Unravelling Oliver

by Liz Nugent

  When I came back to the dorm that night, I was glowing with excitement. Oliver assumed that Madame had piqued my interest, but in fact I had completely forgotten that my mission was to seduce her.

  Of course, Laura was furious: her brother was living it up in the kitchen; her boyfriend was leading an even more refined life in the library; and there she was, a mere pay-sanne. I tried to pacify her by telling her how well she looked. The physical work was toning her nicely, and once she had got past the broiled-face thing, she had developed quite a tan and was beginning to resemble a diminutive Amazonian warrior. She didn’t accept the compliment graciously, but complained continually of feeling tired and excluded. To my eternal regret, I paid little attention to her plight.

  I made a few pathetic attempts to flirt with Madame, but she remained as unconvinced as I was. The language barrier made it that bit more awkward (as if it wasn’t futile enough), but I was determined not to disappoint Oliver. He gave me a few tips and I had my instructions.

  At the end of one particularly hot and sweaty day, I brushed Madame’s hair out of her face and asked if I might comb it for her. Oliver insisted it was a guaranteed winner of a move. She was a little taken aback, but assented. Oliver was right. Women love their hair to be handled. As I was combing her hair, I had a marvellous idea. Madame’s hair was quite long. I took a thick strand in one hand and began to weave it into another strand so that it was sort of knotted on the top of her head. Très chic. I had just invented a hairstyle. How stereotypical of me. It was actually a ‘chignon’, a typical French style popular in Paris in the forties, but how were we to know? I had never played with a woman’s hair before, and Madame may have known her bain-marie from her sabayon, but she was bloody hopeless in the style department. Still, she was no fool.

  ‘Tu es homosexuel?’ she said.

  Luckily, the word translated very easily.

  ‘Oui,’ I said. And then I cried for an hour.

  Madame was terribly sweet about it all. I haven’t a damn clue what she was saying, but there was much miming of finger to lips to reassure me that she would keep my secret. She wasn’t at all perturbed by the news; didn’t have me thrown out, didn’t laugh at me, wasn’t horrified. It all fell into place for her. A mystery was solved. Via sign language, I admitted that I was in love with Oliver, and that scandalized her a bit all right. She knew, as everyone did, that Oliver and my sister Laura were an item. She gave me a maternal hug and said a lot of stuff in French while gesticulating up the hill. I think she meant that I should go for a walk. I did. It didn’t help.

  That night, back in the dorm, Oliver was eager to know how the seduction was going.

  ‘Grand,’ I said.

  The daily struggle continued. Madame would catch me watching Oliver at the centre of his new family with Monsieur and the boy. Bad enough to have my own sister as competition, but now I had Madame Véronique’s family too. I wondered if she was also jealous of the time her father and son spent with Oliver. She would smile sympathetically, but then thrust her comb into my hands. I suppressed my jealousy, buried myself in my new role and learned as much as I could in the kitchen.

  A couple of days later, Madame introduced me to Maurice, a burly odd-looking vegetable producer who owned a farm at the top of the hill. Maurice’s English was better than Madame’s. He intimated that Madame had told him I was un homo. He said he was also gay and that he could bring me to a nightclub in Bordeaux where I could meet other gay men. I was puce with embarrassment, but he laughed heartily and took me away to be deflowered by the divine Thierry – a cross-dressing pig farmer from Saint-Émilion. The scales fell from my eyes that night. I realized that I belonged to this strange community. I fitted into this world. I still have dreams about waking up beside Thierry.

  I arrived late the next morning for my kitchen duties. Madame winked and grinned and made some obscene gestures with her hands. What a truly wonderful woman! Of course, Oliver was full of questions about where I’d been. I made up something, but he knew that I hadn’t been with Madame, and I could feel his disappointment in me. Yet his disapproval of my homosexuality, which had previously so bothered me, now mattered not a jot. My feelings for Oliver had changed overnight. My sexual interest in him would never be reciprocated; what would be the point, after all? He figured out where I’d been, and moved his bunk to the other side of the dorm. Still, nothing was said. Laura was more accepting now that I had taken my eye off Oliver. In fact, she went out of her way to help me with my assignations, arranging lifts to the city for me and introducing me to other men she suspected of being gay. My summer took off in a completely hedonistic way, which now seems horribly inappropriate in light of the tragedy that was to come.

  By mid August, Laura was still complaining of exhaustion, much to the annoyance of the other workers. Everybody had complained in the beginning, but by now they were all used to it. Laura must have been quite isolated in retrospect, her brother and her boyfriend working in the house while she laboured in the fields. There were others in our group, of course, but she was closer to us than to anybody else. I was now far too busy with my new life to notice much about my little sister, though it was clear that her relationship with Oliver was fizzling out. He was spending less and less time with her and more time with the old man and the boy. Then, one day, she was carried into the kitchen in a state of collapse and was brought to the doctor. Madame, as usual, took control. Oliver and I were worried, but Madame later explained to Oliver that Laura had a gastric complaint, that she would be right as rain after a week’s rest. She was installed in a turret room of the chateau, up two floors via a rickety wooden staircase. I looked in on her a few times a day. She was uncommunicative and tearful. I guessed that her relationship with Oliver wasn’t going well, but honestly I couldn’t blame him if he’d begun to lose interest. Her constant complaining had begun to grate on everyone’s nerves. I tried to gently broach the subject, but she didn’t want to know, saying that I ‘just wouldn’t understand’. She was right. I still don’t.

  I tried to talk to Oliver. He maintained that Laura was simply jealous of our working conditions compared to hers. He admitted that he had tried to finish their relationship, but said that Laura found it hard to accept that it was over. He claimed his work for Monsieur simply took up too much time and that Laura resented it.

  It seemed clear to me that while Oliver might have loved Laura once, his love for his new ‘family’ overshadowed that completely. Oliver chose to spend time with them rather than with her. I raised this carefully with Laura and suggested that she just give Oliver some time. It wasn’t as if he was going to stay with them for ever. We would all be returning to Ireland soon enough, and although it was a strange infatuation, could she not see that it was just temporary?

  Laura declared it was over, that she had no choice but to accept Oliver’s rejection of her, but refused to discuss it further. I thought there was more to it than that, but I didn’t push the issue. And then circumstances overwhelmed us to such a degree that Laura’s erratic moods were pushed to the back of my mind.

  Three weeks later, the day after the harvest had started in earnest, we were all fast asleep in our dorms. Everybody was particularly exhausted as all hands were on deck that day. My kitchen duties and Oliver’s admin ones were suspended, as there was a short enough window in which to pick the first harvest of grapes at their best. In a shattered state, I collapsed on to my bunk that night but woke some hours later in a state of disorientation. There were raised voices coming from outside. Oliver and Laura were shouting at each other, though, to be truthful, Laura was the one doing the shouting. Others stirred, and some went out to see what was going on. I had really had enough of Laura’s mood swings. She was just humiliating herself, and Oliver, and me. When I got outside, he was physically trying to remove her arms from around his neck. ‘You do love me! You have to!’ she was sobbing, refusing to let go.

  ‘Laura!’ I called out to her sharply. She let him go then and turned t
o glare at me.

  ‘Go to bed, Laura,’ I whispered fiercely, ‘you’re making a show of yourself.’

  Oliver turned, as if to walk away from me, but I stopped him. ‘Oliver, we need to have a conversation.’ He looked uncertain but followed me back into the bunk-house, and gradually everybody settled down again. In whispers, I began to apologize for Laura’s behaviour.

  ‘She’s not normally like this, I don’t really know what’s got into her … maybe it’s the new environment, maybe the work is just too hard for her.’ I asked him to try to be a bit more patient with her. I understood he no longer wanted a relationship with her, but asked him just to pay her a bit of attention so that she wouldn’t feel ignored. He refused to meet my eyes and kept fiddling with his watch strap. I was mortified at finding myself in this position, so soon after declaring my own feelings for him.

  It was a few moments before I noticed a strange something in the air. I couldn’t place it, but instinct pushed me out of bed again and I rose carefully, unwilling to disturb the others. Oliver followed. We went out into the open air. The night was warm, but there was a distinct smell out here, and in my confusion I thought at first that someone must still be up smoking the herbal stuff. Oliver pointed towards the house. Unusually, there was little moonlight, so it was only possible to make out the bare outline of the chateau against the night sky, and then I heard a kind of crackling sound and suddenly I was running up the steps and I knew the smell was fire and the air was thick with it, and when I neared the top of the steps I could feel the scorching heat on my face and see that the ground floor of one wing was engulfed in flames. Oliver went to wake everyone.

  If I had been more alert, if I had moved faster, if I hadn’t been so tired that day, if I had known, if I had thought about it, if I had … Jesus, I could fill the void with ifs. I started to shout, but my voice drifted meekly into the night and I remembered that the acoustics of the place were such that I had to be actually on the terrace in front of the building to be heard.

  One of my duties had been to summon the workers to lunch by ringing the bell in the tower of the disused chapel in one corner of the courtyard, and through the smoke I could see that side was unaffected by flames, so, roaring for help, I shouldered my way through the heavy wooden door and began heaving on the ancient rope until the bell was clanging frantically without rhythm in the chapel tower. The noise of the fire was loud now, cracking, spitting, groaning. I worried that there might be bedrooms directly above the library, which was by now being consumed by a fierce and angry blaze. People began to appear out of the smoke, and all I could glimpse was a scene of chaos, confusion and horror. I found Laura quickly, crying and clinging to an ashen-faced Oliver. I got a few of the lads to drag up the irrigation hoses from the field, but it took ages and when they had unfurled them it became clear they were fixed in position and didn’t stretch within ten yards of the fire. Several of the workers to my left were shouting and gesturing, trying to prise open the ancient stone lid of the disused well at the bottom of the terrace steps. Others were dragging a long-abandoned garden hose from the cave-like cellars underneath. Still others stood around staring in shock. Then a creature appeared out of the flames, almost unrecognizable as human, but above the noise of the fire and the roars of instructions, I could hear a high-pitched woman’s voice screaming, not in the cut-glass, clean sound one hears from the archetypal heroine on TV, but an ugly, ugly shriek of yearning. I had never heard a sound like that before, and the thought of ever hearing it again fills me with dread. It was the sound of Madame’s loss, grief and despair. Her entire body and whatever slight garment she was wearing were blackened, most of her long hair had burned away, and her head was smouldering. I grabbed her and held on tight as she tried to escape me and run into the gaping maw of the inferno, hoarsely screaming all the time ‘Papa! Jean-Luc!’ until she could scream no longer.

  The entire east wing of the house was engulfed in flames which licked and grabbed at falling timbers, tiles and masonry. Later I was to find out that the boy Jean-Luc often used to sleep in a cot bed in his grandad’s room on the first floor of that wing. I imagine it was an hour before the fire tenders came from the town, but time means little in the face of the elements; it’s an artificial construct that means nothing to the four winds. They pay no heed to ticking clocks. The firemen forced us back and finally took control. They were organized, and I admit that my reaction to their arrival was one of relief, although hope had been long vanquished by the flames.

  There was nothing left of the east wing at the end of that night, bar the exterior walls. Through the flame-filled windows, I could only see the night sky and some collapsed roof beams. There was no hope for either of them. Poor Madame – her past and her future utterly wiped out in the unkindest way possible.

  It was only after I had deposited Madame into the ambulance, completely broken and still convulsed by silent sobs, that I noticed Oliver was standing behind me, still, silent, his face a mask, his hands shaking as if independent of his wrists. He was in a state of shock.

  7. Véronique

  Oliver Ryan’s name has been in the headlines in the papers here over the last month or two. I have refused to take part in any more media interviews. I cannot help but feel responsible for his attack on his wife. It is tragic, but every time his name is spoken, I automatically think first of the harvest of 1973, and I feel the pain as sharply as I felt it almost forty years ago.

  One does not forget the worst time of one’s life, no matter how hard one tries. I have spent so many years wishing to change things. What if one had done this, what if one had done that … But the ache is still there. Time does not heal. It is a lie. One just gets used to the wound. There is nothing more.

  But I must make sense of all this, before it slips through my fingers. One must go back to my father’s time to explain everything. One would want everything to be clear.

  Papa was made old by la guerre, much older than his years. I was a small child at the time of the war, and did not understand anything except that there was a constant stream of visitors to our estate for a certain period. I know now that they were Jewish families protected by my father from the Préfet of Bordeaux in the Vichy regime. It has since been revealed that this civil servant ordered the deportation of 1,690 Jews, including 223 children, from the Bordeaux region to the transit camp at Drancy, near Paris, and then on to death camps in the east.

  It is impossible to believe that so many of my compatriots did nothing, but I think genocide happens every day in some part of the world and it is easier for us to pretend that it is not happening, easier to turn off the TV or skip that column in the newspaper.

  My father was a hero, an intellectual and a noble man. My mother’s death occurred shortly after the occupation, and he was heartbroken, but she had foreseen some of the horror that was to follow and she extracted a promise from my father that he would do everything in his power to protect our friends, no matter what their faith. We lived in very comfortable circumstances in a chateau handed down through seven generations of my father’s family. We produced good wines that were sold all over Europe and gave employment throughout the region. My father was less business-orientated than my mother and struggled to keep a rein on things in her absence. He was too distracted and scandalized that the Vichy government could preside over such evil.

  He invited several Jewish families to make their homes in the wine cellars underneath the terraced steps, particularly between 1942 and 1944, as the round-ups intensified with the full participation of our own French authorities. Papa refused to stay quiet and made several representations to the secretary general to the Préfecture to no avail. So he took the law into his own hands and, using local informants, was able to pre-empt the official round-ups with round-ups of his own. My Tante Cécile was active in the Resistance movement in the city and, through a network of friends, managed to coordinate the rescue of many families targeted by the Gestapo. The families had to be kept out of sight, and
even though we probably had the space for them in the chateau, Papa felt it was too risky. Our chateau was in a valley overlooked on two sides, so it was not possible for any of them to be outside during the daytime. If there was to be a sudden inspection, there must be no trace of them. So Papa set about turning the cellars into a more comfortable home. He knew he risked the business by doing this as wine production would have to cease for the duration. He ordered oil lamps, blankets, books and clothing through some friends in Valence so as not to arouse suspicion in the local village of Clochamps. He took delivery at night and, with trusted friends, created a temporary sanctuary for these families who had nowhere else to run, until a contact could be made to get them north, out of the country and across the border to Switzerland where they were guaranteed to be free of persecution. As a child, it was tremendously exciting for me. A constant stream of new people coming and going. I was too young to notice their sorrow and desperation. Until then, I had been home-schooled, an only child, but Papa made sure that I knew the importance of keeping secrets when it was crucial to do so.

  Despite all this activity, my father continued to make time for me, ensuring that I understood the world in a moral sense and that I knew that I would always come first in his life.