Vintage

by Rosemary Friedman

  ‘Well?’

  Halliday pulled his hand away abruptly.

  ‘We’d better be making a move.’

  ‘How many bottles of wine do you get out of each barrel…?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  Coming back to her psychiatrists in the cellar, Clare returned to château mode.

  ‘The shape, circumference, and even the number of iron bands of the barrique bordelaise is strictly controlled. Each barrel will provide three hundred bottles of point-seven-five litres of wine apiece…’

  Jamie was in bed, reading.

  ‘Thanks for waiting up for me.’

  He put his book down.

  ‘I’ll always wait up for you.’

  ‘That’s such a nice thing to say.’

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘I thought they’d never go home. Jamie…’

  ‘Come to bed.’

  ‘When I came back. From Waterperry. When I thought that you and Miranda…’

  ‘It’s finished. I must have walked for fifteen miles. Rougemont was exhausted. I’ve got it out of my system.’

  Clare removed her jacket. She wore nothing underneath. ‘I didn’t come straight home, Jamie. I drove into Bordeaux…’

  ‘Tais toi!’

  She loved it when he spoke French.

  ‘I was so angry…!’

  ‘It was a misunderstanding. Does it matter?’

  She wanted to explain to Jamie how she had felt, but he was not into feelings. She got into bed.

  ‘No.’

  ‘How long until the harvest?’

  Sunlight was filtering through the curtains. Recapturing their old closeness, they had had very little sleep.

  ‘It’s usually the last week in September. Most growers settle for an average level of alcohol and pick while the weather’s in their favour. The gamblers wait just that little bit longer to get the last drops of surmaturité out of the grapes…’

  ‘There are so many things I wanted to talk to you about. For starters, I didn’t get the job at the Middlesex.’

  ‘Oh, Jamie!’

  ‘It’s OK. I wasn’t that keen on living in London. There might be a consultant job coming up in Oxford.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘What else what?’

  ‘Did you want to talk to me about?’

  ‘I went to see Grandmaman.’

  ‘I’m worried about Grandmaman. Did she say anything to you?’

  ‘She didn’t have to. She’s as thin as a stick. I tried to get her to go back to her GP.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘“Leave life to take care of itself, young man, and don’t interfere!”’

  ‘She said that?’

  ‘Well, actually it was Tolstoy. According to Grandmaman, the body will fight its own battles a great deal better if you don’t paralyse it with remedies. My guess is that if she doesn’t go into hospital PDQ she’ll be dead before Christmas. From what she let slip I think she could have cancer of the colon.’

  ‘I think she wants to die. I think she’s looking forward to it. Grandmaman has always believed that people should think things out for themselves, take charge of their own lives. She likes to have everything under control. If it was me I’d be scared witless. I’m terrified of dying.’

  ‘“If you don’t know how to die, don’t worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you, don’t bother your head about it.”’

  ‘Tolstoy, I suppose.’

  ‘Montaigne. He didn’t share Socrates’ sense of the immortality of the soul. Your grandmother has simply chosen her own way to “get out of it”.’

  ‘Montaigne?’

  ‘Thomas Browne.’

  ‘Do you have to go home today?’

  ‘I’ll be back in a couple of weeks for the marathon.’

  Clare looked at Jamie’s watch; waterproof, shockproof, accurate to a millionth of a second. Never late for anything, he wore the chronometer even in bed. The coarse black hairs on his thick wrist curled themselves round the brown leather strap. Unbidden images flashed into her mind.

  ‘We’ve only got another hour…’ She dismissed the unwanted thoughts from her head.

  ‘Fifty minutes actually…’ Jamie took her in his arms.

  ‘Don’t tell me. Freud!’

  Forty

  By the morning of the Bordeaux marathon, as runners from the United States and Europe as well as from all over France, converged on St-Estèphe, chefs de culture were looking anxiously to both their grapes and the sky. As the annual tensions which accompanied the run-up to the vendange were beginning to be felt, preparations for the forthcoming harvest were being completed throughout the Médoc.

  In the wineries, century-old vats in outmoded pressing houses had been hosed down and dried out; stainless-steel cuves scrubbed clean as saucepans; cement vats scraped; mechanical harvesters taken to pieces, cleaned and reassembled. Everything in the cellars, from mechanical stemmers to electric wiring, had been meticulously checked out, and in a thousand châteaux the casks and vats that would receive the pressed juice lay waiting.

  At Château de Cluzac, Albert Rochas had begun to take regular samples of grapes to the laboratory in Bordeaux, where Halliday Baines assessed them for acidity level and sugar content; with letters piled high on his desk, Monsieur Boniface dealt with applications from the hundreds of pickers (many of them regulars) from all over the world, who were soon to descend on the château; while in the kitchens, together with the wives of the estate workers, Sidonie made preparations to feed them.

  The ingredients for Harvesters’ Stew, almost obliterated by time and spilled grease, from her tattered recipe book, had remained unaltered since the days of Baron Thibault: 50 kilos of beef (cut into 4 cm squares), 50 fine onions, 60 small pieces of garlic and 40 peeled cloves, 160 carrots, 4 fistfuls of cooking salt, 2 fistfuls of pepper, celery and ground cloves.

  Larding the pieces of beef with the garlic and cloves, Sidonie would put them into giant iron cooking pots, add cold water, bring it to the boil several times, and painstakingly remove the foam before throwing in the chopped vegetables, reducing the heat, and letting the stew simmer, so that only a bubble broke the surface, for several hours.

  Placing a slice of gros pain into the soup plate of each weary harvester at the end of the first day’s picking, she would ladle the very hot stew over the bread. Eaten with thickly sliced tomatoes from the château gardens, accompanied by fiery mustard, and washed down with young wine, it was a meal fit for the gods.

  As the annual drama drew nearer, the tourists returned home, the visites to the chais tailed off, and the protagonists prepared for countdown, Clare felt increasingly isolated and alone. She was not short of expert advice. Jean Boyer, Albert Rochas and Monsieur Boniface had lived through a great many more vendanges than she, but as harvest time drew nearer none of them seemed to have time for her.

  Monsieur Boniface was busy with his applications in the estate office; Sidonie was up to her eyeballs counting out piles of plates and sacks of potatoes; and in the vineyards Albert Rochas paced anxiously up and down the rows of vines like a mother hen.

  Halliday Baines was equally preoccupied. He not only had his vineyards to look after, but had stepped up his marathon training. This year he was determined to be accepted into the Commanderie du Bontemps de Médoc, a privilege awarded to the winner who would, in addition, receive the equivalent of his weight in wine. Apart from providing Clare with the address of a winemaker in Spain, who would give her a reasonable price for her old barrels, his one flying visit had been spent in the vineyards in the company of Albert Rochas. He had declined Clare’s invitation to stay for lunch.

  ‘Maureen’s filing for divorce,’ he said, as she walked him to the jeep. ‘She wants to marry Chris.’

  ‘It was on the cards.’

  They laughed, remembering the mind reading.

  ‘It’s different when it actually comes to it
. Billy’s settling into his new school.’

  ‘About the harvest. Is it true that I have to start picking on a Monday?’

  ‘That’s the calendar of men…’ Halliday switched on the ignition. ‘The calendar of nature is something else. Don’t worry about the harvest. I’ll tell you when to start picking.’

  ‘When will that be?’

  ‘When your grapes are ripe.’

  While Halliday was physically absent, Alain Lamotte was mentally remote. Although they had resumed their business dealings and the incident at Assurance Mondiale was not directly referred to, Clare was aware that she had treated Alain extremely badly and that he was still wounded in his pride. Knowing only too well what it was like to feel rejected, she had bought him a tie with butterflies on it and tried to put things right.

  ‘Look Alain, I’ve told you how sorry I am about what happened. Can’t we be friends?

  ‘I thought we were friends.’

  ‘It doesn’t feel like it.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’

  Since the night in his office, Alain had been more obsessed with Clare than ever. Despite his humiliation, and against his better judgement, he knew that he would continue to help her with the château until she was on her feet.

  Delphine had remarked his preoccupation – which she had attributed to the demands of Assurance Mondiale – for which she had suggested a week’s holiday in Morocco. Alain had turned down the idea on the grounds of commitments in Bordeaux, but which were in fact at Château de Cluzac. Even the two little girls had noticed.

  ‘Papa est toujours faché avec nous,’ Amélie had complained, when Alain had curtly refused to play tennis with her.

  ‘Papa doesn’t mean to be angry with you.’ Delphine was in the garden preparing a barbecue over which Alain would preside. ‘Sometimes your papa works too hard.’

  She was not entirely convinced by her own explanation for Alain’s unaccustomedly short fuse and his moroseness. There were days when she could scarcely get a word out of him. When Harry Balard – with whom she had played a mixed doubles at the Primrose – had suggested that she keep a closer eye on her husband, she had reported the conversation to Alain, who had immediately passed it on to Clare.

  ‘If Delphine ever found out about us, she’d go straight back to Paris with the children. I know my wife.’

  ‘There’s nothing to find out,’ Clare said briskly.

  ‘Malheureusement…’

  ‘Come on Alain. You love Delphine. Delphine loves you. Leave Harry Balard to me.’

  Careful not to go anywhere near Alain’s office, they held their frequent meetings in the Bureau d’Acceuil, where the agenda was strictly business.

  ‘I saw Philip Van Gelder.’ Alain lit a cigarette. ‘I was coming out of the Cité Administrative…’

  ‘The tax office?’

  Alain nodded.

  ‘Van Gelder was just going in.’

  ‘Et alors?’

  ‘Afterwards I had lunch at La Tupina. Van Gelder was at the next table…’

  Clare waited.

  ‘He was talking to Monsieur Huchez and Monsieur Combe!’

  ‘What about?’ Clare wondered what the South African wine-grower had to do with the fisc.

  ‘Unfortunately I couldn’t hear what they were saying.’

  Clare had other things to think about. Not only was she worried about the harvest but about Grandmaman. She had been to Notre Dame de la Consolation to discuss the matter with Tante Bernadette.

  ‘I thought perhaps that you could have a word with her…’ Clare had walked round the convent gardens with the Reverend Mother, who stopped to chide a sister as she hoed the dry beds.

  ‘Vous devez ramasser les courgettes quand elles sont encore petites. Elles ont plus de gout.’

  ‘Entendu ma Mère.’

  Clare hadn’t come to talk about the optimum size of courgettes.

  ‘Grandmaman is your mother.’

  ‘Maman abdicated that role long ago,’ Tante Bernadette said.

  Recalling the fateful day of her wedding, when she had left her bridegroom at the altar, Bernadette took Clare’s arm. ‘She has not spoken to me in nearly forty years.’

  ‘Grandmaman is sick. She needs urgent medical attention. Is there nothing you can do?’

  ‘I shall pray for her.’

  ‘That’s not quite what I meant.’

  ‘“More things are wrought by prayer…”’

  ‘You sound like Grandmaman.’

  ‘I am her daughter. A fact your grandmother seems to have forgotten.’

  ‘Grandmaman doesn’t talk to Papa either.’

  ‘The de Cluzacs are a law unto themselves, Clare. I am surprised you haven’t found that out.’

  Stopping for a moment as they paused at a gate in the stone wall at the end of the vegetable garden, Bernadette looked up at the autumnal sky. ‘When I was a small girl, Maman used to take me to the harvest festival at St-Emilion – I think about it every year – that was where my grandmother lived…’

  Passing into the Contemplative Garden, she led Clare to a wooden bench in an alcove formed by a yew hedge, and lowered her voice.

  ‘Every year, on the Sunday before the vendange, the people of St-Emilion would gather in the church on the hill. There was a very old Abbé… Abbé… His name escapes me. It’s not important. He was the parish priest. One Sunday, I must have been about ten years old, he told us about the wedding at Canaan, at which Jesus turned the water into wine: “The wedding guests were all assembled when the mother of Jesus said to Him, ‘They have no wine…’” At which point of course everybody laughed.

  ‘After the sermon, the Abbé blessed the congregation, the choir from the Cathédral Saint-André in Bordeaux sang a Gloria by Monteverdi, the church doors were flung open and we poured out into the sunshine. The Jurade of St-Emilion, in their cardinal-red robes, preceded by pipes, drums, trumpets and heraldic banners, led the way down the steep cobbled streets to the monolithic church…’

  ‘Monolithic church?’

  ‘An old stone monument with subterranean passages. It was used by the Jurade for their induction ceremony. The stage was lit by torches, and as each new applicant arrived the leader of the Jurade asked his Jurats, “Are you willing to open the doors of your cellars and your houses to our new candidate?” Of course they replied, “We are.”

  ‘When the ceremony was over, the Jurade left the church and climbed to the top of the King’s Tower where the Procureur proclaimed the new harvest. The trumpets were sounded, the Jurade cried out “Allelujah!”, and the rest of the day was spent eating, drinking and telling stories to go with the wine. I remember it as if it were yesterday.’

  Bernadette turned to Clare.

  ‘I will pray for Maman. And for your harvest.’

  Although Clare had little faith that Tante Bernadette’s prayers could influence either Baronne Gertrude’s intestines or the Château de Cluzac grapes, there was always the niggling suspicion that lurked in the mind of the unbeliever, that in the next world – should it of course turn out that there was such a thing – she might just be proved wrong.

  The imminent harvest had for weeks now provided le tout Bordeaux with its sole topic of conversation. The marathon, which many of the Bordelais would turn out to watch, provided a little light relief.

  Every year, as Madame la Présidente de l’Equipe Tendresse de l’Association des Joyeux Tartineurs (the Association of Happy Sandwich Makers), Marie-Paule Balard manned the buffet at the finishing line. This year she was assisted by Christiane.

  Things at the Balard residence had gone from bad to worse. The thwarted Claude, whose temper had not improved, had not given up for a moment his ambition to own Château de Cluzac; Harry was still importuning Marie-Paule at regular intervals for funds and had become increasingly secretive; and Christiane was even more besotted with Halliday Baines, for whose benefit it was that she had volunteered to help her mother with the sandwiches.

 
While Halliday, an élite runner who had spent nine months training for the marathon, looked upon it as a personal measuring post, and Alain Lamotte aimed annually at improving his time, Jamie, who started in the back row and made a game out of passing as many people as possible, joined in purely for enjoyment.

  Refusing to agonise over what he ate on the night before the big race, he had refused to let Clare sign him up for the high-carbohydrate Diner de Pâtes which was given by Baronne Philippine de Rothschild at Château d’Armailhacq and attended by two thousand runners. Instead he took her to dinner at Le Chapon Fin – an erstwhile haunt both of Edward VII and Toulouse-Lautrec – where they could be alone.

  ‘I’ve been short-listed for the Oxford job,’ he told Clare as, waiting to be served, they caught up with the news.

  ‘The Oxford job?’

  ‘The one I told you about. It’s a blue-chip job.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘I went to see Grandmaman last night; I knew you’d want an up-to-date report. If anything, she seemed slightly better.’

  ‘Perhaps Grandmaman’s right after all. About the body fighting its own battles.’

  ‘Miranda’s gone back to her flat. She’s organising a memorial service for Barnaby…’ Jamie leaned back as the white-aproned waiter approached with their order.

  Clare did not want to talk about Miranda. She looked at Jamie’s plate with its thick tournedos on a bed of fried bread and foie gras.

  ‘Are you sure that’s wise?’

  ‘I’m only running to St-Estèphe, not Sparta. I’m not in good nick anyway. I was up nearly all night doing emergency surgery. A group of schoolkids ran in front of a bus in the High. You’ve never seen such a mess. Fortunately no one was killed. One poor little girl had several fractured ribs, her humerus poking into the brachial artery, and the bone right through the skin in her forearm. Compartment syndrome. By the time I got to her the pressure had risen and the blood supply to the muscle was almost cut off. I had to do a fasciotomy – separate the fibrous layer – before the muscle died… Am I boring you?’

  Clare picked up her knife and fork. ‘Sorry Jamie.’ She seemed to spend her life apologising lately. ‘I was thinking about my grapes.’