The Olive Tree

by Lucinda Riley

  I showed Viola the bathroom, which she said she needed. I was in the bedroom taking a jumper out of my holdall – the apartment was chilly – when Viola walked in behind me and fell onto the bed.

  ‘Sorry, Alex, but oh my God . . . I am soooo tired.’

  ‘I know.’ I watched her as she closed her eyes. ‘Are you sure you shouldn’t have something to eat?’ I asked her as I looked at her fabulous self, lying there like a nymph on the bed – hair splayed across the pillow, long legs elegantly and photogenically placed, even though she’d literally thrown herself onto it.

  There was no reply. She’d gone to sleep.

  So I went and made myself a strange supper of baked beans and a can of tuna I’d found in the cupboard, and ate it in the sitting room, watching the BBC news (why?). As I ate I tried to put my brain into rational order and plunder my own psyche for a reaction to Sacha dying. But Viola had scrambled my rationale, and every time I thought about Genetic Dad lying in a freezer drawer in a morgue, and how I felt about it, instead I saw her, and my mind went off at another tangent altogether.

  Besides, beyond the fact that I felt sadness for a life brought to an end far too soon, the terrible truth was, using Sondheim’s famous lyric . . . that I felt nothing.

  Then I heard Viola whimpering through the thin stud wall, and went to her.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked, immediately chiding myself for the ridiculousness of the question.

  She didn’t answer. I groped in the dark for a square of free mattress on the edge of the bed so I didn’t sit on bits of her.

  ‘I had a dream . . . that he was alive . . .’

  ‘Oh Viola.’

  ‘I know he isn’t.’ I felt her arm swipe across her eyes and cheeks, wiping away the tears, and wished then that I could feel the same pain for our father as she did, but I couldn’t. And that made me feel even worse.

  ‘I’m so sorry, sweetheart,’ I said softly, ‘but he isn’t.’ And at that moment I cursed Jules and Rupes. No matter what Our Father Who Art in Heaven had done or not done, he was hardly Saddam or Stalin or Mao. Or even a seriously bad human being. He was just flawed and selfish and weak, and rather pathetic. And surely a mother and a brother – adoptive or not – should be here to support the one family member who had loved Sacha enough to be devastated by his departure? ‘It’s only me, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Oh Alex, don’t say that.’ The hand that had been wiping away her tears reached for mine, and I extended it into the near-darkness. It was taken, and squeezed. Very, very tightly. ‘I didn’t mean it like that. I know Daddy’s dead. I meant that you don’t need to be sorry that it’s only you. Of all the people on Earth, I can’t think of anyone I’d like more to be here with me now. It’s like some kind of surreal dream. Really.’

  She squeezed my hand even tighter as a sort of extra emphasis on the last word.

  ‘Alex?’

  ‘Yes, Viola?’

  ‘Would you . . . Would you come and give me a hug?’

  Christ!

  ‘’Course I would.’ So I stood up and made my way round to the other side of the bed, groped again for a spare bit of mattress, then lay down next to her. She snuggled into me as if we were two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, separated for years in different boxes, then finally put together. My arm moved to her tiny waist and my knees did a bendy thing and fitted in perfectly behind hers.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said eventually, just as I was thinking she’d probably gone to sleep.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For being here. For being you.’

  ‘That’s okay.’ Then I really thought she’d gone to sleep, as there was silence for an awfully long time. And believe me, I was counting the seconds.

  ‘Alex?’ she murmured drowsily.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I love you. It sounds corny, but I always have. And I think I always will.’

  The worst thing was, even though every brain cell and sinew in me was desperate to reciprocate the words, I felt I couldn’t. Because I was again thinking about how she might feel when she found out the truth.

  That night was one of the most torturous of my life. And it wasn’t because I had just lost my father – rather that I had just found my future. All night I lay there, wide awake, as Viola slept fitfully in my arms. Every time she stirred, I’d raise the hand that was around her waist to her silken hair. And as she whimpered, I’d stroke it and she’d go back to sleep.

  ‘I love you,’ I mouthed into her ear. ‘I love you.’

  To be fair, I defy any man to lie for an entire six hours with one of the most gorgeous females on the planet in their arms without feeling illicit carnal desire – even leaving aside the complexity of the ‘illicitness’ of my relationship with Viola.

  Viola . . . I must have been hallucinating at some point, as I suddenly saw an instrument floating across my vision, made of shiny, nut-brown wood and complete with strings.

  Violin, cello . . . trumpet! Perhaps I did doze on and off that night, but it wasn’t very deeply, as I remember thinking at one point that maybe we could call our first-born ‘Harp’. But then I remembered that we’d only have to add an ‘er’ to end up with the same name as a child spawned by a famous footballer and his equally famous wife.

  Drum? Or how about Bassoon?

  At some point, I must have really fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew, there was a strong smell of coffee being floated under my nose.

  ‘Alex?’ My Titian muse was upright above me, her hair wet from the shower. She proffered a mug. ‘Wake up.’

  ‘I am! I mean, I will.’

  ‘Here, I made you some coffee.’ She put it down on the table beside me, then walked to the other side of the bed and sat on it cross-legged, a pad and pen in her lap. ‘Okay: so what was it you said we had to do today?’

  Sacha’s funeral was held in the chapel of Magdalen, his and Dad’s old college. And now, of course, mine. I admit to having pulled a few strings when Viola mentioned how lovely it would be to hold it there. Given that Sacha’s life was hardly going to stand out against the achievements of his fellow alumni, I had a word. (There had to be some advantages to doing philosophy for the past three years; it had included a heap of incredibly dull theology lectures given by the college chaplain.)

  Between us we managed to get at least thirty people to attend – the Pandora posse, plus a number of oldies that Dad had managed to convince to come and swell the numbers, promising (I’m sure) a serious piss-up in the college bar afterwards. Whoever and however, they duly arrived.

  Just as I was walking towards my parents, Viola took my hand and insisted that I come and sit in the front pew with her. Rupes sat on my other side, and Jules on Viola’s.

  ‘Alex has been wonderful,’ she told them both.

  So in the end, there I was on the front pew, mourning my father next to my half-brother – who wept like a bloody baby – and Viola, my, er . . . well, what the hell was she to me?

  I spent most of the service pondering this conundrum. And in the end – though I decided I should double-check on the internet to confirm it – I deduced that she was actually nothing at all. Which meant, I thought in relief, that it was possible for her to be everything to me in the future. And that made me feel much better.

  Whatever Mum felt about me being plonked in the centre of a Chandler sandwich at Sacha/Alexander’s funeral like the proverbial cuckoo in the nest, she didn’t say. She sat with William, Chloë, Immy and Fred just behind us.

  I kept in the background at the wake, feeling Jules’ eyes upon me, whether real or imagined. Although at one point she did thank me for being so kind to Viola.

  Having recovered from his tears, all Rupes could ask me was whether I thought there’d be a will. I assured him that there wasn’t. Viola and I had already checked that out, and Sacha hadn’t even made one (thank God).

  Our father had nothing left to leave anyone.

  My mother came up to me just before they left. ‘Viola says you’ve b
een wonderful.’

  ‘Not really, Mum.’

  ‘You haven’t told her yet, have you?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Alex.’ She took my hands in her desperately bony ones, and I thought how fragile she looked. ‘Please, learn from my mistakes. As soon as you can is best . . .’

  Then she kissed and hugged me with all the strength she possessed, which at the time wasn’t very much, and said goodbye.

  That night, I’d managed to secure two rooms in college – one for me and one for Viola. It was obvious she’d drunk far too much, and alcohol and emotion had mixed together to form a lethal combination of false euphoria and despair.

  She babbled on about how she hated – yes, hated – her mum. Apparently, Jules had once had too much to drink, and said it was Sacha who’d wanted to adopt her.

  ‘From now on, she can go fuck herself,’ Viola announced. ‘I never want to see her, or that idiot of a brother, ever again!’

  I knew she didn’t really mean it – she was just distraught and exhausted – but I understood her sentiment. And then she fell onto the bed in my room, not hers. And again, sobbed pitifully and asked me to hold her.

  And my resolve to tell her the truth disappeared.

  Not tonight, I thought, tomorrow . . .

  And the truth was, tomorrow never came. It. Just. Didn’t. And then there was a night a couple of weeks later, when I’d suggested to her that it might do her good to get away, and why didn’t she come with me to a rather grand house party I’d been invited to in Italy by a friend of mine from Oxford. There, truth be told, my resolve left me completely. The host simply assumed that we were a couple. And there, in our beautiful Florentine bedroom, we made love for the first time.

  After that everything was so incredibly perfect that I just couldn’t bear – like my mother before me – to impart the terrible news. And so it went on, and on . . . and with it going on, my guilt built up until I became someone who looked like Alex from the outside, but in fact personified a small, ugly lying troll of deceit.

  Those few months – ostensibly – were the best of my life. I was working in London for the summer, having secured myself an internship at the British Library in King’s Cross, documenting and filing the hard copies and digital details of philosophical works. Mum and Dad had lent me their little apartment in Bloomsbury for the duration.

  During the day I handled works of literary art and by night, Viola, who was the most perfect physical work of art I could ever imagine.

  Having refused to go home to her mother’s cottage for the summer, as she wasn’t speaking to either Jules or Rupes, Viola found herself a job at a supermarket round the corner. Then she asked tentatively if she could move in with me, as she had nowhere to live. And I readily agreed.

  Some mornings, as I cycled – yes, cycled – off down the Euston Road to work, I felt like something out of a novel. My world was perfect.

  Except for the fact I was living a lie.

  Every day I sat in a basement surrounded by books full of wise words, knowing that every last one of them, from Sophocles to the modern self-help versions, would tell me I must ’fess up. And every evening, I’d prepare myself on the wacky race back home to her, swearing to myself that tonight would be the night.

  And then I’d arrive and there she would be, having made something yummy for supper with all the almost-out-of-date food bargains she’d brought home from the supermarket. And looking so lovely and so fragile that I just . . . couldn’t.

  Eventually an autumn chill entered the air, and Viola moved into the rabbit hutch she’d be living in for her next year at uni, and I began packing to return to Oxford to do my MA.

  Both of us were as miserable as hell at the thought of our love-nest being disrupted and torn apart by a mere thing called life. By that time, we’d named all our babies and arranged our wedding, which wasn’t really so stupid anymore, given the fact that we were now both in our twenties: it was perfectly possible that it would happen. We were attached by some kind of invisible glue, and yet neither of us had really said much to anyone about the new and wonderful world we had discovered with each other. Just in case they spoilt it.

  Even though it was under an hour from London to Oxford, and we’d already arranged a schedule which involved one of us travelling to the other on alternating weekends, I remember the last night together being as painful as if I was sailing for the Indies and wouldn’t be back for three years – if ever. We had forgotten what it was like to exist without each other.

  The Michaelmas term passed in a blur of missing her, and my normally invincible concentration flew out of the window as I sat in a dreamy daze during lectures and tutorials. Comfortingly, Viola was just as bad, and when Christmas arrived, I asked Mum and Dad if she could come home with me. She was adamant she didn’t want to spend the holiday with Jules and Rupes.

  ‘I always went to Daddy’s flat to keep him company, you see,’ Viola explained. ‘I was all he had.’

  My mum, who thankfully seemed to be recovering well from her final treatment, pounced on me when we arrived and told me again I must say something. And again, I promised I would, but then . . . it was Christmas, after all. And Viola, ensconced in the bosom of our loving and welcoming family, looked as happy and relaxed as I’d seen her since Sacha died.

  So I didn’t.

  In the New Year, we went back to our term-time routine, me having already decided that I would do my best to get a job in London when I finished my MA. I didn’t particularly care if I had to sweep the streets, as long as I could hold Viola to me every night when I arrived home, dusty and smelly.

  Easter came, and Viola had to go off to some French literature exchange thing for a month. We spent the night before she left in the Bloomsbury flat. She asked to borrow my holdall, and while she packed I went out to buy a bottle of wine and an Indian takeaway as a treat.

  When I arrived back, I called out to her as I walked along the corridor and went into the sitting room. And there she was, sitting on the floor cross-legged, holding the letter Sacha had written to me just before he died.

  My heart sank right down through my body and lay in a pulsating, terrified mass at my feet.

  ‘I . . . how did you find it?’ I asked.

  ‘It was in the front pocket of your holdall.’ Her face was tear-stained and grey. ‘It’s all been a lie, hasn’t it?’

  ‘No, Viola, of course it hasn’t been a lie!’

  ‘Well, it has as far as I’m concerned,’ she whispered, almost to herself. ‘There I was thinking you cared enough about my father to come to the hospital that day . . . Jesus! The number of people I’ve told how marvellous you were . . . when you were there for you! Not me!’

  ‘You’re right,’ I agreed. ‘That first day I came because I felt I should. But the minute I saw you walking towards me across the ward, everything changed.’

  ‘Please, Alex, can you just stop lying!’

  ‘Viola, I understand this is a shock, but these last few months, all we’ve shared . . . how can that be a lie? How can it?’

  ‘Because you’re not who I thought you were. “Caring, sharing Alex”, who all the time was pretending to be there for me . . . And you know the worst thing of all?’

  I could think of many ‘worst’ things, but I refrained from saying any of them.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m actually envious of you. Because you were his real flesh and blood, and I wasn’t.’

  ‘Viola, seriously, he meant nothing to me—’

  ‘Oh, thanks!’

  ‘I didn’t mean it like that! But really, I was totally horrified when I originally found out I was his son. I mean,’ I checked myself, ‘in shock.’

  ‘Like I am now.’

  ‘Yes.’ I held onto that lifeline, and walked towards her. ‘Of course you are. It’s a dreadful thing to have discovered and Viola, I’m so, so sorry. You have no idea how many times I’ve tried to tell you, but you were so distraught, I couldn’t bri
ng myself to say the words. And then you . . . we were happy. So happy that I didn’t want to spoil it. Can you understand?’

  She rubbed her nose in the painfully cute way she always did, and shook her head viciously. ‘At the moment, I can’t understand anything. Except for the fact that I’m in some sort of weird relationship with a . . . relative!’

  ‘Viola, there’s not a shred of common blood between us. As you well know.’

  ‘And my father . . . how could he have done this?! Christ, I worshipped him, Alex. You know I did. No wonder my poor mother hates him.’ She looked up at me then. ‘Does she know?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘It all came out in those last few days at Pandora. Apparently, she’d always known.’

  ‘Jesus Christ! It’s like my whole life is a lie!’

  ‘Really, Viola, I understand it might feel like that, but—’

  ‘And what about your mother?’ She rounded on me. ‘What the hell was the sainted Helena, as my mother always called her, doing shagging my dad?’

  ‘Look, it’s a long story. Why don’t I open the wine, and —’

  ‘No!’ She looked at me with what I can only describe as complete derision. ‘Even you can’t make this one better, Alex. And the worst thing is, I trusted you above everyone, but you’ve lied to me along with the rest of them. And, like, about the most important thing in my life! I thought you loved me, Alex. How could you have been with me for all these months and known?’

  ‘I . . . oh God, Viola, I’m so, so sorry. Please,’ I begged her, ‘try to understand why.’

  ‘I have to go. I can’t cope with any more of this. I need to get my head together, try to think.’

  I watched her as she stood up and reached for the holdall, which I noticed with horror was already packed.

  ‘Please, Viola – I beg you! At least let’s talk about it.’

  She walked straight past me, out of the sitting room and towards the front door.

  ‘I . . . can’t.’ I watched as her lovely eyes filled with further tears. ‘It’s not just you that’s been living a lie, it’s me. I just don’t know who I am anymore.’