‘I’d be pleased to. You can’t imagine how happy I am to find someone who can bear my dreadful French.’
Mireille looked at him closely for a second, then smiled. ‘You may be a foreigner, but you have the heart of a Frenchman. My father’s house is in good hands.’
Jay watched her go, picking her way stiffly along the overgrown path towards the boundary, until she finally vanished behind the screen of trees at the end of the orchard. He wondered whether her roses still grew there.
He poured his glass of wine back into the bottle and stoppered it once more. He washed the glasses and put away the gardening tools in the shed. It was only then that he realized. After days of inactivity, struggling to put together the fugitive pieces of his unfinished novel, he could see it again, bright as ever, like a lost coin shining in the dust.
He ran for the typewriter.
* * *
‘I RECKON YOU COULD START EM AGAIN IF YOU WANTED,’ SAID JOE, eyeing the tangled rose hedge. ‘It’s been a while since they were cut back, and some of em have run to wild, but you could do it, with a bit of work.’
Joe always pretended indifference to flowers. He preferred fruit trees, herbs and vegetables, things to be picked and harvested, stored, dried, pickled, bottled, pulped, made into wine. But there were always flowers in his garden all the same. Planted as if on an afterthought: dahlias, poppies, lavender, hollyhocks. Roses twined amongst the tomatoes. Sweet peas amongst the beanpoles. Part of it was camouflage, of course. Part of it a lure for bees. But the truth was that Joe liked flowers and was reluctant even to pull weeds.
Jay would not have seen the rose garden if he had not known where to look. The wall against which the roses had once been trained had been partly knocked down, leaving an irregular section of brick about fifteen feet long. Greenery had shot up it, almost reaching the top, creating a dense thicket in which he hardly recognized the roses. With the secateurs he clipped a few briars free and revealed a single large red rose almost touching the ground.
‘Old rose,’ remarked Joe, peering closer. ‘Best kind for cookin. You should try makin some rose-petal jam. Champion.’
Jay made with the secateurs again, pulling the clinging tendrils away from the bush. He could see more rosebuds now, tight and green away from the sun. The scent from the open flower was light and earthy.
He had been writing half the night. Mireille had brought enough of the story for ten pages, and it fitted easily with the rest, as if it needed only this to carry on. Without this central tale his book was no more than a collection of anecdotes, but with Marise’s story to bind them together it might become a rich, absorbing novel. If only he knew where it was leading.
In London he used to go to the gym to think. Here he made for the garden. Garden work clears the mind. He remembered those summers at Pog Hill Lane, cutting and pruning under Joe’s careful supervision, mixing resin for graftings, preparing herbs for the sachets with Joe’s big old mortar. It felt right to do that here, too – red ribbons on the fruit trees to frighten the birds, sachets of pungent herbs for parasites.
‘They’ll need feeding, anall,’ remarked Joe, leaning over the roses. ‘You want to get some of that rosehip wine onto the roots. Do em no end of good. Then you’ll want summat for them aphids.’
Sure enough the plants were infested, the stems sticky with insect life. Jay grinned at the persistence of Joe’s guiding presence.
‘Perhaps I’ll just use a chemical spray this year,’ he suggested.
‘You bloody won’t, though,’ exclaimed Joe. ‘Buggerin everything up with chemicals. That’s not what you came here for, is it?’
‘So what did I come here for?’
Joe made a disgusted sound.
‘Tha knows nowt,’ he said.
‘Enough not to be caught out again,’ Jay told him. ‘You and your magic bags. Your talismans. Your travels in the Orient. You really had me going, didn’t you? You must have been splitting yourself laughing all the time.’
Joe looked at him sternly over his half-moon glasses.
‘I never laughed,’ he said. ‘An if you’d had any sense to look further than the end o’ yer nose—’
‘Really?’ Jay was getting annoyed now, tugging at the loose brambles around the rose bed with unnecessary violence. ‘Then what did you leave for? Without even saying goodbye? Why did I have to come back to Pog Hill and find the house empty?’
‘Oh, back to that again, are we?’
Joe settled against the apple tree and lit a Player’s. The radio lying in the long grass began to play ‘I Feel Love’, that August’s Number One.
‘Cut that out,’ Jay told him crossly.
Joe shrugged. The radio whined briefly and went off. ‘If only you’d planted them rosifeas, like I meant you to,’ said Joe.
‘I needed a bit more than a few poxy seeds,’ retorted Jay.
‘You allus was hard work.’ Joe flipped his cigarette butt neatly over the hedge. ‘I couldn’t tell you I was going because I didn’t know mesself. I needed to get on the move again, breathe a bit of sea air, see a bit of road. And besides, I thought I’d left you provided for. I telled yer, if only you’d planted them seeds. If only you’d had some faith.’
Jay had had enough. He turned to face him. For a hallucination Joe was very real, even down to the grime under his fingernails. For some reason that enraged him all the more.
‘I never asked you to come!’ He was shouting. He felt fifteen again, alone in Joe’s cellar, with broken bottles and jars all around. ‘I never asked for your help! I never wanted you here! Why are you here, anyway? Why don’t you just leave me alone!’
Joe waited patiently for him to finish. ‘Ave you done?’ he said when Jay fell silent. ‘Ave you bloody done?’
Jay began to cut away at the rose bushes again, not looking at him. ‘Get lost, Joe,’ he said, almost inaudibly.
‘I bloody might, anall,’ said Joe. ‘Think I’ve not got better things to be doing? Better places to travel to? Think I’ve got allt time int bloody world, do yer?’ His accent was thickening, as it always did on the rare occasions Jay saw him annoyed. Jay turned his back.
‘Reight.’ There was a heavy finality in the word, which made him want to turn back, but he did not. ‘Please thyssen. I’ll sithee.’
Jay forced himself to work at the bushes for several minutes. He could hear nothing behind him but the singing of birds and the shlush of the freshening wind across the fields. Joe had gone. And this time, Jay wasn’t sure whether he ever would see him again.
37
GOING INTO AGEN THE NEXT MORNING, JAY FOUND A NOTE FROM his agent. In it Nick sounded plaintive and excited, the words underscored heavily to emphasize their importance. ‘Get in touch with me. It’s urgent.’ Jay phoned him from Joséphine’s café. There was no phone at the farm, and he had no plans to install one. Nick sounded very faint, like a distant radio station. In the foreground Jay could hear café sounds, the chinking of glasses, the shuffle of draughts pieces, laughter, raised voices.
‘Jay! Jay, I’m so glad to hear you. It’s going crazy here. The new book’s great. I’ve sent it to half a dozen publishers already. It’s—’
‘It isn’t finished,’ Jay pointed out.
‘That doesn’t matter. It’s going to be terrific. Obviously the foreign climate is doing you good. Now what I urgently need is a—’
‘Wait.’ Jay was beginning to feel disorientated. ‘I’m not ready.’
Nick must have heard something in his voice, because he slowed down then. ‘Hey, take it easy. No-one’s going to pressure you. No-one even knows where you are.’
‘That’s fine by me,’ Jay told him. ‘I need some more time on my own. I’m happy here, pottering around the garden, thinking about my book.’
He could hear Nick’s mind clicking over the possibilities. ‘O?. If that’s what you want, I’ll keep people away. I’ll slow things down. What do I tell Kerry? She’s been on the phone to me every other day, demanding to
know what—’
‘You definitely don’t tell Kerry,’ Jay told him urgently. ‘She’s the last person I want over here.’
‘Oho,’ said Nick.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Been doing a bit of cherchez la femme, have you?’ He sounded amused. ‘Checking out the talent?’
‘No.’
‘You sure?’
‘Positive.’
It was true, he thought. He had hardly thought about Marise in weeks. Besides, the woman who first strode out across the pages of his book was a far cry from the recluse across the fields. It was her story he was interested in.
At Nick’s insistence, he gave him Joséphine’s number in case he needed to pass on an urgent message. Again, Nick asked when he would be able to see the rest of the manuscript. Jay couldn’t tell him. He didn’t even want to think about it. He already felt uncomfortable that Nick had shown it unfinished without his permission, even though he was only doing his job. He put down the phone to find that Joséphine had already brought over a fresh pot of coffee to his table. Roux and Poitou were sitting there with Popotte, the postwoman. Jay knew a moment’s complete disorientation. London had never seemed so far away before.
He came home as usual, across the fields. It had rained during the night and the path was slippery, the hedges dripping. He skirted the road and followed the river to the border of Marise’s land, enjoying the silence and the rain-heavy trees. There was no sign of Marise in the vineyard. Jay could see a small blur of smoke above the chimney of the other farm, but that was the only movement. Even the birds were silent. He was planning to cross the river at its narrowest, shallowest point, where Marise’s land joined his. On either side there was a swell of banking topped by trees; a screen of fruit trees on her side and a messy tangle of hawthorn and elder on his. He noticed, as he passed, that the red ribbons he had tied to the branches had gone – blown away by the wind again, most likely. He would have to find a better way of securing them. The river flattened and shallowed out at that point, and when it rained the water spread out, making islands of the clumps of reeds and digging the red soil of the riverbank to make extravagant shapes, which the sun baked hard as clay. There were stepping stones at this crossing place, worn shiny by the river and the passage of many feet, though only he passed here now. At least, so he thought.
But when he reached the crossing place there was a girl squatting precariously by the riverbank, poking a stick at the silent water. At her side a small brown goat stared placidly. The movement he made alerted the child, and she stiffened. Eyes as bright and curious as the goat’s fixed on him.
For a moment they stared at each other, she frozen to the spot, eyes wide; Jay transfixed with an overwhelming sense of déjà vu.
It was Gilly.
She was wearing an orange pullover and green trousers rolled up to her knees. Her discarded shoes lay a short distance away in the grass. To her side lay a red rucksack, its mouth gaping. The necklace of knotted red ribbons around her neck solved the mystery of what had been happening to Jay’s talismans.
Looking at her more closely he could see now that she wasn’t Gilly after all. The curly hair was more chestnut than red, and she was young, surely no more than eight or nine, but all the same, the resemblance was more than striking. She had the same vivid, freckled face, wide mouth, suspicious green eyes. She had the same way of looking, the same knee cocked out at an angle. Not Gilly, no, but so like her that it caught at the heart. Jay understood that this must be Rosa.
She fixed him with a long unsmiling stare, then grabbed for her shoes and fled. The goat shied nervously and danced across towards Jay, stopping briefly to chew at the straps of the abandoned rucksack. The girl moved as quickly as the goat, using her hands to pull herself up the slippery banking towards the fence.
‘Wait!’ Jay called after her. She ignored him. Quick as a weasel she was up the banking, only turning then to poke out her tongue at him in mute challenge.
‘Wait!’ Jay held out his hands to show her he meant no harm. ‘It’s all right. Don’t run away.’
The girl stared at him, whether in curiosity or hostility he couldn’t tell, her head slightly to one side, as if in concentration. There was no way of knowing whether she had understood.
‘Hello, Rosa,’ said Jay.
The child just stared.
‘I’m Jay. I live over there.’ He pointed to the farm, just visible behind the trees.
She was not looking directly at him, he noticed, but at something slightly to the left and down from where he was standing. Her posture was tense, ready to pounce. Jay felt in his pocket for something to give her – a sweet, perhaps, or a biscuit – but all he could find was his lighter. It was a Bic, made of cheap coloured plastic, and it shone in the sun.
‘You can have this, if you like,’ he suggested, holding it out across the water. The child did not react. Maybe she couldn’t lip-read, he told himself.
On his side of the riverbank the goat bleated and butted gently against his legs. Rosa glanced at him, then at the goat, with a mixture of scorn and anxiety. He noticed her eyes kept moving back to the discarded rucksack, abandoned by the side of the river. He bent down and picked it up. The goat transferred its interest from Jay’s legs to the sleeve of his shirt with unnerving rapidity. He held out the rucksack.
‘Is this yours?’
On the far bank the girl took a step forwards.
‘It’s all right.’ Jay spoke slowly, in case she couldn’t lipread, and smiled. ‘Look. I’ll bring it over.’ He made for the stepping stones, holding the heavy rucksack in his arms. The goat watched him with a cynical expression. Hampered as he was with the rucksack his approach was clumsy. He looked up to smile at the girl, lost his footing on a rain-slippery stone, skidded and almost fell. The goat, which was following him curiously across the stones, nudged past unexpectedly, and Jay took a blind step forwards, and landed squarely in the swollen river.
Rosa and the goat watched in silence. Both seemed to be grinning.
‘Damn.’ Jay tried wading back to the bank. There was more current than he had expected, and he moved drunkenly across the river stones, his boots skidding in the mud. The rucksack seemed to be the only dry thing on his person.
Rosa grinned again.
The expression transformed her. It was a curiously sunny, sudden grin, her teeth very white in her dappled face. She laughed almost soundlessly, stamping her bare feet on the grass in a pantomime of mirth. Then she was off again, picking up her shoes and clambering up the incline towards the orchard. The goat followed her, nibbling affectionately at a dangling shoelace. As they reached the top, Rosa turned and waved, though whether this was a gesture of defiance or affection Jay could not tell.
When she had gone he realized he still had her rucksack. On opening it he found inside a number of items only a child could treasure: a jar of snails, some pieces of wood, river stones, string and a number of the red talismans, carefully tied together with their ribbons to form a bright garland. Jay replaced all the treasures inside the bag, then he hung the rucksack up on a gatepost close to the hedge, in the same place he had hung the dragon’s head a fortnight earlier. He was sure Rosa would find it.
* * *
‘I HAVEN’T SEEN HER FOR MONTHS,’ SAID JOSÉPHINE LATER IN THE café. ‘Marise doesn’t send her to school any more. It’s a pity. A little girl like that needs friends.’ Jay nodded.
‘She used to go to the village playgroup,’ remembered Joséphine. ‘She must have been three, maybe a little younger. She could still talk a little then, but I don’t think she could hear anything.’
‘Oh?’ Jay was curious. ‘I thought she was born deaf.’
Joséphine shook her head. ‘No. It was some kind of infection. It was the year Tony died. A bad winter. The river flooded again, and half of Marise’s fields were underwater for three months. Plus there was that business with the police …’
Jay looked at her enquiringly.
?
??Oh yes. Ever since Tony died Mireille has been trying to pin the blame on Marise. There’d been some kind of a quarrel, she said. Tony would never have killed himself. She tried to make out there was another man, or something, that together they’d conspired to murder Tony.’ She shook her head, frowning. ‘Mireille was half out of her mind,’ she said. ‘I think she would have said anything. Of course, it never came to that. The police came round, asked some questions, went away. I think they had the measure of Mireille by then. But she spent the next three or four years writing letters, campaigning, petitioning. Someone came round once or twice, that’s all. But nothing came of it. She’s been spreading rumours that Marise keeps the child locked up in a back room, or something.’
‘I don’t think that’s true.’ The vivid, dappled child Jay had seen gave no impression of having ever been shut up in a back room.
Joséphine shrugged. ‘No, I don’t think so either,’ she said. ‘But by that time the damage was done. Gangs of people gathering at the gate of the farm and across the river. Do-gooders, for the most part, harmless enough, but Marise wasn’t to know that, holed up in her house, with torches burning outside and people letting off firecrackers and throwing stones at the shutters.’ She shook her head. ‘By the time things settled down it was too late,’ she explained. ‘She was already convinced everyone was against her. And then when Rosa disappeared …’
Joséphine poured a measure of cognac into her coffee. ‘I suppose she thought we were all in it. You can’t hide much in a village, and everybody knew that Mireille had Rosa staying with her. The child was three then, and we all thought they must have made it up between them somehow, and Rosa was there for a visit. Of course, Caro Clairmont knew otherwise, and so did a few others, Joline Drou, who was her best friend at the time, and Cussonnet the doctor. But the rest of us … well, no-one asked. People reckoned that after what had happened perhaps they ought to mind their own business. And no-one really knew Marise, of course.’
‘She doesn’t make it easy,’ observed Jay.
‘Rosa was missing for about three days. Mireille only tried taking her out of the house once. The first day. That didn’t last long. You could hear her screaming right down to Les Marauds. Whatever else was wrong with her, she had a good pair of lungs. Nothing would make her be quiet, not sweets, or presents, or fussing, or shouting. They all tried – Caro, Joline, Toinette – but still the child wouldn’t stop screaming. Finally Mireille got worried and called the doctor. They put their heads together and took her to a specialist in Agen. It just wasn’t normal for a child that age to scream all the time. They thought she was disturbed, that perhaps she’d been mistreated in some way.’ She frowned. ‘Then Marise came to pick up Rosa from the playgroup, and found that the doctor and Mireille had taken her to Agen instead. I’ve never seen anyone so angry. She followed them on her moped, but all she could find out was that Mireille had taken Rosa to some kind of hospital. For tests, she said. I don’t know what they were trying to prove.’