Blackberry Wine

37

GOING INTO AGEN THE NEXT MORNING, JAY FOUND A NOTE FROM his agent. In it Nick sounded plaintive and excited, the words underscored heavily to emphasize their importance. ‘Get in touch with me. It’s urgent.’ Jay phoned him from Joséphine’s café. There was no phone at the farm, and he had no plans to install one. Nick sounded very faint, like a distant radio station. In the foreground Jay could hear café sounds, the chinking of glasses, the shuffle of draughts pieces, laughter, raised voices.

‘Jay! Jay, I’m so glad to hear you. It’s going crazy here. The new book’s great. I’ve sent it to half a dozen publishers already. It’s-’

‘It isn’t finished,’ Jay pointed out.

‘That doesn’t matter. It’s going to be terrific. Obviously the foreign climate is doing you good. Now what I urgently need is a-’

‘Wait.’ Jay was beginning to feel disorientated. ‘I’m not ready.’

Nick must have heard something in his voice, because he slowed down then. ‘Hey, take it easy. No-one’s going to pressure you. No-one even knows where you are.’

‘That’s fine by me,’ Jay told him. ‘I need some more time on my own. I’m happy here, pottering around the garden, thinking about my book.’

He could hear Nick’s mind clicking over the possibilities. ‘O?. If that’s what you want, I’ll keep people away. I’ll slow things down. What do I tell Kerry? She’s been on the phone to me every other day, demanding to know what-’

‘You definitely don’t tell Kerry,’ Jay told him urgently. ‘She’s the last person I want over here.’

‘Oho,’ said Nick.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Been doing a bit of cherchez la femme, have you?’ He sounded amused. ‘Checking out the talent?’

‘No.’

‘You sure?’

‘Positive.’

It was true, he thought. He had hardly thought about Marise in weeks. Besides, the woman who first strode out across the pages of his book was a far cry from the recluse across the fields. It was her story he was interested in.

At Nick’s insistence, he gave him Joséphine’s number in case he needed to pass on an urgent message. Again, Nick asked when he would be able to see the rest of the manuscript. Jay couldn’t tell him. He didn’t even want to think about it. He already felt uncomfortable that Nick had shown it unfinished without his permission, even though he was only doing his job. He put down the phone to find that Joséphine had already brought over a fresh pot of coffee to his table. Roux and Poitou were sitting there with Popotte, the postwoman. Jay knew a moment’s complete disorientation. London had never seemed so far away before.

He came home as usual, across the fields. It had rained during the night and the path was slippery, the hedges dripping. He skirted the road and followed the river to the border of Marise’s land, enjoying the silence and the rain-heavy trees. There was no sign of Marise in the vineyard. Jay could see a small blur of smoke above the chimney of the other farm, but that was the only movement. Even the birds were silent. He was planning to cross the river at its narrowest, shallowest point, where Marise’s land joined his. On either side there was a swell of banking topped by trees; a screen of fruit trees on her side and a messy tangle of hawthorn and elder on his. He noticed, as he passed, that the red ribbons he had tied to the branches had gone – blown away by the wind again, most likely. He would have to find a better way of securing them. The river flattened and shallowed out at that point, and when it rained the water spread out, making islands of the clumps of reeds and digging the red soil of the riverbank to make extravagant shapes, which the sun baked hard as clay. There were stepping stones at this crossing place, worn shiny by the river and the passage of many feet, though only he passed here now. At least, so he thought.

But when he reached the crossing place there was a girl squatting precariously by the riverbank, poking a stick at the silent water. At her side a small brown goat stared placidly. The movement he made alerted the child, and she stiffened. Eyes as bright and curious as the goat’s fixed on him.

For a moment they stared at each other, she frozen to the spot, eyes wide; Jay transfixed with an overwhelming sense of déjà vu.

It was Gilly.

She was wearing an orange pullover and green trousers rolled up to her knees. Her discarded shoes lay a short distance away in the grass. To her side lay a red rucksack, its mouth gaping. The necklace of knotted red ribbons around her neck solved the mystery of what had been happening to Jay’s talismans.

Looking at her more closely he could see now that she wasn’t Gilly after all. The curly hair was more chestnut than red, and she was young, surely no more than eight or nine, but all the same, the resemblance was more than striking. She had the same vivid, freckled face, wide mouth, suspicious green eyes. She had the same way of looking, the same knee cocked out at an angle. Not Gilly, no, but so like her that it caught at the heart. Jay understood that this must be Rosa.

She fixed him with a long unsmiling stare, then grabbed for her shoes and fled. The goat shied nervously and danced across towards Jay, stopping briefly to chew at the straps of the abandoned rucksack. The girl moved as quickly as the goat, using her hands to pull herself up the slippery banking towards the fence.

‘Wait!’ Jay called after her. She ignored him. Quick as a weasel she was up the banking, only turning then to poke out her tongue at him in mute challenge.

‘Wait!’ Jay held out his hands to show her he meant no harm. ‘It’s all right. Don’t run away.’

The girl stared at him, whether in curiosity or hostility he couldn’t tell, her head slightly to one side, as if in concentration. There was no way of knowing whether she had understood.

‘Hello, Rosa,’ said Jay.

The child just stared.

‘I’m Jay. I live over there.’ He pointed to the farm, just visible behind the trees.

She was not looking directly at him, he noticed, but at something slightly to the left and down from where he was standing. Her posture was tense, ready to pounce. Jay felt in his pocket for something to give her – a sweet, perhaps, or a biscuit – but all he could find was his lighter. It was a Bic, made of cheap coloured plastic, and it shone in the sun.

‘You can have this, if you like,’ he suggested, holding it out across the water. The child did not react. Maybe she couldn’t lip-read, he told himself.

On his side of the riverbank the goat bleated and butted gently against his legs. Rosa glanced at him, then at the goat, with a mixture of scorn and anxiety. He noticed her eyes kept moving back to the discarded rucksack, abandoned by the side of the river. He bent down and picked it up. The goat transferred its interest from Jay’s legs to the sleeve of his shirt with unnerving rapidity. He held out the rucksack.

‘Is this yours?’

On the far bank the girl took a step forwards.

‘It’s all right.’ Jay spoke slowly, in case she couldn’t lipread, and smiled. ‘Look. I’ll bring it over.’ He made for the stepping stones, holding the heavy rucksack in his arms. The goat watched him with a cynical expression. Hampered as he was with the rucksack his approach was clumsy. He looked up to smile at the girl, lost his footing on a rain-slippery stone, skidded and almost fell. The goat, which was following him curiously across the stones, nudged past unexpectedly, and Jay took a blind step forwards, and landed squarely in the swollen river.

Rosa and the goat watched in silence. Both seemed to be grinning.

‘Damn.’ Jay tried wading back to the bank. There was more current than he had expected, and he moved drunkenly across the river stones, his boots skidding in the mud. The rucksack seemed to be the only dry thing on his person.

Rosa grinned again.

The expression transformed her. It was a curiously sunny, sudden grin, her teeth very white in her dappled face. She laughed almost soundlessly, stamping her bare feet on the grass in a pantomime of mirth. Then she was off again, picking up her shoes and clambering up the incline towards the orchard. The goat followed her, nibbling affectionately at a dangling shoelace. As they reached the top, Rosa turned and waved, though whether this was a gesture of defiance or affection Jay could not tell.

When she had gone he realized he still had her rucksack. On opening it he found inside a number of items only a child could treasure: a jar of snails, some pieces of wood, river stones, string and a number of the red talismans, carefully tied together with their ribbons to form a bright garland. Jay replaced all the treasures inside the bag, then he hung the rucksack up on a gatepost close to the hedge, in the same place he had hung the dragon’s head a fortnight earlier. He was sure Rosa would find it.

‘I HAVEN’T SEEN HER FOR MONTHS,’ SAID JOSÉPHINE LATER IN THE café. ‘Marise doesn’t send her to school any more. It’s a pity. A little girl like that needs friends.’ Jay nodded.

‘She used to go to the village playgroup,’ remembered Joséphine. ‘She must have been three, maybe a little younger. She could still talk a little then, but I don’t think she could hear anything.’

‘Oh?’ Jay was curious. ‘I thought she was born deaf.’

Joséphine shook her head. ‘No. It was some kind of infection. It was the year Tony died. A bad winter. The river flooded again, and half of Marise’s fields were underwater for three months. Plus there was that business with the police…’

Jay looked at her enquiringly.

‘Oh yes. Ever since Tony died Mireille has been trying to pin the blame on Marise. There’d been some kind of a quarrel, she said. Tony would never have killed himself. She tried to make out there was another man, or something, that together they’d conspired to murder Tony.’ She shook her head, frowning. ‘Mireille was half out of her mind,’ she said. ‘I think she would have said anything. Of course, it never came to that. The police came round, asked some questions, went away. I think they had the measure of Mireille by then. But she spent the next three or four years writing letters, campaigning, petitioning. Someone came round once or twice, that’s all. But nothing came of it. She’s been spreading rumours that Marise keeps the child locked up in a back room, or something.’

‘I don’t think that’s true.’ The vivid, dappled child Jay had seen gave no impression of having ever been shut up in a back room.

Joséphine shrugged. ‘No, I don’t think so either,’ she said. ‘But by that time the damage was done. Gangs of people gathering at the gate of the farm and across the river. Do-gooders, for the most part, harmless enough, but Marise wasn’t to know that, holed up in her house, with torches burning outside and people letting off firecrackers and throwing stones at the shutters.’ She shook her head. ‘By the time things settled down it was too late,’ she explained. ‘She was already convinced everyone was against her. And then when Rosa disappeared…’

Joséphine poured a measure of cognac into her coffee. ‘I suppose she thought we were all in it. You can’t hide much in a village, and everybody knew that Mireille had Rosa staying with her. The child was three then, and we all thought they must have made it up between them somehow, and Rosa was there for a visit. Of course, Caro Clairmont knew otherwise, and so did a few others, Joline Drou, who was her best friend at the time, and Cussonnet the doctor. But the rest of us… well, no-one asked. People reckoned that after what had happened perhaps they ought to mind their own business. And no-one really knew Marise, of course.’

‘She doesn’t make it easy,’ observed Jay.

‘Rosa was missing for about three days. Mireille only tried taking her out of the house once. The first day. That didn’t last long. You could hear her screaming right down to Les Marauds. Whatever else was wrong with her, she had a good pair of lungs. Nothing would make her be quiet, not sweets, or presents, or fussing, or shouting. They all tried – Caro, Joline, Toinette – but still the child wouldn’t stop screaming. Finally Mireille got worried and called the doctor. They put their heads together and took her to a specialist in Agen. It just wasn’t normal for a child that age to scream all the time. They thought she was disturbed, that perhaps she’d been mistreated in some way.’ She frowned. ‘Then Marise came to pick up Rosa from the playgroup, and found that the doctor and Mireille had taken her to Agen instead. I’ve never seen anyone so angry. She followed them on her moped, but all she could find out was that Mireille had taken Rosa to some kind of hospital. For tests, she said. I don’t know what they were trying to prove.’

She shrugged again. ‘If she’d been anyone else she could have counted on help from the village,’ she said. ‘But Marise – never says a word unless she has to, never smiles – I suppose people just minded their own business. That’s all it was really; there was no malice in it. She wanted to be left alone, and that’s what people did. Not that anyone really knew where Mireille had taken Rosa – except maybe Caro Clairmont. Oh, we heard all kinds of stories. But that was afterwards. How Marise stamped into Cussonnet’s surgery with a shotgun and marched him out to the car. To hear people talking you’d think half of Lansquenet saw that. It’s always the same, héh! All I can say is, I wasn’t there. And though Rosa was back at home before the end of that week, we never saw her in the village again – not in the school, or even at the firework display on the fourteenth of July, or the chocolate festival at Easter.’ Joséphine drained her coffee abruptly and wiped her hands on her apron. ‘So that was that,’ she concluded with an air of finality. ‘That was the last we saw of Marise and Rosa. I see them from time to time – perhaps once a month or so – on the road to Agen or walking to Narcisse’s nursery, or in the field across the river. But that’s all. She hasn’t forgiven the village for what happened after Tony’s death, or for taking sides, or for turning a blind eye when Rosa disappeared. You can’t tell her it was nothing to do with you; she won’t believe it.’

Jay nodded. It was understandable. ‘It must be a lonely life for them,’ he said. Thinking of Maggie and Gilly, of the way they always managed to make friends wherever they went, trading and fixing and doing odd jobs to make ends meet, always on the move, fielding insults and prejudice with the same cheery defiance. How different was this dour, suspicious woman from Joe’s friends of Nether Edge. And yet the child looked so very like Gilly. He checked for the rucksack on his way back to the farm, but, as he expected, it had already been removed. Only the dragon’s head remained, still lolling its long crêpe tongue, now embellished with a garland of fluttering red ribbons, which sat jauntily on the thick green mane. Coming closer, Jay noticed that the stump of a clay pipe had been carefully positioned between the dragon’s teeth, from which a dandelion clock protruded. And as he passed, hiding a grin, he was almost sure he saw something move in the hedge next to him, a brief flash of orange under the new green, and heard the impudent bleating of a goat in the distance.