Blackberry Wine

49

Lansquenet, Summer 1999

JUNE CAME IN LIKE A SHIP, BLUE SAILS UNFURLED AND SWELLING. A good time for writing – Jay’s book lengthened by another fifty pages – but even better for planting, picking out the new seedlings and setting them in their raked beds, thinning out potato plants and putting them in rows, or weeding, stripping garlands of goosegrass and ground elder from the currant bushes, or picking strawberries and raspberries from their green hollows to make jam. Joe was especially pleased by this.

‘There’s nothin like pickin yer own fruit from yer own garden,’ he pointed out, teeth clamped around the stub of a cigarette. The strawberries were abundant this year – three rows fifty metres long, enough to sell if he had a mind to – but Jay was uninterested in selling. Instead he gave them away to his new friends, made jam, ate strawberries by the pound, sometimes straight from the field, with the pink soil still dusting the flesh. Joe’s crow-scarers – flexible canes decorated with foil streamers and the inevitable red talisman – were enough to discourage the bird population.

‘You should make some wine, lad,’ advised Joe. ‘Never made any strawberry mesself. Never grew enough of ’em to bother. I’d like to see what it turns out like.’ Jay found he could accept Joe’s presence without question now, though not because he had no questions to ask. It was simply that he could not bring himself to ask them. Better to remain as he was, to accept it as another everyday miracle. Too much investigation might open up more than he was willing to examine. Nor was his anger entirely gone. It remained a part of him, like a dormant seed, ready to sprout in the right conditions. But in the face of everything else it seemed less important now, something which belonged to another life. Too much ballast, Joe always said, slows you down. Besides, there was too much to do. June was a busy month. The vegetable patch needed attention: new potatoes to dig and store in pallets filled with dry earth, young leeks to peg out, endives to cover with black plastic shells to protect them from the sunlight. In the evenings, when the day cooled, he worked on his book as Joe watched from the corner of the room, lying on the bed with his boots against the wall, or smoking and watching the fields with bright, lazy eyes. Like the garden and the orchard, the book needed more work than ever at this stage. As the last hundred pages drew to a close, he began to slow, to falter. The ending was still as hazy in his mind as when he first started. He spent more and more of his time staring at the typewriter, or out of the window, or looking for patterns in the shadows against the whitewashed walls. He went over the typed pages with correcting fluid. He renumbered sheets, underlined titles. Anything to fool himself that he was still working. But Joe was not fooled.

‘Tha’s not written much tonight, lad,’ he commented on one unproductive evening. His accent had broadened, as it did when he was at his most satirical. Jay shook his head.

‘I’m doing all right.’

‘Tha wants to get it finished,’ continued Joe. ‘Get it out of your system while you still can.’

Irritably: ‘I can’t do that.’

Joe shrugged.

‘I mean it, Joe. I can’t.’

‘No such bloody word.’ It was another of Joe’s sayings. ‘Does tha want to finish that bloody book or not? I’m not goin to be here for ever, tha knows.’

It was the first time Joe had hinted that he might not stay. Jay looked up sharply.

‘What do you mean? You’ve only just come back.’

Again Joe gave his loose shrug. ‘Well…’ As if it were obvious. Some things did not need to be said. But Joe was more blunt. ‘I wanted to get you started,’ he said at last. ‘See you in, if you like. But as for stayin…’

‘You’re going away.’

‘Well, probably not just yet.’

Probably. The word was like a stone dropping into still water.

‘Again.’ The tone was more than accusing.

‘Not just yet.’

‘But soon.’

Joe shrugged. Finally: ‘I don’t know.’

Anger, that old friend. Like a recurring fever. He could feel it in him, a blush and prickle at the nape of his neck. Anger at himself, at this neediness never to be satisfied.

‘Got to move on sometime, lad. Both of us have. You more than ever.’

Silence.

‘I’ll probly hang on for a while, though. Till autumn, at least.’

It occurred to Jay that he had never seen the old man in winter. As if he were a figment of the summer air.

‘Why are you here, Joe, anyway? Are you a ghost? Is that it? Are you haunting me?’

Joe laughed. In the slice of moonlight needling from behind the shutters he did look ghostly, but there was nothing ghoulish in his grin.

‘Tha allus did ask too many questions.’ The thickening of his accent was a mockery of itself, a dig at nostalgia. Jay suddenly wondered how much of that, too, was a fake. ‘I telled yer first off, didn’t I? Astral travel, lad. I travel in me sleep. Got it down to an art, anall. I can do anywhere. Egypt, Bangkok, the South Pole, dancin girls in Hawaii, northern lights. I’ve done em all. That’s why I do so much bloody sleepin.’ He laughed, and flicked the stub of his cigarette onto the concrete floor.

‘If that’s true, where are you now?’ Jay’s tone was suspicious, as it always was when he thought Joe was mocking him. ‘I mean, where are you, really? The seed packet was marked Kirby Monckton. Are you…’

‘Aye, well.’ Joe lit another cigarette. Its scent was eerily strong in the small room. ‘That dun’t matter. Thing is, I’m here now.’

He would say no more. Beneath them, in the cellar, the remaining Specials rubbed together in longing and anticipation. They made barely any sound, but I could feel their activity, a fast and yeasty ferment, like trouble brewing. Soon, they seemed to whisper from their glassy cradles in the dark. Soon. Soon. Soon. They were never silent now. Beside me in the cellar they seemed more alive, more alert than ever before, their voices swelling to a cacophony of squeaks, grunts, laughter and shrieking which rocked the house to its foundations. Blackberry blue, damson black. Only these remained, but still the voices had grown louder. As if the spirit released from the other bottles were still active, lashing the remaining three to greater frenzies. The air sparkled with their energy. They had even penetrated the soil. Joe, too, was here all the time, rarely leaving, even when other people were present. Jay had to remind himself that others could not see Joe, though their reactions showed that they usually felt something in his presence. With Popotte it was a smell of cooking fruit. With Narcisse, a sound like a car backfiring. With Joséphine, something like a storm coming, which raised the hairs on her arms and made her prickle like a nervous cat. Jay had a great many visitors. Narcisse, delivering garden supplies, had become quite friendly. He looked at the newly restored vegetable garden with gruff approval.

‘Not bad,’ he said, thumbing a shoot of basil to release the scent. ‘For an Englishman. You might make a farmer yet.’

Now that Joe’s special seeds had been planted, Jay began work on the orchard. He needed ladders to climb high enough to strip the invasive mistletoe and nets to protect the young fruit from birds. There were maybe a hundred trees there, neglected in recent years but still good: pears, apples, peaches, cherries. Narcisse shrugged dismissively.

‘There’s not much of a living in fruit,’ he said dourly. ‘Everyone grows it, but there’s too much and you end up feeding it to the pigs. But if you like preserves…’ He shook his head at the eccentricity. ‘There’s no harm in it, I suppose, héh?’

‘I might try and make some wine,’ admitted Jay, smiling.

Narcisse looked puzzled. ‘Wine from fruit?’

Jay pointed out that grapes were also a fruit, but Narcisse shook his head, bewildered.

‘Bof, if you like. C’est bien anglais, ca.’

Humbly Jay admitted that it was indeed very English. Perhaps Narcisse would like to try some? He gave a sudden, malicious grin. The remaining Specials rubbed against each other in anticipation. The air was filled with their carnival glee.

Blackberry 1976. A good summer for blackberries, ripe and purple and swimming in crimson juice. The scent was penetrating. Jay wondered how Narcisse would respond to the taste.

The old man took a mouthful and rolled it on his tongue. For a moment he thought he heard music, a brash burst of pipes and drums from across the water. River gypsies, he thought vaguely, though it was a little early in the year for gypsies, who came mostly for the seasonal work in the autumn. With it came the smell of smoke, fried potatoes and boudin the way Marthe used to make it, though Marthe had been dead for ten years, and it must be thirty or more since she came with the gypsies that summer.

‘Not bad.’ His voice was a little hoarse as he put the empty glass back onto the table. ‘Tastes of…’ He could hardly recall what it did taste of, but that scent remained with him, the scent of Marthe’s cooking and the way the smoke used to cling to her hair and make the apples of her cheeks stand out red. Combing it out at night, loosening the brown curls from the tight bun in which she kept them, all the day’s cooking smells would be trapped in the tendrils at the nape of her neck – olive bread and boudin and baking and woodsmoke. Freeing the smoke with his fingertips, her hair tumbling free into his hands.

‘Tastes a little of smoke.’

Smoke. It must be the smoke which made his eyes water as they did, thought Narcisse dimly to himself. That or the alcohol. Whatever the Englishman put in his wine, it’s…

‘Strong.’