Eight Hundred and Forty-Five

It took the valley about thirty hours.

By Monday the co-operative’s driver was calling me signora instead of signorina, which he thought was a joke and which I have not forgiven him for. On Tuesday a woman I have known since I was six asked me, in the bread queue, whether I would be keeping the house or moving down to Pianello, and had to have it explained to her that a man kissing you behind a café does not come with an address change.

Ettore said one thing about it, on the Monday morning, with his hand on the side of the oak.

“I have known him since he was ten years old and I will not be asked about him in this village,” he said. “So do not expect me to have an opinion, padrona, because I have one and you would not enjoy it, and I am not going to make you carry it around during a bank year.”

Which is, as far as I can work out, the kindest thing anybody did for me that entire month.

Paola Vitali’s letter came on the Tuesday. Would I come to Como on Thursday the nineteenth at eleven, as the committee had now reviewed the file.

She had come up my hill in a car that was too low for it. I noticed that she did not offer to come again.

· · ·Scene break

Vallese’s offices are on the second floor of a building near the station, and the room has a long table in it and nothing on the walls, and Sacchi was already sitting down when I came in, which he had not done in my father’s tasting room.

Paola did not waste any of it.

“Eight hundred and forty-five thousand,” she said. “Down a hundred and thirty-five. The ambassador contract is eighteen months, not three years, with a review. And completion is conditional on Signor Rinaldi’s three-year contract being executed on the same day as the transfer, with a key-person clause and a non-compete over this shore.”

I had the sheet in front of me. I read it twice, which I can do now without my hands going, and that is worth something.

“On the twenty-ninth of October you told me this estate’s name was worth more than the land under it.”

“It is. The name has not moved. The risk has.”

“Say the risk out loud, then. You told me on the terrace you would.”

She put her pen down.

“Very well. The committee looked at four things. One: the technical direction of this estate sits entirely with a man who has no equity in it and no contract with it. Two: the banking history sits with the same man — our enquiry turned up twelve private payments into a loan account, which the owner could not explain in her own tasting room. Three: the owner is twenty-six and ended her professional registration in October, which our people confirmed with the board in four days. And four,” she said, “as of Saturday evening the whole of your village is discussing your private life, and my driver had that from a woman in the café inside an hour of arriving on Monday.”

“So it’s the fourth one.”

“It is all four. The fourth is what turns them into a price.” She was not enjoying it. I would have preferred it if she had been. “Understand what my committee sees. It does not see a romance. It sees an asset whose value depends on one man’s hands, and a seller who cannot be assumed to negotiate at arm’s length from him. If you were fifty-eight and he were your husband of thirty years, that would be a structure, and structures can be priced upwards. A marriage is a fact. What you have is a rumour, and a rumour only ever moves a number one way.”

“And if I told you there was nothing in it?”

“I would not believe you, and if I did believe you I could not put it in the file.” She shrugged, very slightly. “This is the part people find offensive. It is not an opinion about you. Nobody at this table thinks you are a foolish girl. It is a discount for an uncertainty, and you are the uncertainty, and I am the one who has to say the number out loud because Sacchi will not.”

“Sacchi’s very quiet for a man who costs four hundred euros an hour.”

“He is worth six,” said Paola Vitali. “Eight hundred and forty-five. It stands until the fifteenth of December. After that the option lapses on the thirty-first, the bank does whatever the bank does, and I will make you a third offer in February that neither of us will enjoy.”

“Can I ask you something technical?”

“You can ask.”

“If the lower parcel weren’t in it. The meadow, the boathouse, the two-room cottage — if I kept the four terraces and 214/c and sold you nothing else. What would you pay?”

Sacchi looked up for the first time that morning, which told me it was a real question.

“Nothing,” said Paola. “Not a euro. Do you know what my marketing people photograph, signorina? Not a vine. Nobody has ever bought a bottle because of a vine. They photograph water and an old boathouse and a woman in a linen shirt walking out of a stone door. The terraces are the cost of the picture.”

“Thank you,” I said, and wrote it on the back of her own sheet, and she watched me write it and did not ask why, and I have wondered since whether she knew before I did.

“You have not said yes or no this morning,” she said, at the door.

“No,” I said. “I haven’t.”

· · ·Scene break

I drove back up the shore and went into the bank at Menaggio at three, because I had made the appointment a fortnight before and because I was not going to cancel it and sit in my car.

Venturini has had the agricultural files at that branch for eleven years. He is a courteous man with a photograph of a boat on his desk and he has never once been anything but pleasant to me, and I would like to say that plainly before I write down what he said.

I asked whether the bank would stand the loan over into 2027 on a crop plan.

“On its own? No.” He turned his screen slightly, which they do to show you they are not hiding anything. “The file went to head office in the October for review. What the committee will want by the end of December is one of three things. A binding contract of sale. Or the option exercised, which discharges most of it. Or” — and here he became very careful — “continuity of technical direction on the file. A named registered oenologist, with a personal guarantee.”

“There’s a registered oenologist’s signature on my declaration.”

“There is. As a favour, I understand.” He did not say it nastily. That is the thing I keep coming back to. “Signorina, forgive me. You are no longer entered as a practicant. I am not asking why; the board’s list is public and my assistant checks it twice a year. But it means that the technical direction of Le Rive is, on paper, a man who is not on your deed and has no obligation to you. A committee in Milan reads that as an estate run by a person who could leave on a Tuesday.”

“He hasn’t left in two years without a contract.”

“I know. I have had Signor Rinaldi on the telephone about this file more often than I have had you.” He said it apologetically, which was the worst of it. “Everybody assumed he would exercise, you know. I assumed it. Your father told me in 2019 that he had made arrangements, and I took that to mean a partner.”

“Everybody’s assumption has cost me a hundred and thirty-five thousand euros this morning.”

Venturini folded his hands.

“The committee does not doubt you,” he said. “It would simply be more comfortable with a signature it recognises.”

There it is. That is the politer version, and it is the same sentence Paola Vitali had said to me at eleven o’clock with the varnish off it, and I sat in a branch office at Menaggio with a photograph of somebody’s boat in front of me and understood that the two halves of my life had stopped being two halves.

Because it is the same problem. It is exactly, precisely, one problem. If I keep him, I am a girl being run by her father’s partner and everything I do belongs to him. If I let him go, I am an estate with no technical signature and a bank that will not wait. There is no arrangement of those pieces in which I am simply a winemaker who owns a vineyard.

I asked Venturini one more thing on the way out, and I asked it lightly, because I had already decided I would tell Theo everything and I wanted to know what I was telling him into.

“Has he rung you? Recently.”

“Not since September.” He stood up to see me out. “Why?”

“No reason.”

· · ·Scene break

I got home at half five with the light gone and told him all of it.

All of it. Sitting at my father’s table with the sheet from Como flat between us, in order, the numbers first: eight hundred and forty-five, minus a hundred and thirty-five, eighteen months instead of three years, the key-person clause, the fifteenth of December, and then Venturini’s three roads and the sentence about a signature it recognises.

I did not soften one word of it, because we had an agreement, and because I have got very tired of being managed and I was not going to start doing it to him.

He listened the whole way through without moving.

“And the reasons,” he said at the end. “She gave you the reasons.”

“Four of them. The fourth was us.”

“Say the fourth one again.”

“Her driver had it from a woman in the café inside an hour,” I said. “Theo, it was always going to be like that. I said it on the bench before I kissed you. I knew the number would move. I did not know it would move a hundred and thirty-five thousand euros in five days, but I knew which way it went, and I did it anyway, and I would do it again this evening.”

“It’s your vineyard they’re pricing.”

“It’s me they’re pricing. The vineyard is the thing they’ve found to write it on.”

And then — and this is what I want to put down, because it is the only part of that whole day I would keep — I found that I was all right.

Not brave. Not calm. All right, the way you are all right in a cellar at eleven in the morning when a man tells you that the fruit was better than the wine.

Because I have had the worst true thing said to me in that whitewashed room by somebody who was not trying to spare me, and I survived it, and it made the wine better the next time. So I know what a true assessment sounds like. I know its weather. And what Paola Vitali read out to me in Como was not that. It was a good, honest, well-built number with one thing inside it that is not true, which is that a woman of twenty-six who called two picks right this autumn cannot be the judgement in her own vineyard.

I said that to him, more or less, and worse than I have written it.

“You taught me the difference,” I said. “That’s the joke of it. The only reason I can sit here and tell the difference between being told the truth and being discounted is that for two years you refused to flatter me. You gave me the one instrument that gets me through this afternoon.”

He did not answer that. He got up and went to the window and stood with his back to the room the way he does, and I let him have his ninety seconds, because I know the man.

What I should have noticed is that it was more than ninety seconds, and that he was not looking at anything.

“How long does Vitali’s offer stand?” he said.

“The fifteenth of December.”

“And Venturini said the option, a contract of sale, or a guarantee.”

“A named oenologist on the file with a personal guarantee. Yes.”

“Which days is he in the Menaggio office?”

“Tuesdays and Thursdays,” I said.

“All right,” he said, and came back to the table, and put the sheet from Como square with the edge of it, and asked me whether I had eaten, and then went down to lock the press house.

I told him everything. Every number, every road, every door and who was standing at it — because we had agreed that nothing about me would be decided without me, and I had never in my life been so pleased with an agreement.

He was gone before six the next morning, and there was coffee on the wall of the crush pad, too hot to hold.