He wasn’t sure if it was the heat of her body he felt, or the sun reflecting off the stone. But she was standing very close to him. Almost touching. And her eyes still held him in their relentless, searching green. She put a hand on his arm. It felt cool.
‘You know, they say when one door closes another opens. I thought, maybe, that night at Le Romuald, that you were that other door. You’re different, Enzo. Special.’ She pushed herself up on tiptoes to kiss him. A soft, moist caress of the lips. ‘But I guess it wasn’t meant to be.’
He swallowed hard. ‘I’m too old for you, Michelle.’
She smiled and shook her head. ‘No you’re not. It’s my fault. I’m too young. I wish I were older.’
‘No. You shouldn’t ever wish your life away.’ He cupped her face in his hands, and it felt very small and delicate in his palms. He stooped to kiss her softly, before enveloping her in strong arms to hold her tightly for several moments. Moments in which neither of them heard the slamming of a car door in the carpark.
When he let her go, her eyes were moist and her cheeks flushed. She gazed up at him for a long time, searching for words. And when none came, she reached up to kiss him again. A short, sweet kiss. ‘Goodbye, Enzo.’
She turned and hurried off into the shuttered cool of the stone-tiled reception, and he stood for nearly a minute before turning to find Charlotte leaning against the arch of the gate watching him. She cast him a very curious look, before pushing herself away from the wall and walking back across the castine to the car. She was sitting staring straight ahead when he slipped into the driver’s seat beside her, and the car rocked on big, coiled springs. He put his hands on the wheel and held it for some time without speaking. Finally he said, ‘So how much did you see?’
‘Enough.’
‘She’s leaving, Charlotte.’
‘That makes two of us.’
He stared at her very hard, but she refused to turn and meet his eye. ‘Because of Michelle?’
‘Because I have patients.’
And he knew there was no point in discussing it further. He looked over his shoulder to find Braucol watching him with big, sad eyes. Almost as if he had understood. Enzo breathed silent frustration through his teeth and turned the key in the ignition. The one reliable thing in his life turned over, as it always did, the characteristic tinny purr of the two horsepower engine idling patiently, waiting for him to engage first gear.
Sophie followed Charlotte around the gite as she collected her things. ‘But why are you going? It’s because of her, isn’t it?’ She glared at her father. With a woman’s instinct, she had gone straight to what she perceived to be the heart of the matter. Bertrand gave Enzo a sympathetic smile, and Enzo found himself grateful for even that small crumb of support in this conspiracy of the sexes which he knew would always cast him as the villain.
‘No. I have patients.’ Charlotte wasn’t playing the game. ‘I have no reason to be jealous of anyone in relation to your father, Sophie. Least of all a child like Michelle Petty.’
Sophie looked towards Nicole at the computer, in search of an ally. But Nicole just shrugged. ‘In my limited experience, women are always fighting over him. I can’t think why.’
‘I am still in the room, you know,’ Enzo said.
When, finally, Charlotte emerged from the bedroom with her case packed, Bertrand stepped smartly forward to relieve her of the burden. ‘I’ll take that for you.’
Enzo glowered at him. A look that said, traitor! And grabbed the handle before him. ‘I might be nearly twice your age, Bertrand, but I think I can still handle a suitcase.’
After Sophie and Charlotte had kissed goodbye, Enzo followed the psychologist across the grass to her car and heaved her case into the trunk. She banged the lid shut, and they stood looking at each other. He wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her, and tell her if only she would commit to him he would have no need for any other woman in his life. As if she could read his thoughts from the frustration in his face, her eyes softened suddenly, and a slight smile curled up the corners of her mouth.
‘If you go to California, you’ll be flying from Paris?’
‘Probably.’
‘Stay over at my place before you go, then.’ She slipped cool fingers behind his neck and gently pulled his head down so she could kiss him. And then she stepped into the car, backing up before accelerating away on the long drive through the trees to the road.
He watched her go, filled with love and frustration and anger, and wondered if he would ever understand her.
A tugging at his feet drew his eyes down, and Braucol sprang away, never tiring of his party trick, eyebrows pushed up in anticipation of admiration or admonishment. Either would do.
Chapter Thirteen
I
‘Hold still!’
Enzo sat in the chair with his tongue sticking out, and struggled to prevent it from twitching involuntarily.
Bertrand held his head back with one hand, and with the other squeezed the rubber nipple of his eye-dropper to let the blue food dye drip on to the tip of Enzo’s tongue.
‘Now keep your tongue out, don’t swallow.’
Enzo gurgled incoherently as Bertrand pressed the punched hole in a sheet of paper on to the end of his tongue and brought a magnifying glass up to his eye. He started counting the fungiform papillae visible in the hole.
‘Twenty-seven,’ he said. ‘Which puts you bang in the middle category. A taster.’ He gave Enzo his tongue back, and watched as the older man pulled a face and washed away the food dye with a glass of water.
Bertrand had explained the experiment before dropping dye on to each of their tongues in turn. The tongue would take up the dye, he told them, but the small round structures of the fungiform papillae, or taste buds, stayed pink, allowing them to be counted. Fewer than fifteen, concentrated in the seven millimetre hole in the sheet of paper, classified you as a nontaster. Fifteen to thirty-five, as a taster. And more than thirty-five made you a supertaster.
Nicole had been delighted to learn that she was a supertaster, until Bertrand told her that this wasn’t necessarily a good thing. ‘If you’re too sensitive to taste, then you can end up with flavour overkill. Things are too sweet, or too bitter, or too salty.’
Bertrand, Sophie, and her father all had average counts in the fifteen to thirty-five middle range.
‘We can only perceive five different tastes.’ Bertrand was warming to his subject, revelling in his knowledge. ‘Sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and umami — which is a Japanese word that translates as meaty or savoury.’
Enzo looked at the young man with renewed admiration. He really did know his stuff. However, this was an area about which Enzo also knew a little. ‘But we’re sensitive to thousands of smells,’ he said. ‘Although we can only identify up to a maximum of four odours at any one time in any mixture, regardless of whether it’s a single molecule odour, like alcohol, or something more complex, like smoke.’ He grinned. ‘So the next time you see some flamboyant wine review, extolling the virtues of a half dozen or more wonderful aromas, you’ll know just what bullshit it really is.’
Bertrand took up the baton again. ‘The hardest thing, though, is to identify the smells. The olfactory epithelium…’
Sophie pulled a face. “All factory what…?’
‘Epithelium,’ Enzo said. ‘The tissue that traps and identifies smell molecules.’
Bertrand ignored the interruption. ‘The olfactory epithelium in humans is only about a fifth as sensitive as cats, and we just don’t live in the same smell universe as dogs.’ He looked at Braucol, who cocked his head and looked back at him. ‘If dogs could taste wine, Robert Parker would be out of a job.’ He turned back to Enzo. ‘What
