Blackberry Wine Part 20

Even the threats stopped. She saw him twice, sitting in a car beneath her window, but when two weeks pa.s.sed and there was no further sign of him she began to believe she had been mistaken. A few days later she awoke to the smell of gas. He had bypa.s.sed the main supply somehow, and she could find no way to turn it off. She tried the door, but it was jammed shut, wedged from the outside.

The windows, too, were nailed shut, though her flat was on the third floor. The phone was out. She managed to break a window and scream for help, but it had been too close. She fled to Ma.r.s.eilles. Began again. That was where she met Tony.

'He was nineteen,' she remembered. 'I was working on the psychiatric ward of Ma.r.s.eilles general hospital, and he was a patient. From what I understood he had been suffering from depression following his father's death.'

She smiled wryly. 'I should have known better than to involve myself with another patient, but we were both vulnerable. He was so young. His attention flattered me, that was all. And I was good with him. I could make him laugh. That flattered me, too.'

By the time she had realized how he felt it was too late.

He was infatuated with her.

'I told myself I could love him,' she said. 'He was funny and kind and easy to manipulate. After Patrice, I thought that was all I wanted. And he kept telling me about this farm, this place. It sounded so safe, so beautiful. Every day I would wake up and wonder if this was going to be the day Patrice found me again. It would have been easy enough if he'd traced me to Ma.r.s.eilles. There were only so many hospitals and clinics he could check. Tony offered me a kind of protection from that. And he needed me. That already meant a lot.'

She allowed herself to be persuaded. At first Lansquenet seemed everything she had ever wanted. But soon there were clashes between Marise and Tony's mother, who refused to accept the truth about his illness.

'She wouldn't listen to me,' explained Marise. 'Tony was up and down all the time. He needed medication. If he didn't take it he got worse, locking himself up in the house for days at a time, not washing, just watching TV and drinking beer and eating. Oh, he looked all right to outsiders.

That was part of the problem. I had to keep him in check all the time. I played the part of the nagging wife. I . had to.'

h Jay poured the last of the wine into her gla.s.s. Even the k dregs were highly scented, and for a moment he thought he could distinguish all the rest of Joe's wines in that Hfinal gla.s.sful, raspberry and roses and elderflower and Blackberry and damson and jackapple, all in one. No Ignaore Specials, he told himself with a tug of sadness, No more magic. Marise had stopped talking. Her maple- Sred hair obscured her face. Jay had the sudden feeling that J'-he'd known her for years. Her presence at his table was as natural, as familiar as that of his old typewriter. He put his , hand on hers. Her kiss would taste of roses. She looked up, and her eyes were as green as his orchard. I 'Mamanf Rosa's voice cut through the moment with shrill insistence.'I've found a little room upstairs! There's a round window ' and a blue bed, shaped like a boat! It's a bit dusty, but I could clean it up, couldn't I, Maman? Couldn't I?'

Her hand moved away.

'Of course. If monsieur ... if Jay . . .' She looked con281 fused, awoken in the middle of a dream. She pushed the half-empty winegla.s.s away from her.

'I should go,' she said quickly. 'It's getting late. I'll bring Rosa's things across. Thank you for--'

'It's all right.' Jay tried to put his hand on her arm, but she pulled away. 'You can both stay if you like. I have plenty of--'

'No.' Suddenly she was the old Marise again, the confidences at an end. 'I have to bring Rosa's sleeping things.

It's time she was in bed,' She hugged Rosa briefly but fiercely. 'You be good,' she advised. 'And please' - this was to Jay - 'don't mention this in the village. Not to anyone.'

She unhooked her yellow slicker from the peg behind the kitchen door and pulled it on. Outside, the rain was still falling.

'Promise,' said Marise.

'Of course.'

She nodded, a curt, polite nod, as if concluding the business between them. Then she was gone into the rain.

Jay closed the door behind her and turned to Rosa.

'Well? Is the chocolate ready?' she asked.

He grinned. 'Let's see, shall we?'

He poured the drink into a wide-mouthed cup with flowers on the rim. Rosa curled up on his bed with the cup and watched curiously as he tidied away the cups and gla.s.ses and put the empty bottle aside.

'Who was he?' she asked at last. 'Is he English, too?'

'Who's that?' Jay called from the kitchen, running water into the sink.

'The old man,' said Rosa. 'The old man from upstairs.'

Jay turned off the tap and looked at her.

'You saw him? You talked to him?'

Rosa nodded.

'An old man with a funny hat on,' she said. 'He told me to tell you something.' She took a long drink of her chocolate, emerging from the cup with a frothy foam moustache. Jay felt suddenly shivery, almost afraid.

'What did he say?' he whispered.

Rosa frowned.

'He said to remember the Specials,' she said. 'That yo low what to do.'

'Anything else?' Jay's mouth was dry, his head poundi 'Yes.' She nodded energetically. 'He told me to say go 'e; 283.

57.Pog Hill Lane, February 1999 IT WAS TWENTY-TWO YEARS BEFORE IAY WENT BACK TO POG HILL.

Part of it was anger, another part fear. He had never felt as if he belonged before. London certainly wasn't home. The places he'd lived all looked the same to him, with small variations in size and design. Flats. Bedsits. Even Kerry's Kensington house. Places in pa.s.sing. But this year was different. Pick your own cliche, as Joe would have said.

Perhaps it was simply that for the first time there were greater fears than going back to Pog Hill. Nearly fifteen years since Jackapple Joe. Since then, nothing. This went beyond writer's block. He felt as if he were stuck in time, forced to write and rewrite the fantasies of his adolescence.

Jackapple Joe was the first - the only - adult book he had written. But instead of releasing him it had trapped him in childhood. In 1977 he had rejected magic. He had had enough, he told himself. Enough and enough and enough.

He was on his own, and that was the way he wanted it. As if when he dropped Joe's seeds into the cutting at Pog Hill he was also letting go of everything he'd clung to during those past three years; the talismans, the red ribbons, Gilly, the dens, the wasps' nests, the treks along the railway lines and the fights at Nether Edge. Everything blowing away 284.

into the cutting with the litter and the ash of the railbed.

Then Jackapple Joe put it to rest at last. Or so he had thought. But there must have been something left. Curiosity, perhaps. An itch at the back of his mind which refused to be scratched. Some remnant of belief.

Perhaps he'd mistaken the signs. After all, what evidence had he found? A few boxes of magazines? A map marked in coloured pencils? Perhaps he had jumped to a false conclusion.

Perhaps Joe was telling the truth after all.

Perhaps Joe hod come back.

It was something he hardly dared imagine. Joe back at Pog Hill? In spite of himself it brought his heart into his throat. He imagined the house as it was, overgrown perhaps, but with the allotment still well ordered behind the camouflage of Joe's permanent solution, the trees decorated with red ribbons, the kitchen warm with the scent of brewing wine ... He waited several months before he made the move. Kerry was supportive, cloyingly so, imagining perhaps a renewed source of inspiration, a new book which would propel him back into the limelight. She wanted to come with him; was so persistent that he finally agreed.

It was a mistake. He knew it the moment they arrived.

Rain the colour of soot scrawling from the clouds. Nether Edge reclaimed as a riverside building development; bulldozers and tractors crawling across the disused railbed and neat identical bungalows. Fields had become car showrooms, supermarkets, shopping centres. Even the newsagent's, where Jay had gone so many times to buy cigarettes and magazines for Joe, had become something else.

Kirby's remaining mines had been closed for years. The ca.n.a.l was being renovated, and with the help of millennium funding there were ongoing plans for the development of a visitors' centre, where tourists could go down a specially converted mine shaft or ride a barge on the newly cleaned ca.n.a.l.

Needless to say, Kerry thought it was charming.

But that wasn't the worst.

285.

In spite of everything, he was expecting Pog Hill at least to have survived. The main road was still more or less unchanged, with its graceful if slightly blackened Edwardian houses and its avenue of lindens. The bridge, too, was as he remembered it, a new pedestrian crossing at one end, but the same line of poplars which marked the entrance to Pog Hill Lane, and Jay's heart played a funny little riff against his ribs as he pulled the car up to the yellow line and looked up the hill.

'Is that it?' Kerry was checking her reflection in the pa.s.senger-seat mirror. 'I don't see any sign or anything.'

Jay said nothing and got out of the car. Kerry followed him.

'So this is where it all began.' She sounded a little disappointed. 'Funny. I thought it would be more atmospheric, somehow.'

He ignored her and took a few steps forward up the hill.

They had changed the name of the lane. You won't find Pog Hill on any map now, or Nether Edge, or any of the places around which his life had revolved for those three long-ago summers. It's called Meadowbank View now, the houses knocked down to give way to a row of brick-built two-storey flats with little balconies and geraniums in plastic planters. A sign on the nearest building read, 'Meadowbank Quality Retirement Flats'. Jay went to stand where Joe's house would have been. There was nothing. A small tarmacked parking area - residents only - to the side.

Behind the flats, where Joe's garden had once stood, was a bland square of lawn with a single small tree. Of Joe's orchard, of the herb garden, the rows of blackcurrants and raspberries and gooseberries, the vines, plums, pears, the carrots, parsnips, the Specials, nothing remained.

'Nothing.'

Kerry took his hand. 'Poor darling,' she whispered in his ear. 'You're not too terribly upset, are you?' She sounded almost pleased, as if the prospect appealed to her. Jay shook his head.

286.

'Wait for me in the car, OK?'

Kerry frowned. 'But Jay--'

'Two minutes, OK?'

Just in time. He felt as if he might explode if he held it in any more. He ran to the back of the garden and looked over the wall down into the cutting. It was filled with rubbish.

Sacks of household waste covered the ground: discarded fridges, car tyres, crates, pallets, tin cans, stacks of magazines tied together with twine. Jay felt a kind of laughter welling in his throat. Joe would have loved this. His dream come true. Rubbish sprawled down the steep hill, as if ; flung there by pa.s.sers-by. A baby's pram. A shopping r trolley. The frame of an ancient bicycle. Pog Hill cutting i; had been converted into a landfill site. With an effort. Jay I pulled himself up so that he could straddle the wall. The hidden railbed looked a long way down from here, a sheer ;drop for most of the way into a scrub of bushes and a Icontinent of litter. On the far side of the wall graffiti artists ihad been at work. A scree of broken gla.s.s sparkled in the Bun. One unbroken bottle lay against a protruding stump, pie light gleaming on its dusty base. A red cord, grubby 9/ith age, was knotted around its neck. He knew at once it t?as Joe's.

1 ' How it had escaped the demolition of Joe's house Jay Bouldn't imagine, still less how it could have remained itact since then. But it was one of Joe's bottles, all right. "he coloured cord proved it, as did the label, still legible in tie old man's painstaking handwriting: "Specials'. As he lade his way down towards the bridge he thought he saw lore of Joe's belongings strewn down the banking. A broken clock. A spade. Some buckets and pots in which plants had once grown. It looked exactly as if someone had stood at the top of the hill and simply hurled the contents of Joe's house into the cutting below. Jay picked his way across the sad wreckage, trying to avoid broken gla.s.s.

There were ancient copies of National Geographic and pieces of a kitchen chair. And finally, a little further down, 287.

he found the seed chest, its legs broken off, one door hanging. Sudden, white rage pumped through him. It was a complex feeling, directed as much at himself and his foolish expectations as at Joe for letting this happen, or at the person who had stood at the top of the hill and dumped an old man's life into the gap, as if it were just rubbish to be disposed of. Worse, there was fear, the dreadful knowledge that he should have come here sooner, that there had been something here for him to find, but that, as always, he had come too late.

He searched until Kerry came to find him, almost an hour later. He was filthy, muddied to the knees. In a cardboard box he carried six bottles, discovered in various places on the way down and miraculously unbroken.

Specials.

288.

58.Lansquenet, Summer 1999 THAT WAS IT. JAY KNEW AT ONCE HE WAS GONE. THERE WAS A.

finality in that goodbye which could not be ignored. As yf, with the last drop of his wine, the old man had vanished Icompletely. For several days he denied the certainty, telling jhimself Joe would come back, that he hadn't left for good, Jthat he wouldn't have gone away a second time. But the Iheart had gone. The house no longer smelt of his smoke.

iFhe oldies station had stopped broadcasting, to be replaced by a local radio on the same frequency, blasting out modern hits. And there were no more glimpses of Joe just around Hhe corner of a cold frame, or behind the shed, or in the S&rchard inspecting the trees. No-one sat and watched him Jawork at his typewriter, unless it was Rosa, who sometimes fcrept downstairs and watched him from his bed. Wine was ^ust wine, with no special effects. This time he felt no anger.

Instead, there was a sense of inevitability. Once again, the magic had run out.

A week pa.s.sed. The rain began to taper off, leaving more damage in its wake. Jay and Rosa stayed mostly indoors.

Rosa was easy to please. She occupied herself. She stayed reading in her newly furnished room under the eaves or played Scrabble on the floor or went for splashy walks 289.

around the field with Clopette. Sometimes she listened to the radio or played with dough in the kitchen. Sometimes she baked small, hard, floury biscuits. Every evening Mar- ise joined them and made dinner, staying just long enough to eat and check on Rosa before returning to work. The generator had been restored. The drainage ditches were taking time, but would be complete in a few more days. She had enlisted Roux and some other workers from Clairmont's yard to help her. Even so the vineyard remained half flooded.

Jay had few visitors. Popotte called by twice with the mail and once with a cake from Josephine, but Rosa was round the back of the house and went unnoticed. Once Clairmont came by with another load of bric-a-brac, but did not stay. Now that the worst of the weather was past, most of the others had work of their own to do.

Rosa's presence filled the house. After Joe's departure this was more than welcome, for the house seemed oddly bereft, as if something familiar had been taken away. For a child of her age she was very silent, however, and sometimes Jay could almost believe that she belonged more to Joe's world than to his. She missed her mother. Except on one occasion, they had never been apart. She greeted Marise every evening with a fierce, wordless hug. Their meals together were cheerful and animated, but there was a reserve in Marise which Jay had not yet managed to penetrate. She rarely talked about herself. She did not mention Tony, or offer to finish the story she began on the day of the flood. Jay did not try to press her. It could wait.

A few days later Popotte brought a package from Nick, containing the contracts from Jay's new publisher and a number of newspaper clippings, dated from July to September.

A brief note from Nick read, 'I thought you might be interested in this.'

Jay pulled out the clippings.

They all related to him in some way. He read them. Three 290.

small news items from British papers speculating about his disappearance. A piece from Publishers Weekly outlining his return to the writing scene. A retrospective from The Sunday Times ent.i.tled whatever happened to jackapple )oe?

with pictures of Kirby Monckton. Jay turned the page.

There, staring out at him with an impudent smile, was a photograph of Joe.

was this the original jackapple man? queried the headline.He stared at the picture. In it, Joe was fifty, maybe fifty- five. Bareheaded, a cigarette at the corner of his mouth, his small half-moon gla.s.ses perched on the end of his nose. In his hands he was holding a large pot of chrysanthemums adorned with a rosette. The caption read, 'Local eccentric'.

'Mackintosh, with his usual reticence, has never chosen to reveal the ident.i.ty of the original Joe,' continued the article, 'though sources suggest that this man may have been the inspiration for the nation's favourite gardener.

Joseph c.o.x, born in Sheffield in 1912, worked first as head jgardener at a stately home, then for thirty years at Nether Bdge Coalworks in Kirby Monckton before ill-health forced him to retire. A well-known local eccentric, Mr c.o.x lived pr many years in Pog Hill Lane, but was not available for Interview at his residence, now the Meadowbank Retire- dent Home. Miss Julie Moynihan, a day nurse at the home, tescribed him to our reporter. "He's really a lovely old jentleman, with such a wonderful store of anecdotes. I'm hrilled to think he might have been the original Joe." '

Jay barely looked at the rest of the article. Conflicting emotions raked through him. Amazement that he should have come so close to him and not known, not sensed his Ipresence somehow. Most of all, an overwhelming sense of relief, of joy. The past could be redeemed after all. Joe was still living at Pog Hill. Everything could be remade.

He forced himself to read the rest of the article. There was nothing especially new. A summary of Jackapple Joe, with a picture of the original cover. A small photograph of 291.

the Bread Baron with Candide on his arm, taken two years before their divorce. The journalist's name at the bottom was K. Marsden and was slightly familiar. It took him several minutes to recognize Kerry's pre-television name.

Of course. Kerry. That made sense. She knew about Pog Hill Lane, and about Joe. And, of course, she knew a great deal about Jay. She had access to photographs, diaries, papers. Five years of listening to his ramblings and reminiscences.

He knew a fleeting moment of anxiety. What exactly had he told her? What had he given away? He didn't suppose that after the way he'd walked out he had a right to expect any loyalty or discretion from her. He could only hope that she would stay professional and keep his private life private. He realized that he really didn't know Kerry well enough to know what she'd do.

But none of that seemed important then. What mattered was Joe. He could be on a plane to London within a few hours, he told himself giddily, then catch the express north.

He could be there by that evening. He could see him again.