‘I’ll make you a drink,’ he suggested. ‘Here, take your coats off.’ He hung their slickers in the kitchen to drip and put on some water to boil. ‘Coffee? Chocolate? Wine?’
‘Some chocolate for Rosa, thank you,’ said Marise. ‘Our electricity is down. The generator shorted.’
‘Jesus.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ Her voice was calm and businesslike. ‘I can fix it. We’ve had this kind of problem before. The marshland is very prone to flooding.’ She looked at him. ‘I have to ask you for help,’ she said reluctantly.
Jay thought it was an odd way of putting it. I have to ask you.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Anything.’
Marise sat down stiffly at the table. She was wearing jeans and a green jumper, which brought out the green in her eyes. She touched the typewriter keys tentatively. Jay saw that her nails were cut very short, and that there was dirt under them.
‘You don’t have to say yes,’ she said. ‘It’s just an idea I had.’
‘Go on.’
‘Do you write with this?’ She touched the typewriter again. ‘Your books, I mean?’
Jay nodded. ‘I always did have a retrogressive streak,’ he admitted. ‘Can’t stand computers.’
She smiled. She looked tired, he noticed, her eyes strained and bruised-looking. For the first time, and with a feeling of surprise, he saw her as vulnerable.
‘It’s Rosa,’ she said at last. ‘I’m worried she might catch cold – fall ill – if she stays in the house. I wondered if you would perhaps find room for her in your farm for a few days. Only a few days,’ she repeated. ‘Until I can get the house back into shape. I’ll pay you.’ She pulled out a bundle of notes from the pocket of her jeans and pushed them across the table. ‘She’s a good girl. She wouldn’t interfere with your work.’
‘I don’t want money,’ said Jay.
‘But I—’
‘I’d be happy to take Rosa. You, too, if you like. I have plenty of room for both of you.’ She looked at him with an air of bewilderment, as if in surprise that he had given in so easily.
‘I can imagine the problems the flooding has caused,’ he told her. ‘You’re very welcome to use the farm for as long as you like. If you want to bring some clothes—’
‘No,’ she said quickly. ‘I have too many things to do at home. But Rosa …’ She swallowed. ‘I would be very grateful. If you would.’
Rosa was exploring the room. Jay could see her looking at the pile of typed sheets he had arranged in a box on the end of his bed.
‘Is this English?’ she enquired curiously. ‘Is this your English book?’ Jay nodded. ‘See if you can find some biscuits in the kitchen,’ he told her. ‘The chocolate will be ready soon.’ Rosa scampered off through the doorway.
‘Can I bring Clopette with me when I come?’ she called from the kitchen.
‘I don’t see why not,’ said Jay mildly.
From the other room Rosa gave a crow of triumph. Marise looked at her hands. Her face was careful and expressionless. Outside the wind rattled the shutters.
‘Perhaps you’d like that wine now,’ Jay suggested.
55
AND THEN THERE WAS ONE. THE LAST OF JOE’S SPECIALS. NO more after that, not ever. As he reached for it in the rack he felt a sudden reluctance to open it, but it was already alive in his hand, black-corded Damson ’76, releasing its scent as he touched it, effervescent. Joe made himself scarce, as he often did when Jay had company, but Jay could just see him, standing in the shadows beside the kitchen door, the light from the table lamp gleaming on his bald forehead. He was wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt and holding his pit cap in his hand. His face was little more than a blur, but Jay knew he was smiling.
‘I don’t know if you’ll like it,’ said Jay, pouring the wine. ‘It’s a special kind of home-brew.’ The purple scent was thick, almost cloying. To Jay it had an aftertaste which reminded him of the sherbert fountains Gilly had enjoyed so much. To Marise it was more like a jar of jam which has remained sealed for too long and has become sugar. The taste was tannic, penetrating. It warmed her.
‘It’s strange,’ she said through numbed lips. ‘But I think I like it.’ She sipped again, feeling the heat crawl down her throat and into her body. A scent like distilled sunlight filled the room. To Jay it felt suddenly right that they should drink it together, this last of Joe’s bottles. Strange, too, that the taste, though peculiar, should be oddly pleasant. Maybe at last, as Joe had predicted, he was getting used to it.
‘I’ve found the biscuits,’ announced Rosa, appearing at the doorway with one in each hand. ‘Can I go upstairs and look at my room?’
Jay nodded.
‘You do that. I’ll call you when the chocolate’s ready.’
Marise looked at him. She knew she should feel wary, but instead there was a softness working through her, smoothing away all tension. She felt very young again, as if the scent of the strange wine had released something from her childhood. She remembered a party dress precisely the colour of the wine, a velvet party dress cut down from an old skirt of Mémée’s, a tune played on the piano, a night sky wide with stars. His eyes were exactly the same colour. She felt as if she had known him for years.
‘Marise,’ said Jay quietly. ‘You know you can talk to me.’
It was as if she had been dragging something heavy behind her for the past seven years and had only just realized it. It was as simple as that. You can talk to me. Joe’s bottle was a hive of secrets, uncoiling like busy vines in the still air, peopling the shadows.
‘There’s nothing wrong with Rosa’s hearing, is there?’ It was barely a question. She shook her head. She forced the words out like bullets.
‘It was a bad winter. She developed ear infections. There was a complication. She was deaf for six months. I took her to see specialists. There was an operation – very expensive. I was told not to expect too much.’ She drank a little more of Joe’s wine. It was rough with sugar. There was a syrupy residue at the bottom of the glass which tasted like damson jelly. ‘I paid for special lessons for her,’ she continued. ‘I learned sign language and continued to teach her myself. There was another operation – even more expensive. Within two years ninety per cent of her hearing was restored.’
Jay nodded. ‘But why the pretence? Why not simply—’
‘Mireille.’ Strange that this wine, which should have made her garrulous, should instead have made her terse. ‘She’s already tried to take her from me. All she has left of Tony, she says. I knew that if she once managed to get hold of Rosa I’d never get her back. I wanted to stop her. It was the only way I could think of. If she couldn’t talk to her, if she thought she was damaged in some way …’ She swallowed. ‘Mireille can’t bear imperfection. Less than perfect doesn’t interest her. That’s why when Tony—’ She stopped abruptly.
She should not trust him, Marise thought to herself. The wine was drawing more out of her than she was prepared to give. Wine talks, and talk is dangerous. The last man she had trusted was dead. Everything she touched – the vines, Tony, Patrice – died. Easy enough to believe that it was something she carried, passing it on to everyone with whom she came into contact. But the wine was strong. It rocked her gently in a cradle of scents and memories. It teased out her secrets.
Trust me. The voice from the bottle snickered and crooned. Trust me.
She poured another glassful and downed it recklessly.
‘I’ll tell you,’ she said.
56
‘I MET HIM WHEN I WAS TWENTY-ONE,’ SHE BEGAN. ‘HE WAS MUCH older than me. He was a day patient in the psychiatric ward in Nantes hospital, where I was a student nurse. His name was Patrice.’
He was tall and dark, like Jay. He spoke three languages. He told her he was a lecturer at the Université de Rennes. He was divorced. He was funny and wry and wore his depression with style. There was a ladder of cuts up his right wrist from an unsuccessful suicide attempt. He drank. He’d taken drugs. She??
?d thought he was cured.
Marise did not look up as she spoke of him, but instead watched her hands climb up and down the stem of the wineglass, as if playing a glass flute.
‘At twenty-one you’re so eager to find love that you see it in every stranger’s face,’ she said softly. ‘And Patrice was a real stranger. I saw him several times outside the hospital. I slept with him once. That was enough.’
After that he changed almost instantly. As if a steel cage had come down over them, they were trapped together. He became possessive, not in the charming, slightly insecure way which had first attracted her, but in a cold, suspicious manner, which frightened her. He quarrelled with her constantly. He followed her to work and harangued her on the ward. He tried to make up for his rages with lavish presents, which frightened her even more. Finally, he broke into her flat one evening and tried to rape her at knifepoint.
‘That was it,’ she remembered. ‘I’d had enough. I played along for a while, then made an excuse to go to the bathroom. He was full of plans. We were going to go away together to a place he knew in the country, where I’d be safe. That was what he said. Safe.’ She shivered.
Marise locked herself in the bathroom and climbed out of the window onto the roof, using the fire escape to reach the street. But by the time the police arrived, Patrice was gone. She changed the locks on her doors and secured the windows.
‘But it didn’t stop there. He would park his car outside the flat and watch me all the time. He would have things delivered to my door. Presents. Threats. Flowers.’ He was persistent. Over weeks his harassment escalated. A funeral wreath, delivered to her workplace. The locks forced and the entire flat redecorated in black while she was at work. A parcel of excrement, gift-wrapped in silver paper, on her birthday. Graffiti on her door. A mountain of unwanted mail-order items in her name: fetishwear, farm equipment, orthopaedic supplies, erotic literature. Little by little her courage was eroded. The police were powerless to help. Without proof of physical harm, they would have had little with which to charge him. They called on the address Patrice had given to the hospital, only to find it was that of a timber yard outside Nantes. No-one there had even heard of him.
‘Finally I moved out,’ she said. ‘I left the flat and bought a ticket to Paris. I changed my name. I rented a little apartment in Rue de la Jonquière, and I found a job in a clinic in Marne-la-Vallée. I thought I was safe.’
It took him eight months to find her.
‘He used my medical records,’ explained Marise. ‘He must have managed to talk someone at the hospital into giving them to him. He could be very persuasive. Very plausible.’
She moved again, changed her name again and dyed her hair. For six months she worked as a waitress in a bar in Avenue de Clichy before finding another nursing job. She tried to erase herself from all official documentation. She allowed her medical insurance to lapse and did not transfer her records. She cancelled her credit card and paid all her bills in cash. This time it took Patrice almost a year to find her new address.
He had changed in a year. He had shaved his head and wore army surplus clothes. His siege of her flat had all the precision of a military campaign. There were no more practical jokes, no unwanted pizzas or begging notes. Even the threats stopped. She saw him twice, sitting in a car beneath her window, but when two weeks passed and there was no further sign of him she began to believe she had been mistaken. A few days later she awoke to the smell of gas. He had bypassed the main supply somehow, and she could find no way to turn it off. She tried the door, but it was jammed shut, wedged from the outside. The windows, too, were nailed shut, though her flat was on the third floor. The phone was out. She managed to break a window and scream for help, but it had been too close. She fled to Marseilles. Began again. That was where she met Tony.
‘He was nineteen,’ she remembered. ‘I was working on the psychiatric ward of Marseilles general hospital, and he was a patient. From what I understood he had been suffering from depression following his father’s death.’ She smiled wryly. ‘I should have known better than to involve myself with another patient, but we were both vulnerable. He was so young. His attention flattered me, that was all. And I was good with him. I could make him laugh. That flattered me, too.’
By the time she had realized how he felt it was too late. He was infatuated with her.
‘I told myself I could love him,’ she said. ‘He was funny and kind and easy to manipulate. After Patrice, I thought that was all I wanted. And he kept telling me about this farm, this place. It sounded so safe, so beautiful. Every day I would wake up and wonder if this was going to be the day Patrice found me again. It would have been easy enough if he’d traced me to Marseilles. There were only so many hospitals and clinics he could check. Tony offered me a kind of protection from that. And he needed me. That already meant a lot.’
She allowed herself to be persuaded. At first Lansquenet seemed everything she had ever wanted. But soon there were clashes between Marise and Tony’s mother, who refused to accept the truth about his illness.
‘She wouldn’t listen to me,’ explained Marise. ‘Tony was up and down all the time. He needed medication. If he didn’t take it he got worse, locking himself up in the house for days at a time, not washing, just watching TV and drinking beer and eating. Oh, he looked all right to outsiders. That was part of the problem. I had to keep him in check all the time. I played the part of the nagging wife. I had to.’
Jay poured the last of the wine into her glass. Even the dregs were highly scented, and for a moment he thought he could distinguish all the rest of Joe’s wines in that final glassful, raspberry and roses and elderflower and blackberry and damson and jackapple, all in one. No more Specials, he told himself with a tug of sadness. No more magic. Marise had stopped talking. Her maple-red hair obscured her face. Jay had the sudden feeling that he’d known her for years. Her presence at his table was as natural, as familiar as that of his old typewriter. He put his hand on hers. Her kiss would taste of roses. She looked up, and her eyes were as green as his orchard.
‘Maman!’
Rosa’s voice cut through the moment with shrill insistence.
‘I’ve found a little room upstairs! There’s a round window and a blue bed, shaped like a boat! It’s a bit dusty, but I could clean it up, couldn’t I, Maman? Couldn’t I?’
Her hand moved away.
‘Of course. If monsieur … if Jay …’ She looked confused, awoken in the middle of a dream. She pushed the half-empty wineglass away from her.
‘I should go,’ she said quickly. ‘It’s getting late. I’ll bring Rosa’s things across. Thank you for—’
‘It’s all right.’ Jay tried to put his hand on her arm, but she pulled away. ‘You can both stay if you like. I have plenty of—’
‘No.’ Suddenly she was the old Marise again, the confidences at an end. ‘I have to bring Rosa’s sleeping things. It’s time she was in bed.’ She hugged Rosa briefly but fiercely. ‘You be good,’ she advised. ‘And please’ – this was to Jay – ‘don’t mention this in the village. Not to anyone.’
She unhooked her yellow slicker from the peg behind the kitchen door and pulled it on. Outside, the rain was still falling.
‘Promise,’ said Marise.
‘Of course.’
She nodded, a curt, polite nod, as if concluding the business between them. Then she was gone into the rain.
Jay closed the door behind her and turned to Rosa.
‘Well? Is the chocolate ready?’ she asked.
He grinned. ‘Let’s see, shall we?’
He poured the drink into a wide-mouthed cup with flowers on the rim. Rosa curled up on his bed with the cup and watched curiously as he tidied away the cups and glasses and put the empty bottle aside.
‘Who was he?’ she asked at last. ‘Is he English, too?’
‘Who’s that?’ Jay called from the kitchen, running water into the sink.
‘The old man,’ said Rosa. ‘The old man from
upstairs.’
Jay turned off the tap and looked at her.
‘You saw him? You talked to him?’
Rosa nodded.
‘An old man with a funny hat on,’ she said. ‘He told me to tell you something.’ She took a long drink of her chocolate, emerging from the cup with a frothy foam moustache. Jay felt suddenly shivery, almost afraid.
‘What did he say?’ he whispered.
Rosa frowned.
‘He said to remember the Specials,’ she said. ‘That you’d know what to do.’
‘Anything else?’ Jay’s mouth was dry, his head pounding.
‘Yes.’ She nodded energetically. ‘He told me to say goodbye.’
57
Pog Hill Lane, February 1999
IT WAS TWENTY-TWO YEARS BEFORE JAY WENT BACK TO POG HILL. Part of it was anger, another part fear. He had never felt as if he belonged before. London certainly wasn’t home. The places he’d lived all looked the same to him, with small variations in size and design. Flats. Bedsits. Even Kerry’s Kensington house. Places in passing. But this year was different. Pick your own cliché, as Joe would have said. Perhaps it was simply that for the first time there were greater fears than going back to Pog Hill. Nearly fifteen years since Jackapple Joe. Since then, nothing. This went beyond writer’s block. He felt as if he were stuck in time, forced to write and rewrite the fantasies of his adolescence. Jackapple Joe was the first – the only – adult book he had written. But instead of releasing him it had trapped him in childhood. In 1977 he had rejected magic. He had had enough, he told himself. Enough and enough and enough. He was on his own, and that was the way he wanted it. As if when he dropped Joe’s seeds into the cutting at Pog Hill he was also letting go of everything he’d clung to during those past three years: the talismans, the red ribbons, Gilly, the dens, the wasps’ nests, the treks along the railway lines and the fights at Nether Edge. Everything blowing away into the cutting with the litter and the ash of the railbed. Then Jackapple Joe put it to rest at last. Or so he had thought. But there must have been something left. Curiosity, perhaps. An itch at the back of his mind which refused to be scratched. Some remnant of belief.