They were both big men, and their eyes met on a level. Enzo was startled. He had not heard the other man approach. But he stood his ground, determined to brazen it out. The rain began to fall in earnest, so that within seconds they were both soaked, rain streaming down faces carved in stone.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ Fabien’s eyes dropped to the carrier bag and the dripping trowel in Enzo’s hands.
‘None of your business.’ Enzo moved to push past him, but Fabien shoved a big hand into his chest.
‘It’s my land. Which makes it my business. What’s in the bag?’
In his day, Enzo could have met Fabien on an equal physical footing. But although he kept himself fit, there were twenty years between them. He would be no match for the younger man. ‘Nicole says you told her you refused to let Petty taste your wines.’
‘So?’
‘We found his reviews. He tasted five wines from La Croix Blanche.’
Lightning crackled somewhere over the other side of the hill, followed seconds later by an explosion of thunder.
Fabien shrugged. ‘He didn’t get them from me. You can buy my wines in any supermarket or cave around here.’
‘Why would he do that?’
‘You’d have to ask him.’
‘I would. Only someone murdered him.’
Fabien held him in a steady, unblinking gaze, face streaming. His change of subject took Enzo by surprise. ‘So, when’s the funeral?’
More lightning, more thunder. Enzo frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Nicole’s mother.’
Enzo felt anger rise up his back like bristles on a porcupine. ‘What’s it to you?’
‘I thought I might go.’
Confusion diluted anger for just a moment, and Enzo stared at Fabien through narrowed eyes. ‘Why would you do that?’
‘Me and Nicole, we have…an understanding. I think she’d appreciate my support.’
Enzo shook his head. ‘You stay away from Nicole. That’s the only thing you need to understand. You go anywhere near her, you answer to me.’
‘I’m shaking in my shoes.’ Thunder burst above their heads, so loudly that both men ducked involuntarily, momentarily chastened by an anger greater than their own before recovering their dignity and resuming their stand-off. Fabien tipped his head towards Enzo’s carrier bag. ‘Are you going to tell me what’s in the bag?’
Enzo glared at him and sounded much braver than he felt. ‘No.’
‘Looks to me like you’re stealing my land.’
‘Does it?’
‘And you’re trespassing.’
Enzo thrust out his jaw. ‘You know, in Scotland there is no law of trespass. Because we figured out a long time ago that nobody owns the land. We inhabit it for a short time. And when we’re gone, other people inhabit it. The land is forever, we’re just passing through.’
‘Semantics.’
‘That’s a big word.’
‘I read a lot.’
‘Well, read my lips. Stay away from Nicole.’ As Enzo tried to move past him, Fabien’s wet hand pushed into his chest once more. Enzo looked down at it, a hand that could do him a great deal of damage if its owner chose to use it for that purpose. Then he looked into the young man’s eyes. Their faces were only inches apart.
‘I could take you any day, old man.’
‘Maybe you could. But you’d suffer a lot of collateral damage in the process.’
The two men stood dripping in the rain, staring each other down, like animals in the wild. Each daring the other to make the first move. Each knowing that whatever the outcome, it would be bloody for them both. A few moments seemed to stretch into eternity. Then Fabien’s hand dropped to his side, and Enzo pushed past, their shoulders bumping, ungiving and hard, neither man wanting to lose face.
Fabien turned and watched, impassive, as Enzo got into his 2CV, backed it out around Fabien’s four-by-four, and headed back towards the road, down a track which had become a stream. Wipers smeared a fly-stained windscreen. Lightning flashed again across the valley, but the thunder had retreated beyond the hill. Like the threat of violence which had passed, its fury was spent and its roar muted.
III
Enzo pulled out eight inches of plastic from the roll in the machine and drew the cutter across it to make a plastic bag big enough to take a small trowelful of earth. Then, carefully, he placed the cut edge inside the machine and hit the start button. The plastic crinkled around the soil as the machine sucked out the air to create a vacuum before heat-sealing the bag.
He passed it to Sophie for labelling, cut another bag from the roll, and poured in the last of the eighteen samples they had collected.
There was a knock at the door. Michelle opened it, shaking her umbrella out on to the terrasse and propping it against the wall before stepping inside. ‘Hi.’ She tried to sound bright, but there was a tension behind her smile. ‘The rain’s really bad. Nobody’s picking grapes in this.’
Enzo had seen the harvesters out earlier, a frenzied attempt to strip as many of the vines as possible before the deluge. Now the vineyards were empty, harvesters abandoned, dripping in the rain.
Sophie cast Michelle a look, then turned back to her father who was concentrating on the final seal. ‘This is the one from Chateau Lacroux?’
‘Yes, the argile calcaire.’ It was a stony, chalky texture.
‘Hi,’ Bertrand said to Michelle. He was doing his best to ignore the atmosphere that Sophie was doing her best to create.
Michelle gave him a smile of appreciation and crossed the room to see what they were doing. She brought the smell of damp clothes with her and looked at all the bags laid out on the table. ‘Are those the soil samples?’
Enzo nodded as he hit the start button for the last time. ‘Yeah.’
‘I thought I was going to help with that.’
Without looking at her, Sophie said, ‘Some of us manage to get out of our beds earlier than others.’
Enzo glared at his daughter, remembering all the weekend mornings he’d had to tip her out of her bed in time for lunch. ‘We had to move fast before the rain started,’ he said.
The machine sucked the air out of the bag, then buzzed as it heat-sealed it shut.
‘Wow, where’d you get that?’ Michelle said.
Enzo straightened up and stretched his stiffening back. ‘At the hypermarket in town. It’s a food saver, for vacuum-sealing foodstuffs. Ideal for preventing contamination of the soil samples.’
‘How are you sending them to the States?’
‘I’m not. I’m taking them myself.’
Michelle pursed her lips. ‘Do you have official permission?’
‘Why would he need permission?’ Sophie glowered at her.
‘Because you can’t just go carrying soil samples with you on an airplane into the United States. Americans are paranoid about contaminants being brought in from other countries. Bugs and bacteria and viruses. They’re even scared you might carry something into the country in the treads of your shoes. That’s why you have to sign a form on the plane saying you haven’t been on a farm before travelling.’ She looked at Enzo. ‘You do have permission, don’t you?’
Sophie gazed up at her father with concern. ‘Do you?’
