––––––––
There was a drip in the corner. Pitt sat in near darkness, the only sound the occasional drop of water, which took more than fifteen minutes to collect.
There was a light on near the door, but where Pitt was sitting it was almost completely dark. The cellar was large, with a stone, cold floor, and brick walls. Cool, dark and dry, with the exception of the drip in the corner.
Slowly, over the years, Pitt had worked the cellar into beautiful order, rows of oak barrels in regimented lines. The vineyard was well run and well kempt, the farmhouse had been beautifully restored; yet, the cellar was Pitt’s true source of pride. It could have been the cellar of a vineyard and winemaker open to the public, who charged £30 for a tour of the facilities and a short wine tasting, and who showed off to the colour supplements and the Californian tourists.
Round the corner from the kitchen door, a narrow flight of steps led underneath the house to a narrow wooden door. There was nothing from the outside to suggest that the cellar would be anything other than a rough place, a dumping ground for junk.
Inside, the walls and floor had been repaired and cleaned. Not a cobweb, not a mouse hole, not a rodent dropping. Not a piece of dust.
Pitt had personally built the wooden racks that ran down the sides of the walls and down the centre of the room. In each rack there were six barrels. There were fifteen racks in all. Each barrel produced three hundred bottles of wine. The wine was placed in the barrels in early January, to be bottled at some stage around a year later. Pitt had no pre-determined period, although he rarely drew the wine from the barrels in under ten months. Sometimes, he left it as long as a year and a half. He knew that most of his customers would not have been able to taste the difference after the first couple of months in a barrel, but he could, and that was all that mattered to him.
Financially it made little sense to leave the wine aging in barrels for up to a year longer than necessary. Hardyman had often shown Pitt the figures, bland tables of statistics that demonstrated there was no fiscal benefit to selling the slightly more expensive wine, against the delay in getting it onto the market. The great wine taster that Hardyman had been, he refused to accept that you could actually tell the difference between a bottle that had been aged for two or fifteen months.
Pitt had ignored him. He enjoyed the company of the barrels.
The basement also held racks of sparkling wine, which had to be turned every day to evenly distribute the yeast sediment. This was a job that had long since been done by a gyropractor in virtually every vineyard on earth; a machine that automatically turned each bottle eight times a day. Pitt, alone amongst his peers, still did the job manually. Usually, he would talk to the bottles as a group while he slowly went about his task. Occasionally, he would address an individual bottle if he felt for some reason that it required extra encouragement.
Rarely did Daisy question him to his face, although she thought his behaviour remarkably odd and sad, regardless of what was down there. Mrs Cromwell, for her insidious part, questioned Pitt’s behaviour regularly when in conversation with Daisy.
Sometimes, Pitt would feel claustrophobic in amongst the vines, out in the open air, closed in by stalks and the boundaries of the vineyard. In the cellar, space seemed infinite, the darkness of the corners extended for miles.
The cellar, like love, knew no boundaries.
*
The door opened. Even after the refurbishment of the cellar, the door had creaked loudly and Pitt had been quite happy. He liked the sound. He liked the warning. A few months previously, Jenkins, without speaking to Pitt, had had one of the men oil the hinges. The door opened in silence. Pitt had not said anything. He could wait. The oil would wear off, the hinges would creak again. Some day.
Light poured in, like wine. Pitt looked from the darkness at the figure of Jenkins standing in the doorway.
‘Are you here, Mr Pitt?’
Time was up. Pitt wasn’t sure how long he’d been sitting in the cellar. Usually, he did not take a watch. He would sit for as long as was required. Today, he had instructed Jenkins to come and get him when the men from DEFRA arrived.
He stared down at the brown boots he’d been wearing for the past fifteen years. They’d been resoled three times. The last time he’d been told that maybe he ought to get a new pair. Pitt liked his boots.
He walked out of the darkness, Jenkins imagined him some kind of monster emerging from the depths.
‘Did you read the report from the bank?’ asked Pitt.
He and Jenkins walked out of the cellar, up the steps, towards the light of day.
‘Yep.’
‘Anything I should know about?’
‘They have a few suggestions, most of which you will have heard before. All the things that Mr Hardyman used to talk about. A café, a shop, wine tasting for the public, tours of the vineyard, maybe expanding the farmhouse so we could take in guests.’
‘Does it suggest that I get rid of my mother-in-law to make more space?’ said Pitt dryly. He didn’t smile, Jenkins did.
‘And there’s a chance of a TV documentary thing. They’re looking for a vineyard, a year-in-the-life sort of idea. A vineyard that does the whole organic, everything local, nothing added, all that kind of stuff. You know, like River Cottage, that kind of thing.’
‘What’s River Cottage?’
‘Doesn’t matter. We fit the bill of what they’re looking for. If we apply and get it, then expand the business as suggested, they reckon the vineyard could turn over a nice profit.’
‘Could it?’
Jenkins shrugged. Round the corner of the farmhouse, into the sun. Pitt closed his eyes for a second, felt the warmth on his face.
‘A year?’ said Pitt.
‘Well, I guess they don’t move in and live with us for a year. I presume they come every now and again. At harvest, bottling, you know, various stages.’
Pitt opened his eyes and looked across the vines; those at the top of the vineyard before the hill gently sloped away to the south.
‘It’s not happening,’ he said bluntly.
Jenkins nodded. He knew Pitt wouldn’t accept anyone onto the vineyard that didn’t have to be there.
‘Where are they?’ he asked.
‘In the kitchen,’ said Jenkins. ‘Ju’s making her coffee.’
Pitt turned and looked at Jenkins with a raised eyebrow, then walked towards the kitchen.