11
London, Spring 1999
BY THE TIME JAY ARRIVED AT SPY’S IT WAS TEN O’CLOCK AND THE party was well under way. Another of Kerry’s literary launches, he thought ruefully. Bored journalists and cheap champagne and eager young things dancing attendance on blasé older things like himself. Kerry never tired of these occasions, dropping names like confetti – Germaine and Will and Ewan – flitting from one prestigious guest to the other with the zeal of a high priestess. Jay had only just realized how much he hated it.
Stopping at the house only long enough to pick up a few things, he saw the red light on the answerphone blinking furiously, but did not play the message. The bottles in his duffel bag were absolutely still. Now he was the one in ferment, jittering and rocking, exhilarated one moment, close to tears the next, rummaging through his possessions like a thief, afraid that if he stopped still for even a second he would lose his momentum and collapse listlessly back into his old life again. He turned on the radio and it was the oldies station again, playing Rod Stewart and ‘Sailing’, one of Joe’s favourites – allus reminds me of them times I were on me travels, lad – and he listened as he stuffed clothes into the bag on top of the silent bottles. Amazing how little he could not bear to leave behind. His typewriter. The unfinished manuscript of Stout Cortez. Some favourite books. The radio itself. And, of course, Joe’s Specials. Another impulse, he told himself. The wine was valueless, almost undrinkable. And yet he could not shake the feeling that there was something in those bottles he needed. Something he could not do without.
Spy’s was like so many other London clubs. The names change, the décor changes, but the places stay the same: sleek and loud and soulless. By midnight most of the guests would have abandoned any pretentions to intellectualism that they might have had, instead settling down to the serious business of getting drunk, making advances to each other, or insulting their rivals. Getting out of the taxi with his duffel bag slung across his shoulder and his single case in his hand, Jay realized that he had forgotten his invitation. After some altercation with the doorman, however, he managed to get a message to Kerry, who emerged a few minutes later wearing her Ghost dress and steeliest smile.
‘It’s all right,’ she flung at the doorman. ‘He’s just useless, that’s all.’ Her green eyes flicked at Jay, taking in the jeans, the raincoat, the duffel bag.
‘I see you didn’t wear the Armani,’ she said.
The euphoria was finally gone, leaving only a kind of dim hangover in its wake, but Jay was surprised to find his resolve unchanged. Touching the duffel bag seemed to help somehow, and he did so, as if to test its reality. Under the canvas the bottles clinked quietly together.
‘I’ve bought a house,’ said Jay, holding out the crumpled brochure. ‘Look. It’s Joe’s château, Kerry. I bought it this morning. I recognized it.’ Beneath that flat green stare he felt absurdly childish. Why had he expected her to understand? He barely understood his impulse himself. ‘It’s called Château Foudouin,’ he said. She looked at him.
‘You bought a house.’
He nodded.
‘Just like that, you bought it?’ she asked in disbelief. ‘You bought it today?’
He nodded again. There were so many things he wanted to say. It was destiny, he would have told her, it was the magic he had searched for twenty years to recapture. He wanted to explain about the brochure and the square of sunlight and how the picture had leaped out at him from the page. He wanted to explain about the sudden certainty of it, the feeling that it was the house which chose him, and not the other way around.
‘You can’t have bought a house.’ Kerry was still struggling with the idea. ‘God, Jay, you dither for hours over buying a shirt.’
‘This was different. It was like …’ He struggled to articulate what it had been like. It was an uncanny sensation, that overriding feeling of must-have. He hadn’t felt this way since his teens. The knowledge that life could not be complete without this one infinitely desirable, magical, totemic object – a pair of X-ray spectacles, a set of Hell’s Angels transfers, a cinema ticket, the latest band’s latest single – the certainty that possession of it would change everything, its presence in the pocket to be checked, tested, retested. It wasn’t an adult feeling. It was more primitive, more visceral than that. With a jolt of surprise, he realized he had not really wanted anything for twenty years.
‘It was like … being back at Pog Hill again,’ he said, knowing she wouldn’t understand. ‘It was as if the last twenty years hadn’t happened.’
Kerry looked blank.
‘I can’t believe you impulse-bought a house,’ she said. ‘A car, yes. A motorbike, OK. It’s the kind of thing you would do, come to think of it. Big toys to play with. But a house?’ She shook her head, mystified. ‘What are you going to do with it?’
‘Live in it,’ said Jay simply. ‘Work in it.’
‘But it’s in France somewhere.’ Irritation sharpened her voice. ‘Jay, I can’t afford to spend weeks in France. I’m due to start the new series next month. I’ve got too many commitments. I mean, is it even close to an airport?’ She broke off, her eyes moving again to the duffel bag, taking in, as if for the first time, the suitcase, the travelling clothes. There was a crease between her arched brows.
‘Look, Kerry—’
Kerry lifted a hand imperiously.
‘Go home,’ she said. ‘We can’t discuss this here. Go home, Jay, relax, and we’ll talk it all through when I get back. OK?’ She sounded cautious now, as if she were addressing an excitable maniac.
Jay shook his head. ‘I’m not going back,’ he said. ‘I need to get away for a while. I wanted to say goodbye.’
Even now Kerry showed no surprise. Irritation, yes. Almost anger. But she remained untroubled, secure in her convictions.
‘You’re pissed again, Jay,’ she said. ‘You haven’t thought any of this through. You come to me with this crazy idea about a second home, and when I’m not instantly taken by it—’
‘It isn’t going to be a second home.’
The tone of his voice surprised both of them. For a moment he sounded almost harsh.
‘And what the fuck is that supposed to mean?’ Her voice was low and dangerous.
‘It means you’re not listening to me. I don’t think you’ve ever actually listened to me.’ He paused. ‘You’re always telling me to grow up, to think for myself, to let go. But you’re happy to keep me a permanent lodger in your house, to keep me dependent on you for everything. I don’t have anything of my own. Contacts, friends – they’re all yours, not mine. You even choose my clothes. I’ve got money, Kerry, I’ve got my books, I’m not exactly starving in a garret any more.’
Kerry sounded amused, almost indulgent.
‘So this is what it’s all about? A little declaration of independence?’ She fluttered a kiss against his cheek. ‘O?. I understand you don’t want to go to the party, and I’m sorry I didn’t realize that this morning, OK?’ She put her hand on his shoulder and smiled. The patented Kerry O’Neill smile.
‘Please. Listen. Just this once.’
Was this what Joe had felt, he wondered. So much easier to leave without a word, to escape the recriminations, the tears, the disbelief. To escape the guilt. But somehow he just couldn’t do that to Kerry. She didn’t love him any more, he knew that. If she ever had. All the same, he couldn’t do it. Perhaps because he knew how it felt.
‘Try to understand. This place –’ His gesture included the club, the neon-lit street, the low sky, the whole of London, heaving, dark and menacing below it. ‘I don’t belong here any more. I can’t think straight when I’m here. I spend all my time waiting for something to happen, some kind of sign—’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, grow up!’ She was suddenly furious, her voice rising like an angry bird’s. ‘Is this your excuse? Some kind of idiotic angst? If you spent less time mooning on about that old bastard Joe Cox and looked around you for a change, if only you took ch
arge instead of talking about signs and omens—’
‘But I am,’ he interrupted her. ‘I am taking charge. I’m doing what you’ve always told me to do.’
‘Not by running away to France!’ The note in her voice was almost panic now. ‘Not just like that! You owe me. You wouldn’t have lasted two minutes without me. I’ve introduced you to people, used my contacts for you. You were nothing but a one-book wonder, a has-been, a fucking fake—’
Jay looked at her dispassionately for a moment. Strange, he thought remotely, how quickly gamine could shift to plain meanness. Her red mouth was thin, vicious. Her eyes were crescents. Anger, familiar and liberating, wrapped around him like a cloak, and he laughed.
‘Can the bullshit,’ he told her. ‘It always was a mutual convenience. You liked to drop my name at parties, didn’t you? I was an accessory. It did you good to be seen with me. It’s just like people who read poetry on the tube. People saw you with me and assumed you were a real intellectual, instead of a media wannabe without a single original thought in her head.’
She stared at him, astonished and enraged. Her eyes were wide.
‘What?’
‘Goodbye.’ He turned to go.
‘Jay!’ She snatched at him as he turned, slapping smartly against the duffel bag with the flat of her hand. Inside, the bottles whispered and snickered.
‘How dare you turn your back on me?’ she hissed. ‘You were happy enough to use my contacts when it suited you. How dare you turn round and tell me you’re leaving, without even giving me a proper explanation? If it’s personal space you want, then say that. Go to your French château, if that’s what you want, go wallow in atmosphere, if that’s going to help.’
She looked at him suddenly. ‘Is that it? Is it another book?’ She sounded hungry now, her anger sharpening into excitement. ‘If that’s what it is you have to tell me, Jay. You owe me that. After all this time …’
Jay looked at her. It would be so easy to say yes, he told himself. To give her something she would understand, maybe forgive.
‘I don’t know,’ he said at last. ‘I don’t think so.’ A taxi went by then and Jay flagged it down, throwing his luggage onto the back seat and jumping in with it. Kerry gave a cry of frustration and slapped the window of the taxi as if it were his face.
‘Go on then! Run away! Hide! You’re just like him, you know: a quitter! That’s all you know how to do! Jay! Jay!’
As the taxi pulled smoothly away from the kerb Jay grinned and settled back against his duffel bag. Its contents made small contented clicking sounds all the way to the airport.
12
Pog Hill, Summer 1975
SUMMER STEERED ITS COURSE AND JAY CAME MORE OFTEN TO Pog Hill Lane. Joe seemed pleased to see him when he came by, but never commented when he did not, and the boy spent days lurking by the canal or by the railway, watching over his uncertain territory, ever on the lookout for Zeth and his two friends. His hideout at the lock was no longer secure, so he moved the treasure box from its place in the bank and cast about for a safer place. At last he found one in the derelict car on the dumping ground, taping it to the underside of the rotten fuel tank. Jay liked that old car. He spent hours lounging in its one remaining seat, smelling the musty scent of ancient leather, hidden from sight by the rampant greenery. Once or twice he heard the voices of Zeth and his mates close by, but crouching in the low belly of the car – Joe’s charm held tightly in his hand – he was safe from any but the closest investigation. He watched and listened, intoxicated with the delight of spying on his enemies. At such times he believed in the charm implicitly.
He realized, as summer drew inevitably to its close, that he had grown fond of Kirby Monckton. In spite of his resistance he had found something here that he never had elsewhere. July and August sailed by like cool white schooners. He went to Pog Hill Lane almost every day. Sometimes he and Joe were alone, but too often there were visitors, neighbours, friends, though Joe seemed to have no family. Jay was sometimes jealous of their time together, resentful of time given to other people, but Joe always welcomed everyone, giving out boxes of fruit from his allotment, bunches of carrots, sacks of potatoes, a bottle of blackberry wine to one, a recipe for tooth powder to another. He dealt in philtres, teas, sachets. People came openly for fruit and vegetables but stayed in secret, talking to Joe in low voices, sometimes leaving with a little packet of tissue paper or a scrap of flannel tucked into hands and pockets. He never asked for payment. Sometimes people gave him things in exchange: a loaf or two, a home-made pie, cigarettes. Jay wondered where he got his money, and where the £5,000 to pay for his dream château would come from. But when he mentioned such things the old man just laughed.
As September loomed closer, every day seemed to gain a special, poignant significance, a mythical quality. Jay walked the canal side in a haze of nostalgia. He took notes of the things Joe said to him in their long conversations over the redcurrant bushes and replayed them in his mind as he lay in bed. He cycled for hours over deserted, now-familiar roads and breathed the sooty warm air. He climbed Upper Kirby Hill and looked out over the purple-black expanse of the Pennines and wished he could stay for ever.
Joe himself seemed untouched. He remained the same as ever, picking his fruit and laying it out in crates, making jam from windfalls, pointing out wild herbs and picking them when the moon was full, collecting bilberries from the moors and blackberries from the railway banking, preparing chutney from his tomatoes, piccalilli from his cauliflowers, lavender bags for sleeplessness, wintergreen for rapid healing, hot peppers and rosemary in oil and pickled onions for the winter. And, of course, there was the wine. Throughout all that summer Jay smelt wine brewing, fermeriting, ageing. All kinds of wine: beetroot, peapod, raspberry, elderflower, rosehip, jackapple, plum, parsnip, ginger, blackberry. The house was a distillery, with pans of fruit boiling on the stove, demijohns of wine waiting on the kitchen floor to be decanted into bottles, muslins for straining the fruit drying on the washing line, sieves, buckets, bottles, funnels, laid out in neat rows ready for use.
He kept the still in his cellar. It was a big copper piece, like a giant kettle, old but burnished and cared for. He used it to make his ‘spirits’, the raw, eyewatering clear alcohol he used to preserve the summer fruit which sat in gleaming rows on shelves in the cellar. Potato vodka, he called it, jackapple juice. Seventy per cent proof. In it he placed equal quantities of fruit and sugar to make his liqueurs. Cherries, plums, redcurrants, bilberries. The fruit stained the liquor purple and red and black in the dim cellar light. Each jar carefully labelled and dated. More than one man could ever hope to eat. Not that Joe minded; in any case, he gave away much of what he made. Apart from his wine and a few licks of strawberry jam with his morning toast, Jay never saw him touch any of those extravagant preserves and spirits. Jay supposed the old man must have sold some of these wares during the winter, though he never saw him do it. Most of the time he just gave things away.
Jay went back to school in September. The Moorlands School was as he remembered it, smelling of dust and disinfectant and polish and the bland, inescapable scent of ancient cooking. His parents’ divorce went through smoothly enough, after many tearful phone calls from his mother and postal orders from the Bread Baron. Surprisingly, he felt nothing. During the summer his rage had sloughed away into indifference. Anger seemed childish to him somehow. He wrote to Joe every month or so, though the old man never wrote back as regularly. He was not much of a writer, he said, and contented himself with a card at Christmas and a couple of lines near the end of term. His silence did not trouble Jay. It was enough to know that he was there.
In the summer Jay went back to Kirby Monckton. Part of this was on his own insistence, but he could tell his parents were secretly relieved. His mother was filming in Ireland at the time, and the Bread Baron was spending the summer on his yacht, in the company, rumour had it, of a young fashion model called Candide.
Jay escaped to Pog Hill Lane without
a second glance.
13
Paris, March 1999
JAY SPENT THE NIGHT AT THE AIRPORT. HE EVEN SLEPT A LITTLE on one of Charles de Gaulle’s contoured orange chairs, though he was still too jumpy to relax. His energy seemed inexhaustible, a ball of electricity punching against his ribs. His senses felt eerily enhanced. Smells – cleaning fluid, sweat, cigarette smoke, perfume, early morning coffee – rolled at him in waves. At five o’clock he abandoned the idea of sleep and went to the cafeteria, where he bought an espresso, a couple of croissants and a sugar fix of Poulain chocolate. The first Corail to Marseilles was at six ten. From there, a slower train would take him to Agen, where he could get a taxi to … where was it? The map attached to the brochure was only a sketchy diagram, but he hoped to find clearer directions when he reached Agen. Besides, there was something pleasing about this journey, this blurring of speed to a place which was nothing yet but a cross on a map. As if by drinking Joe’s wine he could suddenly become Joe, marking his passage by scratching signs on a map, changing his identity to suit his whim. And at the same time he felt lighter, freed of the hurt and anger he had carried for so long, such useless ballast, for so many years.
Travel far enough, Joe used to say, and all rules are suspended.
Now Jay began to understand what he meant. Truth, loyalty, identity. The things which bind us to the places and faces of home no longer applied. He could be anyone. Going anywhere. At airports, railway stations, bus stations, anything is possible. No-one asks questions. People reach a state of near-invisibility. He was just another passenger here, one of thousands. No-one would recognize him. No-one had even heard of him.
He managed to sleep for a few hours on the train, and dreamed – a dream of astonishing vividness – of himself running along the canal bank at Nether Edge, trying vainly to catch up with a departing coal train. With exceptional clarity he could see the somehow prehistoric metal of the train’s undercarriage. He could smell coal dust and old grease from the trucks’ axles. And on the last truck he could see Joe, sitting on top of the coal in his orange miner’s overalls and a British Railways engineer’s cap, waving goodbye with a bottle of home-brewed wine in one hand and a map of the world in the other, calling in a voice made tinny by distance words Jay could not quite hear.