The Critic

III

Nicole sat on the terrasse of the Grand Cafe des Sports at a plastic table under a yellow awning. The tables at the Brasserie Saint-Pierre next door were empty for the moment, waiting in silent anticipation for the midi rush. There were only a couple of other tables occupied at the Cafe des Sports, a disabled man in a high wheelchair, and two farmers in from the country, greasy overalls and cloth caps and big fingers holding small glasses of red wine. Nicole’s car was lined up among the others in the shade of the trees in the Place de la Liberation, where old men sat on benches watching the traffic and sucking on nicotine-stained, hand-rolled cigarettes held precariously between dried lips. On the far side of the square a young girl was setting tables on the pavement outside the Cassis restaurant where lotus eaters from England gathered to exercise their native tongue and complain about the French. A brown puppy with a huge head and big paws was flapping up and down the pavement, playfully chasing passers-by.

Nicole sipped her coffee and munched on the chocolatine she had bought in a boulangerie across the square, and examined the map and the list of chambres d’hotes she had acquired from the tourist office beside the abbey. There were dozens of them. The trick was going to be finding one close to Chateau des Fleurs, the cost of which would not send Monsieur Macleod into another fit of Scottish apoplexy. He could, she reflected, be seriously bad-tempered at times. She put it down to the lack of a woman in his life.

She highlighted the Chateau des Fleurs on the map with a marker pen, then drew a circle around it with a radius of around two kilometres. Now she tried to match the place names within the circle with place names on the list.

Her concentration was such that at first she didn’t notice the tugging at her shoes. When she did, she tutted with irritation and looked under the table. The brown puppy was pulling at the laces of her running shoes and had somehow managed to undo both of them. When Nicole’s head appeared beneath the level of the table it stopped, looking at her eagerly, as if for approval, but poised ready to back off if its achievement had the opposite effect. Nicole could not be angry. ‘You little devil!’ She reached down and ruffled its head, and it went springing delightedly around the table. She leaned over to retie her shoelaces.

‘Sorry about that. He’s been doing it all week.’

She looked up to see the waiter grinning at her. He was a young lad, with a shock of dark, curly hair shaved close around the back and sides of his head. Nicole was aware of his brown eyes being drawn involuntarily to her cleavage then quickly, self-consciously away. ‘What, untying shoelaces?’

He nodded. ‘It’s a trick he’s learned. Some of our customers are less tolerant of him than you. He’s only narrowly avoided the toe-end of a few boots.’

‘So who taught him the trick? You?’

The boy laughed. ‘No, he’s not mine. Or anybody’s, I don’t think. Probably too many pups in a litter, and he’s been dropped out the back door of a car somewhere. At any rate, he seems to have adopted us. We call him Braucol.’ The pup heard the familiar sound of his name and danced around the waiter’s feet, trying to grab a shoelace. The boy nudged him away with his toe.

‘Braucol?’

‘It’s a local red grape, one of the cepages that gives the Gaillac wine its distinctive flavour.’

‘Braucol.’ Nicole repeated the name, trying it out for size. ‘I like it. It suits him.’ She felt a tugging at her feet and looked down to see that her newly retied shoelaces had been undone again. Braucol went prancing off to a safe distance, eyes wide, watching for her reaction.

The waiter laughed. ‘He’s going to be a big one, too. Trouble is, the boss is fed up with him already. If he makes an official complaint, the municipality will have to take him away, and he’ll probably get put down. You don’t want a puppy, do you?’

Nicole gave a little Gallic shrug of regret. ‘I would if I could, but I can’t.’

A couple sat down at an adjoining table, and the waiter went off to take their order. Nicole retied her laces for the second time and wagged a finger of admonishment at the watching Braucol. ‘Go,’ she said. ‘If you hang around here you’ll just end up in that big kennel in the sky.’

As if he understood her, Braucol went springing off, chasing after the wheels of a passing pram, and Nicole returned to her list and her map. Almost immediately, she spotted a chambre d’hote on a farm that lay virtually next door to the Chateau des Fleurs estate. She drew a circle around the name, La Croix Blanche, and looked around for the waiter to ask if she could use their phone. But even as she caught his eye, she felt a tugging at her shoes. ‘Braucol!’ she hissed under the table in admonishment. The puppy lifted his eyebrows and seemed to smile, as if happy that she knew his name.

She turned her car off the narrow country road into the entrance to La Domaine de la Croix Blanche, past the small, white cross that gave the place its name. Countless rows of vines stretched away across the valley, rising up across chalk hills towards an old church commanding unparalleled views over the right bank of the Tarn. A mechanical harvester sat silent on a stony track, and there wasn’t a soul moving amongst the vines in the midday sun.

Mature oaks cast their shadows across the drive towards the pale green shutters of what must once have been the original farmhouse. Now, it seemed, it was only used for storage, and a tasting room had been fashioned from the garage at the end of it. Washing hung listlessly in the heat, on a rope strung between the trees, and there were cars parked in the glare of a drive of crushed castine chippings.

Nicole left her suitcase in the trunk of her car and walked up the drive to the modern two-story house that had been built to replace the original farmhouse. The door of the cave lay ajar, and she could hear the sound of voices raised in animated conversation coming from within.

She stopped at the open door, and saw, in the cool, dark interior of the cellar, a dozen people or more sitting around a long table, eating starters of crudites served from large stainless steel platters. There were several open bottles of wine on the table. Conversation fizzled out as the diners became aware of Nicole in the doorway. A young man glanced around, before reluctantly leaving his place to come to the door. He was a big man, in shorts and a torn tee-shirt, with thick, strong arms and calves like rugby balls. He had a tangle of dark, curly hair above a round face shining with perspiration and big eyes that seemed to Nicole to be almost black. She thought he was probably in his early thirties and that he was really quite handsome.

He stepped out into the sunshine, pulling the door closed behind him. He gave a short, sharp, upward flick of his head, one eyebrow raised in query. ‘Can I help you?’ But he didn’t sound as if he wanted to, and Nicole quickly found herself reappraising her initial impression of him as handsome. He steadfastly avoided looking at her breasts.

‘I called earlier. About the chambre d’hote.’

‘Oh, yeah.’ He leaned back into the doorway. ‘Maman! It’s the girl about the room.’

Maman turned out to be a formidable old lady with sharp, suspicious eyes. Unlike her son, she was tiny, birdlike, and had a voice that could cut paper. She led Nicole upstairs to a landing of faded floral wallpaper, and a door off it leading to a small bedroom with shutters closed tight against the hot September sun. The young man followed them in and hefted Nicole’s suitcase on to the bed with no apparent effort. The room seemed crowded with the three of them in it and so dark Nicole could only just make out the old framed family photographs on the wall. The inside of the door had the same floral wallpaper on it as the hall outside. Her immediate sense was one of depression. She had spent the last two months sitting in a darkened room at her mother’s bedside, and her impulse was to open the windows and throw the shutters wide, letting life flood in. But she resisted the urge. ‘This’ll be fine.’

‘We’ve never had any complaints,’ Maman said.

‘Have you eaten?’ The young man spoke to her for the first time since greeting her at the door of the cave.

‘No.’

He looked at his mother. ‘There’s enough for one more, isn’t there?’

His mother shrugged. ‘I suppose.’

‘That’s very kind of you,’ Nicole said. And she stuck out a hand towards him. ‘My name’s Nicole.’

He seemed suddenly embarrassed. ‘Fabien.’ He took her hand with reluctance, and it felt huge and rough, and she saw his eyes glance fleetingly towards her cleavage. Perhaps he wasn’t so rude after all. Just shy, maybe.

His mother watched her with patent disapproval. ‘Do you want to eat or not?’

A hush descended for a moment over the gathering at the table when Fabien and his mother returned with the girl who’d appeared briefly at the door a few minutes earlier.

Nicole found a free seat at the far end, beside an old man whom everyone called Pappy, and who had none of Fabien’s inhibitions about letting his eyes wander at will. He had a face as sharp as a blade, and fine, muscled arms exposed by a grape-stained sports vest. ‘Come to pick grapes with us, madamoiselle?’ he asked.

‘Not exactly.’

‘On holiday, then?’ This from a ruddy-faced man across the table who poured her a glass of wine.

‘No, my boss is staying in a gite at the Chateau des Fleurs. He’s the one going grape-picking. Sort of under cover. He’s here to investigate the death of the wine critic, you know, the American, Gil Petty?’

A silence you could touch fell across the table, and Nicole wondered what she had said wrong. All eyes were turned towards her.

‘Grape picking where?’ Fabien said.

Nicole was beginning to think it had been a mistake to say anything at all. But having started, she could hardly stop now. She said, with a lightness she did not feel, ‘The vineyard where the body was discovered. He starts tomorrow.’ She glanced anxiously around all the faces turned towards her. ‘Do you know it?’

The long silence that followed was finally broken by Fabien, whose dark look was reflected in the ominous tone of his voice. ‘We do. It’s here. La Croix Blanche.’ He paused. ‘And you can tell your boss he needn’t bother turning up tomorrow.’

Peter May

The Critic