was left transparent, which created the effect of an additional room, which looked out on to the park. The celebrations, which went on for several days, were a cross between the grandest of fêtes champêtres and an Irish wake. Stumbling into the wrong bedroom – given the size of the château it was a mistake easily made – during a lull in the festivities, Viola came across her bridegroom, his wedding trousers about his ankles, covering one of the more nubile guests. It was not only this discovery, but the fact that, despite Charles-Louis’ pathological weakness for women (a proclivity she was yet to discover), he hated to spend the night with them, that led them, for the eight years of their marriage, to occupy separate bedrooms.

  When Clare Gertrude Sophie Elinore de Cluzac was born, six months after the nuptials, Charles-Louis, having been informed of the child’s gender, held her awkwardly in his arms for a few moments. He managed a brief kiss on his wife’s brow, together with a few embarrassed words of congratulation, before repairing, disappointed, to the vineyards in which an exceptionally mild January had caused the sap to rise in the vines prematurely. It was left to Baron Thibault, who was delighted with his granddaughter, to make all the right noises.