Blackberry Wine (36 page)

‘Last year,’ replied Rosa pertly. ‘When the generator broke down.’

Marise laughed. ‘That doesn’t count.’

That evening she was more relaxed than Jay had ever seen her. She and Rosa laid the table with brightly painted plates and crystal wineglasses. Rosa picked flowers from the garden for a centrepiece. They had
foie gras
on nut bread with Marise’s own wine, which tasted of honey and peaches and toasted almonds, then salad and warm goat’s cheese, then coffee, cakes and
petits fours
. Throughout the little party Jay tried hard to concentrate his thoughts. Rosa,
under instructions not to mention their visit to Lansquenet, was cheery, insisting on her
canard –
a sugar lump dipped in wine – surreptitiously feeding Clopette scraps under the table, and then, when the goat was banished to the garden, through the half-open window. Marise was bright and talkative and lovely in the golden light. It should have been perfect.

He told himself he was waiting for the right time. Of course he knew there was no right time, simply a delaying tactic. He had to tell her before she found out for herself. Worse still, before Rosa let something slip.

But as the evening passed it became harder and harder to make the move. His conversation died. His head began to ache. Marise seemed not to notice. Instead she was full of details about the next phase of her drainage plan, the extension to the cellar, relief that there would still be a wine crop, though much reduced, optimism for next year. She was planning to buy out the land when the lease ran out, she said. There was money in the bank, plus fifty barrels of
cuvée spéciale
in her cellar, just waiting for the right market. Land was cheap in Lansquenet, especially poorly drained problem land like hers. After the bad summer prices might drop still more. And Pierre-Emile, who had inherited the estate, was no businessman. He would be happy to get what he could for the farm and the vineyard. The bank would make up the rest with a long-term loan.

The more she said, the worse Jay felt. Remembering what Joséphine had told him about land prices his heart sank. Tentatively he asked what might happen if, by chance, perhaps … Her face hardened a little. She shrugged.

‘I would have to leave,’ she said simply. ‘Leave everything, go back to Paris or to Marseilles. Somewhere big. Let Mireille—’ She bit off the rest of the sentence and made her expression resolutely cheerful. ‘But that won’t happen,’ she said firmly. ‘None of that will happen. I’ve always dreamed of a place like this,’ she went on, her face softening. ‘A farm,
land of my own, trees, perhaps a little river. Somewhere private. Safe.’ She smiled. ‘Perhaps when I have the land to myself and there is no lease to hang over my head, things will be different,’ she said unexpectedly. ‘Perhaps I could begin again with Lansquenet. Find Rosa some friends her own age. Give people another chance.’ She poured another glass of the sweet golden wine. ‘Give myself another chance.’

Jay swallowed with difficulty. ‘But what about Mireille? Wouldn’t she cause problems for you?’

Marise shook her head. Her eyes were half closed, catlike, sleepy. ‘Mireille won’t live for ever,’ she said. ‘After that – I can handle Mireille,’ she said at last. ‘Just as long as I have the farm.’

For a while the conversation turned to other things. They drank coffee and Armagnac, and Rosa fed
petits fours
to the goat through the gap in the shutters. Then Marise sent Rosa to bed with only a token complaint – it was almost midnight and she had been up for much longer than she was used to. Jay could hardly believe that the child had not given him away during the course of the meal. In a way he regretted it. As Rosa vanished upstairs – with a biscuit in each hand and a promise of pancakes for breakfast – he turned on the radio, poured another glass of Armagnac and passed it to Marise.

‘Mmm. Thanks.’

‘Marise.’

She glanced at him lazily.

‘Why does it have to be Lansquenet?’ he asked. ‘Couldn’t you have moved somewhere else after Tony died? Avoided all this … this business with Mireille?’

She reached for the last
petit four
. ‘It has to be here,’ she said at last. ‘It just has to be.’

‘But why? Why not Montauban or Nérac or one of the villages near by? What is there in Lansquenet which you can’t have anywhere else? Is it because Rosa grew up here? Is it … is it because of Tony?’

She laughed then, not unkindly, but on a note he couldn’t quite identify. ‘If you like.’

Jay’s heart tightened suddenly. ‘You don’t talk about him much.’

‘No. No, I don’t.’

She looked into her drink in silence.

‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t interfere. Forget I said it.’

Marise gave him an odd look, then stared back into her drink. Her long fingers moved nervously. ‘It’s all right. You’ve helped me. You’ve been kind. But it’s complicated, you know? I wanted to tell you. I’ve wanted to for a long time.’

Jay tried to say that she was wrong, that he didn’t want to know, that there was something else he desperately needed to tell her. But nothing came out.

‘For a long time I had a problem with trust,’ said Marise slowly. ‘After Tony. After Patrice. I told myself I didn’t need anyone else. That we would be safer on our own, Rosa and I. That no-one would believe the truth if I told it anyway.’ She paused, tracing a complicated figure on the dark table top. ‘Truth is like that,’ she went on. ‘The more you want to tell someone, the harder it gets. The more impossible it seems.’

Jay nodded. He understood that perfectly.

‘But with you …’ She smiled. ‘Maybe it’s because you’re a foreigner. I feel I’ve known you for a long time. Trusted you. Why else should I have trusted you with Rosa?’

‘Marise.’ He swallowed again. ‘There’s something I really—’

‘Shh.’ She looked languid, flushed with the wine and the warmth of the room. ‘I need to tell you. I need to explain. I tried before, but—’ She shook her head. ‘I thought it was so complicated,’ she said softly. ‘It’s really very simple. Like all tragedies. Simple and stupid.’ She took a breath. ‘I was caught up in it all before I knew it. Then I realized it was too late. Pour me some more Armagnac, please.’

He did.

‘I liked Tony. I didn’t love him. But love doesn’t sustain anything for long anyway. Money does. Security, the farm, the land. That was what I needed, I told myself. Escape from Patrice. Escape from the city, and from loneliness. I fooled myself it was OK, that I didn’t need anything else.’

It had been all right for a time. But Mireille was becoming increasingly demanding, and Tony’s behaviour more and more erratic. Marise tried to talk to Mireille about it, but without success. As far as Mireille was concerned there was nothing wrong with Tony.

‘He’s a strong, healthy boy,’ she would repeat stubbornly. ‘Stop trying to wrap him in cotton. You’ll make him as neurotic as you are.’

From then on every peculiarity in Tony’s behaviour was attributed to Marise: the rages, the bouts of depression, the fixations.

‘Once it was mirrors,’ she said. ‘Every mirror in the house had to be covered up. He said it was because the reflection took all the light out of his head. He used to shave without a mirror. He was always cutting himself shaving. Once he shaved his eyebrows off, too. Said it was more hygienic’

When he learned Marise was pregnant Tony entered a different phase. He became extremely protective. He would follow her everywhere she went, including to the bathroom. He waited on her constantly. Mireille saw this as evidence of his devotion. Marise felt stifled. Then the letters started coming.

‘I knew it was Patrice straight away,’ admitted Marise. ‘It was his style. The usual abuse. But somehow here he didn’t frighten me. We had guard dogs, guns, space. I thought Patrice knew it, too. Somehow he’d found out about my pregnancy. The letters were all about it. Get rid of the baby and I’ll forgive you, that kind of thing. I ignored them.’

Then Tony found out.

‘I told him everything,’ she said wryly. ‘I thought I owed it to him. Besides, I wanted him to understand that we were
safe, that it was all in the past. Even the letters weren’t coming as often. It was dying down.’

She sighed. ‘I should have known better. From then on we lived a siege. Tony would go into town once a month for supplies, that was all. He stopped going to the café with his friends. That was no bad thing, I thought. At least he was sober. He hardly slept at night. He spent most of the time on guard. Of course, Mireille blamed me.’

Rosa was born at home. Mireille helped deliver her. She was disappointed Rosa wasn’t a boy, but there would be plenty of time for that later. She expressed surprise that Rosa looked so small and delicate. She gave advice on feeding, changing and care. Often the advice came close to tyranny.

‘Of course, he’d already told her everything,’ Marise remembered. ‘I should have expected it. He was incapable of hiding anything from her. In her mind I quickly became the villain of the story, a woman who led men on then expected her husband to protect her from the consequences.’

A fierce cold sprang up between the two women. Mireille was always at the house, but rarely addressed Marise directly. Whole evenings would pass, with Tony and Mireille talking animatedly of events and people of which Marise knew nothing. Tony never seemed to notice her silence. He was always cheery and animated, allowing his mother to fuss over him, as if he were still a boy instead of a married man with a newborn baby. Then, out of the blue, Patrice came to call.

‘It was late summer,’ Marise recalled. ‘About eight in the evening. I’d just fed Rosa. I heard a car on the drive. I was upstairs and Tony went to the door. It was Patrice.’ He had changed since the last time she had seen him. Now he was plaintive, almost humble. He did not demand to see Marise. Instead he told Tony how sorry he was about what had happened, that he had been ill, that only now had he been able to face up to that fact. Marise listened from upstairs.
He had brought money, he explained, 20,000 francs. Not enough to pay for the harm he had done, but perhaps enough to start a trust fund for the baby.

‘He and Tony went out back together. They were gone a long time. When Tony returned it was dark, and he was alone. He told me it was over, that Patrice wouldn’t trouble us again. He was more loving than he’d been for a long time. I began to think things were going to be OK.’

For a few weeks they were happy together. Marise looked after Rosa. Mireille kept her distance. Tony no longer stood guard at night. Then one day, as she went to pick some herbs by the side of the house, Marise found the barn door half open. Going to shut it, she found Patrice’s car, ill-concealed behind some bales of straw.

‘At first he denied it,’ she said. ‘Just like a boy. Refused to admit I’d seen it at all. Then he went into one of his rages. Called me a whore. Accused me of seeing Patrice behind his back. At last he admitted it. He’d taken Patrice into the barn that day and killed him with a spade.’

He showed no remorse. He’d had no choice. If anyone was at fault it was Marise herself. Grinning like a guilty schoolboy, he explained how he had brought the car into the barn and hidden it, then buried Patrice somewhere on the estate.

‘Where?’ asked Marise.

Tony grinned again and shook his head slyly. ‘You’ll never know,’ he said.

After that Tony’s behaviour worsened rapidly. He would spend hours alone with his mother, then would lock himself in his room with the television blaring. He would not even look at Rosa. Marise, recognizing the symptoms of schizophrenia, tried to persuade him to return to his medication, but he no longer trusted her. Mireille had seen to that. He killed himself soon afterwards, and Marise had felt nothing but a guilty kind of relief.

‘I tried to leave after that,’ she said in a flat voice. ‘There was nothing left for me in Lansquenet but bad memories. I
packed my bags. I even booked a train ticket to Paris for myself and Rosa. But Mireille stopped me. Tony had left her a letter, she said, telling her everything. Patrice was buried somewhere on the Foudouin estate, at our end or across the river. Only she knew where.’

‘You’ll have to stay here now,
héh
,’ said Mireille in triumph. ‘I won’t let you take my Rosa away. Otherwise I’ll tell the police you killed the man from Marseilles, that my son told me about it before he died, that he killed himself because he couldn’t stand the burden of protecting you.’

‘She was very persuasive,’ said Marise, with a touch of bitterness. ‘Made it clear that she was keeping quiet for Rosa’s sake. Keeping it in the family.’

After that came the campaign to separate Marise from the rest of the village. It wasn’t difficult; in the course of that year she had hardly spoken to anyone and had spent most of her time isolated on the farm. Mireille released all her hidden resentment. She spread rumours around the village, hinted at dark secrets. Tony had been popular in Lansquenet. Marise was only an outsider from the city. Soon the reprisals began.

‘Oh, nothing too serious,’ said Marise. ‘Letting off fireworks under my windows. Letters. General harassment. I’d had worse with Patrice.’

But it soon became clear that Mireille’s campaign was designed for more than simple spite.

‘She wanted Rosa,’ explained Marise. ‘She thought that, if she could drive me out of Lansquenet, she might be able to keep Rosa for herself. I’d have to let her keep her, you see. Because of what she knew. And if I were arrested for murdering Patrice, she would have had Rosa anyway, as her only close relative.’

She shivered.

And so she’d kept them at bay. All of them. She holed herself up in her farm, deliberately isolating herself from everyone in Lansquenet. Isolating Rosa by using her temporary
deafness to deceive Mireille. Patrice’s car she dumped in the marshes, letting it sink deep under the reeds and standing water. Its presence incriminated her still further, she understood. But she needed it to be close. On her land. Where she knew where it was. Remained the body.

‘At first I looked for it,’ she told me. ‘I searched the buildings. Under the floors. Methodically. But it was no use. All the land right down to the marshes belonged to the estate. I couldn’t search every metre.’