‘I’m not staring at you.’
‘Yes, you are.’
Jay grinned. ‘I’m staring at the great – big – earwig that just landed in your hair from that bush,’ he told her.
‘Bastard!’ screamed Gilly, shaking her head.
‘Wait a minute! It’s just there,’ he said, slyly knuckle-rubbing the top of her head.
Gilly kicked him hard on the ankle. Again normality was restored.
For a while.
29
Lansquenet, March 1999
THE NEXT THING JAY DID IN LANSQUENET WAS TO FIND A builder’s yard. The house needed extensive repairs, and although he could probably manage some of the work himself, most of it would have to be done by professionals. Jay was lucky to find them to hand. He imagined it would cost a great deal more to have them come over from Agen. The yard was large and sprawling. Wood had been stacked in towers at the back. Window frames and doors propped up the walls. The main warehouse was a converted farm, low-roofed, with a sign above the door which read, CLAIRMONT – MEUNUISERIE-PANNEAUX-CONSTRUCTION.
Unfinished furniture, fencing, concrete blocks, tiles and slates were piled messily by the door. The builder’s name was Georges Clairmont. He was a short, squat man, with a mournful moustache and a white shirt, greyed with perspiration. He spoke with the thick accent of the region, but slowly, reflectively, and this gave Jay time to understand his words. Somehow everyone here knew about him already. He supposed Joséphine had spread word. Clairmont’s labourers – four men in paint-spattered overalls and caps turned down against the sun – watched with wary curiosity as Jay passed. He caught the word Anglishe in a rapid mutter of patois. Work – money – was limited in the village. Everyone wanted a share in Château Foudouin’s renovation. Clairmont flapped his hand in annoyance as four pairs of eyes followed them into the woodyard.
‘Back to work, héh, back to work!’
Jay caught the eye of one of the labourers – a man with red hair tied back with a bandanna – and grinned. The redhead grinned back, one hand across his face to hide his expression from Clairmont. Jay followed the manager into the building.
The room was large and cool, like a hangar. A small table near the door served as a desk, with papers, files and a telephone-fax machine. Next to the telephone was a bottle of wine and two small glasses. Clairmont poured out two shots and handed one to Jay.
‘Thanks.’
The wine was red-black and rich. It was good, and he said so.
‘It should be,’ said Clairmont. ‘It was made on your land. The old proprietor, Foudouin, was well known here once. A good winemaker. Good grapes. Good land.’ He sipped his wine appreciatively.
‘I suppose you’ll have to send someone out to see the house,’ Jay told him.
Clairmont shrugged. ‘I know the house. Went to see it again last month. Even drew up some estimates.’
He saw Jay’s surprise and grinned.
‘She’s been working on it since December,’ he said. ‘Painting this, plastering that. She was so sure of her agreement with the old man.’
‘Marise d’Api?’
‘Who else, héh? But he’d already made a deal with his nephew. A steady income – a hundred thousand francs a year until his death – in exchange for the house and the farm. He was too old to work. Too stubborn to leave the place. No-one else wanted it but her. There’s no money in farming nowadays, and as for the house itself, héh!’ Clairmont shrugged expressively. ‘But with her it’s different. She’s stubborn. Been eyeing the land for years. Waiting. Fencing it off bit by bit. Serve her right, héh!’ Clairmont gave his short, percussive laugh. ‘She’d never give me any work, she said. Rather get a builder in from town than owe money to someone from the village. Do it herself, more likely.’ He rubbed his fingers together in a speaking gesture. ‘Close with her savings,’ he explained shortly, finishing the rest of his wine. ‘Close with everything.’
‘I expect I’ll have to offer her some kind of compensation,’ said Jay.
‘Why?’ Clairmont looked amused.
‘Well, if she’s spent money—’
Clairmont gave a raucous laugh.
‘Money! More likely to have been robbing the place. Look at your fences, your hedges. Look how they’ve been moved. A dozen metres here, half a dozen there. Nibbling at the land like a greedy rat. She was at it for years when she thought the old man wasn’t watching. Then, when he died …’ Clairmont shrugged expressively. ‘Héh! She’s poison, Monsieur Mackintosh, a viper. I knew her poor husband and, though he never complained, I couldn’t help hearing things.’
That shrug again, philosophical and businesslike.
‘Give her nothing, Monsieur Mackintosh. Come to my house this evening and meet my wife. Have dinner. We can discuss your plans for the Foudouin place. It will make a wonderful holiday home, monsieur. With investment anything is possible. The garden can be replanted and landscaped. The orchard restored. A swimming pool, maybe. Paving, like the villas in Juan les Pins. Fountains.’ His eyes gleamed at the thought.
Cautiously Jay replied, ‘Well, I hadn’t really thought beyond immediate repairs.’
‘No no, but there will be time, héh?’ He slapped Jay’s arm companionably.
‘My house is off the main square. Rue des Francs Bourgeois. Number four. My wife is longing to meet our new celebrity. It would make her very happy to meet you.’ His grin, part humble, part acquisitive, was oddly infectious.
‘Take dinner with us. Try my wife’s gésiers farcis. Caro knows everything there is to know in the village. Get to know Lansquenet.’
JAY EXPECTED A SIMPLE MEAL. POT LUCK WITH THE BUILDER AND HIS wife, who would be small and drab, in an apron and headscarf, or sweet-faced and rosy, like Joséphine at the café, with bright bird’s eyes. They would perhaps be shy at first, speaking little, the wife pouring soup into earthenware bowls, blushing with pleasure at his compliments. There would be home-made terrines and red wine and olives and pimentoes in their spiced oils. Later they would tell their neighbours that the new Englishman was un mec sympathique, pas du tout prétentieux, and he would be quickly accepted as a member of the community.
The reality was quite different.
The door was opened by a plump, elegant lady, twinsetted and stillettoed in powder-blue, who exclaimed as she saw him. Her husband, looking more mournful than ever in a dark suit and tie, waved to him over his wife’s shoulder. From inside Jay could hear music and voices, and glimpse an interior of such relentless chintziness that he blinked. In his black jeans and T-shirt, under a simple black jacket, he felt uncomfortably underdressed.
There were three other guests as well as Jay. Caroline Clairmont introduced them as she distributed drinks – ‘our friends Toinette and Lucien Merle, and Jessica Mornay, who owns a fashion shop in Agen,’ – simultaneously pressing one cheek against Jay’s and a champagne cocktail into his free hand.
‘We’ve been so looking forward to meeting you, Monsieur Mackintosh, or may I call you Jay?’
He began to nod, but was swept away into an armchair.
‘And, of course, you must call me Caro. It’s so wonderful to have someone new in the village – someone with culture – I do think culture is so important, don’t you?’
‘Oh yes,’ breathed Jessica Mornay, clutching at his arm with red nails too long to be anything but false. ‘I mean, Lansquenet is wonderfully unspoilt, but sometimes an educated person simply longs for something more. You must tell us about yourself. You’re a writer, Georges tells us?’
Jay disengaged his arm and resigned himself to the inevitable. He answered innumerable questions. Was he married? No? But there was someone, surely? Jessica flashed her teeth and drew closer. To distract her he feigned interest in banalities. The Merles, small and dapper in matching cashmere, were from the north. He was a wine-buyer, working for a firm of German importers. Toinette was in some kind of local journalism. Jessica was a pillar of the village drama group – ‘her Antigone was exquisite??
? – and did Jay write for the theatre?
He outlined Jackapple Joe, which everyone had heard of but no-one had read, and provoked excited squeals from Caro when he revealed that he had begun a new book. Caro’s cooking, like her house, was ornate; he did justice to the soufflé au champagne and the vol-au-vents, the gésiers farcis and the boeuf en croûte – secretly regretting the home-made terrine and olives of his fantasy. He gently discouraged the ever more eager advances of Jessica Mornay. He was moderately witty, anecdotal. He accepted many undeserved compliments on his français superbe. After dinner he developed a headache, which he attempted, without success, to dull with alcohol. He found it difficult to concentrate on the ever-increasing rapidity of their French. Whole segments of conversation passed by like clouds. Fortunately his hostess was garrulous – and self-centred – enough to take his silence for rapt attention.
By the time the meal was over it was almost midnight. Over coffee and petits fours the headache subsided and Jay was able to grasp the thread of the conversation once more.
Clairmont, his tie pulled away from the collar, his face mottled and sweaty: ‘Well, all I can say is it’s high time something happened to put Lansquenet on the map, héh? We’ve got as much going for us as Le Pinot down the road, if we could only get everybody organized.’
Caro nodded agreement. Jay could understand her French better than her husband’s, whose accent had thickened as his wineglass emptied. She was sitting opposite him on the arm of a chair, legs crossed and cigarette in hand.
‘I’m sure that now Jay has joined our little community’ – she bared her teeth through the smoke – ‘things will begin to progress. The tone changes. People begin to develop. God knows I’ve worked hard enough – for the church, for the theatre group, for the literary society. I’m sure Jay would agree to address our little writers’ group one day soon?’
He bared his own teeth non-committally.
‘Of course you would!’ Caro beamed as if Jay had answered aloud. ‘You’re exactly what a village like Lansquenet needs most: a breath of fresh air. You wouldn’t want people to think we were keeping you all to ourselves, would you?’ She laughed, and Jessica exclaimed hungrily. The Merles nudged each other in glee. Jay had the strangest feeling that the lavish dinner had been peripheral, that in spite of the champagne cocktails and iced Sauternes and foie gras he was the real main course.
‘But why Lansquenet?’ It was Jessica, leaning forwards, her long blue eyes half shut against a sheet of cigarette smoke. ‘Surely you would have been happier in a bigger place. Agen, maybe, or further south towards Toulouse?’
Jay shook his head. ‘I’m tired of cities,’ he said. ‘I bought this place on impulse.’
‘Ah,’ exclaimed Caro rapturously. ‘Artistic temperament!’
‘Because I wanted somewhere quist, away from the city.’
Clairmont shook his head. ‘Héh, it’s quiet enough,’ he said. ‘Too quiet for us. Property prices rock-bottom, while in Le Pinot, only forty kilometres away—’
His wife explained rapidly that Le Pinot was a village on the Garonne, much beloved by foreign tourists.
‘Georges does a lot of work there, don’t you, Georges? He put in a swimming pool for that lovely English couple, and he helped renovate that old house by the church. If only we could generate the same kind of interest in our village.’
Tourists. Swimming pools. Gift shops. Burger bars. Jay’s lack of enthusiasm must have shown in his face, because Caro nudged him archly.
‘I can see that our Monsieur Mackintosh is a romantic, Jessica! He loves the quaint little roads and the vineyards and the lonely farmhouses. So very English!’ Jay smiled and nodded and agreed that his eccentricity was tout à fait anglais.
‘But a community like ours, héh, it needs to grow.’ Clairmont was drunk and earnest. ‘We need investment. Money. There’s no money left in farming. Our farmers make barely enough to keep alive as it is. The work is all in the cities. The young move away. Only the old people and the riff-raff stay. The itinerants, the pieds-noirs. That’s what people don’t want to understand. We have to progress or die, héh. Progress or die.’
Caro nodded. ‘But there are too many people here who can’t see the way ahead,’ she frowned. ‘They refuse to sell their land for development, even when it’s clear they can’t win. When the plans were suggested to build the new Intermarché up the road they protested for so long that the Intermarché went to Le Pinot instead. Le Pinot was just like Lansquenet twenty years ago. Now look at it.’
Le Pinot was the local success story. A village of 300 souls put itself on the map thanks to an enterprising couple from Paris who bought and refurbished a number of old properties to sell as holiday homes. Thanks to a strong pound, and several excellent contacts in London, these were sold or rented to wealthy English tourists, and little by little a tradition was established. The villagers soon saw the potential in this. Business expanded to serve the new tourist trade. Several new cafés opened, soon followed by a couple of bed and breakfasts. Then came a scattering of speciality shops selling luxury goods to the summer trade, a restaurant with a Michelin star, and a small but luxurious hotel with a gym and a swimming pool. Local history was dredged for items of interest, and the wholly unremarkable church was revealed, by a combination of folklore and wishful thinking, to be a site of historical significance. A television adaptation of Clochemerle was filmed there, and after that there was no end to the new developments. An Intermarché within easy distance. A riding club. A whole row of holiday chalets along the river. And now, as if that wasn’t enough, there were plans for an Aquadome and health spa only five kilometres away, which would bring trade all the way from Agen and beyond.
Caro seemed to take Le Pinot’s success as a personal insult.
‘It could just as easily have been Lansquenet,’ she complained, taking a petit four. ‘Our village is at least as good as theirs. Our church is genuine fourteenth century. We have the ruins of a Roman aqueduct down in Les Marauds. It could have been us. Instead, the only visitors we get are the summer farmhands and the gypsies down the river.’ She bit petulantly at her petit four.
Jessica nodded. ‘It’s the people here,’ she told me. ‘They don’t have any ambition. They think they can live exactly as their grandfathers did.’
Le Pinot, Jay understood, had been so successful that the production of its local vintage, after which the village was named, had ceased altogether.
‘Your neighbour is one of those people.’ Caro’s mouth thinned beneath the pink lipstick. ‘Works half the land between here and Les Marauds, and still barely makes enough from winemaking to keep body and soul together. Lives holed up all year round in that old house of hers, with never a word to anyone. And that poor child holed up with her …’
Toinette and Jessica nodded, and Clairmont poured more coffee.
‘Child?’ Nothing in Jay’s brief glimpse of Marise d’Api had led him to imagine her as a mother.
‘Yes, a girl. No-one ever sees her. She doesn’t go to school. We never see them in church. We tried to suggest that they might,’ Caro made a face, ‘but the torrent of abuse from the mother was quite disgusting.’
The other women made sounds of agreement. Jessica moved a little closer, and Jay could smell perfume – he thought it was Poison – from her bobbed blond hair.
‘She’d be better off with the grandmother,’ said Toinette emphatically. ‘At least she’d get the affection she needs. Mireille was absolutely devoted to Tony.’ Tony, explained Caro, was Marise’s husband.
‘But she’d never let her have the child,’ said Jessica. ‘I think she only keeps her because she knows it galls Mireille. And, of course, we’re too far out for anyone to take much notice of what an old woman says.’
‘It was supposed to have been an accident,’ continued Caro darkly. ‘I mean, they had to say that, didn’t they? Even Mireille played along, because of the funeral. Said his gun exploded when a cartridge got stuck in the chamber. B
ut everyone knows that woman drove him to it. Did everything but pull the trigger. I’d believe anything of her. Anything at all.’
The conversation was beginning to make Jay feel uncomfortable. His headache had returned. This was not what he’d expected of Lansquenet, he told himself, this genteel spite, this gleeful hint of cruelty behind the prettiness. He hadn’t come to Lansquenet to hear about this. His book – if there was ever going to be a book – didn’t need this. The ease with which he’d written the twenty pages on the reverse of Stout Cortez proved it. He wanted apple-faced women picking herbs in their gardens. He wanted a French idyll, a Cider With Rosette, a lighthearted antidote to Joe.
And yet there was something curiously pervasive about the story itself, about the three women’s faces drawn close in identical expressions of vulpine enjoyment, eyes squinched down, mouths lipsticked wide over white, well-tended teeth. It was an old story – not even an original story – and yet it drew him. The feeling – that sense of being yanked forwards by an invisible hand in his gut – was not entirely unpleasant.
‘Go on,’ he said.
‘She was always at him.’ Jessica took over the narrative. ‘Even when they were first married. He was such an easy-going, sweet man. A big man, but I’ll swear he was frightened of her. He let her get away with anything. And when the baby was born she just got worse. Never a smile. Never made friends with anyone. And the rows with Mireille! I’m sure you could hear them right across the village.’
‘That’s what drove him to it in the end: the rows.’
‘Poor Tony.’
‘She found him in the barn – what was left of him. His head half blown away by the shot. She put the baby in the crib and rode off to the village on her moped, cool as you like, to fetch help. And at the funeral, when everyone was mourning’ – Caro shook her head – ‘cold as ice. Not a word or a tear. Wouldn’t pay for anything more than the plainest, cheapest funeral. And when Mireille offered to pay for something better – Lord! The fight that caused!’