Blackberry Wine

more eager advances of Jessica Mornay. He was moderately witty, anecdotal. He accepted many undeserved compliments on his francais superbe. After dinner he developed a headache, which he attempted, without success, to dull with alcohol. He found it difficult to concentrate on the ever-increasing rapidity of their French. Whole segments of conversation passed by like clouds. Fortunately his hostess was garrulous – and self-centred – enough to take his silence for rapt attention.

By the time the meal was over it was almost midnight. Over coffee and petits fours the headache subsided and Jay was able to grasp the thread of the conversation once more.

Clairmont, his tie pulled away from the collar, his face mottled and sweaty: ‘Well, all I can say is it’s high time something happened to put Lansquenet on the map, heh? We’ve got as much going for us as Le Pinot down the road, if we could only get everybody organized.’

Caro nodded agreement. Jay could understand her French better than her husband’s, whose accent had thickened as his wineglass emptied. She was sitting opposite him on the arm of a chair, legs crossed and cigarette in hand.

‘I’m sure that now Jay has joined our little community’ – she bared her teeth through the smoke – ‘things will begin to progress. The tone changes. People begin to develop. God knows I’ve worked hard enough – for the church, for the theatre group, for the literary society. I’m sure Jay would agree to address our little writers’ group one day soon?’

He bared his own teeth non-committally.

‘Of course you would!’ Caro beamed as if Jay had answered aloud. ‘You’re exactly what a village like Lansquenet needs most: a breath of fresh air. You wouldn’t want people to think we were keeping you all to ourselves, would you?’ She laughed, and Jessica exclaimed hungrily. The Merles nudged each other in glee. Jay had the strangest feeling that the lavish dinner had been peripheral, that in spite of the champagne cocktails and iced Sauternes and foie gras he was the real main course.

‘But why Lansquenet?’ It was Jessica, leaning forwards, her long blue eyes half shut against a sheet of cigarette smoke. ‘Surely you would have been happier in a bigger place. Agen, maybe, or further south towards Toulouse?’

Jay shook his head. ‘I’m tired of cities,’ he said. ‘I bought this place on impulse.’

‘Ah,’ exclaimed Caro rapturously. ‘Artistic temperament!’

‘Because I wanted somewhere quist, away from the city.’

Clairmont shook his head. ‘Heh, it’s quiet enough,’ he said. ‘Too quiet for us. Property prices rock-bottom, while in Le Pinot, only forty kilometres away-’

His wife explained rapidly that Le Pinot was a village on the Garonne, much beloved by foreign tourists.

‘Georges does a lot of work there, don’t you, Georges? He put in a swimming pool for that lovely English couple, and he helped renovate that old house by the church. If only we could generate the same kind of interest in our village.’

Tourists. Swimming pools. Gift shops. Burger bars. Jay’s lack of enthusiasm must have shown in his face, because Caro nudged him archly.

‘I can see that our Monsieur Mackintosh is a romantic, Jessica! He loves the quaint little roads and the vineyards and the lonely farmhouses. So very English!’ Jay smiled and nodded and agreed that his eccentricity was tout a fait anglais.

‘But a community like ours, heh, it needs to grow.’ Clairmont was drunk and earnest. ‘We need investment. Money. There’s no money left in farming. Our farmers make barely enough to keep alive as it is. The work is all in the cities. The young move away. Only the old people and the riff-raff stay. The itinerants, the pieds-noirs. That’s what people don’t want to understand. We have to progress or die, heh. Progress or die.’

Caro nodded. ‘But there are too many people here who can’t see the way ahead,’ she frowned. ‘They refuse to sell their land for development, even when it’s clear they can’t win. When the plans were suggested to build the new Intermarche up the road they protested for so long that the Intermarche went to Le Pinot instead. Le Pinot was just like Lansquenet twenty years ago. Now look at it.’

Le Pinot was the local success story. A village of 300 souls put itself on the map thanks to an enterprising couple from Paris who bought and refurbished a number of old properties to sell as holiday homes. Thanks to a strong pound, and several excellent contacts in London, these were sold or rented to wealthy English tourists, and little by little a tradition was established. The villagers soon saw the potential in this. Business expanded to serve the new tourist trade. Several new cafes opened, soon followed by a couple of bed and breakfasts. Then came a scattering of speciality shops selling luxury goods to the summer trade, a restaurant with a Michelin star, and a small but luxurious hotel with a gym and a swimming pool. Local history was dredged for items of interest, and the wholly unremarkable church was revealed, by a combination of folklore and wishful thinking, to be a site of historical significance. A television adaptation of Clochemerle was filmed there, and after that there was no end to the new developments. An Intermarche within easy distance. A riding club. A whole row of holiday chalets along the river. And now, as if that wasn’t enough, there were plans for an Aquadome and health spa only five kilometres away, which would bring trade all the way from Agen and beyond.

Caro seemed to take Le Pinot’s success as a personal insult.

‘It could just as easily have been Lansquenet,’ she complained, taking a petit four. ‘Our village is at least as good as theirs. Our church is genuine fourteenth century. We have the ruins of a Roman aqueduct down in Les Marauds. It could have been us. Instead, the only visitors we get are the summer farmhands and the gypsies down the river.’ She bit petulantly at her petit four.

Jessica nodded. ‘It’s the people here,’ she told me. ‘They don’t have any ambition. They think they can live exactly as their grandfathers did.’

Le Pinot, Jay understood, had been so successful that the production of its local vintage, after which the village was named, had ceased altogether.

‘Your neighbour is one of those people.’ Caro’s mouth thinned beneath the pink lipstick. ‘Works half the land between here and Les Marauds, and still barely makes enough from winemaking to keep body and soul together. Lives holed up all year round in that old house of hers, with never a word to anyone. And that poor child holed up with her…’

Toinette and Jessica nodded, and Clairmont poured more coffee.

‘Child?’ Nothing in Jay’s brief glimpse of Marise d’Api had led him to imagine her as a mother.

‘Yes, a girl. No-one ever sees her. She doesn’t go to school. We never see them in church. We tried to suggest that they might,’ Caro made a face, ‘but the torrent of abuse from the mother was quite disgusting.’

The other women made sounds of agreement. Jessica moved a little closer, and Jay could smell perfume – he thought it was Poison – from her bobbed blond hair.

‘She’d be better off with the grandmother,’ said Toinette emphatically. ‘At least she’d get the affection she needs. Mireille was absolutely devoted to Tony.’ Tony, explained Caro, was Marise’s husband.

‘But she’d never let her have the child,’ said Jessica. ‘I think she only keeps her because she knows it galls Mireille. And, of course, we’re too far out for anyone to take much notice of what an old woman says.’

‘It was supposed to have been an accident,’ continued Caro darkly. ‘I mean, they had to say that, didn’t they? Even Mireille played along, because of the funeral. Said his gun exploded when a cartridge got stuck in the chamber. But everyone knows that woman drove him to it. Did everything but pull the trigger. I’d believe anything of her. Anything at all.’

The conversation was beginning to make Jay feel uncomfortable. His headache had returned. This was not what he’d expected of Lansquenet, he told himself, this genteel spite, this gleeful hint of cruelty behind the prettiness. He hadn’t come to Lansquenet to hear about this. His book – if there was ever going to be a book – didn’t need this. The ease with which he’d written the twenty pages on the reverse of Stout Cortez proved it. He wanted apple-faced women picking herbs in their gardens. He wanted a French idyll, a Cider With Rosette, a lighthearted antidote to Joe.

And yet there was something curiously pervasive about the story itself, about the three women’s faces drawn close in identical expressions of vulpine enjoyment, eyes squinched down, mouths lipsticked wide over white, well- tended teeth. It was an old story – not even an original story – and yet it drew him. The feeling – that sense of being yanked forwards by an invisible hand in his gut – was not entirely unpleasant.