Vintage

by Rosemary Friedman

  After the last coach had gone, they had strolled down to the fishing-hut, which was silhouetted on its stilts against the river. Beneath the willows, whose winter branches were used by the vignerons to tie the trimmed vines to the wires, they lay down side by side.

  Jamie caressed Clare’s preoccupied face with a blade of the long grass. ‘I’ve been short-listed for the Middlesex job…’

  ‘Brilliant! Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘This is the first moment I’ve had you to myself.’

  ‘Think you’ll get it?’

  ‘I’m up against the Dean’s son and a Middlesex senior reg… You don’t seem very pleased.’

  ‘Sorry Jamie. I keep worrying about where I’m going to get the money for my new barrels.’

  ‘You’ll do great with the old ones.’

  Laughing, Clare rolled on top of him.

  ‘You don’t know the first thing about barrels.’

  ‘It would mean we’d have to live in London…’

  Clare glanced at the small boats, which brought in the bar, the bass and the lamprey, as they bobbed in the evening breeze. London seemed very far away.

  Walking with Alain over the coarse grass (not to be confused with English lawns), of the Lamottes’ garden, and thinking still about Jamie and the love they had made by the river, she noticed Christiane Balard sharing a tablecloth (secured by a bottle of champagne in an ice-bucket) with Halliday Baines and surprisingly – a truce must have been called – his sworn enemy Big Mick Bly.

  Holding her plate with one hand, and taking her glass of Laurent Rose from Alain, who left her reluctantly, she made her way towards the little group.

  ‘Hi!’ Toni Bly, tiny, in a tiny brown dress which clung to her doll-like figure, waved a brown arm. ‘Why don’t you join us?’

  Big Mick, his sport shirt straining over his huge belly, shifted his giant frame a few inches. There was a spare cushion between himself and Christiane Balard. Her flower-trimmed hat matched her voile dress, the skirt of which flowed on to Halliday’s lap. She was helping herself, intimately, to the food on the winemaker’s plate.

  ‘You couldn’t have picked a better moment.’ Toni Bly played tennis with the Lamottes whenever she was in Bordeaux. She was a little dervish on the court. She dabbed at her scarlet mouth with her mignonette napkin. ‘These two’ – her wrap-around nails vacillated between Halliday and Big Mick – ‘were arguing – for a change.’

  ‘A friendly exchange of views,’ Halliday said, looking at Clare. ‘What kept you?’

  ‘I had to take Jamie to the airport.’

  ‘It was about the wine…’ Christiane Balard’s English accent was charming.

  ‘Oh that.’ Clare pulled the ‘coach’ bag over her head and put it on the grass beside her. Stretching out her legs, she unwrapped her knife and fork. She wanted to forget about wine.

  ‘The fermentation temperature,’ Christiane said, gazing at Halliday adoringly. ‘Monsieur Bly keep the vat at twenty-eight degree, and ’Alliday he like to ’ave thirty-three degree…’

  ‘Raising the temperature briefly,’ Halliday explained to Clare, ‘gives you extra dimensions and extract…’

  ‘Bullshit.’ Big Mick chewed at a herb-encrusted chicken leg. ‘Dimensions and extract! You’re making wine, boy, not minestrone. A vat temperature of more than thirty degrees is positively dangerous. Any fool will tell you that.’

  Reaching across Christiane for the champagne bottle, and meeting Clare’s eyes as he did so, Halliday refilled his glass.

  ‘Genius’ – he addressed Big Mick – ‘sometimes allows one to live dangerously.’

  ‘I’m going to the bu-fay,’ Toni Bly said, standing up in order to create a diversion. She didn’t want a repeat of the Fête de la Fleur episode between her husband and the oenologist. Holding out a hand to Halliday, she pulled him to his feet. ‘Why don’t you help me get dessert for everyone?’

  Clare was playing croquet with Alain, Christiane and Halliday when the rains came, sweeping across the tables, filling the empty coffee cups, and leaving puddles on the parched lawn within seconds.

  Handing the remains of Delphine’s Paris Brest, the bowls of fresh strawberries, and the sodden cheese boards, through the open window of the kitchen as they ran, the guests repaired to the house.

  In the long, low ‘Maison et Jardin’ salon, with its comfortable sofas, antique tables, and huge fireplace replete with meticulously positioned logs and pine-cones, Harry Balard was sprawled in front of the television. He was watching the Formula One German Grand Prix and had the commentary on at full blast.

  Catching the name Barnaby Muirhead, Clare wandered over to the TV. A succession of accidents had eliminated thirteen of the twenty-six starters and the cars that were left in the race were completing their forty-five laps. Barnaby Muirhead was in the lead. Driving brilliantly in his Benetton-Ford, he was cheered on by the roars of the 150,000 spectators at the Hochenheimring, among whom Clare tried to pick out Miranda. The voice of the commentator reached fever pitch as a McLaren Peugeot driven by a Hungarian, and a Lotus Mugen-Honda with an Italian at the wheel, slugged it out for second place. Clare felt her hands break out in a sweat as the two contenders put the pressure on Barnaby.

  ‘I didn’t know you were interested in motor-racing.’ Alain Lamotte was by her side.

  ‘Really?’ Harry Balard’s voice was heavy with sarcasm. ‘I thought you would have done.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Work it out for yourself.’

  Taking her eyes off the TV for a moment and looking at Alain, Clare said, ‘Barnaby Muirhead is a friend of mine. Well a friend of a friend of a friend…’

  A hysterical shriek from the crowd was followed by the frenzied voice of the commentator. ‘…The Italian is acting like a highwayman! He’s lost control of the car on the bend… Muirhead tries to take avoiding action! I think he’s clipped his rear wheel…’

  Clare’s eyes returned to the screen in time to see Barnaby Muirhead forced off the track at a speed of 144 miles per hour. Rooted to the spot, she watched the Benetton-Ford fly into the air like a red bird, execute a slow-motion somersault and bounce on to the grass verge, where it burst into a ball of orange flame.

  Thirty-four

  In the brief respite between the departure of the morning visite and her lunchtime guests, Clare stood among the curling leaves and plump grapes in the dusty vineyards and gazed up in bewilderment at the strange overhead sky with its yellow-edged clouds, the implication of which anyone in Bordeaux could tell her.

  Since the Lamottes’ washed-out fête champêtre on the day that Barnaby Muirhead had competed in his last Formula One race, the Médoc had been holding its breath as the effect of the summer rains on the grapes was assessed. According to Albert Rochas, Château de Cluzac had got off lightly.

  Although in this respect Clare had been lucky, other things had gone from bad to worse. With the harvest only a few weeks away, she was still no nearer to replacing the requisite twenty-five per cent of her oak, and the news from Florida was that the Baron was returning, to arrange for the transport of his cars and dispose of his stables in which the horses were exercised but no longer ridden.

  It was Viola who had told her about the horses. In a long and unexpected letter – Viola hated letter-writing almost as much as she hated the telephone – her mother had explained that she was fed up with Charles-Louis’ constant badgering and had finally agreed to a divorce. French law on the matter being vastly different from English, she was coming to Bordeaux to arrange the terms of the settlement and, at the same time, at the request of Charles-Louis, to cast her eye over the stables. On her way to France she planned to spend a few days in London with Declan, during which she hoped to visit Grandmaman.

  Barnaby Muirhead’s fatal accident, reported the next day in the newspapers, with graphic front-page photographs of the inferno at the Hochenheimring (in colour), was not the only memento of the fête champêtre.

>   Sickened by the tragic death of the thirty-one year-old Formula One driver, which she had witnessed in the Lamottes’ salon, Clare had turned away from the TV set, to which Harry Balard was still insensitively glued. With her eyes full of tears – what was it Grandmaman had said, ‘We weep for ourselves’? – she had looked around for her coach bag and realised that she had left it in the garden where the rain was now coming down so hard that it obscured the windows.

  When the storm eased off a little, she had let herself out on to the terrace. Stepping over the sodden mignonette tablecloths with their now overflowing ice-buckets, she made her way to the far end of the lawn where she had left Jamie’s present.

  She was examining the soaked leather, and hoping that the bag was not irrevocably ruined, when a clap of thunder, a sheet of lightening and a deluge of rain, even heavier than before, sent her running for the nearest shelter.

  Bursting into the pool-house, her clothes plastered to her body, rain dripping off her nose and into her mouth, she found Halliday Baines in flagrante delicto on a pile of swimming towels, not with Christiane Balard, as might have been expected, but with little Toni Bly.

  In a paroxysm of anger, rather than shock, she slammed the pool-house door with as much force as she could muster, and left them to it. She had neither seen nor heard from Halliday Baines since.

  On her return from the fête champêtre, which had turned out to be a great deal more eventful than it had promised, Clare’s first thought had been to ring Jamie. His plane had been on time and he had just arrived back in Waterperry to be greeted by a hysterical message from Miranda – who had watched the Formula One race on TV – on his answering machine.

  ‘You just caught me. I was on the doorstep. I’m nipping over to Holland Park…’

  ‘Nipping? Jamie, it’s fifty miles to Holland Park!’

  ‘I can’t leave Miranda on her own.’

  Telling Jamie to convey her sympathies to Miranda, Clare, who rarely drank alone, had taken a bottle of claret from the dank and cobwebbed caveau and shut herself in the Baron’s Room. Working her way steadily through the Château de Cluzac 1943, she tried to expunge the haunting images – the fireball engulfing Barnaby Muirhead and his Benetton-Ford, and Halliday Baines humping Toni Bly in the pool-house – from her mind.

  By the time she went to bed, the tray of supper Sidonie had insisted upon bringing to the Baron’s Room was still untouched and she had disposed, single-handed, of the entire bottle of wine. Scarcely able to stand, and without undressing, she had flopped on to her four-poster where she had fallen into a profound sleep.

  She was woken by the sound of a dog barking. Thinking that she was still dreaming, she had turned over and gone back to sleep. Forcing open her eyelids five minutes later, when the barking persisted, she realised that the bark was Rougemont’s, and that it was two o’clock in the morning.

  Rougemont was not in his usual place outside the Baron’s bedroom. Following the sound of frenzied barking, Clare found him, now almost berserk, jumping up at the door that led to the courtyard, and tearing frantically at it with his claws.

  Quivering with excitement, head on one side, he watched as she struggled with the old iron key. The moment he could squeeze through the doorway, the dog pushed past her, almost knocking her over, and streaked off in the direction of the chais, where in the high window a dim light was visible.

  Clare followed him into the cellars. Stopping to pick up Jean Boyer’s bung hammer and his flashlight from the bureau where the maître de chai kept his books, she crept gingerly down the dark stairs to the chai de conservation. Reaching the bottom, she stepped, in her bare feet, not on to the beaten-earth floor as expected, but into a cold puddle several inches deep.

  ‘Merde!’

  She remembered that it had been raining. Heavy as the rain had been, however, she knew – her befuddled mind notwithstanding – that there was no way it could have penetrated the thick roofs of the semi-underground cellars. Bending down and dabbling her fingers, she realised to her horror that the liquid which swirled around her ankles was not water but wine.

  Unwilling to venture further without Rougemont, she called softly to the dog.

  ‘Rougemont, viens ici!’

  She heard him scrambling clumsily over the barrels at the far end of the cellar.

  ‘Viens ici!’

  Ignored by the dog, who was now yapping excitedly, Clare shone the flashlight from side to side and ventured into the gloom.

  ‘Qui est là?’ She did not really expect the intruder to respond.

  Had she not been so angry she might have been more cautious. Her heart thumped with rage at the loss of her precious claret. As she went deeper into the cellar, the fumes were overpowering and eddies of wine swirled round her feet. Her own safety was far from her mind.

  With the hammer held high in one hand and the flashlight in the other, she reached the far corner where Rougement stood guard. Squeezing her way between the barrels, she recognised a cowering figure. She shone the flashlight into his terrified face. It was Harry Balard.

  ‘Salaud!’ she shrieked in a surge of adrenalin which dispelled the last vestige of her hangover. ‘Salaud! Qu’est ce que vous faites ici?’

  Harry did not reply.

  ‘OK. Vous pourriez raconter votre histoire à la police.’

  Realising that wine was pouring from half a dozen barriques and that the bungs had been removed from their sides, Clare’s first thought was to save her wine. As she moved towards the barrels, from the corner of her eye she saw Harry Balard heave Rougemont in the chest and scramble past him.

  ‘Don’t move!’

  Moving swiftly, Clare blocked his path. As he came towards her in the alley between the barrels, she stood her ground and brandished the hammer menacingly. Not wishing to kill him, she was not sure exactly what she was going to do.

  She was saved from deciding by Harry. Knocking her roughly and unceremoniously out of his way, so that for a moment she lost her balance, he pushed past her and made for the door.

  ‘Arrêtez!’

  Rougement, who had been distracted by his discovery of the wine, which he was licking tentatively, was alerted by her scream. Bounding past her and after Harry, he fastened his teeth on the seat of his chinos. There was a sound of tearing fabric as Harry lost his footing and slipped, hitting his head on a barrel and crashing to the sopping floor where he remained, motionless.

  Shining her torch into the pale face, now streaked with blood, which seemed to be coming from a cut on his head, Clare thought for a moment that he was dead.

  ‘Harry?’

  There was no movement. She wondered what the penalty was for manslaughter.

  ‘Harry?’

  Rougemont, head on one side, stood beside her. Putting down the hammer, Clare dropped to her knees and felt for Harry’s pulse beneath the slack bracelet of his watch.

  At the touch of her hand, he opened his eyes and grinned. Slightly concussed from the blow to his head, and dizzy from the fumes of the wine which assailed his nostrils, he made no effort to get up.

  ‘Salaud!’ Clare said, as Rougement put his great paws on the intruder’s chest, pinning him to the ground.

  Removing Harry’s loafers, she flung them to the far side of the cellar where they dropped down among the barrels. She undid his Gucci belt and unzipped his wine-soaked trousers. As she struggled to pull them off, a packet of white substance fell out of the pocket.

  ‘Tiens, tiens!’ Her eyes widening, she rescued the tiny plastic package from the wine.

  She threw the trousers after the shoes.

  ‘That’s for slashing my tyres and poisoning my trout…!’

  She reached for his Calvin Klein underpants.

  ‘Non!’ Harry grabbed frantically at the elastic.

  Rougemont snapped at his hand, leaving toothmarks.

  ‘Ouch! Call that bloody dog off!’

  Rougemont growled menacingly.

  Clare removed his underpants and f
lung them disdainfully over her shoulder.

  ‘That’s for interfering with my wine.’

  Making an inspired guess, she held up the plastic packet.

  ‘And this is for the police, if you so much as come near Château de Cluzac again. Alors, foutez le camp! Get out…’

  ‘Je ne peux pas.’ He clutched the flaccid genitals which Rougement was investigating.

  ‘Tant pis. Rougemont…’

  ‘Non, non!’ Harry scrambled up holding his hands before him. ‘Je m’en vais.’

  Had she not been so incensed at his sabotage of her irreplaceable wine, every last drop of which she needed if she was going to succeed, she would have found the sight of Harry Balard, limping across the moonlit courtyard in his socks, his soaked tee-shirt flapping above his tight white arse, extremely funny. The fact that the keys to his Porsche were in his trousers’ pocket, and that he would have either to hitch a lift or walk home, was small consolation. Unable to stem the purple tide which spread steadily on to the floor, she ran to wake Jean Boyer.

  It was four o’clock in the morning before the maître de chai, helped by Clare and a young cellar worker, had replaced the bondes à côté in the barrels and swept up the wine from the beaten earth floor. Jean Boyer was completely devastated. The wine was his life’s blood.

  The financial implications of Harry Balard’s vicious act were brought home to Clare by Julie Smith, who arrived at Cluzac, as promised, soon afterwards. Finding herself short of claret, the Catesbury’s wine buyer tasted the Petite Clare, which she found elegant and full of flavour, and ordered a substantial number of cases. Thanks to Harry Balard, who had cost her several million francs, which there was no way she would be able to recoup, Clare had had, to her chagrin, to cut the shipment down by half.

  Even if the forthcoming Christie’s sale were to reach the reserve Big Mick had suggested, the money from it would neither be enough, nor soon enough, to replace the all-important barrels on which the success of her harvest depended.