Blackberry Wine Read online

  But he was the teacher now, he realized. The teacher going crazy with impatience for the end of school. The pupils wanted desperately to be there, drinking in every meaningless word. He was, after all, Jay Mackintosh, the man who wrote Three Summers with Jackapple Joe. The writer who never wrote. A teacher with nothing to teach.

  The thought made him laugh aloud.

  It must be something in the air, he thought. A whiff of happy gas, a scent of the outlands. The droning girl stopped reading – or maybe she had finished – and stared at him in hurt accusation. She looked so like Kerry that he couldn’t help laughing again.

  ‘I bought a house today,’ he said suddenly.

  They stared at him without reaction. One young man in a Byron shirt wrote it down: ‘Bought … house today’.

  Jay pulled out the brochure from his pocket and looked at it again. It was crumpled and grimy from so much handling, but at the sight of the picture his heart leaped.

  ‘Not a house exactly,’ he corrected himself. ‘A chatto.’ He laughed again. ‘That’s what Joe used to call it. His chatto in Bordo.’

  He opened the brochure and read it aloud. The students listened obediently. Byron Shirt made notes.

  Château Foudouin, Lot-et-Garonne. Lansquenet-sous-Tannes. This authentic eighteenth-century château in the heart of France’s most popular wine-growing region includes vineyard, orchard, lake and extensive informal grounds, plus garage block, working distillery, five bedrooms, reception and living room, original oak-roof beaming. Suitable for conversion.

  ‘Of course, it was a bit more than five thousand quid. Prices have gone up since nineteen seventy-five.’ For a moment Jay wondered how many of those students were even born in 1975. They stared at him in silence, trying to understand.

  ‘Excuse me, Dr Mackintosh.’ It was the girl, still standing, now looking slightly belligerent. ‘Can you explain what this has to do with my assignment?’ Jay laughed again. Suddenly everything seemed amusing to him, unreal. He felt capable of doing anything, saying anything. Normality had been suspended. He told himself that this was what drunkenness was supposed to feel like. For all these years he had been doing it wrong.

  ‘Of course.’ He smiled at her. ‘This’ – holding up the leaflet so that everyone could see it – ‘This is the most original and evocative piece of creative writing I’ve seen from anyone since the beginning of the term.’

  Silence. Even Byron Shirt forgot his notes to gape at him. Jay beamed at the class, looking for a reaction. All were carefully expressionless.

  ‘Why are you here?’ he demanded suddenly. ‘What are you expecting to get from these lessons?’

  He tried not to laugh at their appalled faces, at their polite blankness. He felt younger than any of them, a delinquent pupil addressing a roomful of stuffy, pedantic teachers.

  ‘You’re young. You’re imaginative. Why the hell are you all writing about black single mothers and Glaswegian dope addicts and gratuitously using the word “fark”?’

  ‘Well, sir, you set the assignment.’ He had not won over the belligerent girl. She glared at him, clutching the despised assignment in her thin hand.

  ‘Stuff the assignment!’ he shouted merrily. ‘You don’t write because someone sets assignments! You write because you need to write, or because you hope someone will listen, or because writing will mend something broken inside you, or bring something back to life—’ To emphasize his words he slapped at the heavy duffel bag standing on his desk, and it gave out the unmistakable sound of bottles clinking together. Some of the students looked at each other. Jay turned back to the class, feeling almost delirious.

  ‘Where’s the magic, that’s what I want to know?’ he asked. ‘Where are the magic carpets and Haitian voodoo and lone gunslingers and naked ladies tied to railway lines? Where are the Indian trackers and the four-armed goddesses and the pirates and the giant apes? Where are the fucking space aliens?’

  There was a long silence. The students stared. The girl clutched her assignment so hard that the pages crumpled in her fist. Her face was white.

  ‘You’re pissed, aren’t you?’ Her voice was trembling with rage and disgust. ‘That’s why you’re doing this to me. You’ve got to be pissed.’

  Jay laughed again.

  ‘To paraphrase someone or other – Churchill it might have been – I may be pissed, but you’ll still be ugly in the morning.’

  ‘Fuck you!’ she flung at him, pronouncing it properly this time, and stalked towards the door. ‘Fuck you and your tutorial! I’m going to see the head of faculty about this!’

  For a second there was silence in her wake. Then the whisperings began. The room was awash with them. For a moment Jay was not sure whether these were real sounds or in his own head. The duffel bag clinked and clattered, rattled and rolled. The sound, imaginary or not, was overwhelming.

  Then Byron Shirt stood up and began to clap.

  A couple of the other students looked at him cautiously, then joined in. Several others joined them. Soon half the class was standing up, and most were clapping. They were still clapping as Jay picked up his duffel bag and turned towards the door, opened it, and left, closing it very gently behind him. The applause began to tail off, a number of voices murmuring confusion. From inside the duffel bag came the sound of bottles clinking together. Beside me, their work done, the Specials whispered their secrets.

  10

  Pog Hill, July 1975

  HE WENT TO SEE JOE MANY MORE TIMES AFTER THAT, THOUGH HE never really got to like his wine. Joe showed no surprise when he arrived, but simply went to fetch the lemonade bottle, as if he had been expecting him. Nor did he ask about the charm. Jay asked him about it a few times, with the scepticism of one who secretly longs to be convinced, but the old man was evasive.

  ‘Magic,’ he said, winking to prove it was a joke. ‘Learned it off of a lady in Puerto Cruz.’

  ‘I thought you said Haiti,’ interrupted Jay.

  Joe shrugged. ‘Same difference,’ he said blandly. ‘Worked, didn’t it?’

  Jay had to admit that it worked. But it was just herbs, wasn’t it? Herbs and bits of stick tied into a piece of cloth. And yet it had made him …

  Joe grinned.

  ‘Nah, lad. Not invisible.’ He pushed the bill of his cap up from his eyes.

  ‘What then?’

  Joe looked at him. ‘Some plants have properties, don’t they?’ he said.

  Jay nodded.

  ‘Aspirin. Digitalis. Quinine. What woulda been called magic in the old days.’

  ‘Medicines.’

  ‘If you like. But a few hundred years ago there were no difference between magic and medicine. People just knew things. Believed things. Like chewin cloves to cure toothache, or pennyroyal for a sore throat, or rowan twigs to keep away evil spirits.’ He glanced at the boy, as if to check for any sign of mockery. ‘Properties,’ he repeated. ‘You can learn a lot if you travel enough, an you keep an open mind.’

  Jay was never certain later whether Joe was a true believer or whether his casual acceptance of magic was part of an elaborate plan to baffle him. Certainly the old man liked a joke. Jay’s total ignorance of anything to do with gardening amused him, and for weeks he had the boy believing that a harmless stand of lemongrass was really a spaghetti tree – showing him the pale soft shoots of ‘spaghetti’ between the papery leaves – or that giant hogweeds could pull out their roots and walk, like triffids, or that you really could catch mice with valerian. Jay was gullible, and Joe delighted in finding new ways to catch him out. But in some things he was genuine. Maybe he had finally come to believe in his own fiction, after years of persuading others. His life was dominated by small rituals and superstitions, many taken from the battered copy of Culpeper’s Herbal he kept by his bedside. He tickled tomatoes to make them grow. He played the radio constantly, claiming that the plants grew stronger with music. They preferred Radio 1 – he claimed leeks grew up to two inches bigger after Ed Stewart’s Junior Choice – a
nd Joe would be there, singing along to ‘Disco Queen’ or ‘Stand By Your Man’ as he worked, his old-crooner’s voice rising solemnly above the redcurrant bushes as he picked and pruned. He always planted when there was a new moon and picked when the moon was full. He had a lunar chart in his greenhouse, each day marked in a dozen different inks: brown for potatoes, yellow for parsnips, orange for carrots. Watering, too, was done to an astrological schedule, as was the pruning and positioning of trees. And the funny thing was that the garden thrived on this eccentric treatment, growing strong, luxuriant rows of cabbages and turnips, carrots which were sweet and succulent and mysteriously free of slugs, trees whose branches fairly touched the ground under the weight of apples, pears, plums, cherries. Brightly coloured Oriental-looking signs Sellotaped to tree branches supposedly kept the birds from eating the fruit. Astrological symbols, painstakingly set into the gravel path and constructed from pieces of broken pottery and coloured glass, lined the garden beds. With Joe, Chinese medicine rubbed shoulders companionably with English folklore, chemistry with mysticism. For all Jay knew he may have believed it. Certainly, Jay believed him. At thirteen anything is possible. Everyday magic, that was what Joe called it. Layman’s alchemy. No fuss, no fireworks. Just a mixture of herbs and roots, gathered under favourable planetary conditions. A muttered incantation, a sketched air symbol learned from gypsies on his travels. Perhaps Jay would not have accepted anything less prosaic. But in spite of his beliefs – maybe even because of them – there was something deeply restful about Joe, an inner calm which encircled him and which filled the boy with curiosity and a kind of envy. He seemed so tranquil, alone in his little house, surrounded by plants, and yet he had a remarkable sense of wonder and a gleeful fascination with the world. He was almost without education, having left school at twelve to go down the mines, but he was an endless source of information, anecdotes and folklore. As the summer passed, Jay found himself going to see Joe more and more often. He never asked questions, but allowed Jay to talk to him as he worked in his garden or his unofficial allotment on the railway bank, occasionally nodding to show that he’d heard, that he was listening. They snacked on slabs of fruit cake and thick bacon and egg sandwiches – no Trimble loaves for Joe – and drank mugs of strong, sweet tea. From time to time Jay brought cigarettes and sweets or magazines, and Joe accepted these gifts without especial gratitude and without surprise, as he did the boy’s presence. As his shyness abated Jay even read him some of his stories, to which he listened in solemn and, he thought, appreciative silence. When Jay didn’t want to talk he would tell the boy about himself, about his work in the mines and how he went to France during the war and was stationed in Dieppe for six months before a grenade blew two fingers off his hand – wiggling the reduced limb like an agile starfish – then how, being unfit for service, it was the mines again for six years before he took off for America on a freighter.

  ‘Cause you don’t get to see much of the world from underground, lad, and I allus wanted to see what else there was. Have you done much travellin?’

  Jay told him he had been to Florida twice with his parents, to the south of France, to Tenerife and the Algarve for holidays. Joe dismissed these with a sniff.

  ‘I mean proper travellin, lad. Not all that tourist-brochure rubbish, but the real thing. The Pont-Neuf in the early morning, when there’s no-one up but the tramps coming out from under the bridges and out of the Metro, and the sun shinin on the water. New York. Central Park in spring. Rome. Ascension Island. Crossin the Italian alps by donkey. The vegetable caique from Crete. Himalayas on foot. Eatin rice off leaves in the Temple of Ganesh. Caught in a squall off the coast of New Guinea. Spring in Moscow and a whole winter of dogshit comin out under the meltin snow.’ His eyes were gleaming. ‘I’ve seen all of those things, lad,’ he said softly. ‘And more besides. I promised mesself I’d see everything.’

  Jay believed him. He had his maps on the walls, carefully annotated in his crabby handwriting and marked with coloured pins to show the places he had been. He told stories of brothels in Tokyo and shrines in Thailand, birds of paradise and banyan trees and standing stones at the end of the world. In the big converted spice cupboard next to his bed there were millions of seeds, painstakingly wrapped in squares of newspaper and labelled in his small careful script: tuberosa rubra maritima, tuberosa panax odarata, thousands and thousands of potatoes in their small compartments and, with them, carrots, squash, tomatoes, artichokes, leeks – over 300 species of onion alone – sages, thymes, sweet bergamots and a bewildering treasure store of medicinal herbs and vegetables collected on his travels, every one named and packaged and ready for planting. Some of these plants were already extinct in the wild, Joe said, their properties forgotten by everyone but a handful of experts. Of the millions of varieties of fruit and vegetables once grown, only a few dozen were still commonly used.

  ‘It’s your intensive farming does it,’ he would say, leaning on his spade for long enough to take a mouthful of tea from his mug. ‘Too much specialization kills off variety. Sides, people don’t want variety. They want everythin to look the same. Round red tomatoes, and never mind there’s a long yeller un that’d taste a mile better if they gave it a try. Red uns look better on shelves.’ He waved an arm vaguely over the allotment, indicating the neat rows of vegetables rising up the railway embankment, the home-made cold frames in the derelict signal box, the fruit trees pegged out against the wall. ‘There’s things growin here that you wouldn’t find anywhere else in the whole of England,’ he said in a low voice, ‘and there’s seeds in that chest of mine that you might not find anywhere else in the whole world.’ Jay listened to him in awe. He’d never been interested in plants before. He could hardly tell the difference between a Granny Smith and a Red Delicious. He knew potatoes, of course, but Joe’s talk of blue jackapples and pink fir apples was beyond any experience of his. The thought that there were secrets, that arcane, forgotten things might be growing right there on the railway embankment with only an old man as their custodian fired Jay with an enthusiasm he had never imagined. Part of it was Joe, of course. His stories. His memories. The energy of the man himself. He began to see in Joe something he had never seen in anyone else. A vocation. A sense of purpose.

  ‘Why did you come back, Joe?’ he asked him one day. ‘After all that travelling, why come back here?’

  Joe peered out gravely from under the bill of his miner’s cap.

  ‘It’s part of me plan, lad,’ he said. ‘I’ll not be here for ever. Some day I’ll be off again. Some day soon.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I’ll show you.’

  He reached into his workshirt and pulled out a battered leather wallet. Opening it, he unfolded a photograph clipped from a colour magazine, taking great care not to tear the whitened creases. It was a picture of a house.

  ‘What’s that?’ Jay squinted at the picture. It looked ordinary enough, a big house built of faded pinkish stone, a long strip of land in front, with some kind of vegetation growing in ordered rows. Joe smoothed out the paper.

  ‘That’s me chatto, lad,’ he said. ‘In Bordo, it is, in France. Me chatto with the vineyard and me hundred-year-old orchard with peaches and almonds and apples and pears.’ His eyes gleamed. ‘When I’ve got me brass together I’ll buy it – five grand would do it – and I’ll make the best bloody wine in the south. Chatto Cox, 1975. How’s that sound?’

  Jay watched him doubtfully.

  ‘Sun shines all year round down in Bordo,’ said Joe cheerily. ‘Oranges in January. Peaches like cricket balls. Olives. Kiwi fruit. Almonds. Melons. And space. Miles and miles of orchards and vineyards, land cheap as dirt. Soil like fruit cake. Pretty girls treadin out the grapes with their bare feet. Paradise.’

  ‘Five thousand pounds is a lot of money,’ said Jay doubtfully. Joe tapped the side of his nose with his forefinger.

  ‘I’ll get there,’ he said mysteriously. ‘You want somethin badly enough, you allus get there in the end.’
br />   ‘But you don’t even speak French.’

  Joe’s only response was a stream of sudden, incomprehensible gibberish, like no language Jay had ever heard before.

  ‘Joe, I do French at school,’ he told him. ‘That’s not anything like—’

  Joe looked at him indulgently.

  ‘It’s dialect, lad,’ he said. ‘Learned it off of a band of gypsies in Marseilles. Believe me, I’ll fit right in there.’ He folded the picture carefully away again and replaced it in his wallet. Jay gaped at him in awe, utterly convinced.

  ‘You’ll see what I mean one day, lad,’ he said. ‘Jus you wait.’

  ‘Can I come with you?’ Jay asked. ‘Will you take me with you?’ Joe considered it seriously, head to one side.

  ‘I might, lad, if you want to come. I might anall.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘All right.’ He grinned. ‘It’s a promise. Cox and Mackintosh, best bloody winemakers in Bordo. That do yer?’

  They toasted his dreams in warm Blackberry ’73.