Blackberry Wine Read online

  Joanne Harris is the author of three previous novels, Sleep, Pale Sister, The Evil Seed and Chocolat. Chocolat was shortlisted for the 1999 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award and is also published by Doubleday Canada. Joanne Harris lives in Barnsley, Yorkshire, with her husband and small daughter.

  Acclaim for Blackberry Wine:

  ‘A lively and original talent’

  Sunday Times

  ‘Harris is at her best when detailing the sensual pleasures of taste and smell. As chocoholics stand advised to stock up on some of their favourite bars before biting into Chocolat, so boozers everywhere should get a couple of bottles in before opening Blackberry Wine’

  Helen Falconer, Guardian

  ‘Joanne Harris has the gift of conveying her delight in the sensuous pleasures of food, wine, scent and plants … [Blackberry Wine] has all the appeal of a velvety scented glass of vintage wine’

  Lizzie Buchan, Daily Mail

  ‘If Joanne Harris didn’t exist, someone would have to invent her, she’s such a welcome antidote to the modern preoccupation with the spare, pared down and non-fattening. Not for her the doubtful merits of an elegant and expensive sparkling water or an undressed rocket salad. In her previous novel, Chocolat, she invoked the scent and the flavour of rich, dark, sweet self-indulgence. In Blackberry Wine she celebrates the sensuous energy that can leap from a bottle after years of fermentation … Harris bombards the senses with the smells and tastes of times past … Harris’s talent lies in her own grasp of the quality she ascribes to wine, “layman’s alchemy, the magic of everyday things.” She is fanciful and grounded at the same time – one moment shrouded in mystery, the next firmly planted in earth. Above all, she has wit’

  Jenni Murray, Sunday Express

  Copyright © Joanne Harris 2000

  Originally published in Great Britain by Doubleday,

  a division of Transworld Publishers

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Doubleday edition published 2000

  Black Swan edition published 2001

  ‘God’s Garden’ by Dorothy Frances Gurney

  reprinted courtesy of Burns and Oates Publishers.

  The right of Joanne Harris to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publications, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Doubleday Canada and colophon are trademarks.

  Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Harris, Joanne

  Blackberry wine

  eISBN: 978-0-385-67474-4

  I. Title

  PR6058.A6884B523 2001 823′.914 C00-932132-2

  Published in Canada by

  Doubleday Canada, a division of

  Random House of Canada Limited

  Visit Random House of Canada Limited’s website: www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  To my grandfather, Edwin Short:

  gardener, winemaker and poet at heart.

  Acknowledgements

  Many thanks go to the following: Kevin and Anouchka for bearing with me, to G. J. Paul, and the Priory Old Boys’ Club, to Francesca Liversidge for her inspired editing, to Jennifer Luithlen, to my splendid agent, Serafina Clarke, for showing me the ropes, but not giving me enough to hang myself with, and to Our Man in London, Christopher Fowler. To all my colleagues and pupils at Leeds Grammar School, goodbye, and good luck. I’ll miss you.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2 - London, Spring 1999

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4 - Pog Hill, Summer 1975

  Chapter 5 - London, Spring 1999

  Chapter 6 - Pog Hill, July 1975

  Chapter 7 - London, March 1999

  Chapter 8 - Pog Hill, July 1975

  Chapter 9 - London, March 1999

  Chapter 10 - Pog Hill, July 1975

  Chapter 11 - London, Spring 1999

  Chapter 12 - Pog Hill, Summer 1975

  Chapter 13 - Paris, March 1999

  Chapter 14 - Pog Hill, Summer 1976

  Chapter 15 - Marseilles, March 1999

  Chapter 16 - Pog Hill, Summer 1976

  Chapter 17 - Lansquenet, March 1999

  Chapter 18 - Pog Hill, Summer 1977

  Chapter 19 - Lansquenet, March 1999

  Chapter 20 - Pog Hill, Summer 1977

  Chapter 21 - Lansquenet, March 1999

  Chapter 22 - Nether Edge, Summer 1977

  Chapter 23 - Lansquenet, March 1999

  Chapter 24 - Pog Hill, Summer 1977

  Chapter 25 - Lansquenet, March 1999

  Chapter 26 - Pog Hill, Summer 1977

  Chapter 27 - Lansquenet, March 1999

  Chapter 28 - Nether Edge, Summer 1977

  Chapter 29 - Lansquenet, March 1999

  Chapter 30 - Nether Edge, Summer 1977

  Chapter 31 - Lansquenet, March 1999

  Chapter 32 - Pog Hill, Summer 1977

  Chapter 33 - Lansquenet, March 1999

  Chapter 34 - Pog Hill, Summer 1977

  Chapter 35 - Lansquenet, April 1999

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40 - Pog Hill, Summer 1977

  Chapter 41 - Lansquenet, May 1999

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46 - Nether Edge, Summer 1977

  Chapter 47 - Lansquenet, May 1999

  Chapter 48 - Pog Hill, Autumn 1977

  Chapter 49 - Lansquenet, Summer 1999

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57 - Pog Hill Lane, February 1999

  Chapter 58 - Lansquenet, Summer 1999

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Postscript

  1

  WINE TALKS. EVERYONE KNOWS THAT. LOOK AROUND YOU. ASK the oracle at the street corner; the uninvited guest at the wedding feast; the holy fool. It talks. It ventriloquizes. It has a million voices. It unleashes the tongue, teasing out secrets you never meant to tell, secrets you never even knew. It shouts, rants, whispers. It speaks of great things, splendid plans, tragic loves and terrible betrayals. It screams with laughter. It chuckles softly to itself. It weeps in front of its own reflection. It opens up summers long past and memories best forgotten. Every bottle a whiff of other times, other places; every one, from the commonest Liebfraumilch to the imperious 1945 Veuve Clicquot, a humble miracle. Everyday magic, Joe called it. The transformation of base matter into the stuff of dreams. Layman’s alchemy.

  Take me, for instance. Fleurie, 1962. Last survivor of a crate of twelve, bottled and laid down the year Jay was born. ‘A pert, garrulous wine, cheery and a little brash, with a pungent taste of blackcurrant,’ said the label. Not really a wine for keeping, but he did. For nostalgia’s sake. For a sp
ecial occasion. A birthday, perhaps a wedding. But his birthdays passed without celebration; drinking Argentinian red and watching old Westerns. Five years ago he laid me out on a table set with silver candlesticks, but nothing came of it. In spite of that he and the girl stayed together. An army of bottles came with her – Dom Pérignon, Stolichnaya vodka, Parfait Amour and Mouton-Cadet, Belgian beers in long-necked bottles, Noilly Prat vermouth and Fraise des Bois. They talk, too, nonsense mostly, metallic chatter, like guests mingling at a party. We refused to have anything to do with them. We were pushed to the back of the cellar, we three survivors, behind the gleaming ranks of these newcomers, and there we stayed for five years, forgotten. Château-Chalon ’58, Sancerre ’71 and myself. Château-Chalon, vexed at his relegation, pretends deafness and often refuses to speak at all. ‘A mellow wine of great dignity and stature,’ he quotes in his rare moments of expansiveness. He likes to remind us of his seniority, of the longevity of yellow Jura wines. He makes much of this, as he does of his honeyed bouquet and unique pedigree. The Sancerre has long since turned vinegary and speaks even less, occasionally sighing thinly over her vanished youth.

  And then, six weeks before this story begins, the others came. The strangers. The Specials. The interlopers who began it all, though they too seemed forgotten behind the bright new bottles. Six of them, each with its own small handwritten label and sealed in candle wax. Each bottle had a cord of a different colour knotted around its neck: raspberry red, elderflower green, blackberry blue, rosehip yellow, damson black. The last bottle, tied with a brown cord, was no wine even I had ever heard of. ‘Specials, 1975,’ said the label, the writing faded to the colour of old tea. But inside was a hive of secrets. There was no escaping them; their whisperings, their catcalls, their laughter. We pretended indifference to their antics. These amateurs. Not a whiff of grape in any of them. They were inferiors, and we begrudged them their place among us. And yet there was an appealing impudence to these six freebooters, a hectic clash of flavours and images to send more sober vintages reeling. It was, of course, beneath our dignity to speak to them. But oh I longed to. Perhaps it was that plebeian undertaste of blackcurrant which linked us.

  From the cellar you could hear everything that went on in the house. We marked events with the comings and goings of our more favoured colleagues: twelve beers Friday night and laughter in the hallway; the night before a single bottle of Californian red, so young you could almost smell the tannin; the previous week – his birthday, as it happened – a half-bottle of Moët, a demoiselle, that loneliest, most revealing of sizes, and the distant, nostalgic sound of gunfire and horses’ hooves from upstairs. Jay Mackintosh was thirty-seven. Unremarkable but for his eyes, which were pinot noir indigo, he had the awkward, slightly dazed look of a man who has lost his way. Five years ago Kerry had found this appealing. By now she had lost her taste for it. There was something deeply annoying about his passivity and the core of stubbornness beneath. Precisely fourteen years ago Jay wrote a novel called Three Summers with Jackapple Joe. You’ll know it, of course. It won the Prix Goncourt in France, translated into twenty languages. Three crates of vintage Veuve Clicquot celebrated its publication – the ’76, drunk too young to do it justice, but then Jay was always like that, rushing at life as if it might never run dry, as if what was bottled inside him would last for ever, success following success in a celebration without end.

  In those days there was no wine cellar. We stood on the mantelpiece above his typewriter, for luck, he said. When he’d completed the book he opened the last of my companions of ’62 and drank it very slowly, turning the glass round and round in his hands when he’d finished. Then he came over to the mantelpiece. For a moment he stood there. Then he grinned and walked, rather unsteadily, back to his chair.

  ‘Next time, sweetheart,’ he promised. ‘We’ll leave it till next time.’ You see, he talks to me, as one day I will talk to him. I’m his oldest friend. We understand each other. Our destinies are intertwined.

  Of course there was no next time. Television interviews, newspaper articles and reviews succeeded each other into silence. Hollywood made a film adaptation with Corey Feldman, set in the American Midwest. Nine years passed. Jay wrote part of a manuscript entitled Stout Cortez and sold eight short stories to Playboy magazine, which were later reprinted as a collection by Penguin Books. The literary world waited for Jay Mackintosh’s new novel, eagerly at first, then restless, curious, then finally, fatally, indifferent.

  Of course he still wrote. Seven novels to date, with titles like The G-sus Gene or Psy-Wrens of Mars or A Date with d’Eath, all written under the pseudonym of Jonathan Winesap, nice earners which kept him in reasonable comfort for those fourteen years. He bought a computer, a Toshiba laptop, which he balanced on his knees like the TV dinners he made for himself on the nights – increasingly frequent now – that Kerry worked late. He wrote reviews, articles, short stories and newspaper columns. He lectured at writers’ groups, held creative-writing seminars at the university. There were so many things to occupy him, he used to say, that he had scarcely any time to do any work of his own – laughing without conviction at himself, the writer who never writes. Kerry looked at him, narrow-lipped, when he said this. Meet Kerry O’Neill – born Katherine Marsden – twenty-eight, cropped blond hair and startling green eyes, which Jay never suspected were coloured contact lenses. A journalist made good in television by way of Forum! a late-night talk show, where popular authors and B-list celebrities discussed contemporary social problems against a background of avant-garde jazz. Five years ago she might have smiled at his words. But then, five years ago there was no Forum!, Kerry was writing a travel column for the Independent and working on a book entitled Chocolate – a Feminist Outlook. The world was filled with possibilities. The book came out two years later, on a wave of media interest. Kerry was photogenic, marketable and mainstream. As a result she appeared on a number of lightweight chat shows. She was photographed for Marie Claire, Tatler and Me!, but was quick to reassure herself that it hadn’t gone to her head. She had a house in Chelsea, a pied-à-terre in New York and was considering liposuction on her thighs. She had grown up. Moved on.

  But, for Jay, nothing had moved on. Five years ago he had seemed the embodiment of the temperamental artist, drinking half a bottle of Smirnoff a day, a doomed, damaged figure of romance. He had brought out her maternal instincts. She was going to redeem him, inspire him and, in return, he would write a wonderful book, a book which would illuminate lives and which would all be due to her.

  But none of that happened. Trashy sci-fi was what paid the rent; cheap paperbacks with lurid covers. The maturity, the puckish wisdom of that first work, had never been duplicated, or even attempted. And for all his brooding silences Jay had no temperament to speak of. He had never given in to an impulse. He never really showed anger, never lost control. His conversation was neither brilliantly intelligent nor intriguingly surly. Even his drinking – his one remaining excess – seemed ridiculous now, like a man who insists upon wearing the outmoded fashions of his youth. He spent his time playing computer games, listening to old singles and watching old movies on video, locked in his adolescence like a record in a groove. Maybe she was mistaken, thought Kerry. He didn’t want to grow up. He didn’t want to be saved.

  The empty bottles told a different story. He drank, Jay told himself, for the same reason he wrote second-rate science fiction. Not to forget, but to remember, to open up the past and find himself there again, like the stone in a bitter fruit. He opened each bottle, began each story with the secret conviction that here was the magic draught that would restore him. But magic, like wine, needs the right conditions in order to work. Joe could have told him that. Otherwise the chemistry doesn’t happen. The bouquet is spoiled.

  I suppose I expected it to begin with me. There would have been poetry in that. We are linked, after all, he and I. But this story begins with a different vintage. I don’t really mind that. Better to be his last than his first. I’
m not even the star of this story, but I was there before the Specials came, and I’ll be there when they’ve all been drunk. I can afford to wait. Besides, aged Fleurie is an acquired taste, not to be rushed, and I’m not sure his palate would have been ready.

  2

  London, Spring 1999

  IT WAS MARCH. MILD, EVEN FOR THE CELLAR. JAY HAD BEEN working upstairs – working in his way, with a bottle at his elbow and the television turned on low. Kerry was at a party – the launch of a new award for female authors under twenty-five – and the house was silent. Jay used the typewriter for what he thought of as ‘real’ work, the laptop for his science fiction, so you could always tell what he was writing by the sound, or lack of it. It was ten before he came downstairs. He switched on the radio to an oldies station, and you could hear him moving about in the kitchen, his footsteps restless against the terracotta tiles. There was a drinks cabinet next to the fridge. He opened it, hesitated, closed it again. The fridge door opened. Kerry’s taste dominated here, as everywhere. Wheat-grass juice, couscous salad, baby spinach leaves, yoghurts. What he really craved, Jay thought, was a huge bacon-and-fried-egg sandwich with ketchup and onion, and a mug of strong tea. The craving, he knew, had something to do with Joe and Pog Hill Lane. An association, that was all, which often came on when he was trying to write. But all that was finished. A phantom. He knew he wasn’t really hungry. Instead he lit a cigarette, a forbidden luxury reserved for when Kerry was out of the house, and inhaled greedily. From the radio’s scratchy speaker came the voice of Steve Harley singing ‘Make me smile’ – another song from that distant, inescapable summer of ’75 – and for a moment he raised his voice to sing along – ‘Come up and see me, make me smi-i-i-ile’ – forlornly in the echoing kitchen.

  Behind us in the dark cellar the strangers were restless. Perhaps it was the music, or perhaps something in the air of this mild spring evening seemed suddenly charged with possibility, for they were effervescent with activity, seething in their bottles, rattling against each other, jumping at shadows, bursting to talk, to open, to release their essence into the air. Perhaps this was why he came down, his steps heavy on the rough, unpolished stairs. Jay liked the cellar; it was cool, secret. He was always coming down there, just to touch the bottles, to run his fingers along the dust-furred walls. I always liked it when he came to the cellar. Like a barometer, I can sense his emotional temperature when he is close to me. To some extent I can even read his thoughts. As I said, there is a chemistry between us.