Vintage (25 page)

‘Barnaby?’

‘Barnaby Muirhead.’

Remembering the Formula One driver for whom Miranda had left Jamie, Clare picked up the pieces of her past.

‘It’s only quarter to seven.’

‘I thought you looked too knackered to party. Wouldn’t you rather go to bed?’

Removing Jamie’s glass from his hand, Clare put it on the tiled hearth together with her own.

‘We can do that before we go.’

Barnaby Muirhead, recently headline news over his dispute with the Formula One authorities concerning pit-stop refuelling equipment, not only held sway over the premier table in Quaglino’s (once the haunt of Edward Prince of Wales but now a media mecca), but drew clandestine glances from other diners who recognised the popular racing driver from his pictures in their daily papers.

By the time his birthday cake, a Benetton-Ford in appropriately coloured icing bearing thirty-one flickering candles, was brought in, on the shoulder of a waiter, his guests were decidedly merry and making a very great deal of noise.

Regarding them all – the red-headed Miranda inhaling the smoke from a slim cigar – Clare realised not only how much she had missed Jamie and her friends, but the tremendous strain that she had been under during the past weeks in Bordeaux.

Relieved temporarily from her responsibilities, she had thrown caution to the winds, together with her Château de Cluzac persona, and was rapidly becoming more than a little drunk.

At one end of the long table Barnaby was explaining how, following Ayrton Senna’s fatal crash into the concrete wall of Imola’s Tamburello curve, a short wooden plank bolted to the underside of grand prix cars now prevented them from cornering at G-forces for which most circuits were not designed. Clare, at the far end, encouraged by an equally drunk Jonty Griffiths,
Barnaby’s alter ego and fellow Formula One driver, unravelled the mysteries of wine.

‘Wine…’ Her voice was only slightly slurred. ‘Wine, Jonty, is like people. There are tall people and there are short people. There are thin people and there are fat people. There are big people, and there are little people. Not that you can judge by appearance. Wine has to have character. Some wines have good character. Some wines have bad character. Others have absolutely no character at all. When a wine is very young’ – she was getting into her stride – ‘it has a dark purplish colour…’

It was Jean who had explained to the eight-year-old, sitting on an upturned barrel in her father’s chai, that the appearance of wine was defined by four elements: limpidité, the absence of deposit; intensité, the
all-important
density; nuance, the evolution of the colour from the blue of fermentation to the brown of extreme age; brillance, the refraction through the wine of light.

‘After anything from five to ten years,’ Clare went on, ‘the wine reaches maturity and can continue to improve for anything up to fifteen years. A touch of brick colour at the rim…’ She held her glass of Nuits St-Georges up to the light and tilted it slightly. ‘A touch of brick colour at the rim is a funda… fundamental sign that it is ready to drink.’

‘What I’d like to know,’ Jonty Griffiths said as she proceeded to do so, ‘is why, when you consider the cost of a bunch of grapes, any half-way decent wine has to cost an arm and a leg.’

Picking up the bottle of the most expensive Burgundy Barnaby had been able to find on the wine list, and watched with pride by an amused Jamie, Clare said, ‘You’re not talking South Africa or Portugal here, mate. You’re not talking your Liebfraumilch or your Lambrusco. Early-drinking wines that can be bottled and
sold young – that’s ninety per cent of your reds – are many times cheaper to make than wine which has been matured in small oak barrels, which are not only expensive to buy but ext…extreme…very costly to maintain. I’ll let you into a secret…’ Clare now had the attention of the table. ‘A top-quality, new, French oak barrel – none of your oak chips – amortised over three years’ harvest, can add between thirty and sixty pence to the price of a bottle…!’

Hearing Alain Lamotte’s patient voice in her ears as he went over the costs involved in wine production, and moving her chair (its design said to be inspired by the contours of Betty Grable’s buttocks) closer to the blond young racing driver, who was getting more than he bargained for, Clare leaned towards him.

‘First of all your “bunch of grapes”, my dear Jonty, has to be grown. A well-tended vineyard is like a well-tended garden. It takes an experienced vine worker the entire winter to prune only thirty thousand – out of a total of maybe seven hundred thousand – vines, each of which bears anything from ten to fifteen bunches, which eventually have to be picked, bunch by bunch, by a whole army of pickers, who have to be housed and fed. Take your production costs. In addition to cellar techniques, which involve expensive labour and equipment…’ Holding up her hand with the gold engagement ring, she enumerated on her fingers. ‘You’ve got the basic cost of your wine. You’ve got your bottling and packaging. You’ve got your transport. You’ve got your retail margin. You’ve got your duty. You’ve got your VAT…’

‘You’ve got no more fingers!’ came a voice from the other end of the table.

‘You’ve got your marketing to consider.’ Clare was undeterred. ‘And finally, in the case of a restaurant,
you’ve got your mark-up, in some cases up to three hundred per cent!’

Leaving Quaglino’s well after midnight, Barnaby, who got his kicks both from living dangerously and being constantly surrounded by a crowd of admirers, insisted that everyone join him and Miranda for a glass of champagne and some music at Annabel’s. While the rest of the party, pleading weariness or work, declined, Clare, who was now getting her second wind, persuaded Jamie, who was so happy to see her that he was unable to refuse, to accept the invitation. Banged up, day after day, in her Bureau d’Acceuil at Château de Cluzac, it seemed an age since she had let her hair down.

Dancing with Jamie – although it was more a case of ambling round the packed floor of the nightclub, the lowered lights of which helped protect the anonymity of its members – her arms entwined about her fiancé’s neck, Clare felt his body, warm against hers.

‘All moving parts in working order.’

‘Don’t go back to Bordeaux.’

‘I thought you were behind me.’

‘I need you.’

‘I need you too. You want me to let myself be ripped off?’

‘Does it really matter?’

‘Not in the grand order of things.’

‘You’ve made your point. Why don’t you call it a day?’

Clare thought about it.

‘I have to show Papa.’

Taking the floor with Barnaby, as exhibitionistic on the dance floor as he was on the racing circuit, Clare kept a jealous eye on Jamie who, entwined in Miranda’s freckled arms, was dancing with his ex-flame.

Egged on by an inebriated Barnaby, Clare was stamping her feet, clicking her fingers and gyrating uninhibitedly in time to the Lambada music, when she happened to glance up. In place of Jamie and Miranda, who had returned to the table where they were engaged in conversation, she saw her father, stiff and upright, in a midnight-blue dinner jacket, shuffling his feet disdainfully, while an exotic Latin American, wearing an exquisite emerald necklace, moved her hips provocatively by his side.

‘Someone you know?’ Barnaby followed her glance.

‘You could say that. Will you excuse me for a moment?’

Clare edged her way across the tiny floor.

‘Bonsoir Papa!’ The hooded eyes regarded her without surprise. ‘Je t’avais bien vu.’ Clare indicated his partner who was gazing at the Baron adoringly. ‘Tu me présentes à ton amie?’ she asked.

Her father stared at her. He had no intention of making any introductions.

‘How’s Laura?’ Clare said.

The Baron’s lips tightened in a familiar gesture of annoyance.

‘She’s well.’

‘Perhaps you and your…friend would like to join us?’ It was the champagne speaking.

‘Thank you.’ Charles-Louis’ manners were impeccable as usual. ‘Some other time.’

The next thing Clare remembered was waking up in her old bed in Nicola’s flat in Notting Hill, with Jamie bending over her.

‘How did I get here?’

‘I carried you. Over my shoulder. You were obscenely drunk.’

‘Rubbish.’ She noticed that Jamie was fully dressed. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’

‘I’m going to work.’

‘To work! What’s the time?’

‘Six-thirty.’

‘Aren’t you coming to bed.’

‘I’ve been in bed all night.’

‘You could have fooled me.’

‘I certainly could. You took one look at your father and polished off the entire bottle of Bolly.’

‘My father makes me puke.’

‘Give him a break.’

‘Are you telling me I should feel sorry for him?’

‘I’m telling you I have to go.’

Clare recognised the expression on his face as he slid a hand beneath the duvet.

‘Come back to bed.’

‘Tempting as it is I have a heavy operating list this morning.’

Jamie had his working face on. He was already at the John Radcliffe. It was not surprising that he couldn’t summon up much enthusiasm for her father’s peccadilloes or the problems of the Château de Cluzac vines.

‘See you tonight. At Grandmaman’s.’

‘Love you.’

‘Love you too.’

Calling on Hannah, who lived above her shop in the King’s Road, to collect her first batch of Château de Cluzac tee-shirts, Clare found her fat friend taking a lentil-and-saffron bath and massaging her head with unguents made from chillies and hot oil.

When she’d finished her beauty treatment, Hannah held up an outsize tee-shirt. Across the front in
leaf-green
lettering was ‘Au commencement était la vigne…’ (In the beginning was the vine…), above a facsimile of a gnarled and twisted vine and the de Cluzac coat of arms.

‘I think they’ve turned out rather nicely.’

‘Hannah, it’s gi-normous!’

‘I see no reason why the well-endowed should be marginalised. Most of them are medium and large. You can flog the extra-large to the Germans.’

Before her meeting with David Markham to arrange for the sale of some of her father’s bottle stock, Clare went to Neal Street to make her peace with Nicola, who had already left for the gallery by the time she had finally woken up.

Nicola purported to be more interested in hanging an exhibition of paintings by a young man who lived among the communities on the shores of Lake Atitlan, than in Clare’s problems at Château de Cluzac.

She pointed to a canvas of thickly daubed oranges and reds, and explained how the artist, assaulted by the impact of colour, had explored it in an intense sequence of abstract compositions, while Clare spoke of the hostility she was encountering at the château and recounted in detail the episode of the vandalised sign.

‘He also produces miniature paintings, scaled down from his larger work,’ Nicola said, ‘to make pendants and bracelets, which he frames in cast silver, in homage to the people of Guatemala.’

‘Fuck Guatemala. Aren’t you interested in Château de Cluzac?’

Nicola picked up a cobalt-blue canvas and held it tentatively against the wall.

‘Not particularly.’

‘Is Zoffany coping all right?’

‘She’s OK.’

‘Look, I’m really sorry I left you in the lurch. Getting Château de Cluzac on its feet is something I have to do.’

‘Did you hear me complain?’

‘Nicky…’

‘For God’s sake don’t call me Nicky.’

‘I want to ask you a favour.’

‘Go ahead. I’m listening.’

‘I want you to mount an exhibition for me at Château de Cluzac. Find me some artist who’s done paintings of vineyards – France, Spain, it doesn’t have to be Bordeaux – anything to do with the grape. With the coachloads of tourists I’m expecting, paintings, and posters, should sell like a bomb. I’m also going to flog objects de vin: old labels, funnels, tasters, corkscrews…’

‘Talking of corkscrews,’ Nicola said.

Opening a drawer in the desk, she took out a
brass-and
-ivory corkscrew and held it out to Clare.

‘Victorian. I picked it up in Portobello.’

Recognising it as a peace offering, Clare put her arms round her friend.

‘It’s been shit miserable without you,’ Nicola said. ‘Not to mention the fact that that odious Oleg has shacked up with an Estonian poet.’

‘Why don’t you come to Bordeaux…?’ Clare thought of Halliday Baines, deserted by his wife. ‘I could introduce you to a nice young man?’

Nicola was not displeased with the idea. Her words belied her expression.

‘I have a gallery to run, remember?’

Although Clare was at home in two languages, she was ambivalent about which culture she owed allegiance to. When she was in England she thought and dreamed in English, but no sooner had she set foot in France than her unconscious switched, unbidden, into French.

Suspended, or so it seemed, on a sunlit pillow of cloud, at an altitude of 33,000 feet, between the two countries, she was uncertain where she belonged.

While the mantle of Château de Cluzac, with its moat and turrets, where she had spent her formative years, sat easily on her shoulders, across the Channel, where she had her friends and Jamie, was home.

Pondering the question, she wondered if the answer was that, because she belonged everywhere, she really belonged nowhere (on the grounds that, when ‘everybody is somebody, nobody is anybody’); and, as she stared at the tray of food that had been set in front of her, the voice of the stewardess asking what she would like to drink made her dismiss her metaphysical thoughts and prick up her ears.

‘Du vin, s’il vous plait.’

Clare surveyed the quarter bottles of wine ranged like miniature soldiers on the loaded trolley.

‘Du rouge ou du blanc?’

‘What is the red?’

Picking up a screw-capped bottle, the girl peered at the label.

‘La Balardine.’

One of Claude Balard’s concoctions. Filling her plastic glass with the thin purplish liquid, Clare held it to her
nose in a futile attempt to detect the floral scents of rose, of violet, of broom; the fruity aroma of raspberry, cherry or peach; or the pungent perfumes of spice. Putting the glass to her lips, and letting the wine run over her palate and the sides of her tongue, which reacted to its acidity as if it had been stung by a thousand needles, she shuddered.

According to Halliday Baines, it was a mistake to believe that all French wine originated in the ancient cellars of some distinguished château. Over half of it was primitive stuff, produced in communal wineries where the quality of the end product was equal to the lowest common denominator of the grapes that were tipped into the press. While some local vignerons took pride in their smallholdings, others were less meticulous, and many co-operatives were not very good at making wine.

With the decrease in wine drinking in France (together with the rest of Europe), and the fact that there was absolutely no international market for vin ordinaire, many of the small growers were now being paid by the government to rip up their vineyards, which they were doing to the tune of 100,000 acres per year. Already there were 19 billion bottles of plonk in the European wine lake. Stored as industrial alcohol, it would end up in perfume bottles or be used to make subsidised car fuel. By the year 2000, according to Hallliday, over a quarter of French vineyards would, literally, have gone up in smoke.

Taking out her pocket calculator, Clare estimated the number of seats on the plane, multiplied it by the number of flights per day, then, with the help of the
in-flight
magazine, attempted to work out the number of journeys made by the airline to its various destinations in the course of a single year. The results were astronomical.

When Halliday Baines had suggested that she declassify part of her ’93 vintage and sell it cheaply to an airline, she had been secretly affronted by his suggestion. The unequivocal figures on the tiny liquid crystal display in front of her prompted her to revise her opinion of the oenologue, and take the idea of Petite Clare more seriously.

It was perfectly true, as Halliday had pointed out, that there were two markets for wine as well as two distinctive consumers: the cognoscenti who wanted a high-quality wine – which they were willing to pay for – and the majority, who now regarded wine as an everyday beverage and were perfectly happy with a bottle of Château Catesbury’s to accompany their evening meal. Most supermarket wine was purchased by women and was consumed on the same day it was bought.

Petite Clare would bring an affordable second-growth wine to the shelves. Properly marketed, and at the right price, it would be a welcome replacement for the vinegar she had just tasted, which was deemed fit to accompany the airline food. She was not bothered by the fact that the quarter-bottles would have screw caps, rather than the traditional corks without which the consumers would feel short-changed; they had little more than snobbery to commend them.

Sniffing a cork, as sommeliers in the more upmarket restaurants tended to do, told them little about the
condition
of either the cork or the wine. A good look at the cork, on the other hand, would reveal whether it was wet
and crumbly and likely to have imparted the unforgettable ‘corked’ odour capable of snapping one’s head off. The fact that the corks were punched from the bark of the cork oak, which was often left lying around in pretty basic agricultural conditions, in contact with the soil and other undesirable substances, had prompted the New World pragmatists to make use of the unromantic screw-caps for their bottom of the range wines.

Halliday Baines notwithstanding, Clare could not imagine screw-topped bottles being allowed anywhere near the King Street auction rooms where she had met the senior director to discuss the proposed sale of a quantity of prestige claret, destined to appeal to the discriminating end of the market.

David Markham had greeted her with open arms.

‘You could not have come at a better time, Mademoiselle de Cluzac. Six months ago the market was positively awash with mature Bordeaux. Suddenly, what we call “collectable claret”, for which people are willing to pay quite grotesque prices – thirteen thousand pounds for a dozen Château Latour 1929; ten thousand pounds for a rare bottle of Yquem – has virtually disappeared. Disappeared!’ He put his elbows, in their navy-blue chalk stripes, on the mahogany desk (which Clare, casting a practised eye over it, recognised as George III) and his manicured fingers together.

‘All that I have left today are some undistinguished wines from the better recent years, one or two big names from the frankly uninspiring eighty-seven vintage, plus an exceedingly large number of eighty-sixes and
eighty-eights
, about which I have my suspicions. I would be far more tempted to gamble on them if they were cheaper,
and if I did not have the nagging feeling that a lot of far more attractive bottles were eventually going to emerge from the woodwork.

‘To be perfectly frank, I am so short of claret that I have transferred all this month’s lots to a subsequent auction, which could fit in very nicely with what you have to offer. Tell me Mademoiselle de Cluzac…’ A gold pen, with a gold nib, was removed from an inside pocket and a pristine sheet of the firm’s letterhead laid in eager anticipation on the pristine blotter. ‘What exactly is it you wish to sell?’

‘I haven’t a clue,’ Clare said. She would have to enlist the help of Big Mick or Alain Lamotte to help her make her selection. ‘I’ll let you know.’

Hiding his disappointment that she had not come armed with her cellar list, David Markham re-capped his fountain pen. Sliding a previous sale catalogue across the desk, he ran through the terms under which private stocks of top-quality claret – preferably in the original wooden cases, and excluding large formats, such as imperials and jeroboams – were accepted for sale.

Bidding was per dozen bottles (irrespective of how many bottles there were in the lot), lots consisted of multiples of a dozen, and incomplete dozens were invoiced pro-rata. Commission was charged to sellers, at from ten to fifteen per cent of the hammer price, and purchases could be shipped, by Christie’s contract shippers, to destinations anywhere in the world.

Shaking hands with David Markham, who eagerly awaited her instructions, and promising to get in touch with him as soon as possible, more for her own sake than for his, Clare left the auction rooms and made her thoughtful way up Duke Street to Fortnum and Mason to buy an extravagant cashmere twin-set for Sidonie.

True to his word, Alain Lamotte had advanced her the five million francs he had promised. Out of this she had paid for the inox, which the suppliers had promised to work day and night to install. The rest of the Assurance Mondiale loan had been eaten up by wages, by day-to-day running costs, by incidentals, and by the renovations to the Bureau d’Acceuil and the Orangery.

The purchase of new casks – be it the sixty per cent stipulated by Big Mick (which represented 480 barrels) or the twenty-five per cent (200 barrels) advocated by Halliday Baines – was out of the question. Even if her innovations at the Château proved to be financially
successful
, there was no way she was going to raise the capital sum of around 600,000 francs, which both Big Mick and Halliday agreed was indispensable for a vintage that would restore Château de Cluzac to its former glory.

Outlining the changes she was instigating at Château de Cluzac to Grandmaman, she had surprisingly encountered the same wall of suspicion and resentment that had greeted her efforts in the Médoc.

‘A “bouncy castle!”,’ Baronne Gertrude had said. ‘A “bouncy castle”. Qu’est ce que c’est que ce “bouncy castle”?’

When Clare explained that beneath the ancient cedars of the park, where she had installed her picnic chairs and tables, an inflated plastic fortress, complete with towers and turrets, had been erected, which would hopefully keep the children amused while their parents spent their money in the shop or in the cellars, she thought that her grandmother was about to have a fit.

‘Vraiment, Clare! I am beginning to think that we might have been better off with the South African. I thought that you were serious. I thought that you were going to run the château as it should be run. What is the point of all this…this bouncy castle nonsense?’

‘To make money.’

At the Baronne’s table – which was where Clare and Jamie were sitting over their tournedos, cooked, in accordance with the Baronne’s wishes, to a rare blueness – although no subject, including that of sex, was taboo, any discussion of money was considered the mark of the parvenu.

‘Let’s be realistic, Grandmaman…’ Clare ignored the Baronne’s warning glance towards Louise, who was not the least interested in the conversation, and was circumventing the table with the gratin dauphinois. ‘If Château de Cluzac is to be rehabilitated, if I am to get its name known, and respected, throughout the world, I am going to need money. I’m going to need pots of it. And I’m going to get some of it, I can’t help it Grandmaman – in the form of liquide…’

Baronne Gertrude shuddered at the mention of cash.

‘Hopefully from passing trade.’

As Clare outlined her plans to run the estate on a strictly commercial basis, the Baronne’s eyes grew misty. She saw the wrought-iron gates of the château outlined against the Médoc sky, the vista of the great lawn on which the pagoda seemed to float, heard the ringing of the chapel bells at Christmas time summoning the family to Midnight Mass.

‘Tout passe, tout lasse, tout casse.’ She waved Louise, with her dish, away. ‘Crowds tramping round the de Cluzac cellars. Your grandfather took such pride in them. Trout-fishing in the moat! Bouncy castles on the lawn! Let us discuss the wedding.’

‘I was reading a magazine on the plane,’ Clare said. ‘There was this amazing gold dress, with an embroidered Nehru suit for Jamie…’

‘I’ll choose my own suit!’ Jamie snapped. He had had a heavy day.

The Baronne looked from one to the other.

‘I’m sure you will both look absolutely splendid. My dearest wish is that I shall be around to see it.’

Jamie helped himself to potatoes.

‘I see no reason why you shouldn’t be.’

‘Fantasies of staying the hand of mortality, Jamie,’ the Baronne said sharply, ‘are incompatible with the best interests of our species. You should know that.’

‘We refuse to get married without you,’ Clare said.

‘It is useless vanity to attempt to fend off the certainties that are the necessary ingredients of the human condition, Clare. Far from being irreplaceable, it is right and proper that we should be replaced.’

‘You are being unnecessarily morbid, Grandmaman.’

‘Not at all. Death comes easiest for those who during their lives have given it most thought. One must always be prepared for its imminence.’

‘“The utility of living”’ – Jamie had recovered his composure – ‘“consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived long…”’

‘“…and yet have lived little.”’ The Baronne completed the quotation.

As the airline lunch trays, with their empty
screw-topped
bottles, were swiftly and efficiently cleared away, and the Airbus began its bumpy descent through the clouds to Bordeaux, Clare thought how hard it had been to leave Waterperry and Jamie, who had an interview at the Middlesex Hospital coming up and was on call at the John Radcliffe for the next three weekends.

In the arrivals hall at Mérignac, Clare found herself behind a familiar checked sports jacket and a slim, tanned figure in a sleeveless linen dress, hung about with shiny carrier bags emblazened with designer names.

‘Alain?’

Alain Lamotte spun round at the sound of her voice.

‘Clare.’

‘We’ve been to Paris,’ Delphine said superfluously.

Alain took in Clare’s hand baggage.

‘Do you need a lift?’

‘No thanks. I’ve got the car.’

Alain put a protective arm round Delphine as they made their way towards the baggage claim.

Clare had left the car in the long-term car-park. Slinging her grip on to the back seat, she got into the driver’s seat and switched on the ignition. Lowering the visor against the setting sun, she put the car into gear. The car lurched drunkenly forward as if it were out of control. Realising that something was wrong, she got out and walked round her father’s yellow Renault. The cause of the problem was obvious. Had she not been thinking about Alain and Delphine Lamotte and what a handsome couple they made, she might have noticed. Beneath the bumpers, as if they had been attacked by a madman with a machete, all four tyres had been viciously slashed.