Vintage (20 page)

Delphine Lamotte heard the news in the hairdresser’s. When she had paid her bill, taking care, as she returned her credit card to her wallet, that she did not smudge her freshly varnished nails, she had tucked Bijou, her miniature poodle, under her arm and, by dint of nonchalantly bouncing her Volkswagon Golf off the bumper of the car parked in front of her and backing into the car behind, extracted it from its parking place. Driving straight to the headquarters of Assurance Mondiale in the Rue Vauban, she swept into her husband’s office, where she found him yoked, as usual, to his computer.

‘Alain!’ Delphine put Bijou on the leather sofa.

‘Chérie!’

Pressing the save button, Alain Lamotte, impeccable in his impeccable white-on-white shirt and elephant tie (a Christmas present from Delphine), stubbed out his cigarette in the already overflowing ashtray and got up from his desk. Although he was always happy when his wife dropped in on him unexpectedly, he was surprised to see her. Putting his arms round her, he kissed her on both cheeks and ruffled her hair affectionately.

‘Attention mes cheveux!’ Delphine put a hand to her hair. ‘Sais-tu les dernières nouvelles, chéri?’

‘News?’

Alain sat down again at his desk. He assumed that Delphine had had one of her petits petits accidents in the car, that Amélie or Joséphine had been sent home from school sick, or that there was a problem, a blocked filter or a surplus de chlore in the swimming-pool.

‘Clare de Cluzac is taking over Château de Cluzac from the Baron!’

Alain glanced involuntarily at the Château de Cluzac sale document which for the past six months had been his bible. The list of liabilities to be taken over by a new owner: the long-term loans (buildings and stock as security), the short-term bank credit. He could recite, like a litany, the reported income statement for the past four years (Exhibit 3, Page 15), the sales, the gross income, the profit before depreciation, interest and tax. He was au fait with the volume of wine production of the Château, with the sales and distribution, with the ‘adjusted’ profits and the currency exposure. He patted the dossier as if to reassure himself, and looked at his wife.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘The Baron has handed over the château to his daughter. It has been withdrawn from the market.’

‘It’s not possible. The Baron is already deeply committed in Florida.’

‘I heard it chez Alexandre.’

Alain grinned. His teeth were white and even except for one in the front, which was slightly askew. The aberration produced a small gap which added to the attraction of his boyish smile.

‘Eh bien!’ he said dismissively. Like many men imbued from the cradle with idées reçues, he equated
beauty-parlour
gossip with fiction.

‘Laura Spray was in the next chair.’

A light went out on Alain’s face. Delphine had seen that expression before. When the news had come from Paris that his father had died; when she had miscarried their third child, a boy.

‘Laura Spray told you?’

‘She didn’t exactly tell me. She was shooting her mouth off to Alexandre.’

Delphine had been reading about the latest exploits of Princess Di (she wondered what the magazines would find to write about without her) while she waited patiently – it was not a bit of use looking at your watch – for Alexandre, who was blow-drying the hair of a client in the adjacent chair. Alerted by the transatlantic accents, she had looked in the mirror and realised that the raised voice belonged to Baron de Cluzac’s American fiancée, who was shouting to make herself heard.

‘I wouldn’t live in that old castle if you paid me,’ Laura Spray had said as she helped herself to mineral water from the bottle on the dressing-table. ‘You can’t get the staff. It’s falling to pieces. It needs renovating from top to bottom, and it’s impossible to heat…’

Now paying attention, Delphine realised that Laura Spray was talking about Château de Cluzac, for which Alain had put in a sizeable bid on behalf of Assurance Mondiale, and over the acquisition of which he had had many sleepless nights.

‘There’s something very funny going on if you ask me,’ Laura Spray confided, unaware that the salon had gone quiet. ‘The Baron had everything settled. Mr van Gelder, the new owner, had gone back to South Africa to wind up his affairs. The next thing I hear the sale is off. Off! Cancelled. Finished. When contracts were about to be signed. It doesn’t make any difference to me one way or another. I believe…’ – she lowered her voice – ‘that the Baron is being blackmailed by his daughter. That she has gotten some kind of hold over him. She hasn’t set foot in the place for years. According to her father she’s some sort of junk dealer and doesn’t know a vineyard from a Van Go. To cut a long story short, the last few days have been hell. I was worried the Baron would have a
coronary. Cluzac has been withdrawn from sale and Clare – she could do with your attentions, Alexandre, you want to see what she looks like – is taking over. The Baron wants us to stick around for a while, tie up a few loose ends. Frankly, I wouldn’t care if I never saw another vineyard again. The sooner I can get him away to Florida…’

It was at this point that Delphine, who for the last few minutes had been stuck on a picture of an anorexic Princesse Di looking ravishing in a low-cut black dress, stopped paying attention. She was vaguely aware of Laura Spray buttering up Alexandre, asking would he come to Florida and do her hair for the wedding – which sounded as if it was going to have everything except an Aztec sacrificial fire dance – and why didn’t he open a salon in Palm Beach (she could fill it for him in no time), when the full impact of what she had heard, with all its ramifications, had sunk in.

Ten years ago, Assurance Mondiale had decided to balance the long-term liabilities from its insurance business with long-term assets. It was one of the first major outside investors to run a group of European vineyards as a business, with a computerised database. Despite the vicissitudes of nature, these vineyards aimed to deliver an average return of at least three per cent plus asset appreciation. Those that failed to do so were sold.

Like Alcatel at Gruaud-Larose and Axa at
Pichon-
Longueville-Baron
, Assurance Mondiale had set its heart on acquiring a premier Bordeaux vineyard. For the past six months the potential addition of Château de Cluzac to its portfolio had brought the gentle simmer of life at the Moulin de la Misère, the Lamotte residence near Villandraut, to an excited boil. Alain’s plans for the modernisation of the estate, which included the latest in
bottling chains, capable of filling 2,000 bottles an hour, were known even to the little girls.

Alain had done his homework. While, like an ageing courtesan, the château itself was crying out for a facelift, the eastern aspect of the sloping vineyards, warmed gradually by the morning sun and cooled gently in the evening, allowed the grapes to ripen to perfection. The property sat arrogantly, between two tiny villages, on the most coveted croupe in the Médoc. Of its 150 hectares of gravelly topsoil (which not only reflected the heat but prevented the soil from drying out), stony subsoil (with its minute traces of minerals, which enhanced the subtlety of the wine) and iron foundations, 75 hectares were legally plantable. Thanks however to Baron de Cluzac’s neglect, only two-thirds of these were actually planted. Bringing the vineyards up to their 10,000-vines-per-hectare maximum (as laid down by the Appellation Contrôlée) would mean that there was the very real possibility of doubling the production – and by extension the market value – of the estate in under ten years. Alain had already put too much work into the project to allow such a potentially worthwhile investment to slip through his fingers.

Delphine did not like to be the bearer of bad tidings. Possessed of more than his fair share of energy and drive, and with a well-earned reputation for delivering the goods, Alain was programmed for success. He did not take kindly to failure, which he attributed to some deficiency in himself. The last thing she wanted was to prick his balloon.

‘It doesn’t make sense,’ Alain said. ‘Everyone knows Charles-Louis can’t pay his back-taxes. There is no way he would have chucked away fifty million francs…’

‘There’s something else, chéri.’

Leaning back in his leather chair, Alain waited.

‘According to Laura Spray, the Baron had already made a deal…’

‘With Claude Balard?’

‘With a South African…’

‘A South African?’

‘Charles-Louis, it appears, has been double-crossing both of you.’

By the time Clare had left the Baron’s office after giving him her ultimatum, leaving her father and a stunned Monsieur Long to pick up the pieces, Jamie had set off on his morning run. He had completed his first circuit of the vineyards and, followed by Rougemont, was setting off for the second time, when Clare caught sight of him.

‘Jamie!’

‘Hi!’

‘Jamie, wait. I’ve got something to tell you.’

‘Later.’

‘It’s important.’

‘So is this.’

Catching up with him among the vines, and lunging at him in a rugby tackle, she brought him to the ground, while Rougemont, who had no idea what was going on, barked hysterically.

Jamie pulled Clare down on top of him.

‘It had better be good.’

‘How would you feel about postponing the wedding?’

‘Postponing it?’

‘Say January?’

‘I’ve two conferences in January. Locked Intermedullary Nailing in Rome…’

‘We could always get married in St Peter’s…’

‘And Cement Techniques in Barbados…’

‘Or on the beach.’

‘I’m reading papers at both of them.’

‘I’ve just told my father I’m going to run the château.’

‘You what?’

‘I don’t know what came over me. When I thought about what Papa was doing, what he had been doing for years, I just flipped.’

‘He agreed of course!’

‘He had no choice.’ While Rougemont, who had now quietened down, licked the sweat from Jamie’s face, Clare gave him a résumé of what had taken place.

‘You don’t know the first thing about running a château.’

‘I can learn. It’s better than being ripped off.’

‘What about us?’

‘Think what we’ll be able to do with all the dosh.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘Say the word and I’ll sell the estate to the South African. Let my father get away with swindling me for all these years…’

‘When will I see you?’

‘It’s only for six months.’ Clare interspersed her words with kisses. ‘Bordeaux’s…not…very far…away.’

‘Clare, everyone can see us!’

‘Only Rougemont, and he won’t tell.’

A rusty pick-up truck made its jolting early-morning way along the potholes and came to a halt by the ditch at the junction of the Route des Châteaux and the narrow and anonymous road that led to Château de Cluzac.

Lowering the tail-gate and jumping out of the back, half a dozen hefty, blue-overalled workmen exchanged pleasantries in the flat accents peculiar to the region.

Climbing down from the cab, where she had been sitting next to the heavily tattooed driver, Clare de Cluzac, wearing shorts, a tee-shirt and plimsolls, walked round to the back of the truck to supervise operations.

She watched apprehensively as the team, issuing brusque instructions to each other, gruntingly manhandled a metal sheet covered with old sacking out into the roadway. Regarded with idle curiosity by the early-morning vignerons pedalling their slow way to work on ancient bicycles, the men laid down their burden, cursing colourfully as they strained against its weight. Returning to the truck, they emerged with batons of carved and painted wood, iron chains, mallets,
tool-chests
and rattling boxes of what seemed to be several hundred assorted nuts and bolts.

Realising that it was going to be a long job, and that for the moment she was not needed, Clare crossed the tarmacked road, already shimmering in the
early-morning
heat. Ignoring the fact that the heavy dew had not as yet been dried off by the sun, she sat down among the poppies and the thistles and picked a thick blade of the long coarse grass. Arranging it between her two
thumbs, she put it to her lips and whistled, a trick learned twenty years ago from Albert Rochas.

Ever since she had been a child she had tended to act first and think afterwards. When she had told her father, a month ago, that it was her intention to run the estate, nothing had in fact been further from her mind. She had always regarded the château as belonging to her father (the two were indivisible), and her ultimatum had come as much a shock to herself as it had to Maître Long and the Baron.

Charles-Louis had been the first to recover.

‘Van Gelder’s family has owned vineyards in the Cape for generations. Apart from being an experienced
wine-grower
, he is also a businessman. I think you will find that under his stewardship Château de Cluzac will be “efficiently run”.’

‘You’re not hearing me, Papa.’

‘Understandably, you are interested in your dividends…’

‘Read my lips.’

‘I’ve had enough of your impertinence, Clare.’ The Baron looked at Maître Long. ‘On y va!’

‘If you’re going to try to get round Tante Bernadette,’ Clare said, ‘don’t waste your time.’

After dinner, when he had finished his nightly game of piquet, the finer points of which he had tried to explain to Jamie, Charles-Louis had taken Clare aside. In the Baron’s Room, mellow with post-prandial Armagnac, he had motioned her to a seat and taken his chequebook from the cubby-hole of the desk. Putting on his tortoiseshell half-glasses, he unscrewed the cap of his fountain pen.

‘How much did you say you need for this new gallery of yours?’

‘Fifty thou.’

Making out a cheque for £50,000, the Baron had smiled patronisingly.

‘You always were headstrong. It’s the Irish in you. You take after your mother…’

‘Perhaps I take after you, Papa. Because you happen to be a de Cluzac, you think everyone is for sale. Everything can be bought. Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps you have always been right. Until today, when I suddenly realised that over half the money in the Banque de Genève belongs by right to Tante Bernadette and to Grandmaman and to me, and that for years you have been – not to put too fine a point on it – stealing from your own flesh and blood. That you were no better than a common thief. I don’t know the first thing about running a vineyard. That much is obvious. I know it will be difficult but I’m willing to learn. Van Gelder will have to wait. I intend to stay long enough at Château de Cluzac to put the estate on a proper commercial footing. It can then be sold for its true market value…’

‘Excuse me, I understood you were getting married?’

Ignoring the interruption, Clare glanced pointedly in the direction of the Oeben table.

‘I owe it to the Convent of Notre Dame de Consolation, I owe it to Grandmaman, and I owe it to myself. There is nothing you can do to stop me, unless you want to spend the next five years in jail.’

Clare leaned forward and picked up the cheque from the table.

Breathing a sigh of relief, the Baron took off his glasses and put them back into the case.

‘That’s that then.’ He chuckled. ‘I trust Laura and I will be invited to the wedding.’

Ignoring the comment, Clare stood up, folded the cheque and put it into the pocket of her new ‘smoking’.

‘This will go to Tante Bernadette. For the chapel roof. I too am a de Cluzac, Papa. I am not for sale.’

As she tried to explain later to Jamie, when she had challenged her father with his years of outright dishonesty, with his disdain for Cluzac, with the contempt with which he had treated both Baron Thibault’s carefully husbanded legacy and her own patrimoine, with the Swiss bank account, something inside her had snapped. As she had looked out of the window at the sea of vines among which she had been brought up – such bringing up as there had been – it was as if she had become a vine herself, as if she were rooted to the spot. When the Baron, convinced as usual of his own superiority, of his own pre-eminence, from which pinnacle he believed that no one below had the least knowledge of the world, had enquired superciliously who she imagined was going to run the château along the lines she had described, her response had been unpremeditated. It was the incomprehensible feeling that she was defending the medieval fortress, in whose parks she had once played and in whose moat she had once swum, against the onslaught of the invading Vikings – rather than from the ministrations of a South African entrepreneur – which had provoked her reply. She was as ill equipped to administer a wine-growing estate as she was to mastermind a space station.

‘Would you really have shopped your father?’ Jamie said later as, with his arm round her shoulders, they strolled back through the vineyards.

‘I don’t suppose Papa considered for one moment the fact that he was double-crossing me or that he was doing anything illegal. He simply didn’t want to pay his taxes.’

‘Answer the question. Would you have shopped him?’

‘At that moment, yes.’

‘And now?’

‘It’s what he deserves. Don’t let’s talk about my father.’

‘What shall we talk about?’

Clare put her head on his shoulder.

‘If I do stay here for six months, will you still love me?’

Jamie dropped a kiss on her forehead.

‘It will take more than a few lousy grapes to come between us.’

A great deal more diplomacy had been needed to win over Nicola than it had done to get round Jamie.

‘Bordeaux!’ she had said when, back in London, Clare had broken the news to her. ‘I thought you and I were supposed to be in partnership?’

‘We are.’

‘Has it not occurred to you that you might be letting me down?’

‘It’s only Bordeaux. I’m not disappearing from the face of the earth. Look at it this way. Six months from now the Nicola Wade Gallery will be able to go into business in a big way. We’ll set up a gallery in Paris, one in New York.’

‘I thought the idea was to get out of Covent Garden…’

‘In the fullness of time.’

‘If you really want to know, I think you’re a rat! Not to mention a head case. What do you know about grapes?’

‘Less than nothing. There are people…’

‘Have you considered the possibility that “people” might like to see you fall flat on your face.’

‘No doubt they would.’

‘What does Jamie have to say?’

‘Jamie was OK once he’d got over the shock. He’s going to come over whenever he can.’

‘What about the wedding?’

‘We’ve postponed it until the end of February.’

‘Farm Street or the wind-dried ducks?’

‘Neither, as a matter of fact. Jamie’s parents want us to get married in Aberdeen…’

‘You can twist Jamie round your little finger…’

‘I wouldn’t be so sure.’

‘Don’t expect me to be so accommodating. What am I going to do about the Moti Aron exhibition? What am I going to do about Kettle’s Yard?’

‘Why don’t I ask Zoffany if she’s interested? She’s a bit over-qualified but I don’t think she’s found anything in banking yet.’

‘Suppose I don’t want to work with Zoffany?’

Getting up from the desk, on which stood the vase of sweet peas she had brought Nicola as a peace offering, Clare put her arms round her partner.

‘Don’t be like that, Nick. I feel badly enough about skiving off. Imagine it was your father screwing you.’

‘My father is a dentist.’

‘You wouldn’t let him get away with it.’

‘Michael Millington’s not going to be at all pleased.’ Nicola ran her fingers through her Nicky Clarke haircut as Clare put her jacket on. She was due at her grandmother’s.

‘I have enough problems of my own right now. I can’t take Michael Millington’s on board,’ she had added.

Watching the men erect the heavy metal sheet at the side of the road, manoeuvring it into place and securing it against the wind with wooden struts, Clare went over her conversation with her grandmother, which had taken place among the elephants and rhinoceroses in the Natural History Museum – a short walk from where she lived – which was the Baronne’s second home.

‘I said your father was up to something.’

‘You were right.’

‘He’s lucky that you let him off so lightly. If what you have told me were to get out it would be Cruse all over again.’

She was referring to the scandal of the 1970s, when the greed of the wine-growers, combined with the severe shortage of decent claret, had reduced many Bordeaux negociants to desperation.

By some bureaucratic oversight, the detachable coupons of the tax slips (acquits verts), which enabled suitably approved shippers to move a load of wine from one country to another, indicated neither the colour of the wine involved nor its appellation. This loophole allowed shippers to buy ordinary red wine and AOC white, then switch certificates so that they were selling ordinary white, but AOC red. By this simple trick they lost 10 per cent on the white wine, but gained an illegal 300 per cent by upgrading the red.

All that was needed to perpetrate this deception was a supplier of good red wine that could pass as claret, and front men such as the highly respectable, if commercially ruthless, Cruse et Fils Frères.

Tankers arriving at the Cruse cellars carrying wine from the Midi (equipped with an acquit blanc), were issued with an acquit vert and directed to another of the Cruse warehouses. This manipulation of the tax slips was a licence to print money. When the Tax Office got wind of what was going on, the ‘Winegate’ affair that followed referred to a ‘fraud big enough to make a wine-grower blush’. Everyone in Paris, including Le Canard, was curious to find out the precise nature of the banana skin that had caused ‘the best known shippers in Bordeaux’ to slip up.

The Cruses were charged with criminal practice and tax avoidance. After a trial lasting several weeks and involving 10,000 pages of evidence, they were given
suspended sentences with their businesses to be kept under strict legal surveillance. Protesting their innocence to the last, they were also ordered to find a ruinous 38 million francs to satisfy the taxman’s demands.

Unable to face the ignominy of the trial, old Hermann Cruse, a respected director of the firm, which had been foolishly persuaded to turn the law to its own advantage, had thrown himself from a bridge into the Gironde. The guilty parties in the case were subsequently pardoned, but the reputation of the Cruse family never recovered.

Although it was no secret that Baronne Gertrude held no brief for her son, she had no desire to see the de Cluzacs similarly discredited, nor to tarnish the good name of Bordeaux.

Entering the Whale Hall with its grotesque suspended skeletons, the Baronne took her granddaughter’s arm. ‘You were always a law unto yourself. Do you remember when you cut all your hair off, when you were thirteen?’

‘It was so long I could sit on it.’

‘Such beautiful hair. It was a long time before I forgave you. I only wish I had seen Charles-Louis’ face when you confronted him with the Mémo de Chasse!’ The Baronne had looked at Clare shrewdly. ‘Being chatelaine of Château de Cluzac will give you a worthwhile job to do.’

Sitting by the roadside now, with her back to the Château Martin vineyards, in which the July grapes were setting in promising green clusters, Clare
considered her grandmother’s words and prayed to a God with whom she was unfamiliar, both for guidance and for strength.

As the workmen completed their task, and the canvas shrouds were ripped from the pancarte she had had made, she was faced with the first hard evidence of what, in an unconsidered moment, she had so rashly undertaken.

Bold black letters on a scarlet ground, which dominated the earth-colours of the surrounding countryside, were embellished with arrows pointing in the direction of Château de Cluzac. The legend on the sign declared that the cellars of her ancestral home were now open to the public, and that, for the very first time in the history of the estate, its prestigious deuxième cru wine was to be sold to the hoi polloi, at the door.