House of Peine (8 page)

It was a magnificent July day in the Marne Valley — the sort that gave summer a good name — but far from enjoying it, Clementine was hiding in the darkness of the winery cave, hyperventilating quietly at her
pupitres
as she riddled with trembling hands.

Forty-four years she had lived in the Peine château. In all that time barely one speck of dust had changed, yet now she hardly recognised the place. It may have been a broken-down old hovel full of draughty holes and fur-balls but it turned out that was the way she liked it.

Now there were two sisters injecting their presence into her home like arsenic; slowly, in small amounts so no single dose was lethal but after two months, Clementine was choking. Two months? She clutched at the riddling rack to steady herself. It seemed inconceivable.

Mathilde had arrived with such a small suitcase Clementine had been certain her visit would be short, if sour. Yet here she still was, invisibly tidying and straightening the house behind Clementine’s back; arranging the kitchen
crockery by colour; sweeping the familiar grime from the stairs; lining up her empty bottles in a uniform fashion outside the kitchen door instead of throwing them out the window the way Olivier had. Unconsciously, Clementine had shifted her routine to avoid her sister. She skipped the bathroom when she knew Mathilde would be using it, stayed in her bedroom when her unwanted guest was in the kitchen, returned from the winery only when she could see from the courtyard that the upstairs lights were switched on.

When their paths did cross, Clementine found herself so twisted with pent-up rage that her recriminations stayed lodged in her throat like pebbles. Mathilde had wafted past her one evening wearing a peach-coloured peignoir, everything about her impeccable, clean, glowing, and all Clementine could do was stand there open-mouthed and quivering. She could suddenly feel the dirt beneath her fingernails, the cobwebs in her hair, the unplucked sprawl of her own eyebrows. But she could not speak. All she wanted to know was when Mathilde was going back to her life in America. But the more time passed, the more she was afraid of the answer and the less she found herself able to ask the question.

Then Sophie had turned up.

Clementine’s hands froze on the two bottles she was turning as she fought to catch her breath.

The littlest Peine had been there for weeks herself now, flitting around like a frightened moth, picking things up, putting them down, fluttering in and out of sight. It was … well, Clementine didn’t know what it was. She was a prisoner of her own ineptitude. Her torment sat heavily on her chest like an old cat, drooling and ugly. She could not move it. How could she bring herself to talk to that little
mademoiselle
when there was already another bigger madame with whom she had not dealt?

One day she had gone out to the washing line to hang up her week’s worth of large threadbare underpants only to find Sophie’s tiny, tatty thongs already hanging there next to Mathilde’s fancy silks and satins. This had seemed to her the last straw and she had screamed to the heavens, tears of pain and frustration coursing down her cheeks, and kicked at the ground until she felt her ankle would break. Cochon was the only one who witnessed this. Actually, it was the high point of his day.

There were more signs of someone else with no plans to move on: the leather jacket always hung on the rusty nail inside the back door; the same chipped green cup used day after day. The odd little something from Bernadette’s pâtisserie even turned up here and there. It was infuriating, of course it was, this invasion of her privacy. But less infuriating perhaps than the unwelcome military neatness Mathilde was imparting. A symmetrically intimidating stack of Italian
Vogue
magazines on a re-polished hall table was one thing, a jam jar of wildflowers on the kitchen table another.

In truth, Clementine had to admit that the littlest Peine did not exude anywhere near the same poison as the middle one but this did not mean she could or would speak to her. She wanted nothing to do with either of these two interlopers!

A sob escaped her and those hands, usually so steady, lost their rhythm. A bottle fell to the floor, hitting her foot painfully and rolling, unbroken, away from her. There was only one reason why her sisters were still there and, jam jars of wild flowers or not, she was a fool to keep ignoring it. They weren’t there for the champagne, of that she was sure. Mathilde claimed it gave her a headache and Sophie had probably never even tasted it.

Money. In the end, it was going to be about money.

Clementine might have been tending the vines these past
few years but Olivier had not been nurturing the family finances. She didn’t need to decode the scribbled messages and random calculations in his wine-stained ledger to see just how close to ruin they were. Unopened bank statements littered the floor of his office, unpaid bills decorated the desk, countless correspondences suggested that many customers who had faithfully ordered Peine champagne for years had more recently stopped bothering. There were letters of complaint about gross delays and mix-ups over addresses, and clear evidence that order after order had simply not been delivered and thus not paid for.

In other words, there was no money.

Enough payments limped in from sales of the existing stock to keep Clementine from starvation but if her sisters wanted to be bought out, there was no way on earth she could manage it. Not without caving into Old Man Joliet. Selling off chunks of her carefully tilled Peine soil to that old
mec
would be the only way she would ever come up with the money required.

Images of her Peine ancestors crowded Clementine’s jumbled mind. They had battled the likes of Henri Joliet for centuries — and won — and would roll in their graves and most likely seep out from the Saint-Vincent-sur-Marne churchyard and haunt her into her own should she be reduced to selling off any of her precious plots. And anyway, how would she ever choose which grapes to sell and which to keep? It was an impossible task, like choosing which child to hand over to enemy soldiers.

Another bottle crashed to the ground through Clementine’s shaking fingers, this one shattering, its lively
mousse
— the teenage bubbles — confidently forging tiny pathways in the cave’s uneven floor.

Flawless Mathilde would probably ruin them just for the
fun of it but Sophie looked like someone truly in need of money. She had a few euros to her name obviously, which were funding her trips to the pâtisserie, but her clothes looked about to disintegrate and there was barely enough meat on her bones to keep out the chill that clung to the walls of the house even though summer had arrived in the outside world. Clementine’s sobs gained momentum as she watched the spilt champagne travel further away from her. All at once she was desperate to escape the cool air of the winery and abandoned her riddling, scuttling up the spiral stairs to seek comfort in the warm open arms of her vines.

Outside in the courtyard she all but fell on top of Patric Didier, the cooper’s son, who was chatting animatedly to Sophie. The Didiers had been producing barrels for longer than the Peines had been producing champagne — it was a sign of the House’s once great reputation that they kept returning — but in her angst on this occasion Clementine had forgotten they were due.

“My father can’t be here today,” Patric told her after she burbled a muffled greeting, hiding her face with a series of eccentric hand gestures so that no one could see her tears. “He’s asked me to mend your barrels and your delightful little sister here says she’s going to help me.”

Clementine felt fury chase her anxiety from the tips of her toes to the top of her head where it escaped into the air with a sharp crack through the crinkles in her hair. That little minx! Only here five minutes and throwing herself at poor Patric. She knew from the unpaid bills on Olivier’s desk that the Didiers were owed for the last three years of Peine cooperage so if Sophie put one finger wrong …

Sophie heard the crack, or at least picked up on her anger. “Unless there’s something you would like me to do for you, Clementine,” she offered, her violet eyes wide and innocent.

Half-strangling an anguished cry, Clementine pushed rudely past the young pair and scurried over to her bike.

“She’s a regular charm-school graduate that one,” remarked Patric. “What a fright you must have got to discover she was your long-lost sister.”

“Oh, she’s not so bad,” Sophie said charitably as she watched Clementine pedal away. The truth was, she did not think that she had discovered Clementine at all. In fact, she still knew very little about either of her sisters despite finding herself living in the same house as them. They acted like she was invisible so she acted that way too, hiding herself in a gloomy little bedroom with a sagging but nonetheless cosy bed, creeping around close to the walls of the ramshackle house like a beaten puppy, slinking in the shadows of the winery, sniffing the vats, running her thin little fingers along the rows and rows of bottles in the cave.

She loved exploring the old house and was entranced by its nooks and crannies, its rooms full of forgotten furniture, its bookshelves heaving with old volumes and aged magazines. She loved the different creaks on the staircase, the rattles in the walls, the echo of leaking water hitting bare boards somewhere up in the attic. To her, these sounds were not reminders that the house had seen better times. She simply rejoiced in hearing the same thing day after day, in seeing the same whorls of dust collected in the same corners, the same dead fly in the same abandoned spider’s web. This was how a home spoke to its inhabitants, she assumed, how it murmured light-heartedly of its aches and pains. It just wanted its occupants to know how it felt, to keep them in touch. She took to patting the peeling walls as she climbed the stairs as if to say, “All right, I hear you.” She wanted the house to keep her.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the room she loved most was her father’s. The smell of the tobacco he had smoked in there
seeped out of the walls. She could not breathe in deeply enough when she first slipped inside the door to hunt for any sign of the man he might have been. There was none, or at least very little. He smoked roll-your-owns, drank pastis, was not allergic to dust, and didn’t feel the cold. All this she picked up from the evidence left beneath his bed. There were papers, ash, bottles, and dust-balls the size of tumbleweeds, but no slippers. It wasn’t an awful lot to know about a person, she had thought that day, as she straightened up and looked around the room.

She’d thought a lot about her father over the years, of course she had: everyone who grows up without one does (whether they admit to it or not). She’d gathered from her mother that he was not exactly a knight in shining armour but on the rare occasions when Josephine had spoken of him, and never by name, she had seemed to feel more pity than anything else. All men were bastards, apparently, but Sophie’s father no more nor less than any other.

“You certainly couldn’t say he ruined my life,” Josephine had said more than once. “It was ruined already.”

Anyway, Sophie had been lurking around the shadowy corners of her new home (what a luxury, that thought) and surrounding vines for quite some time and was hungry for conversation when she spied Patric Didier driving up to the door. He was easy on the eye, the cooper’s son, a little younger than her perhaps, tall, fair, slim, with sparkling blue eyes and a slightly wicked grin. She felt it the moment she looked at him, that spark of possibility, that warmth that came with knowing his arms could soon be wrapped around her, his naked flesh against hers. Another home, perhaps, for a while.

Mathilde swatted the faded pink drapes at her window, watching while Sophie transformed into a soft-eyed Bambi for the lanky lout in the courtyard. Something about her younger sister pulled at her insides, adding to the anger that swirled there already. She reached for a Xanax, tossing it down with a mouthful of pastis, trying to drown out that feeling, whatever it was.

Down below she watched scathingly as Clementine emerged from the winery like an old crab, recoiling at the sight of Sophie and the boy, waving her pincers around madly in the air then heaving herself onto her bike. That silly fat creature with her ugly hair and frumpy clothes, thought Mathilde, her discomfort easing. Clementine was just so easy to loathe!

She stepped away from the window and slumped into the rickety wooden chair, the only piece of furniture in the room other than the bed and termite-ridden armoire. She kicked off her high heels, stared up at the water-logged ceiling and waited for the Xanax to start working its magic. Numbness. That was what she craved. What was taking it so long?

Her eyes wandered down the once pretty rosebud wallpaper to her suitcase sitting on the floor and next to it to her cell phone, its battery flat, its charger still in her case. She'd been keeping in vague contact with her office using her Blackberry but felt the importance of work drifting away from her. She'd thought it would be a struggle, letting work go, but it hadn't been, not at all. They could cope without her: that was what she had decided. And it was about time, too. She had mollycoddled the over-paid namby-pambies for far too long.

Home, though, that was a different matter. She had thought letting go of that would be a blessed relief and to some extent she had been right. Just twice she had called, both times when she knew no one would be there, and had left
business-like
messages saying there was much to be done at the House of Peine and she couldn't be spared in the circumstances, didn't know when she could be. She'd felt a surge of power after each of those phone calls but in its wake had been the beginnings of that nagging itch she couldn't quite understand. Wasn't this exactly what she had been dreaming of these past years? Wasn't this what she had been so desperate for?

Mathilde closed her eyes with an irritated sigh. She had imagined her escape so many times but until that call from Paillard it had seemed impossible. Thanks to him, though, or thanks to Olivier's stupidity at the video store, she had actually been able to do what she had longed for all this time. She had found the perfect excuse. Remarkably, when it came down to it, she had been able to shrug off her old life as easily as an Armani coat.

Her eyes flickered spasmodically beneath her closed lids. She had done it, she had fled, she had succeeded. Yes, the tiny voice that belonged to the nagging itch was saying, you got what you wanted. So why, it whispered with a determination she could not fail to hear, do you still feel the same?

“Fuck you,” Mathilde said out loud, standing up and slipping back into her shoes, deciding to take her aggravation elsewhere. “Fuck all of you.”

A little while later, out among the vines, Cochon leaped nervously to his feet and started dancing on the spot like a tiny Lippizaner as the familiar rattle of the family Deux Chevaux drew nearer. Clementine stopped what she was doing, her eyes growing smaller and darker as the car stopped.

Mathilde climbed out, stepping daintily through the pinot meunier to reach her. The miniature horse did not wait around to see if she had her pointy stilettos on, he simply turned and headed for the hills. “Cochon!” Clementine called after him but she couldn't really blame him. Had she been able to move that quickly in the opposite direction to Mathilde she would have. “Don't worry,” she whispered, consoling the cane she was working on (Cecile, number eight). “But don't listen either.” She had yet to share a civil word with her sister and doubted she was about to start now.

“That chandelier that used to hang in the living room,” Mathilde demanded without preamble. “What happened to it? I want to …” Her jaw dropped open as her eyes moved down her sister's body. “Clementine, what the hell are you wearing? Didn't we once have a chaise covered in that pattern? We did. Yes, we did. My God, you look like a sofa!”

Clementine felt tears form an instant rabble behind her eyes. She had made the pinafore she was wearing with material she'd found in the attic. Maybe the old chaise had been covered in it. Maybe that's why she liked it. But she didn't want to look like a sofa! Nobody before had ever noticed or cared how she looked, why did Mathilde take such pleasure in bringing these things up?

“Can't you see I'm busy,” she gulped, clipping at some heavy leaf growth that was hindering Cecile the eighth's berry
formation. “Just go away and …” she scrabbled for a clever aside, a cutting jibe, the sort of tongue lashing she could normally dish out so easily to total strangers, “… file your nails or whatever it is you do.” Mathilde's very presence, as usual, sucked her dry of any semblance of wit.

“Yes, that's right, Clementine, I got to be head of my own PR company just by filing my nails. That's how it works in the real world. Just ask my clients. Calvin Klein, heard of him? Oh, why am I bothering? Look, just tell me where the chandelier is and —” Something distracted her and she looked over Clementine's head to the hillside beyond, shading her eyes and peering dramatically in that direction.

“Is that …? Oh my God. Benoît? He still lives next door? Yes, I suppose he does. Why, he's hardly changed a bit. Just look at him — it's as though time has stood still!”

This was simply too much for poor Clementine. It had been such a worrisome day and she was already at the end of her tether. The tears she had been resisting since the sofa taunt burst their barriers and began to flow down her cheeks.

“Well, that's not very neighbourly of him,” Mathilde continued, quite unaware of her sister's distress, “not even coming to visit in all this time. How rude. And us so tragically bereaved. What's going on, Clementine, have you had a falling out?”

Clementine could not speak but Mathilde, who was still not looking at her, did not notice.

“Well, there's only one way to get to the bottom of this.” Once again those narrow hips just sashayed right past Clementine's round ones, taking Mathilde's long lean legs in the direction of Benoît Geoffroy.

This time, Clementine did not stay to watch. She would rather take her secateurs and slit her wrists. Instead, she
apologised
brusquely to Cecile, jumped on her bicycle and, with one
hand stuffed in her mouth to stifle the wail that was trying to escape, she pedalled home as fast as she could, her sofa dress billowing in the wind, her face unrecognisable as she battled tears that felt they would flow forever.

It was happening again. The worst day of her miserable life was being repeated with the exact same cast of characters. Of all the possibilities she had imagined in the past years, she had not even considered one as unbearable as this. And she had spent many long, lonely nights considering.

It was Sophie who found her several hours later lying in the cave behind the oak barrels of Olivier's 1999 reserve pinot noir which was used in his champagne blend and was a particularly good drop. She was sobbing still, teetering on the brink of a hysteria that comes only when a well-preserved stew of suffering is stirred up with a pinch of fresh pain.

When her eldest sister missed lunch Sophie thought it odd. When supper time came and went and still there was no shuffling of old scuffed boots, no clinking of the cutlery drawer, she became concerned and went looking for her. Once she had found the discarded bicycle lying by the vegetable patch, clippers and a half-eaten pastry spilled from its basket, it didn't take long. She heard the sobs from the open hatch in the winery floor, where Cochon lay slumped and sad, then followed the wretched noise until she found Clementine in a crumpled floral heap in a cramped dark space behind the '99.

In her short but colourful life Sophie had been witness to many a heart in the process of breaking. She could recognise the signs from a hundred paces. And she could tell that this was not the sound of a fresh break. Far from it. Whatever horror lay at the bottom of Clementine's pit of despair had been there for quite some time she was sure.

Far from launching a dramatic rescue, Sophie simply crawled in beside her sister, just a hair's breadth from touching
her. Sitting squashed up against the cellar wall, she pulled her knees to her chest and hugged them. She said nothing, just watched that desolate body heave with misery, waiting for the right moment, if it came, to do anything more. She wasn't sure at first if Clementine even knew she was there but eventually the heaving receded to more of a hiccup and the hoarse weeping to a staccato moaning, the sound of which echoed eerily around the chalk walls of the cave.

This took maybe half an hour, but Sophie was a patient soul. She filled in the time observing the way the colours in the flora on Clementine's dress changed with the rise and fall of her sobs, the pink turning to mauve, the lavender to indigo, the purple to black as it caught and lost the dim light at different angles. They were hydrangeas, the flowers, Sophie thought. Full and lush and beautiful like the ones she had so often seen at the market on Boulevard Edgar Quinet in the sixth
arrondissement
. She imagined choosing a scarf from her friend Enrique's stall, a green one perhaps, to pick up on the little bits of foliage scattered over Clementine's crumpled form. Or a lilac one to bring out the flowers' prettiest colour. She would wrap it up in tissue paper the colour of clotted cream, tie a soft pink ribbon around it and thread a bouquet of dried lavender through the bow. She would give it to Clementine.

At this she realised the moaning had drifted into a lull of sorts, the hydrangeas were not moving as far or as fast. She wriggled ever so slightly closer, sat there for a few silent moments, then reached her small hand over to Clementine's rounded shoulder and gently, gently, gently, lay it there, as soft as a feather. Clementine's body resumed its shuddering under Sophie's caress but she did not shake her sister off, nor shout at her to leave. Whatever unhappiness lurked deep inside her was so desperate to escape Sophie could all but feel it frantically clawing under those hydrangeas. She just kept soothing, her
strokes getting longer, her palm pressing gently but firmly on that unhappy garden, until she managed to draw out each of her sister's anguished breaths for a moment longer than the last.

Soon, Clementine was calm, the cave almost noiseless, so black, so still, so dense, it felt almost to Sophie — who had spent many cold winter afternoons huddled in the chapels of Saint Sulpice — like a confessional.

“I had a baby,” Clementine whispered into the pool of darkness still occupied by that thought. “Amélie.” She murmured the name so softly it was like rain falling in the sunlight, you could only be certain it was there if you caught it at the right angle. Even then, despite it being only a fraction louder than silence, it was the loudest she had ever said it. Amélie. The word bounced around the great empty cavern of her heart, chasing away any hope for the usual operatic “La-aa-a!” to drown it out.

Then came the memory of delivering that perfect squealing little body all those years ago. She had blocked it out for so long, she'd started to believe it had all been a dream, a misty half-remembrance of somebody else's tragedy, but in uttering that one little pink fleshy word, she brought that baby, her baby, back into her life. In that clear, honest moment Clementine felt the loss like a wound, recognised the sore that festered inside her, poisoning everything, saw her womb empty, weeping, useless. She started to howl again.

Sophie moved closer so she was pressed firmly against Clementine's back. She smoothed her sister's crinkled red hair, tucking it behind her ear, and kept her silence. A baby? Clementine? She couldn't begin to imagine what had
happened
to her, where the baby was now, how old she was, who the father was. They were questions that Clementine would not want asked, Sophie was pretty sure of that. And who else
knew about it? Clearly not Mathilde, with her constant arsenal of nasty virgin jokes. What a dreadful, harmful, hurtful secret for her eldest sister to keep and to have kept. And what a price she had paid. This was the misery that reeked from every pore, which pulled her mouth down at the edges and kept her eyes swivelling from side to side, afraid to rest on anything pleasant or peaceful other than her grapes, her children, thought Sophie, and her gentle heart swelled. It was such a good heart. And perhaps Clementine, in her despair, felt it beating with extra vigour on her behalf because her howling started to subside into a less tortured form of grief and eventually evaporated into a mere whimper. Soon after, her breath started coming deep and even. She was asleep.

Sophie stayed for a while before slowly extricating herself. There was nothing more she could do, she knew that, and she also knew that Clementine would probably not want her there when she woke up.

Out in the courtyard the sky was dark, the odd misshapen cloud moving half-heartedly in front of the stars, the moon not yet high in the sky. Sophie took her sister's despair and tucked it away deep inside where she treasured such confidences. Then she hugged herself, a smile forming. Unless she was mistaken, Patric would still be waiting for her at the café. With a skip in her step, she hurried to meet him.