The Boy In the Olive Grove

by Fleur Beale

  ‘I know that! Don’t treat me like an idiot. But why ask today? You can’t go to a bank on a Saturday. He’ll be that much stronger by Monday.’

  In some far-off future, I’d like to be married to somebody who’d protect me the way she was protecting him. I choked on a laugh.

  ‘What now?’ she snapped, still in fight mode.

  ‘I was thinking it’s great the way you’re protecting Dad, looking out for him. Then I thought it’d be nice to be married to somebody who did that for you. And …’

  She burst out laughing too. ‘Yes, you and I didn’t have a relationship like that way back then.’ She slipped her arm into mine, companionably this time. ‘I’ll tell you my version. We’ll go home, have a cuppa and I’ll tell all.’

  ‘Good. I think.’

  On the walk through the car park, Iris kept an enigmatic silence that unnerved me, although once we were in the car she was chatty enough, filling me in on what the doctors had told her. ‘They’ll keep him in for several more days. He’ll have to change a few things when he comes home.’

  ‘No more pies for lunch?’

  ‘I’ll make very sure of that. I’m going to drive to the factory each lunchtime. We’ll walk home. He’ll eat good food, then I’ll walk back with him.’

  Man, but she was fierce. Dad wouldn’t have a hope of reneging. I was so grateful. She’d make him save his stubborn skin whether he liked it or not.

  Back at their house, Iris did her caring earth-mother thing with me. ‘Sit down, Bess. We’ll have a drink. What would you like?’

  ‘If this is going to be as bad as I think it is,’ I said, ‘alcohol could be best.’

  She laughed. How amazing, to make a joke and have her get it. I wasn’t used to mothers who did that. She gave me an elderflower cordial and made tea for herself from fresh mint.

  ‘All right, here goes.’ We sat down at the table. ‘Pin your ears back.’

  Oh god, I so didn’t want to hear this, but I didn’t want to have her burning up in my head all the time either.

  ‘The first time I met you,’ she said, ‘you were nine years old.’

  Mum and Dad split when I was eight. Dad met Iris almost a year later, despite Mum’s dark mutterings to the contrary. I said, ‘You were wearing a swishy red dress and you didn’t care that it clashed with your hair.’ Her wild hair was white now and she let it hang to her shoulders. It was a proper witch look.

  ‘The thing I remember about that day,’ Iris said, ‘was the immediate hatred I felt for you.’

  ‘I was just a little kid!’

  ‘Yes. For months after Charlie and I got together I tried to work out where the antipathy was coming from. My theory to start with was that I must be picking up your mother’s feelings.’

  ‘It didn’t show. You were always so nice to me.’ I remembered Christmas and birthday presents, Iris letting me help her cook, and me always being wary, never letting her close.

  ‘Over-compensation,’ she said with a wry smile. ‘Anyway, in the end I went and stayed a weekend with a friend of mine in Auckland. She’s a psychologist and I asked her to sort my head out.’

  ‘You on a therapy couch? No way!’ I could imagine her going to a guru of some sort, but not a common garden psychologist.

  She ignored that. ‘I could see that if I didn’t get to the bottom of the hatred it would start to get into Charlie’s and my relationship, and I would have done almost anything to stop that happening.’

  But she hadn’t ever tried to protect me. She hadn’t made Dad stand up to Mum. Easier to focus on that rather than on what I feared was coming.

  ‘I went to Auckland, poured it all out to Gwennie. She put me into a deep relaxation and told me to go back to the first time I felt that I hated you.’

  I held up my hands to stop her, to shut it all out. ‘This is too weird. We’re both insane, that’s all. There’s got to be a pill, an ordinariness pill.’

  She patted my hand, kind of absently, absorbed in her story. ‘After a bit I found I was looking at a scene. I was in it, not as Iris in the twenty-first century, though. I was a young woman and I was working in a garden. It was a herb garden, and my husband was arguing with me and telling me to stop using the herbs. He was a strong man with an air of authority about him. I felt that others looked up to him, that he commanded respect. His wife — that was me — looked up to him too, except that I knew about herbs and the treatment of sickness and he didn’t. People came to me for help. He didn’t like the way they trusted me and relied on me.’

  She paused. ‘I saw another scene, one that terrified me in that life, and I felt that terror again in Gwennie’s house.’

  I couldn’t bear it, but I didn’t try to stop her.

  ‘Men burst into my house. It was night. I called out to my husband but he didn’t come. They mocked me and spat on me. I fought them, kicking, scratching and biting, but there were three of them. They over-powered me and dragged me screaming through the night. I kept thinking that if I screamed loudly enough my husband would come to my aid, that somebody I’d cured would rescue me. Nobody came. Dogs barked, but no person came to help me. They threw me into a stone cellar and bolted the door.’

  I sat hunched over, sitting on my hands so that I couldn’t clap them over my ears. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’

  She patted my shoulder. ‘Bess, dear — it’s all in the past. Let it go. We’re different people now. It’s a different age. Have you had enough, or shall I go on?’

  I had to hear it all, even though I knew what was coming. I’d seen it with my own eyes. I said, ‘Finish it. Please.’

  ‘Gwennie told me to go forward to my death in that life.’

  I so did not want to hear this.

  ‘I saw the village square. There was a big woodpile in the middle and all the people I knew, many of them I’d helped — they were all there. When they saw me, their faces filled with hate. They shouted, Burn the witch. Burn the witch. The men dragged me, tied me to the pole in the middle of the woodpile. I looked for my husband. I was sure he would rescue me. I saw him in the crowd. He wasn’t shouting, but he had his arms folded and his face … his expression … it was implacable. There would be no help from him.’

  She stopped, but I finished the story for her. ‘He was the one who shoved the burning brand into the wood to light the fire. It flamed up around you. You cursed me as the flesh burned from your feet.’ I put my head on the table and wept, my hands over my ears now, but I heard her repeat the words that had written themselves into my brain.

  ‘I will hate you for ever. I curse you to burn in hell.’

  Iris rubbed my back, the way she’d done at the hospital. ‘Gwennie kept reminding me that I was safe now, that what happened back then is in the past. She told me to let it go. Take if off like a cloak and leave it behind. Dig a hole and bury it. It took me a couple of attempts but I got there in the end.’ She reached for the roll of paper towels and pushed them at me. ‘Let it go, Bess. It’s not part of who we are now. You don’t need to feel guilty, or ashamed.’

  I doubted I could let it go just like that, however much I longed to be rid of it and never think about it — or see it — again. That was then. This is now. I hated it that Iris’s far-fetched theory felt more real than Hadleigh’s reasoned argument. I wanted to believe him, not her.

  ‘I can’t get my head around it. It’s all … It’s just too weird.’

  ‘Yes, I know. I’ve never told Charlie. You can imagine what he’d say.’

  ‘He’d have you burned as a witch.’

  She smiled and relaxed back in her chair. ‘So there you have it. Believe it, or don’t believe it. All I know for sure is that now I don’t feel that surge of hate every time your name is mentioned.’

  Thoughts, ideas, other explanations all tangled themselves in my brain. The olive grove boy, what about him? Was he some sort of memory as well? Did I have any choice other than to accept what she’d told me? Her story matched what I’d seen too cann
ily for it to be a fluke.

  ‘I don’t want to believe it. It’s too …’

  ‘Witchy?’ she said, laughing at me. ‘Listen, Bess. I don’t think it matters too much. Just accept the experience and the lessons, Gwennie said. She does a lot of this stuff, but she warned me to be careful. People can talk themselves into anything given the right circumstances.’

  I didn’t find that comforting. Could my mind, all on its own accord, manufacture a scene of high drama to explain why I kept my distance from my stepmother? If that was so, then what was the reason behind the peasant boy, and what was my mind going to come up with to explain my relationship with Mum?

  Later. I’d process all this stuff later.

  ‘Why did you start talking about this now, though? And how did you know I’d get what you were on about?’

  ‘Just a feeling,’ she said. ‘You were jumpier than usual around me. You’d taken yourself into drunken oblivion quite uncharacteristically. Could have been anything, of course — but I go by my intuition, and it was telling me the time had come to talk to you.’

  She was possibly more of a witch now than she had been in that other life. Other life. I was accepting it?

  ‘You’re so different from Mum. She doesn’t do intuition.’

  Iris had a wicked glint in her eyes. ‘I’ll take you to see Gwennie,’ she said. ‘She can relax you and instruct you to go back to the cause of the difficulties between you and your mum.’

  I batted that away. I did not want to delve into … whatever it was that Gwennie did. ‘D’you think the pictures will go away now? For me, I mean?’

  She shrugged. ‘Don’t know. I’m not an expert. I hope so, though. They’re not pretty.’

  Whether or not they would, one thing had come out of this strange afternoon, and that was the huge relief of talking about it.

  I stood up. I had to go. I had a bank manager to ring.

  Chapter Eight

  ‘I’M TRYING to get hold of Beverly Maketawa. Is this the right number?’

  It was, and in a couple of seconds Beverly herself was speaking to me. ‘Hello, Bess. Is your dad going to pull through?’

  Small towns again. I wondered what tendril of the grapevine she’d tapped into. ‘He’s going to recover, but he’ll have to take it easy for the next three months. The thing is, with the factory …’

  ‘Are you keeping an eye on things for your dad? You’re at the factory now? Good. I can be with you shortly.’

  I put the phone down, unsure if her coming to see me meant good news or bad.

  Next, being the dutiful daughter I wasn’t, I rang Mum.

  No handy answerphone this time. ‘Clarissa Grey speaking.’

  ‘Hi, Mum. I’ll be a bit late home. Another hour at a guess.’

  ‘That’s inconvenient and thoughtless. Don’t expect me to wait dinner for you.’

  Ah well, her moments of approval of me were few and far between. I’d had my quota for the week, it seemed.

  BEVERLY WAS A SURPRISE. ‘The bank let you have a moko?’ I asked by way of a greeting.

  ‘Bess,’ she said, ‘it would be a brave institution to pick a fight with me over my moko.’

  She was no soft fluffy bunny, then. There’d be no sentiment about her decisions. Well, I wasn’t the softest of bunnies either, so watch it, Ms Maketawa.

  When we went into Dad’s office I half expected her to take his chair. She didn’t, but she did take charge of the conversation.

  ‘Now, Bess, you’ll be concerned about the finances of your dad’s business. With good reason, unfortunately.’

  ‘He told me things were bad.’ I pushed the folder of bills towards her. ‘I’ve added these up. Dad said there was enough money for the men’s holiday pay, but all these add up to a heap of money as well.’

  She waved the bills away. ‘Your dad came into the bank a week ago. On Thursday …’

  ‘The day I came back from school?’ Several geological ages ago.

  ‘… and we reached an agreement. In a nutshell, the bank guaranteed the money for the holiday pay and for him to run the enterprise until the Christmas break.’

  ‘Why would you do that? The business is failing. Banks aren’t generally so chummy.’

  She stood up to go. ‘Sorry, Bess, but I can’t discuss your dad’s confidential affairs. Not even with you. Of course, he was dead set on Hadleigh becoming his partner.’ She tipped her head in a question. ‘I assume the gossip is correct that your brother left the country rather than enter into that arrangement?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Dad made me his partner instead.’

  She sat down again, clearly aghast. ‘Did you sign that to stop him worrying, by any chance? Never mind, it’s done now.’ She was frowning and plainly not wanting to tell me the next part. ‘The thing is, Bess — Charlie put his house as guarantee for the loan.’

  I let that sink in. No wonder he’d had a heart attack. ‘Does that mean that if the business goes down the tubes, he’ll have to sell their house?’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid it does. I tried to talk him out of it, but you know what he’s like. He said he’d go to a loan shark if he had to, but he was going to pay the men out and clear his debts.’

  ‘Well, I’ll bet he didn’t talk that over with Iris first. She’ll be … Oh god, does that mean I’m now liable for half the loan?’ That could make life entertaining, especially if I told Mum.

  ‘Technically, yes,’ she said. ‘But I don’t imagine your dad would let you shoulder his debt.’

  ‘Um … how much is it?’ I screwed up my eyes, ready for the blow.

  ‘Sixty thousand. Not a huge amount in the scheme of things.’

  No, I could see that, but they would have to sell the house to cover it. Iris would have to make a new witch garden for her herbs. If they had to get a small place she wouldn’t have a treatment room. ‘How long have we got? Before the loan needs paying back?’

  ‘The first repayment is due the second week of January. Realistically, we’ll need to see some positive activity before Christmas. The business has only just been holding on. Sinking a little deeper over the past four months.’

  Beverly sat back, giving me time to get my head around that.

  I got my head around it pretty damn quick. ‘You’re giving us three working weeks to turn things around? If we don’t, Dad has to sell the house and pay back the money?’

  ‘Basically, yes.’ It was as clear as the moko on her chin that she didn’t have any faith that we’d do it.

  ‘What would you see as positive activity?’

  ‘Sell the furniture on hand. Get some definite orders. Send somebody out as a rep with a brochure to market the products.’ She held up her hand to stop me speaking. ‘Not you. I don’t know how old you are …’

  ‘Eighteen.’

  ‘As much as that? I’m surprised. Take my advice. Send somebody older. You just don’t look convincing enough, and if you try and look older by what you wear you’ll look like lamb dressed as mutton.’

  ‘But I’m the logical one to go. I can’t make furniture and we’ll be a man short if one of the guys goes.’ And I wanted to go. It was probably the only thing I could really help with.

  ‘Do it then, but don’t set your expectations too high. To tell you the truth, I can’t see that you’ll be able to do much. In a different economic climate maybe, but not right now.’ She shook my hand. ‘But good luck, Bess. I’ll see you in my office Friday afternoon for a progress report. Four-thirty.’

  It was 5.45 when I got home. Mum had eaten her meal. Mine was served and sitting on the bench: fish, new potatoes, baby carrots and a tomato salad. I ate the salad, zapped the rest in the microwave, then ate in peaceful solitude. ‘Thanks, Mum. That was great.’

  She didn’t look up from her Sudoku. ‘Has Hadleigh contacted you?’

  Was this a thaw? A truce? Détente? ‘Not when I checked this morning.’ I grabbed the tablet from where it sat near the phone. ‘I’ll see if there’s anything
now.’

  There wasn’t, and I wanted to cry. If I hadn’t been a complete nutcase at the airport he would have messaged me by now, I knew he would have. ‘I’ll tell you if I hear from him, Mum. I promise.’

  She inclined her head, and I cheered up. There was a definite thaw happening, though she still didn’t look at me.

  ‘Marion Symes wants you to join the tennis club. I assured her you’d be delighted. It’ll give you something to do over the holidays.’

  My heart sank. By her tone, all my Christmases had arrived in a tidy bundle called Marion Symes. The woman must be a person of consequence in my mother’s world.

  ‘That’s nice of her to think of me,’ I said carefully. ‘But Mum, I probably won’t have time to play competition tennis. I have to run Dad’s business until he gets well again.’

  ‘Honestly, Bess, get your priorities right. Here I am, doing my best to repair your damaged reputation, yet you persist in throwing my efforts back in my face. You’re not helping yourself, you really aren’t.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I really am. But Dad needs—’

  She chopped that off quick smart. ‘And how typical of you to choose That Man over me.’

  ‘Mum, please — your relationship with my father isn’t my fault, and it’s nothing to do with me. I didn’t divorce him and I’m not going to cut him out of my life.’

  She reached for the tissues and wiped her eyes. Oh god, when would I learn not to talk about Dad any more than I had to? I did my usual grovel. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you. I’m really sorry.’ It made no difference.

  There was no space in my head right now for her martyr act. I shut myself in my room. To keep my mind from dwelling on her, I turned instead to the boy in the olive grove, striving to recapture that flash of joy. Then I stopped. Going back to that was also an invitation to let something else loose from heaven knew where. I logged on to Facebook instead, grounding myself in news of my ex-classmates. Their lives sounded so normal. Jessica moaned about her tidy-freak sister. Anita was in happy land over a symphony concert she had tickets to. Clodagh wrote: I can love my brothers wholeheartedly when there are fifteen kilometres separating us.