‘He and Tony went out back together. They were gone a long time. When Tony returned it was dark, and he was alone. He told me it was over, that Patrice wouldn’t trouble us again. He was more loving than he’d been for a long time. I began to think things were going to be OK.’
For a few weeks they were happy together. Marise looked after Rosa. Mireille kept her distance. Tony no longer stood guard at night. Then one day, as she went to pick some herbs by the side of the house, Marise found the barn door half open. Going to shut it, she found Patrice’s car, ill-concealed behind some bales of straw.
‘At first he denied it,’ she said. ‘Just like a boy. Refused to admit I’d seen it at all. Then he went into one of his rages. Called me a whore. Accused me of seeing Patrice behind his back. At last he admitted it. He’d taken Patrice into the barn that day and killed him with a spade.’
He showed no remorse. He’d had no choice. If anyone was at fault it was Marise herself. Grinning like a guilty schoolboy, he explained how he had brought the car into the barn and hidden it, then buried Patrice somewhere on the estate.
‘Where?’ asked Marise.
Tony grinned again and shook his head slyly. ‘You’ll never know,’ he said.
After that Tony’s behaviour worsened rapidly. He would spend hours alone with his mother, then would lock himself in his room with the television blaring. He would not even look at Rosa. Marise, recognizing the symptoms of schizophrenia, tried to persuade him to return to his medication, but he no longer trusted her. Mireille had seen to that. He killed himself soon afterwards, and Marise had felt nothing but a guilty kind of relief.
‘I tried to leave after that,’ she said in a flat voice. ‘There was nothing left for me in Lansquenet but bad memories. I packed my bags. I even booked a train ticket to Paris for myself and Rosa. But Mireille stopped me. Tony had left her a letter, she said, telling her everything. Patrice was buried somewhere on the Foudouin estate, at our end or across the river. Only she knew where.’
‘You’ll have to stay here now, héh,’ said Mireille in triumph. ‘I won’t let you take my Rosa away. Otherwise I’ll tell the police you killed the man from Marseilles, that my son told me about it before he died, that he killed himself because he couldn’t stand the burden of protecting you.’
‘She was very persuasive,’ said Marise, with a touch of bitterness. ‘Made it clear that she was keeping quiet for Rosa’s sake. Keeping it in the family.’
After that came the campaign to separate Marise from the rest of the village. It wasn’t difficult; in the course of that year she had hardly spoken to anyone and had spent most of her time isolated on the farm. Mireille released all her hidden resentment. She spread rumours around the village, hinted at dark secrets. Tony had been popular in Lansquenet. Marise was only an outsider from the city. Soon the reprisals began.
‘Oh, nothing too serious,’ said Marise. ‘Letting off fireworks under my windows. Letters. General harassment. I’d had worse with Patrice.’
But it soon became clear that Mireille’s campaign was designed for more than simple spite.
‘She wanted Rosa,’ explained Marise. ‘She thought that, if she could drive me out of Lansquenet, she might be able to keep Rosa for herself. I’d have to let her keep her, you see. Because of what she knew. And if I were arrested for murdering Patrice, she would have had Rosa anyway, as her only close relative.’
She shivered.
And so she’d kept them at bay. All of them. She holed herself up in her farm, deliberately isolating herself from everyone in Lansquenet. Isolating Rosa by using her temporary deafness to deceive Mireille. Patrice’s car she dumped in the marshes, letting it sink deep under the reeds and standing water. Its presence incriminated her still further, she understood. But she needed it to be close. On her land. Where she knew where it was. Remained the body.
‘At first I looked for it,’ she told me. ‘I searched the buildings. Under the floors. Methodically. But it was no use. All the land right down to the marshes belonged to the estate. I couldn’t search every metre.’
Plus there was old Emile. It was always possible that Tony had gone as far as his place. In fact, Mireille had hinted at it already, in her sour, gleeful way, relishing her power and her hold. It was this which made Marise so eager to bid for the Foudouin farm. Jay tried to imagine what she must have felt, seeing him in the house, watching him dig up the beds, wandering round the orchard. Wondering every day whether maybe today—
Impulsively he took her hand. It was cold. He could feel a thin tremor through her fingertips, almost imperceptible. A wave of admiration for her dizzied him. For her courage.
‘That was why you didn’t want anyone working on your land,’ he said. ‘That was why you didn’t give up the marshland for the new hypermarket. That’s why you have to stay here.’
She nodded. ‘I couldn’t let anyone find what he’d hidden,’ she said. ‘So long after the event no-one would believe I had nothing to do with it. And I knew Mireille wouldn’t back me up. She’d never admit that her precious Tony—’ She took a deep breath.
‘So now you know,’ she said with an effort. ‘Now someone else knows.’ She smelt of thyme and rain. Her hair was a fall of flowers. Jay imagined himself telling her what had happened today, seeing the light go out of her green eyes, seeing her face tighten, stony, forbidding.
Someone else might have told her then. Someone of equal courage, equal clarity. Instead he pulled her towards him, feeling her hair against his face, her lips against his, her eager softness in his arms and her breath against his cheek. Her kiss tasted exactly how he’d imagined it: raspberries and smoky roses. They made love there, on Jay’s unmade bed, with the goat looking curiously through the half-closed shutters, and the sweet golden light kaleidoscoping across the dim blue walls.
For a while that seemed enough.
62
SOON. SOON. THEY WERE IN EVERYTHING NOW, THE SPECIALS – IN the air, the ground, the lovers; he lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling; she asleep, her face turned into the pillow like a child’s, her bright hair a pennant against the linen. More potent than ever now, I could feel them, hear their eager voices urging, coaxing. Soon, they whispered, It has to be soon. It has to be now.
Jay looked at Marise asleep beside him. She looked trusting, secure. She murmured something quiet and wordless in her sleep. She smiled. Jay pulled the blanket closer around her and she buried her face in it with a long sigh.
Jay watched her and thought about the morning. There must be something he could do. He could not let her lose the farm. He could not abandon Lansquenet to developers. The film crew was arriving tomorrow. That gave him what? Six hours? Seven?
To do what? What could he do in seven hours? Or seventy, for that matter? What could anyone do?
Joe could do something.
The voice was almost familiar. Cynical, hearty, a little amused.
You know he could.
Sure. He almost spoke aloud. But Joe was dead. Grief surprised him again, as it always did when he thought of Joe. Joe was dead. No more magic. Like the Specials, it had finally run out for good.
Tha never did have much sense, lad.
This time it really was Joe’s voice. For a second his heart leaped, but he realized that Joe’s voice was in his mind, in his memory. Joe’s presence – his real, independent presence – was gone. This was just a substitute. A game. A conceit, like whistling in the dark.
Remember the Specials, I telled you. Don’t you remember?
‘Of course I do,’ whispered Jay helplessly. ‘But there are no Specials any more. They’re all gone. I finished them. I wasted them on trivial stuff, like getting people to tell me things. Like getting Marise—’
Why don’t you bloody listen? Joe’s voice, if it was Joe’s voice, was everywhere now – in the air, in the light from the dying embers, in the glow of her hair spread out across the pillow. Where were you when I was teaching you all those times at Pog Hill? Didn’t you le
arn anything?
‘Sure.’ Jay shook his head, puzzled. ‘But without Joe none of that stuff works any more. Like that last time at Pog Hill—’
From the walls, laughter. The air was rich with it. A phantom scent of apples and smoke seemed to rise from the coals. The night sparkled.
Put your hand often enough in a wasps’ nest, said Joe’s voice, and you’re going to get stung. Even magic won’t stop that. Even magic doesn’t go against nature. You’ve got to give magic a hand sometimes, lad. Give it summat to use. A chance to work for itself. You’ve got to create the right conditions for magic to work.
‘But I had the talisman. I believed—’
Never needed any talisman, replied the voice. You could have helped yourself. You could have fought back, couldn’t you? But no. All you did was run away. Call that faith? Sounds like plain daft to me. So don’t come that faith bullshit with me.
Jay thought about that for a moment.
You’ve already got all you need, continued the voice cheerily. It’s inside you, lad. Allus has been. You don’t need some old bloke’s home-brew to do that work for you. You can do it all on your own.
‘But I can’t—’
No such bloody word, lad, said the voice. No such bloody word.
Then the voices were gone, and suddenly his head was ringing, not with dizziness but with sudden clarity. He knew what he had to do.
Six hours, he told himself. He had no time to lose.
NO-ONE SAW HIM LEAVE THE HOUSE. NO-ONE WAS WATCHING. Even if they were no-one would question his presence, or find it odd. Nor was the deep basket of herbs which he carried in any way unusual. The broad-leaved plants which filled it might be a present for someone, a gift for a flagging garden. Even the fact that he was muttering something under his breath, something which sounded a little like Latin, would not surprise them. He was, after all, English, therefore a little crazy. Un peu fada, Monsieur Jay.
He found he remembered Joe’s perimeter ritual very well indeed. There was no time to make incense, nor to prepare any new sachets, but he did not think that mattered now. Even he could sense the Specials around him, hear their whispering voices, their fairground laughter. He took the seedlings carefully from the cold frame, as many as he could carry, along with a trowel and a tiny fork. He planted them at intervals on the roadside. He planted several at the intersection with the Toulouse road, two more at the stop sign, two more on the road to Les Marauds. Fog, Lansquenet’s special fog, which rolls off the marshes and into the vineyards, rose about him like a bright sail in the early sun. Jay Mackintosh hurried on his circuit, half running in his haste to make the deadline, planting Joe’s tuberosa rosifea wherever there was a branch in the road, a gateway, a sign. He turned round roadsigns or covered them with greenery when he could not dig them out of the soil. He removed Georges’ and Lucien’s welcome placard altogether. By the time he had finished there was not a single signpost for Lansquenet-sous-Tannes remaining. It took him almost four hours to complete the fourteen-mile circuit, looping around the village towards the Toulouse road, then back across Les Marauds. By the end he was exhausted. His head ached, his legs felt shaky as stilts. But he had finished. It was done.
As Joe hid Pog Hill Lane, he thought in triumph, he had hidden the village of Lansquenet-sous-Tannes.
Marise and Rosa had gone by the time he got back. The sky began to lighten. The mist cleared.
63
IT WAS ELEVEN O’CLOCK BEFORE KERRY ARRIVED. CRISP AND COOL in a white blouse and grey skirt, her document case in one hand. Jay was waiting for her.
‘Good morning, Jay.’
‘You’re back.’
She looked over his shoulder into the room, noting the empty glasses and the wine bottles.
‘We should have started earlier,’ she said, ‘but would you believe it? We got lost in the fog. Great blankets of white fog, just like the dry ice at a heavy-metal concert.’ She laughed. ‘Can you imagine? Half a day wasted already. And on our budget. I’m still waiting for the camera crew. Seems they took some kind of a wrong turning and ended up halfway back to Agen. These roads. It’s a good thing I already knew the way.’
Jay looked at her. It hadn’t worked, he thought bleakly. In spite of everything, in spite of his faith.
‘So you’re still going ahead with it?’
‘Well, of course I’m going ahead,’ replied Kerry impatiently. ‘It’s too good an opportunity to miss.’ She examined her nails. ‘You’re a celebrity. When the book comes out I can show the world where you got your inspiration.’ She smiled brightly. ‘It’s such a wonderful book,’ she added. ‘It’s going to be a terrific success. If anything, it’s even better than Jackapple Joe.’
Jay nodded. She was right, of course. Pog Hill and Lansquenet; two sides of the same tarnished coin. Both sacrificed, each in its own way, to the writing career of Jay Mackintosh. After publication the place just wouldn’t be the same. Inevitably, he would move on. Narcisse, Joséphine, Briançon, Guillaume, Arnauld, Roux, Poitou, Rosa – even Marise – all reduced to the status of words on a page, glib fictions to be passed over and forgotten, while in his absence, the developers moved in, planning and demolishing, rethinking and modernizing …
‘I don’t know why you’re looking like that,’ said Kerry. ‘After all, you’ve got the Worldwide contract. That’s a very generous sum you’re looking at. More than generous. Or am I being vulgar?’
‘Not at all.’ A most peculiar feeling of calm, almost of drunkenness, was beginning to steal over him. His head felt as if it were filled with bubbles. The yeasty air seethed and hissed.
‘They must want you very much,’ remarked Kerry.
‘Yes,’ said Jay slowly. ‘I think they do.’
Put your hand often enough in a wasps’ nest, Joe had said, and you’re going to get stung. Even magic won’t stop that. You’ve got to give magic a hand sometimes, lad. Give it summat to use … the right conditions.
That was it, he thought dazedly. So simple. So … simple.
Jay laughed. All at once his head was full of light. He could smell smoke and swampy water and the sweet heady scent of ripe blackberries. The air was elderflower champagne. He knew Joe was with him, that Joe had never left. Not even in ’77. Joe had never left. He could almost see him standing by the door in his old pit cap and boots, grinning in that way he had when he was especially pleased with something, and though Jay knew it was in his imagination, he knew it was real, too. Sometimes real and imaginary are the same thing after all.
Two paces took him to the bed where the manuscript and the Worldwide contracts were still lying in their box. He pulled it out. Kerry turned towards him curiously.
‘What are you doing?’
Jay picked up the manuscript in his arms and began to laugh.
‘Do you know what this is?’ he asked her. ‘It’s the only copy I have of the book. And this’ – holding out the signed contract for her to see – ‘is the paperwork. Look. It’s all completed. Ready to be sent off.’
‘Jay, what are you doing?’ Her voice was sharp.
Jay grinned and took a step towards the fireplace.
‘You can’t—’ began Kerry.
Jay looked at her.
‘No such bloody word,’ he said.
And behind Kerry’s sudden shriek he thought he could hear the sound of an old man’s chuckle.
She shrieked because she suddenly knew what he was going to do. It was crazy, ridiculous, the kind of impulse to which he had never been prone, and yet there was also a strange light in his eyes which had never been there before. As if someone had lit a fuse. His face was illuminated. He took the contracts in his hands, crumpled them and pushed them into the back of the grate. Then he began to do the same with the pages of the typescript. The paper began to catch, first crisping, then turning brown, then leaping into gleeful flame. The air was whirling with black butterflies.
‘What are you playing at?’ Kerry’s voice rose shrilly. ‘Jay, what the fuck are y
ou doing now?’
He grinned at her, breathless with laughter.
‘What do you think? Wait a day or two, till you can get in touch with Nicky, and you’ll be sure.’
‘You’re crazy,’ said Kerry sharply. ‘You’re not going to make me believe you don’t have copies of that typescript. Plus the contracts can be replaced—’
‘Sure they can.’ He was relaxed, smiling. ‘But it isn’t going to be replaced. None of it is. And what use to anyone is a writer who never writes? How long can you sustain public interest in that? What’s it worth? What am I worth without it?’
Kerry looked at him. The man who left six months ago was unrecognizable. The old Jay was vague, sullen, directionless. This man was driven, illuminated. His eyes were shining. In spite of what he was throwing away – stupid, criminal, mad – he looked happy.
‘You really are crazy,’ she said in a strangled voice. ‘Throwing everything away – and for what? Some gesture? It isn’t you, Jay. I know you. You’ll regret it.’
Jay just looked at her, smiling a little. Patiently.
‘I don’t see you staying here beyond a year.’ Behind the scorn her voice was shaking. ‘What are you going to do? Run the farm? You’ve hardly any money. You’ve blown it all on this place. What will you do when the money runs out?’
‘I don’t know.’ His tone was cheery, indifferent. ‘Do you care?’
‘No!’
He shrugged. ‘You’d better page your film crew and tell them to meet you somewhere else,’ he told her quietly. ‘There’s no story for you here. Better try Le Pinot, just across the river. I’m sure you’ll get something suitably upbeat and entertaining there.’
She stared at him, amazed. Just for a moment she thought she smelt something, a strange, vivid scent of sugar and apples and blackberry jelly and smoke. It was a nostalgic scent, and for a second she could almost understand why Jay loved this place so much, with its little vineyards and its apple trees and its roaming goats on the marsh flats. For that instant she was a little girl again, with her grandmother in the kitchen making pies and the wind from the coast making the telephone wires sing. Somehow, she felt the scent was a part of him, something which clung to him like old smoke, and as she looked at him for a moment he looked gilded somehow, as if lit from behind, filaments of brightness shooting from his hair, his clothes. Then the scent was gone, the light was gone, and there was nothing but the staleness of the unaired room and the dregs of the wine on the table in front of them. Kerry shrugged.