Blackberry Wine (30 page)

‘She keeps herself to herself,’ was his only comment. ‘More women should do the same.’ Last year she installed a sprinkler at the far edge of her second field, using water from the nearby river. Narcisse helped her carry it and put it together, though she installed the thing herself, digging trenches across the field to the water, then burying the pipes deep. She grew maize there, and sunflowers every third year. These crops do not withstand dryness as vines do.

Narcisse offered to help her with the installation, but she refused.

‘If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing yourself,’ she commented. The sprinkler was working all night by then – it was useless in the daytime, the water evaporating in midair
before it even touched the crop. Jay could hear it from his open window, a dim whickering in the still air. In the moonlight the white spume from the pipes looked ghostly, magical. Her main crop was the grapes, Narcisse said. She grew the maize and sunflowers for cattle feed, the vegetables and fruit for her personal use and Rosa’s. There were a few goats, for cheese and milk, and these roamed free around the farm, like pets. The vineyard was small, yielding only 8,000 bottles a year. It sounded a lot to Jay, and he said so. Narcisse smiled.

‘Not enough,’ he said shortly. ‘Of course, it’s good wine. Old Foudouin knew what he was doing when he put in those vines. You’ve noticed how the land tilts sharply down towards the marshes?’

Jay nodded.

‘That’s how she can grow those vines. Chenin grapes. She picks them very late, in October or November, sorts them, one by one, by hand on the vine. They’re almost dried out by then,
héh
. But as the mist rises from the marshes every morning, it dampens the vine and encourages the
pourriture noble
, the rot which gives the grape its sweetness and flavour.’ Narcisse looked thoughtful. ‘She must have a hundred barrels of it by now, maturing in oak, in that cellar of hers. I saw them when I made last year’s delivery. Eighteen months on, that wine’s worth a hundred francs a bottle, maybe more. That’s how she could afford to bid for your farm.’

‘She must really want to stay here,’ commented Jay. ‘If she has money, I would have thought she’d have been only too pleased to leave. I’ve heard she doesn’t get on well with people from the village.’

Narcisse looked at him. ‘She minds her own business,’ he said sharply. ‘That’s all.’

Then the talk turned once again to farming.

SUMMER WAS A DOOR SWINGING OPEN INTO A SECRET GARDEN. HIS
book remained incomplete, but he rarely thought about it now. His interest in Marise had gone further than merely the need to collect material. Until the end of July the heat intensified, made worse by a brisk, hot wind which dried out the maize so that its husks rattled wildly in the fields. Narcisse shook his head glumly and said he’d seen it coming. Joséphine doubled her sales of drinks. Joe consulted tidal and lunar charts, and gave Jay specific instructions on when to water in order to achieve the best effect.

‘It’ll change soon enough, lad,’ he said. ‘You’ll see.’

Not that there was a great deal to lose. A few rows of vegetables. Even with the drought the orchard would yield more fruit than Jay could possibly use. In the café, Lucien Merle shook his head in dark relish.

‘You see what I mean,’ he said. ‘Even the farmers know it. There’s no future in it any more. People like Narcisse carry on because they don’t know anything else, but the new generation,
héh
! They know there’s no money in it. Every year the crop sells for less. They’re living from Government subsidies. All it takes is for one year to be bad, and then you’re taking out loans from the Crédit Mutuel so you can plant next year. And the vines are no better.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘Too many small vineyards, too little money. There’s no living to be made in a small farm any more. That’s what people like Narcisse don’t understand.’ He
lowered his voice and came closer. ‘All that’s going to change, though,’ he said slyly.

‘Oh?’ Jay was getting a little bored with Lucien and his great plans for Lansquenet. His only topic of conversation nowadays seemed to be about Lansquenet and how it could be made more like Le Pinot. He and Georges Clairmont had put up signs on the main road and the Toulouse road near by, which were supposed to encourage the influx of tourists.

Most people viewed this with indulgence. If it brought business, good. Mostly they were indifferent, as Georges and Lucien were known for hatching grandiose schemes which never came to anything. Caro Clairmont had tried several times to invite Jay to dinner, though so far he had managed to delay the inevitable. She hoped that he would address her literary group in Agen. The thought appalled him.

That day it rained for the first time in weeks. A fierce rain from a hot white sky, barely refreshing. Narcisse grumbled that, as usual, it had come too late and that it would never last long enough to wet the ground, but in spite of this, it endured late into the night, pouring out of the gutterings and onto the baked ground with lively plashing sounds.

The next morning was foggy. The heavy rain had stopped, to be replaced by a dull drizzle. Jay could see from the waterlogged state of the garden how heavy the downpour must have been, but even without sunlight to dry it out the standing water had already begun to dissipate, drawing the cracks in the earth together, sinking down deep.

‘We needed that,’ remarked Joe, bending down to examine
some seedlings. ‘Good job you got these jackapples covered, otherwise they’d have been washed away.’ The Specials were in a cold frame, carefully snugged against the side of the house, and remained unharmed. Jay noticed they were a remarkably quick-growing plant; the ones he seeded first were twelve inches tall now, their heart-shaped leaves fanning out against the glass. He had about fifty seedlings ready to be bedded out, an excellent success rate for such a demanding species. Joe was fond of saying how it took him five years just to get the soil right.

‘Aye.’ Joe looked at the plants with satisfaction. ‘Mebbe the soil’s right just as it is.’

That morning, too, another letter from Nick arrived, with news of two more offers from publishers for Jay’s incomplete novel. These were not final offers, he said, though already the sums involved seemed extravagant, almost ridiculous, to Jay. His life in London, Nick, the university, even the negotiations on the novel seemed abstract here, eclipsed by even the small damage caused by an unexpected rainstorm. He worked in the garden for the rest of the morning, thinking of nothing at all.

AUGUST WAS FREAKISHLY WET FOR LANSQUENET. RAIN EVERY
other day, overcast the rest of the time, and with winds which lashed at crops and stripped their leaves. Joe shook his head at this and said he expected it. He was the only one. The rain was merciless, stripping away topsoil and washing tree roots bare. Jay went to the orchard in the rain and used pieces of carpet to wrap around the bases of his trees to protect them from water and rot. It was another old trick from Pog Hill Lane, and it worked well. But without adequate sunshine the fruit would fall unformed and unripened from the branches. Joe shrugged. There would be other years. Jay was not so sure. After the old man’s return he had become preternaturally sensitive to the changes in Joe, marking every change of expression, going over every word. He noticed that Joe spoke less than he had before, that sometimes his outline was blurry, that the radio, tuned permanently to the oldies station since May, sometimes played white noise for minutes before finding a signal. As if Joe, too, were a signal, gradually fading into oblivion. Worse, he had the feeling that it was somehow his fault that it was happening, that Lansquenet was somehow taking over – eclipsing Joe. The rain and the falling temperature dampened the scents which were so characteristic of the old man’s appearances, the scents of sugar and fruit and yeast and smoke. During the past few weeks these too had faded, so that for unbearable moments Jay felt absolutely
alone, bereaved, a man sitting at a dying friend’s bedside, listening for the next breath.

Since the wasp incident Marise no longer avoided him. They greeted each other over the fence or the hedge, and though she was rarely exuberant or forthcoming, Jay thought Marise had begun to like him a little. Sometimes they talked. September was a busy time for her, with the grapes fully formed and beginning to turn yellow, but the rain, which had not really given up since last month, was causing renewed problems. Narcisse blamed the disastrous summer on global warming. Others muttered vaguely about El Niño, the Toulouse chemical plants, the Japanese earthquake. Mireille Faizande curled her lip and talked about Last Times. Joséphine remembered the dreadful summer of ’75, when the Tannes dried up and rabid foxes came running out of the marshes into the village. It did not rain every day, but even so the sun was barely present, a tarnished coin in the sky, giving little warmth.

‘If it goes on like this there won’t be any fruit for anyone this autumn,’ said Narcisse dourly. Peaches and apricots and other soft-skinned fruit were already done for. The rain ate through the tender flesh and they dropped, rotten, to the ground, before they had even finished developing. Tomatoes failed to ripen. Apples and pears were hardly any better. Their waxy skin might protect them to some extent, but not enough. Vines were the worst.

At this stage the grapes needed sunlight, Joe said – especially for the later harvests, the Chenin grapes for the noble wines, which had to be sun-dried, like raisins. These grapes rely on the exceptional conditions of Lansquenet’s marshland: the hot, long summers, the mists which the sun brings from across the river. This year, however, the
pourriture noble
had nothing noble about it. Rot, pure and simple, set in. Marise did what she could. She ordered plastic coverings from town, which she fixed into place over the rows of vines with the help of metal hoops. This saved the vines from the worst of the rain, but
did nothing to protect the exposed roots. Any sunlight was hampered by the presence of the sheets, and the fruit sweated inside the plastic. The earth had long since been trodden into mud soup. Like Joe, she laid pieces of carpeting and cardboard between the rows to avoid further damage to the ground. But it was a futile gesture.

Jay’s own garden fared a little better. Further from the marshland, raised above the water level, his land had natural drainage channels, which carried excess water down to the river. Even so the Tannes rose higher than ever, spilling out across the vineyard on Marise’s side, and cutting dangerously close on Jay’s, eroding the banking so sharply that great slices of earth had already fallen into the river. Rosa was under instructions not to approach the damaged banking.

The barley was a disaster. Fields all around Lansquenet had already been abandoned to the rain. In one of Briançon’s fields a crop circle appeared, and the more gullible of Joséphine’s drinkers began to speculate about space aliens, though Roux thought it more likely that Clairmont’s mischievous young son and his girlfriend knew more than they were telling. Even the bees were less productive this year, Briançon reported, with fewer flowers and poor-grade honey. Belts would have to be tightened throughout the winter.

‘It’s hard enough getting the money from this year’s crop to plant next spring,’ explained Narcisse. ‘When the crop’s bad, you have to plant on credit. And with rented land becoming less and less viable,
héh
!’ He poured Armagnac carefully into the hot dregs of his coffee and downed it in a single mouthful. ‘There’s not enough money in sunflowers or maize any more,’ he admitted. ‘Even flowers and nursery produce aren’t making what they used to. We need something new.’

‘Rice, maybe,’ suggested Roux.

Clairmont was less downcast, in spite of poor business throughout the summer. Recently, he had been north with
Lucien Merle for a few days, returning full of enthusiasm for his Lansquenet project. It transpired that he and Lucien were planning to go into partnership on a new scheme to promote Lansquenet in the Agen region, though both of them seemed unusually secretive about the matter. Caro, too, was arch and self-satisfied, calling at the farm twice ‘in passing’, though it was miles out of her way, and staying for coffee. She was full of gossip, delighted with the way Jay had renovated the farm, intensely curious about the book and hinting that her influence with the regional literary societies would be certain to make it a success.

‘You really should try to get yourself some French contacts,’ she told him naively. ‘Toinette Merle knows a lot of people in the media, you know. Perhaps she could arrange for you to give an interview to a local magazine?’

He explained, with an attempt not to smile, that one of the main reasons for escaping to Lansquenet had been to avoid his media contacts.

Caro simpered and said something about the artistic temperament.

‘Still, you really should consider it,’ she insisted. ‘I’m sure the presence of a famous writer would give us all the boost we need.’

At the time Jay barely paid attention. He was close to completing the new book, for which he now had a contract with Worldwide, a large international publisher, and had set himself a deadline of October. He was also working on improving the old drainage channels on his land, with the aid of some concrete piping supplied by Georges. His roof, too, had developed a leak, and Roux had offered to help him mend it and repoint the brickwork. His days were too busy to give much time to Caro and her plans.

That was why the newspaper article took him completely by surprise. He would have missed it altogether if Popotte hadn’t spotted it in an Agen paper and cut it out for him to read. Popotte was touchingly pleased by the whole thing, but it immediately made Jay uneasy. It was, after all, the
first sign that his whereabouts were known. He could not remember the exact words. There was a great deal of nonsense about his brilliant early career. There was some crowing about the way he had fled London and rediscovered himself in Lansquenet. Much of it consisted of secondhand platitudes and vague speculation. Worse, there was a photograph, taken in the Café des Marauds on 14 July, showing Jay, Georges, Roux, Briançon and Joséphine sitting at the bar with bottles of
blonde
in their hands. In the picture Jay was wearing a black T-shirt and madras shorts, Georges was smoking a Gauloise. He did not remember who took the photograph. It could have been anyone. The caption read, ‘Jay Mackintosh and friends at the Café des Marauds, Lansquenet-sous-Tannes.’