Mireille, Jay understood, was Marise’s mother-in-law. Almost six years later, Mireille, who was seventy-one and suffered from chronic arthritis, had never spoken to her granddaughter, or even seen her except from a distance.
Marise reverted to her maiden name after her husband’s death. She apparently hated everyone in the village so much that she employed only itinerant labour – and that on the condition that they ate and slept at the farm for the duration of their employment. Inevitably, there were rumours.
‘I don’t suppose you’ll see much of her, anyway,’ finished Toinette. ‘She doesn’t talk to anyone. She even rides over to La Percherie to buy her weekly shopping. I imagine she’ll leave you well alone.’
Jay walked home, despite offers from Jessica and Caro to drive him back. It was almost two, and the night was fresh and quiet. His head felt peculiarly light, and although there was no moon there was a skyful of stars. As he skirted the main square and moved downhill towards Les Marauds he became aware, with some surprise, of how dark it really was. The last street lamp stood in front of the Café des Marauds, and at the bottom of the hill, the river, the marshes, the little derelict houses teetering haphazardly into the water dipped into shadow so deep that it was almost blindness. But by the time he reached the river his eyes had adapted to the night. He crossed in the shallows, listening to the hisssh of the water against the banks. He found the path across the fields and followed it to the road, where a long avenue of trees stood black against the purple sky. He could hear sounds all around him: night creatures, a distant owl, mostly the sounds of wind and foliage, from which vision distracts us.
The cool air had cleared his head of smoke and alcohol and he felt alert and awake, able to walk all night. As he walked, he found himself going over the last part of the evening’s conversation with increasing persistence. There was something about that story, ugly as it was, which attracted him. It was primitive. Visceral. The woman living alone with her secrets; the man dead in the barn; the dark triangle of mother, grandmother, daughter … And all around this sweet, harsh land, these vines, orchards, rivers, these whitewashed houses, widows in black headscarves, men in overalls and drooping, nicotine-stained moustaches.
The smell of thyme was pungent in the air. It grew wild by the roadside. Thyme improves the memory, Joe used to say. He used to make a syrup out of it, keeping it in a bottle in the pantry. Two tablespoonsful every morning before breakfast. The clear greenish liquid smelt exactly like the night air over Lansquenet, crisp and earthy and nostalgic, like a summer day’s weeding in the herb garden, with the radio on.
Suddenly Jay wanted to be home. His fingers itched. He wanted to feel the typewriter keys under them, to hear the clack-clacking of the old machine in the starry silence. More than anything he wanted to catch that story.
HE FOUND JOE WAITING FOR HIM, STRETCHED OUT ON THE CAMP bed, hands laced behind his head. He had left his boots by the foot of the bed, but he was wearing his old pit-helmet, cocked at a jaunty angle on his head. A yellow sticker on the front read, ‘People will always need coal.’
Jay felt no surprise at seeing him. His anger had gone, and instead he felt a kind of comfort, almost as if he was expecting to see him – the ghostly apparition becoming familiar as he began to anticipate it, becoming …
Everyday magic.
He sat down at the typewriter. The story had him in its hold now and he typed rapidly, his fingers jabbing at the keys. He typed solidly for more than two hours, feeding sheet after sheet of Stout Cortez into the machine, translating it, reversing it with his own layman’s alchemy. Words pranced across the page almost too fast for him to keep pace. From time to time he paused, vaguely conscious of Joe’s presence on the bed beside him, though the old man said nothing while he worked. At one point he smelt smoke. Joe had lit a cigarette. At about five in the morning he made coffee in the kitchen, and when he returned to his typewriter he noticed, with a curious feeling of disappointment, that the old man had gone.
30
Nether Edge, Summer 1977
THEY WENT TO THE EDGE MORE OFTEN AFTER THAT. THEY KEPT out of sight most of the time, visiting when they were fairly certain no-one would be there. There were a couple of clashes with Glenda and her mates – once at the dump, over ownership of an old deep-freeze (Glenda won that encounter) and once at the river crossing (one-up to Gilly and Jay). Nothing serious ensued. Name-calling, a few flung stones, threats and gibes. Gilly and Jay knew Nether Edge better than the others, in spite of their out-of-town status. They knew the best hiding places, the short cuts. And they had imagination. Glenda and her mates had little but spite and swagger to sustain them. Gilly liked to lay traps. A bent sapling with a taut wire across the base, designed to fly in the face of anyone who tripped it. A paint tin of dirty canal water balanced, precarious, on the door of their den. The den itself was raided again and again, until it was finally abandoned, then Jay found the new den – in the dump, between a rusty hulk and an old fridge door – and raided that. They left their signature everywhere. On disused ovens in the dump. On trees. On the walls and doors of a series of dens. Gilly made a slingshot and practised shooting at discarded tins and jam jars. She was a natural. She never missed. She could break a jar at fifty feet without even trying. Of course there were a few narrow escapes. Once they almost cornered Jay near the place where he hid his bike, close to the railway bridge. It was getting dark and Gilly had already gone home, but he’d found a stash of last year’s coal – maybe as much as a couple of sacksful – in a patch of weeds, and he wanted to shift it before anyone else came across it by accident. He was too busy bagging coal chunks for Joe to notice the four girls coming out from the other side of the railway, and Glenda was almost on him before he knew it.
Glenda was Jay’s age, but big for a girl. Zeth’s narrow features were overlaid with a meatiness which squeezed her eyes into crescents and her mouth into a pouty bud. Her slabby cheeks were already raddled with acne. It was the first time he had seen her so close, and her resemblance to her brother was almost paralysing. Her friends eyed him warily, fanning out behind Glenda, as if to cut off his escape. The bike was ten feet away, hidden in the long grass. Jay began to edge towards it.
‘Iz on iz own today,’ remarked one of the other girls, a skinny blonde with a cigarette butt clamped between her teeth. ‘Wheer’s tha girlfriend?’
Jay moved closer to the bike. Glenda moved with him, skidding down the shingle of the banking towards the road. Pieces of gravel shot out from under her sneakers. She was wearing a cut-off T-shirt and her arms were red with sunburn. With those big, fishwife’s arms she looked troublingly adult, as if she had been born that way. Jay feigned indifference. He would have liked to say something clever, something biting, but the words which would have come so easily in a story refused to co-operate. Instead, he scrambled down the bank to where he had hidden his bike and pulled it out of the long grass onto the road.
Glenda gave a crow of rage and began to slide towards him, paddling the shingle with large, spatulate hands. Dust flew.
‘I’ll fuckin ave thee, tha bastard,’ she said, sounding alarmingly like her brother, but she was too busy watching Jay to control her slide, and she overshot the banking with comical suddenness, tipping into the dry ditch at the bottom, where a stand of nettles was just coming into flower. Glenda screamed with rage and chagrin. Jay grinned and straddled his bike. In the ditch, Glenda thrashed and struggled, her face in the nettles.
He rode off while Glenda’s three friends were hauling her out, but as he reached the top of the street he stopped and turned. He could see Glenda, half out of the ditch now. Her face was a dark blur of fury. He gave a small, insolent wave.
‘I’ll ave thee!’ Her voice reached him thinly across the space which separated them. ‘Mi fuckin brother’ll ave thee anall!’
Jay waved again and did a wheelie as he turned down the lane and out of sight. He was laughing-gas dizzy, his jaw aching with laughter, his ribs tight. The talisman t
ied to the loop of his jeans fluttered from his hip like a banner. He whoop-whooped all the way down the hill to the village, and his voice whipped past his face, stolen by the wind. He was exhilarated. He felt invulnerable.
But August was drawing to an end. September loomed like a nemesis. A single week to go before his downfall.
31
Lansquenet, March 1999
DURING THE WEEK THAT FOLLOWED JAY WROTE EVERY NIGHT. On Friday the electricity was finally restored, but by then he’d become accustomed to working by the light of the oil lamp. It was friendlier somehow, more atmospheric. The pages of his manuscript formed a tight wedge on the table top. He had almost a hundred now. On Monday Clairmont arrived with four workmen to make a start on the repairs to the house. They began with the roof, which was missing a great number of tiles. The plumbing, too, needed attention. In Agen he managed to find a car-hire company and rented a five-year-old green Citroën to carry his purchases and speed up his visits to Lansquenet. He also bought three reams of typing paper and some typewriter ribbons. He worked after dark, when Clairmont and his men had gone home, and the stack of typed pages mounted steadily.
He did not reread the new pages. Fear, perhaps, that the block which had afflicted him for so many years might still be waiting. But somehow he didn’t think so. Part of it was this place. Its air. The feeling of familiarity in spite of the fact that he was a stranger here. Its closeness to the past. As if Pog Hill Lane had been rebuilt here amongst the orchards and vines.
On fine mornings he walked into Lansquenet to buy bread. His ankle had healed quickly and completely, leaving only the faintest of scars, and he began to enjoy the walk and to recognize some of the faces he saw along the way. Joséphine told him their names, and sometimes more. As the owner of the village’s only café, she was in an excellent position to know everything that happened. The dry-looking old man in the blue beret was Narcisse, a market gardener who supplied the local grocer and the florist. In spite of his reserve, there was wry, hidden humour in his face. Jay knew from Joséphine that he was a friend of the gypsies who came downriver every summer, trading with them and offering them seasonal work in his fields. For years he and a succession of local curés battled over his tolerance of the gypsies, but Narcisse was stubborn, and the gypsies stayed. The redhaired man from Clairmont’s yard was Michel Roux, from Marseilles, a traveller from the river, who stopped for a fortnight five years ago and never left. The woman with the red scarf was Denise Poitou, the baker’s wife. The wan-looking fat woman in black, her eyes shaded from the sun by a wide-brimmed hat, was Mireille Faizande, Marise’s mother-in-law. Jay tried to catch her eye as she passed the café terrasse, but she did not seem to see him.
There were stories behind all of these faces. Joséphine, leaning over the counter with her cup of coffee in one hand, appeared more than willing to tell them. Her early shyness of him had vanished, and she greeted him with pleasure. Sometimes, when there were not too many customers, they talked. Jay knew very few of the people she mentioned. But this did not seem to discourage Joséphine.
‘Do you mean I never told you about old Albert? Or his daughter?’ She sounded amazed at his ignorance. ‘They used to live next door to the bakery. Well, what used to be the bakery, before it became the chocolaterie. Opposite the florist’s.’ At first Jay simply allowed her to talk. He paid little attention, letting names, anecdotes, descriptions wash past him as he sipped his coffee and watched the people go by.
‘Didn’t I ever tell you about Arnauld and the truffle pig? Or the time Armande dressed up as the Immaculate Conception and laid in wait for him in the churchyard? Listen …’
There were many stories of her best friend, Vianne, who left some years ago, and of people long dead, whose names meant nothing to him. But Joséphine was persistent. Perhaps she, too, was lonely. The morning habitués of the café were a silent lot for the most part, many of them old men. Perhaps she welcomed a younger audience. Little by little the ongoing soap opera of Lansquenet-sous-Tannes drew him in.
Jay was aware he was still an oddity here. Some people stared at him in frank curiosity. Some smiled. Most were reserved, politely dour, a nod in greeting and a sidelong glance as he walked past. Most days he called at the Café des Marauds for a blonde or a café-cassis on the way back from Poitou’s. The walled terrasse was small, no more than a wide piece of pavement on the narrow road, but it was a good place to sit and watch as the village came to life. Just off the main square, it was a vantage point from which everything was visible: the long hill leading down towards the marshes; the screen of trees above the Rue des Francs Bourgeois; the church tower whose carillon rang out across the fields at seven every morning; the square, pink school-house at the road’s fork. At the bottom of the hill the Tannes was hazed and dimly gleaming, the fields beyond barely visible. The early sunlight was very bright, almost crude in comparison, cutting out the white fronts of the houses against their brown shadow. On the river a boat was moored, close to the huddle of derelict houses which overhung the river on their precarious wooden stilts. From the boat’s chimney he could see a scrawl of smoke and smell frying fish.
Between seven and eight o’clock several people, mostly women, passed by carrying loaves or paper bags of croissants from Poitou’s bakery. At eight the bells rang for Mass. Jay always recognized the churchgoers. There was a look of solemn reluctance to their good spring coats, their polished shoes, their hats and berets, which defined them. Caro Clairmont was always there with her husband; he awkward in his tight shoes, she elegant in a series of silk scarves. She always greeted Jay as she passed, with an extravagant wave and a cry of, ‘How’s the book?’ Her husband nodded briefly and hurried by, hunched, humble. While Mass was in progress, a number of old men parked themselves with tired defiance on the terrasse of the Café des Marauds to drink café-crème and play chess, or talk among themselves. Jay recognized Narcisse, the market gardener, always in the same place by the door. There was a tattered seed catalogue in his coat pocket, which he read in silence, a cup of coffee at his elbow. On Sundays Joséphine bought pains au chocolat and the old man always took two, his big brown hands oddly delicate as he lifted the pastry to his mouth. He rarely spoke, contenting himself with a brief nod in the direction of the other customers before settling in his usual place. At eight thirty the schoolchildren began to pass, incongruous in their anoraks and fleeces, a procession of logos against purple, scarlet, yellow, turquoise, lime-green. They looked at Jay with open curiosity. Some of them laughed and called out in cheery derision, ‘Rosbif! Rosbif!’ as they dashed by. There were about twenty children of primary-school age in Lansquenet, divided into two classes; the older ones had to take the school bus into Agen, its windows snubbed with curious noses and thick with finger-graffiti.
During the day Clairmont had been overseeing the repairs to the house. Already the ground floor looked better and the roof was almost completed, though Jay could tell Georges was disappointed at his lack of ambition. Clairmont dreamed of conservatories and indoor swimming pools, Jacuzzis and piazzas and landscaped lawns, though he was philosophical enough when Jay told him that he had no ambition to live in a St Tropez villa.
‘Bof, ce que vous aimez, à ce que je comprends, c’est le rustique,’ he told Jay with a shrug. Already there was a speculative look in his eyes. Jay understood that if he didn’t take a hard line with the man he would almost certainly be deluged with unwanted objects – broken crockery, milking stools, bad reproduction furniture, walking sticks, cracked tiles, chopping boards and ancient farming utensils; all the unloved and abandoned detritus of loft and cellar, granted reprieve from the bonfire by the call of le rustique – which he would then be expected to buy. He should have withered him on the spot. But there was something rather touching about the man, something both humble and absurdly hopeful in the ratty black eyes gleaming above the drooping moustache, which made it impossible.
Sighing, Jay resigned himself to the inevitable.
On Thursday he
caught sight of Marise for the first time since their initial, brief meeting. He was coming home after his morning walk, a loaf tucked under his arm. At the point at which his field backed onto hers there was a blackthorn hedge, along which a path ran parallel to the boundary. The hedge was young, three or four years at the most, the new March growth barely sufficient to form a screen. Behind it he could see the broken line where the old hedge had been, an uneven row of stumps and tussocks imperfectly hidden by a new furrow. Mentally Jay calculated the distance. Clairmont had been right. She had moved the boundary by about fifty feet. Probably when the old man first fell ill. He looked more closely through the hedge, faintly curious. The contrast between her side and his was striking. On the Foudouin side the vines were sprawling and untrimmed, their new growth barely showing, except for a few hard brown buds on the ends of the tendrils. Hers had been cut back hard, twelve inches from the ground, in readiness for the summer. There were no weeds on Marise’s side of the hedge; the furrows neat and clean-edged, a path running along each row wide enough to allow easy passage for the tractor. On Jay’s side the rows had run into each other, the uncut vines clinging lasciviously to one another across the paths. Gleeful spikes of ragwort, mint and arnica poked through the tangle. Looking back towards Marise’s land, he found that he could just see the gable-end of her farm at the edge of the field, screened from full view by a stand of poplars. There were fruit trees there, too – the white of apple blossom against bare branches – and what might be a vegetable garden. A woodpile, a tractor, something else which could only be the barn.
She must have heard the shot from the house. She had put the baby in the crib. Gone out. Taken her time. The image was so vivid that Jay could almost see her doing it: pulling on her boots over thick socks, the oversized jacket around her shoulders – it was winter – the frosty soil crunching under her feet. Her face was impassive, as it had been when they met that first morning. The image haunted him. In this guise Marise had already walked more than once across the pages of his new book; he felt as if he knew her, and yet they had barely spoken. But there was something in her which drew him, an irresistible air of secrecy. He wasn’t sure why she made him think of Joe. That coat, perhaps, or the man’s cap jammed too far over her eyes, that confusing half-familiar silhouette just glimpsed behind an angle of brick. Certainly there was no resemblance to Joe in her features. Joe could never have had that bleak, empty face. Half turning to go, Jay caught sight of something – a figure moving quickly along the other side of the hedge a few hundred yards from where he was standing. Shielded by the thin screen of bushes, he saw her before she caught sight of him. It was a warm morning and she had shed her bulky outer clothes in favour of jeans and a striped fisherman’s jumper. The change of clothing made her boyishly slender. Her red hair had been cut off inexpertly at jaw level – Jay guessed she’d probably done it herself. In that unguarded moment her face was vivid, eager. For a moment Jay barely recognized her.