The Forgotten Summer

by Carol Drinkwater

  For the last couple of years, a majority of the olive mills had started to open several weeks earlier than had been the centuries-old tradition. Due to a perceptible shift in seasonal weather conditions, farmers were picking earlier. The Cambons’ habitual choice of mill, le moulin de la famille Bonnard, had already set its wheels turning, which meant that Les Cigales was at liberty to press as soon as they had collected their first batches of fruit.

  ‘Before our groves are wiped clean, what say we get those drupes off the trees? This bout of late-summer weather could bring out the olive flies again and we’ll stand to lose the lot. Between the flies and the starlings, our olives are a sitting target.’

  Jane concurred and Claude set the upcoming Monday as the launch date for the harvest. This put them two weeks ahead of their projected schedule. Arnaud, due to the change in programme, would not be available. He was departing en vacances. Claude shook his head and said that it was a drawback, and that the boy should stay. Arnaud stood his ground. He was going hunting. End of the discussion.

  Life shifted into top gear.

  It was half-term. Annie and Patrick had returned south for the week and were staying with Matty and Claude. Habitually, it was Arnaud who serviced and drove the Citroën truck, ferrying the dozens of crates – les cageots – brimming with purply olives to and from the mill. As an apology for his upcoming absence, he was working day and night to make the old transport roadworthy before his departure.

  A radio on the ground was blasting out Coldplay. Arnaud’s head was buried in the bonnet of the vehicle, which he had towed out into the barnyard from one of the outbuildings where it had been on blocks since the previous year’s olive harvest. He was bleeding oil, servicing the filters, cleaning or replacing spark plugs, changing tyres, balancing wrenches handed to him by his newly appointed assistant, his nephew, Patrick. Annie was nearby, engaging in lighthearted banter with her brother and son while hosepiping the cageots as well as cleaning out the bidons. The bidons, Claude explained to Jane, were the stainless-steel containers that kept the newly pressed oil stable while it settled in cool dark corners of the cellars no longer dedicated to Luc’s film enterprises.

  Claude, with perennial collaborators, Michel and Jean, was in the groves, laying the nets around the base of each of the trees’ trunks, both young and old. The wives of the two regular employees had also pitched up to lend a hand. These countrywomen were no strangers to olive harvests and knew the process of net-laying as well as any male (some thought better).

  Once the nets, used to catch the falling fruit, were in place – red nets, white nets, green nets, like dozens of Italian flags draped over the ancient stone terraces, reaching from one tree to the next – the signal was given to call in the crew. Claude estimated that the picking of the two thousand trees would take them une bonne semaine, a good week. They needed to work fast and not every one of the younger plants was offering olives. So, yes, it was agreed that une bonne semaine, eight or nine days at the outside, should do it.

  Late on a Sunday morning in the last week of October, the team, with their family members, assembled around two iron tables, dragged into the courtyard for the purposes of meetings, coffee breaks and slices of Matty’s almond and ginger cakes. A slant of sunlight bled across a bowl of purple grapes and apples set in the centre of one of the tables. Fallen fig leaves lay like a mosaic underfoot as Claude talked through the schedule. Each day Jane was impressed by the ease with which their caretaker had assumed so much of the responsibility. He was in his element. Clarisse should promote him to estate manager, she was thinking, as she listened to him, but Clarisse was still sick and was showing no signs of recovery. As he spoke, in his sing-song Provençal accent, Claude was gesticulating theatrically, emphasizing the points with his hands, as so many from these parts did, hands as hairy as bacon rinds.

  ‘We’ll start out as the sun rises and we’ll pick until we lose daylight, which I estimate will be around five thirty to six. So, be ready for long days.’

  At the end of each day, the fruit and crew were to be driven back – the estate tractor and trailer would be used for the journey – to this courtyard area where two other hired helpers, who usually worked with Clarisse at the wine-pressing unit, would sort and select the fruit by hand. While the others slept, they would work through the night till dawn, jettisoning the silvery leaves, the debris, every mountain stone, twig, broken stick or tiny clod of earth that had been hastily gathered up with the olives as they were poured into the crates. The sorted olives would be loaded onto the truck and driven to the mill at first light.

  ‘But without Arnaud who will drive the temperamental old lorry?’ quizzed one of the team.

  In every previous autumn this had been strong-muscled Arnaud’s role – everyone referred to the vehicle as ‘Arnaud’s truck’ even though it officially belonged to the estate. But the hunting season was well under way and he had set off that bright Sunday morning for the national park with a couple of his chums on a shooting expedition. The trip had been arranged before Claude had rejigged the timetable, bringing forward the opening of the récolte. Arnaud was happier overnighting in a tent and spending his days in the Parc de la Mercantour at high altitude where only chamois and booted men with rifles climbed; it had proved a waste of Claude’s breath to try to persuade his son to cancel his much anticipated shooting party. So, they were one man short and the position of chauffeur fell to Jane. ‘Me? No, not me.’ But there really was no one else, unless they hired another assistant, which budget constraints prohibited. She had never been at the wheel of even a Transit van before, and certainly nothing as ancient or treacherous as Arnaud’s heap.

  Claude would brook no objections and the role was designated hers. ‘It will be the men who work the trees,’ he decided. ‘You will scale the wooden ladders.’ They would stretch and pick by hand, filling baskets suspended from their shoulders, like satchels, or sending the olives directly to the earth. Showers of fruit. The women would gather on hands and knees from the nets below. No sticks were to be used to beat the drupes from the branches – ‘It bruises them and our extra-virgin label matters to us,’ Claude reminded the team, who nodded silently, each knowing the business as well as he.

  Matty would keep the meals coming, as she was doing with the cakes right now. ‘There’ll be no disappointments on that score,’ promised Claude, with a rheumy-eyed wink. ‘All will be up to my dear wife’s usual magnificent standards. She’ll be working from the manor-house kitchen, loading up the pantries, as is her usual routine.’

  The difference this year was that Clarisse had been installed in one of the upstairs bedrooms. She remained bedridden and barely aware of the endeavours in progress, and Jane was a little concerned that the disturbances created by the comings and goings would unsettle and upset her, but returning her to her cottage was out of the question. Aside from playing chauffeur to hundreds of kilos of olives and running to the local shops for fresh provisions not available from the land, Jane intended to keep a watchful eye on her mother-in-law as well as being generally available to deal with any unexpected estate emergencies.

  The programme was set. Each knew his role.

  The following morning at the hour before dawn, when the birds are beginning their song, the team assembled, bleary-eyed, and the annual récolte was inaugurated in the stables at Les Cigales with a vast breakfast, baptized with several litres of a gentle estate red. Everyone, including Annie and Patrick, was present, save for Arnaud and Clarisse.

  The kitchen was a hub of enticing aromas and activity. Matty was at her perennial task of keeping the soldiers nourished, while Claude was doing his surprisingly fine best at running the show. While the adults were out gathering the olives, their sons and daughters or grandchildren, nieces and nephews, offspring of the pickers, chums of the offspring, all on mid-term break from their local schools, had assembled into a band, like so many chirruping starlings on the estate. Led by young Patrick, with a Trojan’s energy, they disappeared
en masse, shouting and jumping, immersing themselves within the copses and the pine forests. The raucous tribe was on the hunt for mushrooms, particularly the fleshy cêpes, Boletus edulis, also known in these parts by their Italian name: porcini. As well they kept their eyes peeled for the more delicate chanterelles, morels and the modest whites, returning to base, the courtyard, hours later, their arms laden, twigs in their hair, jumpers torn and boots soiled. They were breaking the law, of course, but who was to uphold it on this vast fertile tract of private land? They should have been collecting in wicker baskets to allow the spores to fall out as they were carried and thus aid propagation. The stipes should have been cut with knives, but no one was in a hurry to give their offspring such a potentially dangerous tool. One or two of the older adolescent boys carried their own pocket knives and they were responsible for the protection of the mycelia. The children had grown up with this annual field and wood recreation and there was little fear they would return to Matty with poisonous fungi. They could identify the edible choices instantly.

  Others, predominantly the girls, were collecting green acorns and removing them carefully from their tiny chaliced cups or, higher inland, shiny chestnuts. All for the red squirrels whose bronze tails were turning black as they prepared to go into hibernation for the colder months. The children amassed neat hillocks of food beneath the fig trees on the large, yellowing leaves that lay like serrated plates across the lawn, hoping that the animals would help themselves to a few future meals before they disappeared into their dreys to sleep winter away.

  ‘How sad that they miss Christmas,’ remarked one small girl. ‘If we knew where they were, we could take them presents.’

  Shouts, cries of joy, could be heard rising in the distance, from across fields, groves and hills, when a bounty had been discovered and hoarded, or when an elated, frolicking Walnut had charged through the hard work and sent the acorns flying.

  While the pickers were collecting sufficient crate-loads for Jane’s first trip to the mill, she busied herself in the small salon where Luc’s possessions were now almost entirely piled. She was packing up boxes of his written materials and archives to be posted off to the CNC in Paris. She had promised all this to them weeks ago. It was long overdue. The collections of old family films, the homemade movies, she had catalogued and stored in the library. She dreamed that she and Annie might sit and watch them together. The pistol lay on a side table. Its presence continued to mystify her and she was uncertain how best to dispose of it. When he returned from the mountains, she would ask Arnaud whether he could find a use for it. The Bible had been a gift from Patrick to his uncle and she was intending to return it to him before he went back to Paris.

  She was gathering up the old photos she’d found a while back of Clarisse and Isabelle posing in front of their Citroën in Algeria – 1960, two years before the war’s end. She thought she might paste them into an album for Clarisse, and for Patrick in years to come. Between her fingers was the head-and-shoulders shot of Adrien Cambon, Luc’s father. Should it be included with the family history? Clarisse had spoken so negatively about him …

  The telephone rang in the breakfast room – the house line. Jane cleared aside the scissors she had been using to cut lengths of string, to make space for the photos on the table. Then she hurried across the hall. She had left the key in the lock of the small salon for she always kept the room firmly closed, chock-a-block as it was with Luc’s life, as well as many souvenirs of her own. Now, in her haste to reach the phone before it went dead, she omitted to close the door and remove the key.

  It was the miller’s wife, Madame Bonnard, returning Jane’s unanswered calls of earlier that morning.

  ‘Ah, bonjour, Madame Bonnard, merci pour me rappeler.’ Jane perched herself on the window ledge, catching sight of her reflection in the open glass, refracted by the sunshine streaming in. She brushed her fingers through her hair. She needed a trim and was mentally calculating how long it had been since she had last visited a hairdresser. She was negotiating dates, times, rates with Madame Bonnard, while listening through the open windows to the exuberance of the youngsters. It made her heart sing to hear such vibrant life about the place. Walnut was scampering, barking, hugging Patrick’s heels. Patrick, who reminded her of Luc, of the adolescent Luc, when she had first met him. Patrick, who lacked Luc’s finesse, was a rougher cut of his uncle but certain lights and certain angles – a turn of the head, a smile, a question, a spoken thought, his boundless energy and curiosity – took her back years to their precious days among the trees, on the beaches, questing and growing, running side by side with the same exuberance beneath a wide blue sky. She and Luc: partners in the heady business of discovering life, of growing up. She sighed, replacing the receiver after securing their first mill booking of the season for the following day, finding herself once more yearning to turn back the clock and pushing aside all thoughts of what the future, which on some days she dreaded, held in store for her. Today, though, she was content and she was occupied, surrounded by this rustic life and bustling activity.

  Clarisse yelling her name broke into her reverie. She scribbled the rendezvous details into her notebook, tossed her pen onto the table and darted up the stairs, her work on Luc’s boxes and memorabilia temporarily forgotten.

  From one of the first-floor-landing windows, she noticed two figures bending and working in the walled garden. She stuck her head out, waved and shouted, ‘Coo-ee!’ Annie straightened and returned the greeting with her broad smile. She lifted one of the few remaining tomatoes still growing on the vines and waved it high for Jane to see. There were no more salads now but a handful of deep ruby aubergines, skins still shiny, offered themselves. Annie and Matty gathered up whatever was edible for the pickers’ lunch. Golden grapefruit and lemons were hanging in abundance from the trees while the bitter oranges used for marmalade and orange wine were green bullets only, slowly ripening. They would be a post-Christmas harvest.

  Jane gave Annie a thumbs-up and sped along the corridor.

  ‘Who were you calling to?’ There were magazines spread all over the bed and floor. Clarisse’s make-up bag had spilt its contents over the duvet cover. Face powder stained the pillows. Cold tea sat in a mug, untouched. A cloying perfume hung low in the air.

  ‘Matty in the garden.’

  ‘That woman is a witch.’ And Clarisse began reiterating her invective, to curse, to verbally tear poor Matty limb from limb.

  ‘Clarisse, you were calling me. Is there something you need?’

  ‘What’s going on? It’s so noisy. There are a lot of people shouting and yelling. I can’t rest.’

  ‘We’re starting the olive harvest.’

  ‘With children? It sounds like children. Who’s here?’

  ‘I invited the pickers to bring their young. I’ve sent them off with Pa– to play on the estate. Why not try to sleep?’ Jane was gathering up the lipsticks and creams and stuffing them back into their pouch. She was tidying the magazines into piles on one of two bedside tables. Foolish. She had almost let slip the fact of Patrick’s presence.

  ‘You just want me out of the way. Who’s running all this? Surely not you. You made a mess of the grapes last year. I need to get up. Someone’s got to –’

  ‘Your blood pressure, Clarisse.’

  ‘I don’t want this place overrun with village children tearing up the grass and I don’t want that bitch who stole my daughter – Where’s your father? He should be here.’ She was getting het up, throwing off the bedcovers, kicking her way out of the bed and was on her feet, gaunt and unsteady. Her jewellery was all that had not shrunk and the rings seemed grossly oversized on her wrinkled fingers.

  ‘Please, get back into bed, Clarisse.’

  ‘Stop ordering me about!’

  They tussled as Jane attempted to stop the patient in her nightdress making for the door. A glass of water on the bedside table went over, spilling across the magazines Jane had just arranged there. She grabbed the frail but su
rprisingly strong old woman by the shoulders and began forcibly to lead her backwards towards the bed. Clarisse resisted and slapped out, elbowing Jane in the bosom.

  ‘Oh, for – I said get back into bed! Or I’ll have to call Dr Beauchene.’

  Was it time perhaps to find a safer residence for Clarisse? Jane recalled how difficult that decision had been with Peter. Still, heartbreaking as it had been, placing him in a care home had proved the best conclusion in the long run. Jane would not be here for ever; Clarisse was not her relative; the task could not be left to Matty; Annie had cut the cord. When the harvest had been completed, Jane would sit down with Dr Beauchene – and Annie? – and talk through Clarisse’s options. What would Luc say if he were alive? She was mopping up the water with a face towel from the bathroom and pouring a fresh glass of Badoit. Clarisse, scowling, had returned to her cave of sheets, coughing, muttering incomprehensibly, drained by her outburst.

  ‘If your father was here, he’d care for me.’

  ‘Here, swallow this. I’ll pop in a little later, bring you a cup of tea. Sleep now.’

  Downstairs at the kitchen door, Matty was laughing and shaking her head with incredulity as she took charge of the armfuls of earthy mushrooms from the excited boys and girls clamouring to hand over their booty. As remuneration, she was serving them multi-coloured plastic beakers of homemade fizzy lemonade and bowls of her grapefruit sorbet ‘to be consumed outside, mind. No muddy feet in here, please. Oh, and the mistress is upstairs and unwell so keep the racket down. No screaming and shouting in the courtyard.’