French Secrets

by Roisin McAuley

Genres: Family Life; Small Town & Rural

Synopsis

Love and fine wine go together, but in both cases it's important to recognise the real thing.

Will HONOR BRADY find true love with wine merchant HUGO LANCASTER, who sweeps her off to his chateau in France?

Her friend DIARMUID KEENAN doesn't think so. But then, he can't find the real thing himself.

Is winemaker DIDIER ROUSSEAU really interested in Honor - or in Hugo's chateau?

And will young American MELANIE MILLAR find roots in the same chateau through a wartime secret in her family past?

Release date: April 7, 2011

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 384

Sample

Crisp, zesty, mouth-watering. Light in body but full in flavour.

Hints of honeyed sweetness in the finish.

I’ve led an accidental kind of life right from the start. I should have been born in a tepee. My mom was living in a commune
in Marin County at the time. She intended a natural delivery using only evening primrose and tinctures of black cohosh – ‘known
as squawroot’ she told my appalled grandparents – to relieve pain. She was carrying a placard – ‘Bombs Kill Babies’ – on
an anti-Vietnam War march in San Francisco when she went into labour. Before she knew it, she was in an ambulance careering
to the nearest emergency room.


The second unintended event in my life was being left in the care of my grandparents, Bill and Dorothy McKitterick. Mom didn’t
mean to leave me permanently. It just turned out that way. A friend of a friend offered her a job in Washington DC. Mom thought
it was Washington State, which would have been fine because she could have commuted. We were all living in Portland, Oregon, at the time.


I don’t remember my father. I was only ten months old when he failed to return from the Woodstock Festival in August 1969.
He wrote, Sorry, Babe, on the back of a three-day ticket and posted it to Mom with a hundred dollars. I watched the film of the Festival a half
a dozen times at least in the hope of spotting him.


I have a photograph of Mom and Dad at their wedding on a headland near Mendocino. Barefooted, flowers in their hair. Dad’s
dark hair longer and curlier than Mom’s blonde bob. They were darling. Dad has his arm around Mom. They are smiling. They
look blissed out. Happy hippies.


I can see Mom’s bump in the photograph. She has her hand on it. On me, I guess. They had a naming ceremony for me – Sky Melanie
Moonbeam Star – at Cuffy’s Cove a month later.


The marriage lasted a year. Dad lasted three more years. Killed by honesty, his friend Cloudy told me when I got around to
tracking down the other members of The Saddlemen, the band Dad played with before he absconded. They cut one record for an
independent label. Eighteen mournful songs about cowboys and coalminers. None of them had that kind of background. They were
all city boys, the sons of businessmen and lawyers. Mom lost touch with them after Dad died in a road accident. Just like
his parents, Mom said.


But Dad’s was a different sort of accident. ‘His pills were cut with other stuff,’ Cloudy told me. ‘He got used to doubling
up. His dealer was busted, so he got himself a new dealer. Turns out the new dealer was honest. Your dad didn’t know that.
He doubled up. Overdosed.’ Cloudy stared at the grey carpet in his office all the time he was telling me this. When he finally
raised his head and met my gaze he said, ‘You’ve got Larry’s eyes. I hope you don’t have his luck.’


Cloudy is a lawyer in Los Angeles. I never met the other two members of the band. One of them is a session man in Nashville,
mostly in work, Cloudy said. The other is a dentist in San Diego. I exchange Christmas cards with Cloudy. He is the only connection
I have on my father’s side.


I have one photograph of my dad and me. I am sitting on his knee, my arms just managing to stretch around the tummy of a toffee-coloured
teddy bear. Dad’s arms easily encompass both me and the bear.


The photograph sits on a shelf in the studio apartment I rent in Monterey, not far from the winery where I work weekends.
I run the wine club and organise group tastings. Weekdays I live on campus at UC Davis. I drive to Monterey on Thursday or Friday, depending on classes. If I leave my apartment at five thirty
on Monday morning, I can be back on campus by nine.


UC Davis was accidental too. I intended to be a teacher like my grandmother. The summer after graduation, I got a job as a
harvest intern for a winery in the Carmel Valley. I fell in love with the landscape. The California hills reminded me of my
teddy bear. Soft, brown, rounded. I felt I could lay my head on them.


My boss,Vincent Briamonte, owner of Carmel Valley Cottontail Winery, promoted me to the tasting room. I had a good palate,
he said, and I explained things clearly to the customers. That October, Vincent offered me a job with time off to study viticulture
and oenology. That’s how I came to enrol at UC Davis instead of Chapman.


I’ve never really felt part of a family. Not like my friend Stephanie who has three sisters and a brother, or my boss Vincent
who is half Italian and has a battalion of nieces, nephews and cousins. My friend, Linda, has a stepfather and two half-sisters
but they all grew up together. I’m sixteen years older than my half-brother and half-sister and I don’t see them often.


I had a stepbrother for a while. Mom was briefly married to a pharmaceuticals expert called Hank, who was divorced and had
a son, Austin, from a previous marriage. Austin lived with his mother. I only met him once.


When Hank was posted to Singapore, Mom went too. They left me with Mom’s parents because I’d started pre-school in Portland
and it seemed like the best thing to do. I called my grandmother Grammy and my grandfather Poppa. They called me Melanie.
Which is what I started calling myself, although Mom went on calling me Moonbeam for a while and Sky is on my first school
certificate.


I overheard Grammy talking on the telephone to Uncle Bobby. I can still picture the black receiver in Grammy’s hand; hear
the squawking coming through the earpiece, Grammy saying, ‘It’s been a big shock for Ingrid. I guess she’ll stay with us for
a while.’ I thought she meant Mom was coming home. I quivered with excitement. Grammy saw me and scooped me up in her arms. ‘That’s you I was talking about, Melanie,You’re going to be staying
with us for another while. Isn’t that great?’ It was just after Mom and Hank split up.


Mom stayed in Singapore after her divorce from Hank. She had a secure job with Citibank. Grammy said Mom wouldn’t get anything
like the same salary back home. I saw Mom once a year at Christmas and I got a letter from her every month. I still do. I
keep them in a pink folder I made in grade school.


I was fifteen years old and attending high school in Portland when Mom wrote me she was getting married to a lawyer she met
at a conference. His firm was based in Atlanta so she would be returning with him to the United States. I wrote back that
I was pleased for her. I could tell from little remarks in her letters that she’d been lonely since Hank left.


I was Mom’s bridesmaid when she married Ivor Kitchov at the church of the Holy Redeemer in Atlanta. The twins – my half-brother
Nicky and my half-sister Alex – were born a year later. They have blonde hair and skin that looks dusted with gold. They are
like smaller versions of Mom and Ivor. I have the same dark curls as my Dad. You wouldn’t think I was related to them at all.




At the beginning of May, I flew up to Portland for my grandfather’s seventy-fifth birthday.

‘How’ve you been, Poppa?’ I slung my suitcase on the back seat of the car and slid into the front beside him.

‘All the better for seeing you, Melanie. But I miss your Grammy. I guess I take each day as it comes.’

Poppa looked a whole lot perkier than the last time I saw him. His skin had a better colour, like he had been in the fresh
air.


‘Are you eating properly, Poppa? Getting exercise? Playing a little golf, maybe?’

Poppa hardly left the house the winter after Grammy died. He hardly played golf the following spring and summer. But he ventured
out again in the fall. He spent Christmas with Uncle Bobby and Maya in Phoenix. I’d noticed him sounding stronger and more
cheerful with every call since then.


At Easter, he’d begun dating a widow from Spokane called May Louise. He met her on a golf course the weekend of his annual
Florida get-together with a couple of old wartime buddies. She was in her sixties but looked and dressed a lot younger.


I teased him about her. ‘You’re such a player, Poppa.’

‘I don’t know why May Louise pays any attention to an old crock like me,’ he said.

But I saw the sparkle in his eyes.

He opened a bottle of wine. No tremor in his hand when he poured. Eyes bright, looking out at the world again. His golf shoes
were in the porch – another good sign.


I relaxed, raised my glass. ‘Here’s to you.’

Poppa introduced me to wine. He acquired a taste for it in France, during the war. He baled out of his fighter plane when
it was attacked in the skies over Bordeaux. He spent two months hiding from the Germans before the Resistance smuggled him
over the Pyrenees to Spain. He got back to England a month after that. Grammy thought he was dead. She got a letter saying
he was missing in action, believed killed. She even got her widow’s pension.


She liked to tell the story of Poppa’s miraculous return from the dead. ‘He turned up on Bobby’s birthday. Same day as the
letter saying he was alive. Matter of fact he got here before the mailman. He came walking up the driveway like he’d only
been away five minutes.’ Grammy always put her hand on her heart at this point in the narrative. ‘I was at the top of the
stairs, by the small window on the landing. I saw him looking up at me with a smile on his face you could see from a mile
off. Well, my heart gave such a leap I thought it would jump out of my ribcage. It was beating fit to burst.’


On the tenth of March every year, Poppa opened a bottle of red Bordeaux. ‘Why today, Poppa?’ I asked him when he judged me
old enough to be allowed a glass of wine.


‘Why today, Poppa? It’s not Uncle Bobby’s birthday. It’s not the day you came home.’

‘I’m remembering the day they found me in the forest with my legs shot up. I was cold as ice. Soon as they got me to the house
they gave me wine to warm me up, deaden the pain.’ He raised his glass in a silent toast.


I imagined him, weak with relief, shivering from the cold, feeling the alcohol warm his throat and trickle through to his
bones, sharing a smile with his rescuers. A moment to remember. A reason to celebrate.


Once, after he had come to my school to talk about the war, I asked him if he ever got in touch with his rescuers again. ‘I
didn’t know the family name,’ he said. ‘They never told me in case I got picked up by the Gestapo. Only one man in the local
Resistance spoke any English. He drove the truck that took me to the Spanish border.’


‘Wouldn’t you like to see them again, Poppa?’

I remembered a trace of regret in his face as he shook his head. ‘It was a lifetime ago, Melanie. It’s history now,’ he said.

Uncle Bobby and Maya flew up from Phoenix for Poppa’s birthday dinner. Mom and Ivor arrived from Atlanta. Ivor had booked
a new restaurant. He always knew the good places to eat.


Everybody was in high spirits.

‘You don’t look a day over sixty, Bill. You still have plenty of hair. Not like your son.’ Maya ran her hand over Uncle Bobby’s
shining head. ‘My darling husband.’


‘Bobby takes after his grandpa Svenson,’ Poppa said. ‘Bald from the time he was forty. The McKittericks all kept their hair.
I’ve got the McKitterick gene.’


‘I wonder where the communist gene comes from,’ Ivor said. ‘Ingrid told me both sides of the family were lifelong Republicans.
Wouldn’t have married her otherwise.’


Mom said, ‘That’s a joke. Right?’

‘Dad’s not a communist,’ said Bobby. ‘He’s just a bit left of the Democrats.’

‘That’s a communist,’ Ivor said.

‘No politics, OK?’ said Mom. ‘Let’s just accept that some people don’t agree.’

‘Too right. You all ready to order?’ Ivor signalled to a waiter.

While we all studied the menu, he took a wine guide from his inside jacket pocket. Ivor was a devotee of the wine critic Robert
Parker and rarely bought anything to which Parker had awarded less than ninety points out of a hundred. Now he perused the
wine list, consulted the guide. This took quite a time. The leather-bound list was the size of a telephone book.


He handed it to me. ‘I’m thinking the William Selyem Pinot Noir.’

I was being asked to concur, not disagree, but I thought the mark-up was way too much.

‘How about something from Oregon?’ I pointed to a Pinot Noir that looked good value for money.


Ivor whisked the wine list from me and snapped it shut. ‘I don’t think so. The William Selyem.’

‘Fine by me.’ I shrugged.

Poppa caught my eye and winked.

After dinner, Ivor called for the bill. He waved away our thanks. ‘Nice we could all be here for the big occasion.’

Mom left the table. Ivor turned to me.

‘Ingrid and I would like to see more of you now that your grandmother has passed away.’

‘I still can’t believe she’s gone,’ I said.

‘Maybe now you’ll get to know your mom better.’

I glanced at Poppa. Bobby and Maya were showing him photographs of their schnauzer, Montgomery. I didn’t think they could
hear us.


‘Dorothy held on to you,’ Ivor said. ‘Stopped you seeing Ingrid.’

‘I don’t believe so,’ I said. ‘Grammy always wanted us to get along.’

It occurred to me that I had lived with my grandmother longer than my mother had. I had probably been closer to her than Mom
had been. I had never lived with my mother. Not since I was a baby, anyway.


‘You might have more time for us now,’ Ivor said.

‘Like I need to spend time with Poppa as well. He misses Grammy too.’

‘He’s a fine-looking man,’ Ivor said. ‘Your mother has the same good bone structure. He’ll probably marry again. Pity about
his politics. But that won’t bother a lot of women.’


‘Excuse me.’ I stood up. ‘I need to go to the bathroom.’

Mom was sitting on a stool, re-applying her lipstick.

‘You used to be a radical, Mom. You were a flower child. Ivor is so right-wing.’

Mom blotted her lips and stood her lipstick on the dressing table. It looked like a pink torpedo. ‘Who says I agree with him?’

‘You don’t disagree.’

‘I just don’t argue with him.’ Mom met my gaze in the mirror.

‘You know, Melanie, there’s more to life than politics. Ivor is a good man. He works hard. He gives time and money to charity.
My life with him is,’ she paused, ‘real.’


‘Your life with my dad wasn’t real? Is that what you’re saying? Mom?’

She spun round to face me. ‘I was eighteen. Younger than you are now, Melanie. I didn’t know beans.’

‘Did you get married so my dad could avoid the draft? I read a lot of people got married around that time for the same reason.
They didn’t want to go to Vietnam.’


Mom sighed. ‘What put all this in your mind, Melanie?’

‘I went to see one of Dad’s old friends a month back. Cloudy Moncreef.’

Mom turned back to the dressing table. I watched in the mirror as she picked up the torpedo, retracted the pink tip, replaced
the gold top. She acted like it was important to be careful about this.


‘Can I ask why you did that?’

‘I wanted to know stuff,’ I said. ‘Stuff you didn’t tell me. Why did you lie to me about the way Dad died?’

Mom stood up and faced me.

‘I did not lie to you, Melanie.’

‘You said it was a car accident.’

‘I said it was an accident. He was in a car.’

‘I asked you how it happened and you said you didn’t exactly know.’

‘That’s true,’ said Mom. ‘They were on their way to Nashville. When they got there, they found Larry was unconscious. They
thought he was asleep. They took him to the ER. But it was too late.’


‘He took an overdose. You knew that, Mom. Am I right? You knew and you didn’t tell me.’

‘You were four years old, Melanie.’

‘I asked you about him again,’ I said. ‘I was at high school. You told me the same thing.’

‘Your dad took drugs, Melanie. In the end, they killed him. Yes, it’s true. Is that what you want me to say?’

I took a deep breath and asked the question that was really on my mind. A question I had wanted to ask for a long time. ‘Did
you love my dad?’


Mom was silent for a little while. She looked down at her hands before lifting her head to look me straight in the eyes.

‘I loved him,’ she said quietly.

I gripped my purse and thought about the photograph I kept inside it. Mom and Dad smiling. Dad’s dark hair longer and curlier
than Mom’s blonde bob. Mom’s hair blowing in the wind.


She didn’t look any older than she did then. Still slim. Still blonde. Still smiling. Just shinier. Richer.

Mom said, ‘It was a long time ago.’ She turned back to the mirror and smoothed her hair. She picked up her purse and clicked
it shut. ‘A lifetime ago.’ Her tone became brisk. ‘We better get back and join the others.’


She linked arms with me. We went back to the table.



Mom, Ivor, Bobby and Maya headed back the next day. Mom said Nicky was in a school play.

‘Hiawatha. He’s the lead. We absolutely have to attend.’


‘Naturally,’ I said.

Ivor gave me a look.

‘I remember the Christmas I came back from Singapore and you were in the school pantomime,’ said Mom. ‘Jack and the Beanstalk. You were darling. You tripped on your robe halfway across the stage and the bucket flew through the air.’


‘I was looking for you in the audience,’ I said.

‘Your grandfather stood up in the front row and caught it. Wasn’t that just amazing?’ Mom laughed. ‘Fortunately it wasn’t
full of milk. The audience loved it. They thought you’d done it deliberately.’


‘We were a great double act.’ Poppa put his arm around my shoulders. ‘Isn’t that right, Melanie?’

Bobby said he and Montgomery were going to be a double act at the Maricopa County Dog Show.

‘He’s certain sure to win a rosette. At least,’ said Maya. ‘We’d best get moving. Takes a day to get him ready.’

Vincent had given me the weekend off. I went with Poppa to lay flowers on Grammy’s grave.

‘Fifty-two years together. Except for the war.’ Poppa got down on one knee to lay a dozen white lilies at the foot of the
black marble cross. He was a little stiff getting to his feet. He stood for a moment with his head bowed.


I stooped to put down my own posy of pink honeysuckle and roses.

Greta May McKitterick,

Beloved daughter. Born March 1947. Died October 1947.

Dorothy Kirsten Svenson McKitterick,

Devoted wife, mother, grandmother. Born 1921. Died 1992.

I glanced up at Poppa. He looked stricken.

‘She gave up a lot for me,’ he said. ‘The Svensons had an automobile business. I had no money and no prospects. They thought
I wasn’t good enough for her.’


‘I’m sure you gave up things for Grammy,’ I said.

‘I guess I did, Melanie,’ Poppa said softly. ‘I guess I did.’

Later, in the twilight, we sat on the deck at the back of the house I still thought of as home. Wisteria twined around the
posts and tumbled from the roof. The yard was bright with tulips, azaleas, cherry blossom. The air was pungent with the scent
of mint, rosemary and thyme. We talked about Grammy’s green fingers, the way she planted when the moon was waxing and pruned
when it waned, her war on crabgrass and dandelions, her habit of adding a little wine to her stews, even though she rarely
drank the stuff, having been brought up as a teetotaller.


I put my nose into the glass, smelled blackcurrants and raspberries. ‘Cabernet Sauvignon?’ I sniffed again. ‘Merlot?’ I tasted
it. Rolled it around my tongue. After nearly two years at UC Davis and Cottontail Winery, the tasting ritual was second nature
to me. I swallowed. ‘It’s a Bordeaux. Maybe four, five years old? The tannins have softened.’ I took another sip. ‘I like
it. How much?’


Poppa smiled. ‘You sure know your stuff, Melanie.’ He swirled the wine around in his glass. ‘Fifteen dollars. Your mom told
me last night that Ivor paid near three thousand dollars for a fifty-year-old bottle of wine. Crazy.’


‘Three thousand dollars for a fifty-year-old wine? It might be undrinkable,’ I said.


‘It’s not about drinking,’ Poppa said. ‘It’s about owning.’

We sat in companionable silence for a moment, watching stars emerge from the darkening sky.

I thought about Jesse Arguello, who moved like a dancer. Who was the real reason I lived in Monterey.

I met him in the Lake Hotel at Yellowstone when I was bussing tables the summer after I graduated from the University of Oregon.
I liked Jesse straightaway because he didn’t make a big fuss when I caught my toe on the edge of the carpet in the dining
room and knocked over a side table. He gave his assistants thirty percent of his tips. Most servers gave fifteen to twenty-five,
max. Jesse said he was a socialist and believed in sharing.


He let me fool around on his guitar. We liked the same kind of edgy country music. One balmy evening in July there was a jam
session by the shores of Yellowstone Lake. One of the other servers had a clawhammer banjo. He and Jesse played ‘Didn’t Leave
Nobody but the baby’. I fell asleep sitting back to back with Jesse as he sang ‘go to sleep you little baby’ and the moon
sailed over the mountain ridge beyond the dark water.


We hooked up for the summer. Summer slid into fall. I applied to do my teaching credential at Chapman in Monterey and in the
meantime got the intern job that accidentally turned into a career in the wine industry.


Now I said, ‘I’m seeing somebody, Poppa. You’d like him. He’s a graduate student. Politics and International Affairs. He’s
working for the Kerry campaign right now. It’s keeping him busy. He’s out knocking on doors most nights.’


‘Sounds good,’ Poppa said. ‘You think he’s the real McCoy?’

I smiled. ‘He could be.’

Poppa put down his glass, folded his arms, stretched out his legs and closed his eyes. His head nodded on his chest. I wondered
what it would be like to be seventy-five.


‘Funny thing.’ Poppa opened his eyes.

‘What’s a funny thing, Poppa?’

‘Memory,’ he said softly. ‘I was trying to remember myself at your age, Melanie.’ He was silent for a moment. ‘What was I like at twenty-five? Not me, like I am now. But not someone else
either.’


‘You were married,’ I said. ‘You had a son. You were in the war. Big grown-up things.’

Poppa nodded slowly. He closed his eyes again. After a while he said, ‘The endless tunnel of memory. You can get lost in there.’



‘I wish I had more memories of my dad,’ I said to Jesse.

We were walking barefoot along the bea. . .