Blackberry Wine Part 9

As the owner of the village's only cafe, she was in an excellent position to know everything that happened. The dry-looking old man in the blue beret was Narcisse, a market gardener who supplied the local grocer and the florist. In spite of his reserve, there was wry, hidden humour in his face. Jay knew from Josephine that he was a friend of the gypsies who came downriver every summer, trading with them and offering them seasonal work in his fields. For years he and a succession of local cures battled over his tolerance of the gypsies, but Narcisse was stubborn, and the gypsies stayed. The redhaired man from Clairmont's yard was Michel Roux, from Ma.r.s.eilles, a traveller from the river, who stopped for a fortnight five years ago and never left. The woman with the red scarf was Denise Poitou, the baker's wife. The wan-looking fat woman in black, her eyes shaded from the sun by a wide- brimmed hat, was Mireille Faizande, Marise's mother-in- law. Jay tried to catch her eye as she pa.s.sed the cafe terra.s.se, but she did not seem to see him.

There were stories behind all of these faces. Josephine, leaning over the counter with her cup of coffee in one hand, appeared more than willing to tell them. Her early shyness of him had vanished, and she greeted him with pleasure.

Sometimes, when there were not too many customers, they talked. Jay knew very few of the people she mentioned. But this did not seem to discourage Josephine.

'Do you mean I never told you about old Albert? Or his daughter?' She sounded amazed at his ignorance. 'They used to live next door to the bakery. Well, what used to be the bakery, before it became the chocoioterie. Opposite the florist's.' At first Jay simply allowed her to talk. He paid little attention, letting names, anecdotes, descriptions wash 157.

past him as he sipped his coffee and watched the people go by.

'Didn't I ever tell you about Arnauld and the truffle pig?

Or the time Armande dressed up as the Immaculate Conception and laid in wait for him in the churchyard?

Listen . . .'

There were many stories of her best friend, Vianne, who left some years ago, and of people long dead, whose names meant nothing to him. But Josephine was persistent. Perhaps she, too, was lonely. The morning habitues of the cafe were a silent lot for the most part, many of them old men.

Perhaps she welcomed a younger audience. Little by little the ongoing soap opera of Lansquenet-sous-Tannes drew him in.

Jay was aware he was still an oddity here. Some people stared at him in frank curiosity. Some smiled. Most were reserved, politely dour, a nod in greeting and a sidelong glance as he walked past. Most days he called at the Cafe des Marauds for a blonde or a cafe-ca.s.sis on the way back from Poitou's. The walled terra.s.se was small, no more than a wide piece of pavement on the narrow road, but it was a good place to sit and watch as the village came to life. Just off the main square, it was a vantage point from which everything was visible: the long hill leading down towards the marshes; the screen of trees'above the Rue des Francs Bourgeois; the church tower whose carillon rang out across the fields at seven every morning; the square, pink schoolhouse at the road's fork. At the bottom of the hill the Tannes was hazed and dimly gleaming, the fields beyond barely visible. The early sunlight was very bright, almost crude in comparison, cutting out the white fronts of the houses against their brown shadow. On the river a boat was moored, close to the huddle of derelict houses which overhung the river on their precarious wooden stilts. From the boat's chimney he could see a scrawl of smoke and smell frying fish.

Between seven and eight o'clock several people, mostly women, pa.s.sed by carrying loaves or paper sants from Poitou's bakery. At eight the bells Jay always recognized the churchgoers. The^ solemn reluctance to their good spring coats shoes, their hats and berets, which defin Clairmont was always there with her hus ward in his tight shoes, she elegant in a scarves. She always greeted Jay as she p< extravagant="" wave="" and="" a="" cry="" of,="" 'how's="" t="" husband="" nodded="" briefly="" and="" hurried="" by,="" hu="" while="" ma.s.s="" was="" in="" progress,="" a="" number="" of="" o="" themselves="" with="" tired="" defiance="" on="" the="" terra="" des="" marauds="" to="" drink="" cafe-creme="" and="" play="" among="" themselves.="" jay="" recognized="" narcisi="" gardener,="" always="" in="" the="" same="" place="" by="" tl="" was="" a="" tattered="" seed="" catalogue="" in="" his="" coat="" pc="" read="" in="" silence,="" a="" cup="" of="" coffee="" at="" his="" elbo="" josephine="" bought="" pains="" au="" chocolat="" and="">

ways took two, his big brown hands oddly lifted the pastry to his mouth. He rarely sp( himself with a brief nod in the directiol customers before settling in his usual place.

the schoolchildren began to pa.s.s, incong anoraks and fleeces, a procession of logos scarlet, yellow, turquoise, lime-green. They with open curiosity. Some of them laughed a]

cheery derision, 'Rosbif! Rosbif as they da were about twenty children of primary-scho quenet, divided into two cla.s.ses; the older 01 the school bus into Agen, its windows curious noses and thick with finger-graffiti During the day Clairmont had been owe pairs to the house. Already the ground floo and the roof was almost completed, thougl Georges was disappointed at his lack of a mont dreamed of conservatories and ind pools, Jacuzzis and piazzas and landscaped 159.

he was philosophical enough when Jay told him that he had no ambition to live in a St Tropez villa.

'Bof, ce que vous aimez, a ce que ;e comprends, c'est ]e rustique,' he told Jay with a shrug. Already there was a speculative look in his eyes. Jay understood that if he didn't take a hard line with the man he would almost certainly be deluged with unwanted objects - broken crockery, milking stools, bad reproduction furniture, walking sticks, cracked tiles, chopping boards and ancient farming utensils; all the unloved and abandoned detritus of loft and cellar, granted reprieve from the bonfire by the call of Ie rustique -- which he would then be expected to buy. He should have withered him on the spot. But there was something rather touching about the man, something both humble and absurdly hopeful in the ratty black eyes gleaming above the drooping moustache, which made it impossible.

Sighing, Jay resigned himself to the inevitable.

On Thursday he caught sight of Marise for the first time since their initial, brief meeting. He was coming home after his morning walk, a loaf tucked under his arm. At the point at which his field backed onto hers there was a blackthorn hedge, along which a path ran parallel to the boundary. The hedge was young, three or four years at the most, the new March growth barely sufficient to form a screen. Behind it he could see the broken line where the old hedge had been, an uneven row of stumps and tussocks imperfectly hidden by a new furrow. Mentally Jay calculated the distance. Clairmont had been right. She had moved the boundary by about fifty feet. Probably when the old man first fell ill. He looked more closely through the hedge, faintly curious. The contrast between her side and his was striking. On the Foudouin side the vines were sprawling and untrimmed, their new growth barely showing, except for a few hard brown buds on the ends of the tendrils. Hers had been cut back hard, twelve inches from the ground, in readiness for the summer. There were no weeds on Marise's side of the hedge; the furrows neat I! and clean-edged, a path running along each row wide enough to allow easy pa.s.sage for the tractor. On Jay's side the rows had run into each other, the uncut vines clinging lasciviously to one another across the paths. Gleeful spikes of ragwort, mint and arnica poked through the tangle. Looking back towards Marise's land, he found that he could just see the gable-end of her farm at the edge of the field, screened from full view by a stand of poplars. There were fruit trees there, too - the white of apple blossom against bare branches - and what might be a vegetable garden. A woodpile, a tractor, something else which could only be the barn.

She must have heard the shot from the house. She had put the baby in the crib. Gone out. Taken her time. The image was so vivid that Jay could almost see her doing it: pulling on her boots over thick socks, the oversized jacket around her shoulders - it was winter - the frosty soil crunching under her feet. Her face was impa.s.sive, as it had been when they met that first morning. The image haunted him. In this guise Marise had already walked more than once across the pages of his new book; he felt as if he knew her, and yet they had barely spoken. But there was something in her which drew him, an irresistible air of secrecy.

He wasn't sure why she made him think of Joe. That coat, perhaps, or the man's cap jammed too far over her eyes, that confusing half-familiar silhouette just glimpsed behind an angle of brick. Certainly there was no resemblance to Joe in her features. Joe could never have had that bleak, empty face. Half turning to go, Jay caught sight of something - a figure moving quickly along the other side of the hedge a few hundred yards from where he was standing. s.h.i.+elded by the thin screen of bushes, he saw her before she caught sight of him. It was a warm morning and she had shed her bulky outer clothes in favour of jeans and a striped fish- erman's jumper. The change of clothing made her boyishly slender. Her red hair had been cut off inexpertly at jaw level - Jay guessed she'd probably done it herself. In that unguarded moment her face was vivid, eager. For a moment Jay barely recognized her.

161.

Then her eyes flicked towards him, and it was as if a blind had been slammed down, so fast that he was left wondering if he had only imagined her before.

'Madame--'

For a second she halted, looked at him with a blankness which was almost insolent. Her eyes were green, a curiously light verdigris colour. In his book he'd coloured them black. Jay smiled and reached out his hand over the hedge in greeting.

'Madame d'Api. I'm sorry if I startled you. I'm--'

But before he could say anything else she had gone, turning sharply into the rows of vines without a backward glance, moving smoothly and quickly down the path towards the farmhouse.

'Madame d'Api!' he called after her. 'Madame!'

She must have heard, and yet she ignored his call. He watched her for a few minutes more as she moved further and further away, then, shrugging, turned towards the house. He told himself that his disappointment was absurd.

There was no reason why she should want to talk to him.

He was allowing his imagination too much freedom. In the bland light of day she was nothing like the slate-eyed heroine of his story. He resolved not to think of her again.

When Jay got home, Clairmont was waiting for him with a truckload of junk. He winked as Jay turned into the drive, pus.h.i.+ng his blue beret back from his eyes.

'Hold, Monsieur Jay,' he called from the cab of his truck.

'I've found you some things for your new house!'

Jay sighed. His instincts had been right. Every few weeks he would be badgered to take off Clairmont's hands a quant.i.ty of overpriced brocante masquerading as country chic. From what he could see of the truck's contents broken chairs, sweeping brushes, half-stripped doors, a really hideous papier-mache dragon head left over from some carnival or other - his suspicions hardly began to cover the dreadful reality.

'Well, I don't know,' he began.

Clairmont grinned.

'You'll see. You'll love this,' he announced, jumping down from his cab. As he did, Jay saw he was carrying a bottle of wine. 'Something to put you in the mood, h.e.l.l? Then we can talk business.'

There was no escaping the man's persistence. Jay wanted a bath and silence. Instead there would be an hour's haggling in the kitchen, wine he didn't want to drink, then the problem of how to dispose of Clairmont's objets d'art without hurting his feelings. He resigned himself.

'To business,' said Clairmont, pouring two gla.s.ses of wine. 'Mine and yours.' He grinned. 'I'm going into antiques, h.e.l.l ? There's good money in antiques in Le Pinot and Montauban. Buy cheap now, clean up when the tourists come.'

Jay tried the wine, which was good.

'You could build twenty holiday chalets on that vineyard of yours,' continued Clairmont cheerily. 'Or a hotel. How'd you like the idea of your own hotel, h.e.l.l?'

Jay shook his head.

'I like it the way it is,' he said.

Clairmont sighed.

'You and 'La Paienne d'Api,' he sighed. 'Got no vision, either of you. That land's worth a fortune in the right hands. Crazy, to keep it as it is when just a few chalets could--'

Jay struggled with the word and his accent.

'La Paienne? The G.o.dless woman?' he translated hesitantly.Clairmont jerked his head in the direction of the other farm.

'Marise as was. We used to call her La Parisienne. But the other suits her better, h.e.l.l? Never goes to church. Never had the baby christened. Never talks. Never smiles. Hangs on to that land out of sheer stubborn spite, when anyone else . . .'

He shrugged. 'Bof. It's none of my business, h.e.l.l? But I'd keep the doors locked if I were you, Monsieur Jay. She's 163.

crazy. She's had her eye on that land for years. She'd do you an injury if she could.'

Jay frowned, remembering the fox traps around the house.

"Nearly broke Mireille's nose once,' continued Clairmont.

'Just because she went near the little girl. Never came into the village again after that. Goes into La Percherie on her motorbike. Seen her going into Agen, too.'

'Who looks after the daughter?' enquired Jay.

Clairmont shrugged.

'No-one. I expect she just leaves her.'

'I'm surprised the social services haven't--'

'Bof. In Lansquenet? They'd have to come all the way over from Agen or Montauban, maybe even Toulouse.

Who'd bother? Mireille tried. More than once. But she's clever. Put them off the scent. Mireille would have adopted the child if she'd been allowed. She's got the money. The family would have stood by her. But at her age, and with a deaf child on top of that, I suppose they thought--'

Jay stared at him. 'A deaf child?'

Clairmont looked surprised.

'Oh yes. Didn't you know? Ever since she was tiny. She's supposed to know how to look after her.' He shook his head. 'That's what keeps her here, h.e.l.l? That's why she can't go back to Paris.'

'Why?' asked Jay curiously.

'Money,' said Clairmont shortly, draining his gla.s.s.

'But the farm must be worth something.'

'Oh, it is,' said Clairmont. 'But she doesn't own it. Why do you think she was so anxious to get the Foudouin place?

It's on a lease. She'll be out the day it expires - unless she can get it renewed. And there isn't much chance of that after what's happened.'

'Why? Who owns the lease?'

Clairmont drained his gla.s.s and licked his lips with satisfaction.

164.

'Pierre-Emile Foudouin. The man who sold you your house. Mireille's great-nephew.'

They went out onto the drive then, to inspect Clairmont's offerings. They were as bad as he had feared. But Jay's mind was on other things. He offered Clairmont 500 francs for the whole truckload: the builder's eyes widened briefly, but he was quickly persuaded. Winking slyly: 'An eye for a good bargain, h.e.l.l?'

The note disappeared into his rusty palm like a card trick.

"And don't worry, h.e.l.l. I can find you plenty more!'

He drove off, his exhaust blatting out pink dust from the drive. Jay was left to sort out the wreckage.

Even then Joe's training held good: Jay still found it hard to throw away what might conceivably be useful. Even as he determined to use the entire truckload for firewood he found himself looking speculatively over this and that. A gla.s.s-panelled door, cracked down the middle, might make a reasonable cold frame. The jars, each turned upside down on a small seedling, would give good protection from late frost. Little by little the oddments Clairmont had brought began to spread themselves around the garden and the field. He even found a place for the carnival head. He carried it carefully to the boundary between his and Marise's vineyard and set it on top of a fence post, facing towards her farm. Through the dragon's open mouth a long crepe tongue lolled redly, and its yellow eyes gleamed.

Sympathetic magic, Joe would have called it, like putting gargoyles onto a church roof. Jay wondered what La Pai'enne would make of it.

Pog Hill, Summer 1977 JAY'S MEMORIES OF THAT LATE SUMMER WERE BLURRY IN A WAY.

the previous ones were not. Several factors were to blame - the pale and troubling sky, for one thing, which made him squint and gave him headaches. Joe seemed a little distant, and Gilly's presence meant they did not have the long discussions they'd had the year before. And Gilly herself ... it seemed that as July turned into August Gilly was always at the back of his mind. Jay found himself dwelling upon her more and more. His pleasure at her company was coloured by insecurity, jealousy and other feelings he found it difficult to identify. He was in a state of perpetual confusion. He was often close to anger, without knowing why. He argued constantly with his mother, who seemed to get more deeply under his skin that summer than ever before - everything got under his skin that year - he felt raw, as if every nerve were constantly exposed. He bought the s.e.x Pistols' 'Pretty Vacant' and played it in his room at full volume, to the horror of his grandparents. He dreamed of piercing his ears. Gilly and he went to the Edge and warred with Glenda's gang and filled bags with useful rubbish and took them over to Joe's. Sometimes they helped Joe in the allotment, and occasionally he would talk to them about his travels and his time in Africa with the Masai, or his journeys through the Andes. But to Jay it seemed perfunctory, an afterthought, as if Joe's mind were already on something else. The perimeter ritual, too, seemed abbreviated, a minute or two at most, with a stick of incense and a sachet of sprinkler. It did not occur to him to question it then, but afterwards he realized. Joe knew. Even then he had already made the decision.

One day he took Jay into his back room and showed him the seed chest again. It had been over a year since he had last done so, pointing out the thousands of seeds packaged and wrapped and labelled for planting, and in the semidarkness - the windows were still boarded up - the chest looked dusty, abandoned, the paper packages crisp with age, the labels faded.

'It dun't look like owt, does it?' said Joe, drawing his finger through the dust on the top of the chest.

Jay shook his head. The room smelt airless and damp, like a place where tomatoes have been grown. Joe grinned a little sadly.

"Never believe it, lad. Every one of them seeds is a goodun. You could plant em right now an they'd go up champion. Like rockets. Every one of em.' He put his hand on the boy's shoulder. "Just you remember, it's not what things look like that matters. It's what's inside. The art of it.'

But Jay wasn't really listening. He never really listened that summer -- too preoccupied by his own thoughts, too sure that what he had would be there for ever. He took this wistful little aside of Joe's as just another adult homily; nodding vaguely, feeling hot and bored and choked in the airless dark, wanting to get away.

Later it occurred to him that perhaps Joe had been saying goodbye.

167.

Lansquenet, March 1999 JOE WAS WAITING WHEN HE REACHED THE HOUSE, LOOKING.

critically out of the window at the abandoned vegetable plot.

'You want to do something with that, lad,' he told Jay as he opened the door. 'Else it'll be no good this summer. You want to get it dug over and weeded while you've still got time. And them apple trees, a.n.a.ll. You want to check em for mistletoe. b.l.o.o.d.y kill em if you let it.'

During the past week Jay had almost become used to the old man's sudden appearances. He had even begun, in a strange way, to look forward to them, telling himself they were harmless, finding ingenious post-Jungian reasons to explain their persistence. The old Jay -theJayof'75- would have relished this. But that Jay believed in everything. He wanted to believe. Astral projection, s.p.a.ce aliens, spells, rituals, magic. Strange phenomena were that Jay's daily business. That Jay believed - trusted. This Jay knew better.

And still he continued to see the old man, regardless of belief. A part of it was loneliness, he told himself. Another was the book - that stranger growing from the ma.n.u.script of Stout Cortez. The process of writing is a little like madness, a kind of possession not altogether benign. Back in the days ofJackappJe Joe he talked to himself all the time, striding back and forth in his little Soho bedsit, with a gla.s.s in one hand, talking, arguing fiercely with himself, with Joe, with Gilly, with Zeth and Glenda, almost expecting to see them there as he looked up from the typewriter, his eyes grainy with exhaustion, his head pounding, the radio playing full blast. For a whole summer he was a little insane. But this book would be different. Easier, in a way. The characters were all around him. They marched effortlessly across the pages: Clairmont the builder, Josephine the cafe owner, Michel from Ma.r.s.eilles, with the red hair and the easy smile. Caro in a Hermes headscarf.

Marise. Joe. Marise. There was no real plot. Instead there were a mult.i.tude of anecdotes, loosely knitted together -- some remembered from Joe and relocated to Lansquenet, some recalled by Josephine over the counter of the Cafe des Marauds, some put together from sc.r.a.ps. He liked to think he had caught something of the air, of the light of the place.

Perhaps some of Josephine's bright, untrained narrative style. Her gossip was never tainted by malice. Her anecdotes were always warm, often amusing. He began to look forward to his visits, enough to feel a dim sense of disappointment on the days Josephine was too busy to talk. He found himself going to the cafe every day, even when he had no other excuse to be in the village. He made mental notes.

When he had been in the village for a little under three weeks, he went into Agen and sent the first 150 pages of the unfilled ma.n.u.script to Nick Horneli, his agent in London.

Nick handled Jonathan Winesap, as well as the royalties for Jackapple Joe. Jay had always liked him, a wryly humorous man who was in the habit of sending little cuttings from newspapers and magazines in the hope of generating new inspiration. He sent no contact address, but a posterestante address in Agen, and waited for a reply.

To his disappointment, he found that Josephine would not speak to him about Marise. In the same way, there were people she rarely mentioned: the Clairmonts, Mireille Fai- 169.

zande, the Merles. Herself. Whenever he tried to encourage her to talk about these people, she would find work to do in the kitchen. He felt more and more strongly that there were things - secret things - she was reluctant to discuss.

'What about my neighbour? Does she ever come to the cafe?'

Josephine picked up a cloth and began to polish the gleaming surface of the bar.