Vintage

by Olivia Darling

  “I suppose.”

  “But I do realize that makes me blinkered. I mean, before your father died, you’d probably never even thought about where wine comes from.”

  “I knew where wine comes from,” said Kelly. “I’m not that thick.”

  “That’s not how I meant that comment to come out.” Guy tried again. “What I meant was, while I went out to the vines this morning, I was feeling pretty angry, but as I worked it came to me that maybe I was being a little judgmental.”

  Kelly nodded. “Er, yeah.”

  “Wine isn’t your passion. It’s perfectly understandable that you don’t want to get up at the crack of dawn and work outside all day.”

  Kelly nodded again.

  “But that doesn’t mean that you can’t have anything to do with the future of Froggy Bottom. There are all sorts of aspects to the wine business.”

  “I’m not interested in anything about wine except drinking it,” said Kelly flatly.

  “But you’re wasting an enormous opportunity here. There are people who would give their right arm to have the chance to make something of a place like this. It’s a glamorous world. I could make the wine and you could be involved in marketing it. You could go round the wine merchants and restaurants and sell Froggy Bottom.”

  “I don’t want to do marketing,” said Kelly.

  “But it’s a glamorous career. Lots of girls want to do it.”

  “You think I should want to do marketing because I’m a girl? I’d heard South Africans were racist. I didn’t know they were sexist too.”

  “I’m sorry.” Guy didn’t know how to come back from that. “It was just a suggestion.”

  “I don’t need you to suggest anything to me.”

  “Then what do you want to do, eh? Sit in the dark for the whole bloody summer?” Guy was finding it increasingly difficult to rein in his exasperation.

  “What are you getting at?”

  “I’m getting at the fact that you seem incapable of getting off your backside. Don’t you want to do anything with your life? Are you happy to achieve absolutely nothing at all?”

  Kelly bristled. “For your information,” she said, sticking out her chin. “I am doing something. I’m organizing an all-nighter.”

  “A what?”

  “I’m going to hold a rave here. I’ve already got a couple of DJs ready to do sets. I just have to set the date.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  “We’re going to set up decks in the barn and—”

  “No way. The barn is full of winemaking equipment.”

  “We can party around it.”

  “Kelly, you’re not holding a party on this farm.”

  “I don’t seem to remember your name appearing in my father’s will, Guy. I’m going to get some flyers done. Gina’s brother will hand them out when he does his set at the Fridge next week. Gina reckons he might even be able to get a new band to do a set here. Five hundred people at fifty quid a head. I reckon we can charge at least that. Maybe more.”

  Guy didn’t care how much they were willing to pay. Five hundred people? He had a horrifying image of all his hard work trampled underfoot as a bunch of kids, high on drugs, marauded through his vineyard. “You can’t do this,” he echoed hopelessly.

  Kelly stood up. “It’s already done. Second weekend in September,” she announced.

  Even worse. With the summer shaping up to be a hot one, there was a very real chance that Kelly’s stupid rave would take place right in the middle of the harvest.

  “Please don’t do this to me,” said Guy.

  “Too late,” said Kelly. “I am. Thanks for the drink.”

  As Guy slammed the empty wine bottle into the rubbish, Kelly strutted back across the farmyard puffed up with the knowledge that she had won that argument. Then she demonstrated the first bit of initiative in months. Back inside the farmhouse, she pulled out a pad of paper and began to design the flyer she would give to Gina’s brother. Gazing around the kitchen while she hoped for inspiration, Kelly’s eyes alighted on one of the empty champagne bottles that were lined up along the top of the Welsh dresser. She fetched it down.

  The bottle, which had once contained Perrier-Jouët, was decorated with a beautiful hand-painted pattern of flowers that wound all the way up around the bottleneck. Kelly began to sketch a design that would incorporate this art deco-style motif. In the center, she drew a woman’s face, looking off into the distance.

  On the other side of the courtyard, Guy lay awake, racking his brains for some way to put a stop to Kelly’s ridiculous plans for Froggy Bottom. How could he get her to leave? How could he persuade her to go back to the city? What would put her off staying in the farmhouse? He remembered one summer when the neighboring farmer had spread his fields with muck during one of the hottest weekends of the year, causing the local campsite to lose almost one hundred percent of its custom as previously happy campers succumbed to the smell and were pestered away by the flies. Guy didn’t even have that option. He dare not risk putting anything on the soil that might taint the eventual flavor of his wine.

  But there was no need to panic. September was a couple of months away. He’d get Hilarian and the trustees to talk to her. Or maybe he’d just call the police. Hadn’t all that legislation in the nineties made it illegal to throw raves anyway?

  Bloody Kelly. He punched the pillow.

  CHAPTER 27

  There were definitely moments over the first few weeks that followed the wine fair when Madeleine wondered whether she should have taken up Mathieu Randon’s offer after all. Though the maison seemed to have made pretty much zero money for the last five years, somehow Champagne Arsenault still owed a vast amount of taxes. Even for a woman used to dealing in seven-figure sums in her career as a banker, the figure was frightening.

  “Can this really be right?” she asked Champagne Arsenault’s new accountant, Laurent Parisot.

  Laurent promised to look into it but he warned her that her father had not paid taxes for several years and, in all probability, the horrifying figure he had come up with was conservative. Madeleine closed her eyes as she allowed the news to sink in.

  Madeleine had used all her banking experience to draw up a new business plan for Champagne Arsenault. Of course she had built in contingencies for late payment of the outstanding debts of her father’s customers, but for some reason it hadn’t even crossed her mind that there might be an outstanding tax bill. Certainly not such a big one. She’d simply assumed that no income meant no taxes. The amount her accountant had whispered into the phone was five times Madeleine’s emergency margin. There were other big costs coming up too. Picking was the most pressing but far from the least of them.

  “Can you cover it?” her accountant asked.

  “Yes,” Madeleine murmured. “I think so.”

  But she was far from certain.

  Madeleine called Geoff in London. He had promised when they last spoke that he would do anything he could to help Madeleine keep Champagne Arsenault afloat, but though he took her call, he didn’t seem quite so sure anymore that he could help her. Somehow Geoff had found himself back at Ingerlander Bank and under Adam Freeman. And when Madeleine asked outright for a fast, low-interest loan, Geoff cleared his throat and said, “I’m not going to get this past him, Mads. I don’t know what you did to him … ”

  Nothing, thought Madeleine ruefully. Absolutely nothing.

  She didn’t bother to press Geoff on the subject. There was no point. There may be loyalty among thieves but bankers …

  Ironically, while the financial affairs of Champagne Arsenault seemed to worsen daily, the vines were doing well. Henri Mason kept Madeleine up-to-date on progress. The vineyards on the hill were flourishing. But there was still better news.

  “I think we may be able to make a Clos Des Larmes this year,” said Henri as they stood in the walled vineyard a couple of hours after Madeleine’s conversation with Laurent Parisot.

  “Really?” Madeleine
asked.

  He nodded. “Look at this,” said Henri, cradling a bunch of pinot noir grapes in the palm of his hand. They were flawless. Each one looked as though it had been blown in glass. “Beautiful. This year is going to be vintage, Madeleine. Your first vintage.”

  Madeleine wrapped her arms around Henri and pressed her soft face against his stubbled cheek just as she had when she was a little girl. It had comforted her then but it didn’t comfort her now. In fact, she held him closely so that he wouldn’t see her tears of anxiety, Still, he must have sensed that something was wrong from her ragged breathing or the tightness of her embrace.

  “Is everything OK?” he asked.

  Madeleine nodded into his shoulder. He was so proud of the grapes. She didn’t have the heart to tell him right then that he was wasting his time. If Madeleine were able to afford to pick Champagne Arsenault’s grapes, she wouldn’t be able to afford to press them. If she found the money to press the grapes, she wouldn’t be able to keep the wine in Champagne Arsenault’s caves until the time came to sell it.

  Madeleine disentangled herself from Henri and went back into the house, claiming that she had a cold coming on and needed to blow her nose. Once inside, she gave way to the tears that had been building since Geoff announced that he was unable to help her clear Champagne Arsenault’s tax bill.

  Every day the tax bill went unpaid, the amount Champagne Arsenault owed crept higher. The revenue wouldn’t wait to be paid. The grapes wouldn’t wait to be picked. The wine in the vats wouldn’t wait to be bottled. Madeleine sat on her bed with her head in her hands and wondered what price Mathieu Randon would give her.

  CHAPTER 28

  Mathieu Randon may have been furious about Christina’s speech at the wine fair but it didn’t seem to have done her any harm. The day after a little article about her surprise denunciation of Domaine Randon appeared in the Times, Christina’s agent, Marisa, fielded a call from the editor of Vanity Fair. Their November issue was to be all about stars taking a stance against globalization. Would Christina consider giving a small interview regarding her decision to walk away from an extremely highly paid job and toward the moral high ground? She responded that she would be delighted.

  “You see,” she said to Bill when they passed briefly in the corridor at the Manhattan apartment. “My ‘stupid stance,’ as you call it, may yet turn out to be the best move I ever made. Vanity Fair wants to interview me, Bill. That’s Vanity Fair!”

  Christina knew the Vanity Fair article would drive Bill crazy. He had yet to make the pages of the magazine except the odd appearance in their film review section, wherein his work was invariably panned. Each February, when the March edition of the magazine—the traditional pre-Oscars “Hollywood edition”—hit the shelves, Bill would spend days brooding over why he never made the cut when his box-office figures rivaled those of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. That the editor of the magazine himself had called Christina directly and assured her he would devote at least four pages to her and her stupid causes sent Bill into something approaching clinical depression. Well, served Bill right, thought Christina. He was her husband. He was supposed to support her.

  A week later, Christina flew from NYC to Napa Valley where she was photographed for the article on the grounds of the Villa Bacchante. She was dressed like a goddess, all flowing drapes and Roman-style sandals. A wind machine blew her long blond hair back from her perfect face. She was like Botticelli’s Venus in a vineyard instead of on the half shell.

  Mathieu Randon heard all about Christina’s forthcoming appearance in Vanity Fair via the journalist who had written his profile for the same magazine. Randon had an unusual talent of inspiring loyalty in the journalists who came into contact with him. The female ones at least. This woman, an unmarried forty-something from Manhattan, would have done anything for the chance to bask in the beam of Randon’s Gallic smile for just a few more moments.

  “Thank you,” he said, when she passed on the message. “You are very kind to let me know. I look forward to seeing you next time you are in Paris,” he added, not meaning a word. In Manhattan, the journalist immediately began searching the Internet for cheap flights to Europe.

  Randon could just imagine how the article would be. Though just a couple of years previously he had been happy enough to pose for the magazine himself to illustrate an article on the new establishment, Randon had little time for Vanity Fair’s thinly disguised celebrity puffs. To him, the magazine was on a par with Hello! Would it have featured ISACL’s campaign at all if someone altogether less photogenic had been fronting it? He was white-hot furious that, as yet, no one had called Domaine Randon’s office to get his side of the child-labor story.

  Still, Randon wasn’t going to let some dozy supermodel and a lazy journalist undo years of hard work. It was time for a preemptive strike.

  He dialed his assistant. “Bertille, will you get Jeremy Fraser on the phone?”

  Fraser was a publicist specializing in “kiss and tell.”

  “There’s someone I’d like you to meet,” Randon told him.

  Amelie’s fifteen minutes of fame had come at last. While Vanity Fair was working photoshop magic on the results of the Christina Morgan shoot, Amelie the call girl was taking part in a photo shoot of her own in a warehouse on the outskirts of Paris. It wasn’t the first time she’d been in front of the camera, but it was the first time she’d been in front of a camera with her clothes on. If you could call the scraps of fabric she was wearing clothes.

  “Chin down, eyes to camera,” said the photographer. “Give me a smile, sweetheart. That’s great.”

  Amelie was a natural, running through a whole gamut of pouty, seductive faces, blowing kisses and cupping her own breasts in classic glamour-model mode.

  Because of France’s strict tabloid journalism laws (and because the French didn’t really care about Bill Tarrant), the story would be broken in Britain’s News of the World. Alongside the full-color shots of Amelie in a virginal white bra and knickers set, the paper would run a couple of grainy pictures lifted from the chip in her mobile phone: Bill Tarrant, exhausted after a night of Parisian hospitality courtesy of Mathieu Randon…

  “I hope that one day in the future Bill will look at this article and smile,” said Randon to Fraser as they admired the finished piece in their respective offices on either side of La Manche. “Five times in one night. Without Viagra! He’s quite a guy.”

  “If it were true.” Fraser laughed. “It’s a time-honored tradition,” he explained to Randon. “Five times a night. What man is going to bring a libel suit if he has to gainsay an article that paints him in quite such a spectacular light?”

  Randon allowed himself a rare burst of laughter.

  Christina was in Napa Valley when the story broke. The previous night she had hosted a fund-raising event for ISACL at the Top of the Mark, the restaurant at the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco. And so, by the time she awoke—slightly later than usual because she was so exhausted from being on show the night before—the story of Bill’s adventures in Paris had raced around the globe and was waiting in her in-box. When she turned on her mobile, she was momentarily gratified to hear she had fifteen messages on her voicemail. The first seven were from Bill.

  “Baby,” he said. “Pick up the phone. You’ve got to call me as soon as you get this message. Don’t check your e-mail first. Promise me you won’t. Call me right away. I need to speak to you the minute you get this. Please pick up the goddamn phone, my love. Don’t check your e-mail first.”

  Christina checked her e-mail.

  It took a moment before Christina connected the grainy photograph that popped up on the screen of her Mac with the man she had exchanged vows with. She felt a little sor did as she clicked on a link to YouTube that actually showed a video clip from the same evening. Her husband lying on a messed-up hotel bed. Spent. The girl holding the camera phone used her free hand, with its chipped red nails, to lift his flaccid penis from his washboard stomach and tr
y to coax it back to life.

  Bill woke up and looked into the camera.

  “What are you doing?” he asked his companion.

  “Taking a souvenir,” said the girl in her heavy Parisian accent. “Smile.”

  “Don’t show anyone, will you,” said Bill, then he lay back against the pillows and closed his eyes.

  “Oh, Bill.” Christina put her head in her hands. “You stupid, stupid man.”

  She turned off her laptop and remained sitting at her desk with her own eyes closed for quite some time. The screen might be blank but now the scene played inside her head instead. She wondered if she would ever be able to see anything else.

  Meanwhile, her mobile was vibrating intermittently—irritatingly—to tell her that she had messages. People were trying to get through. Not just Bill now but her agent, Marisa; her lawyer, Todd; her mother … eventually, she had to pick up.

  “Hello,” she said wearily.

  “Christina?” It was Bill. “Are you OK?”

  “What do you think, you fuck?” her voice cracked.

  How on earth was this going to look?

  Bill flew back to the States from London right away, missing the last day of the film junket he had flown to Europe for (he was, in any case, in no state to do TV interviews after a bout of very heavy drinking in anticipation of the shit hitting the fan). Christina arranged to meet her husband in New York, at an apartment belonging to Marisa’s sister, since the paparazzi were staking out all their own properties. She was snapped rushing through SFO wearing a scarf and a beanie hat despite the eighty-degree heat.

  God, she hated her husband for doing this to her. He better have a good excuse.

  “I guess the honeymoon period is well and truly over,” Christina sighed when she saw him. Her mood had not been helped by the fact that every newspaper she was offered in the first-class cabin of her United Airlines flight (where were your friends with private jets when you needed them?) carried pictures of Christina alongside a cheap headshot of the slut her husband had slept with. No matter that the headlines expressed their incredulity that Bill would cheat on a supermodel with a cheap French call girl by asking “Would you swap this for that?” The awful truth was he had swapped her for that. Christina was humiliated. Devastated. Crushed.