Unravelling Oliver

by Liz Nugent

  Alice rose and went to her room silently without looking back at me, and shut the door firmly behind her.

  I flew to my own room and immediately rang Oliver. He was groggy, and extremely irritated when I explained in urgent whispers what Alice had said.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Moya. She only knows if you told her. I’ve always been careful. What in God’s name have you said to her?’

  Of course I asserted my innocence, but Oliver was furious.

  ‘I don’t need this! I’m writing. I can’t have any distractions. Do not call me again.’

  I didn’t call Oliver again. That day I acted as normal, up to a point. Alice was very quiet. Javier and I spent the morning together saying our intimate goodbyes. I became tearful at the thought of not seeing him again. His eyes darkened with sorrow.

  Alice and I left for the airport and spent an uncomfortable two hours in the departure lounge. I spent all of that time going over things in my head. What did she know? How did she find out here? Had she always known? Was Oliver worth it? What did I actually want? And, oh yes, will Con’s facial expression change when he hears?

  As the flight was called, I knew that I was headed towards a life of dissatisfaction, frustration and boredom.

  There was an enormous fuss at the airport when I declared my intention not to board the plane. The bags all had to be unloaded while mine were identified and the flight was delayed. I hugged Alice and apologized. I didn’t say for what, but I meant it sincerely. She could work it out for herself.

  Javier was just leaving when I returned to the école. He beamed from ear to ear.

  ‘Ma fille,’ he said.

  It has worked out well for me. We will live a very different life from the one I always thought I wanted. Javier and I plan to run our little River Bistro together. He will do most of the cooking and I’ll do the front-of-house stuff plus a spot of cabaret thrown in for free, depending on the clientele. We hope to make enough during the summer to live comfortably in a small villa through the short winter months. My children were hurt and furious but will just about forgive me, I think. Kate and her boyfriend are coming to visit next weekend, and when they see how happy I am, they will understand. Con will be a sweetheart about everything financial. Kate tells me that he seems relieved that I am gone and has taken to wearing a kaftan around the house.

  I am horrified by what Oliver did to Alice. You think you know someone. It turns out that I rang the house on the very night of the assault. I am in a state of shock, to be honest.

  I know I wasn’t fair to Alice. Life wasn’t fair to Alice. But mostly, Oliver wasn’t fair to Alice. So far, the few people that knew about our affair have kept their mouths shut, but when the trial begins next month, the muck raking will begin in earnest. I have a new life now and the last thing I need is for the sordid details of my past with Oliver to jeopardize my future with Javier.

  I could make a fortune if I sold my story, but I won’t. Out of respect for poor Alice.

  22. Véronique

  Towards the end of October last year, two ladies from Ireland arrived at Cuisine de Campagne, both in their late fifties. I noticed them immediately because they seemed such unlikely friends. One of them was loud, wore too much make-up and blatantly set out on a mission to seduce the only available single man in the group. The other was quiet, bookish and less inclined to socialize. I felt sorry for her as it soon became obvious that her friend had decided to abandon her for the duration of the holiday. I introduced myself to Alice and invited her to join us on several evenings, and together with Pierre, we ended up discussing all the things one is not supposed to: politics, religion, race, and so on. Her friend Moya had made the booking online, so it was only on the last night that I noticed Alice’s surname as she signed the guestbook.

  ‘Ryan?’ I said. ‘The first Ryan I ever met was an Irish boy working here the summer of 1973. His name was also Ryan, Oliver Ryan.’

  ‘But that’s my husband’s name!’

  We laughed at the coincidence. She was astonished, and we quickly made the connection that she was the same Oliver’s wife when she showed me some photos. He was older but still handsome, and there was no mistaking him. We spoke for most of the night. I was happy to hear that he was a successful writer. I recalled that Michael may have mentioned that in correspondence. Alice was shocked when I recounted the pivotal events of that season, of the fire and the death of my son and my father. She knew that Oliver had spent summers abroad – she actually fell in love with him on a foreign trip to the Greek islands – but it seemed that he had never told her much about the summer of 1973 except that he worked on a vineyard. I thought this odd because, whatever his trauma at the time, it was bizarre to me that all these years later he had never mentioned the fire or the deaths. The story of that summer is something one could not easily forget, particularly Oliver. With regard for his privacy, I did not tell Alice of the bond Oliver had with Papa and Jean-Luc, realizing that if Oliver had not talked about it in nearly forty years, he had buried it for a reason. I was discreet as ever, and did not mention Laura except as one of the gang, although it seemed that Alice had heard of her. Alice and Oliver had had their wedding reception in Michael’s restaurant, although apparently Michael and Oliver were no longer friends, and she mentioned that Michael’s sister had died tragically young. Poor Laura.

  ‘Oliver was an enormous help to me after the fire. He was very upset.’

  ‘Oh, that’s lovely to hear – I mean, that he was helpful,’ Alice said, proudly.

  ‘Yes, of course he was sad about Papa and Jean-Luc, but he insisted on clearing out the library where he and Papa had worked together. They tell me he did the work of ten men in the week after the fire. He must also have been devastated because all of the work he had done with Papa’s stories went up in smoke. He worked so hard transcribing them for my father.’

  ‘Your father wrote stories?’ Alice said.

  ‘Yes, I am a little surprised that he never told you any of this. My father secretly engaged Oliver to transcribe all the stories he had written for Jean-Luc.’

  ‘Children’s stories? Well, perhaps that’s where he got his inspiration. Oliver writes books for children too. How lovely that it was your father who must have given him the idea. What were your father’s stories about?’ she asked.

  ‘I can scarcely remember, it was so long ago, but the central character was Prince Felix, and there was a trusted servant called Frown, an evil witch and a flying chair.’

  Alice narrowed her eyes and clutched her hand to her breast.

  ‘Prince Sparkle,’ she said, ‘and Grimace.’

  I didn’t understand. ‘Are you feeling all right?’ I asked.

  ‘Tell me more about the stories,’ she said, and her voice had grown thin and shrill. I did not know in what way I could have offended her.

  When I could not recall the details specifically, Alice became agitated.

  ‘Are you sure your father wrote the stories, that it was not Oliver?’

  It was my turn to be offended by her insistence.

  ‘But what a preposterous question! My father began to write these stories when he was released from prison after the Liberation, long before we met Oliver!’

  Alice sprang up from her chair and started pacing. To my astonishment, she began to describe the stories I had not heard in many decades.

  ‘There is a young prince who lives in a land of sunlight and joy. An evil queen and her army come from the gloom to invade and occupy their land. She banishes the sun and orders them to live in the darkness, or to die. The Prince’s servant invents a magic chair that flies beyond the stars, and every morning Prince Sparkle and his servant Grimace would fly far behind the moon until they found the sunlight. They would capture the sunlight in their cloaks and smuggle it back to their kingdom and share it with their people.’

  It was my turn to be shocked.

  ‘How … how could you know?’ I asked.

  ‘Oliver wrote it. I i
llustrated it!’ she said. ‘I have illustrated all the stories!’ and she broke into sobs.

  My shock turned to anger, and I suddenly felt the need to defend my long-dead father from her insinuation. ‘Papa enjoyed writing them,’ I insisted on explaining. ‘He read them to me as a child. It was part of our bedtime ritual, though he wrote less when I grew older. But as soon as I became pregnant with Jean-Luc, he began writing them again with renewed vigour and he continued writing these stories until his death, despite the physical discomfort it caused him.’

  ‘How did he write them? Have you no copies?’ Alice demanded to know.

  ‘They were written on loose sheets of paper all over the house. Papa had primarily employed Oliver to transcribe them into leather-bound books so that they could be compiled in just a few volumes.’

  ‘Why did he ask Oliver? Why Oliver?’

  ‘I don’t know. He liked him. Papa treated Oliver like a son. My father did not like to type anything himself. But he insisted that the stories should be made of ink.’

  To my horror, Alice began to relate more of Papa’s stories to me. The names of the characters and the places were different – Papa’s witch was now an evil queen – but the stories were undeniably the same.

  Truth can cause more pain than lies, I think. Some secrets are best left as secrets. The facts are simple. Oliver stole Papa’s stories. I had no way of proving it. The stories existed solely in Oliver’s typed notes. The only people who remembered their original versions were long dead.

  Oliver used a pseudonym to write these books: Vincent Dax. How clever and sinister. Having no children, I never bought one of his books. Pierre’s girls were not readers. When I looked him up on the Internet, I realized what an industry had been built around Prince Felix, or Prince Sparkle as he was in Oliver’s version. Films, stage musicals, merchandise. Oliver has made millions from my dead father and betrayed his honour.

  The revelations certainly upset his wife. We talked through the night until almost dawn. It seems that Papa’s stories were what attracted her to Oliver in the first place. He was shrewd with the stories, releasing just one every year or two, and has made them last for all this time, although it seems now that he has run out, as he has published nothing for five years. We worked out that he had spent almost twenty-five years carefully translating and plagiarizing my father’s work. Alice insisted that he was currently working on a book but that he was finding this one particularly difficult. It was to be his first adult novel, but he claimed to be suffering from writer’s block.

  It seemed that Oliver was not even a good husband to Alice. She was aware that he had been unfaithful. Possibly even with her travelling companion, Moya. He was dismissive of her work and of her opinions. He was intolerant of her friends. He could not get on with her mentally challenged brother, and upset him to the point where the unfortunate man became aggressive and had to be put into a residential care home.

  ‘Why do you stay? Why do you not leave him?’

  ‘He needs me … needed me.’ She corrected herself. ‘He told me that he could not write the stories without me.’

  ‘What about love?’

  ‘I thought that was love.’

  The next day, Alice and Moya left together. Moya returned alone some hours later. The ridiculous woman was leaving her husband – for our solitary single man, it seemed. Always with the Irish, there is the drama!

  Alice emailed me to tell me that she had found the leather-bound books and was going to confront him, but asked for my patience. I never dreamed that he would attack her, but I was keeping abreast of all news of him and when I read later that he had been arrested for her assault, I realized that I must somehow be involved, that the books were the source of the trouble. I contacted the Irish authorities. I supplied the motive for the attack. I am finally going to Ireland, to give evidence at the trial. The lawyers tell me that he will admit to the plagiarism. I am horrified by what he did to Alice, and a part of me wishes I had never met her and that we had never discovered the truth.

  The truth remains. Oliver has betrayed us all.

  Papa did not write those stories for publication. He wrote them for me and for my precious little boy. I know it should not matter to me that Oliver made money from them. If I had found the books, I do not think it would have occurred to me to publish them, but they were mine.

  What kind of a man is Oliver to have done such a thing? I wonder if he really loved my father at all, if he even cared about my son. Was it an opportunistic moment, when he found the books intact amid the debris and thought he could just take them? Or had he been making secret copies all along, knowing that we would never publish them ourselves? Alice told me that Oliver had no mother to speak of and that he and his father had been long estranged, that in fact she never even met Oliver’s father. So could it be that after my father’s death, he found the books and thought of them as his inheritance?

  I recalled what Oliver said to Laura about her pregnancy, about not wanting another child. But then I think of Laura’s infidelity and it stops making sense. Perhaps Oliver was trying to make a family out of mine. Who knows? He is just a thief.

  Of course, I went into the town the day after Alice left and bought all of the books. The stories are as I remember them, but astonishingly, Alice’s illustration of the central character, Prince Sparkle, is uncannily the image of my boy, Jean-Luc.

  23. Oliver

  The month before I left school, my father sent a cheque for fifty pounds in the post and a curt note suggesting that I find myself a flat and a job as I was soon to be eighteen and could not expect to be supported any further.

  I had no idea what I was going to do with my life, but Father Daniel took me aside and counselled that my grades were good enough for university and that I could always come back to the school to teach when I had my degree. He came to my rescue once more and offered to pay my college fees and found me a bedsit in Rathmines.

  It took quite a while to get used to living alone and preparing food for myself. Up till then, my life had been organized with military precision. I had become institutionalized in my years at boarding school. I was not used to being alone. I wrote to my father telling him of my new address, but received no reply. I worked in a fruit market early mornings and weekends to support myself and to keep myself occupied, but college life was enjoyable nonetheless. A lot of students were living away from home and I could pretend to be like everybody else. I was not an outstanding student by any means, although I was top of the class in French. Trying to work and socialize on my meagre earnings meant that study was sometimes neglected, but I managed to earn respectable grades despite that.

  Having had a taste of freedom, I knew for sure that I could not go back to the school, nor had I the temperament for teaching.

  By early 1973, I was dating Laura. Wild and beautiful Laura. So different from the other girls. I loved her, I thought. Maybe if we had stayed in Dublin that summer, everything would have turned out differently; maybe we would be married, happily ever after married.

  As my second-year exams approached, Laura hatched a plan for us to spend a summer abroad on a working holiday. I thought it was a pipe dream, but Laura wrote to farms and vineyards and canning factories all over Europe looking for jobs and eventually got a response from a farm in Aquitaine. We were invited to an estate in a tiny town called Clochamps. There was a chateau and a vineyard, an olive grove and an orchard. It sounded ideal. Mindful of my previous summers in captivity, I was eager to travel, expand my horizons and see what the world had to offer, and also to spend time with Laura. The plan, of course, was somewhat derailed by Laura’s parents, who, although fond of me, did not approve of the two of us going off together by ourselves. However, there was nobody more determined than Laura, who persuaded her brother Michael and five others to join us. Chaperones, in the eyes of her parents. It was to be paid work with accommodation included, and thankfully, Father Daniel agreed to lend me the fare to get there.

  I
loved it from the moment I arrived. I was used to manual labour from my extracurricular job in the market, and while the others took a little while to adjust, I found it relatively easy. Irish summers could be grey, damp and miserable, but here the sun shone every day and although we could see marvellous lightning storms at night at the other end of our valley, the rain did not fall in Clochamps. My college mates complained of heat and sunburn, but I easily acclimatized. The meals provided gratis were simple but excellent, wine was free too, and Laura and I easily found time and space to be intimate away from her brother and the others.

  The elderly owner of Chateau d’Aigse befriended me early on. I translated for the others. My spoken and written French were good, and he was genuinely interested in me and wanted to know what I was studying, how I intended to use my degree, my plans for the future. After two weeks, Monsieur asked if I would be interested in doing some transcribing work for him. I readily agreed, thinking that the office work would involve typing invoices or some kind of record keeping. That is what he led his daughter to believe. He asked for my discretion and overpaid me. He introduced me to his grandson, Jean-Luc, the most beautiful and charming child I will ever know.

  On the first day I reported for duty in the library, Jean-Luc was there also and Monsieur asked me to take a seat while he read his grandson a story. I was intrigued. Jean-Luc formally stepped forward and shook my hand. I knelt down to his eye level and returned his greeting with a little bow. He laughed and looked up at his grandfather and, pointing at me, he called me ‘Frown’.

  As Monsieur began to tell the story, I watched the boy’s face as he perched on his papi’s knee. He was transfixed by the tale of a happy young prince of a fantastical land and would exclaim in the middle of the telling, would hide his eyes at the arrival of the bad witch, and clap his hands in excitement at our hero’s escape in the end. I realized that Frown was a character who protected the Prince, and that the Prince was clearly modelled on Jean-Luc. I, too, thought the story was wonderful and said so to Monsieur d’Aigse. He was very happy to be complimented and explained that he had written a series of these stories on and off over the last decades, but that they consisted of handwritten notes. He wasn’t even sure how many stories there were. He had developed a palsy in his right hand and could no longer trust his own penmanship. My task, he said, was to type up all these stories to be pasted into some expensive leather-bound books he had bought for the purpose. It was to be our secret. He thought his daughter would disapprove that I was not being used for estate work, but I think she very quickly guessed what I had been employed to do. She did not interfere, however.