Blackberry Wine (24 page)

The rumours began soon after. Everyone had a story. She had an uncanny ability to arouse curiosity, hostility, envy, rage.

Lucien Merle believed that her refusal to give up the uncultivated marshland by the river had blocked his plans for redevelopment.

‘We could have made something of that land,’ he repeated bitterly. ‘There’s no future in farming any more. The future’s in tourism.’ He took a long drink of his diabolo-menthe and shook his head. ‘Look at Le Pinot. One man was all it took to begin the change. One man with vision.’ He sighed. ‘I bet that man’s a millionnaire by now,’ he said mournfully.

Jay tried to sift through what he had heard. In some ways he felt he had gained insights into the mystery of Marise d’Api, but in others he was as ignorant as he had been from the start. None of the reports quite tallied with what he had seen. Marise had too many faces, her substance slipping away like smoke whenever he thought he had captured it. And no-one had yet mentioned what he saw in her that day, that fierce look of love for her child. And that moment of fear, the look of a wild animal which will do anything, including kill, to protect itself and its young.

Fear? What could there be for her to fear in Lansquenet?

He wished he knew.

IT WAS AUGUST WHEN EVERYTHING SOURED FOR GOOD. THE TIME
of the wasps’ nests, the den at Nether Edge, Elvis. Then the Bread Baron wrote to say that he and Candide were getting married, and for a while the papers were full of them both, snapped getting into a limo on the beachfront at Cannes, at a movie première, at a club in the Bahamas, on his yacht. Jay’s mother gathered these articles with a collector’s zeal and read and reread them, insatiably relishing Candide’s hair, Candide’s dresses. His grandparents took this badly, mothering his mother even more than before, and treating Jay with cool indifference, as if his father’s genes were a time bomb inside him which might at any moment explode.

The grey weather grew hotter, mulchy and dull. There was often rain, but it was warm and unrefreshing. Joe worked cheerlessly in his allotment; the fruit was spoiled that year, rotting on the branches and green from lack of sunlight.

‘Might as well not bother, lad,’ he would mutter, fingering the blackened stem of a pear or apple. ‘Might as well just bloody jack it in this year.’

Gilly’s mother did well enough out of it, though; she’d somehow got hold of a whole truckload of those transparent
bell-shaped umbrellas which were so popular then and was selling them at a mighty profit in the market. Gilly reckoned they could live until December on the takings. The thought merely accentuated Jay’s sense of doom. It was only days to the end of August, and the return to school was barely a week away. Gilly would move on in the autumn – Maggie was talking about moving south to a commune she’d heard of near Abingdon, and there was no certainty she would ever come back. Jay felt prickly inside, fey one moment and the next blackly paranoid, saying the opposite of what he meant, reading mockery in everything that was said to him. He quarrelled repeatedly with Gilly about nothing. They made up, cautiously and incompletely, circling each other like wary animals, their intimacy broken. A sense of doom coloured everything.

On the last day of August he went to Joe’s house alone, but the old man seemed distant, preoccupied. Although it was raining, he did not invite Jay in, but stood with him by the door in an oddly formal manner. Jay noticed that he had piled up a number of old crates by the back wall, and his gaze kept moving towards these, as if he were eager to get back to some job he had abandoned. Jay felt a sudden surge of anger. He deserved better than that, he thought. He thought Joe respected him. He ran down to Nether Edge with his cheeks flaring. He left his bike close to Joe’s house – after the incident at the railway bridge that hiding place was no longer secure – and walked down the abandoned railway track from Pog Hill, cutting down into the Edge and towards the river. He wasn’t expecting to see Gilly – they had made no plans to meet – and yet Jay was unsurprised when he caught sight of her by the riverbank, her hair scrawling down towards the water, a long stick in one hand. She was on her knees, poking the stick at something in the water, and he got quite close to her before she looked up.

Her face was pinkish and mottled, as if she’d been crying. Jay rejected the thought almost instantly. Gilly never cried.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said indifferently.

Jay said nothing. He dug his hands into his pockets and tried a smile, which felt stupid on his face. Gilly didn’t smile back.

‘What’s that?’ He nodded at the thing in the water.

‘Nothing.’ She slung the stick into the current and it washed away. The water was scummy, brownish. Gilly’s hair was starred with droplets, which clung to her curls like burrs.

‘Bloody rain.’

Jay would have liked to say something then, something which might have made it all right between them. But the sky felt heavy over them, and the smell of smoke and doom was overwhelming, like an omen. Suddenly Jay was certain he would never see Gilly again.

‘Shall we go and have a look at the dump?’ he suggested. ‘I thought I saw some good new stuff there on the way down. Magazines and stuff. You know.’

Gilly shrugged. ‘Nah.’

‘Good wasping weather.’ It was a last, desperate ploy. He had never known Gilly to refuse an offer of wasping. Wasps are sleepy in wet weather, allowing easier, safer access to the nest. ‘Do you want to come and look for nests? I’ve seen a place down by the bridge that might have a couple.’

Again, the shrug. Gilly shook her damp curls. ‘I’m not that bothered.’

The silence was longer still this time, spinning out endlessly, unravelling.

‘Maggie’s moving on next week,’ said Gilly at last. ‘We’re going to some bloody commune in Oxfordshire. She’s got a job waiting for her there, she says.’

‘Oh.’

He had expected it, of course. This was nothing new. So why then did his heart wrench when she said it? Her face was turned towards the water, studiously watching something on the brown surface. Jay’s fists clenched in his
pockets. As they did he felt something brush against his hand. Joe’s talisman. It felt greasy, smooth with much handling. He had become so accustomed to carrying it with him that he had forgotten it was even there. He squatted next to her. He could smell the river, a sour, metallic smell, like pennies soaked in ammonia.

‘Are you coming back?’ he asked.

‘Nah.’

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

‘Don’t think so. Maggie says I need to go to a proper school now. Don’t need all this moving about.’

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

‘Shit.’
It was the worst word he knew. His mouth felt numb. His heart, too. He kicked viciously at the river’s edge and a clod of earth and grass tore free and plunked into the water. Gilly didn’t look at him.

He let his temper run freely then, kicking again at the banking so that earth and grass showered into the water. Some of it flew at Gilly, too, spattering her jeans and her embroidered shirt.

‘Stop it, for crying out loud,’ said Gilly flatly. ‘Stop being so sodding childish.’

It was true, he thought, he
was
being childish, and to hear it from her enraged him. That she should accept their separation with such ease, such indifference. Something yawned blackly inside Jay’s head, yawned and grimaced.

‘Fuck it, then,’ he said. ‘I’m off.’

Feeling slightly dizzy he turned and walked off up the banking towards the canal towpath, sure she’d call him back. Ten paces. Twelve. He reached the towpath, not looking back, knowing she was watching. He passed the trees, where she couldn’t see him, and turned, but Gilly was still sitting where she’d been before, not watching, not following, just looking down into the water, hair over her
face and the crazy silver scrawl of the rain fanning down from the hot summer sky.

‘Fuck it then,’ Jay repeated fiercely, wanting her to hear. But she never turned, and at last it was he who turned away and began to walk, feeling angry and somehow deflated, towards the bridge.

He often wondered what might have happened if he had gone back, or if she had looked up just at that moment. What might have been saved or averted. Certainly the events at Pog Hill might have been very different. Perhaps he could even have said goodbye to Joe. As it was, though he did not know it at the time, he would not see either of them again.

HE HAD NOT SEEN JOE SINCE THE DAY AFTER MIREILLE’S VISIT
. At first Jay felt relieved by his absence, then as days passed he grew uneasy. He tried to
will
the old man to appear, but Joe remained stubbornly absent, as if his appearances were not a matter of Jay’s choosing. His leaving left a strangeness behind, a bereavement. At any moment Jay expected him to be there, in the garden, looking over the vegetable patch; in the kitchen, lifting the lid of a pan to find out what was cooking. He was aware of Joe’s absence as he sat at his typewriter, of the Joe-shaped hole in the centre of things, of the fact that, try as he might, he could not seem to get the radio to pick up the oldies station which Joe found with such everyday ease. Worse, his new book had no life without Joe. He no longer felt like writing. He wanted a drink, but drunkenness merely accentuated his feeling of loss.

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

JOSÉPHINE MUST HAVE SPREAD THE WORD ABOUT HIM AT LAST. JAY
found people becoming more friendly. Many of them greeted him as he passed, and Poitou in the bakery, who had spoken to him only with a shopkeeper’s politeness before, now asked about his book and gave him advice on what to buy.

‘The
pain aux noix
is good today, Monsieur Jay. Try it with goat’s cheese and a few olives. Leave the olives and the cheese on a sunny window-ledge for an hour before you eat them to release the flavours.’ He kissed his fingertips. ‘
That
’s something you won’t find in London.’

Poitou had been a baker in Lansquenet for twenty-five years. He had rheumatism in his fingers, but claimed that handling the dough kept them supple. Jay promised to make him a grain pack which would help – another trick of Joe’s. Strange, how easily it all came back. With Poitou’s approval came more introductions – Guillaume the ex-schoolteacher, Darien who taught the infants’ class, Rodolphe the minibus driver who took the children to school and brought them home every day, Nénette who was a nurse in the nearby old people’s home, Briançon 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,
héh
? No? Astonishment. Now suspicions had been allayed they were insatiably
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, passed 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 scraps 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 Geographics
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
Culpeper’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
bewilderment – the English writer, dingue mais
sympa, héh! –
someone who provoked laughter and awe in equal doses. Lansquenet’s holy fool. For the moment he could do no 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 Briançon, with an anecdote about his younger sister and how she once tried to prepare a rabbit – ‘after over an hour in the kitchen she flung it out of the doorway shouting, “Take it back! I can’t pluck the damn thing!” ’ and a note: ‘You can use it in your book.’ A cake from Popotte, carried carefully in her postbag with the letters and balanced in her bicycle basket for the journey. An unexpected gift of seed potatoes from Narcisse, with mumbled instructions to plant them by the sunny side of the house. Any offer of payment would have caused offence. Jay tried to repay this stream of small kindnesses by buying drinks in the Café des Marauds, but found he still bought fewer rounds than anyone else.