Vintage (13 page)

Taking Clare’s arm and matching his step to hers, Jamie looked at the tidy soil, at the vines – as carefully tended as if they were in a garden – which stretched in their symmetric rows into the green distance.

‘All this to make a few bottles of grape juice!’

The honour of hosting the annual Fête de la Fleur, which was held in June, and the September Ban de Vendanges, which enabled the wine-growers and people from the trade to get together and for which everyone took tables to entertain their guests, was always keenly fought over. The château owners were not only anxious to celebrate their good fortune in living in Bordeaux – the largest quality wine-producing area in the world, which generated 12 billion francs in turnover, supported 13,000 producers and 550 wine merchants and brokers – but vied with each other in using the occasion to cultivate the market. Although the form taken by the fêtes varied from château to château, the festivities rarely ended before dawn.

Last year the honour of holding the Fête de la Fleur had fallen to Médaillac, which had mounted an oriental fantasy in which champagne flowed, tropical palms sprouted from the floor of the cellars, orchids were flown in from Asia – as were the musicians and entertainers – and guests from all over the world had danced the night away in what was, by day, a prosaic bottle store. It was an extremely hard act to follow.

For Marie-Paule Balard, the Fête de la Fleur marked the high spot in her calendar. This year most of all. It was to be the last, or so she thought, that the Balards, Claude, Marie-Paule herself, their son Harry, and their daughter Christiane, would make their appearance as a family of negociants rather than château owners.

Year after year, firmly corseted, painstakingly groomed, her figure constrained by her evening gown as
if by a mould into which it had been poured (and overflowed), hung about with the family diamonds (her family), which she had warily carried home from their hibernation in the bank, her plump feet tight in their satin shoes, her dimpled hands manicured, her hair firmly laquered, she would sit at the round table. Holding tightly to the anchor of her evening bag, and smiling for all she was worth, she would make animated conversation with those on either side of her, while inside she seethed at the sight of the svelte women in their little black numbers – which scarcely covered their poitrines and often did not reach to their knees – who occupied the places d’honneur.

Like many others in Bordeaux, Marie-Paule Balard disliked her husband, a bombastic man, frequently
overcome
with rage and always on the lookout for a scapegoat upon whom to vent it. Since it was his wife, more often than anyone else, who was around when the paroxysms of anger overtook him, it was on Marie-Paule’s
long-suffering
head that the negociant’s wrath generally fell.

Selling luxury drinks had always been as much a matter of social contacts as of the inherent quality of the product. It was she who was blamed when visiting importers and foreign visitors were not entertained assiduously enough, or if the hospitality she bestowed upon them was not up to standard and they were allowed to slip through the net. It was her fault – despite the fact that she was always ready long before Claude – if they were late for dinner or the opera, if it rained unexpectedly, if they took a wrong turning in the car, or a button detached itself from his shirt. After twenty-five years of marriage, if he lost an order to a competitor, the bourse fell, the roof leaked, or a holiday turned out to be a disaster, Marie-Paule knew that the fault must be
hers. She accepted her role as whipping boy. She was used to taking the rap.

Like many men whose outward behaviour was overbearing and filled with sound and fury, Claude Balard was still a small boy unable to manage without his mother. While he took his resentment at this out on Marie-Paule, he was at the same time dependent upon his wife. The fact that he had been handsomely paid by Marie-Paule’s father to take his homely daughter off his hands was neither here nor there. He compensated for his ambivalent feelings towards her by his assignations with Beatrice Biancarelli, on whose favours he was equally dependent. Dismissing the reality that he was deceiving his wife with his mistress and his mistress with his wife, the chartron deluded himself that he was faithful to them both.

The chartrons – the wine merchants of Bordeaux – took their name from the tall grey façades of the warehouses of the Quai des Chartrons where, since the seventeenth century, the aristocratie du bouchon had carried out their trade. The Quai des Chartrons, once the finest suburb in France, now run down and decaying, ran for two kilometres on the wide banks alongside the Garonne.

Originally, the chartrons, an influential body of
merchants
, had purchased direct from the growers sur souches (before the grapes were picked), or en primeur (immediately after the wine was fermented). Responsible for bottling it themselves, the merchants had cherished the wine like a new baby and, like foster parents, brought it up. As a result of their efforts there were frequent disputes – like those between opposing schools of child psychology – as to whether it was heredity (the vines, the grapes and the fermentation) or environment, the care lavished upon the wine in the dark
of the chartronnais’ cellars, which was responsible for its character.

When the growers finally decided to nurture their own ‘children’ until they were ready to be sent out into the world, the chartronnais were no longer needed as adoptive parents and were deprived of their former glory. They were forced to undertake a less charismatic role and simply bought and sold wine (usually to the wholesalers), which had already been bottled by the château owners.

Wines sold under the label of a particular negociant varied from generic blends to high-class bottles from individual châteaux. In some cases, these châteaux were themselves owned by the negociants. Like many Bordeaux wine merchants, such as the Guestiers and Bartons before him, Claude Balard’s overweening ambition, in which he was supported and encouraged both by
Marie-Paule
and Harry, a partner with his father in Balard et Fils, was to become a classed-growth château proprietor.

Although he was a member of the Syndicat de Negociants de Bordeaux, Claude Balard, unlike the majority of his colleagues, who were pillars of Bordeaux society, was both corrupt and corruptible. His devious nature had been inherited by Harry, a young man exempt from the common laws of politeness, who had more than once been in trouble with the police. By not only paying less than the market price, but selling twice as much wine falsely labelled ‘Château de Cluzac’ as he had bought from the Baron (to markets such as Japan, cruise ships and the less reputable airlines), Claude Balard was able both to line his own pockets and finance the extravagant habits of his son. His ultimate triumph over the Baron would come when he was himself installed as owner of
that much coveted jewel of the Médoc, the Château de Cluzac.

The Balards occupied an elegant, high-ceilinged appartement in the tree-lined Cours Xavier-Arnozan, which ran at right-angles to the dilapidated Quai des Chartrons, where Balard et Fils had their cellars. They were not the only Bordeaux family who were looking forward to the Fête de la Fleur.

The turquoise satin gown, a mute reminder of the forthcoming evening, which would begin with a massed band of welcome on the drawbridge of Château Laurent and end with a display of fireworks over the vineyards, hung on Marie-Paule’s armoire. Another dress, neither turquoise nor satin, but fashioned, what there was of it, of café-au-lait lace, provided an equally trenchant cue.

While Marie-Paul’s creation had come from Beatrice Biancarelli, the fashion guru of Bordeaux, Delphine Lamotte had been shopping in Paris, the city of her birth.

Delphine, whose husband Alain was pinning his hopes on adding Château de Cluzac to his portfolio, was also waiting anxiously for the Fête de la Fleur. With the aid of the little lace number from Givenchy, she hoped to persuade the Baron, notoriously susceptible to the charms of women, to look favourably on Assurance Mondiale, of which Alain was the Président-directeur Général in Bordeaux. Unlike Marie-Paule Balard, Delphine had been brought up in the Boulevard Courcelles, where her family was ‘trés snob’, and her aspirations were not social but material.

Shopping, for herself, her individual home, in which there were always fresh flowers, and her two delightful children – the eleven-year-old Amélie and the
three-year
-old Joséphine – was her north, her south, her east and her west. Her tastes were simple: she liked only the
best. Alain, who took pride in his wife’s looks and doted on her bubbly sophistication, liked nothing more than to indulge her.

The acquisition of Château de Cluzac meant not only an additional feather in Alain’s cap, but that he would be rewarded with a considerable bonus and commensurate rise in salary. It would provide the résidence secondaire after which Delphine hankered, and would hopefully cover more than one yearly visit (usually at the time of the soldes, when the previous season’s models were disposed of more cheaply) to the house of Givenchy.

Of all the young couples in Bordeaux café society, Delphine and Alain Lamotte, together with their
impeccable
home and their beautiful and talented children, were the most envied. The fact that Alain had graduated from ‘Sciènces Po’ and was clearly destined to rise like a meteor in his chosen field, and Delphine, bored with lessons, had left school at seventeen, after which she scarcely opened a book other than Elle Décoration or Marie-Claire, did not detract from their almost perfect relationship.

A devoted mother, Delphine chauffeured her daughters to school, to music, and to elocution and dancing lessons, monitored their reading, escorted them to museums to improve their minds, took them on outings, and
entertained
their friends. Dressed in the latest and most expensive juvenile fashion (much of it brought back from her visits to Paris), looking, even when playing in
the garden, as if they had just stepped out of a bandbox, the two girls were clones of their mother.

Delphine’s dedication to her children did not prevent her from being, to all intents and purposes, an exemplary wife. While she chattered away vivaciously in company, often about nothing at all, the good-natured Alain regarded her with silent admiration. They not only thought alike, and frequently talked alike – as if their opinions had been rehearsed – but had common interests, in bridge, tennis, and sailing on the Gironde. The only arena in which Alain Lamotte experienced the slightest dissatisfaction was the bedroom, where Delphine, so profligate with her energies as far as their home and their children were concerned, seemed unaccountably to lose her enthusiasm.

When Marie-Paule Balard had returned to Biancarelli to fit the turquoise frock, she had run into Clare de Cluzac, whom she had not seen for more than ten years. She had followed her progress since Clare had been a baby, when she had cherished the romantic notion that when she was grown up she would, despite the fact that she was five years older than her son, be a suitable wife for Harry.

To date, Harry had shown no signs of marrying. Marie-Paule presumed that he had girlfriends. He spent nights away from home – sometimes several in a row – to which he returned more disagreeable than ever and looking decidedly the worse for wear. The sight of Clare de Cluzac at Biancarelli’s reinforced her determination to persuade Harry to accompany his parents to the Fête de la Fleur, where the girls to whom he would be exposed would at least be from the appropriate drawer.

Looking at Clare, as she rummaged through the rails of Biancarelli models, Marie-Paule Balard, who had recognised her immediately, was not at all sure that she
had grown into the fairytale princess she had once envisaged as her daughter-in-law. Unlike the marriageable young women of her acquaintance, who paid as much attention to their appearance as did their mothers, Clare de Cluzac, in her black vest, her black ankle-length skirt, her hooped earrings and her plimsolls – she looked, Marie-Paule thought, more like some vineyard worker than the daughter of a château owner – seemed to have little regard for protocol.

Standing before the looking-glass, preening herself in her final fitting for the turquoise dress, Marie-Paule Balard watched Clare from the corner of her eye as Biancarelli knelt at her feet to check the hemline.

‘Que pensez-vous de la vente du château, Mademoiselle?’ Marie-Paule addressed the Baron’s daughter.

‘Ca m’est indifférent.’ Clare extracted a handful of scarlet crepe from the rail and saw that it was liberally adorned with buttons and bows.

‘Monsieur Balard has dreamed of becoming a château owner for a very long time…’

Clare, who knew that Cluzac had already been promised to the South African, met Beatrice Biancarelli’s eyes in the mirror and was aware, although she had no idea how, that the boutique owner knew too.

‘A cru classé estate has always been Claude’s ambition… When do you think your father will make his decision?’ Marie-Paule fingered the satin stretched tight across her chest doubtfully.

Beatrice Biancarelli sighed.

‘Madame a une belle poitrine.’

Proud of her bosom – the de Cluzac girl did not seem to have one worth mentioning at all – Marie-Paule ran her hands over the bolster of turquoise satin.

‘That Assurance Mondiale is after the estate is common knowledge,’ she said. ‘Alain Lamotte wants Cluzac for his company, but to run a château properly you have to live the life. My husband would take a personal interest…’

That Madame Balard was spitting in the wind was not Clare’s business. She let her rattle on about how
advantageous
the move would be for Harry, and how satisfying for herself to move from the Cours Xavier-Arnozan to an even more prestigious address.

Looking through the garments on the rails, not one of which she would be seen dead in, Clare was not all that interested. She wondered how Beatrice Biancarelli knew about Van Gelder, and let the negociant’s wife rattle on.

When Marie-Paule had left the shop, Beatrice Biancarelli apologised for keeping Clare waiting. Madame Balard and her ilk were her bread-and-butter; she had a duty to her regular clientele. Reaching above Clare’s head she drew the curtain, on its rattling brass rings, over the rails of garments.