The Critic

III

The old stone farmhouse on the hill above had been empty as long as Nicole could remember. As a child she had played inside it, until her father had hammered wooden boards across the door. It was dangerous, he had said.

She climbed the track towards it now, glad for a breath of air, past the wood her father had cut and stacked to dry. The collies ran about her legs, chasing each other, barking at the wind. Where the track turned into the old, abandoned farmyard, she stopped and looked out across the rolling, tree-covered hills of the Auvergne. Crystal clear streams cut deep through the rich, red soil so that it seemed the land was repeatedly folding over on itself. She loved the random nature of it; the way it changed through the seasons. The colour of the trees. A field ploughed one year, given over to pasture the next. She loved in equal measure the hot, summer wind that blew up from Africa and the icy winter blasts driven in from the Atlantic.

But most of all she loved her mother and her father, and her heart was filled with fear for them both.

She sat on an old tree-stump, and the collies frolicked around her, pushing against her legs as she tousled their heads in turn. She had spent most of the morning in her mother’s darkened room, just holding her hand for comfort, then made her father’s lunch when he brought the sheep down from the high grazing. Now she had a little time to herself. Time to think about the future. To fret about it. To fear for it. University would start again in just a few days, and she didn’t know how her father was going to manage without her.

Even worse, she had no idea how he would manage without his wife. It had been a long, depressing summer since the doctor had diagnosed terminal cancer. It could be weeks, he’d said. Months, if she was lucky. Lucky! Nicole didn’t think so.

The sound of the car came to her on the wind before she saw it, sunlight catching its roof as it wound its way up the track from the valley below, past the great pile of old tyres holding down the bache that covered the silage. She watched as it drew up in the yard below, and her aunt got out to greet her elder brother, Nicole’s father. They held each other for a long time before he took her case from the trunk and they went into the house. She would be there now until the end, and Nicole had pangs of guilt at the relief she felt. It was like being let out of prison. Or like a runner, exhausted and failing, passing on the baton for someone else to run the final leg.

The dogs crowded around her, peering up anxiously into her face, sensing her distress. She spoke to them softly, running her hands back over upturned heads, and felt a comfort in their untiring love.

‘Nicole!’

She looked up as she heard her name carried on the breeze. Her father stood on the stoop, the telephone held up in his hand. He was a big man, his ruddy complexion visible from here, beneath the ubiquitous cloth cap pushed back on his bull head.

‘A call for you!’