The Critic

II

She was sitting at the table where he had first seen her. She was reading, just as she had been then. But she greeted him somewhat differently. When his shadow fell across her book she looked up, irritation replaced immediately by a smile that broke like sunshine across her face. ‘You’re back. I’m so glad. I had a thought about my dad, and those vineyards he visited…’ She took off her sunglasses, green eyes flashing and stood up to kiss him.

His recoil was almost imperceptible, but it was like a shutter dropping between them. Her smile was gone in an instant. ‘What’s wrong?’

He dropped the buff envelope on the table and sat in the free chair opposite, leaving her to stand looking down at him. He glanced out across the shimmering green and red vines. The harvesters were out again after the rain to gather the last of this year’s recolte. Then he looked up to meet the concern in her eyes and remembered how attractive she was. Clasps held chestnut hair clear of her face. Her lips were pale in a lightly tanned face, and he remembered the feel of them against his. Soft, sensuous. And he recalled her mother’s words in Sacramento: ‘There have been a string of older men in her life, almost as if by making them love her she’s proving to herself that it wasn’t her fault that her father didn’t.’

‘Why have you been lying?’

Her skin paled beneath her tan, and she sat down. ‘What do you mean?’ Her voice was small and uncertain.

‘Four years ago when your father came to Gaillac, you followed him here. You went to see him at the gite.’

But she wasn’t going to admit it easily. ‘How can you know that?’

‘Familial DNA matching, Michelle. It was in my mind for quite another reason, even before I read the report.’

Her self-confidence was evaporating as he looked at her. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Back in 2003, in the UK, a kid dropped a brick from a bridge on a motorway. It smashed through the windscreen of a car and killed the driver. Forensic scientists managed to salvage a sample of the kid’s DNA from the brick. The British have got the biggest DNA database in the world. More than three million people in it. The kid wasn’t one of them. But a relative was. They matched sixteen points out of twenty, and secured a conviction in March 2004. The world’s first conviction using familial searching.’

He could see that she made no sense of this.

‘Michelle, when you went to see your father it was… how can I put this delicately? It was that time of the month. You left a used sanitary pad in a plastic bag in the trash can in the bathroom.’ He saw realisation breaking over her like an ocean wave. ‘For some reason, the police kept the contents of the bin as evidence. I sent the pad for DNA testing, along with those samples of your father’s that we found among his things. And guess what…’

But he didn’t need to elucidate further. She shook her head despondently. ‘You don’t think I killed him?’

He looked at her for a long time, searching those green eyes, trying to divine what complexity they masked. Then he sighed. ‘No. No, I don’t. But I know you lied, Michelle, then and now. And I want to know why.’

He watched as tears bubbled up in her eyes, and she tried hard to control them. ‘I wanted to confront him. I wanted to make him meet my eye and tell me why. Why some goddamned bottle of fermented grape juice was more important to him than his own flesh and blood. But even then, even to my face, he wasn’t going to give any part of himself away. It was the same old blind he always drew on his emotions. He accused me of being like my mother. Possessive and territorial. He said that marrying her had been the biggest mistake of his life. And by implication, I was just an extension of that mistake. He couldn’t even see me as being a part of him, of belonging to him. I’d have given anything…’ She broke off, her voice cracking, and she clenched her fists on the table in front of her, fighting hard to control her emotions, to sublimate them again behind cool, green windows of obfuscation. And Enzo thought how like him she was. How for all her feigned affection, she hid everything real behind the same blind her father had always drawn.

She rediscovered her control, and Enzo saw her expression harden. It was not attractive.

‘We just shouted at one another. And I stormed off. Then, when he went missing, it crossed my mind that maybe he’d killed himself. Because of me; because of our row.’ She laughed, a sad, bitter little laugh without humour. ‘But I should have known better. That might have meant he’d cared.’ She drew a deep breath. ‘Anyway, I never told anyone I’d been there. And when he turned up dead, murdered, it was twelve months too late. And wouldn’t have helped anyway.’

She examined his face for a response, and whatever she saw there brought with it a look of resignation. Her eyes flickered away from his. It was as if she suspected that he had seen her truly for the first time, and that there was no longer any point in pretending with him. She gazed away across the valley, the hum of insects filling the air around them, the distant sounds of the harvesters carried on the warm vent d’autan.

‘So where does that leave us?’ she said.

‘There is no us, Michelle.’ And he was struck by the irony of the words that Charlotte had used so often with him. ‘It’s very flattering for a fifty-year-old guy like me to have some young girl half his age fawning over him, offering him sex, giving him back maybe just a little of his lost youth. But there’s no future in it for you. Go home. Get yourself a real life. Someone of your own generation. Forget your father. Sometimes people are just flawed.’ And his own daughter’s voice rang around his head: ‘I couldn’t believe that the man who didn’t care about leaving his seven-year-old daughter would turn up twenty years later telling her who she could and couldn’t see.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘Even dads.’