Then her eyes flicked towards him, and it was as if a blind had been slammed down, so fast that he was left wondering if he had only imagined her before.
‘Madame—’
For a second she halted, looked at him with a blankness which was almost insolent. Her eyes were green, a curiously light verdigris colour. In his book he’d coloured them black. Jay smiled and reached out his hand over the hedge in greeting.
‘Madame d’Api. I’m sorry if I startled you. I’m—’
But before he could say anything else she had gone, turning sharply into the rows of vines without a backward glance, moving smoothly and quickly down the path towards the farmhouse.
‘Madame d’Api!’ he called after her. ‘Madame!’
She must have heard, and yet she ignored his call. He watched her for a few minutes more as she moved further and further away, then, shrugging, turned towards the house. He told himself that his disappointment was absurd. There was no reason why she should want to talk to him. He was allowing his imagination too much freedom. In the bland light of day she was nothing like the slate-eyed heroine of his story. He resolved not to think of her again.
When Jay got home, Clairmont was waiting for him with a truckload of junk. He winked as Jay turned into the drive, pushing his blue beret back from his eyes.
‘Holà, Monsieur Jay,’ he called from the cab of his truck. ‘I’ve found you some things for your new house!’
Jay sighed. His instincts had been right. Every few weeks he would be badgered to take off Clairmont’s hands a quantity of overpriced brocante masquerading as country chic. From what he could see of the truck’s contents – broken chairs, sweeping brushes, half-stripped doors, a really hideous papier-mâché dragon head left over from some carnival or other – his suspicions hardly began to cover the dreadful reality.
‘Well, I don’t know,’ he began.
Clairmont grinned.
‘You’ll see. You’ll love this,’ he announced, jumping down from his cab. As he did, Jay saw he was carrying a bottle of wine. ‘Something to put you in the mood, héh? Then we can talk business.’
There was no escaping the man’s persistence. Jay wanted a bath and silence. Instead there would be an hour’s haggling in the kitchen, wine he didn’t want to drink, then the problem of how to dispose of Clairmont’s objets d’art without hurting his feelings. He resigned himself.
‘To business,’ said Clairmont, pouring two glasses of wine. ‘Mine and yours.’ He grinned. ‘I’m going into antiques, héh? There’s good money in antiques in Le Pinot and Montauban. Buy cheap now, clean up when the tourists come.’
Jay tried the wine, which was good.
‘You could build twenty holiday chalets on that vineyard of yours,’ continued Clairmont cheerily. ‘Or a hotel. How’d you like the idea of your own hotel, héh?’
Jay shook his head.
‘I like it the way it is,’ he said.
Clairmont sighed.
‘You and La Païenne d’Api,’ he sighed. ‘Got no vision, either of you. That land’s worth a fortune in the right hands. Crazy, to keep it as it is when just a few chalets could—’
Jay struggled with the word and his accent.
‘La Païenne? The godless woman?’ he translated hesitantly.
Clairmont jerked his head in the direction of the other farm.
‘Marise as was. We used to call her La Parisienne. But the other suits her better, héh? Never goes to church. Never had the baby christened. Never talks. Never smiles. Hangs on to that land out of sheer stubborn spite, when anyone else …’ He shrugged. ‘Bof. It’s none of my business, héh? But I’d keep the doors locked if I were you, Monsieur Jay. She’s crazy. She’s had her eye on that land for years. She’d do you an injury if she could.’
Jay frowned, remembering the fox traps around the house.
‘Nearly broke Mireille’s nose once,’ continued Clairmont. ‘Just because she went near the little girl. Never came into the village again after that. Goes into La Percherie on her motorbike. Seen her going into Agen, too.’
‘Who looks after the daughter?’ enquired Jay.
Clairmont shrugged.
‘No-one. I expect she just leaves her.’
‘I’m surprised the social services haven’t—’
‘Bof. In Lansquenet? They’d have to come all the way over from Agen or Montauban, maybe even Toulouse. Who’d bother? Mireille tried. More than once. But she’s clever. Put them off the scent. Mireille would have adopted the child if she’d been allowed. She’s got the money. The family would have stood by her. But at her age, and with a deaf child on top of that, I suppose they thought—’
Jay stared at him. ‘A deaf child?’
Clairmont looked surprised.
‘Oh yes. Didn’t you know? Ever since she was tiny. She’s supposed to know how to look after her.’ He shook his head. ‘That’s what keeps her here, héh? That’s why she can’t go back to Paris.’
‘Why?’ asked Jay curiously.
‘Money,’ said Clairmont shortly, draining his glass.
‘But the farm must be worth something.’
‘Oh, it is,’ said Clairmont. ‘But she doesn’t own it. Why do you think she was so anxious to get the Foudouin place? It’s on a lease. She’ll be out the day it expires – unless she can get it renewed. And there isn’t much chance of that after what’s happened.’
‘Why? Who owns the lease?’
Clairmont drained his glass and licked his lips with satisfaction.
‘Pierre-Emile Foudouin. The man who sold you your house. Mireille’s great-nephew.’
They went out onto the drive then, to inspect Clairmont’s offerings. They were as bad as he had feared. But Jay’s mind was on other things. He offered Clairmont 500 francs for the whole truckload: the builder’s eyes widened briefly, but he was quickly persuaded. Winking slyly: ‘An eye for a good bargain, héh?’
The note disappeared into his rusty palm like a card trick.
‘And don’t worry, héh. I can find you plenty more!’
He drove off, his exhaust blatting out pink dust from the drive. Jay was left to sort out the wreckage.
Even then Joe’s training held good: Jay still found it hard to throw away what might conceivably be useful. Even as he determined to use the entire truckload for firewood he found himself looking speculatively over this and that. A glass-panelled door, cracked down the middle, might make a reasonable cold frame. The jars, each turned upside down on a small seedling, would give good protection from late frost. Little by little the oddments Clairmont had brought began to spread themselves around the garden and the field. He even found a place for the carnival head. He carried it carefully to the boundary between his and Marise’s vineyard and set it on top of a fence post, facing towards her farm. Through the dragon’s open mouth a long crêpe tongue lolled redly, and its yellow eyes gleamed. Sympathetic magic, Joe would have called it, like putting gargoyles onto a church roof. Jay wondered what La Païenne would make of it.
32
Pog Hill, Summer 1977
JAY’S MEMORIES OF THAT LATE SUMMER WERE BLURRY IN A WAY the previous ones were not. Several factors were to blame – the pale and troubling sky, for one thing, which made him squint and gave him headaches. Joe seemed a little distant, and Gilly’s presence meant they did not have the long discussions they’d had the year before. And Gilly herself … it seemed that as July turned into August Gilly was always at the back of his mind. Jay found himself dwelling upon her more and more. His pleasure at her company was coloured by insecurity, jealousy and other feelings he found it difficult to identify. He was in a state of perpetual confusion. He was often close to anger, without knowing why. He argued constantly with his mother, who seemed to get more deeply under his skin that summer than ever before – everything got under his skin that year – he felt raw, as if every nerve were constantly exposed. He bought the Sex Pistols’ ‘Pretty Vacant’ and played it in his room at full volume, to the
horror of his grandparents. He dreamed of piercing his ears. Gilly and he went to the Edge and warred with Glenda’s gang and filled bags with useful rubbish and took them over to Joe’s. Sometimes they helped Joe in the allotment, and occasionally he would talk to them about his travels and his time in Africa with the Masai, or his journeys through the Andes. But to Jay it seemed perfunctory, an afterthought, as if Joe’s mind were already on something else. The perimeter ritual, too, seemed abbreviated, a minute or two at most, with a stick of incense and a sachet of sprinkler. It did not occur to him to question it then, but afterwards he realized. Joe knew. Even then he had already made the decision.
One day he took Jay into his back room and showed him the seed chest again. It had been over a year since he had last done so, pointing out the thousands of seeds packaged and wrapped and labelled for planting, and in the semi-darkness – the windows were still boarded up – the chest looked dusty, abandoned, the paper packages crisp with age, the labels faded.
‘It dun’t look like owt, does it?’ said Joe, drawing his finger through the dust on the top of the chest.
Jay shook his head. The room smelt airless and damp, like a place where tomatoes have been grown. Joe grinned a little sadly.
‘Never believe it, lad. Every one of them seeds is a goodun. You could plant em right now an they’d go up champion. Like rockets. Every one of em.’ He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. ‘Just you remember, it’s not what things look like that matters. It’s what’s inside. The art of it.’
But Jay wasn’t really listening. He never really listened that summer – too preoccupied by his own thoughts, too sure that what he had would be there for ever. He took this wistful little aside of Joe’s as just another adult homily; nodding vaguely, feeling hot and bored and choked in the airless dark, wanting to get away.
Later it occurred to him that perhaps Joe had been saying goodbye.
33
Lansquenet, March 1999
JOE WAS WAITING WHEN HE REACHED THE HOUSE, LOOKING critically out of the window at the abandoned vegetable plot.
‘You want to do something with that, lad,’ he told Jay as he opened the door. ‘Else it’ll be no good this summer. You want to get it dug over and weeded while you’ve still got time. And them apple trees, anall. You want to check em for mistletoe. Bloody kill em if you let it.’
During the past week Jay had almost become used to the old man’s sudden appearances. He had even begun, in a strange way, to look forward to them, telling himself they were harmless, finding ingenious post-Jungian reasons to explain their persistence. The old Jay – the Jay of ’75 – would have relished this. But that Jay believed in everything. He wanted to believe. Astral projection, space aliens, spells, rituals, magic. Strange phenomena were that Jay’s daily business. That Jay believed – trusted. This Jay knew better.
And still he continued to see the old man, regardless of belief. A part of it was loneliness, he told himself. Another was the book – that stranger growing from the manuscript of Stout Cortez. The process of writing is a little like madness, a kind of possession not altogether benign. Back in the days of Jackapple Joe he talked to himself all the time, striding back and forth in his little Soho bedsit, with a glass in one hand, talking, arguing fiercely with himself, with Joe, with Gilly, with Zeth and Glenda, almost expecting to see them there as he looked up from the typewriter, his eyes grainy with exhaustion, his head pounding, the radio playing full blast. For a whole summer he was a little insane. But this book would be different. Easier, in a way. The characters were all around him. They marched effortlessly across the pages: Clairmont the builder, Joséphine the café owner, Michel from Marseilles, with the red hair and the easy smile. Caro in a Hermès headscarf. Marise. Joe. Marise. There was no real plot. Instead there were a multitude of anecdotes, loosely knitted together – some remembered from Joe and relocated to Lansquenet, some recalled by Joséphine over the counter of the Café des Marauds, some put together from scraps. He liked to think he had caught something of the air, of the light of the place. Perhaps some of Joséphine’s bright, untrained narrative style. Her gossip was never tainted by malice. Her anecdotes were always warm, often amusing. He began to look forward to his visits, enough to feel a dim sense of disappointment on the days Joséphine was too busy to talk. He found himself going to the café every day, even when he had no other excuse to be in the village. He made mental notes.
When he had been in the village for a little under three weeks, he went into Agen and sent the first 150 pages of the untitled manuscript to Nick Horneli, his agent in London. Nick handled Jonathan Winesap, as well as the royalties for Jackapple Joe. Jay had always liked him, a wryly humorous man who was in the habit of sending little cuttings from newspapers and magazines in the hope of generating new inspiration. He sent no contact address, but a poste-restante address in Agen, and waited for a reply.
To his disappointment, he found that Joséphine would not speak to him about Marise. In the same way, there were people she rarely mentioned: the Clairmonts, Mireille Faizande, the Merles. Herself. Whenever he tried to encourage her to talk about these people, she would find work to do in the kitchen. He felt more and more strongly that there were things – secret things – she was reluctant to discuss.
‘What about my neighbour? Does she ever come to the café?’
Joséphine picked up a cloth and began to polish the gleaming surface of the bar.
‘I don’t see her. I don’t know her very well.’
‘I’ve heard she doesn’t get on with people from the village.’
A shrug. ‘Bof.’
‘Caro Clairmont seems to know a lot about her.’
Again the shrug.
‘Caro makes it her business to know everything.’
‘I’m curious.’
Flatly: ‘I’m sorry. I have to go.’
‘I’m sure you must have heard something—’
She faced him for a second, her cheeks flushing. Her arms were folded tightly against her body, the thumbs digging into her ribs in a defensive gesture.
‘Monsieur Jay. Some people like to pry into other people’s business. God knows, there was enough gossip about me once. Some people think they can judge.’ He was taken aback by her sudden fierceness. Suddenly she was someone else, her face tight and narrow. It occurred to him that she might be afraid.
LATER THAT NIGHT, BACK AT THE HOUSE, HE WENT OVER THEIR conversation. Joe was sitting in his usual spot on the bed, hands laced behind his neck. The radio was playing light music. The typewriter keys felt cold and dead under his fingertips. The bright thread of his narrative had finally run out.
‘It’s no good.’ He sighed and poured coffee into his half-empty cup. ‘I’m not getting anywhere.’
Joe watched him lazily, his cap over his eyes.
‘I can’t write this book. I’m blocked. It doesn’t make sense. It isn’t going anywhere.’
The story, so clear in his mind a few nights before, had receded into almost nothing. His head was swimming with wakefulness.
‘You should get to know her,’ advised Joe. ‘Forget listening to other people’s talk and make up your own mind. That or kick it into touch altogether.’
Jay made an impatient gesture.
‘How can I do that? She obviously doesn’t want to have anything to do with me. Or anyone else, for that matter.’
Joe shrugged.
‘Please yourself. You never did learn how to put yourself out much, did yer?’
‘That isn’t true! I tried—’
‘You could live next door to each other for ten years and neither of you’d make the first move.’
‘This is different.’
‘I reckon.’
Joe got up and wandered to the radio. He fiddled with the dial for a moment before finding a clear signal. Somehow Joe had the knack of locating the oldies station wherever he happened to be. Rod Stewart was singing ‘Tonight’s the Night’.
‘You could try, though
.’
‘Maybe I don’t want to try.’
‘Happen you don’t.’
Joe’s voice was growing fainter, his outline fading, so that Jay could see the newly whitewashed wall behind him. At the same time the radio crackled harshly, the signal breaking up. A burr of white noise replaced the music.
‘Joe?’
The old man’s voice was almost too faint to hear.
‘I’ll sithee, then.’
It’s what he always used to say as a sign of disapproval, or when signalling the end of a discussion.
‘Joe?’
But Joe had already gone.
34
Pog Hill, Summer 1977
IT REALLY STARTED WITH ELVIS. MID-AUGUST, THAT WAS, AND Jay’s mother grieved with a vehemence which was almost genuine. Perhaps because they were the same age, he and she. Jay felt it, too, even though he’d never been an especial fan. That overcast sense of doom, the feeling that things were coming apart at the centre, unravelling like a ball of string. There was death in the air that August, a dark edge to the sky, an unidentifiable taste. There were more wasps that summer than he ever remembered before – long, curly, brown wasps which seemed to scent the end coming and turned spiteful early. Jay was stung twelve times – once in the mouth as he swigged a bottle of Coke, lucky not to be taken to Casualty – and together Gilly and he burned seven nests. Gilly and Jay started a crusade against the wasps that summer. On hot, moist afternoons, when the insects were sleepy and more docile, the two of them went wasping. They would find the nests, stuff the hole with shredded newspaper and firelighters and flame the whole thing. As the fire took and smoke poured into the nest the wasps would come flying out, some buzzing and burning like German aircraft in old black-and-white war movies, darkening the air and sighing, an eerie, chill sound, as they spread, bewildered and enraged, over the war zone. Gilly and Jay lay quiet in a hollow near by, far enough away from the danger spot, but as close as they dared, watching. Needless to say, this tactic was Gilly’s idea. She would squat, eyes wide and bright, as close as she could. No wasp ever stung her. She seemed as immune to them as a honey badger to bees, and as naturally lethal. Jay was secretly terrified, crouching in the hollows with his head down and pounding with black exhilaration, but the fear was addictive and they sought it time and again, clinging to each other and laughing in terror and excitement. Once, urged by Gilly, Jay put two Black Cat bangers into a nest under a dry-stone wall and lit the fuses. The nest blew apart, but smokelessly, scattering stunned and angry wasps everywhere. One managed to get into the T-shirt he was wearing and stung him again and again. It felt like being shot, and Jay screamed and rolled on the ground. But the wasp was indestructible, twitching and stinging even as he crushed it beneath his frantic body. They killed it at last by tearing off the shirt and dousing it in lighter fluid. Later Jay counted nine separate stings. Autumn loomed close, smelling of fire.