Bruno 02 - The Dark Vineyard

brandishing a massive ladle, serving couscous from a giant cauldron, and Bruno had been recruited to help Xavier open the massed ranks of wine bottles the guests had brought. Pamela was at the next table, tossing vast bowls of salad with olive oil and the commune’s own wine vinegar. Fabiola was bandaging the skinned knee of a weeping small boy who had tripped over one of the young goats, and Jacqueline was still dancing.
    When the crowds were all served, and Bruno and Pamela and the other servers began to feed themselves, the few available chairs were all taken. Bruno tucked a bottle of wine under each arm, his plate in one hand and a stack of plastic glasses in the other, and joined Dominique and Stéphane, who were sitting on the grass. Pamela brought her plate atop a large bowl of salad, one of Alphonse’s loaves under one arm and a roll of paper towels under the other. Alphonse had turned down the volume so the Beatles’
White Album
was a distant backdrop.
    “I feel like I’m back in the Middle Ages,” said Pamela, giving up on the feeble plastic fork and starting to eat with her fingers. Bruno handed her his knife, knowing it would make little difference. He had been to so many such events that he came prepared, and now he reached into a side pocket of his cargo pants and brought out a fistful of foil packets emblazoned with a lobster, each containing a moistened towel.
    “I never go to a picnic without them,” he said. “The MiddleAges might have been different if they’d had them. But I know what you mean, feeling that this is how it must have been for our ancestors. Maybe that’s why we enjoy it.”
    Looking out over Alphonse’s strange property, he saw Fabiola and Jacqueline squeezed onto benches at the same table with the rugby team, laughing and chatting. The mayor was at a table with Alphonse and Céline and some of the original commune members.
    “You’re like a mother hen.” Pamela grinned. “Don’t worry, all your chicks are happily taken care of and enjoying themselves. The guardian of Saint-Denis can relax for once.”
    “I was just a bit worried about Fabiola, but she seems to be fitting in fine and meeting people.”
    “She’s a pretty girl, despite that scar, and since she doesn’t pay much attention to it, other people don’t get embarrassed and after a while you forget about it. It’s like having red hair. I hated it when I was a girl and thought everybody was looking at me all the time, but then you realize they aren’t, and if they are it doesn’t matter.”
    “Really?” Bruno asked. “I thought your hair must always have been that glorious auburn-bronze color.”
    “It was brighter when I was little. Carrottop, they called me, and sometimes Ginger. I had an uncle who used to pretend to light his cigarette from it.”
    “They used to call me ‘dwarf’ and ‘shorty’ and other names because I didn’t really grow until I was fifteen,” said Dominique. “Except Max. He never called me names and never let other people do it, not when he was around.”
    “You know, you had me worried for a while, when you went off to the
lycée,”
said Stéphane. “I thought you and Max were getting far too serious for your age.”
    She smiled, fondly putting a hand on his knee. “It was never like that with Max. He was much more like a brother.”
    “So you didn’t mind when Max took up with Jacqueline?” Bruno asked.
    “Not like you think. But I can’t say I was happy about it. She was cruel to him, dating that other guy, the American. Max used to confide in me, and I didn’t like what I heard.”
    “She seems to be over it now,” Pamela said in a low voice, gesturing to the dome, where Jacqueline was laughing at her table. “But maybe she still is upset. She’s been throwing herself into her work. I took her some coffee earlier today and she was upstairs asleep, but the table was full of work, all her wine books and thick files about vineyards and companies. She has heaps of stuff on that Bondino group, the one with the young American. Since she wants to be in the wine business, I’m surprised she dropped him.”
    Bruno looked sharply at Pamela. “When you say she has lots of stuff on the Bondinos, what do you mean?”
    “Well, I didn’t really look, but she has annual reports, files of press clippings, lots of loose photos of the family. There were a couple of really thick files as well as the one that was open. I suppose she got it all from the Internet,