Vintage (28 page)

Somewhat mollified, and with the promise of extra help in the kitchen, Sidonie, secretly flattered by Clare’s remarks, got out her recipe books and arrived at a simple menu which, with only minor variations (selon le marché) was served at the working lunches. The meal, of Quiche Lorraine, tournedos, cheese and Sidonie’s home-made ice-cream, was accompanied by Château de Cluzac wine (the vintage selected by Jean who had been read the riot act by Sidonie), according to the importance of the guests. Coffee was taken in the salon,
where any deal that had been broached over lunch was hopefully clinched.

Delphine Lamotte, carrying Bijou, and wearing only the narrow towel which she had wrapped round her narrow body after her early-morning swim, stood on the terrace of Le Moulin de la Misère. While Alain, having completed his statutory thirty lengths, frolicked with the children in the pool. She contemplated the leaden sky.

‘Qu’en penses tu, chéri?’

Alain, who had one child screaming with delight on his broad shoulders and another, whom he held by her outstretched hands, with her skinny legs round his waist, attuned to Delphine’s shorthand, knew that what his wife wanted was not only his opinion of the weather, but, more specifically, to know if it was going to rain.

The Lamotte fête champêtre, held annually, was an event to which anyone who was anyone in Bordeaux, and who had not gone away for the summer, was invited, together with their children.

Dress was (by Bordeaux standards) informal and the guests were free to roam the spacious grounds, make use of the pool, play tennis or croquet on the lawn, join in the games organised by Alain, and generally make themselves at home. At two o’clock, or two-thirty, depending how things were going, tables of delicious food cooked by Delphine, who held a Cordon Bleu diploma, were set up in the shade of the old mill, rugs and cushions were distributed, and those who could not find deckchairs disposed themselves on the lawn, which ran down to the mill stream. It was a relaxed and popular occasion, the success of which depended to a large extent on the weather.

‘Alain!’ Delphine rubbed her wet hair on a corner of the towel.

Lifting his younger daughter from his shoulders and depositing her back in the pool where she swam, in her Mickey Mouse armbands, like a tadpole to join her sister, Alain shrugged eloquently. Judging by the appearance of the clouds, it might well rain. He was more concerned about Clare’s grapes than the fête champêtre. Although Assurance Mondiale now had an appreciable stake in the success of the Château de Cluzac récolte, Alain’s interest in the estate was more than twenty-six per cent. It concerned its directrice, with whom he had, despite himself, fallen passionately in love.

It was a coup de foudre. A madness quite beyond his control. From the time that Clare had walked into the Fête de la Fleur at Château Laurent on the arm of Jamie, her image had been imprinted on his retina, from which it refused to budge. From the moment he opened his eyes in the morning, until the time that he closed them at night, no matter what he was doing, how demanding the task on which he was engaged, whether he was slaving away over his computer, clinching a business deal, or making love to Delphine, whose mind was invariably elsewhere, he saw Clare de Cluzac with her luminous skin and lustrous eyes in tantalising proximity. She was even present in his dreams. The folly that possessed him, which was worse than any lunacy, as distressing as an illness, more addictive than any drug – he could not see
enough of the object of his desire and turned up at Château de Cluzac on the flimsiest of pretexts – was not of his doing. He had not asked for it. He had not declared his infatuation to the object of it. Alain loved his wife.

Hoping that he would get over whatever it was that possessed him, he had thrown himself with even more vigour than usual into his work and into his leisure pursuits. Slamming the squash ball against the wall, serving one of his legendary aces on the Lamotte tennis court at the far end of the garden – where already he was patiently teaching the little girls to hit the ball over the net – swimming, in his textbook crawl, until he was exhausted, and running, in preparation for the forthcoming marathon, he had tried to expunge Clare de Cluzac from his mind. To no avail.

It was not as if he had never cheated on his marriage. There had been times when Delphine, who was no longer particularly interested in sex, had taken the children to Paris to see their grandparents or when he had travelled abroad on business, when he had indulged in extremely short-lived affairs. They had not been the grand passion which now obsessed him, and had been forgotten almost as soon as they were begun. This time there were warning bells. Being a cautious man (which contributed to his success at Assurance Mondiale) he heeded them. He had no intention of losing his wife whom he loved, his children with whom he was besotted, the home which he had created, the job to which he was wedded. His reticence was not without considerable cost to himself.

Now, gazing at his wife’s tanned and shapely legs, which never failed to arouse him, as – having put Bijou down on the hammock – she flipped her long hair over her head and rubbed it with the towel, he tried to dispel the mental image of Clare de Cluzac, which was, as usual, superimposed on that of Delphine.

‘Tu as regardé la météo!’ he shouted in answer to Delphine’s question. The TV set was at the end of their bed and together, leaning side by side against the square pillows, they had watched the early-morning weather forecast. There had been small puffs of cloud over the area, but no mention of rain.

‘La météo!’ Delphine’s voice was scornful. ‘Ils se trompent toujours!’

Lifting the little girls out of the pool, Alain followed them, dripping, to their mother’s side.

Wrapping her daughters in their striped bath robes, Delphine despatched them to their room.

Alain opened Delphine’s towel and pressed her to him.

The Lamottes swam naked.

‘Come upstairs.’

‘Alain! J’ai mille choses à faire…’

Listening to the impressive catalogue of domestic tasks she still had to carry out in preparation for the guests, Alain, feeling his disappointment like a pain, as if Delphine had doused his desire with a bucket of cold water, watched his wife snatch her poodle from the hammock and disappear into the house.

To Delphine’s relief, the rain, which threatened all day, held off until lunch was almost finished. At which point, suddenly, and without any warning, the heavens opened, deluging guests, rugs and the remains of the buffet alike, and sending the women, fearful for their dresses and their coiffures, clutching whatever they could, and screaming for their children who were enjoying the diversion, scurrying for shelter.

Clare had arrived late. After a flying weekend visit, she had taken Jamie to Mérignac, where she had bought flowers for Delphine in the airport. Alain had been afraid that she was not coming. Aware that he had been on
tenterhooks, Clare shook hands formally with her host. She was amused by his agitation. Approaching Delphine, who was fussing over the decimated dishes on the buffet tables, she made her apologies.

‘Je m’excuse de ce retard, Madame…’

‘Delphine!’

‘Excusez-moi, Delphine.’ Clare handed her the flowers. ‘I had to take Jamie to the airport. The traffic was horrendous!’

Delphine kissed her warmly.

‘I’m so glad you could come. I understand from Alain that Château de Cluzac is an enormous success.’

‘I’ve left Petronella in charge.’ Clare looked up at the sky. ‘She’s taking the visite. Unfortunately there’s not much that she can do about the rain.’

‘Summer rains…’ Alain handed her a glass of Laurent Rose, the extremely successful second wine of the Merciers, who sat together with the Balards at a table on the lawn. ‘They’re usually not too much of a problem…’

‘Alain is taking a great interest in your harvest.’ Delphine, who wore a white trouser-suit which emphasised her tan – if Delphine Lamotte were to fall down a drain, legend had it, she would come up smelling of violets – gave Clare a plate. It was bordered with a pattern of mignonettes and held couverts wrapped in a matching napkin. ‘N’est ce pas, chéri?’ She put a hand, with its delicate gold bracelet, on Alain’s shoulder and inclined her face intimately towards his. ‘You would think that Assurance Mondiale had a fifty-per-cent interest in the château. This one talks about nothing else.’

Clare, dressed casually in khaki shorts crumpled from the long drive (she thought she had been coming to a picnic) with a taupe vest across which was slung the present Jamie had bought her – a tiny ‘coach’ bag in soft
black leather – and her plimsolls, was oblivious of the stares of Delphine’s smart friends in their linen suits, in acid-drop colours, and diaphanous dresses. Escorted by Alain, she carried her plate of little white shrimps (caught in the river and cooked by Delphine with the fennel which grew in abundance in the Médoc), whiskery langoustines, frilled batavia leaves, and shining dollop of home-made mayonnaise. Picking at the shrimp as she went, she walked down the sloping garden in the direction of the mill stream.

From her table, where she sat like an overstuffed pink silk cushion, Marie-Paule Balard followed her progress. ‘As high-handed as her father,’ she remarked in a loud voice. ‘Look at the state of her.’

Exhilarated after Jamie’s brief visit, Clare had come to the fête champêtre only to please Alain, on whose help with the estate she depended. Skirting the Balards, Marie-Paule (fatter than ever) and Harry, with their heads conspiratorially together, Claude, napkin beneath his chin, concentrating on his lunch, Clare cared neither where she sat nor to whom she talked. By the look of it, some of the guests would not be talking to her. She was not bothered.

Jamie, who had been hoping to get away on Friday, had been operating on an osteosarcoma of the femur, a lengthy procedure which entailed putting in a plastic and metal prosthesis. To her disappointment, he had missed his plane and not arrived until Saturday morning. Most of her day had been taken up with paperwork and visites, one of which Jamie had joined, mischievously asking unanswerable questions and putting Clare off her stride.

After the last coach had gone, they had strolled down to the fishing-hut, which was silhouetted on its stilts against the river. Beneath the willows, whose winter
branches were used by the vignerons to tie the trimmed vines to the wires, they lay down side by side.

Jamie caressed Clare’s preoccupied face with a blade of the long grass. ‘I’ve been short-listed for the Middlesex job…’

‘Brilliant! Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘This is the first moment I’ve had you to myself.’

‘Think you’ll get it?’

‘I’m up against the Dean’s son and a Middlesex senior reg… You don’t seem very pleased.’

‘Sorry Jamie. I keep worrying about where I’m going to get the money for my new barrels.’

‘You’ll do great with the old ones.’

Laughing, Clare rolled on top of him.

‘You don’t know the first thing about barrels.’

‘It would mean we’d have to live in London…’

Clare glanced at the small boats, which brought in the bar, the bass and the lamprey, as they bobbed in the evening breeze. London seemed very far away.

Walking with Alain over the coarse grass (not to be confused with English lawns), of the Lamottes’ garden, and thinking still about Jamie and the love they had made by the river, she noticed Christiane Balard sharing a tablecloth (secured by a bottle of champagne in an
ice-bucket
) with Halliday Baines and surprisingly – a truce must have been called – his sworn enemy Big Mick Bly.

Holding her plate with one hand, and taking her glass of Laurent Rose from Alain, who left her reluctantly, she made her way towards the little group.

‘Hi!’ Toni Bly, tiny, in a tiny brown dress which clung to her doll-like figure, waved a brown arm. ‘Why don’t you join us?’

Big Mick, his sport shirt straining over his huge belly, shifted his giant frame a few inches. There was a spare cushion between himself and Christiane Balard.
Her flower-trimmed hat matched her voile dress, the skirt of which flowed on to Halliday’s lap. She was
helping
herself, intimately, to the food on the winemaker’s plate.

‘You couldn’t have picked a better moment.’ Toni Bly played tennis with the Lamottes whenever she was in Bordeaux. She was a little dervish on the court. She dabbed at her scarlet mouth with her mignonette napkin. ‘These two’ – her wrap-around nails vacillated between Halliday and Big Mick – ‘were arguing – for a change.’

‘A friendly exchange of views,’ Halliday said, looking at Clare. ‘What kept you?’

‘I had to take Jamie to the airport.’

‘It was about the wine…’ Christiane Balard’s English accent was charming.

‘Oh that.’ Clare pulled the ‘coach’ bag over her head and put it on the grass beside her. Stretching out her legs, she unwrapped her knife and fork. She wanted to forget about wine.

‘The fermentation temperature,’ Christiane said, gazing at Halliday adoringly. ‘Monsieur Bly keep the vat at twenty-eight degree, and ’Alliday he like to ’ave thirty-three degree…’

‘Raising the temperature briefly,’ Halliday explained to Clare, ‘gives you extra dimensions and extract…’

‘Bullshit.’ Big Mick chewed at a herb-encrusted chicken leg. ‘Dimensions and extract! You’re making wine, boy, not minestrone. A vat temperature of more than thirty degrees is positively dangerous. Any fool will tell you that.’

Reaching across Christiane for the champagne bottle, and meeting Clare’s eyes as he did so, Halliday refilled his glass.

‘Genius’ – he addressed Big Mick – ‘sometimes allows one to live dangerously.’

‘I’m going to the bu-fay,’ Toni Bly said, standing up in order to create a diversion. She didn’t want a repeat of the Fête de la Fleur episode between her husband and the oenologist. Holding out a hand to Halliday, she pulled him to his feet. ‘Why don’t you help me get dessert for everyone?’

Clare was playing croquet with Alain, Christiane and Halliday when the rains came, sweeping across the tables, filling the empty coffee cups, and leaving puddles on the parched lawn within seconds.

Handing the remains of Delphine’s Paris Brest, the bowls of fresh strawberries, and the sodden cheese boards, through the open window of the kitchen as they ran, the guests repaired to the house.

In the long, low ‘Maison et Jardin’ salon, with its comfortable sofas, antique tables, and huge fireplace replete with meticulously positioned logs and
pine-cones
, Harry Balard was sprawled in front of the television. He was watching the Formula One German Grand Prix and had the commentary on at full blast.