Blackberry Wine

‘I RECKON YOU COULD START EM AGAIN IF YOU WANTED,’ SAID JOE, eyeing the tangled rose hedge. ‘It’s been a while since they were cut back, and some of em have run to wild, but you could do it, with a bit of work.’

Joe always pretended indifference to flowers. He preferred fruit trees, herbs and vegetables, things to be picked and harvested, stored, dried, pickled, bottled, pulped, made into wine. But there were always flowers in his garden all the same. Planted as if on an afterthought: dahlias, poppies, lavender, hollyhocks. Roses twined amongst the tomatoes. Sweet peas amongst the beanpoles. Part of it was camouflage, of course. Part of it a lure for bees. But the truth was that Joe liked flowers and was reluctant even to pull weeds.

Jay would not have seen the rose garden if he had not known where to look. The wall against which the roses had once been trained had been partly knocked down, leaving an irregular section of brick about fifteen feet long. Greenery had shot up it, almost reaching the top, creating a dense thicket in which he hardly recognized the roses. With the secateurs he clipped a few briars free and revealed a single large red rose almost touching the ground.

‘Old rose,’ remarked Joe, peering closer. ‘Best kind for cookin. You should try makin some rose-petal jam. Champion.’

Jay made with the secateurs again, pulling the clinging tendrils away from the bush. He could see more rosebuds now, tight and green away from the sun. The scent from the open flower was light and earthy.

He had been writing half the night. Mireille had brought enough of the story for ten pages, and it fitted easily with the rest, as if it needed only this to carry on. Without this central tale his book was no more than a collection of anecdotes, but with Marise’s story to bind them together it might become a rich, absorbing novel. If only he knew where it was leading.

In London he used to go to the gym to think. Here he made for the garden. Garden work clears the mind. He remembered those summers at Pog Hill Lane, cutting and pruning under Joe’s careful supervision, mixing resin for graftings, preparing herbs for the sachets with Joe’s big old mortar. It felt right to do that here, too – red ribbons on the fruit trees to frighten the birds, sachets of pungent herbs for parasites.

‘They’ll need feeding, anall,’ remarked Joe, leaning over the roses. ‘You want to get some of that rosehip wine onto the roots. Do em no end of good. Then you’ll want summat for them aphids.’

Sure enough the plants were infested, the stems sticky with insect life. Jay grinned at the persistence of Joe’s guiding presence.

‘Perhaps I’ll just use a chemical spray this year,’ he suggested.

‘You bloody won’t, though,’ exclaimed Joe. ‘Buggerin everything up with chemicals. That’s not what you came here for, is it?’

‘So what did I come here for?’

Joe made a disgusted sound.

‘Tha knows nowt,’ he said.

‘Enough not to be caught out again,’ Jay told him. ‘You and your magic bags. Your talismans. Your travels in the Orient. You really had me going, didn’t you? You must have been splitting yourself laughing all the time.’

Joe looked at him sternly over his half-moon glasses.

‘I never laughed,’ he said. ‘An if you’d had any sense to look further than the end o’ yer nose-’

‘Really?’ Jay was getting annoyed now, tugging at the loose brambles around the rose bed with unnecessary violence. ‘Then what did you leave for? Without even saying goodbye? Why did I have to come back to Pog Hill and find the house empty?’

‘Oh, back to that again, are we?’

Joe settled against the apple tree and lit a Player’s. The radio lying in the long grass began to play ‘I Feel Love’, that August’s Number One.

‘Cut that out,’ Jay told him crossly.

Joe shrugged. The radio whined briefly and went off. ‘If only you’d planted them rosifeas, like I meant you to,’ said Joe.

‘I needed a bit more than a few poxy seeds,’ retorted Jay.

‘You allus was hard work.’ Joe flipped his cigarette butt neatly over the hedge. ‘I couldn’t tell you I was going because I didn’t know mesself. I needed to get on the move again, breathe a bit of sea air, see a bit of road. And besides, I thought I’d left you provided for. I telled yer, if only you’d planted them seeds. If only you’d had some faith.’

Jay had had enough. He turned to face him. For a hallucination Joe was very real, even down to the grime under his fingernails. For some reason that enraged him all the more.

‘I never asked you to come!’ He was shouting. He felt fifteen again, alone in Joe’s cellar, with broken bottles and jars all around. ‘I never asked for your help! I never wanted you here! Why are you here, anyway? Why don’t you just leave me alone!’

Joe waited patiently for him to finish. ‘Ave you done?’ he said when Jay fell silent. ‘Ave you bloody done?’

Jay began to cut away at the rose bushes again, not looking at him. ‘Get lost, Joe,’ he said, almost inaudibly.

‘I bloody might, anall,’ said Joe. ‘Think I’ve not got better things to be doing? Better places to travel to? Think I’ve got allt time int bloody world, do yer?’ His accent was thickening, as it always did on the rare occasions Jay saw him annoyed. Jay turned his back.

‘Reight.’ There was a heavy finality in the word, which made him want to turn back, but he did not. ‘Please thyssen. I’ll sithee.’

Jay forced himself to work at the bushes for several minutes. He could hear nothing behind him but the singing of birds and the shlush of the freshening wind across the fields. Joe had gone. And this time, Jay wasn’t sure whether he ever would see him again.

37

GOING INTO AGEN THE NEXT MORNING, JAY FOUND A NOTE FROM his agent. In it Nick sounded plaintive and excited, the words underscored heavily to emphasize their importance. ‘Get in touch with me. It’s urgent.’ Jay phoned him from Josephine’s cafe. There was no phone at the farm, and he had no plans to install one. Nick sounded very faint, like a distant radio station. In the foreground Jay could hear cafe sounds, the chinking of glasses, the shuffle of draughts pieces, laughter, raised voices.

‘Jay! Jay, I’m so glad to hear you. It’s going crazy here. The new book’s great. I’ve sent it to half a dozen publishers already. It’s-’

‘It isn’t finished,’ Jay pointed out.

‘That doesn’t matter. It’s going to be terrific. Obviously the foreign climate is doing you good. Now what I urgently need is a-’

‘Wait.’ Jay was beginning to feel disorientated. ‘I’m not ready.’

Nick must have heard something in his voice, because he slowed down then. ‘Hey, take it easy. No-one’s going to pressure you. No-one even knows where you are.’

‘That’s fine by me,’ Jay told him. ‘I need some more time on my own. I’m happy here, pottering around the garden, thinking about my book.’

He could hear Nick’s mind clicking over the possibilities. ‘O?. If that’s what you want, I’ll keep people away. I’ll slow things down. What do I tell Kerry? She’s been on the phone to me every other day, demanding to know what-’

‘You definitely don’t tell Kerry,’ Jay told him urgently. ‘She’s the last person I want over here.’

‘Oho,’ said Nick.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Been doing a bit of cherchez la femme, have you?’ He sounded amused. ‘Checking out the talent?’

‘No.’