Blackberry Wine Part 3

78.H The driver shrugged, pointing ahead, and slowed the car po a rumbling halt.

'Ld.'

Sure enough, there it was, just behind a little copse of es. The red slanting light of a modest sunset lit the tiled of and the whitewashed walls with almost eerie bright- ss. Jay could see the gleam of water somewhere to the Ie, and the orchard - green in the photograph - was now roth of pale blossoms. It was beautiful. He paid the driver much of his remaining French money and pulled his ie out onto the road.

i'Attendez-moi ici. Je reviens tout de suite.'

;The driver made a vague gesture, which he took to be reement, and, leaving him to wait by the deserted roadie, Jay began to walk quickly towards the trees. As he iched the copse he found he could see more clearly down vards the house and across the vineyard. The photo- aph in the brochure was deceptive, showing little of the ale of the property. Being a city boy Jay had no idea of the reage, but it looked huge, bordered on one side by road id river, and on the other by a long hedge, which reached yond the back of the house on to more fields. On the far ie of the river he could see another farmhouse, small and (w-roofed, and beyond that the village - a church spire, a ad winding up from the river, houses. The path to the house led past the vineyard - already green and leggy with growth among drifts of weeds - and past an abandoned vegetable plot, where last year's asparagus, artichokes and cabbages reared hairy heads above the dandelions.

It took about ten minutes to reach the house. As he came closer Jay noticed that, like the vineyard and the vegetable plot, it was in need of some repair. The pinkish paint was peeling away in places, revealing cracked grey plaster beneath. Tiles from the roof had fallen and smashed onto the overgrown path. The ground-floor windows were shuttered or boarded up, and some of the upstairs gla.s.s was broken, showing toothy gaps in the pale facing. The front 79.door was nailed shut. The whole impression was of a building which had been derelict for years. And yet the vegetable plot showed signs of recent, or fairly recent, attention. Jay walked around the building once, noting the extent of the damage, and told himself that most of it looked superficial, the work of neglect and the elements.

Inside might be different. He found a place where a broken shutter had come away from the plaster, leaving a gap large enough to look through, and put his face to the hole. It was dark inside, and he could hear a distant sound of water dripping.

Suddenly something moved inside the building. Rats, he thought at first. Then it moved again, softly, stealthily, sc.r.a.ping across the floor with a sound like metal-capped boots on cellar concrete. Definitely not rats, then.

He called out - absurdly, in English - 'Hey!' The sound stopped.

Squinting through the gap in the shutter Jay thought he could see something move, a dim shadow just in his line of vision, something which might almost have been a figure in a big coat with a cap pulled down over the eyes.

'Joe? Joe?'

It was crazy. Of course it wasn't Joe. It was just that he'd been thinking of him so much in the past few days that he had begun to imagine him everywhere. It was natural, he supposed. When he looked again the figure - if there ever was a figure - had gone. The house was silent. Jay knew a fleeting moment of disappointment, of something almost like grief, which he dared not a.n.a.lyse too closely in case it should reveal itself to be something even crazier, a conviction, perhaps, that Joe could have actually been there, waiting. Old Joe, with his cap and miner's boots and his baggy overcoat against the cold, waiting in the deserted house, living off the land. Jay's mind crept remorselessly to the recently abandoned vegetable plot - there must have been someone to plant those seeds - with a mad kind of logic. Someone had been there.

80.He looked at his watch and was startled to see that he had been at the house for almost twenty minutes. He had asked the taxi driver to wait at the roadside, and he didn't want to spend the night in Lansquenet. From what he had seen of the place it was unlikely that he would be able to find a decent place to stay, and he was beginning to feel very hungry. He broke into a run as he pa.s.sed the orchard, goosegra.s.s clinging to the laces of his boots as he pa.s.sed, and he was sweating when at last he rounded the curve out of the copse and back onto the track.

There was no sign of the taxi.

Jay swore. His case and duffel bag were lined up incongruously by the roadside. The driver, tired of waiting for the crazy Englishman, had gone.

Like it or not, he was staying.

Pog Hill, Summer 1976 KIRBY CENTRAL WENT IN LATE AUGUST. JAY WAS THERE WHEN.

they closed it, hiding in a tall clump of seedy willowherb, and when they had gone - taking with them the levers, light signals and anything which might otherwise be stolen - he crept up the steps and peered in through the window. Train registers and route diagrams had been left in the box, though the lever frame gaped emptily, and it looked strangely inhabited, as if the signalman had just stepped out and might return at any moment. Jay reckoned there was plenty of usable gla.s.s left, if Joe and he came to fetch it.

'Don't bother, lad,' Joe said when he reported this. "I'll already have me hands full this autumn.'

Jay needed no explanation for his words. Since the beginning of August Joe had become more and more concerned about the fate of his allotment. He rarely spoke about it openly, but he would sometimes stop working and gaze at his trees, as if measuring the time they had left.

Sometimes he lingered to touch the smooth bark of an apple or a plum tree and spoke - to Jay, to himself - in a low voice.

He always referred to them by name, as if they were people.

'Mirabelle. Doin well, int she? That's a French plum, a yeller gage, a goodun for jam or wine or just for eatin. She likes it here on the bank, it's nicely drained and sunny.' He paused. 'Too late to move fold girl, though,' he said regretfully.

'She'd never survive. Yer sink yer roots deep, thinkin yer goin to stay for ever, and this is what happens. The b.u.g.g.e.rs.'

It was the closest he had come in weeks to mentioning the allotment problem.

'Tryin to knock down Pog Hill Lane now, a.n.a.ll.' Joe's voice was louder now, and Jay realized that this was the first time he had ever seen him close to anger. 'Pog Hill Lane, that's bin standin for a hundred year-a-more, that were built when there were still a pit down Nether Edge, and navvies workin down at ca.n.a.l side.'

Jay stared at him.

'Knock down Pog Hill Lane?' he asked. 'You mean the houses?' Joe nodded.

'Got a letter int post tother day,' he told him shortly.

'b.u.g.g.e.rs reckon we're not safe any more. Goin to condemn em all. All t'row.' His face was grim in its amus.e.m.e.nt.

'Condemned. After all this time. Thirty-nine years I've bin here, since Nether Edge and Upper Kirby shut down.

Bought me own pit house offat council a.n.a.ll. Didn't trust em, even then--' He broke off, holding up his reduced left hand in a mocking three-fingered salute. 'How much more do they want, eh? I left me fingers down that pit. I near as b.u.g.g.e.ry left me life. You'd think that'd be worth somethin.

You'd think they'd remember summat like that!'

Jay gaped at him. This was a Joe he had never seen before. Awe, and a kind of fear, kept him silent. Then Joe stopped as abruptly as he had begun, bending solicitously over a newly grafted branch to examine the healing joint.

'I thought it was during the war,' said Jay at last.

'What?'

Gaudy red cotton joined the new graft to the branch. On it Joe had smeared some kind of resin, which gave out a pungent sappy scent. He nodded to himself, as if satisfied with the tree's progress.

83.'You told me you'd lost your fingers in Dieppe,' insisted Jay. 'During the war."

'Aye. Well.' Joe was unembarra.s.sed. 'It were a kind of war down there any road. Lost em when I were sixteen crushed between two trucks back in 1931. Wouldn't take me in the Army after that, so I signed up as a Bevan boy. We had three cave-ins that year. Seven men trapped underground when a tunnel collapsed. Not even grown men, some of em - boys my age and younger; you could go underground at fourteen on a man's wage. Worked double s.h.i.+fts for a week tryin to get em out. We could hear em behind the cave-in, yellin and cryin, but every time we tried to get to em another bit of the tunnel came down on us. We were workin in darkness because of the gas, knee-deep in slurry. We were soaked an half suffocated, an we all knew the roof could fall in again any minute, but we never stopped tryin. Not till at last the bosses came and closed down the shaft altogether.' He looked at Jay with unexpected vehemence, his eyes dark with ancient rage. 'So don't go tellin me I never went to war, lad,' he snapped. 'I know as much about war - what war means - as any o them lads in France.'

Jay stared at him, unsure of what to say. Joe looked off into the middle distance, hearing the cries and pleading of young men long dead from the quiet scar of Nether Edge.

Jay s.h.i.+vered.

'So what will you do now?'

Joe looked at him closely, as if checking for any sign of condemnation. Then he relaxed and gave his old rueful smile, at the same time digging in his pocket to produce a grubby packet of Jelly Babies. He chose one for himself, then held out the packet to Jay.

'I'll do what I've allus done, lad,' he declared. 'I'll b.l.o.o.d.y well fight for what's mine. I'll not let em get away with it.

Pog Hill's mine, an I'll not be moved onto some poxy estate by them or anyone.' He bit off the head of his Jelly Baby with relish and chose another from the packet.

84."But what can you do?' protested Jay. "There'll be eviction orders. They'll cut off your gas and electricity. Can't you--'

Joe looked at him.

'There's allus somethin you can do, lad,' he said softly. "I reckon maybe it's time to find out what really works. Time to bring out sandbags and batten down hatches. Time to fatten up t'black c.o.c.kerel, like they do in Haiti.' He winked hugely, as if to share a mysterious joke.

Jay glanced around at the allotment. He looked at the charms nailed to the wall and tied onto the tree branches, the signs laid out in broken gla.s.s on the ground and chalked onto flower pots and he felt a sudden, terrible hopelessness. It all looked so fragile, so touchingly doomed.

He saw the houses then, those blackened, mean little terraces, with their crooked pointing and outside toilets and windows sheeted over with plastic. Was.h.i.+ng hanging on a single line five or six houses down. A couple of kids playing in the gutter in front. And Joe - sweet old crazy Joe, with his dreams and his travels and his chotto and his millions of seeds and his cellar full of bottles - preparing himself for a war he could never hope to win, armed only with everyday magic and a few quarts of home-brewed wine.

'Don't take on, lad,' urged Joe. 'We'll be reight, you'll see.

There's more than one trick up me sleeve, as them b.u.g.g.e.rs from council'll find out.'

But his words sounded hollow. For all his talk it was really just bravado. There was nothing he could do. Of course Jay pretended, for his sake, to believe him. He gathered herbs on the railway embankment. He sewed dried leaves into red sachets. He repeated strange words and made ritual gestures in imitation of his. They had to seal the perimeter, as Joe called it, twice a day. This involved walking around the property -- up the railway embankment and round the allotment, past Pog Hill box, which Joe counted as his, then into Pog Hill Lane and through the ginnel which linked Joe's house to his neighhour's, past the front door and back over the wall to the other side - carrying a red candle and burning bay leaves steeped in scented oil while they solemnly incanted a string of incomprehensible phrases, which Joe claimed were Latin.

From what Joe said, this ritual was supposed to s.h.i.+eld the house and its grounds from unwanted influences, deliver protection and affirm his owners.h.i.+p of the territory, and as the holidays came to an end it increased daily in length and complexity, growing from a three-minute dash around the garden to a solemn procession lasting fifteen minutes or more. In other circ.u.mstances Jay might have enjoyed these daily ceremonies, but whereas last year there had been an element of mockery in everything Joe said, now the old man had less time for jokes. Jay guessed that behind this screen of unconcern his anxiety was growing. He spoke increasingly about his travels, recounted past adventures and planned future expeditions, announced his immediate decision to leave Pog Hill Lane for his chateau in France, then in the same breath swore he'd never leave his old home unless they carried him out feet first. He worked frantically in the garden. Autumn came early that year and there was fruit to be harvested; jams, wine, preserves, pickles to be made; potatoes and turnips to be dug and stored, as well as the increasing demands of Joe's magical barrier, which now took thirty minutes to complete and involved much gesticulating and scattering of powders, as well as preparation of scented oils and herbal mixtures. There was a haunted look to Joe now, a stretched look to his features, a glittery brightness in his eyes, which came of sleeplessness - or drink. For he was drinking far more now than he had ever done, not just wine or nettle beer but spirits, too, the potato vodka from the pot-still in the cellar, last year's liqueurs from his downstairs store. Jay wondered whether, at this pace, Joe would survive the winter at all.

'I'll be reight,' Joe told him when he voiced his concern. 'It just needs a bit more work, that's all. Come winter I'll be reight again, I promise.' He stood up, hands in the small of his back, and stretched. 'That's better.' He grinned then, and for a moment he was almost the old Joe, eyes br.i.m.m.i.n.g with laughter under his greasy pit cap. 'I've looked after mesself for a few years before you came along, lad. It'd take a sight more than a few council monkeys to get the better of me.' And he immediately launched into a long, absurd story from his travelling days about a man trying to sell cheap trinkets to a tribe of Amazonian Indians.

'And the chief of the tribe - Chief Mungawomba, his name were - handed back the stuff and said - I'd been teachin him English in me free time - "Tha can keep thi beads, mate, but I'd be really grateful if tha could fix me toaster." '

They both laughed, and for a time the unease was forgotten, or at least dismissed. Jay wanted to believe Pog Hill was safe. On some days he looked at the arcane jumble of the allotment and the back garden and he almost did believe it. Joe seemed so sure, so permanent. Surely he would be there for ever.

Lansquenet, March 1999 HE STOOD BESIDE THE ROADSIDE FOR A MOMENT, DISMAYED AND.

disoriented. By then it was almost dark; the sky had reached that luminous shade of deep blue which just precedes full night, and the horizon beyond the house was striated with pale lemon and green and pink. The beauty of it - his property, he told himself again, with that breathless, unreal feeling inside - left him feeling a little shaken. In spite of his predicament he could not shrug off a sensation of excitement, as if this, too, were somehow meant to happen.

No-one - no-one, he told himself - knew where he was.

The wine bottles rattled against each other as he picked up the duffel bag from the side of the road. A scent - of summer, of wild spinach or shale dust and stagnant water rose briefly from the damp ground. Something fluttering from the branch of a flowering hawthorn tree caught his eye and he picked at it automatically, bringing it closer towards him.

It was a piece of red flannel.

In the bag the bottles began to rattle and froth. Their voices rose in a whispering, crackling, sighing, chuckling of hidden consonants and secret vowels. Jay felt a sudden breeze tug at his clothing, a murmur of something, a throbbing deep in the soft air, like a heart. 'Home is where the heart is.' One of Joe's favourite sayings. 'Where the art is.'

Jay looked back at the road. It was not really so late. Not too late, in any case, to find somewhere to stay the night and to buy a meal. The village - a few lights now, winking over the river, the distant sound of music from across the fields -- must be less than half an hour's walk away. He could leave his case here, safely hidden in the roadside bushes, and take only his bag. For some reason - inside the bottles joltered and chuckled - he felt reluctant to leave the duffel bag. But the house drew him. Ridiculous, he told himself. He had already seen that the house was uninhabitable, at least for the moment. Looked uninhabitable, he amended, recalling Pog Hill Lane, the derelict gardens and boarded-up windows and the secret, gleeful life behind.

What if, maybe, just behind the door . . .

Funny how his mind kept returning to that thought.

There was no logic in it and yet it was slyly persuasive.

That abandoned vegetable patch, the sc.r.a.p of red flannel, that feeling, that certainty, that there really was someone inside the house.

Inside the duffel bag the carnival had begun again.

Catcalls, laughter, distant fanfare. It sounded like coming home. Even I could feel it -- I, grown in vineyards far from here, in Burgundy, where the air is brighter and the earth richer, kinder. It was the sound of home fires and doors opening and the smell of bread baking and clean sheets and warm, friendly unwashed bodies. Jay felt it, too, but a.s.sumed it came from the house; almost without thinking he took another step towards the darkened building. It would not hurt to have another look, he told himself. Just to be sure.

89.18.Pog Hill, Summer 1977 SEPTEMBER CAME. JAY WENT BACK TO SCHOOL WITH A SENSE OF.

finality, a feeling that something at Pog Hill had changed.

If it had, then Joe's short, infrequent letters gave no sign.

There was a card at Christmas - two lines, carefully inscribed with the round printing of the barely literate - then another at Easter. The terms crawled to an end as usual. Jay's fifteenth birthday came and went - a cricket bat from his father and Candide, theatre tickets from his mother. After that came exams; dorm parties; secrets told and promises broken; a couple of hot-weather fights; a school play, A Midsummer Night's Dream, with all the parts played by boys, as in Shakespeare's time. Jay played Puck, much to the chagrin of the Bread Baron, but all the time he was thinking of Joe and Pog Hill, and as the end of the summer term approached, he grew jumpy and irritable and impatient. This year his mother had decided to join him in Kirby Monckton for a few weeks, ostensibly to spend more time with her son, but in reality to escape the media attention following her most recent amorous break-up. Jay wasn't looking forward to being the focus of her sudden maternal interest, and said so clearly enough to provoke an outburst of outraged histrionics. He was in disgrace before the holidays had even started.

90.They arrived in late June, by taxi, in the rain. Jay's mother was doing her Mater DoJorosa act, and he was trying to listen to the radio as she pa.s.sed between long, soulful silences and girlish exclamations on seeing forgotten landmarks."Jay, darling, look! That little church - isn't it just the sweetest?' He put it down to her being in so many sitcoms, but maybe she had always talked like that. Jay turned the radio up a fraction. The Eagles were playing 'Hotel California'.

She gave him one of her pained looks and thinned her mouth. Jay ignored her.

The rain came down non-stop for the first week of the holiday. Jay stayed in the house and watched it and listened to the radio, trying to tell himself it couldn't last for ever.

The sky was white and portentous. Looking up into the clouds, the falling raindrops looked like soot. His grandparents fussed over both of them, treating his mother like the little girl she had been, cooking all her favourite meals.

For five days they lived on apple pie, ice cream, fried fish and scollops. On the sixth day Jay took his bike down to Pog Hill, in spite of the weather, but Joe's door was locked and there was no answer to his knocking. Jay left his bike by the back wall and climbed over into the garden, hoping to look in through the windows.

The windows were boarded up.

Panic washed over him. He hammered on one of the sealed windows with his fist.

'Hey, Joe? Joe?'

There was no answer. He hammered again, calling Joe's name. A piece of red flannel, bleached by the elements, was nailed to the window frame, but it looked old, finished, last year's magic. Behind the house a screen of tall weeds hemlock and wormwood and rosebay willowherb - hid the abandoned allotment.

Jay sat down on the wall, regardless of the rain which glued his T-s.h.i.+rt to his skin and dripped from his hair into his eyes. He felt completely numb. How could Joe have gone, he asked himself stupidly. Why hadn't he said something?

Written a note, even? How could Joe have gone without him?

"Don't take on, lad,' called a voice behind him. 'It's not as bad as it looks.'

Jay whipped round so fast he almost fell off the wall. Joe was standing some twenty feet behind him, almost hidden from sight behind the tall weeds. He was wearing a yellow sou'wester on top of his pit cap. He had a spade in one hand.

'Joe?'

The old man grinned.

'Aye. What d'you think, then?'

Jay was beyond words.

'It's me permanent solution,' explained Joe, looking pleased. 'They've cut off me lectrics, but I've wired mesself up to bypa.s.s the meter, so I can still use em. I've bin diggin a well round back so I can do waterin. Come over and tell me what you think.'

As always, Joe behaved as if no time had pa.s.sed, as if Jay had never been away. He parted the weeds which separated them and motioned the boy to follow him through. Beyond, the allotment was as ordered as it had always been, with lemonade bottles sheltering small plants, old windows arranged to make cold frames, and tyres stacked up for potato-planters. From a distance the whole thing might just have been the acc.u.mulated detritus of years, but come a little closer and everything was there, just as before. On the railway banking, fruit trees - some s.h.i.+elded with sheets of plastic - dripped rain. It was the best camouflage job Jay had ever seen.

'It's amazing,' he said at last. 'I really thought you'd gone.'

Joe looked pleased.

'You're not the only one that thinks that, lad,' he said mysteriously. 'Look down there.'

Jay looked down into the cutting. The signal box which had been Joe's greenhouse was still standing, though in a state of dereliction; vines grew out of the punctured roof and tumbled down the peeling sides. The lines had been taken up and the sleepers dug out - all but the fifty-yard stretch between the box and Joe's house, as if overlooked by some accident. Between the rust-red tracks weeds were sprouting.

"Come next year no-one'll even remember there were a railway down Pog Hill. Praps people'll let us alone then.'

Jay nodded slowly, still speechless with amazement and relief.

'Perhaps they will.'