by Liz Nugent
Oliver spoke French well and translated for the others, and Papa quickly began to rely on him as the spokesperson for the group. Since the time of his incarceration, Papa had developed a tremor in his right hand and his handwriting had suffered. He asked Oliver for help with some paperwork. Oliver took an interest in Jean-Luc too, and before long the three boys had bonded completely, regardless of the barriers of age, language and experience. Papa requested that Oliver be assigned as his assistant, and I, never having refused Papa anything before, conceded as usual. The relationship between them was extremely close, extraordinarily quickly. It was as if Papa and Jean-Luc had found the one they had long been searching for. I thought then that I had been wrong to deny my son a father, that Papa would have enjoyed having a man around the house, so while I was not altogether happy about this sudden friendship, I tolerated it for Papa’s sake. I did not know why Oliver had formed such a close bond with them. Presumably, he had a father of his own, but I admit to a little jealousy at having to share mine.
I was not the only person feeling jealous of this new bond. Oliver’s girlfriend was furious about Oliver’s promotion. He began to take his meals with the family in the house, at Papa’s insistence and against my wishes, and Laura seemed particularly jealous of the fact that Oliver obviously preferred the company of an old man and a boy to hers. Jean-Luc adored him. Oliver played the rough-and-tumble games with him for which Papa had grown too old. When I eventually persuaded Jean-Luc to go to bed, Oliver was always included in his chatter of the day. I thought of Pierre and what a wonderful father he could have been, had he known of his son.
Laura had a brother called Michael, who turned up one morning out of the blue at the kitchen door to offer assistance with bread making. It was a serendipitous moment for all concerned, except for Anne-Marie, who was startled to see a big, pasty-faced Irishman in the kitchen, and got such a fright that she fell over and broke her arm. Anne-Marie was my Girl Friday in the kitchen, if one can justifiably describe a 77-year-old as a girl. She had been employed by the family since the first war, and I had asked for her help in the kitchens the previous summer, and we worked well together. She related to me the stories of my mother’s legendary beauty and her generosity. I am constantly aware of how much I have to live up to with the legacy of my parents’ goodness. On that day in 1973, Anne-Marie was finally persuaded for the first time to take a leave of absence while her arm healed. A 77-year-old bone, however, does not heal easily and I knew I must do without her for some months.
Michael, oblivious to the fact that he was the cause of the accident, was quickly enlisted, as lunch was to be served for thirty people at twelve o’clock, while poor Anne-Marie was taken off to the hospital. Luckily, Michael was clever, and as cookery is about demonstration and repetition, the language problem did not become an issue. However, I was astounded by how little he knew about food, how few ingredients he even recognized. Maybe it was true what they said about the Irish, that they ate only potatoes. Michael learned quickly and, what is more, he enjoyed it and was flamboyantly enthusiastic about every aspect of the process. I could not be certain that there was not some other agenda though, and one or two times I caught him looking at me as if I were a kind of unknown ingredient that he was not sure whether to peel, boil or plant.
One day, he flicked my hair out of my eyes rather clumsily, and it came to me suddenly that perhaps he had some kind of inclination to be a hairdresser, so I allowed him to play with my hair for a while. How stereotypical, I thought, a gay hairdresser. He was, quite obviously, gay.
His French was still quite halting, but when I precociously asked him about his sexuality, he had no problem understanding and crumbled instantly, weeping copiously. I realize now that this was his ‘coming out’ and that my words opened a floodgate of guilt, repression and confused identity. I ascertained that he was in lust with his friend Oliver, who was dating his sister Laura. Catastrophe. I assured him that I would tell nobody, and arranged for him to meet with Maurice, our neighbour, who was openly gay and spoke some English. I hoped that Maurice would be able to counsel Michael, so I was quite cross with him when it soon became apparent that he had taken Michael to a gay nightclub. I thought that might be rushing things, but what business was it of mine? They were adults, after all.
So now I knew Oliver and Michael well enough. Laura was the person who connected them, and soon she made her presence felt in my life too. She was a lovely girl, perhaps a little spoiled, but she hated the fact that Oliver and Michael were in the house and that she only saw them in the evenings, while all day long she was left with the others in the orchards, so when she collapsed one day and was stretchered up to the house, I was suspicious to put it mildly, thinking that this was a ploy to get into the house and attract some attention. But she was pale and sick. I was right to be suspicious, but not in the way that I thought. I took her to the doctor in the village, and with her consent he told me that Laura was pregnant. I was initially annoyed. This was my first year taking migrant workers, and first there was the trouble with the Africans and now this. These employees were my responsibility, and clearly her thoughtless behaviour meant there had already been trouble. There have always been ways to avoid pregnancy, and I am not talking about abstention. I tried to be calm when I spoke to her. She was very tearful and afraid that I would ask her to leave the estate. I was not sure what to do. She begged me not to tell Oliver, fearful that this would spell the end of their relationship, although it was apparent to me that the relationship was practically over anyway. He had fallen in love with my family instead. I did not know what advice to offer Laura, so I offered none. She was from a strict Irish Catholic family. Despite the family chapel on our estate, Papa had raised me without a faith and without a need for the guilt in which other Catholics seemed to like to indulge. The options that might have been open to a faithless Frenchwoman would have been unthinkable to an Irish teenager. Laura was only nineteen years old, but she had to make her own decisions. Her brother Michael was concerned. She lied to him, telling him that she had some gastric flu. I allowed her to stay in the chateau for a few days, but then sent her back to the fields. I left it to her to make her choices. Just a few weeks later, I no longer cared. Not just about Laura, but about anything.
During the war, Papa ordered 100 gallons of paraffin for the lamps in the wine cellar so that the Jewish families who stayed there would not have to spend their waking hours in complete darkness. It was delivered at night by a friend in the Resistance who had good contacts in Paris. I know my father sold my mother’s jewellery to pay for it, as gold was the only reliable currency at the time. When the house was raided in 1944, the Germans at first thought it was petrol and tried to fuel their trucks with it, but of all that they had destroyed in the house, the only things they left behind were the cans of paraffin, discarded in a lean-to shed adjacent to the library in the east wing of the chateau. Papa’s bedroom was directly above the library. By 1973, the entire building had long since been wired for electricity. It had crossed my mind at some time to dispose of the oil, but my father, who had lived through two wars and was more conscious of rationing than me, insisted that we hang on to the oil, in case of another war or a simple breakdown of electricity, which he still did not entirely trust. It was a particularly dry and dusty summer. On the 9th of September 1973, it had not rained for eighty-four days, and temperatures were well above average for the time of year.
Jean-Luc alternated between sleeping in my room or his papi’s. His own bedroom was rarely used. Both Papa and I had a small cot bed perpendicular to our own at the foot of our beds. It was very common at the time in French homes. If Papa was telling Jean-Luc a particularly good bedtime story, Jean-Luc could not be persuaded to return to my room. Sometimes the stories were a little bit scary and the walk from Papa’s room in the eastern side of the house to mine in the west wing was too much of a challenge for him. Papa would stay until Jean-Luc nodded off, and then, as it seemed a little cruel to move him
as he slept, we would let him spend the night there.
I do not know what started the fire. My father’s pipe, a cigarette, a stray ember from the charcoal oven, we will never know. My memory of the night is quite unclear; I was woken by a noise like a strong wind rushing through the corridors, and then the sound of shouting. I thought I must be dreaming. Even when I got out of bed and looked out the window and saw the east wing in flames, it was so unreal and absolutely unexpected that I still did not comprehend how much of an emergency it was. I wandered through the smoke-filled hall in my nightdress before I fully understood the horror before me. When I was shocked out of sleep, I was disorientated and lost my sense of direction, but as I ran along the gallery towards what I thought was the east wing, the searing heat and smoke drove me back. I began to shout for my beloved father and son, but the only response I heard was a hiss and a crackle and the splintering and spitting of wood. I became hysterical and batted my way into the flames to get across the gallery to the eastern side of the house, but the floor beneath me was smouldering and I could smell my singed hair. When I realized I was at the top of the burning staircase, I knew I could go no further. I do not know how I burned my hands so badly. At the time, I did not even feel the pain. I do not recall how I got from the upper gallery to the courtyard, but I remember being restrained there by Michael as I kicked and bit him, trying to get away from him to rescue the only people in the world that I loved.
I did not know it then, but I later came to understand that Jean-Luc and his papi died of smoke inhalation, probably in their sleep. It is something of a comfort to me, as I spent months afterwards in the nightmare of imagination wondering if they had to watch each other burn to death, screaming for my help, after desperately trying to save each other.
The chaos of the night comes back to me in small pieces: the surprising sound of my own screams; the grasping arms of Michael and Constantine, who held me back from the flames; the smell of the fire and my own sweat; the women from the dorm crying; the men taking control and becoming important, busy men of action. Quite separately, I remember secretly pregnant Laura hysterical and clinging to Oliver, who seemed not to know she was there.
I was heavily sedated in the days that followed. I have no memory of the funerals, but they tell me I was there. I stayed in the house. The western side was structurally unaffected; there was some smoke damage, but it was minimal. The thick stone walls between the east wing and the hallway stopped the fire from reaching my side of the house. The kitchen, salon and my bedroom, among others, were intact. Hundreds of people came and went, bringing food, prayers, reassurances, blessings, and shared experiences of loss, but it was weeks before I began to see that my future was exactly what Papa had always feared for me.
Some of the labourers left shortly after the fire, apologetically bidding farewell: it was obvious that we could not pay them. The vineyard was abandoned, but the Irish students stayed for another month. Most of them had come to France for the experience rather than out of financial necessity. Michael was wonderful and readily took control of the kitchen. I had no interest in anything, and my hands would take time to heal. The others did their best to clear the wreckage of the east wing. They had to return to college then, as they had already missed the first weeks. Oliver was in shock and barely spoke to anyone. I admit that I resented his grief because I felt he had no right to it. He had known them for a matter of months, but they were my life, and I felt bitter anger every time I saw him sitting absently on the terrace steps with his head in his hands, as Laura tried to cajole him back to life like one of our vines.
When it came to their leaving, Laura asked me if she could stay. She confided that she had told Oliver about the pregnancy in a moment of desperation, hoping that it would shock him into some reaction, but that Oliver did not want to know and insisted that he would never be a father again. Again? What did he mean, ‘again’? Laura explained that Oliver had a game with Jean-Luc where he and Jean-Luc pretended to be father and son, and that my father had taken part. I do not know if this was true, but maybe Oliver really felt that he had become Jean-Luc’s father in a way, and Papa’s son too. It was a foolish game, but finally I understood his pain and grief, and without ever speaking of it, I forgave Oliver.
I told Laura she could stay. I did not think that she would be with me for a whole year, or that she too would die soon afterwards. So much death.
18. Michael
Laura’s moods were erratic in the months following her return from France. My parents were concerned. She returned to college that October of 1974, but dropped out again in November. And then, in the first week in December, she went missing.
I got a phone call in the restaurant on a Thursday morning from Mum to ask if I knew where she was. She’d gone to bed the previous night at about ten o’clock, but when Mum called her that morning, there was no answer. Her bed had not been slept in and nobody had heard her leave the house. We rang around friends and neighbours, but nobody had seen or heard from her. When she still hadn’t returned on Friday morning, my mother was out of her mind with worry. Laura had been very calm when my mother last spoke to her on Wednesday morning, to the extent that Mum thought Laura had turned a corner. They’d talked about going shopping for a new pair of boots at the weekend. Mum had seen a pair that she liked, and thought they would suit Laura. Mum said they’d go into town together to a particular shop on Saturday. Laura said she was looking forward to going back to college and getting back to normal, admitted that the year in France had been a bit of an ordeal, and said that she should have come home with me. Mum reassured her that everyone understood, that once she got back into a routine, things would fall into place. We made Mum go over that conversation again and again, every mundane detail, but could find nothing sinister or disturbing about it. Except that the brand-new boots that Mum had admired were later found in a box in Laura’s wardrobe, but not in Laura’s size. In Mum’s size, bought and paid for on Wednesday afternoon.
We started ringing round hospitals on Friday morning. How often does it happen, I wonder, that a person turns up in hospital amnesiac and unidentified? Not often enough, I imagine, for those of us looking for them. On Friday afternoon, the guards came to take statements. They wanted to put her photograph in the newspapers. The most beautiful photo I had was one I’d taken in France with my Agfa Instamatic. We had all been drunk. Laura was leaning her head on Oliver’s shoulder. He was naked from the waist up. Her eyes were closed, and about one quarter of her face was hidden behind several wine glasses in the foreground. But she was smiling in the photo, as if she knew a secret that nobody else did. We agreed it was not suitable for publication, and Dad found a photo from Christmas the previous year, where she looked happy but serious. My parents were terrified of the glare of publicity that was about to descend. We are private people and to them, my sister’s breakdown was dirty laundry.
The sun continued to rise and set, the grandfather clock ticked its metronome of misery in the hallway, cars drove past, and children could be heard laughing as they passed our gates, but there was a gaping hole in the centre of our lives, a huge question mark without an answer. The photo was due to be published in the newspapers and broadcast on TV on Monday, but on Sunday afternoon the guards called and asked Dad to come down to the station. We knew there had been a development, but Dad refused to let Mum accompany him. I waited with Mum while he was gone, and we speculated on what the breakthrough might be, both of us terrified of uttering what we already knew, as if by saying it, it made it real.
Dad returned a relatively short time later with Mum’s brother, my Uncle Dan, and a young garda. I don’t know why the garda came with him. Maybe it was policy. Maybe it was courtesy, to make sure Dad got home all right.
Laura’s body had washed up on the Tragumna beach that morning in West Cork. A dog walker (why is it always a dog walker?) had seen someone the previous night from the cliff-side and had alerted the guards. Apparently she had walked into the sea fully clothed.
We protested that it couldn’t be her. Why would she go there? But really we knew that was exactly where she’d go. It was the beach we had played on as children when we visited my maternal grandmother in Skibbereen. The guards had found her handbag nearby. There was no note, but enough in her bag to indicate her identity. We all travelled together to Cork that night to make the formal identification. Dad and Uncle Dan tried to persuade Mum and me that we didn’t need to see her. I agreed, God forgive me, but Mum insisted, so Mum and Dad went in together through the swing doors and I was left outside with Uncle Dan to wait. I could hear their footsteps echoing over the tiled floor, and then there was no other sound but that of the hum of industrial refrigeration and my breath and Uncle Dan’s breath. Once again, time proved useless in the face of tragedy as we waited, maybe minutes, maybe hours, for the news that was not new at all. At one stage Uncle Dan suggested that we say a Hail Mary. I did not understand what possible difference it could make to the outcome.
I think my parents died of grief eventually, although it took a few years. Madame Véronique could shed no light on why Laura had killed herself when we contacted her. She maintained that Laura had been an excellent worker and had noticed nothing strange about her. She said we should be proud of such an intelligent and capable young lady. We took solace from that.
I go over and over what I knew of Laura in the final years of her life. Before we went to France, Laura was a brilliant, flighty, flirty girl with a bright future. During that summer of 1973 she began to show signs of change. I was surprised by Madame’s commendation of her. Surprised, but somewhat comforted.