Gruppo Vallese

Paola Vitali came up the track on the twenty-ninth of October in a grey car that was too low for our gravel, with a lawyer called Sacchi in the passenger seat and a wooden box of sample bottles in the boot that she did not bring in, which I thought about afterwards.

I had written to her myself. My letter, my dates, my room. I had said Thursday the twenty-ninth at eleven and I had said the tasting room, and she had written back within a day saying that she would be delighted and that she would be bringing counsel, which is a thing people say when they want you to be frightened in advance and have the good manners to give you the chance.

She is forty-one and about my height and she wore boots that had been up a hill before. That is the first thing I will say for her, and I am going to say all of them, because it would be easier to write her as a woman from Milan with a folder and she was not that.

“Signorina Bianchi.” She took my hand properly. “Before anything else. I am sorry about your father. I met him twice. He told me to my face in 2019 that he would sell this hill to a Frenchman before he sold it to me, and then he gave me a glass of his 2011 and walked me round the whole thing for two hours.”

“That sounds like him.”

“It was a very good afternoon,” she said. “He was also entirely serious.”

· · ·Scene break

She wanted to walk it, so we walked it.

She did not do what people do. She did not say how beautiful, or ask about the view, or take photographs of the lake. She went up the bottom terrace with her head down looking at the soil between the rows and asked me what the bottom two blocks were replanted with after the 2019 frost and how many of them had taken, and when I said ninety-one per cent she said that is very high in a tone that meant she already knew the number and had wanted to see whether I did.

At the top wall she stopped and looked at the gap into 214/c and the cut brambles and the smoke-blacked ground where Ettore’s fire had been.

“And that is the parcel that is not in the vineyard,” she said.

“It is now.”

“Since when?”

“Since last Friday.”

Something moved in her face that I would call pleasure if I did not know better.

“Signorina, I will tell you what I am and then we can stop dancing,” she said. “I am not a wine lover. I have people for that. I am buying a hillside and a surname, and if I could have only one of them, it would be the surname. There are four hundred hillsides in this country. There are about eleven names on this lake that mean anything to a buyer in Hamburg, and your father’s is one of them, and it is going to be worth more in ten years than the land under it. I would like you to hear that from me on the terrace, so that nobody can tell you later that Vallese pretended to care about your soil.”

“Everybody tells me they’d keep the name.”

“Everybody would. I am telling you why,” said Paola Vitali, and walked on up the row.

Halfway along the third terrace she stopped again, at the place where you can see the whole of the top block, and Theo was up there on his own with the mower on the headland, which is where I had asked him to be.

I want that on the record too. I had said to him, on the Tuesday: I am going to do this one on my own. And he had said all right and gone up the hill, and he had been visible from every window of my house for two hours, a man in a blue jacket working a headland he had cut nine days before.

“That is Rinaldi,” said Paola.

“It is.”

“He has not come down.”

“No.”

“Mm,” she said, and wrote nothing down, which was worse.

· · ·Scene break

We did it in my father’s tasting room. Whitewash, north window, the table, nothing else. Sacchi had to put his folder on the table because there was nowhere else to put it, and I have since come to believe that my father built that room for exactly that.

The offer took her four minutes.

Nine hundred and eighty thousand euros for the whole of Schedule A. The loan discharged at completion out of the price. The succession tax settled by them. Completion in February.

The Bianchi name on the label in perpetuity — “in perpetuity, signorina, while the estate is bottled as a single label, which is Sacchi’s clause and not mine and I am not going to pretend it isn’t there.”

A three-year contract for me. Brand ambassador. Forty-eight thousand a year, forty days, travel paid. Fairs in Düsseldorf and Verona, tastings, the photograph on the back label, the granddaughter of the hill.

“And no technical authority,” I said.

“None. The blend, the pick, the press, the racking, the bottling, all of it sits with the winemaker.” She did not look away when she said it. “Which brings me to the second contract. Three years, Signor Rinaldi, as winemaker, on seventy-eight thousand and the cottage on the lower parcel. I have not spoken to him. I would not do that behind you.”

So there it was, in the room my father built so that nobody could lie in it. My father’s name on the bottle and Theo’s hands in the wine and me in Düsseldorf in a nice jacket talking about my grandfather.

They had gone to a great deal of trouble to work out what I was for, and the answer they had come to was: a photograph.

“There is one condition and it is not negotiable,” she said. “Your father’s will gives Signor Rinaldi an option over forty per cent at a fixed price until the thirty-first of December. I cannot buy a thing that a third party can take two fifths of. So the offer is conditional on that option being released in writing, or on it lapsing on the thirty-first. Whichever you prefer. I do not mind which.”

“You’ve thought about this very carefully,” I said.

“It is my job to be exact. You will notice I have not offered to make you a consultant, or to put you on a board, or to call you creative director. I could have. You would have signed it and been miserable in four years.” She closed her folder. “I would rather you were unhappy with me now.”

And then Sacchi, who had said nothing at all for an hour and a half, turned over two sheets in his own folder and asked his question.

“Signorina, a small thing for the file. The loan account shows twelve cash deposits, eleven hundred and eighty euros each, on or about the sixth of every month from October of last year. They are not from the estate account. Our committee will want the source of funds identified.” He had a pleasant voice. “Who has been paying your father’s loan?”

There is a particular noise the north window makes in that room when the wind comes round. It made it.

“I’ll send you the detail by Friday,” I said.

Sacchi wrote Friday on his sheet.

But Paola Vitali looked at me across my father’s table for about two seconds longer than she needed to, and I watched a woman who is very good at her job put something in a drawer for later, and there was nothing I could do about it, because I did not know the answer.

· · ·Scene break

They were gone by one. I did the pump-over on nothing, because there was nothing to pump over, and then I went into the office and got the grey box Serena’s clerk had copied for probate and found the loan statements and put them side by side on the floor.

They were there. Twelve of them. Versamento contanti, the sixth of the month, one thousand one hundred and eighty euros, October to September, fourteen thousand one hundred and sixty euros in total, and against each one, in the payer column, four letters and a full stop.

RINALDI T.

I sat on the floor of the office and went through the second drawer of the filing cabinet, the one with the bank folders in it, because he files everything and he has filed everything in this house for two years, and it took me about ninety seconds to find the envelope.

Twelve counterfoils. Carbon copies, the pink ones, each with the branch stamp on it, and each one made out by hand in the same block capitals he chalks on the tanks with. LE RIVE — MUTUO — VERSAMENTO. The sixth of October. The sixth of November. The sixth of December.

He had put them in the estate’s own file. He had kept the record straight, because he could not not keep the record straight, and it had been sitting in a drawer eleven metres from my desk for a year.

And then I did the other arithmetic, which is the one that took the floor out.

Tuesdays. For a year he had been going down to Domaso on Tuesdays, and I had said, out loud, to Ettore, that Theo had taken on some consultancy at last, and that it was good for him, and that he ought to be charging them more. Fourteen thousand one hundred and sixty euros is eleven hundred and eighty a month, and eleven hundred and eighty a month is a man giving somebody else’s cellar one day a week for a year.

· · ·Scene break

He was on the sorting table in the yard with the last of the crates.

I put the envelope down on the table between us and did not say anything, and he looked at it, and I watched him decide not to look away.

“Twelve,” I said.

“Twelve.”

“Since October.”

“The estate account was eleven hundred short in the October and it was going to be short every month after that,” he said. “Three missed payments and the branch writes to head office, and head office looks at the file, and the file has a clause in it that lets them call two hundred and fourteen thousand euros at the year end. They would have called it last January, Marisol. Not this one. Last.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know Venturini rings me when a file goes to head office,” he said, “because he has rung me about this one twice.”

“He rings you.”

Theo stopped. He had heard it as he said it.

“How long has he been ringing you?”

“Since the probate started.”

I stood in my own yard and let the whole of the last two years turn over and come back down the other way up.

Two glasses of wine on the kitchen table every night at nine o’clock for a year, poured before I came in, never once named. Twenty-two minutes on a wall on the ninth of September with my father’s body four metres away. Eleven hundred and eighty euros in cash on the sixth of the month, twelve times, in an envelope in my own filing cabinet.

“It’s the same thing,” I said.

“It is not the same—“

“It is exactly the same thing.” My voice was not doing what I wanted. “Every time, you work out what I can carry, and you take the rest of it away before I get there, and then you file the receipt. You have never once in two years come and stood in front of me and said: Marisol, this is bad, here is how bad, what do you want to do. Not once.”

“If I had told you in the October you would have stopped me.”

“Yes! Yes, I would have stopped you.” I was shouting by then, in the open, where Ettore could hear it from the press house and did not come out. “I’d have sold the small tractor. I’d have cut Nadia’s crew to eight. I’d have gone down to Venturini myself in a coat and been humiliated for an hour and come home and been sick and it would have been mine. You’ve spent a year keeping me out of my own disaster.”

“I kept the vineyard.”

“You kept me a child,” I said, “and I have just found out in front of a buyer’s lawyer that I do not know who pays my own debts.”

That got him. That one went in; I saw it.

“I didn’t think of that,” he said.

“No. You never do. That’s not cruelty, Theo, it’s worse than cruelty, it’s administration.” I picked the envelope back up because my hands wanted something. “Tomorrow morning. The office. You bring me every book you have. The estate ledgers, the co-operative statements, the bank file, your own account, the Domaso invoices, and the notebook out of your back pocket. All of it on that table, and I look at every page, and you sit there while I do it.”

He did not argue. He did not defend a single item of it.

“All right,” he said.

He said it in exactly the voice he had used in September about the gutter, when I told him to patch it instead of doing it properly: a man accepting an instruction he thinks is wrong, from a woman he intends to go on looking after anyway.