Blackberry Wine (20 page)

LATER THAT NIGHT, BACK AT THE HOUSE, HE WENT OVER THEIR
conversation. Joe was sitting in his usual spot on the bed, hands laced behind his neck. The radio was playing light music. The typewriter keys felt cold and dead under his fingertips. The bright thread of his narrative had finally run out.

‘It’s no good.’ He sighed and poured coffee into his half-empty cup. ‘I’m not getting anywhere.’

Joe watched him lazily, his cap over his eyes.

‘I can’t write this book. I’m blocked. It doesn’t make sense. It isn’t going anywhere.’

The story, so clear in his mind a few nights before, had receded into almost nothing. His head was swimming with wakefulness.

‘You should get to know her,’ advised Joe. ‘Forget listening to other people’s talk and make up your own mind. That or kick it into touch altogether.’

Jay made an impatient gesture.

‘How can I do that? She obviously doesn’t want to have anything to do with me. Or anyone else, for that matter.’

Joe shrugged.

‘Please yourself. You never did learn how to put yourself out much, did yer?’

‘That isn’t true! I tried—’

‘You could live next door to each other for ten years and neither of you’d make the first move.’

‘This is different.’

‘I reckon.’

Joe got up and wandered to the radio. He fiddled with the dial for a moment before finding a clear signal. Somehow Joe had the knack of locating the oldies station wherever he happened to be. Rod Stewart was singing ‘Tonight’s the Night’.

‘You could try, though.’

‘Maybe I don’t want to try.’

‘Happen you don’t.’

Joe’s voice was growing fainter, his outline fading, so that Jay could see the newly whitewashed wall behind him. At the same time the radio crackled harshly, the signal breaking up. A burr of white noise replaced the music.

‘Joe?’

The old man’s voice was almost too faint to hear.

‘I’ll sithee, then.’

It’s what he always used to say as a sign of disapproval, or when signalling the end of a discussion.

‘Joe?’

But Joe had already gone.

IT REALLY STARTED WITH ELVIS. MID-AUGUST, THAT WAS, AND
Jay’s mother grieved with a vehemence which was almost genuine. Perhaps because they were the same age, he and she. Jay felt it, too, even though he’d never been an especial fan. That overcast sense of doom, the feeling that things were coming apart at the centre, unravelling like a ball of string. There was death in the air that August, a dark edge to the sky, an unidentifiable taste. There were more wasps that summer than he ever remembered before – long, curly, brown wasps which seemed to scent the end coming and turned spiteful early. Jay was stung twelve times – once in the mouth as he swigged a bottle of Coke, lucky not to be taken to Casualty – and together Gilly and he burned seven nests. Gilly and Jay started a crusade against the wasps that summer. On hot, moist afternoons, when the insects were sleepy and more docile, the two of them went wasping. They would find the nests, stuff the hole with shredded newspaper and firelighters and flame the whole thing. As the fire took and smoke poured into the nest the wasps would come flying out, some buzzing and burning like German aircraft in old black-and-white war movies, darkening the air and sighing, an eerie, chill sound, as they
spread, bewildered and enraged, over the war zone. Gilly and Jay lay quiet in a hollow near by, far enough away from the danger spot, but as close as they dared, watching. Needless to say, this tactic was Gilly’s idea. She would squat, eyes wide and bright, as close as she could. No wasp ever stung her. She seemed as immune to them as a honey badger to bees, and as naturally lethal. Jay was secretly terrified, crouching in the hollows with his head down and pounding with black exhilaration, but the fear was addictive and they sought it time and again, clinging to each other and laughing in terror and excitement. Once, urged by Gilly, Jay put two Black Cat bangers into a nest under a dry-stone wall and lit the fuses. The nest blew apart, but smokelessly, scattering stunned and angry wasps everywhere. One managed to get into the T-shirt he was wearing and stung him again and again. It felt like being shot, and Jay screamed and rolled on the ground. But the wasp was indestructible, twitching and stinging even as he crushed it beneath his frantic body. They killed it at last by tearing off the shirt and dousing it in lighter fluid. Later Jay counted nine separate stings. Autumn loomed close, smelling of fire.

HE SAW HER AGAIN THE NEXT DAY. AS APRIL RIPENED TOWARDS
May the vines had grown taller, and Jay occasionally saw her at work amongst the plants, dusting with fungicides, inspecting the shoots, the soil. She would not speak to him. She seemed enclosed in a capsule of isolation, profile turned towards the earth. He saw her in a succession of overalls, bulky jumpers, men’s shirts, jeans, boots, her bright hair pulled back severely under her beret. Difficult to make out her shape beneath them. Even her hands were cartoonish in overlarge gloves. Jay tried to talk to her several times with no success. Once he called at her farm, but there was no answer to his knock, though he was sure he could hear someone behind the door.

‘I’d have nothing to do with her,’ said Caro Clairmont when he mentioned the incident. ‘She never talks to anyone in the village. She knows what we all think of her.’

They were on the
terrasse
of the Café des Marauds. Caro had taken to joining him there after church while her husband collected cakes from Poitou’s. In spite of her exaggerated friendliness, there was something unpleasant about Caro which Jay could not quite analyse. Perhaps her willingness to speak ill of others. When Caro was there
Joséphine kept her distance and Narcisse scrutinized his seed catalogue with studied indifference. But she remained one of the few people from the village who seemed happy to answer questions. And she knew all the gossip.

‘You should talk to Mireille,’ she advised, sugaring her coffee extravagantly. ‘One of my dearest friends. Another generation, of course. The things she’s had to bear from that woman. You can’t imagine.’ She blotted her lipstick carefully on a napkin before taking the first sip. ‘I’ll have to introduce you one day,’ she said.

As it happened, no introduction was necessary. Mireille Faizande sought him out herself a few days later, taking him completely by surprise. It was warm. Jay had begun work on his vegetable garden some days earlier, and now that the major repairs to the house were completed, he was spending a few hours a day in the garden. He hoped somehow that physical exertion might give him the insight he needed to finish his book. The radio was hanging from a nail sticking out of the side of the house, and the oldies station was playing. He had brought out a couple of bottles of beer from the kitchen, which he had left in a bucket of water to cool. Stripped to the waist, with an old straw hat he had found in the house to keep the sun from his eyes, he hadn’t anticipated visitors.

He was hacking at a stubborn root when he noticed her standing there. She must have been waiting for him to look up.

‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ Jay straightened up, surprised. ‘I didn’t see you.’

She was a large shapeless woman, who should have looked motherly but did not. Huge breasts rolling, hips like boulders, she looked curiously
solid
, the comfortable wadding of fat petrified into something harder than flesh. Beneath the brim of her straw hat her mouth turned downwards, as if in perpetual grief.

‘It’s a long way out,’ she said. ‘I’d forgotten how long.’ Her local accent was very pronounced, and for a moment Jay
barely understood what she was saying. Behind him the radio was playing ‘Here Comes the Sun’, and he could see Joe’s shadow just behind her, the light gleaming off the bald patch at his crown.

‘Madame Faizande—’

‘Let’s not be formal, please. Call me Mireille. I’m not disturbing you,
héh
?’

‘No. Of course not. I was just about to call it a day, anyhow.’

‘Oh.’ Her eyes flicked briefly over the half-finished vegetable patch. ‘I didn’t realize you were a gardener.’

Jay laughed.

‘I’m not. Just an enthusiastic amateur.’

‘You’re not planning on maintaining the vineyard,
héh
?’ Her voice was sharp. He shook his head.

‘I’m afraid that’s probably beyond me.’

‘Selling it, then?’

‘I don’t think so.’

Mireille nodded.

‘Héh
, I thought you might have come to some agreement,’ she said. ‘With her.’ The words were almost toneless. Against the dark fabric of her skirt her arthritic hands twisted and moved.

‘With your daughter-in-law?’

Mireille nodded.

‘She’s always had her eye on this land,’ she said. ‘It’s higher above the marshes than her place. It’s better drained. It never floods in winter or dries up in summer. It’s good land.’

Jay looked at her uncertainly.

‘I know there was a … misunderstanding,’ he said carefully. ‘I know Marise expected … perhaps if she spoke to me we could arrange—’

‘I will top any price she offers you for the land,’ said Mireille abruptly. ‘It’s bad enough that she has my son’s farm,
héh
, without having my father’s land, too. My father’s farm,’ she repeated in a louder voice, ‘which should have
been my son’s, where he should have raised his children. If it hadn’t been for her.’

Jay switched the radio off and reached for his shirt.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t realize there was a family connection.’

Mireille’s eyes went almost tenderly to the façade of the house.

‘Don’t apologize,’ she said. ‘It looks better now than it has in years. New paintwork, new windows, new shutters. After my mother died my father let it all go to ruin. Everything but the land. The wine. And when my poor Tony—’ She broke off abruptly, her hands twisting. ‘She wouldn’t live in the family house, héh, no. Madame wanted her own house, down by the river. Tony converted one of the barns for her. Madame wanted her flower garden, her patio, her sewing room. Every time it seemed as if the house was finished, Madame would think of something else. As if she was stalling for time. And then, at last, he brought her home.’

Mireille’s face twisted. ‘Home to me.’

‘She’s not from Lansquenet?’ That would explain the physical differences. The light eyes, small features, exotic colouring and her accented but accurate English.

‘She is from Paris.’ Mireille’s tone conveyed all her mistrust and resentment of the capital. ‘Tony met her there on holiday. He was nineteen.’ She must not have been more than a few years older, thought Jay. Twenty-three, maybe twenty-four. Why had she married him? This farmer’s boy from the country? Mireille must have read the question in his face.

‘He looked older than that, Monsieur Jay. And he was handsome,
héh
oui. Too much for his own good. An only son. He could have had the farm, the land, everything. His father never refused him a thing. Any girl from the village would have thought herself lucky. But my Tony wanted better.
Deserved
better.’ She broke off with a shake of the head.

‘Enough,
héh
. I didn’t come here to talk about Tony. I wanted to know if you were planning to sell the land.’

‘I’m not,’ he told her. ‘I like owning the land, even if I don’t have any serious plans for the vineyard. For a start, I enjoy the privacy.’

Mireille seemed satisfied.

‘You would tell me if you changed your mind,
héh
?’

‘Of course. Look, you must be hot.’ Now that she was here Jay didn’t want her to go without knowing more about Tony and Marise. ‘I have some wine in the cellar. Perhaps you’d like to take a glass with me?’

Mireille looked at him for a moment and nodded.

‘Perhaps a small glass,’ she said. ‘If only to be back in my father’s house again.’

‘I hope you’ll approve,’ said Jay, leading her through the doorway.

THERE WAS NOTHING OF WHICH TO DISAPPROVE. JAY HAD LEFT
the house much as it was, substituting modern plumbing for the ancient waterworks, but keeping the porcelain sinks, the woodstove, the pine cupboards, the scarred old kitchen table as they were. He liked the feeling of age in these things, the way each mark and scar told a story. He liked the worn-shiny flagstones on the floor, which he swept but did not attempt to cover with rugs, and though he oiled and cleaned the wood, he made no attempt to sand away the damage of years.

Mireille looked at everything with a critical eye.

‘Well?’ asked Jay, smiling.

‘Héh
,’ replied Mireille. ‘It could have been worse. I expected plastic cupboards and a dishwasher.’

‘I’ll get the wine.’

The cellar was dark. The new electrics had not yet been fitted, and the only lighting was a dim bulb on the end of a bitten flex. Jay reached for a bottle from the short rack by the stairs.

There were only five bottles left in the rack. In his haste
to offer hospitality he had forgotten this; a bottle of sweet Sauternes was the last, finished the previous night as he typed far into the early hours. But his mind was on other things. He was thinking about Marise and Tony, and of how he could ask Mireille for the conclusion of her tale. His fingers tightened around my neck for a moment, then moved on. He must have forgotten about the Specials. He was certain there was another bottle of Sauternes in there somewhere, maybe an extra he had overlooked. Beside me the Specials moved imperceptibly, shifting, snugging, rubbing up against each other like sleeping cats, purring. The bottle next to me – its label read ‘Rosehip ’74’ – began to rattle. A rich golden scent of hot sugar and syrup reached his nostrils. Inside the bottle I could hear soft laughter. Jay could not hear it, of course. All the same his hand stopped on the bottle’s neck. I could hear it beneath his fingers, whispering, cajoling, shifting its shape and turning its label slyly downwards as it released that secret scent. Sauternes, it whispered seductively, lovely yellow Sauternes from the other side of the river. Wine to loosen an old woman’s tongue, wine to cool a dry throat, wine mellow
aaaaall
the way down. Jay picked up the bottle with a small sound of satisfaction.