by Jenny Oliver
Olive shook her head. ‘I really doubt it, Marge. Dolly never does what you expect.’ Then she hung up, taking a quick moment as she briskly opened the menu to get her breathing back under control and her stress levels down. She thought of all the times she’d walked the streets searching for Dolly, the hovels she’d elbowed her way through, the long-haired, greasy know-alls she’d done battle with just to talk to her sister. Surely Olive had done her time. Could she plead past kindness to offset future responsibility?
Zadie snapped her menu shut with a ‘I’m having dough balls, a margherita pizza, a Coke and profiteroles for pudding.’ Then sitting back in her chair, said, ‘OK, we can read the clue now.’
Zadie had wanted to prolong the excitement by saving reading the clue till dinnertime.
‘Are you sure?’ Ruben quipped.
Zadie nodded. A young waiter came over to take their order while Olive dug in her handbag for the little black box, prised it open and pulled out the clue, which had been sealed in small a ziplock bag.
‘You know the maiden rocks that guard the southern bay. But did you know their heart of stone they one day threw away?’
Next to Ruben, Zadie was practically bouncing out of her seat. ‘I know where the maidens are. I read about them when I looked the area up. Three rocks in a perfect straight line – there used to be four but one eroded – they were thought to be the daughters of drowned fishermen sent to guard against the shallow rocks!’
‘Yes, well done, they’re round the headland on the tip of Trevellyn Bay,’ said Ruben, impressed. ‘Maybe you are a genius.’ Then with a cheeky grin, he added, ‘You take after your father,’ throwing out the remark as casually as he sipped the glass of red wine set down by the waiter.
But Olive watched Zadie absorb Ruben’s words like a keepsake, ready for her diary later that night. ‘Dear Diary, everything is going exactly as I’d hoped. Daddy is so handsome and funny and thinks we’re so alike …’ She could see her desperation in those huge blue eyes. The fairy-tale reunion. The beaming smiles and the twirling hugs. The galloping unicorns and the twinkling of stardust.
Ruben however had already moved on to the next subject. ‘What was that earlier on the phone. What’s happened to Dolly?’
‘Oh, nothing,’ she said.
‘Come on!’ he laughed. ‘Clearly something’s going on.’
Olive found herself not wanting to mention Dolly’s suspension and Aunt Marge’s concern as to her whereabouts. It felt too much like the past. As if their family were still as haphazard and chaotic as they always were. ‘Honestly, it’s nothing,’ she said, sitting up straight, taking a sip of her wine, remembering for some reason the look of disdain in Ruben’s father’s eyes when he looked at her, the riff-raff on the estate.
Ruben smiled like he could see straight through her. ‘You’ve become very prim, Olive.’
Olive felt her cheeks flush again. Hating the fact she was coming across as uptight. She thought of Mark; he would be perfectly happy to let the matter lie. For a moment, she wished Mark was here, to hell with what he’d done. Just for the simple comfort of familiarity in moments of weakness. He’d have deliberately changed tack when he saw her get flustered, possibly put his hand on her leg under the table and given it a squeeze. She missed the intimacy of their silent understandings. ‘Could we talk about something else?’
‘If you want,’ said Ruben. ‘Zadie, name your number one holiday?’
Zadie took the bait without question. Chuntering on about the many endangered corals of the Great Barrier Reef while also desperate for a trip to the Christmas markets in Bruges. Ruben caught Olive’s eye and offered a nod of apology. She shook her head like it didn’t matter but she could feel he still had one eye on her while Zadie pontificated.
Then the food appeared, giving Olive a much-needed reprieve. As she ate, she could still smell the lake water on her skin, even though she’d showered. It occurred to her that if she’d been with Mark, he’d have been cringing as soon as she’d jumped in the lake. Embarrassed. Worried what people would think and mortified himself by the draw of attention. In fact, were she still with him, she too would have been embarrassed. Together they lived by life’s rules. Quietly. A little sardonically. Never drawing attention to themselves or away from the status quo.
Yet climbing on that statue, searching for the clue, she had felt the most herself she had in years.
It made her wonder if perhaps they had lived together in such perceived normality so they never had to examine anything even remotely below the surface. Instead, they ticked the boxes of a relationship. They read the same newspaper, discussed the same politics, laughed at and derided the same TV programmes. Both escaping the lives they’d had – don’t get her started on Mark’s bizarre family history – and as recompense let this neutral, vanilla way of living lead the way.
In Angelica’s Trattoria, Olive, Ruben and Zadie gorged on garlic bread and margherita pizza, red wine and Coca-Cola, tiramisu and profiteroles. Lashings of everything while Italian opera bellowed in the background and Angelica popped over for the occasional chat, brandy in hand, squished up cosily next to Ruben, demanding their life stories but interrupting with her own.
And as they talked and laughed, firmly in the moment, Angelica delightfully loud and brash, Zadie wide-eyed with delight, Ruben indisputably charming, Olive thought occasionally of the algae-covered, bone-chilling lake water. The giant fish circling her legs. The cool ripple over her skin as she kicked hard underwater, feeling less like the luxury fabrics executive and more like the girl who cut her hair in the bathroom with the kitchen scissors.
It made her think of Mark sitting at his computer, his heart lighting up when he got a message from mousy Barbara, and for the first time, instead of incredulous disbelief and self-pitying anger, she saw a manifestation of his own unhappiness. An escape from the humdrum of reality. Both of them – Mark and Olive – together but apart, their real selves squashed to the corners of their existence in order to live prosaically as one.
Back at the Big House it felt strangely like they were a family. The evening having smoothed their edges. A sense of easy familiarity between them. Zadie was exhausted. After calling her mum she changed into her pyjamas and trotted off to bed. Zadie slept with Harry Potter on her headphones – ‘I know it’s too young for me but I love it.’ To which Ruben replied with some confusion, ‘Too young? They’re the only books I’ve ever read, and I only finished the last one last year.’
Zadie seemed the most pleased with this answer than any other he’d given and went off smiling.
‘Do you fancy another drink?’ Ruben asked Olive.
From his tone, he clearly expected her to say no, and she would have normally but instead Olive said, ‘Yeah OK,’ reeling slightly from the liberation of self-honesty coupled with an underlying concern about Dolly. She wasn’t ready to go to sleep yet.
Ruben said, ‘The best wine’s in the cellar. Want to come down?’
Olive followed him through the impressive, ornate corridors of the Big House. Past rooms she’d never been in, only imagined. The wine cellar was down a spiral staircase of beautifully restored stone walls and into an arched room with racks and racks of wine. Olive looked around. ‘You can’t tell me you’re not affected by being back here.’
‘Oh, I’m affected,’ Ruben said, running his finger along the various wines until he came across one he approved of and selected a dusty bottle. ‘A great vintage of my father’s,’ he said, wiping the label clean with his hand. ‘He would turn in his grave if he knew we were drinking it like plonk.’ Tucking it under his arm, he started up the stairs, saying over his shoulder, ‘I’ll admit, I was affected in the forest. It was sad being back there. And I was affected in the cottage, but I’m just not affected here,’ he clarified, gesturing towards the austere corridor ahead of them. ‘I don’t massively like it. It means nothing to me.’
Olive closed the door to the cellar stairs behind her and followed Ruben across the
Persian carpets and past museum-esque antiquities, considering all the unhappiness he had experienced within these beautiful walls. ‘I’m not sure I believe you,’ she said, thinking how she hadn’t even been able to go down into the cellar at the cottage.
Ruben laughed, ushering Olive into the sitting room and, grabbing two glasses and a corkscrew from a lacquered drinks cabinet, they went outside through the French windows to sit at the patio table. In contrast to the stuffy stately-home smell of the house, the night air smelt of honeysuckle and fresh mowed grass. The view was out over the lake. The statue of Diana with her bow poised and glinting in the moonlight. ‘You’re the one who said you were completely fine being here,’ he said, opening the wine with a pop.
Olive looked out over the gardens. Ruben placed a glass down in front of her. A fox padded through the beam of the outdoor light. In the distance she saw the roof of the dilapidated orangery. ‘I was lying.’
Ruben snorted into his wine.
Olive found herself smiling. She felt light from a desire for honesty. ‘Everywhere I look I see things I don’t want to see.’
There was a pause. Ruben took a sip of wine and said, ‘Christ that’s good.’ Then to Olive asked, ‘Like what?’
Olive gave him a look. ‘You know exactly what. Everything. The mess at the cottage. The bench you slept on. And I saw you, you didn’t want to go to the orangery either.’
The orangery. The site of so much happiness and yet absolutely hideous at the same time. When he met her eye she could see that he could see it all too. All the moments they spent together hidden by the vines and the palm trees so tall they’d broken through the already shattered glass. The building, decrepit and forgotten even then, had become a haven for their forbidden relationship. Where they sat with their fingers entwined and listed the countries in the order they would visit them when they escaped this place, where they snuggled under blankets and she buried her head against his smooth skin, where he kissed her hair and said, ‘Without you, I don’t think I would be me.’
Ruben looked away back out at the night-lit garden; he opened his mouth to say something but changed his mind, lowering his head a touch. Olive wanted to say that he didn’t have to say anything, that she was thinking what he was thinking, but she didn’t feel she knew him well enough any more to risk such assumptions.
Ruben turned his head to look at her, his mouth tipped in a sad smile. ‘All went a bit wrong, didn’t it?’
Olive nodded.
It was at the orangery – their special place – that they learnt it was another couple’s special place, too. That someone else had taken advantage of the tangle of vines and the giant overgrown leaves. It was there that Olive and Ruben had discovered his father and her mother having an affair, approximately two minutes before her father discovered it and another thirty seconds before her little sister discovered it. The revelation was a flash of time that lived in Olive’s brain, drawn to the foreground as little as possible. ‘I’m not sure I can even go over there,’ Olive said, pointing to the greenhouse roof. ‘Just looking at it, all I see is my mother lying on the floor grasping at his ankle. I mean …’ She rubbed her forehead with her hand. ‘What was she doing? How could she have got so low?’
‘I don’t know.’ Ruben shook his head, sitting back in his chair. ‘You wouldn’t catch me grovelling at that bastard’s feet.’
Olive looked at him; his jaw tight, blue eyes brimming with displeasure. She wondered if he never thought about it either, closed himself off to emotions as well. What safe status quo had he lived by – that of the carefree Lothario from the looks of his Instagram.
Olive would never forget the sight of her mother, cast off by Lord de Lacy as soon as their clandestine affair was no longer clandestine. Limp and broken. Sobbing, inconsolable. Olive had stared frozen, unable to comprehend what she was seeing, so many questions in her head. Why would you do this when you are so loved? Why ruin everything? She remembered feeling a guilty mix of pity and disgust. But then it had all been overshadowed by the ensuing angry confrontation between her lovely dad – just back from his best adventure yet – and Ruben’s. And then as he had stormed away, a new focus. That of Lord de Lacy’s eyes on the tightly clutched hands of Olive and Ruben. The dawning realisation that while he’d been shagging the riff-raff, so had his son. ‘Over my dead body will you throw your life away on her!’ All to a backing track of her mother’s delirium at being cast aside. Detested by Lord de Lacy for the weakness she represented in him.
It made Olive’s stomach tighten to think of it. The haughty disgust of his words aimed at her family. At her. It brought into stark relief the chasm between them. The Lord and his servants. He’d spat. Lord de Lacy had actually spat in distaste near where her mother was lying. ‘For Christ’s sake, get up, woman.’ Olive had let go of Ruben’s hand to haul her mother up. To her it marked the moment when everything ended.
The treasure hunt Olive’s dad had laid, hopping with excitement that he’d struck it rich, was forgotten. His camouflage rucksack that had been dumped in the hall, ‘I’m back, girls, back for good this time!’ gone when they returned to the cottage. Olive half stumbling under the weight of her uselessly sobbing mother. Her dad was gone and they never saw him again. He died three weeks later. Aunt Marge had come to stay with them, Olive’s mother too wrecked to be of any use. Olive had been the one to cover Dolly’s ears as Marge sipped Martinis and said things like, ‘He knew he wasn’t coming back from that trip. You don’t kayak the roughest river in the world and imagine you’re coming home to tell the tale.’
Sitting at the patio table, Ruben gulped down the last of his wine. ‘If only they could have kept their hands off each other.’
‘I know!’ Olive inhaled, surprised by the feelings conjured up by the chat. ‘What was she doing with him? It still makes me really angry. More angry than I thought it would, actually. I’ve just never been able to understand what she was doing. She ruined it all, and for what? He didn’t love her. My dad, he loved her!’ She finished her wine, a little embarrassed at her rant. Ruben topped both their glasses up. She thought of the chaos that had ensued. Her mother’s catatonic breakdown. Aunt Marge’s haphazard attempt to reassemble the lives of two teenage girls. The de Lacys packed up and gone. An eviction notice placed on the cottage. All of it a mess of grief and anger and resentment.
‘If only I had known what was going on with them – with my mum and your dad. Done more to stop it. I feel like if I’d just seen the signs—’
Ruben scoffed. ‘Oh, come on, you can’t honestly be blaming yourself? There were no signs. Your mum was like the perfect mum. No one would have known.’
‘I should have known,’ Olive said, tipping her head back to the starry sky. ‘I knew what she was like.’
Josephine King was the kind of mother who threw tea parties for the teddies with homemade lemonade and hot cross buns. Who spread patchwork eiderdowns on the ground and gathered her girls close for fantastical fairy tales. To anyone looking on it was an idyllic childhood. To Olive though, it felt like her mother was so good with children because really she was always just a child herself. She would stubbornly refuse the burden of reality, referring to herself as the dreamer and Olive as the sensible, practical one. But it was tiring being responsible for someone else’s whimsy.
‘Then there’s my dad, he was locking me in the park, for God’s sake! They were all nuts.’ Ruben shook his head, draining the last of his wine with a sardonic grin.
Neither of them spoke.
The fox trotted back across the grass. Olive watched it pause to stare at them, then disappear into the trees.
Ruben turned to look at her, elbows on his knees. ‘What do you think would have happened if we’d gone? You know, like we talked about, running away together, leaving this all behind.’
‘Your dad would have found you and dragged you with him to where it was he went.’
‘New Jersey.’
‘New Jersey,’ Olive remembered. �
��As far away as he could possibly get from any of us.’
Ruben waved a hand like that didn’t count for now. ‘Just suppose he didn’t.’
‘But he would have done. You would never have been able to get away. And I think you would have regretted it if you had.’
‘I would not.’ Ruben was aghast.
But Olive was too old to believe in fairy-tale fantasies. ‘You would. You would have lost all your opportunities. You would have lived thinking what if. I mean, think about it, you know your dad was an asshole, but I bet you still think if you hadn’t messed up your exams he wouldn’t have kicked you out of the house that first time, don’t you? You don’t think he’d have found something else to complain about? That he was just a bully. He would never have let you be happy with me. And you wouldn’t have been able to be happy because you’d have wanted to prove something to him.’
Ruben narrowed his eyes as he thought. ‘No,’ he said with a shake of his head. ‘You’re right about him being a bully, I’ve never thought that. But you’re wrong that I wouldn’t have been happy. I wasn’t happy in America, so …’
Olive raised a brow. ‘I think you had a pretty OK time in America.’
She watched his lips twitch as he recollected his time at the New Jersey boarding school. ‘It was OK.’
Olive sat back, that admission enough to satisfy her that no mistakes were made. ‘And whatever happened, I had Dolly to look after. And my mum. And … I don’t know, I felt like I’d taken my eye off them for one minute and it all collapsed. And it wasn’t your responsibility. It was my family.’
‘I would have made them my responsibility.’
Olive shook her head. ‘Come on, we were sixteen. And we were too different.’
‘We weren’t different.’ Ruben made a face. Olive wondered if he believed what he was saying or just arguing to win. ‘We agreed on everything.’