She and Brian left early with the deliveries because there were so many: some postponed and some in advance, including the glasses and champagne for the next day’s coming-of-age. I kept shop, smiling, ever smiling as usual, and thinking, when I could.
Shortly after eight in the evening Gerard walked in looking grey and tired and asking if I could shut the damned place and come out and eat. Somewhere quiet. He wanted to talk.
I looked at the fatigued lines in his face and the droop of his normally erect body. I was twenty years younger than he and I hadn’t had a general anaesthetic, and if in spite of taking things fairly easy I still felt battered and weak, then he must feel worse. And maybe the cause wasn’t simply the profusion of little burning stab wounds but the residue also from the horsebox... the frissons of nearness to death.
‘We could take Sung Li’s food home to my house,’ I suggested diffidently, ‘if you’d like.’
He would like, he said. He would also buy the food while I fiddled with the till and locked up, and how soon would that be?
‘Half an hour,’ I said. ‘Have some wine.’
He sighed with resignation, sat on the chair I brought from the office and ruefully smiled at our two slings.
‘Snap’ he said.
‘Flora’s idea, mine.’
‘Sensible lady.’
‘I’ll get the wine.’
In the office I poured some genuine wine from St Estèphe and some of the Silver Moondance version into two glasses and carried them out to the counter.
‘Taste them both,’ I said. ‘Say what you think.’
‘What are they?’
‘Tell you later.’
‘I’m no expert,’ he protested. He sipped the first, however, rolling it round his gums and grimacing as if he’d sucked a lemon.
‘Very dry,’ he said.
‘Try the other.’
The second seemed at first to please him better, but after a while he eyed it thoughtfully and put the glass down carefully on the counter.
‘Well?’ I asked.
He smiled. ‘The first is demanding. The second is pleasant... but light. You’re going to tell me that the first is more expensive.’
‘Pretty good. The second one, the pleasant but light one, came from the Silver Moondance. The first is near enough what it should have tasted like, according to the label.’
He savoured the various significances. ‘Many might prefer the take. People who didn’t know what to expect.’
‘Yes. A good drink. Nothing wrong with it.’
He sipped the genuine article again. ‘But once you know this one, you grow to appreciate it.’
‘If I had any just now I’d give you one of the great St Estèphes... Cos d’Estournel, Montrose, Calon-Ségur... but this is a good cru bourgeois... lots of body and force.’
‘Take your word for it,’ he said amiably. ‘I’ve often wished I knew more about wine.’
‘Stick around.’
I tasted both the wines again myself, meeting them as old friends. The Silver Moondance wine had stood up pretty well to being opened and refastened, but now that I’d poured the second sample out of the bottle what was left would begin to deteriorate. For wine to remain perfect it had to be in contact with the cork. The more air in the bottle the more damage it did.
I fetched and showed him both of the bottles, real and fake, and told him what Henri Tavel had had to say about forgeries.
He listened attentively, thought for a while, and then said, ‘What is it about the fake wine that seems more significant to you than the fake whisky? Because it does, doesn’t it?’
‘Just as much. Equally.’
‘Why, then?’
‘Because...’ I began, and was immediately interrupted by a row of customers wanting to know what to drink inexpensively with Sung Li’s crispy duck and Peking prawn and beef in oyster sauce. Gerard listened with interest and watched them go one by one with their bottles of Bergerac and Soave and Côtes du Ventoux.
He said, ‘You sell knowledge, don’t you, as much as wine?’
‘Yeah. And pleasure. And human contact. Anything you can’t get from a supermarket.’
A large man with eyes awash shouldered his way unsteadily into the shop demanding beer loudly, and I sold him what he wanted without demur. He paid clumsily, belched, went on his weaving way: and Gerard frowned at his departing back.
‘He was drunk,’ he said.
‘Sure.’
‘Don’t you care?’
‘Not as long as they’re not sick in the shop,’
‘That’s immoral.’
I grinned faintly. ‘I sell escape also.’
‘Temporary,’ he objected disapprovingly, sounding austerely Scots.
‘Temporary is better than nothing,’ I said. ‘Have an aspirin.’
He made a noise between a cough and a chuckle. ‘I suppose you’ve lived on them since Sunday.’
‘Yes, quite right.’ I swallowed two more with some St Estèphe, in itself a minor heresy. ‘I’m all for escape.’
He gave me a dry look which I didn’t at first understand, and only belatedly remembered my rush down the yard.
‘Well... as long as I’m not being robbed.’
He nodded sardonically and waited through two more sales and a discussion about whether Sauternes would go with lamb chops, which it wouldn’t; they would each taste dreadful.
‘What goes with Sauternes then? I like Sauternes.’
‘Anything sweet,’ I said. ‘Also perhaps curry. Or ham. Also blue cheese.’
‘Good heavens,’ said Gerard when he’d gone. ‘Blue cheese with sweet wine... how odd.’
‘Wine and cheese parties thrive on it.’
He looked round the shop as if at a new world. ‘Is there anything you can’t drink wine with?’ he said.
‘As far as I’m concerned... grapefruit.’
He made a face.
‘And that’s from one,’ I said, ‘who drinks wine with baked beans... who practically scrubs his teeth in it.’
‘You really love it?’
I nodded. ‘Nature’s magical accident.’
‘What?’
‘That the fungus on grapes turns the sugar in grape juice to alcohol. That the result is delicious.’
‘For heaven’s sake...’
‘No one could have invented it,’ I said. ‘It’s just there. A gift to the planet. Elegant.’
‘But there are all sorts of different wines.’
‘Oh, sure, because there are different sorts of grapes. But a lot of champagne is made from black-skinned grapes... things may not be as they seem, which should please you as a detective.’
‘Hm,’ he said dryly. His glance roved over the racks of bottles. ‘As a detective what pleases me is proof... so what’s proof?’
‘If you mix a liquid with gunpowder and ignite it, and it burns with a steady blue flame, that’s proof.’
He looked faintly bemused. ‘Proof of what?’
‘Proof that the liquid is at least fifty per cent alcohol. That’s how they proved a liquid was alcohol three centuries ago when they first put a tax on distilled spirits. Fifty percent alcohol, one hundred percent proved. They measure the percentage now with hydrometers, not gunpowder and fire. Less risky, I dare say.’
‘Gunpowder,’ he said, ‘is something you and I have had too much of recently.’ He stood up stiffly. ‘Your half-hour is up. I’ll get the food.’
Fourteen
Gerard followed me home in his mended Mercedes and came into the house bearing Sung Li’s fragrant parcels.
‘You call this a cottage?’ he said sceptically, looking at perspectives. ‘More like a palace.’
‘It was a cottage beside a barn, both of them falling to pieces. The barn was bigger than the cottage... hence the space.’
We had joyfully planned that house, Emma and I, shaping the rooms to fit what we’d expected to be our lives, making provision for children. A big kitchen for family meals; a sitting room, future playroom; a dining room for friends; many bedrooms; a large quiet drawing room, splendid for parties. The conversion, done in three stages as we could afford it, had taken nearly five years. Emma had contentedly waited, wanting the nest to be ready for the chicks, and almost the moment it was done she had become pregnant.