Peter May - The Critic

She hurried down the remaining stairs and out of the front door to the garden. There she stopped and breathed the cool night air and was relieved to be out of the house. The lights were still on in the chai. Away to her left, agricultural machinery sat in the brooding shadow of a long, open shed with a rust-red tin roof. At the far end of the old farmyard, beyond the chai, was the shed where the wines of La Croix Blanche were ageing in new oak barrels. Its door stood open, and a wedge of light lay like a carpet in the approach to the entrance.

As she ran across the yard, the security lights came on, and she felt very exposed. She jogged down the length of the chai, stopping only to gather her breath as she approached the shed where the barrels were stored. The lights went off again behind her, and she approached the open door with a great deal of nervous apprehension. She paused in the doorway and peered inside. Rows of barrels, stacked two high, ran off towards the back of the shed. The central strip of each barrel was stained pink between the cooper’s bands of steel. Darker rivulets, like blood, ran down their bellies from cork bungs. The wine was still fermenting, and the smell of it in the air was thick enough to cut.

There was no sound, and no sign of Fabien. She stepped inside and saw an opening off to her left leading to another room filled with yet more barrels. There was an electric pump on the floor, and silver tubing coiled around it like a giant snake.

‘What the hell are you doing here!’ The sound of Fabien’s voice startled her, and she turned in a panic, clutching her chest. He was standing in the doorway, wearing his ubiquitous baseball cap, glowering at her out of the darkness.

‘I was looking for you.’

‘This is no place for someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing. It’s dangerous.’

Nicole almost laughed. ‘Dangerous? Wine? Only if you drink too much of it.’

But he didn’t laugh with her. He grabbed her hand and pulled her out into the yard. ‘Come with me.’

Nicole followed reluctantly, although in truth, she had very little choice. ‘Where are we going?’

‘You’ll see.’

He took her through the chai, where pumps were thundering in the still of the night to transfer freshly fermenting grape juice from one cuve to another. Past rows of brand new stainless steel tanks, and old resin containers from Fabien’s father’s time, to a large room through the back. There, the tops of sunken cuves rose fifty centimetres from the concrete floor. Fabien let go of her hand and knelt down at the nearest of them, and carefully removed the lid.

‘Kneel down.’

‘Why?’

‘Just do what I tell you.’

Scared now, Nicole did what she was told and knelt down beside him.

‘Take a sniff in there.’

She looked down into the cuve and saw the yellow-white frothing grape juice in full fermentation.

‘Go on, smell it.’

With great apprehension she leaned over to smell the fermenting juice and felt her head snap back so suddenly that she was startled into calling out. She had recoiled from a smell and a sensation so extreme, that she’d had no control over her response to it. It had been entirely involuntary. She gasped, ‘What in the name of God was that?’

He cocked an eyebrow at her as if to underline his earlier warning. ‘Carbonic gas. A by-product of fermentation. It’s not poisonous, but it’ll kill you in the blink of an eye.’ He took a cigarette lighter from his pocket, lit the flame, and then lowered it slowly into the neck of the cuve. As he did so, the flame detached itself from the lighter, but continued to burn until the separation between the two was nearly ten centimetres and it was finally extinguished. ‘No oxygen, you see.’ He stood up and offered her his hand to help her to her feet.

She got up, and they stood for what seemed like a very long time, still holding hands, until he was overcome by self-consciousness and took his back. She desperately wanted to ask him about Petty, about his reviews of La Croix Blanche wines, but the words wouldn’t come. And the longer they stood in silence, the more tense they both became. She started to be aware, for the first time, of how dark his eyes were, how long his lashes. And almost as if he knew what was in her mind, he averted his black eyes.

He said, ‘About twenty years ago there was a lake somewhere in Africa that released cubic tons of the stuff into the atmosphere.’

She was taken aback by his sudden digression. ‘Cubic tons of what?’

‘Carbonic gas. The lake was in an old volcanic crater, and the gas must have come up from the volcano below. Probably over hundreds of years. It dissolves in water, you see.’ He pointed to the grille-covered channels that ran through the concrete floor of the chai. ‘We flush water through those gutters to collect and take away carbonic gas from the fermentation. It’s heavier than air, so it sinks to the floor and dissolves in the water.’

Nicole followed the line of the gutter out into the yard.

‘Anyway the gas must just have been lying on the lake bed. Then, during a storm of some kind, there was a huge amount of rainfall, and they think that cold rainwater dropped to the bottom of the lake, displacing the carbonic gas and forcing it to the surface.’ He shook his head, visualising it. ‘Must have looked like the water was boiling. Except that it was the middle of the night, so no one would have seen it.’

Nicole was wide-eyed, imagining the scene as Fabien described it. ‘So what happened?’

‘The lake was way above sea level. So because the gas is heavier than air, it just ran down the valleys, engulfing all the villages in its path. Most of the villagers were asleep in bed. Thousands died from asphyxiation.’

‘Oh, my God, that’s terrible.’ Nicole was still wide-eyed, transfixed by the horror of his story, impressed by the breadth of his knowledge. It was not what she would have expected of a farmer’s boy who made wine.

He fixed her again with his dark eyes. ‘That’s why you don’t ever come in here on your own. Understand?’

She nodded mutely.

As they crossed the yard towards the house he said, ‘So why were you looking for me?’

She was glad he couldn’t see her face. She was not a good liar. ‘It’s just…you weren’t there when I got back tonight.’

‘There were cops crawling about the place all day. I got behind with things.’

As they passed beyond the security sensors, the lights went out, and Nicole saw the wash of moonlight over the hills that rose out of the river valley to the north, the silhouette of the old church starkly outlined against a jewelled jet sky.

‘Is it still in use?’ she asked.

He followed her eyeline. ‘No, it’s all boarded up. Which is a shame. It’s a beautiful old building.’

‘Why did they build a church way up there, anyway?’

‘It used to serve the castle. Then the castle was destroyed during the Albigeoise Crusades against the heretics of Cathar.’ He looked at her. ‘You know who the Cathars were?’

She shook her head with a growing sense of inadequacy. She was the university student, after all. Surely these were things she should know? ‘I know they call this Cathar country. But I don’t know why.’

‘The Cathars were a religious sect in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. They combined Christian and Gnostic elements. The thing that the Roman Catholic church regarded as heretical was their belief that the resurrection was a rebirth, rather than the physical raising of a dead body from the grave. So the Cathars were slaughtered in their thousands and driven out of towns and villages all over southwest France.’

‘How do you know all this?’ She gazed at him in wonder.