‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, grow up!’ She was suddenly furious, her voice rising like an angry bird’s. ‘Is this your excuse? Some kind of idiotic angst? If you spent less time mooning on about that old bastard Joe Cox and looked around you for a change, if only you took charge instead of talking about signs and omens-’
‘But I am,’ he interrupted her. ‘I am taking charge. I’m doing what you’ve always told me to do.’
‘Not by running away to France!’ The note in her voice was almost panic now. ‘Not just like that! You owe me. You wouldn’t have lasted two minutes without me. I’ve introduced you to people, used my contacts for you. You were nothing but a one-book wonder, a has-been, a fucking fake-’
Jay looked at her dispassionately for a moment. Strange, he thought remotely, how quickly gamine could shift to plain meanness. Her red mouth was thin, vicious. Her eyes were crescents. Anger, familiar and liberating, wrapped around him like a cloak, and he laughed.
‘Can the bullshit,’ he told her. ‘It always was a mutual convenience. You liked to drop my name at parties, didn’t you? I was an accessory. It did you good to be seen with me. It’s just like people who read poetry on the tube. People saw you with me and assumed you were a real intellectual, instead of a media wannabe without a single original thought in her head.’
She stared at him, astonished and enraged. Her eyes were wide.
‘What?’
‘Goodbye.’ He turned to go.
‘Jay!’ She snatched at him as he turned, slapping smartly against the duffel bag with the flat of her hand. Inside, the bottles whispered and snickered.
‘How dare you turn your back on me?’ she hissed. ‘You were happy enough to use my contacts when it suited you. How dare you turn round and tell me you’re leaving, without even giving me a proper explanation? If it’s personal space you want, then say that. Go to your French château, if that’s what you want, go wallow in atmosphere, if that’s going to help.’
She looked at him suddenly. ‘Is that it? Is it another book?’ She sounded hungry now, her anger sharpening into excitement. ‘If that’s what it is you have to tell me, Jay. You owe me that. After all this time…’
Jay looked at her. It would be so easy to say yes, he told himself. To give her something she would understand, maybe forgive.
‘I don’t know,’ he said at last. ‘I don’t think so.’ A taxi went by then and Jay flagged it down, throwing his luggage onto the back seat and jumping in with it. Kerry gave a cry of frustration and slapped the window of the taxi as if it were his face.
‘Go on then! Run away! Hide! You’re just like him, you know: a quitter! That’s all you know how to do! Jay! Jay!’
As the taxi pulled smoothly away from the kerb Jay grinned and settled back against his duffel bag. Its contents made small contented clicking sounds all the way to the airport.
12
Pog Hill, Summer 1975
SUMMER STEERED ITS COURSE AND JAY CAME MORE OFTEN TO Pog Hill Lane. Joe seemed pleased to see him when he came by, but never commented when he did not, and the boy spent days lurking by the canal or by the railway, watching over his uncertain territory, ever on the lookout for Zeth and his two friends. His hideout at the lock was no longer secure, so he moved the treasure box from its place in the bank and cast about for a safer place. At last he found one in the derelict car on the dumping ground, taping it to the underside of the rotten fuel tank. Jay liked that old car. He spent hours lounging in its one remaining seat, smelling the musty scent of ancient leather, hidden from sight by the rampant greenery. Once or twice he heard the voices of Zeth and his mates close by, but crouching in the low belly of the car – Joe’s charm held tightly in his hand – he was safe from any but the closest investigation. He watched and listened, intoxicated with the delight of spying on his enemies. At such times he believed in the charm implicitly.
He realized, as summer drew inevitably to its close, that he had grown fond of Kirby Monckton. In spite of his resistance he had found something here that he never had elsewhere. July and August sailed by like cool white schooners. He went to Pog Hill Lane almost every day. Sometimes he and Joe were alone, but too often there were visitors, neighbours, friends, though Joe seemed to have no family. Jay was sometimes jealous of their time together, resentful of time given to other people, but Joe always welcomed everyone, giving out boxes of fruit from his allotment, bunches of carrots, sacks of potatoes, a bottle of blackberry wine to one, a recipe for tooth powder to another. He dealt in philtres, teas, sachets. People came openly for fruit and vegetables but stayed in secret, talking to Joe in low voices, sometimes leaving with a little packet of tissue paper or a scrap of flannel tucked into hands and pockets. He never asked for payment. Sometimes people gave him things in exchange: a loaf or two, a home-made pie, cigarettes. Jay wondered where he got his money, and where the £5,000 to pay for his dream château would come from. But when he mentioned such things the old man just laughed.
As September loomed closer, every day seemed to gain a special, poignant significance, a mythical quality. Jay walked the canal side in a haze of nostalgia. He took notes of the things Joe said to him in their long conversations over the redcurrant bushes and replayed them in his mind as he lay in bed. He cycled for hours over deserted, now-familiar roads and breathed the sooty warm air. He climbed Upper Kirby Hill and looked out over the purple-black expanse of the Pennines and wished he could stay for ever.
Joe himself seemed untouched. He remained the same as ever, picking his fruit and laying it out in crates, making jam from windfalls, pointing out wild herbs and picking them when the moon was full, collecting bilberries from the moors and blackberries from the railway banking, preparing chutney from his tomatoes, piccalilli from his cauliflowers, lavender bags for sleeplessness, wintergreen for rapid healing, hot peppers and rosemary in oil and pickled onions for the winter. And, of course, there was the wine. Throughout all that summer Jay smelt wine brewing, fermeriting, ageing. All kinds of wine: beetroot, peapod, raspberry, elderflower, rosehip, jackapple, plum, parsnip, ginger, blackberry. The house was a distillery, with pans of fruit boiling on the stove, demijohns of wine waiting on the kitchen floor to be decanted into bottles, muslins for straining the fruit drying on the washing line, sieves, buckets, bottles, funnels, laid out in neat rows ready for use.
He kept the still in his cellar. It was a big copper piece, like a giant kettle, old but burnished and cared for. He used it to make his ‘spirits’, the raw, eyewatering clear alcohol he used to preserve the summer fruit which sat in gleaming rows on shelves in the cellar. Potato vodka, he called it, jackapple juice. Seventy per cent proof. In it he placed equal quantities of fruit and sugar to make his liqueurs. Cherries, plums, redcurrants, bilberries. The fruit stained the liquor purple and red and black in the dim cellar light. Each jar carefully labelled and dated. More than one man could ever hope to eat. Not that Joe minded; in any case, he gave away much of what he made. Apart from his wine and a few licks of strawberry jam with his morning toast, Jay never saw him touch any of those extravagant preserves and spirits. Jay supposed the old man must have sold some of these wares during the winter, though he never saw him do it. Most of the time he just gave things away.
Jay went back to school in September. The Moorlands School was as he remembered it, smelling of dust and disinfectant and polish and the bland, inescapable scent of ancient cooking. His parents’ divorce went through smoothly enough, after many tearful phone calls from his mother and postal orders from the Bread Baron. Surprisingly, he felt nothing. During the summer his rage had sloughed away into indifference. Anger seemed childish to him somehow. He wrote to Joe every month or so, though the old man never wrote back as regularly. He was not much of a writer, he said, and contented himself with a card at Christmas and a couple of lines near the end of term. His silence did not trouble Jay. It was enough to know that he was there.