Lace

  They entered a scrupulously clean laboratory: in front of a row of wooden chairs there stood a few spittoons. Several unmarked bottles stood on the central wooden table. “No Smoking” signs hung on the wall. It was indeed extraordinarily dull so far, thought Maxine, as she was introduced to a pendulous-bellied man with a lugubrious face, the purple-red colour of a turkey cock’s wattle.

  The chef de cave solemnly offered them a glass of nonvintage champagne. Maxine thanked him with the grace and dignity that befitted her new position, and Charles then led her back down the stairs and along the black and white marble-tiled corridor toward the dim hall.

  Suddenly he grabbed Maxine’s wrist and pulled her into a dark recess under the staircase. He swiftly unbuttoned her primrose jacket, dipped both his hands into her lace bra and stopped her gasp of horror with his mouth. She felt his tongue pushing against hers. Then Charles pulled his head back and said in a normal voice, “The first bottling generally takes place sometime after April and we add a little cane sugar to the blend to start a second fermentation.” He started to kiss her nipples. Maxine felt physically helpless, but as she groaned with reluctant pleasure, Charles suddenly withdrew his hands and buttoned her up as fast as a lady’s maid.

  Weak with desire, Maxine whispered, “You mustn’t, you really mustn’t . . . do that sort of thing.” But she didn’t sound convincing.

  Charles took her by one hand and led her down more stone steps, saying loudly, “The second fermentation is when the champagne acquires its sparkle. That sparkle is really gas. Fermentation builds up an explosive pressure of gas. So a good cork is vital.”

  Still speaking smoothly, he tugged her from the bottom of the staircase and into the shadows underneath it. Then he held her against his chest as, with his right hand, he felt under the primrose pleated skirt and tugged at her panties.

  “Off!” he muttered.

  “Charles! You must be mad, someone might see,” Maxine protested.

  “Off!” Charles ordered, giving the lace a vicious tug. Nervously, Maxine wriggled out of them and tried to pick up the scrap of yellow lace, but Charles wouldn’t let her bend down. “I’m not having you turn into a prim little countess who worries about what people think all the time, like my sisters,” he said.

  Then he froze as they heard footsteps approaching them. Maxine shut her eyes, and waited for the humiliation! The footsteps advanced and paused, then she heard a door open and bang. Charles released his grip. Maxine quickly bent down, picked up her panties and stuffed them into her linen shoulder bag. Without saying anything, Charles took her by the arm and hurried her toward the elevator at the back of the hall, saying in a normal voice, “I hope you’re going to be warm enough: I warned you yesterday that the cellars are cold. Shall I get a coat from the car?”

  A youth in a white overall appeared behind them and sprang forward to open the iron grille of the two-person elevator.

  “No, no, Charles, stop fussing,” Maxine said in a wobbly voice for the benefit of the respectful boy as he closed the grille shut behind them. Charles pressed a green button, the little lift started to jerk downward and, as Maxine half-expected, his hand was under her skirt, his thumb moving in a steady rhythm against her flesh. The lift jerked downward. Charles’s other hand was clamped around her naked buttocks, the back of her skirt was caught up against the lift. She’d never get those creases out, Maxine thought, it took hours to iron. “Until Dom Perignon came along in 1668, bottles were sealed with linen bungs dipped in olive oil, and of course this didn’t provide a hermetic seal,” Charles explained gravely. Oh, God, she could think of nothing except his fingers. Now she’d risk humiliation rather than have him stop. Charles went on, as if he was having a conversation with his mother. “Dom Perignon’s brilliant idea was to wet a bit of cork to make it pliable, then ram it into the neck of the bottle.” Maxine jumped and quivered as he continued, “The cork sealed the bottle and stopped the gas escaping.”

  The elevator stopped with a swift, gentle shudder. Charles pulled back the iron grille. “The pressure inside a bottle of champagne is about the same as the tire pressure of a bus . . . so you see how important the cork is.”

  Maxine staggered out, smoothing down her skirt. Breathless and wobbly, she moved along the cellars, past thousands of bottles tilted neck downward in racks against the green-tinged chalk walls. Charles waved one hand toward the neat, lustrous rows, the little green soldiers of his empire. “We leave the bottles of blended wine in cellars for a year or two, then they’re put in these special racks so that the sediment from the wine drains down slowly onto the cork.”

  “Onto the cork,” echoed Maxine, in a dazed voice. A drip fell from the ceiling onto her cheek, then Charles tugged her by the wrist into one of the dim, bottle-filled bays and again unbuttoned Maxine’s jacket. This time she didn’t protest.

  “Yes,” said Charles gravely, “onto the cork.” He pulled her back into the main passage and they walked down the long, wide cellar toward a row of silent men in navy sweaters and overalls, all working with their backs to Maxine as they swiftly twisted the bottles.

  Maxine watched the bottles slowly move into the shining maw of a steel machine. Somewhat to her disappointment, Charles was now behaving perfectly. But he moved her closer to the machine so that it hid their bodies from the workers beyond, who could only see their heads. Then Charles grabbed her hand and held it against him, so that Maxine could feel his mounting excitement. Maxine grasped him as Charles continued to talk in a normal voice. “When the cork is removed, the frozen sediment comes out, clinging to it. Clever idea isn’t it?” His body shuddered at the touch of her fingers as he droned on in the bored, singsong voice of a tourist guide. “After that, the wine is sniffed to check that it’s still in good condition, and finally, as you’ll see in the next bay, these men give it a sending-off dose—that’s a tiny quantity of sweetened liqueur made from old wine and cane sugar. . . .”

  He gave a great contented sigh. After a moment, they moved to the next bay where Charles picked up a beaker of liqueur and gave it to Maxine to sniff. “You don’t add much if you want a brut wine, which is generally the best wine a firm makes,” he said. “The liqueur content is increased, according to how sweet you want your wine to be—extra dry, dry, demi-doux and doux, which is disgustingly sweet and will never be served at my table.”

  “Our table,” said Maxine as they moved on. She added, “I think I could make a batch by myself now.”

  “You haven’t seen the last working bay. There it is ahead of us. This is where the bottles are recorked and we fit those little wire nozzles over the cork to keep them in place. After that we rest the bottles for a few years in those cellars at the far end, then we label them and send them off to customers.”

  Maxine looked along the high-arched tunnel; either side was lined with deep bays stacked high with champagne, the black green bottle bases facing toward them in an endless rich pattern. Suddenly, Charles tugged her into another deep bay. He pinned her shoulders against the chalk walls where they could be seen by anyone who happened to pass, but Maxine was now heedless of anything except her urgent need for Charles, and their sexual tension swiftly built up to a climax as violently explosive as the cork bursting from a bottle of champagne.

  18

  WITHIN THREE MONTHS of her marriage, Maxine found to her joy that she was pregnant. Unfortunately, she felt ill throughout her pregnancy, so all her plans for the chateau had to be postponed and she did the minimum work for Paradis. She thanked her lucky stars for the stolid, tough Christina, who continued to run the day-to-day aspects of their business. As Maxine grew larger and larger, she felt dull and sleepy. “I thought I was going to have a wonderful complexion and be radiantly serene,” she shouted to Charles from her bathroom, “not become bovine and lethargic. No, don’t you dare come in, I’m heaving myself into this disgusting support corset. I think I’m going to give up clothes and just lie around in a negligee on a sofa like Madame Récamier for the ne
xt few months.”

  In an easy birth, she had a son, Gerard. Happily she and Charles counted his toes and analyzed his features. “He’s got your nose,” said Charles fondly.

  “But your mouth,” Maxine added.

  “And my hair, though not nearly enough,” said Charles, tenderly stroking the soft, pale, beige silken head.

  “I had no idea that being a father would make me so happy,” Charles admitted four months later. He tugged at Maxine’s cream chiffon negligee and softly kissed the base of her throat.

  “Then you’re going to be twice as happy, Charles.”

  Suddenly alert, he sat up and looked at her questioningly. “Goodness. You don’t mean . . . but Gerard is only four months old!”

  “Goodness had nothing to do with it,” said Maxine, slyly quoting Mae West.

  This time the birth was extremely difficult. She was in labour for three agonizing days, at the end of which she gave birth to another son, whom they christened Oliver.

  The birth left Maxine exhausted and depressed. Her stitches were painful whenever she moved. She burst into tears over trivial matters and she snapped at Charles. As she knew perfectly well that she was a very lucky woman with no reason to feel sorry for herself, she felt secretly anxious about the melancholy that swamped her. Was there something wrong with her? Charles quietly spoke to the doctor about her tears and tantrums. She hadn’t been as bad as this after the birth of Gerard. The doctor said that it would probably be a couple of months before she recovered fully from the birth. Could not her sister or her mother or a friend come and stay to cheer her up? Someone she’d known a long time and with whom she felt comfortable?

  As soon as the doctor departed, Charles reached for the telephone. Pagan was still in Egypt, and there was no answer from Kate, but he got Judy on his first try. He explained the situation.

  “I can’t possibly drop everything and come immediately,” said Judy. “I’m a hired hand, remember? But I’m due for a vacation, and anyway, I’ll be over in Paris for the collections in two months’ time. I could come for a couple of weeks before then, if you like.”

  Maxine burst into tears when she heard of Judy’s visit. She didn’t want to see anyone. Harassed, Charles took his dogs for a long walk in the rain. Women! However, as the weeks passed, his wife slowly grew stronger and more cheerful and by the time Judy arrived, Maxine longed to see her again.

  Every morning Judy ate breakfast in Maxine’s blue silk bedroom, while Maxine lay back against lace-trimmed pillows beneath the billowing blue silken swags that fell from the gilded coronet fixed high above her head. In the morning they went for a short, brisk walk, pushing the two high baby carriages before them over the frozen ground of the park. In the afternoon they sat and chatted in the nursery.

  From the moment Judy arrived, Maxine began to recover her spirits. She loved Judy’s ability to go straight to the point. “You sharpen my wits, Judy,” Maxine said, with admiration and a twinge of regret. “You make me focus on what is important, as opposed to what is merely urgent. And you do this naturally, whereas I find it takes a great effort of will on my part. Every day when I get to my desk, I find it covered with problems. It’s so tempting to avoid the big ones, and so much easier to occupy oneself with little difficulties.”

  “That’s because you’re fat, idle and happily married,” said Judy.

  “I’m all for marriage,” Maxine yawned. “Why don’t you try it?”

  “Oh, because I don’t like very young men or very old men: I like middle-aged men, but nobody will admit to being one.”

  “No, seriously, Judy, haven’t you got some special fellow? You never mention anyone, but surely . . .”

  “I know plenty of men, Maxine, but I can’t seem to get particularly interested in any of them, that’s all. I go out on dates but I never seem to fall in love. I see other women do it all the time, but it just doesn’t seem to happen to me. Anyway, I’m on the road so much that a serious love affair would be a geographical impossibility.”

  “You don’t think that perhaps you’re frightened of giving yourself to a man?”

  “Oh, shove it, Maxine. No, really, there are other things to life, you know. . . . I’m only twenty-two! Men of my age don’t go mooning around and worrying if they’re not in love. I suspect that women overrate falling in love.”

  “Only because you haven’t yet!”

  “If you don’t shut up,” Judy said amiably, “I shall feel obliged to throw this glass of champagne at you.” She raised her long-stemmed, tulip-shaped glass as the cold red sun touched the horizon. “Incidentally, how come you don’t have real champagne glasses?”

  “That is a real champagne glass,” said Maxine, clasping her hands behind her head and leaning back against the buttoned crimson velvet of her chair. “The traditional glass is not supposed to be wide and shallow. A wide glass prevents the concentration of the bouquet, and the wine goes flat more quickly because such a large surface of it is exposed to the air.” She yawned, stretched and scooped up the black cat that lay in front of the fire. “You see, I now know every bloody thing there is to know about champagne.”

  Judy stared into the blazing fire, glanced around the room and then looked at Maxine. “You got it all, kid,” she said, grinning.

  “And Heavens, I work for it!” Maxine suddenly looked harassed and the cat stiffened in surprise. “It’s damned hard work running a home, no matter what the size is. In fact, I think it’s easier to run a business, because your business shows results. Nobody notices housework unless you don’t do it, then they complain. And business hours are generally only eight hours a day, five days a week, while housekeeping is sixteen hours, every damn day of the year, if you’re running a home with young children.” She sighed, “Well, at least I no longer have any guilt about being a mother who goes out to work—although Charles’s sisters never stop sniffing about it.”

  She relaxed again and the cat settled down. “Do you remember, after I had Gerard I also became a bit depressed for no apparent reason? Charles was working hard, running a house was no longer a novelty, I was no longer a young bride showing off. . . . I felt guilty because I was depressed. I thought it must mean that I was not maternal, that I was a bad mother, otherwise I would have been happy with my baby, wouldn’t I?”

  An ironic smile shadowed her face. “So I started to cheer myself up with little snacks between meals, not exactly in secret, but when nobody else was around, you understand. . . . You remember that chocolate is my great weakness? I used to nibble chocolate cakes and chocolate ice cream, drink hot chocolate with thick cream. . . . When I put on weight, I simply stopped standing on the scales, and then I became pregnant again so fast that I had a good excuse for getting . . . well, I never used the word ‘fat’ to myself, of course.”

  She looked up, still stroking the cat on her lap. “Then one day, walking along the street, I caught sight of myself in a shop window—and I didn’t recognise myself! I tell you it was a real shock and I thought, heavens, I’ll soon be as tubby as I was when I first went to Switzerland. That had been puppy fat and not difficult to shed, but after two babies, the doctor warned me it would be more difficult.”

  The cat stretched her front paws and extended her little claws and dug them into Maxine’s knee. She gave it a little slap and continued, “So in order to take my mind off the diet he gave me, I went back to work at Paradis. I worked there every single day for a month, and by the end of the month, to my surprise I found that I was happy again! I hadn’t had time to eat, or feel bored or sorry for myself.” She yawned. “So when I’ve stopped feeding Oliver, I’m going back to work. I’ve argued the case with myself and the doctor and we’ve decided that it’s better the babies don’t have a twenty-four-hour-a-day, depressed, overweight, worried mother. Sixteen hours a day is enough time to spend at home.”

  “You get top marks for sheer ingratitude,” Judy said. “Here you are, twenty-four years old, with a marvellous husband, two adorable babies, a flouri
shing business, a title and a chateau. What more could you want?”

  “Money,” said Maxine simply.

  “But I thought you were rich!”

  “That’s the other reason I went back to work. Paradis pays for all our personal expenses, although the profits really ought to be going back into the business. Christina is getting angry about it, and I don’t blame her. But what can I do? We’re poor. It’s almost our only income.”

  She hesitated, and then in a rush she said, “To tell you the truth, we probably can’t afford to live here much longer. That’s why I’m so glad to have you staying here now. Charles is as stubborn as a mule, he refuses to sell the chateau, but it’s going to fall around our ears at any moment. He insists that one day the vineyards are going to show a profit, but the harvest is mortgaged to the hilt, so it won’t make any difference if we have a good one, and we’ll be in dreadful trouble if we don’t. Papa is going to discuss the business with Charles this weekend. He’s an exporter, so it might be possible for him to improve our foreign sales. But there’s so much competition in the champagne industry, and nobody’s ever heard of de Chazalle champagne. They buy from Moet or one of the other big firms.”

  Judy said thoughtfully, “You must forgive me if I point out that you have six indoor servants. That’s not what I call poor.”

  “Yes, but the two maids are essential to clean this vast place. Charles needs a secretary. The children need a nanny if I am to work. The four of them need a cook, and five servants need a housekeeper to supervise them.”

  Judy raised a skeptical eyebrow, lay back against her chair and looked into the hypnotic flames of the fire. “Maxie, I know you’re sitting on a gold mine. I can feel it. I just can’t quite work out how you can make money, except that you’ve given me such a wonderful time here that I find myself thinking I would far rather stay here than at the grandest hotel. This last month has been a dream. I’ve never enjoyed myself so much in my life. And I’ve never felt so comfortable and so happy. You’re a very gifted hostess, Maxine. Wouldn’t it be possible to run the chateau as a sort of hotel, perhaps not exactly a hotel, but the sort that’s run for paying guests who would like to experience castle life exactly as if they were private guests? For, say, sixty dollars each a weekend, you could give people a fantastic time!”