Free Bruno 02 - The Dark Vineyard by Martin Walker Page B

the adoption and get back to you. And the boy won’t want any more shocks for a while. I know he wasn’t close to his mother, but her death will still take some getting used to.”
    Cresseil nodded. “His new girlfriend will help with that. She’s a pretty thing, that Jacqueline, but she’s got a sharp mind. Wise beyond her years.”
    “Maybe a bit too sharp for Max, you mean?”
Certainly too sharp for me
, Bruno thought.
And too flirtatious
. “Do you want a hand up?” Bruno asked.
    “No, I can totter off on my own. But I’d be glad if you could take the table and chairs back to the porch. And the glasses. You can have that wine, if you like. It’s not bad, is it?”
    “Not bad at all, but it tastes pretty much like your wine always did.”
    The old man grinned. “You ought to hear young Max talk about the way we make the wine around here,” he said. “He’s read all the books, and goes on about cold fermentation and stainless-steel vats and malolactic something-or-other that I never heard of. I tell him that old wooden wine vat was good enough for my father and for his father before that and it’s good enough for me.”
    “I suppose all that new equipment would cost quite a lot.”
    “It’s not so much that. I’m not a winemaker; I always just made enough for myself and the family, with a bit left over for friends. That was how everybody around here did it in the old days. We all got together and helped each other pick the grapes, and we’d all tread them together, all the young people, and then we’d all come together again for the bottling. Those were happy times, Bruno. That’s how I fell in love with my Annette, treading the grapes together. That’s why most of the babies used to be born in May, nine months after the
vendanges
. Did you know that?”
    Smiling, Bruno shook his head. He hadn’t known that, but he could understand how it must have been.
    “It was the harvest of the Liberation, September of ’44. The Germans had been kicked out and De Gaulle was back in Paris. It was a great time, and a great harvest that year.”
    The old man paused, his eyes looking across the valley into a distant past, a smile playing gently among his wrinkles.
    “Of course I’d known Annette before when she was a schoolgirl; she lived just up the valley,” he went on. “But treading the grapes that September, seeing her blond hair tumblingdown around her shoulders and her lovely white legs with the grape juice running down them … I could have licked it all off, I tell you. Ah, Bruno, she was a real beauty, so delicate, and you could tell from the way she liked treading the grapes that she was a lively one. I was young and strong and proud of myself after being in the Maquis, and all the girls looked up to those of us who had fought the Germans. Well, you can imagine. We got married in November, and the baby came along in May. I was in the army by then, in Germany.”
    “So what did it do for the wine, all those bare legs and passion in the vats?”
    “I don’t know what it did for the wine, but it certainly made me feel a lot better when I thought about Annette’s legs each time I had a drink. It still does.”

10
    Bruno was shamelessly looking forward to meeting the business consultant from Paris again. But he kept a straight face as he shook hands with the American, Bondino, and then watched Dupuy blush as Bruno announced to the room: “But of course I know Monsieur Dupuy, and his reputation as a connoisseur of fine wines.”
    They were gathered in the council chamber, a long glass-roofed room that had been built onto the wide balcony of the
mairie
and which looked down to the old stone bridge and the length of the river’s slow bend. Bruno noted that the heir to the Bondino company, Fernando, was about his own height, but sleek and slightly plump with thinning dark hair cut very short. Close to thirty, Bruno estimated, perhaps a little younger. He was dressed in a black linen suit with an