The Halcyon: Book Three

Elodie Quinn had arranged the chairs in the old pressing room so that nobody sat at the head of the table. There was still a head of the table, of course. Her aunt Teresa Bellariva, who ran the estate’s hospitality side, would find it without looking. Teresa’s son Davide, Elodie’s cousin and the manager of the wine cellar, would take the chair immediately to its right, where he could dispute the agenda while claiming not to have one. Elodie could rearrange the furniture; she could not rearrange forty years of family habit. She left a jug of water at each end and opened the high windows before anyone arrived.

The room smelled of cool stone, furniture polish, and the faint sour trace of wine that no renovation had managed to remove. By ten, the air outside had already begun to warm. The late-summer harvest schedule was pinned to a board beside the door. A tractor passed the window slowly enough for Elodie to recognize the driver by the shape of his shoulders. He lifted a hand; she lifted hers. He had worked at Bellariva since before she was born. In an hour she would ask him, along with everyone else, to consider having a camera follow part of his working day. She had spent three months arranging the possibility and still did not know whether he would agree.

Her phone rang. Geneva’s name filled the screen, accompanied by a photograph Elodie had taken of her eldest sister standing in a raincoat outside The Halcyon, visibly annoyed to discover that she was being photographed. Elodie answered with one hand on the window latch.

“I thought you had a meeting,” Geneva said.

“I do. You’re helping me avoid it for the final four minutes.”

Geneva made a small sound that meant she recognized the tactic. In the background Elodie heard crockery and the low movement of the hotel dining room. Geneva had called from work, probably while waiting for a guest to finish a sentence. Six months earlier she would have answered with a list of tasks already completed. Now she asked, “Do you want me to distract you, or do you want to tell me what’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong. Leandro Varela, the documentary filmmaker hired by the growers’ consortium, is coming to record the project. Teresa thinks the film will make everyone look as though they spend the day leaning against a wall in linen shirts. Davide thinks it will make everyone look as though they spend the day cleaning barrels. Both of them want editorial control, although neither has watched his previous work. I have a meeting to explain that workers are people, not agreeable background.” Elodie closed the window against a gust that would have scattered the papers. “There. Distracted.”

“You arranged this film,” Geneva said. “Why are you dreading the meeting?”

Elodie looked down at the agenda. She had built the consortium with four neighboring growers because Bellariva’s export reach could carry smaller producers into markets they could not enter alone. The film was meant to give the project a public face before the autumn trade events. She believed in the work. She knew how to make a room believe in it too. What she dreaded was the moment the room looked back at her and asked whether she belonged to the estate or to the business she had made around it. “Because everyone agrees with me until they realize I intend to do what I said.”

“That sounds like us,” Geneva replied. A door closed on her end of the call. “You’ll manage them. Call later if you want to complain without being advised.”

“Can you do that?”

“For perhaps seven minutes.”

The first chair scraped against stone. Elodie promised to test her sister’s new skill and put away the phone. Teresa came in carrying a folder and a bowl of figs she had apparently taken from the kitchen on the way. Her hair, once as dark as Luciana’s, had gone white in a broad stripe above one temple. She kissed Elodie on both cheeks, set down the figs, and took the chair at the head of the table. Davide arrived behind her with two wine-stained pages of notes. Marta, his younger sister and the person actually supervising the harvest, followed with a soil sample on her sleeve and the expression of someone who would rather discuss irrigation.

By the time the neighbors arrived, every chair was occupied except one. Leandro had been invited to the initial meeting, though he was still on his way from Florence. Elodie had seen two of his films. One followed a municipal laundry in Lisbon over its final months. Another spent an hour with the women who maintained a mountain road. Neither film used an explanatory narrator. People worked, corrected one another, grew tired, talked about dinner. She trusted his interest in ordinary labor. Whether she trusted him with her family was a separate question.

He came in during Davide’s opening remarks, wet-haired from a shower or a sudden rain that had not reached Bellariva. He did not interrupt to apologize. He stood inside the doorway until Davide finished, then said that a road closure had put him behind schedule and took the empty chair. He had a narrow face, dark eyes, and a small pale scar cutting through one eyebrow. His white shirt was clean but creased at the sleeves. Elodie had imagined a filmmaker arriving with a visible performance of artistic attention. Leandro took out a notebook with a torn cover and listened.

Davide wanted a sequence that showed the vines at sunrise. Teresa wanted the courtyard dinner that concluded the harvest festival. One of the neighbors, Alda, asked who owned footage of her son if he happened to cross the frame. Leandro answered her first. They would agree on access, releases, and the treatment of anyone who did not want to appear before filming began. No one would become part of the film because a camera happened to be pointed in his direction. He said it simply, without making the question seem like an interruption to the beautiful pictures everyone else had begun to discuss.

Elodie turned her pen in her hand. “We need a film about the shared work,” she said. “If we make five advertisements stitched together, the consortium will look like a polite fiction.”

“What shared work?” Leandro asked.

Davide began describing the trade agreement. Leandro listened, then looked at Elodie. He was not dismissing her cousin. He was asking whether the commercial arrangement was all she meant. She could have offered the practiced answer: joint shipments, shared exhibition costs, contracts that gave smaller growers access to importers. Those things mattered. She had spent a year making them possible. Yet she thought of Marta lending two workers to Alda when a machine failed; of Alda’s son driving a pallet to Bellariva at midnight because the collection vehicle would not wait; of Teresa borrowing an entire dining staff for a wedding after another family estate lost its power. She gave him those examples instead.

“Then perhaps I begin there,” he said, and wrote something down.

“There is a presentation in Milan in November,” Davide reminded him. “We need a film that can be shown there.”

“You’ll have one. Whether it should begin with a drone over vines is a different question.” Leandro closed the notebook and looked around the table. “I would like three days here before I take out a camera. With permission, I want to follow the routine and meet the people whose work you have described. After that I can propose a structure.”

Teresa examined him. “And if the routine is boring?”

“Then I will have to pay better attention.”

It was not a clever answer. Elodie saw that he meant it. Teresa took a fig and passed the bowl toward him. The meeting moved to costs and schedules, where affection had no power to simplify the argument. Elodie took notes, assigned follow-ups, and negotiated a filming calendar that would not put a camera in Marta’s path on her busiest harvest days. She was good at this. She could hold five objections in mind and answer them without letting anyone feel hurried. When the room emptied, she stayed to collect the glasses, a practical reason to be alone for a minute.

Leandro came back for his notebook. “You were describing a film I haven’t made yet,” he said. “I should have asked what you hoped it would show.”

Elodie stacked two glasses. “I hope the smaller producers recognize themselves in it. After that, I’d like it to persuade people with expensive shoes to buy a few bottles.”

“Those aims don’t have to be enemies.”

“They’re not. But the people with the shoes paid for your commission.”

He took this without offense. “I read the agreement. The consortium commissioned it. It doesn’t give any one member a private edit.”

She met his eyes. He had noticed a clause Davide had skimmed. “You really read the agreement.”

“I tend to before I put people on film.” He picked up the battered notebook and glanced at the seating arrangement. “Did you set the chairs like this?”

“I tried to make it impossible to tell who was in charge.”

“Didn’t work.” His gaze moved to Teresa’s chair, and Elodie laughed before she could stop herself. He was already at the door when he added, “The person the room waited for wasn’t sitting there.”

Elodie remained beside the table after he left. She could have asked what he meant. She knew, and disliked how quickly he had found the answer.