Blackberry Wine (17 page)

‘I’m sure that now Jay has joined our little community’ – she bared her teeth through the smoke – ‘things will begin to progress. The
tone
changes. People begin to develop. God knows I’ve worked hard enough – for the church, for the theatre group, for the literary society. I’m sure Jay would agree to address our little writers’ group one day soon?’

He bared his own teeth non-committally.

‘Of
course
you would!’ Caro beamed as if Jay had answered aloud. ‘You’re exactly what a village like Lansquenet needs most: a breath of fresh air. You wouldn’t want people to think we were keeping you all to
ourselves
, would you?’ She laughed, and Jessica exclaimed hungrily. The Merles nudged each other in glee. Jay had the strangest feeling that the lavish dinner had been peripheral, that in spite of the champagne cocktails and iced Sauternes and
foie gras
he was the real main course.

‘But why Lansquenet?’ It was Jessica, leaning forwards, her long blue eyes half shut against a sheet of cigarette smoke. ‘Surely you would have been happier in a bigger place. Agen, maybe, or further south towards Toulouse?’

Jay shook his head. ‘I’m tired of cities,’ he said. ‘I bought this place on impulse.’

‘Ah,’ exclaimed Caro rapturously. ‘Artistic temperament!’

‘Because I wanted somewhere quist, away from the city.’

Clairmont shook his head. ‘Héh, it’s quiet enough,’ he said. ‘Too quiet for us. Property prices rock-bottom, while in Le Pinot, only forty kilometres away—’

His wife explained rapidly that Le Pinot was a village on the Garonne, much beloved by foreign tourists.

‘Georges does a lot of work there, don’t you, Georges? He put in a swimming pool for that lovely English couple, and he helped renovate that old house by the church. If only we could generate the same kind of interest in our village.’

Tourists. Swimming pools. Gift shops. Burger bars. Jay’s lack of enthusiasm must have shown in his face, because Caro nudged him archly.

‘I can see that our Monsieur Mackintosh is a romantic, Jessica! He loves the quaint little roads and the vineyards and the lonely farmhouses. So very English!’ Jay smiled and nodded and agreed that his eccentricity was
tout
à
fait anglais
.

‘But a community like ours,
héh
, it needs to grow.’ Clairmont was drunk and earnest. ‘We need
investment
. Money. There’s no money left in farming. Our farmers make barely enough to keep alive as it is. The work is all in the cities. The young move away. Only the old people and the riff-raff stay. The itinerants, the pieds-noirs. That’s what people don’t want to understand. We have to progress or die,
héh
. Progress or die.’

Caro nodded. ‘But there are too many people here who can’t see the way ahead,’ she frowned. ‘They refuse to sell their land for development, even when it’s clear they can’t win. When the plans were suggested to build the new Intermarché up the road they protested for so long that the Intermarché went to Le Pinot instead. Le Pinot was just like Lansquenet twenty years ago. Now look at it.’

Le Pinot was the local success story. A village of 300 souls put itself on the map thanks to an enterprising couple from Paris who bought and refurbished a number of old properties to sell as holiday homes. Thanks to a strong pound, and several excellent contacts in London, these were sold or rented to wealthy English tourists, and little by little a tradition was established. The villagers soon saw the potential in this. Business expanded to serve the new
tourist trade. Several new cafés opened, soon followed by a couple of bed and breakfasts. Then came a scattering of speciality shops selling luxury goods to the summer trade, a restaurant with a Michelin star, and a small but luxurious hotel with a gym and a swimming pool. Local history was dredged for items of interest, and the wholly unremarkable church was revealed, by a combination of folklore and wishful thinking, to be a site of historical significance. A television adaptation of
Clochemerle
was filmed there, and after that there was no end to the new developments. An Intermarché within easy distance. A riding club. A whole row of holiday chalets along the river. And now, as if that wasn’t enough, there were plans for an Aquadome and health spa only five kilometres away, which would bring trade all the way from Agen and beyond.

Caro seemed to take Le Pinot’s success as a personal insult.

‘It could just as easily have been Lansquenet,’ she complained, taking a
petit four
. ‘Our village is at least as good as theirs. Our church is genuine fourteenth century. We have the ruins of a Roman aqueduct down in Les Marauds. It could have been us. Instead, the only visitors we get are the summer farmhands and the gypsies down the river.’ She bit petulantly at her
petit four
.

Jessica nodded. ‘It’s the people here,’ she told me. ‘They don’t have any ambition. They think they can live exactly as their grandfathers did.’

Le Pinot, Jay understood, had been so successful that the production of its local vintage, after which the village was named, had ceased altogether.

‘Your neighbour is one of those people.’ Caro’s mouth thinned beneath the pink lipstick. ‘Works half the land between here and Les Marauds, and still barely makes enough from winemaking to keep body and soul together. Lives holed up all year round in that old house of hers, with never a word to anyone. And that poor child holed up with her …’

Toinette and Jessica nodded, and Clairmont poured more coffee.

‘Child?’ Nothing in Jay’s brief glimpse of Marise d’Api had led him to imagine her as a mother.

‘Yes, a girl. No-one ever sees her. She doesn’t go to school. We never see them in church. We tried to suggest that they might,’ Caro made a face, ‘but the torrent of abuse from the mother was quite disgusting.’

The other women made sounds of agreement. Jessica moved a little closer, and Jay could smell perfume – he thought it was Poison – from her bobbed blond hair.

‘She’d be better off with the grandmother,’ said Toinette emphatically. ‘At least she’d get the affection she needs. Mireille was absolutely devoted to Tony.’ Tony, explained Caro, was Marise’s husband.

‘But she’d never let her have the child,’ said Jessica. ‘I think she only keeps her because she knows it galls Mireille. And, of course, we’re too far out for anyone to take much notice of what an old woman says.’

‘It was supposed to have been an accident,’ continued Caro darkly. ‘I mean, they
had
to say that, didn’t they? Even Mireille played along, because of the funeral. Said his gun exploded when a cartridge got stuck in the chamber. But everyone knows that woman drove him to it. Did everything but pull the trigger. I’d believe anything of her. Anything at all.’

The conversation was beginning to make Jay feel uncomfortable. His headache had returned. This was not what he’d expected of Lansquenet, he told himself, this genteel spite, this gleeful hint of cruelty behind the prettiness. He hadn’t come to Lansquenet to hear about this. His book – if there was ever going to be a book – didn’t need this. The ease with which he’d written the twenty pages on the reverse of
Stout Cortez
proved it. He wanted apple-faced women picking herbs in their gardens. He wanted a French idyll, a
Cider With Rosette
, a lighthearted antidote to Joe.

And yet there was something curiously pervasive about
the story itself, about the three women’s faces drawn close in identical expressions of vulpine enjoyment, eyes squinched down, mouths lipsticked wide over white, well-tended teeth. It was an old story – not even an original story – and yet it drew him. The feeling – that sense of being yanked forwards by an invisible hand in his gut – was not entirely unpleasant.

‘Go on,’ he said.

‘She was always at him.’ Jessica took over the narrative. ‘Even when they were first married. He was such an easy-going, sweet man. A big man, but I’ll swear he was frightened of her. He let her get away with anything. And when the baby was born she just got worse. Never a smile. Never made friends with anyone. And the rows with Mireille! I’m sure you could hear them right across the village.’

‘That’s what drove him to it in the end: the rows.’

‘Poor Tony.’

‘She found him in the barn – what was left of him. His head half blown away by the shot. She put the baby in the crib and rode off to the village on her moped, cool as you like, to fetch help. And at the funeral, when everyone was mourning’ – Caro shook her head – ‘cold as ice. Not a word or a tear. Wouldn’t pay for anything more than the plainest, cheapest funeral. And when Mireille offered to pay for something better – Lord! The fight that caused!’

Mireille, Jay understood, was Marise’s mother-in-law. Almost six years later, Mireille, who was seventy-one and suffered from chronic arthritis, had never spoken to her granddaughter, or even seen her except from a distance.

Marise reverted to her maiden name after her husband’s death. She apparently hated everyone in the village so much that she employed only itinerant labour – and that on the condition that they ate and slept at the farm for the duration of their employment. Inevitably, there were rumours.

‘I don’t suppose you’ll see much of her, anyway,’ finished
Toinette. ‘She doesn’t talk to anyone. She even rides over to La Percherie to buy her weekly shopping. I imagine she’ll leave you well alone.’

Jay walked home, despite offers from Jessica and Caro to drive him back. It was almost two, and the night was fresh and quiet. His head felt peculiarly light, and although there was no moon there was a skyful of stars. As he skirted the main square and moved downhill towards Les Marauds he became aware, with some surprise, of how dark it really was. The last street lamp stood in front of the Café des Marauds, and at the bottom of the hill, the river, the marshes, the little derelict houses teetering haphazardly into the water dipped into shadow so deep that it was almost blindness. But by the time he reached the river his eyes had adapted to the night. He crossed in the shallows, listening to the
hisssh
of the water against the banks. He found the path across the fields and followed it to the road, where a long avenue of trees stood black against the purple sky. He could hear sounds all around him: night creatures, a distant owl, mostly the sounds of wind and foliage, from which vision distracts us.

The cool air had cleared his head of smoke and alcohol and he felt alert and awake, able to walk all night. As he walked, he found himself going over the last part of the evening’s conversation with increasing persistence. There was something about that story, ugly as it was, which attracted him. It was primitive. Visceral. The woman living alone with her secrets; the man dead in the barn; the dark triangle of mother, grandmother, daughter … And all around this sweet, harsh land, these vines, orchards, rivers, these whitewashed houses, widows in black headscarves, men in overalls and drooping, nicotine-stained moustaches.

The smell of thyme was pungent in the air. It grew wild by the roadside. Thyme improves the memory, Joe used to say. He used to make a syrup out of it, keeping it in a bottle in the pantry. Two tablespoonsful every morning before breakfast. The clear greenish liquid smelt exactly like the
night air over Lansquenet, crisp and earthy and nostalgic, like a summer day’s weeding in the herb garden, with the radio on.

Suddenly Jay wanted to be home. His fingers itched. He wanted to feel the typewriter keys under them, to hear the clack-clacking of the old machine in the starry silence. More than anything he wanted to catch that story.

HE FOUND JOE WAITING FOR HIM, STRETCHED OUT ON THE CAMP
bed, hands laced behind his head. He had left his boots by the foot of the bed, but he was wearing his old pit-helmet, cocked at a jaunty angle on his head. A yellow sticker on the front read, ‘People will always need coal.’

Jay felt no surprise at seeing him. His anger had gone, and instead he felt a kind of comfort, almost as if he was expecting to see him – the ghostly apparition becoming familiar as he began to anticipate it, becoming …

Everyday magic
.

He sat down at the typewriter. The story had him in its hold now and he typed rapidly, his fingers jabbing at the keys. He typed solidly for more than two hours, feeding sheet after sheet of
Stout Cortez
into the machine, translating it, reversing it with his own layman’s alchemy. Words pranced across the page almost too fast for him to keep pace. From time to time he paused, vaguely conscious of Joe’s presence on the bed beside him, though the old man said nothing while he worked. At one point he smelt smoke. Joe had lit a cigarette. At about five in the morning he made coffee in the kitchen, and when he returned to his typewriter he noticed, with a curious feeling of disappointment, that the old man had gone.

THEY WENT TO THE EDGE MORE OFTEN AFTER THAT. THEY KEPT
out of sight most of the time, visiting when they were fairly certain no-one would be there. There were a couple of clashes with Glenda and her mates – once at the dump, over ownership of an old deep-freeze (Glenda won that encounter) and once at the river crossing (one-up to Gilly and Jay). Nothing serious ensued. Name-calling, a few flung stones, threats and gibes. Gilly and Jay knew Nether Edge better than the others, in spite of their out-of-town status. They knew the best hiding places, the short cuts. And they had imagination. Glenda and her mates had little but spite and swagger to sustain them. Gilly liked to lay traps. A bent sapling with a taut wire across the base, designed to fly in the face of anyone who tripped it. A paint tin of dirty canal water balanced, precarious, on the door of their den. The den itself was raided again and again, until it was finally abandoned, then Jay found the new den – in the dump, between a rusty hulk and an old fridge door – and raided that. They left their signature everywhere. On disused ovens in the dump. On trees. On the walls and doors of a series of dens. Gilly made a slingshot and practised shooting at discarded tins and jam jars. She was a natural.
She never missed. She could break a jar at fifty feet without even trying. Of course there were a few narrow escapes. Once they almost cornered Jay near the place where he hid his bike, close to the railway bridge. It was getting dark and Gilly had already gone home, but he’d found a stash of last year’s coal – maybe as much as a couple of sacksful – in a patch of weeds, and he wanted to shift it before anyone else came across it by accident. He was too busy bagging coal chunks for Joe to notice the four girls coming out from the other side of the railway, and Glenda was almost on him before he knew it.