When the mistral started to blow on the last evening of September, Blake remembered a famous passage from A Year in Provence and thought about his earlier ambitions. If not for the murder rap, he would have written an entry in his Life in Piégon memoirs about his own experience of the icy wind, which blew all night and seemed to have literally swept the last of the summer warmth away. But now he just took it as symbolic of his plight. On Tuesday morning, the trial was set to commence (it was now Sunday evening), and he would attend court dressed in a jacket, shivering before a temporarily excited press (the political season was slow; the football had started but was not yet at an exciting point). Blake anticipated this – his newly appointed French defence lawyer had warned him to dress smartly and do his best to look like the sweet so-and-so she was sure he was.
The last few months had passed slowly, as if his prison sentence had already begun. At first, the loneliness of the evenings pained him, as the shadows lengthened. Then he noticed that the days too felt emptier, as tourists left the Drome and Vaucluse regions which Piégon straddled; the cafés in Vaison seemed to shrink, and the Irish bar was dead. The police interviews trickled out, but he was required to present himself at the station with humiliating regularity, and he had been several more times to Orange to speak with the Juge Rodriguez. She had organised other interviews, including one with a psychologist during which the greffier seemed to write almost continuously, even when he was silent and there was only the still air between him and the young woman. She wanted to know why he wanted to be a writer, what drew him to crime writing, whether he was satisfied with his teaching career, how he would describe his relationship with his parents, with his fiancée, with Birna Aronsdóttir, and so on. The interview ended with a handshake and Blake felt rather disappointed that it hadn’t been a bit longer – he was just warming up; though it was true that he had also been somewhat on his guard and some of his answers were terse, even if accompanied by his best, charming smile.
He had been disappointed to find out that Juge Rodriguez would not preside over his trial. Apparently it didn’t work that way. As the investigating judge, she had combed over the facts of the case with a wise expression that gave Blake hope, and unlike the police, had been very clear in her explanations of the procedures and his options. Yet even Rodriguez doubted him, it was clear. Several times she offered Blake the chance to confess – to enlist her assistance such a level of cooperation was needed – then she could intervene with the procureur and smooth the way for a reduced sentence.
‘The French have a soft spot for writers,’ she had said warmly. ‘You could use that but you must start with the truth. Isn’t that the essence of good fiction, anyway?’
‘Yes, the paradox of fiction writing,’ Blake replied. ‘Have we time to talk about it?’ He realised in such moments how much he missed the classroom; if he had wanted to be a writer, he hadn’t realised how much he would miss the art of conversation, albeit one-sided or combative, as teaching often was.
He continued to stay in Sterling’s Piégon house; the lease was extended and he was paying a reduced rate (in fact, his parents had taken over, in what Blake insisted was a loan. Elizabeth had decided that her funding of his writing adventure was over. She hadn’t gone as far as requesting her bond money back — not yet, anyway).
Elizabeth. Shadows had lengthened here, too – or shortened – whichever was worse. She hadn’t been back to visit him since her stay for a few days in early July, nearly three months ago now, and still the ice hadn’t thawed. ‘I told you,’ Aiden said at the Finnegan’s. ‘Your lawyer is right – you well and truly fucked up.’
But Blake held out hope. It was in his nature to cling to the smallest of hints. So he wrote her a letter each week, like an old-fashioned lover. He made promises and painted a bright future for the two of them in London (with holidays in Australia); he returning to teaching and perhaps further study, supporting her career and improving himself. He didn’t mention his writing much, but he did let her know that he was continuing with his novel, which might yet, who knows, find a publisher and make this whole stuck-in-France-thing an amusing memory.
Promisingly, he dreamt less of Birna, though she continued to be on his mind — at least partly because she had become so elusive. His answers to the pretty psychologist about her had been full of long pauses. He had only seen her twice since his arrest. There was that one time in Avignon the day Elizabeth left, when he found the JosK photograph in a small Avignon gallery. At that time, he had a head of steam up and confronted her with the suggestion that she was involved somehow in Genet’s murder. Or, that her boyfriend-brother was (why did she pose like that in the photograph if he was really her step-brother?). Either way she had to tell the police everything, because as things stood, he was up for a Murder charge and it was more than simply an injustice, it was life-destroying.
At first she had appeared to listen sympathetically to him but by the time he voiced his options to her (‘We go together to the police station, or you write a letter, here and now, and give it to me to take to them’) she was shaking her head and opening her purse to pay for the coffees.
‘No, Blake. I don’t think so.’
He followed her down to the bus station but she hurried along, ignoring him, until finally he was shouting at her and she was covering her ears and brushing off his arm, and a muscular Frenchmen with a beard and a deep, gruff voice was calling out, ‘Allez, monsieur, arrêtez! Stop!’ He had to let her walk away from him then, swearing under his breath, phrases right from the mouths of drunks at the Copacabana Surf Club.
She hadn’t answered her phone or returned his calls, and she left Piégon soon after. He knew that she was still around – he saw her once in Vaison as he drove out of the police station, but he didn’t know where she was staying or how long she’d stick around for. Just as long as required by the police, he imagined, until the trial. Then she’d disappear. He began to see her as his enemy. Later, he would hear from the police that she had accused him of harassing her, and he was warned that this would not look good to a jury. He guessed from her reaction that day that she did have something to hide, though he couldn’t really be sure of her motives and confused them at times with his fictional Swedish beauty, who was herself something taken from news articles, novels, and his imagination. Somewhere in all of this, Birna agreed to meet him for a drink and peace-talks at a small bar in Vaison where they hadn’t been before, and she had turned up looking so beautiful that he temporarily fell for her once again, and squandered his only opportunity for a proper interrogation.
Mid-August. Her skin was tanned, her eyes free of worry, she wore a leather rainbow-coloured anklet, and a see-through blouse that drew his eyes helplessly to her lacy black bra. He remembered their first meeting in Piégon and once again saw her stride towards him with the confidence of a woman who was used to turning heads and whose singsong English accent somehow managed to both soothe him and make his senses alert, like a heady, French perfume.
‘Finish your novel?’ she asked.
‘My novel? I have to appear at court in Orange. Do you have any idea of what that means? Birna, I am facing a trial for a Murder charge and all because of that damned novel!’
‘Don’t get excited.’
She touched his arm and without blinking looked him straight in the eyes and said, ‘I think of you a lot, you know. Perhaps after the trial, we could try again?’
Try again? What did she mean by that? And why hadn’t he asked her straight out if she had murdered Genet, and if she had – inadvertently or not – implicated him to protect herself? Or to protect someone? Because that was the only theory that made any sense to him. But she flirted with him, and in the August heat at the café, he had fallen for small-talk and hints of further meetings. She turned the conversation away from any suggestions of her involvement in the crime easily enough (‘I was at home that evening, watching a film. I fell asleep on the sofa and woke late, or early, and went straight to bed. I slept like a sinner, Blake, but not the sort you mean.’)
After this meeting, Birna had ignored his calls and he felt desperate disappointment. Why had she agreed to meet him again, if it were to come only to this? Why did she then block him out, and (it seemed) complain about him to the police?
Well, he would see her again at some point, in court, from his spot on the stand. But before then, he had to face his parents, who were arriving tomorrow morning from Australia. His father and his mother, Peter and Alison Knox, and all that seeing them again would signify for this minor-celebrity, this writer-murderer.
The wind rattled the shutters and the candle blew out – Blake had taken to dramatic lighting for his long nights of writing and thinking. If only the psychologist were in bed beside him now, with a little machine to measure his dreams, she would know everything, more than he had dared to confess to his mother, or father, or any of his lovers. And a story written from these images would have been truthful, quite opposite from the verisimilitude he aimed to achieve by basing his writing on the so-called real world around him. In the early hours he dreamt of elongated gum trees and oversized red and green parrots; cafés with rows and rows of seats filled with heavy metal fans typing on small computers; classrooms in which he stood naked, looking for an excuse to leave before anyone noticed, holding a small, black writing pad in front of him, a pen in one awkward hand. Under the floorboards, he wrote, where the photographs of the dead artist tell the true story of a death in Piégon…