Blackberry Wine

25

Lansquenet, March 1999

IT WAS EARLY THE FOLLOWING MORNING WHEN HE GOT INTO AGEN. He learned from Joséphine that there were only two buses a day, and after a quick coffee and a couple of croissants at the Café des Marauds he left, eager to collect his paperwork from the agency. It took longer than Jay had expected. Legal completion had taken place the previous day, but electricity and gas had not yet been restored, and the agency was reluctant to hand over keys without all the documentation from England. Plus, the woman at the agency told him, there were additional complications. His offer on the farm had taken place at a time when another offer was under consideration – had, in fact, been accepted by the owner, although nothing had yet been made official. Jay’s offer – superior to this earlier one by about £5,000 – had effectively scratched this previous arrangement, but the person to whom the farm had been promised had called earlier that morning, making trouble, making threats.

‘You see, Monsieur Mackintosh,’ said the agent apologetically. ‘These small communities – a promise of land – they don’t understand that a casual word cannot be said to be legally binding.’ Jay nodded sympathetically. ‘Besides,’ continued the agent, ‘the vendor, who lives in Toulouse, is a young man with a family to support. He inherited the farm from his great-uncle. He had no real contact with the old man for some time, and has no responsibility for what he might have promised before his death.’

Jay understood. He left them to it and went shopping for supplies. Then he waited in the café across the road while papers were faxed from London. Frantic phone calls were exchanged. Bank. Solicitor. Agent. Bank.

‘And you’re sure this person – this previous offer – has no legal right to the property?’ he asked as, at last, the agent handed over the keys.

She shook her head.

‘No, monsieur. The arrangement with Madame d’Api may be of long-standing, but she has absolutely no legal right. In fact we have only her word that the old man accepted her offer in the first place.’

‘D’Api?’

‘Yes, a Madame Marise d’Api. A neighbour of yours, in fact, with property adjacent to your own. A local businesswoman, by all accounts.’

That explained a lot: her hostility, her surprise at being told that he’d bought the house, even the fresh paint on the ground floor. She had assumed the house would be hers. She had done what he himself had done: moved in a little early, before completion. No wonder she looked so angry! Jay resolved to see her as soon as he could, to explain. To reimburse her, if necessary, for the work she had done on the house. After all, if they were going to be neighbours…

It was nearing late afternoon by the time the business was finished. Jay was tired. Hasty negotiations meant that the gas supply had been restored to the house, though he would have to wait another five days for electricity. The agency woman suggested a hotel while the house was made habitable, but he refused. The romance of his derelict, lonely farmhouse was too much to resist. Besides, there was the question of the new manuscript, the twenty pages written that night on the reverse of Stout Cortez. To leave it for the sterile comfort of a hotel room might kill the idea before it had even begun. Even now, as he taxied back to Lansquenet with a cabful of purchases and his head ringing with fatigue, he could feel the drag of those written pages, the urge to continue, to feel the keys of the old typewriter beneath his fingers and to follow the story where it led.

When he got back the sleeping bag had gone. The candles, too, and the box of painting things. Nothing else had been touched. He guessed that Marise must have called by in his absence to remove all remaining traces of her illicit occupancy. It was too late to call at her house by then, but Jay promised himself he would do so the next day. There was no point in being on bad terms with his only close neighbour. He kindled a fire in the grate and lit the oil lamp – one of the day’s purchases – and placed it on the table. He had bought a sleeping bag of his own, and some pillows, as well as a folding camp bed, and with these he managed to make a comfortable enough sleeping area in the inglenook. As it was still light, he ventured as far as the kitchen. There was a gas stove there, old but functional, and a fireplace. Above it a blackened cast-iron pot hung, furry with cobwebs. An ancient enamelled range covered half the space from wall to wall, but the oven was choked with leavings – coal, half-burnt wood and generations of dead insects. Jay decided to wait until he could clean it out properly. The fire was another matter, though. It lit fairly easily, and he managed to heat enough water for a wash and a cup of coffee, which he took with him on his tour of the house. This, he found, was even larger than his earlier search had revealed. Living rooms, dining room, still rooms, pantries, cupboards as large as storerooms, storerooms like caverns. Three cellars, though the darkness down there was too thick for him to risk the broken steps, stairs leading up into bedrooms, lofts, granaries. There was furniture there, too, much of it spoiled by rain and neglect, but some of it usable. A long table of some age-blackened wood, scarred and warped by many years of use; a dresser of the same rough make; chairs; a footstool. Polished and restored, he told himself, they would be beautiful, exactly the type of furniture Kerry sighed over in elegant Kensington antiques shops. Other things had been stored in boxes in corners all over the house – tableware in an attic, tools and gardening equipment at the back of a woodshed, a whole case of linen, miraculously unspoiled, under a box of broken crockery. He pulled out stiff, starched sheets, yellowed at the creases, each one embroidered with an elaborate medallion, in which the initials D. F. twined above a garland of roses – some woman’s trousseau from a hundred, two hundred, years back. There were other treasures too: sandalwood boxes of handkerchiefs; copper saucepans dulled with verdigris, an old radio from before the war, he guessed, its casing cracked to reveal valves as big as doorknobs. Best of all was a huge old spice chest of rough black oak, some of its drawers still labelled in faded brown ink – Cannelle, Poivre Rouge, Lavande, Menthe Verte – the long-empty compartments still fragrant with the scents of those spices, some dusted with a residue which coloured his fingertips with cinnamon, ginger, paprika and turmeric. It was a lovely thing, fascinating. It deserved better than this empty, half-derelict house. Jay promised himself that when he could he would have it brought downstairs and cleaned.

Joe would have loved it.

Night fell: reluctantly Jay abandoned his exploration of the house. Before retiring to his camp bed he inspected his ankle again, surprised and pleased at the speed of his recovery. He barely needed the arnica cream he had bought from the chemist’s. The room was warm, the fire’s embers casting hot reflections onto the whitewashed walls. It was still early – no later than eight – but his fatigue had begun to catch up with him, and he lay on his camp bed, watching the fire and thinking over the next day’s plans. Behind the closed shutters he could hear the wind in the orchard, but there was nothing sinister about the sound tonight. Instead it sounded eerily familiar – the wind, the sound of distant water, the night creatures calling and bickering, and, beyond that, the church clock carrying distantly across the marshes. A sudden surge of nostalgia came over him – for Gilly, for Joe, for Nether Edge and that last day on the railway below Pog Hill Lane, for all the things he never wrote about in Jackapple Joe because they were too mired in disillusion to put into words.

He gave a sleepy, sour croak of laughter. Jackapple Joe never even came close to what really happened. It was a fabrication, a dream of what things should have been like, a naïve re-enactment of those magical, terrible summers. It gave a meaning to what had remained meaningless. In his book, Joe was the bluff, friendly old man who steered him towards adulthood. Jay was the generic apple-pie boy, rosily, artfully ingenuous. His childhood was gilded, his adolescence charmed. Forgotten, all those times when the old man bored him, troubled him, filled him with rage. Forgotten, the times Jay was sure he was crazy. His disappearance, his betrayal, his lies; papered over, tempered with nostalgia. No wonder everyone loved that book. It was the very triumph of deceit, of whimsy over reality, the childhood we all secretly believe we had, but which none of us ever did. Jackapple Joe was the book Joe himself might have written. The worst kind of lie – half true, but lying in what really matters. Lying in the heart.

‘Tha should ave gone back, tha knows,’ said Joe matter-of-factly. He was sitting on the table next to the typewriter, a mug of tea in one hand. He’d swapped the Thin Lizzy T-shirt for one from Pink Floyd’s Animals tour. ‘She waited for you, and you never came. She deserved better than that, lad. Even at fifteen, you should have known that.’

Jay stared at him. He looked very real. He touched his forehead with the back of his hand, but the skin was cool.

‘Joe.’

He knew what it was, of course. All that thinking about Joe, his subconscious desire to find him there, his re-enactment of Joe’s greatest fantasy.

‘You never did find out where they went, did you?’

‘No, I never did.’ It was ridiculous, talking to a fantasy, but there was something oddly comforting in it, too. Joe seemed to listen, head cocked slightly to one side, the mug held loosely between his fingers.

‘You were the one left me. After everything you promised. You left me. You never even said goodbye.’ Even though it was a dream, Jay could feel anger crackling in his voice. ‘You’re one to tell me I should have gone back.’

Joe shrugged, unruffled. ‘People move on,’ he said calmly. ‘People go to find themselves, or lose themselves, whatever. Pick your own clee-shay. Anyroad, isn’t that what you’re doing now? Runnin away?’

‘I don’t know what I’m doing now,’ said Jay.

‘That Kerry, anall.’ Joe continued, as if he hadn’t heard. ‘She were another. You just never know when you’ve hit lucky.’ He grinned. ‘Did you know she wears green contact lenses?’

‘What?’

‘Contact lenses. Her eyes are really blue. All this time and you never knew.’

‘This is ridiculous,’ Jay muttered. ‘Anyway, you’re not even here.’

‘Here? Here?’ Joe turned towards him, pushing his cap back from his face in the characteristic gesture Jay remembered. He was grinning, the way he always did when he was about to say something outrageous. ‘Who’s to say where here is, anyroad? Who’s to say you’re here?’

Jay closed his eyes. The old man’s after-image danced briefly on his retina like a moth at a window.

‘I always hated it when you talked like that,’ said Jay.

‘Like what?’

‘All that Grasshopper mystical stuff.’

Joe chuckled.

‘Philosophy of the Orient, lad. Learned it off of monks in Tibet, that time when I were on the road.’

‘You were never on the road,’ Jay said. ‘Nowhere further than the Ml, anyhow.’

He fell asleep to the sound of Joe’s laughter.