Row Nine

The rain was due at four the next afternoon and the pick was mine to call, which meant that for the first time in my life there was nobody standing behind me whose face I could read instead of the fruit. I went out to row nine at six in the morning to taste it on my own, because if I got it wrong we lost a third of the nebbiolo, and the only argument I had left for keeping Le Rive was that I could run it.

Row nine is where the second terrace narrows and the clay gives out into stone. Eleven vines, all of them stunted, all of them four days ahead of everything around them. My father used them the way other men use a barometer. Row nine is lying to you, he would say, every September, and then he would go and do exactly what row nine told him.

I took a berry from the shoulder of a cluster and one from the tip, which is the only honest way to do it, and I chewed them separately with my eyes shut. The skin on the shoulder berry went in three bites and tasted of the inside of a plum stone. The seeds were brown all the way through and crunched like something toasted. The tip berry still had a thread of green at the seed and a sourness under the tongue that would have been a fault in a fortnight and was, that morning, the last bit of structure I had.

23.4 Brix at the refractometer the evening before. pH 3.32. Acid at six point one and falling faster than I liked, because it had been twenty-nine degrees for six days and the forecast had a front coming down off the Alps with forty millimetres in it.

Forty millimetres on fruit at 23.4 is not a disaster. Forty millimetres on fruit at 23.4 followed by four days of warm wet air is botrytis on the tight-shouldered clusters and a decision made for me by a fungus.

“You’re doing the thing with your jaw.”

Theo came up the row from the bottom end with two coffees and the left knee of his trousers already wet through, which meant he had been down on the lower terrace clearing the drain at the corner of the cottage before either of us had had caffeine. He had cut his hand on something. He had not done anything about it.

“What thing.”

“The thing where you taste one berry and sentence eleven hundred vines.” He handed me a cup. It was too hot to hold and I held it, because after two harvests I had learned that lukewarm coffee is, to Theo Rinaldi, a small moral failure, and there is no arguing with a man about his religion at six in the morning.

“Front’s coming Thursday afternoon.”

“Thursday afternoon,” he agreed. “Four, maybe five. It’ll sit over the water for two days because there’s nothing behind it to push it through.”

“So.”

“So.” He drank. He looked down the row past my shoulder, which he always did, at the netting or the wire or the lake or whatever it is men look at when they have decided not to look at you.

“Theo. Say pick or say wait.”

“No.”

I turned round properly. “I’m not asking you to sign anything. I’m asking you what you’d do.”

“I know what you’re asking.” He turned the cup a quarter turn in his hand, a thing he does when he is choosing the shortest possible sentence. “And if I say it, you’ll do it, and in three weeks when the wine is good you won’t know whether it was good because of you. You’ll have got it right and you won’t believe it. I’m not spending a vintage teaching you that.”

“That’s a very elegant way of saying you don’t know either.”

“It is,” he said, “and it isn’t.”

He went off down the row to look at the netting he had already looked at. I stood there with two dead berry skins in my palm and a cup of coffee scalding through to my fingers, and I was angry at him in the specific, useless way you are angry at somebody who has just refused to take something off you.

· · ·Scene break

I found Ettore at the crush pad with the destemmer in pieces, which is where Ettore is at seven in the morning between the first of September and the middle of October, and has been since before I could reach the top wire.

He is sixty-three. He worked for my father for thirty years. In all that time I do not believe anybody in my family ever asked him a question they did not already know the answer to.

“Ettore. If it were yours. What would you do.”

He put the screwdriver down. He did not pick it up again for a long moment, and that pause is the part of the morning I have thought about most since.

“The bottom two terraces Thursday, first light,” he said. “Twelve pickers, not eight, and the small crates. The top terrace you leave. It is four days behind and it is on stone and it will take the rain better than you think, and after the rain you will get a week of north wind and it will be the best fruit on this hill.” He wiped his hands. “Your father would have picked everything. He could not bear to look at fruit in the rain.”

“And you never told him.”

“Thirty years I was told,” Ettore said. “You are the first one to ask me, and I find I have no practice at it.” He picked the screwdriver back up. “Do not make a habit of it in front of the pickers. I would have to be right.”

So I made the call myself, at twenty past seven, standing in the gravel with the phone in one hand and my father’s old picking book in the other. Twelve for Thursday at half five. The small crates. The co-operative’s truck for the Friday, because if the bottom terraces came in on Thursday the press would be running all night and I wanted the trailer gone before the road got slick.

Nobody clapped. That is not what happens. You say a date out loud to a woman in Pianello who organises the pickers and then you go and clean a destemmer, and the whole of the rest of your life hangs off it, and the destemmer still needs cleaning.

· · ·Scene break

Serena Nardi rang at ten past nine. I had my arm inside the hopper to the elbow.

“It’s done,” she said. No greeting. Serena has never in her life said how are you to a person she intends to give information to. “The court signed on Friday. I have the schedule in front of me. Congratulations, Marisol, you own eleven hundred vines, four terraces, a boathouse, a two-room cottage with a roof I would not stand under, and two hundred and fourteen thousand euros.”

I sat down on the edge of the pad with my arm still wet.

Two years. Two years of certified copies and a regional court that could not decide whether a man who had lived on a hillside for fifty-one years was domiciled on it. Two years of being la figlia di Bianchi, who owned nothing and signed nothing and was tolerated at the table because of who had died.

“Say the number again.”

“Two hundred and fourteen thousand, on the replanting loan from 2019. The interest is not the problem. The problem is the clause your father accepted in exchange for the rate, which is that the bank may call the balance in full at the end of any calendar year with sixty days’ notice.” Paper moved. “They have not called it. I am telling you they can, and that the year ends on the thirty-first of December, and that I would rather you heard that from me in September than from them in November.”

“All right.”

“There is also succession tax, which is smaller and which I will deal with.”

“All right, Serena.”

“And there is clause eleven.”

She said it in exactly the tone she had used for the roof, which is how I know she did not expect it to be anything.

“Clause eleven grants Signor Rinaldi an option to purchase forty per cent of the estate, at a price fixed in the will, exercisable by him at any time up to and including the thirty-first of December of this year. The price is one hundred and eighty thousand euros.” A pause. “It is a generous instrument. Your father priced it at the 2019 valuation, before the replanting. If he exercises, the money goes to the loan and you are left with thirty-four thousand and a partner. It is, frankly, the most sensible thing in the document.”

The destemmer made the noise it makes when the belt is loose. Somewhere down the hill a strimmer started.

“Serena. When was that written.”

“The will was executed in the March before he died.”

“And who has seen it.”

“You. Me. Signor Rinaldi, who was sent the relevant extract by my office in the November after the death, because the option is his and he is entitled to notice of it.” She stopped. I could hear her working out, several seconds too late, what she had just told me. “I assume he has discussed it with you.”

“No.”

The silence on a lawyer is a particular thing. It has weight, like a full barrel.

“Then I have just done something I make a point of not doing,” Serena said, “which is deliver news. Come in on Monday. Bring your identity card and do not bring him.”

I said something. I don’t remember what. I put the phone face down on the concrete and sat there with the sun coming over the ridge behind the house and my arm drying in it, and I did the arithmetic, because I always do the arithmetic when there is something I do not want to feel yet.

Two hundred and fourteen. Minus one hundred and eighty. Thirty-four thousand euros standing between me and everything my father spent his life on. One signature. Three and a half months.

He had known for twenty-two months.

Twenty-two months of six o’clock coffee. Of I never disagree with the woman holding the density meter. Of standing at the end of a row saying nothing while I talked myself round to a decision, with a piece of paper in a drawer somewhere that could have ended the whole conversation.

· · ·Scene break

He came up to the crush pad at half eleven with the drain rods over one shoulder and the cut on his hand still not dealt with.

“The cottage gutter’s gone at the join,” he said. “I can patch it, or we can do it properly in November and it’ll cost three hundred.”

“Patch it.”

“Right.” He set the rods against the wall, squared them so they wouldn’t fall, and then stood there in a way he does not usually stand. “Ettore says you’ve called it for Thursday. Bottom two, top terrace left.”

“I have.”

“Twelve pickers?”

“Twelve. Small crates.”

He nodded slowly, once, the way you nod at a sum that has come out. And then — and I want to be fair to him, because I have gone over this morning more times than is good for anybody — he looked at me directly, which he does perhaps twice a year, and said, “That’s the right call, Marisol. I’d have argued about the top terrace and I’d have been wrong.”

Two years I had been waiting for a sentence like that.

“Serena rang,” I said.

Something went out of his face. Not much. If you had not spent two harvests learning the man the way you learn a vineyard — which corner holds the frost, which vine always sulks — you would have seen nothing at all.

“And?”

“It’s sorted. Probate’s cleared. It’s mine, and so is the loan.”

“Marisol.” He said my name like a man putting a hand out for something. “That’s — good. That’s two years.”

“It is.”

And then he waited. He stood there with the drain rods and the ruined trousers and a cut hand, and he waited for me to say the other part, and I watched him wait, and I understood that he was doing it on purpose, that he had known which call I had just taken and what was in it, and that he had decided to let me be the one to open the subject.

“There’s a lot of paperwork,” I said. “Serena wants me Monday.”

“Do you want me to drive you?”

“No.”

I had never lied to him before. Not once, not even the small ones you tell people to get through a Tuesday. I had told him I could not taste a wine when I could, which is a different thing, and I will come to that.

He picked up the rods and went to patch the gutter, and I stood on the crush pad in the middle of my own vineyard, twenty-six years old and solvent for another hundred days, and thought: he has had a way out of this in his pocket for twenty-two months, and he has never once put his hand in.

I wanted to know why.

I want to be honest about the order of things, because it matters later, and because the version of this I told myself at the time was cleaner. I did not want to know why so that I could save the vineyard. I wanted to know why because a man I saw every day of my life had been carrying something about me, and had decided, without asking, that I was not to be told.