‘I shall never marry,’ said Florence suddenly. She made it sound a matter of fact but not regret.
‘In any case,’ her friend replied, continuing, or perhaps duplicating, the thought, ‘it is well known that a turnip-farmer is beyond any possible transcendence.’
The little steamer tacked from bank to bank, picking up and depositing merchants and peasants, livestock and priests. The Garonne embraced the Dordogne and became the Gironde. Emily’s skirt bulged with the wind until she pressed down on it a map marked with the châteaux of the Médoc. She settled a small pair of field-glasses over her spectacles and adopted a scholarly hunch familiar to her fellow-traveller. Alongside Beychevelle, Emily explained that the château had once belonged to an admiral, that every ship passing along the river had been at one time obliged to lower its sail, or baisser la voile, in homage, and that this phrase had been corrupted into the present name.
‘Quite fanciful,’ commented Florence cheerfully.
Emily indicated Margaux and Ducru-Beaucaillou, Léoville-las-Cases and Latour, appending Baedeker embellishments to each name. Beyond Latour, the boat ran close to the bank as it headed up towards Pauillac. Ribbed vineyards ran away from them like green corduroy. A broken-down pier came into sight, followed by a patch of corduroy stained half-black. Then, a little higher up, a flat façade made biscuity by the sun, with a brief terrace half-obscuring the ground-floor windows. After a nudge of focusing, Emily detected that several balusters were missing from the balcony of the terrace, and others badly askew. Florence took the glasses. The façade had large holes gouged into it, there were some broken upper window-panes, while the roof appeared to have been given over to experimental agriculture.
‘Not exactly our hermitage,’ she commented.
‘So we shall visit tomorrow?’
This teasing pastime had evolved during the last two years of their French excursions. Idling glances proposed a different life: in a timbered Normandy farmhouse, a trim Burgundy manoir, a backwater château of the Berry. Lately, a new gravity of intention had arisen, which neither woman could quite admit. So Florence would announce that their hermitage had again not been found, and soon afterwards they would visit.
Château Dauprat-Bages had not been listed in the great Classification of 1855. It was a modest cru bourgeois, 16 hectares planted with cabernet sauvignon, merlot and petit verdot. During the last decade phylloxera had blackened its green corduroy, and some hesitant replanting had begun under its enfeebled and impoverished owner. Three years previously he had died, leaving all to a young nephew in Paris, who snobbishly preferred Burgundy and sought to divest himself of Château Dauprat-Bages as quickly as possible. But no neighbouring estate could be persuaded to take on the blighted vineyards; the régisseur and the homme d’affaires had therefore struggled on with casual labour, producing a wine which even they admitted had sunk to the level of a cru artisan.
When Florence and Emily returned for their second visit, Monsieur Lambert, the homme d’affaires, a short, black-suited man with a felt cap and a spiky moustache, his manner both fussy and domineering, turned suddenly to Emily, whom he judged the younger, and therefore the more dangerous of the two, and demanded, ‘Êtes-vous Américaniste?’
Misunderstanding him, she replied, ‘Anglaise.’
‘Américaniste?’ he reiterated.
‘Non,’ she replied, and he grunted approval. She felt she had passed some test without having been told what the test might be.
Next morning, over a breakfast of oysters and hot sausages at the Hôtel d’Angleterre in Pauillac, Florence said musingly, ‘You cannot say that they have landscape here. It is more that they have contours.’
‘Then it will not seem entirely a change from Essex.’
Both observed the seduction of might and could into is and will. They had travelled in France together for five summers now. In hotels they shared the same bed; at meals they permitted themselves wine; after dinner Florence would smoke a single cigarette. Each year had been a heady escape, both a justification of their life among the turnip-farmers and a rebuke to it. Their excursions among the French had so far been light-hearted, flirtatious. Emily now felt as if something - not destiny, but the lesser organisation that directed their lives - was calling her bluff.
‘However, it is your money,’ she said, acknowledging that things had become very serious indeed.
‘It was my father’s money and I shall have no children.’
Florence, the larger and slightly older of the two, had an oblique way of announcing decisions. She was dark and sturdy, with a deceptive style of down-to-earth discouragement. In truth, she was both more capable and more benign than she appeared, despite a docile preference for only the broader aspects of any project. Emily could always be relied upon to take care of the particularities; Emily, slim, blonde, neatly fussy, peering through gold-wired spectacles at notebook, sketch-pad, timetable, newspaper, menu, Baedeker, map, ticket and legal fine print; Emily, fretful yet optimistic, who now said wonderingly, ‘But we know nothing of making wine.’
‘We are not applying for posts as vendangeuses,’ Florence replied, with a lazy hauteur that was not wholly self-mocking. ‘Father did not understand how the saw-mill operated, but he knew that gentlemen required desks. Besides, I am sure that you will study the matter. It cannot be more complicated than … cathedrals.’ She threw this out as a recent example, since in her view they had spent excessive time beneath the statue of Bertrand de Goth, Archbishop of Bordeaux and later Pope Clement V, while Emily expounded on 12th-century Romanesque arches in the nave and a choir with double stalls from some other - no doubt earlier, or later - century.
The Burgundian nephew accepted Florence’s offer, and she sold her house in Essex; Emily informed brother Lionel, the solicitor, that he would have to find himself another housekeeper (news she had longed to impart for some years). In the spring of 1890 the two women transplanted themselves irrevocably to France, taking with them no specific reminders of England except the grandfather-clock which had marked every hour of Florence’s childhood. As their train pulled away from the quai d’Austerlitz at the Gare d’Orléans, Emily yielded up a final anxiety.
‘You shall not be bored? I mean, with my company. This is not just an excursion.’
‘I have decided the château will bear your name,’ Florence replied. ‘I have always thought Dauprat-Bages quite lacking in romance.’ She re-pinned her hat, as if to ward off any protest. ‘In the matter of the turnip-farmers, I do not think their memory will fade so quickly. Such dancers! The clods scarcely noticed when they trod upon one!’
Mme Florence and Mme Emily re-engaged M. Lambert as homme d’affaires and M. Collet as régisseur on improved terms. M. Lambert then found them a housekeeper, three estate workers, a maid and a gardener. The shrubbery was dug out of the roof, the balusters mended, the pock-marked façade filled in, the pier rebuilt. Florence occupied herself with the house and presided over the newly-planted potager; Emily directed relations with the vineyard. The commune of Dauprat welcomed the women: they brought employment, and wished to restore a damaged vineyard to prosperity. No one objected when Château Dauprat-Bages became Château Haut Railly. Les Anglaises may have lacked religion, but they entertained the curé to tea each November, and solemnly attended his annual benediction of the vines in April. Such eccentricities as were observed could be lightly ascribed to the impoverished existence they must have previously endured on that distant island in whose cold, wet climate not even an Alsatian vine could flourish. It was noted, for instance, that they were great enthusiasts for domestic economy. A roast fowl might last them a week; soap and string were used until their final centimetre; linen was spared by the women’s sharing a bed.
In late September a band of genial ruffians descended for the vendange; they were awarded huge dinners, and allowed to drink as much of the previous year’s petit vin as they wished.
Florence and Emily were impressed that drunkenness did not ensue. They
were also surprised to see men and women working harmoniously alongside one another in the vineyard. M. Lambert explained that the women were paid less on the grounds that they talked more. With a few sly shakes of the head, he then described a particular local tradition. It was strictly forbidden for any of the vendangeurs to eat the grapes they were picking, and at the end of each morning the women were obliged to put out their tongues for inspection. If the proof was purple, then the overseer would be entitled to claim a kiss in punishment. Florence and Emily kept to themselves the reflection that this sounded a little primitive, while the homme d’affaires concluded, with a wink bordering on impertinence, ‘Of course, sometimes they eat deliberately.’
When the first vintage was safely gathered in, the bal des vendangeurs ensued. Trestle tables were laid out in the courtyard, and on this occasion the effects of alcohol were more readily apparent. Two fiddlers and a squeezebox goaded the heavy-kneed vintagers into some dancing which, even so, displayed a grace and energy way beyond those of the most teetotal turnip-farmer. There being insufficient women present, Florence enquired of M. Lambert as to the propriety of his partnering the château’s new owner. The homme d’affaires pronounced the suggestion an honour, but felt, if he was being invited to offer guidance to Madame, that others in the same situation would choose to watch from the head of the table. Florence therefore tapped her foot in irritated resignation as slight and wiry Frenchmen slung around women who for the most part were taller, plumper and older. After an hour or so, M. Lambert clapped his hands, and the youngest vendangeuse shyly brought Florence and Emily each a bunch of heliotropes. Emily delivered a short speech of thanks and congratulations, whereupon the two women retired to bed, listening through their open window to the whirl and stamp from the courtyard, to the scratch of the fiddles and the indefatigable jauntiness of the squeezebox.
Emily became, to Florence’s indulgent dismay, even more learned in viticulture than in church architecture. The matter was the more confusing since Emily rarely knew the correct English word for the terms she was employing. Sitting in a cane chair on the terrace with the sun glistening the loose hair at the nape of her neck, she would lecture Florence on the parasitical enemies and cryptogamic maladies of the vine. Altise, Florence heard, and rhynchite; cochinelle, grisette, érinose; there were monstrous beasts called l’ephippigère de Béziers and le vespère de Xatart; then there was le mildiou and le black-rot (those at least she understood), l’anthracnose and le rot blanc. Emily saw these disasters in coloured illustration as she spoke: shredded leaves, noxious spottings and wounded branches filled her spectacles. Florence tried to show the proper concern.
‘What is a cryptogamic malady?’ she asked dutifully.
‘Cryptogamia, according to Linnaeus, comprise those plants which have no stamens or pistils, and therefore no flowers, such as ferns, algae, funghi. Mosses and lichens too. From the Greek, meaning concealed wedlock.’
‘Cryptogamia,’ Florence repeated like a pupil.
‘It is Linnaeus’s last class of plants,’ Emily added. She was now at the extremity of her knowledge, but pleased that Florence seemed for once to be following her there.
‘Last, but I am sure not least.’
‘I do not know if the categories imply moral judgment.’
‘Oh, I am sure not,’ Florence asserted firmly, though she was no botanist. ‘But how sad that some of our enemies are cryptogamic,’ she added.
Emily’s discussion of these selfsame maladies with M. Lambert was more complete but less satisfactory. It seemed evident to her that the researches of L’École Nationale d’Agriculture at Montpellier were convincing, and that the ravages of phylloxera should be repaired with vines grafted upon American rootstocks. Professor Millardet of Bordeaux agreed, even if there had been lively differences of opinion in the viticultural press.
To M. Lambert the matter was not at all so evident; indeed, quite the contrary. He reminded Mme Emily, who was a recent arrival in the Médoc, that the European vine, for all its many variations, consisted of but a single species, vinis vitifera, whereas the American vine comprised nearly two dozen different species. The European vine had existed in a state of almost perfect health for more than two millennia, and the maladies now afflicting it were entirely due, as had been proved beyond the least doubt, to the introduction of the American vines into France. Thus, he continued - and at this juncture Emily began to suspect that they had read the same volume - thus, there had been the appearance of oïdium in 1845, of phylloxera in 1867, of mildew in 1879, and of black-rot in 1884. Whatever professors in universities might believe, his colleagues in the vineyards had the opinion that you did not, when confronted by a disease, cure it by importing its cause. To put matters as plainly as possible, if you had a child with pneumonia, you did not seek to cure it by putting into its bed another child already suffering from influenza.
When Emily pressed the argument for grafting, M. Lambert’s face tightened, and he banged his felt cap against his thigh. ‘Vous avez dit que vous n’étiez pas Américaniste,’ he said plainly, as if forcing an end to the discussion.
Only now, with her studies behind her, did Emily appreciate the question she had been asked on their second tour of inspection. The world here divided into sulfureurs and Américanistes: those for whom salvation from phylloxera lay in rescuing and restoring pure French vines by chemical treatment, and those who wished to turn the vineyards into some new California. Her earlier reply to M. Lambert had unwittingly confirmed to him that she was a sulfureur, or rather, as he now put it, with what might have been either linguistic correctness or light sarcasm, a sulfureuse. If she was now telling him that she had changed her mind and was an Américaniste after all, then he and M. Collet, grateful though they were to Mme Florence and Mme Emily, would feel, to say the least, deceived.
‘Who are we to say?’ was Florence’s response when Emily explained the dilemma.
‘Well, we - you - are the owner. And I have been reading the very latest viticultural press.’
‘My father never knew how the saw-mill worked.’
‘Even so, the legs of his desks did not, I trust, fall off.’
‘Dear Emily,’ said Florence, ‘you do worry so.’ She smiled, then gave an indulgent chuckle. ‘And I shall think of you from now on as my sulfureuse. Yellow has always suited you.’ She chuckled again. The matter, Emily realised, had been both avoided and concluded by Florence: such was often her way.
What Florence called ‘worrying’ was to Emily a proper concern for husbandry. She proposed extending the estate by planting the lower meadows close to the river; but was told they were too saturated. She replied that they should import bog-draining fen-men from East Anglia - indeed, she knew just which trenchers to appoint; but was told that even were the slopes to be drained, the subsoil was inhospitable to vines.
Next she proposed the use of English horses to work the vineyard in place of oxen. M. Lambert took her into the estate and they waited at the end of a row of petit verdot as a pair of harnessed oxen, their heads cowled like nuns against the flies, progressed towards them. ‘Look,’ he said, his eyes shining, ‘look how they pick up and put down their feet. Is it not as graceful as any minuet that has been danced in the ballrooms of Europe?’ Emily responded with praise of the strength, docility and intelligence of English horses; and in this matter she had the bump of perseverance. A few months later a pair of sturdy, feather-footed shires arrived at Haut Railly. They were stabled, rested and praised. What went wrong thereafter she never quite discovered: were the horses too clumsy-footed, or the workers too little skilled at directing them? Whichever the case, the shires were soon living out a peaceful early retirement on the unplanted lower meadows of the estate, the frequent aim of pointed fingers from the Pauillac steamer.
This ferry, when not over-burdened, could sometimes be persuaded to put in at the château’s bright new stone pier. Such piers, Emily discovered, were locally called ports. They were so named, she naturally deduce
d, because their intended function was not as a tying-up place for pleasure-craft, but as an embarkation point for goods: specifically and obviously, the estate’s wine must in the past have been sent to Bordeaux for bottling by the direct water-route rather than being hauled overland. She therefore instructed M. Lambert to move the next vintage by this method, and he seemingly accepted the order. But a week later Florence informed her that the housekeeper had offered her resignation amid spectacular tears, because if Madame did not wish to employ her brother the haulier then she herself was unable to work for Madame, since her brother was a widower with many children, and reliant for their bread upon the haulage contract from the château. Florence had of course replied that they had known none of this, and Mme Merle was not to fret.
‘Can the lazy fellow not turn to river haulage as well?’ Emily asked rather snappishly.
‘My dear, we did not come here to disturb their lives. We came for the tranquillity of our own.’
Florence had adapted to the Médoc with a swift content that was close to indolence. For her the year now ran not from January to December, but from one harvest to the next. In November they cleared the vineyard and manured; in December they lightly ploughed as protection against winter frosts; on January 22nd, St Vincent’s Day, they started to prune; in February and March they ploughed to open up the vines; and in April they planted. June saw the flowering; July the spraying and trimming; August contained the véraison, that annually miraculous passage of the grapes from green to purple; September and October brought the vendange. As Florence watched these events from the terrace, she was aware of constant disquiet over rain and hail, frost and drought; but country folk were universally possessed by weather, and she decided as proprietor to exempt herself from such anxieties. She preferred to concentrate on what she loved: the vines draping their octopus arms over the supporting wires; the slow creak and tinkle as the sandy oxen made their stately way through the vineyard; the winter smell of a fire constructed from prunings. On late-autumn mornings when the sun rose low, she would sit in her cane chair with a bowl of chocolate, and from her flattened angle of vision all the rusting colours intensified: flame, ochre, and pale burgundy. This is our hermitage, she thought.
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