Vintage (5 page)

Breaking off from her reminiscences and realising suddenly where she was, the Baronne looked at Clare.

‘Twenty-four per cent of Cluzac is yours, Clare. Have you nothing to say?’

‘No doubt Papa will get in touch with me…’

‘Get in touch with you! Mon Dieu! You should have been consulted.’

‘He can hardly sell the estate without me.’

‘I do not understand your attitude. Cluzac is one of only three remaining châteaux to have remained for so long in the same family. To abandon it is unthinkable. Have you discussed this with your mother?’

‘I haven’t spoken to Viola for months…’

‘Then I suggest it is time you did so. Your father is up to something. He is not to be trusted.’

‘I’m not all that bothered, Grandmaman. I’ll be perfectly happy if I get a chunk out of the château.’

‘You have de Cluzac roots, Clare,’ the Baronne said. ‘Like the roots of the vines, they are planted deep.’

Clare had never had a hands-on relationship with her mother. As she told Jamie, who had as yet met neither of her parents, she would probably have merited more attention from her had she been born a horse. She was only marginally joking.

When Viola Fitzpatrick stated that the perceptions of a helpless new-born must be raised to the highest standard, that her intellect must be cultivated, that from the day of her birth she should be encouraged to look to one for all her little wants and needs, that she should be stroked and petted and respond to the sound of one’s voice and follow one around certain that one has her best interests at heart, she was talking not about her daughter Clare, but about a filly.

Raised on a stud farm, by the time the twenty-
two-year
-old Viola, the eldest of the four Fitzpatrick daughters, left her native Galway to spend the summer in Bordeaux, she had had no sex education at school and none whatsoever from her parents. Although she was intimately acquainted with the covering of a mare by a stallion, she was still virgo intacta and she did not equate such equine couplings with herself.

Although it was her father who mainly concerned himself with the breeding, Viola could not remember a time when she had been thought too young to witness the apparently violent and mechanical process to which the mares were submitted, usually more than once, during their summer heat.

Standing at the door of the breeding shed, she would watch as the mare in her covering boots, twitching and
irritable, her plaited tail held high in anticipation, was held by one stable lad while her private parts were washed down by another. At a nod from her father, the aroused stallion was brought in and the copulation, violent and thrusting, and sometimes not without what Viola mistook for tenderness (a bite on the neck which her father said was merely to keep the stallion in position), took place. There were always four or five stallions, and in the season – Sundays included – there were seven or eight matings daily, each one hopefully representing several thousands of pounds in the Fitzpatrick coffers.

Despite the fact that at home in Ireland she had been surrounded by so much rampaging fertility, Viola’s own deflowering by Charles-Louis Eugène Bertrand, Baron de Cluzac, the consequence of which was to keep her in France for the next nine years, had turned out to be not what she had expected.

The young Viola, dark and feisty, was not the first of her kinsmen to settle in Bordeaux. When the English had put paid to the wool trade in the early eighteenth century, the Irish had come up with the ingenious idea of supplying Bordeaux with home-produced salt beef, in return for which the Bordelais had satisfied the Irish thirst for claret.

The fortunes made by the Irish in Bordeaux were typified by ‘French Tom’ Barton, originally from Tipperary, who bought valuable estates in the Médoc (where his descendants are still to be found), and became the biggest single purchaser of claret in the second half of the century.

Of all this Viola Fitzpatrick had only the haziest idea when she was sent by her father, George Michael Fitzpatrick – who thought it would do her good to get away from Ireland – to spend the long summer at château
Kilmartin with her second cousins once removed. The Kilmartin estate occupied a prime position overlooking the wide estuary of the Gironde, and was one of the few châteaux in the Médoc to produce white wine.

It was when her ‘uncle’ had asked her to take a temperamental gelding and deliver it to the head groom at Cluzac, that Viola had made the acquaintance of
Charles-Louis
Eugène Bertrand de Cluzac, who happened to be crossing the courtyard of his father’s medieval château, as she trotted confidently in over the cobbles and enquired the way to the stables.

Flattered by the admiration in the young man’s eyes – he had silently appraised her wild Irish looks while ostensibly admiring the gelding and her mastery over it – Viola had not been displeased when she ran into Charles-Louis again the following morning in the course of her morning ride.

When he asked if he might join her, Viola readily agreed. The early-morning trysts, during which they often dismounted and walked along the river bank, became a regular habit to which Viola looked forward with anticipation.

Flattered by his attentions, she was not surprised when, on one blistering morning when the sun had already burned away the early mists, he pulled her down on to the grass and started to remove her clothes.

That her objections were only perfunctory was due to the fact that not only did she find Charles-Louis extremely personable – he was quite capable, when the occasion demanded it, of turning on the charm – but, mortal sin or no, it was high time she experienced for herself the pleasures so eagerly awaited by the mares on her father’s stud farm.

As in the breeding shed, the business, owing to Charles-Louis’ high state of arousal and his impetuosity,
was quickly over. Sore and bleeding, with pine-needles stuck to the back of her shirt, and summarily deprived of her virginity, Viola allowed him to help her mount her horse for the ride back to Kilmartin, before, looking extremely pleased with himself, and without a backward glance, he cantered back to Cluzac for breakfast.

The fact that she had let down the Blessed Virgin did not faze Viola, who was too strong-willed to give credence to everything she was told by the Church. What bothered her slightly was the lack of communication between herself and her seducer. While this deficiency of form might be expected between the sexes in Ireland, she had not anticipated it in France, where, informed by the great love scenes she had witnessed in the cinema (even in their censored form), she had imagined that things would be done differently.

This did not prevent her repeating the experience, on subsequent morning rides, when Charles-Louis introduced her to a number of permutations on the sex act which were altogether outside the remit of her stallions.

When, at the end of the summer, she discovered that she was pregnant, and Charles-Louis, panic-stricken, suggested that she take the next boat home, their first real dialogue was opened up.

‘Can you see me, Charlie, living in a home for unmarried mothers run by the nuns?’

Looking at her with her mane of dark hair and her milk-white body, of which he never seemed to tire, as
they lay in the long grass, while the horses grazed nearby, Charles-Louis could not, in all honesty, say yes.

He was about to open his mouth with a further
suggestion
when Viola said:

‘Anything else is out of the question as you know very well.’

‘Qu’est ce que tu comptes faire?’

‘What am I going to do? Do you think you’re in Ireland Charlie, a few jars, take a girl to bed, then run like hell? It was you gave me this baby, Charlie; what are you going to do?’

It was not because he was in love with Viola that Charles-Louis agreed to marry her. Having, as he perceived it, been denied love not only by his mother, Baronne Gertrude, who had left his upbringing to surrogates, but also by his father, Baron Thibault, who was more concerned with the nurturing of his vines, Charles-Louis did not know the meaning of the word love. The reason that he invited Viola to become his bride was because, as his parents never tired of reminding him, it was his responsibility to produce the son and heir who would perpetuate the unbroken line of Barons de Cluzac. The injection of good Irish blood into the attenuated French stock seemed, to all concerned, not such a bad proposition.

The marriage between Charles-Louis Eugène Bertrand de Cluzac and Viola Katherine Mairead Fitzpatrick was solemnised in the chapel at Cluzac on a beautiful spring day, which had brought out the carpet of bluebells beneath the great trees of the drive. The bride wore a dress of Indian muslin, with a high neck and long sleeves, and an embroidered white cap from which fell a waterfall of Brussels lace which successfully concealed her thickening waistline. She was attended by her sisters, Lucy, Annabel, Shiobhan and Rose. The
wedding-breakfast
,
masterminded by Baronne Gertrude, who was not displeased with her new daughter-in-law, took place in a marquee which was hung on three sides, in the style of Bérain, with black and white lengths of cloth, which represented wrought-iron work. One side of the marquee was left transparent, which created the effect of an additional room, which looked out on to the park. The celebrations, which went on for several days, were a cross between the grandest of fêtes champêtres and an Irish wake. Stumbling into the wrong bedroom – given the size of the château it was a mistake easily made – during a lull in the festivities, Viola came across her bridegroom, his wedding trousers about his ankles, covering one of the more nubile guests. It was not only this discovery, but the fact that, despite Charles-Louis’ pathological weakness for women (a proclivity she was yet to discover), he hated to spend the night with them, that led them, for the eight years of their marriage, to occupy separate bedrooms.

When Clare Gertrude Sophie Elinore de Cluzac was born, six months after the nuptials, Charles-Louis, having been informed of the child’s gender, held her awkwardly in his arms for a few moments. He managed a brief kiss on his wife’s brow, together with a few embarrassed words of congratulation, before repairing, disappointed, to the vineyards in which an exceptionally mild January had caused the sap to rise in the vines prematurely. It was left to Baron Thibault, who was delighted with his granddaughter, to make all the right noises.

Although, as an Irishwoman, Viola seemed to possess a certain insight into the character of a horse, she was not a natural mother, and her ideas about child-rearing had been gleaned from the stables.

She believed that early training was as important as a good education, and that if children were started early enough, and dealt with intelligently enough, they would become good children. In England, where the custom was to treat foals gently when first handled and ridden, they behaved like spoiled brats. They needed to feel the hand of the trainer to control and guide them, although punishment should be administered at the moment of misbehaviour and should never be too severe. They should be taught early on the habit of obedience, so that it became a second instinct, and to do what was required of them should seem as natural as to eat when they were hungry and to lie down when they wanted to go to sleep.

It was a question of the more you spare the rod the less you spoil the child. As you bend the twig so grows the tree, and education should be as gradual as moonrise, and perceptible not in progress but in result.

The result of this upbringing had been to ensure that Clare was in awe of her mother, striving to be obedient, to anticipate her wishes and trotting to her side when called. For love and affection she had been dependent, as a baby, on the presence of Baronne Gertrude, who was besotted with her granddaughter. Following Baron Thibault’s tragic death and her grandmother’s summary departure – having been deprived of the attentions of nannies Forbes and McKay almost as soon as she had grown fond of them – she had relied on the comforting presence of Sidonie and the warmth of her kitchen.

Now, watching Jamie as he expertly ground spices in the cramped Waterperry kitchen – she found watching the six-foot-two winger cook incredibly sexy – Clare allowed her thoughts to turn to Viola, with whom her relationship was civil but constrained. She knew that her mother, according to her lights, was fond of her and concerned about her welfare, but, as far as feelings were
concerned, none, as far as she could remember, had ever been displayed.

‘How does coming to Ireland with me next weekend grab you?’

‘Kindly do not distract the cook.’

‘Don’t you want to meet my mother?’

Jamie added the spices to the onions, which were sweating in a pan on the ancient Parkinson Cowan gas cooker, which had come with the cottage.

‘On the contrary. I think it’s about time I met my future mother-in-law.’

Clare laid her head against Jamie’s broad back, feeling his muscles contract as he concentrated on the onions, and wrapped her arms around his waist.

‘If my father really is selling Cluzac we’ll be able to go to town on this cottage. We could build a mega extension…’

‘For the two of us?’

‘I wasn’t thinking about the two of us…’ Clare untied the strings of Jamie’s apron, which were fastened over his middle, and ran her hands provocatively down his body.

‘Cut it out, will you! I…am trying…to make a curry…’

‘I rather thought you might fancy making some little Spence-Joneses.’

There was a loud ‘plop’ as Jamie turned off the gas. Hurling his apron enthusiastically through the open window, he took Clare in his arms in a bone-crunching embrace.

Since leaving the cocoon of her boarding school, where she had been mothered by the nuns and comforted by the ritual, Clare had had a great many short-lived affairs. The men to whom she found herself attracted were often a great deal older than herself, and until she met Jamie she had been unable to form a long-term relationship.

Listening to Hannah complaining about Seth, who thought that his socks washed themselves and jumped back into the drawer while he lay on the sofa reading his interminable scripts, and to Francesca, who because she cooked on camera was expected by every wally she dated to knock up a soufflé every time she brought them home, and Zoffany, who was such a militant feminist that any half-way decent man ran a mile at her approach, she knew that marriage to Jamie, ten years her senior and as solid as a listed building, would be like getting into a hot bath. She would, in addition, get her back scrubbed.

A year ago Clare had been sitting in Francesca’s kitchen, while the TV cook experimented with ‘
foolproof
pastry’, which was sticking doggedly both to the table and the rolling-pin. She was moaning to Francesca that she was never going to meet anyone, all the men she knew were either married or gay or in meaningful relationships.

‘“If you haven’t got a rolling-pin use a milk bottle.”’ Francesca, who was only partly listening to her, addressed an imaginary audience.

‘Who the fuck has milk bottles?’ Clare said.

It was shortly afterwards that Jamie, who had at the time been going out with Miranda Pugh, an old friend of
Nicola’s and the hard-hitting editor of Amazon, a magazine dedicated to career women, had walked into the Nicola Wade Gallery where he had mistaken her for a waitress.

In the interests of the profit margins the gallery was run on a shoestring and the overheads pared to the barest minimum. Clare had no intention of letting it operate in any other way. On Private View days, Nicola, dishing out price sheets like confetti, dealt with the press (if any), chatted up the clients, and massaged the ego of the artist, to whom the act of exposure was usually purgatory. The catering was in the capable hands of Francesca, who could be relied upon to do it economically, which left Clare to dispense the hospitality.

The first words Jamie, who was wearing dun-coloured cords and a scarlet waistcoat, had spoken to her, as she stood by the door with her tray of Francesca’s mini
vol-au
-vents, were, ‘I’m allergic to mushrooms.’

‘I only have to look at a tomato and I get spots on my bottom,’ Clare said affably, intending to put him at his ease.

As he shied away empty-handed, she heard his shocked voice addressing Miranda:

‘Funny sort of waitresses they get these days…’

Later, when the Private View was at its height, the perspiring punters shoulder to shoulder, the noise level in the cellar intolerable, and the oxygen level low, Clare, busy making out invoices, felt a hand on her shoulder.

‘What sort of spots?’

‘Sorry?’

‘On your backside. I came to apologise. I thought you were the caterer. Jamie Spence-Jones. I came with Miranda. I don’t suppose you happen to have a name?’

‘Clare…’

‘Clare. I like it.’

‘Clare Gertrude Sophie Elinore de Cluzac…’

‘We all have our problems,’ he said, making her laugh.

She had got as far as telling him that she was Nicola’s partner and about her Saturday stall in Portobello market, when Miranda, an anorexic redhead dressed, according to the current trend, entirely in black and carrying an outsize black Hervé Chapelier bag, rudely interrupted them to say that she’d absolutely had enough and that if she had to stand the heat another moment she’d die. Ignoring Clare, and taking Jamie, who was at least a foot taller than she, proprietorially by the hand, she pulled him away.

Watching their feet through the railings – Miranda’s Manolo Blahnik black ankle-boots and Jamie’s
Timberlands
– disappear in unison down the road at street level, Clare thought that she hadn’t met a man with a tingle quotient as high as that of Jamie Spence-Jones in months.

‘Tell me about Jamie Spence-Jones,’ she said casually to Nicola, when everyone had gone and they were
counting
up the red dots in the right-hand corners of the paintings.

‘He’s a surgeon. At the John Radcliffe.’

‘I mean him and Miranda.’

‘Forget it.’

‘How serious is it?’

‘Serious. They’ve been an item for years.’

‘Maybe…?’

‘Don’t even think about it! You know, it never ceases to amaze me how the paintings which one is convinced won’t sell jump off the wall, and the dead certs hang about. I don’t know about you, but I’m starving. I booked a table at Zen.’

A month later, Clare had been standing behind her stall in Portobello Road when she heard a voice say, ‘How are the spots?’ and looked up to see Jamie, a clumsily wrapped package beneath his arm, appraising her wares.

‘How’s Miranda?’ Her normally well-modulated voice erupted in a cross between a simper and a squeak.

‘Miranda and I split up. She’s going out with Barnaby Muirhead, the Formula One man.’

‘I suppose you couldn’t compete.’

He ignored her witticism – she always joked when she was nervous – and indicated the bundle beneath his arm.

‘A pewter tankard. One of the theatre sisters is emigrating to Australia. I probably paid too much for it. Will you have dinner with me?’

The seriousness of his voice made her pack up her wares and drive with Jamie to his cottage in Waterperry. Expecting to be taken to a restaurant, she was surprised when he went into the cramped kitchen and, preparing his batterie de cuisine as if he were laying out instruments in the operating theatre, set about making dinner. It became a standing joke between them that, despite Jamie’s best efforts, Clare couldn’t remember what they ate.

‘I once went out with a man,’ Clare said afterwards, ‘who told me, “I’ve cooked the dinner now you can do the washing-up.” On our first date!’

‘I would never do that.’

Clare believed him. Later she discovered that Jamie didn’t play games. What you saw was what you got. Leaving the dirty dishes on the table, they were drawn, like metal and magnet, towards each other and had divested themselves of every fragment of clothing before they climbed the narrow stairs.

‘Lucky for me you came to Portobello for your pewter tankard,’ Clare said later in his arms.

‘Luck didn’t come into it.’ Jamie kissed her passionately. ‘Nicola told me where to find you.’

Clare became a frequent visitor to the cottage and to the John Radcliffe, where her face became familiar in the hospital mess. In all her twenty-seven years she had never been so happy. For the first time in her life she felt loved.

They had been going out for six months when Jamie had taken her to Aberdeen to meet his parents, who still lived in the mock-Tudor house where Jamie and his two younger brothers had been born. His mother, a consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist at the Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, a strong-looking woman with short grey hair, the same height and build as Jamie, had to Clare’s surprise been hanging out the weekly wash in the garden – Jamie explained later that she regarded it as therapy – while his father (a general practitioner who had gone into medicine for the wrong reasons and from whom Jamie had inherited his love of literature), formally dressed for a Sunday in a tweed suit and waistcoat, set the table for lunch.

Watching Jamie’s mother dismember the crisply roasted capon with frightening dexterity, listening to Jamie’s easy discussion with his father about the various consultant posts for which he was applying, as though they were resuming a conversation that had taken place only yesterday, Clare basked in the warmth which, despite the lack of adequate central heating, suffused the oak-panelled dining-room with its bow-fronted sideboard and inherited silver.

‘I think Clare would like another potato.’ Rodney Spence-Jones addressed his wife, as Clare put down her knife and fork.

‘Why don’t you ask her?’ Muriel Spence-Jones lobbed back the ball.

Listening to the laughter provoked by what was
obviously
a family joke, Clare realised where Jamie got both his equable nature and his sense of humour. Although she was unaware of time passing, she was surprised to find that lunch, which had been accompanied, in Jamie’s honour, by a Gevrey-Chambertin with which she could find no fault, had gone on until four o’clock, by which time the tablecloth was liberally littered with shards of walnut shell which had escaped from the nut-crackers, and the plum-patterned fruit plates were overflowing with tangerine peel.

Taking Clare into his book-lined study, on the pretext of showing her the family album, Rodney Spence-Jones looked at her with kindly brown eyes reminiscent of Jamie’s.

‘I never did take to that Miranda.’

Recognising it as his acceptance of her, Clare, in a spontaneous gesture, kissed Jamie’s father, to his delight and embarrassment – he was unused to such gestures – on both cheeks.

Afterwards, Jamie said that according to his brothers, who had had a full telephone report, his parents had not stopped talking about her.

Now it was Clare’s turn, and she was taking Jamie to meet Viola in County Kerry, where she kept a stable of seventy-odd horses. She taught them to trot and canter correctly before instructing them in elementary
dressage. Finally she trained them as show-jumpers which she sold the world over.

When Viola had left Cluzac twenty years ago, taking Clare with her, there was no question of dissolving the marriage in the eyes of the Catholic church. She had not even gone through the motions of a civil divorce. Charles-Louis had not pursued the matter, and, having been trapped into her first wedding by her unplanned pregnancy, she had no intention of getting married again.

Her relationship with Charles-Louis, since her discovery of his infidelity during their nuptials, had been tempestuous. After the death of Baron Thibault and the departure of Baronne Gertrude, her role as chatelaine of Cluzac had been made easy by the fact that the new Baron de Cluzac, unlike his father, disliked entertaining and only rarely deigned to socialise with his neighbours. Under the eagle eye of Sidonie, the Château – staffed by an army of village women who crept around like ciphers with mops and bundles of linen – more or less ran itself.

At the time of their nuptials, Charles-Louis had apologised profusely for his aberration with the wedding guest, and Viola, in her naivety, had put his behaviour down to an excess of male hormone (which she knew all about from her father’s stallions), coupled with the fact that over the past three days he had had a very great deal to drink. The second episode, when she had found him in the Orangery astride one of the stable girls, had found her less forgiving.

Accepting a chestnut mare by way of compensation, Viola had once again drawn a veil over the incident, which was to be repeated, over the years, with
Charles-Louis
’ secretaries, with the wife of one the estate managers, with a housemaid whom she had immediately
dismissed, and with Beatrice Biancarelli, a young Corsican beauty who was currently the toast of Bordeaux.

Viola was disgusted not only by Charles-Louis’
behaviour
, but by his inability to communicate on anything but the most basic level with anyone but Desirée, the red setter bitch who accompanied him to the garages, the vineyards and the chais, and who never left his side. She occupied herself with her husband’s stables, the running of which she assumed; she took an interest in
show-jumpers
, which she gradually learned to train; and she kept a watchful eye, when she remembered, on Clare.

It was when her seventeen-year-old sister, Rose, was visiting Cluzac one September to help with the vendange – between leaving her convent school and going to university in Dublin where she had won a music scholarship to Trinity College – that the crunch had finally come.

Knowing Charles-Louis as she did, and recognising the fact that Rose, with her wild auburn hair and her eyes the colour of vintage marmalade, was as full and juicy as the ripe peaches suspended from the wall of the courtyard, Viola had cautioned him.

‘Keep away from my little sister, now,’ she had told him. ‘You so much as go near Rose, Charles-Louis Eugène Bertrand de Cluzac, and you’ll wish you’d never been born.’

All had gone well until the night of the party held in the great barn to celebrate the end of the vintage. Sitting among the exhausted army of grape-pickers who came yearly to Cluzac from Spain and Portugal, Baronne Viola de Cluzac had graciously accepted the gerbaude, the annual bouquet of flowers, from their spokesperson and recited her statutory few words of thanks, when it
dawned on her that both her husband and Rose were missing from the table.

Stopping by the stables to pick up her riding-crop, and following her intuition, she combed the shadowy grounds. She found them in the gazebo where Rose, who had partaken too generously of the carafes of château wine, was standing naked as a moonlit statue while Charles-Louis worshipped at her auburn shrine.

Yelling to Rose to get her clothes on at once and return to her tower bedroom, Viola, screaming like a Dublin fishwife, had set about her husband with the
riding-crop
. In an angry torrent of cliché and somewhat mixed metaphor, she had told him that this time he had not only widely overstepped the mark but had finally cooked his goose.

The following morning she had packed her bags. Accompanied by a bewildered Clare, and the hung-over and shamefaced Rose, who was unaccustomed to drinking, she had left Château de Cluzac, and returned to Ireland.

She had no hatred for Charles-Louis. During their eight years together there had been times when she had found him both engaging and amusing. He was not an ungenerous man and had left her pretty much to her own devices in the stables, which was what she enjoyed most of all; but she could no longer tolerate his philandering, which she considered, to say the least of it, immature. They communicated whenever it was necessary, usually over matters to do with the child, but there was never any talk of divorce.