‘Thank you.’ She gave a formal little nod. ‘My lovely roses. I’ll put them into water. Come in, and I’ll make some tea.’
Her house was clean and airy, with the whitewashed walls and stone floors of the region, but its simplicity was deceptive. An Aubusson rug hung on one wall, and there was a grandfather clock in the corner of the living room which Kerry would have sold her soul for. Mireille saw him looking. ‘That belonged to my grandmother,’ she said. ‘It used to be in my nursery when I was a child. I remember listening to the chimes when I lay awake in bed. It plays a different carillon for the hour, the half and the quarter. Tony loved it.’ Her mouth tightened, and she turned away to arrange the roses in a bowl. ‘Tony’s daughter would have loved it.’
The tea was weak, like flower water. She served it in what must have been her best Limoges, with silver tongs for the sugar and lemon.
‘I’m sure she would. If only her mother were a little less reclusive.’
Mireille looked at him. Derisively. ‘Reclusive? Héh! She’s antisocial, Monsieur Jay. Hates everyone. Her family more than anyone else.’ She sipped her tea. ‘I would have helped her if she’d let me. I wanted to bring them both to live with me. Give the child what she needs most. A proper home. A family. But she—’ She put down the cup. Jay noticed that she never called Marise by name. ‘She insists on maintaining the terms of the lease. She insists she will stay until next July, when it expires. Refuses to come to the village. Refuses to talk to me or to my nephew, who offers to help her. And afterwards, héh? She plans to buy the land from Pierre-Emile. Why? She wants to be independent, she says. She doesn’t want to owe us anything.’ Mireille’s face was a clenched fist. ‘Owe us! She owes me everything. I gave her a home. I gave her my son! There’s nothing left of him now but the child. And even there she’s managed to take her from us. Only she can talk to her, with that sign language she uses. She’ll never know about her father and how he died. She’s even fixed that. Even if I could—’
The old woman broke off abruptly. ‘Never mind, héh!’ she said with an effort. ‘She’ll come round eventually. She’ll have to come round. She can’t hold out for ever. Not when I—’ Again she broke off, her teeth snapping together with a small brittle sound.
‘I don’t see why she should be so hostile,’ said Jay at last. ‘The village is such a friendly place. Look how friendly everyone’s been to me. If she gave people a chance I’m sure they’d welcome her. It can’t be easy, living on her own. You’d think she’d be pleased to know people were concerned—’
‘You don’t understand.’ Mireille’s voice was contemptuous. ‘She knows what sort of welcome she’d get if she ever showed her face here. That’s why she stays away. Ever since he brought her here from Paris it’s been the same. She never fitted in. Never even tried. Everyone knows what she did, héh. I’ve made sure of that.’ Her black eyes narrowed in triumph.
‘Everybody knows how she murdered my son.’
43
‘WELL, SHE EXAGGERATES, YOU KNOW,’ SAID CLAIRMONT peaceably. They were in the Café des Marauds, which was filling up rapidly with its after-work crowd, he in his oil-stained overalls and blue beret, a group of his workers, Roux amongst them, gathered around a table behind him. The comfortable reek of Gauloises and coffee filled the air. Someone behind them was discussing a recent football match. Joséphine was busy microwaving pizza slices.
‘Héh, José, un croque, tu veux bien?’
On the counter stood a bowl of boiled eggs and a dish of salt. Clairmont took one and began to peel it carefully. ‘I mean, everyone knows she didn’t actually kill him. But there are plenty of other ways than pulling the trigger, héh?’
‘Driven him to it, you mean?’
Clairmont nodded. ‘He was an easy-going lad. Thought she was perfect. Did everything for her, even after they were married. Wouldn’t hear a word spoken against her. Said she was highly strung and delicate. Well, maybe she was, héh?’ He helped himself to salt from the dish. ‘The way he was with her, you’d have thought she was glass. She’d just come out of one of those hospitals, he said. Something wrong with her nerves.’ Clairmont laughed. ‘Nerves, héh! Wasn’t anything wrong with her nerves. But anyone dared say anything about her—’ He shrugged. ‘Killed himself trying to please her, poor Tony. Worked himself half to death for her, then shot himself when she tried to leave him.’ He bit into his egg with melancholy gusto.
‘Oh yes, she was going to leave,’ he added, seeing Jay’s surprise. ‘Had her bags all packed and ready. Mireille saw them. There’d been some row,’ he explained, finishing the egg and gesturing to Joséphine for a second blonde. ‘There was always some kind of a row going on in that place. But this time it really looked as if she was going to go through with it. Mireille—’
‘What is it?’ Joséphine was carrying a tray of microwaved pizzas, and looked flushed and tired.
‘Two Stellas, José.’
Joséphine handed him the bottles, which he opened using the bottle-opener fixed into the bar. She gave him a narrow look before moving on with the pizzas.
‘Well anyway, that was that,’ finished Clairmont, pouring the beers. ‘They made out it was an accident, héh, as you would. But everyone knows that crazy wife of his was behind it.’ He grinned. ‘The funny thing was that she didn’t get a penny from his will. She’s at the mercy of the family. It was a seven-year lease – they can’t do anything about that – but when it runs out, héh!’ He shrugged expressively. ‘Then she’ll be gone, and good riddance to her.’
‘Unless she buys the farm herself,’ said Jay. ‘Mireille said she might try.’
Clairmont’s face darkened for a moment. ‘I’d bid against her myself if I could afford it,’ he declared, draining his glass. ‘That’s good building land. I could build a dozen holiday chalets on that old vineyard. Pierre-Emile’s an idiot if he lets it go to her.’ He shook his head. ‘All we need is a bit of luck and land prices in Lansquenet could rocket. Look at Le Pinot. That land could make a fortune if you developed it properly. But you’d never see her doing that. Wouldn’t even give up the marshland by the river when they were thinking about widening the road. Blocked the plan out of sheer meanness.’ He shook his head.
‘But things are on the up now, héh?’ His good humour was already restored, his grin oddly at variance with his mournful moustache. ‘In a year, maybe two, we could make Le Pinot look like a Marseilles bidonville. Now that things are beginning to change.’ Once again he gave his humble, eager grin. ‘All it takes is one person to make a difference, Monsieur Jay. Isn’t that right?’
He tapped the rim of his glass against Jay’s and winked.
‘Santé!’
44
FUNNY, HOW EASILY IT ALL CAME BACK. FOUR WEEKS NOW since his last sighting of Joe and still he felt as if the old man might reappear at any moment. The red flannel sachets were in place in the vegetable garden and at the corners of the house. The trees at the land’s boundary were similarly adorned, though the wind kept stripping them off. Marigolds, propagated in the home-made cold frame, were beginning to open their bright petals amongst Narcisse’s seed potatoes. Poitou baked a special couronne loaf in thanks for his grain pack, which, he claimed, had given him more relief than any drug. Of course, Jay knew he would have said that anyway.
Now his garden had the best collection of herbs in the village. The lavender was still green, but already more pungent than Joe’s had ever been, and there was thyme and cologne mint and lemon balm and rosemary and great drifts of basil. He gave a whole basket of these to Popotte when she came by with the mail, and another to Rodolphe. Joe often gave out little charms – goodwill charms, he called them – to visitors, and Jay began to do the same: tiny bunches of lavender or mint or pineapple sage, tied with ribbons of different colours – red for protection, white for luck, blue for healing. Funny how it all came back. People assumed this was another English custom, the general explanation for all his eccentricities. Some took to wearing the
se little posies pinned to their coats and jackets – though it was May it was still too cool for the locals to wear their summer clothing, though Jay had long since turned to shorts and T-shirts for everyday wear. Strangely enough Jay found the return to Joe’s familiar customs rather comforting. When he was a boy Joe’s perimeter rituals, his incense, sachets, pig-Latin incantations and sprinklings of herbs too often irritated him. He found them embarrassing, like someone singing too fervently in school assembly. To his adolescent self, much of Joe’s everyday magic seemed rather too commonplace, too natural, like cookery or gardening, stripped of its mysteries. Serious though he was about his workings, there was a cheery practicality to all of it, which made Jay’s romantic soul rebel. He would have preferred solemn invocations, black robes and midnight ritual. That he might have believed. Reared on comic books and trash fiction, that at least would have rung true. Now that it was too late, Jay found he had rediscovered the peace of working with the soil. Everyday magic, Joe used to call it. Layman’s alchemy. Now he understood what the old man meant. But in spite of all this Joe stayed away. Jay prepared the land for his return like a well-raked seedbed. He planted and weeded according to the lunar cycle, as Joe would have done. He did everything right. He tried to have faith.
He told himself that Joe was never there at all, that it was in his imagination. But perversely, now Joe was gone he needed to believe it was otherwise. Joe was really there, a part of him insisted. Really there, and he had blown it with his anger and disbelief. If only he could make him come back, Jay promised himself, things would be different. There were so many things left unfinished. He felt a helpless rage at himself. He’d had a second chance, and stupidly he’d blown it. He worked in the garden every day until dusk. He was sure Joe would come. That he could make him come.
45
PERHAPS AS A RESULT OF DWELLING SO CONSTANTLY ON THE past, Jay found himself spending more and more time by the river, where the cutaway dropped sharply into the water. There he found a wasps’ nest in the ground, under the hedge close by, and he watched it with relentless fascination, recalling that summer in 1977, and how he was stung, and Gilly’s laughter at the den at Nether Edge. He lay on his stomach and watched the wasps shuttling in and out of the hole in the ground and imagined he could hear them moving just under the surface. Above them the sky was white and troubling. The remaining Specials were as silent, as troubling as the sky. Even their whispering was suspended.
It was as he lay beside the riverbank that Rosa found him. His eyes were open, but he did not seem to be looking at anything. The radio, swinging from a branch overhanging the water, was playing Elvis Presley. At his side stood an opened bottle of wine. Its label, too far away for her to read it, said ‘Raspberry ’75’. There was a red cord knotted around the neck of the bottle, which caught her eye. As she watched, the Englishman reached for the bottle and drank from it. He made a face, as if the taste were unpleasant, but from across the river she caught the scent of what he was drinking – a sudden bright flare of ripe scarlet, wild berries gathered in secret. She studied him for a moment from the other side of the river. In spite of what maman told her, he looked harmless. And this was the man who tied the funny little red bags on the trees. She wondered why. At first her taking them was a defiant gesture, erasing him as much as possible from her place, but she had come to like them, their dangling shapes like small red fruit on the shaken branches. She no longer minded sharing her secret place with him. Rosa shifted her position to squat more comfortably in the long weeds on the far side of the river. She considered crossing, but the stepping stones had submerged in recent showers, and she was wary of jumping to the far bank. At her side the curious brown goat nuzzled restlessly at her sleeve. She pushed the goat away with a flapping motion of her hand. Later, Clopette, later. She wondered whether the Englishman knew about the wasps’ nest. He was, after all, less than a metre from its opening.
Jay lifted the bottle again. It was over half empty, and already he felt dizzy, almost drunk. It was in part the sky which gave him this impression, the raindrops zigzagging down onto his upturned face like flakes of soot. The sky went on for ever.
From the bottle the scent intensified, became something which bubbled and seethed. It was a gleeful scent, a breath of high summer, of overripe fruit dripping freely from the branches, heated from below by the sun reflecting from the chalky stones of the railbed. This memory was not entirely pleasant. Perhaps because of the sky he also associated it with his last summer at Pog Hill, the disastrous confrontation with Zeth and the wasps’ nests, Gilly watching in fascination and himself crouching close by. Gilly was always the one who enjoyed wasping. Without her he would never have ventured near a wasps’ nest at all. The thought somehow disturbed him. This wine should have brought back 1975, he told himself aggrievedly. That’s when it was made. A bright year, full of promise and discovery. ‘Sailing’ playing on the radio. That’s what happened before, with the other bottles. But his time machine was two years out, bringing him here instead, sending Joe even further away. He poured the rest of the wine onto the ground and closed his eyes.
A red chuckle from the bottom of the bottle. Jay opened his eyes again, uneasy, certain that someone was watching him. The dregs were almost black in this dull daylight, black and syrupy, like treacle, and from where he was lying there almost seemed to be movement around the neck of the bottle, as if something were trying to escape. He sat up and looked a little closer. Inside the bottle, several wasps were gathered, attracted by the scent of sugar. Two crawled stickily on the neck. Another had flown right into the belly of the bottle to investigate the residue at the bottom. Jay shivered. Wasps sometimes hide in bottles and drinks cans. He knew from that summer. A sting inside the mouth is both painful and dangerous. The wasp crawled thickly against the glass. Its wings were clotted with syrup. He thought he could hear the insect inside the bottle, buzzing in a growing frenzy, but perhaps that was the wine itself calling, its hot bright scent distressing the air, rising like a column of red smoke, a signal, perhaps, or a warning.
Suddenly his closeness to the wasps’ nest appalled him. He realized he could hear the insects beneath him under the soil’s thin crust. He sat up, meaning to move away, but a recklessness seized him, and instead of retreating he moved a little closer.
If Gilly was here …
Nostalgia was upon him again before he could stop it. It dragged at him like a caught bramble. Perhaps it was the scent from the bottle, from the spilled wine on the ground making him feel this way, this trapped summer scent, intoxicating, overwhelming. The radio near by gave a quick crackle of static and began to play ‘I Feel Love’. Jay shivered.
This was ridiculous, he told himself. He had nothing to prove. It was twenty years since he last fired a wasps’ nest. It seemed a reckless, lethal thing to do now, the kind of thing only a child would do, oblivious of the risks. Besides …
A voice – from the bottle, he thought, though it might still be the wine talking – cajoling, a little scornful. It sounded something like Gilly’s voice, something like Joe’s. It was impatient, amused beneath the irritation. If Gilly was here you wouldn’t be so chicken.
Something moved in the long grass on the other side of the river. For a second he thought he saw her, a blur of russet which might be her hair, something else which might be a stripy T-shirt or pullover.
‘Rosa?’
No response. She stared out at him from the long grass, her green eyes bright with curiosity. He could see her now he knew where to look. From a short distance away, he could hear the sound of a goat bleating.
Rosa seemed to look at him with encouragement, almost with expectation. Beneath him he could hear the wasps buzzing, a strangely yeasty sound, as if something below the earth were fermenting wildly. The sound, coupled with Rosa’s expectant look, was too much for him. He felt a burst of exhilaration, something which stripped the years away and made him fourteen again, invulnerable.
‘Watch this,’ he said, a
nd began to move closer to the nest.
Rosa watched him intently. He moved awkwardly, inching towards the hole in the bank. He moved with his head down, as if this would fool the wasps into thinking him invisible. A couple of wasps settled momentarily on his back. She watched as he pulled his handkerchief out of his pocket. There was a lighter in one hand, the same lighter he had offered Rosa that day by the stream. Carefully, he opened the lighter and doused the handkerchief in the fluid. Holding the object at arm’s length, he moved closer to the nest. There was a larger hole under the banking, a hole which might once have housed rats. Around it, a complex of mud honeycomb. A moment’s hesitation, choosing his spot, then he pushed the handkerchief right into the nest, leaving a tag-end of fabric dangling down like a fuse. As she watched, he looked at her and grinned.
Banzai.
He must have been drunk. That was the only explanation he could think of later, but it didn’t feel like being drunk at the time. At the time it felt right. Good. Exciting. Amazing how quickly these things came back. He only had to flip the Bic once. The flame caught instantly, flaring with sudden, incredible fierceness. There must have been plenty of oxygen down the hole. Good. Briefly Jay wished he had brought some firecrackers. For a second or two there was no response from the wasps, then half a dozen came flying out like hot cinders. Jay felt a surge of euphoria and jumped to his feet, ready to run. That was the first mistake. Gilly always taught him to keep low, to find a hiding place from the start and to crouch low, under a root or behind a tree stump, as the enraged wasps came flying out. This time Jay was too busy watching Rosa. The wasps came out in a dreadful surge, and he ran for the bushes. Second mistake. Never run. The movement attracts them, excites them. The best thing is to lie flat on the ground, covering the face. But he panicked. He could smell burning lighter fluid and a vicious stink like burnt carpet. Something stung him on the arm and he slapped at it. Several wasps stung him then, maddeningly, through his T-shirt and on his hands and arms, zinging by his ears like bullets, darkening the air, and Jay lost what cool he had. He swore and slapped at his skin. Another wasp stung him just under the left eye, driving a brilliant lance of pain into his face, and he stepped out blindly, right over the edge of the cutaway and into the water. If the river had been shallower he might have broken his neck. As it was his fall saved him. He hit the water face-first, sank, screamed, swallowed river water, surfaced, sank again, made for the far banking and found himself a minute later several yards downriver, his T-shirt nubby with drowned wasps.