Blackberry Wine Part 14

ockets. As they did he felt something brush against his land. Joe's talisman. It felt greasy, smooth with much landling. He had become so accustomed to carrying it with him that he had forgotten it was even there. He quatted next to her. He could smell the river, a sour, aetallic smell, like pennies soaked in ammonia.

'Are you coming back?' he asked.

'Nah.'

There must have been something interesting on the urface of the water. Her eyes refused to meet his.

'Don't think so. Maggie says I need to go to a proper chool now. Don't need all this moving about.'

Again that flare of hateful, irrational rage. Jay looked at be water in loathing. Suddenly he wanted to hurt someone ^Gilly, himself - and he stood up abruptly.

ta's.h.i.+t.' It was the worst word he knew. His mouth felt Hnnb. His heart, too. He kicked viciously at the river's edge ad a clod of earth and gra.s.s tore free and plunked into the later. Gilly didn't look at him.

He let his temper run freely then, kicking again at the (Silking so that earth and gra.s.s showered into the water.

rae of it flew at Gilly, too, spattering her jeans and her iSttbroidered s.h.i.+rt.

SS^Stop it, for crying out loud,' said Gilly flatly. 'Stop being >:sodding childish.'

sSIt was true, he thought, he was being childish, and to l^ar it from her enraged him. That she should accept their Isparation with such ease, such indifference. Something lawned blackly inside Jay's head, yawned and grimaced. ^f.u.c.k it, then,' he said. 'I'm off.'

Feeling slightly dizzy he turned and walked off up the ranking towards the ca.n.a.l towpath, sure she'd call him >ack. Ten paces. Twelve. He reached the towpath, not aoking back, knowing she was watching. He pa.s.sed the rees, where she couldn't see him, and turned, but Gilly was ;till sitting where she'd been before, not watching, not ollowing, just looking down into the water, hair over her Lansquenet, May 1999 I^HAD NOT SEEN JOE SINCE THE DAY AFTER MIREILLE'S VISIT,.

Iffirst Jay felt relieved by his absence, then as days pa.s.sed tigrew uneasy. He tried to will the old man to appear, but life-remained stubbornly absent, as if his appearances were t a matter of Jay's choosing. His leaving left a strangeness hind, a bereavement. At any moment Jay expected him to :there, in the garden, looking over the vegetable patch; in e kitchen, lifting the lid of a pan to find out what was poking. He was aware of Joe's absence as he sat at his Ipewriter, of the Joe-shaped hole in the centre of things, of e fact that, try as he might, he could not seem to get the adio to pick up the oldies station which Joe found with Bch everyday ease. Worse, his new book had no life Without Joe. He no longer felt like writing. He wanted a link, but drunkenness merely accentuated his feeling of fss.

He told himself that this was ridiculous. He could not uss what was never there in the first place. But still he Ould not shake off the feeling of something terribly lost, yribly wrong.

If only you'd had some faith.

That was really the problem, wasn't it? Faith. The old Jay would have had no hesitation. He believed everything.

Somehow he knew he had to get back to the old Jay, to finish what they had left unfinished, Joe and he, in the summer of '77. If only he knew how. He would do anything, he promised himself. Anything at all.

Finally, he brought out the last of Joe's rosehip wine. The bottle was dusty from its time in the cellar, the cord at its neck straw-coloured with age. Its contents were silent, waiting. Feeling self-conscious, but at the same time oddly *excited, Jay poured a gla.s.sful and raised it to his lips.

'I'm sorry, old man. Friends, OK?'

He waited for Joe to come.

He waited until dark.

In the cellar, laughter.

212.

42.JOSEPHINE MUST HAVE SPREAD THE WORD ABOUT HIM AT LAST. JAY.

Hound people becoming more friendly. Many of them teeeted him as he pa.s.sed, and Poitou in the bakery, who l(r&d spoken to him only with a shopkeeper's politeness S ifore, now asked about his book and gave him advice on h.atto buy.

llsS'The pain aux noix is good today. Monsieur Jay. Try it tth goat's cheese and a few olives. Leave the olives and the sEfiese on a sunny window-ledge for an hour before you eat lem to release the flavours.' He kissed his fingertips. Jihat's something you won't find in London.'

IteiE'oitou 'had been a baker in Lansquenet for twenty-five ^e^rs. He had rheumatism in his fingers, but claimed that ^feitdling the dough kept them supple. Jay promised to aake him a grain pack which would help - another trick t;Joe's. Strange, how easily it all came back. With Poitou's Hlpproval came more introductions - Guillaume the ex- S Ehoolteacher, Darien who taught the infants' cla.s.s, RoJSStoilphe the minibus driver who took the children to school ahd brought them home every day, Nenette who was a tturse in the nearby old people's home, Briancon who kept ^Bees at the other side of Les Marauds - as if they were merely waiting for the all-clear to indulge their curiosity.

Now they were all questions. What did Jay do in London?

Was he married? No, but surely someone, h.e.l.l? No? Astonishment.

Now suspicions had been allayed they were in213 satiably curious, broaching the most personal of topics with the same innocent interest. What was his last book?

How much exactly did an English writer earn? Had he been on television? And America? Had he seen America? Sighs of rapture over the reply. This information would be eagerly disseminated across the village over cups of coffee and bottles of blonde, whispered in shops, pa.s.sed from mouth to mouth and elaborated upon each time in the telling.

Gossip was currency in Lansquenet. More questions followed, robbed of offence by their ingenuousness. And I? Am I in your book? And I? And I? At first Jay hesitated.

People don't always respond well to the idea that they have been observed, their features borrowed, their mannerisms copied. Some expect payment. Others are insulted by the portrayal. But here it was different. Suddenly everyone had a story to tell. You can put it in your book, they told him.

Some even wrote them down - on sc.r.a.ps of notepaper, wrapping paper, once on the back of a packet of seeds.

Many of these people, especially the older ones, rarely picked up a book themselves. Some, like Narcisse, had difficulty reading at all. But still the respect for books was immense. Joe was the same, his miner's background having taught him from an early age that reading was a waste of time, hiding his National Geographies under the bed, but secretly delighted by the stories Jay read to him, nodding his head as he listened, unsmiling. And though Jay never saw him read more than CuJpeper's Herbal and the odd magazine, he would occasionally come out with a quote or a literary reference which could only have come from extensive, if secret, study. Joe liked poetry in the same way he liked flowers, hiding his affection almost shamefacedly beneath a semblance of disinterest. But his garden betrayed him. Pansies stared up from the edges of cold frames. Wild roses intertwined with runner beans. Lansquenet was like Joe in this. There was a thick vein of romance running through its practicality. Jay found that almost overnight he had become someone new to cherish, to shake heads over in 214.

^bewilderment - the English writer, dingue mais sympa, ^hehf - someone who provoked laughter and awe in equal ? doses. Lansquenet's holy fool. For the moment he could do ;hao wrong. There were no more cries of Rosbif! from the ^schoolchildren. And the presents. He was overwhelmed ^ With presents. A jar of comb honey from Briancon, with an ^anecdote about his younger sister and how she once tried to Ilitprepare a rabbit - 'after over an hour in the kitchen she j ij ung it out of the doorway shouting, "Take it back! I can't piick the d.a.m.n thing!" ' and a note: 'You can use it in your ^Ook.' A cake from Popotte, carried carefully in her postbag fcith the letters and balanced in her bicycle basket for the l^lurney. An unexpected gift of seed potatoes from Narcisse, 1th mumbled instructions to plant them by the sunny side Istbe house. Any offer of payment would have caused Hence. Jay tried to repay this stream of small kindnesses llybuying drinks in the Cafe des Marauds, but found he .bought fewer rounds than anyone else.

i t*s all .right,' explained Josephine when he mentioned Hfc to her. 'It's how people are here. They need a little time get used to you. Then . . .' She grinned. Jay was carrying a Ispping bag filled with gifts which people left for him t;der Josephine's bar - cakes, biscuits, bottles of wine, a tsjiion-cover from Denise Poitou, a terrine from Toinette BBrnaiild. She looked at the basket and her grin widened. 'I ynk we can say you've been accepted, don't you?'

llThere was one exception to this new-found welcome.

ll.rise d'Api remained as remote as ever. It was three leeks since he had last tried to speak to her. He had seen iif since, but only from a distance, twice in the tractor and ace on foot, always at work in the field. Of the daughter, lathing. Jay told himself that his feeling of disappointment H^as absurd. From what he had heard Marise was hardly IgllQing to be affected by what happened in the village.

Ip: "'He wrote back to Nick with another fifty pages of the l^ew ma.n.u.script. Since then progress had been slower. Part iof this was to do with the garden. There was a great deal of I11.

I'- . 215.

work to be done there, and now that summer was in sight the weeds had begun to take over. Joe was right. He would need to sort it out while it was still possible. There were plenty of plants there worth saving, if he could only clear the mess. There was a square of herbs about twenty feet across, with the remains of a tiny thyme hedge around it.

Three rows each of potatoes, turnips, globe artichokes, carrots and what might be celeriac. Jay seeded marigolds between the rows of potatoes to eliminate beetles, and lemon balm around the carrots for the slugs. But he needed to consider the winter's vegetables and the summer's salads. He went to Narcisse's nursery for seeds and seedlings: sprouting broccoli for September, rocket and frisee for July and August. In the cold frame he had made from Clairmont's doors he had already seeded some baby vegetables - Little Gem lettuces and fingerling carrots and parsnips -- which might be ready in a month or so. Joe was right, the land here was good. The soil was a rich russet, at the same time moist and lighter than across the river. There were fewer stones, too. The ones he found he slung onto what would become his rockery. He had almost finished restoring the rose garden. Pinned into place against the old wall the roses had begun to swell and bud; a cascade of half-opened flowers dripping against the pinkish brick to release their winey scent. They were almost free of aphids now. Joe's old recipe - lavender, lemon balm and cloves st.i.tched into red flannel sachets and tied onto the stems just above the soil -- had worked its usual magic. Every Sunday or so he would pick a bunch of the most open blooms and take them to Mireille Faizande's house in the Place Saint-Antoine after the service.

Jay was not expected to attend Ma.s.s. En tout cas, tous Jes Anglais sont paiens. The term was used with affection. Not so with La Pai'enne across the river. Even the old men on the cafe's terra.s.se viewed her with suspicion. Perhaps because she was a woman alone. When Jay asked outright, he found he was politely stonewalled. Mireille looked at the roses for 216.

: a long time. Lifting them to her face, she breathed the scent.

Her arthritic hands, oddly delicate in comparison with her bulky body, touched the petals gently.

'Thank you.' She gave a formal little nod. "My lovely roses. I'll put them into water. Come in, and I'll make some tea.'

Her house was clean and airy, with the whitewashed , walls and stone floors of the region, but its simplicity was ^deceptive. An Aubusson rug hung on one wall, and there ,iwas a grandfather clock in the corner of the living room Iwhich Kerry would have sold her soul for. Mireille saw him Hooking. "That belonged to my grandmother,' she said. 'It Used to be in my nursery when I was a child. I remember Stening to the chimes when I lay awake in bed. It plays a tfferent carillon for the hour, the half and the quarter. Bay loved it.' Her mouth tightened, and she turned away larrange the roses in a bowl. 'Tony's daughter would have Bfd it.'

The tea was weak, like flower water. She served it in iisStt must have been her best Limoges, with silver tongs fcthe sugar and lemon.

Tm sure she would. If only her mother were a little less selusive.'

tNBreille looked at him. Derisively. 'Reclusive? Heh/ She's i^isocial, Monsieur Jay. Hates everyone. Her family more ISai anyone else.' She sipped her tea. 'I would have helped r if she'd let me. I wanted to bring them both to live with e. Give the child what she needs most. A proper home. A mily. But she--' She put down the cup. Jay noticed that ie never called Marise by name. 'She insists on maintain- S aig the terms of the lease. She insists she will stay until lllBiext July, when it expires. Refuses to come to the village.

IgRefuses to talk to me or to my nephew, who offers to help Aer. And afterwards, h.e.l.l? She plans to buy the land from jpPierre-Emile. tWhy? She wants to be independent, she says. i^She doesn't want to owe us anything.' Mireille's face was a ftclenched fist. 'Owe us! She owes me everything. I gave her 'I'' ^.

fc 217 a home. I gave her my son! There's nothing left of him now but the child. And even there she's managed to take her from us. Only she can talk to her, with that sign language she uses. She'll never know about her father and how he died. She's even fixed that. Even if I could--'

The old woman broke off abruptly. 'Never mind, h.e.l.lI' she said with an effort. 'She'll come round eventually. She'll have to come round. She can't hold out for ever. Not when I--' Again she broke off, her teeth snapping together with a small brittle sound.

"I don't see why she should be so hostile,' said Jay at last.

The village is such a friendly place. Look how friendly everyone's been to me. If she gave people a chance I'm sure they'd welcome her. It can't be easy, living on her own.

You'd think she'd be pleased to know people were concerned--''You don't understand.' Mireille's voice was contemptuous.

'She knows what sort of welcome she'd get if she ever showed her face here. That's why she stays away. Ever since he brought her here from Paris it's been the same. She never fitted in. Never even tried. Everyone knows what she did, h.e.l.l. I've made sure of that.' Her black eyes narrowed in triumph.

'Everybody knows how she murdered my son.'

218.

43.WELL, SHE EXAGGERATES, YOU KNOW,' SAID CLAIRMONT.

peaceably. They were in the Cafe des Marauds, which was filling up rapidly with its after-work crowd, he in his ;i oil-stained overalls and blue beret, a group of his workers, Roux amongst them, gathered around a table behind him.

The comfortable .reek of Gauloises and coffee filled the air. ^Someone behind them was discussing a recent football (natch. Josephine was busy microwaving pizza slices. 'h.e.l.l, Jose, un croque, to veux bien?'

On the counter stood a bowl of boiled eggs and a dish of t/salt. Clairmont took one and began to peel it carefully. 'I I mean, everyone knows she didn't actually kill him. But there are plenty of other ways than pulling the trigger, h.e.l.l?'

'Driven him to it, you mean?'

Clairmont nodded. 'He was an easy-going lad. Thought she was perfect. Did everything for her, even after they were married. Wouldn't hear a word spoken against her. ;.- Said she was highly strung and delicate. Well, maybe she was, h.e.l.l?' He helped himself to salt from the dish. The way he was with her, you'd have thought she was gla.s.s.

She'd just come out of one of those hospitals, he said.

Something wrong with her nerves.' Clairmont laughed.

'Nerves, h.e.l.lI Wasn't anything wrong with her nerves. But anyone dared say anything about her--' He shrugged.

'Killed himself trying to please her, poor Tony. Worked himself half to death for her, then shot himself when she 219.

tried to leave him.' He bit into his egg with melancholy gusto.

'Oh yes, she was going to leave,' he added, seeing Jay's surprise. 'Had her bags all packed and ready. Mireille saw them. There'd been some row,' he explained, finis.h.i.+ng the egg and gesturing to Josephine for a second blonde. "There was always some kind of a row going on in that place. But this time it really looked as if she was going to go through with it. Mireille--'

"What is it?' Josephine was carrying a tray of microwaved pizzas, and looked flushed and tired.

Two Stellas, Jose.'

Josephine handed him the bottles, which he opened using the bottle-opener fixed into the bar. She gave him a narrow look before moving on with the pizzas.

'Well anyway, that was that,' finished Clairmont, pouring the beers. 'They made out it was an accident, h.e.l.l, as you would. But everyone knows that crazy wife of his was behind it.' He grinned. 'The funny thing was that she didn't get a penny from his will. She's at the mercy of the family. It was a seven-year lease -- they can't do anything about that -- but when it runs out, h.e.l.lI' He shrugged expressively. 'Then she'll be gone, and good riddance to her.'

"Unless she buys the farm herself,' said Jay. 'Mireille said she might try.'

Clairmont's face darkened for a moment. 'I'd bid against her myself if I could afford it,' he declared, draining his gla.s.s. 'That's good building land. I could build a dozen holiday chalets on that old vineyard. Pierre-Emile's an idiot if he lets it go to her.' He shook his head. 'All we need is a bit of luck and land prices in Lansquenet could rocket. Look at Le Pinot. That land could make a fortune if you developed it properly. But you'd never see her doing that. Wouldn't even give up the marshland by the river when they were thinking about widening the road. Blocked the plan out of sheer meanness.' He shook his head.

'But things are on the up now, h.e.l.l?' His good humour was already restored, his grin oddly at variance with his mournful moustache. 'In a year, maybe two, we could make Le Pinot look like a Ma.r.s.eilles bidonville. Now that things are beginning to change.' Once again he gave his humble, eager grin. 'All it takes is one person to make a difference, Monsieur Jay. Isn't that right?'

He tapped the rim of his gla.s.s against Jay's and winked.

*Sante.''

221.

44.FUNNY, HOW EASILY IT ALL CAME BACK. FOUR WEEKS NOW.

since his last sighting of Joe and still he felt as if the old man might reappear at any moment. The red flannel sachets were in place in the vegetable garden and at the corners of the house. The trees at the land's boundary were similarly adorned, though the wind kept stripping them off. Marigolds, propagated in the home-made cold frame, were beginning to open their bright petals amongst Narcisse's seed potatoes. Poitou baked a special couronne loaf in thanks for his grain pack, which, he claimed, had given him more relief than any drug. Of course, Jay knew he would have said that anyway.

Now his garden had the best collection of herbs in the village. The lavender was still green, but already more pungent than Joe's had ever been, and there was thyme and cologne mint and lemon balm and rosemary and great drifts of basil. He gave a whole basket of these to Popotte when she came by with the mail, and another to Rodolphe.

Joe often gave out little charms - goodwill charms, he called them - to visitors, and Jay began to do the same: tiny bunches of lavender or mint or pineapple sage, tied with ribbons of different colours -- red for protection, white for luck, blue for healing. Funny how it all came back. People a.s.sumed this was another English custom, the general explanation for all his eccentricities. Some took to wearing these little posies pinned to their coats and jackets - though 222.

it was May it was still too cool for the locals to wear their summer clothing, though Jay had long since turned to shorts and T-s.h.i.+rts for everyday wear. Strangely enough Jay found the return to Joe's familiar customs rather comforting.

When he was a boy Joe's perimeter rituals, his incense, sachets, pig-Latin incantations and sprinklings of herbs too often irritated him. He found them embarra.s.sing, like someone singing too fervently in school a.s.sembly. To his adolescent self, much of Joe's everyday magic seemed rather too commonplace, too natural, like cookery or gardening, stripped of its mysteries. Serious though he was about his workings, there was a cheery practicality to all of it, which made Jay's romantic soul rebel. He would have preferred solemn invocations, black robes and midnight ? ritual. That he might have believed. Reared on comic books ;, and trash fiction, that at least would have rung true. Now "that it was too late, Jay found he had rediscovered the peace of working with the soil. Everyday magic, Joe used to call it.

t Layman's alchemy. Now he understood what the old man neant. But in spite of all this Joe stayed away. Jay prepared fcthe land for his return like a well-raked seedbed. He [Iplanted and weeded according to the lunar cycle, as Joe Spyould have done. He did everything right. He tried to have faith.

I?' He told himself that Joe was never there at all, that it was to his imagination. But perversely, now Joe was gone he ^needed to believe it was otherwise. Joe was really there, a Impart of him insisted. Really there, and he had blown it with ' his anger and disbelief. If only he could make him come back, Jay promised himself, things would be different.

There were so many things left unfinished. He felt a helpless rage at himself. He'd had a second chance, and stupidly he'd blown it. He worked in the garden every day until dusk. He was sure Joe would come. That he could make him come.

223.

45.PERHAPS AS A RESULT OF DWELLING SO CONSTANTLY ON THE.

past, Jay found himself spending more and more time by the river, where the cutaway dropped sharply into the water. There he found a wasps' nest in the ground, under the hedge close by, and he watched it with relentless fascination, recalling that summer in 1977, and how he was stung, and Gilly's laughter at the den at Nether Edge.

He lay on his stomach and watched the wasps shuttling in and out of the hole in the ground and imagined he could hear them moving just under the surface. Above them the sky was white and troubling. The remaining Specials were as silent, as troubling as the sky. Even their whispering was suspended.

It was as he lay beside the riverbank that Rosa found him. His eyes were open, but he did not seem to be looking at anything. The radio, swinging from a branch overhanging the water, was playing Elvis Presley. At his side stood an opened bottle of wine. Its label, too far away for her to read it, said "Raspberry '75'. There was a red cord knotted around the neck of the bottle, which caught her eye. As she watched, the Englishman reached for the bottle and drank from it. He made a face, as if the taste were unpleasant, but from across the river she caught the scent of what he was drinking - a sudden bright flare of ripe scarlet, wild berries gathered in secret. She studied him for a moment from the other side of the river. In spite of what 224.

maman told her, he looked harmless. And this was the man who tied the funny little red bags on the trees. She wondered why. At first her taking them was a defiant gesture, erasing him as much as possible from her place, but she had come to like them, their dangling shapes like small red fruit on the shaken branches. She no longer minded sharing her secret place with him. Rosa s.h.i.+fted her position to squat more comfortably in the long weeds on the far side of the river. She considered crossing, but the stepping stones had submerged in recent showers, and she was wary of jumping to the far bank. At her side the curious brown goat nuzzled restlessly at her sleeve. She pushed the goat away with a flapping motion of her hand. Later, CJopette, later. ' She wondered whether the Englishman knew about the ; wasps' nest. He was, after all, less than a metre from its ; opening.

I Jay lifted the bottle again. It was over half empty, and lalready he felt dizzy, almost drunk. It was in part the sky which gave him this impression, the raindrops zigzagging l4own onto his upturned face like flakes of soot. The sky went on for ever.

IS From the bottle the scent intensified, became something which bubbled and seethed. It was a gleeful scent, a breath high summer, of overripe fruit dripping freely from the I'branches, heated from below by the sun reflecting from I the chalky stones of the railbed. This memory was not entirely pleasant. Perhaps because of the sky he also I'-a.s.sociated it with his last summer at Pog Hill, the disas- ' trous confrontation with Zeth and the wasps' nests, Gilly watching in fascination and himself crouching close by.

Gilly was always the one who enjoyed wasping. Without her he would never have ventured near a wasps' nest at all.