Blackberry Wine

39

SINCE THAT TIME AT THE STREAM JAY HAD SEEN ROSA ONLY from a distance. A few times he thought he had caught her watching from behind the hedge, and once he was sure he heard quiet footfalls from behind an angle of the house, and, of course, he had seen her leavings. The modifications to the dragon head, for instance. The little garlands of flowers and leaves and feathers left on gateposts and fences to replace the red ribbons she had stolen. Once or twice a drawing – a house, a garden, stick-children playing under improbably purple trees – tacked to a stump, the paper already curling and fading in the sunlight. There was no way of telling whether these things were offerings, toys or some way of taunting him. She was as elusive as her mother, but as curious as her goat, and their meeting must have convinced her that Jay was harmless. Once, he saw them together. Marise was working behind the hedge. For a time Jay was able to see her face. Again he realized how far this woman differed from the heroine of his book. He had time to notice the fine arch of her brows, the thin but graceful line of her mouth, the sharp angle of cheekbone, barely grazed with colour by the sun. Given the right circumstances she could be beautiful. Not round and pretty-plump like Popotte, or brown and sensual like the young girls of the village. No, hers was a grave, pale, northern beauty, small-featured beneath the blunt red hair. Something moved behind her. She sprang to her feet, whipping round as she did, and in that instant he had time to glimpse another change. She was quicker than a cat, turning defensively – not towards him, but away – though even her speed didn’t hide that look… of what?

Fear?

It lasted less than a second. Rosa leaped at her, crowing, arms outstretched, face split in a wide, delighted grin. Another twist. Jay had imagined the child intimidated, perhaps hiding amongst the vines as he hid from Zeth in the old Nether Edge days, but that look held nothing but adoration. He watched as she climbed Marise like a tree, legs wrapped around her mother’s waist, arms locked around her neck. For a moment Marise held her and he saw their profiles close together. Rosa’s hands moved softly, close to her mother’s face, signing in the language of the deaf. Marise snubbed Rosa’s nose gently against hers. Her face was illuminated more sweetly than he could ever have imagined. Suddenly he felt ashamed at having believed, or half believed, Mireille’s suggestion that Marise might be mistreating the child. Their love was something which coloured the air between them like sunlight. The interchange between them was completely, perfectly silent.

Marise put Rosa down and signed to her. Jay had never watched anyone signing before, and he was struck by the grace and animation of the movements, of the facial expressions. Rosa signed back, insistently. His feeling of intrusion increased. The gestures were too quick for him to guess at the subject of the conversation. They were in their circle of privacy. Their conversation was the most intimate thing Jay had ever witnessed.

Marise laughed silently, like her daughter. The expression illuminated her like sunlight through glass. Rosa rubbed her stomach as she laughed and stamped her feet. They held each other as they communicated, as if every part of the body were a part of their talk, as if, instead of losing a sense, they had gained something more.

Since then he thought about them both more often. It had gone far beyond his curiosity for her story and into something he could not define. Joséphine teased him about it. Narcisse refrained entirely from comment, but there was a knowing look in his eye when Jay talked about her. He did so too often. He could not stop himself. Mireille Faizande was the only person he knew who would talk about her interminably. Jay had been to see her several times, but could not bring himself to mention the intimate scene he witnessed between mother and daughter. When he tried to hint at a warmer relationship between them than she had portrayed, Mireille turned on him in scorn.

‘What do you know about it?’ she snapped. ‘How can you possibly know what she’s like?’ Her eyes went to the fresh vase of roses by the table. There was a framed photograph beside it, showing a laughing boy sitting on a motorbike. Tony.

‘She doesn’t want her,’ she said in a lower voice. ‘Just as she didn’t want my son.’ Her eyes were hard. ‘She took my son as she takes everything. To spoil. To play with. That’s what my Rosa is to her now. Something to play with, to discard when she’s had enough.’ Her hands worked. ‘It’s her fault if the child’s deaf,’ she said. ‘Tony was perfect. It couldn’t have come from his side of the family. She’s vicious. She spoils everything she touches.’

She glanced again at the photograph by the side of the vase.

‘She’d been deceiving him all the time, you know. There was another man all along. A man from the hospital.’

Jay remembered someone saying something about a hospital. A nerve clinic in Paris.

‘Was she ill?’ he enquired.

Mireille made a scornful sound. ‘Ill? That’s what Tony said. Said she needed protecting. My Tony was a rock to her, young as he was. Héh, he was strong, clear. He imagined everyone was as clear and honest as he was.’ She glanced again at the roses. ‘You’ve been busy,’ she commented without warmth. ‘You’ve brought my poor rose bushes back from the dead.’

The phrase hung between them like smoke.

‘I tried to feel sorry for her,’ said Mireille. ‘For Tony’s sake. But even then it wasn’t easy. She’d hide out in the house, wouldn’t talk to anyone, not even to family. Then, for no reason, rages. Terrible rages, screaming and throwing things. Sometimes she’d hurt herself with knives, razors, anything which came to hand. We had to hide everything which could be dangerous.’

‘How long were they married?’

She shrugged. ‘Less than a year. He courted her for longer. He was twenty-one when he died.’

Her hands moved again, clenching and unclenching.

‘I can’t stop thinking about it,’ she said finally. ‘Thinking about both of them. He must have followed her from the hospital. Settled somewhere close, where they could meet. Héh, I can’t stop thinking that during all that year when she was married to Tony, when she was carrying his baby, the bitch was laughing at him. Both of them laughing at my boy.’ She glared at me. ‘You think about that, héh, before you go talking about things you don’t understand. You think about what that did to my boy.’

‘I’m sorry. If you’d prefer not to talk about it-’

Mireille snorted. ‘It’s other people who’d prefer not to talk about it,’ she said sourly. ‘Prefer not to think about it, héh, prefer to think it’s only crazy old Mireille talking. Mireille who’s never been the same since her son killed himself. So much easier to mind your own business, to let her get on with her life, and never mind that she stole my son and ruined him just because she could, héh, the way she’s stolen my Rosa.’ Her voice cracked, whether with rage or grief he could not tell. Then her face smoothed again, became almost smug with satisfaction.

‘But I’ll show her,’ she went on. ‘Come next year, héh, when she needs a roof over her head. When the lease runs out. She’ll have to come to me then if she wants to stay here, héh? And she does want to stay.’ Her face was sly and glossy.

‘Why should she?’ It seemed that whomever he asked it came back to this. ‘Why should she want to stay here? She has no friends. There’s no-one for her here. If she wants to get away from Lansquenet, how can anyone stop her?’

Mireille laughed. ‘Let her want,’ she said shortly. ‘She needs me. She knows why.’

Mireille refused to explain her final statement, and when Jay visited her again he found her guarded and uncommunicative. He understood that one of them had overstepped the mark with the other, and he tried to be more cautious in future, wooing her with roses. She accepted the gifts cheerfully enough, but made no further move to confide in him. He had to be content with what information he had already gleaned.

What fascinated him most about Marise was the conflicting views of her in the village. Everyone had an opinion, though no-one, except Mireille, seemed any more informed than the others. To Caro Clairmont she was a miserly recluse. To Mireille, a faithless wife who had deliberately taken advantage of a young man’s innocence. To Joséphine, a brave woman raising a child alone. To Narcisse, a shrewd businesswoman with a right to privacy. Roux, who had worked her vendanges every year when he was travelling on the river, remembered her as a quiet, polite woman who carried her baby in a sling on her back, even when she was working in the fields, who brought him a cooler of beer when it was hot, who paid cash.

‘Some people are suspicious of us, héh,’ he said with a grin. ‘Travellers on the river, always on the move. They imagine all kinds of things. They lock up their valuables. They watch their daughters. Or they try too hard. They smile too often. They slap you on the back and call you mon pote. She wasn’t like that. She always called me monsieur. She didn’t say much. It was business between us, man to man.’ He shrugged and drained his can of Stella.

Everyone he spoke to had their own image of her. Popotte remembered a morning just after the funeral, when Marise turned up outside Mireille’s house with a suitcase and the baby in a carrier. Popotte was delivering letters and arrived at the house just as Marise was knocking at the door.

‘Mireille opened it and fairly dragged Marise inside,’ she recalled. ‘The baby was asleep in the carrier, but the movement woke her and she started to scream. Mireille grabbed the letters from my hand and slammed the door behind them, but I could hear their voices, even through the door, and the baby screaming and screaming.’ She shook her head. ‘I think Marise was planning to leave that morning – she looked all ready and packed to go – but Mireille talked her out of it somehow. I know that after that she hardly came into the village at all. Perhaps she was afraid of what people were saying.’

The rumours began soon after. Everyone had a story. She had an uncanny ability to arouse curiosity, hostility, envy, rage.

Lucien Merle believed that her refusal to give up the uncultivated marshland by the river had blocked his plans for redevelopment.

‘We could have made something of that land,’ he repeated bitterly. ‘There’s no future in farming any more. The future’s in tourism.’ He took a long drink of his diabolo-menthe and shook his head. ‘Look at Le Pinot. One man was all it took to begin the change. One man with vision.’ He sighed. ‘I bet that man’s a millionnaire by now,’ he said mournfully.

Jay tried to sift through what he had heard. In some ways he felt he had gained insights into the mystery of Marise d’Api, but in others he was as ignorant as he had been from the start. None of the reports quite tallied with what he had seen. Marise had too many faces, her substance slipping away like smoke whenever he thought he had captured it. And no-one had yet mentioned what he saw in her that day, that fierce look of love for her child. And that moment of fear, the look of a wild animal which will do anything, including kill, to protect itself and its young.

Fear? What could there be for her to fear in Lansquenet?

He wished he knew.