Blackberry Wine (29 page)

How could Joe have lied?

How could he?

He forgot that it had been he who had run away, he who had lost his faith. All he could think of was Joe’s deception. Besides, he had come back, hadn’t he? He had come back. But if there had been magic, it was long gone.

His back hurt – he must have strained it when he greyed out in the cellar – and he went back into the kitchen feeling leaden and useless. He had cut his hand on a piece of glass. He tried to rinse it in the sink, but the water had already been turned off. That was when he saw the envelope.

It had been propped up neatly against the draining board by the window, next to the dried-up bar of coal tar soap. His name was written across the top in small, shaky capitals. Too large to be simply a letter, it looked plump, like a small packet. Jay tore the envelope clumsily, thinking perhaps this was it, Joe hadn’t forgotten him after all; this had to be some kind of explanation, a sign …

A talisman.

There was no letter in the envelope. He looked twice, but there wasn’t even a slip of paper. Instead there was a small packet – he recognized it as one of Joe’s seed packets from the chest, faintly labelled in red pencil. ‘Specials’.

Jay tore open a corner. There were seeds inside, tiny blackfly seeds, a hundred or more, rolling between his clumsy fingers as he tried to understand. No note. No letter. No instructions. Just seeds.

What was he supposed to do with them? Anger lashed him again. Plant them in his garden? Grow a beanstalk to the Land of Make-Believe? He gave a furious croak of laughter. Just what exactly was he supposed to do with them?

The seeds rolled meaninglessly between his fingers. Tears of angry, desolate laughter squirted from his eyes.

Jay went outside and climbed up onto the back wall. He tore the packet open and let the seeds float down into the cutting, blackfly on the damp winter wind. He sent the shredded envelope fluttering after them. He felt sourly exultant.

Later he thought that maybe he shouldn’t have done it, that maybe there was magic in those seeds after all, but it was too late. Whatever Joe had left for him to find, he hadn’t found it.

JUNE CAME IN LIKE A SHIP, BLUE SAILS UNFURLED AND SWELLING
. A good time for writing – Jay’s book lengthened by another fifty pages – but even better for planting, picking out the new seedlings and setting them in their raked beds, thinning out potato plants and putting them in rows, or weeding, stripping garlands of goosegrass and ground elder from the currant bushes, or picking strawberries and raspberries from their green hollows to make jam. Joe was especially pleased by this.

‘There’s nothin like pickin yer own fruit from yer own garden,’ he pointed out, teeth clamped around the stub of a cigarette. The strawberries were abundant this year – three rows fifty metres long, enough to sell if he had a mind to – but Jay was uninterested in selling. Instead he gave them away to his new friends, made jam, ate strawberries by the pound, sometimes straight from the field, with the pink soil still dusting the flesh. Joe’s crow-scarers – flexible canes decorated with foil streamers and the inevitable red talisman – were enough to discourage the bird population.

‘You should make some wine, lad,’ advised Joe. ‘Never made any strawberry mesself. Never grew enough of ’em to bother. I’d like to see what it turns out like.’ Jay found he
could accept Joe’s presence without question now, though not because he had no questions to ask. It was simply that he could not bring himself to ask them. Better to remain as he was, to accept it as another everyday miracle. Too much investigation might open up more than he was willing to examine. Nor was his anger entirely gone. It remained a part of him, like a dormant seed, ready to sprout in the right conditions. But in the face of everything else it seemed less important now, something which belonged to another life. Too much ballast, Joe always said, slows you down. Besides, there was too much to do. June was a busy month. The vegetable patch needed attention: new potatoes to dig and store in pallets filled with dry earth, young leeks to peg out, endives to cover with black plastic shells to protect them from the sunlight. In the evenings, when the day cooled, he worked on his book as Joe watched from the corner of the room, lying on the bed with his boots against the wall, or smoking and watching the fields with bright, lazy eyes. Like the garden and the orchard, the book needed more work than ever at this stage. As the last hundred pages drew to a close, he began to slow, to falter. The ending was still as hazy in his mind as when he first started. He spent more and more of his time staring at the typewriter, or out of the window, or looking for patterns in the shadows against the whitewashed walls. He went over the typed pages with correcting fluid. He renumbered sheets, underlined titles. Anything to fool himself that he was still working. But Joe was not fooled.

‘Tha’s not written much tonight, lad,’ he commented on one unproductive evening. His accent had broadened, as it did when he was at his most satirical. Jay shook his head.

‘I’m doing all right.’

‘Tha wants to get it finished,’ continued Joe. ‘Get it out of your system while you still can.’

Irritably: ‘I can’t do that.’

Joe shrugged.

‘I mean it, Joe. I can’t.’

‘No such bloody word.’ It was another of Joe’s sayings. ‘Does tha want to finish that bloody book or not? I’m not goin to be here for ever, tha knows.’

It was the first time Joe had hinted that he might not stay. Jay looked up sharply.

‘What do you mean? You’ve only just come back.’

Again Joe gave his loose shrug. ‘Well …’ As if it were obvious. Some things did not need to be said. But Joe was more blunt. ‘I wanted to get you started,’ he said at last. ‘See you in, if you like. But as for stayin …’

‘You’re going away.’

‘Well, probably not just yet.’

Probably
. The word was like a stone dropping into still water.

‘Again.’ The tone was more than accusing.

‘Not just yet.’

‘But soon.’

Joe shrugged. Finally: ‘I don’t know.’

Anger, that old friend. Like a recurring fever. He could feel it in him, a blush and prickle at the nape of his neck. Anger at himself, at this neediness never to be satisfied.

‘Got to move on sometime, lad. Both of us have. You more than ever.’

Silence.

‘I’ll probly hang on for a while, though. Till autumn, at least.’

It occurred to Jay that he had never seen the old man in winter. As if he were a figment of the summer air.

‘Why are you here, Joe, anyway? Are you a ghost? Is that it? Are you haunting me?’

Joe laughed. In the slice of moonlight needling from behind the shutters he did look ghostly, but there was nothing ghoulish in his grin.

‘Tha allus did ask too many questions.’ The thickening of his accent was a mockery of itself, a dig at nostalgia. Jay suddenly wondered how much of that, too, was a fake. ‘I telled yer first off, didn’t I?
Astral
travel, lad. I travel in me
sleep. Got it down to an art, anall. I can do anywhere. Egypt, Bangkok, the South Pole, dancin girls in Hawaii, northern lights. I’ve done em all. That’s why I do so much bloody sleepin.’ He laughed, and flicked the stub of his cigarette onto the concrete floor.

‘If that’s true, where are you now?’ Jay’s tone was suspicious, as it always was when he thought Joe was mocking him. ‘I mean, where are you, really? The seed packet was marked Kirby Monckton. Are you …’

‘Aye, well.’ Joe lit another cigarette. Its scent was eerily strong in the small room. ‘That dun’t matter. Thing is, I’m here now.’

He would say no more. Beneath them, in the cellar, the remaining Specials rubbed together in longing and anticipation. They made barely any sound, but I could feel their activity, a fast and yeasty ferment, like trouble brewing.
Soon
, they seemed to whisper from their glassy cradles in the dark. Soon. Soon. Soon. They were never silent now. Beside me in the cellar they seemed more alive, more alert than ever before, their voices swelling to a cacophony of squeaks, grunts, laughter and shrieking which rocked the house to its foundations. Blackberry blue, damson black. Only these remained, but still the voices had grown louder. As if the spirit released from the other bottles were still active, lashing the remaining three to greater frenzies. The air sparkled with their energy. They had even penetrated the soil. Joe, too, was here all the time, rarely leaving, even when other people were present. Jay had to remind himself that others could not see Joe, though their reactions showed that they usually felt something in his presence. With Popotte it was a smell of cooking fruit. With Narcisse, a sound like a car backfiring. With Joséphine, something like a storm coming, which raised the hairs on her arms and made her prickle like a nervous cat. Jay had a great many visitors. Narcisse, delivering garden supplies, had become quite friendly. He looked at the newly restored vegetable garden with gruff approval.

‘Not bad,’ he said, thumbing a shoot of basil to release the scent. ‘For an Englishman. You might make a farmer yet.’

Now that Joe’s special seeds had been planted, Jay began work on the orchard. He needed ladders to climb high enough to strip the invasive mistletoe and nets to protect the young fruit from birds. There were maybe a hundred trees there, neglected in recent years but still good: pears, apples, peaches, cherries. Narcisse shrugged dismissively.

‘There’s not much of a living in fruit,’ he said dourly. ‘Everyone grows it, but there’s too much and you end up feeding it to the pigs. But if you like preserves …’ He shook his head at the eccentricity. ‘There’s no harm in it, I suppose,
héh
?’

‘I might try and make some wine,’ admitted Jay, smiling.

Narcisse looked puzzled. ‘Wine from fruit?’

Jay pointed out that grapes were also a fruit, but Narcisse shook his head, bewildered.

‘Bof
, if you like.
C’est bien anglais, ca.’

Humbly Jay admitted that it was indeed very English. Perhaps Narcisse would like to try some? He gave a sudden, malicious grin. The remaining Specials rubbed against each other in anticipation. The air was filled with their carnival glee.

Blackberry 1976. A good summer for blackberries, ripe and purple and swimming in crimson juice. The scent was penetrating. Jay wondered how Narcisse would respond to the taste.

The old man took a mouthful and rolled it on his tongue. For a moment he thought he heard music, a brash burst of pipes and drums from across the water. River gypsies, he thought vaguely, though it was a little early in the year for gypsies, who came mostly for the seasonal work in the autumn. With it came the smell of smoke, fried potatoes and
boudin
the way Marthe used to make it, though Marthe had been dead for ten years, and it must be thirty or more since she came with the gypsies that summer.

‘Not bad.’ His voice was a little hoarse as he put the
empty glass back onto the table. ‘Tastes of …’ He could hardly recall what it did taste of, but that scent remained with him, the scent of Marthe’s cooking and the way the smoke used to cling to her hair and make the apples of her cheeks stand out red. Combing it out at night, loosening the brown curls from the tight bun in which she kept them, all the day’s cooking smells would be trapped in the tendrils at the nape of her neck – olive bread and boudin and baking and woodsmoke. Freeing the smoke with his fingertips, her hair tumbling free into his hands.

‘Tastes a little of smoke.’

Smoke. It must be the smoke which made his eyes water as they did, thought Narcisse dimly to himself. That or the alcohol. Whatever the Englishman put in his wine, it’s …

‘Strong.’

AS JULY VEERED INTO SIGHT THE WEATHER GREW HOTTER, THEN
scorching. Jay found himself feeling grateful that he had only a few rows of vegetables and fruit to care for, for in spite of the closeness of the river the earth had become dry and cracked, its usual russet colour paling into pink and then almost white under the sun’s attack. Now he had to water everything for two hours every day, choosing the cool evenings and early mornings so the soil’s moisture would not be lost. He used equipment he found in Foudouin’s abandoned shed: large metal watering cans to carry the water and, to bring it up from the river, a handpump which he installed close to the dragon head at the boundary between his land and Marise’s vineyard.

‘She’ll be doing well enough from this weather,’ confided Narcisse over coffee in Les Marauds. ‘That land of hers never dries out, even in high summer. Oh, there was some kind of drainage put in years ago, when I was a boy, pipes and tiling, I think, but that was before old Foudouin even thought of buying it. Now it’s fallen into disrepair, though. I doubt she’s ever thought of restoring the drainage.’ There was no rancour in his voice. ‘If she can’t do it herself,’ he said bluntly, ‘then she won’t have it done at all. It’s the way she is,
héh!’

Narcisse was suffering from July’s intense heat. His nursery garden was at its most delicate, with gladioli and peonies and camellia just ready to be sold to the shops,
with baby vegetables at their most tender and fruit just forming on the branches of his trees. The sudden clap of heat would wither the flowers – each one needed a whole canful of water every day – burn the fruit from the branches, scorch the leaves.

‘Bof.’
He shrugged, philosophical. ‘It’s been looking that way all year. No rain to speak of since February. Maybe enough to wet the soil, héh, but not enough to go deep, where it matters. Business will be bad again.’ He gestured towards the basket of vegetables beside him – a gift for Jay’s table – and shook his head. ‘Look at that,’ he said. The tomatoes looked as large as cricket balls. ‘I feel ashamed to sell them. I’m giving them away.’ He drank his coffee mournfully. ‘I might as well give it up now,’ he said.

Of course, he meant no such thing. Narcisse, once so monosyllabic, had become quite garrulous in recent weeks. There was a kindly heart beneath his dour exterior, and a gruff warmth which made him liked by people who took the time to get to know him. He was the only person from the village with whom Marise did business, perhaps because they used the same workers. Once every three months he delivered supplies – fertilizer, insecticide powder for the vines, seeds for planting – to the farm.