Unravelling Oliver

by Liz Nugent

  As I heard his stories, I thought they were good enough to send to a publisher, but Monsieur insisted that they were written solely for his family and that when Jean-Luc was older, he could decide what to do with them.

  Laura began to complain bitterly that I was not spending enough time with her. She was right. I was enjoying myself with my two companions, and on several occasions I was invited to dine with the family. Madame Véronique was a little more distant than her father and son, but I loved being there with them and was reluctant to leave when the working day was done.

  I tried to humour Laura, promising that I would devote the next night to her, but I rarely kept those promises. The old man treated me like a son. He thought I was a good man. A family was more seductive than anything she could offer me, although I continued to sleep with her because, after all, a man has needs.

  As I set about typing these stories and then laboriously pasting them into the leather-bound books, I found myself growing closer to the old man and the little boy. I was included in their secret world, and they accepted me without question. I could not get enough of their company, and it suddenly seemed to me as if I had somehow been wasting my time with Laura, as if no mere romantic relationship could be worth more than this platonic one between three menfolk who might, in some realm of possibility, have been three generations of the same family. I lost almost total interest in her affection and her vibrancy, and by now used her only for sex. All of the things in which I had previously delighted were now meaningless, as if the spell of the enchantress were broken. This new connection felt somehow purer.

  For the first time in my life, I felt able to confide my private thoughts. I told Monsieur of my father’s lack of interest in me. He was clearly appalled and he shook his head in wonder, as if to say, ‘How could a man not be proud of this boy?’ and I loved him for it. He suggested that there was enough transcribing work to keep me busy for more than one summer, and I agreed enthusiastically to return the following year.

  The truth is that I did not want to leave. There wasn’t that much time left. The idea of returning to my drab and lonely bedsit filled me with revulsion, and even thoughts of Laura’s affection failed to quell my growing anxiety about the future.

  At this time, I was worried about my prospects. I did not have the family support that most of my fellow students had, and my existence in Dublin was hand to mouth. I hid it well, bought good second-hand clothing, borrowed books, stole stationery, and when in private survived on tea, bread and whatever fruit I could scrounge from the market. I let my friends think my parents lived in the countryside somewhere, and never allowed any visitors to my bedsit. I stayed in their homes and met their families and got more insight into how the other half lived. I desperately wanted what they had, but there seemed to be no way for me to achieve it. I was jealous of their lifestyle and their lack of anxiety about what lay ahead. I was headed for the lowest rung of the civil service, without the all-important contacts that everybody else seemed to have, or the financial backing to set them up in business. When I borrowed the fare to France, Father Daniel very gently informed me that he could not continue to fund my life beyond college. We were both mortified. I was grateful for everything he had done for me. He again suggested that I could come back to the school and teach, but that was now out of the question. I had finally escaped boarding school and there was no way I was going back. I was getting plenty of female attention, but I foresaw that when it came to marrying time, no family of good standing would allow their daughter to hitch herself to a penniless nobody. I needed a plan.

  What could I do to force the d’Aigses to invite me to stay here with them? How could I endear myself to Monsieur d’Aigse to the extent that he would ‘adopt’ me? I probably could have seduced Madame Véronique if I’d put my mind to it, but I was not attracted to her, and regardless, my dream future entailed my being accepted as me, without pretence. I did not want to live a lie. Not then.

  My French was good enough to be able to converse with the locals. I knew of Monsieur’s several acts of bravery during the war. He was a hero in the commune. Could I be a hero too? What if I were to save a life? I began to fantasize about how I could achieve Monsieur’s iconic status. It amused me in my idle hours to imagine being embraced as one of their own. What if I could save Jean-Luc’s life? Wouldn’t that earn their loyalty and gratitude? Wouldn’t they beg me to stay and live with them for ever, as part of the family, their protector? But I reasoned I could never save Jean-Luc’s life without jeopardizing it, and that, obviously, was out of the question. Still, I could not shake off my romanticized dreams of the future. It became as real to me as if it had already happened, and I regarded the old man and his grandson with ever growing affection.

  Then, I thought, what if I were to save the chateau? Surely that would be on a par with saving a life. And maybe it was something I could engineer if I put my mind to it. The idea came together slowly over several weeks – though in the beginning I believe I thought of it as comforting fantasy rather than a plan; something to puzzle over, as if teasing out a mathematical equation. But gradually I began to look around with a sense of purpose. I scrutinized the chateau in a new way.

  It struck me that fire was something I understood. Any boy who spent time in a boarding school was well versed in the art of pyrotechnics. It is said that necessity is the mother of invention, but often it is in fact boredom. We knew what burned fastest, loudest and most colourfully. We knew what caused explosions, what made a damp squib, how to cover up the smell of sulphur. I knew how to start a fire, and I also knew how to contain it.

  The harvest started in early September so all hands were required in the vineyard, but by then I knew my way around the ground floor of the house and I knew that the most flammable part of it must be Monsieur’s library, with its dusty collection of books, maps and ancient ledgers detailing the commerce of the house over centuries. If I could be the first on the scene, if I could save the house, then I would be the hero. I could be employed to restore the library to its former glory. I was the only person who knew where everything in it was kept. Surely, Monsieur would see the wisdom of keeping me on? He would blame himself: a spark from his pipe must have escaped unnoticed, he would think, and smouldered slowly until it caught fire.

  Shaking Laura off that night was the difficult part. She had something to tell me, she said; she needed time alone with me. I assumed she was going to tell me that her brother was a queer, but everyone knew that already. I put her off, saying that I was exhausted and needed to sleep. She insisted it was urgent; she had to tell me something important. I lost my temper with her then, told her I’d had enough of her clinginess, her jealousy of my work in the house, her demanding my attention constantly. I told her our relationship was over and that she should find somebody else to follow like a dog. I was unnecessarily cruel. I regret it. I was too absorbed by my own skulduggery to give much thought to her feelings.

  Monsieur and Jean-Luc came down to the vineyard to say goodnight to me that night. We were working till dusk, and I had not been inside the chateau for a week.

  ‘Goodnight, Frown!’ said the little boy, and laughed, delighted with himself.

  ‘Good night, Prince Felix!’ I responded.

  I must have drunk six cups of coffee that night to keep myself awake. I was exhausted, naturally, but exhilarated by the task I had determined to undertake. Nobody stayed up too late, aware of another arduous day ahead. I lay in my bunk, listening to their breathing, waiting for each room-mate to succumb to hard-earned slumber. Michael tried to engage me in whispered conversation about Laura. He had noticed she had seemed upset earlier in the evening. I admitted we had had a row, but avoided the details of my vindictiveness. I assured him that I would talk to her in the morning and that we would patch things up. He was content with this, and soon he was breathing evenly.

  As soon as everyone was asleep, I made my way silently up to the back door beside the lean-to building and into the library.
The leather-bound books and handwritten papers that I had been working on were kept on a shelf in a corner of the room by the door. It struck me that these must be saved from the fire. How grateful might they be to discover that the summer’s work had been rescued and that Jean-Luc’s most personal inheritance was intact?

  I put them to one side while I amassed a bundle of loose typing paper all around the bookcase and doused it with lighter fuel. I planned to be the one to discover the fire in about twenty minutes so that I could be the hero who stopped the fire going out of control. I lit the touch-paper and watched for a moment. I hoped the fire would catch in time. Hiding the leather-bound books near the bunk-house, I crept back to wait for the appropriate moment to sound the alarm.

  I checked my watch about every six seconds, but time seemed to relax its grip and the minute hand of my watch appeared to freeze. I held it to my ear, and tick, tick, tick, yes, it was working as it should. Minutes before my planned alarm-raising, I heard my name being called softly from the door of the bunk-house. Damn, Laura. I got up and went to her and we had the same argument again that we had had earlier in the evening, but this time she began to fight back.

  ‘You can’t just dump me with no explanation! You can’t just leave me! We love each other!’

  She was raising her voice, growing hysterical, and I knew I must get away from her, go up to the house and put out the fire. Others had emerged to see what the fuss was about, and Laura was by now grabbing at my shoulders, wailing at me, ‘Why? Why? What have I done?’

  I tried to get her to shut up. ‘Nothing, you’ve done nothing, I just can’t … I don’t …’

  I was aware of shadows moving around us. We had woken everyone. Michael emerged out of the gloom. He was clearly annoyed and I think embarrassed that Laura was making such a spectacle of us. He took control and ordered us both sternly to go back to bed. What was I to do? Maybe thirty minutes had now passed, but no sign or smell of smoke or fire had yet reached our quarters, and I thought perhaps it might have gone out. I reluctantly followed him back to the bunk-house as Laura was led away weeping by one of the girls. I lay down, furious, as Michael began to give me a whispered lecture about Laura’s delicate ‘feelings’. Should I just feign storming off in a temper, so that I could go and check on the fire? How much longer could I wait? Could the fire have blown itself out? Michael was still going on and on, but suddenly he stopped. ‘What’s that smell?’ he said, and he leapt out of bed and ran to the door.

  Michael was the one to raise the alarm. He could have been the hero, not me. But we were both too late to save lives.

  I did not know about the paraffin cans in the lean-to shed, behind the door. I had never been upstairs in the house, and somehow I got the impression that there were no bedrooms in the east wing. I never meant harm to the boy or his papi, but I am solely responsible for their deaths. I will never forget the sound of Madame Véronique’s screams. It has haunted me for nearly forty years.

  I was just about putting one foot in front of the other in the days that followed, going through the motions of empathy and sympathy, but I felt nothing at all, just a needle-sharp aching wound in the core of my soul. I tried not to sleep, because waking to the horror of the truth every day was unbearable.

  Sweet Laura tried to comfort me. It was known that I had grown close to the dead, but I could not take her platitudes and rejected her all over again. I worked with everybody else, trying to clear the mess and the destruction and trying to avoid contact with Madame Véronique, whose family I had murdered.

  I cleared out the library, but there was nothing left of it except some maps and an ivory paperweight that were kept in a metal box. Madame came to me and specifically asked about the leather-bound books, among other things. Monsieur must have told her about our project. I told her they too had been destroyed. Then I broke down and wept, and she held me in her bandaged arms and I felt worse. The fire service concluded that a stray ember from Monsieur’s pipe, which somehow ignited the paraffin in the lean-to, must have sparked the fire.

  Four days before we were to leave, Laura told me she was pregnant with my baby. I could hardly ingest the information and ignored it and her, but she was everywhere I turned over the following days. In my grief I snapped at her finally, insisting there was no way I could have a family. My child had just been buried. She stared at me, and I realized what I’d said and realized I’d meant it. She cried and pleaded, but I was not going to concede any more emotion. I was already spent. I told her to get herself fixed up and to send me the bill. Somehow, I would scrape the money together to pay for it. She cried more.

  Laura wisely decided not to come home with us. I assumed she’d find a little doctor somewhere who could sort her out. Michael was baffled by his sister’s insistence on staying on at Chateau d’Aigse, and negotiated between Laura and her parents in expensive phone calls that went on for two days. I presented it to him as philanthropy on Laura’s part. She simply wanted to stay and help Madame Véronique, and sure, what harm could it do. He knew by then that we had split up, but clearly she had not confided any of the details in him. I could not look at her or Madame Véronique on our day of departure. My shame would have been too obvious.

  My shame was not so great, however, that I did not have the leather-bound books containing every story ever written by Vincent d’Aigse wrapped in a towel at the bottom of my suitcase. I’m not sure why I took them. Maybe I wanted some part of my two friends to take with me. Their innocence and their purity. Maybe I needed a reminder of my guilt. I had deliberately lied to Madame Véronique, but these stories were all I had left of those two precious souls and I could not relinquish them.

  Back in Dublin, in my sunless bedsit, I spent a week in bed, not leaving the house or speaking to anybody. How could I even begin to explain that I only meant to be a hero, and not a murderer?

  The books were on the dresser accusing me, and yet I could not bring myself to dispose of them. I did not look at them or open them. Finally, I dragged myself out of my decline. I left the house and went to a second-hand furniture shop where I bought an old wooden box with a sturdy lock. I came home and locked the books into the box and hoped that I would forget where I had hidden the key.

  Laura was not so easy to forget about. She wrote several letters, trying to convince me that ‘we’ could keep the baby, that her parents would stand by us eventually. For a while, I considered it, but ultimately dismissed the notion. Marrying into a wealthy family was not a bad option, but raising a child? When I had just killed one? I do, after all, have a sense of morality. Then she wrote to say that she was going to have the baby in France and that I must go and join her there to raise our child. Another two months went by, and she wrote that she had changed her mind and was going to keep the baby anyway and bring it home, regardless of my involvement, sending me into paroxysms of panic. I never replied to any of the letters, but waited with increasing anxiety for news of the baby’s birth.

  The due date came and went and I heard nothing. But three months later, I assume in a last-ditch attempt to make me change my mind, she sent me a pink plastic hospital bracelet with ‘Bébé Condell’ written on it. There was no letter attached, and I was relieved that my name had not been used. Apparently, I had a child, a baby girl.

  An unwanted child had an unwanted child. Perhaps the apple did not fall far from the tree after all. There are several clichés I could use to illustrate the fact that I am undoubtedly my father’s son. Like him, I did not want a baby. Maybe what I did was worse, by not acknowledging the child at all, but Laura was a sensible person and I knew that if Michael wasn’t allowed out of the closet, then Laura knew how difficult it would be to bring home what was then termed a ‘bastard’ child.

  In August 1974, I heard that Laura was coming home. Nobody mentioned a baby. I assumed she had placed it for adoption. I hoped the baby would have a family that loved her. But at the back of my mind, I had a doubt that there had ever been a baby. I wondered about the possibil
ity that Laura was never pregnant in the first place. I thought she may even have had an abortion or may have miscarried it. Why did she send me the bracelet, and not a photograph? If she was really trying to convince me to keep it, wouldn’t she have sent me a photograph? Also, my instincts told me that Laura simply would not have given up her baby. She was braver than me.

  I saw Laura in college the following October and avoided contact. She was thin and sickly-looking and appeared not to socialize. It was rumoured that she was suffering from depression. Michael came to me and asked if I would talk to her. I could not refuse. I approached her one day in the library. She was standing in front of a bookshelf in the anthropology section. I greeted her and asked if she would like to come and have a coffee with me. She did not speak, but took my hand and placed it on her almost concave belly, just for a moment, and then she walked away. It was the same gesture she had made when I left her in France.

  I was angry with her and wrote her a coded letter then, reassuring her that she had done the right thing but insisting she should just get over the past and get on with her life. She did not reply to my letter, but returned it. I found it in shreds, posted through the slats of my locker.