Tug of War (20 page)

Joe replied calmly. ‘Have you never spoken of this to your uncle?’

Georges shook his head. ‘To no one.’

‘What a burden to carry by yourself all these years, my poor old chap!’ said Joe. ‘But, you say it yourself, you were only seven years old at the time of this terrible event
– if indeed it ever occurred – and I agree, a seven-year-old is quite likely through simple inexperience to put a wrong interpretation on scenes he’s witnessed. Why don’t we
all look at it again with adult eyes and see if we can make sense of it?’

Georges looked at him more hopefully.

‘Tell me some more.’

Judging by the boy’s silence that he had no idea where best to begin, Joe led him into a conversation, pouring out more coffee all round and trying to avoid anything resembling a police
interview of the ‘Where did you last see your father?’ type. He remembered a Victorian painting with that very title. Sentimental, colourful and full of narrative power, it had been his
favourite. A Royalist family had been arrested in their own home at the time of the Civil War by a company of Roundheads. The Cavalier father was missing, fled. His young son, a boy of about six,
stood proudly, stiffly upright, in his blue satin suit on a stool facing up to interrogation by a squad of frozen-faced, dark-clad and totally menacing Parliamentarians. The boy’s older
sister stood behind him in her white satin dress trimmed with pink rosebuds and she wept into her hands. His sister Lydia wouldn’t have wept, Joe always thought. She’d have given them
what for. He identified with the boy and sent himself to sleep each night making up stories of increasing complexity with which he might have fooled the chief interrogator. For a change he
sometimes played the part of this man who, on closer examination, seemed to have a more kindly face than the other soldiers. He leaned forward over the desk, keen and clever.

Instinctively, Joe had always understood that it was here the danger lay. They would never have succeeded in beating information out of such a boy but one sympathetic word, one well-placed
question politely asked and he would be in the net.

Very well. Time to play the kindly chief interrogator.

‘How often did your father come home during those war years?’ he asked. ‘I know leave was hard to come by . . . men went for years sometimes without seeing their
families.’

He was on the right track. Georges replied at once. ‘Hardly ever. That’s the problem. I’m very confused about the times when my father came home. Once, he came home in the
night and he’d had to go away again before I woke next morning,’ he said. This had obviously been a sharp cause of distress. ‘He left a toy horse on my pillow. My mother was
always waiting. When she wasn’t out in the fields or at the hospital working . . . She would sit moping by the window or sometimes on the top step with the dog . . . we had a greyhound in
those days. And she would talk all the time about what my father would say and do, how proud he would be of me when he came home. And he did come home. Three times in as many years. I marked them
down in my day book. But it was always for a very short time and he’d have to ride off again. I’m not complaining, sir. It was like that for every child at that time. Millions of us
were left fatherless. Some lost both parents. I’ve been lucky.’

Joe was glad to hear the boy’s refusal to indulge in self-pity.

‘Were you not evacuated to a safer place?’ Joe asked. ‘Couldn’t help noticing the bullet holes on the façade.’

Georges smiled. ‘Maman refuses to have them filled in. She says they’re a part of the history of the house and there they’ll stay. And yes, we did go away sometimes to my
grandparents in Paris when the war came dangerously close. But mostly we stayed and hoped for the best. We had lots of soldiers through the house, billeted on us. And glad to have them. We always
felt safer with men about the place. Maman cheered up when the house was full. She forgot about waiting and moping. And she felt she was doing her bit. She was very good at it. She’d sing and
play the piano for them, cook whatever we had. Dress their wounds.’ He grinned at Joe. ‘She may look like a butterfly but she’s actually as tough as old boots. And she expected
everyone to pitch in, even me, though I was only small. I remember working in the fields with frozen hands in winter, keeling over in the heat in summer and never daring to complain. I’ve
never lost the habit.’ He held out with pride large square hands callused like a coachman’s.

‘Maman had a poster fixed up at the gates to encourage us all. A call to action to the women and children of France from the Prefect.’ He smiled and spoke the remembered words with
emotion: ‘“
Debout femmes françaises, jeunes enfants, filles et fils de la Patrie! Remplacez sur le champ du travail ceux qui sont sur le champ de bataille. Debout! A
l’action! Au labeur!
” “On your feet! To action! To work!” Hard work though! But we did it. We managed – just about – to take in the fields the places of
those who were on the battlefields. We were even used as an overflow for the hospital once and I had to help with the laundry.’ He shuddered and pulled a face to disguise his passing horror.
‘That was a low point.’

‘Yes, you did it, old son, you did it!’ murmured Joe. ‘Kept the country going.’ And, after a pause, ‘I’m wondering what nationalities you had here? Actually
– you might well have had me! I was based very close by.’

‘We did have a few English. Maman liked them the best. So did I. They were my good friends while they were here. Some of them came back several times. And some wrote to me when they got
back home after the war. They missed their own sons, I think, or their little brothers, and I got quite spoilt. We still get Christmas cards from one or two. I have a friend called John who never
forgets to send me a birthday card even when he’s soldiering abroad. And we had French units of course. Mostly French. There was a day when we almost had Germans!’

He smiled. ‘They made a terrible mistake. It was at the time when the whole area was swarming with all three armies. No time to get away – we just had to sit it out. We had a squad
of English cavalrymen with us at the time when suddenly someone shouted that the Boche were on their way. And a German staff car was spotted coming down the drive. Just driving down as bold as
brass! An officer and his driver. They’d taken the wrong turning and thought they were approaching their billet for the night. Sitting ducks for the English marksmen. They fired warning shots
over their heads and called to them to surrender. The Germans fired back and those are the holes you see in the front of the house. They were taken alive but wounded and sent off for
interrogation.’

‘Good Lord!’ said Joe. ‘I may even have carried out that questioning myself!’ He was reasonably sure that he hadn’t but Georges seemed excited at the coincidence
and he decided to spin out the story. ‘I was with Military Intelligence recovering from a shoulder wound. We were brought an officer with a leather bag in his possession. Lots of bloodstained
rubbish in there but also a map which quite obviously showed von Kluck’s forward planning. We were delighted to have it. Particularly as it showed he was planning a manoeuvre that played
straight into allied hands. We didn’t get an awful lot else out of the officer but his sidekick, a taxi driver from Berlin, sang like a song thrush.’

His confidence won, Georges listened to a few more extracts from the war diaries of Captain Sandilands. ‘I say, sir, would you like to see my record of the war? My notebook? It’s
very . . . well . . . naïve and badly written but it does give the dates when my father was about the place.’

‘I shall probably shed a tear or two but if you wouldn’t mind – that would be a great help. Good to have something concrete to go on in this shifting affair,’ said Joe.
‘No hurry.’

‘Well, the last date of interest you’ll find is in the summer of ’17. My father came home for a couple of days. And after that, nothing. No letters. No news. No
sightings.’ The words were coming from him in uncontrolled staccato bursts. ‘It was said he’d been killed – disappeared anyway – during the battle of the Chemin des
Dames. His body was never found. For good reason. He’s still here. He never left the château again. He was killed here. Buried here. My mother killed him.’

Chapter Eighteen

Joe fought down his instinctive Englishman’s outburst of incredulity. ‘I say, old chap, hold on . . . let’s not be fantastical now . . .’ would have
been the wrong response. But what could possibly be the right one?

While he hesitated, Dorcas asked in an interested voice: ‘Can you show us
where
you think all this happened, Georges? You say it happened here. “Here” would seem to be
about a hundred acres of house and grounds. If we could go with you to the scene, it might help.’

The practical suggestion seemed to stir him from his paralysis.

‘It’s not far,’ said Georges. ‘In fact, I’ve been detailed to take you there this morning. It’s on the tour we give every guest.’ His hands began to
shake again and he bent to hide them, pushing them deep into Bruno’s fur. ‘Every day for nearly ten years I’ve passed within a foot or two of my father’s body and I’ve
never been able to acknowledge him.’ His chin went up in defiance. ‘But today I will.’

They followed him from the house and across a cobbled courtyard. A single-storey wing in the same classical style to their left Joe guessed to be a run of stables ending in a charming dovecote
and, on the right, balancing, but of a later age and of a more simple and workaday appearance, was the cellar. Georges, relieved to be active again, had fallen into his accustomed role of guide
around the family winery. His talk rolled on smoothly: ‘Natural caves in the chalk dug out and enlarged, possibly by the Romans . . . storage for more than a million bottles . . . steady
temperature . . . ten miles of corridor . . . if you get lost, just follow the arrows . . .’

They paused at the oak door at the entrance to the galleries and Georges took a sweater from around his neck and helped Dorcas to pull it on over her head. ‘It’s warm enough out here
but down there don’t forget it’s at a constant 11 degrees Centigrade. The wine enjoys it – you won’t.’ He clicked on the electric lighting system, closed the door
behind them and led the way down a twisting staircase.

They started on the tour, Georges full of information and well-rehearsed jokes, and Joe began to wonder if he’d imagined the scene in the kitchen. All was normal if not even slightly
boring. The chalk walls hewn out over the centuries were whitewashed. The smell was pleasantly musty and made Joe think of mushrooms, forests and ferns. The storage corridors were lined with wooden
triangular racks, double-sided, containing champagne bottles tilted at an angle, dimpled bases outwards. Georges set to, working along the rows, deftly demonstrating with flicks of the wrist the
technique used to give the bottles a quarter of a turn each day, a movement which kept the deposit in the bottles on the move down towards the neck of the bottle.

‘But why do you want the filthy bit at the top?’ Dorcas asked. ‘In red wine the dregs are always at the bottom and you can easily decant the wine and leave the nasty bits
behind.’

‘Ah – we do it this way to achieve absolute purity,’ said Georges. ‘At the very end of the maturing process we have skilled workers who release the temporary cork . .
.’ He took a bottle from a rack and, holding it between his knees, carefully pointing it away from his guests, eased out the cork with two strong thumbs. Joe was prepared for the explosion
but the effect was so shattering in that narrow space as to make him jump and thrust his hands into his pockets. Out shot a spray of gas, champagne and a smear of detritus. A split second later,
Georges had clamped it shut again.

‘
A la volée
! With an explosion! That’s how they do it. And what you’ve just seen is called
dégorgement.
Clearing the neck. All the nastiness gone in
a second and we’re left with the purest wine.’

‘But what is that black stuff?’ Dorcas wanted to know. ‘How did it get in there in the first place?’

‘It’s the remains of the dried yeast. Actually it’s been doing a valuable job in the bottle. It plays its part in developing the character of the finished wine. There’d
be little aroma or flavour without it. Then after release, we recork, label and sell it!’

‘But there’s a space in the bottle now,’ Dorcas said. ‘Look, the bottle’s not full. I don’t know much about wine but I know Granny’s butler would never
accept a bottle with a space between the wine and the cork.’

Georges was pleased with his pupil. ‘Well noticed, Dorcas. We top it up with
liqueur de dosage –
vintage champagne containing sugar – and this allows us to control the
degree of sweetness. Uncle Charles has a good deal of fun with this – he’s discovered that some countries like it sweet, others, like England, prefer it very dry. He always gets it
right. And he has sensitive antennae when it comes to tuning in to changing tastes and trends.’ Georges grinned. ‘Sometimes I think it’s Uncle Charles who
sets
the trends.
A word in the right, influential ear, a well-placed advertisement . . .’

They strolled on, ready for the next sensation. With some excitement, Georges paused by a section of wall and held up a torch, directing the beam sideways to reveal a slight roughness in texture
compared with the wall on either side. On it was tacked a blackboard with chalked words announcing that the bottles stored below were of the best vintage and not to be touched without the express
authority of the cellar-master.

‘And are they?’ asked Joe, kneeling to examine the bottles more closely. ‘No labels yet, I see.’

‘As a matter of fact these bottles are!’ said Georges. ‘It was Maman’s idea. In the war she had these signs made and put them over our poorest vintages so when the
Germans came they would make off with those bottles first. The best bottles were hidden behind the partitions. There – look – do you see where I’m pointing?’

‘Only because you show us with the torch beam,’ said Joe being a good audience. ‘I would have missed it. What’s behind there?’