The Critic

II

The old square in Lisle sur Tarn was almost deserted as they walked across the dusty red blaize in the fading light. Lamps illuminated the dark interior of brick arcades around the thirteenth century bastide. Shops were shut, but customers sat at tables outside Le Cepage restaurant, and the Olivier bar in the far corner. There was a function of some kind in the Hotel de Ville, lights blazing in tall windows all along the upper floor, the sound of accordion music drifting on the warm night air. The Musee du Chocolat was locked up tight, air-conditioning keeping chocolate sculptures safe from the heat.

At the southwest corner, they passed beneath enormous oak beams that held up ancient, sagging buildings. Beyond, a long narrow street ran between cantilevered houses down to the river. Lights from Le Romuald restaurant fell out into the evening gloom.

‘So how do you know about this place if you’re not from around here?’ Michelle inclined her head towards him quizzically.

Enzo could see her green eyes fixed on him, bright and interrogative. Gone was the pain that had clouded them earlier as they went through her father’s belongings. ‘It was a recommendation. From the proprietors of the Chateau des Fleurs. They said if I ever wanted to romance a young woman this was the place to come.’

She laughed. ‘They did not.’

He grinned. ‘No, they didn’t. They said that the food gets cooked over the smoking embers of an open fire in a huge cheminee, and that the cuisine is excellent.’

A young man raked through the remains of oak logs on a hearth raised to waist height, pushing freshly burning chunks of wood to the back, and dragging glowing remnants towards him. He set a grilling rack above the embers and marinated lamb cutlets hissed and sizzled, spitting garlic and blood, as he placed them over the heat.

Michelle watched, fascinated, as she finished her salad entree of goat’s cheese and gesiers. She looked at Enzo, a sudden question occurring to her. ‘Why do the French call a starter an entree?’

‘Because that’s what it is,’ Enzo told her. ‘The entry to the meal. It’s a French word. It’s Americans who have corrupted it to mean a main course.’

‘I suppose you Europeans think Americans have corrupted everything.’

Enzo smiled. “Not everything. You make some pretty good wine in California.’

‘My father thought so. Californian reds made up most of his top ten. That and a handful of Bordeaux.’

‘No Burgundies?’

‘He loved Burgundy. He just didn’t rate it as highly. He adored pinot noir, but not as much as cabernet or merlot or syrah.’

‘Which makes his ratings very much a matter of individual taste.’

‘Of course. What else is a critic going to do, but say what it is he likes and what he doesn’t? A lot of people followed my father’s recommendations and found that they agreed with him. That’s why he was so successful.’

‘For someone who wasn’t speaking to him, you seem to know a lot about your father.’

She shook her head in vigorous denial. ‘That was his fault, not mine.’

Enzo let her sudden flame of anger die again before he said, ‘You talked earlier about curling up with him on an armchair, watching television together.’

‘That’s when I was just a kid. He used to call me his little fish, and I would make these fish mouths at him and make him laugh. And he ended up calling me “fishface.” My friends were horrified. But I was happy enough. I used to figure it meant he loved me.’ She pushed the remains of her salad away, as if she had suddenly lost her appetite. ‘But that was before his newsletter took off big time.’

A light came on in a central courtyard which was open to the sky beyond French windows. There were tables and chairs out there for summer diners, potted plants, crimson ivy creeping up brick walls, and a large woodstore at the back to feed the fire. Michelle was distracted for a moment before gathering her thoughts again.

‘At the height of his celebrity, he had nearly sixty thousand subscribers. That’s still more than Robert Parker has today. But he started off with just a handful. It was a hobby. He loved to drink wine. He and mom had friends round for blind tastings, and they’d all get drunk. And summer holidays were always spent wine-tasting, touring around chateaux in France in the cheapest rental car he could find. The great would-be connoisseur of fine wines pitched a tent every night and slept under canvas. He was a bank clerk, for God’s sake. He couldn’t afford any of it, and he was spending more than fifty percent of his income on wine so that he could taste it and rate it for his precious newsletter. Mom had to get a job, and boy did she hate that!’

Enzo saw how the gentle glow of the fire was reflected in her face, soft hollows and flickering light. There was something touching, childlike in her intensity, but her eyes were feral, and at times when she turned them on him, he had a disconcerting sense of her sexuality. Something in the way she looked at him. Something predatory.

‘Of course, when he got successful and subscriptions were going up every month, he never had to buy wine at all. It arrived on our doorstep. Cases of the stuff. Everyone wanted him to taste and rate their wines. What had started as a hobby, turned into a passion, and then an obsession.’ She examined the backs of her hands, as if they might provide some kind of window to the past. ‘That’s when we lost him. When he quit his job and the money began to come in, and we started being able to afford the things we’d only ever dreamed of.’ She shook her head at the irony of it. ‘Just as life should have begun to get good, it started falling apart.’

‘How did he make his money?’ Enzo was puzzled. ‘He couldn’t have earned that much from the newsletter, surely?’

‘No, he didn’t. There was a point when he got enough subscriptions that he could give up his job. But it was everything else that made him the money. The syndicated newspaper columns. The books-on Bordeaux, Burgundy, Rhone, Piedmont, Rioja. He was producing one a year, and they were all bestsellers. Then there were his radio slots, his half-hour weekly show on cable TV, speaking engagements.’

‘I’m surprised he had any time left over to taste the wines.’

‘Oh, he always had time for tasting wine. He had a custom-made tasting room in the house. He would spend hours in there. And when he left to go on tasting trips he would be away for weeks on end. You know, he could taste a hundred wines in the morning, have lunch, then go on tasting in the afternoon.’

‘If I tasted a hundred wines I wouldn’t be able to stand up.’

Michelle laughed. ‘He didn’t swallow, Mister Macleod, just tasted and spat.’

Enzo shook his head in wonder. ‘Even so. A hundred wines in a morning? How on earth could he ever remember one from another?’

‘He took notes, of course. But my father had an extraordinary memory. Some people have photographic memories. My father could remember smells and tastes. He could file them away then pull them back at will. He could pinpoint the grape, the year, and the chateau of a wine he hadn’t tasted in ten years.’ She was lost for several long moments in some sad reflection. ‘He had a pretty good memory in general. He used to tell us about when he was a kid, just four or five years old. His parents forced him to learn by heart all the US presidents, and all the US states, and made him rhyme them off as a party-piece for visitors. All the same, he had to train his sense of smell and taste. I used to hold his hand as we walked down the street, and he would close his eyes and identify all the smells that came to him. Cut grass. Tar. Rotting garbage. Cherry blossom. He was good at it.’ She drew a deep breath and brought herself back to Enzo’s original question. ‘So, yes, he always had time for tasting wine, Mister Macleod. It was his family he had no time for.’ She shrugged. ‘You know the rest, I guess. Mom divorced him. Got the house and half his money. And his difficult, adolescent daughter refused to talk to him ever again.’

Their lamb came to the table then, along with potatoes that had been scooped out, mashed with cream and garlic, then stuffed back in their skins and roasted in the oven. The meat was smoky tender and perfectly pink. Enzo filled their glasses from a bottle of Domaine Sarrabelle Saint Andre, a hundred percent braucol aged in oak. It was soft and smooth, fruit and vanilla on the tongue.

‘So now you know our whole sordid little story,’ Michelle said. ‘But I don’t know anything about you. Are you married, Mister Macleod?’

‘Enzo.’

‘Are you married, Enzo?’

He looked up and saw again that strange quality in her eyes, pupils dilated, a penetrating ring of green around black. She flicked her head to toss her hair back over her shoulders.

‘I was once,’ he said. ‘A long time ago. Back in Scotland. A girl I was at university with.’

‘Any children?’

He avoided her eyes and focused on cutting his lamb. ‘A little girl. Kirsty. She’s a couple of years older than you now.’

‘So what happened?’

‘I met someone else.’

‘Uh-oh.’

He smiled ruefully. ‘Yeah, not a very original story, is it?’

‘She was French?’

‘Good guess.’

‘There had to be some reason you were here.’

He sipped some more Saint Andre. ‘Her name was Pascale. I met her at a forensics conference in Nice. She was younger than me.’

‘Aren’t they always?’

He shrugged. ‘I’ve always conformed to stereotypes. It’s easier than being original.’

‘So what happened?’

‘Oh, you know, not that different from your dad. My wife divorced me, got the house and just about everything else. And my little girl wouldn’t talk to me again.’

He looked up to find that her eyes had softened. There was sympathy in them. ‘And there’s me been banging on all day about me and my dad.’ She reached out to put a hand over his, and he felt an electricity in her touch. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realise.’

‘Of course not. Why should you?’ She left her hand over his, and he began to feel uncomfortable. ‘Anyway, we had a sort of rapprochement recently.’

‘You’re talking again?’

‘Just about.’

‘That’s what you meant when you said earlier about telling people you love them, because they might not be around tomorrow.’

‘Actually, I was thinking about Pascale.’ He gently slipped his hand out from under hers to scoop up some potato with his fork. It was easier if he concentrated on his food.

He heard her small, sharp intake of breath. ‘She died?’

‘In childbirth. More than twenty years ago. Left me to bring up little Sophie all on my own.’

‘So you have two daughters?’

He nodded.

‘And there’s never been anyone else?’

He shrugged. ‘There’ve been women. Nothing lasting.’ He thought about Charlotte. She was the only woman who had ever meant anything to him after Pascale. But he still had no idea what he meant to her. And he wasn’t about to discuss that with Michelle.

‘That’s really hard to believe.’

He looked up, surprised. ‘What is?’

‘A good-looking man like you, without a woman.’

He felt trapped by her eyes and disconcerted by the hunger he saw in them. His mouth was dry, and there was a strange stab of desire in his loins. But she was far too young. ‘I told you, I’m not the sort of man who preys on young women.’

‘And there was me hoping you might just have been saying that to lull me into a false sense of security.’ Still she fixed him with eyes that seemed to penetrate the very depths of his darkest desires, and he knew she would be difficult to resist.