Cross Channel (21 page)

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 deduced, 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.

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.