Blackberry Wine Part 8

Unfinished furniture, fencing, concrete blocks, tiles and slates were piled messily by the door. The builder's name was Georges Clairmont. He was a short, squat man, with a mournful moustache and a white shirt, greyed with perspiration.

He spoke with the thick accent of the region, but slowly, reflectively, and this gave Jay time to understand his words. Somehow everyone here knew about him already.

He supposed Josephine had spread word. Clairmont's labourers - four men in paint-spattered overalls and caps turned down against the sun - watched with wary curiosity as Jay pa.s.sed. He caught the word Angh'she in a rapid mutter of patois. Work - money - was limited in the village. Everyone wanted a share in Chateau Foudouin's renovation. Clairmont flapped his hand in annoyance as four pairs of eyes followed them into the woodyard.

'Back to work, h.e.l.l, back to work!'

Jay caught the eye of one of the labourers - a man with red hair tied back with a bandanna - and grinned. The redhead grinned back, one hand across his face to hide his expression from Clairmont. Jay followed the manager into the building.

The room was large and cool, like a hangar. A small table near the door served as a desk, with papers, files and a telephone-fax machine. Next to the telephone was a bottle of wine and two small gla.s.ses. Clairmont poured out two shots and handed one to Jay.

Thanks.'

The wine was red-black and rich. It was good, and he said so.

'It should be,' said Clairmont. 'It was made on your land.

The old proprietor, Foudouin, was well known here once. A good winemaker. Good grapes. Good land.' He sipped his wine appreciatively.

'I suppose you'll have to send someone out to see the house,' Jay told him.

Clairmont shrugged. 'I know the house. Went to see it again last month. Even drew up some estimates.'

He saw Jay's surprise and grinned.

'She's been working on it since December,' he said.

'Painting this, plastering that. She was so sure of her agreement with the old man.'

'Marise d'Api?'

'Who else, h.e.l.l? But he'd already made a deal with his nephew. A steady income - a hundred thousand francs a year until his death -- in exchange for the house and the farm. He was too old to work. Too stubborn to leave the place. No-one else wanted it but her. There's no money in farming nowadays, and as for the house itself, h.e.l.lI' Clair- 142.

Bourgeois. Number four. My wife is longing to meet our new celebrity. It would make her very happy to meet you.' His grin, part humble, part acquisitive, was oddly infectious.

Take dinner with us. Try my wife's gesiers farcis. Caro knows everything there is to know in the village. Get to know Lansquenet.'

IAY EXPECTED A SIMPLE MEAL. POT LUCK WITH THE BUILDER AND HIS.

wife, who would be small and drab, in an ap.r.o.n and headscarf, or sweet-faced and rosy, like Josephine at the cafe, with bright bird's eyes. They would perhaps be shy at first, speaking little, the wife pouring soup into earthenware bowls, blushing with pleasure at his compliments.

There would be home-made terrines and red wine and olives and pimentoes in their spiced oils. Later they would tell their neighbours that the new Englishman was un mec sympathique, pas du tout pretentieux, and he would be quickly accepted as a member of the community.

The reality was quite different.

The door was opened by a plump, elegant lady, twin- setted and stillettoed in powder-blue, who exclaimed as she saw him. Her husband, looking more mournful than ever in a dark suit and tie, waved to him over his wife's shoulder.

From inside Jay could hear music and voices, and glimpse an interior of such relentless chintziness that he blinked. In his black jeans and T-shirt, under a simple black jacket, he felt uncomfortably underdressed.

There were three other guests as well as Jay. Caroline Clairmont introduced them as she distributed drinks - 'our friends Toinette and Lucien Merle, and Jessica Mornay, who owns a fashion shop in Agen,' -- simultaneously pressing one cheek against Jay's and a champagne c.o.c.ktail into his free hand.

'We've been so looking forward to meeting you, Monsieur Mackintosh, or may I call you Jay?'

He began to nod, but was swept away into an armchair.

'And, of course, you must call me Caro. It's so wonderful to have someone new in the village - someone with culture - I do think culture is so important, don't you?'

'Oh yes,' breathed Jessica Mornay, clutching at his arm with red nails too long to be anything but false. 'I mean, Lansquenet is wonderfully unspoilt, but sometimes an educated person simply longs for something more. You must tell us about yourself. You're a writer, Georges tells us?'

Jay disengaged his arm and resigned himself to the inevitable. He answered innumerable questions. Was he married? No? But there was someone, surely? Jessica flashed her teeth and drew closer. To distract her he feigned interest in ba.n.a.lities. The Merles, small and dapper in matching cashmere, were from the north. He was a wine- buyer, working for a firm of German importers. Toinette was in some kind of local journalism. Jessica was a pillar of the village drama group - 'her Antigone was exquisite' - and did Jay write for the theatre?

He outlined Jackopple Joe, which everyone had heard of but no-one had read, and provoked excited squeals from Caro when he revealed that he had begun a new book.

Caro's cooking, like her house, was ornate; he did justice to the souffle au champagne and the voJ-au-vents, the gesiers farcis and the boeuf en croute - secretly regretting the home-made terrine and olives of his fantasy. He gently discouraged the ever more eager advances of Jessica Mor- nay. He was moderately witty, anecdotal. He accepted many undeserved compliments on his franpais superbe. After dinner he developed a headache, which he attempted, without success, to dull with alcohol. He found it difficult to concentrate on the ever-increasing rapidity of their French. Whole segments of conversation pa.s.sed by like clouds. Fortunately his hostess was garrulous - and self- centred - enough to take his silence for rapt attention.

By the time the meal was over it was almost midnight.

Over coffee and pet.i.ts fours the headache subsided and Jay was able to grasp the thread of the conversation once more.

145.

Clairmont, his tie pulled away from the collar, his face mottled and sweaty: 'Well, all I can say is it's high time something happened to put Lansquenet on the map, h.e.l.l?

We've got as much going for us as Le Pinot down the road, if we could only get everybody organized.'

Caro nodded agreement. Jay could understand her French better than her husband's, whose accent had thickened as his winegla.s.s emptied. She was sitting opposite him on the arm of a chair, legs crossed and cigarette in hand.

'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. G.o.d 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 noncommittally.

"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 ourseJves, 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 c.o.c.ktails 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 quiet, away from the city.'

Clairmont shook his head. 'h.e.l.l, 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 d fait angJais.

'But a community like ours, h.e.l.l, 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, h.e.l.l. 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 Intermarche up the road they protested for so long that the Intermarche 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 147.

tourist trade. Several new cafes 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 Intermarche 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 pet.i.t 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 pet.i.t 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 . . .'

148.

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 easygoing, 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 Cafe 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 151.

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, c.o.c.ked 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 antic.i.p.ate 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.

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.

Glenda was Jay's age, but big for a girl. Zeth's narrow features were overlaid with a meatiness which squeezed her eyes into crescents and her mouth into a pouty bud. Her slabby cheeks were already raddled with acne. It was the first time he had seen her so close, and her resemblance to her brother was almost paralysing. Her friends eyed him warily, fanning out behind Glenda, as if to cut off his escape. The bike was ten feet away, hidden in the long gra.s.s. Jay began to edge towards it.

'Iz on iz own today,' remarked one of the other girls, a skinny blonde with a cigarette b.u.t.t clamped between her teeth. 'Wheer's tha girlfriend?'

Jay moved closer to the bike. Glenda moved with him, skidding down the shingle of the banking towards the road. Pieces of gravel shot out from under her sneakers. She was wearing a cut-off T-shirt and her arms were red with sunburn. With those big, fishwife's arms she looked troublingly adult, as if she had been born that way. Jay feigned indifference. He would have liked to say something clever, something biting, but the words which would have come so easily in a story refused to co-operate. Instead, he scrambled down the bank to where he had hidden his bike and pulled it out of the long gra.s.s onto the road.

Glenda gave a crow of rage and began to slide towards him, paddling the shingle with large, spatulate hands. Dust flew.

154.

Lansquenet, March 1999 DURING THE WEEK THAT FOLLOWED JAY WROTE EVERY NIGHT.

On Friday the electricity was finally restored, but by then he'd become accustomed to working by the light of the oil lamp. It was friendlier somehow, more atmospheric. The pages of his ma.n.u.script formed a tight wedge on the table top. He had almost a hundred now. On Monday Clairmont arrived with four workmen to make a start on the repairs to the house. They began with the roof, which was missing a great number of tiles. The plumbing, too, needed attention.

In Agen he managed to find a car-hire company and rented a five-year-old green Citroen to carry his purchases and speed up his visits to Lansquenet. He also bought three reams of typing paper and some typewriter ribbons. He worked after dark, when Clairmont and his men had gone home, and the stack of typed pages mounted steadily.

He did not reread the new pages. Fear, perhaps, that the block which had afflicted him for so many years might still be waiting. But somehow he didn't think so. Part of it was this place. Its air. The feeling of familiarity in spite of the fact that he was a stranger here. Its closeness to the past.

As if Pog Hill Lane had been rebuilt here amongst the orchards and vines.

On fine mornings he walked into Lansquenet to buy bread. His ankle had healed quickly and completely, leaving only the faintest of scars, and he began to enjoy the walk and to recognize some of the faces he saw along the way. Josephine told him their names, and sometimes more.