Blackberry Wine

36

‘MY FATHER USED TO MAKE THE BEST WINE IN THE REGION,’ SAID Mireille. ‘When he died his brother Emile took over the land. After that it should have been Tony’s.’

‘I know. I’m sorry.’

She shrugged.

‘At least when he died it passed back to the male line,’ she said. ‘I would have hated to think it went to her, héh?’

Jay smiled, embarrassed. There seemed to be something in her which went far beyond grief. Her eyes were flaming with it. Her face was stone. He tried to imagine what it must be like to lose an only son.

‘I’m surprised she stayed,’ he told her. ‘Afterwards.’

Mireille gave a short laugh.

‘Of course she stayed,’ she said harshly. ‘You don’t know her, héh? Stayed out of sheer spite and stubbornness. Knew it was only a matter of time till my uncle died, then she’d have the estate to herself, just as she’d always wanted. But he knew what he was doing, héh. Kept her hanging on, the old dog. Made her think she could have it cheap.’ She laughed again.

‘But why should she want it? Why not leave the farm and move back to Paris?’

Mireille shrugged.

‘Who knows, héh? Maybe to spite me.’ She sipped curiously at her wine.

‘What is this?’

‘Sauternes. Oh. Damn!’

Jay couldn’t understand how he had mistaken it. The smudgy handwritten label. The yellow cord tied round the neck. Rosehip, ’74.

‘Oh damn. I’m sorry. I must have picked up the wrong bottle.’

He tried his own glass. The taste was incredibly sweet, the texture syrupy and flecked with particles of sediment. He turned to Mireille in dismay.

‘I’ll open another. I do apologize. I never meant to give you this. I don’t know how I could have mistaken the bottles-’

‘It’s quite all right.’ Mireille held on to her glass. ‘I like it. It reminds me of something. I’m not sure what. A medicine Tony had as a child, perhaps.’ She drank again, and he caught the honeyed scent of the wine from her glass.

‘Please, madame. I really-’

Firmly: ‘I like it.’

Behind her, through the window, he could still see Joe under the apple trees, the sun bright on his orange overalls. Joe waved as he saw him watching and gave him the thumbs up. Jay corked the bottle of rosehip wine again and took another mouthful from his glass, reluctant somehow to throw it away. It still tasted terrible, but the scent was pungent and wonderful – waxy red berries bursting with seeds, splitting their sides with juice into the pan by the bucketful and Joe in his kitchen with the radio playing full volume – ‘Kung Fu Fighting’ at Number One all that month – pausing occasionally to demonstrate some specious atemi learned on his travels through the Orient, and the October sunlight dazzling through the cracked panes…

It seemed to have a similar effect on Mireille, though her palate was clearly more receptive to the wine’s peculiar flavour. She took the drink in small, curious sips, each time pausing to savour the taste.

Dreamily: ‘Héh, it tastes like… rosewater. No, roses. Red roses.’

So he was not the only one to experience the special effect of Joe’s home-brewed wine. Jay watched the old woman closely as she finished the glass, anxiously scanning her expression for possible ill effects. There were none. On the contrary, her face seemed to lose some of its habitual fixed look, and she smiled.

‘Héh, fancy that. Roses. I had my own rose garden once, you know. Down there by the apple orchard. Don’t know what happened to it. Everything went to ruin when my father died. Red roses, they were, with a scent, héh! I left when I married Hugues, but I used to go there and pick my roses every Sunday while they were in bloom. Then Hugues and my father died in the same year – but that was the year my Tony was born. A terrible year. But for my dear Tony. The best summer for roses I ever remember. The house was filled with them. Right to the eaves. Héh, but this is strong wine. Makes me feel quite dizzy.’

Jay looked at her, concerned.

‘I’ll drive you home. You mustn’t walk back all that way. Not in this sun.’ Mireille shook her head.

‘I want to walk. I’m not so old that I’m afraid of a few kilometres of road. Besides’ – she jerked her head in the direction of the other farm – ‘I like to see my son’s house across the river. If I’m lucky I might catch sight of his daughter. From a distance.’

Of course. Jay had almost forgotten there was a child. Certainly he had never seen her, either in the fields or on the way to school.

‘My little Rosa. Seven years old. Haven’t been close to her since my son died. Not once.’ Her mouth was beginning to regain its customary sour tuck. Against her skirt her big misshapen hands moved furiously. ‘She knows what that’s done to me. She knows. I’d have done anything for my son’s child. I could have bought back the farm, héh, I could have given them money – God knows I’ve no-one else to give it to.’ She struggled to stand up, using her hands on the table top to hoist her bulk upwards.

‘But she knows that for that she’d have to let me see the child,’ continued Mireille. ‘I’d find out what’s happening. If they knew how she treated my Rosa; if I could only prove what she’s doing-’

‘Please.’ Jay steadied her with a hand under her elbow. ‘Don’t upset yourself. I’m sure Marise looks after Rosa as well as she can.’

Mireille snapped him a contemptuous look. ‘What do you know about it, héh? Were you there? Were you perhaps hiding behind the barn door when my son died?’ Her voice was brittle. Her arm felt like hot brick beneath his fingers.

‘I’m sorry. I was only-’

Mireille shook her head effortfully. ‘No, it is I who should apologize. The sun and the strong wine, héh? It makes my tongue run wild. And when I think of her my blood boils – héh!’ She smiled suddenly, and Jay caught an unexpected glimpse of the charm and intelligence beneath the rough exterior. ‘Forget what I said, Monsieur Jay. And let me invite you next time. Anyone can point you to my house.’

Her tone allowed no refusal.

‘I’d be pleased to. You can’t imagine how happy I am to find someone who can bear my dreadful French.’

Mireille looked at him closely for a second, then smiled. ‘You may be a foreigner, but you have the heart of a Frenchman. My father’s house is in good hands.’

Jay watched her go, picking her way stiffly along the overgrown path towards the boundary, until she finally vanished behind the screen of trees at the end of the orchard. He wondered whether her roses still grew there.

He poured his glass of wine back into the bottle and stoppered it once more. He washed the glasses and put away the gardening tools in the shed. It was only then that he realized. After days of inactivity, struggling to put together the fugitive pieces of his unfinished novel, he could see it again, bright as ever, like a lost coin shining in the dust.

He ran for the typewriter.

‘I RECKON YOU COULD START EM AGAIN IF YOU WANTED,’ SAID JOE, eyeing the tangled rose hedge. ‘It’s been a while since they were cut back, and some of em have run to wild, but you could do it, with a bit of work.’

Joe always pretended indifference to flowers. He preferred fruit trees, herbs and vegetables, things to be picked and harvested, stored, dried, pickled, bottled, pulped, made into wine. But there were always flowers in his garden all the same. Planted as if on an afterthought: dahlias, poppies, lavender, hollyhocks. Roses twined amongst the tomatoes. Sweet peas amongst the beanpoles. Part of it was camouflage, of course. Part of it a lure for bees. But the truth was that Joe liked flowers and was reluctant even to pull weeds.

Jay would not have seen the rose garden if he had not known where to look. The wall against which the roses had once been trained had been partly knocked down, leaving an irregular section of brick about fifteen feet long. Greenery had shot up it, almost reaching the top, creating a dense thicket in which he hardly recognized the roses. With the secateurs he clipped a few briars free and revealed a single large red rose almost touching the ground.

‘Old rose,’ remarked Joe, peering closer. ‘Best kind for cookin. You should try makin some rose-petal jam. Champion.’

Jay made with the secateurs again, pulling the clinging tendrils away from the bush. He could see more rosebuds now, tight and green away from the sun. The scent from the open flower was light and earthy.

He had been writing half the night. Mireille had brought enough of the story for ten pages, and it fitted easily with the rest, as if it needed only this to carry on. Without this central tale his book was no more than a collection of anecdotes, but with Marise’s story to bind them together it might become a rich, absorbing novel. If only he knew where it was leading.

In London he used to go to the gym to think. Here he made for the garden. Garden work clears the mind. He remembered those summers at Pog Hill Lane, cutting and pruning under Joe’s careful supervision, mixing resin for graftings, preparing herbs for the sachets with Joe’s big old mortar. It felt right to do that here, too – red ribbons on the fruit trees to frighten the birds, sachets of pungent herbs for parasites.

‘They’ll need feeding, anall,’ remarked Joe, leaning over the roses. ‘You want to get some of that rosehip wine onto the roots. Do em no end of good. Then you’ll want summat for them aphids.’

Sure enough the plants were infested, the stems sticky with insect life. Jay grinned at the persistence of Joe’s guiding presence.

‘Perhaps I’ll just use a chemical spray this year,’ he suggested.

‘You bloody won’t, though,’ exclaimed Joe. ‘Buggerin everything up with chemicals. That’s not what you came here for, is it?’

‘So what did I come here for?’

Joe made a disgusted sound.

‘Tha knows nowt,’ he said.

‘Enough not to be caught out again,’ Jay told him. ‘You and your magic bags. Your talismans. Your travels in the Orient. You really had me going, didn’t you? You must have been splitting yourself laughing all the time.’

Joe looked at him sternly over his half-moon glasses.

‘I never laughed,’ he said. ‘An if you’d had any sense to look further than the end o’ yer nose-’

‘Really?’ Jay was getting annoyed now, tugging at the loose brambles around the rose bed with unnecessary violence. ‘Then what did you leave for? Without even saying goodbye? Why did I have to come back to Pog Hill and find the house empty?’

‘Oh, back to that again, are we?’

Joe settled against the apple tree and lit a Player’s. The radio lying in the long grass began to play ‘I Feel Love’, that August’s Number One.

‘Cut that out,’ Jay told him crossly.

Joe shrugged. The radio whined briefly and went off. ‘If only you’d planted them rosifeas, like I meant you to,’ said Joe.

‘I needed a bit more than a few poxy seeds,’ retorted Jay.

‘You allus was hard work.’ Joe flipped his cigarette butt neatly over the hedge. ‘I couldn’t tell you I was going because I didn’t know mesself. I needed to get on the move again, breathe a bit of sea air, see a bit of road. And besides, I thought I’d left you provided for. I telled yer, if only you’d planted them seeds. If only you’d had some faith.’

Jay had had enough. He turned to face him. For a hallucination Joe was very real, even down to the grime under his fingernails. For some reason that enraged him all the more.

‘I never asked you to come!’ He was shouting. He felt fifteen again, alone in Joe’s cellar, with broken bottles and jars all around. ‘I never asked for your help! I never wanted you here! Why are you here, anyway? Why don’t you just leave me alone!’

Joe waited patiently for him to finish. ‘Ave you done?’ he said when Jay fell silent. ‘Ave you bloody done?’

Jay began to cut away at the rose bushes again, not looking at him. ‘Get lost, Joe,’ he said, almost inaudibly.

‘I bloody might, anall,’ said Joe. ‘Think I’ve not got better things to be doing? Better places to travel to? Think I’ve got allt time int bloody world, do yer?’ His accent was thickening, as it always did on the rare occasions Jay saw him annoyed. Jay turned his back.

‘Reight.’ There was a heavy finality in the word, which made him want to turn back, but he did not. ‘Please thyssen. I’ll sithee.’

Jay forced himself to work at the bushes for several minutes. He could hear nothing behind him but the singing of birds and the shlush of the freshening wind across the fields. Joe had gone. And this time, Jay wasn’t sure whether he ever would see him again.