Sophie was contemplating the croque monsieur in question as it sat cold and congealing next to the sink when the back door burst open and in clattered Edie and Cochon, both looking as though they had just been lightly iced, like lemon cake.
“It’s snowing!” Edie cried delightedly, pulling out the chair next to Clementine and flopping into it, Cochon’s little head resting on her lap, his mane spotted with snowflakes. “And it’s better than New York snow, too. It’s all French!”
She spotted the croque monsieur, her eyes lighting up further. “Want to split that with me, ’Mentine?”
“Really, Edie, must you?” Mathilde asked. Clementine was just about to launch into a robust defence when there was a loud knock at the front door, still a rare enough occurrence to surprise them all.
“Oh, I forgot,” said Edie. “There was a man coming up the drive.”
“A man?” The sisters’ ears all pricked up.
“What sort of a man?” asked Mathilde.
“Um, tall,” answered Edie. “Older than me but younger than Dad. From a long way away he looked a bit like Johnny Depp.”
Who is Johnny Depp, wondered Clementine?
Hector, wondered Sophie? And just as she was thinking his name and remembering the exact salt quotient in his sweat, he appeared in the kitchen. He knew about the screwdriver and the flowerpot, after all, and had only knocked to be polite. Besides, no one had even moved to answer the door.
“Ladies,” he said to the Peines, “and young lady. It is a pleasure to see you again.” Up close, he too had been lightly iced like lemon cake and didn’t look quite so much like Johnny Depp, but even at 10 Edie recognised his deliciousness.
The sisters said nothing. Mathilde, because she was still smarting over what hadn’t transpired between them; Clementine because she found herself feeling a sudden unexpected pang for Benoît; and Sophie because the look on Hector’s face made her think she was right to worry about the uneaten croque monsieur. Why else would he have come back?
“No, no, no,” she moaned, getting to her feet. “Please, not yet.”
“No, not yet,” Hector agreed gently, coming to give her a little squeeze, “but not much longer. We should go up. I know she will want to talk to us. All of us. Yes, you too,” he added to Edie.
“Oh, please,” grumbled Mathilde. Sometimes she did not seem very rehabilitated. But still she joined the sombre procession up the stairs, Edie and Cochon bringing up the rear.
They trailed quietly into La Petite’s room. At first Sophie thought perhaps Hector had been wrong, that he was too late. La Petite lay as still as a stone, her eyes closed, her face grey and already half-disappeared.
But Hector was not at all perturbed, sitting quietly on the bed as the others found their favourite chairs, the ones their bottoms had automatically started to lead them to in the weeks since La Petite had infiltrated their lives and they’d sought out her company.
Cochon trotted around the far side of the bed and rested his chin on the pillow next to the old woman’s crinkled face. A hotchpotch of drool stains on Mathilde’s Frette indicated it was not the first time he had done so. Mathilde hissed at him and flapped her hand uselessly in his direction.
“Leave him alone,” Clementine whispered furiously.
“Mind your own business,” Mathilde hissed back. “Edie, get that thing away from there.”
“No, she’s right, leave him alone,” Edie whispered back fiercely, moving her chair closer to Clementine.
“You do as I say,” Mathilde demanded, barely containing herself.
“You say something different,” Edie replied.
“How dare you!” The whispering was gone now.
“How dare you!” Clementine was back in the fray. “Let the poor child be.”
“What’s it got do to with you?” Mathilde was furious. “She’s not your daughter. Although where on earth that poor creature is —”
“Stop it!” Sophie cried. “All of you. Just stop it!”
“For the love of Saint Vincent,” La Petite announced tiredly from her bed. “Thank you, Sophie.” She opened her eyes and smiled at Hector. “Oh, it’s you. I thought it might be today,” she said. “I’ve never turned my nose up at Emmenthal before.”
“La Petite,” her great-grandson (or something like it) said fondly, leaning in to give her a gentle kiss.
The sisters fell silent.
La Petite coughed dramatically, rising out of the bed with each hack perhaps a little more than was strictly necessary. “I’m not well, you know,” she reminded them, adding a tremble for good measure. “And this time I mean it. I’m going. I am definitely going. But before I go, I need to lend you poor Peines a helping hand.”
“Poor Peines? A helping hand? Oh, please,” Mathilde started.
“That will be all from you, madame,” La Petite shut her down with a voice that showed no particular sign of pending departure. “I’m lending you a helping hand and you will do me the honour of accepting it. Quietly. Because I’m doing it as a favour to your father who loved you.”
Sophie clasped her hands to her chest, her eyes shining, while Clementine shifted uncomfortably in her chair. Mathilde, however, could not hide her derision. “You mean our father who has been dead for nine months and spent the 40 years before that not giving a shit?”
“Oh, he most certainly did give a shit,” La Petite disagreed. “And he didn’t come back from the grave and ask me for the favour, if that’s what you’re thinking. I don’t deal with the here-afters, despite what you might have heard. No, he asked me before he died. Well before, when he first realised he wasn’t going to be a very good father.”
“He realised it in advance?” Mathilde was incredulous.
“Better than not realising it at all, don’t you think? You especially, Mathilde?”
Edie’s eyes nearly popped out of her head but she didn’t say a word in case she was asked to leave. It seemed to her that the conversation was not the sort to which children were usually privy and although she didn’t completely understand what was going on, she felt a desperate need to be privy to it.
“But what made him think he wasn’t going to be a good father?” asked Sophie.
“That’s a good question and I have just the answer,” La Petite said, although she could feel herself starting to drift towards a faraway place where chocolat chaud was served every hour of the day and the air smelled only of daphne. “Some people just don’t have it in them to love or nurture others, did you know that? They should be neutered, in fact, or spayed like stray dogs. That’s what we do where I come from. It keeps the bad blood out of the family. My third cousin Tomasina, now there was a —”
“La Petite,” Hector interrupted gently. He was stretched out on the bed next to her now, dwarfing her, his legs crossed at the ankle, his boots further dirtying Mathilde’s precious linen. “Some people are not capable of being loving or nurturing …”
“But the good news is that Olivier was not one of them,” she picked up seamlessly. “He had everything he needed to be the most devoted of fathers but his heart was broken when you had only just arrived, Clementine, well before you were born Mathilde, let alone you Sophie. Sadly, he chose the numbness of the bottle over the pain of mending his heartbreak. I can’t imagine what that must feel like, can anyone else in the room? Anyone?”
They all looked at Mathilde who gazed out the window, her jaw set firmly.
“But Olivier was a farmer. First and foremost he was a farmer. And like all good vignerons he knew that starving you would stunt your growth. Yet still, he starved you. Unfortunate, yes, irreversible, no. He was not so callous a man as to ignore the consequences of his actions. Vignerons rarely do. And so he took steps to make sure you wouldn’t be shrivelled up forever. He asked me to tell you, one day when the time was right, when you were all together, what he had never been able to tell you himself.”
“Oh, this is just plain ridiculous!” complained Mathilde.
“No, it’s not — it’s lovely,” cried Sophie.
“What are you talking about?” Clementine was back in the dark.
La Petite coughed a huge gob of phlegm up from her lungs and hoicked it with perfect precision out through the small open gap in the bedroom window. This certainly got their attention. Edie nearly exploded. No one ever hoicked out the window in Manhattan.
“Listen to me carefully,” La Petite said, pulling herself up more and employing as official a look as a very old, nearly passed-on person could manage. “I know you think your father was a mean old misery-guts and I have to say in recent years he certainly did himself few favours and those around him even fewer but …” she coughed another long and phlegmy cough whose sole purpose was to remind them that the bright light was still beckoning, “… he wasn’t always that way. You need to know that. As a young boy your father had so much heart, so much hope, I can see him as though it were yesterday, that lovely head of copper-coloured hair, those twinkling blue eyes, that smile …”
Sophie was alone in being entranced, she could see it like it was yesterday herself, this handsome fairy-tale version of her unknown father. Clementine merely sneaked a sceptical peek at Mathilde, whose eyebrow had shot up to a record level. Neither of them could remember his copper-coloured hair, his twinkling blue eyes nor certainly his smile.
“You know, the vignerons of Champagne were not having the good time they’re having today when your father was born,” La Petite pointed out.
“We’re going back to when he was born?” Mathilde was aghast. “How long is this going to take? I have calls to make, you know.”
“These are my last few breaths,” La Petite said witheringly, “and I do not intend wasting them on any self-centred struggling anorexics, so if you answer that description, please remove yourself.”
To think that La Petite knew what an anorexic was and to think that this actually shut Mathilde up. Sophie was astonished, Clementine confused and Edie in absolute awe.
“Now where was I?” La Petite tried once again to regain her thread, during which time Mathilde cleared her throat and made a meal out of checking her watch.
This was not lost on the old woman. She turned one beady eye towards the middle Peine, raised one tiny hand from the bed covers and pointed dramatically in her direction. “You,” she whispered, then after one long terrifying intake of wheezy breath her eyes closed and she receded back into the pillows.
“Oh, please, no!” cried Sophie, jumping to her feet and rushing to the old lady’s side, a small hand on her still warm forehead as Clementine hovered behind her. “Oh, Clementine, you don’t think she’s …?”
La Petite opened one eye and winked at the worried faces hovering above her. Hector, who had not moved a muscle, just shook his head and sighed.
“I think we’ve lost her,” Clementine said woodenly, attempting to play along, “and on Mathilde’s Frette linen. It will never be the same.”
“’Mentine?” Edie’s face had crumpled and she was getting ready to cry.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” snapped Mathilde, getting to her feet and coming over to the bed. “Have you nitwits never seen ER?” She tugged on La Petite’s big toe beneath the quilt. “She’s acting.”
The old woman opened both eyes and smiled her toothless smile. “You have a lot of spirit for a mean person,” she told Mathilde. “I almost like you.”
“Whatever,” Mathilde rolled her eyes in exasperation but returned to her seat, crossing one long thin leg over the other. “Just get on with it, will you?”
Barriques
“The vignerons of Champagne were not having the good time they are today, remember?” Sophie prompted La Petite when they had all settled back into their chairs.
“Ah, my Little One, so like your grandmother,” sighed the old woman, causing a tug of envy in Clementine’s breast. “Although of course she looked more like Clementine. Such a fine woman. And so strong. Elegant, though, in her own way and clever, too, of course, like you, Mathilde, although not nasty, not ever, that I know of. The things that woman lived through: hunger, poverty, widowhood, Hitler.”
The room grew cold and Clementine pulled her moth-eaten cardigan closer to her body.
“Your grandfather died at the beginning of the second war,” La Petite continued, “and we arrived for the vendange not long after he had passed. Tsk tsk. Poor Micheline. Newly widowed with a young son. And I tell you I’ve seen some terrible vintages in my time but I barely remember a single ripe grape in ’39, once again no men to do the picking or pressing. Just women and children. Your father, Olivier, only 10 years old — your age Edie — and working a full day alongside his mother.”
Edie grimaced at such a prospect.
“Those were terrible times,” recalled La Petite with a faint shake of her head. “It must have been Hitler himself who worked out that if you want to ruin a Frenchman’s day, there’s no better way to do it than drink his wine. A sword through the heart would hurt less. I remember being over at Le-Mesnil-sur-Oger the day the Germans came in on their shiny motorbikes and cleared out all Salon’s ’28. The ’28! The shame of it! They didn’t go for the poisonous pig swill old Rimochin across the road made … oh no. Only the best for Hitler’s mob.”
Sophie’s eyes were as big as saucers. “Did they clear out our champagne?”
“They tried. Peine had a good name back then remember and the soldiers heard about it from someone down the road, no doubt trying to save his own hide. Anyway, they arrived one morning and your father, who was 11 or 12 by then, held them at bay long enough for your grandmother to do some quick restocking in the winery. They didn’t take anything she didn’t want them to have, that I can tell you. You’d be surprised just what that grandmother of yours managed to hang on to. A magnificent woman. She taught Olivier a lot.”
“A lot of what?” Mathilde asked. “Do tell. The suspense is killing me.”
“Well, I am the one dying so mind your manners,” snapped La Petite. “Besides, there are some things you need to find out for yourself, smarty-pants. The Peines have always been good at hiding things and just as good at revealing them, when the time is right, brick by brick, if need be. You should try it, Mathilde, you’d be a better person for doing so, let me tell you.”
“I’m better enough as it is,” answered Mathilde.
“Well, that’s a matter of opinion,” La Petite retorted. “I wouldn’t go asking for a show of hands if I were you.”
Edie giggled, Clementine looked at her shoes and Sophie squirmed some more but broke the awkward silence by asking: “What else? About the war? About Papa?”
“He met Clementine’s mother,” La Petite said proudly. “His finest hour.”
Clementine felt an unfamiliar shudder and looked up to find La Petite staring straight at her through crinkled lids. “It’s a great shame he could never talk to you about her,” she said, “because she was a wonderful woman and they were a wonderful pair. She was kind and honest and clever. To him, she looked just like the Mona Lisa.”
“That’s what people used to say about my mother, too,” Sophie said, wondrously. “The Mona Lisa bit, that is.”
“Mine too,” yawned Mathilde. “Big deal.”
“I suppose you could say that Juliette Binoche has a touch of the Mona Lisa about her, do you think?” Sophie was suddenly excited. “That secretive smile of hers. That night at the video store perhaps …?”
“Never mind Juliette Binoche,” Clementine interrupted. “What about —” she couldn’t bring herself to say maman. “What about Marie-France?”
“She arrived here during the vendange of ’43, a better year than ’39 but still hardly worth picking. Anyway, your grandmother had never forgiven France for rolling over for the Germans the way they did. So every now and then she helped a little with the Resistance, hiding people mostly, in the cave. And she wasn’t the only one — cellars all over France were hiding resistance fighters by then. At Moët in Epernay they had a
whole city just about in the underground crayères. A hospital even. You can still see the markings on some of the walls in the cellars if you visit. A red cross for the nursing station, a blue cross for the soup line, a white cross for a hidey-hole. Oh indeed, such terrible times …”
“Marie-France,” murmured Hector, who was still lying back, hands behind his head, eyes closed.
“Yes, yes, Marie-France,” La Petite snapped back to attention. “She was just 14 when she arrived here. Her parents had been taken in Paris, I think, and the Resistance was trying to get her to England. I was here when she came to the door and you could see it straight away, with her and your father, I mean, Clementine: there was something in the air. Something everyone could feel and it reminded us all that there was still room for joy in the world, room for the future.”
“Oh, Clementine,” Sophie cried, looking at her sister with tears in her eyes. “Can you believe it?”
With all her heart, Clementine wanted to.
“I can see them now,” La Petite continued dreamily, “huddled down behind the reserve wines whispering to each other. Young love! There’s nothing like it. But after a week she had to be moved — it was risky to stay too long in any one place — but there was some problem with the usual transport. The rail line, I think, was no longer safe. Anyway, it was your father who had the idea for how best to smuggle her to safety. He saved her life, saved many lives, in fact.”
“He was a hero,” breathed Sophie.
“I think so,” agreed La Petite, “although he would say he was just doing what needed to be done. He was the son of vignerons, after all, plus he was in love, so what do you think he did? He worked out that a girl the size of his wife-to-be would fit in a wine barrel so that’s just where he put her. Then he drove her across the demarcation line in a horse-drawn cart, right through the German checkpoints, to where she was picked up and taken across the channel.”
“In a wine barrel?” Mathilde was scathing. “Are you kidding me?