in the rack he felt a sudden reluctance to open it, but it was already alive in his hand, black-corded Damson ’76, releasing its scent as he touched it, effervescent. Joe made himself scarce, as he often did when Jay had company, but Jay could just see him, standing in the shadows beside the kitchen door, the light from the table lamp gleaming on his bald forehead. He was wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt and holding his pit cap in his hand. His face was little more than a blur, but Jay knew he was smiling.
‘I don’t know if you’ll like it,’ said Jay, pouring the wine. ‘It’s a special kind of home-brew.’ The purple scent was thick, almost cloying. To Jay it had an aftertaste which reminded him of the sherbert fountains Gilly had enjoyed so much. To Marise it was more like a jar of jam which has remained sealed for too long and has become sugar. The taste was tannic, penetrating. It warmed her.
‘It’s strange,’ she said through numbed lips. ‘But I think I like it.’ She sipped again, feeling the heat crawl down her throat and into her body. A scent like distilled sunlight filled the room. To Jay it felt suddenly right that they should drink it together, this last of Joe’s bottles. Strange, too, that the taste, though peculiar, should be oddly pleasant. Maybe at last, as Joe had predicted, he was getting used to it.
‘I’ve found the biscuits,’ announced Rosa, appearing at the doorway with one in each hand. ‘Can I go upstairs and look at my room?’
Jay nodded.
‘You do that. I’ll call you when the chocolate’s ready.’
Marise looked at him. She knew she should feel wary, but instead there was a softness working through her, smoothing away all tension. She felt very young again, as if the scent of the strange wine had released something from her childhood. She remembered a party dress precisely the colour of the wine, a velvet party dress cut down from an old skirt of
‘Marise,’ said Jay quietly. ‘You know you can talk to me.’
It was as if she had been dragging something heavy behind her for the past seven years and had only just realized it. It was as simple as that.
‘There’s nothing wrong with Rosa’s hearing, is there?’ It was barely a question. She shook her head. She forced the words out like bullets.
‘It was a bad winter. She developed ear infections. There was a complication. She was deaf for six months. I took her to see specialists. There was an operation – very expensive. I was told not to expect too much.’ She drank a little more of Joe’s wine. It was rough with sugar. There was a syrupy residue at the bottom of the glass which tasted like damson jelly. ‘I paid for special lessons for her,’ she continued. ‘I learned sign language and continued to teach her myself. There was another operation – even more expensive. Within two years ninety per cent of her hearing was restored.’
Jay nodded. ‘But why the pretence? Why not simply-’
‘Mireille.’ Strange that this wine, which should have made her garrulous, should instead have made her terse. ‘She’s already tried to take her from me. All she has left of Tony, she says. I knew that if she once managed to get hold of Rosa I’d never get her back. I wanted to stop her. It was the only way I could think of. If she couldn’t talk to her, if she thought she was damaged in some way…’ She swallowed. ‘Mireille can’t bear imperfection. Less than perfect doesn’t interest her. That’s why when Tony-’ She stopped abruptly.
She should not trust him, Marise thought to herself. The wine was drawing more out of her than she was prepared to give. Wine talks, and talk is dangerous. The last man she had trusted was dead. Everything she touched – the vines, Tony, Patrice – died. Easy enough to believe that it was something she carried, passing it on to everyone with whom she came into contact. But the wine was strong. It rocked her gently in a cradle of scents and memories. It teased out her secrets.
She poured another glassful and downed it recklessly.
‘I’ll tell you,’ she said.
56
‘I MET HIM WHEN I WAS TWENTY-ONE,’ SHE BEGAN. ‘HE WAS MUCH older than me. He was a day patient in the psychiatric ward in Nantes hospital, where I was a student nurse. His name was Patrice.’
He was tall and dark, like Jay. He spoke three languages. He told her he was a lecturer at the Universite de Rennes. He was divorced. He was funny and wry and wore his depression with style. There was a ladder of cuts up his right wrist from an unsuccessful suicide attempt. He drank. He’d taken drugs. She’d thought he was cured.
Marise did not look up as she spoke of him, but instead watched her hands climb up and down the stem of the wineglass, as if playing a glass flute.
‘At twenty-one you’re so eager to find love that you see it in every stranger’s face,’ she said softly. ‘And Patrice was a real stranger. I saw him several times outside the hospital. I slept with him once. That was enough.’
After that he changed almost instantly. As if a steel cage had come down over them, they were trapped together. He became possessive, not in the charming, slightly insecure way which had first attracted her, but in a cold, suspicious manner, which frightened her. He quarrelled with her constantly. He followed her to work and harangued her on the ward. He tried to make up for his rages with lavish presents, which frightened her even more. Finally, he broke into her flat one evening and tried to rape her at knifepoint.
‘That was it,’ she remembered. ‘I’d had enough. I played along for a while, then made an excuse to go to the bathroom. He was full of plans. We were going to go away together to a place he knew in the country, where I’d be safe. That was what he said. Safe.’ She shivered.
Marise locked herself in the bathroom and climbed out of the window onto the roof, using the fire escape to reach the street. But by the time the police arrived, Patrice was gone. She changed the locks on her doors and secured the windows.
‘But it didn’t stop there. He would park his car outside the flat and watch me all the time. He would have things delivered to my door. Presents. Threats. Flowers.’ He was persistent. Over weeks his harassment escalated. A funeral wreath, delivered to her workplace. The locks forced and the entire flat redecorated in black while she was at work. A parcel of excrement, gift-wrapped in silver paper, on her birthday. Graffiti on her door. A mountain of unwanted mail-order items in her name: fetishwear, farm equipment, orthopaedic supplies, erotic literature. Little by little her courage was eroded. The police were powerless to help. Without proof of physical harm, they would have had little with which to charge him. They called on the address Patrice had given to the hospital, only to find it was that of a timber yard outside Nantes. No-one there had even heard of him.
‘Finally I moved out,’ she said. ‘I left the flat and bought a ticket to Paris. I changed my name. I rented a little apartment in Rue de la Jonquiere, and I found a job in a clinic in Marne-la-Vallee. I thought I was safe.’
It took him eight months to find her.
‘He used my medical records,’ explained Marise. ‘He must have managed to talk someone at the hospital into giving them to him. He could be very persuasive. Very plausible.’
She moved again, changed her name again and dyed her hair. For six months she worked as a waitress in a bar in Avenue de Clichy before finding another nursing job. She tried to erase herself from all official documentation. She allowed her medical insurance to lapse and did not transfer her records. She cancelled her credit card and paid all her bills in cash. This time it took Patrice almost a year to find her new address.
He had changed in a year. He had shaved his head and wore army surplus clothes. His siege of her flat had all the precision of a military campaign. There were no more practical jokes, no unwanted pizzas or begging notes. Even the threats stopped. She saw him twice, sitting in a car beneath her window, but when two weeks passed and there was no further sign of him she began to believe she had been mistaken. A few days later she awoke to the smell of gas. He had bypassed the main supply somehow, and she could find no way to turn it off. She tried the door, but it was jammed shut, wedged from the outside. The windows, too, were nailed shut, though her flat was on the third floor. The phone was out. She managed to break a window and scream for help, but it had been too close. She fled to Marseilles. Began again. That was where she met Tony.
