Cross Channel

by Julian Barnes

  Each year for her therefore ended on the moveable feast of the bal des vendangeurs. Mindful of M. Lambert’s earlier strictures, Florence had in the summer of 1891 made several mysterious trips into Bordeaux. Their purpose became plain when she celebrated the second vintage of Château Haut Railly in resplendent evening dress: black barathea jacket and trousers, with white silk waistcoat underneath, all cut with an elegant eccentricity by a bemused French tailor. Emily wore the same yellow dress as the first year, and when the trestle-table feast was over, and the fiddles and squeezebox started up, les dames anglaises rose and danced to unfamiliar tunes of furious friskiness. Mme Florence threw Mme Emily around in passable imitation of the wiry, mustachioed vendangeurs, who for their part asserted the democracy of the dance-floor by defending their territory with shoulder and hip. At the end of an hour the two women found, in mid-dance, that everyone else had faded to the edge of their awareness, and they were the proprietors of empty space. When the music stopped, the other dancers applauded, M. Lambert drily clapped his hands, the youngest vendangeuse brought two bunches of heliotropes, Emily made her speech, which was not substantially different, except for an improved accent, from the previous year, and les dames anglaises retired to bed. Florence hung up her evening suit, which would not be taken down until the following year. In the dark, she yawned heavily and summoned up a final picture of Emily, half-blinded without her spectacles, being tossed and whirled about the courtyard in her yellow dress. ‘Goodnight, ma petite sulfureuse,’ she said with a sleepy chuckle.

  The great crisis in the management of Château Haut Railly came in the summer of 1895. One morning Emily noticed the housekeeper’s brother unloading barrels at the door of the chai. She watched the haulier without at first realising there was something inapposite about the way he heaved them from his cart and thudded them down on to the courtyard. Of course, it was obvious – it should have been immediately obvious – that the barrels were full.

  When the haulier had departed she went to see the régisseur. ‘Monsieur Collet, I have always understood that we make wine here.’ The régisseur, a lanky, taciturn man, had fond respect for his employers, but knew that they preferred to approach any subject by an ironical or indirect route. He therefore smiled and waited for Mme Emily to arrive at the matter in hand.

  ‘Come with me.’ She led the way out into the courtyard and stood before the evidence. A dozen small barrels, neatly stacked, bearing no obvious stamp of identification. ‘Where are they from?’

  ‘The Rhône Valley. They should be, anyway.’ When Mme Emily failed to respond, he went on helpfully, ‘Of course, in the old days it was more difficult. My father had to bring Cahors down the Dordogne. Then they opened the railway from Sète to Bordeaux. That was a great advance.’

  ‘Monsieur Collet. Forgive me, my question is this: if we make wine here, why are we importing it?’

  ‘Ah, I see. Pour le vinage.’

  Emily had not come across the term before. ‘Vinage?’

  ‘To be added to our wine. To make it better.’

  ‘Is this … is it… legal?’

  M. Collet shrugged. ‘In Paris people make laws. In the Médoc people make wine.’

  ‘Monsieur Collet, let me get this clear. You, who are in charge of making our wine, you adulterate Château Haut Railly with filth from the Rhône Valley? You do this without permission? You do this every year?’

  The régisseur could see that more than factual explanation was being called for. It was always the younger Madame who caused the problems. She had, in his opinion, a capacity for hysteria. Whereas Mme Florence was much more calm. ‘Tradition is permission,’ he replied. From Mme Emily’s face he could see that the hallowed words of his father were not working their trick. ‘No, Madame, not every year. Last year was a very poor vintage, as you know, so it is necessary. Otherwise no one will buy the wine. If it was a little better, we might be able to improve it with some of our own wine, a few barrels of the ’93. That we call le coupage,’ he added apprehensively, unsure whether he was compounding or diminishing his supposed sin. ‘But last year was truly mediocre, so we need these helpful barrels … pour le vinage.’

  He was unprepared for Mme Emily’s next action. She ran to the store-house, returning with a mallet and chisel. A few moments later, a dozen holes had been made, and the lower part of Emily’s dress was stained with a pungent, spicy red liquor of considerably greater vivacity than the 1894 Château Haut Railly stored a few dozen metres away.

  M. Lambert, attracted by the mallet blows, ran from his office and attempted to calm Mme Emily by introducing an historical perspective to the situation. He told her about les vins d’aide, as they were called, and the preparation of wine for le goût anglais, as it was known in the Médoc, and how the wine that the English gentleman served at his dinner table was very rarely the same liquid that had left a particular estate a few months or years previously. He spoke of a Spanish brew called Benicarlo.

  Emily’s disbelief was like heat. ‘Monsieur Lambert, I do not understand you. In the past you have lectured me severely about the purity of the Médoc vineyards, about how French vines must not be adulterated with American rootstocks. Yet you blithely throw barrels of … of this into what those selfsame vines produce.’

  ‘Madame Emily, let me put it like this.’ His manner became avuncular, almost clerical. ‘What is the best wine of the Médoc?’

  ‘Château Latour.’

  ‘Of course. And do you know the verb hermitager?’

  ‘No.’ Her vocabulary was certainly being broadened today.

  ‘It means to put the wine of Hermitage, a wine of the Rhône as you perhaps know, into a red Bordeaux. To give it weight. To accentuate its virtues.’

  ‘They do this at Latour?’

  ‘Perhaps it does not happen at the château itself. On the Chartrons, in London … The négociant, the shipper, the bottler …’ M. Lambert’s hands sketched a conspiracy of necessary virtue. ‘In poor years it has to be done. It has always been done. Everyone knows.’

  ‘Do they do it there, next door, at Latour?’ Emily pointed south, into the sun. ‘Do the owners do it? Do they have barrels delivered like this, in broad daylight?’

  The homme d’affaires shrugged. ‘Perhaps not.’

  ‘Then we shall not do this here either. I forbid it. We forbid it.’

  On the terrace that evening, while her dress was still in the soak, Emily remained adamant. Florence at first tried to tease her into a good humour, expressing surprise that an enthusiast for transcendence should not wish her wines to enjoy this quality as well. But Emily was not to be humoured or flattered.

  ‘Florence, you cannot say that you approve of this process. If the label of our wine proclaims it to be of a certain vintage, and it is in fact a mixture of two vintages, you cannot say that you approve?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you must therefore approve even less when our bottles contain wine from hundreds of kilometres away, grown God knows where and by God knows whom?’

  ‘Yes. But …’

  ‘But?’

  ‘Even I, my dear Emily, have grasped that it is permitted to add sugar to our wine, and what is the name of that acid …?’

  ‘Citric acid, yes, and tartaric acid, and tannins. I am not sentimental enough to imagine that the process is not in some ways one of manufacturing. It is an industrial as well as an agricultural process nowadays. What I cannot abide, Florence, is fraud. Fraud on those who buy our wine, who drink it.’

  ‘Surely people buy a wine because they know what taste it has. Or should have.’ Emily did not reply, and Florence pursued her thought. ‘An Englishman buys Château Latour with a certain expectation, does he not? So those who provide the taste he requires are merely giving him what he wants.’

  ‘Florence, I did not expect to hear you taking the devil’s position. I am perfectly serious about this matter. It seems to me of the utmost, the final importance.’

  ‘So I can see.’ />
  ‘Florence, we do not talk about such things, and I am happy that it should remain that way, but when we moved here, when we gave up the turnip-farmers, we did so, as I understand it, because we could not live pretendingly, shut up in all that cold formality, waiting for those four weeks of the year in which we might escape. We could not bear the fraud in our lives.’ Emily by now had a lively blush and a stern stillness to her posture. Florence had seen her like this before, when she had the bump of perseverance about a matter.

  ‘Yes, my dear.’

  ‘You like to say that this is our hermitage. Well, so it is, but only if it is we who make the rules.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then we must not live pretendingly, or with fraud, or believe, as Monsieur Collet expressed it to me this morning, that “tradition is permission”. We must not live like that. We must believe in truth. We must not live pretendingly.’

  ‘You are perfectly right, my dear, and I love you for it.’

  For once, M. Lambert and M. Collet were quite unable to prevail upon either of the Mesdames. Normally they knew to intervene with Mme Florence once Mme Emily was safely out of the way. They would address her with pathos or pride, invoke local or national considerations, and appeal to what they regarded as her essential complacency. But this time Mme Florence proved as obdurate as Mme Emily. Arguments from necessity and from tradition, references to the implied authority of the great vineyards, were placed before her in vain. There was to be no vinage and no coupage. There were to be no secretive deliveries of anonymous barrels, and, for that matter, no consequent obfuscations in M. Lambert’s account books. Florence feared another threat of resignation, though far less than she feared the possibility of Emily’s censure. But the two men, after several days of sulking and some growled conversations which seemed to contain more patois than usual, agreed that what had been ordered would be done.

  The decade continued. The 1890s were kindlier years in the Médoc than the 1880s, and the last years of the century brought no sense of ending. Florence would reflect that their glass as yet contained no lees. They had settled comfortably into middle age, perhaps she more comfortably than Emily; and they had no regrets for England. Their stewardship of Château Haut Railly grew lighter. The replanting of the vineyard with ungrafted stock was complete; the oxen danced their minuets, the vendangeurs went through their ruffianly rituals. The old curé retired, but his successor respected the ancestral duties: tea in November, benediction of the vines in April. Florence took to tapestry work, Emily to pickling; they frequented the Bordeaux steamer more rarely. Les dames anglaises had ceased to be a novelty, or even an eccentricity; they had become a fixture.

  Emily would sometimes reflect on how little impact they had truly made upon the estate; how little transcendence had occurred. They had brought money, to be sure, but this had merely allowed the vineyard to reassert itself, the better to take its chance against parasitical enemies and cryptogamic maladies. And at times like this, when she felt that personal will was less significant than philosophers claimed, she liked to think of human life as following its own viticultural cycle. Childhood was full of frosts and pruning, of wrist-cracking labour at the plough: it was hard to imagine that the weather would ever change. But it did, and June brought the flowering. Flowers led to fruit, and with August came the véraison, that miraculous colour-turn, the sign and promise of maturity. She and Florence had now reached the August of their lives. She shuddered to admit how much their maturity had depended upon the fortunes of the weather! She had known many who never recovered from the savagery of early frosts; others fell to mildew, rot, disease; others again to hail, rain, drought. They - she and Florence - had been lucky with their weather. That was all there was to say. And there the analogy ended, she thought. They may be now in their maturity, but there was no wine to be pressed from their lives. Emily believed in transcendence, but not in the soul. This was their patch of land, their patch of life. Then, at some point, the oxen came, dancing an unfamiliar dance, with the blade behind them cutting more deeply into the soil.

  On the last evening of the century, as midnight approached, Florence and Emily sat alone on the terrace at Château Haut Railly. Even the familiar silhouette of the two elderly shires down in the lower meadows was missing. The horses had grown fat and nervous lately, and had been stabled close this night in case the fireworks alarmed them. Les dames anglaises had naturally been invited to attend the festivities in Pauillac, but had declined. There were times when the world shifted and you needed public comfort. But there were also great instants better savoured in private. Not for them tonight the official speeches, the municipal ball, the first purple-tongued riot of the new century.

  Wrapped in rugs, they gazed down towards the Gironde, which was occasionally illumined by a premature rocket. A shuddery, but more reliable light came from the storm lantern set on the table between them. Emily could see that the balusters they had renewed a decade earlier had now quite blended in with the old ones: she could not now recognise, or remember, which was which.

  Florence refilled their glasses with the 1898 vintage. It had been a small crop, reduced by lack of rain after a dry summer. The 1899, currently brooding in the chai, was known already to be magnificent, a grand finale to the century. But the 1898 had its virtues: a pretty robe, ample fruit, a proper length. Whether all these virtues were entirely its own was another matter. Florence, though essentially complacent, could not help being intrigued by the idea that their wine appeared to acquire a certain additional solidity between its journey in cask to Bordeaux and its return thence in bottle. Once, with a cheerful recklessness, she had ventured this notion to Emily, who had sharply replied that all good wine put on weight in the bottle. Florence had acquiesced in this declaration, and sworn to herself that she would never go near the subject again.

  ‘You can be proud of this vintage,’ she said.

  ‘We can both be proud.’

  ‘Then I give you a toast. To Château Haut Railly.’

  ‘To Château Haut Railly.’

  They drank, and walked to the front of the terrace, adjusting their rugs. They placed their glasses on the balustrade. The English grandfather-clock struck twelve, and the first fireworks of the new century climbed into the sky. Florence and Emily played at trying to guess their firing-points. Château Latour, obviously, that ruby explosion close at hand. Château Haut Brion, the browny-gold susurrus in the distance. Château Lafite, the elegant pattern to the north. Between the scatterings of light and the unfearsome crackles, they proposed a series of toasts. They turned towards England and drank; towards Paris; towards Bordeaux. Then they faced one another on the silent terrace with the storm lantern tickling their skirts and toasted the new century. A last, misguided rocket flew low across the water and exploded above their little port. Arm in arm, they walked towards the house, leaving their undrained glasses on the balustrade, and the lantern to burn itself out at some untenanted hour. Florence hummed a waltz, and they skittishly danced the last few yards to the French windows.

  In the hallway, under the burner at the foot of the stairs, Florence said, ‘Let me see your tongue.’ Emily rather delicately extruded a centimetre and a half. ‘Just as I thought,’ said Florence. ‘Stealing the grapes. Every year the same disobedience, ma petite sulfureuse.’ Emily dropped her head in mock contrition. Florence tut-tutted, and turned down the light.

  TUNNEL

  THE ELDERLY ENGLISHMAN was travelling to Paris on business. He settled himself methodically into his seat, adjusting the head-rest and leg-support; his back still ached from some light spring digging. He unfolded the table-flap, checked the ventilation nozzle and overhead light. He ignored the free magazine, audio-plugs and personal video facility with onscreen lunch menu and wine list. Not that he was against food and drink: he retained, in his late sixties, a hectic and at times guilty anticipation of the next meal. But he was allowing himself to become - or rather, to become to himself, rather than merely to others - a li
ttle old-fashioned. Perhaps it appeared an affectation to take home-made sandwiches and a half-bottle of Meursault in a cold-sleeve when lunch was provided free to business customers. But that was what he wanted, so that was what he did.

  As the train eased grandly out of St Pancras he reflected, as he did every time, on the surprising banality that within his lifetime Paris had become closer than Glasgow, Brussels than Edinburgh. He could leave his house in north London and barely three hours later be heading down the mild decline of the boulevard de Magenta without even a flap of his passport. All he needed was his European identity card, and that only in case he robbed a bank or fell under the Métro. He took out his wallet and checked the oblong of plastic: name, address, date-of-birth, social security listings, phone, fax and e-mail data, blood-group, medical history, credit rating and next-of-kin. All these items, except for the first two, were invisible, encoded in a small iridescent lozenge. He read his name – two words plus an initial, all emptied of association after so many years of familiarity – and studied his photograph. Gaunt, long-faced, wattles under the chin, high colour and a few broken veins from disregarding the medical profession’s advice on alcohol, plus the usual serial-killer’s eyes that photo-booths inflict. He didn’t think he was vain, but given his tendency to mildly disagree with most photographs of himself, admitted that he must be so.